Reconciliation and the secular

Abstract

Using the lens of political theory, this article examines how the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) captures the ways in which Indigenous political actors operate in a spiritual key in the public sphere. It considers how the Calls to Action of the TRC – the implementation of which has received support from federal, provincial and municipal governments – imply a re-envisioning of Canadian society that cannot be accommodated within a rigidly ‘closed’ secularism, which sequesters ceremony and sacrality to the private sphere. The paper argues that the model of open secularism posited by Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor, allows space for religion as a fundamental component of secular democratic order and participation, central to processes of Reconciliation in Canada.

Introduction

A common conception of the bounds of the secular holds that secularism implies the sequestering of religion to the private sphere, and its disarticulation from public life. This model falls under what Charles Taylor and Jocelyn Maclure term ‘closed secularism’, according to which secularism is not mere disestablishment in the name of neutrality, but the evacuation of religion from public life (Maclure and Taylor, 2011). Closed secularism is buttressed by those dominant strands of liberalism that see religion as fundamentally divisive, from which this article charts an alternate tack; I seek to consider how understandings of secularism plotted out along a different trajectory might be better suited to balancing the primacy of equality foundational for a constitutional democratic order with freedom of religion and conscience, the latter of which will by nature require that acts of religiosity, while predominantly occurring or exercised in the private sphere, cannot be sequestered within the private but must at times also be allowed expression within public domains. To that end, this article examines a case study involving Indigenous ¹ Peoples in Canada, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, 2015), in order to highlight the ways in which many Indigenous actors operate in a spiritual key in the public sphere. I consider how the Calls to Action (CTA) of the TRC – the implementation of which has received support from federal, provincial and municipal governments – imply a re-envisioning of Canadian society that cannot be accommodated within a rigidly closed secularism. The question I want to answer is this: Can processes of Reconciliation ² in Canada be secular?

It will be beneficial to begin discussion about the bounds of Canadian secularism by commenting on the normative nature of the ‘public sphere’, as this term is commonly understood, including how aspects of the character of that normativity have come to be occluded in many cases, resulting in what can be identified as a degeneracy of the liberal foundations of the public sphere. Consider for example how Habermas' foundational term Öffentlichkeit, which has come to be translated in English as ‘public sphere’, does not merely designate something spatial in his original German usage (Gripsrud et al., 2010). The English terminology employs the word ‘sphere’, a geometrical term identifying a globe, a third-dimensional object by definition extended spatially. This terminological variant discloses something about Öffentlichkeit: namely, that we must be talking about physical spaces. It designates, moreover, one physical space against another physical space – namely, public as opposed to private ones. Now to be sure, the spatial component of ‘public sphere’ is important and my intent is not to disregard its significance – after all, political agency is enacted by bodies in political space that must navigate the power structures of public space. On this point, Hannah Arendt underscores the deleterious consequences of the absence of space in totalitarian regimes and the normative importance of free spaces for freedom to be enacted – public space has a particular character that is its sine qua non (no space, no freedom) (Arendt, 1973).

Equally important, the concept of the public sphere presumes a confluence of the spatial and normative, and both have significant implications for democratic legitimacy. On the one hand, institutional power should be non-secretive, but on the other it must be legitimized and restrained by a ‘deliberating public of free and equal citizens’ (Gripsrud et al., 2010: xv). ³ In other words, the public sphere functions as a public space of debate, justification, reason giving, and persuasion – this is required if it is to underwrite the liberal democratic state as legitimate. It is a space to be sure, but one defined importantly by its normative character, not simply by its physical boundaries. An obvious part of that character is that in a religiously plural secular setting, the state must strive to be neutral in its interactions with all citizens and groups, regardless of religious affiliation – the state ought not to be partial to one religion over another, or by extension to religious belief/practice over agnosticism-atheism (or vice-versa).

