Religious identity crises

I started my blog in August 2012 by writing up a preliminary version of my political and intellectual autobiography, “A life full of lies”, that I then replaced in April 2013 with a more complete version. That text was essentially an account of all the different controversies that I was involved in during the past several decades, beginning as far back as 1965. Now I would like to add occasional commentaries based on the more recent evolution of many of those same controversies, whenever I feel that I have something to contribute to those ongoing debates, that no one else seems to have thought about.

One such debate that resurfaced in August 2013 is the Quebec government’s newest attempt at trying to impose a more secular approach toward religion, notably by getting public sector employees to refrain from wearing religious insignia when dealing with the public. The minority Parti Quebecois government, re-elected several months ago after a long hiatus, is profiting from the popularity of such a move among francophone Quebecers to force all the other political parties into re-aligning their competing stances on this issue. It looks as if the main focus of the debate is about whether or not to confine this move to only persons in legal authority, such as judges, or to all public sector employees including hospital staff and teachers. Should provincial or municipal personnel be banned from wearing crosses, skull caps, head scarfs and so on, because in so doing they seem to be proselytizing for some particular religion when they ought to be proclaiming ideological neutrality?

I was involved in a similar debate several years ago, in 2007, when I managed to get an article published in a francophone daily denouncing the masochistic attitude of the multicultural experts, trying so hard to “reasonably accommodate” every ultra-conservative religious group’s attempt at imposing its own ideological agenda on the more moderate majority. Unfortunately, then as now the whole controversy about how society is supposed to react in these situations has been sullied by the tendency among most English Canadians to use all-inclusive multiculturalism as a weapon against Quebec separatism, and the opposing tendency to use provincial government neutrality toward religion as a fundamental characteristic of what currently makes French-speaking Quebec different from the rest of Canada.

This time around, however, it suddenly occurred to me that this whole debate ostensibly focused on minority rights and freedom of religion is not really about those things at all. Nor should it be considered as just another part of the ongoing constitutional conundrum. In fact, as I implied in several of my past writings, this religious insignia phenomenon is just a special case of ego identification, all over the world, of people trying to solve their own personal identity crises at everyone else’s expense. Throughout history, the people who become religious fanatics, or ideological fanatics, are constantly attempting to convert everyone else to their own very particular world-view. They really want to turn the world upside down, to get the tail to wag the dog so to speak, thereby enabling the extremist minorities to dictate overall political and social behavior to the moderate majority.

People who ostentatiously attach religious insignia to their person do so for the very same reasons that other attention seekers insist on wearing their nation’s flag on their clothing and their property all the time, even when traveling in a foreign country. Their behavior is also quite similar to that of the Maoists I was involved with back in the 1960s, who always wore their Mao buttons whenever they went out, not to mention waving their copies of the Little Red Book in the faces of everyone they met. Many of today’s religious fanatics insist on showing off their colors even when they are supposed to be dealing with the general public as elected representatives or as appointed officials of government. Then they insult other people’s intelligence by claiming that their religious ostentation has no effect whatsoever on their own professional neutrality.

These toxic personalities are particularly interested in bolstering their over-weaning egos by forcing everyone else to adapt to their way of thinking, rather than the other way around. They are part and parcel of the currently dominant wave of libertarian individualism, as in the Tea Party movement in the USA, claiming blatant proselytism as a fundamental human right rather than the more obvious right of normal people to be left alone. Women sporting head scarves, face masks or even overall body armor, are also insulting others by trying to pretend that the very sight of their unadorned beauty would automatically turn every nearby male into a significant threat to their own security.

Moderate practitioners of the various religions that these extremists profess are particularly targeted by such blatant ostentation. They are required to constantly defend their religions by pointing out to non-believers that it is really quite possible, after all, to be a good Christian, or a good Jew, or a good Muslim, etc., without putting on a ceremonial costume in public, particularly when they find themselves in a position of authority.

Unfortunately, it seems highly unlikely that the Quebec government, or any other secular administration, will ever be able to prevail in this debate. In a world chock full of unabashed super-egos, including multi-billion-dollar vulture capitalists, arrogant big-time polluters and mass-murdering dictators, any attempt at controlling such a relatively insignificant form of social bullying is probably doomed to fail.