Until now, the struggle for inclusion has been on tiptoe when it comes to religions. The Minister of National Defense’s Advisory Group on Systemic Racism and Discrimination has just shattered this taboo with astounding radicalism! The report is 131 pages long, but a graphic suffices to make its main demonstration. Minority groups are all underrepresented at the point of entry into the military, but the higher the military ranks, the fewer women and people of color there are. Knowing that skill and bravery don’t care about skin pigmentation or the arrangement of chromosomes, nothing can explain why promotions are, on average and over time, so unequally distributed.
The novelty is hidden in the section dealing with chaplaincy. Because there remains in the army a service of spiritual and religious accompaniment, as at the time when, in the Quebec Catholic unions, there was a confessor assigned to the souls of workers. The role of chaplains is thus defined: they are “responsible for promoting the spiritual, religious and pastoral care of members of the Armed Forces and their families”.
This is less benign than it seems, the authors point out, because “religion can be a source of generational suffering and trauma. This is especially true for many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and two-spirited members of Canadian society. Additionally, Indigenous peoples have suffered unimaginable generational trauma and genocide at the hands of Christian religious leaders, through initiatives such as residential and Indian day school programs.”
The religious past is indeed quite heavy. But there is also the present. The authors aim for this target: “Currently, some chaplains represent an organized religion or are affiliated with an organized religion whose beliefs do not align with those advocating a diverse and inclusive workplace. Indeed, “the exclusion of women from the priesthood by some churches violates the principles of equality and social justice, as well as the sexist notions embedded in their religious dogmas. In addition, some religions have strict tenets requiring the conversion of those whom they consider to be ‘pagans’ or ‘pagans’ or who belong to polytheistic religions”.
Damn! It is like reading the report written by the Conseil du statut de la femme du Québec in 2011 which proposed the banning of religious symbols within the state. What to do with this penetrating lucidity? French President Georges Clémenceau had denounced in his time “the alliance of the saber and the brush” to describe the too close relationship between the armed State (the saber) and the Church, the brush being the watering can of holy water used during masses. The authors have a small idea of how to deal with this problem: “If the Defense Team rejects gender discrimination, anti-Indigenous discrimination and racialized discrimination in all other areas and strives to remove systemic barriers to the employment of marginalized people, it must not allow the hiring of representatives of organizations that marginalize certain people […] »
Seems a bit stiff, right? Opponents of Bill 21 constantly point out that people who adhere to misogynistic or homophobic religions are, individually, much more open. The committee does not eat this bread: the chaplains of these religions cannot be hired even if they “dissociate themselves from the policies of the religion they have chosen”. See? Even if a Catholic, a Jew or a Muslim claims to be much cooler than what the pope, the chief rabbi or the ayatollah claims, that is not an excuse. It represents a non-inclusive religion, end of discussion! At this point, shouldn’t we simply separate the Church and the State, the saber and the brush, offer the military a secular ethical or psychological adviser and, for religion, tell him to practice it at his leisure, in private ? There seems to be a term for that: secularism. The report does not go that far. We should no longer hire people affiliated with major religions, of course, but we should instead select those who represent “many beliefs, including forms of spirituality beyond the Abrahamic beliefs”, that is to say Christians, Jews and Muslims.
We would like to know the list of these beliefs, but the only indication given concerns the “keepers of indigenous knowledge”. But to hire them, you have to remove a major obstacle. The other candidates for the chaplaincy had to hold a master’s degree to gain access to their function. The report proposes that an academic equivalency be given to First Peoples knowledge keepers. They will be needed in large numbers, because a whole segment of the text is devoted to this question of respect for indigenous practices: they can then be assimilated into the traditional military mold without further consideration for their cultural diversity. Very little effort is made to promote access to traditional indigenous medicines or spiritual practices such as smudging ceremonies. »
The members of the advisory group set an example by opening each of their weekly meetings with an Aboriginal ritual evoking in particular “our Elder Brother the Sun, our Grandfathers the thunder beings, our Grandmother the Moon”. The absence of a non-binary stellar figure does not seem to have posed a problem here.
So, to sum up, we understand that in terms of the separation of the saber and the brush, we must exclude all the religions that are currently represented there, but make a central place for Aboriginal spirituality. Welcome to the era of the saber and the staff of purification.
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