Lori G. Beaman

Religion and Diversity in Canada

Multiculturalism, diversity and globalization have become important conceptual identity markers in Canadian society. This book explores the intersections of diversity, foregrounding religion as the primary focus of analysis. While situated in the Canadian context, the analyses have global relevance.

The will to religion: Obligatory religious citizenship

This article takes up the problematic of the ‘new normal’ and its necessary twin, the ‘will to religion’. The notion of the ‘new normal’ describes the shift to the persistent presence, indeed requirement, for religious assessment in all manner of public and institutional life. The idea of the will to religion reflects a broadly Foucauldian perspective on the care of the self and the requirement to confess—in this instance to confess one’s belonging to a religious category. The article calls for a robust attention to the discursive construction of a normal in which we are all religious, and to which values are constituted as ‘universal’ or that we owe our moral and intellectual condition to religion. The article points to four consequences of this shift to a ‘new normal’ in which we are all religious, including the essentialization of religious identities, the overemphasis on religion, the infiltration of particular measures of religiosity, and the spread of religious freedom protectionism.

Battles Over Symbols: The “Religion” of the Minority Versus the “Culture” of the Majority

Moreover, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to identify in the constant central core of Christian faith, despite the inquisition, despite anti-Semitism and despite the crusades, the principles of human dignity, tolerance and freedom, including religious freedom, and therefore, in the last analysis, the foundations of the secular State. A European court should not be called upon to bankrupt centuries of European tradition. No court, certainly not this Court, should rob the Italians of part of their cultural personality. In March, 2011, after five years of working its way through various levels of national and European courts, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights decided that a crucifix hanging at the front of a classroom did not violate the right to religious freedom under Article 34 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Specifically, Ms. Soile Lautsi had complained that the presence of the crucifix violated her and her childrens right to religious freedom and that its presence amounted to an enforced religious regime. The Grand Chamber, reversing the lower Chambers decision, held that while admittedly a religious symbol, the crucifix also represented the cultural heritage of Italians.

Overdressed and underexposed or underdressed and overexposed

Judges and public policy makers have transmitted conflicting messages in relation to womens bodies and have made normative judgements about how women are to appear in public. Women who have been judged to be wearing too much are called to undress as they are seen as interfering with the rights of others or being oppressed. Women judged to be wearing too little are urged to clothe themselves to avoid being seen as inviting sexual assault or dressing like always sexually available prostitutes. Juxtaposing these two situations, the oddness of judicial and public regulation of womens clothing becomes more starkly exposed. This paper examines the shifting nature of equality discourse and the naming of womens oppression; the near-disappearance of patriarchy as an explanatory framework; and the quagmire of womens agency. The concluding section proposes shifting the focus from differences between womens experiences to similarity in order to facilitate critical inquiry, dialogue and strategic action that might reconstitute womens equality in new ways.

Is Religious Freedom Impossible in Canada

The idea of religious freedom is not new in Canadian law or wider public discourse, although it has taken on a life of its own in the post-Charter era (1982 onward) and certainly in the last several years. As the courts wade more fully into the swirling abyss that is religion they find themselves struggling with the issues that preoccupy scholars of religion (and for which they have found no conclusive answer): what is “religion” and how can it be defined in a manner that is inclusive and meaningful? This article takes as its point of departure the provocative and compelling argument made by Winnifred Sullivan in her book, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005), that religious freedom as a legal promise is untenable. In this article I argue that while plausible and convincing in the context of the United States, Sullivan’s thesis may be less applicable in Canada for three key reasons. First, the embeddedness of Roman Catholicism in Canadian social structure has resulted in a textured and nuanced understanding of religion, or, at the very least, a recognition that religion is in some measure a multifaceted notion. Secondly, the recognition of group rights, however defined, means that there is a space created for alternative religious discourses, in part because of the constitutional recognition of multiculturalism. Thirdly, the recent turn by the Supreme Court of Canada to an understanding of the subjectivity of religious freedom strengthens the idea that religion must be conceptualized in relation to the ways in which individuals understand and practice it in their day to day lives.

Re-posing the “Muslim Question”:

