6533b7d6fe1ef96bd1265a79

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Religion and Social Integration in France

subject

description

On some measures, France has the most integrated (and secularised) Muslim population in Europe. For example, attitude research shows that French Muslims share values closer to those of their non-Muslim neighbours than in other European countries (Connor 2010 391). While official sources of data are limited as the French government does not collect statistics organised by religion, ethnicity or any other form of collective identity, a number of private and international surveys have been carried out. Thus, the European Values Survey (2002–6 data) shows that rates of religious observance for Muslims in France are closer to those amongst the majority population than in either Britain or the Netherlands (ibid.), while other sources suggest that rates of regular religious observance of Christian and Muslim heritage populations are similar at around 10 per cent (Withol de Wenden in Allen 2006). A series of polls conducted by the US-based Pew Foundation are particularly detailed. They show that fewer French Muslims perceive a conflict between ‘being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society’ than amongst France’s neighbours — 72 per cent of French Muslims perceive no such conflict, compared to 49 per cent of British Muslims — and French Muslims score lower on the Pew Foundation’s ‘religious-cultural negativity index’ (ranked 0–10 on negative attitudes associated with Westerners), scoring an average of 2.2 compared with 3.2 and 4.2 for Muslims in Germany and Britain, respectively (Allen 2006).