Thoughts on Nôtre Dame

What can I say about the fire at Nôtre Dame?

It is a terrible, terrible disaster. The burning of this great and greatly beloved cathedral church is beyond the capacity of mere words, at least in the shock of tonight’s news. What moved me more even than the images of Nôtre Dame being attacked by the flames was to see French people weeping in the streets of Paris. Old, young, people of many different cultures and backgrounds, but especially Catholics for whom this is a uniquely sacred place, all were saying that this is a tragedy for France.

But the first thing to say is that thank God, no one appears to have been killed or injured thus far by this huge destructive fire. We must keep the fire fighters and others plunged into this emergency in our thoughts tonight. Trying to save a medieval building from total collapse entails great risks to many people’s safety. But there is at least a real hope that the western parts of the Cathedral with its twin towers may have escaped the worst and can be conserved. Meanwhile, our hearts go out to the people of France tonight. Like them we are stunned by this calamity that has overtaken them

I’ve visited Nôtre Dame often. I never went to Paris without venturing inside this miracle of a gothic cathedral. It was never a peaceful place - all year round crowds surged through the building,
laughing, chattering, taking selfies on their mobile phones...and yet they came in their millions,
drawn here by something many of them could not have articulated but which religious faith wants to describe in terms of the mystery of God. No English cathedral attracts visitors in such phenomenal numbers (though some might perhaps, if they did not charge for entry). It was wonderful to think that for the vast majority of tourists, coming to Paris without visiting its cathedral was unthinkable.

This isn’t the place to lament the celebrated treasures of Nôtre Dame that will have been lost, or at least severely damaged. It’s too early to tell how much of the glorious medieval glass has survived, or the sculptures or the furnishings or the organ. The fabric itself will be capable of being reconstructed much as it appeared before; after all, this was precisely what the great nineteenth century architect Viollet le Duc achieved when the French authorities realised that the Cathedral was falling down and would soon be beyond repair. The sacred space can be reimagined, but it’s the contents that are irreplaceable.

We need to understand what Nôtre Dame symbolises for the people of France. It’s similar to the emblematic significance of St Paul’s Cathedral for the English. The famous image of St Paul’s rising serenely above the fires and smoke of wartime London that did not destroy it (though the nation feared for its survival) suggest what France is feeling tonight. But I think the French feel their attachment to Nôtre Dame even more intensely. For all its laicité, France has a powerful feeling for its great Catholic shrines. Emotionally if not spiritually, for the French, Nôtre Dame is the greatest of them all.

This is because the Cathedral has stood “strong and stable” (forgive me) over so many centuries, never yielding to the often chaotic events of France’s turbulent history, surviving war, defeat, revolution, civil unrest and neglect in ways that we English haven’t experienced to quite the same extent. It’s not too much to say that Nôtre Dame symbolises the soul of France. It is its mystic heart, if you like, its collective memory reaching back into the middle ages, and even beyond to late antiquity when her first saints worshipped and evangelised on this very site in the former Roman city. This is why this catastrophe will be felt far beyond Paris, right across the country, right across Europe, right across the world not only by the French but by everyone who loves France. As President Macron said tonight, Notre Dame is part of us alL

I learned a little about what happens to a community when fire engulfs its cathedral. I’m thinking of course of Coventry Cathedral where I worked as a canon for eight years. In 1987 when it celebrated the silver jubilee of the new Cathedral, there were plenty of people who could tell stories about the night of 14 November 1940 when Luftwaffe incendiary bombs burned the medieval church of St Michael. The new building seemed a palpable symbol of resurrection, while the ruins of the old Cathedral became a symbol of forgiveness, reconciliation and hope. TO THE GLORY OF GOD THIS CATHEDRAL BURNED AND IS REBUILT says the striking inscription set in big brass letters into the nave floor of the new building. I was always deeply moved by those words.

What about Nôtre Dame? I’ve no doubt that even tonight, many people will already be thinking about what happens next. This is an especially cruel blow to have struck this great Cathedral during the holiest season of the chuch year, just when the liturgies of Holy Week had begun to be celebrated, and the days were building up to the great Paschal Triduum from Maundy Thursday to Easter.

