The Antidote to False Religion

 

Everywhere we look in Western Civilization people are being forced to affirm the false doctrines of false religions and to bend their knees to idols.   A couple of years ago, in the insanity that ensued after George Floyd died in police custody, the genuflection was even literal.   Today there are several dogmas which if one does not uncritically accept them all, questions them, or argues against them one will find himself deplatformed, defenestrated, and the way things are going perhaps eventually decapitated.   Here are a few such dogmas:

 

I.                   The world’s climate is changing, the change will be for the worse rather than the better, it is all man’s fault and to atone for his misdoing man needs to accept a radical transformation of society and economy that will greatly lower his standard of living, eliminate most if not all of his personal freedom, and drastically reduce the size of his population.

II.                The traditional category of sex which divided people into male and female on the basis of biological differences is, despite its appearance of being essential to human reproduction, a false one, invented by those with power solely for the purpose of oppressing others.   The proper category is gender, which is what you think or feel that you are.   This may correspond to the sex you would have been assigned under the old system, or it may correspond to the other sex, or it may be something different altogether because it is all about you and your feelings and so there are in infinite number of possibilities.  Nobody else is allowed to in any way challenge your self-chosen gender and if somebody calls you by the wrong pronouns or the name your parents gave you before you chose a new one to fit your gender identity that person has committed the worst crime in the history of the world and should be completely and utterly de-personed and removed from society forever.

III.             Race is also a false category invented by white men to oppress all other people.   When white people speak of race or otherwise employ this category they should be told that they are being racist and that race does not exist.   They are not allowed to think of themselves as a race or a distinct group within mankind except if they think of themselves as distinctively evil which they are required to do.   Other groups can speak of race and think of themselves as races and are encouraged to do so.   White people aren’t allowed to call this racist and preach colour-blindness to these other groups.   White people are supposed to practice colour-blindness, except when they are required to  acknowledge their own wickedness and the virtuous racial self-awareness of other people.

IV.             If a new viral respiratory disease is circulating, even if poses no significant danger to anyone outside the group that is most vulnerable to all respiratory disease, it is alright for governments to suspend everyone’s basic freedoms of movement, association, assembly and religion, order them into isolation, shut down their businesses, and basically act as if there were no constitutional limits on their powers, in an effort to curb the spread of the virus.   It is alright for the government and the media to deceive the public and spread panic in order to get people to comply, but if anyone contradicts the official line that person is spreading dangerous “misinformation” and “disinformation” and needs to be silenced.

V.                The way to prevent mass shootings and other gun crimes, overwhelmingly committed with guns that are not legally owned and registered but rather stolen or smuggled, is to pass more gun legislation and take guns away from people who are overwhelmingly law-abiding.

VI.             The most important and valuable way in which  the people who in the old dispensation were called women but whom in the new are called birthing persons and can be of any gender can contribute to society is not by bearing and raising children as mothers but by seeking self-fulfillment in careers outside the home.   That many of them think and choose otherwise in no way contributes to the wage gap between what used to be erroneously called the sexes.   The only acceptable ways of explaining this gap are patriarchy, male chauvinism, and sexism.

VII.          When somebody commits a crime, unless it is a “hate” crime or the perpetrator happens to be white, Christian, male, cisgender, heterosexual or all of the above, it is not he who has failed society and owes society a debt the amount and manner of payment of which are to be determined by a court of law, but society that has failed him and owes it to him to rehabilitate him, no matter how long it takes, even if it takes the remainder of his natural life.

VIII.       While tobacco and alcohol, which for centuries in the case of the former and from time immemorial in the case of the latter, have been comforts enjoyed by people from all walks and stations of life even those who have had little to nothing else beyond the essentials of subsistence, have to be driven out of polite society and cancelled because they can have harmful effects on people’s health, marijuana should be enjoyed by all and a “safe” supply of cocaine, heroin and other opiates, methamphetamine and other hard narcotics along with a place and paraphernalia to use to them should be supplied by the government.

IX.             Masked thugs who go to lectures given by speakers with non-approved ideas and shout them down, disrupt the event, or intimidate its hosts into cancelling, and vandals who damage or destroy statues and monuments or who deface valuable art in order to make some sort of statement that nobody gets but themselves about the environment are all legitimately employing their “freedom of expression”, but if someone says something either in a lecture in person or online which disagrees with any of the tenets of the new progressive religion this is “hate speech” rather than “free speech” and he must be silenced.   Anybody who attempts to prevent the thugs and vandals from exercising their “freedom of expression” is a terrorist and should be treated as such.

X.                The primary purpose of schools should not be to teach children such basic skills as reading, writing, and mathematics, much less to teach them anything about history other than how many bad –isms and –phobias the leaders of their country were guilty of in the past.   Rather the primary purpose of schools is to encourage children, as early as possible, to choose a gender identity other than what would be their sex in the old, obsolete, way of looking at things, to expose them to every conceivable form of sexual behaviour as early as possible, and to instill in them anti-white prejudice or self-loathing if they happen to be white, along with Christophobia, cisphobia, heterophobia and misandry.   Teachers have a duty to do these things and should not be accountable to parents.

XI.             “My body my choice” is only valid in reference to when a birthing person, vide supra VI, wants to terminate his/her pregnancy, even though doing so means terminating the life of his/her unborn child.  The right of a birthing person to an abortion is absolute and not subject to limitations, unlike the rights of all people to life, liberty, and property.   “My body my choice” is not valid when medical experts tell the government we all need to be injected with man-made substances that have never before been used and for which there are no long-term studies because they were rushed to market in under a year.

XII.          Although the relative cost of commodities is determined by such factors as supply and demand – if there are a lot of apples and few bananas, this will make apples less expensive and bananas more so – this does not apply to the means of exchange, money.   Therefore government can print and spend as much money as it wants, this will not cause the price of anything else to go up.   If the prices of commodities such as food go up, this is because of greedy vendors, not the government.   Indeed, it is because of all the greedy businessmen who would prefer that only a few people be able to afford to buy their products rather than many or all people that government needs to keep doling out money so that people can buy things.   Although this does not cause the prices of things to go up, even if it did it would still be the right thing to do, despite the fact that rising commodity prices and devaluation of currency by the unit would harm the most the people that such government spending is supposed to be helping, those with the least purchasing power in society.

 

 

In Western Civilization, which is the name given in Modern times to what has become of what used be Christendom in the days since liberalism began to wax and Christianity began to wane there, these are the main tenets of the new religion that progressives have sought to establish in the place of Christianity.   That this is a fair characterization is evident from the way those who raise valid questions about the first tenet are treated.    If you point out that climate has constantly been changing throughout history, that human beings thrive better in warmer climates than colder, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather is to vegetable life what oxygen is to animal life, that despite irresponsible journalists’ efforts to portray every weather disaster that takes place as a “worst ever” moment recent decades have not experienced the most volatile weather on record nor have they been either the hottest or the coldest, and a host of other similar arguments you will likely be met with the accusation that you are a climate or a science “denier”.   This very accusation demonstrates that to your accuser the idea of man-made, apocalyptic, climate change is not a hypothesis that begins with observations, is supported by evidence gathered through experiments and test,  and rests upon such evidence while being open to being overthrown by other evidence, i.e., science, but an article of faith which we have a moral obligation to accept.

