I’ve been invited to an informal public lecture, a format that took me back to the early ’70s, when I was a teenager in St. Louis, MO. The profs of the various universities and colleges in the area had organized a “free school”. I signed up for courses in American Folk Music and Car Repair. The second left me with some useful knowledge–how to change a tire and keep tires properly inflated–and some no-longer-useful information, such as how to adjust a carburetor. Fuel injectors took care of that. The American Folk Music class was taught by an Asian man, who insisted that if we were going to explore American Folk music, we had to start with the original American folk. So there we were in this huge house in University City, sitting or lying on the floor with our shoes left at the door, listening to vinyl recordings of Native American music. The surroundings disappeared for me as I was totally enveloped by the sound.
I don’t promise anything as earth-shaking for my audience in the backyard of the house on Fuller Terrace. It’s a lecture series that focuses on Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I was told I could talk about anything, and the topic I chose was “Taking Religion Seriously in a Secular Society”. (I couldn’t think of a clever title, so I just tackled it directly.)
So I’m going to initiate this blog by putting my thoughts on this out to the wider world. I’ll break it up into two or three segments, so the entries don’t get too long (besides I’m not finished yet). I’d love to know what people think. Here goes:
Why choose a topic like this—taking religion seriously in a secular society? Don’t we do that already? Maybe a little too much? Here in Canada we have seen controversies, even court cases, over hijabs, kirpans, cartoons, and Christmas trees. We’ve even had a provincial commission in Quebec prompted, in part, by the declaration in Herouxville, with its misrepresentation of immigrant religions and values. Pretty serious stuff. Yes and no. Yes, court cases and provincial commissions indicate a certain seriousness about a matter. But no, they don’t indicate that we actually take religion itself seriously. They indicate a degree of discomfort with difference, an uncertainty about the relation of minorities and the majority, and—underneath it all—a readily apparent growing opposition to religion itself.
The last time I checked, you had to get on a waiting list to borrow Christopher Hitchens’ book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything from the local public libraries. That book and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion are international best sellers. When I was in Europe in 2006, the Dawkins book was everywhere, along with videos of The DaVinci Code, which, among other things, depicts the Roman Catholic Church as the agent of a vast conspiracy to suppress the truth. At the beginning of my introductory course on religion and contemporary culture, I always gather from the class what they think of when they hear the word “religion”. Last year the responses from the majority of Canadian students were so overwhelmingly negative that my international students reported feeling disoriented and appalled. During the hearings of the Bouchard-Taylor commission, according to its report, the sentiment that “religion must remain in the private sphere” was often expressed, although as the final report notes, it was not always clear what was meant by that. It is this context that prompts my concern.
But, you might say, there is nothing to be concerned about. People might feel uncomfortable with or have animosity toward religion, but freedom of religion is in the very first clause in the Canadian Charter under “fundamental freedoms”. That clause asserts that everyone has the “freedom of conscience and religion”. Actually I find that pairing troubling. We construct conscience as internal to an individual. The coupling of religion with conscience would seem to imply that religion is indeed a private matter. In that case this clause is no more than a guarantee of non-intrusiveness of the state in the private affairs of individuals.
But that is too hasty, of course. The next clause under “fundamental freedoms” connects thought, belief, and opinion with the freedom of expression, including freedom of the press and other media. The two remaining “fundamental freedoms” are peaceful assembly and association, hardly private individual pursuits. Even if one holds the notion that religion is essentially an internal, private matter—which I don’t—so is thought. In a way, the idea of declaring a fundamental freedom of thought guaranteed by the state is very odd unless it means the expression of that thought. After all, even in the most brutally repressive regime, you’re free to think anything you like, as long as you don’t tell anyone. Same with religion, right? So it must be that the charter protects public expression of religion.
Actually, public expression of religion can be protected at a certain level and restricted on another at the same time. After all, none of our freedoms are absolute, and I am talking here as much about attitudes as legalities, perhaps more. Attitudes such as “religion must remain in the private sphere.”
