Thanks to Mordecai Richler's endless portrayal of his home province as a hothouse of anti-Semitism, Jacques Parizeau's infamous referendum-night crack about "money and the ethnic vote" and the goofball xenophobia of places like Herouxville, it is an article of firm conviction among English-speaking Canadians that French-speaking Quebecers are the most intolerant people in the country.
That sentiment was reinforced during the campaign leading up to Tuesday's vote in Quebec, largely as a consequence of the reactionary campaign run by Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois. One of her early announcements was a proposed Charter of Secularism, which would ban the wearing of religious symbols such as kippahs, hijabs and turbans in public institutions. On the other hand, a crucifix necklace would be OK, as is the crucifix that hangs in the legislature in Quebec City.
According to Marois, the new charter would serve a dual purpose. First, it would assert the principle of the neutrality of the state. And second, it would affirm the particular place of Catholicism in Quebec's history. "Wanting to take a step toward ensuring the neutrality of the state doesn't mean we deny who we are," she said.
Yet in attempting to square state neutrality with respecting Quebec's Catholic origins, Marois was seen in the rest of Canada as a hypocrite at best, but more likely a bigot. There is a more charitable interpretation of Marois's charter, which sees it as expressing a legitimate approach to the question of the proper relationship between state and church. The confusion arises because there are two distinct approaches to the neutral state.
On the first, the goal of secularism is to control religion, to circumscribe its public expression and keep it firmly in its place. For another kind of secularism, the point is not to control religion narrowly understood, but to manage the entire spectrum of comprehensive world views. These include organized religious outlooks, but also encompass types of spiritualism, scientism, atheism, humanism and so on. All of these have differing notions of the good, so the point of the neutral state is to find a way of accommodating and mediating between all of these world views.
These two secularisms correspond, more or less, to the forms that emerged out of post-Enlightenment France and England, and they are responses to the distinct challenges religion posed to each society. For France, secularism was a response to Catholic authoritarianism. In England, secularism was part of the liberal tradition that sought to handle a large amount of diversity.
It is not hard to see how these two versions of secularism have been transposed into the Canadian context. Quebec has pretty much copied the French approach of purging all religion from the public sphere, while the rest of Canada has embraced the multiculturalism found, in various forms, in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.
But the objection stands: Isn't Marois's proposal to allow the crucifix to remain in the legislature a sign of her profound bad faith? Again, a more charitable interpretation might be that Quebecers simply no longer take Catholic symbolism seriously. Montreal is one of the most irreligious cities on Earth, but its residents go about their business in the shadow of a giant cross. But no one cares. And perhaps the reason rests in the big difference between the French Revolution and the Quiet Revolution: The absence of violence. All Quebecers had to do to shuck off the church was give control of their education and health-care systems to the state.
Maybe, then, the reason Quebecers don't see any need to ban Catholic symbols from public space is not because they are hypocrites, but because those symbols are no longer a threat. But the symbols of other, foreign religions are seen as a threat to the secular order, hence the perceived need to control their expression.
A parallel point can be made with France, which has gone even further than Quebec in pushing religion out of the public realm. In 2004, France instituted a ban on conspicuous religious symbols in schools, and in 2011 passed a ban on the wearing of the burqa and other face coverings. Yet French elementary students still get Wednesday mornings off, thanks to a law passed in 1882 aimed at giving parents time to give their children religious instruction "if they desire."
This is not to say that when it comes to Frenchversus-English secularism, there is nothing to choose, that each is a matter of local taste mixed with historical happenstance. Each form of secularism was an institutional response to a specific threat, and each served its respective society quite well. But looking to the future, we can't say that each is equally suited to the challenges that they face. In particular, the French/Quebec model is overly focused on the threat of religion narrowly understood.
Neither France nor Quebec is in any danger of being taken over by a single religion. The real difficulty is the same one confronting every other major industrialized democracy, namely, the challenge of managing deep and broad diversity.
If the rest of Canada has better policies and better institutions, it is largely thanks to historical factors that are none of our doing. If we insist on taking credit for them while making invidious comparisons with Quebec, the least we could do is make sure that we have purged our practices of all inherited biases.
Andrew Potter is managing editor of the Ottawa Citizen.
