Sharing spaces, sharing visions: The ethics and politics of making Quebec’s churches public

Across Canada, historic churches are closing their doors. In Quebec, the pace is accelerating as local dioceses struggle to reallocate funds for repair and maintenance amid the province’s aggressive funding cuts to religious heritage preservation. Once-sacred spaces are becoming luxury condos, gyms, and even nightclubs. These privatized, for-profit transformations often spark public grief over the loss of a collective inheritance built through generations of tithing and volunteerism.

This church property crisis crystallizes broader political tensions around secularization into concrete decisions about authority, access, and responsibility: Who should profit from the sale of church buildings: religious institutions, private developers, or local communities? Should church properties keep historic tax privileges? Can these buildings ever truly become inclusive spaces if they remain privately-owned religious properties?

As an anthropologist, I study the lived ethical and material dynamics of these church transformations (called “requalification” in Quebec). And I believe that for church leaders, this research matters because it reveals the complex ethical labor involved in redefining what it means for church property to contribute to the common good when a congregation can no longer sustain a building on its own. Take the situation in Quebec, for instance: despite church attendance being the lowest in North America, public outcry about for-profit property flips suggests a lingering sense that these structures still ought to create a kind of value distinct from market economics. At the same time, many people do consider religious real estate as private institutional wealth indistinguishable from, say, the rational self-interest driving corporate businesses. For the many churches now needing both moral and financial support from the secular public to stay open, the ethics and politics of ownership, authority, and governance must be grappled with head on.

I began exploring these dilemmas when Hillary Kaell, an anthropologist at McGill University, invited me to collaborate on an ethnographic deep dive into a repurposed Anglican church in Montreal called St Jax, originally built in 1864. St Jax uses its property tax exemption to provide affordable space to other Christian congregations and charities and to non-religious nonprofits who otherwise could not afford rent downtown.

The vast majority of historic churches in Quebec are Catholic, but St Jax wrestles with financial quandaries just the same: weathered stone bell towers, solid wooden rafters, and leaking roofs can cost hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars to repair. Weekly attendance is barely in the dozens, so warding off profit-seeking developers requires creative—and often controversial—experiments with sacred space, zoning regulations, and commercial activities to raise enough revenue to keep the building open.

Different Christian traditions think differently about sacred space, and St Jax’s low church approach pushes the boundaries more than others: the pews have been removed to create a multifunctional gathering space in the sanctuary that hosts everything from worship and baptisms to circus performances and corporate cocktail parties. Sacriligious humor and alcohol sales mingle with hymn singing and prayer circles, the producers of a Pride-themed cabaret show on Saturday night ensure the sanctuary is prepared for an evangelical pastor’s sermon on Sunday morning. Beyond just space sharing, St Jax experiments with shared governance. The leadership has invited resident organizations to join them in a separate secular nonprofit entity established within the church that is responsible not only for managing building maintenance and resource-pooling but also for co-creating and promoting the site’s vision to the public.

The St Jax case offers a glimpse of the uneasy compromises that owners of religious buildings now face, balancing financial survival, civic value, and religious identity in the same space. And ethnography helps make visible what financial spreadsheets and urban planning documents often miss: the symbolic and emotional weight of these buildings, the difficult conversations about memory, access, and ownership, and the ambivalence congregations feel when opening their doors to non-religious users.

This raises an uncomfortable truth: congregations who want their buildings to serve the common good may have to give up control over how that good is defined. In many repurposing projects, it’s the surrounding community—not just church members—who ends up determining the building’s future role. Often, these are residents with no ties to Christianity at all. As I have observed in my fieldwork, that shift can feel painful, even unjust to those who experience real loss as their church’s local purpose changes. For congregations seeking to flourish amid the property crisis, perhaps the question isn’t just how to preserve sacred space, but how to reinvent it so that new forms of belonging, care, and service can take root.

Sam Victor
Anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at McGill University