This is the last installment of my translation of some preliminary results from Charles Soulié’s study of religion among Paris-8 students, and this is going to be the post where I out myself as some kind of rationalist and modernist… Or at any rate where I express surprise at the non-negligible rates of magical and supernatural belief within the Paris-8 student body. I’ll sum things up: about 1 in 3 students believe in the Evil Eye (or at least they checked “yes” on the questionnaire), about 1 in 5 believe in djinn, and about 1 in 5 believe in astrology. These are minority views, in all cases, certainly, and are no doubt products of the radically transcultural space of Paris-8, where normative French national beliefs are often not in effect. A couple of these seem to be characteristically Islamic beliefs, others more diffuse across religions. To be honest, I can’t say I really understand what it’s like to believe in the Evil Eye, though I do have some idea what it means to believe in astrology (I give the astrologers credit for their acceptance that our lives are determined from the outside, though I strongly disagree that star positions are the most important node in this process of determination). For a devoutly secular person like me… there’s something always just slightly disquieting in reading over the substantial rates of non-secularism in the world.

A further note on this data: The last question here deals with wearing religious signs (strongest among the Greek Orthodox, as you’ll see). I’d emphasize here that our analysis of these religious artifacts ought to be somewhat different from our analysis of the rates of evil-eye-belief. A worn artifact is a sign of external identification (or verification) of one’s social identity in a way that a mental acceptance of some phenomenon (e.g. djinn) need not be. Even religious signs that are worn under the clothing, it seems to me, still have this characteristic of identity marking, even if one is thereby only signaling to oneself one’s own identity. (It’s interesting to note that among these signs of identity, only one, the headscarf, seems to have become a major public controversy. But we won’t get into the French politics of the veil just now.)

So without further ado…

Table 2: Belief in the Evil Eye by religion

Table 3: Belief in djinn (spirits) by religion

Table 4: Belief in astrology by religion

Soulié comments:

Astrology concerns first of all the Buddhists, those who belong to other religions, the Catholics, and the Greek Orthodox. Leaving aside the Catholics, we observe that within this population women (35.5%) believe in astrology more than men (20.5%), and that believers who are moderately practicing believe in it more than others. (This fits with the results of other studies of this matter by Daniel Boy and Guy Michelat.) Globally, the Protestants subscribe the least to magical or paranormal beliefs, and bear the fewest religious signs. Inversely, while Catholics tend not to be practicing, they do tend to wear religious signs more frequently (along with the Greek Orthodox and Other Christians). Muslims tend not to wear religious signs; although wearing the veil does characterize Islam, it ultimately involves only a very small minority of respondents.

Table 5: Wearing religious signs by religion

Table 6: Type of religious signs worn by the students

(Table numbers come from Soulié’s original document, available on request.)