SQER: Establishing the sciences of religion in Quebec: A work still in progress 1

Abstract

This article identifies and problematizes the institutional and epistemological issues of the study of religion in Quebec. Its thesis is the unfinished foundation of the discipline that is primarily devoted to it, the social sciences of religion. The first section traces the institutional evolution of the field of study of religion in Quebec, from theology to the social sciences of religion, from faculties and departments to centers and institutes. The second section measures the progress made in the social sciences of religion since the first programs and assessments devoted to it. The authors note a growing difficulty in understanding the religion of the “center”, that of the majority of Quebecers. The third section deepens this point by drawing up a panorama of the main religious trends observed in contemporary social sciences of religions. Three related trends are identified: advanced secularization, increasing diversity and the unexpected survival of religion. In conclusion, the authors argue for the consolidation of the social sciences of religion in Quebec.

It would be an exaggeration to state that we are on the threshold of a new era in the academic study of religion in Quebec. Nevertheless, this impression was the impetus for relaunching the activities of the Société québécoise pour l’étude de la religion (Quebec Society for the Study of Religion) in 2016. Indeed, some observations called for a review and analysis of a relatively new situation, featuring the following: the reorganization of institutions (closure of university faculties and the opening of centers, schools or institutes in their place); a renewed interest in the subject of religion among academics who, a priori, did not see their work as pertaining to religious sciences or to theology, but rather to law, sociology, political philosophy, psychology, and so on; the arrival on the scene of a generation of researchers with a new academic habitus (involving the internationalization of career pathways, overqualification, an increasing number of publications, greater dependence of research on funding, and so on); and a current state of affairs in which some expressions of religion have been placed at the center of social debate.

These were dynamics we needed to understand. While their significance is manifest in reorganizations “at surface level,” these are just the tip of the iceberg, extending into the theoretical and epistemological bedrock of this academic discipline, which they reveal, shape and transform.

Institutions of knowledge

In June 2015, the Centre d’études du religieux contemporain (Center for studies of contemporary religion) at the Université de Sherbrooke replaced the Faculté de théologie et d’études religieuses (Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies). In May 2016, the School of Religious Studies in the Faculté des Arts replaced the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University. In 2017, the Université de Montréal set up the Institut d’études religieuses (Institute of Religious Studies), within the Faculté des Arts et Sciences, following the closure of its Faculté de théologie et de sciences des religions. These institutional changes began in the 2000s, when the departments of theology and religious sciences at the Universités du Québec à Chicoutimi, Rimouski and Trois-Rivières were closed. What do these reorganizations mean?

The way theology has evolved is instructive and gives us food for thought. Although this subject has been taught in Quebec for over 350 years, the past 60 years have brought in more changes in this field than the three previous centuries did. According to Gilles Routhier (2002: 35), these changes are due less to the major debates over ideas than to economic factors that “originated from the periphery” and were specifically linked to the way the discipline is organized and to the way the institutions are set up. Alongside faculties of theology, institutes and centres ² were established. They were to attract hundreds of male and female religious devotees, in addition to lay students, male and female. From this point on, theology was no longer the preserve of the clergy nor of candidates for the priesthood. These centers were also to have the effect of enabling pastoral activities and practice to gain authority. Theology, as a deductive science, was then called into question: “the activities of the clergy were no longer regulated by morality, spirituality and ecclesiastical law. There was a new discipline which set up its stall at the level of practical action, that is, pastoral ministry” (Routhier, 2002: 35). The authorization of such practices forced the entry of the social sciences of religion into the field of theology. To note only two examples, this major turning point was illustrated both by the establishment in 1958 of the Centre de recherche en sociologie religieuse de l’Université Laval (Center for Research in Religious Sociology at Université Laval) and by the drawing up of a plan to incorporate teaching in the social sciences of religion in the syllabuses at the Faculté de la Théologie (Faculty of Theology) at the Université de Sherbrooke. The issue at that time was to “shake the dust off” theology, to quote an expression used by the dean Lucien Vachon (Dion and Melançon, 1996). In these various experiments, the sociology of religion continued to be perceived as a discipline that was ancillary to theology, with the role of supplying the tools required for teaching and practical ministry. The same trend applied to pedagogy and psychology.

