Religious Need Not Apply?

Imagine that a national political figure made a controversial statement that was highly offensive to black people and the leader of a black organization was to publicly rebuke him for it. Suppose that you then opened your newspaper one morning, turned to the opinion page, and in a syndicated column were to read that although the politician had stuck his foot in his mouth he was now out of hot water because “Canadians don’t like black people involving themselves, at all, in politics.” Would you find this statement to be offensive? If so, what would you consider to be most offensive about it, that it expresses racist sentiments or that it presumptuously attributes those sentiments to you and your countrymen?

There are many substitutions you can make for the main variable in the above scenario. You could substitute any other racial group other than white Europeans for black people. Or you could substitute women or homosexuals. Run the scenario again with each of these substitutions and you will probably get the same results. Progressive, liberal, and forward thinking people would be appalled to read such remarks in their newspaper and would probably put pressure on the editor to stop running the column.

What if, however, we were to substitute “Christians” for “black people”? Or “religious people” used in such a way that many if not most people would automatically read it as meaning “Christians”.

This, it would appear, is somehow different because we were recently treated to just such a comment and by a progressive, liberal, forward thinking commentator, nonetheless.

The national political figure was Justin Trudeau who, a little over a year ago, was elected leader of the Liberal Party, presumably on the basis of his youth, good looks, and family name. He is the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the lawyer and far left editor, writer and activist from Quebec who entered federal politics in the 1960s as a member of the Liberal Party and succeeded Lester Pearson as leader of the Liberals and Prime Minister. Under his leadership the Liberal Party went from being the party of free trade and continentalism, founded with its lips firmly pressed against Uncle Sam’s rear end, to being the party of socialism, multiculturalism and post-modern moral relativism (in other words a huge redundancy as we already had the NDP for that). Take your pick as to which version of the Liberal Party was most repulsive – it is six of one, half a dozen of the other. In the decade and a half that Pierre Trudeau governed Canada as the head of the Liberal Party he did everything he could to undermine the political, cultural, and social traditions of both English and French Canada, while ruining the country’s economy, saddling us with an enormous debt, and creating a constitutional crisis that long threatened to tear the country apart. The reason I bring all this up is because Trudeau fils is doing an excellent job of making Trudeau père look good by comparison.

The controvers y the young Trudeau provoked a few weeks ago was over abortion. The day before the annual March for Life in Ottawa he announced that future Liberal candidates would be expected to vote the party line with regards to abortion and defined that party line as pro-choice – no legislative restriction on abortion. Needless to say, Trudeau’s stance did not impress the Roman Catholic Church, whose members have traditionally tended to vote Liberal in Canada. Trudeau himself is a member of the Roman Catholic Church and claims, despite his obvious disagreement with the Church on this key ethical issue, to be devout. Catholic leaders have condemned Trudeau’s stance and last week, in an interview with the CBC, the Catholic Bishop of Ottawa described Trudeau’s support for abortion as “scandalous”.

Enter Warren Kinsella. Warren Kinsella is, among other disagreeable things, a lawyer, a punk rocker, a former Liberal Party strategist, and a progressive, forward minded, liberal. He writes a column for the Toronto Sun which is carried by the other papers in the Sun chain, including the Winnipeg Sun. As these papers generally have a right-of-centre, neo-conservative slant, Kinsella’s left-of-centre column tends to stand out.

Last Friday an article by Kinsella entitled “Trudeau leaps blindly into abortion debate” appeared on page 9 of the Winnipeg Sun. In the first half of the column Kinsella praised as reasonable Trudeau’s earlier statement that the party’s position is “we do not reopen (the abortion) debate” but then pointed out that by declaring that future candidates would have to toe the party line Trudeau had done just that. He further observed that Trudeau has dug himself deeper into this hole with his confusing and contradictory attempts to salvage the situation.

Then, however, Kinsella went on to talk about and quote from the Catholic Bishop’s remarks, suggesting that by rebuking Trudeau, the bishop has provided him with a way out of the mess he has made. Here is the reasoning he used to arrive at this conclusion:

“As Stockwell Day learned the hard way, Canadians favour a wall between church and state. And they don’t like the religious involving themselves, at all, in politics.”

It is interesting the different ways in which different people remember certain events. When I think back to the federal election of 2000 in which Stockwell Day led the Canadian Alliance, I do not recall “Canadians” as a whole mocking or attacking Stockwell Day because of his Christian faith. I remember progressive and liberal media elites doing so, especially a certain Liberal Party strategist.