But beyond neutrality, what other rules reign within the public sphere, once citizens enter into deliberative processes, and how do we situate religion within this public space? Or, put another way, what is the distinctly secular nature of the public sphere? On this question, the concept of ‘open secularism’ is helpful because it is more attentive to the demands of a liberal public sphere than restrictive secularisms. ⁴

It is with a view then to proceeding with my specific aim of examining whether open secularism may be better suited (than closed secularism) to processes of Reconciliation that lie ahead for Canada, that I turn now to an engagement with the positions found in Maclure’s and Taylor’s Secularism and Freedom of Conscience. To begin, regarding the strictures placed around religion in the public sphere, the closed model is fairly self-explanatory. This modality of the secular places significant restrictions on public religious expression, usually in the name of neutrality, or in pursuit of a narrow understanding of what the separation of church and state entails, including the banishment of religion from the public and its sequestration to the private (rather than mere disestablishment). Against such a model, Taylor and Maclure underscore how open secularism centers ‘on the protection of freedom of conscience and of religion, as well as a more flexible concept of separation and neutrality’ (2011: 27). They argue that what makes open secularism preferable for a liberal, democratic public sphere is its attentiveness to secularism’s ends:

If respect for the equal moral value of citizens and the protection of freedom of conscience are the ends of secularism, and if the separation between the political and the religious and the state’s religious neutrality are means that make it possible to achieve a balance between those ends, it follows that the most rigid conceptions of secularism, quicker to set aside protections of freedom of religion, sometimes come to grant a preponderant importance to the operative modes of secularism, which are elevated to the rank of values, often at the expense of its ends. The full separation between church and state, or the state’s religious neutrality, then assumes a greater importance than respect for individuals’ freedom of conscience (2011: 28).

A central part of their position is that closed secularism fetishizes its means, digging in to protect the neutrality of the public sphere as against the non-neutral private, but without proper attention to the full normative demands of the ends. After all, if the goal of neutrality is to protect religious liberty and freedom of conscience, then it seems paradoxical that such neutrality comes to trump instantiations of the freedoms that the neutrality was meant to protect in the first place. It is for this reason – that the configuration of the neutral space becomes fetishized without a fuller reflection on what the ends of secularism entail – that I place emphasis on the normative character of the secular. Claims for a neutral public sphere, following Taylor and Maclure, can be seen as an entrenchment of that space without the concomitant battle for the freedom of conscience and religion.

With this theoretical picture in mind, I now turn to a discussion of what this could mean in Canada as it pertains to expressions of Indigenous spirituality. For the most part, discussions about the normative bounds of Canadian secularism, particularly around the topic of reasonable accommodation, have tended in recent years to focus on Islam, Judaism, Sikhism and Christianity. ⁵ Now, while there are troubling sides to these controversies around accommodation – particularly insofar as they expose broad patterns of discrimination against certain minority groups – they are important to our discussion here because such moments afford Canadians the opportunity to reflect on the nature of secularism, special accommodation and religious liberty. Importantly, these events can also provide religionists (and their allies) the potential opportunity to mobilize, to protect their rights, and to shift the discourses and practices of the secular where they might marginalize. This is a crucial piece of what I want to engage in this article. What has been missing in scholarship thus far is a fulsome consideration of the unique intersections between Indigenous spirituality and Canadian secularism. My argument is that the pursuit of Reconciliation compels us to do so.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

The Indian Residential Schools (IRS) ‘were created for the purpose of separating Aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages, and to indoctrinate children into . . . Euro-Christian Canadian society’ (TRC, 2015: v). These church-run, government-mandated schools operated in Canada from the late 1880’s until 1996, when the Gordon Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan was shuttered. The TRC’s mandate – as outlined in Schedule N of the IRS Settlement Agreement (TRC, 2015) – included the creating of public space for survivors of the IRS to share stories of family separation, physical and sexual abuse, cultural genocide, and the consequent devastating trauma experienced by survivors and their families. The work of the TRC culminated in the production of a report that included, inter alia, 95 CTA – recommendations to the Government of Canada intended to ‘redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation’ (TRC, 2015: 319). The release of the TRC’s final report in 2015 was met with unanimous support from political leaders. Canada has publicly committed itself to Reconciliation, a process for which the TRC and the CTA provide the framework. ⁶

