Following Christ in a Time of Plague

The following essay was inspired by a blog post written by a member of the leadership team in my parish.   Since this man has been a friend for about a decade and his post inspired me to write the exact opposite of what he had written, I shall do him the courtesy of leaving out his name.   

 

My parish, like all other Churches, sectarian congregations, and sacred communities of other religions for that matter, are presently forbidden to meet in person here in the province of Manitoba, in violation of three of what the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms identify as “fundamental freedoms” and, indeed, in violation of the entire Common Law tradition of justice and liberty that has been the bedrock upon which the Dominion of Canada was built since Confederation.   This insane government overreach, which evokes memories of the persecution of religious communities in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Red China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba and North Vietnam, is called a “Code Red” lockdown, and has been ordered by the public health mandarin, because he and the premier don’t like the fact that the dishonest media concentration on rising numbers of people who test positive for the Wuhan bat flu, regardless of the facts that the tests used are not diagnostic tools and that the majority of the “cases” are people who are not sick in any conventional sense of the term, make them look bad.   Most people are incapable of distinguishing between what the media says and reality and therefore have been duped into thinking that the tearing apart of the fabric of society, dissolving of communities, eroding of social capital, and brainwashing us all into fearing ordinary human contact and distrusting our friends, relatives, and neighbours outside of an extremely small so-called “bubble” of contacts is somehow “necessary.”   The isolation this causes, is not merely an experience we don’t enjoy, something unpleasant, but is downright harmful to our social, moral, spiritual, psychological, and yes, as everyone who knows the meaning of mens sana in corpore sano is aware, physical wellbeing.   Anybody capable of distinguishing between the bare facts and the slant imposed upon them by alarmist adjectives in the news and drawing rational conclusions from the facts will know, regardless of what “most of us” may or may not agree upon, that these measures are by no means precautions necessitated by the spread of a virus which for the portion of the population under 70 and in good health is less dangerous than the seasonal flu and for the portion of the population that is most at risk, that is to say those over 70 and with two or more serious chronic health conditions, these measures are quite evidently not effective at protecting since that portion of the population has been under lockdown since spring.   Furthermore and more importantly, not only are the lockdown measures not necessary, they are not good.   (1)

 

It is not just disappointing, then, but actually rather disgusting, to see so many people, including professing Christians and even Church leaders, so determined to load the burden of these restrictions upon their family, friends, neighbours, strangers and countrymen in general, as if they were not familiar with our Lord’s warning to His disciples about imitating the Pharisees in loading burdens upon others.  

 

For much of the last nine months, but especially since the new lockdown was gradually introduced over October and November, I have struggled to reconcile how professing Christians could so callously disregard not only the civil rights and basic freedoms of their neighbours, but their needs as social and spiritual beings as well.  Jesus told us that to love our neighbours as ourselves was the Second Greatest Commandment after that which tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.   It is one thing to say that the voluntary sacrificing of our personal rights and freedoms in the name of keeping our neighbours “safe” is a fulfilment of this Commandment, it is quite another thing to say that sacrificing the rights and freedoms of our family, friends and neighbours is such a fulfilment.   Supporting public health orders that impose maximal restrictions on everybody’s freedom of association, assembly, and religion is doing the latter.   To mistake sacrificing the rights and freedoms of others, which is what support for these public health orders amounts to, for the voluntary sacrificing of your own rights and freedoms, and patting yourself on the back about how much you love your neighbour, is to give the text of the Second Greatest Commandment merely the most superficial of readings.

 

There is a popular but very wrong and misguided notion that says that to insist upon and stand up for our rights and freedoms is to act selfishly and that to blindly support and obey every rule and restriction that is enacted in the name of public health is to put the common good ahead of our own.   While it is true that at the experiential level rights and freedoms are things that we primarily enjoy on an individual basis it is entirely wrong to say that insisting upon them and standing up for them is selfish.   Once again, voluntarily agreeing to limit the expression of our rights and freedoms for the sake of others may very well be the loving thing to do, but supporting government action that limits those rights and freedoms, not just for us as individuals but for everyone in society, is the very opposite of a loving act.   Our Lord summarized the message of His Sermon on the Mount in the Golden Rule, which states “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you; do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”   That is the rule worded positively, in terms of what we are supposed to do.   It is a coin with a reverse side, which expresses the same thing negatively, in terms of what we are not supposed to do.   Rabbi Hillel the Elder famously gave the negative form of this as “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary” (Shabbat 31a in the Babylonian Talmud).   If supporting government measures that restrict to the point of taking away completely the rights and freedoms of all members of our society does not constitute doing to your fellows what is despicable to you, it is difficult to conceive of what would.

