HE Canadian parliament has passed Bill C-9, known as the Combating Hate Act; it received Royal Assent on June 18 and the provisions come into force on July 18. Mark Carney, the liberal Prime Minister, considers that the legislation is ‘a huge step forward in our mission to build a stronger, safer country’.
Bill C-9 will usher in a ‘dark day’ for Canadians of faith. Conservative MP Brad Redekopp described the Bill as ‘a tool to enforce liberal DEI ideology while leaving fundamental freedoms dangerously exposed’. Such is the danger to the church that the legislation been dubbed the ‘Bible Ban’ Bill.
Bill C-9 changes Canada’s hate-speech provisions in the Criminal Code. Yet, despite the protestations of the Canadian government, Bill C-9 is not a serious effort to combat hate, which is already covered in existing legislation. It is instead a further step in the exercise of government control of society, particularly silencing Christians. The danger for freedom of speech lies in sections that lower the legal threshold for what constitutes hate speech and remove a long-standing safeguard relating to religious expression.
Bill C-9 will remove subsection 319(3)(b) of Canada’s Criminal Code. This section protects the good-faith expression of a person’s religious views based on religious texts such as the Holy Bible. There is nothing included in the Bill to protect freedom of religion or good-faith religious expression.
For nearly four decades, subsection 319(3)(b) has provided a defence for individuals who express an opinion on a religious subject in good faith or based on a religious text. The removal of this subsection makes it easier to go after those Canadian Christians, particularly ministers and pastors, who teach and live by the Bible.
Some supporters of the Bill, even within the mainstream Churches, argue that it is unlikely passages from religious texts read on their own will lead to criminal charges. The Crown would need to believe that the intention of reading the text was to incite hatred, promote hatred or promote anti-homosexual attitudes.
However, with the defence now removed, certain passages from religious texts could now lead to charges depending on the context including when they are read, where they are read, and what other words are used when they are read.
For example, the Bible passage Leviticus 20:13 states: ‘If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.’ Reading or writing this passage on its own would not likely lead to criminal charges despite removal of the defence.
However, depending on context, including what else is said, it may now be possible that speaking this Bible passage would lead to criminal charges. This would depend on whether it is used in a way that can be characterised as extreme vilification or detestation, which may be evidenced by the hallmarks of hate. This of course will be decided by the state prosecutors. Preachers in their sermons will have to be exceedingly careful when dealing with such contentious passages.
There is already legislation regarding hate crimes so there is no need for greater police power. Whether they will admit it or not, this legislation is aimed at silencing those who believe the Bible. This will not trouble modernist Churches which have given up on the Bible anyway and have already excised those parts which are not agreeable to the ‘progressive’ elites who populate our media, universities and politics. The Bill is directly aimed at traditional Christians.
It seeks to protect the new counterfeit human rights and designations of the alphabet groups. As a result we have homophobia and transphobia identified as two of the things that are to be rejected. Any speech that is deemed homophobic or transphobic is going to be illegal and can lead either to a hate crime depending upon the action, or a hate speech criminalised offence.
The most dangerous thing is the existence of hate speech legislation in the first place. Christians don’t deny that there is a category of hate crime or hate speech: we understand that’s the way sin works. There will be attacks, verbal and physical, based upon hatred of a person’s innate characteristics. But such actions are rarer than our legislatures would have us believe. It is possible to consider homosexuality to be sinful or Islam a dangerous delusion without hating either homosexuals or Muslims.
However, with this kind of legislation designed to protect specific classes, you unavoidably run into direct conflict with Christian teaching, even by quoting the Bible in teaching or preaching a sermon. And that is the nub of this legislation: it exists as a direct attack on the Bible and thus on the Church.
In case you think this an exaggeration, Marc Miller, Canada’s culture minister and one of Justin Trudeau’s ‘oldest friends’, went so far as to proclaim that specific verses of the Bible are ‘clearly hateful’ and would be criminalised if invoked to support a position the Canadian state deems unlawful. He cites passages from Romans, Deuteronomy and Leviticus as examples of ‘hateful’ texts. Miller deems such texts as ‘clearly hateful, they should not be used’.
If a minister is preaching from Romans 1 will he:
1. avoid verses 26 and 27,
2. be like the liberal Church and make them mean something they clearly don’t mean, or
3. will he teach what they clearly mean and risk two years’ imprisonment for a hate crime?
Keeping silent or twisting the truth is not an option for the Christian church if it is to remain a church.
Christians should note that this is one of the ways an increasingly oppressive government is moving on the legitimacy of religious expression and is turning gospel witness into a form of hate speech, which of course is being blamed for hate crimes.
