The Religious-Secular Overlap

Debate over the role religion plays in public life wrongly pits the two sides against each other.

The publication of Marci MacDonald’s Armageddon Factor, which warns of the rising influence of the religious right in Canada, has refocused debate over the role religion should take in Canadian public life. MacDonald speaks for the secularist left by claiming that religion – or at least religious conservatives – should play less or no role, while those she criticizes claim the reverse, that there should be more religious voices (especially theirs) participating in public life. There has been a lot of heated debate about her argument. Unfortunately, in considering the proper role of religion in public life, this debate has generated more heat than light.

A clearing of the underbrush is needed for us to gain clarity of what is at stake. Let me suggest that this debate is wrongly conceived as pitting “secular” against “religious.” These two opaque terms actually overlap. Those on the “secular” side make religious (or faith) claims and those on the “religious” side make claims concerning the state of the saeculum (or world, the original meaning of “secular”).

Two statements, recently made by political leaders who might be seen as allies to the secularists, illuminate why the dichotomy of secular-religious is untenable.

Here is the first:

“Human rights has emerged as the new secular religion of our time.”

This statement has been made repeatedly by Irwin Cotler, who served as minister of justice under Prime Minister Paul Martin. He repeated it most frequently in the debates surrounding same-sex marriage. MacDonald states she was shocked when she returned to Canada and heard the intensity of the debate over same-sex marriage. I doubt she has Cotler’s statement in mind.

Obviously, Cotler’s combination of “secular” and “religion” overturns the dichotomy commonly taken to separate the two notions. By combining these terms, Cotler appears to be referring to the belief that stems from the philosophical Enlightenment that human history evolves toward increased democracy, science, liberty, equality, and respect for human rights. Saying that this religion has “emerged” from the progress of history is an article of faith – yes, faith – of the philosophical Enlightenment. This belief in historical progress can be seen as a way of giving cosmic support to notions of liberty and equality that liberal thinkers have struggled to ground or “prove.”

I have recently edited a volume of essays with my colleague Ronald Weed of the University of New Brunswick that considers this political faith, or civil religion, of liberal democracies, as well as those of the ancient world. My own contribution considers the way that Cotler and others speak of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as a founding document for a civil religion in Canada. While Canadians do not, like ancient Rome, have a collegium of priests who take auguries from the entrails of chickens to determine the legitimacy of political decisions, it does have a set of “cardinals,” in the words of Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson, in the justice system, bureaucracy, media, and academy, who reverentially pronounce upon what are supposed to be Canada’s core beliefs, and they do so in the mode of faith which I call civil religion.

The second statement, which illuminates the inadequacy of the secular-religious dichotomy, reflects how one of our fundamental political principles, equality, fits uneasily, if at all, into the “secular” category:

Go into any courtroom, police station or welfare office, and you will find real individuals ignoring the different surfaces of each person they deal with and addressing the juridical equal beneath. They are addressing a moral fiction. Yet it is this fiction, and our devotion to it, that enables us to be just. The entire legitimacy of public institutions depends on our being attentive to difference while treating all as equal. This is the gamble, the unique act of the imagination on which our society rests.

This statement was made by Michael Ignatieff in his book, The Rights Revolution. The secularist demands that all political claims must be justified on empirical or scientific grounds. But what about equality? If anything, Ignatieff here thinks that it is “difference” (rather, let’s be forthright: “inequality”) that fulfils this secularist demand. Equality is a “moral fiction” and “gamble.” A cynical reading of this statement would suggest that Ignatieff, a Russian count after all, considers equality a “noble lie,” just as Plato in the Republic creates a “noble lie” justifying inequality. A more charitable reading would suggest that he regards equality as an article of faith in the same way that Cotler regards human rights as the “secular religion” of our time.

What is shared between “secular religion” and the religious right, which worries MacDonald, are articles of faith that spur their adherents to action, and that sustain their deeply held convictions. Indeed, philosophers such as Kant and Hegel argue that the belief in equality and liberty that has so informed western democracies is also the same belief that stems from Christian love. I am not suggesting we are doomed to a “religious” war of arbitrary faith claims between “secular religionists” and “religious religionists” because both sides participate in the luminosity of the liberal order, as political philosopher David Walsh argues, by articulating and explaining their views. Even so, as much as one can rationally argue for freedom, rights, equality, tolerance, and so forth, deep down what sustains these cherished principles is an animating belief that defies our capacity to rationalize it.