 

When, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, the most famous student of the said Rabbi Hillel’s grandson Gamaliel who went on to become an Apostle of our Lord, St. Paul, in his first epistle to the Church in Corinth instructed them to be careful in how they exercised their Christian liberty so as not to be as stumbling block to those of weaker conscience and to put the good of others ahead of their own good, he clearly meant that they should voluntarily limit and restrict their freedom for the sake of others, not that they should write Caesar and ask him to do it for them and everybody else, nor that they should become Caesar’s cheering section if he did so of  his own accord.   When it came to limiting the freedom of others, St. Paul’s thoughts on that can be found in his epistle to the Galatians, in which the very first anathema sit (actually anathema esto since St. Paul wrote in Greek not Latin) was pronounced on those who presumed so to do.    It is worth pointing out that in I Corinthians the recommended voluntarily imposed limits on freedom involved eating meat of dubious origins and in Galatians the limitations on others that were condemned involved forcing people to cut off their foreskins and to stop eating bacon.   Locking people away in their own houses for months, even if they are healthy, without even the pretence of a criminal charge, let alone trial and conviction, forbidding them any sort of healthy social contact, ordering the businesses in which their life’s work, and possibly that of several generations of their family, is all tied up, and upon which they depend for their living to close and this sort of thing goes far beyond what St. Paul condemned in the legalists troubling the Galatians.    What would he have thought if he had foreseen that some would take his plea to the Corinthians to exercise their liberty prudently and wisely and seek the good of others as an argument for supporting imposed limitations of this nature?

 

I suspect the answer would be close to what St. Peter had to say about those who misused St. Paul’s epistles in his own day “As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.”  (II Peter 3:16)

 

That Jesus demonstrated by His own life what love looks like is most certainly true.   Indeed, His life was a demonstration of what a love that goes beyond the love spoken of in the Greatest and the Second Greatest Commandments looks like.   Remember, those Commandments He said, were the summary of the Law, i.e., that which God rightly requires of us.   A self-sacrificial love, such as Jesus demonstrated by allowing Himself to be unjustly condemned, tortured, and brutally killed for the sake of us all, goes far beyond that, and it is Jesus’ example that Christians are commanded to follow.   To suggest, however, that support and obedience for the lockdown measures is what that kind of love looks like today, is to say something that could only be true in some sort of parallel world where everything is the opposite of our own.

 

Think about it.   In the time of our Lord’s earthly ministry, the disease that everybody feared, for which everybody who contracted it was excluded from the community and forced to announce themselves as “unclean” lest any unwary traveler come too close, was leprosy.   Jesus encountered several lepers at various points in His ministry, each encounter ending with the healing of the leper.   One particular encounter stands out, however, which is related in all three of the Synoptic Gospels.   In St. Matthew’s Gospel it follows immediately after the Sermon on the Mount.   After He comes down from the mountain a great multitude follows Him and a leper comes to Him, worships Him, and says “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.”   He answered, not just in word but in deed:

 

And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

He did not warn the leper to stay a safe distance away.   He did not warn His disciples to stay a safe distance away.   He did not stay a safe distance away Himself.   He “put forth His hand, and touched him.”

 

In 1832, the plague of cholera hit the city that is now called Toronto.   It killed a twelfth of the population.    It was, in other words, a plague that makes the one that has been generating an insane amount of panic this year, look small and pathetic in comparison.   While droves fled the city, John Stachan, the Anglican archdeacon of York who seven years later would become the first Bishop of the Diocese of Toronto, remained, personally attended to the sick, volunteered on the wagons that collected dead bodies, conducted the burials, and arranged for support for those orphaned and widowed by the plague.   He did precisely the same thing when the “second wave” of cholera hit two years later.

 

What does following Jesus’ example of self-sacrificing love for others look like in a time of plague?  Is it what soon-to-be Bishop Strachan did in 1832?   Or is it lecturing other Christians on how abiding by rules that destroy the economy, bankrupt small family businesses and enlarge the market share of big box chains and online corporations like Amazon, tear the fabric of society to pieces, dissolve communities, exhaust social capital, eliminate third places (2), keep families apart, close Churches, encourage distrust of neighbours, and accustom us to accepting severe government limitations on everyone’s basic rights and freedoms, all without accomplishing the stated purpose of saving lives, for the people most at risk and who have been under lockdown much longer are dying anyway and to their number are being added the underreported but rising numbers of suicides, murders, addiction-related deaths and other deaths caused by the lockdowns themselves, somehow serves the “common good”?

