Introduction

Jared Huffman is the Democratic representative for California’s 2nd congressional district and the only open non-believer in the US Congress. He is also at the forefront of the fight against Christian nationalism in America. He helped found the Congressional Freethought Caucus and the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. Andrew L. Seidel, constitutional attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom (and Freethinker contributor) had this to say about Huffman:

Rep. Jared Huffman is unafraid to publicly declare his belief in church-state separation and his lack of religion. That fearlessness is something we rarely see in American politicians, and it gives me hope for our future. There is no more stalwart defender of the separation of church and state than Rep. Huffman.

I recently spoke with Huffman over Zoom about his career and his opposition to the theocratic agenda of a future Donald Trump administration. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: You are the only open non-believer in Congress. Could you tell us about that, and your personal background regarding religion?

Representative Jared Huffman: I had no intention of being known as the only open non-believer in Congress when I got elected back in 2012. I have been without religion for most of my adult life and in recent years came to sort of loosely identify as a humanist. But that was something I largely kept to myself. I had never been asked about it in politics. I’d spent twelve years in local government and six years in the California State Assembly and I could not imagine that it would ever come to be something I was known for in Congress.

But what I learned pretty early on is that there are all of these publications that want to know about the religious identification of people when they get to Congress. The Pew Research Center does this ongoing study about religiosity in Congress and there are all of these Capitol Hill publications that do surveys and ask you to choose your religious label. For the first few years, I essentially declined to answer those questions. I thought it was none of anyone’s business.

That changed when Donald Trump won the 2016 election and brought into government a growing number of strident Christian nationalists and an agenda that troubled me quite a bit and which I saw as deeply theocratic. I decided that this was something I needed to push back on.

However, it was hard to do that when I was keeping a little secret about my own religious identity, so I came out publicly as a humanist, making me the only member out of 535 in the House of Representatives and the Senate who openly acknowledges not having a God belief.

Do you think there are many other nonbelievers in Congress?

I know there are many more, but I’m the only one dumb enough to say it publicly!

Has coming out affected you politically?

I think that’s been an interesting part of the story. Conventional wisdom holds that you should never do that. And even in some of our more recent polls, atheists tend to rank lower than just about every other category in terms of the type of person Americans would vote for. So there was a lot of nervousness among my staff and from a lot of my friends and supporters when I came out in the fall of 2017.

But the backlash never came, and, if anything, I think my constituents appreciated me just being honest about what my moral framework was. I think they see an awful lot of hypocrisy in politics, a lot of fakers and people pretending to be religious, including Donald Trump, and I found that being honest about these things is actually pretty beneficial politically, and it also just feels more authentic, personally speaking.

Since Trump was elected in 2016, you have become very involved in resisting theocratic tendencies in government. You helped to found the Congressional Freethought Caucus in 2018, for example. Could you tell us how that came about?

Yes, that came next, after the Washington Post wrote a story about me coming out as a humanist. I think it was the next day after that piece was published that my colleague, Jamie Raskin, came to me on the House floor and said, ‘Hey, I think that’s great what you did, and I share the same concerns you have about the encroachment of religion into our government and our policies, we should think about some sort of a coalition to work on these secular issues.’ Conversations like that led pretty quickly to the creation of this new Congressional Freethought Caucus that we launched a few months later.

And what does the caucus do?

We support public policy based on facts and reason and science. We fiercely defend the separation of Church and State. We defend the rights of religious minorities, including the non-religious, against discrimination and stigmatization in the United States and worldwide. And we try to provide a safe place for members of Congress who want to openly discuss these matters of religious freedom without the constraints our political system has traditionally imposed.

It seems important to note that the caucus is formed of people from all different religious backgrounds. It’s not an atheist caucus.

Yes, it’s a mix, and it’s a mix that looks like the American people, which is different from Congress itself as a whole. The American people are getting less religious all the time and they are getting more religiously diverse, but Congress is stuck in a religious profile from the 1950s.

Do you think these changing demographics are part of the reason why there is this renewed Christian nationalist push?

I do. Religious fundamentalists correctly sense that their power and privilege are waning and that has caused them to become more desperate and extreme in their politics.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is an extreme takeover plan for a second Trump presidency to quickly strip away many of the checks and balances in our democracy to amass unprecedented presidential power and use it to impose an extreme social order. It’s a plan to take total control over not just our government but also many of our individual freedoms. And the Christian nationalist agenda is at the heart of it.

Do you believe Trump’s statements distancing himself from Project 2025?

No, they are deeply unbelievable and implausible. Trump is inextricably intertwined with Project 2025 and until very recently both Trump’s inner circle and the Heritage Foundation, who published the plan, were openly boasting about the closeness of that connection. As Americans have come to learn more about Project 2025 and what it would do to their lives, it has become politically toxic to be associated with it, and that’s why you see these sudden attempts by Trump and his team to distance themselves from it.

How did people become more aware of it? It flew under the radar for quite a while.

Indeed, it flew under the radar for over a year. But our Freethought Caucus and others in Congress founded the Stop Project 2025 Task Force two months ago and, thanks to our efforts and the efforts of many others in the media and outside advocacy groups, more people have come to know about Project 2025 and the threat it poses to our democracy. Project 2025 went from being an obscure thing very few had heard about to, just a couple of weeks ago, surpassing Taylor Swift as the most talked about thing on the internet.

Quite an achievement! So, how exactly do you stop Project 2025?

It starts by understanding it, by reading the 920-page document that they arrogantly published and proclaimed as their presidential transition plan. That document lays out in great detail exactly what they intend to do. Our task force has been doing a deep dive into that, working with several dozen outside groups and leading experts to understand what some of these seemingly innocuous things they’re proposing actually mean in real life.

They hide beyond technical terms like ‘Schedule F civil service reform’ and we have been able to understand and help spotlight that what that really means is a mass purge of the entire federal workforce, rooting out anyone who has ever shown sympathy for Democratic politics, anyone who has ever been part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion programme, anyone who has worked on climate science—or anyone else who has offended the sensibilities of MAGA Republican extremists. They want to reclassify these employees and summarily fire them. This would affect well over 50,000 people throughout the federal workforce.

And then, as creepy as that already is, these people would be replaced by a cadre of trained and vetted Trump loyalists who are already maintained in a database housed by the Heritage Foundation. Essentially, they plan to repopulate the federal workforce with their own political operatives. This is not self-evident when you read the technical stuff in Project 2025, but that is exactly what their plan entails.

Can you give another example of their plans?

Yes. There are several ways in which they plan to impose their rigid social order. One of these is to dust off old morality codes from the 1870s using a dormant piece of legislation called the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act criminalises things that can be seen as obscene or profane and one of the things it criminalised back in the 1870s was anything that could terminate a pregnancy. Using this dormant legislation, which many believe is unconstitutional, Project 2025 are proposing what would amount to a nationwide ban on abortion, strict nationwide restrictions on contraception, and the criminalisation of in vitro fertilisation—very extreme and dystopic things.

It seems that the best way to stop Project 2025 is to stop Trump from being elected in November.

