Secularism Is a Roof, Not a Weapon: Reclaiming Laïcité From the People Waving It

Secularism and laïcité are about to spend another French election season being shouted by people who mean something else. With Marine Le Pen confirming her presidential run this week, the word will be everywhere, and freethinkers should insist on what it actually means.

Secularism is a roof. It is the arrangement under which the believer, the doubter and the apostate live in the same state without any of them owning it. The state stays neutral; conscience stays free. That is the whole design, and it is one of humanity’s best inventions.

How secularism gets counterfeited

The counterfeit version keeps the vocabulary and inverts the function. It invokes neutrality to target one community’s clothing, one community’s food, one community’s names, while leaving majority traditions untouched as culture. That is not secularism. That is nativism holding secularism’s coat. And it is a gift to Islamists, who tell every wavering young believer that the secular state was always a trick aimed at them.

The people betrayed twice by this counterfeit are the ones this newspaper exists for. Ex-Muslims and freethinkers from Muslim backgrounds, whose testimony we publish regularly, need genuine secularism the way divers need air. When laïcité becomes a cudgel, they lose the only shelter that ever protected them from both the mosque’s enforcers and the mob’s suspicions. Scholars of secularism have long warned of exactly this confusion.

The test to apply all season

Whenever a politician says secularism, ask one question: does the policy protect individual conscience, or punish a group identity? A roof covers everyone standing under it. A weapon requires a target. France built the roof. This column hopes, without much confidence, that France remembers which one it is holding.

This is a freethought column anchored in the verified news of Le Pen’s 2027 candidacy announcement; the interpretive argument is the columnist’s own.