CIVIC RELIGION

CIVIC RELIGION.

The late Mordecai Richler was one of Canada’s leading 20^th century novelists. From the Jewish community in Montreal, Richler fiercely opposed to the narrow French nationalism of Quebec. He was equally dismissive of what he called “sentimental, milquetoast” nationalism of English Canada. A lecture delivered on the Big Ideas program on TVO, Ontario’s educational television network, featured Charles Foran, author of a recent biography of Richler. Yet Foran had difficulty describing the kind of nationalism exhibited in Richler’s numerous novels, magazine and newspaper articles, and television commentaries.

Foran believes that Richler rejected all sense of tribalism, whatever its source. Instead he belonged to a brand of moral individuals springing from Judaism “whose duty is to question and confront” every position that does not meet the highest standards of justice. Without saying so, Foran described a man who was a prophet of his time in the midst of Canada’s struggle to remain a united country.

Canada has a long history of nationalism, particularly in relation to the United States of America. Our first prime minister, John A. Macdonald (1815-1891), was perhaps the greatest of those who could be said to be Canadian nationalists. He was determined to do everything possible to maintain the whole of Canada’s vast geography from east to west coasts as “British North America.” It was his driving motive for striking the political deals that brought about Confederation in 1867. Later he negotiated the entry of Manitoba and British Columbia in the west and Prince Edward Island in the east, as the next provinces to become part of the new “Dominion of Canada” as part of the British Empire.

Today Canada is a vast country stretching from sea to sea to sea, with a very limited population of only 33 million. Our constitutional monarchy expresses a value system that recognizes our place in the world as a nation that seeks to help others protect democracy or achieve freedom and independence. In global geopolitics we have served many times as peacekeepers or peacemakers for the United Nations.

Most everyone may be proud of their own country’s particular brand of nationalism. Some may criticize or condemn it as an extreme form of patriotism. I prefer to call it our civic religion. Each brand of civic religion has its own liturgy, beginning with a national anthem and a constitution that declares the nation’s basic values and system of government. In this country our national holidays and memorials are essential to our civic observances. Our Canada Day celebrations on July 1^st and Remembrance Day parades to the national and local cenotaphs on November 11^th also evoke the liturgies of our civic religion.

One of the more powerful instances of civic religion came  little more than a week ago in the marking of the 10^th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. We in Canada marked the anniversary too by recalling how we had helped the many airline passengers who had been forced to land at airports far from home. We welcomed several thousand passengers from those aircraft into our homes for up to a week while they waited to be cleared to fly on to their destinations in the USA. All this was done without any cost to the passengers. We feel proud of doing more than might have been expected of us. Those simple acts of kindness were a supreme expression of our civic religion.

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