Yes, crucifixion comes into things. But to recognise this on Holy Monday is the clue to what must follow. There will be a resurrection of Nôtre Dame, of that we can be as certain as that we shall celebrate Easter at the culmination of this Holy Week. How and when will be questions that will need to be debated for a long time. But catholic France will not lose hope as a result of this terrible fire. What feels tonight like an irrecoverable attack on a cherished holy place is, from a larger perspective another opportunity for resurrection to be experienced. When St Paul’s burned in the Great Fire of London, a new splendour rose out of the ashes. So it was at York Minster (twice). So it was at Coventry. So it will be in Paris.

These words from one of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible were important to those who oversaw the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral after its destruction. They were spoken to the despondent exiles who returned from Babylon to Judah to find that their beloved temple was in ruins. Could it ever rise again? The prophet raises their spirits to stir them into action with a promise of hope. “The latter glory shall be greater more than it was before, says the Lord of hosts, and in this place I will give prosperity” (Haggai 2.9). As the Psalm says, “Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” Tonight must be about new life as well as death. Which is why the great word of Easter must be the last one on this evening of tears and lament: RESURGAM!

Afterthought on Tuesday morning. Thank God the fire is contained, and the core of the medieval fabric is still standing. The relics have been saved, including the Crown of Thorns, and some of the art works. The firefighters have done a magnificent job, risking their lives for a cathedral they love. Already thoughts are turning towards the rebuilding of the Cathedral and one benefactor has pledged a hundred million euros. Christians in Paris will go on observing Holy Week, but with a new intensity now, and with many tears - but, I think, with a stronger sense of resurrection hope than ever. We feel for them and pray for them today. For now, we are all Parisians.

1968: The Year I Came of Age

It's fifty years ago this week that the second French Revolution didn't quite happen. May 1968 is remembered as the month when students brought France to a standstill. Their protests caught on across the nation and beyond. That month felt as though it could be a watershed in the political and social life of Europe.

Those caught up in the événements came to be called soixante-huitards, 1968-ers. Perhaps I can just about lay claim to that title. I was in France in the first half of 1968 between leaving school and going to university. It was a long way from Paris to the orphanage where I was working in southern France. In the rural uplands of the Ardèche, beautiful but impoverished, what went on in the capital felt like another world. It was only when working people started striking in solidarity that it began to feel real. I recall cycling over the main line from Paris to Marseille. With no trains running, the tracks were already rusting over. That's when it hit me that it doesn't take much to bring normal life to a halt.

I was born in 1950, and had my eighteenth birthday in France (a big rite of passage, your first birthday alone in a strange land). I was not quite an adult because the age of legal majority in the UK was only reduced to eighteen on 1 January 1970. Technically I became a grown up at an Adrian Mole kind of age, nineteen and three quarters. Nevertheless, looking back fifty years I see how formative those months in France were, this threshold between childhood and adulthood. It was the first time I had lived away from home. I had left school. I was financially independent (earning the princely sum of ten new francs a week - but with full board and lodging, there was not a lot to spend your money on in this deep countryside). I was speaking a foreign language. I was walking tall. Not yet legally adult, but then not not-adult either.

In that liminal place, I obscurely admired the students at Nanterre who, protesting against being policed by the university authorities, claimed the right to have sex with their partners in their own bedrooms. To me as a devout evangelical Christian, this seemed not so much to be about sex (God forbid!) as taking responsibility for their own lives as grown-up human beings. This was precisely the personal path I was navigating myself. I now know of course, how the events of May 1968 were a confused concatenation of ideals and causes, some ideals more noble than others, some causes lost from the outset. Historians will argue about that for decades. But that they coalesced around a generalised dis-ease with hierarchical rule and authoritarian control is a plausible reading of that spring. The Fifth Republic certainly felt the shock-waves: it was never closer to the brink of collapse than it was in May and June 1968. And maybe postwar France came of age - or thought it did - as a result.

I was a late developer when it came to political awareness. The "never had it so good" days of the late 50s and early 60s didn't encourage radical questioning among most middle-class baby-boomer kids. I'd briefly woken up to the reality of world events in 1962 with the Cuba Missile Crisis. But in my teenage years, my conversion to conservative evangelical Christianity took over my life. Politics took a back seat and never got anywhere near the front of my consciousness. (When I was visiting schools in connection with the EU Referendum campaign two years ago, I was heartened to find how politically engaged so many teenage students are today compared with then.).

