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The Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity Providing credible answers to the challenges of unbelief in our day Teaching and preaching a world-transforming Gospel message Applying biblical truth to every aspect of life
EZRA INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITY 9 Hewitt Ave. Toronto, ON M6R 1Y4
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General Editor
JOSEPH BOOT EICC Founder
JOSEPH BOOT
2 Editorial Ryan Eras 5
Liberty and Freedom in Canada at 150 AndrĂŠ Schutten
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Descent of a Nation: From Christianity to Charter Values Dr. Michael Wagner
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Lament for a Nation: George Parkin Grant and the Response to Modernity Rev. Dr. Joe Boot
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Oliver Mowat: A Christian Statesman Steven Martins
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Resource Corner
Jubilee is provided without cost to all those who request it. Jubilee is the tri-annual publication of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity (EICC), a registered charitable Christian organization. The opinions expressed in Jubilee do not necessarily reflect the views of the EICC. Jubilee provides a forum for views in accord with a relevant, active, historic Christianity, though those views may on occasion differ somewhat from the EICC’s and from each other. The EICC depends on the contribution of its readers, and all gifts over $10 will be tax receipted. Permission to reprint granted on written request only. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement Number: PM42112023 Return all mail undeliverable to: EICC, 9 Hewitt Ave., Toronto, ON M6R 1Y4, www.ezrainstitute.ca
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JUBILEE EDITORIAL: ISSUE 19
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RYAN ERAS RYAN ERAS is Director of Content and Publishing at the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. He holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Toronto, where he focused on bibliographic control and the history of censorship. Ryan has served in various educational and support roles, providing bibliographic research and critical editorial review for several academic publications. He lives in Toronto with his wife Rachel and their three children, Isabelle, Joanna and Simon.
UNTIL RECENTLY, “SESQUICENTENNIAL” – referring to a 150th anniversary – is a word I haven’t had much experience with, and I don’t envy those who have. Lately this word has been getting more circulation than usual as we approach July 1st, 2017, the sesquicentennial of Canada’s Confederation under the British North America Act. 150 years is surely a significant milestone, and it is natural at this time to celebrate, to reflect, and to take a glance backward and forward – what have we done with the last 150 years? Where have we come from, and what are we going to do next?
Canadians, and particularly Canadian Christians, are likely experiencing conflicting sentiments on this historic occasion. On the one hand, our leaders in government, industry and education in recent years have, with an uncanny consistency, pursued and implemented policies and laws that are overtly hostile to the Christian faith and the broadly Christian principles that motivated our nation’s founders. These policies, oriented away from and in defiance of God, are destructive of real truth, justice and freedom. As just one ready example, consider the case of Jordan Peterson, the (non-Christian) professor who has refused to comply with Bill C-16 and its mandated use of “gender-neutral pronouns,” on the grounds that it destroys the notion of truth, the immediate result of which is chaos. As a result, Peterson has been the subject of a good deal of official censure, and been passed over for research grants of which he seemed to be well-deserving.1 When our civil government begins to hijack language itself to advance an agenda antithetical to God and his eternal Word, a Christian could be forgiven for finding his patriotic sentiments on the wane. Increasingly it seems that behaving as a faithful Christian and as a good Canadian citizen are becoming mutually exclusive activities. But patriotism is not allegiance to a particular leader or civil government; if that were the case then patriotism would be nothing more than a measure of party loyalty. Rather, a godly, rightlyordered sense of patriotism is one mark of rightly-ordered affections – true patriot love, as our anthem prescribes. The Canadian philosopher
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George Grant offers a helpful understanding of patriotism – a love that begins at home, and which we must cultivate in order to rightly love other things farther from home.2 Andrew Sandlin has made a valuable point about North American patriotism, as distinct from much of Europe and Asia, where patriotism is bound up in a sense of “blood and soil,” that is, a particular geography and genealogy. For the American, and perhaps more so for the Canadian, “we are patriots because the principles on which the nation [was] founded allow Christianity to flourish.”3 In other words, a godly patriotism honours and defends godly ideas of self and of nationhood. In light of this, it is encouraging to bear in mind the idea that Canada is a pre-Christian, rather than a post-Christian nation, still waiting for the full light of the gospel to dawn.4 It is true that Canada was birthed into a context of broad Christian consensus, a consensus which has largely eroded in latter days. But it is a naïve nostalgia that would long for some bygone golden age of Canadian Christian culture. Some readers, like my mother, will remember attending Expo ’67 in Montreal in their youth. The theme of this once-in-a-lifetime event celebrating Canada’s Centennial was Man and his World. Hear what Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson had to say on the occasion: The scope of international support for the Expo theme, as shown by the recordbreaking participation, is a wonderfully encouraging display of Man’s faith in himself and his world; in his capacity to improve and progress; in his power to cope with the challenges of his world and himself. In all the wonders of Man which we now have on display at Expo, we can see in inspiring actuality how much every nation has to gain from co-operation and how much to lose in conflict.5
In keeping with the theme of Expo, Man (notice the capital M), his capacity and achievement, and his camaraderie with his fellow man, are front and centre in Pearson’s address. Any reference to God is conspicuously absent.
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To be fair, Pearson’s address was delivered to a self-consciously international audience in the midst of the Cold War, and it was both fitting and prudent to acknowledge the spirit of cooperation in such circumstances. Nevertheless, for a nation whose motto reads A Mari usque ad Mare (from sea to sea), in direct reference to the universal kingship of God described in Psalm 72:8, this address from Canada’s Prime Minister would fit more comfortably alongside the Humanist Manifesto than the pages of Scripture. The prophet Samuel erected a stone of remembrance following the Lord’s defeat of the Philistines and deliverance of his people, marking the place with the words “Till now the Lord has helped us” (1 Sam 7:12). Pearson’s Ebenezer, by contrast, is a startling display of humanistic hubris: “…the lasting impact of Expo will be in the dramatic object lesson we see before our own eyes today: that the genius of Man knows no national boundaries but is universal.”6 It is hard not to see in Pearson’s words allusions to an earlier, biblical instance where the “universal genius of Man” was on display: “Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth’” (Gen. 11:4). Such godless patriotism can do no better than to praise the genius of man, for indeed it acknowledges nothing higher than this. Christians know that we have a higher allegiance than the one marked on our passport; our ultimate citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20), and in all we do, we yearn for “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:16). At the same time, Scripture is clear that God’s people are on mission in this world. In a land that is hostile to the Kingdom of God, we are nevertheless to “seek the welfare of the city” (Jer. 29:7). Furthermore, as ambassadors of King Jesus, to whom has been given all authority in heaven and on earth, we have been given the task of making disciples of the nations, teaching them to obey God’s commands. In a very real way, this yearning for a heavenly country is worked out in our love for our country here and now, the glory and the name of our King moving us to declare his everlasting reign. (Matt. 28:18-20).
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We may rightly mourn, lament, and protest the ungodly actions of our leaders, but we must not neglect to also pray for those leaders. Listen to the words of the apostle Paul, who urged Timothy to pray for the pagan Roman emperors who demanded nothing less than to be worshiped as gods: First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior... (1 Tim. 2:1-3)
So let us celebrate our sesquicentennial, and do so in a spirit of full and everlasting joy, knowing that Canada, like all nations and kingdoms, is under the righteous rule of King Jesus; and let us labour to instruct our neighbours and countrymen in everything he has commanded. IN THIS ISSUE
André Schutten examines the critical idea of freedom and rights in Canada – where do these come from, what do they consist of, and how are they to be guaranteed? If our rights and freedoms are not grounded in a transcendent God, then we risk having them destroyed or redefined by a capricious state. Dr. Michael Wagner surveys the history of Canadian religious culture, demonstrating our heritage of foundational Christian beliefs, and detailing key events that contributed to the loss and abandonment of that foundation, to be replaced by Charter Values in 1982. Guided by precedentsetting court cases relating to commerce and education, the Charter is symptomatic of the rejection of God and his Word as a basis and rule for living. Rev. Dr. Joe Boot reflects on the work of Canadian philosopher George Parkin Grant. Grant’s 1965 classic Lament for a Nation advanced the idea that we had lost a distinctly Canadian identity, becoming absorbed into the technological SUMMER 2017
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empire of the United States. However, this lament was founded on a faulty and anti-Christian understanding of God, mankind, and history, and advocated a withdrawal from the work of culture-making. Steven Martins considers the legacy of Sir Oliver Mowat, the first Premier of Ontario, a Father of Confederation, and a principled believer in the relevance and applicability of Christian belief and practice for every area of life.
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See David Fuller, “Insisting on the truth in times of chaos — Jordan Peterson,” Medium, last modified May 19, 2017, https://medium.com/ perspectiva-institute/the-man-for-the-timesof-chaos-jordan-peterson-2df43c24672f; Christie Blatchford, “‘An opportunity to make their displeasure known’: Pronoun professor denied government grant,” National Post, last modified April 3, 2017, http://news. nationalpost.com/news/canada/an-opportunity-to-make-their-displeasure-known-government-pulls-funding-of-pronoun-professor. Peter C. Emberley (ed.), By Loving our Own: George Grant and the Legacy of “Lament for a Nation” (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1990), xxiv. P. Andrew Sandlin, “A Christian and a Patriot?” Doc Sandlin, last modified July 3, 2012, https:// docsandlin.com/2012/07/03/a-christian-and-apatriot/ See Joe Boot, “William Wilberforce and the Issues of Life,” Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity, last modified September 19, 2016, http://www.ezrainstitute.ca/resourcelibrary/blog-entries/william-wilberforce-andthe-issues-of-life. Lester Bowles Pearson, “Remarks at the opening of Expo ’67, Montreal, April 27, 1967,” Collections Canada, accessed May 16, 2017, https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/primeministers/h4-4029-e.html. Pearson, “Remarks.”
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LIBERTY & FREEDOM in Canada at 150
THOMAS D’ARCY MCGEE, one of
Canada’s founding fathers, once said of Canada, “We have had liberty… liberty to our hearts’ content. There is not on the face of the earth a freer people than the inhabitants of these colonies.”1 The question before us today, in Canada’s 150th year as a Dominion, is: have we still such liberty?2 Do we have freedom from the stifling hand of the state? Do we have creative, religious, familial and economic freedom? For the sake of the individual, for families, for society and for civil government, it is important that we take this question seriously. An improper understanding of human rights will result in the flouting of the rule of law, delays of justice, regulatory paralysis, economic stagnation, fundamental breaches of the autonomy of families and the infantilization of citizens.
This article is not meant to be like that of the United Nations which critiques Canada on human rights, the availability of food and its environmental record, while seemingly turning a blind eye to nations with atrocious human rights records, starving populaces, and unmitigated pollution. Canada remains, on many fronts, one of the beacons of freedom in this world. However, we cannot rest on our laurels. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.5 There is room for improvement in Canada, and increasingly so. HOW FREE ARE WE?
Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.3 Our civil government is constitutionally prevented from limiting the rights and freedoms of its citizens unless it can demonstrably justify those limits in a free and democratic society.4 Even though these well-known phrases from our Charter of Rights and Freedoms were only explicitly made a part of our Constitution in 1982, our country and citizens have historically enjoyed freedom and liberty from civil governments.
The Crown in England once ruled by “divine right:” the monarch was placed over the people by God as his representative on earth. A text from the Christian Bible typically used in coronation ceremonies was Psalm 72, a psalm that implies that God puts the king over the people.6 Interestingly, the Psalm talks extensively about the role of the Crown: he is to “judge [the] people with righteousness” (v. 2); “defend the cause of the poor… and crush the oppressor” (v. 4); “pity the weak and the needy and save the lives of the needy. From oppression and violence he redeems [them]” (vv. 13,14). It’s obvious that the original intention for the role of the Crown is to serve the people, not to be served by them.
However, in the last five decades, we have seen huge increases in the size of the government at both the federal and provincial levels. As the size of the government increases, so does the level of taxation and regulation, coupled with a consequent decrease in the ability of the individual citizen to conduct his or her affairs as he or she sees fit. When we better understand Canadian history and law, as well as the nature of the human condition, Canadian leaders ought to call for greater freedom in Canada.
But, as proven by history, monarchs can and do go bad. As the truism goes, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”7 The English King John horribly abused his power contrary to Scripture (Deut. 16:19; Ps. 26:10; Prov. 15:27; 17:23; Isa. 33:15; Ezek. 22:12; Amos 5:12; Hab. 1:2-4) and the free people in England pushed back. In 1215, they forced the Crown to recognize several rights of his subjects. The Magna Carta, penned that year, required King John to proclaim certain liberties
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ANDRE SCHUTTEN ANDRÉ SCHUTTEN, Hon. B.A., LL.B., LL.M, is General Legal Counsel and Ontario Director for ARPA Canada. Based in ARPA Canada’s Ottawa office, he has the mandate of equipping the Reformed community, especially in Ontario, for political action on a broad range of issues. He conducts regular analysis on the impact of different government bills and court judgments and also acts as ARPA’s chief Parliamentary lobbyist. He also represents ARPA in various court interventions, having made arguments before the Supreme Court of Canada three times and three provincial courts of appeal. André completed his law degree at the University of Ottawa in 2010, and a Masters degree in Constitutional Law through Osgoode Hall Law School in 2013. He is published in two peer-reviewed law journals: the National Journal of Constitutional Law (“Whatcott and Hate Speech: Rethinking Freedom of Expression in the Charter Age,” 2015), and the Supreme Court Law Review (“Lethal Discrimination: A Case Against Legalizing Assisted Suicide in Canada,” 2016). In his spare time, André trains with the Canadian Armed Forces, Infantry Reserve. He and his wife Karyn and their son Gabriel live in Gatineau, Québec.
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and to accept that his arbitrary will was no longer supreme law. For example, no freeman could be punished except by the law of the land.
“The proper understanding of liberty, then, is the right of citizens to conduct their personal affairs and pursue personal ambitions within the confines of moral law without state interference.”
This was the beginning (or restart) of our rule of law and due process, enshrined today in our legal rights as outlined in sections 7 - 14 of the Charter. Lord Denning, arguably one of the greatest jurists in English history, once described the Magna Carta as “the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.”8 One might wonder if the despot (an unfettered monarch) has now been replaced by the despotic “arbitrary authority” of an amorphous bureaucracy. The role of the state has ballooned from one of “protecting the innocent and punishing the wrongdoer” to societal ubiquity. Though it rightly has authority over core issues like immigration, criminal law and national defence, it is also continually asserting itself in smaller and more invasive ways: the government intervenes in relationships between parents and their born children, regulates education of the youth, monopolizes and distributes our health care, limits our speech, interferes in our economic relationships, asserts an environmental zealotry and provides ever more redistributive social benefits. The government protects and defends us, feeds us, makes us better when we are sick, settles our disputes when our marriages break down, educates and raises our children (starting at younger and younger ages), rewards our charitable giving, punishes our criminal behavior, and even ensures our burial is conducted properly. In short, the government is a part of the Canadian’s life from the cradle to the grave in one form or another, either overtly or covertly.
TRUE CONCEPT OF THE RIGHTS OF CITIZENS
With a government so involved in our lives, is it possible to be truly free? Or does freedom come about only when the state alleviates us from the ills of life? When speaking of liberty and freedom, SUMMER 2017
we should ask: What is it from which we must be free? Yes, we need freedom from foreign and domestic enemies, but citizens also need freedom from state interference. A government that interferes too much in the personal affairs of its citizens risks becoming (if it has not already become) tyrannical. Tyranny is not a progressive force, neither morally nor economically. It infantilizes its subjects, reduces initiative, and impoverishes the spirit. The proper understanding of liberty, then, is the right of citizens to conduct their personal affairs and pursue personal ambitions within the confines of moral law without state interference. Liberty does not mean freedom from poverty, envy, hurt feelings or child-rearing – nor does it mean living a comfortable life on the public dime. Liberty is the freedom to grow, and to help others grow. It is voluntary, not coercive. Edmund Burke, reflecting on the French Revolution, gave a proper explanation of the rights of citizens: [Citizens] have a right to do justice, as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in public function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour. In this partnership all men have equal rights, but not to equal things.9 WHY FREEDOM?
