Earlier this summer, Regina found itself in the middle of a conversation that is as old as pluralism itself: what happens when a faith community wants to be heard, quite literally, beyond its own walls?
The Regina City Jamia Masjid, downtown on McIntyre Street, began broadcasting a brief Friday call to prayer — the adhan — from its rooftop speakers. It lasts only a few minutes, once a week, ahead of Jumu’ah prayers.
For the mosque’s director, it was meant as an introduction: a way of saying, simply, we are your neighbours. For many residents nearby, it raised real and understandable questions about noise, precedent, and the character of a shared downtown core. And for a smaller number, it became an occasion for something uglier — criticism curdling into hatred.
Some might ask why a Christian bishop has anything to say about a mosque’s call to prayer. I would answer that it is precisely because we are Christians that we have something to say — and it is not what some might expect.
We do not support the right of our Muslim neighbours to call the faithful to prayer because we are indifferent to the truth claims of our own faith, or because all religions are somehow interchangeable. We support it because we believe, on Christian grounds, in the dignity of conscience and the freedom of worship.
Our own tradition knows what it is to be the minority voice asking for room to exist — dissenters, recusants, and reformers of every stripe have at various times needed exactly the kind of public tolerance we are now called to extend. A church that forgets this history, and asks for freedom only when it is the one seeking it, has confused self-interest with conviction.
There is also something simpler at work. When Dean Mike Sinclair of St. Paul’s Cathedral — quite literally across the street from the mosque — walked over to welcome its director as a new neighbour on that same block where Christians have gathered for generations, he was not blurring the lines between faiths.
He was doing something very old and very Anglican: recognizing that neighbourliness is not contingent on agreement. “We’re the oldest place of worship downtown,” he told them. “You’ll now be the newest … we’re glad that you’re here.” That is not a theological compromise. It is hospitality, which is a Christian virtue long before it is a civic one.
We sometimes talk about “the public square” as though it were a blank, secular space that faith communities are graciously permitted to enter. I would push back gently on that picture. The public square has never been neutral; it has always been contested, always full of competing claims about what is true, good, and worth saying out loud.
The question was never whether faith belongs there. The question is whether we can share it without demanding that every other voice fall silent.
A society that only tolerates religious expression when it is quiet, private and inoffensive to everyone has not actually solved the problem of pluralism — it has simply exiled faith from public life altogether, Christian faith included. The same civic reflex that would silence a call to prayer because it is unfamiliar is the reflex that, on a different day, would find our own church bells, our processions, our Ash Wednesday crosses on foreheads in the grocery store line, equally inconvenient.
We do not get to borrow the protections of a pluralist society and then withdraw them the moment someone else wants to use them.
When disagreement turns to threats, when “I have concerns about the sound” becomes “you are not welcome here,” something has gone wrong that people of every faith, and none, should be willing to name. Supporting our Muslim neighbours’ freedom to pray audibly in their own city is not a departure from Christian conviction.
It is an expression of it — the same conviction that insists every person is made in the image of God, and that the peace of a city is measured not by how quiet it can be kept, but by how much genuine difference it can hold without turning on itself.
Regina has, on the whole, chosen the harder and better path this summer: dialogue over exile, survey over silence, welcome over suspicion. That is worth naming, and worth continuing to choose.