Of course, these sweeping changes fell within the context of major reforms in Quebec society brought about by the Quiet Revolution and, in the Catholic Church, by the Second Vatican Council. Theology then moved out of the theological colleges and seminaries and now had a physical presence on university campuses. This reconfiguration of the network of teaching establishments ensured that the public university became the place for theology, under the associated conditions and constraints, the latter not without creating tensions or raising key questions such as the status of theology as a science and an academic discipline, the academic freedom of the members of the teaching staff, the place of religion in the public space and the place of religious denominations in universities, and likewise of the subject’s performance (i.e. number of students, research projects, service to the community, and so on).

Social sciences of religion, or “science(s) of religion,” also developed in response to the realization that Christianity was being eroded. The aim was to try to understand both the fate reserved for religions in the modern age and the rapid changes that Quebec society was undergoing. In the Quebec landscape there was only the department of the sciences of religions at the Université du Québec à Montréal which, since it was first established, had been resolutely non-denominational both as an institution and in the approach that it put forward – namely “religiology.” Nevertheless, the process of acquiring autonomy was to be relatively fast for the new sciences of religion in Quebec, under the influence of advances in the sciences of religion in Europe, and due to a marked process of secularization and laicization in society. A rather unique feature that can be observed in Quebec, at least when compared with France, is the constant concern that the social sciences of religion and theology should complement rather than be set against each other. A large number of papers ³ published at the time were less anxious to stress the epistemological differences between theology and the sciences of religion than to defend the epistemology that they had in common. Institutional form may have influenced this, as the emerging sciences of religions usually evolved within faculties of theology, and academic researchers often moved between theology and sciences of religion.

Epistemological issues

As was the case elsewhere and in other disciplines, Quebec was able to rely on a rich tradition of literature reviews about the religious dimension. A few of these overviews of the academic literature on religion in Quebec are mentioned here. In 1958, Fernand Dumont gave a lecture entitled “Le christanisme et la problématique d’une science de religion” (Christianity and the problem associated with a science of religion). ⁴ Four years later, Jean-Charles Falardeau (1962) published an article entitled “Les recherches religieuses au Canada français” (Religious research in French Canada). Then, in 1969, on his return from a prolonged visit to the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, Norman Ryan, who at the time was head of the Catholic Teaching division at the Ministry of Education in Quebec, published a text entitled “Situation actuelle des sciences religieuses au Canada français (Current situation of religious sciences in French Canada).” In the same year, Benoît Lacroix (1969) wrote a report that traced “Les origines ou la naissance des sciences humaines de la religion au Québec (The origins or the birth of the human sciences of religion in Quebec”) from 1940 to 1969. Since then we have seen a number of overviews, in particular the books written by Louis Rousseau and Michel Despland (1988), by Jean-Marc Larouche and Guy Ménard (2001), and by Robert Mager and Serge Cantin (2010).

It is striking to note the contemporary nature of the challenges set out in the first of these overviews.

Fernand Dumont quickly diagnosed the scale of the academic change that Quebec was about to experience. He called upon people to study religion not from inside the Catholic tradition but from its outside, yet with an intimate knowledge of religion (Dumont, 1973). For Jean-Charles Falardeau (1962), this secularization of knowledge did indeed present the primary challenge in a science of religion for Quebec. He wrote, “Only those who are little acquainted with sociology will be surprised by the fact that French Canada, which is so solidly framed by structures and is so imperiously influenced by religious monitoring, has an academic literature that is still so diffident regarding these questions. Is the one perhaps caused by the other?” In practical terms, Falardeau (1962) believed that this empowerment of science of religion could not be implemented without creating a distance from some major facets of a literature which at that time was closely associated with the Catholic Church. He raised the question, “Is there any need to specify the fact that we shall include only empirical studies in this list? Our field of study will therefore exclude the official decrees from the hierarchy, the doctrinal and apologetic publications, pastoral briefings, and innumerable writings with moral and moralizing intent that have the aim of righting wrongs. Although we are talking in particular about the present, this is because our academic past goes back at most to the day before yesterday.”

