3.1 Comparative Education and Modernisation of Society

And in comparative education, the same questions arise, such as the relationship to politics: “The project of founding a comparative science of education, from the very beginning of the field of study, can only be understood by putting into perspective the philosophical and political modernity program” (Malet, 2005, p. 169).

Comparative education indeed includes a program, accompanied by Durkheim among others, loaded with the belief in a correlation between scientific progress and social progress. In the second half of the 20th century, this made room for a pragmatic project oriented towards an ideal of pacifying international relations, so that one can identify, according to Malet, a comparative tradition in education that takes the political form of reformist liberalism. More recently, a critical approach has emerged: sometimes with postcolonial designs that consist in reversing the historical relations of domination between regions of the world; at other times, with more moderate designs inspired by the hermeneutic tradition. The latter consist in restoring the meaning of practices beyond flows of globalisation, often presented as inevitable by international organisations, themselves being politically involved in promoting certain orientations of comparative education.

The complexities of comparative education, therefore, cannot be severed from central currents of sociology: first marked by a scientist ideal, quite visible in Durkheim’s work;² then depending on a state request, more pragmatic when it came to democratising and modernising institutions, through studies on access rates to different levels of education, on school effect, etc. In short, ETS are an integral part of human and social sciences because they face the same types of questions and the same challenges. Embedded in social affairs, more or less dependent on a political power, they are conducted to develop a policy, as is the case in sociology. Their political aspect is more or less strong, depending on the objects investigated and the methods used; it is also more or less explicit, depending on the researches’ level of reflexivity. However, ETS are an institutional anchor from which one can question, in a privileged way because it is external (therefore autonomous), the relations between sociology and philosophy.

On questions of citizenship, the explicit articulation between (normative) political philosophy and (descriptive) sociology ensures the avoidance of too many prescriptive considerations. Indeed political philosophy is not intended to be immediately prescriptive: it proposes a reflection on norms, their coherence, their assumptions, making it possible to explain criteria of thought that everyone can then accept or refuse, having a better understanding of them. In this spirit, a critical republican point of view is taken in this book, a ‘preference’ prone to being considered and exceeded, in the service of a research posture that is as clear and explicit as possible. Thus, it is necessary to involve the work of philosophers who have been trying, for decades, to demonstrate the conceptual and empirical coherence of critical republicanism: Philip Pettit, Cécile Laborde, among others.

3.2 Clarifying the Registers of Discourses in the Social Sciences

In short, if the norms forming the framework of this book are just considered norms among others in pluralistic societies, their coherence must however be identified. This is a way of seeking a solution to the problem raised by Pierre Demeulenaere, according to which sociological works, although often rigorous in the treatment of data, remain little formalised in the articulation and hierarchy of their general statements, mixing descriptive proposals, explanatory proposals and normative positions.

We can consider that the task of social sciences is descriptive, explanatory and normative. The description merely describes what is, the explanation tries to account for why that is, and finally normative positions assess what exists and propose action plans. Admittedly, this third task is fundamentally problematic (yet not necessarily unacceptable) from the point of view of a scientific undertaking, we will not come back to it here. Suffice it to say that, in fact, most prestigious or modest social scientists do not hesitate to take all kinds of normative positions within the frame of their scientific work. A systematic reflection on the epistemological bases of this attitude remains to be undertaken.

(Demeulenaere, 2012, p. 75)

In this context, one path consists in using Max Weber’s advice, who invited researchers to explain their relationship to values, on which is based the choice of objects treated. For example, when one tries to study the link between ‘freedom’ and ‘the French Revolution’, it is because the question concerns one as a researcher belonging to a given society, at a given time where and when the value of political liberalism is posed, contested, debated. The question remains of whether this is sufficient to provide an analysis that is free of value judgments, which according to Weber must be ‘suspended’ by researchers. Yet this depends on the subject matter: it is easier to suspend judgment about a work of art, as Nathalie Heinich (2012) did by mobilising the sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot, than about the principle of non-discrimination for instance.

