Religion in the public square
Freedom
of religion doesn't mean freedom from religion – we should hear all voices on
issues that shape society's values
By Margaret
Somerville
If you've paid any
attention to the media over the last week – for instance, regarding whether the
G8 "maternal and infant health initiative" should include abortion,
or The Current's and The National's programs on CBC that focused on Marci
McDonald's new book, The Armageddon Factor, that raises alarm about the rise in
political power and influence of the "Canadian religious right" –
you'll find this secularist truism espoused both front, centre and behind the
scenes: Religion and religious voices and views have no valid role to play in
the public square. Indeed, many secularists are openly hostile to any such
participation. But are they correct?
To respond, we need
to examine the arguments for and against their participation.
First, the nature of
the issues being debated is relevant. Recently they have included euthanasia,
abortion, new reproductive technologies, sex education of children, access to
health care, being soft/hard on crime and drugs, medical marijuana, safe
injection sites, business ethics, corruption, environmental ethics, aid to
developing countries, and so on.
These issues involve
some of our most important individual and collective social-ethical-legal
values. Many of them are connected with respect for life, and with birth or
death, the two events around which we have always formed our most important
values. These values, together with our principles, attitudes, beliefs, myths
and so on, make up the societal-cultural paradigm on which our society is based
– that is, the "shared story" that we tell each other and buy into in
order to form the glue that binds us as a society.
So, in a
"secular society" such as
That depends on what
we mean by a secular society.
Secularists argue it
means that religion has no valid role to play in forming our shared values and
has no place in the public square. I believe they're wrong, but it's true
religion cannot function in the public square in the same way as in the past.
We form society
through a journey of the collective human imagination. In the past, societies
used a shared religion to find their collective imagination and bind themselves
together. That's no longer possible, but can a purely secular approach replace
this function of religion?
Religious studies
scholars Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young have examined what they call
"secular religions." For instance, humanism and atheism function as
secular religions binding their adherents through common belief and ideology.
Science also functions as a secular religion when it becomes scientism.
The same is true of
ethics when it becomes moralism.
As well, sport can
become sportism, especially when combined with another powerful
"ism," nationalism – "Go Habs Go!" And environmentalism is
at least a secondary religion for more and more people – but even that has its
disbelievers and critics. In short, we are witnessing the emergence of a very
large number and range of secular religions.
None of these
"isms" is harmful in itself, but they are harmful to finding shared
values and ethics when they are promoted – as, for instance, scientist Richard
Dawkins does with scientism – to deny any space for spirituality and
traditional religion in the public square and replace those with secularism,
the most encompassing secular religion that functions as a basket holding all
the others.
In other words, I'm
arguing that it's a mistake to accept that secularism is neutral, as its
advocates claim. Rather, it too is a belief system used to bind people
together. And if, despite being a belief system, secularism is not excluded
from the public square, then religious voices should not be excluded on that
basis. The mistake is in taking a disjunctive (either secularism or religion)
approach to a situation that requires a conjunctive (both secularism and
religion) approach.
We need all voices to
be heard in the democratic public square and they have a right to be heard.
The basic principles
on which democracy is founded are liberty and equality. To privilege
secularism, as its advocates argue should be done, is to contravene the liberty
and equality principles of democracy and to prevent democracy functioning as it
should – in short, it's profoundly anti-democratic.
A frequent argument
used by secularists to justify excluding religious voices from the public
square is that secular democratic societies require a separation of church and
state. That's correct, but the question is: What does respecting that
separation require?
First, it means the
state, and its laws and public and social policy, are not based directly on
religious beliefs and laws as, for example, in Islamic societies such as
The doctrine is meant
to protect the state from being controlled or wrongfully interfered with by a
religion or religions, and to protect religions, within their valid sphere of
operation, from state interference or control. For instance, the Chinese
government's interference in the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops in that
country contravenes the doctrine of separation of church and state. The
doctrine has division of powers or demarcation of jurisdictions functions.
Those using
"separation of church and state" to justify excluding religion from
the public square have created confusion among: Freedom of religion; freedom
for religion; and freedom from religion.
Freedom of religion:
The state does not impose a religion on its citizens and there is no state
religion. Freedom for religion: The state does not restrict the free practice
of religion by its citizens. Freedom from religion: The state excludes religion
and religious voices from the public square, in particular, in relation to law
and public policy making. The first two freedoms are valid expressions of the
doctrine. The third is not.
This mistaken
interpretation of the doctrine of "separation of church and state"
has been used by secularists in order to win a victory for their values in the
culture wars by eliminating consideration of the values of their opponents on
the basis they're religiously based. But for many people, their moral reasoning
is connected with their religious beliefs. To exclude them and their moral
views from the public square, because of the source of their beliefs, would be
to disenfranchise them.
In Chamberlain vs.
Surrey School District No. 36, Justice Kenneth Mackenzie, writing for a
unanimous Court of Appeal for British Columbia interpreting what "strictly
secular" in the British Columbia School Act meant, made a
"distinction between religion and morality." He wrote "religion
and morality are not synonymous terms. ... (M)oral positions (whether secularly
or religiously based) taken as positions of conscience are entitled to full
participation in the dialogue in the public square where moral questions are
answered as a matter of law and social policy. ... There is no bright line
between a religious and a non-religious conscience. ... Moral positions must be
accorded equal access to the public square without regard to religious influence.
A religiously informed conscience should not be accorded any privilege, but
neither should it be placed under a disability. ... The meaning of strictly
secular is thus pluralist or inclusive in its widest sense."
Religion brings to
bear important considerations that secularism doesn't, and vice versa. We need
to hear both sides and give proper weight to each, if we are to make wise
decisions about the values that should take priority, when values are in
conflict.
I suggest that the
most important task of the religious voices in the public square is to help to
place and keep social-ethical-values issues in a moral context. Religion should
be seen as an important holder of our "collective moral memory," a
memory we lose or ignore at our peril. We need to revalue religion, even if we
are not people of faith, to see it as a store of traditional knowledge and
wisdom.
We need also to
extend the scope of our analyses of contemporary social-ethical-values issues
beyond an intense present to consider the needs and rights of future
generations. And we must "hold on trust" for them, not just our
physical ecosystem, but also our metaphysical one – the values, principles,
beliefs, stories and so on that create and represent the "human
spirit," that which makes us human. Religious voices can help us to do
that.
Values conflicts
cannot be solved by excluding religious voices from the public square. On the
contrary, doing so is likely to exacerbate those conflicts.
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