Religious Studies

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of Religious Studies.

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The Celebrity Imprint: "Religion" and Identity Among Fans of John Lennon and Johnny Cash
(University of Waterloo, 2023-05-23) Riddell, Kathleen
Fandom-as-religion literature examines similarities between fandom and religion and, in particular, dimensions of the fan experience such as beliefs, emotion, and ritual. This area emerged in the last thirty years and includes perhaps twenty to thirty scholars who direct their attention to this phenomenon. A fundamental line of inquiry guiding this area of study is that scholars question why fandom looks so much like religion and why many fans use religious language and metaphors to describe the fan experience. This dissertation examines why fandom is often compared to religion, what scholars may learn from this comparison, and what similarities and differences of experience between fandom and religion say about fans experience as “religious” actors. “Religious” appears in quotation marks to signal that the fan experience complicates our understanding of the binary between the sacred and the profane by occupying an “in-between” space, in which fans find “direction, order, meaning and purpose.” Given the fandom-as-religion argument is often made in the absence of sufficient field data, I address this limitation by participant observation in New York and Nashville among fans of John Lennon and Johnny Cash, respectively, along with follow-up interviews. I argue that the premise of fandom-as-religion should be reconceptualized as “fandom-as-lived-religion,” a reflection of the reality that fans of Lennon and Cash develop at least part of their fan identity through three “points of articulation”: (a) the extension of the self, an externalized reality that remains part of the fan’s self; (b) the growth of the fan-celebrity relationship in the fan’s religious imagination, an act of the extension, and (c) the celebrity’s death, often a turning point in the fan’s relationship with the celebrity. These points are the focus of the three published articles that serve as the focal point of this dissertation, which asks the question whether the imagined relationship the fan has with the celebrity does religious work, by providing a multi-faceted point of identification. The concepts of the “religious,” the extension of the self, the religious imagination, and religious work come together to tell the story of how fans of Lennon and Cash create the fabric of fan identity that is of “religious” consequence. In the Introduction and Conclusion, I consider how the driving questions of lived experience of celebrity fans say something about the phenomena of religious “nones.” Concluding thoughts concern how celebrity fandom may help address modern religious experience and issues in religious studies as a field.
Out of the 'Broom Closet' and Into the Academy: The Development of Contemporary Pagan Studies and the Role of Scholarship in Shaping Legitimacy
(University of Waterloo, 2022-05-30) Miller, Chris
Contemporary Pagan studies is an academic field that explores the beliefs, behaviours, practices, and identities of contemporary Pagans, borrowing lenses from such fields as religious studies, anthropology, sociology, history, archaeology, and folklore studies. This field emerged within the last roughly forty years, and contains perhaps one hundred scholars worldwide who direct their focus towards this religious community. Two fundamental lines of inquiry guide this critical historical analysis of the field: how do academic fields develop, and how do fields interact with the communities that they study? Concerning the first cluster of questions – how fields develop – this dissertation explores how fields progress from a few scholars discussing their shared interests informally at a larger conference to having established hubs for sharing and presenting research, including conferences, peer-reviewed journals, university courses, and academic publications. This project documents the spaces where Pagan studies exists, traces how these hubs develop, and explores the pitfalls that scholars often experience during processes of institutionalization. Concerning the second cluster of questions – how fields interact with communities – this dissertation explores how Pagan studies interacts with Pagans themselves. Engagement assumes various forms, from practitioners who read publications, informants who interact with scholars in the field, students taking an introductory course, and researchers who are Pagans themselves. I argue that through these different interactions, scholars legitimize those subjects about which they write. Legitimation – which can also be understood as validating or authorizing a particular perspective – can occur both implicitly and explicitly. Scholars discursively legitimize communities through the labels that they apply, by positioning the community in a certain (generally favourable) way, or asserting that particular characteristics are essential to all Pagans. More explicitly, scholars legitimize communities when they speak on behalf of Pagans before media, public institutions, or in legal proceedings. This dissertation explores how scholars perform this legitimizing work, and the debates that occur within and outside this field regarding appropriate relationships between scholarship and advocacy. Although based on a relatively small academic field (studying a small religious community), this dissertation offers insights into such broader processes as how knowledge systems are constructed and the power of academia to legitimize ideas.
