For centuries, the Church showed Europeans the path they were expected to follow. It defined virtues, condemned transgressions, organised collective obligations and promised, at the end of a life lived according to its teachings, a form of salvation. Individuals did not face the uncertainties of existence alone: an institution offered them an interpretation of the world, a hierarchy of acceptable behaviours and a higher purpose.

Contemporary Europe appears to have decisively broken with that order. Freedom of conscience, the separation of spiritual and temporal authority, democracy and the rule of law have progressively reduced the political influence of religious institutions. European societies have emancipated themselves from many ecclesiastical prescriptions without abandoning the ambition to organise collective life around moral principles.

A society can cease to believe in a transcendent authority without relinquishing its search for a higher order. It can abandon the promise of paradise while retaining the conviction that there is a proper way to live, consume, produce and prepare for the future.

In the space created by the declining authority of traditional institutions, states, courts, international organisations and European institutions have gradually acquired new normative responsibilities.

The European Union occupies a distinctive position in this transformation. Born from an ambition for peace and economic integration, it has developed into an institutional system that articulates values, establishes collective objectives and translates some of those commitments into legal obligations.

It does not claim to guide souls towards God. Yet it participates in defining the paths through which European societies are expected to reach a better future.

This development raises a question that extends far beyond familiar controversies over Brussels bureaucracy: has Europe genuinely moved beyond older forms of moral authority, or has it transferred their mechanisms into secular institutions?

The Gradual Disappearance of an Old Order

The historical role of the Church in European societies extended far beyond religious worship. Throughout much of the Middle Ages, and in varying forms during subsequent centuries, Christian institutions participated in organising time, education, welfare, political legitimacy and social behaviour.

Birth, marriage, death, religious festivals and moral obligations belonged to a world in which religion provided a fundamental point of reference. Spiritual prescriptions had material consequences. They influenced family relationships, social hierarchies and the relationship between rulers and the governed.

This authority was neither uniform nor uncontested. Conflicts between religious and political powers, reform movements, dissenting traditions and local practices reveal a far more complex history than that of a Church exercising absolute control over individual consciences.

Nevertheless, religion provided a shared architecture of meaning. It placed individual experiences within a collective narrative in which suffering, obligations and sacrifice could acquire a higher justification.

The Reformation, the Enlightenment, political revolutions, industrialisation and the gradual consolidation of modern states profoundly altered this equilibrium. Civil law expanded its reach, public education developed, scientific knowledge gained increasing autonomy and citizenship progressively became detached from religious affiliation.

European secularisation, however, did not follow an identical trajectory across the continent. Republican France, the Scandinavian monarchies, Germany, Italy and Poland maintain very different relationships with their religious inheritances.

The broader movement nevertheless remains visible. According to research published by the Pew Research Center in June 2025, Christians represented approximately 75% of Europe's population in 2010, compared with 67% in 2020. Over the same period, the proportion of religiously unaffiliated Europeans increased from 18% to 25%.

These figures do not suggest that faith has disappeared. Rather, they indicate that religious affiliation no longer provides the dominant framework of collective identity throughout much of the continent.

Europe has therefore moved away from an order in which moral prescriptions could derive their legitimacy from revealed truth. Yet it has not ceased to produce norms, distinguish desirable conduct or seek principles capable of uniting different populations.

The retreat of the Church did not eliminate the question of authority. It transformed those who exercise it.

From Revealed Truth to Proclaimed Values

The European Union was not originally established as a moral institution. The first European communities responded to political, economic and strategic imperatives: rebuilding the continent, making another major European war less likely, and organising industrial and commercial interdependence.

Economic cooperation offered a means of overcoming national rivalries. Integration was expected to create common interests sufficiently powerful to transform relations between states.

As its competences expanded and its institutions developed, the European project gradually acquired a more explicit normative dimension.

Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union identifies the values on which the organisation is founded: human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.

These principles are not merely symbolic declarations. They provide legal and political references that guide institutional action and can influence the assessment of member states' conduct.

The Charter of Fundamental Rights, which became legally binding with the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009, reinforced this architecture within its defined scope of application.

The Union therefore does more than organise a market. It articulates principles governing the legitimate exercise of power and establishes rights that its institutions must respect.

The distinction from the religious order remains fundamental. European values derive from treaties, political procedures and constitutional traditions rather than divine revelation. They are subject to judicial interpretation, public debate and institutional revision.

Yet an analogy emerges in the social function of these references.

In both cases, a body of general principles provides a framework for assessing the legitimacy of certain behaviours and decisions. In both cases, norms extend beyond immediate individual preferences by appealing to a broader collective interest or obligation.

The analogy therefore concerns not the origin of authority but its capacity to organise collective life around principles regarded as fundamental.

The historical transformation lies in how authority is justified: conformity with a spiritual order has progressively given way to conformity with a legal and political order.

