"Why France is suddenly full of evangelical churches"

Contrary to what this video suggests, France is not suddenly full of evangelical churches.

However, there is a growing visibility in France of a diverse form of evangelical Protestantism. It now reaches over a million people and attracts young audiences. This has caught the attention of journalist Elena Pompei and the YouTube channel ENTR, which published this 11,5-minutes in-depth report a week ago. Let's notice it is featuring an interview with sociologist Christophe Monnot, affiliated with the GSRL research laboratory.

The ENTR channel describes itself as: "ENTR, a unique channel made by young journalists from DW, France Médias Monde, and partners all over Europe."

Lien.

 

Evangelicals in France in social media (France 24)

Since the early 2020s, evangelicals have slightly surpassed one million followers in France.

This continues to arouse the growing curiosity of mainstream media.

After France 2, it's France 24's turn to examine the influence of French evangelicals on social media.

"An area in Bordeaux, France, hosted a massive evangelical worship service attracting nearly 4,000 followers to hear Quebec preacher Claude Houde. Evangelicalism is a religion gaining traction with youth, largely by recruiting on social media. Carla, a 19-year-old influencer, shares her faith with 300,000 followers on TikTok."

Link to France 24: 

Evangelicalism in France : social media used to attract young believers

"The Spirit blows where it wills" (Desert Assembly 2025)

"Every year, the village of Mialet in the Cévennes mountains of southern France becomes a meeting place for those who want to keep alive the country's reformed history and its struggle for religious freedom."

Theme : ‘The Spirit blows where it wills: 1525-2025: 500 years of extraordinary Protestant diversity’.

An event commemorating the 500th Anniversary of Anabaptists, including historians Neal Blough and Sebastien Fath.

Read more here (Evangelical Focus)

And if you want to watch some pics, click here (Flickr Album)

Pastor Lauzet on the beginnings of the CNEF (French Evangelical network)

Evangelical Focus is a Christian online news publication based in Europe, launched in 2015 under the Spanish and European Evangelical Alliances. It provides daily news, reports, interviews, and opinion pieces.  It is coordinated by Pedro Tarquis (editorial director) and Joel Forster (management and operations). The platform is available in English and engages audiences through its website and social media

It's not often that this media outlet covers the French scene. This is the case here with this interview with Pastor Stéphane Lauzet, who was one of the key players in the early days of the CNEF. He is interviewed about his book, which describes the beginnings of the main current French Evangelical network.

Launched in 2002-03 and then formalized in 2010, the CNEF (Conseil National des Evangéliques de France) is the main umbrella network of evangelical Protestants in France.

Link

La Place 2025, the French Evangelical 'rendez-vous' in Paris

 

"La Place 2025" is a major, unprecedented, multifaceted event dubbed “the Rendez-vous of (French) Evangelicals.”

It is currently held over three days—from May 8 to 10, 2025—at the Parc Floral de Paris, and is featuring a diverse program of artists, conferences, and workshops, as well as more than 250 exhibitors and over 3,000 registered visitors.

Link.

French Evangelicals & cultic deviations (Miviludes)

MIVILUDES is, in France, an official State-sponsored mission designed to identify religious sectarian/cultic drifts.

MIVILUDES published its report for the period 2022-2024 on this April 8, 2025.

The number of reports has "more than doubled" between 2015 and 2024, increasingly mentioning evangelical churches.

These figures call for four observations:

Minority Protestant Network's first newsletter

Already presented in these columns, the Minority Protestants Network is a very dynamic research network on Protestantism as a minority religion.

Led by Eugenio Biagini (Prof. Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge), Karina Benazech Wendling (Associate Prof. Université de Lorraine) with the collaboration of Laura Popa (Phd University of Giessen), it just released its first newsletter.

 

Its rich content is available here (link). 

 

2025-2026 Research Residencies at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study

The Paris Institute for Advanced Study is a research center in the social sciences, humanities and cognitive (neuro)sciences, and a partner of the main Parisian higher education and research institutions.

Please look at the 2025-2026 research residencies call at the Paris IAS ! It offers exceptional researchers in the social sciences and humanities the opportunity to develop a research project in ideal conditions that include: a full academic year (10 months) of time for research away from teaching and administrative responsibilities, insertion in an international and interdisciplinary community of top-level researchers and the largest concentration of scientists in Europe, within an excellent work and living environment in the heart of Paris.

More here (link)

The GSRL (UMR 8582) in a glimpse

Group Societies, Religions, Laicities  is a French research laboratory of the CNRS and the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE-PSL).

The GSRL brings together researchers from different disciplines (history, sociology, political sciences, anthropology, philosophy, law, etc.) working on the transformations of religion and issues related to secularism in the contemporary world. Its field of competence encompasses many cultural areas.

Link

French-speaking research to be read

Friendly reminder to our dear english-speaking colleagues : there is a great deal of french-speaking research done every year.

Do not forget to try to read it and quote it, as french-speaking scholars make effort too to read and quote your valuable work.

If not, our social science lenses will not work well, and may make us sometimes almost half blind. No valuable synthesis on religion in Africa, for example, could be done without reading extensively the huge french-speaking scientific knowledge produced by Historians, Anthropologists, Sociologists and so on.

