What is the place of religion in France? Should we worry about the forms it takes with a lot of secularization on the one hand but also minorities tense on very conservative visions in the name of their faith? If ideologues and the media like to argue, quantitative surveys, in particular the European Values Study (EVS) and the religion module of theInternational Social Survey program (ISSP) allow to analyze some trends for more than thirty years.
Here, we will first take into account the image of religions in public opinion, subjective identity (feeling religious and/or spiritual) and the evolution of beliefs.
Religions, sources of conflict
While religions very often present themselves as actors of peace, their image is very different in public opinion: they are widely considered as “bringing more conflict than peace” according to 64% of respondents, both in 2018 and in 1998. And people who have strong religious convictions are viewed with suspicion: 61% consider that they “are often too intolerant towards others”.
It is therefore the bellicose and intolerant image of religions that dominates public opinion, without much change for twenty years, probably because, already at the time, dramatic events had reinforced fears with regard to radicalized religions. , which are the only ones known to some through media messages.
Obviously religions do not all have the same image: 56% of those surveyed have “a completely or rather positive personal attitude” towards Christians, 40% towards Buddhists, 36% towards Hindus, 34% towards Jews and 24% towards Muslims.
The rest of the answers are overwhelmingly made up of undecided people (who say they “neither agree nor disagree”), who probably do not have a clear picture of the religions considered. Negative answers are in fact rare: even for Muslims, the least judged religious group, there are only 26% negative answers, against 4% for Christians and 8% for Jews. There is therefore no rejection in principle of religions, most people adhering to the principles of secularism, recognizing everyone’s freedom to to believe or not to believe.
Religion or spirituality? Young people waiting for an afterlife
Can we distinguish people “faithful to a religion” and individuals who are simply “spiritual, interested in the sacred and the supernatural”? In fact, half of the French population adopts simple positions: they are “religious and spiritual” or “neither religious nor spiritual”.
The other half of the population chooses more complex types:
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“follower of a religion without feeling spiritual”, older group with low education, not very religious but rather conformist, probably often taking religion for granted.
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“not religious but spiritual”, a group that represents religion outside the institution. It is increasing slightly from 15 to 18% in ten years, or a third of people who say they have no religious affiliation. And it is particularly present among those under 35 and graduates who are therefore both very often strongly secularized but a little more open to the sacred and the supernatural.
Young people are not very religious, they only rarely believe in the great stories of institutional religions, but they can be open to beliefs that I qualify as psycho-religious: strong in their vital dynamism, they have more difficulty than older people in imagining that everything will end with death. While aging would make individuals more “realistic”: older people believe in an endless future less often than younger people. There would be an age effect that would explain the propensity of young people to believe in an indefinable future.
Relationships with religious beliefs and the practices they entail are very varied and increasingly deregulated in relation to the great dogmas of the main religions. But minorities often live in a radical and rather intransigent mode the debates on religions, whether they defend traditional models or largely recomposed alternative religiosities.