In a recent article in Le Monde, echoing remarks made by the Bishop of Nice (see interview), the religious affairs specialist Henri Tincq discussed the issue of “Christians of the East and radical Islam” following a conference jointly organized by the European Institute of Religious Sciences and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. A few days later, also under his byline, it was possible to read that the “Vatican reaffirmed its right to evangelize non-Christians and non-Catholic Christians” at the risk of altering already fragile relations with the Russian Orthodox Church. In Turkey, an Italian priest is stabbed in Izmir. And the list of acts and disputes involving religions does not stop there. What can be said about the daily consequences of the geographic and symbolic entanglement of the three monotheisms at the heart of the holy city of Jerusalem? Under these conditions, one can only wonder: why does the teaching of religious facts in schools, long recommended by the essayist Régis Debray in a noted and consensual report on the subject, take so long to be introduced? Is it a sensitive topic? Resistance from congregations wishing to maintain control over the dissemination of their thinking? Therefore, in this laborious wait, we take an interest in the collective work developed by numerous specialists of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, under the direction of Jean-Christophe Attias and Esther Benbassa, “Cultures and Gods,” recently published by Fayard.
The authors’ concern is based on a saddening observation: the existence of a “religious illiteracy” among students, which they rather discreetly explain in a postface dedicated to the teaching of religious facts in schools, making it “difficult to grasp a certain number of artistic works…and entire swathes of history.” In fact, misunderstanding and rejection dominate the current state of affairs. In the form of “reference points for transmitting religious facts,” the authors propose a work that is both didactic in content and accessible in form. The demanding reminder of the “corpus,” dogmas, and institutions that result from them does not prevent an alternation with a plurality of digressions of a more cultural and contemporary nature. Hence their respectful approach to the chronology of the emergence of monotheisms but also their desire to multiply access: can one speak of Judaism without mentioning politics, the creation of the State of Israel, and, in conclusion of the chapter, the “major theological challenges and questions”? Judaism is also, according to the authors, the modern literature of Walter Benjamin to Hannah Arendt, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, or the figure of the Jewish intellectual Emmanuel Levinas. It is still the predominant influence of the Jewish diaspora in the United States, illustrated by the photo of a religious ceremony of the “Jewish marriage of a gay couple” in New York.
The same treatment applies to Christianity, tossed about since its origins between orthodoxy and secularization. One will note thus a significant development on the Christian arts, where both the place of Mary in painting and a spotlight on the rise of religious music are noted. One will also appreciate the chapter dedicated to religious criticism in the West by the philosophers of the Enlightenment: a necessary moment to understand today’s looser, distant reading of biblical texts, somewhat “like one reads Plato or Aristotle, as Régis Debray once explained,” quite different from the more “locked” relationship maintained by men and women with the fundamental text in other beliefs. The section on Islam in the broad sense thus includes Persian, Ottoman, and Turkish literature, and recalls, which can never be done enough, the brilliant figures of Muslim intellectualism in the first four centuries after its birth.
Let us mention a commendable effort by the authors: a successful attempt to cross perspectives between different religions in the 19th and 20th centuries. An era that certainly recalls the ambiguous contributions of colonialism but also highlights the inalienable works of the Palestinian Edward Said or the scholar Louis Massignon. A broad overview that would be quite incomplete without addressing the animist religions of an African continent in full Islamization, the evolutions of Christianity in Central and South America, doubly marked by a return to “customary Catholicism” and a growing influence of “evangelist movements,” without of course forgetting the changes affecting the territories of Asia.
It is understood. The reader wishing to understand the visible and hidden stakes of the religious phenomenon is invited on a genuine world tour of religions. A journey during which they will finally be able to extract all the essential elements of a complex and highly topical debate.
Under the direction of Jean-Christophe Attias, Esther Benbassa, “Des cultures et des dieux, Repères pour une transmission du fait religieux”, Editions Fayard, 2007, 440 pages, 32 euros.
