Ontario’s Education Minister Stephen Lecce says he has asked his staff to review the circumstances surrounding a series of anti-racism training sessions held by the Toronto District School Board in the spring of 2021 following the recent suicide of a former principal who said he was bullied and harassed during the sessions.
“These are serious and disturbing allegations,” Lecce said in a written statement. “No staff member should ever be subject to harassment while in their place of work.”
Richard Bilkszto, a 60-year-old retired principal, sued the TDSB earlier this year, alleging that his reputation was “systemically demolished” during two anti-Black racism training sessions in the spring of 2021 when, after he had challenged some of the speaker’s comments, he was singled out and accused of supporting white supremacy.
The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board allowed Bilkszto’s claim for a “mental stress injury” in 2021 and awarded him compensation for two months of lost earnings. The adjudicator of his case found that the facilitator of the training sessions was “abusive, egregious and vexatious” in their conduct and that it rose “to the level of workplace harassment and bullying.”
Bilkszto, who alleged in his lawsuit that he suffered “severe emotional distress” as a result of what happened in the sessions, died by suicide earlier this month, according to a statement his lawyer posted to Twitter last week.
A member of Bilkszto’s family confirmed his death to the Star, but declined further comment.
In his statement, Lecce offered condolences to Bilkszto’s family and friends, adding that the tragedy “underscores the need for greater accountability of school boards and the necessity to ensure professional training is free from harassment and intimidation.”
He said he has asked his staff “to review what happened in this instance in the TDSB and bring me options to reform professional training and strengthen accountability on school boards so this never happens again.”
The school board released its own statement, jointly signed by Director of Education Colleen Russell-Rawlins and associate directors Audley Salmon and Louise Sirisko, saying they “share the Ministry of Education’s desire to learn what happened” and they will work with the ministry as part of any review.
“We recognize that many are grieving the loss of Richard, who was a colleague, mentor and friend,” the statement reads. “TDSB is in the process of gathering information to better understand the events that occurred.”
KOJO Institute, the company that facilitated the training sessions, said Tuesday that it also “welcomes” a ministry review into the matter and “will co-operate fully” with ministry officials.
The Toronto School Administrators Association said Bilkszto had contacted the association in the aftermath of the sessions saying he had been “bullied, intimidated and harassed” by the facilitators. The association says it asked the school board at that point to investigate Bilkszto’s concerns. “To our knowledge, an investigation was never undertaken.”
According to Bilkszto’s lawsuit, the conflict arose when, during the second of four virtual training sessions, the facilitator, Kike Ojo-Thompson, suggested Canada was more racist than the U.S., in part because it had not reckoned with its racist history in the same way the U.S. had.
When Bilkszto disagreed it led to a brief, but tense exchange. Later in the session and in the following week’s session, Ojo-Thompson is alleged to have implicitly referred to the exchange as an example of “resistance” in support of white supremacy.
The allegations in Bilkszto’s lawsuit have not been proven. The TDSB has not filed a statement of defence.
In a statement provided to the Star prior to Bilkszto’s death, the KOJO institute said it disputes many of the allegations in Bilkszto’s lawsuit against the TDSB, “including the descriptions of interactions with KOJO Institute staff which paint an inaccurate and incomplete picture” of what happened in the sessions.
The company, which has provided anti-racism training to dozens of organizations in the public, private and charitable sectors (including the Toronto Star), is not a party to Bilkszto’s lawsuit. They said it would be “inappropriate” to comment further since the matter was before the courts.
Following Bilkszto’s death, the company provided an additional statement offering condolences to Bilkszto’s loved ones. They added that any interaction with individual TDSB employees during the sessions was “brief” and that they had “no involvement” in any investigation by the school board or the WSIB following the sessions.
In recent months, Bilkszto had become outspoken in his opposition to various school board initiatives aimed at reducing inequity in education. The statement announcing his death, released by his lawyer, says that after his “troubling experience with the (TDSB)’s equity agenda, Richard began advocating to bring people together through a more equality-focused, pro-human approach.”
The pandemic inflicted higher rates of excess deaths on both Republicans and Democrats. But after COVID-19 vaccines arrived, Republican voters in Florida and Ohio died at a higher rate than their counterparts, according to a new study.
Researchers from Yale University who studied the pandemic’s effects on those two states say that from the pandemic’s start in March 2020 through December 2021, “excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before.”
More specifically, the researchers say, their adjusted analysis found that “the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters” after vaccine eligibility was opened.
The different rates “were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio,” according to the study that was published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday.
It’s the latest research to suggest the perils of mixing partisan politics with medical advice and health policy.
How was the study performed?
Researchers analyzed data related to 538,159 people who died between Jan. 1, 2018, and Dec. 31, 2021, at ages 25 and over, compiling their political party affiliations based on records from 2017.
The study collected weekly death counts, breaking down the deceased’s party ties along with their county and age cohort. It used May 1, 2021, as a key dividing line because the date marks a month after all U.S. adults became eligible to receive shots of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The researchers estimated excess mortality based on how the overall rate of deaths during the pandemic compared to what would have been expected from historical, pre-pandemic trends.
Researchers saw a divide suddenly emerge
As they calculated excess death rate data for Florida and Ohio, the researchers found only small differences between Republican and Democratic voters in the first year of the pandemic, with both groups suffering similarly sharp rises in excess deaths that winter.
Things changed as the summer of 2021 approached. When coronavirus vaccine access widened, so did the excess death gap. In the researchers’ adjusted analysis of the period after April 1, 2021, they calculated Democratic voters’ excess death rate at 18.1, and Republicans’ at 25.8 — a 7.7 percentage-point difference equating to a 43% gap.
After the gap was established in the summer of 2021, it widened further in the fall, according to the study’s authors.
The study doesn’t provide all the answers
The researchers note that their study has several limitations, including the chance that political party affiliation “is a proxy for other risk factors,” such as income, health insurance status and chronic medical conditions, along with race and ethnicity.
The study focused only on registered Republicans and Democrats; independents were excluded. And because the researchers drilled into data in Florida and Ohio, they warn that their findings might not translate to other states.
