Québec wants to define itself in terms of a Christian past while setting a course for a secularism that is profoundly hostile to all religious believers.

Québec’s Secular Charter

by Bradley Miller

When eighteenth-century ancestors of mine were, together with their entire village, forcibly resettled to Ukraine, they took with them a distinctive island culture. An important vehicle of this culture was their language—a medieval Swedish dialect preserved on the remote Estonian island that had been their home since the early Middle Ages.

In Ukraine, the language, and the culture it supported, would face severe stress. Large German-speaking settlements soon competed for land. Rising Slavic nationalism made the situation of both Germans and Swedes precarious. Some left to farm the Canadian prairie and were completely assimilated within a generation. Others bet their cultural survival on emigration to Sweden, not realizing that their community would be disbanded, and unaware that the Sweden of their imaginings had passed out of time several hundred years earlier. Unexpectedly alienated, hundreds chose to return home to the (now) Soviet Ukraine, to chance the persecutions, imprisonments, and executions that were to follow.

Today, there are fewer than a dozen speakers of the old medieval Swedish. They remain in the old Ukrainian village, studied by linguists and anthropologists. The language, and the culture it carried, are dead.

The death of one’s culture is the loss of the means to bequeath a patrimony of hard-won truths about what it means to be human. It imperils the ability of parents to understand their children, and to be understood by them. No one who loves his or her community can be indifferent to its perpetuation. The government of Québec is no exception.

Québec politics must be understood by reference to the exigency of community survival. It can be difficult to understand Québec patriotism because its situation is unique in North America. English-speaking Canada need not and does not fear assimilation. It has no project of preserving a common culture. Indeed, the very concept of a common culture is largely gone, replaced by a vague multiculturalism that is officially open for definition and redefinition by all comers, continually subject to realignment. The dominant culture is not one for which anyone is encouraged to feel much attachment or responsibility.

Québec, however, is different. The French and Catholic community within Québec is simultaneously a linguistic and religious majority within Québec, and a minority in the rest of the country. And in a way that is unique in Canada, Québec has always understood itself to be a society with a distinct common good. Accordingly, Québécois lawmakers have taken vigorous steps to preserve their culture, primarily by guarding the French language. Québec is famous for its language laws restricting the use of non-French languages in commerce, and laws restricting access to public education in English.

The glory of Québec is this orientation toward preserving its culture, of making a positive statement of what it means to be Québécois. Its tragedy is how thin its understanding of the common good has become. Since the 1960s, it has been increasingly dominated by laïcité and the mere preservation of language. Its rich heritage, tied up with Catholicism, is now dismissed as the Great Darkness. Quebec’s churches stand empty. Its marriage rate is the lowest of any Canadian province. The percentage of Québec-born francophones has been on the decline, necessitating immigration.

Yet Québec’s identity remains tied to the Church in a pathological way. Though it has become practically irrelevant to the majority, Québec nevertheless values the Church—not so much as a reminder of the actual past, but as a badge of tribal identification. The Church’s symbols are everywhere in public life, stripped of meaning, appropriated to the common culture. Thus, in the least religiously observant province in Canada, people are untroubled by the presence of a large crucifix at the front of the legislative assembly. The Church’s symbols are not understood to be in the service of the Church, but of the state.

For the Church to perform a secular function, Québec needs nominally Catholic people whose worship will serve as a sort of theatrical backdrop for Sunday brunch, who will maintain the beautiful churches, pay the bills, and stay out of public life.

Here, Québec has been frustrated by a low birthrate. Immigration, as in much of the West, has been the answer to the population problem. And, uniquely mindful of the need for immigration to support the common good in its reductionist, linguistic conception, Québec has encouraged immigration from largely French-speaking countries. 

But as it turns out, many of these immigrants are religious, and not quiet about it. That would be problematic enough if they were Catholic. But they are largely Muslim, and their presence has prompted the public articulation that speaking French is not sufficient for membership in Québec society; a richer understanding of the common good is needed.


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