Tories, if and when they are ever true to their own principles, look to their country’s long-rooted traditions and institutions as the foundation of their policies. Progressives look instead to the “will of the people”. Since the people don’t actually have a collective will, unless you count that which is filtered through time and expressed as tradition and which is hence on the side of the Tory rather than the progressive, progressives have to supply the people with one, which inevitably is indistinguishable from the progressive’s own will. Which is why, in this country, one frequently finds progressive writers in an arrogant and condescending tone, telling Canadians what they think.

On almost any issue, Canadians have a wide diversity of ideas. There are those, like myself, who are Tories and support Canada’s traditions and institutions. Then there are those who for some reason or another – perhaps they had a nasty fall when they were children, perhaps they are lacking some important nutrient in their diet, perhaps they have been breathing in too many noxious fumes of one sort or another – are progressive and think more like Kinsella. Of course there are many other viewpoints out there as well. The closest thing to a general consensus among Canadians is that we are not Americans (referring to America in the sense of the country not the continents). Almost everyone agrees about this. Traditional Tories say that we are not Americans with a sense of patriotic pride in our country’s Loyalist heritage and traditions. Neoconservatives agree that we are not Americans but with a sense of regret that we were not part of what they consider to be the great experiment in freedom and democracy shaping the ultimate destiny of the world. Progressives like to say that we are not Americans in the context of telling us what we think, even if what they say we think has less to do with our own country’s traditions and institutions than it does with the United States.

This can be the source of great irony. Note that in the sentences quoted earlier in which the progressive Kinsella tells Canadians what they think, he attributes to them the American concept of a “wall between church and state”. The idea of a “wall between church and state” is not a Canadian idea, nor is it part of our political tradition or constitution. The expression comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut. Jefferson was explaining the significance of the First Amendment to the American Constitution. Furthermore, when Jefferson wrote about “the wall of separation between church and state” he was clearly expressing a liberal, democratic fear of the power of the state, not a progressive contempt for religion. This wall, as Jefferson saw it, was to keep Congress out of religion, not to keep religion from having any say in politics.

Kinsella therefore, has not only attributed to Canadians the belief in a political concept that is part of the American tradition rather than our own, he has also transformed that concept into its polar opposite, a fence to keep “the religious” out of politics rather than a defensive wall protecting religion from state intrusion.

We have not yet mined the irony in Kinsella’s remarks to its full depth. The author of The Web of Hate has built a reputation for himself, among his supporters as an expert on bigotry, among his detractors as a jerk who likes to bully his opponents on the right with accusations of bigotry. You can decide for yourself which version is more accurate, but note in doing so, the irony that this same self-appointed expert on bigotry and hatred, who in the federal election of fourteen years ago publicly ridiculed the leader of the Canadian Alliance for his evangelical Christian beliefs, wrote “the religious” rather than “religion”.

Then ask yourselves whether you, as Canadians, feel complimented or insulted at having this progressive sentiment attributed to yourselves.

The Illiberality of Liberalism

In Taran Wanderer, the fourth of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, a series of fantasy novels for young readers that draws inspiration from Welsh mythology, the hero of the series, Taran, a foundling raised by the wizard Dallben, goes on a quest in search of his parentage. During this quest, he encounters Lord Goryon and Lord Gast, liegemen of King Smoit, his old acquaintance from The Black Cauldron . Lord Goryon, who describes himself as “Goryon the Valorous”, is an arrogant bully whose men pick fights with those weaker than themselves and liberate them of their belongings. Lord Gast, who refers to himself as “Gast the Generous”, invites Taran and his friends to a feast, at which he offers them meager scraps off of his own overloaded plate, all the time praising his own munificence. These lords, each of which identified himself the most with the virtue that was least like his actual character, bring to mind the words of Robert Burns:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us.

The political ideology of liberalism also identifies itself with a virtue. Liberality is one of the classical virtues. It means to be generous towards others in thought and deed, both in the sense of giving and sharing out of one’s material wealth and in the sense of being slow to think ill and quick to think well. Broadmindedness or tolerance, the willingness to let others be, is the very sine qua non of liberality.

Is it, however, a distinguishing trait of liberalism?

Some have suggested that liberalism errs by being generous to a fault, by taking its broadmindedness too far. Towards the end of his life, for example, American poet Robert Frost famously defined a liberal as “a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel”. There is a great deal of truth in this, of course, and example after example could be pointed to of how liberals have insisted upon taking the side of various “others” against their own communities and countries even to the point where it adversely affects the interests of the latter.