The researchers’ data also did not specify a cause of death, and it accounts for some 83.5% of U.S. deaths, rather than the entire number. And because data about the vaccination status of each of the 538,159 people who died in the two states wasn’t available, researchers could only go as granular as the county level in assessing excess deaths and vaccination rates.
The study was funded by the Tobin Center for Economic Policy at Yale University and the Yale School of Public Health COVID-19 Rapid Response Research Fund.
New findings join other reviews of politics and the pandemic
In late 2021, an NPR analysis found that after May of that year — a timeframe that overlaps the vaccine availability cited in the new study — people in counties that voted strongly for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election were “nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19” as people in pro-Biden counties.
“An unvaccinated person is three times as likely to lean Republican as they are to lean Democrat,” as Liz Hamel, vice president of public opinion and survey research at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, told NPR.
Even before vaccines were widely accessible, researchers were working to quantify the effects of vastly divergent COVID-19 policies across U.S. states.
A widely cited study from early 2021 found that in the early months of the pandemic’s official start date in March 2020, states with Republican governors saw lower COVID-19 case numbers and death rates than Democratic-led states. But the trend reversed around the middle of 2020, as Republican governors were less likely to institute controls such as stay-at-home orders and face mask requirements.
“Future policy decisions should be guided by public health considerations rather than by political ideology,” said the authors of that study, which was selected as the article of the year by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
While I wouldn’t make the same generalizations about all DEI courses and programs, this case highlights the risk of an overly aggressive and ideological approach, one that the Board and administrators failed to address. No need to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” but clear need to vet and monitor consultants to ensure respectful and balanced approaches:
By now, you have probably heard the tragic story of former Toronto District School Board (TDSB) principal Richard Bilkszto, an esteemed educator with 24 years’ experience. In 2021, he attended two TDSB-mandated diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) sessions, led by the KOJO Institute, during which the facilitator, Kike Ojo-Thompson, berated him for challenging her statement that Canada was a more racist place than the United States.
“We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people,” she allegedly said, and then reportedly proceeded to berate him in a second session as a “real life” example of someone supporting white supremacy.
Bilkszto, who himself had spoken out against racism during his career, was devastated. Bilkszto went on stress leave and sought support from Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, which found he had been subject to workplace harassment. When he got back from leave, the board refused to reinstate his contract. He then filed a civil suit against the TDSB, seeking additional damages and an apology.
But Bilkszto never fully recovered from the pain caused by the damage to his reputation and his soul. On July 13, he ended his life. According to a statement authorized by his family, “The stress and effects of these incidents continued to plague Richard. Last week he succumbed to this distress.”
Bilkszto’s heart-rending story made headlines across Canada and around the globe. A petition has been started, demanding an inquiry into his death. The Toronto School Administrators’ Association also requested a review. And on Monday night, Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce asked officials to “bring me options to reform professional training and strengthen accountability on school boards so this never happens again.”
Bilkszto’s story resonates so deeply because it is an indictment of the failure of DEI training to achieve one of its stated goals: inclusion. Instead of making space for all voices, Bilkszto was shut down because of his race. Worse yet, in our schools, this type of “training” is now competing for scarce resources with priorities such as safety and academic performance.
Recently in Winnipeg, a school administrator defended his district’s annual spending of nearly $850,000 on DEI programs , saying, “We want our children to be anti-racist because you’re either a racist, or you’re an anti-racist.” In British Columbia, a government official stated that the province’s anti-racism plan for K-12 “is an important part of our work to decolonize our institutions and build a better B.C. for everyone.”
But is this “decolonization” and anti-racism education improving interpersonal relations between teachers and students? In B.C., nine in 10 teachers report experiencing violence or bullying on the job. The aforementioned school district in Manitoba, Louis Riel, saw a 263 per cent increase in unsafe behaviour by students last year.
In Nova Scotia, 87 per cent of teachers say that school violence has increased since 2018 and over half have been victims of violence or threats. And in Toronto, the TDSB is projected to have its most violent year since it started collecting data in 2000.
Meanwhile, student performance is declining. While Canada continues to perform well compared to other OECD countries, between 2000 and 2018, Canada recorded a 14-point decline in standardized reading scores, as well as declines in math and science scores classified as “steadily negative.”
Inequity is rooted in poverty, which has many factors, including race. But correcting for it comes down to resources, not words, applied in the right places.
Instead of hosting DEI sessions to berate their staff, school boards should redirect funds to tutoring low-income students who need extra help. They should fund food programs for kids who are hungry so they can concentrate and learn. Physical education, which has been directly correlated with improving educational scores, should increase. Self-esteem is rooted in achievement, and that should be the goal for every student.
Telling a principal that his whiteness is the problem does not help a single Black kid graduate. What it does do is divide, bully and shame. And sometimes, worse.
Of note, an egregious example of DEI training run amok and a cautionary tale regarding engaging American DEI consultants:
In late April, 2021, a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainer named Kike Ojo-Thompson presented a lecture to senior Toronto public-school administrators, instructing them on the virulent racism that (Ojo-Thompson believes) afflicts Canadian society. Canada, she said, is a bastion of “white supremacy and colonialism,” in which the horrors unleashed by capitalism and sexism regularly lay waste to the lives of non-white and female Canadians.
Anyone who lives in Canada knows this to be a preposterous claim. But in the wake of the George Floyd protests, which opportunistic DEI entrepreneurs in Canada treated as a gold rush, such lies have been treated as unfalsifiable. The same is true of the (equally preposterous) claim that Canada’s experience with anti-black racism directly mirrors that of the United States. And so it was expected that Ojo-Thompson’s audience would simply nod politely and keep their mouths shut until her jeremiad had concluded.
But one audience member refused to submit: Richard Bilkszto, a long-time principal at the Toronto District School Board who’d also once taught at an inner-city school in upstate New York. Having worked on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, he told Ojo-Thompson that her generalizations about the two countries seemed misguided; and that denouncing Canada in such a vicious manner would do “an incredible disservice to our learners.”
Bilkszto’s descriptions of Ojo-Thompson’s presentation (a recording of which was verified by at least one Canadian journalist) suggest that she is indeed quite ignorant of both American and Canadian history. Her claim that Canada’s monarchist tradition marks it as more racist than the United States is particularly absurd, given that the British outlawed slavery decades before both Canada’s creation and the U.S. Civil War.