Earthly Salvation and the Promise of a Better Future

Every political community must explain why it imposes obligations on its members. Legal coercion alone cannot always secure consent. The sacrifices demanded of individuals must also be given meaning.

The European Union has constructed several successive and complementary narratives of legitimacy.

Peace came first. After the destruction of two world wars, European integration promised to transform a continent of rivalries into a space of cooperation.

Prosperity subsequently became a central argument. The common market, followed by the single market and the European currency, was intended to promote growth, stability and the movement of people, capital, goods and services.

The protection of rights, security, environmental transition and technological sovereignty have since joined these ambitions.

These objectives do not follow identical logics. They respond to different historical, economic and scientific challenges. Nevertheless, they contribute to a shared representation of the future.

Climate policy offers perhaps the clearest illustration.

With the European Green Deal, presented in 2019, the Union launched a transformation of its economic policies around the objective of climate neutrality by 2050. The European Climate Law made that objective legally binding, alongside the target of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels.

The project involves changes in transport, energy, industry, agriculture, investment and consumption.

Its justification is scientific and political: limiting the risks associated with climate change and organising the adaptation of European economies.

Yet it also produces a distinctive collective narrative. Present generations are asked to modify their behaviour, bear certain costs and transform their activities in order to preserve living conditions for future generations.

In some respects, this narrative structure resembles older conceptions of sacrifice in the service of a higher good. Immediate effort derives its justification from a future that those making the sacrifice may never experience themselves.

The comparison has obvious limits. Climate policy is grounded in scientific observation, economic assessment and political decisions that remain contestable and revisable. It is not a religious belief.

Nevertheless, it reveals an enduring feature of human societies: collective constraints are easier to understand and accept when they belong to a meaningful account of the future.

When spiritual salvation no longer occupies a central position, other purposes can structure the political imagination. Peace, prosperity, justice and planetary preservation become horizons around which public action is organised.

Paradise is no longer promised beyond earthly existence. A better future is projected into human history.

Compliance as a New Collective Discipline

Institutional authority is expressed not only through grand principles. It becomes tangible when its prescriptions reach everyday activities.

The European Union now exercises considerable influence over product characteristics, corporate obligations, environmental standards, data protection and the operation of digital markets.

This influence is exercised through competences established by the treaties, frequently in interaction with national legislation.

Regulations, directives, supervisory mechanisms and compliance obligations constitute the practical instruments of this governance.

A company must demonstrate that it meets applicable requirements. A product must satisfy relevant standards. Economic activities may be subject to obligations concerning transparency, traceability or risk reduction.

Compliance has consequently become a structural dimension of economic activity.

In traditional religious systems, observance of prescribed conduct could demonstrate membership in a moral community. In the contemporary regulatory order, compliance demonstrates adherence to a shared legal framework.

The similarity, however, ends with the disciplinary function. Administrative penalties are not spiritual penances, and regulatory inspections are not judgements on the moral worth of individuals.

A subtler phenomenon nevertheless deserves attention: certain technical prescriptions can gradually acquire moral significance in public debate.

A behaviour may be legally permissible yet socially regarded as irresponsible. Conversely, compliance with a standard may be presented not merely as a legal obligation but as evidence of virtuous conduct.

The distinction between compliance, responsibility and morality can then become less clear.

This shift is particularly visible when public policies seek to influence individual behaviour in pursuit of collective objectives. Choices concerning consumption, mobility or investment can become markers of adherence to particular conceptions of progress.

The issue is not whether rules are necessary. Every modern economy depends on institutions capable of protecting individuals, correcting certain market failures and making transactions predictable.

Rather, the question is when regulation designed to address a concrete problem begins to be perceived as a general prescription governing how individuals should live.

The boundary between regulating activities and governing conduct remains one of the enduring tensions of contemporary democracies.

Brussels as a New Moral Authority?

The image of the European Commission replacing the Church in directing populations possesses obvious polemical force. It becomes misleading, however, when interpreted literally.

The European Union is neither a clergy nor a spiritual authority. Its institutions exercise no jurisdiction over individual consciences, define no doctrine of salvation and possess no general competence to organise every aspect of social life.

The treaties constrain its actions through the principles of conferral, subsidiarity and proportionality. The European Parliament is directly elected, the Council represents member-state governments, and the Commission operates within a system of defined competences and judicial oversight.

European policies can be challenged before competent courts, modified through legislative procedures or reconsidered through democratic debate.

This architecture fundamentally distinguishes modern political authority from an institution founded on transcendent truth.

The comparison nevertheless remains useful when applied to the production of legitimacy.

The Union articulates common values, identifies objectives extending beyond particular interests and develops instruments intended to secure compliance with certain obligations. In doing so, it helps determine what should be protected, corrected, encouraged or restricted within society.

