Anti-Christian prejudice is the last respectable bigotry, and it’s worse in Canada than anywhere else in the Western world,” says Jewish American scholar Michael Horowitz, a religious persecution expert at Washington, D.C.’s, Hudson Institute. “Your recent election campaign proves it,” he concludes.
The problem of anti-Christian bigotry has been growing in Canada for the past 20 years. However, it took last November’s vitriolic federal election campaign to wake up most Canadian Christians to the depth of the problem. They were shocked to discover that the leading contender to the long-ruling Liberal Party, Stockwell Day with his Western-based Alliance Party, suffered a political and media scourging because he reads the Bible and doesn’t work on Sunday. (See “A New Day in Canada” of the March/April 2001 issue of Liberty.)
During the election race, a Liberal cabinet minister branded the Christian-friendly Alliance Party as “Holocaust deniers, prominent bigots, and racists.” The Socialist Party leader called Alliance Party leader Stockwell Day a “cockroach” for his religious beliefs, and another contender said that “Day is unfit to govern, because he can’t separate his religion from his politics.”
The rhetoric became so extreme, that representatives of different faith groups issued a statement calling for religious tolerance and respect. The declaration, signed by prominent Jewish, Muslim, and Christian leaders usually sympathetic to the ruling Liberals, argued that every faith contains some fundamental truths—even, they might have added, the fundamentalist-extremist secular-humanist faith in the limitless reach of the modern administrative state.
In fact, God hasn’t simply been banished from the campaign trail. The deity has been disenfranchised from Canadian public life for some time.
In September 1998, a memorial service was held in Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, for 229 people who died in the Swissair Flight 111 airplane crash. Before the start of the service, a federal official—reportedly from the Liberal prime minister’s office—told the Protestant minister and the Catholic priest that they would not be allowed to utter the name of Jesus Christ nor quote from the Bible.
A rabbi read from the Torah, a Muslim recited from the Koran, and a native Canadian spoke of the Great Spirit. But both Christians accepted the political decree that they not mention their Lord.
The Peggy’s Cove incident might be seen as just another civil servant’s gaffe. But not long after, at a United Nations meeting on the International Criminal Court, the official Canadian delegation spearheaded an initiative to revoke the centuries-old immunity that a priest or minister not be compelled to reveal what is said by a penitent in confession.
Under the Canadian government proposal, the right to confidentiality would continue to be granted to Red Cross officials. But a pastor or priest who refused to divulge confidences would be punished by the secular court. In some denominations, a confessor who reveals a confession is subject to excommunication.
Such church-state conflicts used to be rare in Western civilization, because the civil and criminal law was largely based on a Christian world view—including the fundamental notion of freedom of conscience. Now, however, as secular humanism becomes the de facto state religion in Canada, conflicts of conscience are becoming more common, and the state holds all the power.
The Abdication of the Church
Vancouver lawyer Iain Benson, director of the Ottawa-based Center for Cultural Renewal, says, “The problem in Canada is bigger than simply the velvet oppression of the political and cultural elites, antagonistic to faith. What we’re dealing with is the corruption of Christianity itself.”
Church leaders cling to the nominal Christianity of four-fifths of Canadians, Benson said. They lack any real engagement with their faith, buy into the consumer culture, and unconsciously acquiesce to the limitless administrative ambition of the Canadian elite.
Roughly 78 percent of Canadians call themselves Christian, yet fewer than 20 percent worship in any given week. And attendance is dropping by about 1 percent per year. As a result of this broad apathy, the political elite are free to squeeze faithful and resistant Christians. That squeeze is taking place largely in the realm of sexual and family law.
And a squeeze it is:
•The Canadian tax agency strips charitable status from a youth group called the Challenge Team that tours the country promoting chastity in schools and youth clubs, because the agency insists that the group must also teach about condoms and other birth control devices.
•Trinity Western, an independent Christian university in British Columbia (one of the few in Canada) is embroiled in a long, expensive, still-continuing legal battle with the provincial teacher licensing agency. The agency refuses to accredit the university’s teacher education program, because the school’s code of student conduct forbids premarital and homosexual sex. (See “Heading Toward Thought Control” of the May/June 2001 issue of Liberty.)
