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Dimitri Soudas: The secular state we’ve forgotten

A secular state does not favour one religion over another, nor does it allow religion to colonize schools funded by the common purse

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I’ll begin with a personal disclosure that may seem, at first, to cut against the argument I’m about to make.

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This Sunday is Greek Orthodox Easter. It is the most sacred day in my faith — the celebration of the Resurrection, the centrepiece of the Orthodox Christian calendar. My family will gather, as we do every year, to mark a holy day that binds us to our heritage, our ancestors, and our God.

Dimitri Soudas: The secular state we’ve forgotten Back to video

And yet, this week, I learned that students in the York Region District School Board — children of Greek Orthodox faith — were denied the flexibility to write their tests even a day or two later, to accommodate a religious observance their families hold deeply sacred. No leeway. No accommodation. Rules are rules.

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I found that troubling. But not for the reason you might expect.

Because here is what I find equally troubling: that the very same school board, like some other publicly funded boards, schedules what are called “diamond days” — days off granted in recognition of various religious and cultural observances — more frequently, in some cases, than it schedules standard PA days. That publicly funded schools have, in many jurisdictions, installed prayer rooms within their walls. That the secular public institution, funded by every taxpayer regardless of faith, has quietly become a mosaic of religious accommodation — while simultaneously being unable to offer two extra days to a Greek Orthodox child before a math test.

Something has gone sideways. And it’s time we said so out loud.

Let me be precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying religion is unimportant. I am not saying faith has no place in the lives of Canadians. I am not saying that Greek Orthodox Easter, or Eid, or Diwali, or any other religious observance is less valid, less meaningful, or less worthy of respect. Every person’s relationship with their faith is their own, and in a free and democratic society, that relationship must always be protected.

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But freedom of religion has two sides to it — and we have become dangerously comfortable with only one of them.

A secular state means that the state does not favour one religion over another. It also means that the state does not allow religion — any religion — to colonize public institutions funded by the common purse. A school funded by taxpayers is not a cathedral, a mosque, a synagogue, or a temple. It is a public institution, bound by a civic compact: to educate every child, regardless of background, to the best of its ability, for the maximum number of instructional days possible.

Prayer rooms in public schools are a violation of that compact. Not because prayer is wrong. But because prayer belongs in the home, in the house of worship, in the private sphere that a free society zealously protects. When we install prayer rooms in schools, we are not being inclusive — we are blurring a boundary that exists precisely to protect everyone equally, including the believers. The moment the state endorses one form of worship through the infrastructure of a public building, it has taken a side. And the secular state has no business taking sides on matters of faith.

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The same logic applies to diamond days. If a school board is scheduling days off to mark religious observances — and doing so more frequently than it schedules days for teacher training — it has drifted far from its mandate. The mandate is education. The mandate is to provide every child in that school with the maximum number of quality instructional hours the calendar allows. Parents who wish their children to observe specific religious holidays have every right to do so. They also have options: religious schools, private schools, charter schools.

The public system should not be bending its calendar to accommodate the liturgical schedules of any faith — including mine.

I say this as someone who will be in church on Sunday, deeply grateful for the freedom to be there. That freedom is real. It is precious. It was won at great cost. But it ends at the doors of public institutions — and that is not a limitation on freedom. That is the very architecture of freedom.

Canada is not a collection of solitudes pressed together in geographic proximity. It is, or aspires to be, a civic nation — a country where what binds us is not ethnicity, not religion, not heritage, but a shared commitment to certain principles. Chief among them: equality before the law, and equality before public institutions.

If we allow those institutions to fragment along religious and cultural lines — accommodating some, ignoring others, pleasing everyone a little and no one fully — we do not end up with a more inclusive country. We end up with a weaker one. A country where the child who shows up to write a test on Greek Orthodox Easter is told there are no exceptions, while the school itself has prayer rooms and religious days baked into its calendar.

That contradiction should bother all of us.

Secularism is not the enemy of faith. It is faith’s greatest protector. It is the guarantee that no religion may dominate the public square — and therefore, that every religion remains free in the private one.

That is why I believe the answer is not complicated, even if it is uncomfortable to say. Public schools should close on statutory holidays — the ones enshrined in law and shared by all citizens. They should schedule PA days as their operational needs require. That is the extent of their calendar obligations to any creed. And there should be no prayer rooms within their walls. Not because faith is unwelcome in the lives of students, but because a public school building is not the place where the state should be making space for worship, any worship. The classroom is not a chapel. The hallway is not a corridor to the divine. Students who need to pray may do so privately, as students have always done, and as the Charter fully protects. But the institution itself must remain neutral ground.

We would do well to remember that.

Dimitri Soudas is a political analyst and commentator based in King City, Ont.

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