From Seminary to University in Quebec: de la théologie aux études religieuses

Abstract

In his book From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada, Aaron Hughes offers a comprehensive portrait of the historical construction of the study of religion in Canada. While Hughes explains in-depth the social, political and historical conditions of production of knowledge on religion as an academic domain in provinces of Protestant heritage, his contribution is less thorough regarding the development of this academic field in the province of Quebec. In this article, I depict how the creation of institutions of knowledge in Quebec hinged around the Catholic hegemony that lasted since the inception of the colony, namely among faculties of theologies that framed main historical universities. I also argue that this heritage has shaped the ongoing construction of the study of religion as an epistemological issue between Catholic theologians and religious studies scholars.

The study of religion occupies a special place in the constellation of activities related to knowledge. Firstly, religious institutions have, historically, been the first places in which knowledge was formally transmitted. Secondly, in no other area of study is the line thinner between believing and knowing. This is why Aaron W. Hughes’s brilliant historical retrospective of the study of religion in Canada is a significant contribution not only to the field of religious studies, but also to the general understanding of the construction of academic thinking. In a time where religion has become a major issue in social, political and cultural life, examining the conditions of the production of knowledge on this issue in the longue durée seems of utmost relevance. The book offers an in-depth and well-informed archival study that examines not only the evolution of the study of religion but also the construction of the education and university system in Canada, including its ideological ties, its moral and Christian influences from Britain, as well as the autonomy it gradually acquired. While Hughes does not argue for a “Canadian take on the academic study of religion” (2020: 55), “nor on the Canadian intellectual originality,” he emphasizes the distinct features and institutional, political, social and legal contexts that paved the way to create an academic and intellectual forum for debating the form, aims and assumptions that should underly the study of religion in Canada. Hughes shows how institutions dedicated to the study of religion in Canada are closely tied to the personal convictions of their protagonists, the historical changes of Canadian society, and federal policies that have shaped the country’s social and religious landscape.

Appearing in the late 17th century, the first seminaries were above all the epicenters of the Christianisation and moralization processes of Canada society. They drew on the idea that religion should be the basis of education and were constrained by the political project of colonization and the limits of financial flows stemming from the motherland. It follows in the 19th century that the first sites of religious learning were confessional colleges of which some were chartered by the British monarchy. They were first and foremost part of a more encompassing ideological project aimed at preserving English tradition in New England as well as building the “moral fabric” (p. 35) of the colony. While the study of religion was then focused on teaching religious truth claims (as opposed to teaching about religion), the educational system was fraught with sectarian debates and rivalries among the variety of Christian denominations. Many factors combined to shift the study of religion from theology toward a stronger emphasis on interfaith dialogue and the inclusion of alternative perspectives on the ethics of human existence: the opening of the Canadian frontiers to the Global South, the implementation of the federal model of multiculturalism as well as, starting in the 1960s, a new demand from students for more teaching on the diversity of cultures.

The academic study of religion has been gradually shaped by shifting perspectives and methodologies, from theological categories (such as inerrancy and prophetic inspiration with a Christocentric orientation) to biblical studies and oriental studies through a comparative lens, as well as the scientific target of more value-neutral or critical lenses that, for example, question the historicity of scriptures. This paradigmatic shift from the religious to secular study of religion has been manifested in many forms, such as the creation of the journal Studies of Religion (as a substitute to the Canadian Journal of Theology), the establishment of scholarly societies devoted to the study of religion, and the diminution of theological education, juxtaposed with what Hughes calls a “florescence” of secular programs of religious studies in universities. By discussing the development of religious studies in Canadian universities, he also emphasizes the tension that the articulation of theology and the academic study of religion inevitably raised, namely the debate between Wiebe and Davis about the inclusion of the confessional approach in the scientific study of religion. While Hughes acknowledges that theology draws on a different set of intellectual investments than the academic study of religion, he also reports that including the academic study of religion in contemporary universities that frame themselves as secular and see the introduction of religion in their curriculum as suspicious also requires drawing the line with theology. In a sense, both traditions would then assume and stand for their own presuppositions.

Although Hughes includes Quebec in his study, he also warns that the unique position and history of the province in the Canadian landscape does not allow him to delve deeply into the evolution of the academic study of religion in Quebec. Indeed, the emergence of the study of religion in Quebec plays out quite differently in a province where the common founding myth revolves around the historical hegemony of the Catholic Church over families, female bodies, the individual and collective consciousness and social institutions. This long period more commonly known as the Great Darkness came to an abrupt end with the so-called Quiet Revolution that occurred in the 1960s, only to trigger a fast and radical secularization process and liberalization of mores, not to mention a dizzyingly swift abandonment of religious practices. This distancing from religious beliefs and institutions also led to a drastic diminution of demand for the training of priests and pastoral workers, and thus emptied the large amphitheatres of theology students who, until then, had filled the benches of the seminaries in Quebec (ironically, the province’s enduring identification with Catholicism as a collective culture or legacy creates a curious paradox). Therefore, unlike in the rest of Canada where the emergence of the secular study of religion resulted from battles among various Christian denominations, in Quebec it stemmed from a strong political and social push to deconfessionalize public institutions and services, including education.

It would however be misleading to present this process as the sole product of the Quebecois population’s collective simple rejection of Catholic Church. As a matter of fact, the internal secularization of the Catholic church that gave rise to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) contributed to paving the way for this major reconfiguration because it not only reformed teachings and liturgies in a more democratic way but also it limited the Church’s domains of action and intervention from authority over inherited practice, morality, and community life to the subjective and intimate religious life (now depicted as spiritual).

