Is Secularism Structural Racism?

 

Well, the short answer is, yes, it is, because the secular is a construct by and for Christians that can only serve (white) Christian hegemony. This is not to say, by the way, that secularity itself a bad thing when understood in a broader sense. It is to say that there are regional and provincial constructions of the secular that do not and cannot work in a globalized society except as forces of entrenchment and reaction. This will take some explaining especially to such readers as may be French or American (assuming they have read past the first sentence!). There are many problems in Canada and one can get very frustrated with its culture of virtuous mediocrity but if there is ONE thing I think Canada HAS figured out it is how to construct a secularity beyond secularism. This is important because it allows Canada to welcome immigrants from Asia and elsewhere who cannot live in any dogmatic construction of a secular society and still express their particular identities (for reasons that will shortly become plain). It also allows us to welcome, if belatedly and shamefacedly, the traditions and culture of indigenous peoples into the national fabric. Of course, the exception to this is the province of Quebec, which has used its special powers to suspend the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in order to force its vision of a ‘secular’ society in the dogmatic sense of that term. It has been forced to do this precisely because Canadian ‘secularity’ cannot underwrite the restrictions on personal liberty required to ensure a visibly ‘secular’ society in an age of global migration. The desired result of this, of course, is to encourage people of a certain Middle Eastern, African or South Asian background to move to Ontario or B.C. where they can pursue careers in education or the civil service without the harassment of the state. This ensures the visible secularity of Quebec society but also serves its ethnic homogeneity for it is visible minorities who are disproportionately affected by laws like the notorious Bill 21. Whether intentionally or not ‘secularity laws’ make societies whiter and serve the cause of white supremacy. Secularism constructs the citizen of the ‘lay’ state as white and Christian and does so structurally even with all the good intentions in the world.      

Let me begin, though, by saying, that there are two very good ideas behind ‘secularism’ even though we need a new idea of the secular to preserve what is good and useful in this discourse. The first is that secularism is a hedge against extremism which in the sphere of religion can be an especially destabilizing force in society. This is laudable but, in fact, ‘secularism’ does not reliably secure this end. The country that, after France and its colonial epigone Quebec, insists most dogmatically on the ‘separation of church and state’ is the United States. Of all western nations it is the United States that has the greatest problem with religious extremism. I do not think this is an accident. Canada is a nation whose head of state is also the head of the Church of England who retained until the other day as his CANADIAN title ‘defender of the faith’. Obviously, Canada was not a theocracy until just last week when Charles got a new title. Where religious extremism is concerned it is manifestly in a better state than its southern neighbor rather as the most secular societies in Europe, the Scandinavian social democracies, retain official state churches.

The reason for this seems to me plain. ‘Secularism’ in this sense is defined by exclusion and if there is one thing we know about the excluded, it is that it always gets its revenge. Secular states in the dogmatic sense are constructed to exclude religion from public space on the grounds that it is inherently dangerous and a threat to freedom and public order. The entirely predictable result of this is that the traditions and forms of life so excluded will try by hook or by crook to get back in. This they will do out of a sense of basic self-protection. Plus, excluded from the constraints of public responsibility and  of norms both spoken and unspoken, religion can take on ever more bizarre and destructive forms. In a ‘secularist’ regime a certain kind of citizen is expected to suppress the religious aspect of his or her identity when acting in the ‘neutral’ public sphere especially in matters of personal dress, diet, and other makers of ethno-cultural specificity. Of course, this can work in a predominantly Christian society and indeed its tendency will be to enhance the hegemony of Christian categories in any society that practices it. The tradition of ‘Separation of Church and State’ never impacted the power of the white, landed Protestant, gentry. This is because WASPS easily present as ‘neutral’ in a ‘secular’ society.[1] It is others, such as Jews or Catholics, whose very identities confuse state and church, who must be excluded from office in the name of ‘secular’ neutrality (of course Catholics have now ‘arrived’ in the U.S. and as arrivistes can turn on current minorities, like Muslims, with contempt, using the very same categories, like ‘allegiance to a foreign religious law code’, that once excluded them).  

This is glaringly obvious in the case of Quebec. Muslims and Sikhs cannot present in a neutral way because their religions require or at least encourage maintaining visible marks of difference. This is why they, not Christians, are the real target of Bill 21. Christians can easily render themselves invisible in the secular world because secularity is THEIR concept. It is in the Christian Middle Ages, with its notion of ‘two swords’, that the sacred was first distinguished from the profane, quotidian realm. This latter did not require full ‘sacralization’ because it was inherently different from the sacred. Over time this meant that the secular could come to increasingly express its independence of theocratic order and constitute its own distinct realm. This means that Christians do not today need any external markers of dress, diet or identity, can pray silently, retain their religious devotions and activities for the ‘private sphere’ and still be good Christians. Christianity’s tendency over the centuries has been to evacuate the secular of ultimate significance which means Christians can inhabit it freely and remain Christians. This is what lies behind the Government of Quebec’s tone-deaf assertion that Muslims do not need prayer rooms because they can ‘pray silently’. Of course, the minister who made this assertion knows full well that Muslims DO NOT pray silently but must do so visibly in a prescribed manner at certain times of day. He can say the law applies just as much to ‘Christians’ as to Sikhs though a Christian can tuck her tiny cross in her blouse while a Sikh cannot simply give up his turban without a considerable invasion of his bodily autonomy. The not very subtle message here is that only one religion (besides irreligion) is the religion of ‘real Quebecers’ and that the others must accept second class citizenship including full discrimination in matters of employment. Of course, the Sikh is ‘free’ to remove his turban if he wants to be a teacher or civil servant but this is exactly like the supposed ‘freedom’ of a gay man to marry a woman if he so chooses. The Quebec government wants to force people to decide between their religious identity and their prospects in their chosen profession. Of course, people who do not want to make this choice will be ‘free to leave’ and that, frankly, is the real purpose of denying Muslims prayer space in schools or forcing Sikhs to cut their hair. Police visible difference this way and the visibly different will indeed take the hint and go elsewhere. If society not only has to BE secular but LOOK secular then people who cannot easily accommodate this demand will move on. In this way the whiteness of pure laine Quebecers will be free from any challenge to its visible hegemony. One will NOT face the painful spectacle of SEEING the other being himself in disregard of YOUR sensibility! This is how ‘secularism’ in this context plays into ethno-populism in a way that a broader ‘secularity’ cannot.

