Samuel Paty was murdered near Paris on 16 October 2020. The 47-year-old teacher had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson about freedom of expression. Three years later, another teacher, Dominique Bernard, was killed in an Islamist attack in Arras.

Pastor Rich Bitterman begins his Medium essay, France Lost Its Christian Majority. Is America Next?, with these two murders. He then turns to the declining Christian population of France.

I kept returning to his opening. What do the murders of two teachers explain about French people no longer identifying as Christian?

Bitterman does not explicitly blame Muslims for the decline. He acknowledges secularisation, and his essay ultimately urges Christians to share their faith. Yet placing Islamist violence at the entrance to a demographic discussion creates an association that the statistics cannot establish.

What Pew Actually Found

France lost its Christian majority between 2010 and 2020. Pew Research Center estimates that Christians accounted for about 46% of the country’s population in 2020.

Across Europe, Christians represented 67% of the population in 2020, compared with roughly 75% in 2010. The religiously unaffiliated rose from about 19% to 25%. Muslims increased from approximately 5.3% to 6%.

The contrast is hard to miss. The unaffiliated share grew by about seven percentage points, while the Muslim share rose by less than one point. Europe’s main religious shift was away from Christian identification, not toward Islam.

Migration and differences in age structure affect religious composition. They deserve attention. But they do not turn a large movement out of Christianity into a story of mass conversion to Islam. Pew’s European findings and its analysis of the drivers of religious change distinguish these processes.

The More Revealing French Numbers

France’s statistics agency, INSEE, surveyed people aged 18 to 59 in metropolitan France in 2019–2020. It found that 51% reported no religion. Catholics made up 29%, Muslims 10%, and other Christians 9%. These are figures for a specific age group, not the whole French population.

The study offers a detail that deserves more attention than another argument about immigration. Among people raised Catholic, 67% still identified with their parents’ religion. Among people raised Muslim, 91% did.

Religious identity does not necessarily mean religious practice. INSEE found that only 8% of self-identified Catholics regularly attended a place of worship. Among people without a migration background, 58% reported no religion.

A church can retain its place in family memory long after regular worship has faded. The figures suggest that French Catholicism faces a problem of religious transmission as well as participation. They do not, by themselves, establish why particular people leave.

The INSEE study provides a much better starting point for that investigation than speculation about another community’s growth.

France’s Secular History Is Older Than Today’s Immigration Debate

France had been contesting the Catholic Church’s public authority for generations before contemporary Muslim immigration became a major political issue. The Revolution challenged the Church’s position. The 1905 separation law later established a secular framework for the state while protecting freedom of conscience.

That law did not tell French citizens to stop believing. Nor can it explain every later change in religious identity. But it reminds us that the relationship between France and organised Christianity has its own long history.

Why Begin With Islamist Terrorism?

Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard were murdered by Islamist extremists. Their deaths demanded a serious response from the French state and remain important to public memory.

They do not, however, explain why fewer French people identify as Christian. The pastor’s choice of opening puts a violent form of Islamism in the reader’s mind before the demographic evidence appears. The subsequent discussion of Muslim organisations and Christian-Muslim doctrine keeps Islam at the centre of attention.

I cannot know whether Bitterman intended readers to connect those subjects. I can judge the effect of the structure: it moves between security, religious identity and theology without showing that one caused the other.

Political Islamism merits scrutiny when organisations seek coercive influence or undermine democratic rights. Ordinary Muslim religious practice is not the same thing. Neither subject can substitute for an account of French Christian disaffiliation.

The Pastor’s Strongest Point Comes Later

Bitterman eventually explains the Christian understanding of Jesus, the crucifixion and salvation. Islam rejects Jesus’s divinity, and mainstream Islamic interpretation differs sharply from the Christian account of the crucifixion. Those are genuine theological disagreements.

A pastor is entitled to explain his faith, just as Muslims are entitled to explain theirs. The disagreement itself says little about the reasons French Catholics stop attending church.

Near the end, Bitterman warns Christians not to become so absorbed by the spread of Islam that they neglect sharing their own beliefs. I found that more persuasive than the demographic framing. It asks Christians to consider their own mission instead of treating another religion’s presence as an explanation for institutional decline.

America’s Question Is Different, but Familiar

Pew found that 62% of American adults identified as Christian in 2023–2024, down from 78% in 2007. The decline is substantial, although Pew also found relative stability in Christian identification since around 2019.

France and the United States have different histories of church and state. Neither country’s future can be predicted by extending an earlier trend in a straight line. But the American figures also point toward a question about people who no longer retain the religious identity in which they were raised. See Pew’s Religious Landscape Study.

The Empty Pews Came First

I wrote earlier about a Dutch church that became a gym. Its congregation had dwindled before the building changed use. The new owner did not cause the empty pews.

France’s religious statistics demand similar care with chronology. The growth of Muslim communities is part of the country’s changing religious landscape. It does not explain why so many people raised Catholic have stopped identifying as Catholic, or why regular worship is uncommon even among those who retain the label.

A pastor may regard that as a spiritual crisis. A secular French citizen may see freedom from inherited religious obligations. Both perspectives belong in the discussion.

But if the concern is Christianity’s future, the harder inquiry begins inside Christian families and churches: what changed between one generation and the next?