Anti-Clericalism: A Fashion or a Confession?

Peinture baroque représentant Jésus couronné d’épines face à une foule accusatrice et à des soldats romains moqueurs. L’expression de Jésus, digne et blessée, contraste avec la violence des visages autour de lui. Lumière dramatique et composition en clair-obscur accentuent la tension spirituelle de la scène.

Introduction – Beyond Rejection: What Lies Behind Hatred of Religion

“The light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” (John 3:19)

For several decades now, it has been fashionable to mock the Church. To keep it at a distance. To characterize it as a relic of a bygone world, complicit in oppression, slow to change, and inherently suspect. In France, more than anywhere else, anti-clericalism takes on a visceral, almost cultural form. All it takes is a Roman collar on the metro, a discreet sign, to awaken reflexes of irony or suspicion. As if the entire institution carried within it an unatoned crime.

But what does this persistent hatred of religion really mean, even though it has lost most of its power? Where does this relentless hatred of Catholicism come from, often much more targeted than against other religious forms? And above all: what are we trying to erase, to flee from, to no longer see?

This is not about defending an institution at all costs. The Church has failed, sometimes seriously. It has sinned, and this must be named. But must every demand, every transcendence, every spiritual memory be swept away in the same accusatory flood? Doesn't the spirit of criticism, salutary when it pushes for reform, become sterile when it rejects all possibility of truth?

Through four axes, I tried to approach this question from different angles, but linked by a common thread: what if this rejection of religion said more about our times than about what it rejects?

What if, behind the legitimate criticism, there lurked a deeper discomfort - that of still being challenged, still being called, still being seen?

These four avenues are both personal hypotheses and invitations to think differently. They do not claim to exhaust the question, but simply to reopen a debate that is often closed in advance. A freedom that no longer knows how to listen, a society that no longer tolerates the sacred, a people who mock holiness: what are they really seeking?

Perhaps, deep down, they are looking for God...

…without wanting to acknowledge it.

Did liberation kill the demand?

“Enter through the narrow gate. Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But narrow is the gate and difficult is the way that leads to life, and few find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14)

There is in the great revolutions of human history a breath that cannot be despised without injustice. May 1968, in its own way, was this kind of storm. A youth, weary of dogmas, hierarchies, and rigid silences, cried out to the world: freedom! Body, speech, desire, everything had to be reinvented. And no doubt certain walls had to fall. Religious power, sometimes mired in dried-up forms, had distanced itself from life. It had, perhaps, forgotten that it did not speak primarily in the name of an institution, but in the name of a Christ who washed the feet of his own.

What I believe is that this rejection of the Church, this violent and sometimes even hateful rejection, played a providential role, despite itself. It shook the foundations. It exposed the hypocrisies, the abuses, the inertia. It forced the ecclesial body to look itself in the face, to listen once again to the cry of the Gospel. It may even have saved, for a time, its soul.

But any liberation, if it is not inhabited by a call, ends up becoming wandering.

And that's where the problem lies.

For what arose in the name of freedom gradually mutated into a widespread suspicion of any form of norm. What was initially rejected was the moral straitjacket of a Church perceived as oppressive. But by constantly attacking this figure, we ended up getting used to the idea that any moral requirement was, in itself, suspect. And today, what remains? A society that proclaims the right to everything, but no longer knows how to express good. A society where everyone is invited to "realize themselves," but where no one dares to ask the question of meaning.

Christ said: "The truth will set you free" (John 8:32). But on the condition that we still want to seek it. On the condition that we do not confuse freedom with being uprooted. Gospel freedom is not a breaking away from limits, it is a passage. An Easter. A joyful demand, that of true love. And love, if it wants to be true, always rests on a framework, a fidelity, a given word.

Zygmunt Bauman, a contemporary sociologist, spoke of a "liquid" era: no more stable form, no more lasting structures, no more common points of reference. Everything adapts, everything dissolves. Even morality. Even suffering. Even evil.

We come to believe that any word that is even slightly vertical is an aggression, a domination. And the Church, by the very fact of its memory, becomes the convenient scapegoat. It doesn't matter that it has changed, that it has humbled itself, that it is traversed by prophetic and poor currents: we resent it for still embodying something like a column. And we strike the column, hoping that the entire temple will collapse. But when everything falls, what remains? A void. A void where we confuse compassion with permissiveness, where we fear moral judgment more than evil itself.

I don't deny the faults. I mourn them. But I refuse to believe that the Church's scandals invalidate any moral proposition. I also refuse to believe that those who strike so hard today are themselves exempt from all responsibility. For the rejection of Catholicism is sometimes, much more than a rejection of clericalism, a refusal to be told that certain things, perhaps, wound the soul.