Our freedoms are essential. Mr. Justice Rand of the Supreme Court of Canada once wrote that “freedom of speech, religion and the inviolability of the person are original freedoms which are at once the necessary attributes and modes of self expression of human beings...”10 Section 2 of the Charter outlines four fundamental freedoms: religion (including conscience), expression (includEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Liberty and Freedom
ing the press), assembly, and association. These freedoms are fundamental to a properly functioning democracy, and ought never to be violated by government unless absolutely necessary for our free and democratic society to function as such.11 Although the Supreme Court of Canada has stated numerous times that there is no hierarchy of rights, the very plain reading of section 2 requires an understanding that fundamental freedoms are the foundation on which other rights and freedoms can be built. So, although these four freedoms don’t have a hierarchy between them, they certainly are fundamentally more important than other positive or legislated rights as outlined in, for example, human rights codes. Thus, a government should never override its citizens’ fundamental freedoms in an attempt to protect recently contrived rights. For example, a positive right to not be discriminated against in employment (seemingly an admirable thing) can lead to the violation of the freedom of association and religion, with the state forcing religious communities to hire people who live at odds with God’s rules for thankful living. Another example: a positive – or legislated – right to be free from hurt feelings or offense requires the state to clamp down on the free expression of other citizens. But it is very important that Christians understand the real reason for freedom. To paraphrase Lord Acton, freedom is essential not so that we can live as we please but so that we can do as we ought. Not even a decade ago, most Canadians would have been on board with this sentiment. However, in the last few years I have observed a nefarious shift where liberty to do as one pleases has morphed into requiring all people to celebrate or assist others to do as they please. Christian doctors are compelled to kill their patients; Christian schools are compelled to celebrate sexual licentiousness; Christian parents are compelled to embrace their child’s apparent change in sexual identity; Christian politicians are compelled to walk in gay pride parades; and Christian students are compelled to sit through LGBTQ+ indoctrination lest their absence from such classes “discriminate” against other students. These examples are not theoretical. And yet ridiculous examples of limits on liberty abound, Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
including no liberty to drink non-pasteurized milk and severe limits on self-defense. RIGHTS NOT CREATED BY A CONSTITUTION
Where do our rights and freedoms come from? If we can’t determine precisely where they do come from, can we, at the very least, eliminate where they do not come from? The adoption of a constitution or of a charter of rights does not, in itself, give us rights. It would be a mistake to think that because our rights are written down they will necessarily be protected. Examples of meaningless documents purportedly enshrining freedom and liberty have been asserted in Russia and China, among other nations. Has our Charter of Rights and Freedoms brought about more freedom or less? With the inclusion of a “reasonable limits” clause (section 1 of the Charter), the power of the Charter to shield Canadian citizens is compromised and susceptible to legislative and judicial abuse. As long as an arguably “reasonable” rationale has sufficient public support at the time, governments may feel free to interfere with individual “Liberty to do as one liberty. For example, the Supreme Court pleases has morphed of Canada held that it was “reasonable” into requiring all in a free and democratic country to deny people to celebrate a Christian parent the right to remove or assist others to do their child from a world religion class where all religions were taught as being as they please.” essentially equal.11 A propensity to ideological bias in an unelected Supreme Court (the final arbiter of whether government infringement is “reasonable”) may make it easier to dismiss such infringements of freedom as “reasonable” in a free and democratic society. So, constitutions and charters do not create rights and freedoms. Rather, these codes simply recognize pre-existing rights and freedoms. Our Charter recognizes the rights of Canadian citizens. These rights have always existed, but in 1982 (and in 1960 with the Bill of Rights) our lawmakers made a conscientious choice to codify recognition of those rights in order to remind future governments to refrain from infringing upon them. SUMMER 2017
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RIGHTS NOT CREATED BY MAN OR THE STATE
Having established that rights do not come from the Constitution, do they come from fellow human beings, a sort of “rights by convention” as argued by Rousseau? If rights come from man, then how is the apartheid era of South Africa any more morally condemnable than any other era? That is to say, men give rights and recognize rights, so how could we argue that their failure to recognize the rights of blacks for a time was wrong? What is the benchmark? The majority’s feelings on the issue? The consensus of academic elites? Or can we now say that South Africa has emerged from an era of injustice? If rights do not come from fellow humans, do they come from the state? If we say that rights come from the state, we face the same conundrum as the earlier proposition. In fact, followed to its logical conclusion we would have to admit that Auschwitz was right and that Nurem“If human rights are burg was wrong. After all, everything that the Nazis did to the Jews (and many created by the state, other groups including homosexuals, the they can be defined disabled and Gypsies) was, strictly speakby the state, limited ing, legal. If human rights are created by the state and by the state, they can be defined by the ultimately removed state, limited by the state and ultimately by the state.” removed by the state. TRUE ORIGIN OF RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS
So, if rights and freedoms do not come from the Constitution (but are recognized by the Constitution) and are not created by man or by the state, where do they come from? We all recognize that there are certain freedoms that exist and need to be protected. We recognize unfairness and injustice. What option is left? Looking to the United States, another option is that rights are given to humanity by its Maker. The American Declaration of Independence begins: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”12 The Canadian Bill of Rights echoes the American SUMMER 2017
Declaration in its recognition of where rights and freedoms come from. Championed by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, the Bill of Rights was enacted by the Canadian Parliament in 1960. Its preamble states, the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions ... also that men and institutions remain free only when freedom is founded upon respect for moral and spiritual values and the rule of law; And being desirous of enshrining these principles and the human rights and fundamental freedoms derived from them.13
Human rights are not created by man, or by the state, or by constitutions. We can possess a genuine right only if it comes from Someone who has the authority to grant it. John Warwick Montgomery, who amassed eleven earned degrees in philosophy, theology, and law, understood this well: “Human rights logically require an identification of human value and pose the question of ‘someone’ – Someone! – who has ‘the right, authority or power’ to give them. And the quest to define rights cannot be separated from the need to justify them.”14 As such, constitutions and states must recognize and respect the human rights of people for the very fact that they are human, created Imago Dei – in the image of God. A secular society may well squirm at such a suggestion. Yet after hundreds of years of trying to do so, secularism remains incapable of explaining why rights are inherent and inalienable apart from God. We can’t throw God out of the public square and still hold onto the same notion of rights that has grounded Western law and policy for centuries. If rights do not have a moral foundation it won’t be long before another despot, or society of despots, decides that rights for others are meaningless and can be disposed of when convenient. ROLE OF THE STATE: LIBERTY AND THE RULE OF LAW
In light of the discussion above, what is the role Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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of the Crown (or government) today in a representative democracy?15 Looking to our Constitution, there is no explicit mention of the role of the Crown.16 However, a genuine objective for the Crown in Canada is the maintenance of peace, order and good government, as outlined in Canada’s 1867 Constitution.17 This is a satisfactory summary of its role: the Crown is to be focused on stability and security and concerned for the equal protection of all of its citizens. This also corresponds directly with the description of the role of the state in Romans 13:1-7. In a representative democracy, the government, though instituted, commissioned and answerable to God, is to be informed by the will of the people. To govern based on “the will of the people” does not mean that individuals give their own meaning to laws, since this would transform community to anarchy. Instead, people protect the scope of their individual freedoms by collectively granting a measure of their liberties to government. Citizens surrender some of their freedom to ensure that each person will be afforded fair and equal protection by the state.18 The philosopher John Locke argued that the primary role of the state is to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens and to do so without discrimination between them.19 Each citizen should be protected equally, but in such a way that infringements on their liberties are minimized. The biggest justification for infringements on liberty today (at least in legal circles) is the concept of equality. 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville warned against the “depravity” of misapplied equality. He wrote, “there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.”20 It is important that as Christians we understand equality before the law properly, as equality of protection and opportunity, and not equality of outcome. The role of maintaining stability and security is intrinsically linked to the other role of the Crown, that is, to promote and defend the rule of law. Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms has legitimacy only because our country “is founded upon Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
principles that recognize…the rule of law.”21 The Supreme Court of Canada explains: “The ‘rule of law’ is a highly textured expression [...] conveying, for example, a sense of orderliness, of subjection to known legal rules and of executive accountability to legal authority.”22 To maintain good government requires that the rule of law be maintained and that justice not only be done but also be seen to be done. We see that there is a need for government to recognize that it ought not to interfere in the individual lives of its citizens; we require freedom from government. However, citizens also require freedom from oppressive neighbours. The role of the state is to protect the good and punish the bad.23 The state is thus mandated to interfere in the individual lives of its citizens in order to enforce and uphold the rule of law. Therefore, the maintenance of a justice system that treats each citizen equally is paramount. The system cannot favour the poor (Ex. 23:3, 6). The rule of law means that “everyone is subject to the law; that no one, no matter how important or powerful, is above the law.”24 One law, one justice system, all treated equally by the law. This is necessary to maintain the trust and democratic engagement foundational to the legitimization of the democratic process. And so, D’Arcy McGee did not end his speech on February 9, 1865 after noting that we have much freedom. He went on to explain that citizens also have great responsibility: “The two great things that all men aim at in any free government are liberty and permanency.” Freedom to conduct one’s personal affairs also requires the stability of a society in which to do that. Therefore, “it is necessary that there should be respect for “It the law… the virtue of civil obedience.”25 We must recognize that personal responsibility and individual liberty go hand in hand – if we want to have a free society, we also need to take more personal responsibility. If someone’s opinions offend us, we should use our own freedom of expression to explain why and to counter the argument. If we can’t get a job with a religious organization, we apply somewhere else.
is important that as Christians we understand equality before the law properly, as equality of protection and opportunity, and not equality of outcome.” SUMMER 2017
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MOVING FORWARD
As Christians in civil society, before advocating for government help or action with this or that issue, first ask whether the issue falls within the responsibility of civil government at all. If there is another sector of society better able to handle the matter (consider the marketplace, the charitable sector, the individual, the academy, the church or the family), allow that sphere of society to handle it.26 For example, the education of children is clearly a parental responsibility and the state should not interfere where parents are taking that responsibility seriously.27 Also ask “As Christians in whether the proposed law infringes on the civil society, freedoms of citizens in any way. If there is before advocating for infringement, ensure that it is absolutely government help or necessary and unavoidable with broad public support. action with this or
that issue, first ask whether the issue falls within the responsibility of civil government at all.”
Politicians should not be afraid to say no to constituents and media who are hungry for government intervention and blame. Instead of having the government supply all things for all people, citizens need to be able to take initiative, garner investment, apply hard work and drive their own projects. Bureaucratic red tape is the biggest attack on free enterprise in a free country. The famous economist Friedrich Hayek wrote about this and the totalitarianism of centralized planning in his treatise The Road to Serfdom. As Alexis De Tocqueville prophesied, [The government] covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrial animals, of which
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government is the shepherd.28
The government must be consistent in the application of the law, not only across jurisdictions, but also across identifiable groups. Affirmative action programs violate the rule of law and should be stopped (Ex. 23:3, 6; Lev. 19:15; Prov. 17:26). Demonstrating excessive leniency in prosecuting criminal activity because individuals are members of certain groups also violates the rule of law and brings it into disrepute.29 All actions of the state must be consistent with the Constitution. If administrative tribunals and commissions are known to violate the Charter and interfere in the private affairs of the people, Members of Parliament ought to speak out and work to have these government bodies controlled, reined in, or dissolved. My hope is that Canada can be strengthened as a bastion of freedom against a world of increased regulation, rules and governmental controls. A Canada in which citizens are able to take more individual responsibility, demonstrate more innovation and exercise more personal and corporate charity is a healthier society and a stronger and freer nation. If we embrace this true freedom, by God’s grace, Canada might celebrate another 150 years.
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Thomas D’Arcy McGee in Canada’s Founding Debates, eds. Janet Ajzenstat, Paul Romney, Ian Gentles and Bill Gairdner, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 16. Professor F.H. Buckley argued in the negative, “Canadians no longer have more… liberty… than Americans. In both countries, benign neglect has been replaced by the bureaucrat’s officious nudges, giving us ugly light bulbs, toilets that don’t flush and idiotic playground rules.” in “Canada was a free country,” National Post, August 15, 2012. Preamble, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part I of the Constitution Act, 1982, being Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (U.K.), 1982, c.11 [hereinafter the Charter]. Charter, supra note 3 at section 1. This quote is often attributed to Thomas JefEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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ferson, although no original source for this has been found in his writings. The earliest established source for similar remarks are those of John Philpot Curran in a speech upon the Right of Election, published in Speeches on the late very interesting State trials (1808): “It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.” Incidentally, this Psalm is also intrinsically connected to Canada: two of its verses are inscribed on the Peace Tower, one of which is the motto of the country (Psalm 72:8 - A Mari Usque Ad Mare – From sea to sea) and the name Dominion, used to describe the type of country Canada is, also comes from this Psalm. Lord Acton, “Letter to Mandell Creighton (5 April 1887)” in John Neville Figgis & Reginald Vere Laurence, eds., Historical Essays and Studies by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton (London: Macmillan, 1907), 504. Danny Danziger & John Gillingham, 1215: The Year of Magna Carta (New York: Touchstone, 2004), 278. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, (Indianapolis: The Liberal Arts Press, Inc., 1955), 67. Saumur v. City of Québec (1953) 2 S.C.R. 299 (S.C.C.) at 329. S.L. v. Commission scolaire des Chênes 2012 SCC 7. Declaration of Independence (US 1776). Canadian Bill of Rights (S.C. 1960, c.44), Preamble. John Warwick Montgomery, Human Rights and Human Dignity (Edmonton: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology, and Public Policy, 1995) 79-80. Canada is also described as a Constitutional Monarchy. An entire paper can be written on the differences between these two concepts. I will work on the assumption that, in effect, Canada is a representative democracy. The Constitution Act, 1867 is a long list of things the government may do, not necessarily what the government ought to do. See Constitution Act, 1867 (U.K.), 30 & 31 Vict.,
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c. 3, s. 91, reprinted in R.S.C. 1985, App. II, No. 5. Section 91 is titled “Powers of the Parliament”. See generally, John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 291. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, ch.. 3 (1835) Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, http://xroads.virginia. edu/~HYPER/DETOC/1_ch03.htm. Charter, supra note 3, Preamble. Reference Re Proposed Resolution Respecting the Constitution of Canada, [1981] 1 S.C.R. 753 at 805. See also Roncarelli v. Duplessis, [1959] S.C.R. 121. This principle is a summary of the role of the state as outlined in Romans 13:1-7. See also Psalm 72. The Hon. Eugene A. Forsey, How Canadians Govern Themselves, 30, (online book): lop. parl.ca/About/Parliament/senatoreugeneforsey/book/assets/pdf/How_Canadians_Govern_ Themselves9.pdf. See in connection with the opening quote of this paper - Thomas D’Arcy McGee, supra note 1. This principle, informed by Reformed thought, is known as Sphere Sovereignty and was elucidated by the Dutch Prime Minister (1901-1905) Abraham Kuyper in the third of his six Stone Lectures delivered at Princeton University in 1898. The lecture was titled, Calvinism and Politics. When applied, this principle has the potential to dramatically increase the personal responsibility, contribution and ownership of citizens toward and in their nation and communities. A similar principle is found among Catholic thinkers called Subsidiarity: a matter ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized authority capable of addressing that matter effectively. Scripture is full of references to educating the youth and in every situation, the responsibility clearly lies with parents. This is seen in God’s directions to Abraham in Gen. 18, God’s instructions to the people of Israel to teach their children his commands in Deut. 6, SUMMER 2017
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the generational instruction outlined in Psalm 78, or the entire book of Proverbs, filled with instructions on how to “train up a child in the way he should go” (Prov. 22), including as it relates to sexuality. (See also Deut. 4:10; Prov. 1:8-9; Eph. 6:1- 4; Col. 3:20.) The state may not drive a wedge between parents and their children or use children as pawns to advance a particular worldview in society. We have an obligation to remind the state that its role is particular and limited (Rom. 13). 28 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America, Volume II, Book 4, Chapter 6 (1835) Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ ch4_06.htm. 29 See, for example, the police indifference to the illegal criminal activity of Tamil Tigers in Toronto. “Tamil protesters end blockade on major Toronto highway” CBC News, last modified May 11, 2009, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tamil-protesters-end-blockade-onmajor-toronto-highway-1.829118.
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DESCENT OF A
NATION:
from CHRISTIANITY to CHARTER CANADA WAS FOUNDED AS a Chris-
tian country and continued as a Christian country for most of its history, but it is important to qualify what that statement means. It does not mean that all Canadians have professed to be Christians, or that most Canadians have been true believers in a strict sense. Rather, to say that Canada was a Christian country refers to the fact that Canada’s legal and political institutions were broadly founded on a Christian worldview, from the first settlement by Europeans until 1982. It was in 1982 that Canada adopted Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adding it to the constitution and thereby divorcing the country from its Christian foundation. From that point forward, instead of Christianity, something called “Charter values” has generally informed the governing philosophy of our political institutions. A CHRISTIAN COUNTRY
The two European countries that originally settled Canada were France and Britain. France was a deeply Roman Catholic nation and its colony along the Saint Lawrence River reflected that influence. Roman Catholicism was at the core of culture in New France. More extensive and pervasive, however, was the influence of Britain. The British government had been officially Christian for centuries. Even today there remains a legally-established Church of England and a legally-established Church of Scotland. In fact, in 1643, England, Scotland and Ireland formally covenanted together and with God to follow the Bible in both church and state, a bond known as the Solemn League and Covenant.1 Though largely forgotten today, the Solemn League and Covenant arguably made Britain into
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VALUES
DR. MICHAEL WAGNER
the most Christian nation (in a Protestant sense) in history. The point here is that Canada was originally settled by Christian nations and from the outset was itself broadly, if not thoroughly, Christian. Some of that Christian element remains today. For example, Canada’s current Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II, took an oath to “maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel” at her coronation.2 Up to this point in history, Canada’s heads of state have always been explicitly Christian. Not surprisingly, therefore, numerous scholars have noted Canada’s Christian heritage. For example, University of Toronto historian John Moir wrote: “At least until a generation ago it was confidently assumed by most Canadians that Canada was a Christian country, and that this was God’s providential intention.”3
MICHAEL WAGNER is an independent researcher and writer with a PhD in Political Science from the University of Alberta. Among his books are Leaving God Behind: The Charter of Rights and Canada’s Official Rejection of Christianity and Standing on Guard for Thee: The Past, Present and Future of Canada’s Christian Right. He and his wife have eleven children and live in Edmonton.
