| Being invited to South Africa to be involved in the drafting of a Charter of Religious Rights and Freedoms in that country has afforded me a good opportunity to see the process of constitutional addition "up close." Under their Constitution it is possible to have a "Charter" that gives greater definition to the general enumerated rights as long as such provisions are not inconsistent with the Constitution itself. That idea, a set of clarification principles to guide politicians and the judiciary, is a very good one and I wish we had the equivalent to Section 234 in the Canadian Constitution; unfortunately, we do not. What transpired recently in an old lecture room on the beautiful campus of the University of Stellenbosch was an inspiration and it is worthy of note in this space. For there, at the last part of their summer under the gorgeous flora that abounds in that part of South Africa, the small working group that had produced a Draft Charter of Religious Rights (the term "and Freedoms" may be added at the next stage), brought together what must stand as one of the most widely representative group of inter-faith leaders ever assembled in one place. The approximately 50 attendees included representatives from Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity (Protestant, Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Moldavian, Reformed and Zion Christian Church-- the largest Christian denomination in South Africa), Mormons and African Customary Religions. This group met to discuss the detailed four-page draft and did so with intelligence, maturity and considerable insight. They not only discussed for a full day, they agreed - 100% with the terms of the document. All recommended, with no dissenting voices, that the Charter was a good and necessary document and that it should go before the South African government to become law once a few more minor tweaks were introduced. . We at the Centre for Cultural Renewal hope to post the Draft on the Centre's website once it has had one more review, but I wanted to point out here that such a consensus document, urging as it does, recognition of the place and independence of religion as well as its co-operation with the State, flies in the face of those contemporary savants who everywhere suggest that religions are the basis not for co-operation but for endless discord and strife. What this broadly representative group showed was that inter-religious commitment to co-operation and respect can operate in a country with the many challenges and difficulties facing South Africa. In fact, perhaps the scale of the challenges facing South Africa makes it more likely that civil society will look to groups such as the major religions for solutions. If so, it shows that when things get difficult then we might be more likely rather than less to observe the important place religions can occupy in the life of a nation. Canada is no stranger to such inter-faith co-operation, though it has not gone as far in this area as in South Africa. In Canada there has been considerable success with inter-faith co-operation in the past, though this has often been in response to court challenges. It would be so heartening In the future, to see substantive cultural strides forward of the sort I witnessed recently in Stellenbosch. Should the religions in Canada, for example, endorse the need for a Constitutional Forum of the sort called for in the past by the Centre (as opposed to using litigation such as the Court Challenges Program) they would be exhibiting the sort of leadership currently being shown in South Africa. Time will tell if religions can mount joint efforts of this sort in Canada, but it would seem that the groundwork for such initiatives has been well laid elsewhere - -and in constitutional democracies that are, on paper, not so distinct from our own. Iain T. Benson© |
