Lisa Richmond: My name is Lisa Richmond.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: And my name is Jean-Christophe Jasmin. We both work at the think tank Cardus and share the desire to foster greater understanding and dialogue between Anglophone and Francophone Canadians.
So one subject that’s been especially controversial across Canada is the Quebec legislation on laïcité, commonly known as Bill 21, which was passed in the Quebec National Assembly in 2019. It’s best known as the law that prohibits the wearing of religious symbols in certain positions of authority within Quebec’s public service, such as police officers, judges, and public school teachers.
This podcast series is an in-depth look at the social and political history that culminated in the present law. It combines our own study of this topic with interviews we’ve conducted with knowledgeable experts whose voices you will hear. As this series is an audio documentary, we as hosts intend to be as neutral as possible so that you can decide what you think. And the people we interview, of course, will express their own views.
Because this documentary focuses on history and social and political philosophy, we set out to speak to people who are academics or other experts on these topics, or who have played a role in legislation or court cases. This series does not give voice to individual citizens who could tell you how the law affects them directly. Another series focused on these voices would be well worth doing too.
There are four parts to this series. The first episode is on history. The second episode focuses on contemporary politics. The third is on the opposing visions of laïcité. And the fourth is on opposing models.
Now, let’s dive in.
What Is Laïcité?
Narration: What is laïcité? Laïcité as a concept has its roots in France, and the word has no exact equivalent in the English-speaking world. The word secular, or in French, séculier, comes from a Latin word, saeculum, meaning a period of time or an age. By extension, the word took on the meaning of “this world and its affairs” — this present and visible world, as opposed to the eternal or spiritual world.
The whole idea that some things are or should be secular arose in the Christian civilization of the West, and it was developed by Christian and non-Christian thinkers over many centuries. This idea echoes Jesus’ invitation to give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. So just as civil authority should not interfere in the life of the church and other religions, the church should not oversee temporal affairs or be confused with the political community. These two distinct spheres should nevertheless work for the common good.
Secularism or secularization are primarily used in English as sociological concepts. Secularism typically refers to an outlook, a stance, or a way of life that does not concern itself with religious beliefs or practices. And secularization typically refers to a process in which people or institutions or functions move to this way of life.
By contrast, laïcité is a political concept. By “political,” we’re not thinking about political parties, but about the polis, the state. The word derives from the Greek word laos, which means “the people” as opposed to the clergy. And laïcité expresses that the state operates separately from the church or religions.
Because English does not really have the word laïcité, English speakers usually use the word secularism, whereas the French use the word laïcité. So throughout these podcast episodes, we and our interviewees will be using the words secularism and laïcité interchangeably. Regardless of which word we use, we will be denoting this political concept that we have just described — namely, an arrangement in which the state and religions constitute two distinct spheres.
We spoke to Professor David Koussens about the basic meaning of laïcité.
David Koussens: My name is David Koussens. I am a professor at the Faculty of Law of the Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec. I am specialized in sociology and in law, and my research analyses the different arrangements of secularism in francophone societies — most particularly in Quebec, in France, and in Belgium.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: So we wanted to ask you first and foremost for a definition of laïcité.
David Koussens: Secularism is not a value. It’s not a theoretical principle. It’s a principle of concrete organization of the state. Secularism corresponds to a state that is separated from the churches, autonomous from religious values, neutral with regard to all the conceptions of the good that are present in societies — and a secular state is separated from the church and neutral with regard to the religious conception of the world, because it has the obligation to protect freedom of conscience and religion and the equality of all citizens, even if they have beliefs that do not correspond to the beliefs of the majority.
So a secular state corresponds to what we can see in all liberal democracies. We usually think that secularism is a principle that only corresponds to states like France and now Quebec. But that’s absolutely wrong, because in every liberal democracy we can find a sort of separation between the state and religion, a form of neutrality of the state with regard to religious convictions, a guarantee of freedom of conscience and religion, and a guarantee of equality of the citizens. So secularism is a principle that we can find in the political organization of a state like Canada. And it’s not the specificity of only one part of Canada, or of states who decided to inscribe the principle in a law or in a constitution.
Narration: We also spoke with Professor Guillaume Rousseau, who advised the Quebec government on the drafting of Bill 21, and a more recent Bill 9.
