On the Secularization of the Public Square

Abstract

This chapter describes a paradox: both France and the United States are seen as societies in which State and Church are separated, even if they have deeply different kinds of States. The French State can be qualified as a strong State, strongly institutionalised and deeply differentiated from any religions since the French Revolution and up to today (with the headscarf and burqua bans being examples). The American State seems to be a weakly institutionalised one, poorly differentiated within ‘a Christian nation’, but nevertheless having succeeded in building ‘a wall of separation’. This chapter try to shows that this ‘wall of separation’, strongly reinforced during the 1950’s thanks to the Supreme Court decisions in a period where some Jewish organisations and some Jewish judges, such as Felix Frankfurter, were quite active, could have lead to secularized State with the banishing of Bible reading and the prayers in schools, as happened in France at the turn of the Nineteenth century, but that the logic of this society and the decisive action of strong religious groups, mainly Catholic and Jewish, slowly prevailed in dismantling this process and bringing back religions to the public space.