Apart from this secularization of knowledge, which has now been achieved (Warren, 2014), Falardeau campaigned for the diversification of the area of study devoted to religion, that is, for the diversification of epistemological points of view and objects of study (1962). It seemed obvious to him that too few academic papers in psychology, ethnography, anthropology and in literature dealt with the field of religion, and even fewer with religious traditions other than the Catholic one. Too many publications, he reiterated, a “vast proportion,” were “essayist” in style, situating themselves “between history, theology, ethics, apologetics and an impressionistic form of sociology” (Falardeau, 1962: 209). In that, his plea also resonated with the need for a wider specialization within the academic field. Whilst commending the work of historians (“history is the [human science] that French-Canadian researchers cultivated first of all,” he wrote at that time), Falardeau (1962: 211) deplored the fact that French Canada had produced too many lawyers, but few true legal experts or jurists, and even fewer jurists with a knowledge of religion, even in matters of religious laws. As with the secularization of research and of university institutions, we may think that this task of diversifying the academic field has since been accomplished. Such were the findings of Louis Rousseau and Michel Despland in 1988. Rousseau (2001) stressed this again, when he listed the diversification of research among the “proud achievements” of academic progress in Quebec. Moreover, the very comprehensive work to which he contributed under the guidance of Jean-Marc Larouche and Guy Ménard (2001) illustrated this point: it paved the way for a large number of publications relating to diverse religious traditions – Indigenous, Protestant, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Orthodox Christian, Afro-Brazilian – but also to contemporary rituals, and particularly to new religious movements.

While several of these challenges in the secular science of religion have been addressed since they were first defined, others are appearing today, as a reflection of the changes experienced in this field. The overview of contemporary religious studies that he carried out may perhaps have inspired him with “prides” and “hopes,” but Louis Rousseau (2011: XIII–XV) also referred to the “concerns” that were surfacing, sharing his fear that academic succession might become difficult to realize in science of religion, and could even be tendentiously compromised. The secularization of university institutions has progressively marginalized the teaching of religion, reflecting the fate reserved for theology, and hence has marginalized the familiarity that students and future teachers have with religion, leading in the process to a diminished interest in acquiring knowledge of religion, and especially knowledge of Catholicism and Christianity.

This concern regarding the comprehensibility of religions and of the societies that they inform is not new and echoes the preoccupations which were already feeding into Dumont’s thinking back in 1958. For him, the departure from the French-Canadian Catholic world, or rather the modalities of this departure, were running the risk of watering down the new science of religion in two unfortunate ways.

The first was inherent in the secular reshaping of religion as an area of research: by seeking to dissociate religion as an area of research from the traditional prism through which it was interpreted (a Catholic and theological one), Dumont believed that the new sciences of religion were tempted, on the one hand, to abstract or universalize religion into the study of a “ sacred dimension” that was more or less connected with the study of historical religions, and on the other hand, to dilute it into a wider study of culture, in one aspect or another of Quebec society. The studies carried out by the commission presided over by Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor in 2007 and 2008 were fairly symptomatic of this shift. Indeed, they claimed, as was indicated moreover by the title of the Commission (Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles [Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences]), to relate to cultural diversity in general, rather than to religious diversity in particular, whereas it was indeed the latter that was the subject of social and political debate. Moreover, the fact that such studies were entrusted to sociologists, philosophers, legal experts and political scientists speaks volumes: religion does not need to be studied by a specialized science, with a corresponding epistemology; any (social) science will do.