In other words, to decree the researcher’s axiological neutrality is all the more difficult since the values at stake (on citizenship, secularism, non-discrimination, freedom of conscience) are also actual legal and regulatory practices; while aesthetic values, for example, are not standardised in legal terms – at least in liberal countries – beyond state support for one artistic trend, considered more legitimate than another, or beyond landscape preservation regulation. Essentially, it is impossible to eliminate the axiological content of certain scientific categories, because “the mere fact of comparing, in a purely factual way, the functioning of a political regime to its displayed ideals is a value judgment” (Pranchère, 2021, p. 761).

In fact, it sometimes happens that the axiological framework underlying researches is implicitly conveyed through supposedly comparative analyses, presented as only descriptive. This is not a problem in itself, but it is worth explaining this axiological framework. Thus, we find anthropologists (Saba Mahmood) and philosophers (Judith Butler) who try a conceptual rapprochement – contrary to European liberal law – between the notions of race and religion, inviting us to rethink ‘Judeo-Christian’ sensibilities in order to respect Muslim ‘wounded religious sensitivities’. This is a sophisticated way to update the ‘blasphemy’ argument (Urbanski, 2022a). The interdisciplinary work, between sociology and political philosophy, precisely makes it possible to better identify what, in this type of analysis, consists in an anthropological description on the one hand, objectively enlightening; and in a political proposal on the other. The latter should be spelt out as such, since it falls within what any citizen can legitimately criticise or refuse. In this case, a philosophically liberal approach – the one deployed here – is not consistent with Butler and Mahmood’s argument on wounded religious sensibilities (March, 2011).

Max Weber gives us a hard time when he considers that “the recognition of empirical facts” and the “evaluative position of the scientist who exercises a judgment on facts” are “two sets of simply heterogeneous problems” that must “absolutely” be distinguished. This is why another, more pragmatic, of his advices to scholars, will retain our attention here: “to bring scrupulously […] to their own conscience and to that of the readers, what the standards of value are that are used to measure reality and those from which [scholars] derive their value judgment” (Weber, 1965, pp. 133, 416). Weber illustrated his epistemological position by commenting on the recruitment of an anarchist as an academic in a law school. Far from being an obstacle, the anarchist’s relation to values provides a distance from the law, allowing for better scrutiny of its arbitrary character. Hence, there lies a potential gain of knowledge, compared to other perspectives oriented by different relations to values … as long as the anarchist manages not to impose his values in the analysis. The challenge in this book will be not to impose³ a close relationship to republican values in the analysis.

5.1 Terror in the Name of Islam Is also Part of Islam

This desire is commendable, consisting in not playing into the hands of right-wing extremists who, on the contrary, overexploit the link between these events and Islam for the purpose of stigmatising an entire population. On the other hand, how can we ignore the ideology guiding these acts, echoing the increasingly strict legislation of certain Muslim countries on blasphemy and the idea of an Umma as a political community beyond states? Violent extremism is unfortunately the current disease of Islam, writes John Tolan, and there is no other way out than to face it. Saying and repeating that Islam is fundamentally a ‘religion of peace’ which has nothing to do with religious fanaticism is not a solution. Nonetheless, let us say that “If we are to face the disease, we must also recognise the vital forces within Islam that are struggling to remedy it” (Tolan, 2022, p. 302). The recent knife attack in 2022 against Salman Rushdie and the reactions (scandalised or approving) of the various states to this event recall the reality of the doctrinal stakes, in Iran as in the Sunni world.