Multi-sited Faith: Chinese Canadian, Young Adult Evangelicals and the Negotiation of Ethno-Religious Identity in the Greater Toronto Area
(University of Waterloo, 2020-05-13) Wall, Scott
In 2016, Census Canada found that more than 1.5 million of Toronto, Ontario’s roughly 5.4 million total population were second-generation immigrants. As part of this significant cohort, Chinese Canadian young adults are coming of age in a diverse, multicultural landscape. This project investigates the experience of my 18-35 year-old Chinese Canadian participants as they negotiate their connection to both their Chinese heritage and their sense of being evangelical Christians. Drawing on 51 formal interviews, 18 months of participant observation using multi-site ethnographic methods, and analysis of material culture, I argue that Chinese Canadian, young adult evangelicals form a variety of identity combinations in order to build and maintain attachment to ethno-religious communities. I found that while some explore and use multi-ethnic congregations and ministries to form these combinations, a far larger contingent of Chinese Canadian young adult evangelicals are drawing from a network of institutions and organizations rooted in the Chinese evangelical community. This network constitutes one of the chief findings of the study and illustrates how the unique second-generation religious forms that it fosters and allows for may help sustain and strengthen continued involvement in immigrant congregations for years to come.
Renunciation and the Householder/Renouncer Relation in the New Kadampa Tradition
(University of Waterloo, 2019-04-30) Emory-Moore, Christopher
Founded by the Tibetan-British monk Geshe Kelsang Gyatso in 1991, the New Kadampa Tradition – International Kadampa Buddhist Union (NKT-IKBU) is a fast-growing and controversial transnational Buddhist network that has enthusiastically embraced an expansionist business model and major monastic reform. Toward an improved understanding of the group and of Tibetan Buddhism’s diasporic modernization more broadly, this dissertation examines the practice of Buddhism’s traditionally monastic soteriology of renunciation (the abandonment of “worldly concerns” on the path to liberation from cyclic rebirth) by members of urban NKT meditation centres in Canada and the United States. When China declared its sovereignty over the Tibetan cultural region in 1951, twenty-year old Kelsang Gyatso was one of over 6,000 monks residing at the Geluk monastery of Sera near Lhasa. Forty years later when he founded the NKT in northern England, Gyatso decided it would have no monasteries, only congregational teaching and meditation centers designed to spread his interpretation of Geluk Buddhism. Without monasteries to institutionally support the Buddhist praxis of renunciation, what does renunciation look like in the NKT? My ethnographic study of the North American NKT addresses this question by engaging field interviews, participant observations, publications, teachings, and media through a conceptual apparatus prominent in both Buddhism and Buddhist Studies: the householder/renouncer relation. I argue that the NKT’s market-driven expansionism not only supersedes its funding of a monastic community but replaces monasticism as the principal institutional framework for renunciation in the form of full-time subsistence missionary work on the part of ordained and lay Kadampa Buddhist virtuosos. Whereas Tibetan clerical renunciation looks like the monastic community’s dual abandonment of the household activities of economic and sexual production, my analysis of NKT labour reveals that these have been bifurcated between ordained Kadampa monastics who renounce sexual reproduction but not economic production, and Kadampa missionary managers who renounce the latter but not necessarily the former. Celibate monastic ordination becomes an optional lifestyle, the suitability of which is primarily a matter of personal preference rather than ritual specialization, and the arduous and austere life of a missionary (lay or ordained) becomes the principal model of a consecrated life of renunciation. Finally, I suggest that this hybrid business model of “missionary monasticism” has been a major factor in the NKT’s external growth, producing a diverse and motivated labour force whose renunciation of economic remuneration provides the organization with the fruits of their economic production, but also in some of the movement’s more visible internal fault lines: labour shortage, turnover, and disgruntled former members.
God, Country, and Christian Conservatives: The National Association of Manufacturers, the John Birch Society, and the Rise of the Christian Right
(University of Waterloo, 2018-05-28) Celestini, Carmen
According to the First Amendment of the United States of America, religion is to be separate from the State, yet the heart and faith of voters cannot always be separated from their choices in the polling booth. Media, social groups, and emotions such as fear can impact an individual’s choice for a political candidate. This dissertation examines a historical timeline, from the 1930s to the early 1980s, of the interactions of corporations, wealthy individuals and religious leaders. These individuals created a strategic plan to politically mobilize a percentage of conservative Christians, through a Christian libertarianism that reflected a Christianity in support of free enterprise and limited government. In particular, I highlight the influence of the National Association of Manufacturers on the John Birch Society, and the Society’s impact on the Moral Majority and the Council for National Policy. In essence, this dissertation argues that the John Birch Society was foundational in the creation of the rise of the Christian Right in America. Through the use of conspiracy theories linked to Christian apocalyptic thought, the JBS, which was at the time under the leadership of Robert Welch, was able to use morality issues and a perception of declining American morality to incite fear into the hearts and minds of some conservative Christian voters. These morality issues would become the foundation for “culture wars” in the coming decades and a basis for the Moral Majority to instigate a voting bloc for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Previous scholarship on the JBS has not included its important role in the rise of the New Christian Right, nor its role in the creation of culture wars issues prior to the late 1960s. This dissertation highlights the role of the overlapping belief systems of conspiracy theories and apocalyptic thought in the mobilization of conservative Christians by corporations, wealthy individuals, and religious leaders to elect “truly conservative” candidates supportive of a Christian America that is representative of a Christian libertarian state. iv
