No Heaven, No People: The Case for a Laïcité That Embraces Christian France

On April 15, 2019, tens of thousands of French people gathered along the banks of the Seine, standing in silence, some of them on their knees, to watch a cathedral burn. Many had not set foot in a church since their First Communion. No one that night talked about heritage. They were mourning something else, and they no longer knew what to call it.

This essay is an attempt to name it, and to follow that thought to its conclusions.

A people is not a sum of individuals

Let’s start with what history suggests again and again. As early as 1864, Fustel de Coulanges showed in The Ancient City that before laws, before walls, before trade, there was the hearth and there were the dead. The Greek or Roman city was not born from a contract among rational individuals; it was born from a cult. Durkheim, an atheist and the founder of French sociology, reached the same conclusion in 1912: every society rests on something sacred, that is, something it sets apart, forbids anyone to touch, and bows before. In his view, a society without the sacred is not a secular society; it is a contradiction in terms. I don’t claim this is a proven law. I simply note that I know of no society without it that has lasted.

So let’s ask the question nobody asks: what actually holds the French together in 2026? Social Security? The traffic code? A GDP to divide up? A contract of interests holds only as long as those interests align. The day they diverge, and they are already diverging between generations, regions, and communities, the contract gets renegotiated by whoever is strongest or most numerous. Democracy requires an “us”, as I’ve written before. The question is what that “us” is made of.

No one dies for a contract

In 1882, Renan defined the nation as “a soul, a spiritual principle.” Not a territory, not a language, not a race: a soul. And he added that this soul feeds on sacrifices already made and on the willingness to make more.

Here is the blind spot of every purely contractual view of society. Who agrees to die for a contract? The soldier at Verdun, the mother of four, the founder working seventy-hour weeks for a company that will outlive him: all of them act for something larger than their own lives. A purely horizontal society knows how to compensate, insure, and redistribute. It does not know how to ask. Our war memorials read Morts pour la France, “Died for France,” not “Died for the social contract.”

The Republic understood this perfectly. It turned the church of Sainte-Geneviève into the Panthéon, it invented Marianne, and it sent its schoolteachers, the famous hussards noirs, the “black hussars” of the Republic, into the villages to spread the good word with missionary zeal. It organized the cult of the dead of 1914–1918 with a liturgy no bishop would have disowned. Péguy summed it up in a single line: “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” The republican mystique existed, it worked, and it held the country together for a century.

Then it went out. And nothing took its place.

Religions without heaven

In 1882, Nietzsche announced the death of God and immediately asked what festivals we would have to invent to console ourselves. The twentieth century answered with terrifying zeal. The nation in 1914, class in 1917, race in 1933, progress everywhere: each of these substitute religions rallied millions and extracted sacrifices from them that the Church would never have dared to ask.

They all shared the same manufacturing defect: no heaven. When the collective is the highest thing that exists, nothing stands above it to judge it. The collective becomes a god, and a god without mercy devours its children. The trenches, the Gulag, and the camps were not accidents of secularization; they were its logical consequence: transcendence without anything transcendent.

Then came the soft version, the one we live in now: comfort, growth, consumption, the swipe. A religion that unites no one and transcends nothing. The village dances have vanished, the churches are emptying, and so are the cradles, and we act surprised that young people can’t find a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

This is where the heavenly dimension stops being ornamental and becomes a structural necessity. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”: that sentence is the first limit on political power in the history of the West. It says there is something the state does not own and never will. A vertical faith binds a people together and, in the same movement, forbids that people to mistake itself for God. That is precisely what the totalitarianisms of the last century lacked, and precisely what ours lacks.

Böckenförde, a German Catholic jurist, put it this way in the 1960s: the liberal state lives on premises it cannot guarantee by itself. Tocqueville had said it a century earlier: despotism can do without faith, but liberty cannot. Two men with nothing in common, one conclusion. A free people needs a heaven. Not a metaphorical heaven, but one it believes is inhabited.

What surfaced that night

Some will object that I am describing a need nobody feels anymore. Look at the numbers before you answer.