For if secular liberalism has a meaning, it is to be able to consider all religions equally. Let us therefore return, by broadening our perspective, to this eminently political idea that actions carried out in the name of a religion nevertheless have nothing to do with it. Can we say today that the reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion in the United States, in 2022, has ‘nothing to do’ with Catholic and evangelical Christianity? That authoritarian nationalisms raging in Central and Eastern Europe have nothing to do with Christianity, especially Catholic and Orthodox? Let us recall in this regard the reaction of Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov to the worldwide commented beheading of Samuel Paty. Keen to avoid upsetting ‘orthodox religious sentiments’, he declared: “It is unacceptable to insult the feelings of believers, and it is unacceptable to kill people. Both are absolutely unacceptable” (The Moscow Times, 2020). The assumed equivalence between a decapitation and a drawing has a religious meaning. Indeed, the Russian fundamentalist orthodox are allied in the ‘fight against blasphemy’ with the most radical Muslims, and the Kremlin underlines that a newspaper like Charlie Hebdo could not exist in Russia as a nation whose ‘fundamental religion’ is Christianity.

Certainly, many jihadist attacks require, on the part of the ones who commit the murderous act, a strong exculturation, to refer to the famous analysis of the Holy ignorance offered by Olivier Roy. In this strict sense, we are faced with a standardised religion, portable, that can be rapidly mobilised and allows quick conversions in very different places. In other words, a religion so exculturated that it has little in common with what we call or would like to call ‘religion’. We can even go further in this direction, by considering that the Islamic State is a pure mafia, the religious device being intended only to camouflage the criminal organisation. Nevertheless, the murderous act requires a whole context of arguments (blasphemy, disbelief, attack on the person whose sensitivity is hurt, etc.) which, in turn, do not have ‘nothing to do’ with religion.

5.2 Islamophobia and Christophobia

Beyond the question of terrorist attacks, and returning to the more ‘daily’ functioning of the courts in connection with the more or less liberal European laws, the recent ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Rabczewska v. Poland, in September 2022, is particularly interesting in terms of symmetrising religions. The ruling condemns the Polish state’s decision to punish a singer who claimed in a major newspaper that the Bible was written by a guy drunk on wine and smoking some kind of weed (jakiś napruty winem i palący jakieś zioła). But Austria was not convicted, in E.S. v. Austria, for punishing a woman who claimed, in a political reflection seminar, that Mohammed had practices that could be described as paedophile because, according to the hadits, his favorite wife was very young.

Although this differential between Christianity and Islam can be explained by the different contexts of enunciation (Christian majority in Poland, Muslim minority in Austria), a European judge, by virtue of his dissenting opinion, openly lamented that Europe was unjust because it would protect Islam from denigrating religious doctrines, but not Christianity, which he said should also be treated favourably (in the name of fairness …). The judge’s arguments are fragile overall: they do not hide his ideological preference for Christianity. Nonetheless, he does identify important points. Is a newspaper with a large circulation (Rabczewska v. Poland) not more ‘public’ and more likely to have an impact on consciences than a political reflection seminar (E.S. v. Austria), which few people attended?

If violence in the name of a religion – whether physical or more symbolic in the form of intimidation and illiberal laws – often has something to do with that religion, it is simply because religion does not exist outside of what humans and human groups do. This is what makes symmetrising interesting: if people describe a drawing from Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo as ‘Islamophobic’ – knowing that this word often includes an accusation of immorality or even of a criminal offence – then it is enlightening to compare this accusation with that of ‘Christophobia’ in Poland. It is formulated by intellectuals and political leaders about relatively similar images, though the contexts and the characters drawn differ: Mohammed, Jesus, Mary. We can, then, grasp the limits of certain anthropological theories that focus almost exclusively on Islam in favour of postcolonial perspectives, and do not see the (illiberal) conservative exploitations of the theme of ‘wounded religious sensibilities’, a new line of attack by devotees against political liberalism since the accusation of ‘blasphemy’ has become archaic in societies based on human rights (Al-Azmeh, 2020). Poland being a site, in the heart of Europe, of Catholic political-religious radicality, studying it enriches our understanding of political liberalism, republicanism and secularism. These are all ideals that are said to be threatened, sometimes by Islam, other times by their own imperialist content (identitarian secularism, ethnocentric liberalism), but are rarely related to the so close clerical threat and its link with the far-right, in power in several European countries.