Guillaume Rousseau: To Bill 21, the act respecting the laicity of the state — so basically, the definition is in section two. And I think it’s pretty much a good definition. And then we can have some nuance to it. So basically, it’s the separation of church and state, and religious neutrality of the state. And it’s linked, but it’s different at the same time. It could be more — in a few seconds — it’s also freedom of religion. Sometimes I prefer to refer to it as the free exercise of religion, because technically freedom of religion is both about free exercise and religious neutrality. And it’s also about the equality between citizens.
When we talk about it in that order, I think the order is quite important. So Bill 21 bases laïcité on four principles: the separation of church or religion and state, religious neutrality of the state, equality of every citizen, and freedom of conscience and of religion. And these principles apply to the state and state institutions, not to civil society or to individual people.
Quebec and France
Narration: Quebec has been particularly influenced by the development of laïcité in France, but it has also taken a somewhat different path from that country. The development of laïcité in France was long and arduous. The French Revolution marked a clear break with the Ancien Régime, a model of very integrated church-state relationships. During the Revolution, churches and monasteries were seized and in some cases destroyed by the state. Clergy were forced to take oaths to the Republic under penalty of death. The situation was calmed under Napoleon’s Concordat, but the 19th century was marked by long debates about the specific configuration that church-state relations would take in France.
A major breakthrough was the adoption of the Law on the Separation of Churches and State, commonly referred to as the Law of 1905. This law was adopted after vigorous debate and collaboration of people from very different political and religious backgrounds — Jews and Protestants, socialists and conservatives.
French laïcité continued to develop and is, in some regards, both more strict and more accommodating than Quebec’s laïcité. On the one hand, it prohibits religious symbols in schools for students too — a prohibition upheld by European courts. On the other hand, most church buildings are owned and maintained by the state, and the state maintains official channels of communication with religious groups by a department within the Ministry of the Interior.
I asked Guillaume Rousseau to compare French laïcité with the Quebec kind.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: The definition you just gave — separation of church and state, equality of citizens — seems like broadly shared secularism, like in the Anglo-Saxon world or in the United States of America, like their tradition of separation of church and state. It doesn’t seem to differ that much. But in your book, you write that laïcité is not quite the same thing as Anglo-Saxon English secularism or liberal, pluralistic liberalism. And it’s not the same thing as French republican laïcité either. So how does Quebec’s definition of laïcité distinguish itself from these two traditions?
Guillaume Rousseau: I think that laïcité in Quebec — there’s a reason why we took the same word, laïcité, the same word that exists in France. I think it’s pretty close to it, and it’s inspired by it, and everyone assumes it. But then the context, the North American context, is taken into account, and it’s more — I think I would say more moderate than some. At least it’s trying to find a balance between religious neutrality and free exercise, the sort of two phases of religious freedom.
So it’s striking a balance where in France, sometimes they would go further in terms of religious neutrality, sometimes to the detriment of free exercise. And sometimes we feel like in Canada, they’re going very far in terms of protecting free exercise, and that could lower the religious neutrality of the state. So that’s how I would describe it.
And then if we go back to our four principles that define laïcité in Quebec — in France, I think we could add a fifth principle, which would be individual emancipation. In France, they believe that if you make sure — not that a person doesn’t have any religion, that’s not the point — but if you make sure that in school every child gets to see the world through secular eyes, gets to see the world in a way that is not specifically the view of the parents or of the religious community, that would help the person to emancipate. Then the person could choose freely to stick with the religion of their parents. That’s not a problem. That’s not an issue. But the point is to make sure that at some point, especially in school, the person could step back from their family, from their religious background, and really think more rationally about the world in terms of science and so on, and then make their own choice freely.
In Quebec, we don’t insist on that as much, and we didn’t put that fifth principle into the law. And I think it reflects the state of reflection in political science and philosophy and so on.
Narration: As Professor Rousseau has written elsewhere:
“While classical liberalism views the state as the principal threat to personal freedom, republicanism views it as the ultimate tool through which individuals are liberated from their birth condition — especially from communitarianism and market pressures beyond their control. Whatever their situation, the Republic offers individuals equality, legitimacy, and the chance to become one’s own person, liberating them, if they so wish, from the constraints of their background.”
