Secularization of Quebec Nationalism

Before the 1960s, Quebec's nationalism was a cocktail of ethnolinguistic and religious sentiments. It was difficult to define Quebec's nationalism without explaining the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism and without reminding the reader about the Catholic struggle for equal rights in Protestant-majority Canada and previously in the British Empire that was based on Anglican nationalism. Roman Catholic Church was the main part and defender of Quebec's culture. However, during the 1960s, many long-term developments and events lead to the "Quiet Revolution" that considerably weakened the link between Catholicism and Quebec nationalism. The religious nationalism declined and became more implicit after the end of Maurice Duplessis era (Quebec's Premier 1936-39 and 1944-59).

Source: Francophone Nationalism in Québec


David Seljak in his article "Why the Quiet Revolution was “Quiet”: The Catholic Church’s Reaction to the Secularization of Nationalism in Quebec after 1960" explains the secularization of the Quebec identity. However, it is important to note that the secularization was not complete:

One of the most important issues was the Church’s acceptance of the secularization of French-Canadian nationalism. If the Quebec state had the power to make the reforms of the 1960s “revolutionary,” then the Church had the power to make the revolution “quiet” – or not. Its reconciliation to the new nationalism has helped to determine the shape of Quebec culture and society after 1960.

While the British North America Act implicitly gave the Catholic Church a semi-established status in the province of Quebec, the two most important motors of modernization, democratic political structures and capitalist economic institutions, remained outside of its control. Consequently, despite its important role in Quebec society, the Church was most often in the position of reacting to social change. From 1900 to 1930, the Church responded to industrialization and modernization with what Guindon has called an “administrative revolution,” an unprecedented campaign tocreate new institutions and bureaucracies to meet the needs of French Catholics in every realm of modern urban life. Besides multiplying its institutions which provided education, health care, and social services, the Church promoted the growth of Catholic labour unions, farmers’ cooperatives, credit unions, pious leagues, newspapers, radio and television shows, films, and Catholic Action groups for workers, students, women, farmers, and nationalists. This project was encouraged by Pope Pius XI, who founded the Catholic Action movement to encourage Catholics to form “intermediary bodies” or voluntary associations to mediate between individuals and the state apparatus. Conservative Catholics dreamed that these bodies would eventually reclaim all those functions in society that had been wrenched from the Church’s control.

While other peoples met the challenges of industrialization and modernization with programs of what sociologist Karl Deutsch has called “nation-building,” French-Canadian nationalists embarked on an aggressive programme of “church-building” with the goal of creating an “Églisenation” (nation-Church) rather than a nation-state. While they encouraged state intervention in specific projects (such as the colonisation of the hinterlands of Quebec), French Canadian nationalists usually preferred to resolve conflicts by creating religiously inspired social structures rather than appealing to state power. For example, in the Church’s corporatist response to the Depression, the actions of the state were limited to those realms where the first agents of society (the family and the Church) were as yet incapable of fulfilling their responsibilities. Typically, French-Canadian nationalism was marked by a certain anti-étatisme and apolitisme. Because it was rooted in a profoundly conservative, clerical, Catholic triumphalism, this nationalism could be xenophobic, intolerant, and repressive, as evidenced by its crusades against Jews, socialists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses in the name of religious and national solidarity. Despite the anti-modern discourse that its authors employed, this bureaucratic revolution ironically promoted the modernization of French Quebec society including that of the Church itself and French-Canadian nationalism. This modernization was certainly problematic. Critics drew attention to the gulf between the modern, multicultural, urban, industrial reality of Quebec society and a conservative Catholic ideology centred on rural values, ethnic solidarity, religion, and a rejection of politics and the state. These critics, including those who participated in the Catholic Action movements, grew suspicious of the traditional nationalism and some even rejected nationalism altogether.

The rapid changes of the 1960s, known as the Quiet Revolution, grew directly out of the type of society that was formed in Quebec after 1867. After World War II, a “new middle class” of university-trained bureaucrats increasingly occupied important positions in the immense bureaucracy that the Church had created. While educated in Catholic culture and values, members of this clerically dominated bureaucracy were simultaneously socialized into modern, rational and democratic values. Thus, they were uncomfortable with the conservative, undemocratic practices of the Duplessis regime and with the complicity of the Church in those practices. They demanded the rationalization of the bureaucracy that oversaw education, health care, and social services. They also demanded its democratization and protested against its “clericalism,” understood as the best positions being reserved for Church officials. Consequently, the new nationalism was defined as much against the Catholic Church as the Anglophone business elite.

The ascent to power of these elites was assured when the Parti libéral du Québec (PLQ) took power in June of 1960. Inspired by a secular and modernizing nationalism, the Lesage government introduced a number of measures that radically redefined the role of the state. It took over the functions of the Church in education, healthcare, and social services. Through the nationalization of hydro-electric utilities and the creation of crown corporations, the PLQ sought both to expand the influence of the government in the economy and to increase the presence of French Canadians in the upper levels of that economy. The state bureaucracy increased at a tremendous rate, growing by 42.6 percent between 1960 and 1965. While the changes adopted by the Lesage government mostly satisfied the interests of the new middle class and francophone business people, some sought to promote a more democratic, humane, and participatory society. The Liberal government introduced more progressive labour legislation and important social welfare reforms. Supporters of the government’s reforms attacked both traditional religious nationalism and laissez-faire liberalism. In doing so they created a new political nationalism that was adamantly secular, state-centred, and optimistically oriented to Keynesian liberalism or even social democracy. 

While accepting these reforms, Catholics attempted to find ways of adapting Church structures and Catholic thinking to the new context. Given the history and theology of the Catholic hierarchy in the 1950s, this reaction was by no means the obvious route to take. Even in the early 1960s, the bishops condemned the attack on traditional French Canadian nationalism in the very popular book, Les insolences de Frère Untel. Even though, led by Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, they had accepted the urbanization of Quebec society and reluctantly had given up the strategies of colonization and corporatism, the bishops’ traditional paternalistic attitude, obedience to Rome, moralizing spirit, and confusion between Catholicism and conservative ideology had remained intact. Yet by 1970, the bishops had largely reconciled themselves to the autonomy of the state, the liberty of individual consciences in political questions, and the legitimacy of the new nationalism. The early opposition and later reconciliation of the bishops was paralleled in many sectors in the Church.

This reconciliation would have been impossible without the coincidence of the Quiet Revolution with the Second Vatican Council. In Quebec, the Church’s redefinition of its relationship to modernity had three immediate consequences. First, it took the wind out of the sails of the conservative rejection of the new society. It made the project of the traditional nationalists impossible – since the Church hierarchy now refused its designated role as spiritual and cultural leaders of the attack on modernity. Second, it allowed Catholics – and even clergy and bishops – to support some projects of the Quiet Revolution in spite of their “laicizing” agenda. Finally, it inspired a new concern for development and social justice among Quebec Catholics. The Council affirmed the new direction of Catholic social teaching laid out by Pope John XXIII. Catholics sought to remain relevant to Quebec society and to participate, as Christians, in the important struggles of their society.

This new social teaching, along with the reflections of the Catholic Church in Latin America, would lead to the emergence of a faith and justice movement in the 1970s. Influenced by this teaching, the Church in Quebec could develop a sustained ethical critique of the new society and the new nationalism while affirming their liberating aspects. Taken together these three developments meant that Quebec society avoided the painful cultural schism between Catholics and modernizers (both liberal and radical)that has marked other Catholic societies

First of these two events was the