 

Go thou and do likewise.

 

(1)   For Christian insights drawn from Plato’s distinction in the Timaeus between “The Good” and “The Necessary” see the Notebooks of Simone Weil.

(2)   Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day, 1989.

 

Scapegoats

The term scapegoat comes to us from the Bible.   The Book of Leviticus, which is the third book of Moses in what we call the Pentateuch and Jews call the Torah, mostly consists of instructions for the priestly, ceremonial, aspects of the Sinaitic Covenant.   Hence the title of the Book.   The Levites were the Tribe of Levi, the tribe assigned to the priestly role.   The sixteenth chapter of the book is a set of instructions pertaining specifically to the high priest, on the one day of the year he was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, the innermost part of the Tabernacle where the Ark of the Covenant with the Shekinah of God over the Mercy Seat was located.   That day was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.   On that day, the high priest was commanded to bring a young bullock for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering.    The fifth verse adds that he was to "take of the congregation of the children of Israel two kids of the goat for a sin offering, and one ram for a burnt offering".   The first bullock and ram were offerings required for himself, the others were required for the people.   This, as St. Paul reminds us in the book of Hebrews, was what was required of the Levitical priesthood in their daily office as well as on the Day of Atonement - first they brought offerings for themselves, then on behalf of the people.   

After Aaron, and by implication his successors in the role of high priest, offered the bullock for his own sin offering, he was commanded to take the two goats and present them before the Lord at the door of the Tabernacle.   Lots would be cast on the goats to determine which would be the Lord's, the sin offering, and which would be the scapegoat.   The one chosen by lot to be the Lord's would be offered up on the altar as a sin offering.   As for the other goat, the scapegoat, after the priest had made the burnt and sin offerings and sanctified everything by sprinkling it with blood, he would bring the scapegoat, present him live before the Lord, lay his hands upon the head of the goat and "confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins", after which the goat would be led away into the wilderness and released.    The purpose of all of this, if it is not already plain, was the symbolic removal of the people's sins.   The live goat, released into the wilderness, was called an azazel in Hebrew.   This word, derived from the verb for "remove", has generally been rendered in translation by words that emphasize the removal of the goat itself, although there is an alternative , mystical, tradition that sees Azazel as the proper name of a demon that receives the goat and the sins.   The English "scapegoat" uses a shortened form of the word "escape", and thus aligns with the first interpretive tradition, albeit in a way that would be awkward if this rendition had been made today.

In Christianity, books such as Leviticus are understood in the light of the revelation of God's mercy and grace in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Atonement He made in His death, and His triumphant Resurrection.   The aforementioned epistle to the Hebrews contains the longest canonical example of such interpretation, laying the foundation for all that followed.   Although St. Paul elaborates in that epistle on how Jesus Christ was the true High Priest to which Aaron pointed, as well as the true sacrifice, and even how the heavenly Tabernacle where He entered through the sprinkling of His Own blood is the true Tabernacle to which the Tabernacle in the wilderness pointed, he does not mention the scapegoat.   It is likely he felt that given everything else he had written the Christian understanding of the scapegoat would be so obvious as to not need to be elaborated on.   Jesus is the fulfilment of both the sacrifice and the goat that was released because it is through Him our sins are taken away.   Elsewhere, St. Paul wrote "For He hath made Him to be sin for us, Who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him". (II Cor. 5:21)   Even before St. Paul, however, the prophet Isaiah had tied the imagery of the scapegoat to the promised Messiah, in the last of his Songs of the Suffering Servant, when he wrote "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." (Is. 53:6)

The word scapegoat in the Biblical sense we have just looked at is a noun.   It has entered common parlance, however, as a verb, and a verb with rather negative connotations.   It has become the verb that denotes the act of unfairly blaming an innocent victim either for your own mistakes or wrongdoings or for some bad thing that is happening to a group to which you and the now-excluded scapegoat belong(ed).   In other words, to do to a person or group of persons, what the high priest was commanded to do to the literal scapegoat in Leviticus.