That’s the best way. That’s the most definitive way. But even if we beat Trump in this election, now that we have seen the Project 2025 playbook, we are going to have to build some policy firewalls against their plans in the future. The threat won’t go away. We need to build our defences against this kind of extreme takeover of government. But that is going to be much harder to do if Donald Trump is in the White House and his sworn loyalists are populating the entire federal workforce and they have broken down all of the checks and balances that stopped Trump’s worst impulses in his first presidency.

In essence, that’s what Project 2025 is: a plan to remove the obstacles that prevented Trump from doing many of the things he wanted to do or tried to do the first time around and to allow him to go even further.

Do you have a ‘doomsday scenario’ plan in the event of a Trump victory?

Yes, but it’s less than ideal. It relies on a lot of legal challenges in a legal system that has been well-populated by Trump loyalists. It relies on mobilising public opinion in a system where democracy and the democratic levers of power will not mean as much, because, frankly, Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy. Of course, there is no scenario under which we would just let all of this bad stuff happen without putting up a fight, but the tools that we would have to stop Project 2025 would be much less reliable if Trump wins.

How would the implementation of Project 2025 affect the rest of the world? What would be the consequences for America’s friends and allies?

I think that’s an important question for your readers. There’s no doubt that Project 2025 is hostile to the rules-based international order and our alliances that have kept Europe mostly free of war for the past half a century and more. It is hostile to globalism, as they refer to it, meaning free trade and the kind of trade relationships that we have with the European Union and many others around the world. It is hostile to confronting the climate crisis and even to acknowledging climate science. All of these are things that I’m sure folks in Scotland and the UK and throughout Europe would be deeply concerned by.

And there’s no doubt that Project 2025 is fundamentally sympathetic to strongman authoritarian regimes. In fact, it was inspired by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The folks at the Heritage Foundation took a little trip to Hungary to learn about how Orbán had advanced all of these conservative, nationalist, authoritarian policies. Orbán has influenced the American right wing in a big way. He’s a bit of a rock star in Donald Trump’s world.

And so is Vladimir Putin, to an extent.

Indeed.

What are the chances of beating Trump in the election, now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate?

A heck of a lot better than they were two or three weeks ago. My hope is that America is about to do what France did very recently. The French stared into the abyss of a right-wing authoritarian government and they realised what a scary and terrible prospect that was. In a matter of weeks, they united around a broad alliance to keep the far right out of power, and they succeeded. I think we are seeing a similar realisation and pivot from the American people. At least, I hope that is what’s happening. It certainly feels that way to me.

Looking in from the outside as an admirer of America, one thing I would like to see more of from the Democrats in particular is the patriotic case for secularism. The Christian nationalists and their ilk have claimed the mantle of patriotism, but their ideals are very far from the ideals America was founded on.

I think that’s a great point. And I know that you have worked with Andrew L. Seidel and others who are doing heroic work to recapture secular thought as part of what it means to be a patriotic American. I’m certainly all in for that. But the truth is that, though we did an incredible thing by separating Church and State in our Constitution, we have never done a great job of upholding that ideal. We have allowed Christian privilege and Christian power to influence our government for a long, long time, and in some ways what we’re struggling with now is a reckoning between the written law and the desperate attempts of Christian nationalists to hang on to their power and the founding premise of separating Church and State.

I suppose in some ways that’s the story of America. The battle between competing visions of America and trying to live up to those founding ideals.

Yes, that’s true. And the other thing that’s going on, I think, is that Christianity itself is in many respects changing around the world. I’ve spoken to secularists in Europe, in Scotland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and it does seem that there is a strain of fundamentalist Christianity that has become more pronounced in recent years, a strain that is hyper-masculine, focused on power, and militaristic. The old ‘love thy neighbour’ Christianity is falling out of favour. People are fleeing traditional Christian denominations and identifying with these extreme, fundamentalist versions of Christianity. And they even mock what they see as soft Christianity. There’s a violence to these strains, which we saw with the January 6th insurrection in a big way.

So there is a lot happening, and it is more than just a fight between secularists and religionists. It’s also an internal struggle within Christianity itself over some pretty core values.

Going back to your point about the influence of Orbán, it seems to me that it also works the other way around. You have American fundamentalists pouring money into right-wing groups in Europe and funding fanatics in Israel and Uganda. So what can people outside of the US do to help in the fight against American fundamentalism?

It’s hard to compete with the mountains of dark money spread around the world by billionaire Christian nationalists, but we’re not powerless. The good news is that most people don’t really want to live in an authoritarian theocracy. I think lifting up education and science and civil society around the world is essential, as is promoting the idea of keeping religion out of government, of letting people make their own private religious choices without being able to impose their morality codes on everyone else. It’s a huge challenge, but I welcome the influence of secularists in Europe and elsewhere to try to counterbalance this wrong-headed phenomenon that, unfortunately, is emanating from my country.

That seems like a good place to finish. Good luck in the fight, and in November.

I appreciate that very much. I hope to talk to you again after we have saved our democracy.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, by Jonathan Church

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

The post ‘Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy’: interview with US Representative Jared Huffman appeared first on The Freethinker.

In the Netherlands, House of Representatives elections were held on 22 November 2023. This turned out to be a great victory for Geert Wilders’ party (Party for Freedom; PVV), which gained 37 seats out of 150. Other parties with a significant vote share included the Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), which won 24 seats, New Social Contract (NSC), which won 20 seats, and Farmers and Civilians (BBB), which won 7 seats. PVV is generally considered to be a populist party and VVD a traditional liberal party, while NSC is a Christian democratic party and BBB is for the protection of farmers’ interests.

On 28 November 2023, the Speaker of the House of Representatives assigned an informateur: Ronald Plasterk. An informateur investigates which parties can form a coalition in the wake of an election and presides over negotiations between the party leaders to draw up a program of policies. Here is a description of Plasterk’s rather broad assignment:

‘1. To investigate whether agreement is or can be reached between the parties PVV, VVD, NSC, and BBB on a common baseline for safeguarding the Constitution, fundamental rights, and the democratic rule of law. 2. If, in the opinion of these four parties, agreement is reached on point 1, then subsequently investigate whether there is a real prospect of reaching an agreement on issues such as migration, security of existence (including care, purchasing power, permanent jobs and sufficient housing), good governance, security, and stable public finances, international policy and healthy business climate, climate, nitrogen agriculture and horticulture, and fisheries.’

The first task is rather striking since no Dutch political party has as its basic premise the view that the Constitution may be violated, or that fundamental rights or the democratic rule of law should be threatened. No party denies the value of fundamental rights or the model of the democratic rule of law. So, reaching a consensus on these principles ought to have been very easy. But was it?

In fact, reaching a consensus proved more difficult than expected. Indeed, it has recently become clear that one of the named parties wants to abandon negotiations: Pieter Omtzigt’s NSC, a relatively new party that emerged from a split with the Christian Democratic Appeal party last August.

Background to the informateur’s brief

We must understand the specific nature of Plasterk’s assignment against the background of a situation that the Netherlands shares with other countries in Western Europe, including Germany, the UK, and France. That background is that, for more than 20 years, Western Europe has been affected by violent terrorist attacks in which the terrorists have invoked their religion as a motivation. This religion is not Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, or Jewish, but Islamic.

Of the four political parties that have recently been exploring whether they want joint government responsibility, one party is wholly focused on this particular issue. That party is Wilders’s PVV, which essentially won the election.