At the same time, one should not gloss over the reality that this state pledge to Reconciliation has fallen short at the level of implementation. Prime Minister Trudeau’s own track record with Indigenous peoples in Canada is not without blemishes, including his government’s purchase of the Trans-Mountain pipeline (which many Indigenous communities opposed) and the high-profile controversy surrounding the 2019 resignation of the Kwakwakaʼwakw Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Jody Wilson-Raybould. Moreover, according to the online platform Beyond 94, which measures the progress of the CTA, only ten of the 94 have been fully implemented as of July 2019 (CBC, 2019). In other words, much work remains in this aspirational commitment to Reconciliation, a commitment which entails the allocation of resources, the development of infrastructure and a broad re-envisioning of Canadian society – the last of which creates the socio-political and theoretical space for an interrogation of Canadian secularism. The basis for such a critical engagement is fairly straightforward and is based on the following contention: the TRC and the CTA are interwoven with implicit and explicit sacred features, and this reality elucidates and makes explicit that Reconciliation cannot be accommodated within closed secularism. After all, it is undeniable that religion, spirituality and ceremony are key aspects of: the pre-commission history of the TRC through the IRS System; the TRC’s own practices, which are highly ritualistic and sacralized; and the CTA themselves. The interrogation of the contours of the secular in Canada – inherently demanded by the CTA – will be well serviced by the reading of open secularism proposed later in my discussion.

Religion is unquestionably at the core of the pre-commission history of the TRC. The modus operandi of the residential schools rested on the elimination of traditional ways of being – Indigenous spirituality and knowledge were intentionally and violently displaced by colonizing ideologies, especially Christianity. Through the IRS, governmental and ecclesial powers colluded to orchestrate the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their homes and ancestral lands, placing them in church-run boarding schools. It was an act of colonization that has been described by the TRC as a cultural genocide, with residential schools designed to undermine the centrality of traditional teachings; spiritual practices and worldviews previously integrated into all aspects of Indigenous culture were suppressed and even outlawed. Consider the blatant racism in Prime Minister John A. MacDonald’s words to Parliament in 1883:

When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself . . . that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men (TRC, 2015: 2).

Despite the immeasurable damage wrought by the residential schools, Indigenous spiritualities have proven resilient. Traditional knowledge was conserved, though many Indigenous people have become disconnected from it – a painful legacy of the residential schools. One of the major objectives of the TRC is to protect and cultivate traditional teachings and ways of being. A detail worth emphasizing here is how traditional Indigenous worldviews across the territories within Canada contain no notion of the sacred as a separate sphere severed from the secular – rather, the sacred is imbedded in all aspects of Indigenous life. This is underscored in the TRC Final Report itself: ‘Land, language, culture, and identity are inseparable from spirituality; all are necessary elements of a whole way of being, of living on the land as Indigenous peoples’ (2015: 225). Such a position is echoed by interview subjects in the documentary film, The Good Life. ⁷ Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke notes that ‘we have a covenant with the Creator as Anishinaabe people . . . [We] understand the Creator's law is the highest law, higher than the laws made by nation states or municipalities . . . it comes from a worldview and a way of life, Mino-Bimaadiziwin [‘Good Life’] that is our instructions . . . and that is not secular . . . That's just how you live’ (cited in Colorado, 2019). Mark Ruml similarly shares his understanding that ‘the sacred/secular dichotomy is not part of a shared Indigenous worldview, which views the world and everything in it as part of the sacred' (Ruml, 2020; see also Colorado, 2019).

