Surely the world can handle a variety of views at one time, religious and secular, says Kevin Little

As an ordained minister and a former candidate for Parliament, I know first hand the tension between church and state. Where is one's ultimate loyalty?

This past year we've witnessed the Prime Minister, a practising Roman Catholic, say that "he must take a wider perspective" than his faith while favouring same-sex
marriages. The implication is that faith is a private matter, that determining government policy is a public one.

And most recently, in response to the London bombings, columnists across this country have called on new immigrants to be made fully aware that in Canada there is a firm wall between church and state.

The catalyst of this debate was former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau, despite being a committed Roman Catholic himself, believed that faith was irrational and
therefore did not belong in public discourse. It was based on something he believed in called "personalism," made famous by the ideas of Emmanuel Mounier and Jacques Maritain, where matters of religious conviction were to be private matters and should never be a serious part of public, political debate.

The former prime minister held true to this conviction. He liberalized divorce and decriminalized homosexuality and told the Canadian Catholic Bishops to butt out when
they criticized his economic policies. The comments I remember were "the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation" and "what do bishops know about economics?" I am troubled by this distinction.

My denominational roots go back to Methodism, and in Canada, Methodism helped develop something we now refer to as the "social gospel." CCF leader and practising Methodist J.S. Woodsworth drew from his Christian faith to fight for programs like medicare, unemployment insurance - the very social programs Canadians now point to as essential to our national identity.

What I don't understand is, why being motivated by faith to get involved in politics should be any different than caring for the environment, the poor or good citizenship?

I think deeper questions are at stake: Should politics and religion mix? Or should religion be relegated to the realm of the merely personal, where the individual soul,
concerned only with the inner life of human beings in their personal relationship to God, like a spare tire in the trunk where we don't think about it until we need it?

Is the church to be judged by how useful it is as a supporting institution and do clergy belong to professions where we help people along in daily living - but do not upset the status quo?

If this is accepted as fact, not only is the issue of homosexuality out of bounds, but so also is child poverty, the environment, Third World debt, and a host of other issues on which the church has spoken out.

To some, the primary entity of democracy is the individual and her/his needs. Society is formed to meet these needs without necessarily commenting on the content of those needs.

Any entity, be it personal or institutional, that suggests a need is inappropriate or even wrong, outright denies the centrality of the individual on which our society is based.


People of faith, both progressive and fundamentalist, believe that society is more than a mechanism to meet the needs of individuals, that there is a profoundly moral component to it.

But I do not believe that God desires a theocracy either, because my theology tells me the law - either that which governs human affairs or that which God decrees - cannot and will not save us. So, to impose biblical law on secular society does violence to both society and the biblical law.

Last year in Alabama, a fundamentalist protestant governor created a stir by taxing the rich and increasing funding to the poor. He did this, he said, because the Bible told
him so. Yet this is the exception rather than the rule.