Title: The Challenges of Religious Pluralism in Kingston, Ontario

Published in: Canadian Journal of Urban Research 15/2 (2006): 50-66.

Authors: William Closson James and Laurie K. Gashinski

Acknowledgments: The authors acknowledge the support of a SSHRC General Research Grant for the project Religious Diversity in Kingston.

Abstract

The Challenges of Religious Pluralism in Kingston, Ontario

During its centennial year of 1967 Canada was being transformed from a Christian country to a religiously pluralistic one (Miedema 2005). Almost four decades later, Peter Beyer predicts that immigration from non-English and largely non-Christian parts of the world will mean, assuming persistence of the trends evident from 1981 to 2001, that "the religious landscape of Canada will continue to become more pluralistic, especially in favour of the three largest non-Christian worldwide religions, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism" (Beyer 2005). Yet, despite aging congregations and plummeting church attendance, the lineaments of something like a Christian culture linger in many Canadian towns and cities, reinforced by such measures as the observance of Good Friday and Christmas as statutory holidays, or Ontario's support of a Separate (i.e., Roman Catholic) school system (and comparable measures in some other provinces), or the continuing vaguely theistic affirmations of God in the National Anthem, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and prayers in Parliament (Biles and Ibrahim 2004).

The prophecy of inevitable and complete secularization has failed. David Lyon cogently points out that instead of "no religion" we have "deregulated, reshaped, relocated, and restructured religion" (Lyon and Van Die 2000). Religion has not disappeared from the public into the private sphere. The resulting situation has become far more complex than a simple bifurcation between those wanting more Christianity in the public realm and those who wish society to be free of all religion, or what in the United States has become a polarization of the religious right against the secular left.[1] Religious pluralism, largely the result of immigration, has meant that the alternatives of Christian hegemony versus secularism have been enriched and complicated by immigrants to Canada who are Jews and Muslims, Buddhists and Sikhs and Hindus, Zoroastrians and Confucians.[2] Their doctrines and worship and behavioural codes and rituals necessitate adjustments and accommodations that towns and cities could not have imagined a generation ago. Kingston, Ontario exhibits many of the tensions and adjustments exhibited in municipalities across Canada, as the presence of diverse religious traditions affects the way in which school boards, city government, and municipal agencies conduct their business early in the 21^st century, often challenging the customary ways of doing things inherited from an earlier era.

Only nine cities in Canada have a population of more than a half-million people. But the next twenty cities range from 500,000 down to 100,000 people. When Kingston (pop. 146,838) is compared with Canada at large, we find that it mirrors the national distribution of population by age, but with fewer immigrants, a larger proportion of highly educated people, and more employment in health and social services and in education. Kingston has been characterized as "an institutional town" (one thinks of its schools and prisons and hospitals) that has changed little over the past 300 years. In the popular view Kingston epitomizes Upper Canada's Anglo-Celtic customs and values (Osborne and Swainson 1988).

Hugh MacLennan was undertaking to depict this Upper Canadian ethos in his novel The Precipice, set in the fictional town of Grenville on Lake Ontario during the 1930s. MacLennan portrayed Grenville, in company with almost every other Ontario town rooted in the Victorian era, as having “streets sweetened by names redolent of British colonial history: Wellington Street, Simcoe Street, Sydenham Avenue, Duke Street, Elgin Lane.” As MacLennan so perceptively observed, “there was hardly a British general, admiral, or cabinet minister who had functioned between the French Revolution and the accession of Queen Victoria who was not commemorated in the name of a street, town, or county somewhere in Ontario” (MacLennan 1948). Grenville’s traditions, even in the period between the wars, bore many of the characteristics of the nineteenth-century Protestant culture of the old Ontario that William Westfall has so ably described (Westfall 1989).

