Religion, Culture, and the State: Reflections on the Bouchard-Taylor Report ed. by Howard Adelman and Pierre Anctil (review)

This thoughtful book brings together a philosopher and a historian as contributing editors and three professors from the fields of English, Judaic Studies, and Law. Excluding the notes and references, the six essays total only 112 pages. All of the authors, except Howard Adelman, are Quebecers. The Quebec media distorted and sensationalized a few minor incidents involving the kirpan, the hijab, and the segregation of men and women, turning them into incendiary issues. These were then exploited for political gain by the right-wing Action démocratique du Québec to convey the false impression that religious minorities were making excessive demands, a characterization that fit with deeply-rooted stereotypes among Quebec francophones.

Deploying the most Canadian of tactics to avoid addressing the place of religion in the social sphere, Quebec's Liberal government launched a commission to probe "reasonable accommodation." Chaired by two internationally acclaimed Quebec intellectuals, the commission grappled with reconciling the multi-ethnic and religious diversity that is contemporary Quebec with the Quiet Revolution's embrace of secularism, known in the province by the French republican term, laïcité. The commissioners proposed a moderate form of laïcité. They rejected what José Woehrling terms "rigid secularism" in favour of an "open secularism" consistent with the Canadian and Quebec Charters of Rights and case law. Among their recommendations, the commissioners called for the removal of religious symbols in governmental institutions. However, even before their report's release, the government announced, and a unanimous vote in the National Assembly affirmed, that the prominent crucifix hanging above the Speaker's chair in the Assembly would remain.

Passions unleashed at the commission's hearings included some xenophobic and racist ranting. Bina Toledo Friewald draws on social psychology to analyze the briefs presented to the commission. Howard Adelman's concluding chapter offers some survey data that contrast the opinions of francophones and anglophones. Data from CBC's more recent and massive Vote Compass survey during the 2011 federal election revealed that Quebecers are the most receptive Canadians to immigration. However, they are also the least tolerant of a public presence of non-Christian religious symbols, beliefs, and rituals. In Quebec, "interculturalism"—the pursuit of a common French-speaking civic culture rooted in the values of freedom, liberty, and human rights—is counterposed to Canadian multiculturalism, which is considered "language-blind" (4), as treating all cultures as equals and therefore denigrating Quebec's distinctive collective personality.

Adelman offers a comparative chapter. It is limited to the Canadian, Quebec, and French cases. This raises a question for this reader: "How are the tensions between community rights and individual rights addressed in other societies such as Britain, Germany, and Sweden?" He examines the contexts and upshots of France's 2003 Stasi commission and concludes that the differences in its recommendations from those of the Bouchard-Taylor commission reflected contradictions between the two societies' interpretations of liberalism. Furthermore, much of the French debate, unlike the Quebec debate, related to a perceived threat of international Islamism and the proper balance between persuasion and law.

Pierre Anctil's Introduction makes the insightful geographic observation that while the mosques and temples of the newer immigrant groups are generally located in Montreal's outer suburbs, the Jews live more centrally. Ira Robinson's thin but illuminating chapter draws particular attention to the Jewish community and the surge of anti-Semitic outbursts at the commission's hearings, which coincided with a rise in anti-Semitic incidents. The Jewish presence in the province goes back 250 years. Nevertheless, Jews found themselves implicated with recent immigrant communities such as Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. This may be because the distinctively dressed and culturally detached Hasidic Jews have appeared in Quebec relatively recently. Many of them live in tiny Outrement where the more affluent francophone intelligentsia who drive the provincial policy agenda also reside.

Because a social...