Trinity Western, Religious Education and Equality Rights

There will be those who settle easily on one side or the other of the Trinity Western (TWU) law school issue. As it stands right now, TWU law school grads cannot be certified to practice in Ontario, BC, or Nova Scotia. Although there are various conflicting court rulings on this matter, the Ontario Courts recently ruled against TWU. You can find the story: here. (If you have not been following this issue, TWU is a BC Christian university that has a faith test, as it were, for admission or employment. In effect, one has to promise that one is either straight or  celibate; and not having sex if one is not married. Some provinces have refused to accredit TWU grad on the grounds that the university discriminates against LGBTQ.)

The question is: should the court have ruled in this way? Ontario is the big lawyer prize, after all. I think TWU would view it as a problem if BC and NS were not on side and would continue to press for accreditation but Ontario, well, that is a big hunk of the market since TWU seems uninterested in Quebec. The other provinces have agreed to accreditation, although the matter is far from settled in some provinces and I expect this story will not end until the Supreme Court decides whether or not it will hear the case and, if it does, until there is a verdict.

The easy answers come from simplifying the issue. Those who support TWU argue that they are just an educational option -- something similar to Crandall with a law school -- and that freedom of religion (which is actually freedom of conscience) protects their students. Hence, even if TWU has some strict rules that intrude on people's personal lives (something other universities do not) and which, de facto and I believe intentionally, discriminate against LGBTQ people ... well, that is, say its proponents, just a matter of worship in which the state should not be involved.

Hold it, say TWU's opponents. Religiously based schooling is problematic precisely because it is discriminatory. Look at what has been going on in the US where the evangelical offensive has limited equality rights and promoted some odd sets of views that seem to say it is OK to discriminate against people as long as you do it for religious reasons. Do we really want that in Canada? Moreover, should a lawyer -- a member of the bar -- sworn to uphold the Constitution and the Charter actually be in a position where they support a law school that denies Charter rights? Is that not a bit too much to swallow?

One of the bigger issue is one I touched on some time ago: how do Christians make a place for themselves in a late modern pluralistic society where their views can no longer be taken for granted and where they, themselves, cannot influence public policy the way they used to? This is not an issue that would have been an issue, say, 50 years ago simply because every university would have accepted -- at least discursively -- the place where TWU now stands. What does that place look like? I tried to suggest that one approach Christians had taken was to create parallel institutions and then try to claim that their institutions allowed them full participation in society writ large. Thus, their schools -- even if they discriminate -- should be taken as the same as any other school. I'm not sold on this as a prescription, but it is one approach that Christians have taken.

I suspect that TWU has a long road to hoe on this one. Why? Well, because TWU is -- without recognizing it -- playing with fire. They are so convinced that this issue is about them versus secular society and efforts on the part of someone in secular society to deny them equal rights that they are missing the bigger picture. I'll argue below that the Supreme Court needs to take that bigger picture into consideration if it gives leave to TWU to hear this case. In fact, it is the Supreme Courts job to look at the bigger picture.

On the other hand, I can't agree with those who dismiss TWU out of hand either. TWU is doing nothing wrong by using the legal channels to advise its case. We might disagree with them -- I have some serious problems with discrimination as I suspect most of the people reading this blog do -- but citizens have the right to use the courts and to advance any argument they so choose. Rosa Luxembourg once said that freedom is freedom for the other. That is, the test of our commitment to democracy was not our insistence on the exercise of our rights but our willingness to ensure and protect other people's rights. Thus, if we are interested in rights, we need to think about our willingness to defend the rights of others with whom we disagree ... and perhaps passionately. I have limits (and I've spelt these out before and so I won't again) but the TWU folks and their advocates have obeyed the law and attempted to make their case in a reasoned and legal way that is -- they at least allege -- consistent with the Charter. We cannot, then, fault TWU for doing what we expect citizens to do in a mature democracy: use peaceful, legal, reasoned and constitutional means to voice decent in an effort to get change in specific laws.

(Nor do I think that this one case will transform Canada into Alabama or even Indiana. The political culture, electoral system, etc., is so different that we Canadians are not about to run into the problems with the denial of rights that has occurred in some states in the US.)

This said, the other bigger issue is likely the one that most people want to talk about: should TWU be accredited? The answer to this question is complicated by three factors:

1. A denial of accreditation affects graduates and not necessarily the law the school and the people who run it. Accrediting the school means allowing graduates to practice law in that province. This is important to note because we do not necessarily know what those graduates themselves think.  Safeguards could be put in place to ensure that our legal profession in each province does indeed support the Charter. Private firms have the right to hire who they will and they would be completely -- as far as I can tell -- at liberty to say to a prospective hire "look, we need to know that you support the Constitution and the Charter and that means that you must be committed to equality. We hire women, we hire straights and gays, we hire on merit, not on faith. If we are going to hire you, we need to know that you are on board with that. Are you? You will not use your position here to place this law firm in the awkward position of standing outside the law."

