A victory, of sorts, for religious freedom

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Quebec’s Education Minister must reconsider his refusal to grant Montreal’s Loyola High School an exemption from the province’s mandatory ethics and religion course (ERC). But is this really a resounding victory for freedom of religion?

Loyola, a private Catholic secondary school, seems to be well pleased with the decision, which recognizes the unreasonableness, if not outright absurdity, of requiring the religious school to teach Catholicism and Catholic ethics “from a neutral perspective,” as the ERC would have done. One of the school’s lawyers, Mark Phillips, said enthusiastically of the ruling, “Every single judge is entirely behind the idea that Loyola as a Catholic school should be allowed to teach its religion and its ethical system without ceasing to be who they are….”

And he is almost correct about that. While the majority decision does not actually recognize or delineate what religious freedom Loyola might enjoy in its own right as an institution, it does make it clear that Loyola’s teachers and students are entitled to religious freedom — freedom that it deems to have been unnecessarily limited by the ERC.

What’s the problem then? Why should proponents of religious liberty, who have had much to worry about in Canada lately, not be breaking out the confetti at this bit of good news?

The reason, I’d suggest, for holding off on the party is that what the court has delivered is really a very limited bit of happy tidings. It’s nice that all the justices have allowed that forcing a Catholic school to teach Catholicism from a secular perspective is not on. But it would have been far nicer if the majority had recognized that legally imposing on a Catholic school in this way is not merely an unnecessary limit given the particular statutory goals at issue in this case, but before that a full-on defeat of the very purpose of a religious institution and thereby an explicit and eternal violation of constitutionally protected religious freedom.

Consider also what is still required of Loyola. It must endeavour to teach the rest of the contents of the ERC — everything but Catholicism and Catholic ethics — from a secular perspective. So in its teachings about other religions and about ethics in more general terms, Loyola must not take a Catholic viewpoint. In this particular case, Loyola has declared itself amendable to the restriction. But as a general statement of religious freedom for private religious schools, this isn’t very encouraging.

To put it in terms similar to those Mark Phillips used, the majority of the Court has essentially held now that a private Catholic (or Jewish or Muslim) school may be forced to cease being who it really is when it teaches about other religions or about dictates of conscience.

It’s especially troubling that the majority decision seems to equate teaching about other religions from a Catholic perspective with intolerance and scorn. “The risk of such an approach,” Justice Abella writes, “would be that other religions would necessarily be seen not as differently legitimate belief systems, but as worthy of respect only to the extent that they aligned with the tenets of Catholicism. This contradicts the ERC Program’s goals of ensuring respect for different religions beliefs.”

For one, this is not giving religious teachers, or religious people in general, very much credit for being able to hold a religious perspective without having the slightest regard and esteem for anyone but their own co-religionists. For another, the majority’s insistence on objectivity about the reasons underlying different belief systems seems almost comically at odds with the very definition of religion, which Oxford states is “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.”

Regulation of religion inevitably means allowing the government to step in with the final word on what may and may not be considered sacred. That’s never a good thing for freedom. And sadly the Loyola decision has not protected us very much from our lawmakers’ ability to do so.

Loyola seems delighted with the Supreme Court’s finding. But it’s a shame the verdict was so limited