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.

Lisa Richmond:

One subject that has 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 is 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.

Jean Christophe Jasmin:

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.

Lisa Richmond:

As this series is an audio documentary, we as the hosts intend to be as neutral as possible, so that you can decide what you think. The people we interview, of course, express their own views.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Because this documentary focuses on history, and social and political philosophy, we sought out people to speak to 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 us how the law affects them directly. Another series, focused on those voices, would be well worth doing too.

There are four parts to the series. This 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?

Lisa Richmond:

Laïcité as a concept has its roots in France, and the word has no exact equivalent in the English-speaking world.

The word secular (in French, séculier) comes from a Latin word, saeculum, meaning a period of time, 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 was developed by Christian and non-Christian thinkers over many centuries. This idea echoes Jesus’s invitation to “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Just as civil authorities 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.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

“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 are not thinking about political parties but about the “polis” (the state). The word derives from the Greek word laos, meaning “the people” (as opposed to the clergy). Laïcité expresses that the state operates separately from the Church or religions.

Because English does not really have the word “laicity,” English-speakers often use the word “secularism” where in French the word would be laïcité.

Lisa Richmond:

So throughout these podcast episodes, we and our interviewees will be using the words “secularism” and laicité interchangeably. Regardless of which word we use, we will be denoting this political concept that we’ve 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 analyzed the different arrangements of secularism in francophone societies, most particularly in Quebec, in France, and in Belgium. […]

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

We wanted to ask you first and foremost for a definition of laïcité.

David Koussens:

Secularism is a, it’s 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 the societies. 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 citizens, and all citizens, even if they have beliefs that [do] not correspond to the beliefs of the majority.

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 the religious form of neutrality of the state with regard to religion, religious convictions, 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 a specificity of the only part of Canada or the states who decided to inscribe the principle in the law or in the Constitution.

Jean Christophe Jasmin:

We also spoke with Professor Guillaume Rousseau, who advised the Quebec government on the drafting of Bill 21 and the more recent Bill 9.

Guillaume Rousseau:

The Bill 21, the Act Respecting the Laicité of the State—so basically, the definition is that section two, and I think it’s pretty much a good definition, and then we’re going to have some nuance to it. So basically, it’s the separation of church and religions, neutrality of the state, and it’s linked, but it’s different at the same time. I could be more precise in a few seconds. It’s also freedom of religion. Sometimes I prefer to refer to it as a free exercise of religion, because, technically, freedom of religion is both about freedom, free exercise, and religious neutrality. And it’s also about the equality between the citizens. But it’s in that order. I think the order is quite important.

Lisa Richmond:

So Bill 21 bases laïcité on four principles: separation of church (or religion) and state; religious neutrality of the state; equality of every citizen; and freedom of conscience and of religion. These principles apply to the state and state institutions, not to civil society or to individual people.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

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 model of very integrated Church-State relationships. During the Revolution, churches and monasteries were seized and in some cases destroyed. Clergy were forced to take oaths to the republic under penalty of death. The situation was calmed under Napoleon’s Concordat, but the nineteenth 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 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 laïcité. On the one hand, it prohibits religious symbols in schools to students too. This prohibition was 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.

The definition you just gave, separation of church and state, equality to the citizens, seems like boilerplate secularism in the Anglo-Saxon world or in the United States of America. Their tradition of separation of church and state 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 also as French republican laïcité. 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 as laïcité, the same word that exists in France. I think it’s pretty close to it, and it’s inspired by and everyone assumes it. But then then the context, the North American context, is taken into account. So it’s more, I would say more moderate, and somehow, at least it’s trying to find a balance between, not only between religious neutrality and free exercise, the sort of two faces of religious freedom. So it’s sort of striking a balance. Where[as] in France, sometimes it 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, that 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 children 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 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 his family, from his 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 much, and we didn’t put that fifth principle into the law, and I think it reflects the state of the reflection and political science and philosophy and so on.

Lisa Richmond:

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 communitarian 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 constrains 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 issue 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 the religion? That is the concern that primarily drives the culture of historically Protestant societies.

From Conquest to Revolution

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

To properly understand Québec’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, the French lost control of civil government, and the Roman Catholic Church became the central institution of the French Canadian people. In the nineteenth 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 Mgr Ignace Bourget and Mgr 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 hyphen 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 or people. Historically, the liberal Rouges (the “Reds”) were anticlerical 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, its survival.

