Beyond Secularism (Laïcité): Québec’s Secularism and Religious Participation in Nation-Building
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the role of religion in nation-building by examining its public dimensions within the evolving context of secularism in Québec. By examining the shift from open secularism, recommended by the Bouchard–Taylor Commission report of Building the Future, a Time for Reconciliation (2008), to a more rigid form under Bill 21, the study critiques Bill 21’s marginalization of religious minorities and explores the broader tension between state neutrality and religious participation in public life. Drawing on Rajeev Bhargava’s concept of “principled distance”, the author advocates for a flexible secular framework that balances institutional neutrality with ethical commitments to equity and justice. Through case studies, including the accommodation of Sikh turbans in the RCMP and the United Church of Canada’s support for same-sex marriage, the article illustrates how religious engagement fosters bridging social capital and enacts public religion, thereby enriching democratic discourse. This article insists on the limitations of rigid secularism in its dealings with pluralism and proposes that principled distance offers a more inclusive approach, allowing constructive religious contributions to civic life without undermining secular governance. Ultimately, the study promotes a vision of secularism that honors differences and encourages religious participation in nation-building.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".