It was another renowned Canadian novelist, Robertson Davies, who in his first trilogy set in the 1950s fictionalized (and satirized) Kingston under the name of Salterton, a small eastern Ontario city whose centres of civic power were the Anglican cathedral, the newspaper, the university and, to a lesser extent, the military college. A few years earlier, under the guise of the slyly ironic newspaper columnist Samuel Marchbanks, Davies had given a comparative description of Kingston in the 1940s:

Those "domes" would of course include Kingston's City Hall and the architecturally similar St. George's Cathedral, as well as Kingston Penitentiary, while the "spires" might refer to both the Gothic architecture of Sydenham Street United Church or of St. Mary's Roman Cathedral, and of Queen's University's Grant Hall. Moral, yes; but can the limestone features of a psychiatric hospital, homes for the aged, or prisons–"its houses of refuge and correction"–truly be said to be "kindly"? Kingston has not had the reputation of adapting rapidly to change, nor of being a city hospitable to outsiders or recent arrivals, though its size and location have more to do with a relatively small proportion of immigrants than overt unfriendliness. And, ironically enough, much of the city's religious and ethnic diversity comes from its hospitalized and incarcerated and student populations, rather than from its permanent residents.[3]

How has the increased ethnic and religious diversity of the past generation, together with other changing practices, altered the face of religion within this mostly unilingual city? And, how has the municipality responded to these changes? Geographer Brian Osborne shows how in the nineteenth century the fortunes of Kingston's major Presbyterian congregation, St. Andrew's, were intricately bound up with the origins of Queen's University and the city of Kingston itself, in addition revealing much about the battles and vicissitudes within the Christianity of that era (Osborne 2004). And at least some of those sectarian struggles stemmed from different immigrant groups having religions not identical with those of earlier arrivals.[4]

In 1824 a Presbyterian funeral procession bearing a child's body (the son of one of the elders of St. Andrew's) made its way towards the burial ground only to find its entrance blocked by Anglicans asserting their sole rites to inter the corpse. For the burial to proceed the Presbyterian minister had to defer to the Anglican priest. In 1843, and continuing for several more decades, a series of violent skirmishes erupted between Irish Protestants, who were supporters of the Orange Lodge, and Roman Catholics, culminating in a shooting death at the building site of the new Catholic cathedral. One outcome was a local split between Scottish and Irish Presbyterians. Today a cannon commemorating such antecedent animosities within the United Kingdom more than three centuries ago still sits on the lawn of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, its barrel more or less pointed in the direction of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral. In 1891, with temperance issues in the fore, the Presbyterians were objecting to the establishment of a new tavern across the intersection from their church–the same intersection where more than one hundred years later Presbyterians have had to cope with street people using the church lawn or objectionable advertising in the window of a clothing store. Internally, there were also debates among Presbyterians about the celebration of the "'popish' festival" of Christmas, not that far removed from today's controversies around the meanings and observances attached to Christmas. Many of these battles of nineteenth-century Christianity parallel and foreshadow contemporary problems (Osborne 2004).

Even in the early twenty-first century some of these issues–religious-secular conflict, interreligious conflict, tensions among groups of immigrants or between more recent immigrants and long-time residents, the assumption of religious privilege on the part of an entrenched tradition–continue, though Presbyterians are less likely to be in the thick of them. Presbyterians have waned in relative size, importance, and influence, in Kingston and in Canada, over the past two centuries. And though Christians continue to have some of their most vehement quarrels with their co-religionists of other denominations and differing theologies, or even internally within their own churches, the growth of religions other than Christianity has created a new urban reality. Christian hegemonic assumptions are challenged by matters as diverse as providing separate times for Muslim women at a municipal swimming pool, accommodating the presence of a gay or lesbian couple at the graduation dance of a Separate School, or deciding about the distribution of explicitly Christian materials (e.g., the shoeboxes prepared for Operation Christmas Child) at public schools.

Though Jews have been present in Kingston since the nineteenth century, only in 2003 did the city elect its first Jewish mayor, Harvey Rosen. Rosen, at the time also the president of Beth Israel Congregation, announced as one of his first acts that there would be no religious dimension to the installation ceremony for the new council: "The simplest thing would be to eliminate it." The alternative–to have one or a number of clergy administer an invocation, prayer, or blessing at this multifaith council–was reportedly rejected as too "complicated" or "difficult" (Phillips 2003). The mayor's decision, while far from a unique response, was not the only option for altering existing practices, often persisting for a century or more, that assumed a uniformly Christian society.

