By Clare Premo, Paris

Is France an old-world Catholic country, a land of soaring cathedral spires and hallowed saints? Or is it an extremely secular state, grimly opposed to religious symbols in its schools, whether crucifixes, yarmulkes or veils? The truth, of course, is that it’s both. And in this week’s edition of Le Nouvel Observateur, scholar Olivier Roy, best known for his studies of militant Islam, uses France’s own experience to look at old time religion in the new world of the 21st century.

France, like the United States and much of the rest of the world, has seen an explosion of what’s often called revivalism and public religiosity. But according to Roy this is no “return to religion” in the traditional sense. He calls it a “mutation”  that is quite particular to our times. Hybrid faiths are emerging as the result of global rootlessness or, as Roy calls it, deculturation. By separating religions from their traditional cultural environments, Roy says, globalization actually encourages fundamentalism as people practicing their faith come to see themselves as embattled minorities. In the French case, the constant influx of North African and Africans has created a substantial population that is no longer grounded in the inherited traditions of the land where they now live or the one that they came from.

Globalization also favors religions that can be “exported” easily, Roy tells Le Nouvel Observateur; in other words, faiths that are not specifically tied to a geographic location or a single culture. For this reason, we should not view today’s religious tensions arising from fundamentalism as a “clash of cultures”; the problem that these mutated faiths pose is precisely that they do not represent any traditional culture at all.

Roy cites the spreading popularity of Pentecostalism. This religion is the fastest growing in the world because it removes all essences of culture from worship, he says. The practice of speaking in tongues is emblematic, since those tongues are not connected to any place on this earth. The message is that the the Holy Spirit does not need to transform itself into a single type of culture and language, but goes beyond.

In this era of “spiritual nomadism,” Roy says, learning is devalued and ignorance exalted. Traditional cultures are seen by new believers as, at worst, pagan execrations, at best of of no value unless they are imbued with the spirit of religion. “What’s disappeared is the idea of culture as something with its own positive value, as a foundation shared by believers and unbelievers,” says Roy. At the same time there is a generalized indifference to theology in favor of “lived” faith. “Holy ignorance is not a return to some kind of archaic belief,” Roy concludes. “It is the expression of a modern design: the affirmation of the self, the enjoyment of the moment, of doing instead of thinking, of the immediate against the enduring.”