A somewhat enlarged notion of religion as a private or semi-private affair is that religion belongs in the home and institutions organized expressly for that purpose, and nowhere else. In that framework the freedom of religion entails non-interference with persons in their homes or with the business of religious institutions, unless other important laws are violated, such as fraud or abuse. This, I think, is becoming a more prevalent idea, even if it isn’t the law. It certainly is in much of Europe these days, in France, for example, or in Denmark. When a group of Muslims wanted to gather to pray publicly for peace and harmony a couple of years ago, this was regarded by the majority of Danes as an affront to their secular society. Not Christian society, mind you. Nor was it out of concern that the gathering could have turned into a violent demonstration. The issue was conducting a religious function in public, and no doubt because it was intended as a public political statement.
I doubt the same response would happen here, at least in terms of degree, and not only because of the provisions of the Charter. Our context is quite different when it comes to the socio-economic makeup of immigrant populations and the history of diversity. Certainly, Canadian society prides itself on being tolerant, live-and-let-live, to a fault. But to tolerate and to take seriously are not the same thing at all. In our tolerant society, you may pursue religion as one might pursue a hobby like horseback riding. There are times and places for public events, and you may ride to your heart’s content on your own property, but please keep out of the downtown area and off the freeway as a matter of public safety.
Our public space—whether it is official government functions, media or literal space—is contested space when it comes to religious expression of various kinds. The ruckus over the word “Christmas” is just one example. Do we fear the public demonstration of the religious nature of the holiday somehow offends those of another, or no, religion? Or that the majority—which Christians still are in this country—is imposing its religious practice and belief on an unwilling population? (By the way, I have no problem with using the word “holiday” in order to be more inclusive. I just don’t think that requires the erasure of “Christmas” from public use.) The fuss over something as trivial as a particular word with religious associations, or a headscarf, points to the larger question I want to address—the inadequacy of our ability to deal with the substance of religion, if we have difficulty over its mere appearance in language and symbol. Part of that arises from how we think about secularity.
The protection of religious freedom certainly entails freedom from interference with the practice of religion and expression of religious ideas, but also from imposition of them. It protects against both deprivation and coercion. This is a matter of power and equity as much as liberty. One party should not be favoured with privilege above another by the power of the state. This last part is critical, so let me repeat it. A fundamental freedom of religion ought to guarantee that one party is not favoured with privilege over another by the state. Because we hold to this we make claims that ours is a “secular society”. But what, exactly, does that mean?
Does “secular” mean non-religious? If that applies to the population, then ours is definitely not a secular society. Over 80% of people on the most recent Statistics Canadian report on religion claim an affiliation with some kind of religion, and many of the rest hold religious views of some kind, but do not identify those with any particular religious tradition or organization. If not the general population, then, do we mean our collective expressions in the media and particularly our expression of collective power through government and state institutions? Most people would recoil against censorship of religion in media, but the state is a different matter. There the idea of secular as “non-religious” holds quite a bit of sway.
Bouchard and Taylor in their report, and many other thinkers on this matter, use the term “neutral” when it comes to the position the state should hold with regard to religion. I much prefer the word “impartial”. At first this would seem like a distinction without a difference. So let me explain by using the words in a different context. Good parents in families with more than one child often strive to be impartial when it comes to their children, but very few would say they are “neutral” towards them. “Neutral” has the connotation of indifference. There is a gap, a distance. The idea of the state occupying a space of neutrality is something I think the majority of people in this county would find comfortable. But rights are not about the majority. They are about protecting minorities, about balance, about not privileging one party over another.
I am not assuming that the state is paternal by using that example to draw attention to the connotations of “neutral”. I just want to point out that the word implies a gap, that in the centre where we all come together, there is a space where religion is and ought to be absent, that the state as an entity, and our political deliberations, should be, as my students would put it, a “religion-free zone”. I fully agree that people who have non-religious and even anti-religious positions should feel free to express themselves. They should be represented and heard, but to make that central space of power one that is “religion-free” accords them a very real privilege over others: The privilege to exclude certain ideas and ways of life, to have one’s own point of view, language, and practice as the norm. And that certainly violates what I consider one of the major dimensions of freedom of religion.
Impartiality, on the other hand, implies a space where all are on equal footing, various religions and non-religious points of view. None favoured, none excluded. But that’s hard. I think we opt for neutrality or “religion-free zones” because those concepts are simpler to put into practice than impartiality. Impartiality requires a delicate balancing act. It requires mutual relationship rather than distance. It makes demands on us for respect, knowledge, and understanding, not mere tolerance. It calls for critical engagement, neither tiptoeing around each other, nor launching broadsides that do nothing but reveal our ignorance of one another.
