Our journey through France has been one of discovery. More than anything that has involved learning that what we thought we knew about this country, based on North American media, would more often than not turn out to be totally false.
One of the big surprises for me was religion. Leaving aside the growing population of Muslim residents and immigrants (because I can’t claim expertise in that area) I just assumed that being French equalled being Catholic.
If you look at the churches, basilicas, and cathedrals that are part of every town, city, and village you would think that religion is an obvious cornerstone of France. The steeples of one church or another are an inevitable landmark that you come to rely on.
It’s only when you look closer that you realise that many of these buildings are locked up nearly all of the time. Some are decommissioned. Some only have services once or twice a year. As I have written before, it saddens me that buildings that are a thousand years old are just tourist attractions.
France has had revolutions, and fighting back at the power and influence of the church has been a critical part of that battle. One legacy of that history is that the vast majority of French people no longer attend church.
According to Statistica, less than 6% of French Christians attend church weekly, and the vast majority of the population only enters a church door for weddings, funerals, and high holy days.
And yet…..
At road crossings all over France you will find a crucifix.
And graveyards are maintained, flowered, and obviously visited in ways that would be unimaginable in Canada.
Holidays are still centred around the church calendar, and the number of towns and villages named after a saint is unimaginable. As are the sheer number of saints that France has created, and in whom people still seem to take great pride. (Wikipedia claims they number 152. At last count.)
It’s as if France has elected to remain a strongly Catholic country while simultaneously rejecting the Catholic hierarchy. A country that, even if people don’t go to church, still comes to a nearly complete halt on a Sunday; where people have one day of the week when they can spend time with their families, at home, or at the park, without worrying about work.
Incidentally, just for comparison, according a 2005 survey, some 21% of Canadians still attended church weekly.
And according to another report, 22 percent of Americans also say they go to religious services at least once a week. Those numbers reportedly dropped somewhat during the COVID pandemic, but they are still significant.
All of which leaves me to wonder about how public policy is influenced by high levels of religious affiliation. Certainly it’s hard to look at the rise of the extreme right in the US, and the various anti-trans, anti-woman, anti-contraception legislations, and at the campaigns to closely monitor and constrain what children are taught in schools, and not see it as directly connected to the rise of the many conservative mega-churches in that country.
And, if we want to move the discussion to another level, I have to wonder if the comparatively lower levels of education, and lower quality of public education, in much of the US leads directly to people’s unquestioning acceptance of whatever the man in the pulpit tells them on Sunday.
Once again I find myself thinking that the people of France seem to have a much better handle on this than many other places. And I can better understand the anti-Muslim headgear bans in France as perhaps less a racist action - although that’s obviously part of it - than a reflection of centuries of struggle to keep the powers of the Church under control.
Obviously this is all much more complex and nuanced than can be explored in a blog post, but on this Easter Sunday, as the bells of the Basilique Notre-Dame ring out at length, and with great beauty, I find that I have to think about it.
Susan has on more than one occasion suggested that my fascination with French churches will lead me to become a Christian. I honestly doubt that, but I know that the Christianity that I see here is very different from what I grew up with.