 

Now I am not opposed to articles of faith.   On the contrary, I think that for communities of faith such as the Christian Church, these are essential.   The articles discussed above, however, are not a statement of faith to which a community of faith akin to the Church asks its members to confess, but a set of beliefs to which progressives demand adherence from all members of every civil society in the West.   This is not a new phenomenon.   Progressivism began as an attack on Christian kings, the Christian Church, and the throne-altar alliance in Christendom and ever since the same progressives who scream “separation of Church and State” against the old order of Christendom have sought to wed the State anew to a different religion.   In early sixteenth century England this was the heretical form of Calvinist Christianity known as Puritanism.   Subsequent generations of progressives have pretended that their substitute religions were not religions at all but secular ideologies.   Communism is one obvious example of this.   The set of propositions that American liberals and neoconservatives claim define what it means to be an American, a citizen of the first country to have a separation of Church and State clause in its constitution, is another.

 

Now, while Americanism is in many respects less evil than Communism, the popular idea that the new false religion that we have been discussing is a rebranding and reworking of Communism is mistaken.      Communism and Communists contributed to its development, for sure.  Many of the dogmas of this new false religion were spreading through the academic world decades before they spilled out into popular culture, and the Marxists who outside the old Communist bloc had more influence in academe than anywhere else undoubtedly contributed to this.    Nevertheless, the new false religion of woke progressivism is more accurately described as a reworking of Americanism than it is of Communism.   It developed in the Western countries that aligned with the United States during the Cold War rather than in the former Communist bloc which has proven to be relatively immune to it.    While acknowledging that Cold War agents of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc had infiltrated the West and were working to undermine it from within – Joseph McCarthy was right about this – and that academic Marxists disappointed with the Soviet experiment  and the failure of the World Wars to produce Marx’s general revolution had begun revising their ideology in a more cultural and social rather than economic direction as early as the 1930s, the development of the new false religion is more directly a consequence of a) post-World War II American policy with regards to the rebuilding of Europe that tied assistance in rebuilding to indoctrination in American liberalism with the aim of preventing a resurgence of fascism, b) the United States’ having become the leading power in Western Civilization at the very moment that American liberalism was beginning to transform itself into an unhealthy obsession with racial and sexual grievance politics, and c) the concurrent emergency of mass communications technology as a medium for the spread of news and culture, newly manufactured for mass consumption in the United States.   Indeed, the central tenet of the universal propositional nationalism aspect of Americanism, i.e., that anyone anywhere in the world is potentially an American if he subscribes to the propositions that define America, is the seed from which the rotten plant of woke progressivism springs.   Implicit within the notion is the idea that someone who was born in the United States, to American parents, whose ancestors going back to the American Revolution were all Americans, but who does not believe all the American propositions is not himself an American or at any rate is less of an American, than a new immigrant or even someone somewhere else in the world who does subscribe to all the propositions.   All that is necessary for this to become woke progressivism is for the propositions to be changed from the classical liberal ones acceptable to “conservative” Americans to the sort of nonsense contained in the twelve articles enumerated at the beginning of this essay and for the emphasis to be shifted to the implicit idea (“you do not really belong if you do not agree that…”) rather than the explicit one (“you belong if you agree that…”).   While some might point out that in many places in Europe as well as in the UK and here in Canada this new false religion of woke progressivism has seemingly gone further and become more powerful than in the United States this does not rebut the fact that it is essentially a reworked Americanism but speaks rather of the weakness and ineffectiveness of the resistance to woke progressivism. Note that here in the Dominion of Canada, the most aggressive promotion of woke progressivism in recent years has come from the currently governing Liberal Party and especially its present leadership.  Ever since Confederation the Liberal Party has been the party that sought to make Canada more like the United States economically, culturally and politically.    The weakness of the resistance to its aggressive promotion of woke progressivism can be partially attributed to the fact that the only party in Parliament other than the Lower Canadian separatists that is not a party that takes part of the Liberal platform and pushes it further and faster than the Liberals themselves do, the Conservatives, have in recent decades been controlled by neoconservatives who share to a large degree the Liberals’ masturbatory attitude towards America and are consequently Liberal lite.     The Liberal Party is a textbook example illustrating the old maxim “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.   The woke Liberals such as the current Prime Minister are constantly preaching the virtues of “diversity” to us even as in the name of that “diversity” they seek to impose a stringent and narrow uniformity of thought upon us.   As the great Canadian Tory historian W. L. Morton once observed, however, the ancient principle of allegiance to a reigning monarch upon which our Fathers of Confederation had wisely built our national unity already allowed for racial and ethnic diversity without the sort of pressure to conform that exists in an American-style compact society.    An updated version of this observation could be that a monarchical allegiance society, allows for racial and ethnic diversity without imposing such as a dogma of faith that everyone is required to believe the way Liberal dogmatic multiculturalism does, and so the older principle allows for a greater diversity, or a more diverse sort of diversity that includes diversity of thought, than does the Liberal cult of diversity.    

 

While I do not wish to belabor this point too much further I will observe that last week began with the entire United States with a few noble exceptions joining in the worship of a false idol.   American “conservatives” and liberals alike paid homage to someone they call “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” although he, like his father, was given the name Michael King at birth and he obtained his doctorate through serial plagiarism.   Everything else about the man was as phony as a $3 bill as well. He was ordained a minister of the Baptist Church even though he did not believe in the essential tenets of faith either of that Church or Christianity in general.   He was launched to fame as a crusader against segregation the year after the American Supreme Court had already dealt Jim Crow a death blow.   He talked a good talk about evaluating people on the basis of the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin in his “I have a Dream” speech, the only thing about him his “conservative” worshippers choose to remember, but the Civil Rights Act which he promoted and the passing of which was his biggest achievement laid the foundation for affirmative action, the racial shakedown industry, and every other sort of anything-but-colour-blind progressive race politics.   Similarly, he cultivated an image of himself as someone who practiced the kind of non-violent civil disobedience preacher by Thoreau, Gandhi, and the like, but there was a great deal of coordination between his talks and marches and sit-ins and the actions of those whose preferred methodology was looting, riots, and burning cities down.

 

We have looked at several of the tenets of the false religion that woke progressives seek to make the new established faith of the West.   We have also briefly looked at how this false religion evolved out of the earlier false religion of Americanism.   The title of this essay, however, is “The Antidote to False Religion”.  It is time that we turn our attention that.

