(Watch the conference presentation on video: Separation & Cooperation within Canadian Pluralism)'I find that the separation of church and the state is one of the most beautiful inventions of modern times.' (Pierre Pettigrew, National Post, 28 January 2006) 'The separation of Church and state is a tool that advocates use when they find religious views to be inconvenient to their political views.' (The Ontario Conference of Catholic Bishops, Media Release, February 1, 2006) 'The contemporary concept of unwritten constitutional principles can be seen as a modern reincarnation of the ancient doctrines of natural law. Like those conceptions of justice, the identification of these principles seems to presuppose the existence of some kind of natural order. Unlike them, however, it does not fasten on theology as the source of the unwritten principles that transcend the exercise of state power. It is derived from the history, values and culture of the nation, viewed in its constitutional context.' (Remarks of the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, P.C., given at the 2005 Lord Cooke Lecture in Wellington, New Zealand, December 1st, 2005.) 'I think we all have reasons to be grateful that the relations between Church and State are so helpful in our country and that it is very necessary future generations should maintain them.' (St. Laurent to T. L. Church, 14 March 1949. St. Laurent Papers, Vol. 70, File, 'Religion - General - 1948-49.') 'As individuals it is our duty to stand firm on the Christian principles which have been taught in our churches and which in themselves have the key to the solution of every problem - social, personal and political.' ('An address by the Secretary of State for External Affairs, Mr. L. B. Pearson, delivered at the Yorkminster Baptist Church, Toronto, March 25, 1953.' Lester B. Pearson Papers, NAC, MG 26/N9/7.) 'The Parliament of Canada, affirming that the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions . . .' (Preamble to the Canadian Bill of Rights, 1960) 'We are now living in a social climate in which people are beginning to realize, perhaps for the first time in the history of this country, that we are not entitled to impose the concepts which belong to a sacred society upon a civil or profane society. The concepts of the civil society in which we live are pluralistic, and I think this parliament realizes that it would be a mistake for us to try to legislate into this society concepts which belong to a theological or sacred order.' (Pierre Trudeau, Canada, House of Commons, Debates, December 5, 1967, p. 5083) 'I don't think God gives a damn whether he's in the constitution or not.' (Pierre Trudeau, Liberal Caucus, April 1981) 'The acknowledgement of one Supreme God to whom we as a nation are answerable gives ground for legislation bearing on all matters human. To omit any such reference only leaves the door open for substitution of other less worthy grounds—utilitarianism, naturalism, secularism, etc.—since legislation cannot escape growing out of presuppositions. Moreover, human rights though recognized by the state in a democratic society are a sacred endowment from God not bestowed but administered by the state.' (Resolution adopted by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada at its biennial meeting convened in Toronto, February 25, 1981. Reprinted in Thrust: The Quarterly News and Review Magazine of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, 13:1, 1981, p.2) 'Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:'. (Preamble, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982)Introduction A glance at the 'beautiful inventions' quoted above demonstrates dramatically that the relations of church and state, religion and politics in modernity and postmodernity, not least in Canada, are increasingly troubled and contested. This has been the case in most Western states since the 1960s. Whereas liberal and leftist theorists of modernity predicted and hoped that the dogmas and superstitions of religion would be supplanted by enlightenment rationalism, science and humanism, history has confounded these projections. If Western Europe has seemingly conformed to secularization theory, the return and expansion of religion—in the form of militant Islam and Christianity in the global south, and the resurgence of conservative religion in the United States—have made sociologists and political theorists rethink the relationship between religion and modernity. Canada seems to be caught somewhere between the US and Europe in its religious and political culture, but the relationship between church and state, religion and politics, is increasingly embattled. Religion is the elephant in the room of Canadian politics and the elephant is not about to go away. This is because issues like gay rights, same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia, family law, human rights, etc., engage us intimately and passionately, and they inevitably involve religion in the public, political and legal realms. Over the last two decades my Canadian Religion and Politics Project has