It is in this context where religion, and hence the study of religion, as a legitimate object of interest has become a taboo and matter of suspicion that faculties of theology that had previously trained priests and pastoral workers in the province under the guise of the Catholic archbishop gradually shifted to departments or centres of religious studies affiliated with universities. Yet, similarly to Hugues’s argument about the rest of Canada, collective acceptance that the study of religion can take place within the university as opposed to being a peripheral topic taught by clerics at theological colleges has not yet been achieved in Quebec. In the latter social context, social pressures to exclude religion from public institutions are based on specific views regarding the relationship between state and religion, with the importation of French concepts like laicité. In this respect, the Quebecois approach to the study religion seems closer to the US case where Hughes interestingly notes that the emergence of the academic study of religion stems from the legal separation between church and state. In Quebec, the removal of religion from education first started with the curricula of primary schools where catechism was replaced by a choice between morals and catechism, and this before entirely switching in 2008 to a class on ethics and religious culture, a class that is likely to be reformed in the near future due to criticism that the word “religion” still appears in the title and that the curriculum supposedly places disproportionate emphasis on Christianity.

This is not to say that Quebec has not experienced the emergence of the secular study of religion that we see in the rest of Canada, and Hughes rightfully mentions the creation of an independent sector of religious studies called “religiologie” that is directly tied to the creation by the government of a network of Universités du Québec aimed at modernizing the province through the democratization and secularization of knowledge. Yet, the transition to the non-confessional study of religion has been far more recent and remains unachieved in the three universities that, historically, were founded by Catholic dioceses, each of which underwent a different process of secularization. Thus, in 2015, the Université de Sherbrooke that was created in 1954 out of the seminary Saint-Charles-Borromée de Sherbrooke (from which it dissociated shortly afterwards in 1960) announced that the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies would be transformed into a University Center for the Study of Contemporary Religion, focusing on graduate and postgraduate training. As for the Université Laval in Quebec, its roots are in the Seminary of Quebec created by Monseigneur François de Laval in 1663, which was later chartered by Queen Victoria in 1852 and received a pontifical charter (canonical consecration) from Pope IX in 1876. When the University abandoned this charter and its Catholic title in 1965, it still granted a special status to the Faculty of Theology that has remained tied to the Catholic Church and been allowed to deliver canonical education even now, while at the same time enlarging its teaching repertoire to Studies in Religion. In 1997, it changed its name to the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies. The Université de Montréal offers an example of a secular department of religious studies that was created from the ashes of the Faculty of Theology that in secular Quebecois society has been greatly devalued for its Christocentric outlook. As Hughes mentions, the Université of Montréal was created in 1878 as a branch of the Université Laval after the pontifical charter. With a canonical status, the Faculty of Theology was first housed at the Seminary where it taught theology to clerics before gradually opening up teaching to lay people and moving its classes to the campus of the university where it settled in 1967. In order to answer demands for more diversity and critical thought, the Faculty gradually opened new programs in biblical and pastoral studies, as well as teaching about religion from a humanities perspective with the creation of the journal Théologiques as a platform to frame this conversation. It changed its name to the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies in 2003, and a philosopher, a historian, an anthropologist and a Hinduist were hired to mark the Faculty’s gradual inclusion of religious studies in its teachings. Due to the significant reduction in student enrollment, as well as the wider collective desire to deconfesionnalize public institutions, the Faculty lost its canonical status in 2016 and became the Institute of Religious Studies, now housed in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. While the Institute maintains teaching relationships with the Dominican Institute, professors are expected to teach from a non-confessional perspective.

Unlike in Ontario where the debate between Wiebe and Davis opened a real (and fraught) debate and reflection on the possible articulation between religious studies and theology, in Quebec, religious studies scholars and theologians have not yet entered a real epistemological conversation on the conditions and possibilities for both of them to contribute to the study of religion and how the latter should be framed. In a Quebecois context where the social relevance of their domain of studies is far from consensual (thereby leaving the study of religion in a state of precarity), both of them seem to cohabitate as two solitudes presenting their own paradigms as two different and complementary approaches to the same object, and sometimes overlapping. At the Université de Montréal, the pastoral theology that was developed during the era of the Faculty of Theology draws on a praxeological model aimed at identifying parochial problematics by drawing on the ethnographic method of participant observation all the while leveraging observations to frame interventions and better pastoral practices. In this respect, one limit to Hughes’s insightful study lies in his narrow definition of theology as primarily the transmission of religious truth claims.

As a matter of fact, theologians also questioned their own truth, sometimes leading to tense relationships with the diocese that in turn looked harshly upon priest-theologians who left the priesthood as well as upon female theologians applying to lead the Faculty. What is more, some theologians integrated academic critical thinking into their own discipline, which gave rise to a decolonial and feminist theology that has become the hallmark of theology at the Université de Montréal, with Denise Couture as the leading figure. The reflexivity of Quebecois Catholic theologians on their own religious tradition is most likely to result from the hegemony of the Catholic denomination, that, unlike at least in the Eastern part of Canada, did not face any religious competition (due to the close association between culture, religion and language that occurred in the province until the 1960s). In the same vein, it would have been useful for Hughes to situate the shift from seminary to university in the internal debates of the various Christian denominations that shaped the Canadian educational landscape as much as he insists on the role of rivalries and collaboration between them. The creation of the United Church of Canada as a Canadian particularity is illuminating and the conditions for its emergence could be explored further. That being said, Hughes’s exceptional documentary work offers us a comprehensive and unique book that no doubt invites further conversations on the construction of the study of religion in Canada, including its legacy within religious and secular circles and its possible contribution to and exchanges with approaches to the study of religion as they are shaped in other national and regional contexts.