REMOTE CONTROL: A History of the Regulation of Religion in the Canadian Public Square. by Norman James Fennema BA., University of Alberta, 1990 BA. Hon., University of Alberta, 1991 MA., University of Victoria, 1996 A dissertation submitted in partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Department of History We accept this dissertation as conforming to the required standard. Dr. Ian MaePherson, Supervisor , (Department of History) Dr. I^nne Marks, Departmental Member (Department of History) Dr. Brian Dippie, Departmental Member (Department of History) Dr. John McLaren, Outside Member (Faculty of Law) Dr. DaiddMarshall, External Examiner (Depe&tment of History, University of Calgary) © Norman Fermema, 2003 All rights reserved. This document may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the permission of the author. Supervisor; Dr. Ian MaePherson Abstract The modem Canadian state is secular, but it is not a neutral state. It is a liberal democracy in which the prevailing value system has shifted. The shift has been from a culture in which a commonly held religion was accorded a special place in the development of law and custom, to a culture in which religious pluralism is recognized and an institutionalized secularism obtains. The assumption would be that this would betoken a new tolerance for diversity, and in some ways it does. In other ways, the modem state behaves with an understanding of pluralism that is just as consensus oriented as the Protestant Culture that dominated in Canada until the middle of the twentieth century, and with the same illiberal tendencies. In historical terms, the effect that can be charted is one of repeating hegemonies, where respect for freedom of conscience or religion remains an incomplete ideal. How do we assess respect for religious freedom? One way is through an evaluation of the developing jurispmdence in the manifold areas in public life where religious freedom is contested. Another is through an exploration of one of these contested facets of the public square. That is what this dissertation attempts to provide. The case study is that of broadcasting: more specifically, the regulation of religious broadcasting in Canada from the time that it began until the last decade of the twentieth century. For explaining the Canadian historical approach to religion, it benefits from an easy comparison with the United States, where a very different set of circumstances evolved. John Moir once characterized Canadian religion since its disestablishment in the mid nineteenth century as that of a “legally disestablished religiosity”. In contradistinction from the United States, the implication is of a greater level of control over religious expression. For the purposes of this dissertation, it is an apt description for how and why the state has altemately suppressed, supported and enjoined Canadian religion in an important area of public life, one whose span straddles the shift from a Christian to a secular culture. In the regulation of broadcasting, both public and private, we see that the management of religious expression has worked from the start to affirm the dominant religious prejudices of the majority of Canadians. Our case study also suggest that such privileging was managed through the advice and support of the mainline churches. It suggests that the discourse of “balance” through which broadcasting was controlled, particularly since the decade of the nineteen sixties, constituted a self-serving defense of discriminatory regulation. As well, the case study provides an argument for the existence of a Canadian civic religion of nation building, for the idea that this civic religion is as old as European settlement itself, and for the promise that in recognizing its existence we can move beyond a pattern in our past of marginalizing non-conforming value systems and those who hold them. This paper operates on three levels. On one level it provides an historical argument for the idea that the modem liberal state is repeating the practices of hegemonic value systems of the past. On another level it provides a philosophical argument that this cycle is fed by the assumption that a healthy public arena is empty of irreconcilable views, and that this idea sustains a perpetual inability of the mainstream to respect true diversity in first order questions. Finally, it is a case study in one area of the Canadian public square - radio and television broadcasting - through which the merits of both of these points can be evaluated. — _________________________________________ Dr. Ian MaePherson: Supervisor (Depairtment of History) artmental (Member (Department of History) Dr. Brian Dippie, Departmental Member (Department of History) Dr. John McLaren, Outside Memb^ (F^pulty of Law) Dr. DavWdvIarshall, External Examiner (Department of History, University of Calgary) Contents Part I Introduction 1 1 The long context 10 Part II 2 The Bible Students 43 3 CHUC Saskatoon and Jarvis Street Baptist; a study in contrasts 79 4 The Promise of Public Broadcasting 100 5 Controversy and control, public and commercial 130 6 The Corporation and the National Religious Advisory Council 179 7 CBC Religion 209 8 The CRTC years 254 Conclusion 295 Part III Post-modern liberalism and the Canadian public square 303 End notes 331 Bibliography 380 Acknowledgements There are many people who have contributed to the completion of this project. Dr. Ian MaePherson, I thank you for your unflagging optimism and encouragement, and for believing in me. Thank you as well for helping me to always put this in perspective, to nudge me toward the questions that needed answering, and for working behind the scenes on my behalf. Dr. Lynne Marks, I thank you for giving me of your time and energy and for offering me both the professional guidance and personal encouragement to keep me on track and to keep me going. Your practical advice and encouraging words meant more than I can say. Dr. Brian Dippie, thank you for always being willing to help out even when the linkages with your own work were tenuous. You have inspired me with your love of history, and I feel richer for having had this connection. Dr. McClaren, I thank you for your willingness to serve on this committee, and I thank you also for your encouragement. I felt privileged to have a person of your calibre involved in this project. Dr. David Marshall, I thank you for your flexibility in coming on board with little advance notice. I have no doubt there were many more pressing things in your world that had to be compromised for your willingness to serve in this way. Your advice has spurred me to again dig into the material and fill the gaps in my research. Thank you for contributing your skills and your wealth of knowledge. VI The information age is the great era of human hubris, the flowering of the Enlightenment ideas of the autonomy of humankind and the power of human beings to control their own destiny. Yet we can’t even control the effects of the technologies that we create! This is the great, laughable irony! -Quentin Schultze Introduction: The document you are holding is not the one it was designed to be when I first began my research. The topic — the regulation of religion in the democratic public square — has not changed, but the long road toward the point at which the following thoughts were assembled into their current form began with a closer destination, both in time and in methodology. The framework as originally conceived would have brought us hack only as far as the early days of radio broadcasting in Canada. This was to have been the starting point for an explanation of how the Canadian state had managed to construct a broadcasting system that alienated whatever religious group stood outside the mainstream, a middle road that was never defined but through the inconsistent application of broadcasting legislation over the past seven decades. Inconsistent being relative, for though the target of censorship of religion programming varied with time and situation, there was a consistent refusal throughout to license religious stations. In fact there was no moment in these decades in which a religious broadcasting station was licensed. The wider interest explains how the parameters of this study expanded into something that begins with a lengthy historical sketch (one that takes us into a time when the technology for the transmission of the voice over radio wave was still centuries away), and concludes with a still lengthier philosophical discussion. The investigation began with a small question, posed by a friend. How to explain “CBC religion”, that humanistic blend of religiosity that stood as the state alternative to religious broadcasters? How could one explain the situation whereby a democratic state would silence contending religious voices while disseminating a civic religion of its own making. How could it continue to a point where it would one eventually make sense that the Playboy channel could secure a license to broadcast, but religious broadcasters could not? These were complicated questions, and the answer lay not in the field of broadcasting, nor even in the age in which it existed: this instead could only be a case study in the answer to the more philosophical discussion of hegemonies and the public square. In the end the topic of broadcasting is almost incidental, in that it could as easily have been on a completely different facet of public life. The use of public education as a means of social control is one of the most obvious examples.’ The history of juridical interpretation is another. Both have been skilfully presented to support the idea that the notion of a secular state is a myth, that in reality the modem state operates according to a distinct worldview with its own intolerances.