But “religion” is a surprisingly tricky term: and not just for Your Party who offended their Muslim members by signing off their recently chaotic Liverpool Conference with John Lennon’s “Imagine” (“and no religion too”). In our Western post-secular world, we tend to think of it as the kind of thing that goes on in specific spaces — churches, mosques — where it is appropriate to speak of God. Religion thus understood is a kind of specialist pursuit that religious people are into, like a hobby you do on the weekend. Sport is an obvious comparison here. Max Weber coined the term “specialization” when talking about the changes brought about by modernity. Different social activities — whether football or faith — did their own thing, established their own rules and institutions, and existed in a semi-detached way to other activities in life. And just as it is possible to live without knowing how Chelsea got on, so one can live, for the most part, without knowing or caring that we are now in the season of advent.

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Before, let’s say, 1500, this wasn’t really the case. And it isn’t really the case for faith traditions that developed outside of the West and specifically outside the orbit of the Protestant revolution that came to govern how we think about that term “religion”. What confuses so many beyond the modern West, and non-Christian minorities within it, is that they cannot conceive of religion as simply being the theological equivalent of buying a ticket at Stamford Bridge. A roll call of places that vex us politically — Russia, Israel, much of the Islamic world — all boast a very different religious “DNA”, one where the boundaries of God’s presence in the world are set in totally different ways.

Take Judaism. It sounds like a pretty straightforward term, one used to describe a religion, like Christianity or Buddhism. But that’s a very modern understanding, one many Jews would not accept, and one that historically would scarcely have been recognized. Even the word “Jew” is a misleading translation of a word like the Hebrew term “Yehudi”. Before the second century, that would have been understood as more like “Judean” — a person from a particular place called Judah. “Jew”, then, is originally an ethnic-geographical term, not a religious one.

Of course, the people from that corner of the Levant had various practices linked to their understanding of God. But to call these practices “Judaism”, and to gather them together as “religion”, misplaces the role that God played in the life of a Jewish person. The great Talmudic scholar Rabbi Daniel Boyarin argues that “Judaism” is a Christian term designed to fit Jewishness into a very Christian template. Tom Holland agrees. After the French Revolution, Jews were told that they had freedom of religion, and were to be French citizens who were able to practice something called Judaism. But as Holland rightly notes, “Jews didn’t have religion”. After all, “religion” as a discreet activity, to be done occasionally and in private, was a totally alien idea to a people for whom identity and faith were indivisible.

To put it differently, then, the very idea of “religion” is arguably a secular one, even as it stems from the deep history of Christianity itself. Certainly, Christianity was the very first to detach its relationship with God from any ethnic or geographical rootedness. You could be a Greek a Jew or a Roman — and still be a Christian. What mattered was what you believed. And through Christianity, belief became the central defining feature of being religious.

This association of religion and belief is further intensified after 1500: thanks to the Protestant Reformation. The Canadian philosopher and sociologist Charles Taylor is particularly illuminating here. The Protestant attack on maypoles and relics, on Christianity as a way of life marked by a panoply of everyday popular practices, reduced religion to something that went on in your heart or your head. This, for the reformers, was where the battle for salvation took place. Yet again, then, religion was about what you believed. And when you gathered in church, it was with other like-minded people.

Back to the Canada secularization bill. If you think of religion as I have just outlined it, then it makes perfect sense to deal with the sort of conflict that can come about by having different world views rubbing up against one another by defining the public sphere as one safely free of religion. After all, religion understood as private belief can be practiced freely in specialist religious spaces. This liberal answer to the religious clash of worldviews is a tidy way of both respecting people’s right to their own faith — and maintaining good public order. Yet this liberal answer to the challenge of a multicultural society only works if Jews, Christians and Muslims all accept that they indeed are a religion in the Western sense of the word.

This is by no means certain. For Muslims, after all, the term “religion” is a kind of trap. Like the trap sprung for Jews by the French Revolution, it is a know-your-place kind of word, one that seeks to fillet what it is to be Muslim. And very few Muslim could accept that. But by that same token, this idea of religion is also a trap somewhere like Israel. The idea of Israel as a majority Jewish state, where Jews are free to behave as Jews, is premised on the idea that there is no such thing as “Judaism” as a religion in the narrowly Protestant sense: but rather that being Jewish is an entire way of life. Indeed, it is perfectly possible to be a Jew in Israel without believing in God or going to synagogue — because being a Jew is a combination of ethnic identity and involvement in various public and family practices that don’t necessarily require that Protestant emphasis on belief. A Jewish atheist isn’t an oxymoron in a way that a Christian atheist is.

