The sociology of secularisation, normative laïcité and multiculturalism

This chapter first examines the Stasi report (2003), which imparted to the French government the crucial recommendation to issue a law prohibiting the wearing of conspicuous religious signs in public schools. The report provides a lengthy analysis of the actuality of laïcité. The final recommendation about the conspicuous religious signs forms only a small part of this document, which redefines laïcité in several regards. I relate my reading of the report to the views of multiculturalists who have concentrated on secularism such as Brahm Levey and Bader, focusing especially on the report's reiteration of the modernist dichotomies discussed in the previous chapters. I then concentrate on where public order comes in, and try to make plausible how it relates to the culture of laicism laid out in Chapter 6. This enables me to explore some further motives in the recent French sociological debates about secularisation and religion in the ‘age of identities’ and securitisation, by analysing the relation between religion, culture, security and politics in the works of Gilles Kepel, Alain Touraine, Marcel Gauchet and Olivier Roy. These authors share an unreflected modernist legacy with regard to modernity and religion, independently of their standpoint about the headscarves or about laïcism.

I pay ample attention to the modernist presuppositions of Roy, a French sociologist of religion who criticises both multiculturalism and laïcité (especially in Roy 2005). By analysing Roy's understanding of the relation between culture and religion in a globalised Islam, I demonstrate that the pattern of cultural laicism returns in Roy's analysis and that we require a deeper critique, one that addresses the modernist heritage in his thinking about secularisation.