DIFFICULT DAYS FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOMS.
CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIANS SAY IT’S NEVER BEEN HARDER TO MAKE THEIR VOICES HEARD
For conservative Christians it feels like a miracle: Nearly every secul ar media outlet has come out against the Canada Summer Jobs program — and in support of religious freedom.
At issue is a new requirement that applicants for federal grant money to hire summer students — including churches — first have to affirm the Liberal position on reproductive rights. Even the ultra- liberal Toronto Star has cried foul, saying the government has gone too far.
“Instead of focusing on what summer- jobs money would pay young people to do, it has made an issue of what the organizations that apply for the funds believe,” stated a recent editorial.
But if the shared outrage has buoyed faith groups opposed to the government dictum — primarily Catholic, evangelical Protestants and Pentecostal denominations — the requirements for getting a grant have not changed.
This is also just the latest skirmish in an intensifying, decadeslong battle between conservative Christians and secular institutions — which believers argue is increasingly constraining their full participation in public life.
“The state of religious freedom in Canada now is alarmingly restricted, more so in than at any time in the nation’s history,” says Christian Elia, executive director of the Toronto- based Catholic Civil Rights League.
Law societies in British Columbia, Ontario and Nova Scotia, for example, have refused to accredit graduates from a proposed law school at Trinity Western University, an evangelical Christian college, because its student honour code prohibits gay and lesbian sexual activity. The case is now before the Supreme Court of Canada.
Groups representing mainly Christian doctors have also been in court fighting for their rights in regards to assisted suicide. They argue that making referrals for patients seeking medial aid in dying is a form of abetting euthanasia. But in January, On- tario’s Divisional Court said the rights of patients trump the conscience rights of doctors.
In 2011, the Saskatchewan government ordered several Christian marriage commissioners to perform same- sex weddings, even t hough t he 2005 Marriage Act, which made same- sex marriage legal across Canada, allows for religious dissension.
Since 2006, 16 anti- abortion campus groups, mainly composed of Christian men and women, have been refused campus-club status or have had their status revoked, according to the National Campus Life Network.
Now comes the new requirement for the summer jobs funding, which Albertos Polizogopoulos, an Ottawa- based lawyer who has argued many religious freedom cases, calls a policy “veiled in Charter language” that “guts the Charter of any meaning.”
This battle for full participation in society comes as churches that are the most conservative, or orthodox, are experiencing the most rapid growth, both in Canada and the United States. Meanwhile liberal denominations, usually called mainstream Protestant, have seen steep declines in attendance and adherence.
Hardest hit in Canada has been the United Church, considered the most l i beral denomination among main line Protestants. A report titled “Welcome to the Last Days of the United Church of Canada,” by Rev. David Ewart, reported that the number of worshippers fell from 338,000 in 1990 to 151,000 in 2013. The study predicted that by 2025, attendance would hit 34,000.
By contrast, a 2012 report by researcher Reginald Bibby found that Roman Catholics have held steady at about 40 per cent of the population, and evangelicals and Pentecostals have grown to about 10 per cent.
Yet even as these religious groups grow, they find their influence stifled by politically powerful liberal secularism. Religious groups are still free to worship, but many feel excluded from public debates over critical issues. Conservative worshippers say they have been told repeatedly to keep their views inside the walls of their churches ( or synagogues and mosques) and apart from secular society.
The idea of secularism itself seems to have shifted. Where once it meant that all parties, including faith groups, could participate in setting the public agenda, with no one group dominating the other, it now seems to mean no religious participation at all — except from those liberal denominations that support abortion rights, euthanasia and same-sex marriage.
“Secularism has now become a belief system like any other,” said Elia. “If you speak to a secularist, you’ll see that the dogma to which they adhere is consistent and they defend it with voracity often unrivalled by religious people.”
John G. Stackhouse, a religious studies professor at Crandall University in Moncton, N.B., says secularists and religious believers alike have a duty to defend both their own rights and the rights of others. But he says secularists have crossed a line into territory where they insist “their ideas of what’s right dominates public life to the repression or even exclusion of alternative viewpoints.”
In part, he says, this has been a reaction to conservative religious views on social issues. He points to “harsh anti- abortion campaigns” that struck many as “anti- feminist, anti- women,” as well as resistance to same- sex marriage.
“Unlike in the cases of abolitionism and suffragism,” he says, Christians “failed to cam- paign for the true human rights of homosexuals. We were left on our back foot when the culture so quickly changed from negative to positive about same- sex relationships.”
Others believe what orthodox religious groups are grappling with is not discrimination from secular forces but the challenges of faith in a pluralistic society. “Religious groups are being listened to in the broader society,” says Gail Allen, co- ordinator of ecumenical, i nter- church and interfaith relations for the United Church of Canada, “but the nature of a pluralistic society is the outcomes of debate may not always please orthodox Christians.”
But Kevin Flatt, associate professor of history at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ont., says those outcomes have become tilted against the religious, especially conservative Christians. He points to the difference between closed secularism, in which government is hostile to religious values, and open secularism, which treats “people and communities equally no matter what their religious convictions and values are.”
Debates over summer jobs requirements, or evangelical students’ right to their own law school, ultimately come down to one question, Flatt says: “Do we want a society where the government allows room for different people and different communities to come to different conclusions? Or do we want to be a society where the government tells Canadians what they have to think? I’d rather live in the first kind of society, a society that has room for true pluralism.”
David Mulroney, president of the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto, says that will take a radical redefinition of what now passes for tolerance.
“Perhaps the most important first step would be to secure agreement that religious believers deserve to be included under the heading of diversity, a term that has in many ways acquired an almost religious significance in our society, but whose protection has not generally extended to religious belief.”
THIS BATTLE FOR FULL PARTICIPATION IN SOCIETY COMES AS CHURCHES THAT ARE THE MOST CONSERVATIVE, OR ORTHODOX, ARE EXPERIENCING THE MOST RAPID GROWTH, BOTH IN CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES. MEANWHILE, LIBERAL DENOMINATIONS HAVE SEEN STEEP DECLINES.