Bill C-9 and the Difference between Good Law and Bad

On Lady Day this year, which fell on the Wednesday before Palm Sunday, Bill C-9 passed its third hearing in the House of Commons.  The following day the first reading in the Senate was completed and it is now in its second reading before that august chamber of sober second thought.  This bill, entitled the “Combatting Hate Act”, was introduced by the governing Liberals last September.  It consists of a series of amendments to the Criminal Code.  These would create four new offences.  The first two have to do with preventing access to places of worship, cultural centres, educational institutions (including daycare centres), seniors’ residences, and cemeteries, by means of intimidation (the first offence) or obstruction (the second offence).  The third new offence is “hate crime” defined to include any existing offence when it is committed with the motivation of hatred.  Creating this “hate crime” offence includes increasing the penalties attached to the existing offences when committed for this motivation.   The final new offence involves the public display of specified symbols, including ones used by terrorists, Nazi symbols, and “a symbol that so nearly resembles” the aforementioned “that it is likely to be confused with that symbol”.  The order in which I have listed the offences here is that of the government’s initial announcement of the legislation, not the order in which they currently stand in the bill (1).

 

In addition to creating these new offences the bill adds a definition “hatred” into the Criminal Code.  Here is the definition from the text of the bill: “hatred means an emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation; (haine)”.  It also adds this clarifying note “For greater certainty, the communication of a statement does not incite or promote hatred, for the purposes of this section, [Section 319 of the Criminal Code pertaining to “hate propaganda”] solely because it discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends.”

 

The bill will also remove something from the Criminal Code.  This is mentioned alongside the four new offences in the summary at the beginning of the bill, indeed, it is the second item in the summary: “repeal the defence based on the expression of opinions on religious subjects or texts in relation to the offences of wilful promotion of hatred or antisemitism”.  What this will repeal is subsection 3 (b) of Section 319 of the Criminal Code as it currently stands.  This reads “3 No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2)… (b) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text”.  The repeal of this subsection, it was reported last fall, was added to this bill in order to obtain the support of the Lower Canadian separatists who made it a condition of their support.

 

Most of the discussion of this bill – the popular discussion, I mean, not the official discussion in the House and Senate – has centred around this last matter, the removal of the good faith religious defence.  The entire bill is rotten to the core, in my opinion, and so is the entire section of the Criminal Code (318-319) which it seeks to amend. 

 

Consider the proposal to create a “hate crime” offence consisting of other offences committed with hatred as their motivation.   If somebody shoots you in the head, will you be deader if he shot you because of the colour of your skin than if he shot you because you were impeding his attempt to rob your house?  Or, if he hits your foot instead of your head, will it be less likely to turn gangrenous and have to be amputated?  Suppose instead of shooting you he punches you in the nose and kicks you in the groin.  Will this hurt any less if he does so because he is high on meth than if he does so because he doesn’t like your religion?  If these questions are absurd then so is the idea that a law prescribing higher penalties to the same crime when committed for reasons having to do with hate could be just. 

 

Someone might counter that the law recognizes different grades of homicide.  For a homicide to be classified as murder the murderer must have intended either to kill the victim or to do something criminal that would make the victim’s death a likely outcome.  (2) To be classified as first degree murder either the murder or some other felony in the context of which the murder took place has to have been planned in advance in cold blood. (3)  A homicide that does not meet the requirements to be classified as murder but is still culpable under law - if done out of the necessity of self-defence it is not so culpable, at least by the letter of the law if not by how morons in His Majesty’s constabulary and on His Majesty’s benches interpret it (4) - is classified as manslaughter (unless it falls under the category of infanticide).  Homicide committed in the heat of passion is the primary example of culpable manslaughter. (5) 

 

These differences, however, are more substantial than mere differences in motivation, they are differences in the very nature of the crime.  In the case of the proposed “hate crime” offence, the motivation is only the difference.  This is because it is the motivation of “hate” and not the criminal act per se that the bill seeks to punish.  This ought to be obvious from the fact that every single act that will fall under the classification of “hate crime” if Bill C-9 passes the Senate and receives royal assent is already against the law.  That this is the case is spelled out in the very wording of the bill.  Therefore, it can only be the motivation that the bill seeks to punish. 

 

A far more honest version of Bill C-9 would simply state that it is creating a new offence, punishable under the Criminal Code, entitled “hate.”  The Liberals would not likely have drafted a bill worded this way, however, because it would have stood far less of a chance of passing the House, and little to no chance of surviving a court challenge if it made it into law.  A bill that proposed directly criminalizing “hate” itself, without attaching it to some act or another, would be a bill that proposes criminalizing something people think and feel.  This would be open intrusion into what has long been regarded as beyond the legitimate sphere of government authority.

 

By “long”, I do not mean merely going back to 1982 when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was passed, or even back to the formulation of classical liberal theory in the eighteenth century.  When Queen Elizabeth I acceded the throne in 1558, the people of her realm were divided in religious opinion.  Some were opposed to the reforms introduced in the brief reign of her brother Edward VI or even those moderate reforms her father Henry VIII had allowed and favoured the reconciliation with Rome during the reign of her sister Mary. Others were the exact opposite of this and felt the Henrician and Edwardian reforms had not gone far enough and that every last vestige of the pre-Reformation tradition needed to be expunged from the Church. Most fell somewhere in between.  Elizabeth restored the Henrician and Edwardian reforms, in a few instances moderating them somewhat, rarely going further, and required of all her subjects external conformity to the Church of England.  While it is unlikely to win her any accolades as an advocate of freedom of conscience from an age like ours, drunk on liberalism and its doctrine of separation of church and state, Elizabeth declared “I have no desire to make windows into men's souls.”  With both papists and Puritans threatening the security of the realm with their plots against her, she defended her authority to regulate the externals of the Church and require conformity to it, while denying to Parliament as much as to herself the right to dictate what her subjects privately believed and how they interpreted the Prayer Book and Articles.

 

A bill that proposed criminalizing “hate”, something that people think and feel, would do the very thing that Elizabeth I said she had no desire to do, open a window into men’s souls.  While volumes could be written about how Modern democratic liberalism has made government more intrusive rather than less intrusive than it was in Christian civilization prior to the onset of the Modern Age, that is something to be explored at length at another time.  Our point here is different.  The governing Liberals, by not drafting such a bill, and by introducing C-9 in the way they did with a lot of fluff about how it was carefully worded to avoid violating the Charter, demonstrated that they recognize that a bill that proposed to directly criminalize what people think or feel would intrude into an area beyond where government can legitimately govern.  What they either are not aware of or are pretending not to be aware of – and this lack of awareness predates the Charter, all the way back to when the Liberals added Sections 318-319 to the Criminal Code in 1970 – is that indirectly criminalizing what people think and feel is no better than directly criminalizing it.