There are also, however, countless examples of how liberalism can be anything but tolerant, broadminded and, well, liberal. As William F. Buckley Jr. quipped decades ago “Liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, but it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”

If we look at the roots of political liberalism this should not come as a great surprise to us. The political party that renamed itself Liberal in the nineteenth century was the Whig Party, organized in the seventeenth century by people that were anything but liberal in the sense of being tolerant and broadminded. The Puritans were Protestant extremists who were unsatisfied with the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement and who wished to cleanse the Church of England of anything that smacked of popery to them. They wanted the laws against recusancy to be strictly and severely enforced against Roman Catholics. They went to war against King Charles I out of a paranoid belief that his High Anglican views meant that he was a closet Roman Catholic, deposed him, and had him beheaded. In the interregnum, during which they governed England, they cancelled Christmas and Easter, closed the theatres and banned public amusements on Sundays, stripped the churches of the ornaments and organ music that brought the beauty of high art into the lives of common people, and waged war against Roman Catholics. After the Restoration, these men became the founders and organizers of the Whigs, who drove James II from his throne. The track record, of the party that renamed itself Liberal, was a rather illiberal one.

The liberals of today, both small and big l, are, of course, worlds’ removed from the Puritans in some respects, the most obvious being that they are highly secular. Nevertheless, the spirit of social and moral reform that drove the Puritans still lives on in liberalism today although its targets and objectives have changed. Today’s liberals no longer crusade against surplices, pictures of the saints, and the sign of the cross as corrupting influences that will lead young Protestants astray into the arms of the Scarlet Woman of Babylon although they might object to these things as being offensive to religious minorities. They have found new reforms to champion, such as attempts to eliminate child poverty by reducing the size of sugared soda containers or to save us all from second-degree smoke inhalation by preventing the owners of restaurants and other businesses from allowing tobacco smoking on their own property. They may no longer base their sense of superiority on the belief that they have a better understanding of the Scriptures than the fathers and doctors of the church but they now base it upon the idea that they have been enlightened by reason and science.

The biggest moral crusade of today’s liberals is their campaign against bigotry. In this one might expect liberalism to actually live up to its name. After all, bigotry, which is a negative opinion of those who differ from you that one persists in holding in the face of the evidence, is pretty much the exact opposite of being broadminded, generous, and tolerant. It is ironic, therefore, that it is in liberalism’s crusade against bigotry that its own illiberalism, its own bigotry, is most prominently on display. In its criticism of the history and traditions of Western societies and civilization, liberalism is quick to think the worst of those who have gone before us and the institutions they have bequeathed us, which in itself is a most illiberal attitude. Any metacritical response to this is usually also condemned as being motivated by nothing more than bigotry.

Last week, Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript, stepped down as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, a position to which he had been newly appointed in March. Eich was one of the founders of the corporation, and of its parent the Mozilla Foundation, which was founded to continue a project that Eich had helped start while working for Netscape before the company was bought out and its software discontinued. In other words, he was clearly qualified for the job and his appointment as CEO made perfect sense.

His resignation, so soon after taking the job, occurred in the wake of a negative publicity campaign against him and his company after it was revealed that in 2008 Eich had made a donation to California’s Proposition 8, an effort to amend California’s state constitution to define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman.

This is just one of several examples, in recent months, of heavy handed attempts to punish dissent from the liberal position regarding same-sex marriage. It was only last December, for example, that Phil Robertson, was suspended by the television company A&E from the apparently popular show Duck Dynasty over his views on homosexuality as expressed in an interview with GQ magazine. The station lifted the suspension after it received a backlash of negative comments but it too had clearly been placed under a similar kind of pressure to that which has been placed on Mozilla.

These incidents are clearly intended to convey a message – that liberalism has won the war for what it calls “marriage equality” and that far from being magnanimous in victory it intends to impose a Carthaginian peace upon its foes. Dissent from the idea that a man has just as much of a right to marry a man as he does to marry a woman and that a woman has just as much of a right to marry a woman as she does to marry a man, or even be shown to have dissented from this idea at some point in the past, and an intimidation campaign may be waged against your employer with the purpose of denying you your livelihood.

Liberals try to get around the obvious illiberality of this sort of behaviour by saying that Eich and Robertson are bigots and that bigotry must not be tolerated. If the views of Eich and Robertson are bigoted, however, that means that the orthodox teachings of the Abrahamic faiths constitute bigotry.

Liberalism would seem to be defining a bigot as anyone who disagrees with a liberal view even if that view is one that liberalism only adopted itself yesterday. If, however, bigotry is not to be tolerated, and everyone who disagrees with liberalism is a bigot, then it follows that disagreement with liberalism is not to be tolerated. Yet liberalism calls itself by the name of the virtue of generosity and tolerance. It is an odd kind of tolerance indeed, which declares the only exception to the rule of tolerance, to be everything except itself.