With this series, the editorial team goes back to the sources of a Quebec model that is struggling in the hope of rekindling its first sparks, those that allowed our nation to distinguish itself from others. Today: secularism.
In the 1960s, God ate a whole lot of them in Quebec. The hippies and their countercultural revolution based on a reinvention of the concept of the Holy Trinity around the figures of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll were not the only ones responsible for these upheavals announced by the prophecy of Global refusal.
In volume V ofPopular history of Quebechistorian Jacques Lacoursière acually describes the contrast between the omnipresence of the Church and its inexorable decline. The Church that “seems everywhere is in fact nowhere,” he writes, quoting Université de Montréal professor and clergyman Jacques Grand’Maison.
The Second Vatican Council would not slow down the secularization of Quebec. While priests were still debating in 1970 whether to allow Sunday Mass on Saturday evenings—oh revolution!—secular society was attacking the crumbling edifice of social control through cassocks through legislative and judicial channels.
To hell with the prescriptions on divorce, on common-law unions, on contraception or on abortion! They would all be shattered over the next two decades. With hindsight, we can see that the first glimmers of secularism were inseparable from feminist struggles to free themselves from a social straitjacket that governed women’s lives, from clothing to procreation.
Of course, Catholic intellectuals participated in the first initiatives aimed at linking God to modernity, without managing to slow down a movement that would move religion from the public sphere to private life. The transformation was longer and less radical than it seems at first glance. Indeed, it would take until 2005 to complete the project of deconfessionalizing schools and until 2008 to see the creation of the Ethics and Religious Culture course.
In Genesis of Quebec society, published in 1993, the sociologist Fernand Dumont notes, in a review of the century, the definitive erosion of the Church as a “political organism and body for regulating morals”. This is one of the most marvelous accomplishments of the permanent march towards secularism. It is not so much a legacy of the Quiet Revolution as a long journey of liberation from dogmas and the guardians of the sacred word, who will never cease to aspire to the “revenge of God”, to paraphrase the sublime essay by Gilles Kepel.
To return to Dumont, he also highlighted in his essay “the floating of collective culture” that accompanies secularism. In a nation constantly searching for its bearings, this is undoubtedly the reason why the nostalgic attachment to Catholicism and its rituals (baptism, marriage) has persisted well beyond the Quiet Revolution. The same is true for adherence to a “catholic-secularism,” which took pleasure in criticizing veiled women while defending the symbolism of the crucifix in the National Assembly. Thank goodness, the latter was shelved during the Legault government’s last legislative offensive.
Today, Quebecers declare themselves among the least religious and least practicing in all of Canada, but religious fervor is also following a downward trend in the other provinces. The fault line is rather observed between support for the State Secularism Act in Quebec and its demonization elsewhere in Canada.
In Quebec’s secularism in the mirror of its religiositythe co-directors of the collective work, Jean-François Laniel and Jean-Philippe Perreault, highlight the challenges of thinking about religion in Quebec when it seems to be slipping towards the status of “foreign or anachronistic body, on the margins of culture and society.” “Secularism, in its desire to neutralize religion, is not neutral,” they say.
This is another way of looking at the Secularism Act. It was useful in completing the work of the Bouchard-Taylor report on the crisis of reasonable accommodations, even if it is too broad in its scope by including teaching staff. Let’s be frank, this law has as much to do with the march toward secularization as it does with the affirmation of identity by a majority group that has a historical love-hate relationship with Catholicism. A group that is now projecting this relationship onto other faiths that are not moving forward at the same pace in their evolving relationship with religion.
By one of those paradoxes that Quebec does not have a monopoly on among modern societies, we have killed God, but we have not overcome the irrepressible need to believe, as evidenced by the rise of spirituality based on tarot cards, witchcraft, chakras or magic rocks. We would be wrong to think that we can legislate beliefs to their extinction, especially not in a digital age where the distinctions between public and private are fading.