Religious Worldviews and the Canadian Political Landscape

A Research Note

Abstract

This article is part of a larger research project on Religion and Environmental Law in Canada. The case study below was initially designed for purposes of illustration, but other implications for this component of the study became apparent during the composition of the larger work. In this note, I explore those implications by proposing the use of case studies to examine the effect of religious worldviews on the crafting of policy and legislation in providing a framework for examining the effect of the presence of religious worldviews in the public sphere more generally. The concept centres on the premise that members of the elite fear that religion in the public sphere will erode the democratic process (Bramadat 2008). The aim is to show that: (1) religious worldviews are extant in the public sphere, and (2) more often than not they are beneficial to, or at least neutral in, the legislative process, rather than detrimental.