DEFRENCHIFICATION:

Is France Getting Religion?: In the immigrant suburbs of Paris, secularism is on the wane. (Elisabeth Eaves, Feb. 1, 2005, Slate)

If France is a fortress of secularism, you wouldn't know it from a Sunday morning visit to St. Denis. Jehovah's Witnesses set up camp each week near the frenetic outdoor market. Muslims wear headscarves and frequent the halal butchers. Back in November, posters advertising end-of-Ramadan celebrations vied for wall space with posters touting Christian preachers on tour. And presiding over this Parisian suburb, which was once known as a bastion of communism, is the Basilica of St. Denis. As the first Gothic cathedral ever built, it's a monument to divinely inspired creativity.

When I visited in January, the Jehovah's Witnesses had set out a board covered with signs in French and Arabic. Their question of the day, printed in Arabic, read, "Is the cross a Christian symbol?" A blond Frenchman was holding an animated Arabic-language discussion about God with two passersby. His colleague Georgette Daguerre told me, "We're like the apostles in the first century. We go to the market to talk to people about Jesus." It's a remarkable market: multilingual and multi-ethnic, selling everything from ladies underwear to lunch, with more than 300 stalls sprawled between a medieval architectural gem and the sharp concrete angles of a futuristic town center.

A 10-minute walk from the market is the Evangelical Assembly of the Pentecost. While the flocks drawn to the famous basilica these days are mainly tourists ogling the stained-glass rosettes, this Pentecostal church draws more than 400 worshippers every Sunday to premises that couldn't be more different. Stark white on the inside, the church occupies the ground floor of a plain brick apartment block.

Pentecostalism, a wing of Protestant Christianity that emphasizes spirituality, is the fastest-growing faith in the world. Born in a Topeka, Kan., Bible college in 1901, it now numbers 520 million people worldwide, with the greatest numbers in Africa and South America.

Pentecostalism is growing in France, too, turning Protestantism, historically the embattled religion in a Catholic society, into a burgeoning faith. [...]

With subsets of Protestantism and Islam its two growing religious forces, France mirrors the larger world. And the expansion in both cases is a direct result of the larger world coming to France.

"The arrival of people of color is a major factor," said Christian Capron, pastor of the Evangelical Assembly of the Pentecost. He is a white Frenchman who grew up in a Pentecostal family and worked as a missionary in Eastern Europe before taking the helm at St. Denis in 1971. "Without them we wouldn't have the same growth."

The next France will be a better place, precisely because not French.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 10, 2005 11:55 AM