European integration, secularism and the legal defense of religion in Romania

In this presentation I look at the gradual development of the interest in legal arguments and mechanisms for the defense of religion in Romania. By standard measures, religion occupies an important place in this majority Christian Orthodox country. But the process of accession to the European Union, through the norms adopted and the institutions created therein by the Romanian state, has opened up avenues for pushing religion away from the public space and from state policy. The contestations of the presence of Orthodox icons in schools and of the system of enrollment in religious education illustrate this situation. The legal defense of religion comes as a reaction to counter the trend of secularist activist mobilization. Drawing on data gathered from interviews and textual sources, a history of counter-secularist activists’ engagement with legal arguments and procedures in Romania is presented, as well as an analysis of the recent initiative to constitutionalize the definition of “marriage” as “the union between one man and one woman”. Both national-level processes and transnational dynamics are shown to have shaped the development of the legal defense of religion in Romania in the face of advancing European secularism.