There is of course a second reason for the secular and that is to prevent a person from being forced into a crisis of conscience when they differ from the religion established by the state. This was something the many dissenting sects suffered in England. This was because ‘enthusiasts’ like the Quakers engaged in acts of religious extremism such as refusing to doff their hats in the company of gentlemen (yes, yesterday’s extremism CAN become today’s norm). While some conflict between the individual and the larger society is inevitable the Canadian Charter minimizes these conflicts by guaranteeing religious liberty (as other democracies do) and preventing laws that discriminate against or disadvantage anyone on the ground of religion. This prevents any establishment of a particular church or religion as effectively as the American principle of ‘separation of church and state'. It does so not based on the necessity of EXCLUDING certain perspectives from public discourse but on the necessity of comprehensive INCLUSION. This is why Canada, should it become a republic, should resist any and all calls to become an officially SECULAR republic no matter how loud and insistent (I don’t have much faith on this score for Canadians do not have the requisite knowledge of themselves OR the peculiar virtue of their institutions). This reading of the charter is backed up by official policies of multiculturalism and by the spirit of Canadian human rights legislation. The reason we do not ban prayer rooms or turbans, the reason we CAN’T ban prayer rooms and turbans, the reason Quebec has to suspend the constitution and charter to ban prayer rooms and turbans, is that Canada is so structured as to welcome full participation from multiple cultures from many parts of the globe. This means making accommodations to difference. IF Muslims cannot pray in the way customary to Christians, we must create circumstances where they can pray in their own way which is not disruptive for them or for the broader community. Nor is ‘feeling uncomfortable at the sight of a Muslim praying’ or ‘being distressed by the sight of a woman in a hijab’ an adequate disruption to justify the restriction of civil liberty and indeed bodily autonomy. Nor, indeed, is the ’feeling of losing the identity of my historically privileged community’. In sum, Canada is NOT a neutral procedural state that TOLERATES difference but a state that PROMOTES it as a positive good. 

Where I work, at Grenfell Campus, this is the order of things. We have many students from the Middle East and to welcome them we provide spaces in which they can pray as a matter of course. Also, we have many students of indigenous heritage. We provide rooms for them to do smudging or other traditional practices. Has there been an outbreak of religious fanaticism or persecution at Grenfell Campus? If there has been I have, somehow, missed it. This is a model of how Canada ought, in principle to work. We are secular NOT in the sense of a triumphalist narrative about ‘secularism’ but in the pragmatic sense of accommodating legitimate human difference in public spaces designed to be inclusive. By the way, one of the core reasons that I cannot accept the ‘secularism’ as defended by the government of Quebec and others is that it is simply incompatible with one of our core aims as an institution which is the advancement of indigenous peoples AS indigenous peoples. The indigenous scholars in our institution are not here as ‘universal rights bearing citizens’ who have submerged their particularity in the (purportedly) universal. They have modes of knowing and inquiry that are their own and they exist in the university as people who know THIS way and have THEIR conception of research and its responsibility to community and land. Indigenous people cannot appear as such in places defined as ‘secular’ for many of these traditions and modes of knowing are bound up with sacred traditions and practices. Nor can they adopt the Christian expedient of ‘privatized religion’ because that is simply not how their traditions and identities work. Canadian secular space is not a space where indigenous identities are erased in the name of ‘neutrality’. Erasure is not what our secular spaces are about in either sexuality, culture OR religion. They are spaces where multiple identities flourish and though there are many challenges to this it is the underlying moral demand moving our society. This is why conceptions of the secular tailored to accommodate white European Christians but not others belong to our past and not our future. Of course, there are many who will not give that past up easily because of the casual, habitual way in which it subtly privileged them over ‘others’ (especially dark-skinned others in alien garb). I find, though, that I cannot make common cause with such people though I am, in some ways, as traditional a ‘white European as can be.              

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Liberal procedural societies conceive of the citizen as the universal bourgeois rights bearer who is the subject of the social contract. As such, he (and frankly this subject is a HE) is not determined by community or tradition or the weight of history but is abstractly ‘free’ as the agent who, from nowhere and no position, assents to the social contract. Well, guess which citizens are free of the weight of history in their universal, rational consent to the social contract? Which kind of citizen gets to be 'above' identity politics because his 'identity' is the identity that is not an identity but the simple, blank, indeed 'white' and 'colorless' universal? Only one kind of citizen is free in this sense and only THAT citizen gets to be the paradigmatic citizen of the procedural state. Only THAT citizen gets to present as ‘neutral’ and ‘enlightened’ and rationally free. That citizen is white, male, and mainline protestant in his religion or, for that matter, in his irreligion.