Even Tom Warner, a longtime homosexual rights leader in Ontario, has noted the central role of Christianity in Canada’s past: “Until the midtwentieth century, if not longer, Christianity and most particularly Christian values and morality were central to the national identity.”4 Evidence of Canada’s original Christian identity is present in the political sphere. Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, stated as much in Parliament. Speaking in favour of a resolution that prayers be read at the beginning of each day in the House of Commons, Macdonald said that “as a body composed of representatives of a Christian country and supposed to be Christians themselves, that it was quite proper that the blessing of the Almighty should be invoked upon the acts of the Legislature.”5
“At least until a generation ago it was confidently assumed by most Canadians that Canada was a Christian country, and that this was God’s providential intention.”
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THE LORD’S DAY ACT
Moreover, Christianity had a direct effect on Canadian society. University of Toronto law professor Lorraine Weinrib points to the Lord’s Day Act as one unambiguous instance of this influence. Unlike England, Scotland and Ireland, Canada did not formally establish Chris“With the provincial tianity as our official religion. But as Sabbath laws Weinrib has written, “Informal religious declared invalid, establishment wielded similar authormany Christians in ity through entrenched personal, social, Canada demanded political, and institutional privilege, as exemplified by the enactment and retenthat the federal tion of the Lord’s Day Act, 1906.”6 government institute
Sabbath legislation. The government obliged.”
At the time of Confederation in 1867, the North American colonies that became Canada’s provinces each had legislation enforcing the Lord’s Day. From early days, however, this law had opponents. The Hamilton Street Railway challenged Ontario’s Sabbath legislation in court on the basis that such legislation was a federal matter rather than a provincial one. The railway wanted to operate on the Lord’s Day, and having the court strike down the law would facilitate that. In 1903 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) in London, England (the highest court in the British Empire) struck down the legislation. The JCPC reasoned that Sabbath legislation was criminal law, and criminal law was entirely under the jurisdiction of the federal government.7 With this decision, all of the Sabbath laws in Canada – provincial laws – were effectively overturned. A Sabbath law would need to be enacted at the federal level in order to be valid. Another point about this decision must be observed. In 1912 a case (Ouimet v. Bazin) involving the Lord’s Day Act made it to the Supreme Court of Canada. It is notable what the Chief Justice, Sir Charles Fitzpatrick, said about the JCPC’s ruling in the Hamilton Street Railway case. Referring to the JCPC’s members as “their Lordships,” he wrote: “In the Hamilton Street Railway Case their Lordships hold, impliedly at least, that Christianity is part of the common law of the realm; that the observance of the Sabbath is a religious duty;
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and that a law which forbids any interference with that observance is, in its nature, criminal.”8 Here it is stated that the highest court in the British Empire had ruled that “Christianity is part of the common law” of Canada. This important detail helps to demonstrate Weinrib’s point about the informal, yet widely-acknowledged establishment of Christianity as the religion of Canada. With the provincial Sabbath laws declared invalid, many Christians in Canada demanded that the federal government institute Sabbath legislation. The government obliged. In the course of the Senate debate on this new legislation, Conservative Senator James A. Lougheed of Calgary quoted from the Globe newspaper as follows: “As the Minister of Justice declared, Christianity is the religion of Canada and the fabric of Canadian nationhood is buttressed by Christian institutions, but the great interests of social economics are as urgent as the churches that this measure be made law without weakening or delay.”9 Thus in the opinion of the Minister of Justice at the time, “Christianity is the religion of Canada and the fabric of Canadian nationhood is buttressed by Christian institutions.” Could this statement be any clearer? The Lord’s Day Act was passed in 1906. THE LORD’S DAY ACT GOES TO COURT
Over time, popular support for the Lord’s Day Act declined. Nevertheless, its authority was not in doubt. When it was challenged in the Supreme Court of Canada in 1963, it was upheld. In 1960, the government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker passed the Canadian Bill of Rights which included protection for “freedom of religion.” Two businessmen, Walter Robertson and Fred Rosetanni, tried to have the courts overturn the Lord’s Day Act using the religious freedom provision of the new Bill of Rights. They were unsuccessful. The Supreme Court noted that there had been laws in Canada enforcing the Christian Lord’s Day since long before Confederation. Thus, the conception of religious freedom enacted in the Canadian Bill of Rights could not possibly entail the rejection of Lord’s Day legislation:
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As has been indicated, legislation for the preservation of the sanctity of Sunday has existed in this country from the earliest times and has at least since 1903 been regarded as a part of the criminal law in its widest sense. Historically, such legislation has never been considered as an interference with the kind of “freedom of religion” guaranteed by the Canadian Bill of Rights.10
Robertson and Rosetanni were unsuccessful because the Bill of Rights’ conception of freedom of religion was seen as being situated within Canada’s Christian social and political history. Canada’s Parliament had not undermined the Lord’s Day Act when it adopted the Bill of Rights in 1960. BIG M DRUG MART
However, that all changed with the adoption of the Charter of Rights in 1982. At a stroke, Christianity ceased to be the basis of Canadian law, and thus any explicitly Christian legislation could now be overturned by the courts. This is what ultimately happened to the Lord’s Day Act. In 1982, Big M Drug Mart in Calgary was charged with violating the Lord’s Day Act because it was open on Sundays. It fought the charges, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. In its decision, the Supreme Court struck down the Lord’s Day Act as a violation of the Charter of Rights, specifically section 2(a), the guarantee of “freedom of conscience and religion.” According to the Court’s interpretation, the purpose of the Lord’s Day Act was to enforce the Christian view that certain activities should not take place on Sunday. As the court put it, “The arm of the state requires all to remember the Lord’s Day of the Christians and to keep it holy.”11 Because this purpose was religious, the court held that it violated the Charter’s guarantee of freedom of conscience and religion, and was therefore invalid. This decision is significant for more than its striking down of the Lord’s Day Act. It provided the template for future court decisions based on Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
s. 2(a) of the Charter. Big M Drug Mart was a groundbreaking decision that would be cited frequently in future decisions. It outlined, in part, how religion (specifically Christianity) would be considered in relation to law for the future. Christianity was no longer acknowledged as the foundation of Canadian law, as had been the case before 1982.
“The Bill of Rights’ conception of freedom of religion was seen as being situated within Canada’s Christian social and political history.”
Professor Weinrib rightly noted that with this decision, “the Court discarded the ideas that had animated the enactment of the Lord’s Day Act, 1906, in effect declaring an end to the propensity of Canadian legislatures to regard Christianity as both generic and normative in the formation of public policy.”12 Christianity was no longer “normative,” that is, it no longer set the norms for Canadian society. CHRISTIANITY IN ONTARIO SCHOOLS
Before 1982, Christianity was also evident in legislation and public policy at the provincial level. In a pattern very similar to what occurred with Canada’s federal Lord’s Day legislation, Ontario’s public education system contained explicitly Christian elements that would be thrown out by courts on the basis of the Charter of Rights. Before the 1980s, Christianity, in the form of religious exercises and some course content, was a significant component of the public education system of Ontario. R. D. Gidney and W. P. J. Millar explain the situation this way: Did twentieth-century Ontario have a religion ‘by law established,’ a set of doctrines and beliefs that were not only widely shared by its people but incorporated into the legal framework of the state? In the schools it certainly did. Here, Christianity was privileged by law, required to be taught ‘by precept and example,’ and integrated into the curriculum in both formal and informal ways.13
Christian practices and teachings were part of
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“For much of Ontario’s history, the official role of Christianity in the public education system was not controversial for most people. However, by the early 1960s opposition to religious education in public schools was growing.”
the Ontario public school system from the early 1800s through to the late 1980s. Clearly, in some sense Ontario considered itself to be a Christian society. Formal religious instruction was first officially instituted in Ontario schools in 1816 by the Home Board of Education, which was established and supported by the government.14 From that time forward, Christianity held a formal place in Ontario’s education system.
There are two components to the religious aspect of public education that are important to distinguish. First is what is commonly called “exercises,” usually “opening exercises” and “closing exercises.” The exercises usually take place at the beginning and/or ending of the school day and consist of prayer and/or Bible reading. The second component is actual religious instruction where the students are explicitly taught about Christianity. The reason that it’s important to distinguish these two different activities is because they would be eliminated from Ontario’s public education system in two separate court decisions, one in 1988 and the other in 1990. For much of Ontario’s history, the official role of Christianity in the public education system was not controversial for most people. However, by the early 1960s opposition to religious education in public schools was growing. This opposition was taken seriously, and in January 1966 the provincial government appointed a special committee headed by J. Keiller Mackay, a former Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, to study religious education in the public schools. It was called the Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario and commonly known as the Mackay Committee.
REPORT OF THE MACKAY COMMITTEE
The Mackay Committee released its report in 1969. In the words of Gidney and Millar, this report “called for the full-scale disestablishment of Christianity in the province’s schools.”15 The report argued that Ontario’s religious education program amounted to religious indoctrination. SUMMER 2017
The material used in the public schools was thoroughly permeated by Christianity as the reported demonstrated: This material, much of which is definitely Christian and Protestant in content, is in our opinion a vehicle leading to religious commitment rather than to true education. The Regulations and Programme clearly states “that ‘the schools of Ontario exist for the purpose of preparing children to live in a democratic society which bases its way of life upon the Christian ideal,’ and further, that ‘the school must seek to lead the child to choose and accept as his own those ideals of conduct and endeavour which a Christian and democratic society approves.’ The teacher is then counseled ‘to bring home to the pupils as far as their capacity allows, the fundamental principles of Christianity and their bearing on human life and thought.’” In accordance with these instructions, the children of Ontario are exposed to Christian indoctrination throughout the elementary grades. This indoctrination begins in the kindergarten where the teacher finds readily available Christian Bible stories, hymns, and busy-work materials adapted to young children, and it continues with more or less intensity into the higher grades.16
Clearly, the Christian content of the curriculum was prevalent. The Committee’s recommendation to discontinue the religious education program was not implemented by the government. Nevertheless, the religious education issue would come to a head in the late 1980s as the implications of the new Charter of Rights were felt in Ontario’s education system. Two major court decisions led to the elimination of Christian influence from Ontario’s schools. In Zylberberg v. Sudbury (Board of Education) (1988), Christian religious exercises would be forbidden. Close on the heels of that decision, a different court ruling, Canadian Civil Liberties Association v. Minister of Education (1990), more Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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commonly known as the Elgin County decision, forbade Christian religious instruction. These Ontario decisions effectively set the tone for the issue of religion in public education for much of the country. THE ZYLBERBERG CASE
In 1985 five parents within the jurisdiction of the Sudbury Board of Education applied to have the daily religious exercises of the Board discontinued. The religious exercises were authorized under Section 28 of the Regulations governing public schools. In particular, the parents wanted s. 28(1) to be declared of no force or effect because it allegedly violated their freedom of conscience and religion under s. 2(a) of the Charter of Rights. Basically, s. 28(1) mandated that public schools have opening or closing exercises with reading of the Bible and repeating the Lord’s Prayer. It’s important to note, however, that provision was made in the Regulations so that parents who objected to their children taking part in the exercises could have their children excused. That is, anyone could opt out. The parents who launched this effort lost the initial court ruling in 1986. However, on appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal, s. 28(1) was struck down as violating the Charter of Rights. The reason offered by the court for this conclusion was as follows: Section 28(1) is antithetical to the Charter objective of promoting freedom of conscience and religion. The recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, which is a Christian prayer, and the reading of Scriptures from the Christian Bible impose Christian observances upon non-Christian pupils and religious observances on non-believers.17
As is normal in Canadian court decisions, the
judges relied heavily on the reasoning offered in previous decisions to arrive at their own conclusion. The Big M Drug Mart decision of the Supreme Court of Canada was one important source of authority in this case. Of special interest, however, was the reliance on a couple of important United States Supreme Court rulings, Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Schempp. In 1962 the US Supreme Court ruled in Engel v. Vitale that public schools cannot ask students to recite prayers. This was a very controversial decision. School prayers had been a normal part of public education in many parts of the United States, so declaring them to be unconstitutional was seen as a drastic measure by many Americans. The following year, in 1963, the US Supreme Court issued another controversial decision in Abington School District v. Schempp. A Pennsylvania school district had a policy of opening each school day with a brief religious program consisting of Bible reading and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Students could be excused from participating at the request of their parents. Nevertheless, this program was challenged by the parents of two children who objected to it as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Much like the Engel decision, the Supreme Court ruled in Abington School District v. Schempp that reading the Bible as part of a public school religious program was unconstitutional.18 Many Americans saw these two landmark court decisions as “putting God out of the schools.” Some people still see them as a kind of turning point in American history.19 Being American, these major decisions on religious practices in schools should not have been pertinent to the Canadian situation. They were, after all, based on a specific clause in the US Constitution. It was only after the adoption of the Charter of Rights that these cases became pertinent to Canada, and played a part in expelling Christianity from Canadian classrooms, just as they had from American classrooms. Terri Sussel explains as follows: As in earlier Supreme Court of Canada decisions considering the Charter’s guarantee of religious freedom, the Ontario Court of Appeal’s conclusions in the Zylberberg case were based in large measure on U.S. decisions relating to the guarantee of religious freedom in the First Amendment to the U.S. constitution. Thus, SUMMER 2017
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notwithstanding the differences in wording between the religious freedom clauses in the U.S. and Canadian constitutions, the Court of Appeal relied on two landmark U.S. school prayer cases from the 1960s that ruled that mandatory religious exercises were unconstitutional.20
In some instances, at least, American First Amendment jurisprudence has become relevant for Canada due to the Charter. The influence of liberal American judges has spread north of the border. ELGIN COUNTY
The Elgin County case was effectively a companion case to Zylberberg, completing the rout of Christianity from the Ontario public school system. It was initiated by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), which supported some Ontario parents who opposed religious instruction in the public schools. In the time leading up to this case, the religious instruction in “On January 30, 1990 Elgin County public schools was decidthe Ontario Court edly Christian.
of Appeal ruled that the religious education program violated the Charter of Rights. The era of Christianity in Ontario’s public schools was over.
