‘VISIBLE’ RELIGION

Calgary school needs to make better case for ‘no prayer’ policy.

If you run a private school with a position on religion, these are interesting times. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled Montreal’s Loyola High School was entitled to teach Quebec’s Ethics and Religious Culture curriculum from a Catholic perspective — that is, it said Catholics were not required to treat Catholicism as just another faith. You might ask: Why would anyone enrol his children in a Jesuit school expecting it to be neutral about Catholicism? Why would a government that strives toward neutrality in matters of religion allow churches to run schools and then presume to tell them how to teach about religion? But this is the country we live in. Many of our governments subsidize the religious schools they’re trying to nudge away from their faiths.

Now a Human Rights Tribunal ruling in Alberta raises another quandary: What if you don’t want any religion on your campus? Accounts vary wildly among the parties involved, but they agree on this much: Webber Academy, a highly regarded Calgary private school that calls itself “non-denominational,” informed two Muslim students and their families that they wouldn’t be allowed to pray anywhere on school grounds — not in the library, not in a vacant classroom, not in a closet. When the parents complained, the school refunded their deposit on the next year’s tuition and politely suggested they find another school.

And that wasn’t on, the tribunal concluded: “We find that Webber Academy’s standard of no overt prayer or religious activities on school property was not reasonably necessary to accomplish Webber’s purpose of maintaining a non-denominational identity that is free from religious influences, and that the students could have been accommodated without incurring undue hardship.”

In the Somewhat Libertarian Republic of Selleystan, private institutions would be allowed to prohibit and accept any sorts of behaviour they wanted, provided they were up front and consistent about it. Rules against prayer and religious symbols, for example, would be perfectly acceptable. Webber being a private school in which no one is obliged to enrol, I have quite a bit of sympathy for its position.

But it’s not hard to see why they lost. Webber claims visible religious practice is a direct affront to its central ethos, but its ethos doesn’t seem to be very coherent: It allows students to wear turbans and hijabs, for example. The school tried to distinguish between garments as “a state of ‘being’ ” and prayer as “a visible activity,” which the tribunal kiboshed on principle; but in any event, the activity wouldn’t have been “visible” had the school provided a private space. And Neil Webber, the school’s president, certain- ly did himself no favours by suggesting a student quickly crossing himself might not be a problem.

There was confusion as to what was allowed and what wasn’t: At the time they were enrolled, the students’ parents say they were assured prayer space could be made available; the school claims the exact opposite. In fact, various teachers were happy to find them prayer space at first. And the confusion is understandable, considering it all rests on an interpretation of the term “non-denominational institution” that precludes prayer. That simply isn’t what “nondenominational” means. Per Oxford, it means “not restricted as regards religious denomination” (my italics).

Webber is appealing. Sarah Burton, a lawyer at the Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre, told CBC she wouldn’t be surprised if it wound up at the Supreme Court. But Richard Moon, a University of Windsor law professor who has written extensively on religious freedom, thinks the tribunal got it right. “The school purports to be open to students from all backgrounds,” he notes — indeed its statement of “beliefs and values” promises “an atmosphere where young people of many faiths and cultures feel equally at home” — “and so (it) must accommodate the students’ religious practices … if (it) can do so without great hardship.”

A school that was more coherently dedicated to a religion-free environment might fare better, however. “There is no reason to think that a strong, sincere and sufficiently comprehensive secular belief would not merit protection,” says Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli, a law and political science professor at McGill University: “a strong and principled atheism,” for example; or the French laïcité model promoted by the Agence pour l’Enseignement Français à l’Étranger — a French government agency that accredits francophone schools abroad, including several in Canada. Moon agrees, suggesting a “Bertrand Russell School” or “Richard Dawkins Academy” would also have better luck in the courts.

That’s cold comfort for Webber Academy. But the good news is that any school clearly articulating a “no prayer” policy is very unlikely to attract students for whom prayer is a daily obligation. And if it did, I’d like to think most people would consider any complainers far more unreasonable than the policy.

Calgary’s Webber School should be able to refuse to accommodate prayer. But it needs to make a better case