Thirsty Land into Springs of Water: Negotiating a Place in Canada as Latter-day Saints, 1887-1947
(University of Waterloo, 2018-05-17) Brassard, Brooke Kathleen
This dissertation examines how Latter-day Saints—originally an American tradition—expanded into an international religion beginning with their settlement on Canadian soil. The “Americanization thesis” promoted by scholars such as sociologist Armand L. Mauss, geographer Ethan R. Yorgason, and historian Thomas G. Alexander, who argued that Latter-day Saints assimilated into the American mainstream society by the mid-20th century, might lead one to expect to find a linear progression of “Canadianization” and a clear distinction between American and Canadian Latter-day Saints (LDS) by the 1950s. However, my investigation of Latter-day Saints in Alberta and their material culture, politics, economics, gendered roles, and marriage practices reveals that there was no singular element that differentiated American from Canadian Latter-day Saints. Understanding the subtle nature of the Mormon experience in southern Alberta (rather than America) required attention to Canadian society and Canadian narratives, and how Canadian LDS negotiated their identities in these Canadian contexts as a type of integration. The key to offering a critical analysis of negotiation, especially with a case study featuring Latter-day Saints, was to focus on the tension between integration and “peculiarity.” Mainstream society forced the newcomers to decide what they were willing to give up, maintain, or innovate in their own tradition as well as what they would adopt, reject, or ignore in their adopted society. Certain beliefs, traditions, and practices unique to Mormonism—characteristics that drew borders around themselves and maintained an identity of peculiarity—provided enough tension between the LDS and outsiders to keep them separate and different; however, this was generally in an inoffensive way because the Mormons successfully represented themselves as valuable settlers and labourers who posed little threat to the status quo in Canadian society.
How it Seams: Religious Dress, Multiculturalism, and Identity Performance in Canadian Society, 1910-2017
(University of Waterloo, 2018-05-16) Morlock, Laura
Canadians generally consider themselves forerunners of acceptance who deem diversity a core value, yet this identity coexists alongside fierce national debates over reasonable accommodation of minority religious practices in public spaces. In this context religious minorities use dress to communicate their needs and goals to the larger society, in the process expanding the parameters of human rights for all Canadians. This challenges the false narrative that Canada is a religiously neutral nation without its mainstream society’s own fervently held beliefs and practices, and of religious minorities as an inherently threatening force to these inviolable values. In order to understand how religious minorities engage dress in highly symbolic ways, this dissertation explores the ways everyday clothes become objects of sacred performance and sites of fierce public contestation in the process of identity creation, maintenance, and re-creation. This study uses three case studies of minorities and religious headcoverings in Canada over the course of a century to understand how dress functions as a means of communication within and between religious minority communities and the larger Canadian society. The first is the debate over Swiss Mennonite women’s headcoverings in Ontario during and immediately after World War I. The second is Baltej Singh Dhillon’s experiences as Canada’s first turban-wearing Sikh RCMP officer in 1989-90. The third is Zunera Ishaq’s Supreme Court case to wear her Muslim niqab during a citizenship ceremony and its effects on the federal election of 2015. These case studies provide examples of potential outcomes for these groups. In the first, the group achieves its ultimate goal but the larger society largely misses its message. In the second, Dhillon achieves his goal while successfully communicating his message to the government. In the third, Ishaq achieves her goal, but the larger society does not fully understand her message and the matter remains hotly debated. This dissertation considers the discursive interactions of clothes, colonialism, human rights, and religion, bringing together a diverse collection of theories and methods from several disciplines, demonstrating that those who “cling” to these parochial ways are far from incompatible with Canadian ideals.
Neospirituality, Social Change and the Culture of the Post-Fordist Workplace
(University of Waterloo, 2017-05-19) Dyer-Witheford, Anne
This dissertation applies a religious studies perspective to the topic of neospirituality in the iconic post-Fordist workplaces of symbolic analysts. Despite a voluminous business literature on the importance of spirituality, this topic is underexplored by scholars of religion. Using secondary sources, I address this neglect by relating the themes of religious modernization and the changing structures of capitalism to this phenomenon. This dissertation outlines the important similarities between the basic beliefs and practices of the neospirituals and the culture, skill-set and worldview of symbolic analysts, dictated by work`s team and networking forms. Like Weber––but for a different class and economy––I analyzed a social stratum that acts as a carrier of a “practical ethic” reflective of a specific religious orientation. To understand this process, I explored neospiritual holism, the corporation as a psytopia, and the dematerialization and second privatization of religion. In relation to post-Fordism, I explored macroeconomic changes, labour-force recomposition, workplace restructuring since the 1970s and the culture of work. Anecdotal evidence and research suggest that neospirituality helps symbolic analysts reconcile themselves to the particular demands and concomitant lifestyle pressures of their creative labour. Five ways are proposed: Neospirituality`s holism supports the transition of early interest in genuine worker empowerment into a neoliberal anti-government sentiment that unites workers and their managers; neospirituality imaginatively collapses the modernist self/other distinction into a unitary world, helping assimilate individual-corporate interests; expensive neospiritual well-being commodities insulate from community relations and direct personal service use, maintaining while denying symbolic analysts superior social status; neospiritual prosumption posits the factory of the self––applied to work, self-production makes workers “owners;” and neospiritual preference for energy over matter mirrors post-Fordism’s privileging of immaterial over material products and its streamlining of all value to commodity value.
