Over the last twenty years the European Court of Human Rights has evolved into a conspicuous, often contentious, force in the multilevel battles over the place of religion in the European public sphere. In light of scholarly debates questioning the direct effects of courts on the issues they address, this paper explores how the nature and extent of European juridical influence on religious pluralism are better understood through developments taking place 'in the shadow' of the Court. Specifically, what is the aftermath of the Court's religion jurisprudence in terms of its applications at the grassroots level? And how might legal and political elites operating at the national and international levels influence the Court's engagement with religion? These questions are important because ECtHR case law will shape, to a large extent, both local and national case law and -less conspicuously but no less importantly -grassroots developments in the promotion of or resistance to religious pluralism. The latter will, in turn, influence the future of the ECtHR caseload.The European public square has, in the last twenty years and increasingly so, been inundated with controversies and debates broadly conceived around the place of religion in the public sphere. In spite of (and, some would argue, because of) popular and scholarly expectations of religion's retreat in Europe, issues such as freedom of religious expression, freedom of speech versus protection against blasphemy, and the public display of religious symbols loom large in the workplace, in schools, in media coverage, etc. throughout Europe, at the local, national, and supranational level. The presence of Islam in Europe has acted as a catalyst in many debates on religion in Europe, but these debates have now grown to encompass much broader assumptions about the nature of religious communities, their relationship to state institutions, and the place of minority religious communities in society. In short, the debates have 1 This research is supported by a grant from the European Research Council. I would like to thank the research team in the Grassrootsmobilise programme for their insights contributed during discussions of an earlier version of this text.2 come to encompass the place, role and rights of the 'Christian majority' (however passively and vicariously Christian it may be in most of Europe) in relation to a plurality of minority religions that are present in Europe. It is against this backdrop of shifting attitudes towards religion-state relations and multitude of Christian, Muslim, secular, and otherwise non-religious voices, that the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence on religion issues has emerged to add its own voice.

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This article presents a symposium on the “indirect effects” of the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence on the place of religion in the educational sphere. The symposium showcases empirical research providing critical insight into how the Court's decisions may influence related domestic debates, raise public consciousness, and change how social actors perceive their rights and articulate their right claims in the area of religion and education. The research underpinning this symposium represents a clear departure from existing scholarship in this domain: it examines the impact of the Court not from the top-down (Court impact on states and their legislative frameworks) but from grassroots level upwards, in seeking to understand whether, how and to what extent Court decisions influence grassroots level actors' conceptions of their rights in the domain of religion and education and their efforts to secure new rights vis-à-vis their states.