French secularism is quite different from the principle of religious liberty enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and even from most of the more extreme versions of the “separation of Church and State” that have arisen over the past two or three generations in America. This has been demonstrated beyond any reasonable question in the recent French “burkini” controversy:
Madeleine Elfenbein, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, offers a sane voice on the matter:
“A Crisis of Faith in Laïcité”
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