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I am English, and spend a fair bit of time in France. In France particularly, the state is aggressively secular. They go out of their way to ensure no religion
by oliwarner 3y ago
I am English, and spend a fair bit of time in France.
In France particularly, the state is aggressively secular. They go out of their way to ensure no religion has any footing in any part of government and this occasionally makes it hard to be religious if you're unable to wear the expected garb or paraphernalia at school or at your government job.
The French have a long history of not wanting a single unimpeachable ruler. God just isn't welcome.
- paulmd 3y agoPart of it is that for a lot of Europeans this is still in living memory I think. It’s really interesting to me how recently some “modern, first-world countries” were still dictatorships or still undergoing rapid democratization. France, Spain, and Korea are all dramatic examples, we totally don’t think of it in this context but at the start of the 80s Korea was a backwater under a military dictatorship, in the 50s France was a quasi dictatorship under de Gaulle with internal instability and unrest, Spain was under a fascist dictator until 1975, etc. Plus there is the other factor that the structure of European cities and societies is much more amenable to protests and political action, where the US citizenry is atomized by design.