Answer:
France and the United States appear not to see eye to eye on issues of religious freedom. This gap in understanding widened dramatically in 1998, when the US Congress and the Government of France both passed legislation on religious freedom that seemed to embrace opposite goals. In the United States, the International Religious Freedom Act imposed sanctions on countries around the world that were convicted of violating religious freedom. The new law created a US Commission for International Religious Freedom and appointed an Ambassador-at-large to head an office on international religious freedom at the State Department. In France , the National Assembly recommended the creation of a governmental task-force, the Inter-Ministerial Mission against Sects , to monitor so-called dangerous cults. In each case, the legislation was approved unanimously. Yet their different goals appeared to conflict. In 1999, US Ambassador Robert Seiple, met with Alain Vivien, the French head of MILS who is also president of a secular development organization called Volunteers for Progress. The two discussed their differences, but failed to reach a common understanding on the goals of the two laws.
The paradox is that both countries embrace religious freedom and respect the separation between church and state. Despite different religious histories, France and the United States have both long embraced religious freedom in their constitutional documents. This principle was affirmed almost simultaneously in the two countries—in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and in the US Bill of Rights—in 1789. At the end of the Second World War, France and the United States cooperated in drafting the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which includes religious freedom. Both also embrace the separation of church and state. Separation has existed in France since the 1905 Law of Separation (except in Alsace-Lorraine in eastern France and in French Guyana). Separation in the United States dates to the First Amendment of the US Constitution, ratified in 1791, and to a 1947 decision by the US Supreme Court that extended religious freedom and the disestablishment of religion to individual states.
But from a common starting point, US courts have erected a higher and more impenetrable “wall of separation,” as Justice Hugo Black called it in his 1947 decision, than have their French counterparts. Controversies that are still divisive today within American society, such as religious discussion in public schools after teaching hours and government subsidies to faith-based organizations, have never been weighty political issues in France. Since 1959, the French government pays the salaries of teachers in private schools, most of which are religious, and gives subsidies directly to those schools. Churches, temples and synagogues built in France before 1905 are the property of the state. National and municipal governments maintain these buildings, which are used free-of-charge by the clergy. Religious feasts are official holidays in France. The government organizes religious funerals for victims of disasters and for French Presidents.
These exceptions to a strict separation of church and state in France result in part from the enduring central role of the Catholic Church. Sunday attendance at mass has dropped to about 10 percent of the population in France today, but 80 percent of French citizens are still nominally Roman Catholics. This makes France the sixth largest Catholic country in the world, after Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Italy and… the United States. Catholicism was the exclusive state religion of France prior to 1791, and one of the four official religions, together with Lutheranism, Reformism and Judaism (later Islam in Algeria), recognized by the state under the 1801 Napoleonic Concordat up until 1905. The central role of Catholicism has in part dictated the nature of the relationship that the French state maintains with all religious organizations today. The four other main religions in France have, like the Catholic church, been organized at the national level, and the French government is currently discussing with several Islamic groups to achieve a similar national representative body for Islam.
