AHC: America adopts a form of secularism closer to the French laicite?

Laïcité is basically the French form of secularism. It is more ''aggressive'' than the typical secularism found in Anglo-speaking countries. The state takes an active approach to keep religion out of the ''public sphere'' and religion is seen something to be kept in the ''private sphere''. For example, in government buildings, people can't display overt religious symbols which also includes public schools. Right-wing critics of this claim the French government of making religion ''politically incorrect''.

I know the French attuide towards religion is very different from the American one, you'll have to change lot of things for this occur. In France, due to the French Revolution, where the modern ''French identity'' was created, religion was seen as a obstable to attaining more freedom and equal right. Religion had a certain reputation of almost being synonymous with feudalism among some circles.

What changes would America need to have such a stance?
 
Maybe a very religious movement/party/president who leads to some catastrophe or the other, it's associated with religion, so secularism is enforced more after that.
 
Laïcité is basically the French form of secularism. It is more ''aggressive'' than the typical secularism found in Anglo-speaking countries. The state takes an active approach to keep religion out of the ''public sphere'' and religion is seen something to be kept in the ''private sphere''. For example, in government buildings, people can't display overt religious symbols which also includes public schools. Right-wing critics of this claim the French government of making religion ''politically incorrect''.

I know the French attuide towards religion is very different from the American one, you'll have to change lot of things for this occur. In France, due to the French Revolution, where the modern ''French identity'' was created, religion was seen as a obstable to attaining more freedom and equal right. Religion had a certain reputation of almost being synonymous with feudalism among some circles.

What changes would America need to have such a stance?

Jello Biafa's RED AMERICA timeline : https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/a-red-dawn-american-revolution-and-rebirth.148698/
 
Laïcité is basically the French form of secularism. It is more ''aggressive'' than the typical secularism found in Anglo-speaking countries. The state takes an active approach to keep religion out of the ''public sphere'' and religion is seen something to be kept in the ''private sphere''. For example, in government buildings, people can't display overt religious symbols which also includes public schools. Right-wing critics of this claim the French government of making religion ''politically incorrect''.

I know the French attuide towards religion is very different from the American one, you'll have to change lot of things for this occur. In France, due to the French Revolution, where the modern ''French identity'' was created, religion was seen as a obstable to attaining more freedom and equal right. Religion had a certain reputation of almost being synonymous with feudalism among some circles.

What changes would America need to have such a stance?

Have America be settled by a Catholic power. French laïcité is intrinsically tied up with the resentment at the enormous wealth and privileges of the pre-Revolution French Catholic Church, but post the Reformation the Church of England was thoroughly tamed with the Benefit of the Clergy abolished, the Monastic lands distributed and secular courts taking primacy over Ecclesiastical courts. Without French levels of resentment against an Established Church there simply isn't going to be a motive for French style laïcité.
 
America used to have Test Oaths which, while anti-Catholic in practice and intent, were also meant to prevent religious (read: papist) influences in government.
 
You would need to have Britain restict emigration to the colonies to Anglicans. Might even have to have a POD at or before the English civil war.
 
You'd need even more than that. The church would have to be perceived as part of the royal system of oppression with blatant abuses of its power (like the judicial murder of the Chevalier de la Barre who, according to the 1766 verdict, had his tongue that sang impious songs on religious holidays cut out, his right hand that failed to remove his hat before a Corpus Christi procession chopped off and who was then burned on a small flame pyre along with enlightenment works like Voltaire's dictionary found in his possesion) and the clearly preferential treatment the church received during the restauration era which went as far as making the desecration of the host a capital offence and again in the early stages of the third republic when the monarchists openly declared that France losing the Franco-Prussian war was God's punishment for the crimes of the Paris commune, the construction of the Sacré-Cœur basilica being the most visible sign of this sentiment. The ongoing struggle between conservatives / monarchists and liberals / republicans before, around and even after the turn of the century and the association of the right with the church were the fertile ground on which laicité legislation could then grow once the liberals finally gained the upper hand in said struggle and had a memorial statue to the martyred young Chevalier erected right in front of the entrance to the Sacré-Cœur basilica in the year of the passing of the laicité legislation, which was removed and melted down in October 1941 by the anti-liberal État Français regime.
 
