Article Added On: June 17, 2004 - over 7 years ago
Title: God in the Marketplace 1
Author: Douglas Todd
Publication: Vancouver Sun
Publication Date: January 01, 2003 - over 9 years ago
Themes: Religion and society

Abstract: In reaction to the one-time dominance of Christianity in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Canada, secularism has risen up and now holds sway. Canadian society has largely shoved religion, spirituality and discussion of morality out of the marketplace of ideas, out of all those institutions that shape who we are -- schools, politics, the news media and popular entertainment.

Description: The first part in a series written by Douglas Todd of the Vancouver Sun in July 2003

---

At least once every year, when I was a bored teenager, we could count on things to get interesting at Argyle secondary school in North Vancouver. That was the day when Christian missionaries marched on to the school grounds, particularly to the smoking zone where the semi-hoodlums gathered.

It was intriguing how the usually tough-talking crowd would allow themselves to be engaged by the evangelists. The Christians would slyly ask the puffing students whether they were happy (knowing they weren't; after all, they were teenagers). And the conversation would inevitably turn to Jesus and an invitation to a "meeting."

It was the late 1960s. Like almost everyone in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />North America, the students had grown up in Christian households, and even though they weren't attending church, they were torn about what to do with the enviably super-confident Christians. In their anxiety, each year a few of the nervous teens would track down a student to straighten things out.

The student they sought was not normally an argumentative type. But he felt strongly about one thing: Religion was for kooks. Every year he would go out and tell the missionaries that existentialists like Albert Camus had it right when they said there is no God and the only meaning humans have is that which they create for themselves. The student then suggested to the missionaries they were offensive and should depart.

I'm not proud of it now, but that student was me.

Three decades ago, that openly anti-religious attitude was not common. My baby-boom generation had spent early elementary school reciting the Lord's Prayer in class. But my brother and I were raised in a doggedly atheist family. As a teenager, I still remember the time I shocked my close friends by nailing a cross out of two pieces of wood and -- in a fit of iconoclasm -- gleefully burned the makeshift crucifix in the fireplace.

Times have changed. Now more people are like I was. As Generation-X author Douglas Coupland describes in novels such as Life After God and his new, Hey Nostradamus!, most people under age 40 have been raised in

non-religious families. Church attendance has dropped by half. Now it's normal to see religion, especially Christianity, ridiculed in public.

In reaction to the one-time dominance of Christianity in Canada, secularism has risen up and now holds sway. Canadian society has largely shoved religion, spirituality and discussion of morality out of the marketplace of ideas, out of all those institutions that shape who we are -- schools, politics, the news media and popular entertainment.

INTEGRATING RELIGION INTO PUBLIC LIFE

Is this the kind of society we want, though? Or is there a way to integrate religion, spirituality and ethics into public life in a way that better reflects the inner yearnings of many Canadians?

After all, about one-third of Canadians still attend a place of worship at least once a month. And another third float about, spiritually speaking -- trying a church service once in a while, sampling yoga or meditation, dabbling in psychic phenomena, reading up on Buddhism, finding spirituality in nature.

Polls consistently show more than 80 per cent of Canadians believe in God -- but they are very careful in choosing where they talk about it.

You introduce yourself these days by telling people what you do to make money. You're a chef, an accountant, a journalist. You talk about your favorite sports team, beer brands or movies. The last thing anyone does nowadays is walk into a party and say, "Hello, I'mGillian. I'm a Lutheran."

It's too bad. If nothing else, it means many people can't fully be themselves in public life. They must keep a deep part of themselves invisible.

A LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP

I don't want to just go back to the bad old days of Christian dominion, though.

It's just that I have a love-hate relationship with secularism -- the global force that The Dictionary of Modern Thought says has become more dominant in the 20th century than at any other time in recorded history.

Thank God (if I can be ironic) for the separation of religion and state. I don't want to live in many Middle Eastern countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, where Muslim fundamentalist regimes punish those who convert to Christianity, Judaism or the Baha'i faith.

I'm also glad I don't live in the West of even 50 years ago, when the Roman Catholic Church held grim coercive power in Italy, Irelandand Quebec, and Protestants pressed for white superiority in the southern U.S. I'm grateful I can work out my own decisions about birth control, divorce, gender roles, homosexuality and how to think about divinity.