In 1988 a Divisional Court ruled against the CCLA. That decision was appealed and on January 30, 1990 the Ontario Court of Appeal struck down education Regulation 28(4) which mandated that two periods per week be devoted to religious education. The court ruled that the religious education program violated the Charter of Rights. The era of Christianity in Ontario’s public schools was over. This new situation was clearly described in a subsequent Ontario court decision, Re Bal et al. and Attorney General for Ontario that dealt with private school funding in 1994: As a result of the decisions of the Court of Appeal involving the Sudbury Board of Education and the Elgin County Board of Education, religious instruction and exercises were not permitted in the public school system. The upshot of all of this has been that the public school system in Ontario has been secularized.21
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NATIONAL RAMIFICATIONS
These were Ontario court decisions, but their ramifications were felt far beyond provincial borders. Most importantly, despite the fact that it was not a Supreme Court of Canada decision, Zylberberg has been accepted as the authoritative ruling on religious exercises in public schools for much of the country: The ruling of the Ontario court in Zylberberg was never heard by the Supreme Court of Canada but it nevertheless had a forceful impact on two similar cases, one in British Columbia, Russow v. British Columbia (Attorney General), and one in Manitoba, Manitoba Association for Rights and Liberties v. Manitoba. In these cases, complainants presented Charterinspired challenges to the provincial legislative regime regarding opening exercises in schools, like those litigated in Zylberberg. The judicial result in the B.C. Supreme Court and in the Court of Queen’s Bench in Manitoba was virtually the same as in the Ontario court, both rulings relying on the reasoning and conclusions of the Zylberberg court. Similarly, neither province appealed the provincial court decision to the Supreme Court.22 MARRIAGE IN CANADA
One more example will suffice to provide evidence of Canada’s Christian origin, where we have come from and how we got to where we are: the definition of marriage. From before the time of Canada’s existence as an independent nation until 2003, marriage was legal only between one man and one woman. Canada had an explicitly Christian definition of marriage. A British court decision known as Hyde v. Hyde in 1866 settled the definition for Britain as well as for the British colonies, and Canada was still a colony at that time. Lord Penzance ruled in Hyde v. Hyde that: “I conceive that marriage, as understood in Christendom, may for this purpose be defined as the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman, to the exclusion of all others.”23
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In the early 2000s, court proceedings were initiated in British Columbia, Quebec, and Ontario to overturn Canada’s historic definition of marriage. The end result of these proceedings was a series of rulings, the most earth-shattering of which was the decision handed down in Ontario, Halpern et al v. Attorney General of Canada et al. There were a number of aspects to this case but the central one was whether Canada’s historic Christian definition of marriage violated the Charter of Rights. Section 15(1) of the Charter guarantees equality before the law and equal protection of the law. And as the court ruled, “the common-law definition of marriage as ‘the voluntary union for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others’ violates s. 15(1) of the Charter.”24 Therefore, from June 10, 2003 onward, Ontario’s definition of marriage included same-sex couples. Over the next couple of years many of the other provinces and territories adopted same-sex marriage as a result of court cases within their jurisdictions. Then the federal law on marriage was formally changed in July, 2005, making same-sex marriage legal throughout the entire country. THE CHARTER VERSUS CHRISTIANITY
Osgoode Hall law professor Bruce Ryder has neatly summarized the effect of the Charter upon the public place of Christianity in Canada: The elimination of the Lord’s Day Act, the amendment or repeal of other Sunday closing laws, restrictions on religious prayer and religious exercises in public institutions, the replacement of a definition of marriage inspired by Christendom with one more consonant with the objectives of contemporary marital regulation – all of this is confirmation that the Charter has accelerated Canada’s journey from a de facto Christian state to a secular pluralist state.25
Before the Charter, Canada was (in Ryder’s words) “a de facto Christian state.” But the adoption of the Charter involved a rejection of Christianity and its replacement by a different worldview. Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
With the Charter, Canada, in a constitutional sense, turned its back on its past and its original Christian underpinnings. Similarly, Weinrib explains that “the Charter severs the individual from the social and political framework of informal religious establishment. For that reason, early Charter cases dismantled faith-based Sabbath observance laws and removed religious indoctrination and prayer from the public schools.”26 In her view, Canada originally had an “informal religious establishment” of Christianity, but was severed from this by the adoption of the Charter. The Charter’s severing of Canada’s informal Christian establishment did not leave a vacuum. Instead, as St. Thomas Univer“With the Charter, sity political scientist Thomas Bateman Canada, in a explains, Canada now has a governing constitutional philosophy informed by “Charter values.” sense, turned its In various Supreme Court of Canada deciback on its past sions released since the Charter’s adoption, and its original so-called “Charter values” are referenced Christian as authoritative in reaching certain conclusions. Unsurprisingly, “Charter values” underpinnings.” reflect a modern progressive conception of political life that dovetail closely with leftist stances on controversial issues. If the Charter was restricted to governing the activities and relationships of the federal and provincial governments (as historic constitutional theory would suggest), that would limit the reach of the Charter’s power. However, modern progressive constitutional theory will not accept such limits. It seeks to manage the activities and relationships of society as well as government. Thus, as Bateman summarizes the progressive view, “Charter values govern not only the actions of the state but also the life of institutions and individuals in civil society.”27 In some sense, then, “Charter values” may now constitute the established religion of Canada. CONCLUSION
Canada Christian foundation is a matter of indisputable historic record, and this foundation has to a large degree been abandoned. Although SUMMER 2017
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there were sociological and other reasons for this loss, from a political perspective the adoption of the Charter of Rights is likely the most significant reason. Emphasizing Canada’s Christian foundation is not meant to romanticize Canada’s history or to say that all is well with its past. There have been many instances of evil in Canada’s history. An obvious example is the racist policies that dealt a great deal of harm to First Nations and other “non-white” people. Such sinful episodes in Canada’s past deserve to be criticized and, where possible, made right. But the only way to truly make amends is to start with widespread cultural repentance for turning our national back to the eternal Christian principles that largely motivated our founders. Few countries in the history of the world have been as free and beneficent as Canada. Canada is a much more free and prosperous nation than many countries, and that is why millions of people desire to come here. Many of the most attractive aspects of Canada (e.g. the rule of law, prosperity due to economic freedom, etc.) are the result of the country’s original Christian foundation. 1
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Michael Wagner, The Anglosphere’s broken covenant (Lewiston, ID: Gospel Covenant Publications, 2010). Humphrey Waldock, The blind goddess: Law without Christ (West Vancouver: Metwand Publications, 1995), 209. John Moir, Christianity in Canada: historical essays (Yorkton, SK: Redeemer’s Voice Press, 2002), 1. Tom Warner, Losing control: Canada’s social conservatives in the age of rights (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010), 5. Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada. Vol. 3, 40 Victoria, 1877. Fourth Session—Third Parliament. Ottawa, 27. Lorraine E. Weinrib, “Ontario’s Sharia Law Debate: Law and Politics under the Charter” in Law and religious pluralism in Canada. Edited by Richard Moon (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 246. Paul Laverdure, Sunday in Canada: The rise
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and fall of the Lord’s Day (Yorkton, SK: Gravelbooks, 2004), 18. Ouimet v. Bazin, [1912] 46 S.C.R., 507. Debates of the Senate of the Dominion of Canada. 1906. Second Session—Tenth Parliament, 1215. Robertson and Rosetanni v. R., [1963] S.C.R., 658. R. v. Big M Drug Mart Ltd., [1985] 1 S.C.R., 337. Lorraine Eisenstat Weinrib, “‘Do Justice to Us!’ Jews and the Constitution of Canada” in Not written in stone: Jews, constitutions, and constitutionalism in Canada. Edited by Daniel J. Elazar, Michael Brown, and Ira Robinson (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2003), 46. R. D. Gidney and W. P. J. Millar, “The Christian Recessional in Ontario’s Public Schools” in Marguerite Van Die, ed. Religion and public life in Canada: Historical and comparative perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 275. J. Keiller Mackay et al, Religious information and moral development: The report of the Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario (Toronto: Ontario Department of Education, 1969), 4. Gidney and Millar, “The Christian Recessional,” 281. Mackay et al, Religious information and moral development, 21-22. Zylberberg v. Sudbury (Board of Education) [1988] 65 O.R. (2d), 654. John W. Whitehead, The separation illusion: A lawyer examines the First Amendment (Milford, MI: Mott Media, Inc., 1977), 118. David Barton, America: to pray or not to pray? A statistical look at what has happened since 39 million students were ordered to stop praying in public schools (Aledo, TX: Wallbuilder Press, 1988). Terri A. Sussel, Canada’s legal revolution: Public education, the Charter, and human rights (Toronto: Emond Montgomery Publications, 1995), 141. Re Bal et al. and Attorney General for Ontario et al. 21 O.R. (3d) 1994, 685. John Long and Romulo Magsino, “Religion in Canadian Education: Whither Goest Thou?” in The courts, the Charter, and the schools: The impact of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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on educational policy and practice, 1982-2007. Edited by Michael Manley-Casimir and Kirsten Manley-Casimir. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 115. Halpern et al v. Attorney General of Canada et al. [2003] 65 O.R. (3d), 166-167. Halpern et al, 190. Bruce Ryder, “The Canadian Conception of Equal Religious Citizenship” in Law and religious pluralism in Canada. Edited by Richard Moon (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 94. Weinrib, “Ontario’s Sharia Law Debate,” 247. Thomas M. J. Bateman “The Supreme Court of Canada as Moral Tutor: Religious Freedom, Civil Society, and Charter Values.” in Liberal education, civic education, and the Canadian regime: Past principles and present challenges. Edited by David W. Livingstone (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen University Press, 2015), 233.
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REV. DR. JOE BOOT REV. DR. JOE BOOT is the founder of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto. Before this, he served with Ravi Zacharias for seven years as an apologist in the UK and Canada, working for five years as Canadian director of RZIM. A theology graduate of Birmingham Christian College, England, Joe earned his M.A. in Mission Theology from the University of Manchester and his Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought from Whitefield Theological Seminary, Florida. His apologetic works have been published in Europe and in North America and include Searching for Truth, Why I Still Believe and How Then Shall We Answer. His latest book, Gospel Culture, is designed to help Christians understand the scope and implications of the gospel in the twenty-first century. He is Senior Fellow of the cultural and apologetics think tanks, truthXchange, and the Centre for Cultural Leadership, both in Southern California, and Director of the Wilberforce Academy training program in the UK. Joe lives in Toronto with his wife Jenny and their three children, Naomi, Hannah and Isaac.
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Lament for a Nation:
George Parkin Grant
& t he Re s po n s e to Mo d e r n i ty THINKING CANADA
CANADA IS MY HOME. Though I was
born and raised in England and have Dutch and Scottish family roots, two of my three children were born in Canada, and my parents now live here also. Like many Canadians, I am an immigrant, who adopted Canada into my heart and so have spent most of my working life to date above the 49th parallel on this great continent. I moved to Canada because I felt called to come and to contribute. At the same time, and without contradiction, I am proud of the distinctly British roots and inheritance of the Canadian nation, our largely British-made institutions, and I am grateful that we remain a part of the British Commonwealth of Nations with Queen Elizabeth II as our constitutional Head of State. In short, if defined by a sense of pride in and commitment to the broadly Christian inheritance of our nation and its institutions, I am a Canadian patriot. Because of Canada’s history and deep connection with European nations, especially Britain, though it is often now neglected, underneath us is a rich heritage of religious thought and tradition. When most outsiders think of Canada it is usually great lakes, Niagara Falls, big game, Mounties and vast tracts of prairie or mountainous wilderness that come to mind, not a land of cultural heritage and deep thinkers. The relatively brief history of Canada since the time of European settlement, and specifically its existence as a distinct nation, has meant that it is not yet known for producing great minds after the fashion of continental Europe, Great Britain or the United States. This may also be due to the fact that for many years Canada viewed itself as an extension of Great Britain, with no need for developing an independent intellectual tradition. No doubt it is also a result of the reality that philosophy – viewed as a discipline primarily concerned with
the great metaphysical questions regarding reality – has fallen out of favour in a late-modern culture more concerned with instrumentality and pragmatic solutions to technical problems than with the labour of thinking through age-old questions. Nonetheless, Canada’s brief history has produced a number of notable thinkers, rightly regarded as philosophers, who wrestled with the thought and culture of the modern Western world and Canada’s place in it.1 CANADA THINKING
One of the most important, and perhaps the most famous of these past thinkers was the distinguished public intellectual, George Parkin Grant. He was born in Toronto in 1918, the youngest of four children, descending from a Maritime family line of distinguished teachers and Presbyterian ministers. His father was a historian with a special interest in Canadian history. He taught at Upper Canada College, Oxford University and Queens University during his career. Badly injured during the First World War, George’s father returned to Canada in 1918 to become principal of Upper Canada College. Evidently the family context in which George was raised was a good example of a middle-class, liberal Protestant home, where belief in Christian morality and conduct remained important – rooted in generalized notions of the existence of a higher being – but where the substance of the evangelical faith of their forbears no longer gripped hearts or gave direction to their thinking. Not surprisingly George Grant attended Upper Canada College and then went on to Queens to study history and literature, hoping to enter law and then politics. He won a scholarship to study at Oxford University as the Second World War was just beginning, which interrupted his law degree. Initially a pacifist and conscientious obEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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jector, he enlisted in the ambulance corps. Later, under pressure to leave his pacifism behind, he enlisted in the merchant navy, was assigned a ship, but apparently deserted for several months to a farm in Buckinghamshire where he had a spiritual experience that deeply impacted his life: At the worst stage of the war for me…I found myself ill, and deserted from the merchant navy and went into the English countryside to work on a farm. I went to work at five o’ clock in the morning on a bicycle to open a gate and when I got back on I accepted God… if I try to put [this experience] into words, I would say it was the recognition that I am not my own.2
He sometimes called this a ‘conversion,’ but to my knowledge he did not unpack this event in anything more than very vague terms and so it would be a misuse of the incident to regard it as Christian conversion experience in any biblicalevangelical sense. Suffering from tuberculosis, Grant returned to Canada to be nursed back to health in Toronto by his mother for the remainder of the war. Here he got involved in radio broadcasting with the CBC, carrying a passion for educating the public about democratic citizenship. He then returned to Oxford in 1945, but with a new mission of studying theology and philosophy, doing his doctorate in philosophy and becoming a university teacher. He studied and wrote on the work on the Scottish theologian John Oman, with a particular interest in examining the relation between the natural and supernatural – a theme originating in Greek philosophy that remained important to Grant’s thought for the rest of his life. He married in 1947 and taught philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax for eleven years. Slowly Grant began emerging as a public figure; no doubt in part because he emphasized the importance of philosophy for all sorts of people in their varied vocations in order for them to understand how their work relates to the general ends a society is pursuing. His style was informal and often popular enough for the non-specialist to engage meaningfully with his writing. Manifesting a keen insight, he understood and attacked Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
the complacent secularism and professionalism of academic philosophy, which promoted the illusion that their subject was “essentially a technique independent of theological dogmas of faith.”3 In 1958 he did a series of radio lectures on Philosophy in the Mass Age, published in 1959, that laid out his basic understanding of philosophy. Moving to the Toronto area in 1960 he soon became head of the department of religion at McMaster University in Hamilton. This enabled him to focus his teaching and writing on thinkers he found interesting, unrestricted by the attitudes of the professional theologians and philosophers that irritated him. By all accounts he was unconventional, independent-minded, and an engaging teacher who enjoyed the freedom the new teaching post afforded him. In his most noted early works, Lament for a Nation (1965) and Technology and Empire (1969), he secured a reputation as a kind of Red Tory and leading critic of modernity with a nationalist vision for Canada – so he was not an uncontroversial figure! In Lament for a Nation, chunks of discussion are taken up with expressing approval toward the defeated Canadian Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, and his resistance to certain American military demands, thus helping to reinforce a sense of independent Canadian identity rooted in a traditional British conservatism that he viewed as predating the ‘age of progress’ and ‘technological empire’ – the vanguard of which he viewed as the United States. His nationalism and the rather inequitable anti-American element in his writing nonetheless helped to build a loyal following for Grant across Canada. By the end of the 1960s he was not just a popular teacher but a prominent public figure with a following outside university corridors – a significant achievement for an academic. Donald Forbes characterized him as “an odd mixture of the arrogance and pretensions of Canada’s old anglophile elite and the rebelliousness of its counter-cultural youth.”4 In the 1970s he began appearing on television and was involved in public debate, whilst his personal concerns broadened not just into more abstract philosophical discussions regarding the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger or the liberal political theory of John Rawls, but in the SUMMER 2017
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practical outworking of liberal theory in the emergence of abortion on demand in Canada and the United States. For Grant, this social development was a sign that darkness now surrounded the idea of justice – abortion as ‘choice’ was a poison chalice and the fruit of individualism gone mad. Not surprisingly this unpopular stance made Grant more controversial than his soft socialism and Canadian nationalism had ever done, for here he was now well outside the acceptable consensus of elite opinion. Eventually, with failing health and in the wake of a bitter disagreement with colleagues at McMaster, Grant moved back to Dalhousie in 1980. His last book was Technology and Justice (1986). He died in 1988 aged just seventy and is buried in one of his favorite villages near Halifax.
“Grant remains important and fascinating because he was pre-eminently concerned with the interrelationship of politics and morality to philosophy and religion.”
Though discarded by some today as a relic or incurable pessimist for his critique of late-modern social and political thought – especially the dangers of technology shaping that modern political spirit – Grant denied being despairing of the modern world, for “when a man truly despairs, he does not write; he commits suicide.”5 And Grant did write quite a lot. This author has profited from reading a number of his books and several works discussing his life and thinking. Certainly his classic contribution to a specifically Canadian thought and context was Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965) and it still deserves attention. In my judgment Grant remains important and fascinating because he was pre-eminently concerned with the interrelationship of politics and morality to philosophy and religion. He wanted to trace political, social and cultural-technological developments back to underlying philosophical and religious ideas. It is this element that makes him a significant philosopher and a very interesting one, if at times vague or elusive. What is clear, however, is that he regarded Canadian identity as having gradually collapsed during the twentieth century: The confused strivings of politicians, businessmen, and civil servants cannot alone
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account for Canada’s collapse. This stems from the very character of the modern era. The aspirations of progress have made Canada redundant. The universal and homogeneous state is the pinnacle of political striving. “Universal” implies a world-wide state, which would eliminate the curse of war among nations; homogeneous means that all men would be equal, and war among classes would be eliminated. The masses and the philosophers have both agreed that this universal and egalitarian society is the goal of historical striving. It gives content to the rhetoric of both communists and capitalists…man will conquer man and perfect himself.6
As this far-reaching insight intimates, Grant perceived a significant crisis in late-modern Western culture, one that he elaborates on in his Lament for a Nation (as well as various other works). Obviously his considerable corpus cannot be comprehensively dealt with in this article, but since Grant called himself a Christian and regarded truth, beauty and meaning as something that must transcend mere subjective human ‘value’ judgments, it is worthwhile for Christians to consider where this Canadian notable helps illuminate the crisis of our age, whilst also examining where and why his Lament for Canada misses the mark, from a scriptural standpoint. GRANT’S LAMENT
In lamenting with Grant where we are as a nation, it is important for orthodox Christians to be mindful of several things. First, Grant rightly recognized that true “lamentation is not an indulgence in despair or cynicism. In a lament for a child’s death there is not only pain and regret but also celebration of passed good.”7 When we lament, just as the prophet Jeremiah did over Jerusalem, we weep over the dying or decline of something loved. Jeremiah declared regarding his city, “Her uncleanness stains her skirts. She never considered her end. Her downfall was astonishing; there was no one to comfort her” (Lam. 1:9). Clearly a lament presupposes the objective reality of good and evil, which can never lead to the despair of the theatre of the absurd. Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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Second, from a scriptural standpoint, because all men must live in God’s creation, subject to the governing and ordering power of his law-word for reality – which includes norms for human thought (whether people accept and believe this word-revelation or not) – the fruits of serious and coherent intellectual labor from people with faulty religious assumptions can still contain many valuable moments of truth to be gathered up. Grant’s lament over Canada lacks sufficient hope and direction because he did not adequately grasp the explanatory power and truth of the biblical worldview nor the might of regeneration by the Holy Spirit. As a result, scripturally-directed Christians will not be able to agree with Grant’s religious presuppositions. Nevertheless, he did lament for a nation collapsing under the weight of its own idolatry, even if he did not accurately recognise the root problem as the apostasy of the Canadian heart from faith and trust in Jesus Christ as the creator and redeemer of all things. With those caveats in mind, then, what are the main concerns in George Grant’s lament for Canada as a nation and what might we say about their legitimacy? At the more superficial, but nonetheless important level, what Grant is lamenting is what he believes is the passing away of Canada as a sovereign nation – primarily via the loss of its unique and ultimately ancient conservative identity stemming from its British heritage. But even more important for Grant, this passing was actually a symptom of a broader and deeper problem – the religious character of the modern era itself. His idea of what Canada really was had been made increasingly redundant by the philosophy of the mass age which not only saw time as history,8 but history as the theatre in which man conquers both man and nature and establishes a universal egalitarian order and value system by scientific technique. This vision was an expression of the religion of historicism – the belief that there is no eternal order, transcendent law or reality that binds men and nations to something greater than human self-expression which arises in the course of history. True freedom in this view is man’s autonomous prerogative to positivize his own values in time and create history so as to make all nature serve his self-centred ends.