It could be argued that this usage distorts the original meaning of the word and such an argument would, in a sense, be right.   It is worth noting, however, that the vernacular usage of the verb scapegoat describes precisely the actions of the human agents involved in the Crucifixion, from the priests and lay leaders of Israel who conspired against Jesus, to the Roman governor who acquiesced to the execution of a Man he knew to be innocent to satisfy the demands of a mob.    Think of the words of Caiaphas, as recorded by St. John, following the resurrection of Lazarus "Ye know nothing at all, Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one Man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not" (Jn. 11:49-50) and consider them in the sense obviously intended by the high priest, rather than the prophetic sense recognized by the Apostle.   The intent is parallel to that of Pontius Pilate - sacrifice an Innocent Man to avoid a catastrophe that would affect the whole society.    However Caiaphas and Pilate may have eased their own consciences over this, they have gone down in the judgement of history as the most cowardly and treacherous villains of all time.

One thinker who saw a very close connection between the literal Biblical scapegoat and the social phenomenon that bears its name was the late French-American historian, literary professor and social philosopher René Girard.  Girard, who was born and raised in France, but who taught in various American academic institutions including Indiana, John Hopkins, and finally Stanford Universities, developed his thoughts on scapegoating as a societal mechanism in the context of his larger theories with regards to mimicry.    What began as a fairly non-controversial theory of learning and development - that human learning begins with the imitating of adult language and behaviour - he expanded into a general theory explaining the origins of violence, conflict and religion.   As people learn by copying others, they come to develop the same desires as others.  This mimetic desire, as Girard called it, produces competition and rivalry, which grow into conflict.   Here violence enters into the picture.   Scapegoating, in the sense of finding someone to pin all the blame for the conflict and violence upon, and then banish or kill that person, he maintained, was the means which communities and societies had developed for relieving the pressure from this cycle of violence when it had gotten to the point of being about to explode and destroy everything, restoring unity and harmony,  and preserving the community.   This only worked, however, if everybody accepted the (false) guilt of the scapegoat.   The restored societal peace was built upon a lie. 

Religion, Girard maintained in Violence and the Sacred (1972, 1977) has its origins in the scapegoat mechanism.   The human sacrifices of primitive religions were scapegoats, the animal sacrifices of more advanced religions were an attempt at accomplishing the same end with less human bloodshed.   Christianity, Girard, who was a Roman Catholic, argued, in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978, 1987) presented a solution that was the very opposite of all of this.   Jesus Christ was the ultimate victim of the scapegoat process, but turned it all around.   As He was crucified He forgave His murderers.   He rose from the dead, proving both His divinity and His innocence.  This denied to His persecutors the fulfilment of their purpose in scapegoating Him - no new unity could be built upon the acceptance of the lie of His guilt, but He offered something better instead.   If man cannot live in peace and harmony without the death of an innocent victim, then so be it, but let there be no pretension about it.  He Himself would be the last sacrifice, the voluntary scapegoat, satisfying the sinful human need for innocent blood and offering real peace and unity, but on the grounds of the truth of our guilt and His Innocence, rather than the lie of the reverse.

Of course people are as free to reject this solution as they are to accept it and so scapegoating continues long after the final Sacrifice.

Almost a century ago, a man who rejected the Christian solution rose to power in a country that had largely turned its back on Christianity in its embrace of modernity, by promising them relief for the hardships they had endured since the end of the First World War.   As part of his pitch to the German people, Adolf Hitler employed the scapegoat mechanism of blaming the Jewish race for their woes.   I don't need to tell you what the result was.   As the late Paul Harvey used to say, "now you know the rest of the story".

Which brings us to this year and what is going on right now.   

The number of cases of bat flu here in the province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada has been rising since the end of summer.   There has also been a rise in hospitalizations and deaths, the latter mostly among those who are very old and have three or more health conditions.   The media with its alarmist hype has blown all three of these rises - case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths - way out of proportion, and tried to convince us that we are living out Stephen King's The Stand..   Brian Pallister, the province's premier, and Brent Roussin, the chief health mandarin, have sought to allay the irrational fears brought about by this irresponsible excuse for reporting by imposing restrictions upon Manitobans,   When the first set of restrictions didn't work, they imposed more, and when that didn't work, they imposed more yet again.   Once again they failed to achieve their desired result.   Sane people, at this point, would have realized that if something hasn't worked, and more of the same hasn't worked, and yet more of the same hasn't worked either, that it is time to try something else instead.   They were incapable of thinking of anything other than restrictions, however, and so we ended up with more of the same.   Ultimately it got to the point where we were in complete lockdown again, worse than earlier this year, with a month-long ban on socializing with people outside of our immediate households.   It was as if they wanted to move us out of The Stand and into The Shining (another Stephen King novel in which an alcoholic writer, driven mad by loneliness and isolation, tries to murder his family).