This dilemma of mine suggests why the debate over God in the marketplace is so challenging: the two extremes are so unattractive -- theocracy is abhorrent, but ideological secularism is vacuous.

In Canada we need to be working at the complexities of synthesizing a Third Way, which somehow combines secularism and public religion and leads to a more civil society.

Janet Somerville, the Toronto-based general -secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches, the umbrella organization for Canada's Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and Eastern Orthodox churches, is a passionate, forward-looking Catholic. The last thing she wants is to turn back the clock to the bad old days when Christian rules were imposed on every Canadian. Still, Somerville is not above striking a few blows for a non-triumphalistic form of Christianity. "Secularism has brought a new uniformity -- a demand we all think the same way. It as imperialistic as the churches used to be," she says. "Our imaginations are now more strongly shaped by TV and advertising than spirituality."

Like Somerville, I'm worried that secularism's drive to debunk old myths and worldviews has formed a vacuum of meaning -- which has been filled this century by new "isms," such as fascism, tribalism, totalitarian Communism, hedonism, capitalism and consumerism.

In his book, The Secular Mind, famed Harvard psychiatrist and pediatrician Robert Coles forcefully laments the supremacy of secular values -- which he defines as the drive to master, to explain, to compete, to acquire.

At its worst, extremist secularism leads to countries such as China, where the officially atheist leadership jails members of the Falun Gong sect, occupies Buddhist Tibet where it murders and jails monks and exiles the Dalai Lama, and restricts Catholics and Protestants. Secularism has brought us both the rigid materialism of Communism and the sometimes cruel forces of unbridled capitalism.

Bonnelle Strickling, a philosophy instructor at Langara College in Vancouver, says every human being possesses a religious impulse, a desire to make sense of existence.

And if that impulse does not go into a spiritual direction, it can often be funnelled into an unhealthy obsession with the things of this world.

It is not the purpose of this series to suggest all people should become explicitly religious.

Formal religion can be a huge source of strength, courage and resistance to crass values. But no one should be shy about pointing out the many pitfalls of various ways people practise religion.

Too many wars have been fought in the name of religion. Pollster Michael Adams is right when he points to how too many North Americans show an unhealthy and blind deference to religious authority -- who simply want to follow orders and find a sense of certainty and safety.

People can and do find deep layers of meaning without believing in a Supreme Being.

As such, I am proposing something more inclusive and embracing -- that we will be better off, as individuals and as a society, if we go about our lives within what Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor, calls "wider horizons of significance."

THE ANSWER TO TRUE HAPPINESS

These horizons of meaning don't need to be formally religious. For even an atheist can be spiritual. Spirituality is about how we shape a worldview that gives our life meaning.

Mark Wexler, a Simon Fraser University professor and a director of the Canadian Jewish Congress, says formally religious people can be spiritual. But you don't have to be religious to be spiritual.

To Wexler, spirituality is about developing a sense of wonder, integrity and a concern for non-commercial values. He thinks an agnostic baseball player can be just as spiritual as an observant Buddhist or Jew.

"I think of spirituality, and positive religiosity, as a relationship to things that are larger than me -- a great chain of being, a sense of awe or numinousity, that sense of the quest for meaning and the bigger questions that are sometimes embraced by philosophies, such as 'What is this all about? What is the good life? They are important questions that are not being embraced in our secular society."

In contrast, Wexler suggests, too many of us know the price of everything but the value of little.

Instead of creating a sense of meaning, belonging and understanding between a person and the big picture, we focus on trying to gain control, through money or prestige.

We belong to a culture characterized by desire, Wexler says. We want condominiums with views, big salaries and fame. But spirituality, in contrast, makes us ask: Why do we desire those things? Will they really bring us happiness?

Even the young toughs on the Argyle school grounds wanted to know the answer to true happiness -- before I abruptly ended the discussion.

Many in Canada are trying to focus on such questions, but they're getting little help.

They don't come up in political debate or in courtrooms. Nor in high schools or universities. Nor in the news media or mass entertainment.

Millions of people are starving for spirituality and meaning, but they are having trouble finding public forums in which to explore it.

This series will suggest ways we could be more public about the kind of spirituality that asks the big questions.

dtodd@png.canwest.com

Illustration:
" Photo: Picture Post / Children praying at their desks in class at Walsgrave Colliery School near Coventry.