Multiple Secularities and Cultural Memories in Québec

Contemporary contestations over secularity in Western liberal democracies frequently take shape as politics of memory in which accounts of the past are mobilized to legitimate privileges of Christian Churches in the public domain. Such mobilizations meet with legal challenges as there are increasing pressures to bring such privileges into harmony with fundamental rights (equality, freedom, non-discrimination).

This paper addresses the politics around cultural memory and laicité in Québec and specifies three distinct accounts, carried by civil society protagonists, that feed into institutional responses to religious diversity (‘heritage secularism’, sceptical secularism,  ‘open secularism’). Using examplary cases, it shows how these accounts are brought to bear on judicial dynamics and civil society activism. The paper is based on archival research and qualitative interviews carried out in 2012 and 2013.