 

All “hate” laws are fundamentally bad laws because they all try to do indirectly what would be instantly recognizable as a tyrannical or totalitarian move if it were done directly

 

Defenders of “hate” laws, particularly those that would limit what someone can say in public, try to ward off criticism by saying that all these laws do is prohibit threatening and urging violence against protected groups.  If this were the case, such laws would still be bad laws because they are not needed due to their redundancy. Incitement has been a crime for a very long time – it did not begin as a statutory offence, that is to say one written into law by an act of legislation, but as a Common Law offence.  Incitement is the act of encouraging others to commit a crime.  It is itself a criminal act because it involves the person who does the incitement in the guilt of the person who commits the criminal act that has been incited.  The fact that it is a crime is a limit on speech, but not a limit due to the thought or feeling expressed in the speech, but rather due to its nature as an act, as explained in the previous sentence.  For speech to be incitement it must take the form “Do X to Y”.

 

Either “hate speech” legislation prohibits only speech that takes the form “Do X to Y” or it prohibits speech that does not take this form.  If it only prohibits speech that takes the form “Do X to Y”, it is redundant because that was already covered by the law against incitement.  On top of its redundancy, it adds to the law against criminal incitement by saying that such and such groups deserve more protection against criminal incitement than others, in order to make it easier for law enforcement to “get” such and such offenders.  Neither of these things, providing special protection for certain groups nor trying to “get” someone, is characteristic of good law, it is rather a red flag that the law in question is bad. 

 

If, on the other hand, the “hate speech” legislation goes beyond “Do X to Y” then it is limiting speech due to something other than it being an act of incitement.  It is limiting speech due to its content, due to its expression of what the speaker thinks or feels.  It is the government intruding where it has no business to intrude, trying to open up “windows into the souls of men.”

 

The history of “hate” legislation in Canada shows that it has been bad in both of these ways at the same time.

That the original “hate propaganda” act that put Sections 318-319 into the Criminal Code in 1970 was intended to “get” certain people is evident from the fact that when, due to defendants under these sections being entitled to the protections all defendants are entitled to under criminal law (right to a trial, right to a defense, right to the presumption of innocence until guilt is established beyond a reasonable doubt), it turned out that it was not so easy to “get” those people after all, the government was immediately lobbied to find a way around this, which it did by including Section 13 in the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977.  The Canadian Human Rights Act is civil, not criminal, legislation and so those accused under it do not have the rights to which criminal defendants are entitled.  Section 13 was hardly limited to speech that takes the form “Do X to Y”, it was so broadly worded – speech that is “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” - that you could drive a convoy of trucks driving side by each through it.  The entire Canadian Human Rights Act, obiter dictum, is bad law, passed like its UK equivalent the Race Relations Act, in imitation of a bad Act in the United States.  For decades complaints made under Section 13 had a 100% conviction rate, which is a huge indication that the law is not just bad but horridly so.  Eventually, when the spotlight was turned on Section 13 in the first decade of this millennium, public opinion turned against it in Canada and in 2012, a private members bill to repeal Section 13 which had been introduced by Brian Storseth, then MP for Westlock-St. Paul, passed third reading in the House, receiving royal assent in 2013, and coming into effect in 2014. 

 

That the people that both Sections 318-319 and Section 13 were originally intended to “get” were people generally reviled in Canadian society does not make these laws any better.  Indeed, this is the way bad laws of this sort work.  They start by going after people who, because of the general revulsion against them, have few defenders, and then, when these have all been “gotten” move on to others.  Although the Rev. Martin Niemöller’s famous poem starting with “First they came for the Communists” was talking about the actions of a regime rather than the cumulative mission creep of a piece of legislation, it illustrates the process quite well.  That those the Canadian “hate” laws were initially intended to “get” were those who continue to identify with the ideology of the regime that did the “coming for” in Niemöller’s poem does not alter the point.  This ideology was one of two ideologies held by parties that established remarkably similar totalitarian terror-states that murdered a lot of people in the twentieth century.  This ideology was short-lived, it basically died with its regime in 1945, whereas the other ideology seized power earlier (Russia, 1917), in more countries (at its peak it controlled roughly a third of the world), lasted longer (some countries still officially claim the ideology today), and killed more people (over 100 million).  Yet the second category of “hate” symbols to be banned under C-9 consists entirely of symbols of this dead ideology, which very few people would display in public in Canada at this point in time, but not the symbols of the other ideology which plenty of people, especially idiots in academia (faculty and students alike) are fond of displaying.  No, my point is not that Bill C-9 would be improved if the hammer and sickle were banned alongside the swastika.

 

There are two reasons the swastika and the SS symbol are specified to be banned by C-9 and the hammer and sickle, red star, and raised fist are not.  The first is that the ban is designed to “get” an extremely small number of people.  The second is that it is designed to provide special protection to the adherents of one particular religion in Canada, Judaism.  There is already a subsection of Section 319 of the Criminal Code that explicitly provides special protection to the adherents of Judaism. (6)  This subsection, which was smuggled in by the Liberals under their previous leader in a budget bill four years ago, deserves examination here because it demonstrates that speech of the “Do X to Y” form is hardly what “hate” legislation is intended to combat.

 

The special protection that subsection 2.1 provides to adherents of Judaism is protection of their feelings. This is because hurt feelings is the only way the speech prohibited by subsection 2.1 could possibly hurt them.  The speech prohibited does not take the form “Do X to Y”.  It takes the forms “I approve of Event A”, “Event A happened differently than what we have been told” and “Event A wasn’t as important as it is made out to be.”  Only the first of these could be reasonably considered to be an expression of hatred.  Speech of the second and third forms ought never to be banned, it is a crime against conscience, reason, and common sense to ban it and a violation of the fundamental freedoms of His Majesty’s subjects, even in the watered down wording of section 2 of the Charter, to so ban it.  (7)

 

Organizations purporting to speak for Judaism – generally self-appointed activists rather than the religion’s spiritual teachers and leaders - had been lobbying for “hate” legislation since long before the first “hate” bill was passed in 1970.  This is not a criticism of such organizations, per se.  Any group of His Majesty’s subjects has the right to petition His Majesty’s government for what they feel is in their own best interest.  They do not, however, have the right to have their petition granted at the expense of the general good of the realm.  It is the duty of His Majesty’s government to see to it that the general good is protected, even if it means denying the petition of the lobbying group.  This duty that has been sorely neglected, when it comes to “hate” laws, when the Liberals have formed His Majesty’s government in Ottawa, at least since the first Trudeau premiership.  Yes, it is a duty of His Majesty’s government, because the general good that is compromised by “hate” legislation is the good of freedom of conscience, of freedom from having the government try to open “windows into men’s souls” a good that protects us all.