In 1999 the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in a case arising in another jurisdiction that the Lord's Prayer, whose use tended to "impose a Christian moral tone on the deliberations of Council," violated religious freedom (Csillag 1999). The decision resulted from the efforts of one of the few Jewish residents of Penetanguishene, an Ontario town of eight thousand people, who felt pressured to stand and recite the Lord's Prayer with others when he attended council meetings. Reportedly, he had even discarded the idea of running for council because of this practice. The court suggested as an alternative that the town "follow the lead of the House of Commons, where, since 1994, proceedings have opened with a moment of silence and a non-denominational prayer." Penetanguishene's mayor seemed not to comprehend the principles involved and issued a statement reporting that townspeople were having difficulty "understanding how one person can dictate what they can say or not say" (Csillag 1999). Diana Eck, who since the early 1990s has headed up the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, says that Americans must discover a form of "positive pluralism" beyond mere tolerance or recognition of the diversity of religions. She argues that Christians need to discover ways of maintaining the truths they find within their own religion without denying the validity of other faith traditions for those practising them (Eck 2001).

But even if the wishes of a majority cannot settle what mode of religious invocation might be used to open a city council meeting, neither can the objections of every possible minority be anticipated or satisfactorily accommodated. In 2001 the Ottawa City Council voted to retain its opening prayer, "Almighty God, let us work together to serve all our people," despite its invocation of a "singular supreme being" that excluded atheists, non-theists, or people having no religious faith (Wheeler 2001). When a secular humanist objected that the council in Renfrew, near Ottawa, violated his religious freedom with recitation of a prayer that named God, the court ruled against the objection. (It is worth noting, as an aside, that such objections seem more often to come from atheists or secularists than from nontheists or non-monothesist such as Hindus or Buddhists or Confucians.) Justice Hackland, citing parallel phrasing in the Charter, observed that the reference to God in a prayer as a source of values was not "a coercive effort to compel religious observance":

The question of how to "commit the act of religion in public," as someone has phrased the issue, remains a challenge within a religiously diverse Canada. Members of a Roman Catholic order, the Sisters of Providence, have themselves demonstrated ways in which public multifaith ventures might be conducted. More than a decade ago they initiated a weekly silent vigil against poverty outside City Hall. On key occasions representatives from other faith groups have joined them. On the tenth anniversary of their Silent Vigil, for example, there was an interfaith service with participation from Orthodox and Reform Judaism and various Christian denominations, as well as Quaker, Unitarian, Hindu, and Muslim representatives. While broadly inclusive representation might be unwieldy on every single occasion, other alternatives exist, such as rotating through a roster of participants, or drawing on a selection of prayers from various faith groups, or using an inclusive, more generic prayer.

In many parts of Canada old customs die hard, especially at particular seasons of the year. In Toronto a few years ago the city came under fire when in an attempt at inclusivity the civic Christmas tree began to be referred to as a "holiday tree." A spokesperson for B'nai Brith Canada opined that "to take a generic term, slap it on a symbol that really only has significance to one religion ... and then say we're being multicultural does not really fit." Common sense would seem to support the view that "whatever you call it, it's still a Christmas tree" (Reuters 2002). And Bernie Farber of the Canadian Jewish Congress thought this renaming was an excess of political correctness: "It's time to sort of get on with life, accept everybody for who they are and revel in their holidays as opposed to look for ways to deny people's holidays. It's just plain silly" (Reuters 2002).

In Kingston in 2004 some objections were raised about a city employee who sent Christmas greeting cards to co-workers in City Hall. After the story appeared in the local newspaper, The Kingston Whig-Standard, letters to the editor took up both sides of the issue, some seeing the gesture as a well-meaning expression of goodwill while others thought it was insensitive. Local religious leaders, including Jewish and Muslim representatives, in general have agreed that people should be free to extend whatever form of greeting they wish–though of course they cannot expect a religiously identical reciprocal greeting. In concert with contemporary practice, the City of Kingston recently made the decision to refer to December as the holiday season rather than the Christmas season, and to holiday hours rather than Christmas hours (Popplewell 2005). Nonetheless, a "Christmas tree" remains, perhaps anomalously, in the office of Kingston's Jewish mayor, decorated by the H'Art Studio, a local organization for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (City of Kingston 2005). This "holiday" versus "Christmas" debate was greatly reinvigorated in 2005 when Boston seemed about to rename a Nova Scotian gift of a Christmas tree a "holiday tree," and a similar fate threatened the tree at Rideau Hall. In both cases the threat was averted when Boston's mayor and Canada's Governor General both opted for the more traditional nomenclature they themselves had grown up with (Ottawa Citizen 2005).