6.1 Negative Freedom and Non-Domination

The hybrid approach of Laborde and Joppke, in the sense that they are both liberal but refer to the republicanism of Philip Pettit, invites us to recall an important point: the boundaries between liberalism and republicanism are not watertight, including in France. Apart from its conservative manifestations (Dominique Schnapper, Pierre-André Taguieff), republicanism can be understood as a particular version of political liberalism (Spitz, 2005), and more broadly as a path among others to analyse negative freedom according to Isaiah Berlin: freedom from rather than freedom to.

While Berlin favoured freedom from interference, the Republican Philip Pettit, wary of the neo-liberal consequences of this type of definition, conceptualises the freedom not to be dominated, which is still a negative freedom. In this sense, the Pettitian approach is very different from the (French) communitarian versions of republicanism that value the ‘community of citizens’ as a positive freedom, by confusing it with a non-reflective culture of secularism.⁵

That being said, Pettitian republicanism is not fully liberal. Indeed, if we were to make a distinction between republicanism and liberalism, by typifying positions, we would say that liberals think that the antonym of freedom is interference, whereas critical republicans believe that the appropriate term is domination. However, this precisely only works if one typifies these positions. By softening the perspective, we note with Kymlicka that a ‘liberal’ such as Rawls considered the conditions necessary for self-respect as a ‘primary good’; that is to say the conditions that provide a person with the firm conviction that their conception of property, their life project deserves to be implemented (Kymlicka, 1995).

The question therefore is about the conditions of non-domination, or even of recognition: every person needs other people and institutions to recognise that his or her life project deserves to be executed. For this reason, Pettit would say that this person must not be dominated; in other words, no arbitrary interference can be exercised, even in the future, on the formation of his or her life plans.

It remains to be seen whether certain life projects, though chosen with full knowledge of the facts and providing a sense of personal fullness, do not deserve to be executed as much as others. To what extent should the life project of a prestigious Harvard mathematician who decides to count all the blades of grass on an island for the rest of her life – instead of putting her talents to the benefit of the community – be seen as a primary good? Rawls offered this example, and it was widely discussed. Kitcher, for example, thinks that the grass counter’s way of life is not an authentic primary good, because she does not direct it towards the community.

However, a liberal could retort that inviting an adult person, against their initial wish, to move towards the community would require a formal ranking of conceptions of well-being, which by definition are quite subjective, and that would run counter to the principle of non-interference. The crucial point is that these typical discussions do not suffice to draw a line between those who are liberal and those who are not. Kitcher is indeed a Liberal. Yet, just like Mill, Rawls and Dewey, he questions his own tradition.

Essentially, liberalism and critical republicanism come together in their criticism of positive freedom, which Isaiah Berlin was already dismissing as the freedom of the Ancients, in his influential Two Concepts of Liberty of 1958. On the contrary, the promotion of positive freedom is clear today in authors as different as

1. –political scientist Tariq Modood, promoting the recognition of religion by the state to better integrate Muslims;
2. –the jurist Joseph Weiler, defending the presence of crucifixes in public schools on the grounds that secularity is a political position that divides society and manifests itself, in particular, by class walls free of religious signs;
3. –the sociologist John Holmwood, criticising the very principle of a teaching about religions that would put too much distance between the complete religious personality of children (whole selves) for the benefit of a secular majority that is not respectful enough, according to him, towards minority ethnic identities (Urbanski, 2022b).

But the promotion of positive freedom is not necessarily religious. So-called republican thinking, in its secular version that, for instance, orders the prohibition of the wearing of ostensible religious symbols by parents accompanying school trips, also consists in promoting a positive (state) freedom, requiring these people prove their adherence to republican culture before they can contribute to public affairs (res publica). Thus, political liberalism’s criteria do not apply to a particular religion or ideology. And this is crucial: liberal principles have certainly found a particularly successful elaboration in European and North American law, but they are nonetheless appropriable by everyone.