We can already begin to see how the preservation and cultivation of traditional teachings may not work within closed secularism, with its bifurcating orientation that draws sharp barriers between public and private and ostensibly leaves no public role for religion and ceremony. ⁸ A revitalization of traditional worldviews through Reconciliation would surely bring many ceremonial practices into the public sphere. The TRC itself is an example of this – ceremony was integral to the commission. The report notes that TRC National Events always began with the lighting of sacred fires, and that they followed rituals and traditions of ‘the Aboriginal peoples in whose territories the Commission was a guest’ (2015: 30; see also Niezen, 2013). Demonstrating the centrality of the sacred, the commissioners detail how spirituality provided their framework: ‘Traditional knowledge and practice guided much of the Commission’s work. The Seven Sacred Teachings of the Anishinaabe – Respect, Courage, Love, Truth, Humility, Honesty, and Wisdom – served as the themes for the seven National Events, and ceremony and traditional observance played an important part in the National Events’ (2015: 30). Indeed, these teachings were integrated into the TRC’s logo (TRC website, 2015; Colorado, 2019). The release of the final report on December 15, 2015, was broadcast across the nation and was anchored by numerous traditional rituals. Algonquin Elder Peter Decontie delivered an eleven-minute prayer to the Creator in his traditional language and conducted a smudging ceremony, a process of purification involving the burning of sacred medicines. And featured centre stage (as it was at other TRC events) was the Bentwood Box created by Coast Salish artist Luke Marston. This box was a repository for reminders of the IRS and depicts Marston’s own grandmother, whose hands were maimed through her experience of violence at a residential school. Ronald Niezen describes how it functioned as a ‘ritual vessel connecting commissioners with participants’ – the ever-growing sacrality of which was enforced by ‘rituals of deposition’, whereby items were placed in the repository with reverence, intentional movement and gesture, and ‘respectful silence’ (2013: 66–67). ⁹

Sacrality was clearly an intentional feature of TRC proceedings, so it is unsurprising that it is at the core of the Commission’s deliverables. A key component of the TRC’s mandate was to produce ‘recommendations to the Government of Canada concerning the IRS system and experience’; these are found in the CTA, an abundance of which centre on spirituality – a large proportion deals with and explicitly refers to religion, ceremony, traditional spirituality, knowledge and medicine. Many of these specific calls aim at undoing the damage of colonization and prescribe education related to traditional ways of knowing and the integration of Indigenous knowledge into law, healthcare, educational curriculum, prisoner rehabilitation, and so on. Perhaps the most encompassing CTA in these regards is 48, which calls on Canada to ‘[respect] Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination in spiritual matters, including the right to practise, develop, and teach their own spiritual and religious traditions, customs, and ceremonies’ (TRC, 2015: 327). In addition to those CTA that clearly identify traditional spirituality and religion, others rest upon themes of peoplehood, treaty, and land, all of which the report repeatedly connects to traditional knowledge (TRC, 2015). In other words, the framework for Reconciliation provided by the CTA unmistakably assumes the primacy of ceremony and traditional spirituality. A question that remains, and to which the remainder of this article seeks to attend, is this: how can processes of Reconciliation, which necessarily unfold in a spiritual key, enable us to rethink secularism and its assumptions about how Canadian publics out to be ordered?

Decolonizing the secular?

Providing any response to this question requires us to say something about the nomenclature deployed above, particularly as it pertains to the concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ (the latter of which has been described as co-constitutive of the former) (Asad et al., 2013; Hurd, 2008). Despite its use in the TRC Final Report, one might object that the term ‘religion’ should not be utilized to identify Indigenous sacred knowledge and ceremony, given the word’s association with devastating processes of colonization. Cree scholar and activist Tasha Spillett asserts that much trauma experienced by Indigenous peoples involves the term ‘religion’:

When [agents of the state and the IRS] came for children, they came and they used religion as their way of accessing children from our communities. To me, that's the biggest assault that the state has perpetrated on our communities . . . the theft of our children. And they used religion as a means . . . to give permission to that aggression (Spillett, cited in Colorado, 2019).