studied church-state relations since 1945; here the intention is briefly and selectively to distill from the larger project major themes and transitions in constitutional discourse and change, in the quest for human rights, and in the evolving construction and features of Canadian pluralism/s. The paper will conclude with several reflections of contemporary relevance. The 'beautiful and not so beautiful' quotations above will be visited periodically to animate the analysis and drive things forward. The principal thesis is that in Canada religion and politics, Christianity and liberal ideology, functioned cooperatively, until the great caesura of the 1960s, mutually supporting and constraining each other. When one subordinated the other, as in the Catholicism of Duplessis' Quebec, or the liberal secularism following the Trudeau revolution and Charter jurisprudence, something precious is lost for both church and state, as their relationship becomes antagonistic.Brief history of Separation & Cooperation within Canadian Pluralism Let us start with Chief Justice McLachlin:'The contemporary concept of unwritten constitutional principles can be seen as a modern reincarnation of the ancient doctrines of natural law. Like those conceptions of justice, the identification of these principles seems to presuppose the existence of some kind of natural order. Unlike them, however, it does not fasten on theology as the source of the unwritten principles that transcend the exercise of state power. It is derived from the history, values and culture of the nation, viewed in its constitutional context.' Now, strangely enough, when I first read this passage, the phrase 'the history, values and culture of the nation, viewed in its constitutional context' struck home, because this is pretty much what I have been studying since the 1980s. However, Ms. McLachlin's reading of Canadian history is radically different from what I have found in the record of constitutional discourse and jurisprudence, and in the evolving phases of Canadian pluralism. Put simply and briefly, my research identifies three principal phases in the status and functions of religion in Canadian constitutional history: 1. Canadian Christendom or Christian Pluralism; 2. Religious Pluralism; 3. Secularist Pluralism.1. Canadian Christendom or Christian Pluralism (Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent) From the earliest colonization of the Americas, including French and British North America, the Christian religion was central to the defining elements of politics, law, culture, and imperial purpose. After the British conquest, Quebec Catholicism was given legal protection, and with the frustration of the Church of England's quest for establishment after the 1840s resolution of the clergy reserve struggle, Canadian churches lived with denominationalism, competitive but also cooperative—in an informal establishment, functionally not dissimilar to Britain and America, despite the constitutional differences.1 In this informal establishment religion functioned as 'the conscience of the state,' performing priestly functions (public prayers, rituals, legitimating government authority); pastoral functions (health, welfare, socialization/schooling, chaplaincies); and prophetic functions (guardians of family / sexual morality; temperance crusades, social gospel criticism of capitalist injustices). In this Christian pluralism run by the national, mainline Protestant and Catholic churches (with the 'sects' peripheralized), Canada defined itself manifestly as a 'Christian democracy' where the Christian religion and liberal ideology cooperated in governance. The ties of church and state were consciously tightened in times of national peril, especially wartime, when the national churches and the Governments defined the struggle as a crusade for Christian and liberal civilization against Nazi Paganism—and then godless communism in the Cold War. In the post-WWII period, under Liberal Prime Ministers Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent (the former a devoted if eccentric Presbyterian, the latter a devout Catholic) the mutual respect and cooperation of church and state remained intimate, as Canadian society experienced a period of so-called religious revival and unprecedented institutional expansion. In this 'post-colonial' period, as Canadian nationhood was searching for new identity distinct from Britain, as the British Empire became the Commonwealth of Nations, and as appeals to the of Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council were ended in 1949 with the Canadian Supreme Court becoming really supreme, Canadian political elites, even more than religious elites, insisted on preserving the Christian component of national identity. My project finds this continuum especially in the political and constitutional discourse generated by the quest to bring Canada into the 'Age of Human Rights'—by supporting the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and testing the project of a Canadian Bill of Rights.2 Given the mixed Canadian record on civil liberties