National Post columnist Jamie Sarkonak describes what happened after Bilkszto began speaking up:
“Ojo-Thompson is described to have reacted with vitriol: ‘We are here to talk about anti-Black racism, but you in your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on for Black people?’ Bilkszto replied that racism is very real, and that there’s plenty of room for improvement—but that the facts still show Canada is a fairer place. Another KOJO training facilitator [KOJO Institute is the name of Ojo-Thompson’s company] jumped in, telling Bilkszto that ‘if you want to be an apologist for the U.S. or Canada, this is really not the forum for that.’ Ojo-Thompson concluded the exchange by telling the class that ‘your job in this work as white people is to believe’—not to question—claims of racism.”
This is not a unique story. I have reported for Quillette on other instances in which audience members have been smacked down for raising their voices when confronted with this kind of diatribe. It is part of the pattern of hypocrisy that surrounds the DEI industry more generally: While these consciousness-raising sessions are typically conducted on the conceit of teaching participants to be “brave” and ”disruptive,” the well-paid corporate trainers who lead them often demand a climate of craven subservience.
Ojo-Thompson didn’t confine herself to rebuking Bilkszto in that moment. She also allegedly attacked Bilkszto in a subsequent lecture as exemplifying the forces of white supremacist “resistance.” In Ojo-Thompson’s view, her original treatment of Bilkszto had presented everyone with a valuable template for how they should respond when “accosted by white supremacy.”
For his part, Bilkszto responded by suing the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) for harassment. He also sought a TDSB investigation of Ojo-Thompson’s actions, which the school board refused to conduct. But Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) took the incident more seriously, determining that Bilkszto was owed seven weeks of lost pay due to the mental stress he’d endured.
The WSIB judgment, later obtained by the National Post, concluded that Ojo-Thompson’s behaviour “was abusive, egregious and vexatious, and rises to the level of workplace harassment and bullying,” and that she’d intended to “cause reputational damage and to ‘make an example’” of Bilkszto.
I spoke with Bilkszto several times over the last two years, and he would often email me stories about other Canadians who’d been targeted as heretics. He took a leading role in a group of Toronto educators looking to address the problem of ideological extremism, and brought me in once as a guest speaker in late 2021.
Although Bilkszto and I never met (this was still the COVID era, when almost every meet-up was done over Zoom), we quickly bonded over our shared principles, both of us being traditional urban liberals who’d become concerned by the social-justice fanaticism that now suffused the TDSB.
Yet nothing in my own experience allowed me to fully comprehend the pain that Bilkszto was experiencing. A political progressive who’d devoted more than two decades of his life to the TDSB, Bilkszto never fully recovered from being falsely smeared as a supporter of white supremacy in front of his peers.
This month, Bilkszto, aged 60, committed suicide. I don’t know if he left a note. But according to his family, his suicide related to the false accusations of racism he’d endured in April 2021.
Bilkszto was particularly devastated by the fact that some of his TDSB bosses, whom he’d naively expected to defend him (or at least have the courtesy to say nothing at all), eagerly piled on with the public shaming meted out by their external DEI consultant.
On Twitter, Sheryl Robinson Petrazzini, then the TDSB’s Executive Superintendent, thanked Ojo-Thompson and her KOJO colleague for “modelling the discomfort [that] administrators”—i.e., Bilkszto—“may need to experience in order to disrupt ABR [anti-Black racism].”
For good measure, Robinson Petrazzini also suggested that Bilkszto (whom she did not name, but was the obvious subject of her Tweet) was allied with the forces of “resistance” to anti-racism, and so was abetting “harm to Black students and families.”
Bilkszto personally asked Robinson Petrazzini to delete the Tweet. She did so only eight months later, and only after receiving a letter from Bilkszto’s lawyer warning her that she’d be sued unless she did so.
According to Bilkszto, his other bosses also refused to support him, instead attacking him for his “male white privilege.” And yet, once Bilkszto filed a lawsuit against the TDSB, seeking $785,000 damages for the emotional and reputational harm he’d endured, those same administrators now began claiming that it was Ojo-Thompson who’d gone rogue.
While they’d been perfectly happy to throw Bilkszto under the bus when the stakes were confined to emotional “discomfort,” the TDSB suddenly decided to sue Ojo-Thompson for negligence and breach of contract, demanding that she effectively indemnify the school board for any payout that might become due to Bilkszto. (The TDSB later claimed that it planned to discontinue this suit. But Sakornak reported that it was still a going concern as of June 6.)
I live in Toronto, where my own children have all passed through TDSB schools. Their experience has been a positive one, and I’m happy with the education they’ve received, notwithstanding the sometimes excessive pedagogical focus on race and genderwang. In fact, I have come to sympathize with the teachers—most of them smart hard-working people who find themselves being pressured by their own unions and administrators to adopt militant social-justice postures in their classrooms.
In some school boards, moreover, professional advancement is limited to those who explicitly embrace “anti-racist, high anti-oppressive” leadership principles. So while social-justice puritans comprise a small minority at most schools, they are able to exert disproportionate power in their bid to censure, humiliate, or even oust colleagues, such as Bilkszto, who speak up for the silent majority. In some cases, these ideological enforcers work closely with local race activists and their media allies, so as to harass or censor educators and parents accused of wrongthink.
While the work of anti-racism careerists such as Ojo-Thompson and TDSB Director of Education Colleen Russell-Rawlins is often justified as a righteous crusade against the forces of privilege, it would be difficult to find a more privileged clique of professionals in the field of Canadian public education.
Prior to getting her $300K-per-year TDSB gig, for instance, Russell-Rawlins served as the anti-racism czar at the (even more dysfunctional) neighboring Peel District School Board. Since coming to the TDSB, she’s presided over a series of embarrassing scandals, including an aborted student census that was discovered to be full of overt social-justice propaganda, a revamping of specialty schooling that was found to have been based on a plagiarized research report, and the cancellation of a speaking event by a Nobel-winning ISIS survivor on the grounds that it might be seen as Islamophobic. She’s blithely sailed through all of this without suffering any career repercussions.