Islam as a problem and a breaking point

Wilders takes the motivation given by terrorists themselves very seriously and concludes that ‘Islam’ is thus a challenge to Europe.

He also proposes measures to stop the growth of Islam. Wilders and his party have proposed measures like banning the Qur’an, expelling ‘radical Muslims’ from the Netherlands, closing mosques, and denying Islam the status of a religion (and thus excluding it from the constitutional right to freedom of religion). The PVV even made a legislative proposal to settle these things. These measures are—to put it mildly—at odds with the Dutch constitution, fundamental human rights, and the democratic rule of law—and also with the European Convention on Human Rights. Nevertheless, PVV’s most extreme ideas have been ditched by Wilders in the recent negotiations.

Contrary to what he has been accused of, Wilders does not discriminate based on skin colour. He is only vehemently anti-Islam. He is very critical of Moroccan youth but not because of their ethnicity; rather, he is concerned about the overrepresentation of Moroccans in the criminal statistics.

In any case, the negotiations for the formation of a new government are in a critical phase now. Two weeks from now (4 May 2024), the four parties involved in negotiations will tell the public whether they will make the jump. Is there still hope?

Two clashing perspectives

I think there are still chances for a settlement. Let us first put the question: what should the conversation between the four parties mentioned at the beginning of this article be about? There are two opposing perspectives.

First, that of journalist Peter Oborne, as set out in his book The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam (2022). Oborne argues that throughout the Western world, people are needlessly worried about Islam. Islam is an ‘ordinary religion’, and all stories about Islam as inherently violent or impossible to integrate into democratic conditions are based on false assumptions.

Second, there is Anne Marie Waters’s perspective, as set out in her Beyond Terror: Islam’s Slow Erosion of Western Democracy (2018). The title speaks for itself.

Geert Wilders, in his book Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me (2012), took a stand supportive of Waters’s point of view and illustrates this with numerous examples. Not least the example of his own life: he has been on the hit list of jihadist terrorist organizations for decades.

In my view, Oborne is naïve. But Waters (and Wilders) are too pessimistic. What we should do is focus on Islamism, or political Islam, not on Islam as such.

The significance of this debate

This debate is also of great interest to freethinkers and atheists. If Waters and Wilders are right, then it is not only permissible but urgent that restrictive measures be taken to protect the democratic rule of law from the forces that undermine it. And if Oborne is right, anything Wilders proposes is out of order, discriminatory, and contrary to the Constitution, the democratic rule of law, and the fundamental rights of citizens.

France as a guiding country

The most interesting developments on the status of Islam and its practitioners in Europe are currently taking place in France. This is not surprising. France has the largest Muslim population compared to other Western European countries, and it has also been hit by the most horrific jihadist attacks. Think of Charlie Hebdo (2015), the Bataclan (2015), and the beheading of Samuel Paty (2020). These events, together with France’s century-long tradition of thoroughgoing laïcité, have unleashed an unprecedented intellectual energy in finding solutions to the related problems of Muslim integration and Islamic/Islamist terrorism.

The most recent development is the struggle against ‘Islamist separatism’. In 2020, President Emmanuel Macron vowed to tackle this phenomenon, which he described as the attempt of France’s Muslim community to supplant civil laws with its own laws and customs derived from religious practice. The Macron administration opposes this because it essentially creates two parallel societies.

In my view, the solution lies in recognizing that Islamism poses a challenge to Western European countries, but that, at the same time, one should try to respect the rights of all citizens, including Muslim citizens, as much as possible. One way to do this is to avoid creating privileges for religious minorities, e.g., granting Muslims the right to wear headscarves in situations where this is forbidden for all citizens (such as in the army or the judiciary).

One finds this line of argument defended, for example, by the French philosopher Sylviane Agacinski in her Face à une guerre sainte (2022) and by the French lawyer Richard Malka in Traité sur l’intolérance (2023). What these approaches have in common is targeting Islamism, rather than Islam itself.

So what Wilders will have to convince his interlocutors of is that Islamism is a real problem, not just in the Netherlands but in all of Europe—and the world.

Wilders is also a well-known Dutch politician in other parts of the world. Indeed, he is so well known that jihadist-motivated murderers have travelled from Pakistan to the Netherlands to kill him. In 2019, Pakistani Junaid I. was sentenced to 10 years in prison for an attempt to kill Wilders, while last year, the Pakistani ex-cricketer Khalid Latif was sentenced to 12 years for incitement to murder Wilders.

The Netherlands as a test case

The Netherlands could become a test case for developments in other parts of Europe. At present, in Germany and Belgium, parties similar to Wilders’s are on track for steep gains in 2024. These parties are critical of Islam and mass migration and in favour of national sovereignty. This is generally characterized as the ‘far-rightisation’ of Europe or the ‘normalisation of the far right’. It is a matter for debate whether this increasing drift to the right among the populations of these European countries ought to be of serious concern. Personally, I think the so-called right-wing parties have some good points to consider; above all their critical attitude towards the Islamist undermining of democratic institutions. Nevertheless, it is essential that Europe finds a liberal path forward. What happens in the Netherlands will be a sign of what is to come.

Further reading on religion in the Netherlands

Judging the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by Derk Venema and Niko Alm

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

The post Geert Wilders, Europe, and the threat of Islamism appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘Thought is free, or it isn’t thought.’ 

This fine remark comes from Emile Chartier (1868-1951), a French thinker, writer, teacher and humanist best known under his pseudonym, Alain. He was a prominent intellectual figure in the France of the 1930s, but is unfortunately little known in the Anglophone world, and sparsely translated into English. He remains one of the rare thinkers to make the bridge between philosophy and literature: ‘the finest prose of ideas of the century’, as the contemporary philosopher, André Comte-Sponville, has said.

Having trained as a philosopher and started a career as a teacher that would lead to the prestigious lycées of Paris, Alain began in 1903 to contribute short columns to a radical local newspaper in Normandy. From 1906, this became a daily exercise which he continued right up to the outbreak of the First World War, making a total of over three thousand pieces. He called these brief essays propos (not an easy word to translate, implying both ‘proposals’ and ‘remarks’). Their concise and vivid style soon attracted a loyal readership and they were collected into published volumes. The starting point was often a precise fact or event, something seen in the street or read in a newspaper; at first mainly comments on politics, their subject matter broadened to include philosophy, literature, education, nature, religion.  He wrote, he said, to provoke his fellow citizens into thinking for themselves, to wake people up.

To return to the opening quotation, that thought is not thought unless it is free, this encapsulates a theme that runs throughout Alain’s work. As he wrote in his intellectual biography, Histoire de mes pensées (1936): ‘I’ve not reflected upon anything as much as freedom of judgement.’  What is it to think freely?  He provided two lapidary definitions. ‘To think is to weigh’ – penser, c’est peser, almost a pun in French. The second is perhaps his best known quotation: ‘To think is to say no’ (penser, c’est dire non). The second half of this quotation is even better: ‘Note that the sign for “yes” is that of a person falling asleep; while to wake up is to shake the head and say no.’