But in France in the spring of 1968, politics was impossible to ignore. Which was important at that stage of my personal development. A few months later I went up to Oxford. The spirit of Nanterre was alive and well that first academic year. The Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students (ORSS) famously besieged All Souls College in protest against the privileged academic life symbolised by its emblematic plum pudding. In my college (Balliol), ORSS students daubed the senior common room with revolutionary slogans in red paint to mark a visit by Ted Heath. They marched along Broad Street carrying placards demanding "Prove there are no files!" which provided the agenda for a tutorial on linguistic philosophy I was having with Anthony Kenny at the time.

It was a long time ago. But in important ways that era influenced me. I was not altogether conscious of it at the time - far from it. But more and more as I look back, I realise how formative the late 1960s were when "revolution" was the metaphor being claimed in so many areas of life and endeavour: politics, theology, education, art and culture. It wasn't so much a case of "bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" as Wordsworth said of his own revolutionary times. But I couldn't fail to warm to the soixante-huitard mantra, "Be realistic. Ask for the impossible!" with its blend of radical questioning and witty sense of paradox. 1968 in France had its ugly side. But in its best moments it had a lightness of touch as well.

For Philip Larkin, 1963 was the year (when "life was never better than...."). For me it was 1968 that was the watershed in my journey towards adulthood. To be in France and be a back-row witness of what happened there that year gave me insights that have, I think, been profoundly important for the rest of my life. It taught me (or began to) not to accept the status quo but critically to test assumptions, ask questions of people who have (or claim) authority, not be afraid of argument, go back to the sources of established political, intellectual or theological standpoints. It made me into a liberal - even if it has taken a lifetime to understand what thaword means. But I believe I glimpsed, even then, that Christian faith is fundamentally liberal in the sense of being generous, inclusive and exploratory. For it calls us not to be enslaved to entrenched positions but to become questioners of the environment we live in, as Jesus himself abundantly demonstrated. That's the kind of Christianity I've tried to practise as a disciple and as a preacher.

Which is why I'm glad - proud even - to be a Soixante-Huitard. I now recognise how much I was shaped by that liminal year. The fact that we are still talking about what happened fifty years later shows that its historical importance continues to be felt. And if I am typical, then it's not just societies that have been influenced by it, but individuals too.

Crumbling Cathedrals?

Well, if they're not crumbling yet, they will do one day. I once preached a sermon for Advent in Durham Cathedral in which I said this.

"We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t marvel at wonderful stones and buildings, least of all when we are sitting among them in a World Heritage Site.  But that doesn’t mean that they last for ever.  Buildings, like people, are mortal. What Jesus says about the temple is also true of this place.  We can hardly bear to think of these wonderful stones and wonderful buildings lying toppled one far-off day in a heap of rubble.  And yet, in aeons to come, when the sun is in its death throes and planet is swallowed up in a vast red expanding disc, and the history of the human race is done, the Cathedral, like everything else we have built and cherished, will be dust and ashes.  To claim anything else would be idolatry.  St Paul says that what is seen is transient; it is what is unseen that is eternal. We need to judge accurately where eternity belongs. Temples have their day and are gone: in the celestial city, says the Book of Revelation, there is no temple."

I was making the point a trifle dramatically, I suppose. But we need to remind ourselves, religious people especially, that we must look at things sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of what lasts for ever. We wander among the stones of Fountains Abbey or Glastonbury or Tintern and see how history and the relentless flow of time have their own way of crumbling mighty buildings and anticipating their ultimate destiny.

But a recent news item in The Times headlined Crumbling Cathedrals was, I think, a little premature (how sub-editors always fall for alliteration!). Deans are right to claim that their cathedral buildings have probably never been in such good condition since the days they were built. This is thanks to assiduous care and oversight by cathedral chapters, architects and surveyors, fabric advisory committees and the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England (CFCE). It's hugely costly, but it's a labour of love. Simon Jenkins' recent book on Cathedrals is only the latest to pay tribute to this magnificent collective effort. A cathedral may merit one star or all five in that book (why have star ratings at all, I want to ask?) but the care invested in it will be to exactly the same standard. Having worked in four different cathedrals, I've seen for myself how imagination, hard graft, technical skill and eye-watering amounts of money are willingly expended out of the love people have for these great national institutions.

