THE NEW YORK TIMES: Nicolas Cadène sees the failings of France’s secular model even as he upholds it.
PARIS — France is in theory a nondiscriminatory society where the state upholds strict religious neutrality and people are free to believe, or not, in any God they wish. It is a nation, in its self image, that through education dissolves differences of faith and ethnicity in a shared commitment to the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship.
This model, known as laïcité, often inadequately translated as secularism, is embraced by a majority of French people. They or their forebears became French in this way. No politician here would utter the words “In God we trust.” The Roman Catholic Church was removed more than a century ago from French public life. The country’s lay model supplants any deity.
But, in a country with an uneasy relationship to Islam, laïcité is also contested as the shield behind which France discriminates against its large Muslim population and avoids confronting its prejudices. As a result, the job of Nicolas Cadène, a mildly disheveled official with a mop of brown hair and multiple law degrees, has become a focus of controversy. » | Roger Cohen | Friday, January 1, 2021
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