One of the more remarkable chapters in the history of secularism and atheism is the mid-20th century rejection of the Roman Catholic Church by large numbers of Québecois, which culminated in "The Quiet Revolution" of the 1960s, the time when, as many Québecois say, "everyone stopped going to church."

In light of that, there's an interesting story from the CBC website archives on an artistic movement, Le Refus global, beginning in the late 40s, that was at the vanguard of the secularization of Québec:

archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-68-1...fus_global/

They note that at the state funeral of the artist who started the movement, Jean-Paul Riopelle, some of his friends refused to attend, because it was held in a church.

The Church had been intimately bound up in the provincial power structure for two centuries, as the intermediaries for the Anglais who dominated both the capitalist hierarchy and the federal government. They ran the schools and the hospitals. In the rural areas, the priests were the main authority figures. It seems that resentment against the Church for being the enablers of English oppression built up over the many decades and finally resulted in its being cast off. So that rejection was intimately bound up in the story of Québec separatism, making it a complex tale, which most commentators have tended to oversimplify by concentrating just on the separatist side of it.

Joel Garreau's chapter on Québec in his book The Nine Nations of North America has some good descriptions of this background and the subsequent secularization:

"But the British, after the fighting, offered a canny deal that, for all practical purposes, started to freeze the development of Quebec society right where it was. All sides ended up accepting it with gratitude. The habitants got to keep what they wanted - their rural French North American society. The French elite was saved from instant ruin, although in short order they found themselves in decline, as some merchants and administrators left for greener pastures and others were crippled by the disruption of their lines of credit and sources of goods on the continent. The British got the peace and quiet that they would have loved to obtain from their thirteen Atlantic colonies to the south. And the big winner under the new English Protestant regime, ironically, was the Roman Catholic Church, which became the executor of this deal, and thus, in effect, the real wielder of secular power over the vast majority of the inhabitants of Quebec.

"The political authority of a Protestant society," writes Alfred Dubuc, "thus became the defender of the values and institutions of the Catholic Church, while the religious authorities of French-Canadian society upheld, in the eyes of their flocks, British institutions."

and

"What you had, until the "Quiet Revolution" began in 1960, was a society that, in hindsight, was amazingly backward and ingrown by North American standards.

In fact, many Quebecois now date the dark ages of their society not from the Conquest of 1760, but from the 1830s, when the democratic liberal secular elite from within the Quebecois society began to try to wrest power away from the Church and the English. This resulted in armed revolution by 1837, but the Patriotes, as they were called, were defeated by the same old coalition: French Catholic denunciation from the pulpit, and professional English military tacticians on the ground. It was after the crushing of the Patriotes that the Quebecois, while still far and away the majority in Quebec, began to think of themselves less as one of the races destined to rule North America than as a minority. In order to convince themselves that their survival was worthwhile, they immersed themselves in their ancient traditions, and thus was launched 150 years of petrifying conservatism. "

and

"Another measure of how far things have come is how rapidly the Church has lost power. Since its authority as an elite was inextricably intertwined with the old secular order, it crumbled under the assault on other values. Not only did it lose communicants in droves, but it lost nuns and priests at a rate so extraordinary that Quebecois now feel a little sheepish at how long the Church was considered a bastion of their nationalism. The change suggests strongly that the Church's foundations had been rotting for a long time, and the only reason it stood so long was for lack of attack. The Quebecois know well the wisdom of the line from the Pogo comic strip: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." The speed with which the Church lost influence in Quebec is still as much of a puzzle as the speed with which Islam gained power in Iran. As one anthropologist observed:

Religion became another cultural trait. It was never discussed. There was no opposition. It was the thing to do. It was a given.

When spring comes, the habitant discards his mittens. The Quiet Revolution came, and religion became a thing of the past.

In my village, nobody had ever met a Protestant. You didn't have to fight for your religion. When a cultural trait becomes so ingrained, so naturalized, it no longer means what it was supposed to: revolutionizing your life. It was a custom. Something you had to do.

The anthropologist could take a great Gallic delight in recounting in ribald detail the manner in which, even in the forties and fifties, and even in the small rural parishes, Church teachings on such matters as eating fish on Friday, abortion, fornication, moderation in the use of alcohol, and respect for the parish priest were routinely ignored.

You have to remember [he said], what Mass was. Sunday was a holiday, and you put your good clothes on, and you go to see your neighbors, and you arrive as late as you can. In one village [near Quebec City], there were these big processions and the priest said everybody had to be there. Everybody took his place in the procession, so I took a place in the procession, and there were two files. The priest was walking down the rows, and, when he was at the far end, the people near me were laughing and telling dirty stories. It was terrible. The priest came near us, and he was telling the beads, and everybody bowed his head, and when he was gone, they'd go back to telling their dirty stories."


It doesn't mean that church-going died out altogether, but to this day the Québecois are largely secular. Many may be holiday, wedding and funeral attendees, but it's not a significant force in their lives.

I live in an immigrant neighbourhood, and there's far more church-(and mosque-)going among them, with various evangelicals making inroads, than among the French. In fact, I think one the many tensions that characterize conflicts over what's called l'accommodation raisonable (the government policies of multicultural tolerance extended toward immigrant cultures, which has involved bending over backwards to accommodate requests by ultra-Orthodox Jews and hijab-wearing Muslims, for instance) is the Québecois distaste for religious dominance, rooted in their own cultural memory. (They can also just be racist mofos at times, too.)

It's hard to imagine an America where "religion became a thing of the past." I hope it doesn't mean a nation has to go through a period of total dominance by religion before people finally shrug it off. (As may yet happen in Iran, where half the population is under 25 and have never known anything other than Islamic totalitarianism.)