Un article publié dans la revue Australian Religion Studies Review, The Journal of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion, vol. 21, no 1, 2008, pp. 3-5. London: EquinoxOnline.

In our secularized modern world, religion remains an important factor for the definition of individual and collective identities, despite the fact that it no longer is the central focal point of social life in most Western democracies. This special issue of the Australian Religion Studies Review focuses primarily on the role of religion in the formation and mobilization of collective identities at the national and international levels. In many countries today, the pressure for recognition of religious groups by the secular state is increasing exponentially, ushering along what many scholars have called the post-secular era. With great difficulty, the secular state tries to respond to religious demands for reasonable accommodations that it cannot always understand or satisfy, as authors of this issue show, because of the increasing diversity of religious actors who do not speak with one voice and of non-religious actors who fear a return to traditional denominationality (‘confessionalité’). In Canada, the state tries to reasonably accommodate the conflicting demands originating from religious groups and individuals who, on the one hand, want to practice freely their religion or, on the other hand, want to expand the secularity of existing institutions. What was at first an agreement between the three national founding minorities of Canada (French, English and Native) to preserve their religious rights has evolved in the last twenty years into a complex legal system that encompasses all ethnic minority religions. 

Martin Geoffroy, Ali Dizboni and Pierre Rossi present different perspectives on the reasonable accommodation crisis that is currently playing itself out in Canada. Martin Geoffroy illustrates the struggle of the French Canadian national minority in its dealings with what is considered to be a series of attacks by immigrants on their fragmented and fragile identity, which has strong historical ties with Catholicism. By studying the situation of the French-Canadian minority in the three different provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick and Manitoba, the author initiates a comparative study of the reaction of French-speaking communities to the ongoing debate over reasonable accommodations. 

Dizboni and Rossi present the same debate, but from the point of view and perspective of Muslim immigrants who have become an important religious community in Canada in recent years. They show that the low threat to Muslim identity in Canada has severely fragmented the discourses of their spokespersons into three distinct types: liberal-secularists, traditionalist-conservatives and literalist-orthodox. The emergence of a polymorphous Muslim Canadian identity with the existence of a perceived external threat to their religious identity should contribute to mobilize Canadian Muslims in the direction of extremism, but since this external threat is practically nonexistent for Muslims in the Canadian context, they remain mostly moderates, as far as their religion is concerned. 

This is not the case with the Habad-Lubavitch movement in the context of modern Judaism. In their case, as Italian sociologist Enzo Pace points out in his article, external threats are multiple and constantly renewed by the movement’s strong identity and by the organizational performance of an extreme messianic type of social action. The author describes how a small community of ‘mystical pious Hasidim’ became, through the promotion of extreme Messianism, a modern charismatic enterprise. 

From a wider and more comprehensive perspective, Jean-Guy Vaillancourt provides a more theoretical and conceptual reflection on religious identity, by revisiting and expanding Glock’s classical typology of the five dimensions of religiosity. His new expanded typology of the ten dimensions of religion stresses particularly the important role that religious identity plays as a fundamental part of religion and religiosity. 

The different issues and problems addressed in this collection of articles demonstrate the need for more research on the question of religion, not only as an identity factor, but also as an identity marker. In a post-secular age, lines in the sand will have to be traced over and over again, until religious identities can truly coexist with more secular ones. Responses of various states to the question of the regulation of religious pluralism and diversity are themselves very diverse. They lead us to examine a wide spectrum of choices; but ultimately, they bring us back to the very foundation of society and to the identity of individuals who are part and parcel of that society. In years to come, we anticipate that questions raised in this issue will become central for the social sciences of religion. 

Martin Geoffroy, Université de Moncton
Jean-Guy Vaillancourt, Université de Montréal