Private firms can ask that because they are spending their money. They are not refusing to hire anyone on the basis sex or faith or anything. Instead, they are making a commitment to the Constitution a condition of employment. And, to be honest, if I ran a law firm, I'd want to know that my co-workers were committed to the law that they are supposed to be upholding and sustaining (all lawyers must agree to uphold the law in order to practice).

Said differently, I am not 100% sure that we should judge the lawyer by the school from which he or she came. I've said this before but it goes double for law schools ... we don't know why some people chose particular schools and we don't know their views. I go to a church that has made a strong commitment to ensuring that religious education gets the same funding as the public system. If you've read my blog, you know that I'm far more ambiguous on that issue and I don't want to be judged by what others in my church say, particularly when I disagree with them. So, before we scratch TWU off the list -- and we might end up doing that anyway -- we should pause and think that we might be scratching people off the list who actually share our views. Is that a good thing to do?

The state can make the same qualifications requirements of the job, but more so. My wife works in the NS Public Prosecution Services and they have an even higher burden to maintain the law than those in private practice. They cannot reject the Constitution because they are the ones who are supposed to uphold it. Thus, the state can say to prospective new lawyers: look, you have to uphold the Constitution and that means that you will have to defend equality for gay people and -- potentially -- argue against funding for religious institutions like the one from which you graduated or you might have to take the same side as gay and lesbian plaintiffs against discriminatory religious institution (FYI, I don't believe this is going to happen but follow the argument). Can you do this? Said in other words: the state is more than at liberty to say "we're in the Charter enforcing business and we can only hire lawyers who are in that business. We are the state. We have to treat everyone equally and personal religious perspectives are not good enough to opt out of that obligation."

2. The second thing that we need to bear in mind here as a complicating factor is that, unlike Crandall, TWU's faith-based requirements really might impose some level of material harm on LGBTQ people. There are, by design, only a limited number of law school positions in Canada. If a certain percentage of those are not accessible to LGBTQ people and only accessible to those who mirror the faith-based criteria of TWU ... then, we do have a more substantial problem than a small primarily undergrad institution like Crandall, where substitutes are readily available.  In effect, Christians are saying that a percentage of the legal profession will be de facto reserved for them and will, de facto, exclude LGBTQ people.

Since, as I have explained previously in this blog, the law in Canada must work in a way that promotes equal benefits (and I explained why previously), this is something more than a minor issue. In effect, to accept TWU's claim is not simply to allow freedom of conscience, it is to allow a situation where there is *not* equal benefit of the law. Christians are not prohibited from applying any law school in Canada. They are not required to abrogate their faith to attend those schools or to enter into social or marital or sexual arrangements which contravene their faith. They may -- for their own reasons -- prefer to attend TWU but those are personal reasons, not legal ones. The fact is this: neither Dal nor UNB nor any other law school has an admission requirement that prohibits admission to straight Christians (the TWU market). Thus, we have discrimination one way but not the other.

What I am trying to say is this: TWU is not simply asserting freedom of conscience, something I can get behind, as I suspect can most people, but they are a legal institution that is engaging in a practice that is denying equal benefit of the law.  This does not mean that the Supreme Court will rule against them but it does, in my view, damage the case they are making.

3. The third complicating factor is precedent. And, I suspect that this may weigh heavily on the Court's mind (because, of course, it has to since their rulings establish precedents). Several years ago there was a bit of a stink about Sharia law in Ontario. It was never a serious option (we don't need to get into the details) nor a seriously considered option, including by the vast vast majority of the Muslim community. But, it briefly incited a significant debate about the boundaries between religion and the state. My view at that time was that religious groups did not have a right to call on the state to enforce religious laws that stood outside the criminal code or civil or administrative or regulatory or constitutional, etc., law in Canada.

What TWU needs to think about -- why I think they are playing with fire -- is that they are moving to establish a precedent that I suspect they will regret trying to establish: religion in law is OK and discrimination is OK if you can claim it is religiously based. TWU's case, in other words, is that their discrimination is based in faith and therefore protected by freedom of conscience. The state, IOW, must protect and facilitate the very thing that upset people about Sharia law. The state can be called upon to enforce religious law: in this case allowing accreditation to a legal educational institution that denies equal benefit of the law and -- apparently -- rejects the equality provisions of the Charter.

Because the Canadian state must treat people equally, the state cannot, then, deny rights to other groups that it upholds for TWU. Just about anyone can, then, provided they use a religious defense, create institutions that discriminate and the state must accept and accredit its graduates. What if that freedom of conscience meant prejudice against black Canadians (don't say "no way" Christianity does not have a good record on slavery), or Native people, or that women should not have certain jobs (I know Christians who fundamentally believe that women should not be in leadership roles and can site scripture to that purpose) or ... the converse: an atheist who believes that Christians should be second class citizens and denied equal rights?

Said differently, TWU thinks it is defending its rights and the rights of its graduates but it is doing something, the implications of which are far broader and deeper than they realize. They are, as it were, asking the court to legalize Sharia law. And, as Canadians, might ask: are we happy with that?