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Have America be settled by a Catholic power.

Agree

French laïcité is intrinsically tied up with the resentment at the enormous wealth and privileges of the pre-Revolution French Catholic Church, but post the Reformation the Church of England was thoroughly tamed with the Benefit of the Clergy abolished, the Monastic lands distributed and secular courts taking primacy over Ecclesiastical courts. Without French levels of resentment against an Established Church there simply isn't going to be a motive for French style laïcité.

Disagree

Well, one difference between catholics and protestants, at least during and after the 18th century is that protestants are nominalists and catholics are philosophical realists, the liberalism too is nominalist. The french secularism is not only a resentment from the revolutionaries, but an ideological instrument to make the forceful transition from the catholic realism to the liberal nominalism. Without a realist threat there isn't motivation to this ideological tool.
 
For lack of a better description, the colonies had already rebelled against the British in the form of religions given the wide variety of religions in the colonies. The fact that the British were willing to make Benjamin Franklin (described as a "true champion of generic religion") the assistant Postmaster General of North America indicates that religion had passed being an issue (except for those pesky Catholics. :))
 
For lack of a better description, the colonies had already rebelled against the British in the form of religions given the wide variety of religions in the colonies. The fact that the British were willing to make Benjamin Franklin (described as a "true champion of generic religion") the assistant Postmaster General of North America indicates that religion had passed being an issue (except for those pesky Catholics. :))

Well they hadn't really "rebelled against the British" most of the non-Anglicans (Episcopalians) in the 13 Colonies were either Scottish Presbyterians who were practising an Established Religion (the Church of Scotland), English religious dissenters who had been encouraged to leave for the Colonies where they established governments more hostile to religious plurality than England (Massachusetts) or European Protestants who had been invited to settle. But yes post the Glorious Revolution Britain basically tolerated all forms of Protestantism and really the main issue with Catholics was Jacobitism and the fact that most of them were Irish.
 
Have America be settled by a Catholic power. French laïcité is intrinsically tied up with the resentment at the enormous wealth and privileges of the pre-Revolution French Catholic Church, but post the Reformation the Church of England was thoroughly tamed with the Benefit of the Clergy abolished, the Monastic lands distributed and secular courts taking primacy over Ecclesiastical courts. Without French levels of resentment against an Established Church there simply isn't going to be a motive for French style laïcité.
That does not explain Québec or much of Latin America, also settled by Catholic powers and yet don't have the same sense of laïcité that France has. Yes, Québec went heavily secular during the 1960s (with antecedents even earlier), but the secularism Québec had is not the same thing as the secularism in France. Heck, the most obvious example of this is that Québec's national holiday is a saint's day - the Nativity of St. John the Baptist - and not something like Bastille Day or (for comparison) July 4th, and Québec is now the capital of new religious movements with the most high-profile example IOTL being Montréal as the centre of the Raëlian movement (there are probably more Raëlians per capita in Québec than in the rest of the world). Even in Latin America, while they too were colonized by Catholic Spain and Portugal and pre-Revolutionary Catholic France, really only in Mexico do you have this sort of resentment against the wealth and corporate privileges of the Catholic Church, and even then the Church still retains a lot of power and influence there despite the rise of Evangelical Protestantism. So having the US colonized by Catholics isn't enough (heck, this was attempted once - in Maryland - and look how that turned out).
 
