In this episode of On The Line, Jen Gerson sits down with Brian Dijkema, president of Cardus Canada, to discuss a new Department of National Defence directive that would move military chaplaincy away from explicit religious language, symbols and prayer in favour of more generic forms of “spiritual reflection.”
This episode is brought to you by BioCanRx. Through our partnership with federally-funded Canadian not-for-profit BioCanRx this summer, we’re talking about potential solutions for the problems that are limiting Canada’s ability to domestically develop new drugs, especially immunotherapies for cancer. Today: new methods for biomanufacturing.
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Dijkema argues that the change isn’t actually neutral. Instead, he sees it as part of a longer-running bureaucratic effort to reduce the visible role of religion within the Canadian Armed Forces. He and Gerson dig into the philosophical question at the heart of the dispute: is secular humanism really a neutral baseline for a diverse society, or is it itself a worldview that the state risks imposing on everyone else? They also talk about what military chaplains actually do. Dijkema argues that chaplains serve a special purpose. Questions about death, war, morality and meaning are not simply clinical problems, and military personnel should have access to people capable of engaging with them through their own religious traditions.
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Gerson and Dijkema also examine the directive’s special treatment of Indigenous spiritual practices, which Dijkema argues is both logically inconsistent and ultimately patronizing. His preferred alternative is straightforward: expand the space available to religious and non-religious Canadians alike rather than trying to make everyone conform to a supposedly neutral middle ground.
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