6.2 Universalisable Principles

To say otherwise would be perilous. Indeed, this would amount to attributing to the inhabitants of a particular cultural area the responsibility of political principles. This is difficult, since the place of incubation of the latter in a given space does not change the fact that each one of us is “no more or less than an heir likely to join or reject them” regardless of geographical location (Avon, 2020, p. 21). Christianity was born in Palestine: was it reserved for the inhabitants of this region? Islam was born in Arabia: did it not find a place in the Maghreb, then Southern Asia? Certainly, liberalism is not a religion. However, like many of them, it formulates proposals for political organisation, which everyone can try to appropriate, defend, implement or reject. This is currently happening in Poland or Tunisia, for example, in a salient way.

The goal, of course, is not to minimise the geopolitical stakes that play a part in the more or less assured acceptance, depending on the regions of the world, of the principles of political liberalism. As Dominique Avon explains in his book La liberté de conscience (The liberty of conscience) published in 2020, the history of this idea and this right, diversely accepted among religions and different cultural areas, does not prevent us from grasping the power games between states, or the unequal economic flows. Nor is it a question of reducing the elements of social criticism, available outside religion, which foster a sense of illegitimacy of liberal nations: criticism of the responsibility of European states in the war in Palestine, Libya or Yemen; questioning of the link between the Gulf monarchies and the Western empire led by the United States.

Finally, when public school and citizenship education are at stake, conceptual antinomies between republicanism and liberalism fade somewhat. Indeed, though republican thinking is originally centred on the state, whereas liberalism is centred on the individual, the question becomes more complicated as soon as the state carries an educational mission: links appear between the liberal aim, which seeks to “place the lives of persons as much as possible in the private domain, to protect them from public interference”, and the democratic aim that “concerns the public character of individuals […] and finds a strong expression in its desire for citizens to identify with the political community” (Levinson, 2002, p. 107). That is why school Republican secularism has a very special status:

If a secular regime of civic and inclusive equality presupposes a collective practice of public reason, this practice itself presupposes, to be effective, an education that trains individuals to its epistemic challenges. […] Here we find the reversal of the primacy of liberalism in the primacy of democracy: the liberal ideal introduced to the democratic ideal as to its logical consequence – but it turns out that democracy, or more precisely democratic socialisation, is itself the condition of existence of a liberal society.

(Pranchère, 2023, p. 139)

The boundaries between liberalism and republicanism (but also socialism, as we will see) are therefore real but not watertight (Laden, 2006). By continuing to explore these interfaces, in an intellectual context where positions tend to stiffen, it is crucial to be clear without giving in to public postures that leave little room for nuance, which is an academic’s duty:

On migration, Islam, populism and activism, French academics too often rely on feelings, thus feeding the less rational political horizons […]. Multiculturalist slogans, memorial claims of all sorts, the feeling that France’s Muslims are persecuted: these phenomena cannot be associated in any way with the terrorist threat. The rejection of clericalism, which seeks to win back secularised Muslims, the rejection of competing memories, and the criticism of identitarism imposed on individuals: so many political positions present among democrats of all stripes and which do not fall under the ‘lepenisation’ of minds. […] We do not expect academics to let loose, but on the contrary to behave. Those who sneer at the appeal to decency today should nonetheless understand that it is a protection against an ultra populism that bides its time without saying a word. […] Let us not offer it fuel.

(Schaub, 2021, pp. 20–21)

7.1 Genealogism, Community, Society

It is indeed at the junction between sociology, law, and political theory that the modalities of constitution and maintenance of groups are played out. For here, we are faced, as we said in the general introduction, with a problematic that is both ontological and political: if law informs modern ideology, sociology is a product of it. More precisely, it is the place of a nagging distinction between community and society, on two levels.