 

The antidote to false religion is true religion.    The True and Living God satisfies the longing for the divine in the human heart in a way that none of man’s inventions, made with his own hands, can do.   The salvation man is in need of is spiritual salvation from sin, which has been given to us freely in Jesus Christ.   The salvation through political activism, legislation, and regulation that progressivism seeks is a poor substitute.  Unlike in the world of finance, where “bad money drives out good” as the law named for Sir Thomas Gresham states, in religion light drives out darkness, as it does in the literal sense.  Consider the ancient world.    St. Paul in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans describes the darkness of moral depravity into which the nations of the world had descended by turning away from the Creator into idolatry.   Much ancient discussion as witnessed in the writings of Herodotus and Aristotle focused on the question of happiness, how a man attains it, and how he can be rightly judged by others to have attained it.   The answer was not to be found in the pagan religions and the writings of Plato and the tragedies of Euripides, testify to a growing dissatisfaction with gods who were merely more powerful human beings with all the moral failings of mortals and, indeed, often more.   Calls had begun to arise for reforms of the pagan religion.   Into this darkness, St. John attests, the Word, Who became flesh and dwelt among us, shone as the Light of Men, satisfying the hunger and thirst attested to in the writings of the philosophers in a way that paganism, no matter how reformed, never could.   The darkness of today’s false religion was able to creep back in because over the course of the past several centuries, Western man was lured into once again putting his faith in the creations of his own hands, now called science and technology, through the promise of wealth and power.   Initially, the new idols seemed to impressively deliver on their promises but now they are starting to fail as all such false gods eventually do.   Man now stands at a crossroads.   The Light of Jesus Christ is still there calling him back.   Or he can plunge himself further into the darkness of the new false religion. 

 

There is a difference between the false religion of today and the false religion(s) of the ancient world.   Ancient paganism was pre-Christian, the idolatry in which men indulged before God sent His Only-Begotten Son into the world.   Concerning this idolatry St. Paul, speaking to the philosophers at Mars Hill, said “And the times of this ignorance, God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent”.    The false religion of today is sometimes called post-Christian, that is to say, the idolatry into which men sink after they abandon the true faith of Jesus Christ.   A more Scriptural term for this might be Anti-Christ. 

 

It has often been said that someone who has turned his back on Christ is far harder to reach than someone who has not yet heard of Him for the first time.   This seems to be true and the difficulty may be greater when it comes to nations and an entire civilization rather than just individuals.   However this may be, the true religion has not changed and we must call those who have abandoned it back.

 

We started this essay by looking at several articles of the new false religion being dogmatically imposed upon us.  Twelve of these were given and this number was chosen for a reason.  Since the earliest centuries of Christianity, the true faith has been confessed in a statement we call the Creed from the Latin word for “believe”.   There are two basic forms of the Creed, the Apostles’ and the Nicene.  (1)  Ancient tradition says that the twelve Apostles themselves composed the Creed, each contributing an article.   Whether or not that is the case, the Creed consists of twelve articles, one for each of the Apostles.   The Nicene Creed, or more accurately the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, composed and revised at the two first Ecumenical Councils of the fourth century, is the most universal form being accepted by all the ancient Churches.   While this is a longer form of the Creed, it too contains twelve articles which mostly correspond to those of the Apostles’ (Article III of the Nicene Creed contains matter not found in the Apostles’, Article IV of the Nicene includes everything in both Articles III and IV of the Apostles’, the Descent into Hell is included with the Resurrection in the Apostles’ otherwise the Articles of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan are longer or fuller versions of the corresponding Articles in the Apostles’).

 

I intend, the Lord willing, to give each of these articles an essay-length exposition this year.  The text of both forms of the Creed will be commented on, with the essays following the order of the Articles of the Apostles’ Creed, covering Article III of the Nicene Creed under Article II.   I have not yet decided whether to do this over the next couple of months or whether to spread it over the year covering one Article a month.   Either way, the purpose of the series will be to remind people of the true faith so as to call them back from the false one.

 

Here are the twelve Articles of the Apostles’ Creed:

 

I.                    I believe in God, the Father almighty,
    maker of heaven and earth;

II.                And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord;

III.             who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
    born of the Virgin Mary,

IV.             suffered under Pontius Pilate,
    was crucified, dead, and buried.

V.                He descended into hell.
    The third day he rose again from the dead.

VI.             He ascended into heaven,
    and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty.

VII.          From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

VIII.       I believe in the Holy Ghost,

IX.              the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,

X.                the forgiveness of sins,

XI.             the resurrection of the body,

XII.           and the life everlasting. Amen.

 

(1)   The Athanasian Creed is not, properly speaking, a Creed, but is more like a commentary on the Apostles’ Creed.   This can be seen in the fact that whereas the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are both in the first person, expressions of what I or we, believe, the Athanasian is in the third person, a declaration of what must be believed.

Romans 13 and State-Ordered Church Closures

 The thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans poses a problem for those who profess the Christian faith and also subscribe to either the doctrine of civil disobedience as taught by Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth century and exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in the twentieth or to any other version of Whiggism, for that matter, including the founding ideology of the American republic.    This dilemma has inspired a number of very creative attempts at interpreting the passage to  say other than what it says.   Perhaps my favourite of these is the one thing that says St. Paul was being sarcastic.

I do not have this difficulty myself.   I have always thought Thoreau to be an overrated nincompoop, am not part of the idolatrous cult that worships Gandhi and King, do not believe in civil disobedience, and wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Johnson that "the first Whig was the devil."    I therefore accept the New Testament passage at face value, as enjoining civil obedience upon Christians and teaching the "divine right of kings".  As you have probably deduced from the title of this essay it is the first of these two items that is our primary concern here.   Therefore, I shall discuss the second first to get it out of the way.

