Is France exceptionally irreligious? A comparative test of the cohort replacement theory

While scholars have often pointed to the fact that France might be an exceptionally irreligious country, this hypothesis has not yet been tested with longitudinal data; and nor have researchers tried to account for this alleged irreligiosity. The present article tries to fill this gap in the literature by comparing France to other Catholic countries in Western Europe. To do so, we use the Church Attendance and Religious change Pooled European (CARPE) dataset, which to date is the most extensive dataset of church affiliation and church attendance in European countries, as well as International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data that allow us to measure religious beliefs and make retrospective estimations as far back as the 1910s. We find that France shows significantly lower aggregate religiosity than other Catholic countries in Western Europe, although this difference has diminished in the last few decades; and this low level of religiosity cannot be explained by France-specific period effects operating in the last 40 years. Rather, secularization in France takes the form of cohort replacement, which has led to differences in religiosity between the countries being reproduced from one generation to the other. In other words, France is so irreligious because it began on the path of secular transition earlier or from a lower level than comparable countries.