Bruxy Cavey and The Meeting House Megachurch: A Dramaturgical Model of Charismatic Leadership Performing “Evangelicalism for People Not Into Evangelicalism”
(University of Waterloo, 2016-03-21) Schuurman, Peter
Megachurch pastors—as local and international celebrities—have been a growing phenomenon since the 1960s, when megachurches began to proliferate across North America. Why are these leaders and their large congregations so popular in an age of increasing “religious nones”? Commentators in both popular and academic literature often resort to characterizing the leadership with stereotypes of manipulative opportunists along the lines of Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry (1927) or narrow characterizations of savvy entrepreneurs who thrive in a competitive religious economy. Similarly, writers assume megachurch attendees are a passive audience, or even dupes. This dissertation challenges the Elmer Gantry stereotype and the religious economic perspectives by examining one particular megachurch pastor named Bruxy Cavey in the context of his “irreligious” megachurch community called The Meeting House. It argues that charismatic leadership, not calculated management and branding techniques, best explains the rapid growth of this megachurch as well as the deep commitments many people make to it. While the concept of “charisma” is often used equivocally, in the tradition of Max Weber I contend that charismatic authority is best understood not only as an extraordinary individual quality but as a form of cultural authority that arises when traditional and institutional forms have lost their plausibility and people experience uncertainty, dissatisfaction, or distress. People attribute exemplary powers to someone who offers them a way out, and intellectually and emotionally bond with the visionary and their vision. This charismatic authority I portray as a dramatic production, what I call a “dramatic web” that draws followers into its scene and script, offering some resolution to their worries. The complex, compelling nature of this drama is best understood in the context of Wendy Griswold’s “cultural diamond,” which proposes four elements in the analysis of a cultural object: the cultural object itself, its creators, its receivers, and the social world that encapsulates them all. I investigate the four elements as part of a “charismatic diamond”: the cultural object is the “dramatic web” of Cavey’s church, marketed as “a church for people who aren’t into church”; the creators are Cavey and his staff, who employ a variety of media to generate and disseminate the drama; the social world is a Canadian culture ambivalent about religion and which stigmatizes right-wing evangelicals; the receivers are various concentric circles of audience who participate in the subculture of the church to varying degrees. Following the dramaturgical themes of Erving Goffman, I investigate the “dramatic web” of The Meeting House in two parts—as a deconstructive, satirical project displayed on Sunday mornings and then as a re-constructive, romantic adventure that is exemplified in weekday Home Churches. For the first, I show Cavey deliberately takes “role distance” from the stereotype of a right-wing evangelical pastor, using satire to deconstruct the mores of North American evangelical culture and create an “alienating effect” in his audience. The negatively oriented opening acts create a space in which a new script can be constructed, and I demonstrate next Cavey’s two core romantic narratives that champion “relationship, not religion”—a script that is to be enacted through their weekday Home Churches. Not all attendees are caught up in this dramatic web to the same degree, however, as attendees select elements from it for their own purposes, some embracing and identifying with the whole script, while others take pieces from it to arrange into a more eclectic religious life. The final chapter explores moments of “dramaturgical trouble,” including the question of what happens when Cavey retires, dies, or is deposed. In other words, how might this religious performance come to an end? I offer a typology of possible endings and their sequels—three scenarios of charismatic succession I developed from Weber’s writing on the routinization of charisma. The dissertation concludes by suggesting that, contrary to predictions of the megachurches demise, if megachurches indeed are a compelling drama co-produced by leader and follower that brings meaning, purpose, and joy to followers’ lives in the midst of cultural tension, megachurches are not just a passing fad or vulnerable personality cult, but a viable and likely enduring North American religious institution.
