Introduction: ‘Open Secularism’ from the Margins La « laïcité ouverte » vue des marges

Canadian historical secular trajectories

With its geographical and cultural proximity to the United States, its former colonial ties to Great Britain and France, and its laws protecting religious freedom and multiculturalism, many presume Canada upholds a clear separation of religion and politics and/or is legally ‘secular.’ The reality is that the legal status of Canadian secularism is far from straightforward. Unlike the United States – which prohibits established religion through the First Amendment of the Constitution – or France – which formally established state secularism in 1905 – or the UK – which has a unique and variegated relationship with established religion – Canada’s ongoing historically and colonially based protection of Protestantism and Catholicism, violent erasure of Indigenous spiritual and cultural expressions, and protections for ‘religion’ in the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms and its Multiculturalism Act, have created a complex environment which both accepts certain manifestations of religion in the public sphere while isolating some to the margins, as ignored or illegitimate.

The five interventions in this special issue aim to interrogate one model of secularism that has emerged from Canada, led by the preeminent Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor in collaboration with Gérald Bouchard and Jocelyne Maclure: ‘open’ and ‘closed’ secularism. The adjectival addition of ‘open,’ Taylor, Bouchard and Maclure explain, underscores freedom of religion and equality as the fundamental ends of secular political structures, while simultaneously striving to protect space for religious actors and enactments in public life (Bouchard and Taylor, 2008; Maclure and Taylor, 2011; see also Chambers, 2010; Proulx, 1999). Taylor, Bouchard and Maclure’s open/closed framework thus largely accepts, for one, the visibility of religious signs in public spaces as a key mechanism to ensure equality. At the same time, in aiming to balance the presence of religion and the promise of state neutrality, Taylor and his coauthors implicitly privilege the Canadian state as a primary adjudicator and politics as a central expression of the secular. Several of the papers that follow similarly privilege law and politics in their interrogations of the ‘open secularism’ model in Canadian contexts. Three papers draw on ethnographic data, while two others reference data sets comprised of mass and social media sources. All five papers examine the ‘open secularism’ model from contemporary demographically (and often politically) marginal positions: from that of non-religionists in the province of Québec (Mossière); from the vantage point of Canadian Sikhs (Mann) and Muslims (Selby, Beaman and Barras); from the Idle No More movement (Ruml); and from Indigenous worldviews (Colorado).

Conceptualizing the secular in Canada (a concept we have engaged elsewhere: see Colorado, 2010; 2012; 2019; Selby, Barras, Beaman, 2018; Selby, 2012) must necessarily take into account the country’s ongoing colonial legacies (as they impact both Indigenous and Settler populations); and regional differences (particularly by historically situating the state management of religion in the province of Québec as contrasted with the rest of Canada, or the ‘ROC’). Both Québec and the ROC have been invested in legally delineating the parameters of expressions of religion.

The particularities of the province of Québec within the broader federal context of Canada make it a particularly fascinating case study for Secularism Studies scholars. On the one hand, Québec’s distinct society model has often been positioned as espousing a third path between Canadian multiculturalism and the French Jacobean model (McAndrew, 2001; Juteau, 2002). Yet, on the other hand, as the province’s non-Christian population has grown and diversified, the normative Republican concept of laïcité has increasingly appeared in provincial government reports and in the press (Milot, 2009: 31; Lefebvre and Beaman, 2012; Selby, 2014). In his political work, and at key junctures in his philosophical writing, the Québec context receives Charles Taylor’s attention, so we too focus our brief introduction on his work and on contemporary Québec. Scholars have considered secularism in Québec from a range of methodological and theoretical vantage points; Taylor’s more philosophical contributions remain noteworthy.

‘Open secularism’ in Québec

Most scholars begin their historicizations of secularism in Québec with the province’s ‘Quiet Revolution’, an era spanning the 1960s characterized by radical social, political and cultural transformations, which saw powers related to education, healthcare, and social services shift away from the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church toward the state (Choquette, 2004; Dickinson and Young, 2008; Gauvreau, 2015), alongside a growing nationalism. In contrast to dramatic societal shifts in other times and places, the Quiet Revolution is so named because it occurred relatively peaceably. As Géraldine Mossière notes, these shifts also comprised significant social changes, including a notable drop in birth and marriage rates. This historical period, alongside diversifying religious demographics, become the context for numerous debates about the role of religion in the Québec public sphere—many of which have involved Taylor.

