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Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork about the repurposing of defunct church buildings in Montreal (Canada), I show how clergy collaborate with residents to form collectively governed spaces, reshaping commitment to public good through property ownership strategies that claim both secular and sacred sources of value.

Paper long abstract

Since the mid-twentieth century, church attendance across the global North has plummeted, forcing Christian institutions to divest from expensive historic buildings. In Quebec, austerity-driven cuts to heritage conservation have accelerated the commercial redevelopment of churches into luxury condos, gyms, and nightclubs. Although secular reforms in the 1960s dismantled the Catholic Church’s role as an institutional guarantor of public good, sales to private developers spur public outcry over the loss of a collective inheritance built through generations of tithing and volunteerism. In response, residents are experimenting with social enterprise models that repurpose defunct churches into collectively governed public assets (immobilier collectif).

Drawing from fieldwork (2023–2024) at a repurposed church in Montreal, this paper examines the political stakes of converting religious property wealth into civic value in Quebec’s secularized social economy. Thinking with—and critically beyond—“moral economy” (Fassin 2009; Palomera and Vetta 2016), I show that while church repurposing initiatives challenge commercialization and private ownership regimes, they also hinge on infrapolitical strategies for working virtuously within capitalist infrastructure to promote social—and sacred—values like reciprocity and redistribution: clergy leverage tax exemptions to offer subsidized rent to nonprofits who also co-manage the site, while monetizing the sanctuary through worship and corporate event rentals that fund building operations. I join calls for an anthropology of capitalism beyond denunciatory critique (Millar 2024), tracing how religious actors reshape their commitment to public good through property ownership strategies that claim alternative sources of value (Rudnyckyj and Osella 2017; Simoni 2016).