"J'y Suis. Pour de Bon." Montreal Jewish Education and the Social Construction of Diaspora Identity
(University of Waterloo, 2015-09-25) Read, Jamie Anne
This work examines the meaning of the State of Israel in diaspora Jewish education in contemporary Montreal, Canada. It does so by asking three central questions: “Is there a common idea of the nation?” “How is the idea of the nation made compelling and transferred from one generation to the next in a diaspora context?” and “Does the local context of a given diaspora community affect how the idea of the nation is taught?” The first part of this study draws on Anthony Smith’s theory of ethnosymbolism to investigate how symbols and myths provide the cultural foundations necessary for the social construction of modern national consciousness. Particularly, it reveals the process through which the political myth of the State of Israel expanded on pre-modern religious narrative frameworks in order to elicit communal will and emotion and unify highly divergent Jewish communities around the idea of the nation. Taking Montreal Jewish day schools as a site of inquiry, the second dimension of this research analyzes how the process of nation building occurs in a diaspora setting. It investigates how specific elements common to nations - the myth of election, territorialisation, shared ethnohistory, and communal destiny - are interwoven and actively cultivated in Israel education curricula and programming developed for mainstream Montreal Jewish day schools. This case study reveals how the absence of territorialisation creates certain challenges when cultivating diaspora nationalism and highlights how Montreal Jewish educators systematically attempt to overcome those challenges. A final aspect of this work develops the idea that Jewish education is influenced by local social forces and that attachment to a national homeland increases when a diaspora community experiences social isolation. Specifically, it argues that fostering a common idea about the State of Israel in mainstream Montreal Jewish education is made possible due to the near institutional completeness of the Montreal Jewish community; isolation from other local communities, namely the francophone community of Quebec; intensive Hebrew language and Jewish Studies curricula; and the placement of Israeli teachers in Jewish day schools. This study offers new insight into the affects of the socio-linguistic and local context on the process of diaspora identity formation in Jewish day schools. Equally, by emphasizing the foundational role religion holds in the social construction of national identity, this dissertation reveals how religion and nationalism can reinforce national cohesion in a diaspora context.
Drag Queens and Farting Preachers: American Televangelism, Participatory Media, and Unfaithful Fandoms
(University of Waterloo, 2015-07-14) Bekkering, Denis J.
Studies of religion and fandom have generally considered sincere devotion a fundamental point of contact between the two cultural phenomena, an assumption not reflected in fan studies proper. This dissertation aims to expand the scope of research on religion and fandom by offering cultural histories of “unfaithful” fan followings of three controversial American televangelists – Robert Tilton, Tammy Faye Bakker/Messner, and Jim Bakker – dating from the 1980s to 2012, and consisting of individuals amused by, rather than religiously affiliated with, their chosen television preachers. It is argued that through their ironic, parodic, and satirical play with celebrity preachers widely believed to be religious fakes, these unfaithful fans have engaged in religious work related to personal and public negotiations of authentic Christianity. Additionally, it is demonstrated that through their activities, and in particular through their media practices, these fans have impacted the brands and mainstream representations of certain televangelists, and have provoked ministry responses including dismissal, accommodation, and counteraction.
The Political Discourse of Religious Pluralism: World Religions Textbooks, Liberalism, and Civic Identities
(University of Waterloo, 2014-09-22) Puett, Tiffany
Religious pluralism is a meaningful framework for many scholars and students of religion as well as citizens working to make sense of a religiously and culturally diverse society. It purports noble aims: bringing people together across differences and facilitating the inclusion of more people at the proverbial table of democracy. Pluralism has become an essential element in the management of religious diversity in the American public sphere. While presenting itself as politically neutral, the discourse of pluralism is, in fact, embedded with veiled politics. While it embraces a democratizing agenda, it simultaneously engages in regulatory activities that impose limitations and exclusions on people’s beliefs and behaviors. My work investigates this tension. I use Norman Fairclough’s theory of critical discourse analysis to analyze world religions textbooks as discursive sites for the production of the discourse of religious pluralism. I contend that pluralism is a formally non-political discourse that reproduces and legitimates liberal norms and ideology. It functions as a practice of liberal governance—a mode of governmentality. Its discursive practices serve as tools for orchestrating social cohesion and regulating religion within a liberal social framework. By framing this analysis through the concept of governmentality, I aim to explore the enduring salience of liberalism in American society and the multiple discourses that support liberalism’s totalizing tendencies. I investigate the ways in which the rhetoric of liberalism touts individual freedoms as a foundational value, while it simultaneously works in other ways to implicitly manage, regulate, and limit many of those freedoms. As I look at how these world religions textbooks help to mediate and transmit the liberal public sphere, I also consider how these discursive practices reveal the ambivalence and complexity involved in religious diversity in the U.S.