On a political level, community is often brandished by conservatives such as Romantic counter-revolutionaries, who see it as the remedy against the truly liberal disconnect. It is also claimed by nationalists such as French political parties invoking the homeland, who seek to counter neo-liberal deliberation and its new society, too anonymous and made of superficial links, guided only by an instrumental interest (Karsenti & Lemieux, 2017). Ontologically, the distinction between community and society is expressed a little differently. The societal bond is a posteriori: it unites beings only superficially and to the extent of their will; while the community bond is a priori: it does not belong to the will of its members, and it immerses them in a totality that shapes them through and through (Kaufmann, 2011).

The question then is what the respective places of community and society in modern times might be. In connection with the above, the following question must be asked: if the nation-states adhering to the European Convention on Human Rights thereby value a Christian conception of religion, is this a community sign that requires equalising the conditions of secular liberalism as other communities (in the sense of non-Christians) take up more and more space in Europe? This is what Asad, Brown, Butler and Mahmood (2013) suggest, insofar as they attribute the whole strength of their explanatory model to the genealogy of the notion and the right of freedom of conscience: this genealogy, according to them, is Protestant, meaning Western secularism would essentially be Protestant (they sometimes say: Judeo-Christian). The problem with this explanation is that it does not give legal instruments their real place in modern societies. To show this, it is necessary to take into account the specific dynamics of modernity and the related constraints in terms of social forms that occur there.

If one follows Durkheim, there is a logic that is proper to social forms: community is possible – and desirable – only in “small groups”, in which “we can know each other intimately”. As social aggregates become larger, society weighs less heavily on the individual who finds himself naturally ‘emancipated’: social integration is no longer based on ‘status’ or function, but on a ‘contract’. The union and confusion of consciences, so “clumped that none can move independently from the others”, make way for the contractual rationalisation of conducts and for the division of labour, both being synonymous not of similarity, but of complementarity. […] The tension between the sociological perspective on the difference between ‘society’ and ‘community’ favoured by Durkheim and the subjective perspective proposed by Weber is entirely relevant here. If, as Weber suggests, subjective postures are not determined by social forms, however, they are more or less adjusted to their morphology or geometry. To extend, through the category-based imagination, the topology of the circle specific to reciprocal links and mutual obligations onto the large floating society of anonymous transgresses the law of quantitative determination of a group. In doing so, it exposes itself to real errors of category, but also of geometry.

(Kaufmann, 2023, pp. 72, 76)

This is where the social bond, of a community type, necessarily gives way to regulation and law. Not because of any arbitrary prevalence of the state, but simply because in a large society, one cannot have a communal experience with all its members: this type of experience must give way to category-based projections, on the model of the famous imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) that are nations. Certainly, the latter are still likely to descend into artificialism. Nonetheless, this is not a sufficient reason to reduce society’s order, to that of the community: as Durkheim showed, modern societies evolve in their morphology and physiology far beyond the simple cultural genealogy staged by Asad, Brown, Butler and Mahmood (2013).

Therefore, it is by entering the sphere of political theory and of law as an impersonal third party, that the genealogical consequences of the postcolonial anthropology of Asad and Mahmood can be overcome. To do this, Cécile Laborde’s proposal, consisting in disaggregating religion in relation to actual legal practices in different countries, seems fundamental. In order to assess the legitimate place of ‘religion’ in the public arena, Laborde proposes not to treat the phenomenon as existing in itself, but to divide it analytically into three components: epistemic propositions, conceptions of the good life, and collective identities. On this level, she somewhat joins the anthropology of Asad and Mahmood, since she shares with these authors the objective of decentring political liberalism from a particular religion, precisely by means of this disaggregation, which is interesting in that it can be applied to much broader social phenomena than what we call ‘religion’.

Of course all liberals, including liberal-communitarians like Charles Taylor, want to approach religion from secular categories. Thus, the latter wants to see religion as a conviction, sometimes so strong that it requires reasonable accommodations (such as allowing the wearing of the kirpan, a sacred Sikh knife allowed in Canadian schools), just as a secular conviction could legitimately require accommodation (for example pacifism, which is incompatible with military service). Nonetheless, by taking into account the strength of beliefs, Taylor gives less consideration to ritual collective practices, for example.