What is going on with Christianity? Part III

This series of blogs began a few weeks ago as a discussion of what a post-Christian Canada entailed. The argument I was trying to put forward was that the relationship between state, civil society, and church had changed appreciably in Canada over the past couple of generations and created what I might call a 'post-Christian' country. By this, I did not mean simply the demographics of religion, although this is part of the equation. Instead, what I meant was a system of ethical, cultural, and political order in which there were other accepted bases of the good and which grounded morality that competed with Christianity to define the systems of social, political, and economic relations that marked the lived experiences of Canadians. Christianity continued to occupy a more favourable position regarding public policy than other religions (for a variety of reasons) but it no longer worked with a guaranteed connection to public policy that had to be taken into account by the state.

This issue is, of course, more complicated than a one-paragraph summary can allow. But, I did contend that (a) this issue was important and (b) it was far from clear what post-Christianity actually was. I suggested that Christianity would continue to influence Canadian policy and culture but in ways that were different from the experiences of the United States (again, for a variety of reasons) and so we should not confuse the two.

In this blog I want to approach the same issue from the opposite perspective. If the critics of Christianity approach Christianity in a post-Christian age with a series of misplaced stereotypes, how do Christians approach it? This short answer is: from no one single perspective. Some churches have attempted to deny the changes that have done on in Canada in the last several generations; others have made an uneasy peace with them; and still others embrace them and provide (say, in the case of equality and marriage) some measure of leadership. But, one strand of Christian thought that worries me, as Christians grapple with the post-Christian age, involves a similar process of forgetting. I'll again speak using some personal examples in the hope that they capture general dynamics.

Recently, we had a guest speaker at my church who told the congregation that the Christian worldview differed from that the wider culture in a number of respects. First, he asserted that Christians believe that there is truth and that the society at large does not. It is sort of a everyone do your own thing type of thing. Second, he argued that Christianity provided a grounding and a morality that was otherwise lacking in civil society. Without morals, in other words, the society slides to disorder.  These are points that are widely believed, from what I can tell, by devout Christians so let's address them, but from the historical-transitionary perspective I am trying to lay out in this series of blogs.

What Christians need to realize is that neither of these arguments are true in this sense. In the last few years, a number of my Christian friends have much-belatedly started using the discourse of postmodernism. Frankly, I'm not certain what the term really means but I don't recognize any of the central characteristics I've learnt in their definition. They assert that postmodernists deny truth, are relatively hedonistic, and place everything on the individual. Whether or not this view of a postmodern culture is accurate (and, btw, I don't think we have a postmodern culture), what it highlights is the fears of Christians and these fears are leading them to think about society in the wrong way. How so?

It is very important to many of Christian friends (people whom I love and respect) to assert that there is truth. This is a desire for certainty and to find that certainty outside of themselves. I don't blame them. I suspect most people want to do this but the idea that truth is denied in civil society or in secular modern culture is just plain inaccurate. In fact, the problem might be precisely the opposite: it is not an absence of truth but a profusion of them. Back in the day, the dominance of Christianity connected to a series of other cultural elements that tied together into a worldview. To be Christian meant to be more, "civilized," advanced/progressive, respectable, knowledgeable, in possession of certainty, and the like. I am not arguing that all of these different strands of culture and thought necessary fit together well. What happened, however, is that they merged into a single framework, despite some potential contradictions that were papered over or edited out. Hence, "back in the day" one could associate Christianity with truth in Canada, at least within the framework of the culture of the time.

But, this is no longer so and likely never was fully true. The absence of Christianity in a person's life does not mean that the stop believing in truth. It does not mean that they don't have an ethics that allows them to separate right from wrong, or a conception of history, a sense of justice, and conception of the good and it does not mean that these things are, for them, just assertions. In other words, Christianity needs to recognize that simply asserting that "there is truth" is not going win friends and influence people because most people who are not practicing Christians already believe this.

Likewise, the idea that culture is infused by a "if its good for you ..." mentality is also problematic. It is true that this is a discourse that is widely used. Indeed, it is a language that we use and the use of that language causes problems (this, too, might be the subject for another blog), but few people really believe that, even if they use those words. For instance, if murder is good for you ... its OK? Seriously, no one believes that and they don't need scripture to tell them that murder is wrong.

The mistake that Christians make is assuming that the way people approach consumer goods is the way they approach their more serious life choices. Thus, there is really is not anything seriously wrong with according a scope for personal judgement in the music people listen to, the foods they eat, the colour they paint their walls, the types of shoes they wear. If you like brown shoes ... fill your boots ;) But, the fact that we use that logic for relatively insignificant decisions in our lives (will I watch Dr. Who or Orphan Black?) does not mean that people deploy the same logic for more serious decisions -- the values they teach their children, their perspective on the environment, their views of international affairs or justice or equality in society or labour relations. Consumerism may be an important part of Canadian culture, but it is not the only part and so we cannot and should not mistake one part for the whole.

The problem for Christians, again, is that their critique of culture falls on deaf ears because they are telling people things that they already know: hedonism is wrong. On serious matters there are and should be limits to behaviour or actions. And, in the process, Christians are also misjudging modern culture and post-Christian Canada.

