Religious culture and neofascist ethics

I just finished reading a book about a compulsory course, or rather program, called “Ethics and Religious Culture”, that has been imposed on all primary and secondary students in Quebec since 2008. The book, La face caché du cours “Éthique et culture religieuse”, (literal translation: (The hidden face of the course on “Ethics and Religious Culture”) was published in 2016 and edited by Daniel Baril and Normand Baillargeon. It is in fact a series of a dozen critical essays, written singly or collectively by a total of 14 different authors, seven of those texts severely criticizing many different aspects of the ECR program and five more texts proposing different ways of replacing that program with something much more appropriate. Most of the authors are Quebec educators, philosophers and freethinkers well-known for their support of laicity, secularism and critical thinking.

Another contributor, Sylvie Midavaine, is a teacher and freethinker from France whose text describes the various different ways by which France’s historically rigorous separation of Church and State (since 1905), particularly in that nation’s schools, has been undermined recently by revisionist consultants like Régis Debray. Since 2001, while pretending to do a better job of teaching students about religion, as an ordinary fact of life, those revisionists have really decided to promote religion as a remedy for current social problems instead. The other non-Québécois contributor, philosopher Christopher DiCarlo from Ontario, suggests that every Canadian province, including Quebec, should reject any program similar to the one adopted in Quebec, and replace it with a much more progressive program aimed at teaching critical thinking instead, that has recently been developed, and approved, for secondary schools in Ontario.

The main argument of the ten essays focused on the Quebec program, is that it is an enormous step backward for that province’s schools to have reintroduced religious education only eight years after they were finally liberated from the grip of the previously existing Catholic and Protestant school boards. Even though Quebec replaced its largely private, Christian school system, originally adopted in 1875, with a much more modern, state-run Ministry of Education back in 1964, an enormous effort still had to made to overcome all sorts of complicated constitutional hurdles protecting the denominational school boards up until the year 2000.

For a brief period of time, parents in Quebec had a choice between registering their children in a traditional religious course, or sending them instead to a non-religious, “personal and social development” program. During the opening years of this century, however, the highly emotional political debate concerning to what extent Quebec should accommodate an ever-increasing number of demands for special treatment in public institutions, coming from several different kinds of fundamentalist religious groups, spilled over into the education sector. Even though the Quebec government initially promised that it would not promote religion openly, but would adopt a more neutral approach, it decided instead in 2008 to introduce the “Ethics and Religious Culture” program into all of its schools. This compulsory course has in fact eliminated all pretences at overall government neutrality toward religion.

For example, in the “ethics” part of the program, children are taught that whereas in the past Quebec society was heavily biased in favour of men (sexism), nowadays gender equality has been accepted as the new norm. However, in the “religious culture” part of the program, the whole idea of sexual equality is totally ignored in the textual part of the manuals made available to teachers, while the very numerous illustrations used in those same manuals almost always show girls and women engaged in “traditional” occupations like cooking and cleaning, rather than in going to work every day like the men do. The same misogynist bias also shows up in practically all the projects being proposed to pupils, in order to get their grades. The number one preoccupation of the authors of those manuals seems to be to studiously avoid all possible criticism of the traditional religious bias against gender equality. The refusal to criticize any religion, in any way at all, supposedly being justified by the need to present every religion in an entirely “positive” light, so as to naively make every religious community “feel good” about every other religious community. All teachers are instructed to always promote the slogan “vivre ensemble”, in other words “live together (harmoniously)”.

The authors of the essays directly criticizing the ECR program have come up with hundreds of examples taken from that program to show just how incredibly biased it is in favour of religion, particularly in favour of the more fundamentalist interpretations of each designated religion. The program is heavily focused on the Christian religion, and only uses references to the Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu and indigenous religions in a vain attempt to appear unbiased, while making no reference to such other religions as Confucianism or Shintoism. No attempt whatsoever is made to accommodate unbelievers, who according to recent polls make up about 12% of the total Quebec population. Nor does the program take into account the fact that most of the people in Quebec, from every religious community, are only “cultural believers”, who say that they belong to some particular religious denomination, such as Catholicism or Sunni Islam, for reasons of cultural identity, but who are not the least bit interested in actually practising whatever religion to which they claim to adhere.

As in the religious accommodations debate, the Quebec government has been heavily influenced by such anti-Enlightenment philosophers as Charles Taylor, Canada’s number one advocate of multiculturalism, as well as by a large number of like-minded civil servants in the Ministry of Education, left over from the previously existing, confessional administration. Taylor and his followers believe that Western civilization made a major mistake after the Middle Ages by going back to the ancient Greek philosophers rejection of religion in favour of rationalism and critical thinking, then going on to develop modern science instead. They are convinced that a major emphasis on traditional spirituality is the only way to save every separate culture from the moral and social “collapse” that they feel is inevitably brought on by the loss of traditional cultural landmarks. They also believe that each religious community should always remain entirely separate from every other such community, even when living side by side, and that all such communities should not allow any impious elements to try to foist any possible universal or secular values on any of them.

