There are now as many atheists as there are believers in Quebec. According to a Léger surveyThe duty, to the question “Do you personally believe in God?” », 51% of Quebecers answered yes and 49% no. Among francophones in Canada and Quebec, the majority of non-believers has already been reached.
These results signal a historic break. The ancient Catholic Tibet described by the playwright Paul Claudel a century ago falls into disbelief as the government announces its intention to replace the course in ethics and religious culture with citizenship training and where the debates take place. continue around the Law on the secularism of the State.
The online survey conducted from October 8 to 10 among 1,545 Canadians also highlights regional disparities across the country: in Ontario as in Alberta, two out of three people say they are religious, while in British Columbia, it drops to 53%, almost like in Quebec, what, taking into account the margin of error.
These results can be compared with the group portrait recently produced in France by the French Institute of Public Opinion, where again half of the respondents said they did not believe in God, a first in the country of the invention of laicity. The Quebec poll took up the French question to establish the same historical observation.
In 1966, only one in five French people (20%) declared themselves to be non-believers. The decline in faith is in fact confirmed in many countries, even in the United States. According to a 2016 survey, 45% of young Americans (18-30 years old) said they did not believe in God.
Atheist youth
In Canada, women (61%) believe a little more than men (56%). But it is above all age that becomes the most determining factor in this group portrait, more than income, occupation and even education: 54% of young Canadians aged 18-34 say they do not believe in God. Among those aged 55 and over, one in three respondents (36%) fall into this category.
The young Quebecer Elias, who requested anonymity, was brought up without God and he is no worse off. The 20-year-old lives in the Montreal area. His family with Maronite Christian roots is originally from Lebanon. Her mother, “emancipated, truly detached from religion”, was particularly important in her non-religious education.
“I grew up as an atheist in a family which had a rather negative attitude towards religion, summarizes Élias. As a teenager I questioned this idea and wondered if I was not rather agnostic, since I can’t really tell if there is a God or not. Over time, the more I think about it, now, in the present moment, I can say that I do not believe in a higher entity. I am atheist. “
Euthanasia of God
What are we talking about, anyway? Atheism, agnosticism, non-affiliation, à la carte religions, personalization of faith?
“The questions come back to the fundamental definition of religion and religion, of belief or of the status of belief,” replied Professor Martin Meunier, sociologist of religions at the University of Ottawa, who has been studying these realities for decades. . “In sociology, we talk about the non-religious and we note their rise in importance. But this theme itself has connotations. A person may well declare himself without religion, not to have a religious practice, while demonstrating rare moments of religiosity, on the fringes of life, in times of crisis. “
The professor finds significant the difference of 10 points between the percentage of unbelievers in Quebec and that in the Rest of Canada (ROC) revealed by the Léger poll. He wonders whether this difference is due to the higher number of first- or second-generation immigrants outside the province.
He himself is currently completing an investigation of life stories. Interviews of three hours each with about fifty people follow the religious attitudes of grandparents to grandchildren.
“We realize that it is very rare for an individual to have a constant religiosity in his life,” he says. Rather, people have three or four moments of strong religiosity in their lives, times that can last for months and are associated with crises – separation, illness, death. The religious is then used to get through the ordeal, to find a certain meaning in the face of suffering and to recover in a quasi-therapeutic way. There is a sort of identity reconstruction through the mediation of religion. “
The specialist adds that this distinction does not exclude frank atheism, pure and hard unbelief, one might say, a phenomenon which is actually growing. Elias is one of them. Moments of serious and deep questioning about the meaning of life or death, he too has plenty of them. Only, his answers do not push him to resuscitate the dead or euthanized gods.
“I don’t have a negative point of view on religion, I sometimes discuss religious beliefs with relatives, but God, I do not believe in it, he sums up. I don’t need this to answer existential questions and find meaning, even in times of crisis. I wonder and I do not see the logic of having only one ready-made answer. I live very well not knowing certain things, what is after death for example. “
Martin Meunier adds that this now fairly widespread attitude signals a very new social fact in Quebec. “The situation has changed in the last 15 years or so,” he says. We went into another regime of religiosity. “
Cultural Catholicism in Peril
The sociologist explains that with and after the Quiet Revolution, between 1960 and the beginning of the 2000s, the old priest-ridden province lived a moment of “cultural Catholicism”. Another 75% of all children born in 2001 in Quebec were baptized, despite an extremely low rate of practice of people, of the order of 3 to 5%, on a weekly basis, which is still mainly associated with the elderly. or from recent immigration.
“It was huge and I recalculated several times,” says the professor. The average Quebecer practiced little or not and he believed in a lot of things, but with varying intensity. “
This world therefore seems to be changing rapidly. The rate of people baptized has dropped by half for newborn babies. “A portion of the population remains in cultural Catholicism, this place of identity, historical, intergenerational gathering, while another portion of the population passes to a pluralist regime of much more individual religiosity. “
We must also qualify. There are several Quebec in Quebec. “In a way, Montreal looks more like Toronto or Ottawa than Quebec or the regions,” says the professor at the University of Ontario. In the diocese of Chicoutimi, more than 90% of people say they are Catholics. It’s almost everyone. In the suburbs, the evangelical movement thrives. In Montreal, there is a whole new fauna of non-religionists, young people are breaking away from traditions and non-Christian religions abound. “
The professor finally recalls that at the last census of 2011, 73% of Quebecers declared themselves Roman Catholics. Data from the new 2021 census will be released shortly. “It will be necessary to monitor whether the fall in Catholic membership continues and resonates with these data on personal belief in God. It is to be bet that with the Sauvé report (on pedophilia in France) and the horrors of boarding schools, cases in which several religious communities were involved, the indicators of Catholic membership will continue to fall. “