This interdisciplinary collaborative research project, led by a team of four experts from the Hertie School, CEU, and EUI, seeks to lay the foundations of and conduct a pilot study for a larger investigation on the role that organized majority / (de facto) state religion plays in democratic backsliding and the rise of illiberal democracy. It focuses more closely on its impact on constitutional and judicial politics of fundamental rights in ECE. The research will explore the ways in which different constitutional texts and judicial interpretation have become venues for continued or unprecedented contestation of fundamental rights and liberties through the use of Orthodox Christian and Catholic value claims in Hungary and Poland, and in the understudied cases of Bulgaria Czechia, Romania, Latvia and Moldova.