Les héritiers du baby-boom. Jeunes et religion au Québec

Abstract

Quebec youth are largely detached from traditional religious institutions today and live in a socio-religious context that has been deeply transformed by the 1960s Quiet Revolution’s rapid social, political and cultural modernization. As a result, the French-Canadian majority is not so much the Catholic Church’s orphans as the inheritors of the Cultural Revolution incarnated by baby boomers who have transmitted a spiritualized and non-institutional type of religiosity and participation to the ambient hyper-mediatized consumer society. Thus Quebec’s long-time specificity regarding religion has eroded while aligning with other West-European societies. The characteristics of contemporary youth religion are cast as forming a system, thus challenging the widespread diagnoses of fragmentation, transience or blurriness. This supports the argument that a methodology less concerned with the destiny of congregational religious institutions than with the lives, experiences, and actual beliefs of youth is required for the sociology of religion today.