 

Now, someone might object that the religious defence that Bill C-9 will remove from Section 319, also provides special protection to specific groups.  Unlike the case of the second class of symbols to be banned under C-9, however, the defence to be removed is written in general terms.  See the text of the defence quoted in the third paragraph of this essay.  Subsection 3 (b) was included in Section 319 to prevent a section intended to prevent people from being made the targets of propaganda because of their religion from itself becoming a weapon with which to target religion.   The assurances of government ministers, such as Marc Miller, that the removal of this defence will not mean that religions will be so targeted ring very false and are not to be trusted.  In the context of advocating this bill, he declared three Biblical passages, two from the Old Testament and one from the New to contain “clear hatred”. That anyone quoting these passages in public might find himself to be charged is hardly an unlikely outcome of this bill. (8)

 

To put the matter in more general terms, the proposed removal of a legal defence should sound warning alarms.  A fundamental principle of our justice system – not merely that of Canada, not merely that of the Commonwealth, but of the civilization formerly known as Christendom, with roots in ancient Roman Law and in the Scriptures common to Christianity and Judaism (9) – is that it is better to leave the guilty unpunished than to unjustly punish the innocent.  Good laws, rarely if ever, make it easier to prosecute.  This is the reverse side of the coin to the bad laws are written to “get” people principle that we have already discussed.

 

Defenders of the removal of the defence argue that nobody should be allowed to use religion as a defence for urging violence.  As we have seen, those who drafted this defence, did so with regards to speech that was not limited to the “Do X to Y” form.  There is, however, a simple solution to this which would give the advocates of C-9 what they claim they want without creating a cudgel against religion.  That is to eliminate Sections 318-319 entirely.  

 

This should have been done long ago.  There is nothing in Sections 318-319 worth preserving.   There is only one thing under the absurd category of “hate speech” or “hate propaganda” that ought to be against the law.  That is criminal incitement, the urging of violence or other criminal activity in the “Do X to Y” form.  This was against the law before Sections 318-319 were entered into the Criminal Code.  It will still be against the law if those Sections are removed.  Moreover, it will only be against the law in a way that protects everyone, without trying to “get” anyone and without pandering to those who think they deserve special protection.  There will be no religious exception, both because this will die with Sections 318-319 and because it won’t be needed.  The basic law against criminal incitement cannot be weaponized against religion because unlike “hate” laws which are designed to be weaponized against certain people on behalf of other people, it is there to keep the king’s peace.  There is little, if anything, that could be regarded as good law, which does not exist mainly if not solely for this purpose.

 

 (1)   In the text of the bill the prohibition of symbols is the first offence, hate crime is the second, intimidation the third, and obstruction the fourth.

(2)   Criminal Code of Canada, Section 229.

(3)   Criminal Code of Canada, Section 231.

(4)   Criminal Code of Canada, Section 34.

(5)  Criminal Code of Canada, Section 232.

(6)  Criminal Code of Canada, Section 319, (2.1).

(7)   The two most notorious “hate” trials in Canadian history, both of which took place in my youth during the Mulroney premiership, were primarily about speech of this “Event A happened differently than we have been told” form.  One individual, the one charged under section 319 of the Criminal Codes, was also charged with speech in the form “Y is guilty of Z”.  None of the speech was in the form “Do X to Y”, and in the course of the trials, the other individual, who was charged under a different law that the Supreme Court of Canada threw out on appeal, himself became the target of criminal violence.  I thought at the time, and I think so still, that these trials were an utter disgrace and the type of thing better suited to the sort of regime that these men were accused, with varying degrees of accuracy, of supporting, than to a Realm of His (Her at the time) Majesty’s Commonwealth.  In February 2001, Esquire published an article by Jewish, liberal, literary journalist, war correspondent, and author John Sack in which he discussed a meeting he had attended of those who hold the “Event A happened differently than we have been told” perspective where he had met the second mentioned of these defendants.  To this day it is my go to reference whenever some jackass takes exception to my obviously correct position that if the spirit of the Third Reich lives on today it is more in the “liberals” (would J. S. Mill recognize them as such?) who pass laws against “Holocaust Denial” than in those they persecute.

(8)   Charges of this sort were made against Hugh Owens in 1997.  During the week which has subsequently dropped the lesser of the two sins in its title and retained the worse (and expanded to a month, then a season), he took out an advertisement with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix with two male stick figures holding hands inside the red circle with a slash symbol.  It also contained references to a number of Bible verses on the subject.  The complaint, which was made under the provincial human rights code, was initially upheld, but in 2006 overturned by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal.  More recently (2013) the Supreme Court of Canada overturned Bill Whatcott’s successful appeal to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal against his conviction by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal in a somewhat similar case.  In the unanimous ruling, the Court utilized the earlier court definition of hatred from R v Taylor.  Although the Supreme Court said that “hatred” needs to be understood as "extreme manifestations of the emotion described by the words 'detestation' and 'vilification'" the fact that they ruled that Whatcott’s flyer distribution constituted such shows how empty this description really is.  That this is the basis of the definition of “hatred” to be added to the Criminal Code by C-9 is not a good sign.  An “extreme manifestation” of “detestation”, to any sane person, would consist of violent actions rather than words.  “Vilification” is an act not an emotion and it is already covered by defamation law, there is no need to include it under “hate.”  The use of the word “emotion” is revealing (among other things it reveals how much a better sort of justice is needed for the highest bench of His Majesty’s court).  It is not the place of government to tell people what to think or feel.

(9)   Gen. 18:16-33.

 

Christian Nationalism?

The subject of “Christian Nationalism” has been much discussed as of late.  A friend and classmate from my theological studies in Otterburne in the 1990s has been decrying it all over social media.  His assessment of it relies upon the acceptance of a number of axioms that progressives regard as self-evident but which I correctly consider to be bunkum.  Needless to say I do not share his perspective.  My rejection of my friend’s fatally flawed opposition to Christian Nationalism should not be taken as an endorsement of it.  Quite the contrary.  Recently, the administrator of an Anglican social media forum opened a discussion thread on the subject.  This essay is for the most part an expansion of my response.

