Is Secularization Bringing Back Religion? A Social Policy Analysis

The process of secularization can have contradictory outcomes. The current scholarship has generally pointed out the weakening authority of churches and declining religiosity of people, but it has paid limited attention to the fact that secularisation can also lead a minority, but nonetheless relevant, part of the population to rediscover the reasons for their faith and take an active role to promote them. In this sense, secularization can bringing religion back (Rémond, 1992) and it may become an opportunity rather than a threat for religion to acquire a stronger public role (Beck, 2008). This process is favoured by the crisis of legitimation of public authorities and existing political organizations, the fading state/church cleavage that has lessened the ideological constraints against the involvement of religious actors in the public sphere, and the extension of political regulation to fields (e.g. bioethics, reproductive technologies) that may reactive forms of political protests inspired by long-standing religious values. This paper studies this return to religion from an unusual perspective by investigating the impact of French Catholic-inspired groups on two policy fields that have traditionally attracted the strong mobilization of Catholic organizations: housing policies and morality politics. In consideration of its secular political culture, France seems a decisive case to test the resilient strength of religious-inspired actors in influencing the public sphere in Western Europe. The analysis of policy documents, official publications, and interviews with key people involved in government policies and social mobilizations enable us to recognise two paradigmatically different scenarios in the changing relationships between public authorities and religious-inspired groups. The first scenario is characterized by greater cooperation between Catholic-inspired actors and public bureaucracies. The increasing social engagement of Catholic-inspired associations may open up new forms of collaboration between public authorities and religious-inspired groups. The new cooperation is based on reciprocal recognition for mutual autonomy. The state and religious-inspired actors acknowledge their dissimilar ethical backgrounds, but this does not prevent them from establishing various forms of cooperation in the interest of citizens, particularly the most socially vulnerable. Even though religious-inspired actors do not pretend to structure the social domain and they accept the rules prescribed by public powers, their stable partnerships with public powers lead them to become part of the public institutional system and this may provide them with the opportunity to exercise a subtle influence on political and social issues. The second scenario that was partly sketched out by Suzanne Berger (1994) is defined by the re-emergence of strong ideological conflicts between state authorities and religious-inspired actors. In this case, religious-inspired social movements and public authorities do not recognise the full legitimacy of the other. Their contrasts may provoke new divisions or the reactivation of profound social and political cleavages that characterized French history. Single-issues movements could thus become the agents of anti-system un-secular politics that contest the existing institutional order.