The same is true of Robinson Petrazzini, the former $200K/year TDSB superintendent who went on Twitter to spike the football when Bilkszto was humiliated by Ojo-Thompson. Shortly after Bilkszto lawyered up, Robinson Petrazzini became Director of Education at the neighbouring Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board.
As for Ojo-Thompson, she continues to be feted by numerous Canadian organizations and media outlets. In 2022, she served on the board of directors of Parents of Black Children, a Toronto-area lobby group that’s made a name for itself largely by urging school boards to implement the same anti-racism instructional modules that constitute Ojo-Thompson’s own stock-in-trade. (Her partner Rohan served until recently as Workplace Equity Manager with the Peel District School Board, and the two would appear together on stage to talk about “the Impact of Systemic Racism on K-12 Workplace Well-Being.”) The market for the sort of militant anti-racist diatribes that Ojo-Thompson peddles seems inexhaustible within Canada’s corner offices, and I seriously doubt whether even the negative attention resulting from Bilkszto’s death will dent her income.
And in any case, she’s been through this before—for this was not the first time that Ojo-Thompson has encountered “resistance”: A 2021 diversity training session that she delivered to councilors of Sarnia, a small Ontario city on the shores of Lake Huron, reportedly sparked a revolt among some audience members, causing Ojo-Thompson to quit that gig in a huff.
“The undisputed, uncorrected, and unabated hostility demonstrated by some members of Council toward our Principal Consultant Kike Ojo-Thompson was wholly inappropriate,” declaimed the KOJO Institute’s director of client services, Craig Peters. “There were things that were said in that meeting—that we won’t divulge—that led us to believe that it wasn’t in the organization’s best interest to continue.”
When contacted by The Sarnia Journal, Ojo-Thompson added that the comments she’d heard had made her feel unsafe.
“Safety isn’t always physical,” said Ojo-Thompson. “There is emotional and mental harm that can be done.”
No doubt, Richard Bilkszto (1963-2023) would agree.
From 2016 onward, the relationship between conservative Christianity and MAGA-style populism has generated a wide range of reactions, few of them dispassionate. Center-right evangelicals lament the populist strand of the religious right and distinguish it from the moral strand. Critics on the left argue that the populist and moral strands were always one and the same. They declare MAGA politics to be the culmination of a radicalized religious right, and issue blanket condemnations. Postliberal Christian thinkers see a religious populist backlash as the natural consequence of the excesses of American liberalism. They exult in the prospective crumbling of the liberal system, hope for a robust Christian social order to replace it, and issue calls to arms.
These perspectives contain varying degrees of insight, but none is quite satisfactory as an explanation of how we got here. In his new book The Godless Crusade: Religion, Populism, and Right-Wing Identity Politics in the West(Cambridge University Press 2023), Tobias Cremer offers a different interpretation of the conspicuous religious element in modern populist politics. He argues that across Western democracies, populist parties are increasingly employing religious symbolism and rhetoric in an identitarian rather than a religious way. What appears to be an embrace of Christianity is more a celebration of cultural markers (say, Christian history and architecture) used to define themselves against outsiders than an expression of Christian beliefs or moral commitments—Christendom without Christianity. Mobilizing statistics, political analysis, and the content of interviews with 114 political and religious leaders in Germany, France, and the United States, Cremer makes a strong case that religious-themed populism is not the result of religious revival or even backlash, but rather of secularization. This work marks a key contribution to conversations about religious populism and Christian nationalism.
Secular Uses of the Sacred
Cremer’s argument is fourfold. First, the old economic and moral cleavages that used to shape party politics in Western democracies are being supplanted by a new division between cosmopolitans and communitarians. Cosmopolitans embrace globalization, individualism, and multiculturalism, whereas communitarians place greater value on local attachments, inherited identities, and majority rights. The latter group, finding themselves culturally maligned by internal elites and demographically threatened by external immigrants, seek redress in the form of a combative, “us vs. them” populist style of politics. Second, right-wing populists wield Christian symbolism as a way of marking cultural identity rather than religious belief. For populist leaders seeking to forge a shared national identity in a diverse population, Christianity serves as a symbolically powerful “lowest common denominator” as well as a boundary marker against Muslim immigrants. Third, and crucially, populist use of religious symbolism resonates most strongly with nonreligious voters, while practicing Christians are comparatively immune. Fourth, this “religious immunity” to right-wing populism is dependent on the availability of appealing political alternatives for religious voters, as well as the extent to which religious leaders discourage support for populist parties among their followers.
Cremer illustrates these points with an in-depth examination of the cases of Germany, France, and the United States, each of which receives its own section of the book. All three of these countries saw a rise in the demand for populist politics during the 2010s— Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) in France, and Trump’s Republican Party in the United States. In each of these cases, populist use of religious symbols has been highly visible. AfD supporters march in Dresden singing hymns and wielding large crosses. French demonstrators by the thousands, organized by RN, deposit flowers at the feet of a statue of the country’s national saint, Joan of Arc, in veneration. In the United States, crowds wielding bibles and waving Christian flags storm the Capitol building in defiance of the outcome of the 2020 election. Observers of these spectacles draw the seemingly reasonable conclusion that they represent a radicalized religious right in the democratic West.
But this conclusion, Cremer argues, is mistaken. In each of these countries, populist use of religious symbolism has coincided with the marginalization of Christian belief and practice within populist parties. In Germany, AfD expresses skepticism toward the nation’s system of state-supported churches and resists the high social and political status of religious leaders, preferring a reduced role for religion in the public square. France’s RN similarly embraces an extreme form of public secularism, or laïcité. Neither AfD nor RN shows any interest in a conservative social agenda on such issues as same-sex marriage or abortion. Indeed, many statements by populist party leaders explicitly identify the kind of Christianity they advocate as cultural or identitarian rather than religious, and reject the prospect of their parties being influenced by Christian doctrine. While the United States differs in some key respects, the Trump administration shared with its European counterparts an elevation of nonreligious or populist figures over religious ones. Most religious leaders had little access to the Trump White House, and while he maintained an evangelical Faith Advisory Board, Cremer’s interviewees suggest this represented a strategic effort to curb religious criticism rather than any serious desire to institute a Christian policy agenda. In Trump’s administration, the Steve Bannon wing loomed larger than the Mike Pence wing (and current tensions between the Trump campaign and the pro-life movement suggest that not much has changed). Similarly, in AfD and RN Christian members are marginalized while secular, atheist, or neo-pagan strands of the parties wield greater influence.
