The line from 1905
In 1905, France stripped the Catholic Church of its property, its role in education, and its claim on civic life. Brutal, necessary, and it worked. Within two generations, France built a civic identity that did not depend on which God you prayed to on Sunday. Laicite is not a preference. It is the operating system.
People who call us intolerant have not done the history. The secular public sphere was ripped from the grip of the most powerful institution in European civilization. When we apply the same principle to the hijab, the kippah, and the crucifix in schools, we are holding a line our great-grandparents bled to draw.
A country is not a hotel. It is a culture — shared references, shared obligations, shared ways of resolving disputes. The Puritans who crossed an ocean understood this. The multiculturalists call our position cultural erasure. We call theirs cultural suicide. Multiculturalism as practiced — not theorized, practiced — produced parallel societies in Birmingham, in Molenbeek, in the banlieues. Merkel declared it utterly failed
in 2010. She was a centrist describing what she saw.
American expats in Costa Rica are instructive. Scale it. Imagine two million Americans establishing English-only neighborhoods and demanding English-language services. Costa Rica would respond — not from bigotry but because every nation has a threshold. Italy’s protests are evidence for our position: a country that admits without integrating creates the backlash that eventually demands removal.
Where we concede ground: France’s ban produced dropout and alienation for a measurable number of Muslim girls.
What would change our mind: A genuinely multicultural country maintaining cross-group trust across two generations.
Read the full synthesis: What can a country ask of its immigrants?