A crowd of 40,000 huddles outside in the cold rain, unable to fit in the newly restored cathedral of Notre-Dame. Visitors have gathered in front of the building on December 7th, 2024 for its reopening ceremonies—made possible thanks to a tsunami of donations from all over the globe. Inside, world leaders pack the first rows of the pews: US President-elect Donald Trump, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, William, Prince of Wales, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Catholic clergy, firefighters, and donors—chosen by lottery—are also ushered inside to witness the reopening, inaugurated with a Catholic procession led by the Archbishop of Paris. Before the doors open and the mass begins, the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, is due to give a speech. But it was raining.
Notre-Dame’s reopening was a stage for a new, global mode of secular power, one that increasingly centers a culturalized version of Christianity. This culturalized Christianity, however, is not just about “values,” beliefs, or even ideology. The global secular network is material. Edifices, religious artifacts (like crucifixes in public buildings), holiday trappings like Christmas trees and nativity scenes, and gestures of prayer are coalescing to form the secular material repertoire. In the French case, Catholic aesthetics have merged with political performance. From Macron to Trump, from French laïcité to American “cultural Christianity,” we are witnessing a shared aesthetic grammar of secularity that favors certain religious forms, softens others into “heritage,” and renders some fundamentally incompatible with public life.
The emergence of various versions of what we might call secularized or cultural Christianity is not new, though it has reached a new stage of intensity. Musk, the world’s richest man and a driving force in the second Trump regime, declared early in 2024 that he was devoted to a “religion of curiosity, the religion of greater enlightenment.” He rebranded himself during the US election campaign as a “cultural Christian,” affirming his support for the theory that “western” civilization has derived historical benefits from its proximity to Christianity. This label has also been appropriated by prominent atheists, including New Atheist Richard Dawkins. Ayaan Hirsi Ali—once in the New Atheist circle—now professes a version of Christianity that she sees as necessary to ground a deep-rooted fortification against both “wokeness” and Islam. (Although she insists this is full-on Christian conversion, Dawkins has tried to gently reframe what she’s doing as “political Christianity.”)
As far back as Thomas Jefferson, a tendency to hurl Christianity through the Enlightenment’s purifying fire and gather up what falls out on the other side has been a powerful facet of American secularism. Jefferson’s self-description as a “real Christian” was the eighteenth-century equivalent of a “cultural Christian.” His protest that his Christianity was “real” was only necessary because his belief system was so utterly baroque: his total rejection of miracles and the divinity of Christ, his call for a “wall of separation” between church and state, and his founding of the University of Virginia as an expressly non-religious institution all spoke to the fact that his religious views had been turned inside-out by the secularizing impulse.
But cultural Christianity—like all formations of the secular—is not just about transfigured beliefs. It manifests itself through specifically material forms. As tempting as it might be to view the secular as strictly neck-up—a heady exercise of rearranged convictions after reflection and contemplation—Notre-Dame shows how the secular also roots itself in a global material culture. The material secular is part of the network of power that allows secularity (in all its polymorphous shapes) to project soft power worldwide. Although nominally Catholic, Notre-Dame is also a monument of secularity, a relay point in a transnational secular circuit.
The prospect of an unprecedented speech by the French head of state at Notre-Dame had already sparked controversy: Macron wanted to give his speech inside the cathedral, arguing that the speech was essentially secular and therefore not in violation of the delicate balance between secular and spiritual powers that has coexisted for decades in French cathedrals. Since the 1905 law of separation of churches and state, the cathedrals have belonged to the state, which is responsible for their upkeep, but allow the bishops to use them for Catholic worship. And at the same time, France’s secular principle, laïcité, requires all public officials to be neutral in religious matters and especially the President of the Republic. (This goes for the mainland; the colonies are a different story.) So, Macron’s desire to give his speech inside the cathedral was resisted and initially rejected. But contrary to the plan, Macron did not give his speech in front of the cathedral on the Parvis as planned, but inside the building, in the nave in front of the altar, under the gaze of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus in her arms, despite the disapproval of the Archdiocese of Paris.
The weather probably had no influence on Macron’s speech about gratitude and the central importance of Notre-Dame for the French nation, which he concluded with the words “vive Notre-Dame de Paris, vive la République, vive la France” (“Long live Notre-Dame of Paris, long live the Republic, long live France”). In the heart of the cathedral, the secular republic was proclaimed again. Notre-Dame acts as a sort of pelagic zone, where the secular and religious purl together. Material secularity—or laïcite materielle—is dependent on historical rules, habits, practices, sensibilities, passions, perceptions, and affects related to religion.
