Vote-seeking politicians are only too glad to misuse religious symbols as campaign gimmicks.
On the whole, Canadians seem pretty well behaved. So during a vacation visit to Montreal last weekend, I was surprised to find the province of Quebec in the middle of a church-state brouhaha.
According to the Montreal Gazette, a special commission assigned to look into issues of religious liberty, minority rights and immigration had come out with a startling recommendation. In the interests of what the authors called “open secularism,” the report recommended the removal of the crucifix prominently displayed over the speaker’s chair in the National Assembly.
The proposal was only one of 37 recommendations from McGill University philosopher Charles Taylor and University of Quebec sociologist Gerard Bouchard. But it sparked an intense emotional response.
Before the Bouchard-Taylor report was even officially unveiled, Premier Jean Charest engineered a unanimous Assembly vote in favor of leaving the crucifix in place.
“The crucifix is about 350 years of history in Quebec that none of us are ever going to erase and of a very strong presence, in particular, of the Catholic Church, and that’s our reality,” huffed Charest.
According to the Toronto Star, Charest told a news conference, “We won’t rewrite history…. The church has played a major role in who we are today as a society; the crucifix is more than a religious symbol.”
More than a religious symbol, huh?
That comment gives us one good reason why religious symbols generally don’t belong in governmental buildings. They transubstantiate from sacred objects into political footballs – or in hockey-crazy Quebec, make that political pucks. Vote-seeking politicians are only too glad to misuse religious symbols as campaign gimmicks.
Charest is wrong on other fronts too. I recognize that Canada has a complicated religious and ethnic story, with a French-speaking population centered in Quebec that is trying to maintain its cultural identity in a nation where English is the majority language.
But notwithstanding that history, the crucifix is the quintessential symbol of the Catholic faith. Display in a government building inevitably sends the message that the Catholic faith is favored. It doesn’t belong over the speaker’s chair in a society that aims to welcome persons of all faiths (and none).
Furthermore, that crucifix hasn’t been there 350 years, as Charest implied. According to MacClean’s, it was put in place in 1936 by Premier Maurice Duplessis to emphasize his allegiance to the church.
The Catholic hierarchy once held a stranglehold over education and other social services in Quebec. But during the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, the province moved boldly toward a broad separation of religion and government.
Today, the vast majority of Quebec residents are nominally Catholic, but regular church attendance is quite limited, perhaps 10 to 20 percent. Homeowners and churches are free to display crucifixes if they wish, but their government shouldn’t do it on their behalf.
American church-state separationists would agree with some of the Bouchard-Taylor report’s recommendations and disagree with others. But one point is clear: the crucifix over the Assembly speaker’s chair shouldn’t be there.
PS: I wonder what our Religious Right friends would say about all this. They’re always pushing for Christian symbols at courthouses and statehouses in the United States; would those fundamentalist Protestants be as excited about leaving in place a Catholic symbol? I doubt it.
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