Refugee settlement and religion in British Columbia

In this working paper, I have two objectives. First, I use data from a pilot study I conducted in British Columbia during 2011-2012 to reflect on the practical challenges these groups face in contemporary society. Among other issues, I am interested in what is happening in and to these groups in an era in which religious identity and observance have become increasingly (or at least differently) problematized. I interviewed leaders of religiously affiliated agencies, as well as civil servants, to assess their perspectives on the state of government-agency relations. The evidence indicates that religiously affiliated refugee settlement agencies serve as excellent case studies for understanding the evolving relationships between religious communities and secular societies. The second objective of this working paper is to describe and assess the ideological environment in which discussions about the relationship between religious groups and government aims might occur. In particular, interviews confirm the power of closed secularism to delimit not just the ways in which agency leaders and government workers interact in the present, but also the ways they think about how they might interact in the future. While volunteers may complain about one or another feature of the private sponsorship system in Canada, religiously affiliated agencies generally accept the restraints placed on them by a secular state. However, the discursive norms that discipline both government and religious actors may reflect a society in which the latter are expected to misrepresent themselves. Whether or not this pattern of silence surrounding the religious commitments of service providers (or refugees themselves) will remain unproblematic or practical in an increasingly multicultural, religiously pluralistic, post-secular future remains an open question.