Article Added On: June 17, 2004 - over 7 years ago
Title: God in the Marketplace 2
Author: Douglas Todd
Publication: Vancouver Sun
Publication Date: January 01, 2003 - over 9 years ago
Themes: Religion and society

Abstract: It's the first taboo of politics in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Canada: Don't talk about your religion.

At least that's what Alliance Party founder Preston Manning and former Quebec Liberal leader Claude Ryan told a 2002 conference on religion in the public square.

Description: The second in a series by Douglas Todd on God in the Marketplace appearing in the Vancouver Sun, 2003

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It's the first taboo of politics in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Canada: Don't talk about your religion.

At least that's what Alliance Party founder Preston Manning and former Quebec Liberal leader Claude Ryan told a 2002 conference on religion in the public square.

"In the world of Canadian politics and policy, the spiritual dimension is ignored, suppressed and prevented from even being expressed," said Manning, one of Canada's three million evangelical Protestants.

"There's a virtual absence of religious or spiritual references in parliamentary and political debate, even on moral and ethical issues. In the House of Commons, it is taboo to get in any depth into what your own personal convictions are and how it might apply to public policy. ' We don't talk about things like that here,' is the unspoken rule.'"

Ryan, one of Canada's 14 million nominal Roman Catholics, said he learned early in his political career it was unwise to be too forthright about religious convictions. "I once said on television that I was guided by the hands of God," he recalled. It provoked a furore. "I never retracted that statement because I believed it was true, but I never repeated it." Manning and Ryan maintain the publicpendulum has swung too far in Canada toward a secularism that is not neutral toward faith, but actually anti-religious and anti-spiritual.

Federal Liberal leadership hopeful Paul Martin, a practising Catholic, added his cautious voice to the debate over religion in the public square in May, saying: "I don't usually talk about [my faith] very much because it does make people cynical because politicians use it to say, 'Trust me.' But it's an element of my value system, and my value system impels me to love my neighbour and to do things to try to better his or her condition in life."

Prime Minister Jean Chretien probably illustrates the attitude of many Canadians when he says religion should be strictly a private matter. So did Liberal leadership hopeful Sheila Copps, when she said this year that politicians must avoid religion so as not to focus on things "that divide us." Former minister of multiculturalism, Hedy Fry, also displayed an all-too-common lack of tolerance for public religion when she accused Alliance leader Stockwell Day, an evangelical Christian, of "abusing his political power by making all Canadians believe, as he said, that Jesus Christ is the God of the whole universe. I say that is an insult to every Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, everybody else who believes in other religions." She charged Day of having "no respect" for non-Protestant religions.

But I'd argue it was Fry who was showing no respect. When conservative Christians say Christ is Lord of the Universe, it doesn't mean they're going to try to force everyone to believe it. Fry was fear-mongering.

She was also displaying the kind of high anxiety that has largely kept religion, spirituality and moral discussion out of Canadian public life. Canadian society has rendered "invisible" the religious and spiritual inner life of these politicians. It's a form of discrimination -- largely unconscious and quietly devastating.

Philosophical utterings taboo

Sometimes it seems there is not only a taboo against organized Christianity and other religions in the public sphere, but a taboo against even philosophical utterings, except the most hackneyed ones ("I believe in freedom / "I believe in tolerance").

Anglican Primate Michael Peers makes a good case that society is poorer when spiritual and philosophical values are kept out of public debate.

The senior Anglican in Canada pointed to Chretien's response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as a sign of how spiritually bankrupt Canadian politics has become. The best Chretien could do to rally shell-shocked Canadians after the attacks, Peers said, was to urge them to "go shopping." Salvation lay only in consuming, keeping the economy pumping.

While secularists believe religion should be kept out of public life because it's the key cause of the world's conflicts, Peers reminds anyone prepared to listen that "the same [religious] traditions that can degenerate into conflict also share a commitment to service, compassion and generosity. We forget that hospitals, schools and social services were originally grounded in religious convictions about human worth."

If Canadians continue to ignore the religious and spiritual realities of their neighbours, Peers said, it will lead to cultural Balkanization. "Suspicion of those who are 'other' thrives on ignorance and generates fear and distrust ... There is no spiritual health in mutual ignorance, suspicion and hostility."

Many Canadians want to suppress religion because they associate it -- not completely inaccurately -- with restrictive attitudes toward sexual issues related to homosexuality, abortion and divorce. But religious people care about a lot more than sex. Evangelical, Catholic, mainline Protestant, Jewish, Muslim and others leaders have been pushing, usually with little success, to influence broader social issues.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops has been pressing, for example, for environmental reforms in Canada's free-trade agreements with the U.S. and Mexico. The United Church of Canada, citing Christian morality, has been standing up for native rights and for humanizing capitalism. The Anglican Church has been pressing politicians for more Third World aid. Many of these churches, plus Muslim organizations, were also openly opposed to the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

These religious leaders are not necessarily right on every issue, but they are trying to bring spiritual and ethical values such as compassion, justice, human dignity, concern for the poor and devotion to the common good to society's discussion table. It's too bad so few Canadian leaders seem prepared to even listen to them.

THE FOUR EPOCHS

We shouldn't be surprised we've come to this in Canada, perhaps.

The history of religion in public life in Canada has gone through four epochs, argues John Stackhouse, of Vancouver's Regent College. Unfortunately, he says, each has featured one dominant group dictating what it means to live "correctly."

