POINT OF VIEW. Religions and school: untimely remarks

The current reaffirmation of republican values ​​and secularism is absolutely necessary. Their implementation does not suffer any exception. The notion of blasphemy has no acceptable meaning in our law. We must therefore reaffirm the freedom to publish and republish the Prophet’s caricatures. And this freedom concerns all religions, all spiritualities.

However, a difficult question resurfaces, particularly in the role of education and schools in the fight against fanaticism: what to do with the suffering of a believer in front of a caricature that deeply wounds him? Behind religions, there are human people. The messages we send to each other can be hurtful, seen as disrespectful.

Free expression of differences

But in the tragedy that afflicts us, the professor Samuel Paty He himself draws in advance a remarkable and deeply secular ethical line: these caricatures, we have the right to publish them and those who kill to dissuade them from doing so, are condemned and commit horror and the unacceptable. But on the other hand he recognizes that images can hurt believers. On these Muslim students it is not fair to impose on them the sight of these images which lack respect for the Prophet, at least so they can be perceived intimately.

Students may feel hurt, they have the right to express their disagreement. But they must stick to Voltaire who declares in substance: I do not agree with what you say but I will fight to guarantee you the freedom to say it. They must understand their freedom to express themselves as conditioned by their consent to debate, to the free expression of differences, to respect for the opponent, and to the refusal to possibly force the elimination of the opposition by violence. ‘opponent.

It is important that the young person seduced by jihadism can fully express his freedom of thought, instead of walling in a constrained silence. Because then, republican freedom would be wounded by the very place where it was claimed to be defended. Should we insist? You can be a good Republican and disapprove of the message of cartoons. The challenge is to accept the republican principle of freedom of expression for those who approve of cartoons as well as for those who condemn them. The latter, it would be harmful to classify them globally as affected by jihadist sympathies. But above all, we must give them the right to free speech.

This, in the school, is linked to the practice of debate. This immediately raises a serious question: does secularism exclude the approach of problems linked to religions?

Make possible a dialogue of religious beliefs

Let us note this fact: whether we like it or not, religion is present in the courts, and this, for the moment in execrable conditions, because it is in the form of a perverted religion, a fanaticism in which the representatives of religions do not recognize themselves.

The urgency is to make possible, in the school debate, a dialogue of religious beliefs. The question on the spiritual is present in the consciousness of young people in school. It is very sad to speak, in school, of religion only when tragedies violently challenge the social space. Of course, a minute’s silence is needed. But it is above all necessary to restore the school space of free speech.

In fact, the minute of silence on its own will not permanently compensate for the inability of secular and republican schools to integrate into their culture all the questions raised by the existence of religions. Finally, it must be said: to speak of “religious fact” has become insufficient. Protecting children from religious perversion fanaticism is necessary work. But we can only do this in the context of a reflection on the meaning of greatness, the possible perversion of the various religions.

Let us recall that secularism has never forbidden the question at school of the cultural importance of religions for civilization. The urgency is, finally, to find this minimum of common morality without which society is exploding.

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