THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST:

On our list of rights, religion comes last (Robert Fulford, November 30, 2002, National Post)

Canada has become rather impatient with public manifestations of religious belief. Having decided we are a secular society, we assume that all institutions should follow secular rules, even if those rules keep changing. When religious beliefs collide with individual rights, we tend to come down on the non-religious side, if necessary using the courts to impose our vision of Canadian life. We grow nervous when public figures are overtly religious. In the last federal election it became acceptable to jeer at the Pentecostal faith of the Canadian Alliance leader, a form of national intolerance unparalleled in the last half-century. Even the prime minister thought it appropriate to scorn Stockwell Day's refusal to campaign on Sunday.

Without thinking much about it, we have apparently developed a new rule of religious freedom: You can believe what you want to believe, so long as you don't act on it or talk about it much. To many of us, religion still looks like the Establishment, and this is a period that favours underdogs and victims rather than leaders.

Canadians of a certain age remember that when Christianity dominated the country, non-Christian children found themselves singing carols about Jesus in public schools, church-going was mandatory in the armed services, and Sabbath rules made Sunday wretched (in Protestant areas) for the rest of us. Probably most citizens were delighted to see the church lose that kind of power.

But in the first 20 years under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we have moved so far in the other direction that we casually tolerate unfairness to religion. Rabbi David Novak, a philosophy professor who holds the Shiff chair of Jewish studies at the University of Toronto, called one recent judicial decision "an assault on the integrity of every religious community in Canada." He was talking about the case of Marc Hall, the 17-year-old Oshawa student whose Catholic high school refused to let him bring his boyfriend to the prom. A court overturned the decision of the Durham Catholic School Board, on the grounds that "The cultural and social significance of a high school Prom is well-established. Being excluded from it constitutes a serious and irreparable injury to Mr. Hall." Gay rights trumped religious rights.

Rabbi Novak makes a credible case that religious freedom becomes empty when religious communities lose the right to make moral decisions about their own institutions. He believes that "the culture-forming elites" of Canada (the universities, the media, and the courts) see religious liberty as a lesser priority, and don't protest even when it's attacked by what he sees as the "people who want to drive it into the closet or eliminate it entirely."

Odd how easily secularism slips into intolerance. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 11, 2002 8:48 PM