Intersecting gender, religion, and politics in Europe. An overview and a research agenda.

Scholars have demonstrated that religious experiences are profoundly shaped by gender, influencing how individuals engage with faith, spirituality, and religious institutions. Building on this, the chapter explores the significance of adopting a gendered approach to analyzing the contemporary intersections of religion and politics in Europe, by examining both central and marginal political spaces. On the one hand, “gender” is at the center of the European political debate, playing a key role in political narratives that mobilize religion too. On the other hand, gendered religious processes at the margin of the political sphere suggest paying attention to elements that are often overlooked in contemporary analysis of religion and politics. The chapter advocates for the incorporation of a gendered, embodied, and intersectional approach, acknowledging how gender intersects with other social categories such as race, ethnicity, and class in shaping religious and political experiences, and it highlights three main implications of such an approach for the analysis of contemporary intersections of religion and politics in Europe.