The Mystical Geography of Quebec

Catholic Schisms and New Religious Movements

Susan J. Palmer, Martin Geoffroy, Paul L. Gareau, Susan J. Palmer, Martin Geoffroy, Paul L. Gareau

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030330613
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030330620
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

This study of new religious movements in Quebec focuses on nine groups—including the notoriously violent Solar Temple; the iconoclastic Temple of Priapus; and the various "Catholic" schisms, such as those led by a mystical pope; the Holy Spirit incarnate; or the reappearance of the Virgin Mary. Eleven contributing authors offer rich ethnographies and sociological insights on new spiritual groups that highlight the quintessential features of Quebec's new religions ("sectes" in the francophone media). The editors argue that Quebec provides a favorable "ecology" for alternative spirituality, and explore the influences behind this situation: the rapid decline of the Catholic Church after Vatican Il; the "Quiet Revolution," a utopian faith in Science; the 1975 Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms; and an open immigration that welcomes diverse faiths. The themes of Quebec nationalism found in prophetic writings that fuel apocalyptic ferment are explored by the editors who findin these sectarian communities echoes of Quebec's larger Sovereignty movement. 

© The Author(s) 2020

S. J. Palmer et al. (eds.)The Mystical Geography of QuebecPalgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualitieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33062-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Quebec’s New Religions in Social and Historical Context

Susan J. Palmer¹

(1)

Department of Religions and Cultures, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

Susan J. Palmer

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The observant traveller, while driving through rural Quebec, will likely notice the plaster Virgins who guard the dairy farms and apple orchards. They are reverently enshrined in up-ended bathtubs and often festooned with paper flowers and Christmas lights. Slowing down to proceed along the rue principale of the next village, the traveller will pass by many brick and clapboard houses, declaring the nationalist sentiments of their residents with Québec Libre! stickers or fleur de lys flags. Entranced by the flavour of traditional Quebec, the traveller might stop by a local dépanneur for drinks and snacks—to be confronted by posters for local yoga classes, shiatsu massage, tarot readings or meditation courses.

Continuing eastwards along the Saint Laurence River, towards Quebec City, the traveller will observe the tiny riverside villages surrounded by pine forests, each dominated by a Catholic Church, its neo-Gothic tin-coated steeple still intact and pointing to heaven. But for the curious visitor who ventures inside these churches, it will soon be apparent that attendance at the daily Mass is quite low.

Christianity was a driving force in the founding of New France in the seventeenth century. The Jesuits’ conversion of indigenous people and establishment of farming settlements for Catholic pioneers led to the growth of the first French (later British) colony known today as Quebec City. Its oldest churches and basilicas date back to the 1600s; Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, Notre-Dame de Québec and Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré are between 300 and 360 years old. And yet, within the dioceses of Quebec’s major cities (Montreal, Quebec City and Sherbrooke) over a hundred churches were sold between 2000 and 2009 (Hamilton 2014). Statistics Canada, in a study of the church-going habits of Canadians, found the steepest decline in church attendance was in the province of Quebec. It dropped from 48% in 1988 to 29% in 1998 (Chung 2009).

Does this low attendance suggest that today’s Quebeckers are less religious than their parents and grandparents? Not exactly.

Scholars of contemporary religion in Quebec (Bergeron 1982; Chagnon 1985; Kaell 2017) have found that popular expressions of spirituality have left the churches and cathedrals and moved to the ski chalets, lakeside hotels, commercial buildings, private homes, remote farmhouses, forest clearings or mountain tops. There, the intrepid researcher or journalist might find motley gatherings of ‘spiritual seekers’—the new recent converts to Hindu ashrams, Buddhist sanghas, Wiccan covens or magical-arcane orders.

How ‘New’ Are Quebec’s New Religions: And What Is Their Provenance?

New, eclectic immigrant religions have been recognized as a global phenomenon since the mid-twentieth century, but one might argue that in Quebec, new religions are particularly ‘new’. Montreal sociologist, Roland Chagnon (1985) insisted that the new religions established in Quebec since the 1960s and 1970s are ‘new’ in both a cultural and a contextual sense: ‘They represent a major rupture in the homogeneity of the history of Francophones in Quebec, which up to now had been exclusively Christian and Catholic.’ Other scholars agree with Chagnon that Quebec’s new religions must be studied within the social and historical context of a Catholic background.

There are, of course, exceptions to this ‘newness’. The Mission of the Holy Spirit, for example, was founded in the early 1900s, and both the Army of Mary and the Berets Blancs were active as social movements in the province long before they became established as new religions (between 1958 and 1960).

The new spiritual groups that have ‘invaded’ and transformed Quebec’s Catholic landscape are quite disparate, and they arrived through different routes. Lorne Dawson (2007) finds five ‘sets’ of new religious movements (NRMs) in contemporary Western societies: (i) groups associated with Asian traditions, (ii) groups from the Human Potential Movement, (iii) groups emerging from the magical/occult revival, (iv) New Age groups, and (v) groups focusing on extraterrestrials and UFOs. These five sets can all be identified in Quebec, but it might be more useful to categorize Quebec’s alternative religions in terms of their geographical origins and provenance.