Clearly, Pallister and Roussin's bat flu policies were a complete failure.   Worse, they had taken away all of the traditional and prescriptive freedoms that are rightfully ours as citizens of one of Her Majesty's Commonwealth Realms, as well as our constitutional rights, and had nothing to show for it.   They decided to look for a scapegoat and found it in the very few Christian congregations in this province who have not behaved as quislings in the face of the flagrantly unconstitutional suspension of the fundamental freedom of worship.   The reason the case numbers keep going up, Pallister and Roussin tell us, is not because they, Pallister and Roussin, have small, one-track minds, incapable of thinking of anything more creative than slapping restrictions and fines on people, but because these congregations insist on meeting in violation of public health orders.

They are blaming innocent parties for their own failure.   Classic scapegoating.

Take, for example, the story that has been all over the CBC this weekend.  On Saturday evening and again Sunday morning, Springs of Living Water held drive-in services.   These services are banned under the present public health orders even though they cannot possibly contribute to the spread of the bat flu, because everyone stays in his own car in the parking lot and listens to the service on a loudspeaker.   Since nobody can transmit the bat flu - or any other contagion for that matter - under these circumstances, the public health order forbidding them are unconstitutional.  Court precedent dictates that limitations on our fundamental freedoms - and the freedom of worship, assembly, and association are all involved here - can only be considered constitutionally justifiable if their impact on the freedom/right is minimal and demonstrably contributes to the policy end for which the limitation is enacted.   The inclusion of drive-in services in this ban fails both of these litmus tests and is clearly in place to bully and harass worshipping believers.   I don't think much of the "prosperity gospel" theology of this congregation and its pastor Leon Fontaine, but they are well within their constitutional rights to stand their ground here, and are certainly not contributing to the spread of the bat flu.

The other congregation that has been all over the news for its defiance of these evil and unconstitutional public health orders is the Church of God, located just south of Steinbach in the Municipality of Hanover.   Last weekend the police fined this congregation $5000 for meeting and they fined its pastor, Tobias Tiessen, about half that amount in two tickets, one for holding the service, another for attending the anti-lockdown rally in Steinbach on the 14th.   The latter ticket, of course, is a violation of the constitutional right to peacefully protest.   This weekend, the congregation had planned a drive-in service to be held in the parking lot, against which no public health order is constitutionally acceptable.   The RCMP blockaded the congregation's parking lot.

It is time that we call this government harassment of people exercising their constitutional "fundamental freedom" of worship what it is - scapegoating.  It is not people attending worship services that is causing the bat flu numbers to rise.   It is not even people breaking the stupid and absurd health orders in general.   There is simply not enough of that going on here for that to be the cause.   The fact of the matter is that the continual rise in numbers prove that the public health orders don't work and should be rescinded in toto immediately.   Pallister and Roussin should admit their bullying, thuggish behaviour and vile health orders don't work, apologize for infringing upon our rights and freedoms, and immediately cease and desist their attempts to scapegoat Manitobans who wish to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms, live their lives, and obey their God, rather than locking themselves away in their homes and living in fear of the bat flu.

Condemn Captain Airhead – But For the Right Reason

Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau as unimaginative types like to call him, has received a lot of much deserved criticism this week. As was the case in the notorious “blackface” scandal of last year’s Dominion election, in which it was revealed that on at least three occasions he had worn skin-darkening makeup which, had any of his subordinates or opponents done, would have resulted in him requiring that they resign and be sent in permanent exile to the land of perpetual shame, a hypocritical double standard was the problem.

Captain Airhead, like his Communist father before him, hates the rights and freedoms of Her Majesty’s free subjects in Canada and the Common Law tradition from which they arise. C. S. Lewis in The Horse and His Boy has the Tisroc of Calormen utter these words to his Grand Vizier and to his son Rabadash “It is very grievous…Every morning the sun is darkened in my eyes, and every night my sleep is the less refreshing, because I remember that Narnia is still free.” This is very similar to the sentiment of Captain Airhead, except that he is the Grand Vizier, which is another name for Prime Minister, and it is his own country’s freedom that he hates.

