French Elections: A Bad Soufflé?

source: The Sun

Have you ever gone through the bother of making an ornate dinner for a party only to have to eat a disastrous resultant dish? A soufflé that did not rise? Overcooked steak? A béarnaise that scrambled? French voters are going through a similar experience right now.

The French Republic sent God to the guillotine in the 1790s, although the Church was allowed to exist independently until 1905, when the government nationalized Church property including hospitals and schools. Since then the official policy of France has been secularism in a post Christian age. Marine Le Pen herself extols France's take on secularism, which is effectively a resolute irreligion in the public sphere, but tolerance for fragments of the Christian age gone by.

Islam does not fit very well into this narrative. Some French have taken to calling their growing immigrants les rats. Middle Eastern Muslims live in a different narrative of the roles of the sexes, the place of religion in the public sphere, legal procedure, and the nature of God Himself than either Catholic or secular Frenchmen.

And what can they do about it? Nothing. Much like their older brother, the United States, the French government's official irreligion tolerates differences, which peaceably keeps us until we become too different. Even a culturally Christian country nation like Hungary or Poland could reasonably flaunt the E.U. and deny immigrants from Muslims countries. France has no such pretext unless they wish to argue the burqa is unattractive against the backdrop of churches museums. So to stop immigration and related terrorism Le Pen must resort to preaching positive secularism from years gone by while her opponents are more in tune with today's secularism. But as any Catholic knows, there is little more to conservatism than conserving yesterday's liberalism in the face of today's liberalism.

Regardless of how the election turns out there is a fundamental dishonesty in how the question of immigration must be framed. But France has spent over two centuries cooking this secular dinner with the butchered pieces of Christianity, now she must eat it.