The result is a situation where people talk past each other. Christians make points that are already widely accepted and misjudge the degree to which society can function without state, church and civil society marching together; critics get Christianity wrong and work with a series of stereotypes. In the process, they end up denying what I suspect are the very things they want to preserve: diversity and freedom of conscience.

Christians, on the other hand, end up with nostalgia ... lamenting the demise of a day and age whose demise they should not at all lament. They seen historical development as decline when the truth is that it is neither progress nor reversion. Society is not more or less moral than it was in the past. It functions with no more and no less dysfunction.

Post-Christianity in Canada, to sum this up, is then a situation of misapprehension, contradiction, and multiplicity.  It is a situation in which both Christians and their critics are trying to accomplish oddly similar aims but their confusion about each other leads them away from the direction in which they could actually move together and into conflicts that, frankly, do not need to happen.

What is going on with Christianity? Part II

In a previous post, I noted that I was going to write a series of blogs about Christianity and a post-Christian Canada. This is an important, I think, historical, social, cultural, religious, and political subject. The Indiana anti-gay and lesbian law interrupted my plans, largely because it was connected to the subject I was trying to address. Let me get back to the subject of post-Christianity. I used the term not in an ethical or moral sense, but in an interdisciplinary way to signify a change in the relationship between state, church, and civil society. I tried to argue that we live in a post-Christian Canada. This does not mean that Christianity has ceased to exist. It hasn't and won't. Instead, it means a number of things:

• Christians can no longer accept the "taken for grantedness" of their values and worldview 
• Christians no longer have as privileged a position as they once did in defining the boundaries of the good life and no longer have as privileged an access to the state 
• Other value systems have made a claim to public adherence and been able to demonstrate that they can promote aspects of the good life: equality, say, as an example, at least as well if not better than Christians (or, at least some of those claiming in the loudest voices to speak in the name of Christianity)
• Other values systems challenge challenge Christianity for public attention and individual preoccupation (say, consumerism) and have been remarkably successful is so doing. 
• Post-secondary education has been largely secularized in the sense that direct connections between churches and universities have been broken
• Education, more broadly, has been secularized in that Christianity is no longer taught as "right" in the public schools
• Some of the serious problems with Christian complicity in the oppression of aboriginal people, for instance, have come clearly into light and raise questions about the supposed Christianity of Christians

In this post, I want to more directly consider the implications of this. I'm arguing that some of the things we see going on about us in our society are a result of this historical transition. This includes, for instance, demands from religiously-based universities (Crandall and TWU) to equal  treatment of their graduates in the public sphere (say, becoming teachers or lawyers) and a recent demand by "Christian" doctors to opt out of the requirement that they provide care to patients if that care would contravene their (the doctors') values. I've already said I don't agree with the doctors and tried to suggest (in other blogs) that the issues regarding post-secondary education are more complicated than either proponents of Christian education or its detractors allow. What I am arguing in this series of blogs is that these individual incidents are not individual incidents but rather part of an historical process whereby Christians are trying to work out a new relationship with state and civil society. 

The implications of these changes are important, I will argue in this blog, because a lot of people get it wrong, both Christian and their critics. I'll give you an example and it is one I have used before. A number of years ago, my daughter and her friends tried to start a prayer group in their school. One can think this is good or bad. That is your right and, perhaps, responsibility. I don't want to intrude on that right or tell you what to think.  What I found interesting about the discussion was how quickly those who found problems with my daughter's group reverted to stereotypes of Christians. One person who I know well -- and who is a staunch opponent of any form of prejudice and whose commitments I admire -- told me that religion had no place in the schools. I argued that that was not his place to say because the constitution guaranteed each individual the right to practice their religion. The schools could not impose religion on students and should not, but nor should it stop people from practicing their faith, particularly if it was causing no harm to anyone. In other words, if my daughter and her friends wanted to use an empty classroom to pray ... so what? Likewise, if Muslim students or Jewish students, etc., wanted to do the same thing ... so what? Their tax dollars paid for the school, a vibrant public sphere should not limit expressions of spirituality that are constitutionally guaranteed rights. If someone wanted to form an atheists club using an empty classroom at lunch (that is, on their own time), that was OK with me as well. 

My friend had a very hard time with this and said "but I don't believe that the state should take sides with regard to religion." "Neither do I," I replied. "But, you are saying the state should take sides by allowing people to practice their religion." "How?" I asked. "Well, " my friend said, "you can teach religious studies. I'm OK with that. But, people should practice religion on their own time." "Totally agree," I said. And on and on ... talking past each other. Me arguing that preventing people from practicing religion was taking a side. Him arguing that the only way to not take sides was to stop the practice of all religion in the schools. 

My second example occurred because of the same incident. A person who I did not know well at the time, but for whom I have since also come to have a similarly deep respect, vocally opposed the prayer group. Why? Because it will be used to marginalize other children.  How? Well, bad things have happened in the past when the church was let loose. Look at the inquisition. 