What if, deep down, we are afraid of what the Gospel might still demand of us?

Religion as a mirror of the collective unconscious

“Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

What we often hate is not the object itself, but what it reveals about us. We don't break a mirror because it is false, but because we see an image in it that we can no longer bear. What if this were true of the rejection of religion? What if the Church, despite its very real flaws, were less disturbing because of what it is than because of what it reflects?

Since the Enlightenment, and even more so since May '68, Catholicism in France has become the receptacle of an ancient mistrust, an almost instinctive suspicion. For many, it embodies a frozen past, moral chains, a patriarchal voice from which we must finally free ourselves. We distrust its language, its silences, its rites. It bothers. It irritates. It awakens something too intimate for it to be neutral.

But perhaps we should look back.

What if what we're fighting in the Church isn't an external authority, but an internal echo? A truth we no longer want to hear because it speaks too clearly of the human heart. Because it puts words, sometimes harsh ones, to our fractures. Because it speaks of guilt, forgiveness, conversion. And these words burn, especially when we claim to need nothing but ourselves.

Carl Jung wrote that we project onto the outside world what we refuse to see in ourselves. Christianity, as a discourse of salvation, is not primarily a morality; it is a mirror. It tells us that we are fragile, dependent, called. It tells us that evil is not just a social problem, but also an intimate brokenness. It tells us that freedom, true freedom, does not consist of doing everything, but in learning to love. This is unbearable in an era that sanctifies autonomy.

"He who does the truth comes to the light" (John 3:21). This forgotten verse is nevertheless a threshold. For doing the truth is not just confessing what one has done—it is daring to see oneself as one is, before an Other who, precisely, does not look away.

Modern anticlericalism, while it has had its historical reasons, has sometimes transformed into a form of collective blindness. A way of repressing spiritual thirst, the thirst for meaning, for verticality, for transcendence. Marcel Gauchet, a contemporary French philosopher, historian, and sociologist, speaks of Christianity as "the religion of the exit from religion." What if this exit had been a necessary step, but not an end? What if, at the end of secularization, modern man discovered that he lacked something fundamental, not to obey, but to exist?

We have not become post-religious beings. We have become beings orphaned by the sacred. And perhaps that is why we are so hard at hitting what still bears its traces. The Church is disturbing, not because it is powerful—it is no longer—but because it continues, against all odds, to speak of the soul, the fall, and salvation. To say that man is more than what he consumes, what he desires, what he claims.

And that, in a world of one-way mirrors, is almost an offense.

Morality and Truth: The Temptation of Avoidance

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often I would have gathered your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!” (Matthew 23:37)

There is a gentle, almost imperceptible slope down which our era seems to slide: no longer seeking the truth, but fleeing from what might reveal it. This temptation—for it is one—does not take the form of a brutal rejection. It advances in disguise. It presents itself as kindness, openness, tolerance. But upon closer inspection, it is based on fear. Fear of having to answer for oneself.

For a long time, the Church embodied, for better or for worse, a place where this responsibility was recalled. And perhaps this, more than anything, is still disturbing today. We don't just hate the institution for its abuses—very real and serious—we hate it because it demands, or at least because we believe it does. Because it reminds us that there is good and evil. That man is not neutral. That he has to answer to himself, to others, to God.

So we hit. We accuse. And sometimes, we're right. But in this outpouring of criticism, don't we sense a form of selective relentlessness? An obsession? As if hitting the Church were a bit like hitting that part of us that hasn't given up believing there is a truth. We reassure ourselves in this way. We say, "Look, they too have failed. So no one can claim to be moral anymore." And we thus give ourselves permission to no longer demand anything of ourselves.

"Why do you see the speck in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log in your own?" (Matthew 7:3). These words of Christ are not a call to relativism. They do not invite us to cease all discernment. They point to the ease of transference, the sweet intoxication of judgment when it allows us not to look at ourselves.

The thinker and anthropologist René Girard, known for his theory of mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism, described this ancestral process with rare clarity: to prevent the implosion of social tensions, human groups project their own violence onto a victim. They name them, accuse them, eliminate them symbolically or physically, and thus find temporary peace. What if the Church, today, had become this modern scapegoat? What if it bore, in the eyes of the world, all the flaws we don't want to see elsewhere—in politics, education, family, and intimacy?

This is not about absolving him. It is about not fighting the wrong battle. Christian truth, when lived and not imposed, is not a power, but a light. A light that illuminates man in his greatness and his flaws. Which tells him that he can fall, but also rise again. And this is what we often refuse to hear: that we must change. That there is a justice that surpasses our justifications.

