While browsing videos in Blockbuster, most Americans brush right over the top of their own Michael Moore’s recent documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” an opinionated film outlining America’s weaknesses in the arena of gun control.
But in France it was a blockbuster hit, with French students piling into theaters to watch an American portray his own countrymen as trigger-happy warmongers.
The stereotypical militant person was a fascinating concept to those living in a nation with a violent crime rate miniscule in comparison to that of the United States.
But recent developments in France have brought worldwide publicity to the country and shown it to be equally (if not more) militant in a nonliteral battlefield — separation of church and state.
The philosophy simply hails different values in the people of France than in the people of the United States.
While the French attempt to understand the American’s need to “bear arms,” Americans struggle to grasp a phrase common in French but without a direct English equivalent — laicite.
Similar to secularism, it’s what the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News called “the closest thing the French have to a state religion.”
The word laicite may trigger no explosion among the French, but it became the shot heard around the world in mid-February.
A ban was passed in a landslide vote to keep French students in public schools from wearing religious symbols such as the Muslim head covering and any Christian cross deemed large enough to be “conspicuous.”
“It is the neutrality of the public sphere which enables the harmonious existence side by side of different religions,” said French President Jacques Chirac in a Dec. 17 address to the nation in defense of the ban. “Like all freedoms, the freedom to express one’s faith can only have limits in the freedom of others, and in compliance with rules of life in society.”
Religious freedom, Chirac said, cannot be tolerated as a cover for challenging “the laws and principles of the republic” or as an attempt to upset the “subtle, precious and fragile balance” of the secularism seen by the French as “one of the great achievements of the republic.”
So what religious liberty advocates in America see as a major infraction is virtually a nonissue to most in France.
In the minds of the French, school is simply school — a training ground for good citizens, not good clergymen.
“Most students seem to be in favor of the ban and agree with the government,” said Tim Krason, an assistant high school English teacher in Aire sur l’Adour in southwest France.
“Only two girls I spoke with disagreed with the ruling. They questioned why it was acceptable for some students to wear blatantly offensive clothing that was immodest or promoting violence, yet others couldn’t wear a cross or scarf,” said Krason, a native of Tupelo, Miss.
But, he emphasized, these students are the exception to the rule.
“The general mind-set is that government and religion naturally do not intersect, and the students just accept it as the way it is,” Krason said.
This acceptance is what the Associated Baptist Press quotes Phil Strickland, director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas Christian Life Commission, as saying signals “religious liberty is at risk in France.”
Government has no business promoting religion or prohibiting religious expression, Strickland said.
Dennis Barton, International Mission Board (IMB) strategy associate for France and Belgium, said though the restrictions are new, liacite has been long established in France. “Secularism is not new, it’s just becoming more codified,” he said. “The thought process has been ingrained since birth.”
Religious liberty ‘at risk’
And though that is an obstacle to overcome, Barton said, the separation as such can be an ally on the flip side.
“It’s a good thing in a way, because although the government pours money into its cathedrals, it doesn’t influence religion at all,” he said. “Many see the French as unspiritual, but it’s not so much that they accept or reject the gospel but that they simply haven’t had the opportunity to hear it.”
When they do consider religion, Barton said, they filter it through the traditional Catholic worldview still lingering amid the secularism. However, Scott Sontag, music minister of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Paris, said the 83- to 88-percent Catholic population tends to be that much more in name than in practice.
The Catholic church defined French culture before the violent shift to secularism during the French Revolution. As a result, the semblance of French spirituality today appears to be housed in old tradition, Sontag said, and doesn’t seem to leak over into other areas of life at all.
“Many French are ‘Christian,’ or are dedicated, married, et cetera in the Catholic church simply because their mother and grandmother and great-grandmother were — but that’s as far as it goes,” Sontag said.
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