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THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CANADA
Because in Grant’s view cultural striving in the West was now directed toward accomplishing this imperious historical purpose, the notion of ‘progress’ meant that the idea of Canada – as a conservative and unique community in North America – was essentially over. Gradually, Canada was being ideologically, politically and economically absorbed into a vast globalist vision; especially under the influence of its powerful southern neighbor with its dynamic progressive liberalism and rugged individualism. Consequently, Grant laments the dying of Canada as a truly sovereign nation and holds up the nationalist Canadian Prime Minister, Diefenbaker, as one of the last hold-outs. For Grant, what was taken for granted back in the 1920s was that Canada was a unique nation with an ancient British heritage, deeply rooted in a classical conservatism that predated the age of ‘progress’ or revolution9 - an age of which he was deeply suspicious and indeed fearful given its pretensions. The heritage he looked back to was more ‘communitarian’ (self-giving) than “Grant’s lament ‘contractual’ (self-interested) in its social over Canada outlook – a feature which he regarded, rightly or wrongly, as one distinguishlacks sufficient ing aspect of essentially Canadian versus hope and direction American political and social thought. because he did not However, Grant was not naïve, nor was he adequately grasp purely nostalgic. He was aware that the old the explanatory aristocratic British conservatism of throne power and truth and altar was already a largely spent force of the biblical – even in Britain Lockean individualism was taking over, so looking to Britain for worldview nor clearer Canadian identity was no solution. the might of Consequently, amidst Grant’s enthusiastic regeneration by the opposition to progressive American liberalHoly Spirit.” ism, individualism, globalizing tendencies through massive corporations and the homogenizing of international political life, Grant found himself defending a soft socialism for Canada as ‘more conservative’ than economic capitalism. This was a very dubious conclusion given that the emergence of the socialistic, interventionist welfare state is a late-modern phenomenon rooted in the progressive utopian ideologies and social engineering that Grant despised – but he had his SUMMER 2017
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political reasons for living with this tension and embracing socialism. From a scriptural standpoint we might observe that Grant was right to appreciate Canada’s historically communitarian, indeed covenantal view of society and to attack a reductionist contractual vision of social order that did not wish to see beyond individual rights, capital gain or personal gratification. But his not uncritical sympathies with Marxism and socialism were incongruent with his vision of a society rooted in transcendent norms and voluntary familial community, not to mention his opposition to an egalitarian homogeneous global order. Indeed, the British heritage and ancient traditions he looked to were aristocratic and monarchical in character, and thus inherently resisted the leveling tenden“Grant’s lament is for cies of both socialism and modern liberal democracy. But for what, ironically, seem an original romantic like reasons of utility, Grant saw no aldream of a ternative to a measure of socialism with Canada rooted in planning and control from Canada’s seat ancient tradition of government in Ottawa in order to and a concept of preserve a nationalist vision of the nation, eternal law.” “After 1940, nationalism had to go hand in hand with some measure of socialism. Only nationalism could provide the political incentive for planning; only planning could restrain the victory of continentalism.”10 There is a rather pragmatic type of reasoning at work here that obviously conflicts with his visions of natural law, and eternal order. We may also be seeing the varied influence of Plato’s Republic, British Fabian socialism as well as Grant’s failure to adequately consider the role of the Christian church and private charity in building community, leading him in this socialist direction as he reached back and out for a more communal understanding of social and political life than the modern technological world had left him. But whatever moved him in this direction, he evidently regretted the gradual perishing of Canadian community. Essentially then, Grant’s lament for a dying Canada was rooted in his conviction that Canada had its foundations in an Christianized organic conservatism, classical philosophical studies and natural SUMMER 2017
law – a view of life that urged self-restraint, with public order and tradition as guiding values as opposed to the emancipation of the passions in an individualistic ‘progressive’ society. Such a society of self-restraint had to be rooted in a recognition of a higher order. But he feared that in our technological age, such a vision of society could not be recovered. Thus, Grant’s lament is for an original romantic dream of a Canada rooted in ancient tradition and a concept of eternal law, over against a modern view of absolute freedom as man’s essence – a freedom without limits. The scripturally-directed Christian can certainly see several points of truth in this aspect of Grant’s lament. The protectionist elements of his nationalism (which is not synonymous with patriotism) might be challenged as wrong-headed and his rather biased assessment of America’s role in the world disputed, but it cannot be doubted that the familial, communitarian Canada he pined for had indeed been lost; a loss which militates against the concerns of Scripture and should likewise be a matter of regret for every Christian. His view of Canada as having a unique heritage in North America is also hard to dispute and his critique of rugged individualism along with the loss of self-restraint in a technological age of socalled ‘progress’ is right on point. THE KILLING OF CANADA: OPEN-ENDED PROGRESS
In Grant’s view, then, the proximate cause of Canada’s funeral as an independent and unique nation in the Americas is the disappearance of an organic classical conservatism rooted in an appeal to transcendent reality through ancient tradition; a decline he claims was accelerated under the powerful influence of a technological, dynamic and liberal southern neighbor. But his lament for Canada has an underlying philosophical conviction concerning the ultimate cause for the passing of a uniquely conservative nation in North America – the religion of the modern age itself. So let’s take some time to examine the broad contours of Grant’s view of the modern age. According to Grant, “modern civilization makes all local cultures anachronistic. Where modern Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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science has achieved its mastery, there is no place for local cultures…; our culture floundered on the aspirations of the age of progress.”11 The basic idea here is that in the open-ended age of ‘progress’ where nature is conceived like an amorphous lump of clay ready for human formation, man recreates the world as he wants it to be. Mastery of nature then becomes an end in itself. Going beyond even the Marxist goal of recreating the world for the perfectibility of man, the truly free man is constrained by no particular concept of happiness, perfection or alienation, as he is in the materialist creed of Marxism. Where man is fully self-conscious, all value judgments are purely subjective – the human good is simply what we choose for our good. Grant illustrates how this ‘freedom’ increasingly operates in the social order: In the private spheres, all kinds of tastes are allowed. Nobody minds very much if we prefer women or dogs or boys, as long as we cause no public inconvenience. But in the public sphere, such pluralism of taste is not permitted. The conquest of human and non-human nature becomes the only public value…; liberalism is the fitting ideology for a society directed toward these ends. It denies unequivocally that there are any given restraints that might hinder pursuit of dynamic dominance.12
No preconceived notions of the good are now allowed to bind anyone, because that would limit the possibility of the future. Consequently, for Grant this was an age marking the ‘end of ideology’ because here people just do whatever they want. Western civilization is “committed in its heart to the religion of progress and the emancipated passions.”13 Grant’s critique of Protestantism’s failure to curb this spirit by allegedly encouraging greed through unrestrained acquisition is superficial, unfair and part of elite intellectual reaction against so-called ‘bourgeois’ evangelical faith in mid-twentieth century liberal-protestant Canada. In Grant’s case it is particularly rooted in his anti-biblical stance regarding the nature of history (we shall return to this theme later), but his keen criticism of the modern doctrine of ‘progress’ via the emancipation of every restraint Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
is clearly sound. He clearly understood the trajectory of Western political thought from a classical view of nature and natural law to the modern concept of freedom that implied a progressive mastery of a malleable cosmos: Man in his freedom was thought to stand outside nature, and therefore to be able to perfect it. We could interfere with nature and make it what we wanted. It is from this doctrine that the continuous revolution of the modern era has proceeded.14
This idea spread from Rousseau, through Kant, Hegel and Marx and has produced both communist and democratic totalitarianisms.15 Moreover, Grant saw that modern public education “Grant saw that had greatly helped to advance this secular with only an vision of progress, whilst purposefully denying the orthodox Christian view of man: external order “At the heart of modern liberal education evacuated of norms lies the desire to homogenise the world. transcending the Today’s natural and social sciences were historical aspect conspicuously produced as instruments to of life, a true this end.”16 For Grant, because a residual conservatism had Christianity had preserved some sense of the eternal in the West, it had thus far been become almost able to preserve certain freedoms that were unthinkable.” lost within Marxist tyrannies in the East. However, he saw that a sceptical liberalism was now the dominant ideology of those who shape Western society; a liberalism whose goal is the mastering of nature and the re-shaping of social order by means of man’s planning and technology. In such a world, the conservative is reduced to being one who defends the particular structure of power at that time necessary for technological change. Grant saw that with only an external order evacuated of norms transcending the historical aspect of life, a true conservatism had become almost unthinkable, as, I would add, is any valid concept of progress. In short, an ethic of virtue and self-restraint was incongruent with utopian movements pursuing an open-ended ‘recreation’ of the world by man’s free personality. For Grant, this made the future appear bleak because utopian political philosophy committed to political, social and economic universalism as SUMMER 2017
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well as unlimited technological advance, cannot take seriously a transcendent order by which human actions are measured, limited and defined. Yet without such an order, conservatism is little more than a defense of property rights with a nostalgic appeal to the past. Thus, with a universal, homogenized order as the historical goal for modern elites, the idea of Canada becomes “a misguided parochialism.”17 Faced with such a philosophical and political juggernaut, one can easily understand why Grant turned for resources to ancient philosophy, traditional notions of natural law and Canadian nationalism in an effort to arrest a seemingly irresistible march toward extinction. This is why he laments that Canada cannot survive as a sovereign nation, indeed has ceased to be a nation, in the face of internationalism (i.e. progressive liberalism). Though his tentative and overly pessimistic predictions of the gradual annexation or progressive political absorption of Canada into the United States have not been realized (and show no sign of ever being so), his notion of Canada as increasingly a branch-plant satellite of American, liberal, technological progressivism has some merit. Canada’s biggest corporate cities like Toronto and Vancouver are massive cosmopolitan centres that differ little from Chicago, Seattle or L.A and there is no denying the economic, social and political sway of the United States over Canada – its entertainment industry alone shaping the norms of Canadian youth culture. Ironically, with the collapse of conservative Canadian identity, Canada’s bureaucratization and social progressivism has moved ahead of the religion of progress in the United States. There at least, a nineteenth-century liberalism (called conservatism in America) still holds significant sway over the minds of the people with political counter-reactions to some elements of the progressive, homogenised global society recently raising their head due to that libertarian influence. Once again without applauding everything he writes, the scripturally directed Christian can see several ‘moments of truth’ in Grant’s analysis of the religion of open-ended progress. For biblical faith, once man seeks to unhook himself from creation and God’s law-word for creation – as SUMMER 2017
though he can stand above and apart from it – he is on a suicidal course. The attempt to remake man and the world in terms of man’s idea, building an homogenized society in defiance of God’s kingdom-norm for historical development, goes all the way back to the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 where God himself reveals that man’s pursuit of technological progress and social unity, if founded on an idolatrous motive, has to be undermined for humanity’s own good: The Lord said, “If they have begun to do this as one people all having the same language, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down there and confuse their language so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth, and they stopped building the city. (Gen. 11:6-8)
Clearly Grant’s lament over the pursuit of continental empires on the basis of a false faith in progress (before the EU became the political entity it is today) is one that resonates with biblical concerns. For scriptural faith, a manipulative society governed by a desire to renew the world through the re-creation of man and nature by man’s power and idea is a perverted parody of the biblical vision of the kingdom of God under Christ the king. It is by parody that this pale imitation gains its plausibility and power in cultural life. CRITIQUING GRANT: INADEQUACY OF TRADITION
Whilst many of Grant’s insights are therefore valuable, I would argue that his past-bound response to the religion of progress is wholly inadequate to the challenge of our age, and his strong tendency to withdrawal and pessimism is testament to the fact that he was unconvinced of the historical usefulness of his answers. He confesses quite readily, “I do not know the truth about these ultimate matters.”18 He was even unsure as to whether, in the end, a universal and homogeneous state might not prove to be the better vision for social order.19 As a result he was left in doubt about the very propriety of his lament over Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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the disappearance of a virtue-oriented Canada he and his forbears had known.20 The problem is that, in the final analysis, Grant’s lament does not move beyond appeal to tradition and via tradition to autonomous reason; a reaching back for the ‘alternative answers’ of pagan philosophers for help with practical life. He wrote, “my lament is not based on philosophy but on tradition. If one cannot be sure about the answer to the most important questions, then tradition is the best basis for practical life.”21 Certainly the guiding and conserving power of tradition is important, we could not have culture without it, but how could Grant make this value judgment if he had no certainty, no ultimate ground or criterion for knowing what is best? Indeed, how could we know that reaching back to ancient tradition is better for society than the liberal progressivism of our time? Consequently, though yearning to reach up for an eternal and transcendent order, he is unable to confidently connect such an abstraction to the real world, to history. Grant is therefore unable to free himself from the grip of the historicism he resents. When God’s Word is set aside and man’s so-called ‘reason’ made ultimate in the search for answers, mysticism, scepticism and cynicism are the inevitable outcome. Out of his uncertainty modern man has turned to a faith in his own power to remake the world – that is, a mission not to understand the world as creation and to serve God’s purpose, but to change it. No one understood this predicament of modern man better than one of Grant’s contemporaries in Europe, the Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd: Historicism, sacrificing reality to its historical aspect, is the fatal illness of our ‘dynamic’ times. There is no cure for this unwholesome view of reality as long as the scriptural creation motive does not regain its complete claim on our life and thought. Historicism robs us of our belief in abiding standards; it undermines our faith in the eternal truth of God’s Word. Historicism claims that everything is relative and historically determined, including one’s belief in lasting values…above all
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you must be progressive, for then the future is yours.22
Grant saw the fatal illness of our dynamic times, but in the end, through his implicit appeal to the ultimacy of autonomous ‘reason’ and explicit appeal to human ‘tradition,’ his lament unwittingly sacrifices reality to its logical and historical aspect – and in the process an idol is made of man’s abstract ideas. Indeed, in rejecting “When God’s Word scriptural revelation as direction-giving for is set aside and life, he looks to man and his philosophy to man’s so-called reformulate the very doctrine of God: Our doctrine of God will only become more adequate if a multitude of philosophers give their time to re-thinking in the greatest detail such concepts as “purpose,” “revelation,” “progress,” “time,” “history,” “nature,” and above all “freedom” and “evil.”23
‘reason’ made ultimate in the search for answers, mysticism, scepticism and cynicism are the inevitable outcome.”