In other words, Quebec’s ECR program has become a sort of “moral rearmament” policy aimed at saving society from materialist perdition, in the same hypocritical way that the ultra-conservative, and ultra-corrupt, Duplessis government tried to promote a similar, ultra-Catholic, political program during the “Grande Noirceur”. Which is to say, during the “dark age” of Quebec history, at first from 1936 to 1939 and then from 1944 to 1959, when Maurice Duplessis was the provincial premier. In a recent article in Quebec’s Le Devoir newspaper (March 19, 2017), doctoral student Jérôme Blanchet-Gravel also referenced Taylor’s multiculturalism as being quite similar to the “total renovation” of Western society that was being proposed several decades ago by such reactionary thinkers as René Guénon, using traditional, religious-identity attitudes imported from Oriental countries in order to save the West from its supposedly unfortunate modernism.

For Daniel Baril, the ECR program also closely resembles Isiah Berlin’s “Counter-Enlightenment” philosophy, which treated all possible points of view as if they had equal value. I would add that many aspects of the program also seem quite similar to the efforts being made nowadays by the recently elected Trump administration in the USA, using slogans like “alternative facts” in order to appear to give minimal support to physical science and technology, but only for the defence industry, while rapidly eliminating all the social and biological sciences, as well as the humanities, and replacing them with a massive return to old-time religion. From a scientific point of view, however, religious belief in totally imagined heavenly fathers and heavenly mandates in fact possesses about the same degree of (in)credibility as belief in magic and other paranormal nonsense. Which is entirely different from the rigorous testing of hypotheses through observation of nature and experimentation that are the hallmarks of modern science. Expressions like “Christian science”, “Islamic science”, “a democratic Jewish state”, and so on, also have to be seen for what they really are, that is as propaganda attempts at deliberately confusing fact with fiction.

Another major shortcoming of this program, that was also thoroughly denounced in the book, is its ridiculous attempt to present morality as if it were entirely dependent on religion. This is another incredibly bogus idea, which seems strangely out of place in today’s world, when innocent victims are being massacred every day, all over the world, not only by hundreds of thousands of paramilitary religious fanatics but also by their regular-military enemies, constantly bombing civilians from the air instead of confronting the terrorists head on. Any serious student of history, as well as of current events, has to laugh out loud at any suggestion that religious ideologies could possibly have anything whatever to do with improving the world’s overall level of morality. This is equivalent to trying to suggest that the totalitarian communist program of “militant atheism” turned all the former communist (or state-capitalist) countries into bastions of moral superiority. Today’s most important, proselytizing ideologies, neoliberalism and neofascism, are just as bad, or even worse, from a moral standpoint.

The entire thrust of Quebec’s ECR program seems to be aimed, as essayist André Gagné pointed out, at “radicalizing” as many young Québécois as possible, turning them into out and out, raving-lunatic, religious fanatics. His solution, teaching the history of religion instead from an uncompromising, scientifically accurate point of view, is an excellent idea since it would certainly discourage the formation of fundamentalist extremism, rather than encouraging it like the present program does.

As I pointed out in the article (“Gare au racisme raisonnable”) that I published ten years ago (September 16, 2007) in the Quebec newspaper, La Presse, there are already far too many true believers in religious fundamentalism, spread out all over the world. Millions of people in the West are already reacting in a “racialized”, Islamophobic way toward Muslims, treating every Muslim as a terrorist and refusing to recognize that most of the world’s Muslims are in fact “moderate” or “cultural” believers, rather than fanatics. Millions more people in the Muslim-majority countries have also been reacting for quite some time in the same, “racialized” fashion toward Christians (“Christianophobia”), Jews (anti-semitism) and all the other religious minorities in their midst (such as Yazidis or Druzes). Millions of Hindus in India are also reacting to religious minorities in that country (Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, etc.), in the same “racialized” fashion. The same thing goes for Buddhist majorities treatment of their own religious minorities in predominantly Buddhist countries and Jewish treatment of their minorities in Israel. And so on and so forth, all over the world.

The last bloody thing that this world needs now is yet another country (or province like Alberta) deliberately fomenting religious fanaticism inside its education system. Every neofascist country and movement on this blighted planet, from the USA to Turkey, from Hungary to Myanmar (Burma), from Russia to Malaysia, from Brazil to Nigeria, from Bangladesh to Australia, needs to turn its public schools into another crucible for fundamentalism even less than it needs to embark on such equally reactionary projects as building a new, or much-expanded, nuclear-weapons, or fossil-fuels, program.