A Critical Conversation on Religious Diversity in China,Canada and India

In the fall of 2012, two research centres at the University of Victoria (the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society and the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives) organized a conference entitled “The Governance of Religious Diversity in China, India, and Canada.” The event drew together a group of 24 international scholars and graduate students along with a dozen invited guests from local religious/cultural organizations, media, government, and the business community in the Victoria area.

Our goal was to create a unique research event that would generate original scholarly understandings of the relationship between state and religion while actively promoting the transfer and exchange of knowledge among diverse audiences. Part of this objective was met during the discussions that occurred, in which we addressed a number of core questions; ¹ the other part is met in the pages that follow, where readers will find a number of scholarly articles based on the lectures delivered at our conference.

On the surface, the value of comparing societal and state approaches to religion in Canada, India and China is perhaps not immediately apparent. Just as there are vast differences in the various roles that religion(s) play within these societies, so too do the three states’ approaches to recognizing and accommodating religion seem equally incomparable (Bhargava, 2012; Koenig, 2009; Laliberté, 2011a; Hong, 2011; Wang, 2007). However, while the historical development of the Chinese, Indian and Canadian states, and particularly their approaches to framing and constraining religious expression, have been markedly distinct, it is arguably around religion, and each state’s response to it, that many of the most contentious and potentially divisive debates of our contemporary period – in all three of these societies – are rapidly coalescing (Bramadat, 2008; Bramadat and Seljak, 2009; Casanova, 2008; Koenig, 2009; Lamba, 2009).

In China, for example, one encounters in most regions a distinctive syncretic combination of Buddhist, Taoist, folk religion, and Confucian sensibilities, all set within the unifying cultural–religious overlay of a basic force we might call “familism.” Against this backdrop, the revolutions of twentieth-century China and the explosive growth of China’s economy during the last decade in particular have led to a complex stance being taken toward religion by the state, characterized by significant openness to religious innovations (and new religions) on the one hand and firm control on the other (Goossaert and Palmer, 2011; Laliberté, 2011a, 2011b).

The articles in this special issue by Jianping Wang, Alison Marshall, and André Laliberté all address the ways China, as both a society and a state, has understood, regulated and provided a framework for religion. Marshall adds to this a focus on the ways Canadian society has responded to Chinese national, ethnic and religious sensibilities over the past many decades. Wang’s interest is in the ways the Chinese state relates to Islam, a tradition that is both tolerated and scrutinized. The processes he observes reveal a great deal about both the lengths to which the state will go to protect the harmony of Chinese society as well as its efforts to secure access to oil and challenge the imperial ambitions of western states. Laliberté provides a detailed portrait of the historical and political forces that explain China’s distinctive approach to its official religions as well as its religious minorities. These articles should provide readers with an excellent overarching framework within which to understand much of the news one hears about religion in China and Chinese religion in Canada (for example, controversies around the so-called house-church movement, the rise of Chinese Islam and evangelical Christianity, the status of Tibet and Tibetan Buddhists, the legal latitude of Falun Gong, and disagreements related to the appointment of Roman Catholic leaders).

After gaining independence in 1947, India followed its own distinctive path of secularism in order (among other reasons) to ensure that existing communal tensions among Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs did not overwhelm the post-independence development of the Indian state. In India we note the complex religious and political quagmire of Kashmir; the enduring power of the caste system and related forms of state discrimination against Dalit and tribal populations; and the power of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) within electoral politics. Although factions within the Hindu majority population sometimes exert disproportionate influence over social and political life, and although its history has been scarred by religious and ethnic strife, India has developed cultural, legal, and political traditions that soften the impact of these divisions on a society in which religion is rarely far from the centre of social life (Banerjee, 2012; Bhargava, 2011; Lamba, 2011). Sushmita Nath’s article uses two important court cases to demonstrate the complex ways in which the state has responded to demands from religious communities for special legal treatment. These cases illustrate the political trade-offs at work within government and legal systems interested, at least theoretically, in both gender equality and the perpetuation of arrangements that project the legal pluralism that is so appreciated by members of India’s religious minorities. Rinku Lamba’s contribution links Gandhi’s approach to Indian secularism and political life to contemporary concerns associated with the election of a Hindu nationalist party in the 2014 national election.

Within Canada, religion, religious groups or religious claims have for decades found their ways into the public arena in the context of the debates over the legal and political claims made by Aboriginal survivors of church-run residential schools; in the controversial public hearings conducted across Quebec on the accommodation of cultural (read: religious) practices; in the alleged incursion of Evangelical-Christian influence into federal politics; and in the numerous anti-hijab scandals in Quebec (Milot, 2009). Canadians often claim that their society is characterized by a formal separation of church and state, but in fact such a formal separation has never been part of our political culture, and these controversies demonstrate that religion has certainly not receded from the public arena. In fact, Canadian Christians have always enjoyed formal and informal privileges that their non-Christian neighbours are denied (for example, statutory holidays that fall on Christian holidays, provincial funding for (only) Roman Catholic education in Ontario, and a legal framework that uses a particular form of Christianity as the implicit norm for legal decisions). Such conventions are the legacy of the European Christian settlers who defined the core features of the Canadian state. However, as Canada has embraced more fully the ethos and policies of secular multiculturalism over the past four decades, we are witnessing a reduction in the privileges accorded to Christians and a rebalancing of the claims and rights of non-Christian religions (Bramadat and Seljak, 2013; Milot, 2009; Moon, 2008). Seljak uses the public and political debates over the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s code on “creed” to illustrate the great lengths governmental systems will go to in order to balance the rights of religious communities with those of the whole society.

While dissimilar in many respects, the religious landscapes of China, India, and Canada provide rich terrains for new forms of comparison, insight, and analysis on the global “problématique” of state–religion dynamics. The range of topics and approaches covered by presenters at the symposium and apparent in these articles will be relevant for academics, policy makers, and religious communities who seek effective approaches to the governance of religious diversity in pluralist societies.