The Legal Revolution against the Accommodation of Religion: The Secular Age versus the Sexular Age

Abstract

In Western liberal democracies religion has a special status. For example, the law allows a religious adherent to leave work for a holy day though not for a football match. Why is it that religion has been so privileged? It was the “why” that Bussey wanted to find an answer to.’During his research he found that the current accommodation of religion in the law is being robustly challenged – and even disregarded – by government actors, legal academics, and the media. The case study is the Trinity Western University case in Canada. This private, evangelical institution proposed to open a law school, but three provincial law societies refused accreditation because they deemed the admission’s requirement (which defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman) discriminatory against the LGBTQ community. In 2018, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of the law societies.Religious institutions that maintain traditional beliefs and practices are increasingly characterized as discriminatory. The extent to which this criticism is being accepted by the courts and the legal community is new. Using Thomas S. Kuhn’s theory, Bussey calls this development a legal revolution against religious accommodation.