The Return of Faith and Reason to Laïcité

Régis Debray and ‘le fait religieux’

Bibliographic Data

ID12244337
AuthorsEnda Mccaffrey (Nottingham Trent University, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume16
Issue3
Pages273-290
Publication date2005-09-22
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFrench Cultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0957-1558 • E-ISSN: 1740-2352
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0957155805057294
OpenAlexW1973893804
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited12

In 1985, Marcel Gauchet wrote of the ‘retour du religieux’ as an end to the social role of religion and the beginning of its privatisation. However, far from an indication of the withering of religion on the vine of modernity, the return of a religious discourse was resurrected by the democratisation of the ‘croyant’ in the mid-1980s. The ‘âge égalitaire’, coupled with the specificity of the ‘croyant’, created a platform on which to challenge the model of laïcité in contemporary France. This discourse sought to re-appropriate reason from the logic of secular objectivity and postmodern self-reliance, and re-signify it within a Catholic theological language of belief and faith. The transmission of religious ‘knowledge’ would also be seen to compete for intellectual equality with the forms and transmission of knowledge approved by laïcité in the republican school. Régis Debray's report to the Ministry of Education in 2002 on the teaching of the ‘fait religieux’ in French schools advances this debate by defending the introduction of the study of religion in school from the perspectives of theological rigour, the indivisibility of knowledge (the coexistence of ‘témoin’ and ‘savant’), and the inextricable links between faith and reason in their production of knowledge with a valid claim for public consumption

Christian ministry · Democracy · Democratization · Epistemology · Faith · Islam · Modernity · Objectivity (philosophy · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Rigour · Secular education · Secularism · Secularity · Secularization · Social science · Sociology · Theology · Law · Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious Education and Schools · Religious studies · Religious Studies

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