Free Republic

Around one in four French Muslims, mostly young people, support an ultra-conservative form of Islam, including the wearing of the full-face veil, but the vast majority accept France’s strict secular laws, a study showed Sunday. The Ifop survey carried out for a major study of French Muslims by Institut Montaigne, a liberal think-tank, showed that the vast majority of people who identify as Muslim accept curbs on religion in public. But 60 percent considered girls should nonetheless be allowed to wear the headscarf in school, 12 years after it and other religious symbols were banished from the classroom, the survey...

The cultural civil war in which America is engaged is, in large measure, about American exceptionalism. Conservative America generally believes in the concept; liberal America generally finds it chauvinistic and dangerous. What is American exceptionalism? The belief that America often knows better than the world what is right and wrong. This belief drives most of the world's opinion-makers crazy. And it particularly infuriates the American Left, that part of America that trusts what is called "world opinion" more than it trusts the American people. And from where does this belief in American exceptionalism derive? Mostly from the religious beliefs that...