Religion in Quebec and Otherness at Home: New Wine in Old Bottles‪?‬

"My parents are uncomfortable with all matters concerning religion, a bit like all Quebecois." Lesla (1) The modernization and secularization of the Quiet Revolution pervaded all levels of society in the 1960s and led to an overall decrease in religious practice (Larouche, Menard, and Bellavance). Even though they lived with the Church's control and hegemony, native-born francophone Quebecois (henceforth referred to as native-born Quebecois) still consider Catholicism to be a key family legacy, as well as a fundamental identity referent (Lemieux 1993, 2002; Milot). However, this religious identity is being transformed in diverse ways and under various influences, such as through intermingling with new religious references imported from immigrant populations. Transnationals, such as international migrants and missionaries, have also introduced new traditions into Quebec's religious landscape, which is witnessing a diversity of religious tendencies. Among these are "spiritual" practices that focus on a quest for meaning (i.e. Spiritualism and various offshoots of the New Age movement), as well as conversion to minority religions such as Islam and Pentecostalism (Meintel and LeBlanc; Mossiere). Even though institutional religions remain dominant, native-born Quebecois religiosity is no longer part of a collective project. Individuals give sense to their world as much as they construct their own subjectivities by choosing, arranging, and appropriating symbolic and social resources provided by their evolving environment. For Lemieux (1990), native-born Quebecois religious behavior is the end product of a constant dialectic between official Catholicism on the one hand, and personal religious experience and needs on the other. Bibby agrees that in Canada, individual selection and reinterpretation of religious symbols, as well as their reintroduction into a new system of meaning, is governed by the subjects' trajectories and their perception of the various events that punctuate them. Although literature focused on religious experience reflects a prevailing postmodern tendency that emphasizes the individualized self (Hervieu-Leger), others argue that this experience emerges and is enhanced through an encounter with alterity, or another self. LeBlanc's study of multiethnic unions between individuals of Sephardic origin and those of French-Canadian descent in Montreal is a case in point. Most of the unions that she observes plan to transmit Jewish ethno-religious symbolic markers to their children, which inspires her to ask: "are Quebecois in search of an identity and ties of belonging?" (149).