It also operates in an environment where national governments, businesses, non-governmental organisations, experts and courts contribute to the definition of collective norms.

Brussels is therefore not the single centre of a new European morality. It is one of the arenas in which competing conceptions of the common good encounter one another.

This distinction matters. European norms do not descend from an authority standing outside society. They emerge from political relationships, negotiations, legal procedures and compromises between sometimes conflicting interests.

Yet their complexity can create distance between citizens and decision-making processes.

When an obligation appears as a technical requirement developed across several institutional levels, its underlying political choices may become less visible. Citizens encounter the rule without necessarily understanding the decisions that produced it.

Within this distance, the perception of a normative authority that prescribes more than it deliberates can begin to emerge.

The Power of Experts and the Question of Truth

The transformation of European authority belongs to a wider development in modern societies: the growing role of expertise in public decision-making.

Climate, health, finance, industry and digital technology require specialised knowledge. Governments cannot reasonably design policies in these fields without relying on scientists, engineers, economists and legal specialists.

This dependence on expertise is not unique to the European Union. It characterises contemporary states more generally.

Yet European governance, because of its institutional organisation and the technical nature of many shared competences, makes the relationship between specialised knowledge and political decision-making particularly visible.

A difficulty arises when scientific authority, which concerns the establishment of facts and assessment of possible consequences, becomes confused in public debate with political authority, which involves choosing between competing legitimate objectives.

Science can establish that an activity presents certain risks. It cannot, by itself, determine which distribution of costs, restrictions or social priorities should be adopted.

Such decisions involve collective choices.

When policies are presented as necessary consequences of expert knowledge, disagreement may be interpreted as opposition to facts rather than disagreement over the proposed means.

Expertise then risks acquiring an authority that experts themselves do not necessarily claim.

This development recalls an old question in political philosophy: who possesses the legitimacy to determine what is true, just or desirable for a community?

Medieval Europe developed its own answers through the interaction of theology, philosophy and political power. Contemporary democracies must construct theirs by distinguishing knowledge, deliberation and decision.

The danger is not the existence of experts. It lies in the potential disappearance of the boundary between scientific conclusions and political choices.

A democracy can recognise the necessity of knowledge without transforming every disagreement over public policy into an intellectual or moral failing.

Fault, Responsibility and the New Languages of Judgement

Religious societies possessed categories through which they distinguished sin, transgression, repentance and reconciliation. These concepts structured particular understandings of individual responsibility.

Contemporary societies employ different vocabularies: risk, harm, discrimination, environmental responsibility, compliance, prevention and remediation.

It would be excessive to regard these categories as merely secular translations of sin. They possess distinct legal and philosophical foundations and respond to genuine problems.

Nevertheless, they reveal a continuing collective need: to identify behaviours capable of harming others, establish obligations and determine the consequences of violating them.

Environmental responsibility illustrates this transformation. An economic activity can now be assessed not only according to its immediate profitability but also through its effects on distant populations, ecosystems and future generations.

The scope of responsibility expands across both space and time.

This development changes the representation of the individual. A person is no longer regarded solely as an autonomous actor free to pursue personal interests within the limits of the law. Individuals are also understood as participants in interconnected systems whose consequences extend beyond their immediate intentions.

The political question then becomes one of proportion.

How far can individuals be required to modify their behaviour in pursuit of collective objectives? How should obligations be distributed fairly between households, businesses and states? And how can disagreement remain legitimate when the objectives pursued enjoy considerable moral authority?

These questions do not constitute an objection to regulation in principle. They remind us that pursuing the common good also requires reflection on the limits of power exercised in its name.

A society may multiply obligations intended to protect its members while discovering that the accumulation of prescriptions transforms their relationship with freedom.

The Temptation of Morality Without Transcendence

European secularisation does not necessarily imply the disappearance of the sacred. It can also be interpreted as a transformation of the objects to which societies assign exceptional value.

Human dignity, freedom, equality and the preservation of life can become principles to which institutions attribute fundamental importance.

These values are not thereby religious. They belong to diverse philosophical and legal traditions, some of which developed precisely in opposition to confessional authority.

Nevertheless, they sometimes perform a function comparable to that of shared moral references: they enable individuals who do not share the same beliefs or interests to recognise certain reciprocal obligations.

This function is particularly important for the European Union.

Unlike a nation-state, it possesses neither a single language nor a homogeneous historical memory nor a universally shared cultural identity. It must build cohesion among societies whose political, religious and economic experiences remain different.

Common values therefore become instruments of integration.

They make it possible to define political belonging without relying exclusively on nationality, origin or religious affiliation.

Yet this architecture encounters a fundamental difficulty: a value may be widely accepted in principle while generating sharply divergent interpretations.

