Moving toward an inclusive concept of religious freedom

Religious freedom is in the news, with the announcement of the ambassador for the Office of Religious Freedom by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. But have we paused to consider what we mean by religious freedom?

We need to analyze the concept, if we want to form a clear idea of what the Office should do.

At one level, the answer seems very straightforward: religious freedom means the absence of religious persecution. When we identify a religious group targeted for discrimination on religious grounds, as when they are prevented from praying peacefully in their sacred places, or denied access to jobs on the basis of their religion and so on, especially if they are minority — as is said to be the case with the Ahmaddiyas in Pakistan or the Coptics in Egypt — then their religious freedom would be secured by the removal of such disabilities. The con- tours of the concept of religious freedom are thus not difficult to identify in cases involving gross discrimination. The Office should clearly be engaged in rectifying these situations with the resources at its command.

The moment we proceed beyond such clear-cut cases, however, the concept seems to become less evident. The right to propagate one’s religion is often axiomatically assumed to be part of religious freedom. Were then the Christians exercising their right to religious freedom — the right to freely propagate their religion — when aboriginal children were being put in residential schools?

This example might make us feel a little awkward as an expression of religious freedom. And it should, because the rights of those who were being converted to Christianity were being compromised, although those who were doing the converting may have felt that these children were being saved from going to hell. The point, then, is that the exercise of what the proselytizing religion might consider not just its right, but its birthright — the right to convert others — may seriously compromise the religious freedom of others. But the offending party may not see it that way, if it sees itself as doing a spiritual favour to the aggrieved party!

In other words, one needs to distinguish clearly between two meanings on the word conversion: (1) my right to change my religion, should I wish to do so, and (2) someone else’s right to ask me to change my religion. While my right to change my religion is virtually unqualified, the same may not be said of someone else’s right to ask me to change my religion, as the case of the residential schools illustrates.

I have taken the example of the residential schools to highlight the point that a non-missionary religion is often at a disadvantage, when facing a missionary religion, as they are playing by different rules. And the situation is further aggravated if the missionary religion has access to more resources and even political power. What is significant for our discussion is the fact that the two kinds of religions operate with different concepts of religious freedom, when it comes to proselytization. The missionary religions include this right in the definition of their religious freedom; the non-missionary religions exclude it.

The discourse on religious freedom has been so completely dominated by the concept of religious freedom as entertained by the missionary religions that the position of the non-missionary religions in this respect has just not been taken into account, even though many religions in the world are in fact basically non-missionary — such as Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Shinto and Primal religions. These cover more than a third of the globe’s population and are also represented within Canada’s multicultural society. Clearly, therefore, the Office should be concerned with evolving an inclusive concept of religious freedom in which all religions could be stakeholders.

Let us now examine the concept of freedom a little more closely. At the one end of the spectrum, it means absence of restrictions, as when I am free to move, when my movement is not restricted; at the other end of it, it means the enlargement of options, as when instead of offering five courses in a field, a uni- versity offers 10 and we are we now free to take many more courses than we could earlier.

Freedom of religion, then, could mean the minimization of restrictions on the one hand, and the maximization of options on the other.

Higher up in this article I mentioned how one mission of the new Office could be to work for the removal of the restrictions under which some religions, especially religious minorities, operate.

The mission of the Office could similarly also be conceived in terms of maximizing the religious options available, by promoting the study of world’s religions around the globe, sometimes referred to as the comparative study of religion.

Once a student knows the basic principles of the world’s religions, they will then become live options, as live as one’s own religions, thereby enhancing religious freedom around the world.