Image of the Sacred
an Interview with Renée MolitorForty years after pitched battles in the streets of Paris between youth and authorities, another youth movement is causing ripples throughout Europe.
Renée Molitor is InterVarsity Link staff coordinator for Europe
and Francophone Africa. She spent several recent years in France, working among University Students, and is currently working on a masters’ degree in French Cultural Studies through Columbia University.
Urbana.org: In your recent research and experince with French students, how would you say the religious climate is changing in France?
RM: Compared with the relatively non-religious environment of the nineties, there is a marked increase in interest in what we could call ‘parallel spirituality’ – spiritual tinkering, astrology, new age practices, ancient practices and a dose of Catholicism.
At the same time, whenever I’ve talked with students, they invariably claim Catholic identity at one level or another, but the meaning of that identity is quite diverse. For many students, Catholic and French identity go hand in hand. As the situation evolves in France and the European Union, both of these identities have drifted into the background, but they are still a significant part of the landscape.
The more important trend is do-it-yourself spirituality. Many students I’ve talked to, from one end of the belief spectrum to the other, have piecemealed their beliefs and values, creating their own individual religion in the process. Recurring values include human rights, tolerance, family and the environment.
It is possible that many people are adopting some of these values as part of what they perceive to be a European-wide ethos – a situation of values following identitification, if you will. Still, almost no one in my research could use just one label for themselves. They were uncomfortable with getting too pinned down.
U.Org: That sounds lonely.
RM: Yes, and it relates to this create-your-own spiritual environment. If there was any pattern in my research to students’ self-identification, I found that non-believers were much more likely to define themselves exclusively in negative terms, by what they were not like.
The whole idea of identity is very interesting to me: it’s kind of a mirror. Images are reflections. But what is the original? When we construct our own identity, we are playing off the image of God. And we are creating an image of God that looks a lot like us. Since people are a lot more open today about identity and spirituality, their God-mirror will reflect that.
Many people say that young people do not believe in the sacred, as we traditionally express it. However, as you talk to French students today, and decode their vocabulary and define who they are and who they aren't, you see that they do indeed have an idea of what is "sacred". It is this "sacred", I believe, that draws them to God, the source of all that is truly sacred.
But if our image of God is really grounded in the sacred, it won’t change with the seasons, although God, as an active person, will engage us at the level of our questions. God is big enough to withstand our most urgent questions of identity.
U.Org: You mentioned students identifying as European. What does European mean?
RM: As with spiritual and national identity, there are negative and positive aspects. On the negative side, it’s a fairly straightforward; "we’re European because we’re not American," for instance, or other places. But much more significant is the growing sense of common life experience among the younger generations of Western Europeans.
As the European Union expands, this common experience grows a little harder to describe, but it’s still there. For instance, in the last five years, there have been sweeping reforms in the universities. The end goal is a standardized degree structure across the continent, which would enable students to move from one country to another and have their degrees recognized. There is already an equivalent degree structure in place to the undergraduate, graduate and doctorate tiers in North America; this system is getting tighter each year.
U.Org: So the EU is more than economics to today’s young people?
RM: Much more. Look at the Erasmus programme, for instance. This is an enormously influential higher education program that allows students to study at universities in other European countries for periods of three months to a year. Over a million students from across the continent have already undergone an Erasmus program. It is becoming a normal part of life to mingle with students from all over the continent.
In highly multinational situations like that, English is becoming the language of communication for a generation of students identifying as European. I’ve witnessed conversations in tortured English, which proceed for a while until both parties realize that they’re all speakers of the same native language, at which point they switch over. In social situations like these, the emergence of a European identity is quite natural and authentic.
U.Org: Thank you, Renée.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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