Sharia and Constraint: Practices, Policies, and Responses to Faith-based Arbitration in Ontario
(University of Waterloo, 2014-03-13) Cutting, Christopher
In the fall of 2003 Syed Mumtaz Ali, leader of the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice located in Toronto Ontario announced in a media interview that his institute was in a new position to offer faith based arbitration to Muslims in Ontario in family law matters such as divorce, custody, and wills. This announcement precipitated a media storm. Participants in the public debate on faith based arbitration, or what came to be called the “sharia debate,” worried that vulnerable people such as Muslim women and children might not receive fair treatment by faith based arbitrators. Although, these were legitimate concerns, I argue that much of the public discourse was deeply Islamophobic, and factually wrong in several respects. I argue that the media played an important role in advancing what I call imperial secularism and what others have called colonial feminism. Furthermore, no one knew what was taking place on the ground in Muslim communities with regard to alternative dispute resolution of family law matters generally. My fieldwork research revealed two unanticipated results. First, the vast majority of Muslim adherents seeking out alternative dispute resolution services related to family law matters were Muslim women rather than Muslim men. Second, the vast majority of Muslims seeking out these services were looking for a religious divorce in addition to a civil divorce so that they could remarry within their religious community. They were not on the whole seeking guidance on matters, for example, regarding custody, division of family assets, or support payment amounts upon divorce. The Dalton McGuinty government ultimately decided to ban faith based arbitration, making its announcement on September 11, 2005. However, I argue that due to de facto legal pluralism there are several other avenues for making religious legal traditions legally enforceable, for example, through faith based mediation, if the disputants agree to enter the results of a mediation into a separation agreement. I argue that this apparent oversight of the resulting policy is in part due to a public discourse that treated vulnerable people generally and Muslim women in particular paternalistically as “children” in need of rescue. I argue however that given the realities of Canada’s Family Law Act, it is crucial to develop policy that recognizes vulnerable people as agents, facilitating agency rather than essentially denying it. Furthermore, my fieldwork suggests that many of the practices of Muslim faith mediation are much more reasonable than several participants in the public debate assumed, questioning the Islamophobic tone of the public debate. However, there are still risks in faith based mediation and the like, and for that reason I make several policy recommendations designed to facilitate the agency of vulnerable people to protect themselves. Notably, Orthodox Jewish communities have been using faith based arbitration for several years. Therefore, I conducted research to see how the McGuinty government’s decision affected them. The unanticipated result was that very little had changed in practice for Jewish communities precisely because of de facto legal pluralism. I argue that the Islamophobic discourse of the public “sharia debate” and the limited policy formed following the debate are the result in part of imperial secularism and colonial feminism. Therefore, I argue that anti-imperial secularism and post-secular feminism should be developed within Canada’s larger multicultural framework in order to promote improved public discourse and public policy that treats vulnerable people generally and Muslim women specifically as agents rather than as “children” in need of paternalistic rescue.
Religion, Land and Democracy in Canadian Indigenous-State Relations
(University of Waterloo, 2013-05-22T20:14:05Z) Shrubsole, Nicholas
Many indigenous communities perceive an intimate connection between land and religion, and land has, and continues to remain, at the heart of indigenous-state relations. This dissertation examines how philosophies of land and religion in correlation with histories of dispossession and differentiation contribute to socio-political structures that threaten the religious freedom of Aboriginal peoples and the very existence of indigenous religious traditions, cultures, and sacred sites in Canada today. Through a political-philosophical approach to ethical concerns of justice as fairness, national minorities’ rights, and religious freedom, I examine court decisions, legislation, and official protocols that shape contemporary indigenous-state relations. I identify philosophical and structural issues preventing Canada from protecting the fundamental rights guaranteed to indigenous peoples and all Canadians. More specifically, I examine the historical manifestations of concepts of land and religion in philosophies of colonization, emphasizing their effects in contemporary indigenous-state relations. I analyze the impacts of secularization, socio-economic expansion, and the dispossession of Aboriginal traditional lands on the protection of indigenous cultural rights and off-reserve sacred sites. Based on this analysis, I discuss communicative democratic theory and the potential benefits and limitations of the “Duty to Consult and Accommodate”—the most recent framework for indigenous-state relations—for the protection of indigenous religious traditions and the importance of the inclusion of indigenous peoples in administrative and decision-making processes. Finally, I explore indigenous representation, religious revitalization and the politics of authenticity, authority, diversity and cultural change.