Instead of the strength of beliefs, Laborde prefers to consider the way in which religion has emerged in a particular society. This way, one does not need to wonder whether it is important for Muslims to go to the mosque; it is enough to note that in European societies, the majority religion has taken a prominent place in the form of holidays dedicated to the practice of Mass (on Sundays); therefore, it is fair to take into account the ritual practice of going to the mosque on Fridays, although the (historically Christian) calendar is not calibrated for this. Accommodation in the workplace must also be taken into account: not so much because of a strength of beliefs (a field that political liberalism is not well equipped to judge), but because of a historical differential between majority and minority religions.

By not specifying a particular dimension of religion, but rather leaving three possibilities open (conceptions of the good life, epistemic propositions, collective identities), Laborde’s republicanism does not depend on religious discourse: rather than posing a religion in itself, one studies its analytical dimensions. The genealogist pitfall of Asad and Mahmood is thus avoided and we have a road map to implement a significant political liberalism.

7.2 Liberalism and Public Arena

Let us clarify further what ‘liberalism’ means, because it must not be confused with market liberalism or neo-liberal regimes. Unlike neo-liberalism, which tends to impose its functioning on social spaces that should be preserved from it, liberalism is an “art of separation”, aiming to build “a world of walls”, each of them “creating a new freedom” (Walzer, 1984, p. 315).

Affinities with the idea of secularism, historically associated with the idea of separation, both in France and in the United States, are important: the point is to separate spheres (how, remains to be seen). Parliament, public schools and the courts are therefore part of the public arena, but it is still necessary to distinguish the actors within these institutions. Public school teachers in France are subject to stricter rules than pupils: they cannot express their (ir)religious opinions, whereas the pupils can. In the same place, rules relating to the public arena (teachers) can coexist with rules relating to the public space (students as users). The political history of each state further complicates the problem, making it difficult to generalise. Yet it remains possible to identify some transversal criteria of (non)permissibility of religion in the public sphere. According to Laborde’s disaggregated approach, religion should have no place in the public sphere if:

1. –The epistemic propositions it conveys are inaccessible to public reason. For example, “the embryo contains a soul because it is written in the Bible, and prescriptions contained in this sacred book apply to all humans since it was written under the action of the Holy Spirit, co-creator of the world”. This statement is unintelligible to anyone, even a practicing believer, who does not share the traditional dogmas of the religion concerned.
2. –The conceptions of the good life that it promotes are encompassing. For example, if it is legitimate to organise optional religious courses in public schools, the state should still have a right to set certain criteria, especially if it finances them, to ensure that their content is compatible with the pluralism of liberal societies. Consequently, textbooks can be checked for compliance with ‘British values’ in Britain, and guidelines can be given to religious teachers in the Czech Republic so they are compatible with democratic pluralism. Without this type of control, religion can become encompassing, as is the case in Poland where religion courses in public school consist, among other things, in teaching that homosexuality is a sin, even though this falls within the conceptions of the good life that each citizen is entitled to choose or refuse.
3. –The collective identities it transmits are divisive. For example, the Italian and Polish states force public schools to display crucifixes in classrooms, on the grounds that they embody, among other things, national identity. While non-Christian students may not be bothered by this practice, the fact is that this display publicly signals a hierarchy between two types of citizens, those who are Christian (valued by the state) and those who are not (Laborde, 2017).

If one of these three criteria is verified, then the liberal state is entitled to set limits to ‘religion’, without venturing into theological abysses since the phenomenon is disintegrated. Conversely, if a ‘religion’ affirms epistemic propositions accessible to public reason, if it promotes conceptions of the good life that are non-encompassing and collective identities that do not generate division, then this ‘religion’ may have a place in the public arena. It is therefore understood as a culture, similar to a musical culture, and its study is mandatory, subsidised by the state through school education, without anyone complaining about the principle of it. Because valuing the music of Bach or Debussy, necessarily to the detriment of other works, is not in itself an attack on the impartiality of teaching, even though this choice is not neutral: the ‘neutrality’ of the state is therefore not a decisive criterion.