Lisa Richmond:

In the 1830s, the Patriote 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. 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.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

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 the beautiful province. […] I did my master’s degree in spiritual theology at Laval University. […]

So there’s an intertwine 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’s different episodes, but that’s a period in itself. And after, after the Patriotes, what happened is that at the same time, the French-Canadians were able, step by step, to have their own political elite, and representatives, and also a parliament, first parliament, etc. There was a period there where the civil society was able to grow to a certain limit, and it went a little bit too far, in the eye of the British Empire, with the Patriotes in 1837 and 1838.

And then right after, it was impossible for French-Canadians to develop their culture, their institutions inside what we call the secular world, or with the state today, because the British Empire didn’t want, they wanted to assimilate again, with the Durham Report and everything. So, after the Patriotes came a kind of a void, and there the Church arrived and filled in. They filled that void, with a bishop in particular, Bishop Bourget, so Mgr 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, they don’t have [any state to] take care of them, even the power wants to assimilate them. So I will take care of them.”

So, he started that, and that’s really where it started, the new implication of the Church in, in a very important way, in the education, social charity, and, healthcare. […] In the sixties, it was still the Church with the same amount of power. […] The church present, from Mgr Bourget to the 1950s and 60s, the Church built and grew and grew. So that’s how it happened, basically.

But it looks like there was a difficulty of having that reform, internal reform. Instead of saying, “Okay, so now we have enough institutions, we should help the civil society to jump in,” it looks like there was kind of a period where the Church decided to hold on to all institutions. 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, to give properly the services that she pretends to give. And you have a people that is increasingly skeptical about it and see that the king is naked, more and more. And then arrived the 1950s. And that’s when the state took those institutions.

Lisa Richmond:

As Francis Denis says, around the middle of the twentieth 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 Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Laval University, became fierce critics of the “Church-nation” concept and actively campaigned for the secularization of institutions and the separation of the church and the state.

In 1960, after Duplessis’s death, the Union Nationale political party lost power to Jean Lesage’s Liberals. 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. In 1965, 80 percent of Quebec Catholics attended Sunday Mass, but by 1998, that number had fallen to just 18 percent. Although in Quebec this withdrawal of the Church from many areas occurred at roughly the same time as the 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, before France, in the nineteenth century, in the second part of the nineties, nineteenth 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’s still very religious, Catholic and Protestant with a growth of evangelical churches too in Mexico. So there is a very strong distinction.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

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 at 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 turned 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. […]

Yes, for quite a long time, things were quite simple in Quebec history, because there was the great dark ages, or 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 1945 to 1960. And why do I say 1944, 1945? It’s when Maurice Duplessis, of the Union nationale political party, returned to power. He was elected, I think, in the, in 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. And 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 go even further, 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 Patriote Rebellions of the late 1830s, when Britain imposed a merger of what later became known as Ontario and Quebec. […]

So in any case, the myth of the history of Quebec, well, these “dark ages” came suddenly to a halt on June 22, 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 Quebeckers, particularly French-speaking Quebeckers, 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. So that’s the—and of course in terms of morality and intellectual currents, everything became allowed and started to flourish, starting really on June 22, 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 the Maurice Duplessis and Union Nationale government, in power for sixteen consecutive years, having got majority mandates in the provincial elections of 1944, 1948, 52, 56, and almost assured of gaining another one in 1960, of course became complacent and arrogant and believed 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, very strict. Yes, definitely abuses were committed with public funds and a certain authoritarian streak is a fact under the Union nationale et régime. […]

And even people who are vehemently opposed to what the Church has done in Quebec will recognize that in the mid-nineteenth century, Quebeckers 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 begin to assume responsibilities really far exceeding the sacristy and the altar and the pulpit and being in charge of the schooling system up to universities inclusively, taking an important role, of course, in the private lives of parishioners, but such was the case in every Catholic society everywhere. […]

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

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—. […]

Xavier Gélinas:

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. […] 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 part of 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 had to be fully spiritual, ardently spiritual, but not involved in civil institutions.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

So the whole “freedom” narrative of the Quebec underclass “breaking the shackles” of the Catholic Church in 1960—.

Xavier Gélinas:

Many of the meetings of the intellectual or political and social movements advocating for a quote-unquote “liberation” of Quebec from the oppressive yoke of the Church took place in church basements and church buildings, rent-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, and where future prominent people like Gérard Pelletier or Pierre Trudeau or Pierre Junot would write, or Jeanne Sauvé and others, you know, the writers were entirely ardent Sunday regular church-going believers, if not personally mystics. They were very, very strong believers, and yet for them they saw no paradox and no contradiction in blending an 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 and the grande noirceur, when did it appear? Did it appear right away?

