Abstract
There can be no doubt that all attempts to relegate religion to the private sphere have failed, in Canada as everywhere else. Religion has always had a public dimension both as a congregational activity and as an instrument for formulating and evaluating laws and regulations that govern the behaviour of people in a given jurisdiction. The appropriate limits of the latter function in Canada are the subject of this collection of essays.
The thirteen chapters are divided, quite arbitrarily, into four overlapping groups: the public/private divide, private life, the pubic/private continuum and public life. They are case studies in the broadest sense, with some focusing on specific religious communities and others providing a comparative or historical treatment.
Paul Bowlby sets his study of the history of religious education in Canada’s Maritime Provinces within the larger context of secularization, in which Canada occupies a middle position between Europe and the USA. The early privileging of Anglican/Protestant education, which reflected what Bowlby terms the Victorian Christian social imagery, was fiercely contested by Catholics, which subsequently led to their being given special accommodation. More recently a secular social imagery has predominated, in which there is no place for religion in education. Lori Beaman sees three contesting imaginaries in Canada today: a multicultural/multireligious one, a rigidly secular one and a Christian dominant (but tolerating others) one. She discusses several court cases dealing with the public expression of religion and notes four emerging trends: the discourse of the postsecular, the shift from “religion” to “culture,” a move to interculturalism and the increased regulation of women’s bodies (52).
Peter Beyer’s case study looks at the intersection of religion and culture among immigrant and second-generation adults, with whom his research team conducted focus groups and individual interviews between 2008 and 2010. They note the participants’ feeling that most other Canadians value multiculturalism but are conflicted about religious diversity, especially when it receives public expression. Rubina Ramji’s topic is how second-generation Muslim youth use the Internet rather than the mosque or local community to maintain and transform their religious identity. She concludes, “the vast majority of our participants are very comfortable as Muslims and as Canadians. Accessing Islam online added to their sense of identity but did not affect their sense of ‘citizenship’” (115). In their chapter Yolande Cohen and Yann Scioldo-Zürcher compare the religious marital practices among Sephardic Jews in Paris and Montreal between 1954 and 1980. In both places Jewish immigration from North Africa revitalized declining Jewish communities and pushed them in a more Orthodox direction. From her study of the role of religion in domestic violence, Nancy Nason-Clark concludes that religion is both part of the problem, with its emphasis on male domination and female submissiveness, and part of the solution, for example, through faith-based abusers’ rehabilitation programs.
Following the 2008 report of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on “reasonable accommodation” of minority religious practices in Quebec, Solange Lefebvre studied the practice of private sector firms on this issue and found that they treated religion as just one of the types of diversity to be considered and, where feasible, accommodated. Pascale Fournier and Erica See also deal with the “reasonable accommodation” controversy in Quebec, specifically the law banning the niqab when giving or receiving publicly funded services. Despite its support by feminist groups, it greatly disadvantages many religious women. In her account of Haitians in Quebec, Margarita A. Mooney notes that “The disdain Haitians sense towards their private piety and their often public demonstrations of faith leads them to feel that their strong Catholic identity presents a barrier to their symbolic incorporation in Montreal” (207). Kamala Elizabeth Nayar’s topic is the attempt of Sikh youth in British Columbia to assert their religious identity in the secular sphere, specifically the public school system.
Paul Allen’s “case study” deals with the teaching of religion in university religious studies courses. He argues that the social-scientific approach to religion should be supplemented by a theological approach so that “diversity and religious pluralism do not become a prescriptive orthodoxy that proscribes the capacity for (secular) self-criticism” (238). Clark Banack analyzes an Alberta law that allows parents to withdraw their children from any educational program that deals with sexual orientation, and concludes that although conservative Christians were strong supporters of this provision, the main reason for its popularity was the traditional anti-statist culture in the province. Phillip Connor and Matthias Koenig examine immigration and employment data and conclude that “religion seems to operate as a bridge for most immigrants seeking to make a better life in Canada, but at the same time as a barrier for religious minorities” (308).
In their conclusion the editors apologize for the omission of contributions on indigenous Canadians. Otherwise the book provides useful material for understanding the public role of religion in Canada.