Protestant group calls for neutral body on secularism amid Bedford controversy

Reports of proselytizing in Quebec public schools have revived the need to establish an independent body to protect children’s right to a secular education, argues a group of evangelical Protestant churches.

The Réseau évangélique du Québec is denouncing what it calls the instrumentalization of religion for political ends by certain parties in the current controversy over teachers who are violating their duty of confidentiality in public schools, including the Bedford School in Montreal.

The Quebec Liberal Party (PLQ) and the Parti québécois (PQ) voted to end public funding for private schools with a religious vocation, even though the controversy does not affect private schools, but public schools.

“The religious schools issue has been completely blown,” lamented the group’s director of external affairs, Jean-Christophe Jasmin, in an interview with The Canadian Press Monday.

“Why, when the state fails in its religious neutrality, is the response to attack religious groups that have nothing to do with it? We have a public school that is governed by laws, but does not apply them, and we have private religious schools that respect the educational program and the laws. There is no logical link between them.”

Religious minorities end up being tarnished, even discriminated against, he said.

For example, when evangelical organizations and churches want to rent space in a hotel, they are refused or cancelled, and in municipal halls, they are also told no in the name of the law on secularism, when nothing prohibits renting space to a religious group in the law, Jasmin noted.

He is calling for a neutral institution, separate from the state, such as an Observatory of Secularism, in order to clarify certain interpretations of the law, receive complaints and issue recommendations.

In Quebec, some fifty religious schools, Catholic, Protestant evangelical, Muslim, Jewish or Orthodox, receive approximately $160 million per year in public money, according to the PQ.

The investigation report on the Bedford school indicates that soccer was banned for girls and mentions “certain religious practices, such as prayers in classrooms or ablutions in communal toilets.”

It indicates that, although “these practices were mostly not carried out in front of students,” the evidence analyzed reports “two events where students were allegedly involved in religious practices.”

It also writes that “witnesses told investigators that they had observed a strong influence of the community environment on several members of the Bedford school staff. A certain number of them would attend a community centre and a mosque located in the neighbourhood.”

The report mentions however “that although the majority clan is mainly composed of people of Maghrebi origin, people of other origins are also associated with it. Also, the minority clan is also partly composed of individuals of Maghrebi origin, including some of the strongest oppositions to the majority clan.”

It adds that “although there is indeed a presence of clans at the Bedford school composed of individuals of different origins, the investigators mainly observed an opposition between ideologies.”

The document also reports “gaps in the teaching of oral communication, science and technology, ethics and religious culture and sex education.”

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews