Works for me.

Whenever we have an event like the inauguration of a new President there are concerns raised about the mixing of religion and politics. They are often inadequately expressed in phrases like “Church and State” or “God and Government”, but they are valid concerns nonetheless, directing our attention to a real and serious danger. And they are not essentially partisan concerns, expressions of anti-God or anti-religious bigotry, as many conservative Christians seem to think. Civil religion is a problem for thoughtful people, believers and nonbelievers alike, who take God and/or religion seriously. And it’s actually part of a larger concern.

A pluralistic democracy, something most of us take for granted in this day and age, is a very challenging notion indeed. How is it possible for government to express the will of a people when the people in question hold radically different, and mutually exclusive, fundamental values? Well, it’s done by a process of continual consensus seeking, not only in parliaments and legislatures, but boardrooms, union shops, community leagues, clubs and societies of all sorts. It’s supremely done through the public education system, which is why private schools are so controversial in a pluralistic society. And it’s done by forging common values of toleration and acceptance, by forging common interests, and ultimately by creating a common, non-religious, non-ethnic, non-racial, non-specific mythical being called a Canadian or an American. This being has hopes and aspirations, dreams and accomplishments, friends, relations, fellow workers, and fellow citizens, but no colour, faith, language, age, or even gender. This being is committed to a “way of life” which is about consuming, becoming whatever “it” wants to be, and letting everyone else consume and become whatever they want to be.

Of course, there are obvious problems with this notion of a generic citizenry. In our personal lives, i.e., our actual and real lives, each of us is a particular expression of all of the above; race, language, faith, ethnicity, gender, etc. And there are public occasions when it feels like a denial of ourselves to keep these personal qualities private. We want a Black President, or Prime Minister, or Governor General for a change. We want a Woman, or Hispanic, or Francophone, or Hindu; someone a little more like us, or perhaps a little more like these folks who haven’t had their turn yet.

And, when we come to these great and iconic public events, we want to reach deep, beneath that generic image we’ve created, to the sources of self that are somehow still essential to who we really are. And here is the problem: how do we acknowledge these ultimate differences, without being divisive or implying that they don’t really matter?

Well, we bring as many representatives of these things as we can accommodate, a Black, an Asian, a Christian, a Jew, an Atheist, a Woman, a Gay, etc. We invite them to come and be themselves on the condition that we do this together. None will be too stridently Jewish, Asian, Christian, Black, Woman, Gay. And if they are, or we personally think they are, we will, by tacit agreement, try not to notice. For we all know, of course, that even this display of personal uniqueness, is part of the overriding process of sublimation that makes a pluralistic democracy possible.

It’s clever, effective and, perhaps most of all, continual and pervasive. And, though we all find it a bit stressful and troubling from time to time, especially when we feel someone has overstepped a line, we all support it because we haven’t yet found a better way to keep people from getting shot.