The Costs of Secularity
Shortly after this summer’s London bombings, The Financial Times created an interactive map showing the Muslim population levels within Europe. If you click on France, you’ll find a fascinating bit on France writen by John Thornhill:
Nobody knows for sure how many Muslims there are in France. Because of a strict insistence on the secular nature of the republic, state officials are not allowed to ask a citizen’s faith when conducting a census.
But Islam is estimated to be the second-biggest religion in France with about 5m followers, out of a total population of 60m.
. . .
In theory, French insistence on secularism makes state institutions blind to race or religion and eases integration of immigrant communities. In practice, many Muslims feel subject to unofficial discrimination. The unemployment rate in many Muslim communities is far higher than the national average, while their level of representation at the top of political, legal, business and media professions is disproportionately low.
Yazid Sabeg, a French Algerian businessman who has championed positive discrimination as a means of redressing these imbalances, has warned that without radical change France is in danger of creating a “social and political atom bomb.”
Alarmed at the influence of radical imams, who came from abroad and did not speak French, the government created the French Council of the Muslim Religion in 2002 as an intermediary between the state and Muslim communities.
Nicolas Sarkozy, who has twice served as interior minister, has even advocated state support for mainstream Muslim associations and mosques to deter the extremist fringe. However, this argument is still bitterly resisted by secularists.
Two points. First, the social and political atomic bomb has exploded in France. Second and more significant, the secularist predilections of the French elite have prevented their government from exterminating the terrorist rant of Wahabbi clerics and immams from their borders who have provided the needed bile and jihadist rhetoric that propels young, easily malleable Muslims to violence and self-destruction.
Indirectly, France’s secularist handicap is a lesson of the danger in maintaining the First Amendment falsity of a separation of church and state. Taken to an extreme, religious separationism would not only prevent the United States from providing support to (e.g., tax-exempt status) or procuring assistance from (e.g., faith-based initiatives) religious organizations but would bar any attempt by federal, state, or local governments to expel–based upon their religious expression–the terrorist spite that froths from the radical elements of Islam.
The French elite may value their secularity greatly but their immigrant Muslim population does not–which is why the Parisian suburbs are burning red accompanied the arabic battlecry “God is Great” instead of the peaceful greeting of “Bonjour, can I have another pastry?”