This powerful testimony should give one pause, especially in the context of Reconciliation (advocates for which must avoid replicating historical patterns of colonization). Any venture seeking to encapsulate traditional sacred teachings and practices within a notion pulled from the lexicon of Christendom and European empire, therefore, seems fraught with risk. The term ‘secularism’ faces analogous obstacles. That secularism has been connected to Christendom, coloniality and empire within much contemporary scholarship (Asad et al., 2008; Calhoun et al., 2011; Fitzgerald, 2014; Hurd, 2008; Johnson et al., 2018; Mahmood, 2015; Taylor 2007) provides grounds to scrutinize and interrogate the ways that the secular might undergird colonialist structures of power in the context of Reconciliation. Indeed, this need for caution holds for Euro-western nomenclature in general – and here we might consider the important work of Dene scholar Glen Coulthard, and his critique of the politics of recognition. His book Red skin, white masks argues that Indigenous peoples’ ‘efforts to engage these discursive and institutional spaces to secure recognition of our rights have not only failed, but have instead served to subtly reproduce the forms of racist, sexist, economic, and political configurations of power that we initially sought, through our engagements and negotiations with the state, to challenge’ (2014: 179).

At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that some Indigenous political actors have deliberately deployed terms like ‘religion’ (and the practices and views to which they gesture) in order to challenge, interrupt and fracture colonialist arrangements of power. Ojibwe political leader Wab Kinew observes how Indigenous spirituality has often been portrayed as inferior to Abrahamic religions, including through popular culture and academic histories. In light of these colonialist tropes, Kinew notes: ‘When I use “religion” to describe Indigenous ways, part of it is to convey . . . that our worldviews are as sophisticated, that our worldviews are as complex, are as worthy of respect, as Christianity or Islam’ (cited in Colorado, 2019). In other words, certain deployments of the colonizer’s lexicon can create sites of empowerment for Indigenous political actors in articulating their traditions. The categorization of traditional practices as ‘religion,’ which provides access points to legal rights under the Canadian Charter, is one example of this. While there may be limits to the dominant language of rights as it pertains to Indigenous spirituality – including the claim that such a legal construction further entrenches coloniality (Beaman, 2002) – there is also ground-breaking work that explores how Indigenous spirituality can be protected not just through traditional Indigenous law, but also Canadian Constitutional Law and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Bakht and Collins, 2017; Borrows, 2008a; Morales, 2016). An aspect of this body of scholarship is the consideration of the applicability of section 2(a) of the Charter – ‘freedom of conscience and religion’ – to Indigenous spirituality. While the present article does not contribute directly to this kind of much needed legal analysis, the aim is nevertheless to explore some of the theoretical backdrop and thus to complement the vital contributions of legal scholars that engage the questions at hand regarding the protection of Indigenous spirituality.

What I am advocating here, in the end, is great caution in balancing the opportunities for political resistance that may be present through rights frameworks and references to language of religion and the secular – which includes reasonable accommodation – with the very real potential risks that those like Beaman, Coulthard and Spillett raise. As this pertains to open secularism and its compatibility with Reconciliation, the fundamental question is whether secularism can be reframed – or, decolonized – in such a way that it does not reproduce configurations of the very colonialist power that undergirded the IRS in the first place. Does open secularism offer that possibility? It is notable that Building the future – in which the rudiments of open secularism are laid out (and for which Charles Taylor was co-author with Gérald Bouchard) – specifically notes that Indigenous issues related to religious accommodation had to be removed from the commission’s mandate. ¹⁰ The rationale was that such a consideration would require a different kind of resolution ‘between nations’ – the state of Quebec and the Indigenous Nations. This is not the only place that Taylor underscores the unique status of Indigenous peoples. In an article that engages the Nisga’a Treaty, Taylor aligns himself with major aspects of Reconciliation and acknowledges the primacy of treaties, and of Indigenous sovereignty and self-government: ‘We're not just dealing with any minority of disadvantaged Canadians. [Indigenous] people have rights in virtue of having been functioning societies on this territory when the ancestors of non-Aboriginal Canadians came’ (1998: 39). Taylor’s position is clear – Indigenous peoples comprise unique communities and nations with unique rights.

