Quebec’s Act Respecting the Laicity of the State and the Demise of Religion: Scandal or Trial?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On June 16, 2019, Quebec’s National Assembly voted and adopted an Act respecting the laicity of the State, which prohibits a wide variety of government and civil officials, including public school teachers, from wearing religious symbols at work. The act also establishes laïcité as a fundamental principle superseding the exercise of certain rights and freedoms and prevailing over the provisions of any subsequent law. The proposed bill was debated heatedly in Quebec and encountered stiff opposition in the rest of Canada. This article analyzes five factors that were interwoven in the debate: identity, modernity, demise of religion, laïcité activism, and gender equality. The act reflects the difficult journey of a society trying to enforce and protect its unique cultural, social, and political profile within an overwhelmingly English-speaking and multicultural continent. However, the debate and the act itself reveal modern assumptions shared by both the proponents and the opponents regarding the private nature of religious beliefs and practices. From a theological perspective, the article argues that a post-secular approach to contemporary politics would be better suited to a society that, like many others, is facing major local and global issues. Such an approach would entail the possibility for religions and other symbolic sources of meaning to contribute to public debates. Jürgen Habermas and others have defined conditions for the implementation of this approach and called for a “complementary learning process.” The opponents to Quebec’s laïcité act and advocates for religion should see beyond scandal and understand this event as a trial proving religion’s capacity to make positive and fruitful contributions to public life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".