The French have a real mess on their hands.

As tothesource goes to release the fate of two French journalists is still unknown. Radio France Internationale correspondent Christian Chesnot, 38, and Georges Malbrunot, 41, of Le Figaro newspaper were kidnapped over a week ago by Iraqi militants as they traveled from Baghdad to Najaf.

The group holding the men is threatening to kill both journalists unless France lifts its ban on Muslim headscarves in state schools.

The French government has vowed not to bow to the kidnappers' demands.

Wow! We have finally found a principle on which the French will hold their ground, and it turns out to be exclusive secularism!

The ban on religious apparel became law in March after months of acrimonious debate. It is due to take effect when the French academic year begins today.

The law forbids religious apparel and "conspicuous" signs that show a student's religious affiliation. It is regarded as central to the government's policy of keeping state institutions secular, but has sparked protests at home and abroad, with many Muslims saying they feel unfairly targeted.

Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crosses are also forbidden.

Any student of French history should not be surprised by this bigoted and short-sighted legislation. Ever since revolutionary guillotines dropped the heads of throne and altar onto bloody French soil over 200 years ago, anti-religious governance has always found fertile ground in France.

The slogan of the French revolution, if complete, would read “ Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Secularism!”

When atheistic Jacobins seized the reins of power in France during the revolution, the subsequent government would necessarily be anti-religious.

Church property was confiscated by the state. The clergy was forced to take an oath asserting the primacy of the state over church concerns. A Revolutionary calendar was substituted for the Christian calendar. Decrees ordered the municipalities to seize and melt down the bells and other treasures of the churches.

Every effort was made to “dechristianize” France. The Convention deciding the future of the Revolution mandated that decadi, a cult that worshiped the fatherland, would be the new religion of France. Priests would be forced to marry. Every tenth day would be a day of rest, not Sunday. A list of state heroes would be compiled to replace Christian Saints. Churches were closed. Clergy who refused to abandon their posts were threatened with deportation.

The Catholic Sunday Mass was replaced with the civil mass of decadi.

Even a close reading of Robespierre’s (Rousseau's translator) notion of Supreme Being reveals that God must be worshipped as Nature which is defined as progress advantageous to the state.

The Church of Notre-Dame-de-Paris became a temple of ‘Reason’.

In short, every effort was made to “wipe out eighteen centuries of error”.

Today this obsession with Nature and State as the primary organizing principles of life is known as secularism.

Holyoake’s Secularism (a term he coined) repeats these earlier themes of the French Revolution.

Secularism is that which seeks the development of the physical, moral, and intellectual nature of man to the highest possible point, as the immediate duty of life – which inculcates the practical sufficiency of natural morality apart from atheism, theism or the Bible.

Holyoake, an agitator for both secularism and socialism, sought the secularization of education in the public school. He would have agreed with France’s new ban on religious symbols.

Bradlaugh, Holyoake’s successor as president of the London Secular Society in 1858, steered secularism in a pronounced atheistic direction. After all, the word secular means of this world in Latin and is the opposite of religious.

Although at present it may be perfectly true that all men who are Secularists are not Atheists, I put it that in my opinion the logical consequence of the acceptance of Secularism must be that the man gets to Atheism if he has brains enough to comprehend.

So France’s bloody revolution that sought to eliminate traditional faith from public life continues today, even expands today, in this demand by proponents of secularism to whitewash our communitarian space of all things religious.

Ironically, by making this demand that secularism function as the only official state religion, secularist become religious zealots, demanding absolute adherence to their dogmas and creeds.

In 1880, the enthusiastically atheistic Jules Ferry continued this attack on traditional faith. He expelled all religious staff from public schools and nuns from hospitals. Twenty years later another atheist, Emile Combes, closed down over 2500 religious schools. He fired teachers who were from religious orders and went on a witch hunt to expel from the government any person with religious faith.

A compromise was finally achieved when, in 1905, a law was passed that structured the separation of church and state in France. New religious symbols were forbidden on public land. You couldn’t even put a cross on your gravestone.

French President Jacques Chirac thought the 100th anniversary of this law would be an opportune time to buttress up secularism. But instead of oppressing Catholics this new legislation targets France’s five million Muslims.

The French are afraid of real differences. They seek a uniform populace as the solution to possible conflict between peoples of various ethnic and religious backgrounds. Unfortunately for the government, there are real differences in their population that must be dealt with more realistically.

Luc Ferry, France’s current Education Minister and a direct descendant of Jules Ferry, said recently that he is seeking a system of religious-style ethics: a secular system that goes deep but keeps religion well out, calling it “sacred secularism”.

Ferry's goal gets to the heart of the French quandary because secularism fails to insure the tolerance it is supposed to promote when it becomes an exclusive worldview that insists all other worldviews be silenced. In fact, to be effective, secularism must become totalitarian as well as atheistic.

So what should France do?

Concerning issues of governance, France should reject secularism and endorse
 pluralism. When William James wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience he used the word pluralism to express his delight in the complex and complicated social structure of late 19th century America. He considered America’s heterogeneous society an opportunity to learn from each other. He believed this would ultimately make our union more, not less, sustainable.

For James, this is the essence of tolerance, that we are able to accept each other as different while maintaining our own unique and firmly held beliefs.

There is no tolerance needed in secularism because true differences are not permitted to be expressed.

The French seek unity by rejecting the expression of religious belief. This is the easy way out. And it is not sustainable.

America ’s founders valued religious liberty above all else and built both freedom from state oppression and freedom to express religious belief into our founding documents.

Respect of other’s religious beliefs, especially when those differences are significant, and the expression of your own truth claims creates a diverse and faith-rich culture.