Leaving Religion in France

French laïcité has done most of the work of secularizing French Catholic families over the last hundred years. Many of the people who would technically be deconstructing in another country have simply grown up in households where the church was already a family memory rather than a practice, and the leaving — if there was one — happened a generation or two ago. What is happening now in France is the wave that was deferred: the residue of cultural Catholicism, the holidays that everyone still keeps, the grandmother who quietly believed, the Sunday lunches that still feel Catholic-shaped even when no one says grace.

The harder French exits are happening in the immigrant Muslim communities of the banlieues and the major cities. For French Muslims of North African or West African origin, leaving Islam often costs more inside the family than the rest of the country recognizes, and the broader French political conversation about Islam and laïcité makes this a politically loaded thing to talk about publicly. There is also a long tail of small French evangelical and Jehovah’s Witness exits, plus a Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox Jewish exit in Paris and Strasbourg.

If you are deconstructing in France, you have one of the easiest broader cultures in the world to land in — nobody on the street cares whether you go to Mass. The family stuff and the immigrant-community stuff is where the real work is.