The ‘‘Muslim Question’’ (MQ) is an increasingly referenced polysemous schema that constructs and abstracts Muslims and Muslimness in problematizing their integration within a western secular public sphere. The reader is perhaps already questioning this definition and the taken-for-grantedness of all these concepts—integration, Muslim, the West, secularism, and the public sphere—that have themselves been sites of significant scholarly debate and critique. Yet, despite being firmly lodged in these enduring concepts, the genealogy of the MQ is recent. The coinage appears with frequency alongside socio-legal debates about the visibility of Islam in western nation-states, whether through so-called conspicuous religious signs and practices, gendered norms, or through the racialized presence of minorities. The ‘‘question’’ has peaked following terror-related events, beginning with 9/11 and re-appearing most recently following the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. There is no reason to think that the ‘‘question’’ will disappear in the immediate future: many countries (including Canada, Germany, Lebanon, Sweden, and Britain) are receiving a large number of refugees from Syria, and one of the pervasive themes of public discourse is their integration. Mobilizing stark, threatening, and Islamophobic characterizations of Muslims has served as an expeditious ‘‘wedge’’ political tool for some western governments. We saw this in Canada earlier in 2015 on the question of the acceptability of niqabs, a garment worn by a few dozen women. It differs from Islamophobia. The MQ, to cite contributor Matteo Gianni [p. 23], ‘‘is a conglomerate of discourses, attitudes, and practices that call into question the agency, subjectivity, and moral equality of Muslims as individuals, as bearers of religious values, and as citizens.’’ In this way, the MQ includes analysis of discriminations and violences to which Muslims are subjected but is not reducible to these foci. It is also sometimes linked to the ‘‘Jewish Question.’’ In general, the papers in this issue situate the MQ in two registers: First, in a Huntingtonian sense, in ways that call into question the visibility of Muslims and reify and affirm a variety of secularization projects. In this way, ‘‘Islam’’ as a singular object is

Woven together: advocacy and research as complementary

One of the many important contributions of second-wave feminist scholarship was the re-positioning of scholarly activity as being necessarily situated in relation to ‘I.’ This insistence on standpoint, or positionality, was coupled with a contribution from postmodernism, which challenged the notion that (universal) truths could circulate without specific attachments to people and places. Advocacy was a less used word, but the position taken in this paper is that every piece of research, in all science, carries with it the potential for advocacy. Drawing on the authors own experiences of advocacy as interwoven though her career as a lawyer and an academic, this paper examines various aspects of the intersection of advocacy and professional work.

The inclusion of nonreligion in religion and human rights

An aspect of the protection of religious belief and expression is the protection of those who are nonreligious. Though this may seem counter-intuitive, the rising number of ‘nones’ in many countries reveals the extent to which religious establishments shape day-to-day life in a manner that is experienced as coercive by the nonreligious. Examples include: the recitation of prayers in state spaces (municipal councils, legislatures); the display of religious symbols in schools or legislative bodies; the performance of religious rituals such as baptism to ensure one’s children have access to schools and so on. This article examines the growing area of tension between ‘the religious’ and ‘the nonreligious’ using the examples of the display of majoritarian religious symbols in public spaces and religion in education to explore: (1) the contours of religious establishment; (2) the narratives of exclusion that are woven through contests between the religious and nonreligious; and (3) the coercive impact of majoritarian religion.

Freedom of and Freedom from Religion: Atheist Involvement in Legal Cases

Beaman presents her reflections on the various claims made by atheists in the legal arena, such as “the objection to prayers in municipal council meetings, and the placement of religious symbols in public spaces.” Her work has often explored the exercise of religious freedom in court, but as she began paying more attention to cases involving atheists she began to notice that atheists were often being negatively caricaturized in both media and the courtroom, and religious symbols pertaining to Christianity were often countered as being cultural as opposed to religious, which in effect paints atheist complainants as being anti-cultural. This chapter contextualizes atheism in the legal arena, as well as how legal cases involving atheists have been reported.

Displacing Religion, Disarming Law: Situating Quaker Spirituality in the Trident Three Case

The authors focus on the case of the “Trident Three”, who boarded a Trident submarine control station on barge on a Scottish loch and, using their bare hands and small hammers, disabled much of the computer equipment in the station, temporarily disarming one third of Britain’s nuclear weapons system. Drawing primarily on a discourse analysis of the case, the authors identify a profound disjuncture between the ways in which the law and religious discourse framed the actions of the Trident Three. They explore the ways in which religious claims are reshaped by legal discourse as isolated actions rather than as actions set in a broader moral context with transcendental implications. Their project is to conduct a socio-legal analysis of competing discourses, paying particular attention to the ways in which power relations are worked out. They also acknowledge the contribution of social movements literature to an understanding of the ways in which groups deploy notions of “the good society” or “the public good” in order to ground their justification of choice of action. Les auteures se penchent sur le cas des “Trident Three”, qui sont montés à bord d’un poste de contrôle d’un sous-marin Trident stationné sur un loch écossais. À l’aide de leurs mains et de petits marteaux, ils démantelèrent une grande partie de l’équipement informatique à bord de la station, désarmant ainsi temporairement un tiers du système d’armes nucléaires de Grande-Bretagne. S’appuyant principalement sur une analyse du discours de l’affaire, les auteures font valoir qu’il existe un fossé profond entre les façons dont la loi et le cadre discours religieux façonnent les actions des “Trident Three”. Elles explorent les façons dont les prétentions religieuses sont remodelées par le discours juridique comme étant des actions isolées plutôt que des actions menées dans un contexte plus large avec des implications morales transcendantes. Leur projet est de réaliser une analyse sociojuridique des discours concurrents, en accordant une attention particulière à la façon dont les relations de pouvoir sont établies. Elles ont aussi recours à la littérature des mouvements sociaux pour comprendre la façon dont les groupes développent des notions telles que “la bonne société” ou “le bien public” pour fonder la justification du choix de leurs actions.