Ethnographie de la citoyenneté en périodes de tension au sein de groupes catholiques, musulmans et sécularisés et dans leurs relations mutuelles

The Greater Montreal region cannot escape the complex reality that makes the city a place where coexist multiple visions, beliefs and cultures. For example, the most recent statistics show a majority Catholic population with 63.4%, followed by a heterogeneous group with no religious affiliation of 17.9%, then by 5.9% Muslims, and the remaining percentage distributed among many other religious affiliations. This diversity leads from time to time to tensions influencing the living together and citizen engagement. The research of this doctoral thesis is based on a qualitative approach in the form of an ethnographic study of the interactions between Catholics, Muslims and Secularists in the region of the Greater Montreal between 2013 and 2016. The third group called "secularists", is made up mostly of people with religious identities that do not influence their worldviews (Roof 2003). The main objective of this thesis is to better understand their civic implications in times of major social tension. Drawing on participatory observation notes and interviews with influential people from all three groups, their interactions before social tensions were triggered were found to be intermittent and discontinuous, disconnected from each other and often rarely exceeding the stage of interreligious exchanges. Then, the draft "Charter of Quebec Values" (CVQ) proposed as of September 13, 2013 by the Government of Quebec became the main case of tension studied beside others. From this thesis it emerges that the debate over the CVQ has shaken the usual boundaries of the organizational structures in the three groups, generating at the same time new divisions as well as the genesis of new ephemeral alliances following a restricted life cycle that found their dissolution at the appeasement of each tension. The discourse held during the many tensions studied was in the form of superimposed levels of positions reflecting layers of meaning going from one extreme to the other. In the pro-charter cluster, the levels began with a form of responsible and official discourse at one end of the spectrum, to that of a violent speech, at the other end, when the anonymity is at its highest level in the virtual spaces of the Internet. As for those who are anti-charter, the discourse took the form of a citizen commitment to oppose the project through legal and political means, then gradually deviating to a position of victimization and an intent of departure away from Quebec. None of the three groups represented a monolithic position toward the CVQ. On the contrary, the lines of the divisions that appeared enabled the birth of new inter-group groupings each one articulating a new and different position toward the CVQ law proposal. Under tension, the discourses exclude each other creating series of “impossible words”, words that aren’t allowed to exist. In the face of a “theology of hospitality” promoted by the majority institutional current, the Catholics, Muslims and Secularists interviewed in this research claim a first-class citizenship (no room for second-class citizens), with some dimensions associated to a world citizenship. The ideal-type on religiosity that was analyzed in this thesis demonstrates a lack of a direct correlation between religious practice and citizen engagement.

Keyphrases: Tension, Islam, Isolement, Citizenship, Charter of Quebec values, Catholicism, Secularists, Isolation, Hospitality