Dieu – à droite ou à gauche?

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Abstract
In his study of the spatial symbolism of primitive societies, Robert Hertz noted that the left was the side associated with weakness and evil, the right being on the contrary linked to purity, strength, and religion. The works of I. Wile and V. Fritsch, among others, have confirmed this privileged – though not universal – association of right with the positive side of the dichotomies which together with left-right form symbolic constellations used to interpret the social as well as the physical environment. These studies – based on the comparison of religious rituals, social customs, and languages – have not considered or considered only incidentally the use made of the left-right classification for the ordering of one's political landscape. This article is a partial attempt to do so from the answers of American, French, French-Canadian, and English-Canadian respondents to a questionnaire administered in 1967–8. The respondents were asked to locate selected religious and profane concepts in an extreme left to extreme right visual scale. The hypothesis that the students interviewed, like the primitives studied by Hertz, would see religion on the right was verified for the concepts God, religion, and clergyman but not for Jesus Christ which tended to be located on the left. The deviance of Jesus Christ, rather than taken as ground for rejecting the hypothesis, is explained by the non-religious, the man-like rather than God-like qualities associated with that concept.

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