Secular Portraits and Religious Shadows

Abstract

Pa sca l e Fou r n i e r* Introduction: Of Religion, Women, and the Legal LandscapeOf the three countries covered by this book, France is certainly the one in which secularism has spawned the most enduring and high-profile debates regarding church-state boundaries. Laïcité, the French word for secularism, has been incessantly invoked and mobilized by mandarins and public intellectuals from across the political spectrum to justify controversial legal and political projects. Specifically, laïcité has been at the core of two intertwined debates: the place of religion in a secular state and the impact of religious norms on women's equality. My intervention, based on socio-legal fieldwork among Jewish and Muslim women who have gone through religious and civil divorce in France, addresses both topics. Laïcité is minimally defined as entailing the religious neutrality of the state and the nonestablishment of religion, 1 a trait it shares with what is referred to as "secularism" in other countries. 2 However, over the course of the past decades, laïcité has been held to encompass a more extensive relegation of religion to a private sphere of personal belief, out of the neutral and universal "public sphere." 3 Under this radical approach to secularism, religious beliefs are (and must be) subjective