under the War Measures Act, the treatment of Japanese Canadians, the revelations of the Jewish Holocaust, the incarceration of suspected communists after the Gouzenko revelations and Royal Commission on Espionage, and the depredations of Duplessis' regime in Quebec, leaders of Canadian liberalism and the Left pressed for protection of fundamental liberties and rights. The Liberal Governments of both King and St. Laurent, however, with trans-party concurrence, insisted that human rights must be given an explicit, transcendent, religious source. When the Canadixan Government's insistence that the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights contain a religious referent failed, Canada voted for the Declaration only with great reluctance—and to avoid being grouped with a small band of abstainers: the Soviet Bloc, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. When St. Laurent, following the electoral victory of 1949, gave Liberal Senator Arthur Roebuck the latitude to chair a Senate Committee in 1950 to canvas support for a Canadian Bill of Rights, Roebuck, mobilizing civil libertarians leaders like Frank Scott {McGill), John Humphrey (Director of UN Human Rights Division), J. King Gordon (UN Human Rights Division), projected in his committee's Report a visionary future for inaugurating a new era in nationhood: This is then the very time for Canada to decide the basis upon which this new Nation is founded.... this is the time to nail the emblems of law, liberty and human rights to our masthead. This is the very moment in which to decide our nationhood, to guarantee human rights and fundamental freedoms to all our citizens, and to proclaim our principles to the world.3The Catholic members of the Roebuck Committee insisted on placing any support for a Bill of Rights within a manifestly religious framework and also in reaffirming Canada's national identity in Christian terms: the Report therefore concluded by portraying Canada as 'a Christian country' and recommending 'that all men give thought to the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man,' so as to further the rule of law and the rights of individuals. The St. Laurent Government showed no inclination to proceed with constitutional innovation or the writing of a Canadian Bill of Rights—especially when the Korean War broke out just after the Roebuck Committee reported.2. Religious Pluralism (John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson) The next major intersection point of religion in constitutional discourse and evolving Canadian pluralism comes with the quest by John Diefenbaker's Conservative Governments, after the elections of 1957-58, to advance the cause of human rights—a project which culminated in the Canadian Bill of Rights of 1960.4 While Diefenbaker, as a devout Baptist, was wary of any interlocking of church and state, he maintained close relations with not only church leaders but also the Jewish community through his long-term participation on the Canadian Council of Christians and Jews. The evidence clearly indicates the continuing salience of religion in directing government purpose and legitimating its authority; but exclusively Christian language was now giving way to a more inclusive 'religious pluralism,' as political leaders made explicit efforts to include Canada's Jewish community in the national religious consortium. While human rights now came to make greater claim on Canadian national identity and purpose, political and religious elites nevertheless remained agreed that government authority and human rights needed a religious foundation. When the Diefenbaker government took up the task of legislating a Canadian Bill of Rights, the discussion in committee and in Parliament demonstrated there was near unanimous support, as previously, for placing rights explicitly within a religious framework. The Preamble to the Canadian Bill of Rights therefore specified 'that the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions . . .'. This wording reflected close consultation with Jewish leaders on the part of Justice Minister Davie Fulton and the leading Liberal member of the Parliamentary Committee, Paul Martin Sr., both being faithful Catholics. The reference to the 'supremacy of God' in the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights did not herald a renewed age of faith. Indeed, the decade of the 'sixties would witness fundamental shifting in Canadian cultural history, not least as the religious affiliations, beliefs, and behaviour of Canadians experienced unprecedented, rapid retrenchment—first in English-speaking Protestant Canada but soon also in Catholic Quebec where the so-called 'Quiet Revolution' led by the Liberals under Jean Lesage saw the Provincial government rapidly remove the Catholic church from its former privileged role in culture, welfare, health services, and education. Churches in Canada and internationally would engage in radical rethinking of theology and mission—most thoroughly and systematically in the deliberations of Vatican II (1962-1965), but more radically in Protestant immanentalist