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A word in Arabic that appeals many times in the Quran and is often translated as “religion” is the word “deen”. But a better translation is something like “way of life”, or “way of life that should be followed”. A word with the same root appears in Hebrew, and occurs, for instance, in the “Beth Din”, the “House of Judgment” or religious courts. Deen, then, is far more all-encompassing than the Western term “religion”, one relegated in Quebec and elsewhere to mere private belief. It includes public life, government, food, clothing, law, art, everything. This is why Muslims and Jews who are promised freedom of religion by secular Western states are bound to feel confused.

Of course, none of this is to say that the secular answer to maintaining fairness in the public realm is necessarily wrong. Even so, the very different idea of religion as deen, doesn’t, if I can put it this way, travel very well. You could almost say that Christianity was, right from the start, designed to be portable. All those maps of St Paul’s journeys around the Mediterranean, which they used to have in Bibles, was an indication of an understanding of religion that could uproot and replant itself in different cultures. We should not expect that other religious traditions will find it so easy.

Come 4 July, the Scottish Nationalists are in danger of losing badly, having become bound up with a militant current of minoritarian social liberalism which undermines the collective and civic basis of classical nationalism, as it has historically existed on the Left. Meanwhile, the national project of the Brexiteers, which lives on the Right, fell short of its own lofty expectations: its architects in the Conservative Party (set to fare even worse than the SNP) proved unable to deliver on their promise of a Britain secure from the ravages of economic and cultural globalisation. 

In short, Britons seem unable to do nationalism with any success or conviction, that is, to put it into practice beyond its merely performative aspects. So, as the election day approaches, where can the British political establishment look to form a coherent nation-based system?

There is, one place that anyone aspiring to a functional nationalism, in Britain or elsewhere, can take notes from: a forgotten corner of its former empire, where the people happen to do a decent job of maintaining themselves both as a nation and a state, even if it isn’t actually a state in the Westphalian sense. I’m talking about Quebec, a Canadian province that is also a nation unto itself, and one with its own fraught history of holding referendums. Today is Quebec’s own Fête nationale: Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. And what better occasion to survey the trajectory of nationalism there?

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The animating fact of Quebec politics and history is that of survivance, the desire of its people to survive as a distinct society of Francophones in the midst of an overwhelmingly Anglophone continent. Though Quebec’s identity is rooted in the French language and descends from a heritage that stretches back to New France, modern Quebec nationalism was forged in the Fifties and Sixties, in a time of immense social change known as la Révolution Tranquille (The Quiet Revolution). It saw the conservative and pro-clerical regime of Maurice Duplessis replaced by the reforming government of Jean Lesage, which nationalised utilities and took over education and welfare services from the Catholic Church; these measures established the modern contemporary incarnation of l’etat québécois or the Quebec state, looked to by its people as the supreme institutional expression of the Quebecois nation.

In the Seventies, desires arose among both the political-intellectual elite and the broad populace to make that Quebec state sovereign: their leader was journalist-turned-Lesage cabinet minister René Lévesque, who executed the utilities nationalisation scheme. His Parti Québécois (PQ) would lead the push for independence from Canada with the referendum of 1980; though it was rejected by a 60-40 margin, Lévesque’s government nonetheless largely shaped the character of Quebec nationalism for decades to come: Left-wing, pro-union, secularist, feminist, environmentalist, and aligned with global anti-colonial currents. It was under Lévesque as well that Quebec passed legislation to enshrine French as its official language, cementing the Quebec state’s role as defender of the national character. 