Freedom can be invoked to defend individual autonomy or to challenge particular forms of public intervention. Equality can justify common protections or policies designed to correct inequalities. Solidarity can support greater redistribution or increased responsibility among economic actors.

Conflicts do not therefore necessarily arise from rejecting European values. They may concern their meaning, their relative importance and the means through which they should be realised.

When these differences are treated as legitimate political disagreements, they sustain democracy. When they become confrontations between virtue and wrongdoing, debate risks closing down.

One of contemporary Europe's central questions is how to defend common principles without turning every institutional interpretation of those principles into an unquestionable truth.

The Europe of Conscience and the Europe of Institutions

The comparison between the historical Church and the European Union ultimately reveals two different conceptions of collective belonging.

In the traditional religious order, community could be founded upon shared faith, doctrine and practice. In the contemporary European order, political belonging rests on institutions, rights, obligations and procedures.

The transition from one to the other is not a simple replacement.

European society remains shaped by religious, national, cultural and philosophical identities that coexist with institutional integration. Christianity retains considerable historical and social influence, while other religions and non-religious convictions also contribute to the continent's pluralism.

The Union cannot therefore be understood as the exclusive successor to the Church. It is the product of a much broader history involving modern states, constitutionalism, political liberalism, social movements and economic transformation.

Yet this plurality makes common rules all the more necessary.

The question becomes one of legitimacy.

Can an institution demand sacrifices in the name of the future without adequately explaining the choices that justify them? Can it promote a particular conception of progress while acknowledging that alternative paths may be defended democratically? Can it make the protection of rights a fundamental requirement while preserving the freedom to challenge its own policies?

These tensions are not anomalies. They belong to the condition of a political organisation seeking to reconcile normative unity with democratic diversity.

The European Union consequently faces a difficulty that older religious institutions encountered in a different form: maintaining a community around common principles without suppressing the plurality of interpretations.

The decisive difference is that a democratic order must preserve the possibility of revising decisions made in its name.

Salvation Cannot Be Decreed

Contemporary Europe has not abandoned morality. It has transformed its foundations, institutions and instruments.

Where the Church once offered spiritual guidance, public authorities now organise much of the material framework of coexistence. Where religious prescriptions situated behaviour within a transcendent perspective, contemporary policies invoke security, justice, prosperity and the protection of the future.

These transformations have accompanied considerable advances in the recognition of individual freedoms and the limitation of arbitrary power. They have also generated new questions concerning the extent of regulatory authority, the role of expertise and the ability of citizens to participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their lives.

The European Union concentrates some of these contradictions because it seeks to construct a common order without possessing all the historical characteristics of a state, and to defend shared values across societies that do not always interpret them in the same way.

It has not replaced the Church on the faithful's path towards God. It participates in a different undertaking: defining the conditions under which diverse populations can organise their collective future.

Yet that undertaking carries a permanent temptation. As institutions accumulate objectives, norms and instruments of control, they may begin to present certain political orientations as moral necessities beyond legitimate discussion.

In a democracy, however, the legitimacy of an objective never eliminates the need to scrutinise the means employed to achieve it.

Europe has gradually learned to distinguish faith from law, individual conscience from public authority, and spiritual truth from political decision-making. Its contemporary challenge is to preserve these distinctions in a world where the complexity of problems encourages the concentration of expertise and the multiplication of prescriptions.

For the deeper legacy of secularisation is not merely that religious institutions lost part of their temporal power. It is that a society became possible in which no authority should be entitled to claim exclusive possession of the complete definition of what is good.

For centuries, the Church showed the faithful the path to salvation. Today, European institutions propose pathways towards a better future.

The essential difference rests on one principle: in a free society, the path must always remain open to discussion by those who are asked to follow it.

Main Sources

  • Pew Research Center, June 9, 2025, How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020 — Religion in Europe. Changes in religious affiliation and the religiously unaffiliated population.
  • European Union, Treaty on European Union, particularly Articles 2, 5 and 6. Founding values, competences, subsidiarity, proportionality and fundamental rights.
  • Council of the European Union, Fundamental Rights in the EU. Scope and legal status of the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
  • European Commission, Delivering the European Green Deal. Climate objectives and the transformation of economic sectors.
  • European Commission, Areas of EU Action. Distribution of competences between the Union and its member states.

Additional Intellectual References

  • Max Weber, Science as a Vocation and Politics as a Vocation. Rationalisation, legitimacy and the distinction between knowledge and political decision-making.
  • Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. The social function of the sacred and the construction of collective representations.
  • Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World. The historical transformation of the relationship between religion and political organisation.
  • Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Governmentality, the conduct of populations and the evolution of techniques of power.
  • Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion. Pluralism, public reason and the place of religious convictions in contemporary democracies.

The philosophical references provide interpretative frameworks rather than empirical evidence that the European Union constitutes a religious institution. The analogy developed in this article belongs to sociological and political analysis.