Religious Immunity
Interviews with religious leaders show that the relationship between religion and right-wing populism is chilly on both sides. In Germany, Catholic and Protestant leaders have been consistent and outspoken critics of AfD, instituting strong social taboos against populist support among their members. Until recently, the French Catholic Church similarly denounced RN without equivocation, even denying sacraments to some of the party’s politicians. Cremer credits strong social taboos against participation in populist politics instituted by religious leaders for the fact that churchgoing Catholics and Protestants in these countries have historically exhibited low support for these parties, indicating a “religious immunity” effect.
Early in the 2016 primaries, this effect was in evidence in the United States as well. Several prominent religious leaders declared Trump an unfit candidate for office, and in the primary vote, churchgoing Republicans were substantially less likely to support Trump than their religiously disengaged co-partisans. Yet by the time of the general election, religious voters were some of his most loyal supporters. Cremer identifies several factors that explain this reversal. First, party loyalty—religious support for the GOP was too entrenched to be disrupted by the nomination of a decidedly irreligious candidate. Second, a lack of alternatives—in a two-party system, the only other serious contender was a Democratic Party with a secularist stance and socially liberal policy platform wholly unacceptable to many religious voters. Third, the Trump campaign made inroads with evangelical leaders and made policy commitments that were appealing to the religious right. Fourth, given the diffuse and non-hierarchical nature of America’s churches, there was a lack of religious leaders with sufficient ability and influence to oppose the right-wing populist movement as clergy in France and Germany had done. These factors in combination undermined the “religious immunity” effect in the United States.
Ultimately, Cremer is positing a Europeanization of American politics in which social cleavages have less to do with economics or morality than the value of national and cultural identity. This shift is captured in a quote from sociologist Eric Kaufmann: “During the Bush years European observers saw American politics as profoundly alien. By 2016 it was to become thoroughly familiar.” American analysts have struggled to provide an accurate diagnosis because they are thinking in categories of class struggles and culture wars that are becoming outdated. For insight into our political moment, we should look across the pond.
Post-religious Right
With respect to the question of “how we got here” in the American case, Cremer’s key insight is that Trump—and more broadly, the style of politics he represents—did not rise to power on the shoulders of the religious right, but rather the post-religious right. Indeed, his presidency was made possible by the very process of secularization that the religious right has long sought to combat. Trump’s coalition may instead be viewed as an alliance between the religious and post-religious right, with the former playing the role of junior partner. Counterintuitively, the conspicuous Christian symbolism present in such populist settings as MAGA rallies and the January 6 storming of the Capitol does not reflect a resurgent and radicalized religious right, but rather one that has been eclipsed by more secular right-wing forces. This understanding offers an important corrective to reductionistic accounts of a Christian nationalist monolith that have dominated scholarship in this area.
While Cremer’s theory goes a long way toward helping us make sense of the past decade’s bewildering political developments, however, it pays little heed to evidence of at least partial overlap between the religious and populist right. Religion data scientist Ryan Burge has shown that in the 2016 Republican primaries, 44 percent of weekly-or-more churchgoers voted for Trump over evangelical candidates like Ted Cruz. This is, if not an outright endorsement, hardly a stinging rebuke. Figures with unimpeachable religious right credentials such as Eric Metaxas have come out as full-throated Trump supporters, while center-right evangelicals like David French and Tim Alberta lament the MAGA-fication of their religious communities. Clearly for many Americans, the tension between their religious commitments and populist politics is surmountable.
On the other side of the ledger, the religious right gained undeniable policy victories from their alliance with the populist right. The religious conservative Holy Grail of the overturning of Roe v. Wade would not have happened if religious voters had withheld support for Trump in the 2016 general election. These facts suggest a possibility absent in France or Germany, where weekly worship attendance is in single digits, but perhaps present in the United States: that of a populist religious right. The populist political style is not incompatible with either religious commitment or social conservatism, and social boundaries can be drawn around religion and morality as easily as birthplace or ethnicity. GOP lawmakers in red states like Texas and Montana offer a taste of what a populist politics that emphasizes religion over ethnicity might look like. Cremer rightly draws our focus to the distinctions and tensions between the religious and populist right, but we should also not lose sight of the prospect of their synthesis.
This caveat aside, The Godless Crusade offers an elegant, compelling, and well-researched account of the overlooked role of secularized religious-themed populism on both sides of the Atlantic—one refreshingly free of pontificating. It deserves to be widely read. Cremer both builds on and challenges existing accounts. His book can create more fruitful conversations about conflicts over the role of religion in the public sphere.
Would be much stronger, as is often the case, were the commentary include more of a historical perspective on changes, progress and gaps. And normal, albeit frustrating, the time lag between increased diversity and it being fully represented in the various institutions.
While I haven’t yet looked at the relevant 2021 Census data for the education field of study, in 2016, visible minorities formed less than 20 percent of those in education, Blacks less than two percent, highlighting some of the “supply side” issues and barriers:
As a Canadian, you could be forgiven if the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action has furthered your sense of moral superiority over our southern neighbours.
After all, in contrast to America, Canada’s constitution explicitly allows “any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” But in the four decades since Canada has had constitutionally sanctioned affirmative action, how much progress have we made in addressing racial disparities?
According to the University of Calgary’s Malinda Smith, the primary beneficiaries of these efforts have been white women. Smith argues that “despite four decades of equity policies — corporate boards, the judiciary, and the police continue to be shaped by racial and ethnic segregation, and remain overwhelmingly white and to a lesser extent male, thus maintaining the historic colour-coded ethnic pecking order even across gender and sexual difference.”
Smith has termed this process “diversifying whiteness,” whereby institutions promote their increased diversity (with respect to gender, sexuality, and disability), while comfortably maintaining a predominantly white workforce.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in our K-12 education systems. It has long been recognized that having school staff that reflect the students and communities they serve can lead to more equitable outcomes.
