From March 6-8, France 3 asked French philosophers: “What should French secularism be?”
For Michel Onfray, atheist philosopher, “secularism must evolve,” because when the 1905 law was proclaimed, “we were in an ultra Catholic non-Muslim context.” He calls for a “republican Islam: We should be able to allow imams to be trained in France and there should be public financing for all places of worship. We know very well that as long as we allow mosques to be privately financed, it will be funded by businesses in Saudi Arabic and Qatar, who believe in a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, they will be the ones to place and monitor the imams.”
For Onfray, the law separating the Church and State is hypocritical. “We know very well that the Republic has rights over religion. Today a bishop is named with the approval of the political powers in place.” Onfray believes that “we need to stop making secularism a religion,” and instead must “rethink it in the historical context, in the sociology and the demography of our country.”
