Abstract
The European construction is heuristically useful when it comes to analysing the mutations affecting relations between the religious and the political in western European countries. The European Union is an archetype of immanence in politics. While access to Europe's pluralistic, competitive public space imposes a relative secularization upon the religious, complex transactions nonetheless are at work in Brussels, where a European compromise between immanence and transcendence is being forged. Religions, as patrimonial and anthropological resources, they testify to/are the repository of an idea of transcendence by which they propose a critique of individualistic and market-driven Europe. Suffering from a symbolic deficit, European institutions call upon religions in order to ``to give Europe a soul''.