To elaborate: ‘The problem is always the same, we have to control appearances, through the view of a free mind, which arouses and re-arouses doubt and proof together… we have to begin by not believing everything and so navigate the problem with our own strength alone, to find ourselves lost and abandoned as was always the case for a human being who rejects pious lies, and to recognise ourselves as completely deceived by appearances, and to save ourselves by the constructions of understanding alone.’ He also gives this definition of ‘mind’ (esprit): ‘at bottom the power of doubt, which is to raise oneself above all mechanisms, order, virtues, duties, dogmas, to judge them, subordinate them, and replace them by freedom, which only owes anything to itself.’ This link between the freedom of the mind and the freedom of the individual can be seen as a precursor to the existentialism of the 1940s associated with Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus.

I have hinted at the variety of Alain’s interests. His propos, which he continued after the war, have been gathered into many published collections, the best known of which is Propos sur le Bonheur (one of the very few books of his to be translated into English, as Alain on Happiness). He also wrote major philosophical works after the war.  He is probably best known in France for his views on politics; he also developed sophisticated theories of perception and the imagination, but for the remainder of this article I shall focus on his humanism and views on religion.

As a thinker who avoided labels, Alain did not call himself a humanist as such. A label is a summary that must always leave something out. But it is clear enough that he is very close to it, in this definition: ‘the aim of humanism is freedom in the full sense of the word, which depends above all on a bold judgement against appearances and seductions… Humanism always aims at increasing everyone’s real power, through the widest culture – scientific, aesthetic, ethical. And a humanist recognises as precious in the world only human culture, through the outstanding works of all periods.’  We can see in this description the activity of the teacher he was, and remained in his writing. The ‘widest culture’: in his philosophy classes, as well as Plato, Descartes and Kant, he also taught Homer and Balzac; he wrote books on Balzac, Stendhal and Dickens, and commented on the poems of Paul Valéry, as well as on the arts in general  – the humanities, as he preferred to call them. Humanity lives in its works and that is where to seek it out: ‘human works, mirrors of the soul.’

Another area of humanity’s manifestations is its festivals, like Christmas and Easter. Alain reminded his readers that these are essentially pagan festivals which link us to nature and are, at the same time, powerful symbols and expressions of human feelings. Christmas promises rebirth, of which a newborn child is an image. Or, in another propos: ‘the images of Christmas are astonishing and even, when looked at closely, subversive. The child in a crib, between the ox and the ass, with the adoring kings from the Orient, this means that power isn’t worth a single grain of respect.’ Easter is resurrection of the earth. All Souls’ Day ‘falls where it should, when the visible signs make it quite clear that the sun is abandoning us…There is harmony between customs, the weather, the time of year and the course of our thoughts.’  

Alain remained firmly anticlerical all his life. In fact, in 1897 he managed to earn a headline in a local Catholic paper in one of his first teaching posts, after casting doubt on the existence of the devil and hell in a public lecture. The newspaper assured him, ‘No offence to the young man teaching philosophy in the lycée: Hell exists.’ Parents were advised to withdraw their children from his lessons. Yet he recognised that religions, like festivals, are also human constructions and activities. An anecdote he often recounted is that of being asked by a fellow soldier during the war, who had noticed that Alain was a non-believer, what he thought of religion. ‘It’s a story,’ he replied, ‘a fairy tale, which like all stories is full of meaning. No one asks whether a story is true.’ 

Alain’s meditations on religion culminated in a work published in 1934, Les Dieux, translated into English in 1974 as The Gods. Religious stories and practices, he argues, ‘are not facts, but thoughts.’ They express truths more vividly than theoretical and theological statements. Likewise, the gods themselves are human creations. ‘The gods refuse to appear and it’s through this miracle that never occurs that religion develops into temples, statues and sacrifices.’ And again, ‘the gods are our metaphors, and our metaphors are our thoughts’. There is no transcendence. There is nothing behind the signs and metaphors. All the mystery is man-made.

A further implication is that factual and historical questions are rejected. It does not matter whether Christ existed or not, whether he said this or that, here or there. The Gospels are less a historical record than like a great work of art that continues to speak to us. What matters is the truth in the story. When Jesus attacks the Pharisees in Matthew 23, for their shows of religion and their hypocrisy, what matters is whether what he says of them applies to some human beings, which might even include oneself. To ask whether Jesus actually said these words is to postpone that self-examination. In short, it is the morality taught by religion, explicitly and implicitly, that is important. ‘It is never the dogma that proves the morality; morality, as far as I understand it, supports itself; God adds nothing; paradise, hell, purgatory add nothing.’

The Gods also has a classification of religions, drawing on Hegel and Auguste Comte, which presents Christianity as a development of pagan religion, and an improvement in that it rejected sacrifices and oracles. It made everyone, slaves included, brothers and sisters. Alain liked to quote an anecdote from Chateaubriand’s Les Martyres. A pagan and a Christian meet a poor man. The Christian gives him his cloak. The pagan, knowing that the gods sometimes visited in the shape of a human being, says ‘No doubt you thought it was a god’. – ‘No’, replied the Christian, ‘I simply thought he was a man.’

For Alain, Christ appears as a new god who is human, who has lived the life of human beings, who was ‘weak, crucified, humiliated’ and who rejected power and force. He represents the free mind which is the final judge of all power, though the church, unfortunately, has always tended to associate itself with power. ‘The meaning of the cross is that the highest model of man lived poor and scorned by the great and that he died, punished for his virtues which denied ambition, desire, evil. It was a miserable fate, ennobled by thought, ended by an executioner.’

It is an interpretation of Christianity that leaves out the unrelenting god of the Old Testament. Stripped away are beliefs in miracles, in life after death, in divinely revealed truth, in original sin and redemption through sacrifice. There is also a refreshing avoidance of arguments about the existence or non-existence of god. (In fact, Alain has an argument that existence is not susceptible of proof.) To put it briefly, he interprets Christianity as a humanist religion.

This article can only give a taste of the richness of Alain’s writings, which are concerned with what it is to be a human being. How should we live? How should we live together? These questions do not age.

Find out more

There is an excellent website dedicated to Alain’s work https://philosophe-alain.fr/  Most of the material is in French, but there is also some English content: translations and a handful of articles, including a longer treatment of his discussion of religion.

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Official secular states are falling like dominoes into the hands of radical religionists the world over. Many secular Israelis say they would rather cope with anti-Semitic backlash overseas than live under the incumbent ultra-Judaic regime. India, an erstwhile battleground for minority and majority fundamentalisms, is now firmly in the grip of Hindutvaadis (proponents of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism), who control the state machinery. There are demands for death and apartheid for sacrilege against Islam in Bangladesh. Even the US, the ‘leader of the free world’, cannot guarantee anatomical freedom for half of its population owing to the pervasiveness of conservative Christian beliefs about abortion.

In these countries and others, not only have secular spaces been usurped by religion, but the term ‘secularism’ itself has been declared anathema by the religionists. Meanwhile, the self-avowed defendants of secularism – especially the left-wing progressives, depicted as part of the liberal elite by their detractors, who are accustomed to combatting philosophical challenges with condescension more than contemplation – are religiously refusing to accept that their own privileging of regressive ideas is analogous to intolerant religious dogma. The tendency of left-wing progressives to equate satire on Islam with persecution of Muslims, or to conjure up unsubstantiated allegations of ‘Islamophobia’, reveals an embrace of Islamic dogma which is part of a comprehensive failure to strengthen the separation of religion and state.