The divine right of kings is a doctrine that is widely misunderstood.    This is undoubtedly due to the fact that its opponents, the Whigs to whom we have already alluded and their myriad of ideological descendants, have written most of our history books since the late eighteenth century.   Although Herbert Butterfield  exposed the fundamental fallacies of their method of interpreting history , id est to take the progressive liberal values of the present and interpret the past as movement towards those values with people cast in the role of hero or villain according as they are perceived to have advanced or fought to retard the march of progress, in a short volume first published in 1931, with a few notable exceptions such as the dean of Canadian historians Donald G. Creighton and the Hungarian-American Catholic historian John Lukacs, the Whigs have continued to dominate the field.  Most people, therefore, first encounter the divine right of kings in the caricature of its foes.   The doctrine does not mean that God gives kings unlimited, autocratic, power to rule their subjects as they see fit.   It means precisely the opposite of this, that because the king's office is vested with authority the recognized ultimate source of which is God, the exercise of that authority is a sacred duty and vocation for which God holds him strictly accountable and he is therefore by no means free to abuse his authority by tyrannizing his subjects.   Should any of you have been reading my essays since the beginning you may recall that the first posted here, "The Divine Right of Kings versus the Tyranny of the People", made the case that contrary to the Modern belief that freedom and democracy go together, it is democracy and not divine-right kingship, the internal logic of which leads inevitably to tyranny and totalitarianism.   If government exists by the will of the people, whatever that nonsensical phrase which attributes to a collective something that only individuals possess is taken as meaning, and to serve that will, then it need not recognize any limits on what it does to the people it governs, provided that is what the people want.   That this is where the internal logic of democracy ultimately leads was recognized as a problem long ago.   Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous commentary on Democracy in America (1835, 1840), warned about the "tyranny of the majority" and the twentieth century attempt to get around this by redefining the principle of democracy from "whatever the majority wants" to "whatever we all agree upon" was no improvement in this regards for it ultimately means that everybody must be forced to agree and dissent not tolerated, tyranny in its most extreme, totalitarian, form.    The ancient wise men, such as Plato and Aristotle, knew that democracy is the mother of tyranny.   The Whiggish attempt to circumvent the destiny of democratic tyranny by moderating democracy with liberalism, the recognition of individual rights as a limitation on even democratic government , was doomed to failure.   The evidence of that failure now surrounds us.   All it took for elected politicians to shatter completely the fetters placed upon them by constitutional protections of rights and freedoms was for the public to be persuaded that it was "necessary" to "save lives".   Democracy, far from being held back from evolving into its tyrannical, totalitarian form, by liberalism, broke liberalism's bonds like they were made of straw.    Indeed, it broke not only liberalism but the older safeguards of freedom that predated the rise of Modern Whiggery.   Parliamentary control over government spending, a safeguard of freedom the roots of which go back to the Magna Carta, was attacked in both Parliament and our provincial legislatures as both levels of government sought to be released from this oversight in order to deal with the pandemic.   The distinction between public and private, another safeguard of freedom which goes back to the feudal recognition that "every man's home is his castle", was obliterated by the public health mandarins' demands for technology-enhanced total surveillance of everyone to facilitate "contact tracing" in the name of keeping us safe.   These and other examples of pre-Modern safeguards of liberty, belong to the ancient ideal of constitutional government, with which the divine right of kings is consistent and compatible, and which can be summed up as the idea that the civil authority itself is subject to and bound by the law.   Indeed, the divine right of kings properly understood, and not as the Whigs caricatured it, requires the ideal of constitutional government, which is why monarchs are required as part of their sacred coronation oath to vow to uphold and protect the law.   Democracy, as we have seen from the events of this year, is not consistent with this ancient ideal, and indeed, it could be said that democracy in Modern thought has usurped the place of constitutional government in pre-Modern thought (remember that tyranny and usurpation were originally one and the same concept).

When the divine right of kings is stated within the context of moral theology rather than political philosophy it is pretty much what you find in the thirteenth chapter of Romans.   St. Paul says that the civil authority, the "higher powers" in the Authorized Bible, are "ordained by God" and, switching to the singular, are "the minister of God to thee for good".   More specifically "he beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."  Some might object that this is a generic "divine right of civil authority" that contains no endorsement with regards to specific constitutional forms.   I will grant that, but point out that the Scriptures as a whole are hardly silent on the latter subject.   If you turn to the passage that "Christian" republicans use as their chief proof-text, the eighth chapter of I Samuel, and read it through, note first that a democratic republic was not what Israel had prior to this chapter and second that every single negative thing Samuel is instructed to tell the Israelites about what the king they have asked for will be like, has historically also been true of republican and democratic governments, and, indeed, democracies and republics have been historically much harder on their people in the way of taxes than kings ever were.   You will find good kings and bad kings in the Bible, and God Himself is identified as the King of kings.   You will not find a good republic or democracy mentioned in the Bible and, indeed, in the numerous examples from Genesis to Revelation of the people getting together to demand something, either of their governors or of God, it far more often than not displeased God, Who not infrequently punished them by giving them exactly what they asked for.

Now, let us turn back to the civil obedience enjoined upon Christians in this passage.    Does this passage require that the Christian Church close its doors and cease meeting together when the state orders it to?   Is there any way I can answer that question with "no" that does not require a clever re-interpretation of the passage like the ones I referred to and rejected at the beginning of the essay?

The answer to the first question is "no" and the answer to the second question is "yes".

The reason the answer to the first question is no is because it involves a situation that is an obvious exception to the general rule.   It is an obvious exception for two reasons.

The first is that if the civil obedience St. Paul enjoined upon Christians involved shutting the Church down and not meeting if so ordered by the state, then Christianity would not have survived the first century.   Christianity began within the Roman Empire and while the Empire was for the most part quite tolerant when it came to religion in various locations the Roman authorities became hostile to the Christian faith, usually when enemies of the faith went to them and accused Christianity of being a subversive political movement.   That Christianity is nothing of the sort is evinced by the passage we are considering, whose author likely had the false accusations against the Church in mind when he penned it.   However, at various times the accusations against Christianity reached to the very highest level and a general persecution of the Christians was ordered by a Caesar.   If St. Paul did not mean meeting together as a Church to be an exception to civil obedience if forbidden, then all a hostile Caesar would have needed to do was forbid the Church to ever meet again and it would have had to have dissolved permanently.   The Roman authorities did, in fact, outlaw Christianity at various times, and the Church had to meet in secret.   This was not "civil disobedience" in the Thoreau/Gandhi/King sense of defiantly breaking the law to challenge injustice.   It was simply not obeying a civil order that would  have required them to disobey a command from the Highest Authority.

This brings us to the second reason, which is that this very type of scenario occurs in the Scriptures and the way the Scriptures deal with these scenarios makes it clear that an exception to civil obedience is to be found here.

These examples can be found in both Testaments.   The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament is set in the period of the Babylonian Captivity.   You might recall from the Book of Jeremiah that when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and carried everyone away captive, the Lord's instructions through the prophet were that they were to go away, be good subjects of the Babylonian king, and they would live and one day He would return them to the Promised Land.   Daniel and his three friends were among the youth of the Hebrew nobility who were taken captive.   Being devout, they set out to obey the Lord's command and be good Babylonian citizens.   At various points in the book, however, they were required to do something that would break the Law of God.   In the third chapter, for example, Nebuchadnezzar ordered a giant gold idol to be erected in the plain of Dura and commanded all of his high officials to fall down and worship it.   Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, Daniel's three friends who had been raised to such positions at the end of the second chapter as part of Daniel's reward for revealing and interpreting the king's dream (of a giant image with a gold head interpreted to be Nebuchadnezzar himself, presumably the inspiration for his misguided actions in this incident, and the reason, although the text doesn't spell it out, why the image is widely thought to have been of the king himself) were among those so commanded but, since this would be the idolatry forbidden by the Second Commandment, they did not worship the image, and were cast into a fiery furnace as punishment, from which they were miraculously delivered.   Later in the book, in the sixth chapter after the Persians have conquered Babylon, and Daniel is promoted to an even higher position, other officials envious of him persuade Darius to make a decree forbidding anyone to make a petition to any other God or man except himself for the period of a month.   When Daniel continues, despite the edict, to pray to the Lord three times a day, he is accused, and thrown into a den of lions.  Like his friends he is miraculously spared.