However, the reality is that our schools are largely the domain of white women. An audit of the York Region District School Board found that while racialized people comprise about half of York Region’s population, just under one quarter of school board staff is racialized.
According to data from the Halton District School Board, while half of its students are racialized, racialized people make up only 18 per cent of its staff. Similarly, an investigation into the Peel District School Board found that while 83 per cent of its students were from racialized backgrounds, racialized people comprise only 33 per cent of its staff. In all boards, staff are predominantly white and female.
So how is it that despite decades of constitutionally sanctioned affirmative action, we still have school systems that are mostly white? It is part of an educational trajectory — that starts in elementary and high schools and continues to universities and school boards — where some people are encouraged along certain paths, and others are nudged away. Addressing the racial disparities in our school systems requires disrupting current practices at all points in this trajectory.
This is why the TDSB’s attempts to diversify admissions to its specialty schools is so important. It is also why the Waterloo Region District School Board should be commended for its recent job fair specifically for Indigenous, Black, and racialized individuals. It takes a certain amount of moral fortitude to persist despite the inevitable reactionary backlash that occurs when racial disparities are addressed so explicitly.
Critics have panned both initiatives as divisive and akin to establishing a racial hierarchy. It is as if we do not already have a well-established racial hierarchy, which is what these programs are trying to address.
Opponents of affirmative action programs state that we should just accept the best candidates, irrespective of race. As U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts once wrote, “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Yet, decades of studiesthatcontinue to show that organizations respond to resumes with white-sounding names at much higher rates than identical resumes with racialized names expose the myth that we are all judged on some objective metric of “merit.” Organizations need to stop pretending that it is complicated. The way to have greater racial diversity is to have greater racial diversity.
Sachin Maharaj is an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy and program evaluation at the University of Ottawa.
Notable improvement in terms of employment rates, less positive with respect to incomes but still showing improvement compared to 2016:
Un taux d’emploi comparable
L’étude montre une participation de plus en plus active des personnes noires sur le marché du travail, souligne Luc Cloutier-Villeneuve, analyste en statistique du travail à l’ISQ et auteur de l’étude. Selon lui, il s’agit d’un des éléments les plus frappants. « Les taux d’activité sur le marché de l’emploi chez les universitaires et les détenteurs de formations postsecondaires sont relativement identiques à la population qui n’est pas issue d’une minorité visible », indique l’expert. De fait, tous âges compris, le taux d’emploi atteint le seuil du 78,8 % chez les Noirs, comparé à 77,5 % pour les personnes non issues de minorités visibles.
Le Québec derrière la Colombie-Britannique
Le Québec présente une meilleure équité entre personnes issues des minorités visibles et personnes blanches que certaines autres provinces du Canada, dont l’Ontario. Les Noirs (78,8 % au Québec, contre 68,8 % en Ontario), les Latino-Américains (76,2 %, contre 71,4 %) et les Arabes (70,8 %, contre 57,4 %) ont tous un taux d’emploi supérieur dans la Belle Province. Toutefois, la Colombie-Britannique est plus paritaire du côté des personnes noires (76,1 %) et arabes (60,6 %). Luc Cloutier-Villeneuve constate que plusieurs changements positifs ont été réalisés depuis le recensement précédent, en 2016, mais la partie est loin d’être gagnée.
Un écart de revenu qui diminue
Le revenu moyen d’emploi des personnes issues de minorités visibles âgées de 25 ans à 64 ans (43 240 $) est toujours inférieur au revenu moyen d’emploi des personnes blanches (56 250 $), confirme l’étude. Mais cet écart diminue. En 2019, il était de 22 %, alors qu’en 2015, soit quatre ans plus tôt, il atteignait 28 %. Plus précisément, en 2019, le revenu d’emploi moyen allait d’environ 41 800 $ (personnes noires) à 47 700 $ (personnes arabes).
Différences selon l’âge
La parité varie selon l’âge, indique l’étude de l’ISQ. Chez les personnes de 55 à 64 ans, l’écart est petit, ce qui révélerait une meilleure intégration à la société, soutient Luc Cloutier-Villeneuve. « On sait qu’il y a des variables qui jouent sur l’intégration, que ce soit la langue maternelle, la scolarité, la durée de résidence [au Québec], et l’ordre dans l’arbre généalogique », explique l’expert.
Connaissance du français, un facteur
Un certain nombre de facteurs peuvent expliquer les écarts constatés dans l’étude, souligne Luc Cloutier-Villeneuve. Parmi eux, l’analyste en statistique mentionne la connaissance du français ou encore la reconnaissance des diplômes. « Ce qui est clair, c’est qu’en termes d’analyse subséquente, ce serait intéressant d’aller creuser ces aspects pour comprendre pourquoi ces écarts persistent. »
On the eve of the Women’s World Cup, as soccer fans cheer our talented female athletes, let’s not forget the many women and girls worldwide who are being denied the opportunity to play the beautiful game.
Here in Canada in 2007, 11-year-old Asmahan Mansour was set to enter a tournament match in Laval, Que., when a referee barred her from the soccer pitch for wearing a hijab. There had been no issues in previous games; this ref insisted on following a memo from the Quebec Soccer Federation (QSF) forbidding all religious headgear. Asmahan’s teammates, their parents, and coach rallied in her support by forfeiting the match and withdrawing from the tournament in protest – as did four other Ottawa-based teams.
The QSF insisted it was a safety issue. The matter made it all the way to FIFA, which initially upheld the hijab ban, then reversed it in 2012. In the interim, the Canadian Soccer Association allowed the hijab, provided it met safety standards.
In 2013, the QSF banned Sikh turbans, basing the decision on its interpretation of FIFA’s rules. Turbaned children in Quebec could play in their backyards, but not in official matches. The QSF backed down after its suspension by the Canadian Soccer Association, claiming it was all a misunderstanding. Soccer peace ensued; children from all backgrounds can now play “the beautiful game” across Canada. It was admirable to see the pushback against discrimination by ordinary Canadians, who insisted on inclusion and fair play for all children.