This trajectory is in line with the ongoing process of the culturalization of Christianity, which for several decades has been increasingly seen in Europe as heritage and tradition rather than exclusively as religion. For decades, the courts have been distinguishing between the “festive” and religious character of nativity scenes, for instance, in order to adjucate whether their existence in the town halls of various French cities is lawful. The courts have largely sided with municipalities wishing to put up creches, arguing that nativity scenes are emblematic of French culture and history, rather than religion per se. Much as the discourse of religious freedom in the US has been shown, time and again, to favor Christian practices, in the French context, the laïc alarm bells are silent when watching the intrusion of Catholicism into the public sphere.
Notre-Dame’s status as a secular cathedral emerges within this dynamic. During the fire in 2019, then-chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel, together with many other heads of state and government from around the world, sent a message of mourning and solidarity in which she declared that “Notre-Dame is a symbol of France, but also of our European culture” (emphasis added). Atheists, too, spoke out with enthusiasm for Notre-Dame, with one commentator writing “as we watched the viral footage of Parisians kneeling and weeping near the church to sing ‘Ave Maria’ and other hymns… it was easy to see why even the least God-fearing among us would feel crushed.” Notre-Dame is not only Catholic, but also an object of secular attachment, longing, and nostalgia. It is part of the network of material sustenance of secular ideals.
But this material bulwark of secularity is—like all formations of the secular—also a device of exclusion—often racialized exclusion. This was not the first time Macron sparked controversy over the boundaries and separation of powers between church and state. In September 2023, Macron attended a 60,000-person mass organized at the Vélodrome Stadium in Marseille, led by Pope Francis. The Elysée ardently repudiated the accusation that Macron’s attendance at the event as the president of the Republic was a violation of laïcité.
Macron’s attendance at the mass in Marseille coincided with another hotly debated law that banned the wearing of abaya (a long, wide dress worn in certain Muslim countries) in schools. Any kind of conspicuous religious sign, along with Islamic veils, had already been forbidden at schools in France since 2004 by the law drafted by the Stasi Commission to reassert the primacy of secular principles. But the new ban went further, preventing the wearing of a full-body piece of clothing; it was justified by an appeal to laïcité as a way of ensuring the neutrality of public schools and the equality of all pupils. Certain articles of clothing are irrevocably religionized, even while the French Republic’s ceremonial stage is increasingly Catholicized.
Laïcité, then, is being fashioned in compatibility with Catholicism, rendering Catholic material forms as culture or heritage rather than exclusively as religion. Catholicism has become the ambient backdrop of a feeling infusing the French cultural landscape, one that passes muster as secular. It’s Catho-Laïcité: a deep coalescence of the coordinates of the Catholic church and French secularism, manifesting as a kind of exclusivist material form of laïcité. As Elayne Oliphant has written, “the easy way in which Notre-Dame—particularly its medieval components—was equated with French ‘culture’ when it burned in the spring of 2019 demonstrates… its capacity to be seen as naturally French, despite widespread claims that religion must always be absent from public life.”
Simultaneously, Islamic material forms—architecture, gestures of prayer, diet, and especially clothing—cannot enjoy this “banality” (in Oliphant’s term), the quality of being unmarked—of not being a constant challenge to the natural order of how things should look and feel. While the Catholic practices, edifices, sentiments are constantly culturalised, all that relates to Islam are considered to be exclusively religious and nothing to do with culture (or at least not the right kind of culture), and therefore a constant breach of laïcité. We have not only seen this further religionization of Islam in the new abaya ban, but also in the ban on head coverings for all French athletes during the Olympic games that took place in 2024 in Paris. French officials argued that it was an exclusively religious sign for them and so a violation against laïcité; the International Olympics Committee, by contrast, deemed the headscarf as a cultural sign—and therefore permissible for any other athlete to wear.
Jewish practices have come to occupy an ambiguous position within laïcité—not only historically but also within the recent politics of mingling of politics and religion. Catho-laïcité has become more accommodating toward French and European Jews since the October 7 attacks. Macron, for the first time in the history of the Republic, allowed the celebration of the first day of Hanukkah to take place at the presidential office, The Élysée Palace. He stood by the side of the chief rabbi of France as he lit a Hanukkah candle and the crowd sang Hebrew prayers. Is this physical presence of religion within the political sphere also part of a growing discourse on the Judeo-Christian roots of Euro-Americancivilization? Is catho-laïcité evolving into judeo-catho-laïcité? Or will the resurgence of the European right—for now claiming to support the Jewish communities they have historically been violently hostile to—ultimately collapse back into Catholic/secular supremacism?
Notre-Dame is not just a French cathedral, but a symbolic node in a global material culture of secularity, where religious forms are selectively valorized or excluded according to wider geopolitical and cultural currents. The material secular constitutes an international matrix—producing new configurations of inclusion and exclusion. Material secularity is strategic, yet it is also a structure of affect that divides groups into those that are overtly “religious” and those that are safely ensconced in the secular. These material dynamics—sometimes the rain itself—determines who is inside and who is on the outs.
