The cross : You are leaving the Conference of Religious Leaders in France (CRCF), created in 2010 and which you have chaired since 2015. Was the purpose of this informal body to offer a united front of religions in dialogue with the public authorities?
Francois Clavairoly: No, it was a matter of consulting regularly between leaders of the six main religions (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist) in order to check the points on which we can agree and those on which we do not. not. It is the complete opposite of a front of religions.
This also allowed us to know the evolutions of each other. I can talk about Islam, which experienced a series of crises that led it to end the period of the CFCM, the French Council for Muslim Worship. This poses a problem, in turn, for the CRCF: the question today is who will represent Islam in this informal consultation body.
At first very discreet, the CRCF gained visibility from 2015 and the jihadist attacks that hit France. Was it then important that a body be able to carry the word of the cults and relay a call for the cohesion of society?
CF: We have indeed experienced it like that, all of us. We wanted to show that religions were both wounded and bearers of a word of concord, peace and reconciliation, a call to fraternity. And recall the transcendent or spiritual dimension of everyone’s life in the face of these tragedies that France has experienced. President François Hollande and Bernard Cazeneuve, then Minister of the Interior, were in tune with this initiative to have people recognize that, in society, the spiritual word makes sense, that it is not out of scope.
The hidden foundations of democracy, buried in everyone’s memory, are nourished by Jewish and Christian messages, it is undeniable. Like the roots, we don’t see them, we don’t have to make them permanently visible, but we mustn’t forget them. In addition, this spirituality is a resource that nourishes many fellow citizens and debates. We see it on ethical and bioethical questions, of society.
How to fight against injustice? No one can be satisfied with the fractures, the archipelago of neighborhoods and cities, at the bottom of a form of gentle segregation that is taking hold in the country. And, for that, spiritualities are backfires.
Isn’t this sometimes difficult to make heard within the political class and in a society in the process of advanced secularization?
CF: The Republic, which does not recognize any cult, knows them all, and therefore encounters them. I form the wish that we will never be in a secularism of indifference, and that a secularism of dialogue and debate will remain. A society that would be completely dried up on the spiritual level, whose culture would be in amnesia of what founds it, would favor violence, disintegration.
Voted in the summer of 2021, did the so-called “separatism” law highlight misunderstandings between the executive and the cults?
heart rate : There are no misunderstandings, on the contrary we have understood very well: it is a poster law that in no way solves the difficulties linked to the political project of radical Islamism. What responds to it is the army, the intelligence and the police. This law also does not solve the problems linked to what I would describe as “social nervousness” concerning the presence of Islam in France. It reinforces the control of religious associations and distills suspicion towards them.
Something has taken place that alerts me. The politicians and intellectuals of our country would be well advised to revisit the foundations of the house in which they dwell.
Otherwise, in your opinion, are the fractures in society that are revealed from one election to another likely to widen?
heart rate : Yes. Let’s look at abstention: we can analyze it by contesting the proposed choice, a disempowerment of citizens, but we can also interpret it by forgetting the foundations – spiritual – of this relay transmitted from generation to generation to make society. If we forget these sources it is perhaps by choice. But then we will have to be told what are the other foundations on which to build the society of tomorrow. And in today’s intellectual offering, I don’t see anything. Nothing other than every man for himself in a neoliberal postmodernity and the search for self-realization.
What wish do you form on the threshold of Emmanuel Macron’s second term and a new legislature?
heart rate : That of a nourished and respectful dialogue, but also the reformulation of a common history, which holds us together, believers and non-believers. The National Council of Resistance was precisely that: those who believed in Heaven and those who did not. The National Refoundation Council (that Emmanuel Macron must launch on Wednesday June 22, editor’s note) should not forget religions. This omission would reinforce my analysis, and I would be unhappy about it.
How do you feel about handing over to the CRCF?
CF: I was happy to live these years of interreligious fraternity. It’s an amazing gift! I don’t know if this dialogue exists to this extent in other countries.
François Clavairoly: “the National Council for Refoundation should not forget religions”