Unfortunately, women and girls are denied the opportunity to play the beautiful game elsewhere in the world. Afghanistan comes to mind. And France, where since 2016, the French Football Federation (FFF) has banned any player, coach or referee from wearing the hijab – contrary to FIFA rules. The FFF insists it is in keeping with the official French policy of laïcité, which restricts religious expression in the public sphere. To paraphrase a memorable Seinfeld character, the FFF has declared “No soccer for you!” to hijabifootballers.
This policy has had a painful impact on many aspiring French Muslim female soccer players, who have faced a choice between the sport they love and their faith. In response, Les Hijabeuses, a collective of French female Muslim soccer players, was formed in 2020 with the aim of ensuring that all women can play the sport they love. They’ve launched petitions, gathering support from the broader sports community (including Nike). The members and their allies play soccer together, connect with other French teams and provide training sessions to encourage other young Muslim women to get into the sport. They have gone to court to try to overturn the ban, citing FIFA’s ruling.
Last month, the public rapporteur of France’s highest administrative court (Le Conseil d’État) recommended annulment of the ban, stating that wearing the hijab is neither “proselytism” nor “provocation.” Nor is “neutrality” required for soccer players, since they are not public servants. According to the rapporteur, religious symbols are already present: players cross themselves before entering the pitch. The rapporteur’s recommendation is usually adopted by Le Conseil.
Surprisingly, Le Conseil upheld the ban, in order “to guarantee the smooth running of matches and prevent any confrontation,” while acknowledging this limits freedom of expression and conviction. Without a hint of irony, the FFF welcomed the ruling, stating it would reaffirm “its total commitment to combating all forms of discrimination.” If laïcité was meant to supplant the Catholic Church, it still denies the personal agency of women.
The ban is even more galling given that France is the only European country that excludes hijabis from playing in most competitive domestic sports, and it is unclear whether foreign players with hijabs will be allowed to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics. Why is France denying Olympic opportunities for its own hijab-clad athletes?
On the eve of the Women’s World Cup, there has been thundering silence from FIFA and national soccer federations regarding the French exclusion. Contrast this to the protests raised against one of the tournament’s sponsors: for the country’s treatment of women’s rights defenders, FIFA’s revoked the sponsorship ofSaudi Arabia’s state tourism authority. National soccer federations should mount a united stand against France’s blatant discrimination, with the Canadian Soccer Association taking the lead. FIFA should at least sanction the FFF for violating official FIFA policy.
Listen to Asmahan Mansour’s young Ottawa teammates in 2007: “I like to play soccer, but Azzy is my friend, and I don’t want to play if she’s not going to play,” one said. “If one person can’t play soccer because of her religion, it just wouldn’t be fair. Inside is what matters, not the outside,” said another.
Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman.
The first-ever Caste Con, an event dedicated to “dissolving caste consciousness,” held in Fremont, California, on Sunday (July 16), may sound to the uninitiated as if its point was to oppose discrimination based on India’s social hierarchy that places Brahmins at the top of the social order and Dalits at the bottom.
In fact, the gathering brought together a group of activists who warn that recent efforts to outlaw caste discrimination in the United States only serve to reaffirm caste differences in a way that could negatively affect the U.S. Hindu community and stigmatize Indian Americans in politics, at school and in the courts. Many of the attendees are outspoken opponents of SB 403, a bill headed for a vote in the California State Assembly that would single out caste bias as a violation of the state’s anti-discrimination statute.
Richa Gautam, a data analyst who organized the event, portrays caste awareness as a version of American identity politics that left-leaning politicians use to force presumptions about caste on Indian immigrants such as her, she told Religion News Service in the days before Caste Con.
“Any seepage of identity politics is against multiculturalism,” said Gautam. “It is against progress, it is against even spiritualism, you know, the whole concept of Hinduism.”
Caste differences, a fact of life in India and other South Asian communities around the globe, has caused increasing controversy in the U.S. South Asian immigrant community since colleges and universities began adding caste to their list of differences, along with race and sexuality and gender identity, that were protected against bias. Brandeis University banned caste discrimination over complaintsfrom some Hindus in 2019; the California State University system added caste to their nondiscrimination policy in early 2022.
Gautam was inspired to join the fight against these measures in 2020, as California was prosecuting the most prominent legal case of alleged caste discrimination involving the computer giant CISCO Systems. An anonymous CISCO employee, a Dalit, accused two of his managers, Ramana Kompella and Sundar Iyer, of passing him over for a promotion. California’s civil rights department sued the two defendants in a years-long case that ended just this month, when it was dismissed due to lack of evidence.
Iyer made a surprise appearance at Sunday’s Caste Con, claiming that the state prosecutors decided he was a high-caste Hindu based on his last name, even though he identifies as non-religious.
“Ramana and I are the state of California’s best and only example of caste litigation,” said Iyer. “The CRD is supposed to protect civil rights, yet deliberately violated my religious liberty.”
More recently, 12 of the complainants in a 2021 lawsuit that alleged forced labor among “lower-caste” workers on the BAPS Swaminarayan Temple of Robbinsville, New Jersey, retracted their claims, saying they were coerced into making false allegations of caste discrimination.
Yet an often cited report on caste bias released in 2018 by Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organization and a co-sponsor of the California bill, found that two-thirds of respondents said they suffered discrimination at work; one-third reported that they had faced discrimination in education.
In an article on Caste Files, Gautam’s website tracking the issue, she characterizes the report as “fake and unscientific.” Other Hindu organizations, including the Ambedkar Phule Network of American Dalits and Bahujans, representing traditionally lower-caste groups, have also criticized Equality Labs’ findings.
“Any survey or any bill that is made without us is looking to butcher our cultural existence,” Sandeep Dedge, a volunteer at APNADB, told the Caste Con audience. “The people with little experience are trying to oppress the contributions of the Dalits and Bahujans.”
Those who reject the need for provisions against caste discrimination say not only that such laws have no place in the United States, but they also deny that caste is primarily a feature of Hinduism. Instead they claim that caste was imposed by British colonizers of India, who fastened on varna — a spiritual term dictating one’s inner nature — and jati — a description of a distinctive social group — and conflated both with caste as a way of ordering Indian society under their rule. It should be removed from American consciousness altogether, they say.