These great national institutions. That's a point I want to underline. Cathedrals belong not only to their diocese or city or county. They belong to the nation. Like bishops, cathedrals are there to serve the nation and in the case of the medieval cathedrals, this idea would have been embedded from the outset in how they were understood. It's obvious that Canterbury and St Paul's are national institutions. But it's not so obvious even in the case of York, Durham or Winchester, let alone the smaller or younger cathedrals. And the legal definition in the Cathedrals Measure 1999 rather colludes with a more localised understanding when it speaks of "the seat (cathedra) of the Bishop and a centre of worship and mission". Cathedrals are not less than that, certainly. But they are a lot more than that too. And this becomes evident every time there is a crisis in a cathedral. It's always big news in the national media. It's assumed to be a matter of nationwide public concern.

Let me warm to my point. The "crumbling cathedrals" headline is largely about the parlous financial position cathedrals find themselves in. And here there is no argument. The funding regime under which cathedrals operate is ludicrously inadequate to serve their present mission, let alone respond adequately to the ever-increasing expectations that are laid on them. Some cathedrals - a few lucky ones - have enough recurring income to service their day to day operations. But even they are only "just about managing". A large number are so constrained that they are not able to invest as they should and as they want to in the liturgy, the spirituality, the music, the arts, social service, intellectual activity and the architectural heritage that makes them such popular destinations for both visitors and pilgrims. Large-scale fabric is ravenously hungry for resources. And that greed is never satisfied.

Our country is proud of its cathedrals. They are among the glories of our land. Cathedral towers and spires populate the British landscape of the imagination. They feature prominently in the way this country is branded and marketed to visitors. I don't need to go on. So my question is, why is the nation as hesitant as it is in helping to fund these institutions that contribute so significantly to our collective wellbeing? Why doesn't it do more to lift the heavy financial burdens they struggle beneath so that the funds they hold can be allocated to the mission they exist to serve in their localities, their dioceses and the nation as a whole?

It's true that "the state" does provide some help, up to a point. The Heritage Lottery Fund has supported many a cathedral development project, including at both Durham and Newcastle. The former Chancellor's First World War Centenary Cathedrals Repair Fund offered two tranches of £20 million for cathedrals to develop fabric projects associated with the memory of the Great War. Historic churches and cathedrals have had access via English Heritage to funds for fabric maintenance, though sacred buildings are no longer ring-fenced. But whatever the route by which money is made available, the funding environment is highly competitive. Need far outstrips available funds, and the evidence is that resources are becoming scarcer than they used to be. The effort involved in submitting bids is hugely intensive, not to mention the challenge of voluntary fundraising to match offers made by funding bodies or private benefactors.

I've wandered round cathedrals in continental Europe for most of my life. I know France best of all. France has a secular constitution that rigorously excludes any blurring of the boundaries between church and state. Laïcité is a sacred principle. But when it comes to its architectural patrimoine or built heritage, the French are European leaders in investing in their priceless legacy. Cathedrals and greater churches (and a fair few lesser ones of historic importance or beauty) are maintained by the state to a very high standard. You look at the hoarding outside a cathedral that is undergoing restoration and you find that while the church and local commune both contribute a little, it's the département, the region, the nation and the European Union that fund most of the work. The ministry of cathedrals goes on without the burden of prohibitively expensive maintenance. You can read how it works here.

My question is very simple. If France, a wholly secularised state, can enter into this kind of funding partnership with the church, why can't it happen in the UK?

Let me talk about England for a moment. Here, the majority of Grade 1 listed churches belong to the established church. So there is (or ought to be) a presumption that church and nation exist in a symbiosis that enhances the role of each for the public good. I think it is time that the Church of England presses the case hard for substantial state funding support for the fabric of its cathedrals. The principle of direct state aid has already been conceded by the First World War Fund. I don't deny that when public funds are so contested, it would perhaps be controversial to begin with. But the sums of money that would be involved, say £50 million a year, would be paltry compared to the budgets for health, education, social welfare or defence. But they would make a substantial difference to cathedrals. And I don't simply mean Anglican cathedrals, though I would expect the Church of England to take the lead in negotiating such a scheme. All church buildings that satisfy heritage criteria and are understood to be "cathedrals" within their particular tradition would qualify. And whatever scheme is devised for England would also of course apply to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

I don't know if church leaders have the stomach to open up this conversation. But there are compelling reasons that it's urgent. Negatively, I'm not alone in fearing that cathedrals are facing a crisis of financial sustainability. They are amazingly inventive when it comes to levering in funds, but the best initiatives in the world are not sufficient to address the problem globally. Visitor admission charges make a difference only when a cathedral already has more than about a quarter of a million visitors. That rules out half the English cathedrals, and these are inevitably the less well-resourced.

