French media & Evangelical demographics

Evangelical visibility in France, well as the Fab Four once sang, "It's getting better all the time."

When I was in elementary school I wanted to have shoes just like Paul's, n'est-ce pas !
To answer the question that my daughter would ask just to make me feel old,
Paul is the 2nd from the left :-p

The March 1, 2007 edition of the weekly Catholic magazine La Vie published "Exclusive: The Map of France's Religions: department by department where the believers… and the atheists are." So here is a quick FYI sample from the current “Evangelicals-in-the-French-media” season.
La Vie's research shows that France is:

• 64% Catholic
• 28% Without religion
• 3% Muslim
• 2% Protestant
• 0.6% Jewish

I found this report helpful and evenhanded. Just one monolithic statement crept in that would have been true during the 20th century, but not in the 21st. La Vie proclaims, "Catholicism remains the only national religion." As Aerosmith sang, Dream On!

France has become religiously pluralist due to the growth of Islam. As La Vie admits, “Islam has become France’s second religion.”

Aerosmith somehow seemed cooler than this when I saw them perform in the ‘70s
(My older brother took me to the concert)

A FEW OBSERVATIONS

While 64% of all French people claim to be Catholic (1), only 2% of all French people between the ages of 18-29 are regularly practicing Catholics (2).

French Protestants are subdivided into three major branches: Lutheran, Reformed and Evangelical. Once the number crunching is done, France is somewhere around 1% Evangelical.
Between 1993-1999, the percentage of French people between the ages of 18-29 who claimed to be "without religion" rose by 59% (3).

Back in 2001, The World Christian Encyclopedia claimed that France's Muslim population was 7.1% (contra La Vie's 3%). That figure has certainly risen in the past 6 years. France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe.

A mosque is being built about 100 meters from
the Protestant Evangelical Church of East Dijon (where I attend)

La Vie classifies the Côte d'Or, the department in which I live, as having 10 to 20 mosques. There are only 7 Evangelical churches in the department (pop. 500,000).

La Vie cites the French Evangelical Federation (FEF) of which the Dijon church is a member. Map source: www.lafef.com/protestantisme-29-40.html

The things that struck me about the La Vie articles is that Evangelicals were taken seriously, were quoted more often than Reformed officials, and that we are seeing terms like "Evangelical dynamism" creep into articles.

This was straightforward report with no negative overtones. Such neutral, respectful reporting is much appreciated and helpful. C’est La Vie!


(1) David Barett's World Christian Encyclopedia, 2001 gives the exact same figure.
(2) In 1993, 4% of the 18-29 age group claimed to be regularly practicing Catholics. By 1999, the figure had dropped to 2%, a 50% decrease in just 6 years. Sources: INSEE Les jeunes (143) and Les valeurs des français: évolutions de 1980 à 2000 (137).
(3) There are numerous indicators of a resolute French departure, irrespective of age, from institutional religion in general.
(4) Sébastien Fath, one of France's leading sociologists of religions, asserts, “in terms of regular practitioners, the [Evangelical] proportion [of all Protestants] goes beyond two-thirds, possibly even three-quarters." Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire du Protestantisme Français, oct-dec 2002. Fath states that in 2002 there were approximately 350,000 Evangelicals in France. Compare this to 500,000 French Buddhists and Hindus, and 13,000,000 "without religion."