Raymond J. de Souza: Quebec's war on Islam an attack on the religious liberty of all

The Liberal government’s plan, at the behest of the Bloc Québécois, to remove the religious faith exemption from the Criminal Code prohibition on hate speech ran into unexpected and formidable opposition this week. A House committee meeting was abruptly cancelled on Thursday, leaving the future of the amendment, and the Liberals’ hate speech bill itself, in question.

Hate speech restrictions inherently sit uneasily with constitutional free speech rights, so Canada’s hate speech laws currently have some safeguards. The provincial attorney general must authorize a prosecution. The law cannot be used to limit religious liberty.

The background to the current Bloc proposal is that Quebec is going through a period of anxiety about the public face of Islam in the province. The provincial government has proposed banning all prayer in public — and even in relatively private spaces, such as prayer rooms in public institutions — because it does not like Muslims (aggressively, in its view) praying in public squares. It cannot ban Muslim prayer alone, so it looks to ban Christian and Jewish prayer, too.

It repeats Quebec’s approach to religious dress in government jobs: the province did not want Muslim teachers or nurses wearing the hijab, so it banned Christian and Jewish religious symbols, too, including Montreal police from wearing badges of their patron, St. Michael the Archangel.

This time around, the proximate cause has been the prevalence in Quebec — and elsewhere in Canada — of anti-Israel demonstrations after the Hamas terror massacres of 2023. They became occasions of overt antisemitism, sometimes including anti-Jewish vandalism and violence.

Why modifying the hate speech law would be effective when the police have been notably reluctant to enforce other laws regarding harassment and disturbing the peace remains a question. Still, there is support in the Jewish community for tougher hate speech laws, even at the cost of diminishing religious liberty. The leadership of Canada’s Christian communities have been strong in their opposition and have the support of the Conservatives.

Quebec’s particular discomfort with public Islam has its roots across the Atlantic, in the French commitment to laïcité, or state secularism. The French Revolution sought not only to overthrow the French monarchy, but the centuries of altar-and-throne arrangements in which the French crown and the French Catholic Church shared governance of society.

Altar-and-throne arrangements were the norm in Christian Europe, which is why civil authorities sought to govern religious practice and made a crime of heresy. It was altogether predictable that when altar-and-throne was replaced with throne alone, things might get worse for liberty, power now being more concentrated. Across the English Channel, King Henry VIII gave a preview of that in the 16th century.

The French innovation was to abolish the throne, too, concentrating power in the hands of zealous revolutionaries. That produced the Terror, and an orgy of lethal vandalism against French culture, history and faith. Laïcité did not get off to a promising start. It is supposed to promote liberty. It often fails, as is now the case in Quebec and, if the Bloc gets its way, in Canada.

Laïcité can coexist with French or Quebec history and culture — what Pope Benedict XVI called an “open” rather than “closed” secularity, with a state that is truly neutral, rather than suppressing religious expression in favour of aggressive secular fundamentalism.

Often enough in history, Christians promoted altar-and-throne arrangements, but they are not essentially required by the faith, and have now lost favour. The Christian faith began with three centuries of (sometimes fearsome) state persecution in the Roman Empire. The original throne of Jesus was an excruciating altar — the cross.

Islam is a different matter. Muhammad died in 632 as a successful conqueror and civic ruler. The Islamic conception of society tends therefore to the theocratic, not so much altar-and-throne as altar, or mosque, alone. In recent decades though, there have been important theological and social developments in rethinking Islamic conceptions of state power, not least in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country.

Nevertheless, Islam historically offends against the secular fundamentalism of France and Quebec, and, as local Muslim populations have significantly increased due to immigration, that tension has grown. Hence the preference in both jurisdictions for the use of state power against public manifestations of Islam, with Christianity and Judaism thrown in to appear neutral.

Aggressive secularism, contrary to how it presents itself, has the same totalizing tendencies as the publicly assertive Islam it claims to combat. It needs to police how people dress, how they speak, how the gather — even whether they pray. The grand emptiness that secularism offers turns out not to be that compelling without the smack of state coercion.

It was reported this week that Notre-Dame cathedral, in its first year after re-opening, had more visitors than before the great fire, some 11 million. It is a reminder that the monuments that stir the soul and draw the pious and curious are not the works of laïcité.

For the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, “La Grande Arche de la Défense” was added to the monuments of Paris. It is massive, impressive, even possessing a certain beauty arising from its proportions. But it remains a vast emptiness, a hollow cube that houses nothing but government offices in its soaring sides. It is bureaucratized nihilism. Can there be anything less moving of the human spirit?

Faith in general, and Islam in particular, is not content with bureaucratized emptiness as the organizing principle of a worthy human life .That is what Quebec nationalists seem to have on offer, as long as it is articulated in the French language. And if people do not desire it, state power will force it upon them.

National Post