Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

In the early 2000s, the City of Richmond in Metro Vancouver authored a policy designating the No. 5 Road corridor between Blundell Road and Steveston Highway as a preferred location for new religious communities. Formerly part of larger plots in British Columbia’s Agricultural Land Reserve, these lots had been rendered into sizes more appropriate for assembly use buildings as they were traversed by Highway 99. The new policy proposed that religious communities that would line this strip of three kilometres would farm the back two-thirds of the land in order to keep their tax exempt status. The result was the phenomenon that some have called the “Highway to Heaven,” over twenty religious institutions next to each other. In this paper, I explore the religious presumptions behind this policy and trace its execution. Drawing from thirty-four semi-structured interviews with city officials and religious stakeholders, I trace how the assumptions about spiritual connectedness with the land was at a mismatch with the mostly middle-class professional status of the various religious communities that ended up on the land. My main argument is that the theological differences between these two groups – the City and the communities – draw from different understandings of human labor in relation to land, the City from an agriculturally-based tradition, the communities through technological engineering. This analysis challenges postsecular societies to engage in genuine dialogue about everyday lives before making presumptions about religious practices that have consequences in land use policy.