Read moreRegular readers of this blog may remember my debate with sociologist Nathalie Heinich, when her book-“tract” was published: What activism does to research (May 31 and June 7, 2021). This disputatio gave rise to a second: the writing of a work, entitled The Tears of Secularism (1). Like the other books in the collection (directed, with talent, by Sophie Nordmann and Mazarine Pingeot), this publication is structured by an exchange of letters between the two authors (I use only the masculine because, for Nathalie, the masculine is also a neutral gender).   Nathalie Heinich is a recognized specialist in the sociology of art (the book that made her famous is about The Glory of Van Gogh). She also ventures outside this field and her works on "values" or on "visibility" have achieved a success, in my opinion, entirely deserved. She claims to be an adherent of the "value neutrality" advocated by Max Weber and readily declares that she makes a strict distinction between her academic work, which aims for scientificity, and her committed writings (she has published, in particular, a Sociologist's Blooper Reel and has collaborated on a Lay Skeptic's Blooper Reel).   I also believe that the activist should not stifle the researcher; the latter must aim for an objectivity that is never absolute but that years of work in his field of study can make consistent. Our first disputatio, the one transcribed on the Blog, had, however, taught me that we did not interpret the relationship between research and activism in the same way. So I was expecting a difficult debate and... what happened fulfilled my hopes: the publishing house even speaks, on the back cover, of "tough correspondence"! I will, of course, present our work from my perspective. Some of my friends, including Nathalie Heinich, who is very active in the Observatory of Decolonialism, have asked me what I was "doing in this mess". Answer: In matters of "struggle", a Protestant, since Louis XIV, has a certain historical experience! Not an opposition between anti and pro headscarf but between prohibition and pro-choice. The two co-directors of the collection suggested that we start by retracing our journey, in matters of secularism, and they insisted on the "argued" aspect that our disputatio should have.  The initial discussions allowed for some differences to be addressed in a peaceful manner. But a sudden change of direction occurred, with yet another "scarf affair" breaking out between two letters. As a result, my interlocutor changed her tone, made remarks that I would describe as literal, and fell into a typical pattern of "orthodox discourse" where, as a knight of good, one fights the axis of evil (I will come back to this).   What was my attitude going to be? To contrast white with black, at the risk of ending up with a book in which those already convinced would have applauded their respective heralds? This way of doing things did not fit my perspective: I am not pro-headscarf, I am pro-choice, which is structurally different. The risk of slipping into opposition, dogma against dogma, with a dose of moralism, and a multiplication of blind spots, is inherent in controversy. I tried to avoid it. Throughout our discussions, I will primarily criticize Nathalie Heinich for being excessive, one-sided, and refusing to acknowledge that reality is the result of interactions in which all actors are involved.    Our divergence is therefore primarily a difference of form. This also refers to the different ways in which we make a distinction between social sciences and engagement. It seems to me (everyone can judge for themselves) that Heinich separates scientific writing and activist statements in a way that allows her to forget, in the second case, the methodological rules and the conceptuality that she judiciously implements as a sociologist. The activist is no longer Weberian at all. I show this on several occasions and even allow myself the luxury of citing his work on “visibility” in favor of an approach to “religious visibility” that is heterogeneous with the one that she operates. For my part, I seek to operationalize in engagement what I have learned in my research and in my "scholarly" readings. Recurring discussions on gender equality. Given the collection, it is reasonable to hope that the book will be read by people influenced by the dominant political and media discourse while asking themselves certain questions in a fog of uncertainty. These are the people I wanted to address above all. So I tried to decipher a perspective which appeared to me to be a condensed version of the dominant discourse, presented with Heinich's own qualities and his undeniable talent as a polemicist.  Thus, in the recurring exchanges we had on gender equality, it was by no means my intention to deny that there is "sexism" in "Muslim" circles (or those perceived as such), but to show the consequences that have arisen in France from considering sexism as solely, or primarily, the business of real or supposedly Muslims. The way in which, in recent decades, the cause of women and secularism has been linked has produced a certain blindness. And Heinich doesn't answer me on this point, which she considers "irrelevant".   