Editorial: The history of “religion” and Quebec politics
When we think about religion in Quebec, often what first comes to mind is Bill 21, the infamous bill to limit religious expression for public workers.
While there has been equal criticism and support for this bill in Quebec, as a scholar of religion, I can’t help but try to connect the contemporary situation to broader historical processes.
For example, we can trace different traditions of Quebec’s proactive secularism in this bill, like in France. However, the bill also connects with the rejection of the hegemony of the Catholic Church in the 1960s Quiet Revolution. In my own scholarship, I have been tackling the question of religion from a postcolonial or decolonial perspective. I think exploring the history of religion from this decolonial perspective can give us some important insights into how we think about religion today in Quebec.
One of the fundamental insights of the study of religion is that “religion” as a conceptual construct has transformed over time. How we think of religion today is different than we’ve thought of it before, and outside of the West, historically, people didn’t map their conceptual worlds in the ways we think about religion now. Religion as we know it today has a fairly recent history that we can trace to the Enlightenment.
Seventeenth and 18th-century European Enlightenment thinkers transformed understandings about religion because they identified the cause of the 16th and 17th-century wars in Europe as “religious wars” between Protestants and Catholics. Accordingly, Enlightenment thinkers started an influential project to cut out religion from the public sphere and pushed to relegate religion to the private sphere as a matter of “individual conscience.” This is the origin of the idea of the separation of church and state. And yet, religion was still culturally important, so religion was also accorded a special status: protected from criticism, religion became a matter of faith. Thus, conceptual dichotomies were produced that remain today: reason versus faith, religion versus science, religion versus philosophy, religion versus politics. Domesticated by the Enlightenment, religion could be managed by broader European society.
And yet, the influence of Protestantism transformed broader European ways of thinking about religion. Protestantism is famous for rejecting the authority and institution of the church, rejecting the mediation of clergy and belittling Catholic over-ritualization. For Protestants, the goal was to cut through the middlemen and go right to the source, where individuals could connect to the divine themselves, through the Bible.
These “Protestant presuppositions,” as Gregory Schopen, professor of Buddhist studies at UCLA, calls them, transformed the understanding of “religion” in European ways of thinking. Religion became invested with these new normative understandings of what “religion” was: It was about doctrines, not practices; it was a matter of individual experience; it was centred in texts; it critiqued what we now call “organized religion;” and it posited an essence for religion. All of these and more became part of how Europeans understood religion and still shape how we think of religion today. It was also around this time that Europe was beginning to conquer the rest of the world in its colonial adventures.
Enlightenment ideals and Protestant presuppositions transformed how Europeans thought about “religion,” who then projected that out onto the world as a universal category. This kind of universalizing projection is known as Eurocentrism and is a part of the colonial project. Colonials could evaluate colonized people, who had different understandings about “religion,” and find them lacking in comparison to the hypostatized European ideal.
Colonial discourse is always trying to find levers to justify colonial interventions, and at the level of knowledge, the binary constructs of civilized and barbaric, modernity and tradition, and East and West become tools for projecting onto the world the putative superiority of the West. The category of religion became one such tool. Where Indigenous “religion” didn’t look like the now secularized Enlightenment/Protestant framing of religion, the colonized were denigrated as barbaric, degenerate or more passively as not yet “caught up.” Thus, often, how we conceive of “religion” becomes a tool for more insidious power moves.
In my current work, I reflect on how the modern development of the concept of religion becomes wrapped up in colonial race politics. From the early Iberian relegation of Black and Indigenous folks, through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and into the later Enlightenment colonial project, religion has been used as a litmus test of civilizational status based on race.
We see this even today where what scholars call the World Religions Paradigm (the various -isms of world religions) often relegates African Traditional Religion and Indigenous Religion to footnotes, if included at all. These hierarchies of race and religion are mobilized in connection with what decolonial thinkers call colonial capital. Global capitalism wants hierarchies of labour: Who gets to work plantations, who gets to be an information technology expert, who gets to be the bosses—who holds capital?
The contemporary politics of religion in Quebec are a little easier to understand when we think of them as another manifestation of this trajectory of the concept of “religion.” If we think of the Quebec government’s focus on discouraging overt religious symbols and how this disproportionately affects Muslim women (while allowing Christian symbols in the public sphere as “historical”), we can think back to how European norms become universalized and applied to an Other. We can see how secularism in this context as a post-Enlightenment discourse mobilizes religion in ways that connect with notions of race/ethnicity as a kind of colonialism of the nation.
Even for a secular society, there are “better and worse” religions, and these are coded to an ever-changing set of norms mobilized to divide us for political gain. While nationalist discourses in the West attempt to determine who “fits” in a nation, they are inevitably inheritors of a long colonial tradition of inclusion/exclusion that connects to the needs of global capitalism.
This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 8, published January 28, 2025.