A deep acknowledgement of this uniqueness of Indigenous peoples is at the core of Reconciliation. But can open secularism as a conceptual framework be defended as a decolonized politics that attends to that uniqueness? After all, it presumes a liberal democratic politics and a colonialist understanding of citizenship. Indeed, decolonizing the secular at its most radical level may ultimately mean a rejection of secularism altogether and the championing of Indigenous models of public life and deliberation to engage cultural and religious difference. Such Reconciliation implies the full Indigenization of Canadian society – this must ultimately centre on healing relationships, a process which the CTA presumes will be mediated by sacred practices, objects and teachings. In terms of the last of these, Spillett references how the Cree notion of ‘Kahkithaw Niwâhkômâkanak, which translates directly to “We're all relatives, we’re all related” . . . [reaffirms] that we all have a relationship and a responsibility to one another in life.’ She suggests that this idea – analogues of which are found in other Indigenous languages in Canada – provides a politics that, like secularism seeks to do, mediates social division and conflict that might stem from cultural or religious variances, because ‘when we acknowledge that we are related, when we acknowledge that we share an experience . . . [of] life as humans, that creates a connection, a bond that potentially if done right could supersede the differences that we use to other each other’ (in Colorado, 2019).

Can open secularism be shaped in such a way to embody this Indigenous vision of responding to diversity? I would argue that it can at least provide preliminary steps to that lofty goal, but with some provisos. If open secularism is fundamentally about the management of Indigenous spirituality, then its suitability must be questioned. Indigenous spirituality cannot simply be categorized as an instantiation of difference to be treated as a site of conflict, nor can it be reduced to its alterity, and thus disciplined because it is perceived as other. This resonates with the scholarship of Selby, Barras and Beaman and their balanced critique of reasonable accommodation. The case studies in Beyond accommodation ‘reveal significant fissures and power imbalances in how reasonable accommodation is translated and put into action,’ often putting individuals from vulnerable communities at risk by assuming from the outset that their religiosity is ‘non-normative’ (2018: 7; see also their article in this special issue). A different aspiration from the mere management of religion is required. As laid out at the outset of this article, Maclure and Taylor emphasize a focus on the foundational liberal ends of freedom of religion and conscience and equality between groups and individuals as the nucleus of secularism. I would suggest that the reduction of harm must be intertwined with those ends when we are considering the unique case of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the effort to create public space for traditional ceremony.

Notably, the category of harm is highly discursive and can be applied towards illiberal consequences. Beaman’s Defining harm provides illuminating critical engagement with the category of harm and how it can be used in ways to abrogate the rights – including freedom of religion – of religionists at society's margins (including, for example, by objectifying an other as a threat to democratic political order, resulting in a case to limit rights because of the menace of harm) (2008). My argument for the concept here is deeply attentive to the concerns against which Beaman rightly warns and is intended to work in precisely the opposite way, as a bulwark against disenfranchisement. Arguably, when a society fetishizes secularist means – like disestablishment and a neutral public sphere – it is evident that harm to the religious other becomes at best a second order concern, supplanted by the ambition to remove religion’s public presence. The aim of keeping the public square free of religiosity – notwithstanding those manifestations of dominant religious traditions that are treated as exceptional through appeals to heritage ¹¹ – in practice means that accommodation for the religious other from the outset tends to be framed (problematically) as interruptions to an otherwise peaceable social order. What open secularism has the ability to do is tilt the discussion so that harmful consequences for secularism’s ends – namely individual freedoms and equality – are magnified as a first order concern. To be sure, this account of secularism will not eliminate conflict where we encounter competing rights. Canada has already encountered a legal case in which an Indigenous smudging ceremony in a school classroom has been challenged as an infringement against a student’s freedom of religion (Servatius v. SD 70, 2016). What I am suggesting is that open secularism may refine a set of political values which in turn give rise to practices that might better emphasize the presumption of the reduction of harm against Indigenous peoples in Canada in these sorts of cases, precisely because that harm is tied to deep wells of coloniality, violence and oppression.