Well they hadn't really "rebelled against the British" most of the non-Anglicans (Episcopalians) in the 13 Colonies were either Scottish Presbyterians who were practising an Established Religion (the Church of Scotland), English religious dissenters who had been encouraged to leave for the Colonies where they established governments more hostile to religious plurality than England (Massachusetts) or European Protestants who had been invited to settle. But yes post the Glorious Revolution Britain basically tolerated all forms of Protestantism and really the main issue with Catholics was Jacobitism and the fact that most of them were Irish.
It is entirely possible that a revolution in a single isolated colony with some of these characteristics might get there, but as a group, they arguably spanned a religious spectrum wider than than that of the Germanies.
 
So having the US colonized by Catholics isn't enough (heck, this was attempted once - in Maryland - and look how that turned out).
However only one of the four representatives to the Constitutional Convention was Catholic..
 
That does not explain Québec or much of Latin America, also settled by Catholic powers and yet don't have the same sense of laïcité that France has. Yes, Québec went heavily secular during the 1960s (with antecedents even earlier), but the secularism Québec had is not the same thing as the secularism in France. Heck, the most obvious example of this is that Québec's national holiday is a saint's day - the Nativity of St. John the Baptist - and not something like Bastille Day or (for comparison) July 4th, and Québec is now the capital of new religious movements with the most high-profile example IOTL being Montréal as the centre of the Raëlian movement (there are probably more Raëlians per capita in Québec than in the rest of the world). Even in Latin America, while they too were colonized by Catholic Spain and Portugal and pre-Revolutionary Catholic France, really only in Mexico do you have this sort of resentment against the wealth and corporate privileges of the Catholic Church, and even then the Church still retains a lot of power and influence there despite the rise of Evangelical Protestantism. So having the US colonized by Catholics isn't enough (heck, this was attempted once - in Maryland - and look how that turned out).

It's worth pointing out that Quebec is more French than Anglo in terms of it's secularism, e.g. Bill 60 banning public employees from wearing religious garments i.e. the hijab, the kippah, the turban etc. As for Latin America while Mexico went the furthest there were Secularist movements on the French model in much of the region, they just didn't succeed. Spain also had a strong current of "Liberal" Anti-Catholicism throughout the 19th century up to and including the Spanish Civil War.

But as you said being Catholic isn't enough to get Laïcité enacted but Laïcité as a concept is fundamentally linked to Catholicism. Sort of like how Predestination is an exclusively Protestant concept but most Protestants aren't Predestinationists.
 
It's worth pointing out that Quebec is more French than Anglo in terms of it's secularism, e.g. Bill 60 banning public employees from wearing religious garments i.e. the hijab, the kippah, the turban etc. As for Latin America while Mexico went the furthest there were Secularist movements on the French model in much of the region, they just didn't succeed. Spain also had a strong current of "Liberal" Anti-Catholicism throughout the 19th century up to and including the Spanish Civil War.

But as you said being Catholic isn't enough to get Laïcité enacted but Laïcité as a concept is fundamentally linked to Catholicism. Sort of like how Predestination is an exclusively Protestant concept but most Protestants aren't Predestinationists.

Well, French -tyle secularism used to be fairly big in at least one Muslim country (Turkey) and influenced others (Tunisia, at times Egypt) so it is clearly not just a Catholic thing, although both countries adapted it to local models. Although it's rise is strongly tied to the contect of a heavily Catholic France, and would have hardly arisen otherwise, the model was "exportable" in some ways. Also note that the French notion of laicité is usually tied to a strong Statist current, i.e. a mild hostility to civil society and intermediate bodies between the individual and the State, so that for example many people in France dislike local languages under the same logic they dislike religious symbols in the public space. This is part of why this model was appealing to Kemalist Turkey (where it wasn't really about the State's religious neutrality, rather than the state's supremacy and control of religious life - a drive that existed in France itself in a milder form).
 
