this may shed some light on your question.
According to Wikipedia: - in the US "laws prohibiting hate speech outside of obscenity, defamation, incitement to riot, and fighting words are unconstitutional" - in France (where I'm from) "hate speech laws are matters of both civil law and criminal law, protecting individuals and groups from being defamed or insulted because they belong or do not belong, in fact or in fancy, to an ethnicity, a nation, a race, a religion, a sex, or a sexual orientation, or because they have a handicap."
I'm not sure what you were referring to as what I "think is happening"? I'm aware of the history. I'm also aware that in response to such terrorist attacks western nations tend to abandon their tolerance of the associated religions, regardless of how loose the association may be.
First and before anything, I think the biggest part of the society has quite ambivalent ideas on freedom of religion, probably due to our "1905" law on the separation of church(es) and state. For 100 years the families have learnt to let their religion at home and not to display it. Then immigrants from everywhere have a hard time understanding or adapting, so a normal reaction from a French to seeing a veiled lady is somewhere between: "may she look the way she wants" and "can't she just dress like anybody" (and I'm not even talking about "is she forced by her husband or father to wear that"). That makes the freedom of religion a complicated one: you don't get problems for following a religion but for displaying it (so still because of your religion, really). I hope you can grasp this particular shape of french society. Now I think that the events in Toulouse shook and shocked the country, who then wanted to reconcile/reunite: see the big gatherings that happened in memory of the victims. It's still a bit early to observe but the polls at one month of the presidential election show an interesting trend: the far-right (hate-based speech) decreasing while the far-left (unification-based speech) increasing. So all in all tolerance and terrorism have really different paths in France, and hopefully the society remains clever enough to understand the distinction.
It's an unusual thing to grasp that the french people want to keep religion something that is separated from the state completely. Does this include christians too? The reason I say it's unusual to grasp is that in the US the people that want to unify church and state tend to be the christians. And we have many of them here. They want religion included in schools but when asked about including other faiths: Muslim, Hindu etc they are opposed. Personally, I've had it up to my ears with religion. I'm tired of it and wish it would either go away or stay "at home" as you put it.
Until 1905 we used to be officially a catholic country so catholics are especially the ones who have learnt early to keep their beliefs quiet. Except obviously in religious institutions, it feels disturbing to see any religious display. But the ambivalence shows the situation is not yet ideal either.
I think religion is going to play a major role in the upcoming US Presidential election. I wish it wouldn't.
The whole problem is not so much the people who believe the religions, as the governments who run the law and the institutes.... it would be better if they left religion to people and did away with 'churches' and 'temples' and solid places of worship. Being Irish, I see far too many churches around the place, and went to a school where religious education was more or less orientated around Christianity....there is no room in schools here for anybody else. The answer in my oppinion is either do away with state regulated religion and keep religion out of government...or teach something like Philosophy; where almost every view is embraced and there is no room to form a prejudice.
Well, that's the problem inherent to the first amendment, isn't it? People are generally allowed to say what they want. I don't like people being hateful anymore than the next guy, but I think people's right to speak their mind should be protected. Even if their opinions are as hateful as these folks.