Let me take the occasion to share this link to the new version ot Theses.fr portal, which helps to locate all the Ph.D completed in France.

Link

Gen Z in Europe: more devout than their elders?

I recently found this article in Evangelicals Now Magazine:

The Global Religion 2023 survey, conducted by market research service Ipsos, interviewed 19,000 people in 26 countries. It has revealed that ‘in countries where religious practice is high, older adults tend to engage in it more than the young, while in countries where religious practice is low, young people tend to have higher engagement.’...

Let me confess I missed this European survey 10 months ago. But it is better late than never.

 

The whole IPSOS findings can be read here (IPSOS, GLOBAL RELIGION 2023).

 

Among the data, 5% of non-catholic Christians in France, including Evangelicals

Protestant History: new Digitalized prints (BPF, Paris)

In 2023, the brand new BPF documentary portal (French Protestant Historical Library in Paris) has been enriched with some 500 digitized prints worth to be seen.

Discover some of them here (link), including this 1736 depiction of an Anabaptist Communion service (Last Supper service), from Jacok Van Schley.

 

A major book on the Geneva Revival

The nineteenth-century international religious movement known as the Reveil had a major impact on Protestantism, and particularly on Evangelicalism. That impact is still evident today. Yet as a multi-faceted phenomenon, this movement has not received its due share of scholarly attention. This book offers a collection of essays exploring the international dimensions of the Genevan strand of the Reveil, providing an overview of events and trends, outlining the careers of some of its key figures, and highlighting some of the areas in which it made a contribution to contemporary society.

COngratulation to Jean Decorvet and the whole team for this major book.

Link.

Have a look at the GSRL's new website

The Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités (GSRL) remains today Europe's biggest social science research centre working on contemporary religion.

 

Based in Aubervilliers (Campus Condorcet), it upgraded this year its website. 

The brand new GSRL website is available here : GSRL Link

Religion and Francophonie (French speaking world)

A GSRL program led by Pascal Bourdeaux and Sebastien Fath (GSRL)    

 321 million people worldwide are able to express themselves in French (OIF data 2023).  

From a social sciences perspective, these French-speaking spaces lead us to think differently about religious interaction and dynamics. The French-speaking global framework (including Africa, Americas, Asia, Carribean isles, Pacific islands....) invites to reshape analysis beyond a hexagonal prism (French-centered) that remained hegemonic for long.

 

Deploying the analysis of religion in society in this French-speaking and postcolonial space-time, such is the purpose of this program “Religion and Francophonie (French-speaking world)”.  

MISTIC, a research program to discover

This blog gathers information related to the MISTIC research program (Migrations of religious specialists and transnational construction of competence) financed by the French Collaborative Institute on Migrations (CNRS).

This research program focuses on the migration and transnational circulation of religious specialists of various faiths.

 

Link

Africa: towards the World's biggest megalopolis

According to a vast global study published in The Guardian,

"By 2100, the Lagos- Abidjan stretch is projected to be the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people".

Among these people living in the World's biggest megalopolis, millions and millions of young French-speaking African citizens impacted by post-colonial Christianity and revivalism....in a context of massive Global warming, which is directly threatening the megalopolis, boosting people to leave.

Cf. Howard W. French, "Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century"

Link

Discover the French Collaborative Institute on Migration

As I've just been honored to be accepted as a fellow at the French Collaborative Institute on Migration, let's put some light on this great research structure. 

There are ten « Convergence Institutes » (collaborative institutes) in France that were created in 2016 and 2017 on behalf of an international jury leading the 2nd Programme des Investissements d’Avenir.

The goal is to gather scientific research by gathering 600 researchers from various institutions to combine disciplines and create an original training program. The French Collaborative Institute on Migration (CI Migration) is the only program that brings together social sciences, human sciences and health sciences.

Within the CI Migration, 5 specialised thematic departments and a department dedicated to the academic course (Master’s Degree on Migrations) have been established.

Link

Imaginer la libération, des femmes noires face à l'Empire

Good news! Annette Joseph-Gabriel's landmark book entitled Reimagining Liberation: how Black women transformed citizenship in the French Empire, (Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2019, 262 p) has now been translated in French. And will be available as soon as the beginning of May, 2023.

"Black women living in the French empire played a key role in the decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. Thinkers and activists, these women lived lives of commitment and risk that landed them in war zones and concentration camps and saw them declared enemies of the state. Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel mines published writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of seven women. Though often overlooked today, Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson took part in a forceful transnational movement. Their activism and thought challenged France's imperial system by shaping forms of citizenship that encouraged multiple cultural and racial identities. Expanding the possibilities of belonging beyond national and even Francophone borders, these women imagined new pan-African and pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices. The visions they articulated also shifted the idea of citizenship itself, replacing a single form of collective identity and political participation with an expansive plurality of forms of belonging".

Link

9% of the French population today are Christian, but not Catholic

According to the French national institute for statistical and economic studies (INSEE), in 2019‑2020, 51% of the population aged 18 to 59 in metropolitan France declared that they had no religion.