In what used to be called Christendom, but is now called “Western Civilization”, people who hate freedom tend to hate Christianity. Christianity teaches that God, after liberating Israel from literal slavery in Egypt, made a Covenant of Law with them, and promised that one day He would make a New and better Covenant, which promise He fulfilled in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, events which took place on the anniversary of the original Passover, and which brought spiritual liberty to the entire world. St. Paul, especially in his epistle to the Romans but in many of his other epistles as well, emphasizes that through our union with Christ in His death we die to the sin which enslaved us and that through our union with Him in His Resurrection we are raised to the new life, which is a life of liberty. This is the reason why totalitarians have always hated Christianity above all other religions.

Needless to say, the Christian Passover, known as Easter in countries with Germanic languages, and Pascha everywhere else, which commemorates the liberation of the world from spiritual bondage in the death and Resurrection of Christ, is not the favourite holiday of freedom haters.

With all the necessary apologies to Dr. Seuss, the following is what I suspect went down in the Prime Minister’s residence as Lent drew to a close and Holy Week approached. Captain Airhead, whose heart and whose brain are at least two sizes too small, was stewing away and saying to himself “I’ve got to stop Easter from coming, but how?”

So he consulted with Hajdu, he consulted with Tam, he called on his Cabinet to think up a plan.

Then Captain Airhead, he had an idea – a terrible, monstrous, horrendous idea.

Said Captain Airhead:

“I know what I’ll do, I’ll frighten them all with catching bat flu. The virus from China is now over here, I’ll shut down the country for over a year. I’ll close all the churches, I’ll close all the schools, I’ll close all the libraries, malls, parks and pools. I’ll close all the businesses, except grocery stores, I’ll clear out the sidewalks, and lock all the doors. I’ll scold them and nag them and boss them around, I’ll bully, I’ll badger, I’ll act like a clown. After eighteen months straight of only TV, they all will forget that they ever were free. And then when Easter is just round the bend, I’ll tell everybody ‘Stay home this weekend!’”

He’s a mean one, that Captain Airhead.

Well, we all know what happened. After telling Canadians to sacrifice their Easter plans, he then took off from Ottawa to Harrington Lake, Quebec to be with his family at their cottage for the weekend.

Did Captain Airhead’s heart and his brain grow three sizes that weekend?

Sadly, I’m afraid not. He still insisted that the rest of us give up Easter, put our lives on hold, and surrender our freedoms to the total control of the public health officials.

He has not escaped criticism in the press for his double standard, but that criticism, or at least the portion of it that I have read, has all been rather wrongheaded in my opinion. It has taken the form: Trudeau told all the rest of us to sacrifice our Easter plans, therefore he should have sacrificed his own. It should have taken this form instead: Trudeau was not willing to sacrifice his own family plans for Easter weekend, therefore he should not have told all of the rest of us to do so.

The problem is not that he spent the weekend at the cottage with his family. That at least is a human thing to do. The problem is that he has been bullying and threatening and scolding the rest of us into giving up our lives and our freedoms. That is a despotic thing to do.

Should the fourth estate finally start criticizing Trudeau for piling on rule after rule on top of an already excessive heap of rules, this will be the first sign of our recovery from our true affliction, which is not some batty coronavirus from China but a lack of appreciation of our fundamental rights and liberties.

Worse than Infidels

“Take heed”, the Lord Jesus Christ told His disciples “and beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” (Matt. 16:6) It was not, as His disciples initially supposed, literal bread against which He was warning them, but the teachings of these first century Jewish sects. The frequency with which He told His disciples not to follow the example of the Pharisees suggests that He recognized in this a temptation to which His followers would be particularly prone.

When, therefore, we consider the Christian duty enjoined upon us by the Great Commission, whether we interpret that commission in a high church sense as speaking of the ministry of Word and Sacrament of the organized Church or in the evangelical sense of the duty of all believers to tell others about the Gospel (1) we ought always to keep in mind as a warning Christ’s declaration:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. (Matt. 23:16)

Clearly there is a right and wrong way to evangelize and we ought to be wary of the kind of theology that subordinates all other concerns to the very real need to bring the Gospel to those who have not yet heard it.

Consider a popular evangelical response to the present migration situation. For some time now a massive wave of migration has been going on as thousands of people from what used to be called the Third World but which the politically correct word police now insist we call the Global South have been moving into the countries of what used to be Christendom but is now known as Western Civilization. Some are coming claiming to be refugees or asylum seekers, legitimately and illegitimately, some are going through the proper channels to immigrate legally, whereas many others are just swarming in, but refugee or immigrant, legal or illegal, they are coming. A standard evangelical response is to say that we should look upon this as an opportunity and welcome them, because they here are the unevangelized arriving on our doorstep.