The second  example, you will note, is closer to the scenario we are contemplating because rather than requiring something wrong, idolatry, as was the case with the first example, it involves the forbidding of a duty owed to God.

In the New Testament, after the Ascension the disciples of Jesus wait in Jerusalem as commanded until the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Ghost comes upon them and empowers them.   St. Peter preaches a bold sermon to the crowd and about three thousand are converted and baptized.  These continue to meet on a daily basis in the Jewish Temple and, for their specifically Christian fellowship, involving the Apostles' teaching, the Eucharist ("breaking of bread") and prayer, from house to house, as there were no buildings assigned to the purpose and consecrated for it as of yet.   Daily their numbers increased.   Evidently they did not believe in the Satanic lies of "social distancing" and "limiting gatherings" but this was because they put their faith in God, living two millennia before George Bernard Shaw could sadly but accurately say "We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession".   In the third chapter of Acts, SS Peter and John heal a man born lame at the gate of the Temple.  This leads to another sermon by St. Peter in Solomon's porch.   Five thousand are converted but the Apostles are arrested.   Brought before the chief priests the next day, they preach to them as well.   The Jewish authorities forbid them to preach and teach in the name of Jesus and their answer is "Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye.  For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard".  In the fifth chapter, after they have continued their ministry and the Church has continued to grow, the Apostles are imprisoned, miraculously set free, and, after they have resumed their teaching the next day, brought before the Sanhedrin.  Their answer to the council began with the words "We ought rather to obey God rather than men."

It is these words that express the response of the faithful when those in authority forbid the practice of the Christian religion.   

So clearly a command from the state not to meet as the Church is an exception to the civil obedience commanded of Christians by St. Paul in the epistle to the Romans.    This does not mean that when the state orders the Church to close, as it has done this year, that we ought to conduct sit-ins, or behave in any of the other ways that have come to be associated with civil disobedience.   When refusing to obey orders of this nature it must be with the attitude that this is an exception to a general rule that is necessary because to obey such orders would be to disobey the very Higher Authority that enjoined civil obedience upon us through St. Paul's words.

There is no Church if she does not meet.   This is something that those whose ecclesiology begins and ends with "the Church is the people not the building" overlook.   Yes, the Church is the people and not the building in which they meet.   The individualist spin so often put on this phrase has no warrant in Scripture.  The very name given to the Body of Christ in the New Testament, ekklesia, is the Greek word for "assembly".   It is people, but people joined together as an assembly or congregation, not people apart from each other doing their own thing on an individual basis.   When the state orders the  Church not to meet - and remember in the first days of the Church they met daily not once a week - it is commanding the Church not to be the Church.   When it tells the Church we can meet but only "virtually" not "in-person" it is commanding us to live a lie.   For that is what being apart, mutually watching an online video, and calling it "being together" is.   It is pretending that this artificial "virtual space" that exists only as an image on our computer screens is reality.   That is an incredibly dangerous road down which to go.

It has been very disappointing, therefore, that this year, the Churches have with few exceptions, chosen to obey man rather than God on this matter.   Medical doctors, who belong to the profession with the least respect for privacy, rights, and freedoms, and therefore ought never to be trusted with any sort of civil authority, have been handed dictatorial powers because of a virus that they have been allowed to blow completely out of proportion, and they have ordered Churches to close, to offer virtual services only, and, in the brief respite from this over the summer, to limit their numbers, forbid congregations from singing, require them to register in advance, sit in designated places, and muzzle their faces.   It is very sad that most Churches have followed these evil orders, despite their being a clear exception to the rule of civil obedience, while those following the Apostles in saying "we ought rather to obey God than men" have been mostly the separatist sects and outright heretics.

God save the Queen and may He punish the politicians who do evil in her name!

Race Riots: One More American Import We Don’t Need

I have, for as long as I can remember, been an opponent of the Americanization of Canada. This will probably not come as a surprise to long-time readers, although it might shock those who think of the Canadian way as being progressive, liberal, and left-wing and the American way as being reactionary, conservative and right-wing. When one takes the historical point of view, however, and remembers that all three of the latter set of terms originally referred to people who supported the institution of royal monarchy and the establishment of a Church governed by bishops in direct succession from the Apostles, it is quite apparent that they are misapplied in reference to the secular, republic of the United States of America. It is less difficult to argue against the claim that the Canada of the present day is progressive, liberal, and left-wing, but to the extent that this is true, it is true because of the Americanization of Canada. The Liberal Party was historically the party of Americanization. This was most obvious in 1891, 1911, and throughout the entire period when William Lyon Mackenzie King was Prime Minister. (1)


I oppose the Americanization of Canada politically, on the grounds that the Westminster System of parliamentary monarchy is superior to any form of republicanism and that innovations introduced from the American republican system have never improved things here but only made them worse. I oppose the Americanization of Canada religiously - while I would prefer that the mainstream Christian Churches in Canada were far more orthodox and far less liberal than they are, I do not think the solution is more of the mixture of Puritanism, direct-personal-revelation-from-God-through-experience enthusiasm (2), and fanatical Millennialism that tends to characterize American folk Christianity. We have quite enough of our own domestic version of that sort of thing. I oppose the Americanization of Canada culturally. Probably nothing originating below the 49th Parallel has been more erosive and corrosive of Canada's traditions, institutions, culture, morality, and religion than what has been imported from the motion picture studios of Hollywood, California, and the recording studios of greater Los Angeles. To be fair, this is also what has been eroding and corroding the United States' own traditions, institutions, etc.



It is greatly to my disgust, therefore, to see signs that the American custom of the race riot is starting to move northward. We have enough trouble with our own, closest domestic equivalent, to worry about. Periodically Indians illegally blockade roads and railroads until the cowardly and craven politicians in Ottawa throw enough of the taxpayers' money at them and make enough absurd and meaningless gestures in response to whatever demands, reasonable or unreasonable, they are making. Nowadays, as the railroad blockade earlier this year demonstrates, professional agitators on the payroll of American petroleum interests can get away with this by claiming to be Indians, even if this claim has about the same level of validity as Elizabeth Warren's. We certainly do not need what is going on south of the border happening up here.


Once again the inner-cities of major American metropoles are burning. The race riot is an American tradition that is usually traced back to the Harlem riot of 1935. I am going to pass over this and the Harlem riot of 1943 due to their being isolated incidents, however celebrated, and date the tradition to the Harlem riot of 1964, since it was demonstrably the first in a chain. The riot, which started in response to a police officer’s having shot down a black teenager named James Powell, ran for almost a week. It began on July 16th. This was two weeks to the day after the Civil Rights Act came into effect.


