There has been a lot written about secularism in the light of the terror attacks against the French Magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish deli in Paris. French secularism with its roots in the French Revolution is quite different than American secularism. William McGurn puts it this way:
The question is whether French secularism is up to the challenge of defending itself.
At the heart of laïcité are two principles: first, that religion and the questions it raises have no role in French public life, and, second, that no one faith will be favored over others.
In theory, this latter ought to make France more attractive for a minority religion. In practice, this has not happened, in good part because many in France’s Muslim community don’t wish to be assimilated.
The received wisdom is that France — and Europe — must respond to the threat of radical Islam by rededicating themselves to their highly secularized selves. What no one asks is whether it might in fact be the way the French and the Europeans define a secular state that accounts for some of their weakness.
He says concisely and accurately:
Can you beat something with nothing?
Maybe, but it’s very difficult. In France, public life is completely devoid of any reference to a higher power; the public square is wiped clean of religion. Some radical secularists in America have tried to say America’s Founders intended such a secular state, but they would be mistaken. In fact our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, has five references to God itself! Our very liberty is grounded beyond the state, in the “laws of nature and nature’s God.”
We tend to forget that the liberties and prosperity bequeathed to us in Western civilization did not come from nowhere. In America, Christianity and the Enlightenment fused to make the most stable experiment in republican government in the history of man. It was not one to the exclusion of the other; any other reading of history is either dishonest or blind. That’s why when Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s he marveled that religion, i.e. Christianity, far from being a destabilizing force as the French believe it was, in fact was a glue that held society together. McGurn has a fantastic quote about the importance of the Judeo-Christian foundation of the West:
[A]s Britain’s Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has put it, an understanding that “you cannot expect the foundations of Western civilization to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact.”
As Europe increasingly moves away from its Christian roots, this will certainly be put to the test.
As I’ve read about this discussion, I’ve thought of a tremendous book that is required reading if one is to have a healthy, and accurate understanding of secularism properly understood: The End of Secularism by Hunter Baker.
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