Religion made a significant contribution to the long process whereby Eastern Europe emerged from communism. This process was primarily a process of differentiation, insofar as it is true that the Soviet project aimed fundamentally at homogenisation. Merely affirming that politics must be submitted to ethical principles is already an instance of pluralisation, an integral element in the process of emergence from totalitarianism and the establishment of democracy. Emergence from the communist system has an effect, however, on the type of relationship the churches maintain with society. The movement is from a relationship of obligation to one involving a free choice of values. The church has struggled for the establishment of democracy that is, of the relative. The problem for the church today is to define its place within the 'relative', which is plurality. Everything seems to indicate that this will be a challenge much more difficult to meet than that which was posed by the Soviet system. I have analysed elsewhere the three types of relationship between politics and religion which have existed successively or simultaneously in this part of Europe over the past four decades: persecution, compromise and conflict. Here we may recall that precisely these three types of relationship have emerged because of the status accorded to religion by Soviet policies. Communism refused to integrate religion ideologically; and religion was the only phenomenon that communism refused thus to integrate. As a result, religion was established in a potential triple role as vector of disalienation (at the level of the individual), of detotalisation (at the level of society) and of desovietisation (at the level of the nation). We are speaking of a potential role: the churches had to take positive steps to realise it. But it is important to underline the fact that it was Soviet practice itself that assigned religion its potential role in Eastern Europe, and that now this practice no longer exists, the role allocated to religion can only undergo a total redefinition. The 'political' and the 'religious' are now redeploying themselves in parallel. This process of transition is characterised by two tendencies: firstly, the removal of the ambiguities which attended any appeal to religion; secondly, the political reinstrumentalisation of the religious.