I am not going to go over all the problems raised here, but to select two: the first relates to the 1905 law separating Churches from State, the second, and undoubtedly the most fundamental, concerns the conception of religion, which, it seems to me, lies in the background of current debates concerning secularism (and of our exchanges), a conception that Nathalie Heinich has clearly explained, which has the great merit of bringing it out of the implicit. With this approach to religion, I have, as a historian and sociologist, relative agreement and enormous disagreement. Two disagreements on the 1905 law The first disagreement concerns a "republican reading" of the law which is opposed, in her (and others), to a "liberal reading" (illegitimate). This goes against the words of all the "republican" supporters of separation who have all described it as a "liberal law". Certainly, the actors' discourse should not be taken at face value, but one must have serious reasons to contest it.  But here, in order to be able to make this distinction, first, a pseudo-liberal reading of the law is invented which would reduce secularism to (I quote) the "peaceful coexistence of religions". This is not, of course, my position nor that of the late Observatory of Secularism on which Heinich piles up untruths. On the contrary, I have always maintained, and I explain it again in the book on several occasions, that secularism imposes "secular freedoms" on religions, as indeed on everyone else.    Then, according to my interlocutor, "liberal freedom will lead to a civil conception of freedom", which must be "protected from the State", whereas "republican freedom" is a "civic conception of freedom".  Heinich relies here on Laurent Bouvet, who himself takes up a thesis of Claude Nicolet, except that the latter (a specialist in ancient Rome) essentially bases his conception of secularism on Emile Combes and sidesteps the issue as soon as his subject would lead him to talk about the 1905 law (it is too well known for him to address, he claims!). Nicolet does not cite any text on the drafting of the law, and he is right to do so, because his thesis is untenable for any historian who has carried out first-hand work: on the contrary, the truly recurring reproach, the mantra, of Gallican centrists as well as of certain left-wing anticlericals against the 1905 law related, precisely, to the fact that in their eyes, it "disarmed the State" by giving too much freedom(s) to Catholicism! The law of separation is, in fact, the manifestation of a liberal republicanism.   The second point of disagreement concerns the fact that I would stick to the 1905 law, while current events are leading to a new situation. This criticism ignores that at the heart of my work there is what in history is called "periodization", that is to say the formalization of characteristic features of a historical period. I have constructed three distinct thresholds of secularization, the first concerns the period 1789-1880s, the second goes from this decade to 1989 and the third indicates what is typical of the current period, in order to analyze the specific problems of today. But, on the one hand, the 1905 law (and its consequences) succeeded in ending the "two Frances conflict" with an inclusive victory for secularism, which, at the start, seemed totally impossible. It is therefore interesting to understand how this was achieved. Then, the 1905 law is still in force and there is a difference between updating and changing the model! In 1905, at the heart of the debates on secularism, we find freedom of conscience. State neutrality in religious matters constitutes a means which makes sense in relation to freedom of conscience. The risk is that today neutrality (understood, moreover, as a neutralization of entire sections of public space) becomes an end in itself. And, in the dominant social discourse on secularism, there is little question of freedom of conscience. An implicit conception of religion comes out of the woodwork... Nathalie Heinich writes, at the beginning of our exchanges, that she "enjoys" often placing this sentence in a conversation: "I, who am lucky enough not to have a religion...". If he likes it, fine. Moreover, I agree with her when she refutes people who declare: "You believe in values, therefore you have a religion. "There are, indeed, non-religious values." And freedom of conscience is worth, as international texts emphasize, the right to choose "one's religion or belief." But then, she adopts a conception of religion which would be somewhat surprising if it were not, in fact, quite widely shared.    