Now, both my friend and this other person have, I strongly suspect, modified their views, not because of me but because they are thinking people. What I'm interested in is the implications of living in a post-Christian Canada for debates such as this. I won't say my arguments in favour of my daughter's prayer group were particularly good. (In my mind, I sounded witty and insightful as I remember it but ... well, I think I am editing history.) But, the opposition had a number of characteristics

1. It confused the individual practice of religion in the public sphere with oppression of others. Now, to be sure, it can be and certainly was in the past in Canada, and is, very clearly, being used as a justification in some parts of the US to attain precisely this result. They have some reason, in other words, for concern, to ask questions, to ask for supervision or guarantees. But, the idea that all religion is a thing of the past that has no place in the public sphere is actually (a) wrong (since the Charter guarantees freedom of conscience) and (b) actually a religious perspective. To try to use the state through the school system to prevent people from practicing their religion is the odd mirror of using the state to force people to practice a religion. It is not providing for individuality or dialogue but trying to stop dialogue and impede individuality. 

Thus, one of the characteristics of a post-Christian Canada is a misunderstanding when it come to Christianity of what state neutrality means, what diversity means, and what constitutional guarantees mean. The fact that the constitution guarantees the right of individual choice in religion does not mean that the state is imposing any religious view on people. In fact, it is the strongest guarantee we can have against the imposition of religious views on the population. I can see how someone watching what is going on in Indiana or Arkansas can have concerns and real ones. Those are things that Christians need to address. But, Canadians also need to recognize that they don't live in the US, that the stakes are different here, public policy is different, and political culture is different. 

2. The most vocal critics of Christianity often don't know a lot about Christianity. I can't fault them for that either because those people who speak in the name of Christianity often do a very poor job of it. There is a need for Christians to speak up against what the use of constitutional guarantees of "religious freedom" in the US to turn (or, try to turn) some people into second-class citizens. But ... I also can't let the critics of Christianity off the hook because they can ask questions. I  was surprised, for instance, by people who I had known for years, with whom I'd gone to parties or passed time talking about the Jays or worked with, started to refer to me as some sort of medieval cleric. "Have you learnt nothing about me in the years you have known me? I wanted to ask. Do you really think I'm attempting to regenerate the burning of heretics?" In other words, the debate (and in my telling, I am the good guy, you might have noticed) became falsely polarized. It was no longer about an individual's right to practice their religion but about something vaguely ominous that threatened others. 

3. Finally, neither Christians or members of other religions are doing anything wrong by using the established mechanisms of citizenship to try to address their concerns. I can disagree with them. You can disagree with them or with me. I frequently do. I think these doctors who are trying to establish the right to deny medical treatment to patients on the basis of their own values are just plain wrong. But, the fact that they are using the courts to put their case forward is not, in itself, wrong.  The judicial system is what we use to adjudicate disputes in a society built on the rule of law (and, I like the rule of law). They are doing nothing wrong with putting their arguments forward at election time or even trying to make election issues of them. That is a right of citizenship and I'd be concerned if someone  tried to deny them that right. I would, frankly, worry about the precedent it set. It would be, in my view, a step away from democracy. 

Now, I hasten to add, that Christian citizens also have a requirement to respect the law and to behave in a decent and mature way. Christians need to very carefully consider the implications of their actions but I'll get to that in another blog. 

What we have then, as one of the characteristics of living in a post-Christian society is a confusion about what Christianity is all about, individual rights, and citizenship rights and the proper way to put items on the public agenda. We can disagree, I say again, but Christians -- even loud-mouthed Christians -- have that right and they are doing nothing wrong with using it. The real problem, however, is that this confusion prevents us from engaging in a more constructive dialogue. It leads us to do dumb things, too (I suspect those people who used heightened language and referred to my daughter's group as the return of the Inquisition would love to take those words back) but it prevents us from understanding the character and nature of rights and the right to practice one's faith in a diverse society. The end result, oddly, is that we misconstrue the very individual rights that have come to substitute for Christianity as the centre of the Canadian value system. 

What is Going on with Christianity? Part I

Christians are on the offensive. Most of my friends who are Christians would find that statement odd.  They feel they are on the defensive, a minority under siege, they might say, in their own homes. I have sympathy for this perspective. I don't share it but is important to note because the opposite perspective also finds a lot of support: that Christians occupy a dominant or privileged position in contemporary Canada that is manipulated in ways that subvert diversity and limit opposing spiritual perspectives. I have some sympathy for this view, too, and there is no shortage of examples to which we can point. Rather than trying to adjudicate between the two perspectives, I thought I'd make an effort to figure out what is going on. The sad truth is that there is not a lot of truck and trade between these two views. Christians don't spend a great deal of time talking to their critics and their critics don't spend a great deal of time talking to Christians. Each side, I think, is less vital and vibrant in its commentary than it should be.  That is, though, an ethical view. What is going on is something different from my ethical position. What is going on is an historic transition and what is going on with Christians, in particular, is their efforts (potentially problematic) to adapt to a post-Christian Canada.  In short, Christians are trying to work out a new relationship between themselves, the state, and civil society. Resistance from civil society is part of this dialogue -- part of this effort of an effort to define relations between Church, state, and society -- for a different time.

