ABSTRACT
Rapid economic, social and cultural change in Western societies since World War II has not left religion untouched. As the first youth generation educated en masse, the post-war generation lived its formative years in a society characterized simultaneously by the economic transformations of the 1960s and by the political and moral trauma that decolonization provoked. The chapter highlights general trends while concentrating on the case of Roman Catholicism in its dominant position in French society. Roman Catholicism is the faith to which 82 percent of the French claim to belong. Finally, one must point out that, while religious and non-religious appropriations of the Christian tradition are proliferating, there is a growing tendency towards accommodating these "traditions within the tradition" on the basis of similarities with earlier periods in the religious development of France. One can argue, therefore, that the post-war generation is the one that experienced most directly a major cultural transformation in France.
