Religion at the G8/G20: Simply Religion in the Public Sphere? – Simon Appolloni

With the launching of the epic G20/G8 events in Toronto and Huntsville, Ontario (June 25-27, 2010), what better opportunity to examine religion in the public sphere.

One would have to be terribly reclusive or severely anthrophobic not to be aware of the growing civil opposition surrounding the two summits. A simple walk through the citadel (formerly known as downtown Toronto) with its seemingly de rigueur consecration of the rejection of anything smacking of democracy, or a simple gander at a flood of websites, such as The People’s Summit (civil society’s “counter Summit” which happened before the G8 and G20 Summits; see http://peoplessummit2010.ca/section/2 ) will tell you there is much strife and dissatisfaction with how the world is being run. So where are the religions in all this?

They’re there, although you’d have to look, as they are often intermixed with civil society groups or found ruminating in less contentious venues. Most notable of the groups, perhaps, is the World Religions Summit: Interfaith Leaders in the G8 Nations, where up to 100 religious leaders from diverse faiths including Christianity, Judaism, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Islam, Indigenous Spirituality and Shinto traditions have gathered in Winnipeg from June 21-23, 2010 (Winnipeg you ask?! It was at the invitation of Dr. Lloyd Axworthy, President and Vice-Chancellor, University of Winnipeg, in conjunction with the Canadian Council of Churches). Their hope is to push political leaders to address poverty, climate change and armed conflict.

Then, there is the 2010 G-20 Toronto World Leaders Summit of Faith and Business Leaders (unconvincingly advertised – by the minute size of its font – as “not being officially affiliated with the G20 Summit”) which, according to its chairman, Dr. Charles McVety, has its own project: to “gather in praise and prayer to petition God to guide these leaders toward peace and freedom,” with an overall aim to curb the “G20 world leaders’ wild spending” which is “putting our future in jeopardy.” A conference on June 25 includes Karl Rove as keynote speaker along with talks from conservative pundits like Michael Coren, and is backed by sponsors such as the Canada Family Action, the Conservative Values of Canada and B’Nai Brith Canada.

Add to this list Jubilee USA, an alliance of more than 75 religious denominations and faith communities, along with human rights, environmental, labor, and community groups working for the definitive cancellation of crushing debts to fight poverty and injustice in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The group recently gave the G20 nations a near-failing grade for their progress on eradicating world poverty. Tony Blair is weighing in religiously too with his Faith Act Fellows to speak on poverty and disease in the world and what faith can do about it.

Development and Peace, the Canadian Catholic Church’s international development agency, and KAIROS, a Canadian Ecumenical Justice organization, in the lead-up to the G8/G20 summit, joined the At The Table campaign, a coalition of civil society organizations asking that poverty eradication, climate change and economic reform be placed as priorities on the agendas at both the G8 and the G20 meetings. The United Church, along with a an array of groups such as Banyon Youth, Canadian Federation of Students, Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, Community Coalition Against the Mining of Uranium, Mining Watch Canada, No One Is Illegal, Polaris Institute (to name a few!) endorsed the People’s Assembly on Climate Justice: Moving Forward from Cochabamba, June 23. And KAIROS sponsored a town hall meeting the following day entitled, “From Copenhagen to Cochabamba, Toronto and Cancun: How Can We Build the Movement for Climate Justice in Canada.”

Smaller groups, such as Citizens for Public Justice, a national organization of members “inspired by their faith to act for justice in Canadian public policy,” has weighed in. First Nations groups, and not a few women religious and clerics, have also weighed in. Among them is Cole-Arnal, an ordained Lutheran minister who, according to Kitchener’s paper, The Record, June 19, wants “to show his disdain for what he calls the corporate elite and their political allies.”

Finally, let’s not forget the individual blogs written on the summit by religious individuals ranging from self-proclaimed “Christian radicals” to “Christian conservatives.” And while thousands of people are expected to take to the streets and protest the summits, several decidedly more conservative Christian Canadians, we are told, will take to their knees in prayer, among them evangelicals and Catholic Opus Dei adherents.

I do not offer this list as a complete picture of the involvement of religion at the summit; yet, even as it stands, it offers us an interesting snapshot of religion in the public sphere, raising some interesting and distinct observations, depending on where we focus our attention.

