The question of the place of religion in European public life is a critical one – and a four-year research project into faith and secularisation in Europe finds underlying links between a variety of of different kinds of church-and-state issues.

At first glance, Irish Catholics voting for same-sex marriage, British Muslims living according to sharia and French secularists chasing symbols of faith from the public sphere would seem to have little in common. Some seem to be drifting away from religion, others towards it.

But according to a four-year study on religion in today’s Europe, these phenomena have a deeper link that goes beyond Catholicism, Islam or atheism. They all reflect the tensions that arise in secularised societies because of the contemporary disconnect between religion and culture.

That’s from an interview with Oliver Roy, a French academic and director of the EU-funded ReligioWest research project, recently published in the Tablet.

Roy argues that while the “disconnect between religion and culture” affects all faiths, Catholicism may take it particularly hard.

“Contrary to Protestantism and Islam, which can imagine themselves without roots in the dominant culture (like evangelicals and Salafis), the Catholic Church has always said faith should be rooted in the culture,” said Roy. “That was its great success, combining universalism and a cultural anchoring. The Catholic Church considers European culture to be of Christian origin, so it has a harder time than other religions with this divorce from the dominant culture.”

The ReligioWest project has now concluded, but the many reports and publications it has produced are available at its website – it’s an extremely useful resource for anyone interested in these questions. The full interview with Roy is available here.