Quenching the Spirit: The Transformation of Religious Identity and Experience in Three Canadian Pentecostal Churches
(University of Waterloo, 2012-03-09T20:59:28Z) Stewart, Adam
According to Census Canada, after eight decades of consistent growth Canadian Pentecostal affiliation reached an all-time high of 436,435 individuals in 1991. A decade later, the results of the 2001 Canadian census revealed that Pentecostalism underwent a precipitous 15.3 percent, or 66,969 affiliate, decline—the first in Canadian Pentecostal history. Scholars of religion assumed that this decline in affiliation represented an actual decrease in the number of Canadian Pentecostal adherents. Drawing on 42 personal interviews, 158 survey responses, content analysis of material culture, and one year of participant observation within three Canadian Pentecostal congregations located in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, I provide an alternative interpretation of the decrease in Canadian Pentecostal affiliation that pays closer attention to both the data contained in the census as well as important changes in religious culture that have occurred at the congregational level. I demonstrate how the decrease in Canadian Pentecostal affiliation recorded by Census Canada does not alone provide adequate evidence to claim that Pentecostal adherents abandoned their congregations at a rate of more than 15 percent in the decade between 1991 and 2001. Instead, I argue that this decrease in affiliation can be explained by the fact that Canadian Pentecostals have experienced a transformation of religious identity, belief, and practice from traditionally Pentecostal to generically evangelical categories significant enough to be detected by the census. When asked, for instance, to describe their religious affiliation, 86 percent of interview participants in this study chose a generically evangelical or Christian moniker rather than the term “Pentecostal.” This means that just 14 percent of interview participants would have been recorded as Pentecostal if they answered in a similar way on the census instrument. The significant proportion of the participants in this study that did not identify, believe, or behave the way that Canadian Pentecostals did just a few decades earlier, I believe, helps explain the dramatic, if misleading, 2001 census results.
Playing for keeps: The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada in the public sphere, 1983-2006
(University of Waterloo, 2011-06-14T13:41:36Z) Patrick, Margaretta Linda
This thesis is an intellectual history of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) and its public policy activity from 1983 to 2006. The EFC represents many of the major evangelical Protestant denominations and organizations in Canada. Although some commentators interpret its work in light of the American Religious Right, the EFC is non-partisan and strives to be more politically moderate. This stance reflects the historical political moderation of Canadian evangelicalism. EFC leaders give direction to the evangelical community by contributing to the development of an evangelical identity that assumes political engagement, ecumenism, persuasion, and a high view of the state. Their model of engagement is politically pragmatic and emphasizes the imago Dei principle and the common good. The two concerns that contributed to evangelical political mobilization in the early 1980s were the increasing secularization of Canadian society and the privatization of religion. The EFC responded to these concerns in two ways. First, it defined secularism as intent on limiting religion in the public sphere. This interpretation enabled EFC leaders to mobilize their constituency, argue that public policy can never be religiously neutral, and insist that liberalism is not a neutral philosophy. However, it also meant that they did not critique the most secular of all spheres, the economy, or recognize the degree to which Christianity continues to enjoy cultural privileges as compared to other religions. The struggle against secularism took the EFC to Parliament Hill and into the courts. Second, the EFC called for religious groups to be at the policy making "table." This "table" is a liberal-democratic one that often requires participants to engage in discussions in a secular liberal manner. The impact of these requirements was evident in the EFC‘s participation in the public debates surrounding the definition of marriage. Many of its arguments employed liberal reasoning and de-emphasized religious convictions. Over time the EFC moved toward the social consensus about the need to protect same-sex relationships. This movement, however, did not indicate secularization on the part of the EFC. Rather, its leaders desired to develop publicly accessible arguments and thereby they contributed to civil society.
Springfield's Sacred Canopy: Religion and Humour in The Simpsons
(University of Waterloo, 2010-11-12T15:26:28Z) Feltmate, David Seward
This dissertation examines religion’s satirical portrayal in The Simpsons. Building upon a sociological theory of humour developed from Peter Berger’s sociological theories of knowledge, religion, and humour, it assesses how The Simpsons criticizes America’s major religious traditions and their social roles. Arguing that the program presents a spectrum of acceptable religious practice, this dissertation demonstrates how The Simpsons constructs its arguments by selectively interpreting each tradition through its most recognizable characteristics and the common sentiments through which those characteristics are interpreted. These “ignorant familiarities” are used as a basis for understanding what Americans presumably know about religion, what is deemed acceptable “religious behaviour” in the public sphere, and what the consequences are for those religions that The Simpsons caricatures.
