Laïcité, Cults: Is There an Alternative to the Foot-in-the-Dish Politics?

Laïcité, Cults - Is There an Alternative to the Current Foot-in-the-Dish Politics?

by Éric Bouzou of CICNS

A certain time having passed since Nicolas Sarkozy’s speeches at Saint-Jean de Latran and Riyadh and those of Emmanuelle Mignon and Michèle Alliot-Marie on the cults, it is not useless to return coolly to these episodes which set a good number of commentators boiling. The two subjects are linked, since the question of the cults belongs to the controversial framework of laïcité as an outlet for repressed passions.

The least one can say is that Nicolas Sarkozy’s statements raised a chorus of mostly critical reactions.

A few examples in the media. “Sarkozy the American introduces into France the tradition of ‘God bless America’” (France 24 quoting Le Monde). Le Monde goes further: “Nobody contests that France has Christian roots. But the Republic of which M. Sarkozy is President remains, in the terms of article one of the Constitution of 1958, ‘indivisible, secular, democratic and social’. It also has roots forged by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789.” For Jean-Yves Camus (Rue89): “Nicolas Sarkozy persists and signs: for him, the two great scourges of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, were born not ‘of an excess of God, but of his formidable absence’ (…) We have escaped (for the moment) the calling into question of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, but narrowly”. Sylvain Lapoix (Marianne) questions the application of the 1905 law: ”(…) Certainly, the text instituting the separation of Church and State does not guarantee an ideal functioning of the religions. But is that not because it is badly applied rather than because it was badly written? There is a question one hardly has time to ask oneself when one wants to mark history with the seal of one’s politics of civilisation”. Grégory Blachier in the JDD wonders: “Does Nicolas Sarkozy want to patch things up between Church and State?”

The sociologists and philosophers are not to be outdone. Jean Baubérot, who devoted a book of answers to the President’s speech, specifies in Le Monde: “Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech infringes laïcité insofar as it is not philosophically neutral, but privileges religious convictions to the detriment of other convictions, instead of respecting all beliefs, all convictions, as is said in the preamble of the French Constitution”. Henri Pena-Ruiz makes a similar observation: Nicolas Sarkozy “feeds a constant confusion between spirituality and religion. Spirituality is the life of the spirit, the life of human consciousness freeing itself from the immediate. It is irreducible to religion. Religion is a perfectly respectable form of spirituality, but there are others” (L’Humanité). Régis Debray in Le Monde of 24 January 2008 comments thus on the President’s assertion that — “In the transmission of values and in the learning of the difference between good and evil, the schoolteacher will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor (…)” —: “After happy insights into the considerable contribution of Christianity, the Latran speech drifted towards a falsification of our civil status (…) There is a long way from the secular teaching of the religious fact, which I had recommended, which the National Assembly approved, to this devout diversion of the secular fact. Our purpose was not to humiliate the schoolteacher to vaunt the imam or the pastor. But to extend the Enlightenment to the ‘dark continent’ of the religions, not to lower it. Still less to extinguish it.” As a counterpoint, Emile Poulat thinks that “Nicolas Sarkozy’s message to the religious forces is situated explicitly within the framework of the existing secular regime and the established equilibria. He is only saying out loud, for the first time, what has been done without words for a century, including under the Popular Front. It is not a gift: it is a call. It delights the churches: will they know how to answer it more and better than they do today? The answer is not obvious (…) The President did not resist the pleasure of irritating the ‘secularists’. He could have avoided it.” (Le Figaro).

The politicians did not miss the occasion either. Following the Latran speech, François Bayrou exclaimed: “This is nothing other than the opium of the people that Marx denounced” (Le JDD). Laurent Fabius judged it “very important that the President keep to the traditional version of laïcité. We must not mix the religions, which I respect, and the public domain in which they have no business interfering.” (Le JDD). Jean-Luc Mélanchon, relying on his very personal vision of laïcité, explains: “From laïcité as the State’s indifference towards the religions, he passes to laïcité as ‘neutrality’. Then neutrality is described as the equal treatment of the religions, which is already quite another thing than indifference. Then, from this equal treatment one slides to the idea of an equal valorisation of the religions as indispensable to the good functioning of society and the flourishing of persons. Of course this no longer has anything to do with the laïcité of the 1905 law” (Voltairenet). Michèle Alliot-Marie recognises, in answer to a question from Jean Glavany (PS), a divergence on the very meaning of laïcité: “We wish to recognise the role of spirituality” against “negative laïcité, a sectarian attitude” (La Croix).

The speeches of the President of the Republic triggered an outcry from the secular associations: “Among the first to judge ‘unacceptable the calling into question of this principle indispensable to civil peace’ figure the teaching unions, the FSU, the Sgen-CFDT, Unsa éducation, the trade-union confederations CGT, CFDT, but also the Grand Orient de France, the Libre Pensée, the League of Human Rights…” (Libération, 26 February 2008, by Marion Mourgue). A petition in defence of laïcité has moreover already gathered more than 150,000 signatures (Appel laïque). Nicole Delattre (Union rationnaliste) asks: ”(…) one may also pose the following question: by going to play exactly the same score as the most fundamentalist of the Muslim fundamentalists on ‘the sacred land of Islam’, does President Sarkozy think he is protecting France against Islamist terrorism? (…) what Sarkozy is doing in France, indeed proposing for Europe when ‘his’ France takes the presidency of the Council of Europe in July: before all things, not to shock the conscience of believers; as for the atheists, the agnostics and the indifferent, although they have in France the right to express their absence of belief, having no conscience, they could not legitimately be shocked.” For the Grand Orient de France, “the anti-Enlightenment forces are taking their revenge” (La Croix).