Notre-Dame raised nearly €850 million in donations within a few months, from all over the world, from people who will never set foot inside it. Its reopening in December 2024 was followed as a global event, and I saw in it the triumph of work and faith far more than the triumph of a president. At Easter 2025, the Catholic Church in France baptized more than ten thousand adults, an all-time record and an increase of nearly half over the previous year, along with thousands of teenagers. The Chartres pilgrimage fills up weeks in advance. The Camino de Santiago has never been busier.

This is not a return to Sunday Mass. It is something else, deeper and more anxious: a generation that grew up without heaven, coming to see whether any of it is left. The demand is there. What is missing is a Republic willing to stop pretending it doesn’t see it.

Christian: an identity choice, and I own it

Let’s be honest, since that is the only way to be taken seriously. Nothing in anthropology requires Christianity. Japan has Shinto, Israel has Judaism, and Greece writes Orthodoxy into its Constitution and pays its priests. If I argue for a Christian heaven over France, it is not because some law of nature demands it. It is a choice. An identity choice.

The phrase frightens people, and it shouldn’t. Every nation makes identity choices: speaking French rather than having several official languages, celebrating July 14 rather than January 21, burying Victor Hugo in the Panthéon rather than somewhere else. The only question is whether we make those choices with our eyes open or while pretending we aren’t making any. I prefer my eyes open.

That doesn’t make the choice arbitrary. History, at least, is not a matter of opinion. Clovis was baptized around 496. Joan of Arc led her armies under a single motto: “My Lord God, served first.” Saint Louis dispensed justice beneath an oak tree in the name of the Gospel. The abbeys cleared the land, taught, and healed for a thousand years before the welfare state came along to nationalize what it had never built. Our public holidays are Christian feasts, our villages bear the names of saints, and our bell towers trace the skyline of every valley. The phrase “eldest daughter of the Church” is fairly recent, popularized by Lacordaire in 1841, but it merely names fifteen centuries of the obvious.

Even the republican motto is secularized Christianity. Liberty presupposes free will. Equality presupposes that all men are children of the same Father. And fraternity, without a Father, means absolutely nothing: you cannot decree brothers into existence, you can only recognize them.

France was shaped by Christianity the way a river is shaped by its bed. That the Republic should take it as its reference does not follow automatically; it is a decision. Other French people, just as devoted to their country, will make a different one. I am simply stating which one is mine, and why it seems to me the most faithful to who we are.

1905: the Republic took the churches, not the responsibility

Let’s get concrete, because this is where today’s hypocrisy breaks into the open.

The 1905 law separating church and state provides that the Republic “neither recognizes, pays, nor subsidizes any religion.” In the same stroke, it made municipalities the owners of parish churches and the state the owner of cathedrals. Forty thousand municipal churches, eighty-seven state cathedrals. But the obligation that comes with this ownership is minimal: administrative courts require municipalities only to keep the buildings wind- and watertight, and nothing compels them to pay for restoration.

The result is right in front of us. A village of three hundred people inherits a fifteenth-century church and a budget that can’t cover a new roof. In 2022, the French Senate estimated that between 2,500 and 5,000 religious buildings could be sold, abandoned, or demolished by 2030. The national heritage lottery is a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage. And Notre-Dame itself burned under the direct responsibility of the state, in the middle of an underfunded restoration project.

The laïcité of 1905 transferred ownership without accepting the burden. The Republic declared itself the owner and behaves like an absentee landlord. That isn’t neutrality. It’s abandonment.

My laïcité: owning a Christian past and present

Here is what I propose. It is not an election platform; it is a vision, and I am entitled not to have settled every detail.

Freedom of worship remains complete. Every religion may be freely practiced. Building non-Christian places of worship remains free and unsubsidized, exactly as it is today.

Christian buildings are maintained by the Nation. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox: the Protestant churches of the Cévennes and Alsace belong to France as much as the Gothic cathedrals do. For buildings erected before 1905, the state and municipalities finally take responsibility for what they own. For those built after 1905, ownership stays with the dioceses and religious associations, but maintenance is no longer their burden alone. I know this is where I depart most sharply from 1905, which separated what the state owns from what religious bodies own. I don’t deny that distinction; I deliberately move past it. If the Nation recognizes Christianity as its foundation, it cannot honor it in Gothic cathedrals while ignoring it in a neighborhood church built in 1930. Public funding confers no title of ownership and no authority over worship. It expresses recognition, not appropriation.