First, she believes that "transcendence" is a matter of "somewhat derisory beliefs, belonging to a 'metaphysical stage' directly inherited from the 'theological stage' and which is destined to dissolve into the 'positive stage', according to the famous trilogy of Auguste Comte. “This evolutionary trilogy (in the background of a certain secular integralist thought) seems to me, on the contrary, quite outdated. For my part, in the line of Cornelius Castoriadis (and others), I attach great importance to symbolic structures, which can be religious or non-religious, structures by which human beings (individuals, groups, societies) give meaning to life, to death and to the “world”, to happiness and unhappiness, to fear and hope, to space and time… I participated, at the end of last week, in two study days organized by the lab that I founded in 1995, the GSRL: the notion of “existentiality”, and even of “enchanted existentiality”, was discussed in relation to the approach to symbolic phenomena.” Several researchers have indicated that they have encountered phenomena of hybridization between the “religious” and the “non-religious.” There, he has a strong disagreement.   This divergence is compounded when Heinich, in a way, sets religion apart from all other aspects of social and historical reality, as if it functioned in a way that was heterogeneous to all other human activities. Thus, it denies the right to draw analogies between the religious and the non-religious. If we follow his reasoning, it would not be legitimate to decipher, for example, something parareligious in Stalinism or Maoism. And to suggest that there are beliefs other than religious ones would be to use "tricky terms that allow the religious paradigm to sneak back in through the window as soon as it has been chased out the door." "This disagreement has a very concrete issue at stake." Thus, she finds "greatly perversity" the expression of Farhad Khosrokhavar speaking of the risk of "secular fundamentalism". According to her, first of all, it would be "implicitly making religions the matrix of all values, in contempt of secular ethics".  However, this is not at all about "ethics" but about conceptualization. Although the term "fundamentalism" is used, it is not employed in the same way as by the fundamentalists themselves, who focus on doctrinal content. Sociologically constructed, the notion now designates ways of thinking and, in the work, I develop a composite portrait of the type of "orthodox discourse" and show that my interlocutor adopts this form (nothing to do with the content, naturally) of discourse. Then, for Heinich, assimilating "secularism to a very particular relationship to religion, namely fundamentalism, which is precisely what the supporters of secularism fight against", constitutes a "perverse reversal: explicitly attributing to the adversary, by a simple lexical shift, the very fault that he denounces. "However, this is not at all about 'secularism' or 'supporters of secularism', but about a very particular type of activist who, precisely, adopt a fundamentalist way of thinking in that they claim to have a monopoly on a secular truth. The others would only be social traitors to secularism (she speaks, for example, of "Islamo-feminism")! The conflict with certain religious people then becomes a fight between enemy sisters or brothers and it is precisely there that, at the level of form, a "perverse reversal" occurs! Rejecting the term "secular fundamentalism" is a way of shielding those for whom the term "secular" is reserved from any criticism. It is not for nothing that I mentioned Stalinism: in the heyday of the Communist Party: when we deciphered the para-religious patterns of its functioning, its members replied with the same type of arguments as Heinich: 'Move along, there is nothing to see here!' In my opinion, we can read our entire exchange of letters from the reading grid constituted by this divergence.   I could continue: thus, to assert, as Jaurès did, that "secularism will be social or it will not be" would, according to Heinich, be "muddying the waters. "And every time I remind her that the world is stone, she replies: 'irrelevant'." So, discrimination… Read on, you'll see that I'm not exaggerating.  That being said, I do not regret having participated in this undertaking. A disputatio leads to clarifying, in the face of contradiction, different aspects of one's thinking in a more explicit way than one could do alone in front of a computer. Especially since the reactions that this explanation provokes, induces new clarifications. On rereading, it seems to me, while I have already written a lot on the subject, to have given some different angles of attack. And Nathalie Heinich, for her part, clearly sets out a conception that is currently quite widely shared. So, instructive controversy? It is up to you, dear readers, to judge.(1) Published by Mialet-Barrault, collection: “Disputatio: argumentative controversy”, 164 p. 12 €.

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