Western countries with a predominantly Catholic heritage differ from those with a predominantly Protestant heritage when it comes to the question of what exactly laïcité is trying to guard against. Is the concern that, without a careful separation, religion might have undue influence over the state? This is the concern that primarily drives the culture of historically Catholic societies. Or is it that the state might have undue influence over religion? That is the concern that primarily drives the culture of historically Protestant societies.
From Conquest to Revolution
Narration: To properly understand Quebec’s relationship with laïcité, we must understand its particular history with the Catholic Church. After the British conquest of New France in the Seven Years’ War and the Treaty of Paris in 1763, French Canadians lost control of civil government, and the Roman Catholic Church became the central institution of the French-Canadian people.
In the 19th century, the church in Quebec was strongly influenced by a Catholic school of thought called ultramontanism, which promoted supreme papal authority in matters of spirituality and governance and rejected modern ideals. Influential bishops such as Monseigneur Ignace Bourget and Monseigneur Louis-François Richer-Laflèche subscribed to this doctrine, viewing the Catholic Church in Quebec as the state of a stateless nation.
The expression église-nation — “church-nation” — refers to this use of the church as a proxy for the nation-state that the French Canadians did not have. In practice, it merged religion, politics, and the nation. Historically, the liberal Rouges, the Reds, were anti-clerical and critical of the church’s role in Quebec, while the conservative Bleus, the Blues, were defenders of the ecclesiastical institution as central to the French Canadian nation, enabling its survivance, or survival.
In the 1830s, the Patriot Rebellion arose in what was then called Lower Canada. The rebellion was defeated, and the British government sent Lord Durham to investigate the people’s grievances and propose a way forward. And in words that have become famous, he wrote that he found two nations — that is, two peoples, two ethnic groups — warring in the bosom of a single state. His report recommended the assimilation of French Canadians and the merger of Lower and Upper Canada, present-day Quebec and Ontario. The Act of Union was passed in the British Parliament in 1840, creating the United Province of Canada.
We spoke with Francis Denis, the author of Une révolution pour rien, about these events.
Francis Denis: I’m a French Canadian from Quebec City. I’m born in Quebec City, the capital of a beautiful province. I did my master’s degree in spiritual theology at Laval University.
So there is an intertwining from the Conquest to the Patriots, let’s say, about how to preserve the faith in a context in which the conqueror — the British Empire — is reluctant to let us pray and to let us live our faith as we want. There are different episodes, but that’s a period in itself, because at the same time, French Canadians were able, step by step, to have their own political elite and representatives and also a parliament. There was a period there where, you know, civil society was able to grow to a certain limit — and it went a little bit too far in the eyes of the British Empire, with the Patriots in 1837 and 1838.
After the Patriots, what happened is that it was impossible for French Canadians to develop their culture and their institutions inside what we call the secular world, or within the state today, because the British Empire didn’t want that — they wanted to assimilate again. So with the Durham Report and everything, after the Patriots came a kind of void. And there the church arrived and filled in, with a bishop in particular: Bishop Bourget, Monseigneur Ignace Bourget, second bishop of Montreal.
So he arrived and he took all the place he could. What he saw is: okay, we have a population, my own people, the French Canadians; the power wants to assimilate them, so I will take care of them. And that’s really where it started — the new implication of the church in a very important way in education, social charity, and healthcare.
In the 1960s, it was still the church with the same amount of power. The church, from Monseigneur Bourget to the 1950s and 60s, built and grew and grew. So that’s how it happened, basically. But it looks like there was a difficulty of having internal reform — instead of saying, okay, so now we have enough institutions, we should help civil society to step in. It looks like there was a period where the church decided to hold on to all its institutions.
And so that period went — I would say from the 1930s to the 50s and 60s. You have a thirty-year period where the church is not able to reach and to give properly the services that it claims to give. And you have a people that is increasingly skeptical about it and sees that the king is naked, more and more. And then arrived the 1950s. And that’s when the state took those institutions.
Narration: As Francis Denis says, around the middle of the 20th century, this social organization came under increasing criticism. Premier Maurice Duplessis, who served from 1936 to 1939 and from 1944 to 1959, embodied a conservative vision of Quebec close to the church and content to let it manage most of what lies within social policy today, such as health and education.