La Révolution Tranquille, however, also spawned a divergent and opposing tradition: federalism, which may be understood formally to mean an acceptance of continued membership in the Canadian federation. But in Quebec, it also has deeper philosophical underpinnings: a kind of radical emancipatory individualist liberalism developed in the pages of the Duplessis-era dissident journal Cité Libre. Its great champion was Pierre Trudeau, who as prime minister of Canada prevailed in the 1980 referendum, but whose subsequent actions sowed the seeds of the knife-edge second referendum of 1995, when Quebec nearly seceded, had it not been for a 54,288-vote margin (1.16%) in favour of “Non”. 

For 40 years, Quebec politics was a struggle between the two poles, nationalist-sovereigntist and federalist, with “soft” or semi-nationalist compromises sometimes gaining ground. By the 2010s, however, something different was happening, a depolarisation of the old sovereignty debate and the emergence of a new alternative: firmly nationalist but agnostic or neutral on independence. Such a stance meant that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) could attract both soft nationalists and sovereigntists, amounting to a majority of the Francophone electorate. Indeed, this was the formula that its founder and leader François Legault used to win power in the elections of 2018 and 2022.

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The CAQ has pledged to leave behind the quest for independence, treating it as a settled affair (Legault was a former PQ minister). But it has never hesitated to brandish its nationalist credentials in other ways, namely its aggressive agendas on language, culture, and migration: these can be discerned in a bevy of new regulations expanding French-language requirements for businesses, immigrants and English universities, in addition to raising the latter’s tuition costs. Legault has also routinely squared off with Justin Trudeau’s federal government, pressuring it to act more decisively in halting the flow of refugees through Quebec’s borders, as well as proposing a referendum — not on independence — but on strengthening immigration powers. 

Though what is significant from a historical point of view is what the CAQ represents: the re-emergence of Right-wing nationalism as a dominant force. Indeed, the intellectual implications of this tendency are only now being fleshed out by a new generation of thinkers, led by the likes of Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard, Legault’s 23-year-old speechwriter, who published a treatise Le Retour des Bleus (“Return of the Blues”) attempting to revive the conservative or bleu strain of Quebec nationalism; this would entail a rehabilitation of figures such as Duplessis, whose legacy remains anathema to the largely progressive sovereigntist movement.

Just as interesting is the recent resurgence of the PQ as the chief opposition to Legault’s CAQ. After having been written off as a dying Boomer-era artefact, the sovereigntist party has risen in the polls under an energetic young leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, who has threatened to hold a third referendum on independence. However, tough support for the PQ has not actually translated into support for the idea of sovereignty, suggesting that this boost in the PQ’s fortunes has more to do with voicing dissatisfaction with Legault than with Quebecers wanting to revisit the issue. 

All of which means that Quebec politics now appears to be a contest between two vigorous but antagonistic nationalisms; a fact highlighted by the decline of the federalist Quebec Liberals. Though the tension is genuine, these two variants of nationalism are nonetheless united both in their recognition of the Quebec nation as a civic-collective entity, as illustrated by their common resistance to the minoritarian social liberalism that’s taken hold in the rest of Canada; and in their shared readiness to deploy the powers of the Quebec state as a means of safeguarding that nation (leaving aside whether that state should be sovereign), as shown by the activist policies of the nationalist parties, Left and Right. As a result, for instance, Quebec’s language regime may seem absurd or even vindictive to outsiders and non-Francophones, but it starts to make a bit more sense when viewed as part of a larger historical project, that of ensuring national survivance. 

These linguistic and cultural differences aside, we can glean the operative principle for those — in Britain, America or Anglo-Canada or elsewhere — who find themselves drawn to the nationalist persuasion after years of hyper-globalisation: the nation-state only makes sense if both its constituent terms are taken seriously. 

For those on the Left, reclaiming the nation requires promoting unifying bonds and symbols of nationhood over and above the subaltern identity politics that’s become fashionable across the West, for the nation is ultimately what legitimates the state. For the Right, meanwhile, a constructive nationalism in the post-Brexit era will have to rest on restoring the state and its capacity to act in defence of the nation, most of all with respect to borders and rebuilding industry. It will involve a rejection of that odious and long descredited combination of free market-ism and flag waving that’s been the standard of the Anglo-Saxon Right for decades.

For as many a Québécois can attest, without a powerful state to act on your behalf in a hostile world, any nation, no matter how historically great, is liable to be reduced to, in David Starkey’s phrase, a “feeble little country.”