•A Christian print shop owner, Scott Brockie, is in court for refusing to print custom stationery for the Toronto Lesbian and Gay Archives; he normally accepts commercial jobs from homosexuals, but he felt this job would constitute an endorsement of the practice, contrary to his faith. Having already lost twice before the human rights tribunals, he may now lose his business. (See “Canadian Velvet” of the May/June 2001 issue of Liberty.)
•A Christian grandmother, Linda Gibbons, has spent most of the past four years in jail for speaking to women entering abortion clinics—politely, the sheriff admits—and offering to help them keep their babies or adopt them. She is never charged, but simply jailed for a couple of weeks or months at a time. “Bubble zones” prohibit free speech near abortion clinics in many Canadian cities.
•A Christian missionary family, the Raths, had their four-year-old daughter seized by social service workers, on the word of a drug addict accusing them of sexual abuse. Even after a medical examination proves no abuse, the social workers refuse to release the child for more than a month.
•At the University of British Columbia, some pro-abortion students were videotaped trashing a large Christian pro-life display, but the provincial attorney general refuses to prosecute the vandals, because it “wouldn’t be in the public interest.”
•A Christian pharmacist in Alberta was suspended from her job for refusing to dispense the “morning-after” pill.
•A Christian psychiatric nurse in Ontario was fired from her job, without recourse, for praying with a patient.
The list goes on and on.
Needless to say, given Canada’s at least nominal Christian majority, the suppression of the public presence of religion could take place only with their acquiescence.
In fact, the Christian-friendly Alliance Party did make gains in the election, increasing their popular vote (to almost 25 percent) and seats (from 58 to 66 in the 301-seat Parliament).
One of the few unexpected Alliance losses, however, was Calgary Centre Member of Parliament Eric Lowther, losing to the leader of the fifth-ranked Progressive Conservatives, Joe Clark. Clark beat Lowther with a widely advertised local coalition between his own party, local members of the ruling Liberal Party, and the inner city’s gay and lesbian block. And again, religion became the issue.
“Christians in politics believe they have real administrative solutions for governance that can work for a broad base of the electorate, Christian and non-Christian alike,” Lowther said after the election.
“But there’s one worldview that holds that individuals have a spark of something divine in them, a value and a worth that goes beyond the pragmatic definitions of the state . . . .
“And there’s another worldview that believes the state to be the final, all-powerful, and all- legitimate authority in human affairs. And people holding that worldview will ignore your public policies and attack your religion for being oppressive.”
Not surprisingly, Lowther believes his Christian faith to have been attacked by a militant coalition of the devotees of secular administration.
The Secular-Humanist Culture
Part of what proved surprising to Canadian Christians, during the last federal election campaign, was the complicity of the media in the political elite’s gang-up on what they saw as the Bible-thumper from the sticks.
In the middle of November’s race state-sponsored CBC-TV aired a documentary on Alliance leader Stockwell Day, featuring an eyewitness account of a speech Day had delivered at a Christian school—three years earlier. Day had declared his belief that human beings are descended from Adam and Eve, that the earth is 6,000 years old, and that human beings once lived alongside dinosaurs—in short, that he’s a young-earth creationist. Day himself was not interviewed for that broadcast. So the next morning he was left trying to argue in the now-primed media that his beliefs are no more relevant to his political platform than a Hindu’s belief in the descent of the lord Krishna from heaven.
“I don’t see why this should be aired in any kind of detrimental way in any political campaign,” Day said.
But it was.
A day later, Liberal Party strategist Warren Kinsella appeared on a national television talk show, with a Barney—a purple dinosaur that stars in a public broadcasting show for school-age children—chortling that the Flintstones were not a documentary. For the last few days before the election, despite a simmering corruption scandal among the ruling Liberals, the media focused almost exclusive attention on Day’s creationism. The CBC documentary, aired by the federal broadcaster just days before the election, reinforced Christian suspicions that the media is not neutral on religion, but is actively hostile.
Political scientist Lydia Miljan, director of the Fraser Institute’s National Media Archives, believes that the media chose to obscure Day’s policies with his faith. “I thought the way the media handled the whole creationism issue was bizarre,” Miljan said. “I’ve got nothing against attack journalism, but journalists should try to be fair.”
Miljan has documented why those journalists weren’t fair. Duplicating sociologist Robert Lichter’s pioneering work in the U.S., she has polled the Canadian media and discovered that only 42 percent of them believe in any sort of God—half the national average. Only 15 percent of media personnel make any effort to attend church, and their median church attendance is less than once a year. They are also overwhelmingly pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, and pro-government.
