Tocqueville v. terror: The limits of French secularism

By William McGurn

Photo: EPA

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, Laicité.
The first three words, with their roots in Robespierre, officially constitute the national motto of France. Unofficially, the French have added the fourth — laïcité — to describe an arrangement where nothing is sacred save the nation’s faith in its own secularism.
For the terrorists avenging the Prophet Mohammed no less than the millions who marched under the banner Je Suis Charlie, last week’s bloodletting was aimed as much against the foundation of secular France as it was against the individuals so cruelly executed in that Paris newsroom.



On this much both the terrorists and their targets agree.
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.
Well, some have asked.
Not quite a decade ago, Pope Benedict asked at Regensburg, when he warned of the perils of faith uninformed by reason and of reason whose definition of truth was limited to science — and was roundly condemned for his supposed insensitivity to Muslim feelings.
In fact, the questions he raised were as much a challenge to a secular Europe.
A cruder way of putting it might be this: Can you beat something with nothing?
The roots of French secularism, of course, go back to struggles with the Catholic church that was once aligned with the French monarchy.
And religious minorities — especially the Jews — that hadn’t fared very well under earlier alliances between throne and altar have understandably seen a highly secular Europe as their best refuge.
But it isn’t turning out that way, is it? Today, the more secularized Europe gets, the more vulnerable the continent’s Jewish community appears to be.
Ask yourself this: Is it really a coincidence that a terrorist atrocity that began at a French satirical magazine ended with four Jews murdered at a kosher grocery?
In this bloody wake, some believe the way forward is to double down on the cartoon blasphemy of the Prophet Mohammed that so offended the killers.
It’s an understandable reaction — and, to the degree that it would demonstrate the terrorists have failed to terrorize us into changing our behavior, there’s a reasonable argument it’s necessary.
It’s difficult, however, to see how insulting Islam for the sake of “getting back” at the terrorists will do much to separate peaceful French Muslims — or European Muslims for that matter — from the Islamists within their midst.
Or persuade them that the secular state, at least in the French version, is their friend.
But France isn’t the only model of secularism. America too is a secular state. The difference between the two is that the American secular order isn’t founded on indifference to truth but on self-evident truths about man and God.
And religious people aren’t required to repudiate their religious identities to participate in the public life of the nation.
This seems to be the model Pope Benedict had in mind in his first encyclical, when he called for a “healthy secularism of the state.” It is also the model that enthralled a 19th-century French observer named Alexis de Tocqueville.
In the Old World, Tocqueville noted, religion had direct power in alliance with the throne and was reactionary, whereas in the New World the religion’s power was strong but indirect — and in favor of freedom.
This doesn’t mean an individual citizen has to be devout or believe in God to be a good American. But it does suggest the need for an intellectual understanding and honesty about the consequences of a society that throws all that overboard.
Or, as 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.”
America is a living, secular contradiction of a contemporary secularist orthodoxy: for the United States is at once the most modern as well as the most religious nation on earth.
Maybe something for French intellectuals to ponder as they seek to defend a secular state against a determined enemy that is having none of it.