At its core, the idea of for-profit companies reflecting religious scruples in business in a “church-like” fashion might sound a bit odd to European ears. Yet in the United States, where Christian evangelicalism has had a (not so invisible) hand in shaping corporate culture, a growing body of USSC case law is now supporting the doctrinal and theoretical possibility of extending immunities traditionally confined to churches to “faith-based” companies. Challenging the terms of the contemporary debate, the argument here is that a similar “business turn” is also happening within the EU Single Market, where this time it is “neutrality-based” companies that benefit from religious immunities to advance their mission and shareholders’ appetites. Seen in this way, churches, but also, say, the Belgian branch of a secular provider of global logistics services, are nothing more than complementary instances of the same legal phenomenon of corporate religious freedom. At its core, this argument is anything but a theoretical exercise. Rather, and perhaps counterintuitively, it is precisely in treating utterly secular companies as FoRB claimants that employees can find brand new ammunition in their quest for proportionality vis-à-vis “neutral” employers, as my book, Business, Religion and the Law, attempts to explain.

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