From an interview with Charles Taylor:
What a lot of the Quebecois are dealing with centers around religion, but in two contradictory ways, which is why it’s so difficult to understand. On the one hand, part of the sense of where they are at in their national identity is the “Quiet Revolution,” which reacted against an extremely authoritarian religious moment. They consider this revolution to be one of their great achievements, so you get this expression of fear toward unfamiliar religions, Sikhism, but mostly Islam. You get the fear that it’s going to bring them backward, which is not a very nice idea to them.
On the other hand, there is also a sense that where they come from is a very deeply Catholic past. And of course, the same kind of people have these two kinds of emotions; horror toward religion in general because of the dominance of the Catholic Church, but also a certain attachment to the Catholic past. And sometimes this is played out in a way that is very bewildering. So the same kind of people can have these two very different reactions, and from that point of view these unfamiliar religions are kind of threatening. They threaten to dethrone and relativize the deeply culturally Catholic identity of Quebec.
So you get the two reactions from the same people, which results in two very different responses. The first would be in favor of the very general hard line laicism [or secularism] of the kind people think is French but really isn’t. The people’s image of French laïcité is so far from the reality. So we’re dealing with myths of a certain sort. Sometimes people react as very hard line laïcité [or secularists], but sometimes they are more concerned to defend the local tradition; so they get very angry at what they think are the demands of people from other religions, for example, those who want to remove the Christmas tree from the town hall. These demands are invariably made but by those who have become very atheistic, not by the minority religions who really don’t want to get into that. But there is this idea that the minority religions are somehow behind these demands.
So you get these two kinds of fear and indignation going in very different directions. I guess I didn’t know until we went through the whole process how important each one was. I think that in the end, the strong secularist position is a very minority position. However, their spokespeople are very articulate and educated, and therefore, they can produce a lot of op-ed pieces and exert a disproportionate amount of influence. But they really don’t represent the majority of the people.
Read the full interview at The Other Journal. More here and here.