Looking at this picture at one level, focusing our eyes just on the religious involvement, we would see religion active in the public sphere, thus putting another stick in the stained spokes of the secularization debate. If there is a rationale that binds the actions of these divergent individuals and group, it is that they all seem to be dissatisfied with how the world is being run. Thus, much like I argued in a previous blog entry (see Monday, December 21, 2009: ‘When it comes to religion, what is it we are dealing with at COP 15?’), religion remains a powerful medium through which both an environmental and social agenda can be presented at a global level.

If this is true, then the thesis put forth by Christiano and Swatos might help us understand from where this dissatisfaction stems. The authors state that what we understand as ‘secularization’ today is the “process by which societies in the experience of ‘modernization’ have created competing institutions for doing better.” The present new ‘religion’ of our time, which the authors cite as the “religion of reason” that emerged in the Enlightenment, is ultimately not doing better. This would seem to be the message of our religious followers above. We should note that according to the authors, the human being suffers from a ‘limitless dissatisfaction’ which, at this point, is now directed at modernization with its mathematico-rational ways of knowing. Thus, Christiano and Swatos suggest that the “return to the sacred” offered by religions is ostensibly our human psyche feeling unfulfilled by the raw materialism offered by the ‘Church of Reason’.

It’s not a bad argument and at one level it seems almost commonsensical. However, two points seem to muddy its clarity with regard to the G8/G20 summits if we refocus our glace to see a broader picture. First, what of the non-religious civil society that is also dissatisfied with how the world is being run? It too, one might presume, is rejecting the modern way of doing things. Yet, its vision is not necessarily a ‘return to the sacred’, or is it? What is sacred? Oh boy, I can see this is getting too deep; let me rise from these theoretical depths a bit a leave with a little thought:

If we look at the demands of, let’s say, the workshop mentioned above, the People’s Assembly on Climate Justice: Moving Forward from Cochabamba, we find not only the United Church but many non-religious groups involved as well. Development and Peace and KAIROS’s involvement in At The Table is decidedly alongside many non-religious groups, NGOs and unions. Many religious affiliated groups are participating in the Shout Out for Global Justice on June 25, sponsored by the Council of Canadians. Moreover, the demands put forth at rallies and gatherings by both religious and non-religious protesters are ostensibly similar: sustainability, justice and democracy. In short, the lines between religious and non-religious groups seem to blur somewhat when one looks at the picture more broadly.

There’s another difficulty that muddies the picture, and one you might have caught. You might have asked, ‘What about the Opus Dei, the conservative Christian bloggers and the G-20 Toronto World Leaders Summit of Faith and Business Leaders with Karl Rove et al?’ Indeed – and at the risk of gross generalization – I think it safe to say their dissatisfaction with the way the world is being run is decidedly different to that of the other religious affiliated individuals and groups mentioned above: those attending workshops or alternative summits co-sponsored by unions, the Council of Canadians, the David Suzuki Foundation and so on. In other words, those more left of the political spectrum.

If this is the case, the conclusions made by Swatos and Christiano where today we are witnessing a “competition” not only between historical religious traditions but also between “historical religious approaches to doing better and other systems of doing better,” presents us with only part of the picture. What we are seeing is not only a competition between a religious way of knowing the world and a non-religious way, but a cooperation among groups and individuals sharing one particular worldview in competition with yet another cooperative venture among groups and individuals sharing a different worldview.

In other words, think a case can be made to show that looking at ‘religion in the public sphere’ under too tight a focus on religion alone, might not adequately assess the phenomenon we are observing. Certainly with regard to the G8/G20 picture above, focusing only on religion skews the overall portrait. Looked at more comprehensively, we find an expression of just how divided our world is by left and right politics. In this way, you have the right religious cooperating with politicians and corporate business leaders while you also have the left religious cooperating with civil society and politicians (albeit seemingly fewer).

We might even put it this way: it is not enough to say, as do Christiano and Swatos, that postmodernity “is nothing more than the disenchantment of that sacrality the Enlightenment gave to Reason…a so-called return to the sacred.” I would argue, in light of what we are seeing at the G8/G20 summits, that we are also witnessing the disenchantment of that sacrality (and power) history conferred to an elite few – who are more pleased with how things are being run – who now form the backbone of the political right of our world. Some religious people like it; some do not.

Notes:

*I’m sticking to a fairly traditional understanding of religion here. If we were to include the notion of civil religion or environmental activism as religion, or even the religion of market-capitalism, then we’d have pretty much everyone participating in the G8/G20 from a religious stance, which isn’t helpful here.

*William H. Swatos, Jr. And Kevin J. Christiano, “Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept,” Sociology of Religion 60, no 3 (1999): 209-228.