Religion and the Secular State: French Report
BLANDINE CHELINI-PONT NASSIMA FERCHICHE Religion and the Secular State: French Report PROLOGUE In the context of the political and legal controversy raging in the United States since the 1990s around the meaning of the U.S. Constitution and the spirit that animated its Framers, many in the academic and legal community in the United States reject the interpretation of the principles of neutrality and separation as they have been interpreted by the Supreme Court, especially since Everson in 1947.1 We are well aware that the expression ‘Secular State’ can have a pejorative sense in the American milieu and can cause fierce criticism against ‘radical’ liberalism, its ethical weakness ethics or its contaminating atheism. We start from the French understanding of the term Secular State. This term is not pejorative in the French context, and what it represents to lawyers in France is the exact definition of their state: a non-confessional state, without organic or conventional ties to one or more religions, whose “philosophical” ideal is republican and democratic. These notions are no longer contested by any French political or academic factions. A consensus has operated since the synthesis of the Fifth Republic. I. SOCIAL CONTEXT France is a country of some 66 million people with three characteristics, a population of ancient roots possessed of a great many traditions, customs, and a particular way of life, and a population highly urbanized due to various industrial transformations. At the same, the modern population is the fruit of intense and constant immigration since the nineteenth century. France today has four million foreigners, most of them with European familial roots that are ancient (Italy, Belgium, Poland, Spain, Portugal) or more recent (Poland, Lithuania, Romania), but also many from the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia), Africa (Mali, Chad, Senegal, Niger, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin, Zaire, Rwanda, Comoros), or Asia (Vietnam, China, Sri Lanka).
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