Xavier Gélinas:

Immediately. The myth of the Quiet Revolution was convenient for many parties, parties with a lowercase or a very uppercase P. […] The rhetoric of the Liberal Party was that we have to slay the ugly beast, la bête immonde de l’Union nationale, avec son visage horrible. […] The Union nationale, as with every political party, being 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 in 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 (chez nous les Franco-Québécois, the French-speaking Quebeckers), we would at last be masters economically in the province, as opposed to being, you know, 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, I mean, how could one say no to being master in one’s own house? […] And most Quebeckers went for it. […] Apart from the purchase of the private electricity company, Quebeckers did not become fully masters in their own house in the 1960s Quiet 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. […] You know, where Quebeckers could have become more actually masters in their own house would have been through, you know, root-and-branch economic reforms aimed at the private sector, which to a large degree was not à nous. For that, the Quebec government did not proceed.

Lisa Richmond:

Xavier Gélinas also described for us how the movement to separate the church from the other institutions of society coincided with a decline in church-going:

Xavier Gélinas:

At the same time, starting precisely in 1965, or if not, 1966, French-Canadian Catholics started deserting the Church, the weekly 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. […]

Lisa Richmond:

Do we know why, or, what are theories as to why, suddenly, so many people stopped going to church?

Xavier Gélinas:

The disaffiliation of la fréquentation dominicale, or of Sunday attendance, has created much ink to be spilled, and we will not solve this, I think. Because I see, personally, two reasons accounting for it.

The one reason was advanced by a school of sociology from Université Laval, and I think led by Fernand Dumont, who was himself personally a very good case study of ardent, if not mystical, you know, 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. […]

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

And put the chapelet on the corde de lin…

Xavier Gélinas:

Yeah, yeah, c’est ça, pray, yes, the rosary, et cetera, and having a small figurine of our blessed mother Mary would do no harm to bring good luck into our home, increasingly, however, perhaps more as a sentimental amulet than as a really 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 formally right thing to do perhaps is no longer as relevant as it used to be, you know it’s optional, you know we are the people of God; we may do as we want; hey, if we can do as we want, you know, on Sunday I prefer to have French toast and sleep late, et cetera, 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, 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, by default. […]

That’s one strong view. The other view, which I personally believe in, which is not incompatible with the Laval sociology view, is that the Church itself, via the Second 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 caduque or outdated, etc., was viewed by ordinary believers as a sort of lack of faith, sorry for the pun, in the institution for herself. In other words, well, if nothing is sacred anymore, […] if we have bearded pot-smokers playing guitar and banjos and tam-tam in church, if processions are viewed as kitschy, you know, 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.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

I would call that the “mass à go-go” thesis, we often hear, the “mass à go-go” that started in the sixties. I remember my grandmother, she was an orphan at fourteen, so, grew up, raised by the nuns in the thirties and forties, a devout Catholic, and what made her quit was, she said it in her own words, it was Vatican II. It’s like, well, we learned that thing, we learned the missal, we learned that every day, and then suddenly it’s not true. Like, give me a break, you know, I’m going to . . .

Xavier Gélinas:

That’s exactly— […] Vatican II became like an insult. The Church, ah oui, the church buildings became ugly. The sound system was a forgotten aspect of church. It was like East Berlin in terms of a church building. Yes, c’est ça. And the nuns wearing Fortrel polyester thing. And the clergyman no longer wearing the clergyman collar. […]

And let’s please add to this that 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 for the ineligibility of women to the priesthood. Suddenly, the new breed, new wave of Catholics who viewed Jesus Christ as a cool, funky superstar 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, you know, were disheartened by what they were seeing, well, 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.

Lisa Richmond:

So nobody was happy.

Xavier Gélinas:

No. Exactly. And increasingly, the Catholic Church in Quebec stopped being a place where normally people would 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 neighborhood. 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, christening, 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.

Lisa Richmond:

So, to this day, Quebec and its intellectuals have a complex relationship with the Catholic Church. Some recognize the Church’s role in preserving Québec’s French identity, while others see it exclusively as an oppressive and backward institution.

From Catholicism to Islam

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

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 onward.

In 1989, the “Creil veil affair” made national news 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 the perceived threat of communautarisme (withdrawal) from the Republic by minority groups.

Lisa Richmond:

In 2004, President Jacques Chirac asked a special commission to clarify what France’s policy should be in regard to religious symbols. The commission suggested banning them for teachers and students in schools. It did so on the principle that school should be a neutral ground, where students can go beyond their own cultural backgrounds to embrace France and the Republic.