As the historian Michael Gauvreau demonstrates in his book The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, it was not atheism but rather reform movements within the church that paved the way for this quiet — that is, non-violent — revolution. Clergymen such as Fr. Georges-Henri Lévesque, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Laval University, became fierce critics of the église-nation concept and actively campaigned for the secularization of institutions and the separation of the church and the state.
In 1960, after Duplessis’ death, the Union Nationale political party lost power to Jean Lesage’s Liberals. And this began a period in which the church retreated from the social realm, leaving most of its previous secular roles to the state. This same period was also marked by a steep decline in religious practice. For example, in 1965, 80% of Quebec Catholics attended Sunday Mass. But by 1998, that number had fallen to just 18%.
Although in Quebec this withdrawal of the church from many areas occurred at roughly the same time as secularization in the sociological sense, this has not been the case everywhere. As Professor Koussens notes:
David Koussens: Just remember, for example, that one of the first secular countries in the world is Mexico. It’s Mexico that, even before France — because Mexico inspired France — in the 19th century, in the second part of that century, quickly became a very strong secular state, adopted laws of separation, inscribing secularism in the way the public schools were organized. And Mexico is still now a very secular state, but the population is not secular — it is still very religious, Catholic and Protestant, with a cross of evangelical churches in Mexico. So there is a very strong distinction.
Questioning the “Great Darkness”
Narration: In conventional Quebec historiography, it is now common to describe the period preceding the Quiet Revolution as la Grande Noirceur — the Great Darkness. The term describes Quebec of that time as a pre-modern society, isolated from modernity. This myth — myth in the sense of explanatory story — has been challenged by many historians and intellectuals who emphasize continuity rather than abrupt rupture. To understand this era better, we turn to the historian Xavier Gélinas.
Xavier Gélinas: My name is Xavier Gélinas, and I’m a curator in political history at the Canadian Museum of History, located here in Gatineau. Of course, I’m speaking here as a historian and not engaging my institution.
For quite a long time, things were quite simple in Quebec history, because there was the Great Dark Ages — la Grande Noirceur — and after. And according to the authors, la Grande Noirceur, the Great Darkness, either lasted from 1840 to 1960, or more like from 1944 to 1960. Why do I say 1944–45? It’s when Maurice Duplessis of the Union Nationale political party returned to power. He was elected in the late summer of 1944 and he reigned with quite a tough fist in Quebec until his death in September 1959. And soon afterwards, a year after, his political party, the Union Nationale, lost power.
Many people for a very long time have argued that Maurice Duplessis and his Union Nationale regime were proponents of darkness and repressive measures in many respects. Some went even further, saying that la Grande Noirceur, or the great dark age of Quebec history, would date from about 1840 — soon after the unsuccessful end of the Patriot rebellions of the late 1830s, and when Britain imposed a merger of what later became known as Ontario and Quebec.
In any case, in the myths of the history of Quebec, these dark ages came suddenly to a halt on June 22nd, 1960, at the provincial election then held in Quebec, when the Liberal Party of Quebec was elected, headed by Jean Lesage. And according to that myth, the Quiet Revolution started then and there. And they gave Quebecers — particularly French-speaking Quebecers — self-confidence. They suddenly blew the whistle or opened the green light to development in all fields: education, health, welfare, economic development, material construction, the subway, freeways, and all that.
And of course, in terms of morality and intellectual currents, everything became allowed and started to flourish, starting really on June 22nd, 1960. Of course, it’s a cartoonish view of things.
Of course also, as with every cartoonish or prejudiced view of things, it is not born out of nothing. It is a fact that Maurice Duplessis and the Union Nationale government, in power for sixteen consecutive years, having won majority mandates in the provincial elections of 1944, 1948, 1952, and 1956 — and almost assured of gaining another one in 1960 — of course became complacent and arrogant and believed that government, the judiciary, the civil service, and our friends in the private sector were more or less the same clientele, and the boundaries were not very strict. Yes, definitely abuses were committed with public funds, and a certain authoritarian streak is a fact under the Union Nationale.
And even people who are vehemently opposed to what the church has done in Quebec will recognize that in the mid-19th century, Quebecers were dirt poor and the church was there to take charge of institutions and programs that otherwise would not have existed at all — in education, social areas, and health in general. But yes, it is true that church authorities began to assume responsibilities really far exceeding the sacristy and the altar and the pulpit, being in charge of the schooling system up to and including universities, taking an important role of course in the private lives of parishioners — but such was the case in every Catholic society everywhere.
