God Keep Our Land? Imagining a Secular Canada

A new study says Canada is among nine nations where religion will be all but extinct by mid-century.

Following a recent Quebec human-rights tribunal decision mandating the municipality of Saguenay, Que., to cease opening government meetings with prayers, Mayor Jean Tremblay mounted a campaign to raise funds for an appeal. In the context of religion and secularism, the mayor asked that we consider Canada in 50 years and wondered, “Where are we French-Canadians going with our values?” The mayor asks a question worth pondering by all of us.

As a secularist advocate, it’s an interesting exercise to consider what a truly secular Canada might look like in 50 years. Is this a meaningful exercise? Last year, journalist Marci McDonald released a book, The Armageddon Factor, suggesting that evangelical Christian influence at the level of federal politics was at an all-time high.

But a series of polls conducted over the last decade shows an increasing level of atheism and agnosticism, reaching up to one-quarter of Canadians in a 2008 Harris/Decima poll. Now a study by a group of mathematicians suggests that by 2050, as many as 61 per cent of Canadians will identify themselves as non-religious. And it’s not just Canada: Eight other countries, including Australia, Ireland, and the Netherlands, are set to become mostly secular by mid-century.

So while these musings may sound fanciful, there is legitimacy to this reflection.

A secular Canada would have no state-sanctioned prayer or reference to God at any level of government. There is nothing new in this proposal. In the famous case of Zylberberg vs. Sudbury Board of Education, the court ruled in favour of removing the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer from public schools, finding that it unfairly pressured non-Christians to conform to the practices of the Christian majority. Since then, prayers in public spaces like schools and, more recently, at government meetings, have been on the retreat.

For similar reasons, introducing secular modifications to the national anthem and the preamble to the Charter of Rights are in order. The awkward and legally irrelevant reference to God in the Charter’s preamble has been controversial from the beginning. Though pressured to add it by a loud evangelical minority, then prime minister Pierre Trudeau expressed his own personal view in The Globe and Mail in April 1981, when he was quoted as saying, “Strange, so long after the Middle Ages that some politicians felt obliged to mention God in a constitution which is, after all, a secular and not a spiritual document.”

In February of this year, Toronto Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett led an all-party group in singing a “gender-neutral, secular, bilingual” version of the national anthem. She has gone on to continue singing her version every week.

While many think it unprecedented to alter the lyrics of the anthem, the English lyrics to “O Canada,” originally written by Robert Stanley Weir in 1908, contained no mention of God. Returning to Weir’s original words would allow us to simultaneously update the anthem to better reflect modern Canada’s diversity of beliefs, and honour an older, secular Canadian heritage.

All the aforementioned modifications would serve the goal of a broader inclusivity – one that incorporates not only believers of all stripes in the form of non-denominational prayers or vague references to God, but atheists as well. To leave out non-believers is to build an illusion of religious tolerance, ultimately founded on the need to keep God, however defined, as the one concept all Canadians have in common.