The Marches for Jesus in Paris.
Résumé
This chapter analyses the Marches for Jesus in Paris as an illustration of the tensions that shape a global city combining an ethnic “hyper-diversity” with an “hyper-concentration” of political and social resources. The urban fabric of the Paris region is shaped by deep socio-economic inequalities and spatial segregation. Within Protestantism, these inequalities are partly intertwined with ethnic boundaries between “indigenous” Protestants and evangelical migrant populations, whose position is peripheral in three ways: spatially, socially and within the protestant institutions. After having replaced the Marches within the context of Parisian Protestantism and the frame of French laïcité, the chapter shows how the symbolic dimension of central Paris fosters this kind of claim for visibility and strategies of “spiritual recapture” of the urban space; and how the massive participation of evangelical migrants in the Marches has raised questions about their ability to pray for (and in the name of) the French nation.