This point holds a central place in contemporary discussions in political theory, because devotees in all countries demand an increased state recognition of their religion, arguing that the state is not neutral when it subsidises certain sports, monuments, museums, culinary heritage (etc.) to the detriment of others. To answer that sort of argument, it must be broken down. Disaggregation does not offer ready-made answers, but it does provide guidelines to counter the genealogist objection described above, assimilating secularism to ‘Judeo-Christianity’, and more specifically to Protestantism.

7.3 Disaggregating Secular Ideologies Too

Nevertheless, the major interest of the disaggregating analysis is that it is not limited to religions. Here Laborde engages a debate with Will Kymlicka. Are religions, once diluted in culture, ipso facto less likely to challenge the principles of political liberalism? Kymlicka moves in this direction, but Laborde’s position is nuanced. Western-European far-right movements often value a culturalised Christianity, reduced to inheritance and tradition, expurgated from any proper religious reference (God, mysteries, etc.), but no less divisive with regard to immigrants, ethnic minorities or those who refuse to accept Christian cultural identity. This means that one of the three criteria mentioned above, in this case the last one, is not respected: it is not by bartering religion against culture that Christianity can be considered part of public reason.

The same goes for Dutch homo-nationalism, not particularly religious but that nonetheless stigmatises populations suspected of not being sufficiently acculturated to Christian-liberal frames, supposedly more gay-friendly. The example of a test of conformity to Dutch liberalism, between 2006 and 2008, intended for people wanting to acquire citizenship, is revealing. Though candidates from Canada, the United States or New Zealand did not need to pass it, nationals from other extra-European countries did: they were made to watch a video of same-sex people kissing in the street. The aim was to ensure that potential first-time citizens accepted this behaviour. While the attempt to enhance tolerance towards homosexuality is welcome, the fact remains that this should not be done through a public policy targeting specific populations. Indeed, native Dutch can also be homophobic, while remaining citizens (Laborde & Lægaard, 2020).

The method of disaggregation thus makes it possible to symmetrise religious and non-religious phenomena, all potentially vectors of the three aforementioned elements that political liberalism must qualify: epistemic propositions (non-accessible?), conceptions of the good life (comprehensive?), collective identities (divisive?). It is then possible to specify the dangers of homo-nationalism (e.g. Netherlands), religious nationalism (e.g. Poland), or French secularism expressed in the Chatel circular of 2012, which aims to prohibit accompanying adults on school trips from ostensible wearing of religious signs.⁶

Crucifixes displayed in the classrooms of public schools pose the same challenge as certain secular policies, such as the test of conformity to Dutch liberalism and the Chatel circular: all three gestures, be they religious or not, are divisive. Indeed, they send a public message that some students, accompanying parents or potential citizens have a higher status than others. The challenge is therefore not whether ‘religion’ in itself is insufficiently or too present in the public arena, but to identify its components – epistemic propositions, conceptions of the good life, identities – whose legitimacy in this arena must be judged according to the same criteria as their secular counterparts. Ultimately, if classical republicans marked by liberal thought, such as Catherine Kintzler, defend themselves against claims that they promote state atheism, and fight conservative secularism, the fact is that their tools for reflection are insufficient in the light of the republican tradition instigated, from an international point of view, by Philip Pettit, then developed by Cécile Laborde for liberalism and what she considers its condition: minimal secularism.

As ETS researchers, our main objective is not to provide a theory of the permissibility in the public arena of religion, or secularism or any system of beliefs. It consists in identifying tools, between philosophy and social sciences, which avoid the reification of these beliefs. Thus, through an interdisciplinary approach, we assume a renewed republican perspective to explore the relationship between culture and politics.