Aside from the unabashed elitism in this perspective, there is on display a remarkable confidence in sinful man to arrive at true knowledge of the divine and of the world by autonomous theoretical thought. Grant’s hope is finally in human tradition and theoretical thought, not in Jesus Christ, the creating, incarnate and redemptive Word of God. Quite logically he proceeds to overestimate and simultaneously greatly fear man’s ability to manipulate and control God’s world, to unfold ‘fate’ on the basis of autonomous human judgments. Grant understandably feels robbed by historicism of abiding standards and virtues, but he refuses to believe and root himself in the scriptural creation motive to find them in God’s word-revelation. So, whilst claiming to be a Christian philosopher, Grant’s religious confusion and faltering lament bring to mind the prescient words of Evan Runner around the time Grant was writing his first book: The weakness of the West is its inability to believe something. Unable to embrace any integral Christianity, the West, perhaps to a significant degree because of what yet is left of Christendom in the SUMMER 2017
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world, cannot with singleness of heart accept the faith of modern unbelief either. She is like Israel in the days of Elijah, limping between two sides, critically weak.24
Grant’s failure to embrace an integral Christianity, a failure grounded in his rejection of the biblical doctrine of creation and history, means he limps between the assumptions of Greek philosophy and Christian truth, between a rationalistic worldview and a biblical one, making his lament for the nation spiritually toothless and inescapably gloomy. A FAULTY VIEW OF HISTORY
It is impossible to understand the inadequacy of Grant’s lament without saying something about his view of history. In an important sense, Grant is a contradiction in this regard. His “Pragmatism exalted lament is all about the impact of philoaction over thought sophical thought on historical-cultural and thus refused to development and he wouldn’t have written his books without some desire for condemn any action influencing history himself. Yet his view as categorically of time and history results in his advowrong, since all cating a mystical flight from history to an actions may be at abstract world of ideas, with man taking some point ‘useful’ a passive approach to historical/ cultural to a given subjective development in favor of a Platonic life of contemplation on eternal being. His purpose.” thought contains, at least theoretically, a fundamental rejection of historical progress as triumphalist and a rejection of man’s role as a primary agent in the shaping of the world. Grant was caught in the dialectical character of the nature and freedom problem of modern thought – puzzling over how these ideas could live harmoniously together. He believed in a kind of order to ‘nature’ that should govern and guide one’s thinking and living, but he equally wanted to believe in the freedom of the human personality – the excessive rejection of that freedom was, he thought, the reason for the failure of Marxism. So on the one hand Grant believed nature should be understood as the expression of an eternal and divine law-order which impinges upon man – an order he thought was being foolishly jettisoned by purely pragmatic and instrumentalist concerns SUMMER 2017
– whilst on the other, the supposed autonomy of reason or theoretical thought from ‘revelation’ (an autonomy he desired), proved disturbing to him in its cultural effects. This anxiety is obviously connected to his critique of technology as an expression of man’s desire to impose his ‘freedom’ (his idea) on the world, and where Grant ends up primarily emphasizing the ‘nature’ side of the nature-freedom dialectic. It seems to me that, once again, Grant was partly right in his assessment of the modern view of history. He grasped the nature-freedom dialectic of modern thought, and recognized that modern man saw it as his role to impose a limitless freedom on nature or ‘substance’ in history.25 Immanuel Kant’s view of absolute freedom could obviously not be reconciled with the ancient view of substance and natural law. Grant’s lament was therefore justly concerned with man’s reckless pursuit of the expansion of power as an end in itself, and he even saw the coming of what today is called post- or trans-humanism: Will it be good for men to control their genes? The possibility of nuclear destruction and mass starvation may be no more terrible than that of man tampering with the roots of his humanity. Interference with human nature seems to the moderns, the hope of a higher species in the ascent of life; to others it may seem that man in his pride could corrupt his very being. The powers of manipulation now available may portend the most complete tyranny imaginable. At least, it is feasible to wonder whether modern assumptions may be basically inhuman.26
Given this insight, whilst he would have viewed them with genuine horror, Grant would clearly not have been shocked by recent efforts in our culture to redefine marriage, manipulate human sexuality with hormone drugs and surgical technique, interfere with our genes or experiment with three-parent human embryos. But for Grant, this technological and inhuman manipulation was inevitable given the modern view of history. Moreover, Grant saw that Protestantism, as Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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an active faith historically concerned with the transformation of culture, when twisted and evacuated of Christian theological content in the hands secularists, had turned into a dangerous pragmatism that no longer aimed to obey God or follow the hand of providence, but sought to use nature for its own sinful purposes. Pragmatism exalted action over thought and thus refused to condemn any action as categorically wrong,27 since all actions may be at some point ‘useful’ to a given subjective purpose. Again, with Grant’s attack on the modern concept of history as the theatre for man to impose a limitless freedom (i.e. imposing his own will) on ‘nature’, the scripturally directed Christian can agree. In biblical faith man is always regarded as a vice-gerent, a servant, a steward, called to pursue the creational purposes of God, not as a dominating dictator serving his own ends. Only in apostasy against God, that is in his rebellion and sin, is man found seeking to absolutize his cultural calling for his own wicked purposes in the name of freedom. The Christian can also applaud Grant’s assault on the iniquitous ideology of pragmatism. However, it must be clearly asserted that his flight from history in response to this demonic urge is in error. Let’s now examine why. REJECTION OF THE SCRIPTURAL GROUND-MOTIVE
We now approach what is, in my judgment, the great disaster of Grant’s pseudo-Christian thought which prevented him from discovering true answers within his lament – that is, his failure to see or embrace the pivotal and indispensable nature of the scriptural ground motive of biblical faith: Creation, Fall and Redemption in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Instead, Grant foolishly dismissed robust scriptural faith as ‘Biblicism’ and a rejection of philosophy.28 In its place he wanted a radically revised Christianity. In what is a high-sounding but essentially absurd statement he said, “I have no doubt that Christianity is true, and therefore, I think it has to be reformulated.”29 Likewise, he said that “I can’t look at Christ and say he is not the truth. I think many, many people in the East, for exEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
ample, most followers of Vedanta, or what we call Hinduism, would look at Christ and say he is the truth.”30 Clearly Grant’s understanding of Christ and truth are not that of Scripture and historic, orthodox Christianity. Under the strong influence of radical anti-capitalist, Marxist and religious mystic Simone Weil, as well as the neo-pagan German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Grant shows great sympathy for both the polytheism of the ancient world and Eastern religions, because his concept of divine being is vague at best and far from an orthodox Christian understanding of the personal God of Scripture revealed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, providentially governing creation. Obviously, if Christianity has to be radically ‘reformulated,’ then biblical Christianity as received and preserved by the church for centuries can’t be true! So what does it really mean for Grant to say that he believes Christianity is true? That is not easy to precisely identify because of a studied obscurity in Grant on the subject, but his definitions of faith and religious experience are illuminating. Religious experience for Grant is about a vague awareness of the supernatural and, following Weil, faith is “the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love.”31 There is nothing remotely biblical about either of these definitions. Not surprisingly then, like many liberal Protestants, Grant had a very low view of Scripture and viewed Christianity as locked in Augustinian forms or a ‘Western’ interpretation.32 Moreover, and of great significance for all of Grant’s thinking, this supposedly Augustinian and historic view of the Christian faith was the underlying historical culprit in bringing upon us the strange currents of thought that brought down conservative Canada and were pushing the West into a technological, utopian, planned society where man dominates and perfects nature. Yet this seems immediately counterintuitive. How could this be the case? How could scriptural Christianity be to blame for the decay of a conservative, communitarian and virtuous Canada into technological, liberal progressivism? To answer that by a brief overview, Grant essentially held that ‘the idea of creation,’ with its SUMMER 2017
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concomitant view of history, was at fault – a disastrous line of thinking he gleaned from Weil.33 The notion of creation for Grant was “an abyss in which our minds are swallowed up.”34 Whatever the precise meaning of this rather ambiguous statement, it is clear from his other comments on the subject that he is concerned with denying the biblical doctrine of creation – and here lies the religious root of his error. Captivated as he was by the ancient Greek form-matter conception of nature, the biblical idea of creation was excluded in principle.35 He then falsely characterizes the orthodox view of creation as an act of “Grant not only divine ‘self-expansion’ and conceives of artificially the scriptural doctrine as involving “the separates knowing stamping proclamations of the creating from willing, he will.”36 In other words, Grant thought wants a ‘god’ that the biblical doctrine of creation as withdrawn from a free act by a personal, relational and providential God led to the destruc‘nature,’ leaving tive concept of religion as the exercise man to his freedom.” or assertion of the will rather than the pursuit of knowledge. Grant not only artificially separates knowing from willing, he wants a ‘god’ withdrawn from ‘nature,’ leaving man to his freedom. For Grant, this freedom was rationalistic and elitist; it was a gift of truth acquired through right reason, not a primal fact of creation. In addition, again following the Marxist and philosophical mystic Simone Weil – the thinker to whom Grant paid most frequent obeisance – it seems he regarded divinity (god) or eternal being in essentially numinous and impersonal terms. God must be thought of as divine absence, not divine action and presence. Though Weil’s language co-opts a Christian terminology, its thought-content, which so impacted Grant, is much closer to Gnosticism. She (and it appears Grant), believed That the same truth that was manifest in Christianity had been manifest in all the ancient civilizations. “The children of God,” she said, “should not have any other country here below but the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it ever has contained, contains, or ever will contain.… Christ has bidden us to attain to the perfection of our heavenly Father by imitating his indiscriminate SUMMER 2017
bestowal of light.37
For Grant it was the Jews who first ‘discovered’ and advanced the destructive idea of creation and history where time is finite, beginning with creation and concluding with the end of the world. Moreover, biblical faith held that what happened in time was willed and governed by a providential God with a definite goal or purpose. Grant wrote: By Biblical religion is meant the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament and its culmination in the incarnation of God, Jesus Christ. That religion was unique in its absolute historicity. It was the Jews who discovered the very idea of history. More than anything else, what has made Western culture so dynamic is its impregnation with the Judaeo-Christian idea that history is the divinely ordained process of man’s salvation. This is an idea utterly foreign to any other civilization … the idea of a God of will, who acts in history, brings with it the idea of a final end or purpose toward which his acts are directed and to which history itself is directed.38
It was against this scriptural teaching that Grant strongly reacted. Such a conception of God and history, for Weil and Grant, was the root of the problem of the modern world with its technocratic drive for the dominance of nature! For him, the Platonic notion of time as the moving image of eternity – the ancient Greek notion of being and becoming – was the better solution. Thus, scriptural faith in Christ as the messiah redeeming his people and establishing his kingdom, along with the spread of this biblical faith in the form of ‘Augustinian’ Christianity was the root of modern historical man and “the deepest source of modern secular culture as a whole.”39 In sum, the problem in Grant’s view was in seeing time as history – a view rooted in this scriptural revelation about God and creation. And of course, if man is made in God’s image, as one who makes and forms, a vice-gerent called to turn creation into culture in terms of a particular purpose, then rather than passively withdrawing and contemplating being, man will seek to impose and dominate. Hence for Grant, here in Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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biblical faith was the root of so-called technological domination which, when fully secularized, loses all connection with an eternal norm and becomes the naked drive for control. ASSESSING GRANT’S ATTACK ON SCRIPTURAL FAITH
Whilst it is clearly true that Christianity teaches a doctrine of creation with a God-given cultural mandate for man to rule and subdue in history, and whilst it is undeniably the case that a dynamic, technological culture did develop in the thoroughly evangelized West, Grant’s charge that the modern relentless imperialism of the religion of progress – with its vision of limitless freedom to aggressively dominate both man and nature – is the result of biblical Christianity, is simply false. On the contrary, it was the Renaissance in the West which concerned itself with a ‘rebirth’ of humankind that would revive the ancient religious ideas of the Greeks – with whom Grant is so enamoured. These humanists were seeking a revitalized participation in Greco-Roman culture freed from its accommodation to Christianity, and asserting the freedom of the human personality as a law unto itself. It was a view of freedom and autonomy that “did not permit scientific thought to proceed from a given of creation order. The creation motive of the Christian religion gave way to faith in the creative power of scientific thought which seeks its ground of certainty only within itself.”40 It was this line of thinking, not scriptural faith, that gave rise to the notion of human autonomy and limitless freedom to impose man’s idea on nature. Grant’s assessment here was plainly wrong-headed. Following the trajectory of all those impacted by humanism, whether of the ancient Greek or Renaissance stripe, Grant had no patience for a realistic and historical view of sin, man’s fallen condition, his need for regeneration and redemption in Jesus Christ or his renewed calling to serve the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven. Instead, human purpose, in keeping with his notion of divine absence, is to withdraw from cultural work and to make one’s ‘reason’ receptive to ‘being.’ There must be no free act of creation where God governs and foreordains the bringing to pass of Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
his purposes according to the counsel of his will (Eph. 1:11). There can be no God relating to man in terms of historical covenant with blessing and cursing for obedience and disobedience – no interference in history from God. Rather, the ideal man for Grant is the philosopher who reformulates the doctrine of the divine, reformulates Christianity, and gives hope to man by reconciling his modern philosophical antinomies!41 In light of these things it is difficult to see how, for Grant, Christian ‘truth’ ends up being any more than a mystical leap into ‘being.’ Following Plato, Weil and Heidegger in denying a free creation, Grant’s ethereal view of time as a moving image of the eternal is both an attempted flight from history and finally a complete absorption in being – it is exactly where Greek philosophy ended up in Plotinus – in pure thought, an ineffable Oneness or unity. This is why the ancients were fatalistic and disinterested in history as such and why Grant can put the invention of history down to the Jews. For many of the ancients, as for a number of Eastern religions, man was absorbed in being via an eternal “Following the process of becoming, trapped in the wheels of determinism, where the only hope was trajectory of all escape from the world of becoming by those impacted an ascent of the soul substance from the by humanism, material world to contemplate the mystery whether of the of being. As already noted, it seems to me ancient Greek that this germ of Greek thought – this reor Renaissance jection of creation and history – was the religious root of both Grant’s mysticism, his stripe, Grant had pessimism and consequently his suspicion, no patience for indeed fear, of technology. a realistic and The suspicion of technology – a consequence of biblical religion’s allegedly false view of history – was nurtured in Grant by Heidegger, whom he credits with teaching him its meaning, “what I have learned from Heidegger is the meaning of technology.”42 Technology was dangerous because it supposedly estranged man from ‘being.’ Egbert Schuurman has pointed out that Heidegger did not seek to appreciate technological development, but to draw back from it, “in order to command all devotion for the great mystery of being.”43 Moreover, in Heidegger’s opinion, Christianity “has abetted the advance
historical view of sin.”
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of the destructive power of technology.”44 In fact history (in the Christian sense) is for Heidegger the history of technology, such that technology becomes the hermeneutical key to history itself. Just as Marx reduced history to economics, Heidegger brings everything under the rubric of technology and so reduces historical life to a limited part of its cultural aspect whilst missing the specific meaning of technology as “freely giving form to material.”45 For Heidegger man is caught up in the destiny of being in the midst of his technological life. He rises up in violence to subject everything to himself, yet at the same time has forgotten Being, “from which, by which, and unto which all that is, is; he has become a nihilist.”46 Likewise, the Christian person (especially the Protestant, in self-assurance and self-interested in personal salvation) is seen as egocentric and thus a major source of the modern problem. Thought should instead be ruled by and directed toward ‘being.’ This idea supposedly “offers the perspective of escape from the turmoil, frenzy and de“In short, Grant’s structive urge of modern technology.”47 In such a view, victory over the nihilism whole philosophy of modern culture cannot be by any noadvocates a return tion of ruling being – such a claim must to ‘nature,’ delivers be withdrawn. Man must be freed by people from ‘history,’ ‘being,’ as thought and being become alleviates people of united, to escape man’s suicidal course.
work and denies them responsibility and calling.”