While a municipal Christmas tree, especially if interpreted as secular seasonal symbol, or Christmas cards distributed by one city employee might be acceptable or at least excusable, a more explicitly religious representation such as a public manger scene may well cause offense. In the United States displays featuring the symbol of one religion have been prohibited in public places, because church-state separation forbids favouring one religion above another (Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance 2005). A religious symbol might be acceptable if paid for privately rather than by public funds, or if one religious exhibit is "offset" by the symbol of a second religion (e.g., placing a menorah alongside a créche). In one Florida town, however, the town removed both displays when it was objected that placing a menorah beside a Christmas tree amounted to foisting the Jewish religion upon residents (Lithwick 2001).

In Kingston a nativity scene, owned, maintained, and stored by the City, is erected annually in Confederation Park across the street from City Hall. In 2002 Isabel Turner, then Kingston's mayor, contradicted a news report that its installation was going to be discontinued after some complaints had been voiced. The Mayor announced that council members had agreed to continue the practice. She also reported that "the majority of councillors want all creeds to be offered an equal opportunity to erect and display symbols of their faith that recognize important dates or events" (City of Kingston 2002). But would such an "equal opportunity" not mean that another faith group could ask the city to purchase a religious object appropriate to their tradition, and then have it erected, dismantled, and stored by the Parks Operations department at the taxpayers' expense? Because such a request for equal treatment is unlikely to emerge from a minority religious group that has appeared only comparatively recently in the city this civic presentation of Christianity continues.

Close to the nativity scene an outdoor stage provides the venue for the performance of music by various groups. Salvation Army members, who have used the area adjacent to City Hall since the nineteenth century, have sung hymns and gospel songs. In other ways too religious groups have made use of public civic space. One church distributed flyers throughout their neighbourhood inviting people to join them in a nearby city park for food, refreshments, and entertainment. Whether this occasion served a missionizing or evangelistic purpose for the group, rather than general service to the community or an opportunity to get acquainted, one can imagine that aggressive preaching or giving testimonials in parks or on street corners might today arouse objections, despite a general understanding that there exists the freedom in Canada to promulgate one's religion. Regulations governing the barricading of streets for parades or other events might affect religious organizations differentially. A group of Christians still gets approval to march down the city's main street with a cross on Good Friday, but could the city similarly accommodate other religious organizations on their sacred days—especially if those are not statutory holidays? Whether or not it is accounted an explicitly religious practice, people can be seen in public spaces in Kingston practicing tai chi, as they can in most other Canadian cities. Perhaps more notably, the Queen's University Muslim Students Association has held their welcoming picnic in September near the Time sculpture on Kingston's waterfront, accompanied with the offering of prayers in the usual position of prostration (sajda).

A city park is a public park, and therefore "the public" (including religious groups) may use it in any way, at any time, for any reason, without permission. So long as a group does not violate any municipal, provincial, or federal laws, cause damage to the park, or infringe on others' enjoyment of the space, they are free to use the City's public space. However, while it is not necessary for individuals and groups to seek permission from City Parks before meeting in Kingston's public parks, booking a park is highly recommended if a group wants to ensure use of park facilities in an uninterrupted manner (City of Kingston Parks Operations 2005). As with many procedures that lie in abeyance or remain unenforced, such booking "recommendations" can presumably be invoked as a means of control should the need arise.