Christian visibility is explicitly protected. Nativity scenes in town halls, crosses on monuments, processions, church bells, the calendar of feast days: all of it written into law, instead of being left to the case-by-case rulings of the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, which since 2016 has been dissecting the Nativity with a scalpel according to whether a crèche has a “cultural or festive character.”

Non-neutrality is owned. The Republic says who it is. Article 1 of the Constitution states that it “respects all beliefs,” and that sentence stands in full. Respecting is not leveling. You can respect all your neighbors and still know which house you come from.

There is nothing exotic about this model. Denmark has a state church, and so does England. Greece enshrines Orthodoxy in its fundamental law, and none of these countries has ever been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for it. Closer to home, the Concordat still in force in Alsace-Moselle has paid priests, pastors, and rabbis out of public funds since 1801, and the Constitutional Council ruled in 2013 that it does not violate laïcité. The Republic has lived with officially recognized religions in three of its departments for more than two centuries. It is none the worse for it.

Funding: the state oversees the stone, never the faith

How we pay, and above all how we don’t interfere.

Funding would take the form of an annual grant paid to the churches themselves, diocesan associations for Catholics and religious unions for Protestants and Orthodox Christians, or of a permanent national fund financed by a dedicated revenue stream. Not a cent goes to Rome: the churches of France are French, and a grant “to the Vatican” would mean paying a foreign state to maintain our own walls.

As for oversight, I know the French reflex: five thousand civil servants to keep watch over bell towers. No. The state does not read homilies, approve priests, or inspect sacristies. It checks that the roof money went into the roof, and it does so without creating a single new position: a private auditor, already mandatory for any association receiving more than €153,000 in public funds; after-the-fact spot checks by the regional audit courts, which already exist; and an annual public report of completed work, church by church, readable by any taxpayer and any parishioner.

That is more transparent and less bureaucratic than today’s municipal patchwork, in which every town hall negotiates alone with the state’s heritage architect. The state oversees the stone. It never touches the faith.

The objections, and why they don’t hold

“The state must be neutral.” It never has been. It funds French and not Breton, the Louvre and not manga, the Panthéon and not Père-Lachaise. It chose its holidays and its monuments. Absolute neutrality is a convenient fiction that spares us from saying which non-neutrality we embrace. I am saying mine.

“It violates equality.” Article 1 guarantees equality before the law for all citizens, without distinction of religion. It speaks of citizens, not institutions. A Muslim, Jewish, or atheist French citizen loses not a single right under my model: they pray where they like, build what they like, vote, teach, and lead. Equality between persons is untouched. Equality between histories does not exist, and no law will ever create it.

“This is identity politics.” Yes, in the literal sense: it is a politics that says who we are. All politics does that; the only difference is that mine admits it. What would disqualify this choice is taking away a right from anyone who doesn’t share it. It takes away none.

“You are exploiting the faith.” That is the real danger, and it is exactly why I reject any state control over the content of faith. The Church keeps its full independence: its appointments, its doctrine, its voice. The state serves; it does not direct. God remains above Caesar, and that is the only guarantee that no Caesar will ever take himself for God.

“It’s illegal.” Today, yes. Law is meant to evolve, and the Constitution itself lays out how it can be amended. This is not a technical question. It is a question of will.

A nation needs a heaven

Let’s go back to the riverbanks. What those French men and women mourned in April 2019 was not a timber roof. It was the sudden proof that something still stood above them, something that came before them and would outlive them, and that they were in the process of losing it.

What I am proposing is not to convert the Republic. It is to ask the Republic to stop pretending it doesn’t know where it comes from. I believe a nation needs a heaven: not a heaven by decree, but a heaven acknowledged. I choose the one that has stretched over France for fifteen centuries, and I choose it knowing full well that it is a choice. It asks only one thing, and it is not to be believed by decree. It is to stop being left to collapse, one roof at a time.