Religion has long been a blind spot both in European politics and in European Studies. This has changed with the increasing acknowledgement that even in Europe religions maintain a public influence and relevance. Facing a significant political salience of religion in the world, the EU and many of its member states have started to introduce principles and institutions into their foreign policies to promote freedom of religion and belief and to engage with religious actors. European foreign policy research, however, has been surprisingly silent on these issues yet. With only a few exceptions on EU relations with Turkey and with Islamist actors in North Africa and the Middle East, there has not been any systematic research on the role of religion in European foreign policy so far. The proposed panel therefore brings scholars together whose research addresses this lacuna by looking at different aspects of religion in European foreign policy. They draw on a variety of analytical and methodological approaches, including policy formation and implementation, policy learning, interaction processes between member states and supranational institutions, the analysis of religious arguments in parliamentary debates, discourse analysis, comparative legal analysis, and transatlantic comparisons, in order to better understand how EU institutions and member states deal with issues of religion in their external relations, how they interpret and select religious issues and actors, why this agenda has come about, what consequences it might have, and what it says about the identity of the European Union.