To gain the City's approval a form must be completed with the name and purpose of the event–whether social (e.g., church picnics, reunions, etc), legal (e.g., weddings), or religious (e.g., prayer services, memorials, etc). Applicants must provide proof of at least two million dollars of liability insurance coverage. As the Use Permits for city parks specify, no one using a park may "stereotype or discriminate on grounds prohibited under the Ontario Human Rights Code" nor may they "promote or preach hatred or derision of any groups covered by section ii of this declaration." If any group is found to be discriminatory or inciting hatred the City has the right to deny the booking of a City Park, or to cancel an event in progress, even if approval was not previously sought, and may deny any future requests from the respective group.

Monuments and memorials in public spaces play an essential role in fostering a sense of Canadian collective identity and a shared national history. They become the site of memorial ceremonies, as can be easily demonstrated at war memorials every Remembrance Day in towns and cities across Canada, when people come together to reflect upon the past, its meaning, and our collective loss. Such commemorations create a sacred space for this activity of shared religious and ritual observance. Kingston's Islamic Centre on its website publicly endorses participation by its members in Remembrance Day observances, together with an exposition of the Muslim view of war and peace. The only restriction on Muslim involvement is a caution against taking part in rituals that are specific to another religion. In general, though, such public gatherings have aimed at being inclusive and multifaith in nature. Even the aforementioned Sisters of Providence vigil held in front of City Hall on Good Friday a few years ago–on that occasion oriented toward world peace–included reflections by the rabbi of Beth Israel Congregation, the president of the Islamic Centre, and the monsignor from St. Mary's Cathedral. Perhaps ironically, particular religious groups, often supposed to be at odds with one another, have often promoted interfaith cooperation far beyond anything that municipal governments have endeavoured to facilitate.

But what can be said about impromptu memorials erected following a tragic event and/or death? Spontaneous shrines, more popular after the death of Princess Diana or 9/11, are frequently set up at the scene of a road accident or of a murder, consisting variously of bouquets of flowers, or written messages of condolences, or, if a child's death, toys or stuffed animals. Whether personal act of remembrance, public display of grief and loss, acknowledgement of human mortality, or warning of societal dangers, or defiant political statement (e.g., with deaths due to drunk driving and gang-related shootings), these shrines represent positive and life-affirming responses, inherently religious because they seek to transcend the limits imposed by death. They stand as "ways of imagining a human community that includes both the living and the dead" (Chidester 2002). Such public expressions of the grief of private citizens, individually or en masse, when established in public places, are often constructed without the express permission or consent of the respective authority.

Sometimes families want a continuing memorial at the site, perhaps a lasting commemoration of their loved one, or to make a statement about unsafe streets or drunken drivers. Of course, a proliferation of crosses at a dangerous bend in a highway has for decades served as a more effective reminder to slow down than any warning sign could provide. But an unauthorized wayside memorial might itself become a traffic hazard if drivers reduce speed unexpectedly to gawk. One wonders about responsibility for the maintenance of such sites as years pass, or when people move elsewhere. While some memorials are maintained, or are renewed annually–often on the anniversary of the fatal incident–often these roadside shrines are left to their fates as crosses break down with age, and flowers wilt or fade over time. In such cases compromises have to be sought, perhaps through the city offering the family an alternative way to remember a departed loved one.

Obviously, the practice of erecting roadside shrines represents deeply meaningful human behaviour. What is a city to do when public space becomes sacralized due to the acts of a few citizens? Normally the City of Kingston requires citizens and businesses to apply for an eighty-five dollar encroachment permit before the erection of any sign or physical object on public property. In the case of roadside shrines, bylaw enforcement officers have an unspoken policy of leaving them alone so long as they are not obstructing pedestrian or vehicular traffic. Additionally, City Parks may ask for their removal if snow-clearance or grass-cutting is affected. Despite the unauthorized nature of their presence, bylaw enforcement personnel tend to leave these shrines intact as a gesture of respect to both the living and the dead. Trees bearing memorial plaques in parks are a possible alternative, and have become a popular commemoration that also renews the urban canopy of foliage. In general, municipal officials informally recognize roadside memorials as private sacred spaces on publicly owned lands (City of Kingston Engineering Department 2005). Roadside shrines are an example of a policy grey area–neither legal nor illegal, neither written nor spoken. Likewise, when it comes to the private religious use of public spaces, the City of Kingston prefers a "live and let live" approach.

