The World of Religions No. 49 – September/October 2011 —
The strengthening of fundamentalism and communitarianism of all kinds is one of the main effects of September 11. This tragedy, with its global repercussions, revealed and accentuated the Islam-West divide, just as it was the symptom and accelerator of all the fears linked to the ultra-rapid globalization of previous decades and the resulting clash of cultures. But these identity tensions, which continue to worry and constantly fuel the media (the Oslo massacre that occurred in July is one of the latest manifestations), have left in the shadows another consequence of September 11, quite the opposite: the rejection of monotheisms precisely because of the fanaticism they arouse. Recent opinion polls in Europe show that monotheistic religions are increasingly frightening our contemporaries. The words "violence" and "regression" are now more readily attached to them than "peace" and "progress." One of the consequences of this return to religious identity and the fanaticism that often results from it is therefore a sharp increase in atheism.
While the movement is widespread in the West, it is in France that the phenomenon is most striking. There are twice as many atheists as there were ten years ago, and the majority of French people today identify as either atheists or agnostics. Of course, the causes of this sharp rise in disbelief and religious indifference are deeper, and we analyze them in this issue: the development of critical thinking and individualism, urban lifestyles, and the loss of religious transmission, etc. But there is no doubt that contemporary religious violence is accentuating a massive phenomenon of detachment from religion, which is much less spectacular than the murderous madness of fanatics. We could use the saying: the sound of a falling tree hides the sound of a growing forest. However, because they rightly worry us and weaken world peace in the short term, we focus far too much on the resurgence of fundamentalism and communitarianism, forgetting to see that the real change on the scale of long history is the profound decline, in all layers of the population, of religion and the age-old belief in God.
I will be told that the phenomenon is European and especially impressive in France. Certainly, but it continues to grow, and the trend is even beginning to reach the East Coast of the United States. France, after having been the eldest daughter of the Church, could well become the eldest daughter of religious indifference. The Arab Spring also shows that the aspiration for individual freedoms is universal and could well have as its ultimate consequence, in the Muslim world, as in the Western world, the emancipation of the individual with regard to religion and the "death of God" prophesied by Nietzsche. The guardians of dogma have understood this well, they who constantly condemn the dangers of individualism and relativism. But can we prevent a human need as fundamental as the freedom to believe, to think, to choose one's values and the meaning one wants to give to one's life?
In the long term, the future of religion hardly seems to me to lie in collective identity and the submission of the individual to the group, as was the case for millennia, but in personal spiritual quest and responsibility. The phase of atheism and rejection of religion into which we are penetrating ever more deeply may, of course, lead to triumphant consumerism, indifference to others, and new barbarities. But it may also be the prelude to new forms of spirituality, secular or religious, truly founded on the great universal values to which we all aspire: truth, freedom, love. Then God—or rather all his traditional representations—will not have died in vain.