The significance of that timing cannot be stressed enough. Ten years previously, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that de jure segregation was unconstitutional in its decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The American President at the time, liberal Republican Dwight Eisenhower, declared that this decision would be backed up by force if necessary and three years later, when he sent the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas he demonstrated that he meant it. Progressive liberals, to distract public attention from the fact that the institutional white racism, which even then they were blaming for all the evils of the world, had been dealt a death blow in a top down move by an all-white Supreme Court (3) backed by a white President, had the new mass media of communications technology shine its spotlight on a bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama led by a local Baptist minister about a year and a half after Brown v. Board, to create the illusion of a grass-roots, protest movement, headed by a saintly preacher of non-violent resistance, that would slay the dragon of segregation. In reality the movement was fighting a mortally wounded segregation in its death throes. Its crowning achievement was the aforementioned Civil Rights Act which laid the foundation for the crazy busing schemes of de jure integration, Affirmative Action and its quotas, anti-discrimination litigation and the shakedown industry in general. Two weeks after it had come into effect, the first race riot began. Let that forever shut the mouths of those who try to justify riots of this sort on the grounds that “it’s the only way they can make themselves heard.” That is and always has been utter tripe.


Ten days after the Harlem riot broke out in July of 1964, another one started in Rochester in the same state. Then in August race riots broke out in Illinois and Pennsylvania. These were relatively small scale compared to the one that broke out in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles the following summer, after a black man was pulled over by a highway cop for reckless driving and found to be drunk as a skunk. Like the Harlem riot this one lasted almost a week. It saw 34 deaths, over a thousand injured, and some $40 million worth of property damage as almost a thousand businesses and government buildings were looted and burned. In July of 1966 there were race riots in the West Side of Chicago and the Hough section of Cleveland. The year after that saw the infamous “long, hot summer” in which over 150 race riots broke out between the months of June and August all over the United States, the worst of which was the one in Detroit, Michigan. Finally, in 1968, another string of riots broke out in Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore and over thirty other cities, upon the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.


These marked the end of the first wave of the race riots. There would be others periodically in the next two decades but it would not be until 1992 that anything comparable to those of the sixties took place. The previous year, Rodney King, who had been driving drunk in violation of his parole for robbery, sought to elude arrest. The result was a high speed chase which ended badly for him. A video of his capture which showed the police beating him was released – although the longer, unedited version paints rather a different picture of the events than the small clip that was repeatedly played on the media. When the police who arrested him and were charged with excessive force were acquitted in early 1992, race riots again erupted in Los Angeles. The deaths and injuries were about double those of Watts in 1966, and the property damage was at least twenty-five times greater.


What has grown into the current wave of race riots began almost a decade ago when the Black Lives Matter movement sprung up in response to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, an incident which the media had grotesquely misrepresented in a deliberate and successful effort to stir up strife. Called activists by their sympathizers and terrorists by their detractors, Black Lives Matter appears to subscribe to a belief system in which all police brutality is directed towards blacks and black men are more likely to die at the hands of the police than in any other way, are always unarmed, never resist arrest, and are always salt of the earth pillars of their community. This belief system forms the interpretive lens through which they view any incident involving the police and a black man.


When you look at the actual data available on the subject you discover that pretty much everything progressive liberals, Hollywood celebrities, the news media, etc. take as given when it comes to race and the police in the United States is the opposite of the truth. Blacks are not killed by policemen in numbers disproportionate to their own involvement in violent crime unless by disproportionate we mean lower than we would expect, more whites are killed by American police each year than blacks and Hispanics, cops are more likely to be killed by black criminals than unarmed blacks are likely to be killed by police, white cops are far more likely to kill other whites than they are to kill blacks, it is black cops who are the most likely to kill other blacks, and black people in general are far more likely to be killed by black criminals than by either whites or police of any colour and ethnicity. That these facts sound so strange to so many people is entirely due to the duplicity of the media. The newspapers and television news highlight cases of white cops killing black suspects, editorializing on them for weeks on end, while under-reporting cases that don’t fit the pattern.


It is that same media that refers to every Black Lives Matter event as a “protest” regardless of how violent it gets, similar to how the illegal blockade of the railroads earlier this year was called a “protest” even though it manifestly went beyond a peaceful demonstration.


Early last week, a black man named George Floyd was arrested for passing a counterfeit bill in Minneapolis. A video that someone took from their phone showed him on the ground by a police car, with an officer named Derek Chauvin keeping him in this position by pressing his knee on the man’s neck for almost ten minutes. Floyd could be heard saying that he could not breathe and within an hour was dead. It is difficult to imagine any evidence coming to light that would show this not to be an excessive use of force and Chauvin has been charged with third degree murder. Yet, despite the fact that the officer responsible was quickly charged, a protest that was held in Minneapolis the day after Floyd was killed quickly degenerated into a riot, and riots rapidly spread to other cities of the United States. The number of cities where these riots have occurred or are occurring already exceeds that of the “long, hot, summer” of 1967. While David Warren is quite right when he says “there is no such thing as a spontaneous riot” these show evidence of a much higher level of organization than previous riots of the type. It is quite obvious who is doing the organizing. Despite the looting, arson, and other lawlessness typical of these sort of riots, many in the media persist in calling them “protests.”


How all of this will end is difficult to say at this point. The police are hardly in a strong position to contain these riots and the use of military force to keep the peace is being decried by the same sort of “human rights” watchdog groups who had no problem whatsoever with governments placing their entire populations under house arrest for two and a half months to stop the spread of bat flu.


There are those in this country who hold the opposite sentiments to those expressed in the first two paragraphs of this essay. There are those who think we need a “Canadianized” version of everything that happens south of the border, seemingly putting no thought into the question of whether it is good or bad in itself. There are others who would like to see Canada swallowed up by the United States entirely. One would like to think that nobody would be so foolish as to want the civilization-threatening violence south of the border to come up here, but apparently one would be mistaken in so thinking.


I was rather less than impressed, Saturday, to watch a televised report of a protest in Toronto. The protest pertained to the death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet last Wednesday. Korchinski-Paquet was a 29 year old black woman, whose mother had called the police late in the afternoon. Some sort of conflict was going on and her mother asked the police to take Korchinski-Paquet to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She was subject to epileptic seizures and apparently had other mental health problems as well. She ended up falling to her death from the balcony of their apartment on the twenty-fourth floor. Her mother, in an interview that evening, accused the police of pushing her daughter off the balcony.


This was, I think, the least credible accusation of murder that I have ever heard levelled against the police. It is one thing to accuse a policeman of using too much force and beating someone to death or of being too quick to pull the trigger. These things, regrettably, happen. It is far less believable that they would push a mentally ill person they are trying to help off of a balcony.