Regarding the scattering of cremated remains (strictly speaking not "ashes," but compressed bone fragments, a much denser and more particulate substance), the City seems to have no clear answer. For all intents and purposes, the scattering of remains on Kingston's public parks and waterways is sensitively overlooked by the City. Bylaw officers, City Parks' employees, and funeral directors seem equally unaware of the laws and regulations governing this practice. One memorial society even refers to cemeteries, private space, and crown land as possible areas for the scattering of cremated remains. And while public parks are not mentioned, this Society does state that it is "best not to scatter them on the ground where people will frequent" (Funeral Advisory and Memorial Society of Peterborough and District 2005).

Presently the Ontario Ministry of Government Services is replacing the Funeral Directors and Establishments Act and the Cemeteries Act with one statute, the Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services Act. According to Chapter 33, Part 3, Section 4, "no person shall scatter cremated human remains at a place other than at a scattering ground operated by a person licensed under subsection (1) unless the person is permitted by regulation to scatter cremated human remains in such circumstances, at such a place or in such a manner as may be prescribed" (Province of Ontario 2002).

As with the case of the erection of roadside or sidewalk shrines, presumably the permission to scatter the remains of a loved one has not been sought beforehand. Families may opt to spread such remains discreetly on their own terms while the City remains unaware of the time and place of such practices. So long as the scattering of remains goes undetected, the City is tolerant of a custom that proceeds unhindered. The City of Kingston does have a memorial bench or memorial tree program in place, though it is currently under revision with regard to placement, payment, and perpetuity. Citizens may purchase a bench or request the planting of a tree in remembrance of their dearly departed (City of Kingston Parks Operations 2005). People sitting on a park bench, or whose dog visits a park tree, might well wonder if anything else was surreptitiously placed at this private sacred site.[5]

Concerns by city residents about the impact of religious practices on their city or neighbourhood might be aimed directly towards faiths that are new or unfamiliar, or simply representative of a minority tradition. In some cities the establishment of a mosque, a meditation centre, or a Hindu temple has led to protests. In Kingston in the early 1950s the Roman Catholic Church reportedly declined to sell a piece of its property to a Jewish congregation wanting to relocate. A few years earlier, in 1945, Ontario Justice Keiller McKay had ruled against a restrictive covenant aimed at preventing the sale of property to Jews on the grounds that it contravened public policy. McKay stated: "If sale of a piece of land can be prohibited to Jews, it can equally be prohibited to Protestants, Catholics or other groups or denominations." He felt that "nothing could be more calculated to create or deepen divisions between existing religious and ethnic groups in this Province, or in this country" (Qtd in McLachlin 2004). But, one suspects, the citizens of a more secular society might be worried about the practices of Christianity as readily as those of any other religion. What of a Christian church situated in a mostly residential area providing a mission to the homeless, to street people, to psychiatric outpatients, or to ex-offenders? A church with a large bell or carillon, whatever the denomination, might not be readily tolerated by neighbours whose sleep is disturbed on a Sunday morning. And, indeed, an anti-noise bylaw in Kingston has restricted the use of some ecclesial chimes and bells.

The confident assumptions and predictions of a generation ago that increasing secularization would drive religion out of the public sphere have far from materialized. Despite an undeniable increase in an inner and private spirituality focused on the individual, the public manifestation of religion in a pluralistic society remains, demanding to be accommodated. And sometimes those who are unaffiliated seek to establish their shrines, scatter remains, or hold services in public spaces. As a result, the distinction between religious and secular has become difficult to uphold in contemporary Canada. Nineteenth-century Christians were concerned about the use of canals on the Lord's Day. Today stores remain open on Sundays, as do sports arenas, theatres, and other centres of entertainment and commerce. Within the stretch of a kilometre or so along Kingston's main street, one restaurant trades on the decline of the sacred with a sign that gleefully announces, "We confess! Our deserts are sinful," while a similarly designed sign outside a United Church dispenses maxims of secular advice such as "Never let failure go to your heart."