But I believe that any deal should be based on a more positive perspective. The value cathedrals add to the national and local economy is well researched and documented. We can put figures on the contribution they make to employment, tourism, visitor spending in hotels, restaurants and shops, uplift in local property values and so on. Their indirect and intangible benefits are incalculable but real. I doubt that anyone in government would dispute this, or question that cathedrals are indispensable heritage assets that belong to the nation. There's no reason why a public that increasingly values its built and landscape heritage would not think such a scheme well worth believing in.

At present, a Cathedrals Review Group is looking at the governance and management of cathedrals and how they can become more sustainable. I hope its report, due in the new year, will be bold in asking the nation to rise to the challenge of contributing realistically to the necessary maintenance of its cathedrals. Of course there would need to be carefully designed structures of national oversight and accountability to make sure that public funds were being administered properly. Chapters might groan at the idea of yet another layer of scrutiny on top of those to which cathedrals are already subject.

But I think it's a price worth paying for the kind of security such a "heritage contract" would offer both cathedrals and the nation. If worries about premature crumbling (take that both literally and metaphorically) were to be lifted, it would set cathedrals free to exercise their mission in wholly new and wonderful ways. They are already very good at it. This would help them to become even better.

Let's say it again. Cathedrals are great national institutions.

Last Words from France: a rite of passage

Well, these are possibly not my last words ever from France, a country I have loved since childhood. But for the time being. This summer we went to our beloved hill-top town of Vézelay for one final visit. We have sold the little house I inherited seventeen years ago near the Basilica. Why did we decide to part with it? It seemed like the right time. In retirement it becomes necessary to simplify things.

But there's no denying the sense of loss. Not least the associations it came to acquire of peacefulness, spirituality and retreat, happy memories of family holidays, rites of passage it had been present to in our lives like the marriages of our children, the births of our grandchildren, our retirement, the breaking news of family deaths, the preparation for their funerals. When say farewell to a house you have had a long connection with (in this case, longer than any other I've known), things become charged with symbolism. To take a final cup of coffee in such familiar surrounding, switch off the lights, turn off the boiler, shut the front door, lock it for the last time, get into the car and drive away - what significance those everyday actions suddenly acquire!

I've blogged about Vézelay before. So I won't write about the landscapes of northern Burgundy, its Christian history, the golden limestone churches that adorn the villages, the wines (of course) and our life in the village. But let me say something about the Basilica where we have worshipped so often, and in particular, a carving just outside the north door that seems to me to symbolise life's transitions, not least how we let go, lay aside and travel into a new and unknown future.

The marvellous Basilica of the Madeleine that crowns the hill is one of the treasures of Romanesque architecture in Europe. It is to France what Durham Cathedral is to England, an incomparable masterpiece. In the middle ages pilgrims flocked here both to reverence the relics of Mary Magdalen (long story, that) and to set off on the Camino to Compostela. After the Revolution it been allowed to fall into decay. It was fortunate to find in Viollet le Duc a gifted young architect who set about restoring it - a major commission that brought him fame, fortune and some critical opprobrium too.

The west front was so decayed that much of it had to be completely rebuilt. So only one of the original Romanesque sculptures remains visible on the outside. But that single survivor on the south door jamb of the north portal is highly significant. It depicts Jacob struggling with the angel in the famous story in Genesis.

Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” The man asked him, “What is your name?”“Jacob,” he answered. Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”  Jacob said, “Tell me your name, I pray.” But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”  (Genesis 32.22-30 NRSV). 