theologies, welcoming the 'secular city,' being 'honest to god,'demythologizing the faith, and finally heralding the 'death of god.' Journalist Pierre Berton's 1965 best-seller book, The Comfortable Pew, broke all Canadian sales records and engaged the mainline Canadian Protestantism in a firestorm of self-analysis and an urgent quest for renewed relevance. Indeed, by brilliantly popularizing the main themes of the radical theologians, Berton captured and projected the agenda of Canadian liberal Protestants for the rest of the 20th century as they abandoned the old theology, the old curricula, and the old morality in the age of the pill and mass entertainment. After the disintegration of the Diefenbaker Government in 1963, Lester Pearson would lead a series of minority Liberal Governments ineffectively addressing a rising tide of bewildering issues, scandals, and national malaise. A child of the manse (Methodist, then United Church), the Prime Minister was as sincere a Christian believer as his predecessors. If he preferred sports, especially baseball, to church services on Sundays, Pearson nevertheless respected deeply the role of Canadian religious communities in the country's national life. Addressing a conference at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church in 1953, Pearson had advised his co-religionists:'As individuals it is our duty to stand firm on the Christian principles which have been taught in our churches and which in themselves have the key to the solution of every problem—social, personal and political.' After the politically bruising struggle in 1964 to agree on a new Canadian flag (devoid of the Christian symbols in the previous Canadian Ensign), the Pearson Government had the happier task of arranging for the year-long celebrations to mark the centennial of Confederation in 1967, and to host the Montreal World's Fair—Expo 67. Here the Government and its officials in the Centennial Commission took the initiative in helping Churches across Canada participate eagerly in their local communities' centennial celebrations, with appropriate liturgies and prayers to honour the country. The Canadian Corporation on the 1967 World's Exhibition also took the initiative in planning for religious participation in Expo 67. A fine recent study of the religious dimension of the Centennial and Expo 67 indicates clearly the religiously-positive pluralism of the Government and its officials in organizing this national spectacle.5 The Centennial Commission started by setting up, funding and providing administrative and publicity services for a Canadian Interfaith Conference which included representation from the national churches and eventually some 33 faith communities, including Pentecostals, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Bahá'ís. While the various religious communities were eager to join in the celebrations, the form of participation signaled some confusion and controversy in the evolving nature of pluralism in Canada. The Centennial Commission pressed for a single religious pavilion, housing all faiths under one roof. The leadership of the national churches wanted a single ecumenical pavilion for Christians, and declined to embrace the inter-faith pluralism first suggested by the Centennial planners. Moreover, the evangelical Protestant churches equally declined ecumenism, and were the first to acquire a site for their own pavilion at Expo, where their Sermons From Science, drawn from the Moody Bible Institute, served principally as a forum for evangelization. The Canadian Jewish community also mounted its own pavilion. Whatever distinctives the churches and other faith communities wished to sustain at Expo, their pavilions turned out to be popular successes and equally signified the positive religious pluralism of the Pearson Liberals in facilitating religious participation in national life—and on terms favoured by the religious communities themselves. The greatest political challenge faced by the Pearson Liberals came in the form of Quebec nationalism. With Quebec Catholicism freely cooperating in its political disestablishment, the Quebec Liberals' quest to be 'maitres chez nous' soon transformed into a nationalist ideology which supplanted the discredited public functions of religion as previously exploited by Duplessis. Québécois ethnicity, language, and cultural assertion challenged Canada's English hegemony and its federal constitutional structure. The federal Liberal's responded with the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963­1969) which initiated a long process of re-imagining the Canadian nation on the basis of a fairer Anglophone-Francophone partnership. The work and reports of the Bi and Bi Commission attempted to redefine Canadian nationhood in terns of ethnicity and language. The former centrality of religion in Canada's national identity, as underlined repeatedly in the Parliamentary Committees studying human rights, constitutional issues and national purpose in the 1940s and 1950s, and in the drafting of the Canadian Bill of Rights, found no place in the findings