“What’s strangest of all,” Miljan said, “they don’t seem to realize that having no religion is a value in itself, that it colors the way they look at the world.”
The result is a steady stream of low-level bigotry:
•Shortly after his appointment as host of CBC Radio’s national morning show, announcer Michael Enright calls the Catholic Church “the greatest criminal organization since the Mafia,” and he is not disciplined for it.
•Covering a protest at a Toronto abortion clinic, three journalists from religious publications are summarily arrested, and their film is seized. Despite the obvious threat to free speech, none of the secular media will report the incident.
•The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, the country’s broadcast watchdog, receives applications for cable distribution from the Playboy Network and the Eternal Word Television Network; Playboy is approved and the Christian EWTN is denied, because of its “foreign influence.”
•CBC-TV airs a Christian comedy special, showing Christ uttering vulgarities from the cross, and the state-funded broadcaster then ignores the complaints.
•First prize at a publicly funded art show is given to a drawing of Christ being sodomized by a minister, and government officials defend the “free speech” of the artists.
The Secular-Humanist
Faith in Public Administration
The oppressive trend in Canada is an object lesson of how a dogmatically secularist elite can dominate a majority with a merely nominal faith, and how that secularism becomes identical to a faith in the limitless expansion of public administration.
The battle against the minority of observant Christians is being fought largely in the realm of sexual politics, says Iain Benson of the Center for Cultural Renewal, because “sex is the mysticism of the materialists.”
The secular elite “cannot make this a non-faith society,” Benson said, “because even their atheism is a kind of faith.” So the “chattering classes in the government, media, state-funded universities, and public schools continue to be antagonistic to the very existence of Christianity,” simply because of its latent claim to an independent moral authority. “What we see today is a triumph of the secular vocabulary, so that even church leaders find themselves addressing social problems in terms of the universal power of the state,” he said. “The churches have lost any independent moral presence in society.”
And that exclusive secularization is having an immediate effect even on the 80 percent of the population that has no explicit religious commitment.
“The church invented things like public hospitals, schools, and charities,” Benson continued.
And we’re discovering that these institutions remained humane only so long as they preserved their original [religious] inspiration.”
As the state has taken over these humanitarian functions, they are becoming increasingly agents of secular “liberation.” The hospitals are increasingly flirting with budget-driven euthanasia, the public schools have become purveyors of sexual “diversity,” the universities (almost all of them state-run) are propagandists for the malignant administration, and the social welfare programs have become actively antagonistic to the natural family.
“Our most cherished institutions are becoming inhumane,” concludes Benson.
The Way Forward
The most explicit pretext for the public suppression of Christianity in Canada has been “multiculturalism,” the need to avoid “oppressing” non-Christians with a dominant public faith. In fact, Canada, to make up for its aging (and soon to be shrinking) labor force, allows immigration, largely from the developing world, to the tune of about 1 percent of the population per year.
Yet many or most of those immigrants from Asia, Africa, or Latin America are already Christian, and those who aren’t still largely agree with the public policy positions of the suppressed Christian minority.
Over the past three years we have witnessed the growth of an interfaith coalition made up of evangelical Christians, Catholics, Sikhs, and Muslims; all fighting the legal redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples. The federal government has actually been funding the court challenge to the existing marriage law by gay activists, and is more than eager to subvert the traditional family with its own taxes. And with slowly increasing coherence, this interfaith coalition, now dubbed the Coalition for Family Autonomy, has been resisting.
This resistance has little chance of success, at least in the short run. But it does give the lie to the government’s pretext that its own anti-family initiatives are for the sake of fostering a gentler, more “multicultural” society.
What’s more, the coalition points the way forward in another, more substantive sense. Most Canadians still retain a residual identification with a Christian denomination, yet they do not themselves feel particularly threatened by either government policy or the cultural drift. So the threat to the church is simply disregarded.
Taxes, however, take just under half of an average middle class income. So the threat to the traditional family is palpable, if not to the completely secularized, at least to the residually Christian. If an interfaith coalition can effectually serve as the champion of the traditional family, it may begin to wean Canadians from their ever-expanding public administration.
Joe Woodard is religion correspondent for the Calgary Herald, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
|
TOP LEVEL
Past Issues
Printer-friendly page
Send this page to a friend