One of the problems of Anglophone attempts to read France’s sécularisme through its English false cognate is the conflation of two very different projects. Where American secularism has mainly been interested in protecting religions from the state, the French version is meant to protect the state from religion. In his article “France’s secular ayatollahs” (March 5), Paul Taylor illuminates this distinction better than most.
Unfortunately, that is as far as illumination goes. French secularism, the author suggests, is not only in the hands of fanatics but has its roots in the murderous zealotry of the Jacobin club. This is an elegant, clear and entirely inaccurate account of the issue.
France’s first full-fledged experiment with secularism began in 1795 one year after Maximilien Robespierre was led to the guillotine. French secularism and the country’s separation of church and state were not paroxysms of irrational violence; they were critical instruments of emancipation from the political use of religious norms. Their fruits were the education of women, the legalization of work on Sundays and the democratization of the judicial systems — to name just a few.
The American model, in contrast, was designed to protect all versions of divine authority from the competing authority of the state. In so doing, it honored their respective aspirations to define the laws of the land. The recent success of religious groups in defining American policy is precisely everything that French secularism was designed to avoid.
American secularism has been no match for the metastatic growth of religious cosmology in biology classes, the policy of abstinence to combat AIDS, the emergence of pious anti-intellectualism and opposition to gay marriage as a vindication of the sacredness of marital vows. Those in Taylor’s crosshairs know this history, and, with good reason, they see it not as a model to follow but as a cautionary tale.
The French model is, of course, imperfect — but unlike the American state, the French state refuses to be the conduit of religious demands. Taylor seems to overlook the fact that it is precisely the demand that the state segregate daughters and sons in swimming pools, suppress pork in schools, ban alcohol in predominantly Muslim areas that have buttressed the more reactionary agents of nativist politics. Not by chance, it is the National Front that attracts the largest numbers of Christian fundamentalists who now see themselves in competition for political predominance.
Martin Gak
Religious affairs and ethics correspondent, Deutsche Welle Television
Berlin, Germany