In 2010, President Nicolas Sarkozy and his government tabled a bill to ban the wearing of the full-face veil in France. In the name of human dignity, public civility, and equality between men and women, they declared that concealing one’s face in public under a burqa or a niqab was now illegal in France.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

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 some journalists because of their writings and drawings. Laïcité thus became an issue of free speech and democracy. The 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.”

Lisa Richmond:

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. Bouvet writes, “The political landmarks that have long served as our compass for secularism are now obsolete or indecipherable. On the left, […] religious practices are now defended in the name of individual freedom. On the right, […] people now stand against an Islam deemed incompatible with republican principles and secularism. The old dividing line is dead.”

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

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. It is no longer a debate between “two Frances” but framed as a struggle between France’s republican values and radical Islam. As Bouvet mentions, the political left, which was very invested in laïcité when Christianity was at stake, has now becoming its chief critic, and the right has realigned in favour of laïcité, despite being reluctant before.

Lisa Richmond:

Quebec is undergoing this 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 Abbot College. I teach the sociology of the religion and secularism. That’s what I specialize in. […] My bachelor was in Islamic law, it’s Sharia law. […] and my PhD is in the confessional education. […]

The talks and the debates about state neutrality [are] 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 1960s. If the sixties were about the Quiet Revolution, about pushing religion [out], why didn’t we have a strict secular law about religious symbols in France in 1906 (because the laïcité law was in 1905)? Obviously because the religious symbols that we had at the time in the sixties here in Quebec and in the twentieth 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 are visible, we are unease with it. […]

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Yes, yes. It’s an image I often use: I say, when I try to explain that, it’s like Quebeckers see Catholicism like a bear pelt is. It’s like, 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.

Lisa Richmond:

And here’s David Koussens:

David Koussens:

In the last decades, well, it’s been now thirty, forty, 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 up and now performative, because it’s clearly built on this fear of Islam. This narrative was not present in Quebec twenty years ago, in the beginning of the century. […] And it’s also a way for, 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. And this certain conception of secularism, assimilationist, where we invisibilize some identities, is a clear way to mark a strong opposition to the Canadian way to organize diversity.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Guillaume Rousseau argues, however, that Bill 21 is not especially concerned with the place of Islam.

Guillaume Rousseau:

Those who have this argument and so on, they pretty much focus only on the prohibition of wearing religious signs or the prohibition to have your face covered and they forget section 2 about the principles of the laïcité, separation of church and state, religious neutrality, freedom of religion, equality. Basically what they’re saying is that all of Bill 21 is about Islam, it’s about a few Muslims, a fear of Islam. […] 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.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

So you’re saying the are many ways in which non-Islamic people are affected by it.

Guillaume Rousseau:

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, you know, far-right groups, that are in fact Catholic and they only disagree with Islam, but they want the Catholic Church to be everywhere in the State. That’s not it at all. Like 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, that 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 that there is 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 that there is this fight against the influence of the Catholic Church, then there are other religions that become influential, and the fight against those religions in favour of laïcité goes on, and now it affects other religions. […] I think it’s against all religion, including Islam, not more, not less.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

So ironically, correct me if I put words in your mouth, but you would say that on the one hand the integration of Islam to the discussion about laïcité is more proof of the integration of the reality of Islam in Quebec’s political life than anti-Islamicism.

Guillaume Rousseau:

Yeah, exactly. Because we could have said, “Okay, laïcité is going against the Catholic Church. Now they are Muslim. 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 are 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 are into school, you are a citizen and everybody is treated equally.” So that’s the way we see it.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

If in Quebec, much as in France, the contemporary debate about laïcité 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 Sikhs, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews asked for accommodations that some Quebeckers thought violated mainstream “Québécois values.”

Lisa Richmond:

When then 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?”

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

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 fears 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.”

Lisa Richmond:

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.

Jean-Christophe Jasmin:

Thank you for listening. This podcast is a project of Cardus, a public policy think tank based in Ottawa and Hamilton, Ontario. To learn more about Cardus, please visit our website at cardus.ca. The narration was written by Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, Lisa Richmond, and Jean-Christophe Jasmin. Hosted by Jean-Christophe Jasmin and Lisa Richmond. Produced by Francis Denis. We acknowledge with gratitude our interviewees: Francis Denis, Nadia El-Mabrouk, Xavier Gélinas, Julius Grey, David Koussens, Guillaume Lamy, Guillaume Rousseau, Stéphane Sérafin, Charles Taylor, and Hicham Tiflati.