Dumont was doubtless inviting people to stop deciding between what he called the “logic of the religious dimension” and the “logic of the social dimension,” because it is in this back and forth between what a religion says about itself and its social expression that religion can be best observed. But if this was an invitation to adopt a reliable disciplinary ecumenicalism, it prioritizes a specific religious object of research, albeit an abstract one, namely religion or the religious dimension, while maintaining a concrete object of research, namely religions, which are situated in specific times and societies. For these latter, theology then proves to be essential, whether it be Christian, Muslim or another faith, as it provides the terms for the self-understanding of religions and hence for the meaning of their deployment in the world. Faced with the secularization and diversification legitimately desired for religious knowledge, Dumont also called to mind the importance of an integrated and unified discipline devoted to the study of religion, a discipline equipped with a knowledge that was consistent and independent, and of long duration.

Indeed, we may think that science of religion bears a specific responsibility and benefits from an important advantage. This specific responsibility is that it plays a central role in the knowledge of Quebec, a society where Catholicism is deeply ingrained. The study of religion is capable of contributing to an intimate understanding of this society, past and present. The important advantage, which interprets this responsibility in a different way, consists in having a unique heuristic key for understanding a number of changes in our modern societies, whether the issue is that of ethnocultural diversification, the increasing number of religious identities, or the search for models for harmonious cohabitation. To understand the place of religions in society, we need to know the place they have occupied historically.

To sum up, the utility of the study of religion does not in theory have to be advocated anymore, as is confirmed by the plethora of studies, research papers and theses devoted to it (and funded) in numerous academic fields, such as anthropology, law, political science, philosophy or sociology. And yet, this advantage, this responsibility and this utility are not succeeding in quieting persistent doubts in anyone observing religion as an area of study, that is a specific and specialized discipline – doubts to which the present article bears witness. To put it simply, we might say that these doubts are rooted in a paradoxical dynamism: on the one hand, it is acknowledged that religion is an issue for society, a subject of debate in the public sphere and of curiosity in the private sphere, and on the other hand we are observing the constant difficulty that the science of religion is experiencing in order to be recognized as a subject area in the humanities and social sciences as well as to maintain its place in the institutions of knowledge.

This paradoxical dynamism that is affecting religion and the study thereof is reproduced in various forms and ways of thinking. It is hard to explain why the enthusiasm of the media, the arts and literature for religion and spirituality struggles to translate into an interest in the courses provided by the science of religion. Let us consider why, for example, despite the relevance of the religious dimension to the current climate and despite the richness and the pertinence of our research studies, “the sociology of religion is often perceived as less serious, more subjective, and thus less suitable for delimiting the central axes and perspectives of general sociology,” as E-Martin Meunier (2015a: 5) asks. How can we understand the recent institutional reorganizations in Quebec’s universities at a time when religions are in the headlines and researchers in all fields are taking an interest in them? What can the study of religion gain from this, but what, too, does it lose?

What religion reveals to us

Just as paradoxical is the fact that these issues are bringing religion into the foreground whilst we are seeing the exculturation of its traditional forms. Until recently, the Quebecois remained entrenched in a certain cultural Catholicism through high membership figures and a relatively constant demand for religious ceremonies (although Sunday observance figures have long been low). But now, the trends seem to indicate a shift to a different regime of religiosity, with a “center” that is less visibly shaped by Catholicism (Meunier and Wilkins-Laflamme, 2011).

This is resulting in a polarization that tends to give visibility to “fringe” forms of religion, which are sometimes more radical, in a certain disconnection with the culture in which religion was rooted until now (Roy, 2008). This disconnection works in particular to the advantage of a reconnection with the culture of the individual, of personal fulfilment, of authenticity, of global consumption, of “religious secularities” (Lemieux, 1999). Three related trends can be identified in the academic literature: advanced secularization, increasing diversity and the unexpected survival of religion.