It's a mysterious story with many layers of meaning. But the symbolism of placing the sculpted capital right next to the church door helps explain it. It is clearly about travelling across a threshold, facing the risks and uncertainties of transition and liminality. Jacob is facing a journey and an encounter that he knows will be crucial in his life. He needs to be reconciled to his brother Esau from he stole both his birthright and his inheritance. He is all alone, and frightened of this imminent meeting that could prove to bring with it great suffering, even death. The awful journey through water in the dead of night, his struggle with the nameless adversary, his emerging as the sun rose with a new name to mark a new identity, and a limp to remember the ordeal - it all speaks of a rite of passage from one stage of life to the next. Interpret it as you will: Jacob facing his demons and (partially) overcoming them, or encountering God in all his numinous mystery and grace (or both of these) - it is one of the most powerful narratives in the Bible.

The sculpted capital and its story came to mean a lot to me in that final week in our house not many metres down the hill. I kept going back to it to contemplate it and photograph it (difficult to do because it stands, literally and figuratively, at the junction of light and shadow). While not comparing myself to Jacob-Israel, I recognised that even a little rite of passage like saying goodbye to a place and the home you have made there is still an ordeal to be faced up to and travelled across. I guess that it felt significant partly because saying goodbye to my working life as a priest, closing the door of the Deanery at Durham and walking away from the Cathedral and all that it stood for in my life was - still is - all very recent. Just as one bereavement triggers memories of others, so it is with saying farewell to a place and its people and the home you have made there and the friends you have got to know.

And, I have to say, getting on the ferry and leaving France behind did feel like our own personal Brexit. It wasn't of course, and still isn't now that we are back in Britain. But there's no denying that it was often on our minds during our summer on the hill. We frequently discussed it with both French and British friends, the latter mostly expats living in Burgundy, far from certain what the future after Brexit will mean for them. One of them told us about their son's recent visit to the UK in his (French) car. On parking it in a place he knows well in England (I'd better not say where), he realised that his French number plates had drawn attention to the car, and that he was being subjected to a volley of booing and hissing. Is this the generous decent country we were brought up in, the England that has shaped and nurtured us? - that was the unspoken thought. The Referendum was itself a rite of passage for Britain and for Europe, for all of us however we voted, I thought as I gazed on Jacob and the angel. And we have emerged on the other side unhealed, limping badly, more broken than we were before, not with a hope-filled sunrise to walk into but a gloomy sunset to walk away from as it gets dark.

Ah well. We are where we are, in a truly liminal place. But whatever our future in Europe, we are grateful to have glowing memories of our Burgundian adventure to bring with us. On our last day, I wrote to the Mairie and to the Jerusalem brothers and sisters whose spiritual home the Basilica is, to thank them for these wonderful years in Vézelay. It will always have a special place in our hearts. Adieu. And Deo gratias!
 

France, Faith and Laïcité

I always read Giles Fraser's Loose Canon articles in the Guardian with enjoyment. I almost always find myself agreeing with him. He is one of the best Christian minds encouraging us to embrace intelligent religion in our contemporary world. Even if his knockabout style is not yours, it's hard to argue that he hasn't penetrated to the core of whatever matter he is exploring. But when it comes to his latest piece** on France's celebrated (notorious?) doctrine of Laïcité, I think there is more to be said. So I want to try to nuance his article so that we can see Laïcité in a larger context that offers possibilities as well as challenges. 

He is right that the recent cavalier destruction by the French authorities of the church and mosque in the Jungle at Calais was cruel and indefensible, especially when it seems that assurances had been given that they would be spared despite the police plan to create a buffer zone between the camp and the autoroute. But I doubt that when they bulldozed these Christian and Muslim sacred spaces, they had Enlightenment theories of the state's relations with religion buzzing round their heads. They were probably just being thoughtless and rough, oblivious to human consequences, as heavy mobs always are. 

So what is Laïcité? It's the notion, embraced energetically at the French Revolution, that the state should be disinterested when it comes to religion. Public space should be free of religious ideology or values. These belong strictly to faith communities and individual adherents. It's had a chequered history since 1789, but in 1905 it was finally embedded in Article 1 of the French constitution, and this is how it is understood today by the state and its public institutions. 

People read Laïcité differently. For some, it perpetuates revolutionary anticlericalism and is perceived as hostile to any form of organised religion. Its implicit agenda is secularist and atheistic. Others, however, take a more positive view. Literally, the word simply means 'lay-ness', meaning that in respect of religion, the state should properly behave as 'lay', not determining or even pronouncing on, matters that belong to religious bodies. In the best spirit of the Enlightenment, it wants to create a genuinely open space where all expressions of faith (including atheism itself) can be practised, honoured and protected, where no faith is publicly preferred above any other and where no faith finds itself under pressure. It's about the separation of powers.