Religion in the Ranks: Religion in the Canadian Forces in the 21st Century
(University of Waterloo, 2008-05-23T20:27:50Z) Benham Rennick, Joanne
Religion in the Ranks offers insights into the role of religion in the modern bureaucratic institution of the Canadian Forces and the nature of religious identity among its personnel. This study of religion in a modern Canadian institution relies first on historical sociological analysis to identify the role that religion has traditionally played in the CF both in the institution of the chaplaincy and in the lives of individuals. However, given the broader social developments of the past century that have seen the authority of religious institutions wane in the face of individualism and secularization, this study goes further to examine the role religion plays in the lives of personnel in the Canadian Forces today. While traditionally religion in Canada was governed by religious authorities and institutions it now includes more diffuse, privatized, subjectivated and individualized forms that can only be studied by asking individuals about their beliefs. Consequently, this study also relies on field research in the form of in-depth interviews with both chaplains (those who represent traditional religious institutions) and personnel who may or may not affiliate with a religious tradition. This research provides three insights of particular relevance to understanding religion in late modernity. First, it demonstrates that religion persists in an individualized, subjectivated and diffuse state in the military (as it does in Canadian society) and even people who belong to traditional religious communities have to wrestle with the new social conditions that give rise to this new form of religious identity. Modern conditions make the rise of individualism and subjectivation of religion virtually inescapable, since even those who remain in traditional and authoritarian religious communities must now choose to do so. Second, it indicates a new religious pluralism stemming from individual interpretations of belief that produce new ways of being religious (e.g., Pagans) in addition to the pluralism that comes from integrating immigrants from minority religious traditions (e.g., Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhist, Muslims, etc). Third, it points to the continuing relevance of the chaplaincy, an institution inherited from Canada’s Christian past that has been able, more or less successfully, to adapt to these new conditions. These three observations demonstrate that despite important changes in the structure and culture of religious identity and practice, religion persists in this putatively secular social institution. Despite the obvious signs of secularization, my interviews showed that this new form of individualistic and subjective forms of religion served a variety of purposes for CF personnel. The personal religious beliefs of the people I interviewed offered them opportunities to examine the uncertain or unknowable aspects of life and death, morality and ethics, good and evil, as well as one’s purpose for existing. Moreover, for several of the participants in this study, religion played a mediating role between the alienating forces of modernity that effected people working in large bureaucratic modern institutions. This study also revealed the depth and breadth of the new religious pluralism that has marked Canadian society since the 1960s. This pluralism has several sources. First, Canadians raised in the Christian tradition have, thanks to the forces of individualism and subjectivation discussed above, adopted a variety of non-conformist religious perspectives, such as Wicca, neo-paganism, and other new religious movements as well as that diffuse form of religious identity called “spiritual but not religious.” Second, the rise of traditional Aboriginal spirituality among Aboriginal personnel has meant a “return” or conversion to Aboriginal spirituality for many CF personnel. Finally, immigration has resulted in an increase in religious diversity and the CF has had to deal with an increase in the numbers of its members who identify themselves as Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists or members of the world’s various religious traditions. Whereas traditional Christian worldviews prevailed in earlier times, religion in Canada today is marked by pluralism, individualism and rapid change. Finally, my study found that despite the challenges posed by secularization, the transformation of religious identity and belonging, and the new religious pluralism, CF personnel remained loyal to the military chaplaincy. The transformation of the chaplaincy to these new conditions illustrates the adaptability of religious institutions in the face of modern influences. Despite requirements to fit their religious vocations into a system based on reason, bureaucracy, and the requirement for “acceptable” credentials, chaplains have been able to retain and even expand their place within the military. They have done this by adapting to aspects of military society while remaining outside the formal structures that govern other military personnel. Moreover, they have modified their role to accommodate new religious realities by taking on duties such as pastoral care and “generic” ministry to all military members regardless of their faith tradition. While senior military officials see the chaplains’ presence as a means to ensuring “operational effectiveness” by keeping personnel fit for and effective in their duties, chaplains understand their role as being essential to helping personnel to order their experiences, providing comfort in the face of suffering, loneliness and fear, as well as interpreting some of the violence they see in their role. Furthermore, the transformation of the chaplaincy into a multifaith institution over the last fifty years has been remarkable. This transition has not been without its contradictions, conflicts and difficulties. While much work remains to be done, the chaplaincy has adapted to the challenges of pluralism with some degree of success. The evidence of the continuing significance of religion for individuals employed by a highly-bureaucratic organization such as the military indicates the continuing significance religion can have in a secular Canadian institution. It is a clear indication that despite secularizing trends that have resulted in the privatization and subjectivization of religion, religion persists in its significance, albeit in new forms, for many people. Further, indications that people turn to religious resources in times of hardship and stress suggests that religion and religious resources may retain their significance as a source of comfort and consolation despite a resistance to traditional organized forms of religion. Religion and religious diversity in Canadian society, despite their changing forms, will continue to be important social and cultural reference points for present and future generations.
Creating a Timeless Tradition: The Effects of Fundamentalism on the Conservative Mennonite Movement
(University of Waterloo, 2007-12-14T18:52:46Z) Martin, Andrew C.
Revivalism and fundamentalism were significant forces that greatly influenced the life and theology of North American Mennonites during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After World War II, the (Old) Mennonite Church began to make a significant shift away from fundamentalism. The Conservative Mennonite movement began in the 1950s in protest against the theological and sociological changes taking place in the Mennonite Church, particularly the loss of fundamentalist doctrines. This thesis traces the influences of fundamentalism as they were adopted early in the twentieth century by the Mennonite Church and came to fulfillment in the founding of the Conservative Mennonite movement. By looking at the history of the (Old) Mennonites in North America and the development of Protestant fundamentalism, this thesis provides a theological analysis of the influence of fundamentalism on the Conservative Mennonite movement.

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