What I'd like to do is write a series of blogs about this subject because it is an important subject for Canadian Studies and one that I, at least, address too infrequently my classes. It is an important element of contemporary Canada that defines the framework of the diversity of spiritual beliefs with which we operate. Hence, the time I want to take with this subject. In this blog I'll address the broad parameters of the changing context of Christian spirituality.  The overall argument I want to make is that there are good reasons for Christians to embrace post-Christianity. That might sound like a silly statement. Why would someone embrace something that seems to set them in the past. I don't think that will be the case. What I think grappling with post-Christianity can do is to deepen Christianity and help define its perspectives and the relationships it tries to forge in a more meaningful way. There will be those among my Christian friends who do not like this. Who will see in post-Christianity a threat. To them ... I hope to be able to show that this is not the case.

One final opening word, this is a blog. Comments are welcome, disagreements are welcome. But, it is not a refined academic piece. I'm not looking up evidence as type this or finding sources for footnotes. I'm attempting to sketch out broad parameters of change and their implications.

What does it mean to live in a post-Christian society. The term is odd because Canada has and has not been a Christian society for a long time. Official state churches were disestablished in the colonial era. Canada has also made a sincere and honest commitment to diversity and religious freedom, particularly since the 1960s. I recognize that this commitment is often honoured in the breach but I also think that we need to recognize that this commitment was something more than hegemony. It represented an effort to define the basis of what could be a good society organized around individual freedom and protection, particularly from the arbitrary authority of the state and from prejudices in society. The Charter, for example, specifies that all Canadians are guaranteed freedom of conscience and religion. What is more, increasing numbers of Canadians are exercising that right. Agnosticism and atheism are rapidly growing in Canadian society and all major religions are well represented in Canadian demographics. Moreover, the state is prohibited from discriminating against people on the grounds of religion and Quebec has moved away from its "secular Charter," which would have marginalized Muslims and Sikhs, but not Christians.

In other words, we have a great deal of evidence that shows us that Canada is not an officially Christian society in terms of rights, established  religion, freedoms, etc.

But, we also have appreciable evidence that Christianity exerts an unusual influence over culture in society. If Canada did away with state churches before Confederation, this does not mean that the churches did not enjoy privileges with regard to public policy and its implementation. The state and the churches, for instance, worked together to run Native residential schools, the Christian calendar is imprinted on the public calendar in Canada (I always get Christmas "off"). Sunday is not the "day or rest" that it used to be, but its not Monday or Tuesday, etc. either. Things do slow down on Sundays, even if some shopping is allowed. In other words, while Christians cannot claim any special rights or privileges under the law, this does not mean that some elements of Christianity were not embedded in the operation of Canada long after the demise of state churches and, indeed, up to the present day. The effect of this embeddedness is that religious freedom falls unevenly across Canadian society. Christianity is easily accommodated to the public sphere because it helped build the Canadian public sphere.

Moreover, there has been more than a bit of "push back" against secularism and diversity from the current government. The Harper Tories have ditched the idea of rolling back equality rights for gays and lesbians, but they are also trying to draw lines. These lines are draw by offices of religious freedom that are supposed to detail the abuse of Christians in other parts of the word, citizen requirements that discriminate against some Muslim women, or anti-terrorist laws that restrict freedoms and that seem to be directed against the people of certain faiths but not others.

In other words, what living in a post-Christian society means is not living, as it were, after Christianity. I personally doubt that  could happen. What it means is living with a new relationship between Christians, the state, and civil society.

This relationship is perhaps most evident in the cultural realm. The high point of church attendance in Canada was the 1950s. We can likely see why. Not only was belief in God largely unquestioned in popular culture but the Churches offered stability, ethics, propriety. They helped explain right and wrong in a society where there were serious questions about the character and scope of right and wrong, a deep desire for stability, and grounding. Attending church was an ordinary and unquestioned part of middle class life for most people. Religious observance at university, for instance, was simply taken for granted; many universities maintained open and direct affiliation with specific denominations. There were people -- and perhaps a surprising number of them -- who had questions about the churches, but they tended to keep these views silent. Christianity was a fundamental part of Canadian culture, equated with progress, civilization, and morality.

What has changed since then is not necessarily the emergence of new ideas, but their broader diffusion in society. The great protest waves of the 1960s and early 1970s put other items on the agenda that the churches did not always deal well with. Some did. There were important church figures who stood up for the poor, argued against racism, urged Canadians to adopt a pacifist stance internationally, but as Pierre Burton pointed out long ago in _The Comfortable Pew_ these voices were not always heard and the weight of counter veiling conformism was strong.