On reflection, the problems seen here are obvious. If ‘being’ is the source of all things and the end to which all things tend, then being rules technology through the thinking being, which is man himself. In this vision of being, isn’t human freedom swallowed up in the fatalistic destiny of being – isn’t then the subjectivism of historicism that Grant wants to escape the outcome once again? How could and why should man halt his course with technology if he is caught in the wheels of the necessity of being – if his thought and being are at root one? Schuurman states the problem this way: Heidegger becomes enmeshed in a dialectic. On the one hand there issues from Being the necessary destiny of Being to which man is subordinate and because
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of which he is thus not free. On the other hand, Being must give man freedom. Heidegger’s idea of Being is intrinsically contradictory.48
Exactly. Heidegger and Grant want to resolve these antinomies of their thought by speaking of the ‘mystery of being’ – which is simply a nonexplanation. Even if Grant believes that ‘being’ is not completely self-sufficient (i.e. is not identical with the divine) and requires a ‘creator’ (who for Grant is essentially unknown), this offers no help because ‘god’ does not interfere in history nor reveal his specific will. Both Grant’s and Heidegger’s notion of being is simply a speculative product of would-be autonomous thought that leaves them with a deep sense of powerlessness in the face of man’s sinful domination of man. Man needs saving from the technology of his own making because it estranges or alienates him from true ‘being.’ But what if Grant’s view of history and technology were accepted by all – what does it really mean to be delivered from dynamic historical development? In the same way that his denial of ‘creation’ implies a flight from history, surely this turning toward ‘being’ to escape the turmoil of technology simply means the end of a cultural consciousness and a cultural task. In short, Grant’s whole philosophy advocates a return to ‘nature,’ delivers people from ‘history,’ alleviates people of work and denies them responsibility and calling. Death, disease, suffering and existence in a world as permanent wilderness are implied and essentially legitimized in such a view. It is no wonder Grant was accused of pessimism. CONCLUSIONS
Grant’s life-long lament over Canada and the modern world has certainly helped shed light on a serious problem in Western culture. He has exposed the destructive nature of dynamic power exercised for its own sake; he has highlighted a ruinous modern view of history in which time is made a theatre for the unlimited imposition of man’s self-will; he has drawn attention to the threatening development of a technocratic and bureaucratic ‘progressive’ culture that sees its role as stage-managing the universe to realize man’s Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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utopian ends; he has attacked a pragmatism and subjectivism that denies objective truth and rejects right and wrong as realities that transcend human will and desire. With these critiques and concerns the scripturally directed Christian has great sympathy. However, we have seen that Grant’s critique is launched from a shaky and wholly inadequate platform – one without a truly transcendent foundation or objective criterion for truth. His turn toward ‘being’ and denial of the scriptural worldview left him both with a sense of powerlessness and with antinomies that are actually ‘non-problems’ because they result from his idolatrous construct called ‘being.’ Grant’s interminable vagueness and ambiguity in offering real solutions for culture throughout his life-long lament are not the product of ‘openness to being,’ but are the consequence of his apostate faith and faulty religious assumptions. What we finally see in Grant is a futile attempt to address the reality and challenge of sin – that is, man’s disobedience to the law of God in asserting his own prideful will in cultural life – by denying creation, withdrawing both God and man from history, uniting human thought with an abstract concept of being, and rejecting altogether the cultural mandate given to man at the beginning of creation to rule and subdue under God. In other words, Grant wants to deal with man’s rebellion and heal the ravages of sin by an alternative act of disobedience. Grant recognizes a problem with man’s cultural activity, but then finally lays the blame for man’s misuse of man and ‘nature’ at the door of the living God and his Word for creation: in effect Grant says to God, ‘the task you gave me is the problem.’ But Grant is wrong about God, creation and history because he denies the authority of God’s Word. In so doing he sees history conceived as God’s creative act and technology itself as the root of the human problem and therefore of all Canada’s woes, rather than the sinful heart of man. The Word of God does not identify estrangement from ‘being,’ the Jewish idea of history, or man’s calling to freely form creation, as the source of our cultural problems. Robert D. Knudsen has clearly stated the scriptural diagnosis: Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Where all the strands of meaning come together in…the heart, there is a fundamental religious taking of position with respect to the origin. Either one is rooted in the transcendent God as he is revealed in the Scriptures or he is related to an idol, worshipping what is a fabrication of his apostate and distorted imagination, namely a myth. At any and every point one is turned in his heart either to the right or to the left, either to the true God or to an idol. Because it is of a central, radical kind, this orientation manifests itself in all human activity.49
In other words, man is an idol maker and it is a scriptural principle that man becomes like the idol he makes (Ps. 135: 15f; Jer. 5:21-31). “His false If we reject the creator God of Scripture and mythical who rules and governs all things in righgod, who is teousness and justice, the God who has called us to a task, and who is working indistinguishable out his redemptive purposes in history, from eternal then we will create a false God of our own ‘being,’ inevitably imagination – a myth. Because of Grant’s leads him to the unscriptural and religious taking of a pocreation of a false sition with respect to the origin, his false mandate, denying and mythical god, who is indistinguishable from eternal ‘being,’ inevitably leads him the cultural one to the creation of a false mandate, denying assigned in God’s the cultural one assigned in God’s Word for Word for creation.” creation. Grant’s withdrawn and formless god who does not create or form by free act, nor command man to subdue all things in terms of a purpose, requires him to posit the contemplative man, likewise withdrawn from freely forming creation for a purpose. It is true that if cultural life is seen only as a function of human dominion, with man as the ruler of being, then man is gradually robbed of freedom and identity and is pulled toward disintegration, ruin and death – the imperial and lawless urge for limitless expansion and control is certainly one of the roots of our lamentable culture in Canada and the West. The problems are real, but Grant absolutizes them rather than placing Jesus Christ in the place of total sovereignty, authority and power. Schuurman’s response seems tailor-made for Grant: SUMMER 2017
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What is essential is not a conversion to Being but a conversion to God, the Creator, the redeemer in Jesus Christ. In this conversion there is no hint or shadow of flight, for man comes to stand once again in the place to which God originally appointed him – not at the centre, not as the ruler of reality, not as man sufficient to himself, but as a bondservant called by God to engage in the forming of culture, including the development of technology, and accountable to Him for every act of commission and omission. This confession is liberating in the face of the worshippers of science and technology on the one hand, and in the face of those who would flee science and technology on the other.50
The gospel of Jesus Christ is the only thing that can call man back from his apostasy and false worship, to the humble service of God in creation. This task of service is not easy “We cannot throw and there are many temptations and down our tools or challenges along the path of obedience implements just to the cultural mandate and Great Commission. But the Christian answer to because some men such challenges, obstacles, anxieties and are ploughing in the temptations can never be the surrender wrong direction or of culture and thereby of God’s creation, freely fashioning an to the apostasy of men and devils. When idol.” people’s hearts are darkened so that they form the materials of creation in a manner that denies God’s order, seeks to overturn his distinctions and boundaries, or works to join what he has separated and separate what he has joined, the path of holiness and righteousness is the cultural preservation of divinely-ordained distinctions and the differentiation and unfolding of God’s purposes over against those of sin and death. We cannot throw down our tools or implements just because some men are ploughing in the wrong direction or freely fashioning an idol. Rather we must put our hand to the plough and sow the seeds of cultural renewal with the assurance that God will bring forth the harvest in due time. The Christian idea of cultural development, in the words of Herman Dooyeweerd: Continues to observe the inner tension between sinful reality and the full demand of divine law…; this demand is terrifying SUMMER 2017
when we consider how much the temporal ordinances labor under the destructive power of the fall into sin. Terrifying also, when it puts before us our task as Christians in the struggle for the power of cultural formation. For it makes a demand on us which as sinful human beings we cannot satisfy in any way. And it urges us, in the misery of our hearts, to seek refuge with Christ, from whose fullness, nevertheless, a Christian can derive the confidence of faith to carry on the ceaseless struggle for the control of culture’s development … the struggle is directed against the spirit of darkness who dragged us all down with him in the apostasy from God, and who can only be resisted in the power of Christ.… As Christians we shall hate that spirit because of the love of God’s creation in Christ Jesus.51
And so, our great struggle above the 49th parallel, indeed our holy lament for the Canadian nation on this 150th anniversary must be rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ and directed against the spiritual forces in heavenly places that battle against us – or it will be futile and powerless. As the Christian church, we must say again to the nation of Canada, “for if the message spoken through angels was legally binding and every transgression and disobedience received a just punishment, how will we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?’ (Heb. 2:2-3).
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Charles Taylor is a current and noted Canadian philosopher, perhaps best known for his massive work A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Hugh Donald Forbes, George Grant: A Guide to His Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 171. Forbes, Grant: A Guide, 8. Forbes, Grant, A Guide, 11. George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), 3. Grant, Lament, 53-54. Grant, Lament, 2-3. Grant adopted an essentially ancient and platonic view of time as a ‘moving image of eterEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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nity’ and rejected the biblical view of time as a finite creation by God moving from beginning to end in terms of God’s active providence and redemption in history. This is one of Grant’s most serious errors and it leaves him without a viable source of resistance to tyranny in time. There is no space here to discuss Grant’s interesting reorganization of contemporary political labels. For example, he viewed American conservatism as actually old-fashioned eighteenth and nineteenth-century liberalism – which I think is accurate. He doubted the future of American conservatism because he felt the USA was dominated by a vision of the age of progress. Grant, Lament, 15. Grant, Lament, 56. Grant, Lament, 57. Grant, Lament, 59. Grant, Lament, 61. See Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko’s interesting study, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (New York: Encounter Books, 2016). Grant, Lament, 79. Grant, Lament, 85. Grant, Lament, 96. Grant, Lament, 96. Grant, Lament, 96. Grant, Lament, 96. Emphasis added. Herman Dooyeweerd, The Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular and Christian Options (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2012), 63 George P. Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age (Toronto: Copp Clark Publishing, 1959), 110. H. Evan Runner, Walking in the Way of the Word: The Collected Writings of Evan Runner (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2009), 127. Grant, Philosophy, 110. Grant, Lament, 94. Grant, Philosophy, 92. True scriptural faith is neither Biblicist, i.e. narrowly interpreting all of Scripture ‘literally’ or limiting valuable knowledge to that derived directly from the Bible, nor anti-philosophy. In fact many of the world’s greatest philosophers from Augustine to Aquinas to Dooyeweerd have been Christian. The challenge is developing a distinctly Christian philosophy rooted in and directed by a scriptural vision of reality. David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation
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(Concord: House of Anansi Press, 1995), 119. 30 Cayley, George Grant, 119. 31 Forbes, George Grant, 209-210. 32 Augustine was in fact North African and followed the other Church Fathers in affirming the early creeds of the church. Moreover, the Eastern Orthodox churches uphold the same essential beliefs about the triune being of God, the person of Christ, divine creation, the meaning of time as history and the presence of the kingdom of God. Grant appears to have been out of his depth in assessing historical theology and Augustine. If anything, Augustine failed to adequately ground the City of God in history and struggled to shake off his own Neo-Platonism. 33 Cayley, George Grant, 35-39. 34 Cayley, George Grant, 38. 35 See, Herman Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2012), 30. 36 Cayley, George Grant, 38. 37 Cayley, George Grant, 39-40. 38 Grant, Philosophy, 44-45. 39 Forbes, George Grant, 92. 40 Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture: Pagan Secular and Christian Options, trans. John Kraay (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2012), 151. 41 Grant, Philosophy, 111. 42 Cayley, George Grant, 129. 43 Egbert Schuurman, Technology and the Future: A Philosophical Challenge, trans. H. Donald Morton (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2009), 124. 44 Schuurman, Technology, 126. 45 Schuurman, Technology, 128. 46 Schuurman, Technology, 132. 47 Schuurman, Technology, 135. 48 Schuurman, Technology, 141. 49 Robert D. Knudsen, Roots and Branches: The Quest for Meaning and Truth in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2009), 302. 50 Schuurman, Technology, 144. 51 Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, II (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2016), 364.
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A CHRISTIAN STATESMAN
STEVEN MARTINS A CANADIAN PROFILE NEGLECTED STEVEN MARTINS is Director of Ministry Development and Advancement at the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. He holds an undergraduate degree in Human Resource Management from York University, and is working towards a Masters of Arts in Christian Apologetics at Veritas Evangelical Seminary. He blogs and writes regularly, and serves with the Ezra Institute as an itinerant speaker and debater. Steven lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife Cindy.
In 1905, a monument was raised outside of the Legislative Building of Ontario, to commemorate the life of the Christian politician Sir Oliver Mowat (1820-1903). It remains to this day. However, despite being the “most famous provincial premier of the nineteenth century,” as historian Donald Swainson writes, Mowat’s has become a forgotten name amongst many twentyfirst century Canadians.1
Mowat’s life was one of great political achievement, largely influenced by his childhood spent learning alongside the nation’s future leaders. He was born in Kingston, Ontario in 1820, the eldest son of the Scottish immigrants John Mowat and Helen Levack. He was educated in a private school in the Presbyterian tradition, alongside John A. Macdonald, the future and first Prime Minister of Canada, and John H. Cameron, a future Member of Parliament. Mowat and Macdonald studied and worked together at a small Kingston law firm (Macdonald was five years his senior), where they also rubbed shoulders with Alexander Campbell, a future father of Confederation. It was during these early years of his public life when Mowat confessed to “If elected, my desire Campbell that he feared that he would is to perform my duty “never be anybody,” not because he dein Parliament in the sired greatness out of selfish ambition, but because he desired to be used for spirit and with the some significant end, a purposeful life views which become a where his gifts, skills and knowledge Christian politician.” would be used maximally in service to God and country. Little did he know at the time that he was working with those who would unite the British provinces and form the Canadian dominion; in fact, he would himself be one of those founding fathers.2 Mowat was called to the bar of Upper Canada in SUMMER 2017
1841, working from the city of Toronto, where he established a profitable practice. While there he also served for two years as a member of the Toronto City Council, and as a member of the Union House, the joint government between Ontario and Quebec, until his resignation in 1864. Though not at the forefront in the confederation conferences, Mowat was nonetheless a member of the Confederation Coalition in 1864, earning the title of one of the ‘Fathers of Confederation,’ jousting with Macdonald about the federal-provincial relations of the Canadian dominion, and writing down decisions of many of the conferences into judicial language.3 He also served as the vice-chancellor of Ontario until 1872, until he was persuaded by George Brown to run for the position of Premier of Ontario, which he held from 1872 to 1896. Shortly thereafter, he took on the mantle of Minister of Justice and Senator under the leadership of Wilfrid Laurier, and by 1897 accepted the lieutenant-governorship of Ontario until his death in 1903. As Swainson writes, “Mowat’s public career lasted some fortyfive years and was one of unparalleled success.”4 To this day, very few books have been written on Sir Oliver Mowat; those available mainly emphasize his public career, to the neglect of his religious convictions. But as Mowat’s son-in-law, Charles R.W. Biggar, would write, we cannot understand Mowat if we do not understand his Christian faith. For example, when writing a letter to an electoral riding which had urged him to become their candidate in the provincial parliament electorate, he wrote with the utmost sincerity that “if elected, my desire is to perform my duty in Parliament in the spirit and with the views which become a Christian politician.”5 As Biggar writes in Sir Oliver Mowat: A Biographical Sketch, “there are few who would contend that the desire expressed in his concluding sentence was not sincerely felt and faithfully fulfilled.”6 Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Oliver Mowat
The various contributions of Mowat to the Canadian legal and political system are vast, and much can be written about them, but where the work of historians has left much unsaid about the influence of Mowat’s Christian faith on his work, the man himself tells us more about this significant aspect of his life. We can best understand his work as a form of worship unto God as he sought to realize (1) a just dominion, and (2) a learned province. A JUST DOMINION
When Mowat first entered public office, he was faced with a society with a growing population and many moving pieces, whether economical, judicial, political, etc., but without much of a collective order or unity. By the end of his life he had reorganized the judicial system, codified the laws of the province, made reforms to reflect the growth of statute law, introduced employment laws, ironed out a more efficient system to administer justice, and connected cities and towns with numerous railroads for economic growth.7 The result was the early development and ushering in of a post-Confederation Ontario, and though Mowat didn’t accomplish this singlehandedly, he was essentially a chief architect of the province. What Mowat managed to accomplish was in many ways a fulfillment of the cultural mandate of Scripture. In Genesis, man had been commissioned with cultivating God’s creation into a godly civilization; our first parents were meant to be the “royal priests in God’s cosmic temple – to subdue and develop all things under God and turn creation into a God-glorifying culture,” in short, bringing all things subject to the will and purpose of God.8 What Mowat had done was bring about a societal structure oriented towards God. It was by no means perfect, but it was a step in the right direction. As Mowat comments regarding the Christianization of Canada: By the last Dominion census of Canada, 1881… out of a population of 4,324,810, only 2,634 were returned as having no religion; and nearly all the rest were returned as professing some form of Christianity… Immense progress has been made Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
towards the Christian Ideal since Christ died on the cross; the 19th century is far in advance of the first; and is in advance of every century since… The goal unhappily is far from being reached yet; the world still abounds in selfishness and cruelty; but Christian churches, Christian societies, and Christian men and women are working for the Divine cause heartily and hopefully, never more so, in a hundred ways in all lands; and that continued progress is being made in the great work is most manifest.9
It was encouraging to Mowat that most of Canada was made up of professing Christians, but it was even more encouraging that the Christian religion was no privatized faith, it was the “It was even more integral foundation for Canadian society. encouraging that Mowat affirmed this as he wrote about the Christian the work of the kingdom of God, stating religion was no that it was the duty of every Christian to privatized faith, love God, and “in all respects to do God’s it was the integral will,” for it was expected that all, regardfoundation for less of vocation, were to fulfill their duties, whether civic, familial or ecclesiastical, as Canadian society.” “unto God” and not to mere men (what would be coined the ‘Protestant work ethic’).10 By doing this, they would be crafting the Canadian dominion into a Christian society, paying tribute to the Lordship of Christ (Ps. 72:8), and proclaiming to all the good news of salvation and Christ’s righteous reign. When surveying Mowat’s work and his contributions to law and politics, it is clear that everything he did was influenced by his faith; indeed, by no other means could he have hoped to pursue a just Canadian dominion. When I refer to a ‘just’ dominion, I mean an awareness of justice in terms of the kingdom of God, recognizing that the state, whether federal, provincial or municipal, is accountable and subject to the Lordship of Christ, and that its function is to operate as a servant of God in faithfully administering public justice.11 This is not the ‘social justice’ of our day, put forward by the cultural Marxists seeking liberation from supposed and illusory ‘oppressor groups,’ but rather true justice, biblical justice, defined as God’s law interpreted and applied. SUMMER 2017
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This notion of biblical justice was more than mere symbolism or lip service, Mowat’s life’s work was devoted to this end. Although mostly operating on the provincial level, Mowat’s experience and affiliations nonetheless allowed him to wield profound influence among other politicians. As historian Margaret Evans affirms, “the phrase often used of Mowat – ‘Christian statesman’ – is not a misnomer;” he argued, ruled, legislated and acted “with a strongly religious tone.”12 For example, when operating as a Chancery Court judge, Mowat was recognized as having reported his decisions with clarity and logical consistency, he was regarded as the high authority in the courts, and proved to be “learned in jurisprudence, skilled in technique, and familiar with precedents.” It was clear to his colleagues that, as he fulfilled his duty as judge, Mowat was heavily influenced by the American Christian jurist William Blackstone, often citing his principles of the law in his deciding cases.13
