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Originally Posted by SeattleUte
You evince a dismayingly simplistic view of French attitudes toward their mother church. (It reflects traditional anti-Catholicism of your religious heritage.) There's no question that the French hold the perpetrators of the French Revolution in lower regard than Catholic clergy of the age, and especially Catholic clergy of today. Today if you visit the magnificent medieval French cathedrals French sadly point out damage done by French revolutionary thugs. Everyone knows about the perpetual rising and falling guillotine blades, which came ultimately to decapitate the original perpetrators of the Revolution, but that was not the half of it. Ironically, as often happens with revolutions, the French Revolution itself has come to stand for ideological and dogmatic excess. More important, whatever the Catholic Church's transgressions, and admittedly there are many, any educated person would credit the distinction between Catholicism and Islam as a but for cause of the difference between what we have become and what the Middle East has become.
French are more aware than your average American of the complex interplay between the Catholic church and the intellectual movements that made our modern world. For them it's an old story. France was arguably the cradle of the Enlightenment, and later the Romantic movement, which reacted to the excesses of the Enlightenment.
But I digress. Logically, if the LDS Church presented such a positive contrast to the Catholic Church, your point (the factual predicate of which is just plain wrong, as explained above) would lead us to expect that France, with its strong Catholic presence, should be a hotbed of Mormon conversions. It's not, the contrary is true, and for the obvious reasons. Carrying your logic further, how do you explain the virtual absence of LDS converts in countries such as Germany, Holland and Great Britain where the Protestant Reformation came to dominate, and being a Catholic involved risking life and limb long before the French Revolution?
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You're just as guilty as you accuse Noah of. You've oversimplified and ignored aspects of French society and their "relationship" with their church.
Noah has valid access in that he lives there.
What is your relationship to France? How well do you converse in French?
I admit my relationship at times with French society is superficial, but it has existed for 36 years, ranging from travel, linguistics, and poetry.
First point. Not all segments of any society, let along French society are sophisticated. As an example, when I served a mission in Germany, I was excited. I thought here will be a sophisticated bunch of intellectuals who understood Goethe and Lessing. For whom Kant would be commonplace. Boy was I disappointed. The average German heard about those things once in school, but had no familiarity with it. Same with the French; just because their reading of the telephone annuaire sounds cool, doesn't make it anything more than a phone book.
Second, French intellectual traditions often are almost counter-intuitive. In French writing, they go bottoms up, starting with a thesis and seeking out information that merely complies with their thesis. At one time, double blind scientific studies were uncommon, or at least not required. I remember researching a case for the FTC in hair growth. The studies proposed by the scheisters were French and Finnish, non-double blind studies, basically testimonials and they passed that off as science.
Third, France, as well as Germany, reject religion, not out of intellectual sophistication, but out of wealth. Education probably plays a role, but in my research a smaller role. Money plays a bigger role, usually, in religiosity. If you're needy, you think about things, but if you have no needs, you play and stop thinking about things, to state it overly simplistically. The Church has demographics as to which groups are most receptive and least receptive. The French have almost no relationship to their Church. It's very odd to be religious in French society. It's frowned upon. Mind you, I like the French, I try to understand them, but it's very awkward being French, it's awkward to work within the labyrinthian maze which is French society. It is cumbersome, but I wouldn't characterize French relations with her Church to be sophisticated. Yes, there are French intellectuals who recognize the roles her Church played, but the average French citizen has abdicated his religion and the average Frenchman is not very cultivated or sophisticated. That is the greatest myth ever perpetrated.
The least receptive are the very wealthy, not the most educated. The poorest have no time either.