Pierre Legendre's sociology reminds us that every society needs a symbolic place where the law is established. Not to confine, but to structure. Man without limits is not free; he is lost. And in an era that destroys benchmarks in the name of progress, it is becoming urgent to rediscover what the Christian word proposes: a requirement not as condemnation, but as promise.

Because to flee from morality is also to flee from the possibility of good. And to flee from the truth is to end up no longer hoping for anything.

The Scandal of Holiness: Why the World Hates Saints

“They hated me without a reason.” (John 15:25)

There are hatreds that we believe to be rational, but which are not. They burn with an older, deeper fire, that of an instinctive rejection. What if this were the case with the hatred that many harbor toward the Church? What if this rejection were not so much that of a structure or an institution, but that of holiness itself—or at least of what it recalls?

For let's be clear: it is not the Church as an organization that our era is fighting most violently. It has lost its political power, it has become weakened, divided, marginalized. No, what the world still hates, sometimes with a dull rage, is the trace of radicalism it retains. Its way, however discreet, of saying: "There is more. There is something else. There is a light." A light that reveals—and therefore disturbs.

“The world cannot hate you, but it hates me, because I testify that its works are evil.” (John 7:7)

These words of Christ, forgotten in modern catechisms, resonate with a disturbing relevance. They are not a complaint. They are a key. There is something scandalous in holiness, not because it judges, but because it exists. It reminds us that banality is not everything. That man is not made for half measures. That he can—that he must—give his all.

And this, in an age that sanctifies compromise, is unbearable.

We love inclusive discourses, vague spiritualities, and armchair Zen wisdom. We celebrate religions as long as they don't say anything too definitive, that they fit into the consumerist ecosystem, that they are useful, therapeutic, and gentle. But holiness isn't gentle. It disturbs. It cuts, it slices, it calls. It doesn't propose balance: it proposes the cross.

The saints are not models of sanitized perfection. They are fires. They are ruptures. They testify that God is real, not as a concept, but as a living fire. And the world fears this fire. Because it illuminates too much. It does not impose itself—but it exposes.

And it is this fire that Christ came to light: “I have come to cast fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49).

This explosive word, often set aside, contains the naked truth of the Gospel: it is not a question of appeasing the world, but of burning it with the fire of love, the fire of truth, the fire of holiness.

Michel Foucault, in his work on power and morality, showed to what extent the word that speaks the truth is always perceived as a threat to dominant structures. He spoke of parrhesia, this audacity to speak, against all odds. Yet this is precisely what the Church embodies, in its most authentic figures: a word that does not bow to the times, that does not comply with the dictates of progress or comfort. A naked word. Incendiary. Useless. Sacred.

And this word, when it is carried by men and women burned with God, becomes unbearable.

So we mock, we ridicule, we marginalize. We consign the saints to the dustbin of history or to the margins of madness. We accuse them of pride, neurosis, fundamentalism. We transform them into caricatures or dead icons. We do everything except listen to what they say—because we sense there is something irreducible there, a remnant of salt, a sliver of heaven that cannot be tamed.

The world hates saints because they won't leave us alone.

And perhaps, in the end, this is still what the Church carries most alive: not an authority, but a burning memory, the memory of the fools of God who preferred to lose everything rather than betray Love.

When Freedom Offends: Blasphemy as Duty, or the Triumph of Emptiness

“Do to others whatever you want them to do to you.” (Luke 6:31)

So yes, the world hates saints, and with them the very idea that a man might not belong to himself. But by fighting this fire, what are we really trying to extinguish? What if this rage against holiness, against the Church, against the sacred, concealed an unacknowledged thirst? A lack? An inverted call?

This is where a broader, even more burning question arises: what do our contemporaries really expect from this hatred, this relentlessness, this right to blasphemy, which has become, for some, a sort of civic duty? In what kind of society do we want to live, if provocation becomes a virtue, and offense, an art? Is it really necessary, to prove our freedom, to trample on what others love, mock what they believe, desecrate what keeps them upright?

In a country that claims to be civilized, enlightened, and fraternal, what does this quiet disregard for the deepest sensibilities mean? We hide behind the law—"I insult your religion, not you; in France, we have the right"—but what is the value of this right exercised without conscience, without love, without regard for others? What greatness is there in knowingly offending what, for a heart, is sacred? Liberty, says an old forgotten saying, is nothing without charity.

So what are we really looking for?

To purify society of religion or to evacuate the discomfort that the existence of another view of the world causes in us?

To bring down idols or to convince us that everything is equal — so we no longer have to choose?

And ultimately, in this right erected as an obligation to humiliate that which escapes our certainties, what does that say about us?

Perhaps the real question lies there.

And this is the one I'm leaving pending, for a future article:

If blasphemy is a right, why does it become a necessity for some? And what does this reveal about our moral emptiness?