First, we find the large, international organizations with headquarters in other countries (like Scientology, ISKCON, AMORC, Eckankar and Soka Gakkai that have all set up branches in Quebec). Second, we find our post-Catholic schismatic groups; these came about when conservative factions in the Catholic Church objected to the reforms of Vatican II, or rejected other modern compromises, and formed splinter organizations. Third, there are groups founded by local mystics or prophets. These may have started out as ‘Catholic’, but they quickly developed into eclectic, syncretic and strikingly original religious movements, like the Mission of the Holy Spirit.

In the fourth category are the so-called sectes that started out in France. For many French spiritual associations, Quebec is equivalent to the ‘Plymouth Rock’, the famous American icon of religious freedom on the Massachusetts coast. Since the 1990s, the province of Quebec has become a haven for alternative spiritual and philosophical groups, labelled pejoratively in France as sectes (Palmer 2011a). After weathering police raids, tax investigations and negative media coverage in the wake of the Solar Temple’s mass suicides in 1994 and 1995, several spiritual associations relocated to Quebec. The Aumistes of Mandarom (the ‘holy city’ in the French Alps) set up an ashram in Sainte-Lucie in the Laurentian mountains (Palmer 2011). The Solar Culture Association, an ecological commune near Toulouse, France, experienced a brutal police raid where their founder-prophet, Manitara, was arrested. Tired of the constant intimidation and surveillance by the police, they purchased a hunting lodge in Cookshire, Quebec. There they constructed the ‘Maple Village’ and changed their name to the ‘Christian Essene Church’ (see Melanson, this volume). Rael, the French leader of the world’s largest ‘UFO religion’, moved to Quebec, to found the Canadian Raelian Movement, and applied for Canadian citizenship in order to avoid death threats fanned by mediabolization—plus the steadily mounting back taxes on the sale of his books in France (Palmer 2004).

The contributors to this volume will describe the various ways these alternative religions established their roots in Quebec. They will address the mysteries of how—and why—new, alternative religions are flourishing in Canada’s most ancient and (until recently) most devout Catholic province. Finally, our authors will explore some of the ‘uniquely Quebecois’ aspects of these new, alternative religions.

Why Are NRMs Thriving in Canada’s ‘most Catholic’ Province?

Quebec’s short history of ‘alternative altars’ goes back to the 1960s’ ‘Quiet Revolution’ (Révolution tranquille ). This vivid, if paradoxical, description of the critical period of rapid change in Quebec during the 1960s was first used by an anonymous Toronto journalist in The Globe and Mail. Although Quebec was already an industrialized, urban and relatively modern society by 1960, the Union Nationale party, which had held power since 1944, was criticized for its stubborn adherence to a conservative ideology and its staunch defence of outdated traditional values. The Liberal Party posed a challenge to the Union Nationale, citing as their slogan, ‘It’s time for a change.’

In the elections of 22 June 1960, the Liberals won the vote. Once the Liberal Party rose to power, the province went through a process of rapid secularization. The Union Nationale had previously protected the status quo of the Catholic Church, which had controlled many of the province’s social services, such as hospitals, schools and orphanages (Baum 1986). Under Jean Lesage, the Liberal Party set into action a coherent and wide-ranging platform for reform. Education and healthcare were taken out of the hands of the church and became the government’s responsibility. A rising French-speaking middle class fought against anglophone companies for greater control over Quebec’s economic resources, and a contentious struggle to redefine the role of francophone society in Canada ensued.

This period, called the ‘Quiet Revolution’, involved a major reconceptualization of French-Canadian identity. Aside from becoming more closely tied to Quebecois nationalism, many francophone Quebeckers sought to disassociate themselves from their Roman Catholic roots (Balthazar 1990; Baum 1986). During Quebec’s ‘post-Catholic’ period of rapid secularization, in which the social and legal environment encouraged immigration and tolerated cultural diversity, there was an ‘invasion’ of new, foreign (as well as home-grown) alternative religions which proliferated rapidly—what Richard Bergeron called in his 1982 book title, Le cortège des fous de Dieu (‘the crazy for God parade’ or ‘the procession of fools for God’).

Since the 1960s Quebec has provided what the American sociologist Rodney Stark terms a ‘favourable ecology’ for new religions (Stark 1996). He argues that when a community is enriched by several strong, successful mainstream religions, or dominated by one monolithic religion, it will be difficult for new religions to establish their missions. New religious movements are likely to prosper only when they compete against weak, local churches and religious organizations within a ‘relatively unregulated religious economy’. In communities where conventional church membership and church attendance rates are low, the incidence of new religious movements will be high. Of course this argument would apply only to those societies whose constitutions protect religious freedom and human rights (Stark 1996). Quebec society today is a relatively tolerant, open society, particularly after the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms was passed by the National Assembly of Quebec on 27 June 1975.

As Rodney Stark might have predicted, in the wake of the decline of the Catholic Church in Quebec, new religions rushed in opportunistically to fill the vacuum. Non-Catholic religious leaders, including New Age practitioners, Protestant ministers, grandmasters of magical-arcane orders and Wiccan priestesses, were soon competing for new converts and seeking social legitimacy on an equal playing field (Bergeron 1982).

Anthropologists Deirdre Meintel and Geraldine Mossière (2012) argue that the Quiet Revolution gave p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Quebec’s New Religions in Social and Historical Context
• 2. New Religious Studies in Quebec Since 1944: A Literature Review
• Part I. Catholic Fundamentalisms and Schisms
• Part II. Radical Sexuality
• Part III. Controversial New Religions
• Back Matter