A pledge to combat every form of “political, economic and religious” extremism and build a “society in which everyone can live peacefully together”: the declaration is made by the French Protestant Churches in a communiqué issued on 1st February at the end of a national colloquium on extremism held in Strasbourg. “We understand says the statement the difficulty of living together and share the fear of the stranger, of the violence and delinquency in our cities and suburbs. We also understand the difficulty of those who see the world changing too rapidly”. “But there are ideas and forms of conduct we cannot accept”. The Protestant Churches reject above all the idea that the foreigner is “the cause of all our woes” and “the claim that differences between people justify exclusion and hatred. We resist add the Protestant Churches the forces that destroy the fundamental rules of our society, human rights and democracy”. The Protestant Federation also rejects all forms of social exclusion, and a view of man that reduces him to “producer and consumer”, to the “logic of the market”, to “the god of money”, and to the “commercialisation of the human being”. The Federation pledges to listen to “those who cannot express themselves in our society”, to be their mouthpiece, to “encourage dialogue in our local districts” and “participate in the search for solutions to the problems of society”.
