29 September 2026
Rachele Caggioni
Why are more people getting baptised in France?
Across a Europe where religious practice has appeared to be in decline for years, some data point to a different trend: an increasing number of adults and young people are choosing to draw closer to the Catholic Church.
Recently, the Christian experience has found fertile grounds in Ireland, Scandinavia, and even Spain, but the French case has attracted the most attention: in just four years, France has more than doubled the number of believers among both adults and teenagers: the 4,500 adults who joined the Catholic community in 2020 had grown to about 10,000 by 2025, while the 1,200 teenagers registered in 2020 now number over 7,400.
Statistically speaking, this represents a significant increase of 45% among adults and 33% among adolescents. This is a surprising phenomenon not only because it reveals a renewed need to question oneself and seek answers in spirituality, but also because it seems to translate into a desire to actively participate in it. In fact, even among those who identify as Catholic—about 3.5 million in France—only a minority tends to practice their faith, for example, by attending Mass, going to confession, or receiving Communion. When people are interested in spiritual and religious topics, the phrase “I believe in God, but I don’t believe in the Church” often comes up in related discussions.
After a long time, Catholic faith is no longer limited to an intimate and sporadic dialogue with God, but is rooted in trust in those who are committed to providing a structure and a body of teachings for each person’s faith. The Catholic community increasingly feels the need for guidance, rules for discernment, and concrete, dogmatic support on the journey toward God. But why has this “renewal of faith” been met with greater openness in France? What does this tell us about the French cultural, social, and political system? And how can we explain, or at least attempt to analyze, this sudden change in the hierarchy of values?
One of the most insightful cultural semiologists, Yuri Lotman, points out the existence of a precise methodology that repeats itself almost scientifically in the process of constructing cultural systems. His theory concerns the signs and symbols with which every cultural unit interacts during its development: the very need to define itself through self-models, values, anti-values, codes, norms, and clichés has different roots and outcomes depending on the historical, political, and social circumstances in which a culture establishes itself.
If we were to condense Yuri Lotman’s thought into a few lines, we could distinguish two modes of norm production: on the one hand, cultural systems in which custom precedes law, to the point of becoming ingrained in the social fabric and acquiring normative value; on the other, systems in which a formalized regulation, set forth in a pre-existing text, precedes custom, which is then internalized and reproduced from it. The Russian semiotician offers the example of language learning: one can learn through examples and customs (parents speaking to us in that language and us repeating after them as children) or through rules (using a grammar textbook).
Which of these two types of culture does France belong to, and how can semiotics explain the relative resurgence of faith there?
Is this a renewed interest in what Lotman categorizes as “texts”—that is, the Holy Scriptures, Catholic dogmas, and precepts—or is it a symptom of learning by assimilation, that is, by following a repeated example or custom?
To answer this semiotic question, we must begin with a characteristic that makes the French context particularly significant: France ranks among the ten most religiously diverse countries and, as the only European nation in the top ten, holds the tenth position globally according to the Religious Diversity Index published by the Pew Research Center in 2026. It should not be forgotten that this statistic also takes into account the twelve “territoires d’outre-mer,” the “overseas territories,” which have a religious history completely different from that of mainland France.
Lotman’s theory and the data presented above suggest that French culture takes on a new form as a result of the ritualization of experience: specifically, the daily experience of the Other. Is it therefore possible that the devotion to religious practice among Muslim believers—ritualized within everyday French life—has sparked a renewed desire to practice the Catholic faith as well?
In today’s polarized world, we cannot rule out the possibility that the resurgence of the Catholic faith is, on the contrary, an attempt to neutralize otherness and a desire to assert identity through opposition. Anna Maria Lorusso, professor of cultural semiotics at the University of Bologna, explains this paradox of cultural systems well in her essay *Semiotics of Culture*: “Heterogeneity is inevitable, engagement with the Other is necessary, and yet this mostly leads to homogenization, the neutralization of otherness, and standardization,” and further, “Pluralism thus reveals its limits: contrary to any notion of irenicism, coexistence does not always—and not only—generate life, dialogue, and free coexistence, but also standardization and strategies of hegemony.”
To conclude these reflections—but also as a starting point for new questions—it is useful to ask ourselves how we choose to coexist with the Other: not only in society, but also in the most ordinary experiences of daily life, starting with the family, living with roommates, and extending to relationships with colleagues in shared workspaces, where encountering the Other is often inevitable. Does the Other exist solely to be assimilated, reduced to what we already know, or can the Other participate in a pluralism capable of generating something new—in thought, in norms, and in behavior?