Amidst all this apparent backtracking, left-leaning progressives of this persuasion have arguably made a pariah out of the only rendition of secularism that actually is uncompromisingly neutral on religion: laïcité.

Every time French authorities treat Islam like other religions, the blame is laid at the door of laïcité. This simple refusal to allow for Islamic exceptionalism might as well be the effective definition of ‘Islamophobia’. Whether it is the anti-radicalism bill, the enforcement of the ban on religious symbols in public institutions, or the 1905 law that laid the foundation of the separation of church and state, none of the French legislative provisions explicitly mentions Islam and all are equally applicable to all religions. If an egalitarian law impacts some groups of ideological adherents more so than others, it only serves to highlight the expansionist and exceptionalist tendencies of those ideologies, rather than any intrinsic discrimination in policy. Yet this remains a blind spot for those Anglo-American progressive secularists, whose treatment of anti-secularist ideas sometimes seems to depend on nothing more than the numerical strength of their proponents.

The fundamental difference between classical Anglo-Saxon secularism and French laïcité lies in the way in which they separate state and religion. Anglo-Saxon secularism aspires to separate the state from the individual, or communal, religious space, while French laïcité aims to separate religion from statecraft. The differences are rooted in the countries’ respective histories of secularisation, and their corresponding sociological evolutions. The US and the UK have sought the post-Enlightenment harmonisation of Christian sects, while France predominantly occupied itself with overturning the monopoly of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century.

The Indian version of secularism is even more passive and accommodationist. Different religious communities have been allowed to govern their own exclusive matters: this in effect creates separate communal spheres which have adopted an apparent commitment, at least temporarily, towards coexistence, in line with the pluralistic, polytheistic, traditions of the Indian subcontinent. However, while today’s multi-religious societies pose a challenge that the Anglo-Saxon and Indian brands were supposedly designed to address, it is French laïcité that offers the best solution, because it would eliminate religion from any level of governance altogether, and so in effect would create more robust checks, both between and within religions.

Paradoxically, by officially distinguishing between communities based on religious beliefs in their bid to maintain harmony between them, both the Anglo-Saxon and Indian brands of secularism actually institutionalise religious separation. This in turn empowers radical ideologues within these communities to uphold their religion’s exceptionalism, because they are able to define its adherents through the narrowest interpretation of their ideology and demand others to respect this strain in the ‘sprit of secularism’. For instance, the Islamic ban on the depiction of Muhammad – a Salafi enforcement which was not originally in other interpretations of Islam – has been dutifully lapped up by many in the Anglo-Saxon ‘progressive elite’, who are terrified of offending ‘all Muslims’. Furthermore, this buttressing of ideological lines abandons minorities and the marginalised within those communities to their fate, as exemplified by the Muslim women being victimised by sharia rulings even in the West.

Elsewhere, secularism and religious heritage are coalescing to forge national identities and ultimately bring about theological takeovers. Unlike the adherents of the other two Abrahamic faiths, secular and even nonbelieving Jews have historically overcome identitarian dissonance by staking their claim to being an ethnoreligious group. However, given that this belief itself is rooted in the orthodox, religious Judaic tradition of matrilineal descent, the transformation of Israel from a state for the (ethnic) Jewish people to one for (religious) adherents of Judaism – especially after decades of the sustained privileging of ultra-orthodox Jews – was inevitable.

In India, the land of Sanatana Dharma, or Vedic religions, which in themselves are scripturally devoid of the monotheistic rigidity of Abrahamic texts, it is the Hindutva, or ‘Hinduness’, that is being peddled by the majoritarian ideologues as an uncharacteristically monolithic definition of an Indian. This in turn elevates Hindu beliefs over others even unofficially. Sri Lanka, meanwhile, has facilitated the rise of radical Buddhists by describing Buddhist heritage as the supreme binding force of the nation in the state’s constitution. This illustrates the way in which the Dharmic religions of the Indian subcontinent too can be weaponised to enforce a nationalistic religious hegemony and erode longstanding traditions of secularism. Myanmar has taken this weaponisation to murderous extremes, prompting the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims.

Laïcité provides safeguards against any consolidation of religious dominance by barring the manifestation of any religion, majority or minority, in public institutions. As such, it in effect treats religion like any other ideology. The fundamental failure of all other brands of secularism is that they allow exceptional behaviour in the name of a religious ideology that they would not allow on the basis of other ideologies, traditions, or individual preferences. Judges or teachers are not allowed to wear the insignia of political parties, because of the suggestion of bias that they would create; the wearing of religious emblems in public institutions should not be treated any differently. To make exceptions for religion where they would not be allowed for political beliefs or personal prejudices is to give religions a truly privileged status, which undermines a state’s claim to be neutral in such matters of conscience.

Laïcité is also often misinterpreted as an exclusively French obsession or colonial hangover, which France has exercised over its Arab or Muslim subjects. But this misinterpretation dismisses the various versions of secularism that have thrived across the world. The tradition of laïcité has sustained secular ideals in Tunisia and Lebanon; secularists in the latter have even organised ‘Laique Pride’ protests to insist that only a more assertive secularism can undo the religious and sectarian fault lines dividing their society. Making the state laico in 2010 helped Mexico to decriminalise abortion last year; as a result, many American women have travelled down south to exercise their fundamental human right to bodily autonomy.  

Albania overcame the Millet institutionalisation of religious communities, an Ottoman remnant, through the creation of shtet laik, ‘laicist state’, and a strict neutrality on religion. The maintenance of shtet laik also helped the Muslim-majority European state overcome the state-sanctioned atheism and religious repression of the Communist era, which has seen an Islamist resurgence in many other Soviet states since the fall of the USSR. The unflinching neutrality emphasised by laïcité, and its many proponents, also extends to anti-religious expressions. It is critical to stress this point, since an active crackdown on religious beliefs undoes impartiality. In other words, privileging atheism above religion, in policymaking and statecraft, is no better than the other way round.

Similarly, it is crucial to note that merely enshrining laïcité in the constitution is no guarantee of sustained state neutrality on religion. The example of Turkey shows how any reversal in staunch secularism, whether in the name of nationalism or misdirected liberalism, eventually paves the way for a religious takeover. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the man who spearheaded Turkey’s Islamisation; Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is the leader of the Mustafa Kemal Atatürk-founded Republican People’s Party (CHP) that created Turkey on the founding principle of laiklik, or laicism. As the two rivals participated in the runoff election on 28th May – one of the most critical elections of recent times – even a cursory debate on the country’s secularism was not being held. This was because the Turkish opposition had surrendered in advance to the nation’s conservatives, who want more Islam in governance and consider it integral to Turkish identity. Such an attitude has unsurprisingly eroded religious tolerance and subjugated minorities in the country once deemed the benchmark for Muslim secularism.

The reason different versions of laicism have been misconstrued as ‘illiberal’, whether in Turkey or France, is due not least to the general capitulation among progressives to identity politics. This attitude not only reinforces communitarian boundaries, but earmarks certain minorities as designated vote banks. Whether it is the Labour or Democratic parties in the Anglo-American sphere, or the Congress in India, traditionally left-wing parties have, not unlike their opponents on the right, sought to profit from a communal segmentation, with both ends of the political spectrum offering contrasting, but similarly damaging, perversions of secularism. This divisive approach has helped create a world where both the rejection of religious ritualism, and the embrace of religious identitarianism, are simultaneously rising, as demagogues within religious communities successfully exploit the loopholes in submissive secularism. Religious ideologies do not only threaten the principle of equality before the law, but have now mutated into forms of religiously-grounded nationalism. This makes it more critical than ever to confine the manifestation of religion, as of all other ideological manifestations, to its designated sphere.