Unfortunately, this incident took place two days after the death of George Floyd, just as the riots were heating up south of the border. Which brings us back to the protest in Toronto on Saturday, with approximately 4000 in attendance. Some wore coronavirus masks, others wore Antifa masks. There were signs demanding “justice for Regis”, signs that made reference to George Floyd, and signs with all sorts of left-wing slogans of varying degrees of inanity. There were plenty of Marxist flags and anarchist and revolutionary chants. It was just the sort of thing that could easily and quickly have degenerated into the sort of thing happening south of the border.


The next day that was exactly what did happen in Montreal. What began as a demonstration outside of police headquarters late in the afternoon turned into a violent riot in which windows were broken, shops were looted, and a barricade was set on fire.


This is precisely the sort of import from American culture that we would be better off without.


(1) The point could be argued that in the period when the Liberal Party veered to the hard left - the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau - it abandoned its platform of Americanization for one of anti-Americanism. It could be counter-argued however, that this was merely a matter of appearance. At the time the United States was engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the two superpowers seemed to be each the polar opposite of the other. This was not how things looked in the period from 1933 to 1945 in which the American president was the biggest cheerleader of the Soviet Union and the latter was ruled by the most brutal despot of its entire history. It was in this period that Lester Pearson betrayed his king and country, and became a spy for the Soviet Union through the network headed and later exposed by Elizabeth Bentley. Pearson would later win a Nobel Prize for supporting the Soviet and American interest - once again united - against the French, Israeli, and, most important, British in the Suez Canal Crisis, betraying Canada's tradition of Commonwealth Loyalty and costing the government in which he was minister the next election. When he became Prime Minister himself in 1963, it was by bringing down the Diefenbaker government in a conflict over whether Washington DC should be allowed to dictate policy to Canada. Diefenbaker took the con position, Pearson the pro - see George Grant’s Lament for a Nation (1965). In Trudeau père's premiership, his most Communistic innovations were all brought in by following American precedent. His "just society" expansion of the welfare-nanny state followed the example of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society", and his Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, establishing the Canadian equivalent of Soviet thought police and tribunals, was modeled on the United States' Civil Rights Act of 1964.

(2) I am using this term in its technical theological meaning, not its colloquial use.

(3) Thurgood Marshall Jr. was not appointed to the American Supreme Court until 1967, a good thirteen years later.

What Would the Non-Jurors Do?

Rodney Howard-Browne is not exactly my idea of a sound theologian. Those who would have recognized his name prior to the events of this week would have remembered this South African born evangelist-pastor primarily as a leading figure in the “Laughing Revival” of the 1990s. A Canadian manifestation of this, the so-called “Toronto Blessing”, began in January of 1994, during my last semester of high school and was the subject of much discussion that fall when I began my theological studies in Otterburne. My attitude towards the phenomenon at the time could have been summed up in the words of Shania Twain “that don’t impress me much.” It has not changed much since.

That having been said, I must say that I felt a certain degree of admiration for Howard-Browne this week when I read about his having been arrested and charged with “unlawful assembly” for holding services in defiance of Hillsborough County, Florida’s “safer at home” order.

Note that I said “a certain degree of admiration”. It is not an unqualified admiration. I am not a believer in Henry David Thoreau’s doctrine of civil disobedience, nor do I hold in high esteem those practitioners of the same that have been elevated to sainthood if not apotheosized in the last generation or two, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

That having been said, the state has no legitimate authority to suspend worship services and tell Churches to close. Some might point to the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, in which the Apostle enjoins us to be “subject unto the higher powers”, meaning the civil authorities, because they are “ordained of God” and the “minister of God to thee for good” as saying otherwise, but to do so would be to twist the meaning of the Scriptures. Does anyone seriously believe that St. Paul was telling the Church in Rome that if Emperor Nero ordered them to renounce their faith, disband, and never meet together as a Church again that they were to obey? Obviously that is not the case.

All across what used to be Christendom, Churches and sects are closed because an insane mass panic over the flu’s bigger, tougher, second cousin, twice-removed on its mother’s side has persuaded everyone to blindly trust politicians and public health officials, both of which groups are at the present high on the biggest power trip that I have witnessed in my entire life, and hence are completely unworthy of the trust they demand from us. Those politicians and public health officials have decided that to save us from the big, bad, coronavirus, they need to lock us in our houses, take away our basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion, and dehumanize us by conditioning us to fear human contact and non-virtual social interaction. They are, in other words, doing evil of the kind and on the scale that is only ever done by those who are convinced that they are doing good.

There have been some “Christian” commentators who have spoken out in favour of the – hopefully – temporary closing of the Churches and sects. Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, How Dante Can Save Your Life, and The Benedict Option, who blogs at The American Conservative, has been commenting on the coronavirus for a couple of months now. His way of looking at the whole thing is very different from my own. He describes his approach as one of prudence rather than panic, although he has failed to convince me that the line between the cardinal virtue and the irrational, fear-driven, mob mentality falls where he thinks it does. Two weeks ago he expressed relief when his Eastern Orthodox Archbishop ordered the laity to stay away from the Liturgy, offering a justification from Eastern Orthodox theology that seems a bit bizarre when we consider that the lit in Liturgy comes from the same root as the word laity. I wonder if this was something like how the Anglican Church of Canada gave us a theological justification for Communion in one kind prior to the closing of the dioceses altogether even though this flatly contradicted Article XXX of the Articles of Religion. More recently he expressed his support for his Archbishop’s essentially cancelling Easter. Needless to say he does not think very highly of those pastors who have continued to hold services. He castigates Christians who argue that to refrain from our duty of coming together to worship as the Body of Christ during this pandemic is to allow ourselves to be governed by fear rather than to walk by faith, accusing them of being selfish and judgmental towards their brethren who support the anti-COVID measures, apparently without any sense of the irony of his own shrill, hysterical, self-righteous, and judgmental tone.

Dreher, who believes that “social distancing” and the other measures being imposed upon us to fight COVID are necessary, views the entire question as being that of a choice between human lives and the economy. Framed that way, the only moral answer to the question is to choose human lives. As I argued in my last two essays, however, this is the wrong way of framing the question. The non-economic cost of the anti-COVID measures needs to be factored into the equation. Instilling in people a fear of meeting with each other, shaking hands, hugging, and human contact in general is a way of killing social capital, robbing us of our sense of community. One would think that Dreher of all people, whose first book was very communitarian, would understand this point. The telephone, Skype, live-streamed liturgy, and other technological replacements for community are not adequate substitutes, especially not over extended periods of time. Conditioning the entire populace to look upon them as if they were is an extremely dangerous thing to do. Especially when this conditioning goes hand-in-glove with a request that we give up our basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion. Moreover, it is quite evident that Dreher hasn’t got a clue about what the real cost of sacrificing the economy would be. As true as the words in the title he borrowed from Flannery O’Connor are, this is not a choice between poverty and death. It is a choice between the death of billions, which will be the Malthusian consequence of shutting down all but the “essential” sector of every national economy for too long, overloading that sector, causing it collapse under the strain, and creating a worldwide depression worse than that of the 1930s, and the death of the thousands or, at worst, millions who might die from COVID-19, apart from these measures. It is the choice, in other words, between what is potentially another Spanish flu and what could potentially be a global-scale Holodomor.

