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Laïcité and Secularisation

Olivier Roy explains his view on the difference between French "laicite" and secularisation
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Secularisation means just that people stop to feel concerned by religion. It doesn’t mean that they are anti-religious, or things like that. They can have the same moral values as the Church, but without really believing, and without really practicing. Religion stopped to be at the core of the society. Laicism is an entrenched laïcité. It is something which has almost turned into an ideology. It’s, I would say, in a sense, ideologized secularism. The idea is that religious, the religious, is a problem as such– and that any religion has a potential of threatening the secular society. So laïcité is now striving to chase religion from the public space, to keep religion in the private realm.
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So we have a growing gap between faith communities and the dominant secular culture of Europe now.
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