The Return of Religion

Abstract

In 1980, Marcel Gauchet, a respected French philosopher and sociologist, could confidently predict that the development of democracy from Christian sources would lead to the “tomb of religions.” Girard, for his part, responded by saying: “Christianity is not the religion of the exit from religion, as Marcel Gauchet thinks. … Our celebrated humanism will turn out to have been nothing but a brief intermission between two forms of religion.” We will look at what allowed Girard to see things in this way below, but it is more from the viewpoint of a Gauchet than a Girard that we speak of a “return of religion.”