Where ‘religious tolerance’ has become synonymous with tolerating religious intolerance, a form of secularism that is sustainable and that treats everyone equally can only be attained by making religion irrelevant in all matters of public policy. This is what the supporters of laïcité maintain, notwithstanding various shortcomings in its implementation in states like France. The ideologues who champion the more selective and opportunistic brands of secularism fear that making religion inconsequential might render their own positions irrelevant. It is thus crucial to safeguard secularism from manipulation, whether by progressives, religious ideologues or nationalists. The only way that this can be done is by upholding truly ‘laicist’ neutrality on religion.

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Since the beginning of the 2000s, while the Netherlands and Belgium had already made legislative provisions about assisted dying, in France, the debate has continued endlessly.

Three laws were made on this subject from 2005 to 2016, primarily by the same deputy [in the National Assembly], a cardiologist opposed to euthanasia, who once even claimed that his law was a model for other countries to follow. With self-serving complacency, this same doctor, although opposed to euthanasia, admitted to Le Point in 2008 that he had ‘switched off respirators in order to free [hospital] beds’.  

The debate in the French media about the end of life was launched in 2003 by the case of Vincent Humbert, a young firefighter who, following a car accident, found himself locked in his body and only able to communicate with one finger. Through the mediation of his mother, he asked the president of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, for the right to die with dignity. But this was denied him.

Humbert was finally freed from his body, which had become a prison, by his mother and his doctor. His case provoked an immense emotional response in the French population. It was the first of many such cases. From then up to the present, the debate on assisted dying has continued.

France adopted three laws about the end of life in 2005, 2010 and 2016. These pieces of legislation firstly gave guarantees to doctors and allowed them to acknowledge advance healthcare directives (or ‘living wills’), even if, while being restrictive, these could not always be contested. The doctor could always decide not to honour them in a situation of vital urgency or if they were ‘manifestly inappropriate’ – something which, in French law, does not mean anything.

From 2005, although euthanasia and assisted suicide were completely ruled out by the legislature and successive right and left-wing governments, palliative sedation became a possibility. Finally, the latter was redefined and limited to the patient’s dying moments. Since 2016, ‘profound and continuous sedation’ up to death has been the only legal way of stopping mental suffering or futile, unbearable and unassuageable pain.  

If sedation of this kind can be a genuine solution for people who are very old or completely debilitated, it becomes an act of medical cruelty when it lasts two or three weeks – as is unfortunately too often the case in France.

In fact, as it was put rather naïvely by Jean Leonetti, the architect of the laws of 2005, 2010 and 2016 (and also, extraordinarily, their evaluator), in order to let someone ‘sleep before dying’, it is necessary to stop giving them food and water, thereby provoking a sickness so that their kidneys are affected, and death at last follows. Everything, in fact, remains under the control of the doctor, who can choose whether or not to accelerate the sedation. Moreover, under the influence of this type of slow sedation, there is no study that shows that the patient does not suffer. What is certain is that people close to the patient, such as carers (in particular the nurses), do suffer from this slow form of death.

The politicians responsible find it hard to understand that our death can belong to us. They have always followed the lead of doctors who wish to medicalise death and retain sole control over it. But as a result of cases [like Humbert’s] and debates in the media, our elected representatives have finally admitted that they ought to have a change of approach and put the dying person at the centre of these decisions – that it ought to be the patient or their healthcare proxy who decides.

Under the previous government, the National Assembly ought to have adopted the legislative proposal of the deputy Olivier Falorni, which would have legalised active assistance in dying. For the first time, there was a large majority in favour, but the government did not want to allow this law to pass all the way through the legislative process. However, during his presidential campaign, Macron, who would be reelected, committed himself to launching a citizens’ debate and even expressed himself in favour of the Belgian model.

This commitment is now on the point of being honoured. In September 2022, the National Consultative Ethics Committee issued Opinion 139, paving the way to a law that could authorise euthanasia. The French President has announced a citizens’ convention that will be held from December 2022. This convention will be put under the control of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council. An evaluation of the last ‘Leonetti-Claeys’ law of 2016 will be made by the National Assembly in the coming months.

At last, a debate will be organised throughout the country. This will be an important occasion for supporters of the ultimate freedom to demonstrate that a law that permits assisted dying is a possibility given to every individual – and not an obligation, as some people would have it considered.

The issue today is about defending a law which strictly respects the wish of the dying individual. This law ought to rest on two limbs: on the one hand, universal access to palliative care, and on the other, the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

This law will be faithful to our republican triptych – Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – which applies to all of our official institutions:

Liberty to live as long as possible for those who wish to. Liberty of conscience for carers who will never be obliged to assist in a case of euthanasia, thanks to a ‘conscience clause’. Liberty, finally, for those who cannot endure to live any more, because there is no principle, in a secular democracy, that obliges anyone to die at the last possible moment – and especially to die in pain and suffering.

Equality before death. There is no doubt that all of us are going to die – even if certain politicians seem not to have not realised it – but we are not all going to die in the same conditions. If you have relatives or the means to do so, you will end up dying abroad, in Belgium or Switzerland. But to do so in Switzerland, you need to scrape together more than 10,000 euros (£8,650). The vast majority of French people do not have this sum. It is like when abortion was forbidden in France: up till 1975, women who sought one had to flee abroad. Those who did not have the means to do so submitted to backstreet abortionists (so-called ‘angel-makers’), and some of them died. Similarly, in France today, old and very ill people are being driven to violent suicide, because they are not guaranteed a serene and dignified end to their lives.

Finally, Brotherhood, because not all physical pain and psychological suffering can be assuaged. What can be said to people who have pains that resist treatment? ‘Die in agony!’

To conclude, the law that we want for France will at last allow each person to control the end of his or her life. A society which gives individuals this final right elevates itself. France will thus be able to reassume its vocation as a leading country for the respect of fundamental human rights. Roll on 2023!

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La fin de vie : enfin une loi d’Ultime liberté en France ?

Depuis le début des années 2000, alors que les Pays-Bas et la Belgique avaient déjà légiféré, la France n’a cessé de relancer d’ininterrompus débats sur la fin de vie.

Trois lois de 2005 à 2016, trois lois faites principalement par le même député, un cardiologue opposé à l’euthanasie, et qui un jour prétendit même que sa loi était un modèle dans le monde. En terme, d’autosatisfaction, on n’est jamais aussi bien servi que par soi-même. Lequel médecin, opposé à l’euthanasie, avouait dans un grand magazine, en 2008, avoir « arrêté des respirateurs pour libérer des lits. »

C’est l’affaire Vincent Humbert, du nom d’un jeune pompier qui, à la suite d’un accident de voiture, se retrouve enfermé dans son corps n’ayant plus qu’un doigt pour communiquer, qui va lancer médiatiquement le débat sur la fin de vie en France. Par l’intermédiaire de sa maman, il va demander au président de la République, Jacques Chirac, le droit de mourir dans la dignité. Ce qui lui sera refusé.

