Grandstand. The French reader may have been perplexed, and we can understand it, in front of the images showing President Donald Trump who awkwardly brandished a bible in front of a church, not far from the White House. And no doubt he is just as struggling to understand the formidable scandal that the scene has aroused across the entire American political spectrum.
To explain both the event and the reactions, it is necessary to return to the place occupied by religion and communities of believers in the public debate in France and the United States, two countries which are nevertheless close in their conception of individual freedoms. .
The long history of collusion between the state and a particular Christian church (the Roman Catholic Church) as France has known it is not that of the United States at all. Conversely, even the founding of the United States was the work of individuals who saw their principles on matters of conscience hindered by an official Church supported by power (the Anglican Church), and who dreamed of a a nation that would allow all faiths to flourish, without none being privileged.
So while the United States and France guarantee religious freedom in their Constitution, the expression takes on a very different meaning in each of the two countries.
In France, the laws of 1901 and 1905 on secularism established a separation between the Churches and the State which clearly intended to protect the latter from any interference, and even any influence, from religious institutions or communities. This French separation is so strict that, in the eyes of an American, the equality of treatment of all religions amounts above all to considering them all equally suspect. She returns de facto to refuse that the values of a citizen, when they are the product of the ideas and principles of a given religious tradition, can have a legitimate role to play in debate or public affairs.
In the United States, the separation between religion and power was immediately understood quite differently. In 1802 Thomas Jefferson (who was consulted by Lafayette for the writing of the Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, and who was in France when he started working on the "Virginia State Statute on Religious Freedom" (from 1786)) evokes him "Wall of separation between Church and State" intended primarily to protect religions from interference from public authority.
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