In 2007, in response to growing discontentment (and embarrassment) with the management (or ‘reasonable accommodation’) of religious difference, Taylor, with sociologist Gérard Bouchard, was appointed by Québec’s Premier as a co-chair of a Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences (2008), which came to be known as the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. This commission was mandated to:

a) take stock of accommodation practices in Québec; b) analyse the attendant issues bearing in mind the experience of other societies; c) conduct an extensive consultation on this topic; and d) formulate recommendations to the government to ensure that accommodation practices conform to the values of Québec society as a pluralistic, democratic, egalitarian society (2008: 7).

In their final report for the Commission, in which they introduced 37 recommen-dations, Bouchard and Taylor present a preference for the theoretical model of ‘open secularism’; Taylor later refines and expands on it with Jocelyn Maclure in their co-authored, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (2011). Maclure and Taylor argue that, unlike the ‘restrictive’ or ‘closed’ secularism that is often exemplified by the rigidity of the French Republican model, which sets strict limits on the visibility of religion in the public sphere in pursuit of state neutrality and religious disestablishment, ‘open secularism’ emphasizes the liberal ends of secularism – namely, freedom of religion and conscience, and equality—rather than fetishizing the means (i.e. state neutrality, disestablishment) – a fetishi-zation which they suggest hinders the protection of the ends of secularism (2011). ¹ They see the ‘open’ model as well suited for the Québécois context.

The Coalition Avenir Québec’s Bill 21 in 2019

Despite Bouchard and Taylor’s finding that Québec’s ‘accommodation crisis’ was fundamentally an issue of perception, or, that while there were ‘occasional friction points, doubts and dissatisfaction,’ there was ‘nothing that confirms that the overall situation might be uncontrollable’ (2008: 13), the notion of an accom-modation ‘crisis’ nevertheless persisted as a fundamental and divisive facet of Québec political life following the Bouchard-Taylor Commission’s Report and recommendations.

Since 2010, four provincial bills ² have been proposed by different political parties in attempts to ‘solve’ the ‘reasonable accommodation’ problem. Taylor has remained active in these debates. First, following the unprecedented violence in a January 2017 mosque shooting that killed six men at the Islamic Culture Centre of Québec in the capital city, Taylor publicly distanced himself from an earlier recommendation in the Report against religious signs in positions of authority, recognizing the stigmatization of restrictions to religious signs on racialized minorities (Scott, 2018) and how these might unintentionally foster violence.

Second, Taylor has remained engaged in Québécois politics. Beginning in the 1960s, he ran in federal elections in Québec ridings four times and has been involved in government debates related to religious accommodations, including around the recent passing of Bill 21. ³ The ‘Act Respecting the Laicity of the State’ aims to affirm secularism in the province (which the Bill enshrines with the neologism ‘laicity’) primarily by prohibiting the wearing of religious symbols for government employees in positions of authority (Article 6), while also requiring those seeking government services to have their face uncovered (Article 8 – a clause largely impacting those Muslim women who might don a full-face veil). Provincial Premier François Legeault pre-emptively invoked a notwithstanding clause, allowing the bill to override sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (which explicitly entrenches rights related to freedom of religion and conscience) for a period of 5 years.

Prior to the bill’s passing, Taylor and Maclure appeared together before a committee of the provincial National Assembly. Their joint statement affirmed secularism in Québec and principally objected to Article 6, as well as more generally how the law counters both the Québec and Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Maclure and Taylor, 2019). Here again, Maclure and Taylor make their case through their framework of open secularism, arguing that ‘this prohibition [Article 6] is in tension with the ethical foundations of secularism, namely the equal respect due to every citizen and the freedom of conscience and religion’ (2019: 3; our translation). They characterize Bill 21 as fostering a discriminatory ‘closed secularism’ model that meets neither the means nor the goals of equality in Québec (2019: 5). In sum, they find the model useful in critiquing the most recent law.