There is truth in this response. Yes, these people need the Gospel, yes, most of them have not heard the Gospel, yes, we have a Christian duty to share the Gospel with them, and yes, their having come to where we are certainly makes evangelizing them more convenient for us. This is not the whole side of the story however, and it is going too far to say that because of the evangelism opportunities it creates we ought therefore to welcome this wave of migration as a blessing.

When a country experiences immigration on a large enough scale to noticeably alter the ethnic and cultural composition of the country’s population this will have a number of negative effects on the country. Some of these negative effects will be economical and these will be felt the most by the poorest people in the country as the influx of newcomers increases the labour supply, driving down wages, and increases competition for jobs. This will especially be a problem if the country already has a high rate of unemployment. There are other ways, however, in which large scale, demographic-transforming, immigration negatively affects a country. The trust in one’s neighbours and countrymen, the social capital so essential to a sense of community – a sense of who “we” are – has been demonstrated to be seriously compromised by the diversity that this kind of immigration brings. (2) Furthermore, a country’s most basic rights, freedoms, and legal protections of the same, can be placed in jeopardy by this kind of immigration if the cultural tradition in which these things are rooted is seriously threatened.

These are exactly the negative effects this kind of immigration has been having in my country, the Dominion of Canada. When Canada was founded in Confederation 150 years ago as a self-governing Dominion within the British family of nations, it already was culturally plural with three basic ethnic communities – English-speaking Protestant Loyalists, French-speaking Roman Catholics whose religion, language, and culture had been protected by the British Crown after the Seven Years War and the Indian tribes of various religious persuasions, Christian and otherwise, who had signed treaties with the British Crown. A common allegiance to the British Crown, albeit for different reasons with each group, was the sole factor uniting these different communities – which is the reason why immigrants ever since have had to swear allegiance to the Crown to obtain citizenship. Our parliamentary form of government and our Common Law rights and freedoms are rooted in the cultural tradition attached to the Crown. The Liberal Party of Canada has, since the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, waged an assault on that cultural tradition using mass immigration of the type we have been discussing as one of its chief weapons. With the weakening of the British tradition in Canada has come a weakening of our basic rights and freedoms, one which was not successfully repaired by the Liberal Party’s attempts in 1982 to shift these onto the new basis of a written Charter. (3) Since the Liberal Party regained control of Parliament in 2015, it has set immigration targets at a record high, despite Canada’s having an unemployment rate of just under 7% which the Party seems determined to drive even higher with its ill-conceived, economy-killing, environmentalist schemes, such as the carbon tax.

For an evangelical Christian to endorse this sort of thing, just because it makes evangelism more convenient is an act of impiety in the extreme.

Impiety is the name of the sin with which Christ charged the Pharisees when He accused them of getting around the commandment to honour their fathers and mothers by declaring the portion of their wealth that could otherwise have been used to support their parents to be corban, i.e., dedicated to the temple treasury. (Mark 7:1-13) It is, as its name suggests, the opposite of piety, the ancient virtue which consisted of showing proper and dutiful respect and devotion to God and to one’s parents and ancestors. That devotion to God and to one’s parents/ancestors were so closely connected as to be a single virtue is recognized in virtually every ancient tradition – Plato made this the focus of his Euthyphro, the Romans regarded pietas as one of the chief virtues, and C. S. Lewis provided several examples of the same thought recurring in other traditions in the appendix to his The Abolition of Man. (4) In the Hebrew Scriptures, the commandment to “honour thy father and mother”, in addition to being the first commandment with a promise, as St. Paul notes, is placed immediately after the commandments outlining duties to God and before the commandments outlining duties to one’s fellow men, making it possible to link the commandment with the first set. The ancients understood that duty to one’s parents and ancestors involved looking out for the good of their descendants as well and so piety by extension includes devotion to one’s entire family and household. Devotion to the spiritual household – the family of God, the church – and patriotism, devotion to the national family, are further extensions of this duty.

St. Paul, in his first epistle to Timothy, pronounced the judgement of Christianity upon impiety. Having instructed Timothy to regard elder men in the church as fathers, younger men as brothers, elder women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, he tells him to honour widows, saying that if a widow has children or nephews they should “learn first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents: for that is good and acceptable before God.” (5:4). Of those in the church who refuse to do this, he writes “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (5:8)

The same judgement applies to those who sanctimoniously cite evangelistic opportunity, as a reason for supporting and welcoming immigration and refugee policies that have harmed and are harming – perhaps irreparably – their countries.


