Nicolas Sarkozy is the president of faith, hope and love. The French elected him in May in the hope of change, which he doesn’t just call le changement (”change”) but la rupture (a “break” with the past). Love? Just take a look at the latest Parisian soap opera starring “President Bling-Bling,” pouting ex-wife Cécilia and new flame Carla Bruni. As for faith, we’ve been reporting and blogging about his plans to remodel laïcité, France’s trademark separation of church and state, and expect more to come this year.

For anyone following issues of faith in France, the bilingual blogger Sébastien Fath is a must-read (along with this blog, of course!). A leading French specialist on evangelical Protestantism, he has been blogging for a while en français at Sébastien Fath, commenting on the news in France, the United States and elsewhere. I’ve just discovered he took a bold leap over the language barrier a few months ago and launched an English-language blog called French Windows. In his latest posts there, he discusses in religion and politics in France and the U.S. and asks whether Sarkozy understands laïcité at all.

Nicolas Sarkozy likes to talk about religion in public life, even though many French don’t think it has any role there. He never misses the opportunity to tell religious leaders how important faith is as a moral guide for modern societies. Every now and then, he goes public with it in a provocative way. He could not have been more provocative than he was on Thursday when he met Pope Benedict XVI and was inducted as the honorary canon of the Basilica of Saint John Lateran (a centuries-old tradition for French heads of state). He delivered a long speech praising faith’s role in public life and urging believers in general and Catholics in particular to play a more active role in French public debates.

“There has probably never been a French president who defended his country’s Catholic heritage so vigorously,” the French Catholic daily La Croix wrote approvingly.

We’ve covered the visit and done a story on the reactions in France (which continued to roll in after our story ran). One typical reaction was Le Monde’s front-page cartoon showing Sarkozy dressed as a bishop while George Bush, who has a cross and a U.S. flag with crosses instead of stars), tells Pope Benedict “I think this guy’s stealing my job.” The French almost instinctively contrast their reticence about bringing religion into politics to the way U.S. politicians display and debate their faith in public.

But just as Sarko l’americain — as his critics call him — is not really all that American in his policies, he is not all that American in his “Godtalk” either. He discusses the role of religion in public life in a broad sociological and political manner, as one of several possible stabilising elements in modern societies swept up in rapid change. It’s clear in his approach to Islam, for example, that he mostly wants moderate imams to help calm the poor suburbs by giving Muslim youths there a sense of purpose and direction in their lives. The details are not as important as the result. He wants results (which also strikes the French as very American).

Sarkozy rarely gets specific about religion, though. It’s not about this or that reading of Scripture, not about rejecting evolution or wondering whether someone is Christian or Muslim or Jewish enough to be acceptable. It’s certainly not about divine inspiration for any policy. His is a more philosophical approach. “A person who believes is a person who hopes. The republic has an interest in having many men and women who hope,” he said in his speech.

The president is also reluctant to speak about his personal views. While he says he is a Catholic “by tradition and in my heart” (as he told Vatican Radio), he is twice divorced, rarely attends Mass and has drawn criticism from Catholic bishops for cracking down on immigration and liberalising Sunday shopping laws. But that didn’t stop him from attending Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger’s funeral in Notre Dame or going to the bishops’ conference reception to congratulate the current archbishop of Paris, André Vingt-Trois, on being named a cardinal.

Still, Sarkozy is the most faith-friendly president to come along in France in a long time, so religious leaders aren’t complaining . But they are waiting to see if he puts his rhetoric into action.

The Economist, which printed God’s obituary in its millennium issue, has produced a long and very interesting survey on religion and politics around the world in its latest issue. There’s also an editorial on the separation of church and state and an audio interview with the author John Micklethwait.

As the editor of one of the leading journals of the globalised world, it’s interesting to hear what he says about religion:

“Religion is a bulwark against globalisation for a lot of people. I think you see this particularly in the Islamic world,” he said. But there was also a positive side, which he said could be seen in the United States where so many people read Rick Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life. “They’re saying, look, here’s a lifestyle that helps you get the best out of globalisation. I think a long time ago, we made this sort of category mistake, which was to associate modernity with secularism. I think, really, modernity goes much better with pluralism.”

“A free market in religion generally tends to help religion and, I would argue on the whole, it tends to help the state as well. Fundamentally, I think it’s better, the sort of religion we’re heading towards now, which is much more based around choice, far more around individual choice than used to be. It’s not just a question of religions people are born into. It’s a question of religions people are choosing.”

Lots more in the survey itself.

It is now clear that Turkey, a country to which Western visitors have often applied adjectives such as “timeless” and “slothful”, is changing profoundly, and with un-Oriental speed.

Anyone who’s been following the news out of Turkey this year has to nod in agreement when reading the lead to Christopher de Bellaigue’s interesting article in the New York Review of Books. It was only last April that the army issued a veiled threat to intervene if the governing AK party — usually called a “party with Islamist roots” — tried to overturn Turkey’s secular system.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan called their bluff and won a snap general election, allowing his AK partner Abdullah Gül to be elected president. The AK-led government now plans to replace the military-era constitution with a new document that will confirm “our democratic, secular and social state and guarantee basic rights and freedoms”, as Gül told parliament early this month.

Gül and Erdogan started their careers as Islamists critical of secularism, but along the way came to see secularism as the best guarantee of more rights for Muslims. The secular system, they found, pledges to respect individual rights — the problem was that the rigid army-guided secularism of Kemalist Turkey did not allow them. One shorthand way of describing these ex-Islamists is “Muslim Democrats” analogous to the Christian Democrats of post-war Western Europe. Their stress is much more on promoting Muslim values than imposing Muslim laws. This is an important turn in political thinking in the Muslim world. If Turkey continues along the road it’s on, it could become easier to answer the question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy.

De Bellaigue’s “Turkey at the Turning Point?” gives a useful overview of the evolution of the AK party which he says “gives grounds for hope. It is possible that an Islamist movement with a history of intolerance and bigotry will succeed in transforming Turkish politics along genuinely democratic lines”.

One of the factors behind this evolution in Islamist thinking in Turkey is Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim preacher who founded a large and influential movement named after him. He advocates what might be called a “middle class Islam” that advocates a secular state, personal freedom, religious tolerance and an entrepreneurial spirit. The movement has built up a large media and business empire in Turkey and a network of more than 100 schools in Turkey and Central Asia. It is active in international dialogue with other religions.

A three-day conference on Gülen and his movement was held in London last weekend. Its website has posted a massive 755-page PDF with all the papers presented there. Two that are particularly helpful for understanding this movement and the changing relationship between Islam and politics in Turkey are “What Made The Gülen Movement Possible?” by Mustafa Akyol and “Changing Perspectives on Islamism and Secularism in Turkey: The Gülen Movement and the AK Party” by Ahmet T. Kuru.

Akyol makes the interesting point that these Turkish Muslims came to see the West as better than the limited “Westernising” that Turkey’s secularist establishment offered them. He quotes Gülen, who lives in the United States, as saying:

“Islam flourishes in American and Europe much better than in many Muslim countries. This means freedom and the rule of law are necessary for personal Islam. Moreover, Islam does not need the state to survive, but rather needs educated and financially rich communities to flourish. In a way, not the state but rather community is needed under a full democratic system.”