The other day a small (but photogenic) band of protesters gathered in front of our church –St. Andrew’s Cathedral in downtown Victoria—calling for the reopening of church services by the public health authorities, and asserting our rights to worship, assemble and speak. These are all recognized by our Charter of Rights as “fundamental freedoms,” which I take to mean, they are rights fundamental to human nature, which the charter, as I said, recognizes, rather than grants.
A young, intense woman striding by muttered, then repeated more loudly, that she also recognized our right to worship, three times in all before facing us fully and delivering her punchline.
“You have a right to worship, BUT—not a right to endanger the health of others.” (You’ve all heard it in the more truncated version from “woke” advocates: “I believe in free speech BUT—not hate speech.”
To which we replied that Walmart, Costco, lounges and restaurants, gyms and yoga clubs, dance classes, and, in the selfsame churches closed to services, 12-step groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, are all open and operating, subject to the distancing, masking and sanitizing requirements forced on us by the Wuhan Virus, aka Covid 19.
“But they pay taxes,” was her unexpected, smug reply. “Churches don’t pay taxes.” I managed to blurt out, “What about Alcoholics Anonymous?” before she left angrily, cursing us as she departed.
Whimsically, I wonder, and I wonder why the Legislative Press Gallery to which I once belonged hasn’t asked, how many members of the NDP cabinet, plus St. Bonnie Henry our public health officer, attend church weekly, and how many attend 12-step groups, and how many eat out at lounges and restaurants on a weekly basis?
But I am being whimsical. Surely these inconsistent regulations are not based on petty personal habits. No, I think our caustic passerby was not far from the mark. The reason for the inconsistent lockdown is that bars, lounges, gyms and supermarkets employ young people with lower incomes. In two words: NDP voters. Whereas churches, which also employ people, but usually older ones, are free assemblies of those who are older, own property, have higher incomes and so on: not NDP voters.
There is a deeper and more sinister reason for NDP hostility to churchgoers. Churches are independent generators of values, and values often in opposition to the NDP’s, and nationally, if not provincially, to the Liberals.’
Look at other values generators in our society, the universities, the media, the arts community, and you will find institutions totally enslaved to wokeness, political correctness, the LGBTQIA etc juggernaut that has deranged and bedevilled us. Only churches now mount a semi-organized resistance, while families and ethnic groups offer what support they can.
As for the courts, they use the Charter not to protect our fundamental freedoms but to attack them. The focus of their campaign has been the anti-discrimination clause that prohibits discrimination based on ethnicity, sexuality, age, race, religion and so on. Religion, thus reduced from a fundamental to an also-ran, is often the identified discriminator in cases involving sexual minorities. The judiciary’s way of deciding whether to protect the religious minority or the sexual minority is to weigh the injury done to one versus that done the other. Whichever suffers most if denied is the winner.
This totally subjective standard allows for the travesty that was the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Trinity Western University case. There the court reversed its ruling of 20 years earlier and decreed the legal profession could refuse graduates from TWU’s proposed law school on the grounds that TWU required students to conform to Christian morality—no sex outside heterosexual marriage. It was thus discriminating against homosexuals.
The absurdity is clear; the sinister intent is less so. TWU’s law school would have opened up more law school seats nation-wide, thus more seats for homosexual students. Now there will be fewer for all, but especially fewer for believers seeking a Christian perspective on law. Fewer as in : zero.
Here is the sinister part: the law schools of Canada are uniformly woke, monolithic, politically correct, and uncompromisingly hostile to Christian values. The legal professions have cemented in place that monopoly by rejecting TWU law grads before the school ever opened and the Supreme Court bolted steel clamps onto it.
Christian and Jewish and Muslim faiths provide what ought to be treasured in a pluralistic, liberal democracy: independently sourced values. But they are not treasured. Instead, religious faith is looked upon as a harmless if eccentric pastime at best, and at worst, a baneful influence connected to residential schools and discriminatory practices.
Returning to the young woman who attacked out freedom to worship while pretending to support it, what I might have said, should have said to her taxpaying comment, is that churches have never paid taxes because they have always been recognized as beneficial to society for their good deeds, for the soup kitchens, the hospitals, the schools, and the hospices they build and support, and which anyone can use, regardless of race, religion or sexual preference.
Moreover, in less obvious ways, churches benefit their individual members and through them, society. I commend to our readers the website of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute, or MARRI, which collects and generates social science research on just these subjects. This link will take you to an excellent compilation of the benefits: church attenders earn more, live longer, commit less crime, volunteer more, and donate more to secular charities, for example. By the same token their children do better in school and also commit less crime.
Please note, these are the benefits of frequent physical church attendance, not zoom attendance or television viewing. Nor of some vague“spirituality” expressed by standing in a quiet grove in an old growth forest, contemplating one’s navel while holding the tiger pose, or earnestly holding theist beliefs. Church attendance.
This week a BC judge is hearing arguments against the church lockdown in BC. The argument for the lockdown will be based on public safety. Against the lockdown, it will be contended that it violates the Charter, which recognizes limitations on the fundamental freedom of worship only to the degree they are reasonable. If you can sit in a restaurant, attend a fitness or dance class, work out in a gym close to other people, and cannot attend a service, it seems on the face of it to be unreasonable. But who expects the courts to be reasonable anymore? Not me. Sorry. And I mean, I am very, very sorry for Canada.