School of Social and Political Science

Description

In recent years, mainstream commentators in France have struggled to analyse the rise in ecological commitment among Catholics. In pre-pandemic years, for instance, something of a moral panic emerged in the press around the matter of urban Catholic intellectuals choosing to leave the cities in order to settle in rural towns and villages. Many feared that this ostensible advocacy of small-scale, locally-situated green lifestyles hid a nefarious identity politics – a reactionary promotion of the (rural and Christian) 'roots' of France at odds with the Republican ideal of civic nationalism.

In this talk, I consider the changing scalar imaginaries of political and ecological responsibility held by young French Catholics inspired by the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, and in particular by Pope Francis’s 2015 call to ‘Care for Our Common Home’. For them, I argue, the key scalar logic at stake in the Catholic turn to ecological commitment is not 'localism' but 'subsidiarity': the principle of the 'smallest scale appropriate'. Rather than promoting a particular pre-fabricated politics, I suggest that they are engaging in an evaluation of the 'appropriateness' of multiple ways of scaling economic, political, and community life – scales which may be both smaller and larger than that of the Republican nation-state.

By bringing a scalar lens to the anthropology of religion, the talk therefore examines the fraught place of French Catholics on the national public stage not (only) in terms of a conflictual presence of religious actors in a secular political sphere, but as a tension between two visions of the scalar articulation of responsibility, individual dignity, and collective ‘Common Good’.