On the increase over the past ten years, this religious disaffiliation concerns 58% of people without immigrant ancestry, 19% of immigrants who arrived after 16 years of age and 26% of descendants of two immigrant parents. If Catholicism remains the first religion (29% of the population declares itself Catholic), Islam is declared by a growing number of faithful (10%) and confirms its place as the second religion in France. The number of people declaring another Christian religion also increases, reaching 9%.

The whole study is available here (link)

(Un)believing in modern society

Professor at Lausanne University (Switzerland), Jörg Stolz was invited today for the GSRL monthly seminar.

He spoke about the secularization process from an international perspective.

An occasion to remind that he was among the editors of this important book:

Stolz, J., Könemann, J., Schneuwly Purdie, M., Englberger, T. and Krüggeler, M. (2016). (Un)Believing in modern society. Religion, spirituality, and religious-secular competition. London: Routledge.

Lien

Secularism in Comparative Perspective

Edited by Jonathan Laurence, this new book on Secularism in Comparative perspective

• Brings new texts on the critical issue of Secularism in comparative political contexts

• Includes many non-Western experiences and viewpoints on how secularism is theorized and lived

• Featuring the writing of preeminent scholars – such as Michael Walzer, Asma Afsaruddin, Sudipta Kaviraj AND Carol Ferrara, who wrote an essay on France, which provides a thorough history of the 1789 French Revolution, Church-state relations, colonialism, and education, and how the intersection of these elements with the evolution of French secularism led to modern-day laïcité

Link

France : welcome to Campus Condorcet

Have you not heard  yet of the CAMPUS CONDORCET (France) ?

Time to catch up !

Apart from being my beautiful workplace, it is one of the world's biggest social science university campus.

"Campus Condorcet firmly believes that the exacting requirements of scientific excellence can be reconciled with social impact. It therefore intends to radically transform the approaches and practices used for research, training and innovation promotion in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) fields, as well as their interface with other sciences. This ambition for far-reaching change is on a par with the level of investment required to create a campus that will bring together an exceptionally large scientific community both by European and global standards (3500 researchers and 4600 doctoral students), in a dynamic region, and the many challenges that this entails". 

Link

The complexity of the French principle of Laïcité

Want to discover The groundbreaking volume published by Philippe Portier and Jean-Paul Willaime about religion and secularism in France ?

Reminder, Philippe Portier is Professor of History and Sociology of Secularism at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, PSL, France, and Jean-Paul Willaime is Emerite Professor of History and Sociology of Protestantism at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, PSL, France. Both are outstanding scholars

Here are some points from the Chapter introduction (link)

"French secularism and the fight against separatism" (Nancy Lefevre)

French lawyer Nancy Lefevre serves as in-house legal counsel to the Conseil national des Evangéliques de France (CNEF), the main French Evangelical network (officialized in 2010).

She is also considered as a prominent defender of religious freedom in that country.

Published last year in the International Journal for Religious Freedom, this insightful article discusses the historical roots and conceptions of laicity underlying the 2021 reform.

It also focuses on the impact on religious organisations resulting from the state’s greater control over religious groups’ activities

A must-read.

A Park renamed in Paris to honor Protestants

The city of Paris has decided to make more visible its commemoration of the St Bartholomew massacre of Protestants 450 years ago on the 24th of August 1572, by renaming a park in the city centre. 

This inauguration will be held tomorrow, on Friday the 16th of September, 2022.

Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, will be speaking.

As I plan to attend, expect pictures to be posted on this Flickr album (link).

French Evangelical Armenians

Did you know ? There is a vibrant Armenian diaspora in France. Among them, many Evangelicals, strongly attached to Biblical orthodoxy (as they understand it) and Christian orthopraxy. 

On the occasion of the 175th Anniversary of the Armenian Evangelical Church (worldwide), French Armenians, oganized within the Union of Armenian Evangelical Churches in France,  have recently updated they website with a very detailed narrative about their History and identity in Contemporary France.

Thank you for that, Pastor Joel Mikaelian.

Link.

Religion and Secularism in France Today

Philippe Portier is Professor of History and Sociology of Secularism at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, PSL, France.

Jean-Paul Willaime is Emerite Professor of History and Sociology of Protestantism at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, PSL, France. Both are outstanding scholars.

This groundbreaking volume explores the dynamic life of religion and politics in France and investigates the extent to which the French idea of secularisation has been pushed to be more thorough and radical in its interaction with its other European counterparts.

A must-read !

Link

History of French Baptist Churches, a video serie to follow

Did you know that Baptist chiurches started in France before they started in Texas ?

If you master just a little bit of French, please try to follow this video, which is the first of a serie of short History videos retracing the long story of Baptist Churches in France from 1810 to 1950 (based upon a PhD).

 

"Protestants continue to support Macron" (interview)

Amid fear and polarisation, French evangelicals share “hope” as “churches continue to multiply”, says historian

Uncertainty and discontentment give the far-right a chance to win the Presidential election on Sunday.

But Protestants continue to support Macron, says researcher Sebastien Fath.

Link