Given his point of view, it is perhaps understandable that Dreher has been taking the stance that Christians should regard the forsaking of Church assembly, voluntarily or involuntarily, as a self-denying sacrifice for the sake of others. I cannot help but wonder, however, what he would be saying if some world leader were to arise and tell us that the COVID-19 pandemic can be contained, but to do so we will all have to stay at home, except for essential purchases such as groceries, and that to ensure we do this everyone will be required to receive a mark on his right hand or forehead authorizing him to take part in permitted market transactions. Would he tell us it is our Christian duty to submit to the mark as a sacrifice to save lives or would he tell us, as St. John does, that anyone who submits to the mark will be permanently cut off from the Covenant of Grace?

Earlier this week, the Manitoba Public Health Officer ordered all “non-essential” services to close from April 1st to April 14th. The Right Reverend Geoffrey Woodcroft, Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land in a directive on March 31st, remarked that “While several social service agencies were exempt, Churches specifically are not exempt.” Services had already been suspended as of March 16th by an earlier directive from His Grace. Some parishes, including my own, had switched to online services, either live-streamed or pre-recorded until the lifting of the interdict. Whether even this, inadequate, substitute for gathering together and worshiping will be available during the next two weeks under the limitations of the new directive remains to be seen.*

I bring this up not to criticize my bishop but to draw attention to what is implied by the Manitoba provincial government’s order. If “non-essential” services must close, and Churches are not exempted from that, then Churches are clearly deemed to be “non-essential” by the government. This is not a point of view which orthodox Christians are allowed to share. In my last essay I pointed out that the government’s distinction between “essential” and “non-essential” when it comes to businesses is a fraudulent one and that it is even worse that the government is treating our fundamental freedoms as if they were “non-essential.” If it is not the state’s place to tell anybody that the business he depends upon for his living is “non-essential”, and it is not, and it is not the state’s place to tell us that our freedoms of assembly, association, religion, belief, etc. are “non-essential”, and it is not, it is certainly not the state’s place to tell us that Christ’s Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is non-essential.

We live in an age in which our thinking about the proper authority of the Church and the state within their own spheres and in relation to each other has been fogged by the triumph of liberalism and its presuppositions derived from a secularization of the heretical view of Church and state held by the Anabaptists and the disestablishmentarian branch of Puritanism. This was not the case four, or even three, centuries ago.

In 1688, the Right Reverend William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, was imprisoned in the Tower of London by the order of King James II, along with Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wales, John Lake, Bishop of Chichester, William Lloyd, Bishop of St. Asaph, Jonathan Trelawney, Bishop of Bristol, Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, and Thomas White, Bishop of Peterborough. The issue was that these prelates had refused to publish the king’s 1687 Declaration of Indulgence and had sent a petition to the king, explaining their opposition to it.

There were two elements to their opposition to the Declaration, its content and its legality. The Declaration relaxed the strictest of the Church establishment laws in two ways, first, by allowing private worship for Roman Catholics and Non-conformist Protestants, second, by suspending the Test Act, which required that all who hold public office belong to the Church of England. Today, most would find it difficult to understand why this was problematic, and regard it in a positive light, as moving towards freedom of religion. The second part, the suspension of the Test Act, was the reason why they viewed it so differently in the seventeenth century.

James II was a Roman Catholic. His father, Charles I, had been falsely accused by the Puritans in the English Civil War, of trying to bring the English Church back under the jurisdiction of Rome, as Mary Tudor had done. This, ironically, led to James becoming a Roman Catholic, because when the Puritans murdered his father after an illegal trial, he spent the interregnum in France where he was first exposed to and attracted to Romanism. He “crossed the Tiber” as the saying goes, during the reign of his brother Charles II. As king, he had the right to set aside the Test Act requirements for individuals. Suspending it entirely, however, was regarded as a step towards packing the government with Roman Catholics, as well as an illegal infringement on the rights of the Parliament that passed the Act.

The bishops were tried and acquitted. Parliament then invited William III, Prince of Orange, who had married James’ daughter Mary, to come over, depose his father-in-law, and take his place as king. This accomplished, Parliament then required the clergy of the Church of England to swear an oath of allegiance to the new king.

For five of the seven bishops – Lloyd (1) and Trelawney are the exceptions – as well as four other bishops, and over three hundred priests, this was a problem. If the king had overstepped his divine right by trying to overturn an Act of Parliament, Parliament had overstepped its authority by deposing the king. Furthermore, it had no right to command the clergy to commit an immoral act – to swear an oath, which contradicted the oath they had already sworn to James II and his heirs. They refused to swear the new oath, for which reason history remembers them as the “non-jurors”, and were deprived of their livings.

New bishops were appointed to their sees, turning what was already a political and a moral dilemma, into a theological one. The non-jurors maintained, and they had the weight of the consensus of Catholic antiquity behind them, that Parliament had no legitimate power to depose a bishop, that a bishop so deposed remained the legitimate bishop, and that the bishop put in his place was illegitimately consecrated and schismatic. George Hickes, who as a priest had refused the new oath, was later consecrated a bishop by the non-juring bishops, and become the de facto leader of the group after the death of Archbishop Sancroft, explained these principles at length in a posthumously published book entitled The Constitution of the Catholick Church and the Consequences of Schism. Briefly summarized, it was that the Church and the State were two distinct realms, whose membership overlapped, in the former of which the bishops were the governors and kings as members were subject to them, in the latter of which kings were the governors and bishops as members were subject to them, each government having its own sword to enforce its authority, the bishops having the power of excommunication, the king’s sword being somewhat more literal, but neither had the right to depose the other, or to intrude into the other’s sphere of authority.

The non-jurors had a much clearer understanding than the vast majority of people today, of the distinction between Royal authority, Parliamentary authority, and Ecclesiastical authority, and stood up for the rights of each when infringed upon by one of the others at the cost to themselves of prison, deprivation and poverty. What would they think of today’s totalitarian health bureaucrats ordering Churches to close and “Christian” writers like Dreher who cheer them on?

(1) There were two bishops named William Lloyd. The Bishop of Norwich by that name did become a non-juror, but he was not one of the seven who had signed the petition against the Declaration of Indulgence.

* Update: On April 1st, His Grace updated this directive. He began by saying "In light of further information received from Minister Friesen’s Office and interview on CHVN Radio, it is clear that live-streaming celebration of worship is permissible. I therefore encourage you to continue the practice of live-streaming as you were, because they offer a much needed pastoral response and relief to our people."