Door to Door Missionaries in Quebec

In the last 20 years, churches have made many advances in America. They have gained converts, established private schools, and become a political force to be reckoned with. At the same time, they are rooted in the past, opposing sciences including medical, geological, environmental, and the science of evolution. And even more frightening, they support apocalyptic religious wars, spying on fellow citizens and torture.

But it is important to remember that backward religions are not inevitable. An example of the advance of liberalism against conservative religion occurred in Quebec in the sixties.

Between 1961 and 1971, the rate of religious practice in the highly urbanized diocese of Montreal fell from 61% to 30%. By 1971, Quebec Province as a whole had dropped to between 37 and 45% religious attendance. I don't know what the average attendance in the province was in 1961, but from my own personal observation it might have been as high as 95% among French Canadians.

The Dumont Commission of 1971 concluded "Religious practice is abandoned without drama, as one would throw off an old, ill-fitting garment ... more often, people leave the church without making a sound, sneaking out by the back door."

These were my high school and university years in Quebec. Thinking back, it was an unprecedented historical change in Quebec. In 1961, the Catholic church was all-controlling, and to my mind, backward thinking. There was a lot of religious observance and ritual, but very little in the way of understanding of the message. You probably know what I mean. People piously sitting and kneeling in church, but rushing the door at the end to be the first out of the parking lot, and the resulting traffic jam was always rude and aggressive.

I can remember the actual occurrence when the Catholics in Baie Comeau stopped attending church. There was a strike at the aluminium plant, and during the strike, many people stopped going to church on the rather flimsy excuse that they didn't have the money to put in the collection plate. When the strike was over, they simply didn't bother to go back to church.

This all took place during the "Quiet Revolution", when French Canadians took over the province of Quebec. The province had been run by a small English speaking elite for two hundred years, ever since Quebec was ceded to Britain by France.

For 200 years, the Catholic church had held a dominant position in French Canadian society. Before 1960, most people, both English and French believed that there was some kind of genetic predisposition of French Canadians toward a fundamental Catholicism. However, studying the history of New France before 1760 you would have noticed that the French were not particularly devout Catholics. After the British took over, a deal was struck with the Catholic church where the British governor would ensure payment of tithes by all French Canadians to the church, and the church would have full control of the educational system for the French colonists. In return, it was assumed the church would not incite the French to revolt against the English. The deal held up well until about 1961. By then, the church was rich and had a stranglehold on Quebec. For example, no religious missionaries were allowed to go door to door, particularly the Jehovah's Witnesses. No movies could be shown (in French anyway) that the church did not approve of. Books that were banned by the church could not be found in libraries, or bookstores.

During the time I was in Sierra Leone (1969-72), these Catholic laws had all been repealed. And already, Quebec had become the destination for more missionaries than the entire continent of Africa. Every fundamental church in America tried to fill the spiritual vacuum and was equipping missionaries with French lessons and sending them up to Quebec. I remember just a few weeks after arriving at my apartment in Sherbrooke in 1972, some Mormons appeared at my door. This was the first time I had ever seen religious door-to-door missionaries. I naively invited them in. I had heard of the Mormon church, but only as a kind of joke - like they have a lot of wives. I thought they were just going to come in and chat, then leave. Instead they came in, set up a felt board, and started with a bizarre audiovisual presentation. Then gave me some homework reading and left. When they came back to check up on my studies, I returned their book, and sent them on their way, with them grumbling about me not having the courtesy to read the book they had so kindly left for me.

From then on, I never engaged in any more doorstep "debates" with religious missionaries. And in the Quebec of the seventies, they came by frequently. After a while, the missionary fever subsided, as the various fundamental churches came to the conclusion that French Canadians were not such a fertile ground for the salvation of the Lord. French Canadians in fact started to gain a reputation of being hedonistic. That's how fast things can change when the conditions are right. But honestly, I cannot figure out why people were ready for this change in Quebec during the sixties, except that maybe it went together with throwing off the English ruling minority.