Electoral Chair’s Seminar – 11 December
Institutions and Rapid Religious Reversals: Understanding the Secularization of Canada
Benjamin Tremblay-Auger-Stanford Graduate School of Business
Why was the decline of religion much more pronounced in Europe than in the US after World War II? The Canadian case holds the key to understanding divergent secularization patterns since it is a hybrid case: most of the country followed a pattern of sustained religiosity similar to the US, while Quebec saw a rapid decline of religion similar to many European countries, such as the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland.
As part of what historians call the “Quiet Revolution,” Quebec experienced one of the world’s fastest episodes of secularization starting in the late 1950s. It went from being the most religious province in Canada to the least religious in less than two decades, a pattern that I document by combining multiple historical polls. I propose a new theory in which such rapid religious reversals are caused by a high degree of interdependence between public institutions and cultural religiosity. This interdependence generates a political multiplier effect in which more religious public institutions increase the population’s religiosity, leading them to support policies that reinforce the religiosity of institutions. However, a shock can reverse this multiplier effect and generate a rapid shift toward a strongly secular society. I argue that the institutions of the Catholic Church and the provincial state became highly intertwined, which created a greater interdependence between religiosity and public institutions in Quebec than in other parts of Canada. Low federal transfers and insufficient recruitment weakened the religious welfare state in the 1950s, which opened the way for a shift in the 1960s to an equilibrium with a strongly secular and generous welfare state along with low cultural religiosity.
This content has been updated on 9 December 2024 at 9 h 59 min.
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