So maybe we need to differentiate between 'hard' and 'soft' versions of Laïcité. Let's call them versions 1 and 2. The first is the negative form that is root and branch opposed to religion in principle, or (in Giles' colourful words) regards religion as a 'dirty little secret' like the Victorian attitude to sex. It pursues an aggressive programme of marginalising religion to the point where it becomes, in Whitehead's immortal phrase, no more than 'what a man does with his own solitude'. 

The second, soft version, is the positive form that is permissive, more benign, more generous, that promises people of faith freedom from discrimination and that genuinely encourages an environment in which there can be a fruitful conversation between people of different faith traditions or of no faith. Laïcité 2 is about toleration in the best sense of that great word. 

France is only one of a number of countries whose public life is founded on Laïcité. Perhaps the closest parallel is found in the United States. The USA was formed in precisely the same philosophical and political environment as the French Republic. Like modern France, it's a child of the Enlightenment. Here too, the constitution expressly forbids the state's involvement in religion. Yet far from religion being in decline in the USA, it continues to be practised to an extent that fills European believers with envy. What is more, politicians are free to express their personal commitment to faith (which many do, though not always wisely). This is a good example of Laïcité 2: positive, collaborative and humane.

In practice, I think the UK is already moving towards Laïcité 2. That England and Scotland have established churches is making little difference to an increasing disinterest towards religion on the part of public institutions. The fractious debates about same-sex marriage are just one example of how little religious attitudes now influence public policy. (Sometimes, a wearisome political correctness is even driving local authorities and educational institutions into attitudes that owe more than a little to Laïcité 1.) I'm not advocating disestablishment. I'm simply saying that from my experience as an Englishman who knows and loves France, I don't detect that in the sphere of religion a great deal is different. In both the UK and France, churches and faith communities have to find their own way. I don't think this is at all a bad thing if it means that they can shed dependency and come of age.

Indeed, in some ways the UK is more secularised than France. There, Catholic religious festivals are still public holidays. The state, the departments and the communes put vastly more funding into the conservation of historic religious buildings than in the UK, thus enabling worshipping communities to go on using them. There is even a statutory involvement of the President of the Republic in approving appointments to bishoprics. After a century of Laïcité, I dare to hope that there is growing mutual respect, and even co-operation between secular and faith institutions in France that would have been unthinkable in 1789. This is in the spirit of Laïcité 2. Some politicians even speak openly about the contribution Christian history and thought has made in shaping the people of France. 

I am no political philosopher but to me, the idea that 'lay-ness' is the proper vocation of the nation state or a coalition of states like the EU makes sense. Laïcité 2 with its endorsement of the separation of powers (always a healthy thing in institutions) has a lot to be said for it. Churches and faith communities will have space in which to grow and flourish without fear. Different kinds of institutions can become partners rather than foes because their distinctiveness in the public arena is understood. It wouldn't rule out the things we value in the UK: chaplaincies to schools, universities, hospitals, prisons and the armed forces, the solemnisation of marriage, the holding of public religious ceremonies at times of commemoration or celebration. The USA demonstrates how the active engagement of faith with public life is entirely consistent with its officially secular character. 

The fact that France is more cautious in all these areas is no reason why it must always be that way. To be sure, there's still a lot of Laïcité 1 across the English Channel. Islamism, Charlie Hebdo, the Paris massacres and bad-tempered debates about wearing public signs of personal faith have hardened attitudes all round. Muslims in particular, but Jews and Catholics also from time to time, can feel they are on the receiving end of a hostile doctrine. There is no chance that France will give up its cherished Laïcité. But if it could morph into the type 2 version, maybe the whole nation, and not just its faith communities, would feel a whole lot easier with themselves. In our highly diverse societies of many creeds and cultures, that seems to me to be a necessary direction in which to travel.

**Giles' article can be found at http://gu.com/p/4gdyn/sbl. You may also be interested to read a piece in New Republic that's been brought to my attention by a comment on my blog: https://newrepublic.com/article/127179/time-france-abandon-laicite