Were the Acadians/Cajuns (really) "devout Catholics"?

Abstract

For almost three centuries the Acadians of Acadia and their Cajun descendants in Louisiana have been described as "devout Catholics." Unfortunately, anyone who searches for evidence of this long-standing stereotype, either in the historical or ethnographic literature, finds that such evidence is simply not there. Given this problem, my goal in this article is to merge feminist theory with the few bits and pieces of information that we do have about the lived experience of Catholicism in Acadian communities in order to propose another way of "seeing" Cajun Catholics and Cajun Catholicism. In particular, I want to suggest that at least in the nineteenth century, Cajun religiosity derived less from "piety" (as that term is commonly understood) and more from ways of "doing gender" in Cajun communities.