'GENERIC' PRAYERS
Principle of religious neutrality of the state not just important for atheists.
On Monday, the Post’s Joseph Brean reported on an Angus Reid Internet-panel poll about religion in Canadian politics. Polls make excellent fertilizer for the columnist: he abuses them almost unconsciously. If the writer approves of the majority opinion expressed in the poll, this demonstrates that the intuitive wisdom of the great Canadian public is on his side, as is only natural. When he disapproves, he can denounce the false consciousness of a deluded, mendacious rabble.
If someone checked, they could probably catch me doing these things in consecutive weeks. This time, I stand with the masses. According to Angus, a slight majority of Canadians approve of the April Supreme Court decision that outlawed the recitation of a Catholic prayer at meetings of the Saguenay, Que., city council.
That lawsuit began when some cranky village atheist — I use this as an epithet of praise — went before a human rights tribunal objecting to the prayer, which invariably commenced with the mayor intoning: “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” The complainant also groused about the presence of religious symbols in the council chamber, including a crucifix and a statue of Jesus displaying His electrically illuminated Sacred Heart.
The tribunal agreed that these items were unlawful, but the city took that ruling to Quebec’s Court of Appeal, which overturned it partly on the grounds that the prayer “expressed universal values and could not be identified with any particular religion.” This would have been quite ridiculous enough: I’m no scholar, but I’m reasonably sure that the Holy Trinity is strongly identified with a particular religion, and it ain’t Shinto. The court, however, doubled down, adding gratuitously that the Sacred Heart and the crucifix were “works of art that were devoid of religious connotation.”
This may sometimes be true, as- suming that those items are found on a heavy-metal album cover or a skateboard deck. (Although as far the Sacred Heart goes, even when it is used as kitsch, it is definitely Roman Catholic kitsch.) The Supreme Court of Canada would have had to actively play dumb to endorse a ruling fraught with such contrivances.
It appears that the wider public has equally sound instincts. The principle of the religious neutrality of the state is not just important for atheists — indeed, it is probably not even useful primarily to atheists. There is no credal statement so generic that it does not define, and therefore exclude. The most innocuous religious nuances can sow infinite strife, and if you don’t believe me, please go Google “filioque.”
What strikes me about the Angus Reid poll is that our suspicion of prayer integrated into public meetings seems to account for two different aspects of religious symbols. Some atheists apparently told the pollster they were comfortable with traditional invocations of Jesus, even in public contexts that otherwise need to be religion-neutral. (What one often finds upon inquiring, of course, is that such “traditions” began as reactionary innovations, like the “under God” in the American Pledge of Allegiance.) The pollster also asked Canadians how they would feel about taking “God keep our land” out of the national anthem, and only seven per cent of respondents liked that idea.
It sounds as though Canadians are making an intelligent distinction between having an officially Jesus-beseeching government and merely accepting that our civilization has Christian roots and folkways — which, happily, have included the dignity of the individual and the notions of charity and mercy. It is often observed that unbelieving intellectuals can be particularly fierce defenders of old texts like the Latin Mass or the Book of Common Prayer. Atheists have the luxury of viewing such texts as objets d’art, literal museum pieces, and of disregarding their propositional truth or their utility.
The whole point of singing a national anthem is largely that it is the same anthem your grandfather sang. An anthem is the old song, usually the fight song, of a club of citizens. The club still includes the dead members, or at least honours them, and the living are not the sole owners of the club’s traditions. If you renovate an anthem’s form too often, in an effort to suit the times, the essence of the exercise is lost.
So no one is meant to subscribe to or believe every word of a national anthem. It would be otiose to object to the French version of O Canada on the ground that, no, sorry, you would make a mess of it if you were personally asked to wield either an épée or a cross.
Prayers are not like that, are they? They are either uttered in earnest, or they are an insult to the deity. The details are always important. There isn’t really any such thing as a generic prayer, one that covers Satanists and Hindus and Pentecostals with equal effectiveness. Only a Quebec Court of Appeal that was nervous about the possible consequences of unlimited militant secularism could be talked into asserting such a thing — let alone believing it.
The principle of the religious neutrality of the state is not just important for atheists