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This article offers an analysis of Lionel Groulx’s relationship to politics during the interwar years. By subordinating his nationalism to Catholicism, which he consistently refused to instrumentalise for political purposes, Groulx developed a traditionalist and providentialist ideology that paid little attention to questions of the regime or institutional reform. This in turn left Groulx relatively shielded from the influence of Maurrassism. Groulxism did contain, however, a measure of ambiguity toward the political inasmuch as it envisioned, to some extent, the creation of an independent “French State”. The growing dialectical tension between the national and religious issues within the realm of French Canadian ideology was one of the main causes behind Quebec’s Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.