volvement with the UCBS was illustrative of how fundamental the Christian scriptures were to his private life and public works. This is evident in his post as director of the Anti-Slavery Society, founded by George Brown, which was part of a larger international abolitionist movement. Though slavery had been in decline since 1793 in Canada, it was formally abolished in 1834 thanks to the Christian political activist William Wilberforce in England. However, the Society’s attention was directed towards the United States, much of which still maintained the immoral slave trade.16 As Mowat would comment, it was the Christian faith which promulgated laws for the protection of all persons since it was first proclaimed; laws which the pagans never truly understood or cared for. The call to end man-theft and slavery was an inevitable response to the teaching of Scripture (Ex. 21:16; Gal. 3:28), it was “the natural, necessary and immediate outcome of the teachings of Jesus.”17
Mowat’s politics were as faith-driven as his legal work, as the Rev. Principal Caven of Knox College would write concerning Mowat’s moral influence in Canadian politics: “The first question he asked regarding any course of action was, ‘Is it right?’” It was no secret that Mowat’s faith influenced all he did, and for this he was mocked by some and admired by others, but all knew Mowat’s chief purpose was not personal ambition but “What is it that rather faithful devotion to God. As the Christianity requires citizens of the Bay of Quinte District had said of him, “During your long of us? As regards and busy career…you always sought to conduct towards promote such legislation as secured to others it requires that the fullest extent the civil and religious in every act of life rights of the people,” and as Caven each of us enquire: writes, “the integrity, the purity, the What does honesty beneficence which we admired in his require?” course were more than ethic virtues; they came out of the depths of his character and were Christian graces.”14
There were other ways in which Mowat demonstrated his Christian faith in public office, such as when he was approached by his electorate to find solutions for the “social ills of disease and crime.” Historians have noted that with Mowat’s premiership came a humanitarian movement which sought to provide comfort to the less fortunate in Canadian society. And in affirmation of the journalist Goldwin Smith’s public advocacy, poverty, infirmity and old age were declared free from being considered crimes of any sort, and that such conditions were nowhere close to warranting imprisonment. That these things were even being considered in Ontario’s society is appalling to modern sensibilities, but there was clearly a need to see the poor, the sick and the elderly attended to. As Evans writes, this inevitably involved “intrusions by the state into what had been family and community matters.”18
Mowat, for example, despite his legal and political responsibilities, served as the director for the Upper Canada Bible Society, what is now known as the Canadian Bible Society, an organization which initially sought to distribute Bibles throughout Canada and now the world.15 His inSUMMER 2017
Historically, the church had provided healthcare, had ministered to and provided for the poor, had served and attended to the elderly. The fact that these issues were brought to the Mowat government’s attention meant that the church was failing to fulfill its mission in Canadian society, for all this constituted kingdom work. The state certainly is required to protect the poor, the sick Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Oliver Mowat
and the elderly, but to take on the role that was originally fulfilled by the church, that is to administer the grace of the gospel, had significant implications for the future of Canadian society. This is how the state came to adopt the role of healthcare and welfare provider. And as a result of Canada’s departure from a Christian consensus, the intrinsic moral values of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the poor are now being wrongly attributed to the humanistic worldview when historically, such ‘Canadian’ values were the result of a Christian worldview (Heb. 13:16; Jas. 2:14-17; 1 Jn. 3:17). This is why Mowat’s leadership, in a time where Christianity was still considered the religion of Canada, required action when very little was being done; this also entailed delivering an exhortation to the church: We are to bear one another’s burdens, and therein fulfill the law of Christ… We are to render glad and loving service in a special sense to the friendless, the sick, the suffering and the needy… What is it that Christianity requires of us? As regards conduct towards others it requires that in every act of life each of us enquire: What does honesty require? What do justice and fair-dealing require of us? What does humanity require of us?19
For Mowat, the ‘just’ society, the ‘humane’ society, the ‘Christian’ society, were all one. It is for this reason he was credited with being a godly man whose “two chief objects of his life were the service of God and his country,” as his monument outside Queens Park attests to, with the two figures of ‘public justice’ and ‘jurisprudence’ engraved.20 A LEARNED PROVINCE
It’s also important to note, as we consider Mowat’s achievements and shortfalls, that he was not a learned theologian. He did invest the time, outside of his private education, to study comparative religions and to learn from his father who served forty years as an elder of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Kingston. Yet because of his upbringing and public witness in politics and law, he was on occasion given opportunities to Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
preach and teach. On one occasion, he delivered a lecture to medical students at the University of Toronto on the public influence of Christianity. This was later developed into an apologetics book titled Christianity & Its Influence, where he wrote: The average medical student, and the average medical practitioner in our province, is said to compare favourably with the average of such students and practitioners anywhere, and as regards both the learning of the profession and skill in its application. This is gratifying to all Canadians. It would be still more gratifying to all the best of them if it could also be truly said that our medical men, young and old, were distinguished above their fellows throughout the world for hearty acceptance of the Christian faith, and for Christian conduct and character.21
For Mowat, the role of education was vital to fulfilling man’s mission as given by God. It was a necessity which, if neglected, could prevent man from faithfully and maximally serving both God and country. To him, education was more than just narrow intellectualism, it was instructing man in his mission to build God’s kingdom on earth, and this involved thinking God’s thoughts after him, dedicating creation unto God, and faithfully stewarding creation.22 Mowat’s understanding of the Scriptures involved “Education seeing man’s role as prophet, priest and was more than king.23 We cannot dismiss the religious fervor of Mowat from his contributions to Canadian society, as several historical revisionists have done for the past fifty years, according to scholar David Yates.24 For Mowat, the Christian faith and public office were inseparable, because the Christian faith is the only true faith. In fact, he believed that by removing the Christian faith, much of which made Canadian society a model for the international world would be lost. This concept of the Christian faith as foundational to all of life wasn’t, of course, fully articulated and explained by Mowat, but the concept was evident in Mowat’s think-
just narrow intellectualism, it was instructing man in his mission to build God’s kingdom on earth, and this involved thinking God’s thoughts after him, dedicating creation unto God, and faithfully stewarding creation.” SUMMER 2017
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ing as a result of his biblical instruction. As he wrote in Christianity and Some of its Evidences, a lecture he gave to Knox Church in Woodstock, Oxford County in 1890: For us [Canadians] the paganism of the Greeks and Romans is nothing; for us Confucianism is nothing; Brahminism is nothing; Mohammedanism is nothing; and every other cult is nothing. If Christianity is a delusion, the whole human race is, and has been always, without a true religion; men know nothing of the world of spirits; nothing of the relations between God and man; the protection which religion [that is, Christianity] has heretoafter afforded to morality and order is at an end; and the whole subject of a future life is in thick darkness.25
Mowat’s religious convictions undergirded his judicial and political contributions, and this was evident in his involvement with the development of the public education. When we speak of Ontario’s education system, the first person to come to mind is generally Dr. Egerton Ryerson, a Methodist minister who traveled throughout Europe on a tour to develop the Canadian “The church gladly education system.26 Unfortunately for Ryerson, the Enlightenment thinkgave up much of its ing of Europe at the time was more education mandate to influential in his policy-making than the state, which at the was his theology, as he advocated for time seemed harmless an education system which was largely in a Canadian governed, determined and funded by Christian society.” the state.27 Mowat, ignorant to the implications that would follow as a result of a state-run education system, was supportive of the idea, but he had a different perspective than Ryerson’s. Ryerson had adopted the Rationalists’ doctrine of the mind as a ‘blank slate’ of potentiality, and the belief that with the aid of an educator, it could be made into something great. It was the “humanistic philosophy of education” derived from Horace Mann of Prussia, as the historian Bruce Curtis affirms, which essentially had no need of Christian theism.28 The insight of a late cultural commentator is helpful for us to understand the SUMMER 2017
underlying philosophy of the rationalist approach to education: The marvels of this [blank slate] theory for educators of the Enlightenment were immediately apparent. Man was able to remake man and the educator to play the role of a god… No modern goal in education is understandable except in terms of this hope of the Enlightenment. Education thus involved a war against the past [Christian orthodoxy] … against which all men of intellect must make war. For the Enlightenment ‘education’ became a veritable mania, a magical concept which was the cure-all for all problems – social, ethical, and economic. Education would produce universal brotherhood and a paradise on earth, freedom and happiness for all… But the clean tablet concept is not concerned with education but radical re-creation of the person beyond anything envisaged by religion. It is a radically messianic and religious program, aiming at the recreation of man and his total culture.29
This would become the mainstream philosophy behind the public education system of Canada, as we witness in the present-day an attempt to redefine the family, gender, and reality; an overthrow of all Christian vestiges which initially formed the foundation of Canadian society. Ryerson had brought with him a humanistic poison, and as Canadian culture drifted over the years from the Christian faith, it moved ever closer to adopting a full-fledged, radical rationalist approach to education. Of course, because of modern education’s rootless nature, it is unable to create any true ‘culture’ and inevitably paves the way to an implosion of itself. For how can education, steeped in secular humanism, create anything if it cannot make sense of anything?30 How can it teach law and order, justice and the meaning of life, while rejecting Christian theism, the foundation upon which these are properly understood? It must be said, however, that if the church had faithfully fulfilled its educational mandate, there would be little need or opportunity for the state to step in with a competing vision of education. Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Oliver Mowat
Mowat, for example, was educated under the Rev. Robert McDowall, the pioneer Presbyterian minister of the Bay of Quinte District, who had been sent by the Dutch Reformed Church of the United States.31 Even prior to the 1800s, schooling was provided and operated by churches and local parents in Canada.32 However, the church gladly gave up much of its education mandate to the state, which at the time seemed harmless in a Canadian Christian society, but as the state became increasingly secular and humanistic, so did its education system, replacing the God of Christianity with the god of the state, collectivized man, in its curriculum. In the end, Ryerson’s Enlightenment thought, which was baptized in Christian clothing, was realized in the Canadian education system. Yet in spite of this, Mowat sought to preserve the parent and the church as the primary educators, so as not to hand over full authority to the state. As it concerned the development of the provincial curriculum, he followed the example of his American neighbors, who had also founded a state education system, but “was largely under local control and extensively given to religious influence.”33 Contrary to the ‘blank slate’ theory that was so typical of Enlightenment theories of education, Mowat believed that the mind was either in a state of covenant obedience or covenant rebellion against its Creator, consistent with the Calvinistic influence of his religious education. This is why, when establishing the Ontario Department of Education, he consulted a coalition of church leaders from the Protestant and Catholic communities to discuss the religious nature of the provincial curriculum.34 Prayers, Scripture readings, and biblical instruction were all introduced thanks to Mowat’s work, and a vestige of this Christian influence remains today in the Ontario Education Act, where section 264(c) states that it is the duty of every teacher to “inculcate by precept and example respect for religion and the principles of JudaeoChristian morality and the highest regard for truth, justice, loyalty,” etc.35 It is also noteworthy to mention that Mowat had insisted that the minister of education should be a Christian minister as opposed to a candidate determined by the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
electorate, something which Ryerson vehemently opposed.36 Yet in spite of Mowat’s best efforts, the later displacement of the Christian religion for a more attractive secular humanism would run counter to Mowat’s counsel, direction and “Christians conviction for Canadian education. In spite of all this, to the best of his ability, Mowat sought to cultivate a learned province, which learning aligned with Christian truth, for as the Synod of Toronto and Kingston stated in his day, “he showed himself to be a Catholic in the truest sense of the word, for he has always adhered loyally to the church of his fathers.”37 AN ETERNAL HOPE
do not believe that a collapse of faith is impending; they do not believe that Christianity has received its mortal blow; they do not believe that faith in it has given way.”
At the end of Mowat’s life in 1903, many Christian Canadians began to fear the influence that Enlightenment rationalism would have on the country’s society and institutions, particularly concerning the future of faith in Canada. Yet prior to his passing, Mowat remained steadfast in his hope. He persevered in his belief, even on his death bed, that regardless of what turbulence might come in the years ahead to test the church’s faith, the Christian worldview would always emerge the victor, for nothing could triumph over or negate the truth. As he wrote in exhortation to the church: Christians do not believe that a collapse of faith is impending; they do not believe that Christianity has received its mortal blow; they do not believe that faith in it has given way. A prophecy of the near destruction of Christianity has been often written and spoken… since Mount Calvary; but the prophecy has never come true, and Christians do not believe that it ever will.38
The truth of Scripture would never fade as a result of the rationalism and humanism that would creep out from the shadows (Matt. 24:35; Mk. 13:31; Lk. 21:33). Mowat knew that much, for he trusted in God’s promise that God’s kingdom would be made fully manifest (1 Cor. 15:24-28). Whether this first involved a time of falling away, SUMMER 2017
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or a steadfast persistence in covenant fidelity, was irrelevant to the end result. This was the eternal hope that drove Mowat in all his public work. As Evans writes, infused with his Christian hope, it was “under [Mowat’s] careful but forward-looking guidance, that the province left behind its pioneer youth and moved steadily and prosperously toward maturity in the twentieth century.”39 As we look back at this Christian statesman, we discover a devout Christian spirit which sought to instill biblical principles in all aspects of society. He was a man who walked contrary to the current of the time, for while he sought the fidelity of the church in the public square, many of the Canadian churches were headed in the opposite direction. The gospel that Mowat proclaimed promised great transformation, which involved the fulfillment of the calling of both the church and the family. But under the sway of Enlightenment thought, the church steadily surrendered its interaction with various aspects of culture, such as education, law, arts, charity, medicine and government. As Joe Boot writes: “We progressively retreated into a pietistic bubble, concerned largely with eternal verities and keeping souls from hell, and we faithlessly limited Christ’s jurisdiction to the institutional church.”40 This cultural retreatism, which is still evident today in most Canadian Christian communities, inevitably led to the marginalization of the church and a change in the social order, for as the culture – that is, the publicly-manifested religion of the people – changed, so did the institu“The gospel that tions. We now find ourselves in such a time where it has never been more Mowat proclaimed necessary for the church to take up its promised great plow again and recover its biblical mistransformation, sion, to plant and cultivate Christian which involved education, health care services, advothe fulfillment of cacy for the protection of the unborn the calling of both and the elderly, and provision and care for the poor, for all these things are the church and the essential to the church’s proclamation family.” and expansion of the kingdom of God. It is of little surprise, then, that Mowat has been forgotten in modernity, for he lived out a faith that humanistic culture loathes: a public witness SUMMER 2017
of the gospel of Christ, and a model of faithful service to God in public office. Though historical revisionists may attempt to downplay Mowat’s faith and the role it played in his public life, they cannot deny the diverse testimony that credits his service to God and country. Mowat, the man of God, was the same in his private study as he was in public office. May we imitate his bold faithfulness, learn from his mistakes, and take his final words as a call to covenant fidelity and kingdom proclamation: As patriots and philanthropists, then, as deeply concerned for the earthly well-being of our families, our friends, our country, and our race, now and in the future; and above all, as creatures and servants of the most High God; as having, ourselves and our fellows, immortal lives to think of… and as having had communicated to us a religion of love and hope and holiness, an Atoning Saviour, a Pardoning God, a Sanctifying Holy Spirit, let us all hold fast unto the end our Christian faith, without wavering; and let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to all good works.41
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Donald Swainson, ed., Oliver Mowat’s Ontario (Toronto, ON: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1972), 1. Paul Romney, “Biography: Mowat, sir Oliver, Volume XIII (1901-1910),” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 1994, http://www.biographi. ca/en/bio/mowat_oliver_13E.html. Government of Canada, “ARCHIVED - Sir Oliver Mowat - Canadian Confederation,” Library and Archives Canada, May 2, 2005, accessed February 1, 2017, https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/confederation/023001-4000.54-e. html. Swainson, ed., Oliver Mowat’s Ontario, 1-2. Cited in Charles Robert Webster Biggar, Sir Oliver Mowat: A Biographical Sketch, Vol. 1 (Toronto: Warwick Bro’s & Rutter, 1905), 70. Biggar, Sir Oliver Mowat, 70. Swainson, ed., Oliver Mowat’s Ontario, 4. Joseph Boot, Gospel Culture: Living in God’s Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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Kingdom (Toronto: Ezra Press, 2016), 4. Oliver Mowat, Christianity and Some of its Evidences: An Address (1890) (Toronto: Williamson & Company, 1890), 9, 37. Mowat, Christianity, 31-32. Willem J. Ouweneel, Power in Service: An Introduction to Christian Political Thought (Jordan Station, ON.: Paideia Press, 2014), 15, 19-21. A. Margaret Evans, “Oliver Mowat: NineteenthCentury Ontario Liberal,” in Oliver Mowat’s Ontario, ed. Donald Swainson (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972), 36-37. Cited in Michael D. Clarke, ed., Canada: Portraits of Faith (Medicine Hat, AB.: Home School Legal Defence Association of Canada, 2001), 71. Cited in Charles Robert Webster Biggar, Sir Oliver Mowat, Q.C., LL.D., G.C.M.G., P.C: A Biographical Sketch, Vol. 2 (Toronto: Warwick Bro’s & Rutter Limited, 1905), 674, 691-693. Julia Skikavich and Donald Swainson, “Sir Oliver Mowat,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, last modified January 31, 2001, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sir-olivermowat/. See Fred Landon, “The Anti-Slavery Society of Canada,” The Journal of Negro History 4, no. 1 (1919). Mowat, Christianity and Some of its Evidences, 64-65. A. Margaret Evans, Sir Oliver Mowat (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 114-115. Cited in Evans, Sir Oliver Mowat, 115. Biggar, Sir Oliver Mowat, Vol. 2, 688, 696. Mowat, Christianity & Its Influence (Toronto: The Hunter, Rose Co., 1898), 5. Mowat, Christianity and Some of its Evidences, 31-37. See Cornelius Van Til, “Creation: The Education of Man - A Divinely Ordained Need,” in Foundations of Christian Education: Addressees to Christian Teachers, ed. Dennis E. Johnson (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1990). David Yates, “‘Bred in the Bone:’ Egerton Ryerson, Methodist Polity and Educational Administration, 1844-1850,” Canadian Society of Church History: Historical Papers 1996, 107, accessed February 1, 2017, http://historicalpapers.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/historicalpa-
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pers/article/viewFile/39431/35757#page=105. 25 Mowat, Christianity and Some of its Evidences, 11. 26 David Yates, “Bred in the Bone,” 105. 27 Yates, “Bred in the Bone,” 106. 28 Bruce Curtis, True Government by Choice Men? Inspection, Education and State Formation in Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 62. 29 Rousas J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 2002), 2, 7. 30 Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia, 7. 31 Biggar, Sir Oliver Mowat, Vol. 2, 675. 32 Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia, 59. 33 Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia, 59. 34 Biggar, Sir Oliver Mowat, Vol. 2, 473-476. 35 “Education Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. E.2,” Government of Ontario, accessed February 2, 2017, https://www.ontario.ca/laws/ statute/90e02#BK435. 36 Evans, Sir Oliver Mowat, 111-112. 37 Biggar, Sir Oliver Mowat, Vol. 2, 674. 38 Mowat, Christianity and Some of its Evidences, 82. 39 A. Margaret Evans, “Oliver Mowat and Ontario, 1872-1896: A Study in Political Success,” Ph.D. Thesis (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1967), 574. 40 Boot, Gospel Culture, 6. 41 Mowat, Christianity and Some of its Evidences, 84.
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