Il sera finalement libéré de son corps devenu une prison par sa mère puis par son médecin.

Cette affaire va provoquer une immense émotion dans la population française. Elle est la première de nombreuses autres. Et le débat sur la fin de vie sera ininterrompu jusqu’à ce jour.

La France a donc adopté ses trois lois sur la fin de vie en 2005, 2010 et 2016. Ces législations ont d’abord donné des garanties aux médecins et ont permis de reconnaître les directives anticipées même, si tout en étant contraignantes, elles ne sont toujours pas opposables. Le médecin peut toujours décider de ne pas les respecter en cas d’urgence vitale ou si elles sont manifestement inappropriées, ce qui, en droit français, ne veut rien dire…

Dés 2005, si l’euthanasie et le suicide assisté ont été totalement écartés de la loi par le législateur et les gouvernements de droite et de gauche successifs, la sédation terminale est devenue une possibilité. Finalement, elle a été redéfinie et limitée à l’agonie. Depuis 2016, la sédation profonde et continue jusqu’à la mort est devenue la seule possibilité d’arrêter des souffrances ou des douleurs inutiles, insupportables et inapaisables.

Si cette sédation peut être réellement une solution pour des personnes très âgées ou totalement affaiblies, elle devient un acte médical cruel quand elle dure deux ou trois semaines, ce qui est malheureusement encore trop souvent le cas en France.

Car, en effet, pour laisser dormir avant de mourir, comme l’énonce avec un peu de naïveté Jean Leonetti, l’artisan des lois de 2005, 2010 et 2016 – mais aussi, extraordinaire, l’évaluateur de ses propres lois ! – il faut arrêter d’alimenter et d’hydrater la personne et donc provoquer une maladie pour que les reins soient atteints et que la mort s’en suive enfin ! Et, tout reste en fait sous le contrôle du médecin qui peut accélérer ou non la sédation… D’autant que sous le coup de cette forme de sédation, lente, aucune étude ne prouve que le patient ne souffre pas ; ce qui est certain, c’est que l’entourage, dont les soignants, au premier rang desquels les infirmiers, souffrent de cette lente agonie.

Les responsables politiques ont du mal à comprendre que notre mort puisse nous appartenir et ont toujours suivi ces médecins qui souhaitent médicaliser la mort et en garder, seuls, le contrôle.

Mais, à force d’affaires et de débats médiatiques, les élus ont enfin admis qu’il fallait changer de logique et mettre la personne mourante au centre des décisions. Que ce soit elle qui décide ou sa personne de confiance.

Sous la précédente mandature, l’Assemblée nationale a failli adopter une proposition de loi du député Olivier Falorni légalisant l’aide active à mourir. Pour la première fois, il y avait une large majorité pour le faire mais le gouvernement n’a pas souhaité permettre à ce texte d’aller au bout du chemin législatif. Cependant, pendant la campagne présidentielle, le candidat Macron, réélu président, s’est engagé à lancer un débat citoyen et s’est même prononcé en faveur du modèle belge.

Cet engagement est en passe d’être tenu.

Le conseil consultatif national d’éthique a rendu un avis à l’automne 2022 permettant d’avancer vers une loi qui autoriserait l’euthanasie et le président de la République a annoncé la tenue d’une convention citoyenne à partir du mois de décembre 2022. Elle sera placée sous le contrôle du Conseil économique, social et environnemental.

Une évaluation de la dernière loi de 2016 dite Leonetti-Claeys sera faite par l’Assemblée nationale pour janvier 2023.

Enfin, un débat sera organisé partout dans le pays. Ce sera notamment l’occasion pour les militantes et les militants de l’ultime liberté de démontrer qu’une loi sur l’aide active à mourir est une possibilité donnée à chacune et chacun. Et non une obligation comme certains voudraient le faire croire.

Il s’agit de défendre aujourd’hui une loi qui respecte strictement la volonté du mourant. Cette loi doit reposer sur ses deux jambes : d’une part, l’accès universel aux soins palliatifs et d’autre part, la légalisation de l’euthanasie et du suicide assisté.

Cette loi sera fidèle à notre triptyque républicain, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité qui s’étend sur toutes nos édifices officiels !

Liberté de vivre le plus longtemps possible pour celles et ceux dont c’est le vœu. Liberté de conscience des soignants qui ne seront, jamais obligés d’accompagner une euthanasie grâce à une clause de conscience. Liberté enfin de celles et de ceux qui n’en peuvent plus car il n’existe aucun principe, dans une démocratie laïque, qui vous oblige à mourir le plus tard possible, notamment dans la douleur et la souffrance.

Égalité devant la mort. Certes 100% d’entre nous allons mourir même s’il semble que certains politiques ne s’en rendent pas compte, mais nous ne mourons pas dans les mêmes conditions. Si vous avez des relations ou des moyens, vous arriverez à mourir à l’étranger, en Belgique ou en Suisse. Mais aller en Suisse, ce sont plus de 10 000 euros qu’il faut réunir. L’immense majorité des Français n’ont pas cette somme. C’est comme quand l’avortement était interdit en France jusque 1975, les femmes devaient fuir à l’étranger. Celles qui n’en avaient pas les moyens se donnaient aux faiseuses d’anges et certaines en mouraient. Comme aujourd’hui, on pousse en France les seniors et les personnes très malades à se suicider violemment faute de leur garantir une fin de vie sereine et digne.

Fraternité enfin, car on ne peut soulager toutes les douleurs physiques et toutes les souffrances psychiques. Que dire à des personnes qui ont des douleurs réfractaires ? Agonisez dans la souffrance !!!

En conclusion, la loi que nous voulons pour la France permettra enfin à chacune et à chacun de maîtriser sa fin de vie.

Une société qui donne ce droit ultime s’élève. La France renouera alors avec sa vocation de pays exemplaire pour le respect des droits humains fondamentaux… Vivement 2023 !

The post Assisted dying: will the final freedom be legalised in France? appeared first on The Freethinker.

A key element of secularism is opposing the age-old symbiosis between rulers (or governments) and state religion, each dependent on mutual legitimisation. King James I was under no illusion: ‘No bishop, no king.’ And as the American lawyer, writer, and orator Robert Green Ingersoll noted in 1881, ‘the throne and altar were twins – two vultures from the same egg.’

One of the most treacherous examples in the last century of this symbiosis was the way in which France’s Roman Catholic hierarchy propped up the Nazi puppet Maréchal Pétain during World War II.

I remind readers just how relatively recent this all is. For me it is not dusty academic history; as I will demonstrate, it is on the cusp of living memory. It is a case history of the fragility of liberty, something too many of our politicians – even those who claim to be historians – seem to be very careless about.

On 22 June 1940, Philippe Pétain signed an armistice with Hitler, conceding defeat. As a result, while the Nazis battled to overwhelm the northern half of the country, the southern half, euphemistically entitled ‘Free France’, was nominally under Pétain’s control, relieving Hitler of any need to deploy forces there. The Pétain regime was based in the spa town of Vichy, chosen for its many lavish hotels and transport links.