And that church quite ironically undertook its own quiet revolution around the same time as the Quebec Quiet Revolution, with Vatican II and the whole —
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: Exactly. Because in this mythical understanding of French Quebec history prior to 1960, the Catholic Church hierarchy is a mighty building, rich, powerful, with octopus-like arms ruling everything, and also of a unanimous mind, and absolutely reticent to let go of any part of its authority. That’s a huge exaggeration.
Xavier Gélinas: Clerics themselves were at the forefront of the disengagement of the church from many areas. Therefore, when the strong winds of the political Quiet Revolution started blowing in Quebec after 1960, and when the Second Vatican Council started to express such progressive views after 1963, there was not a very fierce counter-reaction from the institutional church to its disengagement from non-strictly religious pursuits. On the contrary, there was either acknowledgement, or acquiescence, or relief — because many church people themselves, and many ardent lay believers, believed that for the church to be more authentic and more herself, she had to be fully spiritual, ardently spiritual, but not involved in civil institutions.
So the whole freedom narrative of the Quebec underclass breaking the shackles of the Catholic Church in 1960 — many of the meetings of the intellectual, political, and social movements advocating for a so-called liberation of Quebec from the oppressive yoke of the church took place in church basements and church buildings rented for free to these people, who often worked in cordial agreement and cooperation.
Let’s keep in mind that an influential intellectual and political periodical called Cité libre, founded in 1950 in Quebec, where future prominent people like Gérard Pelletier, Pierre Trudeau, Pierre Juneau, Jeanne Sauvé, and others were writers — they were entirely ardent, regular, churchgoing believers, if not personally mystics. They were very, very strong believers, and yet for them they saw no paradox and no contradiction in blending anti-clericalism — which is what they were — and an ardent level of personal engagement in their faith.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: So how did that myth — the Quiet Revolution myth, the Grande Noirceur — how, when did it appear? Did it appear right away?
Xavier Gélinas: Immediately. The myth of the Quiet Revolution was convenient for many parties — with a lowercase p, or very much an uppercase P. The rhetoric of the Liberal Party was: we have to slay like the ugly beast — la bête immonde de l’Union Nationale, avec son visage horrible. The Union Nationale, as with every political party in power for sixteen consecutive years, was — it is a fact — associated with many negative things.
And then when the Liberal Party took power and started populating the state apparatus with its supporters and its people, of course it was to the advantage of all of them to portray their own rule in contrast with the preceding rule.
Also, what happened to an enormous degree in the 1960s in Quebec — and to a quite good degree ever since — is bombast. Self-affirmation that is not warranted by raw, cold facts. So, for instance, maîtres chez nous — “masters in our own house.” Well, very debatable. In 1962, the Liberal government had maîtres chez nous as the slogan of the election. The principle was that chez nous, we — les Franco-Québécois, the French-speaking Quebecers — would at last be masters economically in the province, as opposed to being the lackeys and underlings of big mean cigar-smoking Anglo-American capitalists operating in Cleveland, New York, London, or even worse, Montreal and the leafy suburbs.
Well, how could one say no to that — to being master in one’s own house? And most Quebecers went for it. Apart from the purchase of the private electricity company, Quebecers did not become fully masters in their own house in the 1960s Quebec revolution, because the sectors that the Quebec government appropriated were sectors that were entirely belonging to us — that is, the sectors formerly run by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Quebec. There was nothing more national than that. Where Quebecers could have become more actually masters in their own house would have been through root-and-branch economic reforms aimed at the private sector, which to a large degree was not new. For that, the Quebec government did not proceed.
Narration: Xavier Gélinas also described for us how the movement to separate the church from the other institutions of society coincided with a decline in churchgoing.
Xavier Gélinas: At the same time — starting, I think, precisely in 1965 or if not 1966 — French Canadian Catholics started deserting the church, the Sunday service. It became absolutely stark around 1970. So there were, in fact, two strands occurring at the same time. Of course, they were reinforcing one another. Of course, they did not belong to different universes. But let’s please be careful to keep them distinct, because they were distinct.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: Do you know why? What are the theories as to why suddenly so many people stopped going to church?
