The visibility of religious places in urban contexts: the example of Evangelical Protestant Churches in Montreal

In a famous passage of the second volume of theetudes de sociologie religieuse, Gabriel Le Bras contended that the attractiveness of cities had a very negative impact on the religion of newcomers from rural areas. He held that for each hundred newcomers who settled in Paris, about 90 of them stopped going to church upon leaving the Montparnasse Station (Le Bras, 1956). This highlights the role attributed to cities in research that focusses on urban setting as the main stage for the process of secularization. Therefore, the aim was to shed light onto both the progressive disappearance of religion and the religious institutions' difficulty to deal with new social realities. However, sociologists, historians and geographers now insist on the key role of cities in contemporary religious dynamics. Many of them show that religious groups gain an unprecedented visibility and are able to adapt efficiently to urban realities and their rapid mutations. In this article, I explore the case of Montreal's Protestant Evangelical Churches and shed light onto their spatial dimensions. With this example, I want to show how those Churches integrate the existing urban fabric by setting up a "visibility regime" (Lussault, 2003) that draws upon a logic of rendering invisible that stems from both specific features of Protestantism and the effort to adapt to external urban constraints.