The first trend falls in line with a process of advanced secularization of Quebec society. First, a continuous decline in religious observance is now impacting Catholic rituals that had until recently been spared, such as baptism and funerals. Numerous studies have thus documented the shift from an ethnic Catholicism to a cultural Catholicism, ⁵ as well as more recently the process of exculturation. ⁶ This process of progressive disconnection is accompanied and nurtured by another process, that of the secularization of education, a process that has affected the transmission of a Catholic religious identity, or even of a Quebecois religious culture. For some thirty years now, in the aftermath of the introduction of a non-denominational school system and of the establishment of the course entitled Éthique et culture religieuse (Ethics and Religious Culture), major research projects have analyzed both these breaks in transmission, and also the modalities through which the cultural teaching of religion is organized today. ⁷ The plan to discontinue the course on Ethics and Religious Culture is now reinforcing a persistent taboo of mistrust regarding the religious dimension in Quebec. Secularism, the subject of so much debate, comment and analysis in the course of the past twenty years, has become, moreover, a central issue in the area of study relating to religion in Quebec. ⁸

The advanced secularization of Quebec society is accompanied by another observable trend, namely the increasing diversification of Quebec. The move away from a standardized “center” has meant that religions on the “fringe” have become more visible and diversified. A growing number of academic theses and studies are now devoted to groups that are in a quantitative minority, to new religious practices perceived as “exotic,” or more simply to religious phenomena that are “non-standard.” We are also observing the growing popularity of transnational studies, where national societies are no longer a frame of reference and analysis but rather transnational migratory networks. Finally, reflections on secularism are themselves undergoing such shifts, most often finding themselves approached as simple measures for the practical management of ethnocultural diversity, rather than as a principle for the political and legal organization of relations between the Churches and the State.

However, a third trend has come along to complicate matters, namely that of the unexpected survival of the religion of the “center.” Catholicism, for example, remains the religion with which a large majority of Quebeckers are affiliated, a large number of whom, for example, wanted to see the cross remain in the National Assembly whilst supporting the plan for a secular state. Moreover, the category of those who claim to have “no religion” is growing more slowly in Quebec than elsewhere in the West, particularly than in English Canada. In addition, the decline of orthopraxy and orthodoxy does not take into account the survival of a sacrosanct belief in God, a supernatural force or strong convictions. In this respect, while the advanced secularization of Quebec society in the “center,” and its growing diversity on the “fringes,” are leading to a kind of polarization between the “ majority” and “minorities,” and between the invisible and visible forms of religion, a factor that cannot be overemphasized is that this polarization appears to be some kind of political and intellectual construct, in that it tends to confuse a marginal and visible religion with the entirety of migrant “minorities,” taken as a fixed and monolithic block. “Minorities” are also diversified, even more than the “majority”: they do not all have the same relationship with religion, they do not all have the same religion, and they do not all have the same degree of religiosity, if only because a high proportion of immigration to Quebec is from France and North Africa. Perhaps, then, we could also speak of the unexpected survival of the absence of religion on the “fringes.”

Omnipresent as it is in today’s world, religion is also surprising in its dynamism in places where it was not expected, perhaps, or even where it was no longer observed, as is demonstrated by the large numbers of the faithful who take part in Catholic pilgrimages that might have been, wrongly, relegated to the ranks of simple relics inherited from the past. Yet, added to the hundreds of thousands of the faithful who patronize Saint Joseph’s Oratory, the Notre-Dame-du-Cap Sanctuary, or one of the roughly eighty sites of Christian pilgrimage that Quebec has to offer, there are also large numbers of Quebecois who have left well-trodden paths and have ventured onto new, different, and sometimes incongruous religious or spiritual territory. Religion is therefore also emerging in new places. From religious innovation to the management of diversity via the paradoxical dynamism of traditions and the religious dimension outside religion, the question of religion is shifting and restructuring, and in so doing, intrigues, fascinates and worries us.