The effect was to lessen the role of churches in society and the broader emergence of a view that suggested that one could lead a good life and be a moral person without attending church or even believing in God. Indeed, at times, the views of some people claiming to speak in the name of Christianity seemed to suggest precisely the opposite: that to be a good person, one needed to move past Christianity. Some Christians may have worked in urban missions, run after school programmes for disadvantaged kids, helped operate food banks, and the like, but others stood up for sexism and homophobia. The result was an increased cultural bifurcation. Christianity, which had once been part and parcel of culture, now became something that seemed, at least at times, to stand in the way of progress.  Increasingly, Canadians who sought to promote equality, autonomy, decency, found themselves fighting against self-defined Christians. They turned other aspects of culture and politics, such as the Charter to defend their views, explain their conception of the good, and promote it in society.

Consumerism promoted a similar type of process. Consumerism, I would argue, is deeply anti-Christian (which may be one of the reasons why Christians so opposed Sunday shopping but I'll get to that in another blog). Why? Because it promotes a non-Christian conception of the good life. This does not mean, I hasten to add, that one becomes a bad person by engaging in consumerism. I do all the time and I sure hope I ain't a bad person. What it means is that the values of consumerism and Christianity are different.  Consumerism is more  complex than most people give it credit for and I'll distort its operation by reducing it to a single line, but for the sake of brevity: consumerism places its conception of the good life in material objects. Those objects (computers, cars, going to the ballgame) fulfill us, or are supposed to. Christianity should place its conception of fulfillment in relationships: one's connection to God and one's connection to other people. Consumerism turns one's job into a means to an end. One works to afford to pay for things one wants (again, I do this so I'm not slagging it.) Christianity looks at work a different way. I won't get into the details because I don't want to engage in a theological discussion, but one's job and one's skills, in the Christian worldview, are supposed to match. One is supposed to go a good job at one's job (to be equal to one's calling) as an end in and of itself facilitated by the match between one's abilities, dispositions, etc., and what one does for a living.

Consumerism has been a powerful force in post WW II Canadian culture. It provides an alternative conception of the good life, one accepted, in some measure largely unquestioned, by many people.

Finally, we can and should not demographic changes. It is not just the rise of agnosticism and atheism that is of not by the fact that Christianity is not building a new relationship between itself, state and society by itself. All religions are looking to do this. Points of dramatic debate -- say, over Sharia law -- are important for a variety of reasons but they are also about the character and scope of that relationship. To what degree should the state facilitate religious perspectives as a mater of discipline over defined communities?  The so-called "secular charter" in Quebec was about the same thing.

This, then, is the position in which we find ourselves in Canada today. We have not moved past Christianity. Most Canadians believe in some sort of deity; most Canadians self-identify as Christians, and the churches play an important role in many communities. But, the situation is complicated and cross currents run rampant. We life, in other words, with a series of contradictions where Christians believe they are fighting a rear guard action and their critics believe that Christians occupy the high ground. It is the scope and nature of these contradictions and cross currents that define post-Christianity in Canada.

Moral Standards

Sorry folks: this one is long.

One of the low level on-going debates here in New Brunswick relates to Crandall University, formerly Atlantic Baptist University. Crandall receives modest amounts of public support. That public support is larger then one might think if we were to properly calculate it, but let’s use the existing definition that Crandall’s critics seem to be using: direct grants from state bodies. The federal government provided some infrastructure spending last year (or, over the last two years, apologies I did not check out the facts) and the City of Moncton provides a very small grant, somewhere between $100 000.00 and $200 000.00 dollars. For those of you who go, gee … that ain’t small, for comparison Mount A (where I work) has a total budget approximating $40 million and we are a small university. Crandall is primarily supported through tuition fees and the Atlantic Baptist Convention. To be sure, then, we are not dealing with regularized state support (infrastructure grants are not regular) or on-going support in any significant way. In terms of university funding, to say this again, we are dealing with tiny amounts of money.

I feel I need to make this point because reading some of the critics of Crandall, particularly those who argue that something is horribly amiss if the institution receives state support, might lead one  to believe that mass amounts of public money are flowing to religiously based institutions. Point number one of this discussion should be to acknowledge that this ain’t the case.

Point number two should be to acknowledge that the problem with Crandall is not its statement of faith. I listened -- courtesy of a friend who sent me the link -- to the CBC discussion of whether or not religious institutions violate academic freedom. I think that anyone who seriously believes in diversity will accept the idea that in a vibrant civil society there will be all kinds of institutions. Some of these will be secular (in NB UNB), some will be semi-secular (STU), some will be secular in practice and ignore their religious heritage (Mount A), etc. In other words, different institutions will do different things and provides services to different communities. Moreover, these institutions will change over time as they direct their future. I see nothing wrong with this. I do think, however, that the argument made by critics of religiously-based education -- that it is somehow wrong -- is completely off the mark. One would need to do something more they theorize here. I’d need some evidence. In other words, I would say that one is innocent until proven guilty, a fact that a lot of the critics of religiously-based schools seem to have neglected. They assume the worst.

So, is Crandall’s statement of faith a problem? Does it hamper freedom of speech? Is anyone making that allegation who works there (as opposed to people who have visited for an afternoon and have no knowledge of how it works)? Are any students alleging that their voices are being silenced? To date, the critics of Crandall have provided no one single case. Now, I am not trying to be hard on the critics. If there is a case, let’s here about it. But, the fact of the matter is that the facts seem to be for Crandall on this point. When its president argues on CBC that the statement of faith does not hamper academic freedom, he seems to have the weight of evidence on his side.