of the Commission. Nor did this theme figure in the submissions made by the churches, who generally affirmed the Liberals' attempt to re-imagine Canadian nationality along more inclusive linguistic and ethic lines.3. Secularist Pluralism (Pierre Trudeau to Paul Martin) The efforts of the Pearson Liberals to re-imagine Canadian nationhood in terms of bilingualism and biculturalism soon proved inadequate, critiqued roundly by aboriginal and other ethnic communities. By the late 1960s Canada was on the verge of several decades of radical re-imaginings which would witness transformative change in its constitution, jurisprudence and, not least, in church-state relations. Indeed, the defining elements of Canadian pluralism would shift from religion to language and ethnicity, as multiculturalism supplanted biculturalism in a new quest for national identity, purpose, and unity. Simultaneously, Canadian legislators embraced the protection of human rights as the fundamental legitimator of renewed governmental authority. By the time that God would return to haunt the renewed Canadian constitutional discourse directed by Pierre Trudeau as Justice Minister and then Prime Minister after 1968, Canadian public life and rhetoric would be in process of rapid de-Christianization, while jurisprudence and political theory were searching for non-religious foundations. The larger dimensions of this story can but be alluded to tonight.6 The 1960s and 1970s were transformative in terms of secularization, as ethnic and ideological pluralism supplanted the former Anglo-French, Protestant-Catholic dualism of Canadian history. The Canadian experience forms part of a process of modernization shared with all industrialized societies and, in Canada's case, heavily influenced by Britain and America. From Britain came the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report—that criminality and morality should be separated in such matters as homosexuality and prostitution, and that the state should confine itself to the proscription and punishment of behaviour that was manifestly harmful to society, while protecting the freedom of the individual, even if the choices indulged socially harmless 'sinning.' These themes found a sympathetic hearing in liberal Canadian quarters. Concurrently, from America the integration of politics and religion was most clearly challenged by a series of Supreme Court decisions that asserted a strict wall of separation between church and state in matters of public education, and other public services. In Canada, the legal transitions had the added drama of coinciding with the making of a new constitution—a project which focused in large measure on the protecting human rights. The Canadian constitutional drama, moreover, was driven by a philosopher-king, Pierre Trudeau, who, as Prime Minister after 1968, made the constitutional entrenchment of a Charter of Rights his own political mission, seeing it through to success in the constitutional settlement of 1982. When in 1967 Trudeau became Justice Minister in the Pearson's Liberal Government, the concurrent celebrations marking the centennial year of the Canadian confederation were troubled, at least latently, by a diffuse sense of social malaise as to national purpose and identity. With the crises of the depression and war now receding into memory after decades of unprecedented prosperity and a dawning of detente in the Cold War, the country found itself faced with not only the manifest challenge of resurgent Québécois nationalism but also a cultural revolution that was eager to challenge the traditional privileging of religion well beyond Quebec Catholicism. In the germinating legitimation crisis which attended the drift, scandals, and confusions of the last years of the Pearson government, it was the genius of Trudeau's politics to project updated themes of classic liberal ideology—brilliantly indiginized for Canadian appeal: federalism to confront the separatist aspirations of Quebec nationalism; multicultural pluralism to accommodate and contain ethnic assertion and ideological conflict; civil libertarianism to enshrine protection for individual rights in a revised constitution; participatory democracy to include citizens in the shaping of the just society, and secularism to disentangle a modernized Canadian legal order from its religious constraints. Each of these themes resonated with Canadian mass culture by the latter half of the 'sixties, and appealed deeply to academic, cultural, and media elites, offering renewed government purpose and legitimation while concurrently rejuvenating the Liberal Party. When the project to modernize Canadian law and liberate it from its religious framework addressed itself first to divorce legislation, Trudeau instructed Parliament in 1967 on the cardinal themes of the new jurisprudence: We are now living in a social climate in which people are beginning to realize, perhaps for the first time in the history of this country, that we are not entitled to impose the concepts, which belong to a sacred society upon a civil or profane society. The concepts of