 

To answer the question of whether or not nationalism can be Christian in any real, orthodox, sense, we need to first determine what nationalism is.  The best way that I know to do this, is by distinguishing nationalism from something much older than nationalism with which it is often confused.  That something is patriotism. 

 

Patriotism belongs to the category of natural affections.  Think of the love that under ordinary circumstances a child feels for his parents and a parent feels for a child.  These are natural affections, loves that unless something happens to impede them, everyone naturally develops.  The love of home, which the late Sir Roger Scruton called oikophilia, is another such natural affection and one that is very similar to patriotism.  Patriotism derives its name from the Greek word πατρίς (πάτρα in some dialects, such as Homeric Ionic) and its Latin cognate patria, both of which mean “native land” or more literally, since they are themselves derived from the word for father, “fatherland.”  Patriotism is the affection, attachment, and love that one feels for one’s homeland, one’s country, as naturally as one loves one’s parents and offspring.

 

Patriotism, like all natural affections, has been regarded as good and virtuous from time immemorial.  To illustrate, consider the thirtieth verse of the first book of Homer’s epic Iliad which is the verse in which the word πάτρα appears for the first time in Homer.  This appears in the portion of the poem where Homer is providing the background story to the wrath of Achilles which brought all sorts of nastiness upon the Greeks from his breech with Agamemnon until their reconciliation after the death of Patrocles at the hands of Hector which is the main theme of the epic.  Chryses, the priest of Apollo, has come to the Greek encampment to buy the freedom of his daughter whom Agamemnon holds as a war prize.  His graceful address and his offer of an extremely generous ransom has won over all the other Greeks but infuriated Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and Argos and general leader of the Greek expedition against Troy.  Agamemnon responds with an extremely rude and ill-tempered speech in which he orders Chryses away from the encampment and the ships, warning him that if he catches him there again the symbols of his priestly office will not protect him.  Then, to add insult to injury, he adds in verses twenty-nine and thirty the following:

 

τὴν δ᾽ ἐγὼ οὐ λύσω: πρίν μιν καὶ γῆρας ἔπεισιν

ἡμετέρῳ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ ἐν Ἄργεϊ τηλόθι πάτρης

 

This means “but your (daughter) I will not release, until old age finds her also, in our house in Argos far from her fatherland.”  The insult extends into the next verse where it gets much cruder and Agamemnon’s speech into the verse after that but we have arrived at the point. 

 

The words τηλόθι πάτρης, “far from her fatherland” are intended as a particularly cruel twist of the knife here.  Obviously, Agamemnon was going out of his way to say that he will do the exact opposite of what Chryses had requested, but in stressing the distance of his palace from the girl’s homeland he was also saying that he will inflict upon her what he and all the Greeks were themselves suffering at that point in time.  The Iliad is set in the last year of the ten year siege of Troy.  The Greeks had been τηλόθι πάτρης themselves for a long time and were feeling the effects of it, as Agamemnon’s speech as a whole and the bitter strife that would soon thereafter divide him from Achilles demonstrate.

 

Homer’s ability to communicate this in this way rests upon the common understanding between him, his hearers, and his readers down through the generations, that one’s πάτρα is to be loved and cherished and that to be far from it is misery.  

 

So again, patriotism is a natural affection, a feeling of love akin to love for one’s family and home.  This has many implications.  One, is that patriotism has nothing to do with how you think your country compares to other countries.  Patriotism may incline you towards thinking that your country is the best in the world but it is never based on thinking this.  The patriot loves his country because she is his and not because he thinks her to be better than such and such other countries.  Patriotism has nothing to do with whether or not one’s country is “great.”  While children often go through a “my dad can beat up your dad” phase they ordinarily grow out of it.  Someone who persists in talking this way into adulthood does not demonstrate a healthy filial affection but rather a case of arrested development.  The same applies to love of country.

 

From this implication, we can infer further that patriotism is not naturally bellicose.  Since love of country, like love of family and home is natural to humanity, and since it is not based on concepts like “greatness” that measure one’s country against others, it is not threatened by other people loving their other countries nor does it impel one to threaten others.  Patriotism is a great motivation to fight defensively in war, that is to protect one’s country, but it is no motivation to wage aggressive war against others.

 

Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century lexicographer, famously said “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” (1)  James Boswell, his biographer, from whom we have the account of this and Dr. Johnson’s other table-talk, immediately after recording it explained “But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.” (2)  The conversation took place in 1775 in the midst of the controversy that would lead to the American Declaration of Independence the following year.  The year previous, Dr. Johnson had expressed his thoughts on the American rebels-to-be and their gripes in a pamphlet entitled The Patriot.  There is little doubt as to who the scoundrels were to whom Dr. Johnson referred.

 

Although Boswell put it in terms of real versus pretend, patriotism, and this was not a wrong way of describing it, from the standpoint of hindsight it could be said that what had occurred was the emergence of a new thing which was not patriotism as we have described it but which had not yet been given a name of its own and so for a time it shared the name of the age old love of country.   Did Dr. Johnson himself see that there were now two things sharing one name?  In his Dictionary he defined patriotism as “Love of one’s country; zeal for one’s country.”  Most likely he meant this as a single definition, certainly in The Patriot he spoke in Boswell’s terms of real versus pretend, but it is interesting that the two phrases from his definition could be taken as defining the two different “patriotisms” of the time.  Zeal is not the same thing as love.

 

The American Revolution was a war cast from the mold of Lucifer’s rebellion against God.  So was its antecedent, the Puritan rebellion against Charles I, but Crowell et al., had wrapped themselves in the hypocritical piety of their legalistic Calvinism.  The propagandists of the American Revolution such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine (“the infidel Paine”) whose minds were steeped in the skepticism and deism of eighteenth century philosophy had no such recourse and so justified their actions by appealing to the ideals of “Enlightenment” liberalism, a philosophy born out of explicit rejection of the Christian faith of the civilization of the age that preceded the Modern.  Since such justifications had little popular appeal in a day in which the Age’s retreat from Christianity was still in its early years – past infancy, not quite in adolescence yet – their cloak when taking their ideals public was patriotism.  It was not the age-old natural affection patriotism but the new thing that had not yet come into its name but was still borrowing the name of the old patriotism and so rightly decried as a pretender by Dr. Johnson and Boswell.  The term that would become its name was around - Johann Gottfried von Herder had used it in a treatise in 1772 – but had not yet become attached to the thing.  In the French Revolution, born out of the same false ideals as the American and in which the bloody fruit of those ideals was much more naked, opening the eyes of Dr. Johnson’s friend Edmund Burke to the nature of these “armed doctrines”, the name and the thing would find each other.  That name is nationalism.

