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1. The Church in France It is hard to say how many of the nearly 60 million people in France belong to a church, for official statistics do not list church membership. The largest church, the Roman Catholic, is uncertain of its own precise membership. There are no church taxes (Church Finances), nor is there legal membership (Church Membership). If we take baptism as a standard, then most people (80 percent) belong to the church. Even anticlericalists want their children baptized, and the church does not refuse them. Otherwise, however, only about 50 percent of the people make use of the church’s ministry and maintain their allegiance to it, while only a small portion of this 50 percent (variously estimated between 5 and 30 percent) takes an active part in church life. The modern wave of secularism is less immediately obvious than in other European countries, since the process of secularization began in France many years before it became a fact in other countr…