Xavier Gélinas: The disaffiliation from la fréquentation dominicale, or Sunday attendance, has created much ink to be spilled, and we will not solve this, I think. I see personally two reasons accounting for it.
The one reason was advanced by a school of sociology from Université Laval, led I think by Fernand Dumont, who was himself personally a very good case study of an ardent, if not mystical, Catholic who agreed and pushed for secularization. The Laval School of Sociology posited that for a long time the population continued more or less robotically — as a matter of fact — to attend church service, to take part in the obligatory huge processions, to of course espouse the various rites of baptism and so on, sort of as “the right thing to do” — to use a commercial slogan for oatmeal — without really investing much time and personal commitment to it. And having a small figurine of our Blessed Mother Mary would do no harm to bring good luck into the home, increasingly, however, perhaps more as a sentimental amulet than as a real object to whom you convey sense and devotion.
And when the winds of change in the Western world, and in Quebec and Canada, started to suggest to the population that — hey, you know, this formerly “right thing to do”… perhaps it’s no longer as relevant as it used to be. You know, it’s optional. We know we are the people of God. We may do as we want. Hey, if we can do as we want on Sunday, I prefer to have French toast and sleep late, and watch university football if you ask me. And what does my neighbour think? Well, the neighbour washes his car. So then as a ripple effect, what used to be — and according to the Laval School, I’m cartooning it — what used to be like a sheepish behaviour began increasingly a sheepish behaviour of another type, like by default. That’s one strong view.
The other view, which I personally believe in — and which is not incompatible with the Laval sociology view — is that the church itself, via the Second Vatican Council, expressed publicly for four or five years the desirability of questioning nearly every assumption that had come to define the church over 2,000 years. What was deemed by the church hierarchy in Rome to be a very healthy exercise of opening all drawers and all closets and removing the cobwebs and cleaning and perhaps adjusting what was clearly caduc — outdated — was viewed by ordinary believers as a sort of lack of faith in the institution in herself. In other words: well, if nothing is sacred anymore, if we have bearded pot smokers playing guitar and banjos and tom-toms in church, if processions are viewed as kitschy — well, why would I devote time to a product or brand that seems uncertain of herself? I won’t really proclaim it too loud. I may keep my faith for myself and transmit it to my offspring, but I prefer to watch university football too, and to wash my car, than to go into an institution where nothing that I used to like — or at least that I used to be used to — seems to be endorsed anymore.
I would call that the messe à go-go thesis. We often hear the messe à go-go that started in the 60s.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: And yeah, I remember my grandmother — she was an orphan at, what, fourteen? Grew up raised by the nuns in the 30s and 40s, devout Catholic. And what made her quit was… she said it in her own words, but it was Vatican II. It’s like: well, we learned that thing. We learned the missel. We learned that every day. And then suddenly it’s not true. Like, give me a break.
Xavier Gélinas: That’s exactly it. Vatican II became like an insult. The church buildings became ugly, the sound system — like it was a forgotten aspect of church. It was like East Berlin in terms of a church building. And all the nuns wearing — you know — fortrel polyester things. And the clergyman no longer wearing clerical dress.
And let’s please add to this: those who, on the contrary, were espousing the new breed of the Catholic Church were disheartened by the late 1960s with the encyclical letter by which then-Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the traditional morality of the Catholic Church vis-à-vis sexual life and the conception of children and all that. And also various church pronouncements on the ineligibility of women to the priesthood.
Ah — suddenly the new breed, the new wave of Catholic who viewed Jesus Christ as a cool, funky superstar and liberator of the oppressed finally realized that — oh, there is still such a thing apparently as 2,000 years of church teachings. I’m again exaggerating the viewpoint, but it is to say that just as the traditionally minded were disheartened by what they were seeing, the sincere progressive Catholics of a quite ardent persuasion were also dissatisfied and saddened by the apparent persistent conservatism of the church. So in fact, the church was deserted on two flanks.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: So nobody was happy.