 

The name nationalism is obviously derived from the word nation.  The word nation comes ultimately from the Latin verb nascor “be born” through its third principal part natus sum, “have been born” (3).  Natio, the noun derived from this verb could mean the act of birth but it also mean a tribe, kin group, or people united by a common birth or line of descent.  It carried this second meaning but not the first into Modern tongues like English where it became nation.  Here we see an indication of a divergence from patriotism.  Patriotism is love directed towards one’s country – a place.  Nationalism is – something, we will consider what momentarily – directed towards one’s people group.

 

This difference should not be exaggerated. The closest natural affection to patriotism is the love of home.  This too is a love of place.  Home, however, is the place where your family is.  Love of family and love of home cannot be separated and similarly patriotism is not a love of the land considered abstractly apart from the people and institutions and way of life. 

 

That having been said, the history of nationalism shows that this difference is important.  If patriotism is the love of home writ large, as in Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” account of it, nationalism is tribalism writ large.  While there is something to be said for the group loyalty of tribalism, that aspects of it need to be suppressed for there to be the rule of law and order necessary for civilization is the fundamental message of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.  It is also the reason for various provisions of the Mosaic Law, most obviously the refuge cities.  This is good reason to be wary of something that is basically tribalism but with the tribe the size of a Modern nation.

 

The history of nationalism demonstrates that it does not belong to the same class or category, natural affections, as patriotism.  From the beginning nationalism has been characterized by a belligerence towards others.  In the American Revolution, when it was still going under the name it borrowed from true patriotism, the belligerence was directed towards the larger society, the British Empire, of which it had been a part.  In the French Revolution, the violence initially directed against the society’s own traditional institutions and upper classes quickly turned on anyone suspected of disloyalty to the Revolution and its leaders and as this “Reign of Terror” started, Revolutionary France declared war on its neighbours who had militarized their borders in an effort to contain the revolution.  While the Reign of Terror ended with the arrest of Robespierre and the dawn of the Thermidor Reaction in July 1794 neither the wars nor the nationalism impelling them ceased with it and a general who had won his initial fame in those wars would before the eighteenth century ended launch the first of the serious of conquests which along with his simultaneous rise to power in the civil government would twice make him Emperor of France.  Among Napoleon’s generals, at least according to a play from the 1830s, (4) was a man named Nicolas Chauvin who refused to give up Napoleon’s imperial cause even after it was clearly over and Napoleon dead, and whose name became synonymous with an imperialistic nationalism that sees other peoples as existing only to be crushed, conquered and subdued by one’s own (although from the second wave of feminism in the middle of the twentieth century it has come to be more commonly used for males with enough self-respect not to buy into feminism’s lies but not enough sense to be subtle about it).  

 

A century after Napoleon’s death an Austrian-born German nationalist would become the leader of a small German socialist party to whose name he would attach the German word for nationalist.  As leader of the National Socialists, he began his rise to power by exploiting Germany’s grievances over the loss of World War I and promised to restore Germany to her glory by building a Reich that would last a thousand years.  Shortly after having won the office of Chancellor in 1933, he secured himself in that office by declaring a state of emergency after an arson in the Reichstag (German parliament building) and using the emergency powers this granted him to transform his office into that of a dictator and Germany into a single-party totalitarian state that resembled nothing so much as the Soviet Union which the Bolsheviks had created in Russia.  Hitler remilitarized Germany then began seizing territory such as his country of birth, Austria, which had historically been German-speaking but never part of the Germany that Otto von Bismarck had forged under the Prussian House of Hohenzollern (at the time she was the centre of her own empire under the Hapsburgs), by bullying and threats and exploiting the fact that the other powers were desperate to avoid the outbreak of a second war.  Then, having made a pact with the Soviet Union to divide Poland between themselves, he invaded that country, launching World War II in which he, like Napoleon before him, conquered most of Europe, before repeating Napoleon’s fatal mistake of trying to seize Russia.

 

Hitler’s nationalism was particularly belligerent against other peoples because it was wed to his belief that the races of humanity were locked into a Darwinian struggle for existence that was a zero-sum game (5) in which there could be only one winner.  While this was unique to National Socialism, in its three centuries nationalism in general has consistently demonstrated a hostile attitude towards other nations that is far removed from the irenic love of country that is true patriotism.  One final detail about Hitler deserves mention here.  On 19 March, 1945 as the Red Army was rapidly approaching Berlin while the American commander disgracefully held back the Western Allies, a little over a month and one week before he and his bride ended their lives in his bunker, Hitler issued the “Destructive Measures on Reich Territory” decree, ordering the destruction of the civil infrastructure of Germany.   Fortunately for the Germans, Albert Speer made sure this insane “Nero Decree” was not carried out.  Hitler had ordered the Germans to reduce their own country to the stone age in order to spite the Russians, but by this point in time he was convinced that the Russians had won the Darwinian struggle and that the Germans, having failed him, had lost and were not worthy to survive.  A nationalist could come to this horrid conclusion.  A patriot never could.

This is because patriotism has nothing to do with how one’s country and her people compare to other countries and other people.  It is a love that comes naturally.  Nationalism is concerned with how big and strong and powerful and great its country is and if its country fails the nationalist can easily turn on it as Hitler turned on Germany at the end.  Nationalism is not a love, a natural affection at all.  It is an ideology, a zealous commitment to the idea of one’s country as the greatest and best.  The nationalist will demand that his country be made great again.  Love, however, “envieth not…vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” (6) The patriot loves his country as she is and if he is a Christian patriot will be far more concerned with his country’s goodness than her greatness.

 

Nationalism then is an artificial substitute for the natural love of country that is patriotism, a substitute that could only have been produced in the Modern Age.  This is because it is the product of the Modern idea of democracy.  The emphasis in the previous sentence is on the word Modern.  Modern democracy is not the same thing as the democracy of ancient Athens.   Nor is it the democracy that is an aspect or element of the traditional institution of parliament that developed long before the Modern Age, although it has grafted itself onto that democracy and corrupted it.  Modern democracy is an idea that comes from Modern liberal philosophy, which philosophy was thought up by Modern men thinking Satan’s thoughts after him. 

