![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In this paper I focus on designations of ‘our culture and heritage' that defend practices and symbols of religious majorities. I consider the entanglement of nationalist narratives, secularity and the ‘us' in the claims of social actors and public discussions about culture and heritage. What is understood as being religious and what is culture/heritage is dependent on the social actors involved, their position in society and the interpretive frameworks available to them. I consider the following questions: How are culture and heritage used in legal and public discourse to justify the continued presence of such symbols and practices in Christian majority countries in the West? What are the religious histories implicated in this process? Who is imagined to be included when crosses and prayers are staked out as ‘our culture and heritage’? What is the relationship between culture and heritage and national imaginaries? Ultimately, as religious majorities see their numbers dwindle and power relations shift, the attempt to imbricate religious practices and beliefs in public spaces and rituals is quite possibly a translation of the religious to the secular.
Acknowledgement
I would like to acknowledge the financial support of my research through my Canada Research Chair in Religious Diversity and Social Change. Lauren Strumos has provided research and editorial assistance and is a valued conversation partner and collaborator. I am grateful to the Multiple Secularities Institute and my colleagues there for hosting me (October 2022–March 2023) as the University of Leipzig Leibniz Professor and for collaborating on the workshop ‘Who is “Us”: Our Culture, our Values, our Heritage and the Reconfiguration of Religion’, 9–10 March 2023.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Transubstantiation is a theological concept that holds that the bread and wine used for communion become the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
2 David Seljak (Citation2012, p. 10) explains that ‘Canadian secularism is residually Christian, that is, it still bears the imprint of its Christian past, and consequently has not addressed Christian privilege sufficiently’.
3 Mouvement laïque québécois v. Saguenay (City), 2015. SCC 16 [2015] 2 S.C.R. 3. Hereinafter ‘Saguenay SCC’.
4 Lautsi and Others v. Italy 2011. ECHR. No. 30814/06. Hereinafter ‘Lautsi'.
5 See also Griera (Citation2012) and Griera and Clot-Garrell (Citation2015).
6 The representative surveys Gallup Ecclesiasticas 2011 and 2015 found that 85-85 per cent of Finns approved of singing the hymn, while 4-5 per cent opposed it (Sorsa Citation2016, p. 184).
7 See also Waterton and Watson (Citation2013) on heritage and its material forms.
8 In addition to those works discussed in detail later in this paper, a recent noteworthy work is William T. Cavanaugh’s Migrations of the Holy (Citation2011). See also Saba Mahmood’s ‘Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?’ (Citation2009).
9 For instance, Bruno Reinhardt (Citation2018, p. 87) demonstrates the importance of sociohistorical context for the construction of the ‘religious’ and ‘heritage’ in Brazil, following the breakdown of a ‘Catholic monopoly over religious heritage’.
10 Saguenay (Ville de) v. Mouvement laïque québécois, 2013. QCCA 936. Hereinafter ‘Saguenay CA’.
11 Burchardt (Citation2020, p. 10) argues that in Quebec ‘secularism and Catholicism are both central to the nation-building project, chiefly because both are defined as the majority’s cultural heritage. As a result, migration-driven religious diversity is to a much greater extent seen as a threat to the Quebec nation and to secularity modeled as a means to achieve greater national unity, while the legal and political measures proposed to enact this secularity often conflict with the religious commitments of members of minorities’.
12 In January 2023 in the province of New Brunswick, the provincial legislature refused to permit a one-time recital of a Hindu prayer with the clerk of the legislature saying that they would not deviate from the ‘well-established’ recitation of Christian only prayers (Poitras Citation2023). A report by the British Columbia Humanist Association found that in 2018, 23 of the 162 municipalities in British Columbia included prayer in their inaugural meetings. In Ontario, 156 of the 328 inaugural council meetings in 2018 for which data was available included prayer (Phelps Bondaroff et al. Citation2020, Citation2022). Following these findings, one news article from the town of Newmarket in Ontario contentiously stated the report ‘slams Newmarket’ and that the town ‘earned scorn’ (Quigley Citation2022).
13 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Citation1983) in The Invention of Tradition highlight the use of ‘tradition’ as a strategy for the production of social cohesion and nationhood in diverse societies.
14 Brubaker also writes about religion and nationalism as analogous phenomena; religion as a cause or explanation of nationalism and religious nationalism as distinctive nationalism).
15 For an intriguing analysis of media as ‘a discursive space in which the term secular is variously filled and contested’, see Tim Karis’ (Citation2018, p. 331) analysis of the debate over the inclusion of what he describes as nonreligious belief groups in the BBC radio programme Thought for the Day.
16 John Borrows speaks of references to love in land agreements between the state and Indigenous peoples in Canada. Although Borrows is generally positive about love in politics and law, he does not adopt a romantic narrative around it: ‘I reject foundational, universalized, or first-order appeals to love. Calls to love can be co-opted and abused to serve narrow, selfish, and discriminatory purposes. They can be very destructive. Lawyers, judges, politicians, and others might argue that their way of loving is foundational and therefore coerce others to purposes they do not share. The language of love can be dangerous, and we must be exceedingly wary of its appearance. It can be domineering and subordinating. Love can be devastating’ (Borrows Citation2019, p. 28).
17 Simoneau v. Tremblay, 2011. QCTDP 1.
18 Section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, passed in 1982, states: ‘This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians’.
19 Thank you to Lauren Strumos for observing that these founding peoples are usually imagined and articulated as being ‘founding fathers’.
20 Servatius v. Alberni School District No. 70, 2022 BCCA 421. Hereinafter ‘Alberni BCCA'.
21 Strumos (Citation2023) frames the Alberni Court of Appeal decision as a confrontation of settler colonialism.
22 See Beaman (Citation2013a; Citation2020). I am grateful to Marian Burchardt for his comments on the role of law in constructing nationalism.