Sudha Jagannathan, a board member of the Coalition of Hindus of North America and longtime California resident, says she never experienced discussions of caste before coming to the United States. She began referring to herself as Bahujan only after caste became a talking point in recent years. To her, caste is a “slur against Hindus” that is already covered under the existing anti-discrimination laws.
“The caste discrimination ban is broadcasting caste consciousness into America in big ways,” said Jagannathan. “The Americans who did not know this, whenever they see a Hindu now, the first question they ask is, ‘What is your caste?’”
California, where a vast number of Indian immigrants live, has long been the center of the discourse about caste in America. In 2006, the Hindu Education Foundation, along with the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu American Foundation, fought in California courts to erase mentions of the caste system, among other stereotypes about the Hindu religion, from the state’s school textbooks. The litigation ended in settlements, with repeated text changes.
“I want to always err on the side of life,” Pence told AP News. “I would hold that view in these matters because … I honestly believe that we got this extraordinary opportunity in the country today to restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law.”
It seems illogical, not to mention inhumane, to outlaw abortion when there is no chance a fetus can be born alive. One is not saving a life, because that life will end before it comes to term. And one may be taking a life: a non-viable pregnancy can kill the woman carrying it, as evidenced in a recent lawsuit challenging an abortion ban in the state of Texas.
Forcing a woman to carry a fetus fated to die is also psychological torture of the highest order. Every time a stranger asks about her pregnancy, every time she catches a glimpse of her swollen abdomen in the mirror, every time she thinks of the child she wanted but who is not to be, she is made to suffer. There’s nothing Christian about that.
But that does not matter to Pence. He needs to mobilize the votes of the religious right to win the GOP nomination. He has the pedigree: he championed their issues in the White House during the Trump administration and since then only hardened his stance. “I am pro-life and I don’t apologize for it,” Pence told Face the Nation in April. He argued this week that restricting abortion is “more important than politics” and calls it the “cause of our time.”
That’s where the clothes come off the emperor. Pence is no defender of the American Constitution, nor is he a conservative. He is a religious autocrat. Founding father Thomas Jefferson famously declared that when the American people adopted the First Amendment, they built a “wall of separation between the church and state.” Christian autocracy flies in the face of this dictate, basing policy not on evidence, reason, or debate, but on the tenets of a specific faith. It violates the United States Supreme Court’s neutrality test that requires that government be neither the ally nor the adversary of religion.
But the American religious right isn’t concerned about this. It has friends in high places. Domestically, it now has the Supreme Court on its side, as evidenced by its overturning of Roe v. Wade. And internationally, it has a lot of disturbing company.
One of those is Hungary’s Fidesz Party, that came to power in 2010 under Viktor Orban. In 2022, the European Union Parliament condemned Orban for creating an “electoral autocracy” that restricts the rights of the judiciary, LGBT individuals, the press and ethnic minorities. That same year, Orban set his sights on Hungary’s abortion law. It currently permits terminations up to twelve weeks in cases of rape, risks to the mother’s health, serious personal crisis, or a severe foetal disability. But by decree, the Hungarian government now requires that pregnant women must listen to the foetal heartbeat prior to making their decision, similar to laws enacted in Texas and Kentucky.
Iran’s Islamic theocracy is another regime infamously hostile to human rights, including those of women. In September 2022, 22-year-old student Jina Masa Amini was killed while in police custody. Her “crime” was not wearing her hijab tightly enough, in contravention of Iran’s strict religious dress codes. Amini’s death sparked nationwide and then worldwide demonstrations under the motto “Woman, Life, Freedom”. In her home country, more than 500 Iranians were killed in the protests and five sentenced to death between September 2022 and April 2023.
As for abortion, it is illegal in Iran unless a fetus is diagnosed with a genetic disorder or the mother’s life is endangered. But the government has now upped the ante. In May 2023, Iran’s Center for Population Rejuvenation created a volunteer militia called Nafs (life) to identify doctors and clinics performing abortions, and shut them down. Iranian media have dubbed the group the “[Anti] Abortion patrols analogous to the same type of hijab enforcement units that arrested Amini.
Then, there’s China. In 1980, faced with a rising birth rate, China imposed a one-child policy. Millions of women were forced to terminate additional pregnancies, and due to a cultural preference for male children, hundreds of thousands of girls were aborted, abandoned or killed. In 2016, China repealed the policy due to an imbalance of the sexes and low birth rate, resulting in an aging population and demographic decline.
At first glance, China’s policy appears to be the polar opposite of religious pro-life policies that restrict abortion, but it’s driven by the same principle: removing bodily autonomy from women in the name of the state. China’s goal isn’t religious, but secular: the manipulation of the birth rate to ensure a steady supply of workers and soldiers to carry out the nation’s ambitions. And to ensure that the “right” children are conceived, namely, ethnic Han Chinese.
What all three nations have in common is not piety, but ethnic nationalism. The real drivers for their abortion and fertility policies are low birth rates among “desired” groups, coupled with aging populations.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khameni has described population growth as one of the “most urgent duties and essential policies of the Islamic Republic as the leading Shia country in the Muslim world.” Pregnancies are being documented to prevent abortion “so that the population of the country could grow.” Hungary is not only making access to abortion more difficult, but decreeing that women with four children will be exempt from paying income tax for life. In China, whose population shrank this year and was surpassed by that of India, companies are paying employees to have children. But according to an Associated Press investigation,China continues to limit births – including by forced sterilizations — among ethnic minorities including the Muslim Uyghur population of Xinjiang. It further seeks to assimilate these cultures to achieve its policy of “ethnic fusion”.
Theocracies are not pluralist. They favour believers and condemn those who dissent to second class status, or worse. If Americans think Pence would stop at abortion, they are deluded. Any minority – defined by race, belief, gender or country of origin – would be in his administration’s sights.
If the Republican party is to truly preserve the Constitution, if it is to offer a truly conservative political option, it must reject authoritarianism, including Pence’s Christian autocracy. Otherwise, it will become just as statist as the Left that it condemns.
Multicultural Meanderings 