 

We have already touched on this in discussing the American Revolution and the origins of nationalism.  Satan became Satan by rebelling against the Sovereign King of all His Creation, God.  He was so full of himself, so proud of his own beauty and other fine qualities – gifts God had given him – that he thought he ought to rule the universe instead of God.  Modern man looked around at Christendom, the Christian civilization into which he had been born, and thought that he could think up a better way of organizing things that would eliminate most or all of human suffering, and rebelled against the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of Christendom.  The semi-Pelagianism that had crept into the Western Church towards the end of the Middle Ages which the Reformation in its theological reforms sought to correct was perhaps the initial impetus for this kind of hubristic thinking, although the Calvinists, the most Augustinian of the Protestants at least in their own conceit, were the first of the Modern rebels.  Pelagianism was the early heresy that rejected Original Sin.  A firm grasp on Original Sin is a preventative for thinking that humanity can achieve its own salvation by political means.  In the Fall, man lost the Paradise in which he had been placed at his creation.  Paradise awaits man, redeemed by God through Jesus Christ, after the Second Coming.  In between, as we struggle against our own sinful tendencies, there will be no elimination of the suffering that is born out of our fallen sinfulness but which, having been borne by Christ Himself to the cross, is the path down which we are called to follow Him.  This does not mean that we are not to try to alleviate the suffering of others, to the contrary, just as He healed the sick and made the lame to walk and gave the blind their sight, so we are commanded to do good to others. (7)  It means that we are not to think that by doing so, much less by outsourcing this work to the government, we can eliminate suffering and create a Paradise in this life.

 

The Modern idea of democracy, again as distinct from the ancient idea of democracy and the democracy that developed historically as part of our traditional parliamentary system, comes directly from liberalism’s belief that it can create an earthly Paradise and that it is justified in following Satan’s example of rebellion in order to do so.   The constituted authorities, the king and the Church, should have eliminated human suffering and made a Paradise.  That they didn’t do so means they need to be torn down and replaced with government by the people in whom sovereignty will now be vested.  That is the idea of Modern democracy, although liberals rarely put it so starkly, and it is utterly Satanic. It is also the idea that had to be thought first, before that artificial inferior substitute for patriotism, nationalism, could arise.  The sovereign people of Modern democracy is the nation of nationalism.

 

Nationalism then, in its historic sense, belongs to the Modern Age’s revolt against Christianity and so can hardly be called Christian.  There is a question, of course, as to whether what those who call themselves Christian Nationalists today mean by nationalism is nationalism in its historic sense.  Just as the first nationalists called themselves patriots so there have been those who have used the word nationalism to mean something closer to patriotism.  From what I have seen of self-designated Christian Nationalists this is not the case with them although that doesn’t immediately translate into their nationalism being the historical type either.  They have taken up the label of nationalist in reaction against the post-World War II movement towards re-orienting everything to an international or global scale with which they associate the increased secularism of the era.

 

While I am in complete agreement with their opposition to secularism and also detest the general way in which the world has been re-organizing itself since World War II, I do think that the Christian Nationalists have overlooked a number of things in coming to their position.  Secularism, while it has gotten much worse in the post-World War II era, is not the product of that era.  The first secular country was the United States of America (8) and the second was the French Republic formed in the French Revolution.   Secularism was joined at birth to nationalism. 

 

Also overlooked is a fact pertaining to progressive liberalism’s aggressive push after World War II to dissolve national identities, or at least those of the civilization formerly known as Christendom, both by submerging them in larger identities and breaking them down through large scale immigration.   While this is on the surface obviously an overreaction to Hitler, on a deeper level, one of which the progressive liberals themselves are almost certainly not consciously aware, an attempt to fill a void created by Modern liberalism.

 

In Christendom – Christian civilization – allegiance was not directed inwards, towards the people as a group, but upwards, ultimately to God in Heaven, but along the way to the sovereign, the king, in the civil sphere, and to the Catholic – universal – Church in the religious sphere, which spheres while distinct, overlapped.   

 

The king in Christendom, whether he reigned over a single realm or a vast empire, was what he is in the New Testament – God’s minister, to whom Christians are commanded to submit and to honour (1 Pet. 2:13, 17) and for whom they are commanded to offer supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks (1 Tim. 2:1-3). (9)  As God’s minister, he represented in the civil sphere that was his realm, the universal government of the King of Kings, which is a much higher sense of representational government than that of representational democracy. 

 

The Church was called Catholic for a number of reasons, the one of which that is germane in this context being that she transcended the boundaries of realm, empire, and nation and was a universal institution that was one wherever she was found.  In every kingdom and empire, she had One Lord in the sense of a divine Master higher than any earthly authority.  No matter where she was she confessed One Faith in the words of the ancient Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  Anyone from any country anywhere in the world could join her through her One Baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  While this concept did not disappear in the sixteenth century Reformation at the beginning of the Modern Age, neither did it pass through that period unscathed, especially in external practice.  On both sides of the Reformation divide, other things came to took precedence over the aforementioned matters in which the unity and Catholicity of the Church are to be found. (10)  A tremendous blow was dealt to the external unity of the Church and in the separation that followed, between the followers of the papacy and the Protestants, between the Lutherans and the Reformed, and between all of the above and the myriad of smaller separatist groups, each communion developed an inward gaze in which its own identity and distinct doctrines were regarded, in practice at least, as more important than the One Lord, Faith, and Baptism.

 

Mercifully, the office and institution of king survived the Modern Age in several countries, including my own, and forces aligned against the Catholic Church will, as Christ has promised, never prevail.  The position of both king and Church was weakened from what it was in Christendom, however, by the spread of the now ubiquitous notion of popular sovereignty and the fracturing of the Church into denominationalism which both involved a re-orienting of the gaze away from that which is higher, upward, and beyond, internally towards self, albeit in these examples the self of the group rather than of the individual person, the inward focus on which was also developing at the same time, all of these in accordance with the general shift from the theocentric outlook of Christendom to the Modern anthropocentric one.  It is that which pulls us out of ourselves and directs us to that which is higher and beyond ourselves that civilizes us, however, and this general inward reorientation of outlook of the Modern Age, by weakening these upward influences has created a vacuum into which different types of civilization-threatening barbarism enter.  The extreme nationalism of the World War II era was one such barbarism.  After the war, progressive liberals, realizing the need for a higher allegiance but, being progressive liberals, unwilling to turn to God, king, and Church, attempted to create various artificial substitutes in international, regional, and even world-level associations, organizations, and quasi-governmental bodies, but the soulless, toxic, bureaucratism that accompanied these at every level proved this to be but another form of barbarism.

