Something is only "secular" within a given theology

I continue not to receive unanimous support for my arguments in favour of treating all religions equally in Ontario. I imagine John Tory knows how I feel. The Left is scared of evangelicals (F.R. Scott's defence of the Jehovah's Witnesses would make him unwelcome in all the circles he helped create). The Right wets its bed at the notion of Muslims.

Not that either of them is necessarily wrong. The idea that a society can cohere with a genuine diversity of ultimate metaphysical commitments or "comprehensive conceptions of the good" is hardly justified by either logic or evidence. Few of the traditions of the world would have endorsed the idea, and none of the interesting political theorists would.

Commenter "B" wants religion out of politics altogether. I think this is closer to the French/Turkish notion of laïcité to anything I could recognize as non-establishment and free expression, let alone the Canadian tradition. Canadian politics has always been about religion, even more than language, and certainly more than ideology or class.

The difficulty is that laïcité (and, for that matter, the more civilized Protestant traditions of free exercise) are themselves theological conceptions. Indeed, you really only can have a notion of the "secular" within some theological space.

Although maybe that isn't really a difficulty. All states need a civil religion -- and laïcité could in principle provide it, as long as you could make it stick. I don't think you can make it stick in English Canada, because those who like it will never breed enough. Also, you'd need tanks, or at least guns, and again I suspect the social base for laïcité don't know how to use them.

I think it would be better to think through what our civil religion should require in a way that acknowledges that the evangelicals, the Ismailis and possibly other Muslims could be a part of it. Fund everyone willing to take the money on those terms and ruthlessly suppress the rest.

We Respond to Our Critics

I'd like to do a big post on the Ontario schools question, with citations to Rawls and Grant and so forth, but time is scarce. So I'll just reprint my response to the critics in the comment box (especially since the last response got cut off by Haloscan):

DC,

I'm not completely sure whether you are genuinely advancing an argument against public funding of education or are making a reductio to the effect that if non-breeders can't complain about their tax money going to other people's offspring, nobody can complain about any allocation of tax money at all, no matter how sectarian and discriminatory.

It doesn't matter, I suppose, since if the earnest argument doesn't work, the reductio doesn't either. If we think of the tax money as being spent on children, rather than the parents of children, there is no discrimination since everyone is a child at some point in their life-cycle. If that doesn't convince you, there is still the question of external benefits from (a) other people having children and (b) those children being educated. Finally, there are also subsidies to the childless, so maybe things work out in the end (although I wouldn't put a lot of weight on that one).

None of these things are true of funding the religious education of one confession and no others. Protestants don't become Catholics at some point in their lives. If there are external benefits to Protestants of educating Catholics, they can't really exceed those to Catholics of educating Protestants. Moreover, this is clearly a case of a subsidy that has no counter-balance anywhere else in the overall system of public expenditure.

B.

If history has a direction in a descriptive sense, it is impossible to reverse it. If you believe it has a direction in a prescriptive sense, you have a controversial (and false) theological belief. I can't see why people who disagree with this belief should have to send their children to be indoctrinated by those who think otherwise.

The distinction between a sewer system and an educational one is that it is genuinely possible to keep sewage merely technical, bracketing "comprehensive conceptions of the good." We all want our shit to flow somewhere it won't cause trouble. (Even if there are people who feel otherwise, there are non-metaphysical reasons to coerce them.)

Education is different. You can't teach kids in a purely technical way.

Andy,

Are constitutional arrangements a contract of adhesion that those coming here freely can't object to since they had notice of them? I'm probably more sympathetic to that idea than most Canadians, which doesn't make me very sympathetic.

But even on that view, I'd doubt that the original compact has really been maintained. In 1867, the regular public schools could be assumed to be generically Protestant. They'd avoid the disputes between Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians, but everyone would be taught the Lord's Prayer and the Whig Interpretation of History.

Neither Protestantism nor the public schools are what they used to be. A generation ago, it might have been possible to assume that they were both travelling in the same self-liquidating secularizing direction. But your future in Ontario is our present in the West: it belongs to the sects that proletyze and have kids, not the United Church. But those sects have as much right to claim descent from the Protestants of 1867 as do the lapsed secular types. So the initial deal, however fair in its time, has become unfair -- even to one of the original parties. We need to apply a cy pres solution, and Tory is approaching it.

Ontario: Fund Everybody's Schools

Those who like history to repeat itself (whether farcically or otherwise) will be happy to see the next Ontario election is going to be fought over the funding of religious schools. Somewhere the shade of George Brown is chuckling.

American readers may be a bit starteld to know that Ontario publicly funds Roman Catholic schools and those of no other religious groups. This arrangement is constitutionalized, and reflects a time when the public schools provided non-denominational Protestant instruction for the province's majority, and the only religious minority were the Papists. It is beyond dispute that them days are over: the public schools teach only the sub-Marxist mush popular in education faculties, unappealing to those who take their Protestanism seriously, and there are now other religious groups with their own insistent demands.

John Tory, of the eponymous Progressive Conservative Party, has proposed to remedy this situation by providing equival funding for evangelical, Mormon, Sikh or Muslim schools on the same basis as currently provided to those in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. The Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty decided to come out swinging this week in total opposition, referring to it as "segregation", "regressive," and contrary to multiculturalism.

In support of the "farce" idea, it turns out McGuinty is himself a product of the "regressive" and "segregated" Catholic school system, and his wife works in it. Moreover, his one plausible argument -- that a common public system is necessary to assimilate Muslims and wingnut kids. The trouble with this argument, though, is that as long as Ontario isn't going to ban home schooling and private schools, it isn't going to get at the people you most have to worry about. Those who abide by the public funding rules will necessarily be taking a move into the mainstream. Further, the public schools already teach the toxic stew of victim identity politics.

More fundamentally, it is just wrong to require parents to put their kids in schools that teach things they abhor if they want to take advantage of their own taxes. It is impossible NOT to teach some sort of religious view in schools, and the "religion of progress" is just as much a matter of faith as young earth creationism.

I suspect McGuinty's position will hurt the Liberals electorally -- if not right away, then over the next generation. He is taking on the most demographically dynamic groups on an issue they are likely to care much more about than anyone else. And the hypocrisy of his position in favour of his own religion can't be dodged.

If the Catholic hierarchy is serious about religious freedom, it should distance itself from McGuinty.