I had a hard time thinking of a topic for this letter, because I didn’t want to revisit Catholicism or Islam in France. But there’s no avoiding them. For one thing, there really aren’t many other large religions in France. According to the CIA World Factbook, 83 to 88 percent of the French are Catholic, 5 to 10 percent are Muslim, 2 percent Protestant, and 1 percent Jewish.
When I asked my host family's son, who is soon going to be ordained to the priesthood, why the French feel threatened by Islam, he explained it to me like this: Unlike America, which has a history of religious pluralism, France has been dominated by Catholicism, and no other religion has ever really been able to compete before. Religious institutions are numerous in the United States, and moreover, many of them are pretty similar in beliefs and culture. But in France the Catholic hegemony is being challenged by another religion as well as a corresponding cultural identity which are both radically different from the French character in many ways, and for some people that is kind of scary.
One thing that was drilled into my head in my "French Culture and Writing" class at Georgetown last fall is that French people have two distinct areas of their character, la vie publique et la vie privée, or public life and private life, and it takes a long time before a French person feels comfortable broaching the division with someone. Religion is firmly entrenched in the private life. There's an understanding that you keep certain things to yourself. But many Muslims feel that being devout means incorporating their religious beliefs into their everyday lives. These two ideas are diametrically opposed, and the more one side tries to push its agenda, the more the other side is repelled.
Plus, there is a very obvious segregation between the Catholic and Muslim communities in France, which gained media attention during the riots in the suburbs a year ago. In Lyon, for example, I live in an upper-class, all-white section of the city, and I rarely see Muslims in the streets. When I strolled into a Muslim neighborhood one day while exploring the city, I suddenly realized that I was the only white person and the only woman on the street, and all of the men were staring at me.
In the center of Lyon, when a woman in a lavender head scarf and a leather jacket came up to us. We are used to getting comments from people when we speak to each other in English in public, so the woman's initial questions were nothing unusual: where are you from, what are you doing in Lyon, what are you studying, and so on. But then the woman began to pry about our religious beliefs, asking us if we believed in God, explaining why evolution has to be false, and telling us several times that we would be punished if we did not follow the teachings of the Qur'an. While I have learned about Islam in an academic setting and respect the tenants of the faith, the direct way she confronted us made me feel uncomfortable. I have to say, though, that in a way this incident kind of reminded me of home (which for me is Mississippi, right smack in the Bible Belt), where I have been asked by Southern Baptists if I have been saved and accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.
It's impossible to miss the irony in the fact that the French use the 1905 laïcité law, which was intended to remove Catholic influence in the state, to disarm Muslims today. But laïcité was in the beginning really only meant to remove the state's financial support of the Catholic Church (as well as three other religions that it supported at the time) so that the state would not have to be beholden to the church in its decisions. The real problem is the social implications of laïcité that have evolved in the past 100 years. The French have tried to use laïcité as a barrier to Muslim expression and to enforce the separation of religion and politics, but legal institutions evidently cannot hide the societal fractures that first need to be healed.
One thing that was drilled into my head in my "French Culture and Writing" class at Georgetown last fall is that French people have two distinct areas of their character, la vie publique et la vie privée, or public life and private life, and it takes a long time before a French person feels comfortable broaching the division with someone. Religion is firmly entrenched in the private life. There's an understanding that you keep certain things to yourself. But many Muslims feel that being devout means incorporating their religious beliefs into their everyday lives. These two ideas are diametrically opposed, and the more one side tries to push its agenda, the more the other side is repelled.
Plus, there is a very obvious segregation between the Catholic and Muslim communities in France, which gained media attention during the riots in the suburbs a year ago. In Lyon, for example, I live in an upper-class, all-white section of the city, and I rarely see Muslims in the streets. When I strolled into a Muslim neighborhood one day while exploring the city, I suddenly realized that I was the only white person and the only woman on the street, and all of the men were staring at me.
In the center of Lyon, when a woman in a lavender head scarf and a leather jacket came up to us. We are used to getting comments from people when we speak to each other in English in public, so the woman's initial questions were nothing unusual: where are you from, what are you doing in Lyon, what are you studying, and so on. But then the woman began to pry about our religious beliefs, asking us if we believed in God, explaining why evolution has to be false, and telling us several times that we would be punished if we did not follow the teachings of the Qur'an. While I have learned about Islam in an academic setting and respect the tenants of the faith, the direct way she confronted us made me feel uncomfortable. I have to say, though, that in a way this incident kind of reminded me of home (which for me is Mississippi, right smack in the Bible Belt), where I have been asked by Southern Baptists if I have been saved and accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.
It's impossible to miss the irony in the fact that the French use the 1905 laïcité law, which was intended to remove Catholic influence in the state, to disarm Muslims today. But laïcité was in the beginning really only meant to remove the state's financial support of the Catholic Church (as well as three other religions that it supported at the time) so that the state would not have to be beholden to the church in its decisions. The real problem is the social implications of laïcité that have evolved in the past 100 years. The French have tried to use laïcité as a barrier to Muslim expression and to enforce the separation of religion and politics, but legal institutions evidently cannot hide the societal fractures that first need to be healed.
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