In an indispensable article in The Spectator Mark Steyn compares the mighty and religious US with the weak and secular European Union and concludes that the European flight from religion has undermined the continent in important ways. He also points out that had Quebec remained seriously Catholic it would now be a separate republic. Hearken to his words (I would link to it but the magazine requires a registration):
What happens when you opt for the ‘post-Christian future’? Take my beloved Quebec. As recently as 1960, the birth rate in the province was an average of four children per couple. (Jean Chrétien, the recently retired Canadian prime minister, was the 18th of 19 children of a Quebec mill worker.) But then came the so-called ‘Quiet Revolution’, determined to free the people not just from the House of Windsor but from the Church of Rome, too. There’s a fine scene in Denys Arcand’s Barbarian Invasions in which a sad Catholic priest in Montreal explains to an art appraiser from London that one month in the Sixties the churches simply emptied out and the people never came back.
Fast forward to 1995, and Quebec’s referendum on ‘sovereignty’. Lucien Bouchard, the separatist leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, wanders off-message in one speech and urges the women of the province to have more children because they have one of the lowest fertility rates of any ‘white race’ on the planet. Immediately, all the bien pensant types berate him for his faux pas. But the thing is, he wasn’t wrong. A couple of weeks later, his side narrowly lost the referendum, by a few thousand votes. Given that young Francophones tend to be separatist, had Quebec Catholics of the mid-Seventies had children at the same rate as their parents, M. Bouchard would now have his glorious république. Now he never will. Quebec couples have an average of 1.4 children, and their shrivelled fertility rate has cost them their country.
In the space of a generation, a Catholic backwater became the most militantly secularist jurisdiction in North America. Marriage is a dying institution: Quebec has the highest rate of common-law relationships on the continent. Families are a dying institution: Quebec has the highest rate of abortion in Canada. And more to the point, as far as the separatists are concerned, the dream of an independent country is dead. Andre Langevin, the enterprising mayor of Coaticook, a small town on my commute from New Hampshire to Montreal, offers his citizens $75 for their first child, $150 for the second, and $750 for every child thereafter, plus various other incentives. M. Langevin understands the basic arithmetic of the Euro-Canadian welfare state: without population growth, it’s insolvent. Unfortunately, the paradox of a welfarist society is that it weans people away from the familial impulse necessary to sustain it.