FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE – The circular from the Ministry of National Education of November 9 against attacks on secularism does not go back to the causes of the crisis of religious identity that our country is going through, deplores the associate professor of history and geography Ambroise Tournyol du Clos.
Ambroise Tournyol du Clos is associate professor of history and geography and author of Transmit or disappear, Manifesto of a craftsman teacher (Salvator, 2021).
Can we ask more of secularism than what it is? A legal principle postulating the separation between the Churches and the State and the neutrality of public power. Can we expect more human warmth from her, a more intimate understanding of religious phenomena? Can we even hope that it contributes to weaving the political and social bond that escapes us? In its current configuration, secularism is like a cold border around which the postures of each other stiffen. Either we overinvest it, like a substitute spirituality, a “religion of the exit from religion” (Gauchet), the ultimate spiritual principle compensating for the loss of others. Reconnecting with the most radical version of Third Republic anticlericalism, Ferdinand Buisson style – whose ghosts are still too often invoked – this disguised atheism continues to have its followers. These work on the elaboration of a sacred republican, on the formulation of a secularized and universal morality, in the Kantian vein. These profess, from the top of their platforms, a reductive and old-fashioned scientism where reasoning reason convinces itself that it liberates minds through simplistic schemes. Either it is instrumentalized as a security tool, intended to preserve the school, a sanctuary devoid of sacredness. The circular of November 9, 2022 seems to stick to this minimalist line, which brings us back to the spirit of the sumptuary laws without going back to the causes of this crisis of religious identity. Let it be said, now the “wearing of outfits signifying religious affiliation” will be punished!
Read alsoThe secular education of the religious fact struggles to impose itself at school
The fragility of the ministerial response indicates how much our secularism is now up against the wall. This forms a triple wall that the lyrical exaltations of declining secularism will not be enough to shake. First, Muslim fundamentalism, which today affects important sections of French Islam. His followers, sometimes immersed in a great “cultural poverty” (A. Bidar) totally reject the secularist ideology of which the public school has, according to them, become the Trojan horse. Their children cultivate the double allegiance but one can guess in advance which will prevail of the marks transmitted in family or the cold values of the Republic declined in their courses of EMC (moral and civic education). The second fortress, which can make all the supporters of authentic secularism pale, is that of ignorance. Faced with the complexity of the religious fact, faced with the possible reaction of recalcitrant students, faced perhaps with the inadequacies of their own training, teachers are too often tempted to dodge the transmission of religious questions. A colleague endowed with 25 years of good and loyal service thus declares in the teachers’ room that she prefers to stick, to study the question of medieval Christianity, to the history of the arts (Romanesque, Gothic), leaving on the edge of the way any consideration “theologico-thing”. But isn’t it depriving the Middle Ages of meaning to reduce it to a vague exercise in aesthetic interpretation? Another who teaches philosophy admits to me that the question of “Religion”, dealt with at the end of the year, often goes by the wayside, while it is out of the question not to open the program with the question of ” Topic”…
Based on the distinction between spiritual and temporal orders, a secularism conscious of its impasses would open up a new freedom for the Churches and for the State. It would offer the conditions for a renewed and peaceful dialogue between faith and reason.
Ambroise Tournyol du Clos
Current ignorance in matters of religion thus builds a “secularism of incompetence” (R.Debray) where one pays oneself the luxury of despising what one is profoundly ignorant of. This regime of tightness vis-à-vis the religious – Péguy spoke of the “oil cloth” to evoke the closure of modernity to the spiritual — can produce a kind of shared obscurantism and nourish, through rejection, religious fundamentalism. The third obstacle, and not the least, which should make the last Voltaireans think, is the triumph of the market. How can we deprive our students of transcendence when the consumer society takes care of it with the power and the effects that we know: loss of bearings, individualism, despair? How can we abandon the great metaphysical questions when a cold and hopeless materialism freezes hearts and minds? How can we fail to note the tragic coincidence of the fight against Christmas cribs and the opening of shops on Sundays, the vogue for qamis and the triumph of TikTok? One could not better prove the defeat of Marx and Voltaire if materialism must result in feeding capital, and rationalism be resolved in the compulsive instincts of the shopping.
Read alsoIn college, these young heralds of secularism who live under insults
Can we then hope that secularism maintains a another relationship to religion? A secularism which, aware of its impasses, would strive to define a fair and liberating framework. Based on the distinction between spiritual and temporal orders, this would first open up a new freedom for the Churches and for the State. It would offer the conditions for a renewed and peaceful dialogue between faith and reason, and would suppose that the school takes seriously the transmission of the major questions posed by the different religious traditions, starting with the Christianity from which we mainly inherit, concerning life, of love, of death, of God, of eternity… The atheist, agnostic or believer student would find there the opportunity to analyze the relationship between faith and science, between the regime of belief, that of superstition and that of knowledge, without this reflection leading elsewhere to any hierarchy that would allow the scientist to trample the man of faith.
The religious, no more than any other object, would thus not escape the regime of reasoning, as Albert the Great (1206-1280) already understood, whom we celebrate on November 15, and his brilliant disciple Thomas Aquinas ( 1225-1274), in their time. Moreover, this teaching would not suppose a watertightness between the two domains: the pupil could state his religious questionings but would be invited to practice a process of critical analysis. Nothing would then prevent him personally from creating a dialogue between faith and reason. From Augustine to contemporary exegesis, the exercise has borne fine fruit, for which Western culture is largely indebted.
A “secularism of intelligence” would allow the school and society to open up the question of meaning. By casting a bright light on the major religious themes, which is not reduced to listing the meanings that escape us.
Ambroise Tournyol du Clos
This more ambitious secularism would also have the courage to recognize our heritage. Not the clean slate, cold and chilly, supposed to draw the meaning of a story from which God would disappear, because we now know that the “death of God” (Nietzsche) is a fable, but a banquet of abundance, warm and generous, where secular culture would profitably digest the deeply religious dishes of our Western civilization, François d’Assise, Rabelais, Corneille, Dostoyevsky, Péguy, Claudel, Jaccottet … This “secularism of intelligence” (R. Debray) would once again allow school and society to open up the question of meaning without shuddering. By casting a bright and broad light on the major religious themes, which is not reduced to listing the meanings that escape us (the Trinity, Paradise, the Holy Spirit, etc.) but to illuminate the deep meaning of our fragmented existences and disoriented. Where a moral wave of secular substitution has failed, a solid transmission of culture, broad and lucid, can succeed.
Conscious of being only the legal framework conducive to coexistence within a plural society, secularism must allow proposals of meaning to unfold at school, in public debate, through the media. The return of fanaticism combined with religious ignorance now urges secularism to offer an intelligent answer to the questions it thought it could avoid, in the name of secularization. Should we indeed resign ourselves to the ridiculous alternative in which our adolescents are plunged: theabaya or pornography? Do we fear the possibility of a new hope, of a restored and alive humanity? Are we basically convinced that secularism can be a school of freedom?
“For an ambitious secularism that finally takes our heritage into account”