This is important to me as a scholar. Anyone can speculate and speculation can be fun. But, we need to remember that speculation is speculation. It is not empirical reality. So, for those who don’t like Crandall, don’t speculate: send in your evidence. Post it on this blog. No “if X then  Y but also maybe Z” but actual cases.

In point of fact, if we accept the idea of freedom of religion, as guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Crandall’s statement of faith is fairly innocuous. It basically says you have to be a Christian to work here. As I understand it, everyone who works at Crandall has to sign this statement of faith. Those who oppose Crandall will say that this is wrong but this raises another issue. Do we want the state telling universities who they can and cannot hire? Would not that be a violation of academic freedom? Gee … Mount A, I see that you are semi secular and you don’t have enough agnostics on staff, your next six hires will have to be agnostics. I’d argue that this would not be good. Yet, oddly, in asking for sanctions against Crandall -- financial penalties, in effect -- this is what Crandall’s opponents argue. The state should use its financial power to punish those people who take seriously the freedom of conscience provisions of the Canadian constitution.

The real issue and the crux of the matter is something other than the statement of faith. It is Crandall’s “Statement of Moral Standards.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the real issue is not its anti-porn provisions (most academics, I suspect, will accept that having already been convinced by feminist arguments against pornography) but its anti-gay provision. In other words: one line is cause the problem.

I am less certain how applicable this. I don’t know whether one must agree to this statement as well. Here those people like me who defend Crandall run into difficulties for a couple of reasons. Let’s start with big reason number one:

1) the theology is faulty. Yep: this statement is based on a pretty loose and weak reading of The Bible.  Let me give you two examples: the anti-gay provision is simply debatable. Sorry. If anyone takes the Bible seriously, there is no way that they can make a hard and fast statement that “God doesn’t like gay people.” End of discussion. Only an ideologue could make this statement. Jesus, for instance, never mentioned anything about homosexuality. (Again, I’m a bit of an empiricist: prove me wrong. Post your evidence. Give me a quote from Jesus.)

Moreover, this statement is a bunch of “thou shalt nots.” That is pretty shaky Christianity. Where is the “thou shalt.” For instance, references to helping the poor are mentioned frequently by just about everyone in the Bible (I read there are something like 2000 references to helping the poor). That is absent from Crandall’s statement and that is just plain wrong from a Christian perspective. I’d argue, in fact, that Crandall should be embarrassed about this absence and about their neglect of God’s word.

2) The “Statement of Moral Standards” readily acknowledges that it is not based on the Bible. Here is a direct quote: “Every community has standards.  As a Christian community, Crandall University upholds Christian standards of behavior to which faculty and staff are required to conform.  These standards derive not only from the Christian scriptures, but also from the culture of the supporting evangelical constituency.”

Here is the problem, you are not asking me to defend your freedom of religion any longer but your culture. I’m more than willing to argue that culture  is culture. The government should not be in, say, the assimilation business. Someone moves to Canada from, say, England, nothing should be done to force them to change their accent or change their diet or religion. A silly example, to be sure, but you get my point. We can defend freedom of religion and argue that this is important. It is another thing to defend the intrusion of institutions into people’s lives on the basis of something as vague as “the culture of the supporting evangelical constituency.” I consider myself part of that constituency. I don’t donate a lot of money to Crandall but they are on my list of missions to which I will be contributing this year. Yet, the anti-gay part of their moral statements clearly contravenes my culture. Culture is notoriously slippery. If the supporting culture favours Italian food, does it become a requirement?

Moreover, and this is the key point, we need to be really careful here. Crandall advocates can say “this is God’s will” (or this is Biblically grounded) but, as I have already demonstrated, they have made selective use of the Bible, neglecting key elements of God’s desire for us (care for the poor) and substituting others that are far more shakey. This is not the word of God but human beings claiming the right to tell us what the will of God is. And, let us be clear, this is something different. Christians have a bad history of interpreting the will of God for other people and imposing it on them. We don’t need to review the history such things in Canada because we can simply use the words “residential school” and that should be enough for anyone to be cautious about too much certainty.

Let’s not go overboard. If there is no requirement to sign the moral statements and agree to it, no harm has been done: no harm no foul. If Crandall permits and encourages open discussion of their statement of faith, how far it can be applied, whether or not it should be modified, etc., academic freedom has been preserved. Their president seemed to be suggesting this and so I will take him at his word. What I would suggest is that just about everyone in this low-grade debate is wrong. Those who reject state funding are wrong and, in fact, in violation of the very document -- the Charter -- on which they base their arguments. There is no mass movement of public dollars to religious institutions and, in fact, Crandall is part of a broader post-secondary educational system that includes all matter of different institutions (it is not a secular v religious black and white dichotomy). Crandall, on the other hand, needs to rethink their moral statements and needs to make them more pro-active. God is about many things, but among the things he is about are mercy, justice, and love. I’d like to see those things more directly stated.