Advocating for the unique treatment of Indigenous spirituality is not a call for the hierarchical preference of an Indigenous vision of the good life over other worldviews. That would render secularism and its position on state neutrality internally inconsistent. Instead, an emphasis on harm brings to the fore the demand to respond in substantive ways (i.e. through government policies, through social practices, through education, etc.) to the history of colonization and IRS. Underscoring harm in this way allows for a unique approach to freedom and equality that emphasizes the need to repair relationships and atone for past wrongs as a nation. It helps to carve out the political space needed to attend to cases in which tension between freedom and equality requires mediation, while also enabling Canadians to respond to the enduring and systemic impacts of coloniality. This reimagining of the secular and the unique treatment of Indigenous sacrality rest upon an acknowledgement that though an open secularism approach and an emphasis on harm may very well take on different guises in other political contexts and territories, that the CTAs provide some obvious parameters for how Canadian secularism must be shaped if it is to be shorn of its coloniality.

In a 2015 interview with me for a forthcoming book, Charles Taylor acknowledged the limits of secularism. He spoke to the power of the challenges raised by his interlocutors, like Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, who have contributed to the body of scholarship that very clearly aligns secularism with coloniality. While he agreed with many of the premises of their theoretical work, he also noted that his own scholarship has always had a practical orientation. As described in this special issue’s Introduction, Taylor himself ran for federal political office and was enlisted by the government to co-chair a public commission. Taylor noted that he has always been a very politically engaged academic, which has forced him to take practical positions even when pure theoretical solutions evade his grasp. Taylor explains:

You have got to say, ‘this is where I stand.’ These are principles and yes, they are very hard to apply. And I am sure that we are making some mistakes now, but at least we have a basis to stop [the religious discrimination] from happening . . . You should not discredit the whole operation [of open secularism] because [then] you disarm yourself against [those who utilize power to oppress religious minorities] (Colorado, forthcoming).

Arguably, Taylor’s position rests on the reduction of harm against religionists at the margins of Canadian society. Consistent with this interview, he and Maclure refer at critical junctures in Secularism and Freedom of Conscience to the category of moral harm. The presumption of the reduction of harm, it would seem, is a pivotal aspect of their position on open secularism, and thus is assumed to be a factor in determining the normative character of the public sphere.

The aim in this article has been to reflect on the decolonization of the secular – to that end, we have only scratched the surface. That said, what is clear is that a re-envisioned secularism must fall within certain parameters if it is to be reconcilable with Reconciliation. A decolonized secularism must be 1) compatible with the mandate and findings of the TRC; 2) congruous with the CTA, including those calls that insist on self-determination for Indigenous peoples as it pertains to spirituality and religion; 3) respectful of Indigenous sovereignty more broadly, acknowledging that Reconciliation between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples necessarily exists alongside and intertwined with movements of Indigenous resurgence (Asch et al., 2018); and 4) attentive to the ways that Canadian Constitutional law exists alongside Indigenous law, the latter of which rests on sacred stories and spiritual concepts (Borrows, 2008a; 2008b; 2016). My contention is that a closed secularism approach fails in these regards; whereas a version of open secularism, that emphasizes the ends of secularism inflected by a consideration of harm as an outcome of both historical and contemporary coloniality, may provide us with a fresh view on spiritual/religious accommodations consistent with the requirements outlined above.