(1) The Great Commission is worded differently in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, St. Matthew’s wording lending itself to the high church or catholic interpretation, St. Mark’s to the low church or evangelical interpretation.
(2) Dr. Robert D. Putnam, Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, and author of the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, conducted an extensive study on the effects of diversity on social capital. He published his findings in 2007, writing that “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’-that is, to pull in like a turtle” which means that they “tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century”, Scandinavian Political Studies, 30:2 (June, 2007), pp. 137-174.
(3) See my “Civil Libertarians of Canada: The Charter is Not Your Friend”: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2015/05/civil-libertarians-of-canada-charter-is.html
(4) C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), in which the first example under “Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors” is “Your father is an image of the Lord of Creation, your mother an image of the Earth. For him who fails to honour them, every work of piety is in vain. This is the first duty.” Hindu. Janet, i. 9 is cited as the source. In this appendix, Lewis is providing examples of what he, borrowing the term from Chinese philosophy, calls the Tao, i.e., universal natural laws underlying traditional moralities.

This and That No. 17

In my last "This and That" I praised the Harper government for restoring "Royal" to the titles of our navy and airforce but warned against the Omnibus Crime Bill and the threat to privacy and free speech which it poses.

In this edition, I would like to again offer praise and criticism to the government. Prime Minister Harper has ordered all Canadian embassies to display a portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. That is an excellent decision although it is unfortunate that it was necessary - the embassies should already have had the Queen's portrait on prominent display.

Now for the criticism.

In an interview with the CBC's Peter Mansbridge, Prime Minister Harper said that the biggest security threat to our country is Islamic terrorism. That may or may not be the case. It is not this statement of Harper's that I wish to criticism but his plan to revive the anti-terrorist legislation the Chretien government introduced 10 years ago after 9/11.

This legislation gives the police powers which they do not need to effectively fight terrorism. This violates the rights of all Canadians.

The United States, after the terrorist attack of ten years ago, passed the USA PATRIOT Act which granted enhanced investigatory powers to the executive branch of the American government. A couple of years later the Bush administration asked for yet more powers. The late Sam Francis, in his syndicated column, wrote the following:

It is thunderously noticeable in most of the defensive speeches, wisecracks and sarcasm about the critics of these laws that hardy anyone ever actually specifies why such vast powers are needed and what terrorism they have actually prevented. What we do know is that every few weeks the government issues yet another statement claiming that the "terrorist threat" remains serious or is greater than ever or may be getting worse. There seems to be no reason to think the new powers have helped us at all.

But the larger point is not what this administration does or doesn't do with the new powers.

The point is that the powers are far larger than the government of any free people should have and that whatever powers this administration doesn't use could still be used by future ones. (Sam Francis, "Bush Writing Last Chapters In Story of American Liberty", Creators Syndicate, September 25, 2003)

The same, of course, can be said of the Canadian equivalent of such legislation.

Here in Canada, we ought to be aware of the way measures taken to combat terrorism can threaten the liberty and rights of ordinary Canadians. Or have we already forgotten how Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in peacetime in 1970, imposing martial law on the entire country, in response to the criminal actions of a domestic terrorist organization based in Quebec?

Pierre Trudeau had absolutely no respect for Canada's British tradition and the rights and freedoms which are the heritage of Canadians because of that tradition (he had no respect for Canada's French tradition either but that is not relevant in this context). Prime Minister Harper, however, by restoring the traditional titles of our military and properly insisting that our embassies display the Queen's portrait, has been telling Canada and the world that he does respect our British tradition.

That tradition consists of more that outward symbols, important as they are. It consists of rights and liberties too. As I wrote at Free Dominion the other day:

"Islamic terrorism poses no threat to Canada that a sensible immigration policy would not solve. There is no need for domestic surveillance and laws which further erode the traditional, prescriptive, rights of Canadians. It would be better for the government to work at undoing the damage to the traditional rights which all Canadians are supposed to possess as subjects of the Queen that was done by Trudeau's Charter of Rights and Freedoms." (http://www.freedominion.com.pa/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=146920#p1643469)

I am still working on my next essay in my "Arts and Culture" series. It is on the topic of music. I have re-written it a couple of times already and am still not satisfied with it, but will hopefully have it ready to post next week.