The state of Canadian society: secular or secularist?

THE NEW ORTHODOXY:
CANADA’S EMERGING
CIVIL RELIGION

Bruce J. Clemenger
Burlington: Castle Quay Books, 2022.

I am grateful that divisive Canadian topics appear in these pages. Just to name a few flashpoints: Jordan Peterson (2016), Medical Assistance in Dying (2018), and the Ottawa truck convoy (2021). In my own discussions with fellow Canadians, the question I often hear is, “What’s happening to Canadian society?”

Bruce Clemenger addresses this question in his new book, The New Orthodoxy: Canada’s Emerging Civil Religion. Clemenger was the president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada for over 30 years until he became the EFC’s Senior Ambassador earlier this year. He has spent decades representing evangelical Christian faith at the highest levels of Canadian society: the federal government, the Supreme Court, numerous written and spoken addresses and as a PhD candidate at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto.

Canadians love to poke fun at civil religion in the USA. Clemenger believes that nearly all Canadians recognize that Canada was established as a diverse, secular country. But he does not hold the view that Canadians are without a civil religion. It is not whether Canada has a civil religion or not; the question is which civil religion Canadians will have.

In Part 1, Clemenger begins tracing Canada’s political story by presenting a framework for understanding the theory behind Canada’s politics. Canada is rooted in liberalism, the Enlightenment idea that religiously/ideologically diverse people can form a just society through agreed-upon rights and freedoms. In Part 2, he evaluates how well Canada is living up to its ideals today.

For Clemenger, the complicating factor is that liberalism has evolved into two different streams (or what Charles Taylor calls different understandings of secularism). There is the traditional view in which each citizen is equally free to orient their lives in the way they see fit (provided they don’t injure their neighbour). No official religion or established church – not even the state itself – has the authority to tell Canadians what to believe or how to live out those beliefs.

But the emerging view of liberalism, which Clemenger argues is rapidly becoming the “new orthodoxy,” holds to a progressive “secular creed” that must be imposed on society by the state to ensure equity in the midst of diversity. Citizens are permitted to hold their religious beliefs in private but, in the public square, there is only one right way to think and live. He believes that this singular way of seeing things is the heart of Canadian civil religion today.

A new colonialism

To support this claim, Clemenger points to two recent issues: the federal government’s summer job grant application attestation and Quebec’s Bill 21 prohibiting some provincial employees from wearing religious symbols. In both cases, Clemenger discerns a “Father knows best” attitude in the government. It is as if the state knows how diverse religious beliefs should be manifest in public and has enforced this ideological view with coercive political power. Clemenger doesn’t use these words but he’s charging Canadian governments (federal and provincial) with being colonial – knowing how diverse Canadians should express their beliefs in public, no questions asked.

Despite its irony, Clemenger is arguing that Canadian liberalism today isn’t liberal (in the sense of free) enough. Our secular society isn’t secular enough. Privilege still exists, thanks to the power of the state and its ideology. The irony is that political liberalism arose historically to accommodate the growing numbers of “non-conformists.” But ideology, operating in any sphere of human life, always produces non-conformists because human beings are fundamentally diverse. If the power of the church cannot impose an artificial uniformity of thought or lifestyle, can the state to do any better?

Where does Canada go from here? Is a post-liberal secularism possible for Canada? As Canadians, we affirm that the Sovereign is the defender of the faith – but what is the faith that’s going to be enforced by the state? Will it be an artificial sameness that shoves dissenters to the margins more and more forcibly? Or, will Canadian society truly recognize the inherent diversity and equality of its citizens and adopt policies that safeguard their freedoms to pursue their own chosen paths to meaning and fulfillment? Will the emerging credo of “equity, diversity, and inclusion” be a truly pluralist pathway towards welcoming and inviting or will it morph into a dogma which judges, punishes, and excludes?

Clemenger’s answer is that Canada’s civil religion is still “emerging.” Human beings make the world.