To eliminate religious symbols is to live in a state of dishonesty

Complete secularism is a myth — and to adopt it is cultural demise.

Humanity is a feeling, breathing, self-aware and expressive entity in the universe. And religious expression is part of being human.

When Professor Harvey Cox began in the religion department at Harvard University in 1965, there was some contention that religion was on the way out. But as Cox says in his latest book, The Future of Faith, published at his retirement in 2009, it is clear that the religious expression of our humanity is here to stay in developed na- tions and in the world more broadly.

The top-down quality of a chartered secularism like the one the Parti Québécois is proposing echoes back to attitudes in Quebec before the Quiet Revolution. Perhaps those politicians who are now proposing to enforce secular totalitarianism should learn from our history.

On one hand, this push for a chartered secularism reflects an unease over how to address situations of minority accommodation. But on the other hand — and this is something that the proposed secularism misses as a policy response — Quebec is not a province characterized by charters; it is first and foremost defined by people. These people — le peuple — who live and work and study and even have children here, they are human. We are human.

To impose or to dictate, or to attempt to eliminate from the public eye, any symbol of one’s religion is to hollow out the rich personality and history of our province — and to try to make it into something false.

If we can’t live with integrity, free to be ourselves and to express without hate or harm the spiritual connection we have to the wider universe, then we Quebecers will be heading in a direction that is brutal, dishonest to each other, and vacant of love.

But then, maybe things like honesty and love don’t matter in dictatorial state secularism. With the kind of secularism the PQ is proposing, we will serve not each other, but that false, unchanging and vacuous idea that what matters most is that we look the same, act the same, express ourselves the same way and encourage one another to live carefully planned, ghettoized, dishonest lives.