Xavier Gélinas: No, exactly. And increasingly, the Catholic Church in Quebec stopped being a place where people would normally congregate for essentially spiritual and social and traditional purposes. It became a place associated with some — there was serenity in having your church in the neighbourhood. You knew it was always there. Suddenly, once it became socially acceptable not to practice every Sunday, subtly, every month became the new acceptable norm. Then Easter, definitely. Christmas, baptisms, christenings, weddings, funerals. And increasingly, the church buildings became a building representing a respected tradition, but no longer speaking individually to people one by one, which helps explain that there is no serious large-scale hostility to the Catholic Church in Quebec today. There is just a very powerful disaffection.
Narration: So to this day, Quebec and its intellectuals have a complex relationship with the Catholic Church. Some recognize the Church’s role in preserving Quebec’s French identity, while others see it exclusively as an oppressive and backward institution.
From Catholicism to Islam
Narration: In France, the beginning of the 21st century saw the return of the debate on laïcité with a wholly different framing. It was no longer a war of two Frances — that is, secularist republicans against Catholics — but a debate on immigration and integration in the face of a growing Muslim presence. Several events put the issue of laïcité back at the heart of French politics from the 1990s onwards.
In 1989 — the Creil veil affair — national news was made as three students wearing the hijab refused to take it off in school, despite being asked by their teachers to do so. This controversy ignited a debate on the role of schools in the integration to a common French culture and perceived threats of communautarisme — a form of withdrawal from the Republic by minority groups.
In 2004, President Jacques Chirac asked a special commission to clarify what France’s policy should be with regard to religious symbols. The commission suggested banning them for teachers and students in schools, on the principle that schools should be a neutral ground where students go beyond their own cultural backgrounds to embrace France and the Republic.
In 2015, Islamic terrorist attacks in France brought the issue of laïcité again to the forefront. In one of these — at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — terrorists killed journalists because of their writings and drawings. Laïcité thus became an issue of free speech and democracy. A slogan, Je suis Charlie, emphasized the right to criticize religion and express controversial opinions without fear of violence.
And in 2020, teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in the street by a young Islamic terrorist for showing Charlie Hebdo‘s caricatures in his class. In 2023, teacher Dominique Bernard was also murdered by a terrorist. These two incidents reignited the debate on the place of Islam in France and the difficult assimilation to republican values. Bills were tabled by the government to ban the abaya, another form of Islamic veil, and to curb religious separatism.
This new context is the sign — as political science professor and laïcité activist Laurent Bouvet calls it — of a new laïcité question, articulated above all around the place of Islam in France. Thus, laïcité has become tangled up in the contemporary culture wars over immigration, multiculturalism, and Islam. This was not the case back in 1905, when these issues did not exist on the political radar. There is no longer a debate between two Frances, but — framed as a struggle between France’s republican values and radical Islam — the political left, which was very invested in laïcité when Christianity was the target, has now become its chief critic. And the right has realigned in favour of laïcité, despite being reluctant before.
And Quebec is undergoing the same change of focus. To understand this further, we spoke to the sociologist Hicham Tiflati.
Hicham Tiflati: I am a college professor in Montreal — John Abbott College. I teach the sociology of religion and secularism. That’s what I specialize in. My bachelor’s was in Islamic law — it’s Sharia law. My PhD is in confessional education.
The talks and the debates about state neutrality, it’s actually about the worldview of the human beings of society and of the communities that live in the state — and not about the state itself. And it’s for a reason that we have Bill 21 in 2019 and not in the 60s.
If the 60s were about the Quiet Revolution, about pushing religion away, why didn’t we have a strict secular law about religious symbols in France in 1906? The loi sur la laïcité was in 1905. Obviously, because the religious symbols that we had at the time — in the 60s here in Quebec, and in the 20th century — did not disrupt the status quo. It’s not a threat to see a nun veiled in her religious clothing. But if you see a large Muslim community that is visible — we’re uneasy. We’re uneasy.
Yes. It’s an image I often use. I say: when I try to explain that — it’s like Quebecers see Catholicism like, you know, a bear pelt. You wouldn’t keep a live grizzly in your living room. But for them, Catholicism is a dead thing that’s not threatening anymore. But Islam certainly seems alive.
Narration: And here is David Koussens:
David Koussens: In the last decades — and it’s been now thirty years — there is this growing narrative of secularism according to which secularism would correspond to a very strict separation between the state and religion, and a separation that should be characterized by the imposition of an invisibilization of the religious from the public sphere. And this narrative is growing and now performative, because it’s clearly built on this fear of Islam.
