France calls it laïcité — a word that translates roughly as secularism but carries the full weight of two centuries of French political theology. In practice, it has come to mean something the English word does not quite capture: not merely the absence of a state religion, but the active suppression of religion’s visible presence in public life. And increasingly, it means French Muslim women cannot play basketball in a headscarf.
The French Senate voted 210 to 81 in favor of a bill that would ban the wearing of “ostensibly religious” clothing across all French sports competitions — from professional leagues down to amateur swimming pools. The bill would also prohibit prayer in any sports facility and require sports educators to pass government background investigations before receiving professional credentials. The National Assembly has yet to vote on the measure, but the Senate’s margin makes the direction of French policy unmistakable.
Six months before that vote, France had already barred its own athletes from wearing the hijab at the 2024 Paris Olympics — a restriction that applied to no other competing nation. A review of rules across 38 European countries by Amnesty International found that France is the only one to have enshrined bans on religious headwear at the level of national law or official sports regulation. This is not a fringe position tolerated at the margins of French governance. It is state policy, endorsed by the courts, defended by cabinet ministers, and now being extended.
For Americans who take the First Amendment seriously, this ought to register as more than a foreign-policy footnote.
Freedom of Religion vs. Freedom From Religion
The constitutional DNA of France and the United States looks, on the surface, nearly identical. Both nations drew from Enlightenment principles. Both enshrined separation of church and state. Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the famous “wall of separation” letter in 1802, was himself heavily influenced by French philosophical traditions, and the debt runs in both directions.
But the divergence, as legal scholars have long noted, is fundamental. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The operative verb is prohibiting. The government may not obstruct religious expression. The French framework, by contrast, was built not to protect religion from the state but to protect the state — and, in the French reading, the citizen — from religion. As one comparative analysis puts it plainly: the United States guarantees freedom of religion, while France strives for freedom from religion.
This is not a semantic distinction. It determines who bears the burden of justification. Under the American framework, the government must justify any restriction on religious expression. Under French laïcité, the religious practitioner must justify why their expression does not constitute a threat to republican values. The presumption runs the other direction.
French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin captured this logic precisely in June 2023 when he said, after the nation’s highest court upheld the soccer federation’s hijab ban: “You don’t wear religious clothes when you play sports. When you play soccer, you don’t need to know the religion of the person in front of you.” This is the state speaking not as a neutral arbiter but as a moral authority — deciding which human identities are appropriate for which public activities.
A Pattern, Not an Incident
The sports ban does not exist in isolation. It is the latest increment in a policy architecture that has been under construction for more than two decades. In 2004, France banned all “conspicuous religious symbols” from public schools — a measure that nominally applied to crosses and kippot alongside the hijab, but whose enforcement, critics argue, fell overwhelmingly on Muslim girls. In 2010, France banned full-face coverings in all public spaces. In 2023, the government extended the school prohibition to the abaya, ruling that the garment “ostensibly manifests a religious affiliation” even though it carries no explicit religious designation. Each step has been framed as a defense of republican neutrality. Each step has fallen more heavily on one community than any other.
UN human rights experts, including the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief and the Working Group on discrimination against women and girls, formally communicated their concerns to the French government in October 2024. Their assessment was unambiguous: “The neutrality and secular nature of the State are not legitimate grounds for imposing restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief. Any limitations of these freedoms must be proportionate, necessary . . . and justified by facts that can be demonstrated, and not by presumptions, assumptions or prejudices.” France has not changed course.
Basketball player Hélène Bâ, who was barred from competition since October 2023 for refusing to remove her headscarf, described the experience to Amnesty International: the walk to the stands after being ejected from the bench, the public nature of the exclusion, the sense that one’s body and its coverings have become the subject of state adjudication. This is not a hypothetical rights violation. It is a woman being removed from a gym.
What This Means on the Western Shore of the Atlantic
American advocates for religious liberty — across faith traditions — sometimes treat the French case as self-evidently cautionary and leave the argument there. That is a mistake. The lessons are more specific, and they point to specific pressure points in domestic law.
The French model succeeded in part because French secularism became a constitutional identity, not merely a legal rule. Laïcité is named in the first article of the French Constitution as a defining characteristic of the Republic, alongside “indivisible,” “democratic,” and “social.” This gave courts and legislators a positive constitutional mandate for restricting religious expression, not just a neutral baseline. The restrictions on religious expression did not arrive as attacks on freedom. They arrived as implementations of a competing constitutional value.
That pattern — the conversion of a secular principle from a constraint on government into an affirmative government power — is precisely the risk that Employment Division v. Smith introduced into American jurisprudence in 1990. Justice Scalia’s majority opinion held that neutral, generally applicable laws do not require a religious exemption, even when they substantially burden religious practice. Smith did not create laïcité in America, but it reduced the friction between government regulation and religious exercise in ways that left minority faith communities, particularly those whose practices are unfamiliar or politically inconvenient, with fewer procedural protections.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 was Congress’s response to Smith, reimposing a compelling-interest test for federal law. State RFRAs vary in scope and coverage. The patchwork is imperfect, and the doctrinal tension between Smith and RFRA remains a live fault line in American religious liberty law — one that courts have not definitively resolved.
France’s trajectory offers a data point on what happens when that fault line is resolved in the wrong direction: restrictions accumulate, each one justified by the last, each one extending the terrain where the state presumes authority over religious identity. The sports arena is not the end. It is the latest boundary marker.
The Consistency Problem
American religious liberty advocates face a credibility challenge that the French situation clarifies. The principle of religious expression as a protected right is only as strong as its consistent application. If American conservatives champion the right of a Christian baker to decline a same-sex wedding cake but remain silent when a Muslim athlete cannot compete in a headscarf, they are not defending a principle. They are defending a preferred outcome. The same is true in the other direction.
Religious liberty as a constitutional value requires defending the expression one finds unfamiliar as vigorously as the expression one finds congenial. The First Amendment does not ask whether a given religious practice commands widespread sympathy. It asks whether the government has a compelling reason to burden it. France’s answer, increasingly, is: the state’s vision of civic identity is compelling enough. That is an answer Americans should not be willing to accept — for anyone.
Hélène Bâ did not stop being French when she put on a headscarf. She stopped being permitted to play basketball. The distinction between those two facts is the distance between the French constitutional model and the American one. It is worth maintaining.
Michael Peabody, is the founder and publisher of ReligiousLiberty.TV, an independent publication covering First Amendment law and religious freedom.