the civil society in which we live are pluralistic, and I think this parliament realizes that it would be a mistake for us to try to legislate into this society concept that belongs to a theological or sacred order.That the rights and freedoms of the individual would provide the animus for a comprehensive modernization and liberalization of Canadian law was evident not only in Trudeau's approach to the issue of divorce law, but also in the initiatives he undertook in a coterie of other 'morality' issues, such as lotteries, birth control, homosexuality, and abortion—all of which contained potentially explosive intersections of religious and legal principles. After legal study of several of these issues within the Justice Department, and comprehensive public hearings on the issues of birth control and abortion conducted by the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health and Welfare, Trudeau combined these 'morality' issues with a series of other changes in the criminal law code into an Omnibus Bill which was given first reading in the Commons 21 December 1967. By the time the Omnibus Bill was passed in 1969, Trudeau had captured the leadership of the Liberal Party and led it to electoral triumph in 1968, assisted by the powerful, if transient, appeal of 'Trudeaumania.' However, if Trudeau's charisma and progressive agenda won him the first Liberal majority government since 1953, his trenchant federalism sparked revolutionary violence from the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ). Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act in October 1970 to suppress separatist terrorism in Quebec both demonstrated the perceived fragility of state authority and shocked civil libertarians that one of their own would go so far. A friend and protégé of Frank Scott, Trudeau had advocated a constitutionally-entrenched charter of rights from the early 1960s; it would be this 'magnificent obsession' which would inspire Trudeau and the Liberals through the economic and political crises of the 1970s, as the Parti Québécois under René Lévesque gained Provincial power in 1976 and fought an unsuccessful referendum on 'sovereignty-association' in 1980. Re-elected in 1980 after a brief retirement, Trudeau confronted the Quebec separatists with the promise of constitutional patriation, which would also include a constitutionally-entrenched Charter of Rights a project Trudeau carried out in 1982 after over a year of complex and Machiavellian political maneuvering in federal-provincial relations. To the Government's surprise, beyond the impassioned debate in Committee and Parliament on challenges mobilized by civil libertarian, aboriginal , and women's groups, religious issues emerged powerfully as religious lobbies joined with Conservative Party leaders to criticize the 'Godlessness' of the Liberals' proposed Charter. What is perhaps most noteworthy for our purposes regarding the religious dimensions of the constitutional debate is that whereas the mainline Protestant submissions and witnesses gave support to the Charter project, concentrating on justice issues with little concern for issues of religious freedom or religious grounding for human rights, it was the Catholics and the evangelical Protestants who pressed the government most determinedly on these issues. According to the caucus briefings prepared by David Smith, Liberal Deputy House Leader, and information he conveyed to me, it was the rising demographics of evangelical Protestantism and its convergence with Catholicism in theology and politics, which convinced a reluctant Trudeau and his Justice Minister, Jean Chrétien, to include a religious referent in the Preamble to the Charter: 'Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law'. Previously, Trudeau criticized the Conservatives as 'hypocritical and detestable' for playing politics with God, claiming that they were inspired more by fear of the electorate than fear of God. Although Trudeau thought 'it was strange, so long after the Middle Ages that some politicians felt obliged to mention God in a constitution which is, after all, a secular and not a spiritual document,' he also genuflected to the electorate, claiming now it was his personal preference to include the reference. Privately, Trudeau told the Liberal caucus the he didn't think 'God gives a damn whether he was in the constitution or not.' The Liberals were confronted with a mass media and letter-writing mobilization of conservative Christians, supported by the Conservative Party: Canadians demonstrated once again that they wanted God in their constitution.Conclusions At a vital moment in the successful campaign to acknowledge the 'supremacy of God', the leaders of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada wrote directly to the Prime Minister explaining clearly why they wanted this reference in the Canadian constitution: 'The acknowledgement of one Supreme God to whom we as a nation are answerable gives ground for legislation bearing on all matters human. To omit any such reference only leaves the door open for substitution of other less worthy grounds—utilitarianism, naturalism, secularism, etc.