“During the French Revolution, France developed a much more aggressive approach to church/state separation than other European countries. Instead of merely keeping religion out of state affairs, French secularism condemned religion’s influence on political culture in general as pernicious. Formal separation of church and state isn’t enough; you need to exclude religion from national identity and political conversation entirely.

Both France and Belgium have also experienced large-scale Muslim immigration. Their political and social treatment of those Muslim communities, the theory goes, are affected by their preexisting culture of laïcité. You do see this play out in, for example, France’s unusually strict laws restricting the practice of veiling. And this could extend in some way to former French colonies, such as Algeria and Tunisia.

This would perhaps be one way in which Francophone political culture would explain the apparent correlation between Francophone countries and radicalization.”

The above passage comes from an article in Vox, by Zack Beauchamp, which discusses a new study apparently showing that people from French-speaking countries are more likely to become jihadists.

I’m not sure I completely buy into into it all, but as I was reading it I couldn’t help but think about the “radical” French philosophers I’ve encountered over the years, many of whom severely criticize religion to no end but, at the same time, end up creating their own “religions without religion” — I’m thinking of folks like Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan in particular here. I don’t think many folks would disagree with me saying that these four thinkers don’t have many nice things to say about religion, and would “rightly pass for atheists,” but at the same time they don’t shy away from using religious language in their work in an effort to provide (among other things) some extra persuasive flourishes of ethos and pathos.

Now I like radical thinkers, and actually really appreciate the four thinkers I mentioned above. I’m even ok with radical thinkers criticizing the cultural tradition they’ve come from (I do this all the time; I feel obligated to criticize what I feel are unhealthy forms of Christianity for instance), but where I part ways with radical thinkers is when they 1) refuse to recognize the varieties of religious experience and, 2) criticize their cultural traditions, then turn around and pretend to create their own “new thing” ex nihilo, as if the past has no bearing or reference to the here and now. Up until reading the Vox article I was not familiar with laïcité, but I have to say that it sounds ridiculous to me to believe it’s possible to exclude religion from any sort of identity (national or otherwise) or political conversation. Nonsense. Theology/religion is inherently political, and politics is inherently religious.

Tags:deleuzederridaFoucaultLacanlaïcitéradicalizationreligionsecularismtheology