Special issue contributions

The authors of this special issue opine differently on the utility of Taylor and his co-authors’ model: While Mossière and Selby et al. are more critical, Ruml, Mann and Colorado see political and intellectual utility in the framework. Aforementioned, our decision as co-editors on the make-up of the papers in this special issue itself reveals an implicit critique of the original iteration of the model, introducing work centred on worldviews that tend to be both hyper-monitored (i.e. Sikhism and Islam) or ignored (Indigenous spiritualities) by the ‘neutral’ secular state. In general, developments in Secularism Studies (Asad et al., 2013; Calhoun et al., 2011; Fitzgerald, 2014; Mahmood, 2015; Shakman Hurd, 2008; Taylor, 2007) highlight how secularism emerges coextensively with the colonialist political project of Christendom and, as such, tends to treat Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity as normative religion. The articles in this special issue acknowledge these assumptions about the normativity of mainstream Christianity, and how the secular has bolstered colonialist roots impacting both Indigenous peoples and settlers, but primarily question open secularism by exposing ways it can and cannot encapsulate religionists at the margins. We hope this exercise is constructive for future iterations of open secularism, including making it more expansive to better protect those who face intersectional discriminations, whether by the state or non-state actors and entities. As alluded to by Colorado in his article, focusing on religionists ‘on the margins’ offers a vantage point to see how ‘religion’ is defined (by the state, by theorists, by religionists) and the implications therein.

Mossière opens the special issue, critiquing the Maclure and Taylor model based on her qualitative study with Quebecker baby boomers of French-Canadian origin. She examines her interlocutors’ individual experiences along-side significant political transformations that have focused on secularism in the province and their attention to gender equality and pluralism. Mossière argues that these two values have been central to common articulations of modernity for this generation and considers how they translate into her participants’ moral principles.

Mann’s article engages a high-profile Canadian case regarding religious accommodation in the workplace: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) turban debate, which culminated in the federal government lifting its restrictions on key aspects of amritdhari (a Sikh initiated into the Khalsa) dress for Sikh RCMP officers. Drawing on media and qualitative data, Mann argues that the open secularism model usefully interrupts certain problematic assumptions about Canadian nationalist identity, as well as discriminatory discourses about Sikh identity.

Selby, Beaman and Barras argue that even if Maclure and Taylor’s ‘open’ and ‘closed’ model is helpful in nation state comparison, it ineffectively engages the power asymmetries lodged within the management of religiosity, including, as in Bill 21, latent and overt anti-Muslim racism, xenophobia and other forms of intersectional discriminations. Drawing on their interview data with self-identified Muslims, they show that the model is too focused on outcomes, protects the political status quo by not calling institutional values into question, and entrenches conflict as reflective of the lives of religious minorities. Selby, Beaman and Barras propose that focusing on processes rather than outcomes (as the open/closed model does), better captures the navigation and negotiation that occurs in everyday life and how religiosity is always embedded in power relations.

In the penultimate article of the issue, Ruml considers the spiritual undercurrents of Indigenous activism in Canada, including through an examination of the utilization of social media as a key activity for contemporary grass roots Indigenous movements, like Idle No More. Ruml tracks how Indigenous activists in Canada draw on sacred narratives and concepts, including notions of kinship and relationality, as these activists navigate the ‘New Forest,’ an Indigenous re-envisioning of modernity, which he borrows from Mohawk lawyer and scholar, Patricia Monture-Angus. Ruml’s exploration identifies affinities between the New Forest as a space in which Indigenous activists can resist and challenge coloniality, with the notions of public religiosity presumed within open secularism.

Like Ruml, Colorado engages open secularism through a consideration of Indigenous political life in Canada, focusing on the activities and deliverables of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, many of which emphasize ceremony and sacrality as constitutive facets of traditional Indigenous worldviews. Colorado’s analysis exposes the asymmetries between such worldviews – and the commitment to Reconciliation – and closed secularism. He advocates for an iteration of open secularism that includes the reduction of harm amongst its ends, and that acknowledges the uniqueness of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in making determinations about the role of ceremonial life in public settings.

Sharing the backdrop of ‘Canada,’ the authors in this issue investigate how the Taylor, Bouchard and Maclure model can be read vis-à-vis different groups on the Canadian ‘margins.’ The legislative arc from the Bouchard Taylor Report in 2008, when the notion of ‘open secularism’ is first introduced, to the critique of articles 6 and 8 in Bill 21 in 2019, shows that the notion remains alive and both upholds and critiques political secularism in contemporary Canada. With appeals and debate still unfolding in Québec at the time of writing, the relationships between Canada and Québec’s versions of secularism are still being written. Even while the articles’ primary foci are on Canada, given Taylor’s international influence in discussions around politics and the secular, we hope that the critical perspectives put forward in this special issue will be useful for jurisdictions beyond Canada also weighing secularist models of sociopolitical life.