The first cultural epoch in Canada was shaped entirely by native Indians, Stackhouse says. Then came European colonization, whenChristian missionaries, explorers and generals said you had to live their way or you were toast.

In the mid-19-century, English-speaking Canada came to be ruled by conservative Protestantism. Quebec was held in the sway of a fervent Roman Catholicism, an ultramontane system in which Catholic doctrine -- against abortion, divorce, homosexuality and numerous other things -- was enshrined in legislation. That period ended in the 1960s, with the Quiet Revolutions in Quebec, which loosened the control of the church.

Now we have what we call multiculturalism. But Stackhouse says: "We still don't have coherent pluralism. We have a new hegemony that is secular and liberal and individualistic, which wants everyone else to be the same way. Evangelical Protestants and Catholics had their reign of being righteous, now a different group knows how to be righteous. We still don't know how to allow more than one group at the discussion table."

Finding a way out of the confusion

Canadians, clearly, are strongly divided on how to handle religion and spirituality in public policy.

On one hand, most Canadians are dead certain they don't want a state religion. We rightly fear politicians who want to force religion on us. At the same time, we're unsure about how to loosen the girdle on religion, spirituality and ethics in public life so that they could make a more creative contribution to politics and a civil society.

How do we find a way out of this confusion?

Yale University Professor Steven J. Carter offers guidance from the perspective of Americans, who have been struggling with what to do with openly evangelical presidents since Jimmy Carter in 1977.

Although it often grates to hear drawling U.S. politicians invoke God and Jesus Christ, the Yale scholar stresses the American Bill of Rights did not emphasize separation of religion and state to ensure politics would be strictly secular.

The American constitution, he says, was simply trying to stop elected officials from favouring a single religion -- a widespread practice in Europe in the 1700s.

Carter, author of God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics, says too many intellectuals believe politicians should "bracket" off their faith when entering politics. Carter argues religious people have a role to play as "moral critics" of society and should also be allowed to take their religious principles to the government and economic spheres.

What Carter doesn't say is that if we are to allow leaders to use religion and spirituality to shape their politics, we shouldn't be afraid of challenging them on their beliefs. When George W. Bush says his favorite political philosopher is Jesus, I think that deserves as much hard scrutiny as it would if another leader said Betty Friedan was their strongest influence.

We don't need to be overly reverential about saying what we like and don't like about a religious conviction. When people such as Manning, Day, Martin and anyone else are ready to put their spiritual concerns in the marketplace of ideas, it is fair to criticize those concerns -- as long it's done accurately, without the caricaturing and cheap shots employed by someone like Hedy Fry.

Everybody part of a minority

As philosopher Charles Taylor says, everybody belongs to one minority or another. The courts have recognized that as they've struggled to strike a balance to allow religious groups to play a role in the public sphere, without tromping on the rights of the non-religious.

For better or worse, many of Canada's high-profile religion-state cases have revolved around homosexuality. In balancing the rights of active gays and lesbians, conservative Christians have lost court battles to ban public-school books on same-sex parents in Surrey. But they've won the right to discriminate against homosexuals at private evangelical schools such as Trinity Western University in Langley, even though they are training teachers for public schools.

It needs to be pointed out, however, that the consumer marketplace can legally allow almost anything to go -- for or against religion.

For instance, General Motors has been vilified, mainly by Jews, for trying to promote its cars and vans specifically to the evangelical Christian market.

But there is nothing to stop a company promoting itself based on Christian loyalties. It simply has to live with the risk of losing other customers who might be offended.

In a similar way, Gap clothing stores are free to ask their employees to wish customers "Seasons Greetings" rather than "Merry Christmas," (as the company did in 2002). But Canadian Christians, or the Sikhs and Muslims and others who insist they like all public expressions of spirituality, should feel encouraged to let Gap know they're appalled.

Although there is no doubt barriers have been erected against religion in Canadian public life, the onus remains on spiritually inclined people to find more effective ways to influence society.

Few have done more in that way than Harold Coward, former head of the Centre for Religion and Public Policy at the University of Victoria. An ace at obtaining public and private grant money, Coward has launched major international forums, published books and met with politicians and public servants around the world to illustrate how religious sensibilities could positively address a host of issues.

Coward has shown how widely held spiritual values could curtail the population explosion, reduce vicious ethnic rivalries, bring moral principles such as stewardship of Creation to dwindling fish stocks on the East and West coasts and improve health-care management, sometimes in controversial ways.

In medicine, for instance, the policy proposals emphasize spiritual and ethical beliefs that place a community's common good over an individual's right to an unlimited range of expensive and questionable treatments.

Instead of religion and spiritual being taboo in Canadian politics, Coward has been a leader in showing how it's time they were allowed to join the fray and play an influencing role.

At their best, religion, spirituality and philosophy have been about reforming the world for the better.

At their best, they've challenged politicians, outworn assumptions and cultures that promote power over justice and compassion. It won't be simple, but at their best, they could help inject more transcendent and life-giving principles into our country's laws.

Illustration:
" Color Photo: Vancouver Sun files / Liberal MP Hedy Fry displayed lack of tolerance when she accused Alliance leader Stockwell Day, an evangelical Christian, of "abusing his political power by making all Canadians believe, as he said, that Jesus Christ is the God of the whole universe.