Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec ed. by Hillary Kaell (review)

Quebec, Canada's second most populous province, represents multiple mysteries and fascinations when it comes to the subject of religion. Now, thanks to Hillary Kaell, professor of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal, scholars can turn to her edited volume Everyday Sacred for help in understanding Quebec's religious complexities. (McGill-Queen's University Press does not accent either Quebec or Montreal.) Kaell draws on specialists from inside and outside Quebec universities to probe the following: Pentecostal immigrants, gendered religious practice, Powwow music, Iraqi Jewish identity, rural wayside crosses, pilgrimage sites, Muslim veiling, Montreal Spiritualism, and transhumanism. Each of the nine topics earns its own chapter and illustrates that Everyday Sacred is not an overview of religion in Quebec but a dive into specific aspects of the religious story. Thankfully, the editor provides a helpful introductory overview of Quebec's religious history along with commentary about the study of religion in the province.

Perhaps more than any other state or province in North America, Quebec represents unprecedented change in the last century or so. In an 1881 visit to Montreal, Mark Twain quipped: "You couldn't throw a brick without breaking a church window." After the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s, Quebec politicians were alarmed by the sale of Roman Catholic church buildings. Even in a climate of rising secularism, the loss of heritage proved troubling. In the late 1950s church attendance was hovering around 90 percent. Today it is somewhere between 10 and 15 percent.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Catholic hierarchy worked mainly in tandem with the government of Maurice Duplessis. His political reign is denounced by critics as La Grande Noirceur—The Great Darkness—but traditionalists revere those days. Duplessis placed a crucifix in the National Assembly in Quebec City in 1936. It was taken down in July 2019 by Quebec's current premier, Francois Legault. If Everyday Sacred is updated, there will have to be a chapter devoted to Legault's infamous Bill 21, passed in June 2019, which prohibits the wearing of religious symbols by those engaging in public service. The new law has already led to Sikh teachers moving to other Canadian provinces looking for employment. Muslim women have felt particularly targeted.

While a majority of Quebecers support Bill 21, its passage does not mean religion is dead in the province. Kaell writes in her introduction that about 90 percent of Quebecers with French descent identify as Catholics and still baptize their children. Despite government promotion of laicité (neutrality on religion), the shrine of Saint Anne de Beaupré gathers almost one million visitors every year, notes Emma Anderson in her discussion on Catholic pilgrimage. The editor has a chapter on rural Catholics who maintain 2500 wayside crosses throughout the province as a testimony to Catholic Christian faith. Of course, the religious element must not be overstated since, after all, Quebec is officially secular.

As much as Christian faith in its Catholic form is at the heart of Quebec's history, Everyday Sacred is particularly adept at bringing to the fore other religious traditions or new factors in the changing face of Catholic Quebec. Thus, for example, Géraldine Mossière documents how Pentecostalism in Montreal is shaped by immigrants from various countries who must negotiate their religiosity while dealing with their own backgrounds, not to mention the cultural norms of immigrants from other countries in Asia, Africa, or elsewhere. Frédéric Parent and Hélène Charron show how feminism intersects with a dwindling priesthood in shaping the Catholicism of rural Quebec. There is an ongoing struggle over how to let women have their place in church leadership without impinging on the role of the male priest. The place of Powwow music among Quebec's indigenous peoples is explored by Laurent Jérôme. It is fascinating how the drumming tradition among various Native groups survived the Catholic missionary impulse to eradicate these "demonic" elements...