The Christian currents rather welcomed Nicolas Sarkozy’s statements. The President of the Protestant Federation of France, Claude Baty, concedes: “I am not disappointed that the religions are recognised as having a right to speech and to public expression. That representatives of the religions should, for example, be invited to take part in the Economic and Social Council seems to me a matter of good sense. We are social actors! No better than the others, but no worse either! (…)” On the subject of adjustments to the 1905 law, he specifies: “Much as I am ready to step back from the current polemic, which seems to me largely a false debate, it is out of the question that the media noise should divert us from our objectives. Because we are laity, we shall not content ourselves with glosses on the holy law!” (Fédération Protestante de France). It is not useless to recall that the Protestant current is the one that most applies the 1905 law, with the greatest number of worship associations. Jean-Marie Guénois in La Croix considers that “on the Catholic side, and beyond the diverse political options of these milieux, the Latran speech was rather well appreciated. ‘Positive laïcité’, understood as a new culture, relaxed and constructive, between State and Church, is an ardent wish for a majority of Catholics after a century of bitter combats whose gravity the centenary of the 1905 law recalled. A law, in passing, whose balance the Church appreciates and which it does not want to see revised.” Some, however, hear in the Latran speech nothing Catholic at all: “The former Grand Master Alain Bauer, quoted by Martin Peltier, joins him perfectly in decrypting Sarkozyan thought: ‘Sarkozy’s speech is paradoxically not a Catholic speech. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, none of them can recognise themselves in the absence of a doctrinal backbone in this speech’ (…) In other words, Sarkozy’s openness is that of Masonic humanism, not atheist but agnostic, culturally open to the religious fact in a relativist conception” (Chretienté info).

As for Emmanuelle Mignon, her flash of brilliance was short-lived. After asserting in VSD that the cults in France were “a non-problem”, that the MIVILUDES should be “transformed” “into something more effective, and an end put to the blah-blah” (Nouvel Obs), she did as all politicians do who realise the embarrassing import of their statements: deny their authenticity and muddy the waters. In the same way, Michèle Alliot-Marie, who seemed to take the measure of the excesses of the anti-cult fight in France, quickly returned to an “orthodox” discourse with the support of François Fillon on the question (AFP). Raphaël Liogier well described the difference of culture that exists between the Ministry of the Interior and the Prime Minister on the question of the cults. A difference criticised by Alain Gest when Michèle Alliot-Marie launched her trial balloon: “This evolution is the fruit of a manipulation orchestrated by senior officials of the Ministry of the Interior favourable to the cult movements, who place the debate on freedom of conscience and religion, when the dangerous movements today no longer have religious references” (Le Monde). As for Jean-Pierre Brard, he exclaimed: “Let us refuse the Kärcher clean-up of the 1905 law as of the Miviludes” (PARIS, 6 Feb 2008 AFP). Nevertheless this difference of culture, bearing optimism for a more balanced treatment of the question of the cults, apparently did not survive the fall in the President’s popularity. One can deal with the cults more intelligently, certainly, but perhaps not at the price of popularity. The latest MIVILUDES report brought, in this respect, no good surprise.

To say that the cults are a non-problem is a quick way of stating a real fact: the sociological problem of dérives sectaires is minor. It can of course be treated, but no longer within the current framework of the French anti-cult fight. The true large-scale problem is the use of the fear manufactured around the cults by a part of the public authorities.

The words of the members of the executive up to the highest level are not script errors, possibly marks of ignorance for certain statements. It is a matter of sounding out opinion on difficult subjects, indeed of imposing a personal vision on the President’s part. Some might call this the “politics of the foot in the dish”, with the consequence of sowing confusion and discord.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to ask why it is chronically impossible in France to broach calmly, and with the necessary openness of mind, the subject of laïcité and that of the cults (except in an academic context), it being understood that one can no longer call “debate” the epidermic contributions, gesticulations and other courtroom flourishes encouraged by the media. One remembers in particular the law on laïcité (alias the veil law) and the About-Picard law, promulgated in the name of a laïcité that many want petrified and sanctified.

One then finds oneself dreaming of a salutary recovery by the public authorities which, following the example of Quebec with the Bouchard-Taylor commission, would launch a great project of reflection to define “the practices of accommodation related to cultural differences” (see our page on the subject). That is something other than the French parliamentary commissions of inquiry on the cults, or even than the Machelon commission convened on the quiet in the suspicious French climate. Jean Baubérot, who knows the subject, believes he sees in the Quebec approach an opportunity, since he intends to entitle his next book: “Liberté, laïcité, diversité. Le Québec une chance pour la France” (Blog Jean Baubérot).