 

So-called Christian Nationalism is a response to this other type of barbarism.  Unfortunately, it is no solution because it is enmeshed itself in the Modern way of thinking that produced the problem.  This is evident, not merely in its embrace of nationalism, the Modern artificial substitute for natural patriotism.  It is also evident in the kind of Christianity that it weds to nationalism.  While not all Christian Nationalists are evangelicals the form of Christianity that went into making Christian Nationalism is evangelicalism, not as Dr. Luther and the Reformers used this word nor as it was historically used in the Church of England nor as it is used in Europe today, but evangelicalism in a distinctly North American sense of the word, which evangelicalism, for all that it has to commend itself, has a very unhealthy tendency to confuse Christianity with Americanism.  Americanism, however, is a variant of liberalism, the ideology that drives the Modern Age’s movement away from God and Christianity. 

 

Nationalism, we observed earlier, is tribalism writ large, and tribalism is very much an apt description of Christian Nationalism’s approach to the various social, moral, and cultural problems that have arisen in our countries due to the transformation of Christendom into secular, liberal, Western Civilization over the course of the Modern Age.  That approach is to treat these as battlegrounds in a power struggle between groups, with our group, Christians, on the one side and some other group or groups on the other side, and to regard the government as an instrument (and an instrument in battle is called a weapon) with which to defeat the other group.

 

Interestingly, this way of looking at things has certain things in common with the thinking of the progressive liberals who abhor Christian Nationalism.  Progressive liberals as well, and all the more so the more the progressive takes dominance over the liberal in their thinking, tend to see everything in terms of power struggles between groups.   For Christians, however, this way of looking at things ought to be anathema.  Eph. 6:12 tells us that our struggle in this world is not against other people, but against the spiritual powers of darkness in this world.  Moreover, in this the Christian Nationalist approach bears more than a passing resemblance to the error at the heart of all progressive thinking, the belief in a political salvation.  Indeed, I would say that the resemblance to progressive salvation-through-political-means is far deeper than whatever surface similarity there may be between the Christian Nationalist idea of the role of government and the classical Tory view, of necessity more reactionary than conservative in the current political climate, that in my view is the closest thing there is to a translation of orthodox Christianity into the language of civil politics.  Where Christian Nationalism and Toryism bear a superficial resemblance is that we both reject the liberal notion of the separation of Church and State.  This liberal idea, the root from which all forms of secularism sprang, began as an argument for limiting the powers of the State but inevitably became an argument for limiting the influence of the Church while exponentially expanding that of the State.  Classical Toryism rejected this idea as an assault on the order of Christendom in which the king and the Church had distinct roles, distinct tasks to do, distinct spheres in which to do those tasks, and distinct powers with which to do them.  The king was not the instrument of the Church, he was to do his job rather than the Church’s. The Church was not the instrument of the king, she was to do her job rather than the king’s.  If both did their jobs well, it would work for the good of the other, because ultimately their roles, tasks, spheres, and powers came from God and were complementary.  Christian Nationalism, by contrast, which, incorporates liberalism through the Americanism it blends with its Christianity, rejects liberalism’s separation of Church and State, not in favour of the old order but of one in which the State is the instrument of the Church.

 

This has further diminished the Christianity of a movement, the Christianity of which was already diminished by being blended with Americanism.  The attitude that is visibly on display in the movement looks a lot more like hubris than humility.  Apart from being the very opposite of Christ’s own example and what He enjoins upon His followers and apart from being utterly unappealing and ugly in itself, this is counterproductive if we regard one of the challenges that Modern liberal secularism has created to be the re-evangelism of our civilization.  Look back to the early centuries of the Church when, facing the hostility of both the culture of the pagan Roman Empire and of those Jews who did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah, the early Christians first set about the task of evangelizing the ancient world.  They did so, not by political activism and organization, but by imitating Christ’s example and obeying His command to take up their cross in humility and follow Him to the point of martyrdom.

 

In Canada as in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth Realms, I have said often in the last few years that we are fortunate to have as our hereditary Sovereign a man who chose to modify his coronation service so that being welcomed into Westminster Abbey with the words “Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings” he responded with “In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served but to serve.”  I have noted the huge contrast between this and the attitude of the egomaniacal narcissist around which the MAGA cult, which overlaps Christian Nationalism to a large degree, especially in the United States, is centred.  Last week, as Western Christians celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and as Eastern Christians on the Julian calendar entered their Holy Week in preparation for the celebration of the Resurrection, and as the aforementioned Yankee narcissist thought it appropriate to mark the occasion with a threat to destroy an entire civilization in war, (11) many infected with the Christian Nationalism we have been discussing attacked His Majesty in a most unchristian manner.  As the king himself was observing the Sacred Triduum from the Maundy Thursday service at St. Asaph Cathedral in Wales to the celebration of Easter in the traditional Matins service at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, these “Christian” Nationalists attacked him for not recording a video Easter message.   The words “not recording a video” are the operative words here.  He did issue an Easter greeting on the social media platform formerly known as twitter.  He wished Christians around the Commonwealth a “Happy Easter” and gave the simple but powerful message “He is risen!”

 

The controversy was entirely manufactured on the part of His Majesty’s “Christian” critics. Although he recorded a video for Easter last year, it has not become an established royal tradition for the monarch to do so as it has to record one for Christmas.  The king’s critics complained that he had sent a message to Muslims wishing them a happy Ramadan and accused him of everything from abandoning his role as Defender of the Faith to being a crypto-Muslim.  Anybody who took the time to compare – in good faith, mind you – what the king said to his Muslim subjects and what he said at Easter this year and last, would recognize that the fundamental difference between a greeting addressed to Muslims and a Christian message such as “The abiding message of Easter is that God so loved the world — the whole world — that He sent His Son to live among us to show us how to love one another, and to lay down His own life for others in a love that proved stronger than death” from last year’s video or this year’s more simple “He is risen” shows the utter stupidity of these accusations and conspiracy theories.