In the centre of Kingston's downtown a contemporary clothing store aroused the ire of neighbours across the street at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church with banners in the window proclaiming "Gsus sucks." The defense that "Gsus," the brand name of the Dutch clothing company, was a reference to a descending guitar chord, and not a homonym of the name of Christianity's central figure, did little to settle the storm. Gsus Sindustries, known for its self-mockery and provocative advertising, has recently inaugurated its "od," or "original denim" line, with the logo "gsusod" whose first and last two letters are in contrasting colours with the central "sus." Is "Jesus God" a curse or an ironic proclamation of the divinity of Christ or a typographical "coincidence"? The Presbyterians, whose late nineteenth-century coreligionists were concerned about the appearance of new tavern at the same intersection, complained, without success, to Kingston's Dutch consul and to the police about the possibility of this being an instance of a hate crime. According to an article in the Toronto Star, 29 July 2004, theirs was the only complaint brought against the company during its three years in Canada. A compromise was reached when the store agreed to remove the sign on Sundays, and to seek a replacement banner from the company. The new banner read "Lost in Gsus."

In many respects the changing fortunes of religion within a Canadian municipality can be gauged by the history of this same St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church. The nineteenth century was marked by confrontations with the Anglican Church over Presbyterian rights of burial in a churchyard, and by violent conflicts between Catholics and Orange Protestants at the site of the building of the new Roman Catholic cathedral. Today Catholics and Protestants, as well as Jews and Muslims, live more or less amicably together. The proportion of Presbyterians has declined in the past century and a half, while the number of Muslims in Kingston today exactly equals the number of Jews. Nationally the number of Muslims exceeds the number of Presbyterians by more than 40% (580,000 to 410,000). In Kingston a single Islamic Centre accommodates Muslims of many nationalities and theologies, whereas by comparison there may be as many of as a half-dozen Muslim groups on the Queen's University campus. As members of Kingston's Hindu community have reported, when the numbers are small, sectarian divisions must be avoided, and members have to get along.[6]

The changing demographics of religious pluralism have sometimes led to new alliances. On such contemporary issues as same-sex marriage evangelical Protestants may find that they have more in common with Roman Catholics, or even Orthodox Jews or Muslims, than with liberal Protestants. And Orthodox Jews seeking to establish a Hebrew Day School might also find more commonality with other faith groups wanting government funding for their religious schools than with Reform Jews. As Diana Eck says, "stories of interreligious encounter also remind us that our religious traditions are multivocal, that no one speaks for the whole, that we argue within our traditions about some of our deepest values, and that newfound alliances may be made across the political and religious spectrum" (Eck 2002).

Kingston, like many other Canadian cities, tends to deal with the challenges posed by immigration and the resulting religious diversity, as well as changing contemporary practices, through trial-and-error modifications, informal accommodations, ad hoc adjustments, or alterations necessitated by formal legal tests more often than by undertaking deliberate and considered policy changes. But in the absence of any coherent policy age-old practices are allowed to continue as if the city were still uniformly Christian (which, of course, never was the case). Opportunities are available to Christians that are not extended to other groups. If occasions do arise in which religious privilege or preference becomes too blatantly obvious or offensive, the expedient is often simply to banish religion from the public realm altogether rather than trying to accommodate religious diversity.[7] When interfaith ventures are undertaken, they almost always occur at the initiative of the various faith groups themselves, not because the municipality has sought to provide a space for such cooperation or invited their participation.

And yet, surely, providing a public forum in which the full range of voices existing in the community can be heard is one of the imperatives of civic government. Moral issues will arise in any community needing discussion in a public forum where religious diversity will be present, and in which, it is hoped, religious pluralism can be forged. As Diana Eck maintains,

In almost any Canadian municipality immigrant groups of differing religions and ethnicities are to be found, eager to share their traditions and to participate in this common task of creating a civil society. In many respects the need is for something like what Paul Bramadat urges, namely, "cultivating a pluralistic, multicultural, open society" of the kind most Canadians cherish in their best moments by making "much better use of the constructive and creative social capital generated by certain forms of religion" (Bramadat 2005).

ENDNOTES