Studying the religion of Quebec

The risks that affect the study of religion in Quebec today are diverse. They include diluting the subject of religion in various epistemologies that do not make the question of religion itself their very foundation, reducing the phenomenon of religion to its extreme and marginal forms, and studying religion as a subject in vitro and not in vivo. We might add a further risk to this list: care must be taken not to simply think of religion in Quebec without understanding the religion of Quebec (Fortin, 2018). Although in the past decade we have simultaneously spoken much and little of religion in Quebec, for similar reasons, we have likewise spoken much and little of Quebec itself, of religion as it is in fact lived, practiced, thought about and enshrined in Quebec society. The word “religion” may well have been on everyone’s lips, but it was more a question of universal principles and state models for the management of religion than of the religion lived, practiced and thought about here. The one does not exist without the other: it is indeed concrete aspects of religion that the law is proposing to enshrine, and it is indeed some concrete relationships with religion that are informing the law. Likewise, the religiosity that exists in Quebec is not a priori the same dimension that exists elsewhere. Not only does the same apply to the relationships, both divergent and convergent, that French-speaking Quebecois have with the Catholic tradition regarding religion, but the same applies, on a broader scale, to the entire religious landscape of Quebec: religion here has unique dimensions and is framed differently by institutions.

In fact, whether the issue is the ethnoreligious pluralization of its societies, the post-modern diversification of expressions of faith, the renewed ethical demands, the re-publicization of religions, the growth of religious populism or, on a broader scale, the calling into question of the modernist paradigm of secularization, Quebec has recently been providing a special case for comparative study. Not only is it more often featured in comparativist publications, ⁹ but also recent Canadian and international publications have been mainly or entirely devoted to Quebec. ¹⁰ Various factors may help to explain this popularity of the religion of Quebec. Undeniably, Quebec is caught in the cross-current of diverse issues common to advanced modern societies – secularization, religious pluralism, a secular regime, and the exculturation and internationalization of Catholicism. Further, it is located at the crossroads of diverse geographical and cultural areas (Transatlantic, North American, French-speaking, Catholic), which facilitates diffusion and comparison even with diverse fields and research networks, while vastly increasing the number of variables available. What is more, Quebec offers a number of distinctive features (late and increasing secularization, cultural Catholicism, a multinational set-up and a fragile collective identity), something which enriches any comparative study and opens it up towards other horizons. In more than one respect, for a large number of specialists, Quebec serves as a laboratory for analyzing the religious dimension and religions in the advanced modern age.

Thus, from an outside perspective, too, the study of religion in Quebec is relevant. In this respect, there is no need to create a dichotomy between the national and the transnational, or between the center and the fringes, but the challenge and the imperative is to articulate these factors such that the image of the religious dimension of Quebec is depicted more clearly. In light of this, the defense and consolidation of the intellectual Quebecois tradition of religion are needed. A review of and public focus on this will, in the long term, facilitate a survey of the contours of religion such as it exists in Quebec, whilst providing the means, the approaches and the intuitions that will make it possible to move forward an amended study program. This is because, if in Quebec religion no longer exists except on the fringes and in those passing through, people will be surprised neither by the removal of religion from university institutions (on the grounds of limited relevance) nor by its popularization as a sub-field of other disciplines (on the grounds of limited specialization).

In favour of religious studies

Following this overview, we are coming to the conclusion that, in Quebec, establishing a science of religion remains a work in progress. Indeed, this discipline does not seem to have managed to fully develop its approach, its contribution or its focus since it was secularized and diversified in the 1970s. In other words, it has not managed to fully develop the understanding of religion in society and avoid being watered down, that is, either by a withdrawal into a decontextualized religion or by the dilution of religion into other social dimensions. The challenge is considerable, but the future of studies of religion remains fully open. The relaunch of the Société québécoise pour l’étude de la religion is therefore also intended to be a rallying call. Long may the universities in Quebec continue to support and fund teaching and research related to religion.