Laïcité is basically the French form of secularism. It is more ''aggressive'' than the typical secularism found in Anglo-speaking countries. The state takes an active approach to keep religion out of the ''public sphere'' and religion is seen something to be kept in the ''private sphere''. For example, in government buildings, people can't display overt religious symbols which also includes public schools. Right-wing critics of this claim the French government of making religion ''politically incorrect''.

I know the French attuide towards religion is very different from the American one, you'll have to change lot of things for this occur. In France, due to the French Revolution, where the modern ''French identity'' was created, religion was seen as a obstable to attaining more freedom and equal right. Religion had a certain reputation of almost being synonymous with feudalism among some circles.

What changes would America need to have such a stance?

I think the relevant differences between America and France in this respect are:

(1) Many of the early American settlers came precisely to get away from government-enforced interference in their religious practice (in the form of compulsory membership of the Church of England and the like), so they and their ideological descendants would be likely to see a French-style laïcité less as "A welcome protection from the tyranny of the Church" and more as "Precisely the sort of interfering crap we came over here to escape from".

(2) France was overwhelmingly Catholic, whereas America was split into a multitude of different denominations. This means that, even if one particular Church (the Anglicans, say) ended up in an analogous position to the Catholic Church in France, it would be implausible to take this as a problem with "religion" or "Christianity" in general, and any resentment would probably be focused on the Anglican Church specifically.

(3) Gallicanism meant that the Catholic Church in France was much more influenced by the secular government, so resentment at the latter easily boiled over into resentment of the former. America never had a similar tradition of state control over the church, so there was no reason for resentment at government policies to lead to resentment of the Church.

(4) The prospect of a reactionary counter-revolution seeking to undo the French Revolution was seen as a real risk, and since the Catholic Church for a variety of obvious reasons wasn't very keen on the FR, they were seen by a lot of liberals as potential fifth columnists seeking to bring back the bad old days. Conversely, there has never been any notable body of opinion in America for undoing the American Revolution, so the idea that "If we let the Church do what it wants, it'll just try and bring back the King of England to rule over us" would come across as pretty laughable.

So, to get America to adopt a French model of laïcité, you'd have to make America more like France in these respects. A good start would be to make the Thirteen Colonies overwhelmingly Anglican somehow, so that in the minds of most people "religion" and "the Church of England" are more-or-less interchangeable. Then give the secular authorities control over the Church in America somehow -- give governors the authority to appoint bishops, that sort of thing. Then give the American Church pro-British sympathies after the Revolution, so that the idea of the Church supporting a return to British rule is a plausible one. Then you'd probably get something like laïcité introduced in America.
 
So, to get America to adopt a French model of laïcité, you'd have to make America more like France in these respects. A good start would be to make the Thirteen Colonies overwhelmingly Anglican somehow, so that in the minds of most people "religion" and "the Church of England" are more-or-less interchangeable. Then give the secular authorities control over the Church in America somehow -- give governors the authority to appoint bishops, that sort of thing. Then give the American Church pro-British sympathies after the Revolution, so that the idea of the Church supporting a return to British rule is a plausible one. Then you'd probably get something like laïcité introduced in America.

Or you could just make the American Revolution more or less a carbon-copy of the English Civil War. If we think in terms of English Civil War terms, New England would have been sympathetic to the Roundheads (in fact, there are documented cases of New Englanders making the crossing back to England to fight for Cromwell and the Puritans) while the South (or, rather, for TTL purposes, the rest of the colonies) would be sympathetic to the Cavaliers. So the remainder of the American colonies would be similar to what you're proposing, while New England can just simply follow its OTL trajectory. In that case, while New England would be an early spark for the Revolution (as per OTL) and they wouldn't mind having the Anglican Church go, given the mindset of the times I would not be surprised if New Englanders in general would be horrified at the results if such a laïcité came about. (In that case, New England could be to the US what the Vendée was to Revolutionary France or the Cristeros to Mexico.) In that case, forget even the creation of a truly united United States of America. They're going to stick with state support of the Congregational Church, consequences be damned.
 
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