Pétain’s grip on power was tenuous and he needed all the support he could summon. Who better to fulfil this role than the Catholic Church, preaching to the nation from its pulpits each week? The purges against the Jews had already started, even in France, but that proved to be no impediment to the Church’s unconditionally supporting Pétain. And not just the French Church. In August 1941 Marshal Pétain enquired about the Vatican’s view of his collaborationist government’s anti-Jewish legislation. According to the report of the International Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, top Vatican officials found ‘no objection to these restrictions so long as they were administered with justice and charity and did not restrict the prerogatives of the Church.’

The Church’s leaflet, addressed in 1942 to every French person, made just one point: that it was a religious obligation to support Pétain, almost as if he were a saint. He was already a national hero for his military role in World War I. The leaflet comprised sycophantic pro-Pétain statements from practically every senior cleric in the country. It is not hard to imagine devout matriarchs and other pious family members castigating detractors – for example, those in the resistance or protecting Jews – simply because anything short of unquestioning allegiance was portrayed as a sin against the diktat of the Church. In 1942, Bishop Lusaunier went as far as to direct that ‘the French should obey Pétain, not De Gaulle’ – who was leading the resistance from London.

It is not surprising that there is little or no evidence of a public backlash to the leaflet at that point. The Vichy regime was a police state, whose rules affected every single life. Even children had to sing a daily hymn to Pétain: Maréchal, nous voilà! (‘Marshal, here we come’).

The history of the Catholic Church is replete with its support for the oppressors over the oppressed, going back at least to the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores of South America in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the case of the Church’s collaboration with Pétain, its price for this Faustian pact was the reversal of laïcité, the secularist reforms of the opening years of the 20th century, from which the Church was still reeling. For example, France’s Third Republic had proscribed religious instruction or observance in publicly funded schools. On 9 July 1940, the Government of the Republic was transferred to Pétain’s control. Defeat was blamed on the Jews, Communists, atheists and Freemasons, and portrayed as divine retribution for the secularist reforms.

Religion was let back into publicly funded schools. Public funds were permitted to be used to finance religious schools. Pétain closed the teacher training establishments set up after the Revolution. From 1943, communes were required to pay for church maintenance. The Church was given back assets, particularly property, that had been sequestered by the Third Republic.

The Church will also have been delighted that the revolution’s battle cry of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was abandoned. Pétain replaced it with travail, famille, patrie (‘work, family, fatherland’). This ushered in a new moralism, an attempt to woo ardent Catholics, for example by discouraging divorce and demanding that women dressed modestly and bore children within wedlock. Jacques Duquesne, the author of a book on French Catholics during the occupation, believed that ‘one reason for the church’s mute acquiescence was its enthusiasm for Vichy’s moralizing, family-based, traditionalist agenda.’

Nothing in this regime actually operated as it was presented to the people. Although the cornerstone of the new regime was ostensibly Catholic, there were secularists among its ranks. And life in Vichy was as libertarian as it gets. Pétain’s private life was similar: he was not a practising Catholic, married a divorcée, and had affairs but no children.

A few months after the leaflet’s release, the Church’s position unravelled a little. In July 1942, Archbishop Saliège of Toulouse, despite having supported Pétain, protested together with some other clerics, but no other prelates, about the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup and the reportedly enthusiastic arrest of over 13,000 Jews by the French police without any coercion by the Nazi authorities. By mid-1943, however, control of the notorious Drancy transit camp northeast of Paris, from which 67,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, came under Nazi control, demonstrating conclusively that the Vichy regime was subservient to the Third Reich.

Tellingly, Saliège’s protests did not shame the Church into rethinking its collaborations. As late as February 1944 the bishops condemned the resistance army, despite the fact that the extent of Nazi atrocities was widely known by then, as was their all but certain prospect of defeat in Europe. This was just six months before the allies liberated Paris, and, soon after, France.

After the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944, the Nazis deported Pétain against his will to Germany to head a ‘government’ in exile, but Pétain refused the role. In October, however, he was brought back to France for trial.

He played the wronged victim. ‘Power was legitimately given to me and this was recognised from the Vatican to the USSR.’ He was, if nothing else, a murderous anti-Semite. However the ‘Lion of Verdun’, as he had been known for his valour during World War I, saw himself as the country’s grieving father. On 17 June 1940, he had proclaimed, ‘France is a wounded child. I hold her in my arms.’ Five days later, as told by Martin Goldsmith in Alex’s Wake, he signed the Armistice with Hitler, at the latter’s request, ‘in the very same railroad car and on the very spot where, twenty-two years earlier, the Germans had surrendered at the end of World War I.’

Pétain may well have been motivated by an attempt to avoid France’s total destruction, and it is possible that he himself was the puppet of Prime Minister Laval. One of his main accusers was Paul Reynaud, briefly prime minister before Pétain took over, who had done his utmost to oppose the Nazis. Reynaud told the court, ‘never has one man done so much damage to a nation as Maréchal Pétain has done to the French.’

De Gaulle commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. Pétain was exiled to prison on l’Isle d’Yeu, where he died in 1951. Laval was executed.

Astonishingly, there was no wave of anticlericalism at liberation. The Church emerged unscathed from its collaboration with Vichy because the Gaullists, socialists, communists and the Christian Democrats were all united in a government that needed the support of the Church.

It was not until 1997, on the site of Drancy transit camp, that French bishops asked forgiveness ‘for the collective silence [sic] of the bishops of France during these terrible years.’

As the Guardian reported in 2002: ‘Successive French leaders have had their own reasons for perpetuating the illusion that the Vichy regime was a victim of the Nazis and not an active participant in a Germano-Franco fascism.  It was not until 1995, the year he became president, that Jacques Chirac broke the taboo of silence, admitting that “the French government had given support to the criminal madness of the occupiers”.’

Christian Eyschen, Secretary General of the secularist Federation Nationale de la Libre Pensée, cites numerous examples of Pétain’s concessions to the Church which have not been reversed, even now.

Unfortunately, my recent experiences of French justice lead me to go further. I have witnessed clerics not being held accountable under secular law for the sexual abuse of minors, nor for reporting their knowledge thereof as the law requires. In my opinion, the Church in France appears to be above the law, just as it was before the Revolution. The most spectacular example of this was the trial of the then most senior Catholic in France, Cardinal Barbarin (who had papal ambitions), for failing, as had been unlawful since 2000, to report abuse by a priest of numerous scouts over decades. Barbarin’s awareness of the abuse was not in contention, but the public prosecutor refused to initiate the case. Yet Barbarin was convicted after a private prosecution in 2019. In a bizarre development, however, the conviction was overturned by an appeals court, on the basis that Barbarin was not legally obliged to report the abuse allegations, because his victims were adults at the time when they alerted him. This decision was upheld on appeal by the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court for civil proceedings.

As to living memory, in 2019 I stayed at a family hotel on the south side of Lac Léman (Lake Geneva) in the French spa town of Thonon les Bains in the department of Haute Savoie. It is famous for its maquisards, the guerrilla fighters opposing the Vichy regime, whose numbers included many Catholics. Some joined to avoid the ‘Compulsory Work Service’ (STO) that provided forced labour for Germany.

The patriarch of the hotel, a delightful man by then in his nineties, had been a maquisard. I shook his hand as he told me proudly of standing next to de Gaulle at the liberation of Paris.

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