Patrick Simon

We measure a person’s religious affiliation by way of two questions: Do you have a religion, and if so, which one? The notion of religion is not exactly identical to the notion of spirituality, in that it refers primarily (but not exclusively) to a body of beliefs and a type of worship. The main religions we investigate are Christianity (encompassing Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity and other forms of Christianity), Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and the Hindu religion (other religions are grouped together in a single category). But having an affiliation with a religion does not necessarily say anything about the importance it has in a person’s life or their degree of religiosity. We find, for example, that people who say they are Catholic have a fairly distant relationship to religion: 27% say it is fairly or very important in their life. For people who identify as Muslim, the figure is 76%. Another way of looking at religion is to consider the religious dimension of people’s personal identities. When respondents were asked to choose up to 4 dimensions to describe their identity, they seldom mentioned religion: 8% of Catholics, 30% of Muslims, and 52% of Jews did so. Religious affiliation and identity do not necessarily coincide.

The role of intrafamily religious socialization is decisive: people raised in a family where religion was present are more likely to have a religious affiliation. However, transmission rates vary among the major religions, which helps explain the increasing strength of secularization (the abandonment of religion) from one generation to the next. While 93% of people who grew up in atheist or agnostic families say they have no religion, the transmission rate is lower among Catholics (67% of persons who grew up in a Catholic family identify as Catholic) than Muslims (91%).  

The survey questions people on signs that signal a person’s religion, such as the headscarf, worn primarily by Muslim women. In France, 26% of Muslim women aged 18 to 49 wear it, and the practice has increased perceptibly since the 2008-2009 survey, in which 18% of Muslim women reported wearing it. The increase concerns all ages and generations, but the practice continues to be more widespread among immigrant Muslim women (36%) than among immigrants’ descendants (17%). In the latter group, the women who wear it most are relatively young (20% of Muslim women aged 25 to 34, as against 17% in the 35-44 age bracket), suggesting, among other things, that the practice may fluctuate in the course of a woman’s life. Last, many fewer women who wear the headscarf are in employment: 27% are, compared to 55% of Muslim women who do not wear it. These differences are due in part to higher unemployment, but above all to a considerable distance from the labor market, for reasons pertaining both to family models and a French context over the last 20 years of increasingly coercive insistence on public, visible neutrality in the area of religion (the official French value known as laïcisme), resulting in stronger job market exclusion of this category of women. 

Source: Lucas Drouhot, Patrick Simon et Vincent Tiberj, 2023, La diversité religieuse en France : transmissions intergénérationnelles et pratiques selon les origines, Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (Insee) (Éd.), Immigrés et descendants d’immigrés en France. Insee Références. Édition 2023, Montrouge : Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE), p. 39-47.