This narrative was not present in Quebec twenty years ago, at the beginning of the century. And it’s also a way, in Quebec — for example, for political parties, and more specifically for nationalist parties — to mark their opposition to multiculturalism, which is the valorization of all the different identities that constitute Canada. This certain conception of secularism — assimilationist — where we invisibilize some identities, is a clear way to mark a strong opposition to the Canadian way of organizing diversity.
Narration: Guillaume Rousseau argues, however, that Bill 21 is not especially concerned with the place of Islam.
Guillaume Rousseau: Those who make this argument mostly focus only on the prohibition of wearing a religious sign, or the prohibition to have your face covered. And they forget section two about the principles of laicity: separation of church and state, religious neutrality, freedom of religion, equality. And basically what they’re saying is all of Bill 21 is about Islam — it’s about a fear of Islam and so on.
In fact, if you look at the consequences of section two, it applies almost only to the Catholic Church, or at least mostly to Christianity. So you’re saying there are many ways in which non-Islamic people are affected by it?
Yeah. The same people that were fighting against the influence of the Catholic Church — and are still fighting it, even though the fight is pretty much over — now they’re fighting against the influence of other religions. So it’s not like far-right groups that are in fact Catholic and only disagree with Islam but want the Catholic Church to be everywhere in the state. That’s not it at all. Politically, sociologically, historically — that’s not it at all, at all, at all.
Jean-Christophe Jasmin: The optics of the issue, though — it would seem that at least in the discourse around this notion of laïcité, there’s a strong fear of Islam. Maybe as a resurrected Catholicism, in a sense, or a re-emergence of visible religious practice in Quebec. So do you think there’s any electoralist motivation regarding Bill 21 — to kind of satisfy voters who have these fears or express these fears?
Guillaume Rousseau: The way I see it is this fight against the influence of the Catholic Church — and then there are other religions that become influential, and the fight against those religions in favour of laicity goes on. And now it affects other religions. I think it’s against all religions, including Islam. Not more, not less.
So ironically — and correct me if I’m putting words in your mouth — you would say that on the one hand, the integration of Islam into the discussion about laïcité is more proof of the integration of the reality of Islam in political life than it is anti-Islam.
Yeah, exactly. Because we could have said: okay, laïcité is good against the Catholic Church. Now there are Muslims. Let’s not apply laïcité to them. Let’s make sure that they have all their religion in school and the imam will be invited but not the priest, and so on, because, you know, Muslims — they’re different. No, that’s not the approach. The approach is: well, we’re all Québécois, whether you’re Muslim, Catholic, atheist, it doesn’t matter. When you’re in school, you are a citizen and everybody is treated equally. So that’s the way we see it.
Narration: Much as in France, the contemporary debate about laïcité in Quebec became a debate about multiculturalism and immigration. It is understandable that it came to the fore in about 2006 or 2007 in what was called the Reasonable Accommodations Crisis, after some Sikh, Muslim, and Orthodox Jewish individuals asked for accommodations that some Quebecers thought violated mainstream Québécois values.
Parti Québécois minister Bernard Drainville put forward the Charter of Quebec Values, which you will hear about in the next episode. He clearly stated that the issue was about the need for minority religions to embrace what Christianity had done decades earlier. He said: “We decided to separate church and state. If that choice was right for Catholics, why wouldn’t it be right for all religions fifty years later?”
Nevertheless, the discourse continues to draw on certain unpleasant memories of the Catholic Church in Quebec, particularly among older people. Current concerns about immigration include fear of a step backward — a return to the Great Darkness that would undermine liberal values such as personal autonomy and equality between the sexes. Even though the context has changed, contemporary laïcité is framed by many as a completion of the Quiet Revolution.
Conclusion
Narration: So to sum up: in this matter of laïcité, Quebec has followed a path similar to that of France, although there are some differences. But due to the linguistic and cultural ties between the two, and similar immigration patterns, the same questions have arisen. In both Quebec and France, it can be observed that laïcité — which initially concerned the relationship between the Catholic Church and the state — now focuses primarily on the place of minority religions and integration into Western values. In its approach to religious symbols, Quebec has drawn inspiration from laws adopted in France and other European countries.
In the next episode, we turn to the contemporary debate. Thank you for listening.