 

Through all this His Majesty has shown a far better understanding of how a Christian king ought to act towards his subjects of another religion than how these “Christians” have shown of the honour and submission Christianity requires of us towards our temporal king regardless of his personal religion.  The title “Defender of the Faith” was originally conferred on the king for writing a treatise defending the seven sacraments against the criticisms of Dr. Luther in his Babylonian Captivity.  Within the same reign, it was redefined to mean one who defended the Church in his realm against foreign claims of jurisdiction, including that of the foreign power that had bestowed the title in the first place.  Over the course of the century that followed it came to include the defence of the reforms made to that Church in subsequent reigns.  Today, His Majesty’s critics think that it should be given a tribalistic interpretation that has little if any connection to its historical development and which is fundamentally at odds with the basic nature and duty of the office of king, to reign over his realm from a position above partisanship representing law and justice for all.  Whatever corrections from the standpoint of orthodox theology, His Majesty’s views of the relationship between Christianity and other religions might be better off for, they are far preferable to those of the critics who interpret any remarks about Islam that are not bellicose and condemnatory as “promotion” or “preference.” (12)

While not all of these critics would identify as Christian Nationalists they are generally people who have allowed the Christian Nationalist perspective to influence their thinking just as Christian Nationalism has allowed the fundamentally anti-Christian Modern ideologies that it has embraced to warp its version of Christianity.  Followers of Christ should avoid such a movement.  We should love our countries as patriots, honour, pray for, and submit to our earthly king if we are fortunate enough to have one as Scripture enjoins, place the orthodox faith of the Creeds of the early centuries when the Church was undivided ahead of sectarian emphases on lesser matters that pit Christian against Christian and Christians against everyone else in “struggles against flesh and blood”, and take up our cross and follow our Lord’s example of humility rather than hubris.

 

(1)  It is usually misquoted with the definite rather than indefinite article.

(2)   James Boswell, Life of Johnson, April 7, 1775.

(3)   This is a deponent verb – it doesn’t have the regular active voice forms, and has only three principal parts, the third being what would be the fourth in a regular verb (the perfect passive participle).

(4)   Charles-Theodore and Jean-Hippolyte Cogniard, The Tricolour Cockade, 1831.  Whether Chauvin existed or was a fiction created by the Cogniards is a matter of dispute.

(5)   In game theory a zero-sum game is one in which the gains of the one player equally match the losses of the other player so that together they cancel each other out to produce the net sum of zero.

(6)   1 Cor. 13:4.

(7)   Compare the works which Isaiah prophesied that Christ would do Is. 61:1-3 with those for which Christ said He would reward His sheep in Matt. 25:34-40.

(8)   Progressive liberals in my country, Canada, both amuse and disgust me when they say foolish things about secularism distinguishing us from the United States.  Secularism is the American tradition, not ours.

(9)   These instructions from SS Peter and Paul, were not written to Christians living under a Christian king, the king in question was the Roman Caesar and specifically Nero whose reign encompassed the period in which the Apostles were writing. 

(10)                       On the one side, they doubled down on their insistence that the papacy was given universal jurisdiction over the Church that had previously played a role in dividing the Eastern Church from the Western Church.  By declaring the Church to be absent where the jurisdiction of the pope is not acknowledged, they elevated the papacy above the One Lord, Faith, and Baptism.  On the other side, the doctrines that would later be somewhat inaccurately summarized as the Five Solas, were similarly elevated.

(11)                       This man, who regained his office as head of the New Rome and its beastly empire in a campaign that saw him take a gunshot to the head, drop to the ground as if it had taken him out, then, since it had only grazed his ear, bounce back up fighting (Rev. 13:3), has since outdone this by posting a blasphemous picture of himself as if he were Jesus on the Eastern Pascha (Easter) of the Julian calendar.  This was done in the midst of a controversy between himself and the current Roman Patriarch over the pope’s opposition to his war in Iran.

(12)                       His Majesty’s critics have circulated a meme quoting a speech he gave as Prince of Wales in 1993.  The meme is rather mendacious as it implies the words are recent.  The quotation, “More than this, Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost” should be read in the context of the entire speech entitled “Islam and the West”.  In that context, it is about the pre-Modern holistic – he used the word “integrated” - view of Creation.  In the same speech, and shortly thereafter, he said “At the core of Christianity, there still lies an integral view of the sanctity of the world, and a clear sense of the trusteeship and responsibility given to us for our natural surroundings.”  Note how he said the West “gradually lost this integrated vision of the world”.  It was “with Copernicus and Descartes and the coming of the scientific revolution”, in other words, the very anthropocentric view of the world succeeding the theocentric view of pre-Modern Christian civilization that I have criticised as liberalism repeatedly in the text of this essay. 

 

While some might not like the way he treats the pre-Modern integrated view of Creation as common to all religions, I would point out that Christianity’s claims to uniqueness have never rested on this point, but upon God’s having visited His Creation in a unique manner by becoming Man in the Incarnation, and upon His having accomplished the salvation of the world from human sin through His having died for us and rose again, none of which is questioned or even the matter at hand here.  That all religions contain truth, is in fact, the teaching of orthodox Christianity.  This is because religions are derived from natural revelation (the kind St. Paul talks about in the first chapter of Romans).  Christianity’s claims to uniqueness pertain to special revelation, the historical special revelation of the Gospel. 

 

St. Justin Martyr in the second century argued that the Divine Logos, which in the preamble to St. John’s Gospel is identified with God and specifically the Person of the Trinity Who became incarnate as Jesus Christ, had planted seeds of Himself throughout the nations prior to His Incarnation, that these had born fruit as philosophy, and that to the extent the ancient philosophers followed the Logos they could be regarded as Christian.  The opposite view, that pre-Christian philosophy contained nothing of value to Christianity could also be found if inconsistently practiced, most notably in Tertullian, but it is difficult to read the New Testament in the original Greek and side with Tertullian. 

 

Where I would respectfully disagree with the speech, which remember was given over thirty years ago, is that, while his overall argument that no one group has a monopoly on either truth or extremism is substantially accurate, the idea of holy war is, in my opinion, more integral to the essential theology of Islam than most other religions.  His Majesty did say, at the beginning of those remarks, that he was not an expert on the subject, however, and I would point out that those who are so quick today to jump on anything positive said in the direction of Islam usually do so for reasons that are less rooted in the differences between Christianity and Islam than they are in the United States’ post-Cold War conflict with the Islamic world.  This conflict arose in part out of the United States’ arrogant belief that she could do whatever she wanted anywhere in the world with impunity, in part out of the United States’ being the spearhead of Modern, materialistic, liberalism, in part out of her having armed and trained the more militant factions of Islam to use against the Soviets in Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War, and in part by much of Christianity in the United States having been deformed by heretical notions, such as the idea that the religion which shares a common pre-Gospel history with Christianity but which is explicitly built on the rejection of Jesus as the Christ, the Middle-Eastern state constructed by adherents of which religion has a vested interest in destabilizing the countries mostly populated by Muslims in the region, is owed some type of allegiance by Christians.