—since legislation cannot escape growing out of presuppositions. Moreover, human rights though recognized by the state in a democratic society are a sacred endowment from God not bestowed but administered by the state.' This was a theological statement which could have been fully approved by Catholics Å“ indeed it reads like Canadian evangelical Protestants had now discovered Thomas Aquinas! At first glance, the inclusion of the reference to God represented a signal success for the evangelical Christian lobbyists. The constitutional success, however, did not mean that the deeper cultural tides of de-Christianization or secularization had been reversed or that the traditional role of religion in Canadian political history had been restored. The constitutional reference to God had come as a result of tactical political calculations, not from any conversion on the part of Trudeau or the Liberals to the philosophic or theological convictions expressed by Conservative leaders , let alone the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. If Trudeau's desire to remove theology from politics had suffered a temporary reverse, the Charter itself would serve to launch a new era of secularist pluralist jurisprudence in Canadian political culture. Indeed, similar to the patters of jurisprudence through the post-1960s decades in Britain and the United States, the Canadian church-state relationship would be transformed as the Christian religion would see the state largely divest itself of religion's traditional priestly functions of legitimating government authority and law, and its prophetic and pastoral functions in guarding family and sexual morality. Which brings us back to where we started, with the beautiful inventions of Mr. Pettigrew and Chief Justice McLachlin. The capacity of democratic governments to perform successfully without religious legitimations and conscience has a very brief and untested history. Equally, it remains to be seen if religion will remain within the peripheralized and privatized spheres assigned to it in the secularist pluralist jurisprudence that Chief Justice McLachlin mistakenly and mythically elicits from Canadian history. If the mainline national churches of Canada have been demographically decimated and politically marginalized in recent decades, the re-configurations and re-alignments of religious conservatives from Protestantism and Catholicism, in Canada and internationally, and the effective coalitions now increasingly being built with other faith communities, perhaps herald changes to come. The reference to 'the supremacy of God' in the Canadian constitution may yet prove to be a crucial part of our written constitution—indeed, a beautiful re-invention. Traditionally, Canadian religious and political leaders defined Canada's national identity as a 'Christian democracy.' In the circumstances of today's demographic multicultualism, this formula is no longer possible; nor is nostalgic longing for the reconstruction of Canadian Christendom. What is possible and clearly represents an emerging dynamic in Canadian civil society is the formation of religious coalitions representing the common values of all the major faiths to guard what is precious in the human person and the religious freedoms of faith communities, in face of ideologies, politics, and jurisprudence which would subvert these. Will the definition of Canadian pluralism and multiculturalism be religiously friendly, as in our longer tradition, or religiously hostile and exclusionary, as in recent experience? Can religious faith and liberal ideology regain their traditional interdependence? Can religion reaffirm its standing at the head of the Canadian constitution, or will religious freedoms continue to be subordinated to equality rights? It is hoped that the historical perspectives offered in this address can contribute to better informed, positive responses to these most important challenges.Notes 1 E. R. Norman, The Conscience of the State in North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). 2 See the author's 'Entering the Age of Human Rights: Politics, Religion, and Canadian Liberalism: 1945-1950,' Canadian Historical Review, LXXXV: 3 (September 2004), pp. 451-479. 3 Canada, Parliament, Senate, Proceedings of the Special Committee on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1950). 4 See the author's 'Writing the Canadian Bill of Rights: Religion, Politics, and the Challenge of Pluralism, 1957-1960, Canadian Journal of Law and Society 19:2 (November 2004), pp. 1-22. 5 Gary R. Miedema, For Canada's Sake Canada: Public Religion, the Centennial Celebrations and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005). 6 See the author's 'Trudeau, God and the Canadian Constitution: Religion, Human Rights, and Government Authority in the Making of the 1982 Constitution,' in David Lyons and Marguerite Van Die, eds., Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada between Europe and America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000) pp. 90-112.