Religion in the News

The BBC's Robert Pigott reports that "as secularisation takes an increasingly firm hold over French society, Catholic congregations are disappearing and the country's ageing priests are dying."

Meanwhile, Tom Heneghan of Reuters informs us that

Evangelical Christians in France face growing problems as authorities enforce secularism, favor Muslims or view them as supporters of President Bush, French Protestant leaders say.

Evangelicals, who make up 40 percent of the French Protestant Federation, complain of bureaucratic hurdles when trying to open churches and of being seen as sects because they differ from France's traditional faiths.

Leaders of mainstream and evangelical Protestants, who together make up only about two percent of the population in traditionally Catholic France, stress religious freedom is not under threat. But the problems have prompted them to speak out.

… Stephane Lauzet, secretary general of the French Evangelical Alliance (AEF), [and] Jean-Arnold de Clermont, head of the main umbrella group, the French Protestant Federation (FPF) … said that many French, unfamiliar with the varied faces of Protestantism, linked the evangelicals with the U.S. religious right and with Bush, highly unpopular in France.

The left-leaning weekly Le Nouvel Observateur ran a cover story last spring with a picture of Bush and the headline "Evangelicals — the sect that wants to conquer the world."

The magazine apologized after the FPF and AEF protested. …

The deeper problem, he said, was that some French officials wanted to limit religion's role in public life and squeeze all churches into large groups like the FPF to deal with them easily. Most of the new evangelical churches are outside the FPF and remain totally independent.

"The local authorities want to deal with the religiously correct and that means what they can recognize," Clermont said. "When they don't recognize something, they want a good conduct certificate from the Federation, but they are not all members."

Lauzet said even some energetically secularist bureaucrats betrayed hidden religious prejudices. "To them, anything that's not Catholic is a sect," he said.

(Gregory be praised)

In America, meanwhile, George W Bush explains what membership in a sect entails for him.

(Hallelujah, brother RV)