Can you think of a better time to tell Jews to keep their symbols out of our public spaces than while Hamas supporters roam Canada chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free?” Moncton City Council apparently couldn’t.
Riiiight. Evolving away from the tedious actual language of our charter, so recently fresh and inspiring, beginning “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.”
Note that the charter does not recognize the supremacy of “God or lack thereof.” Nor of “gods.” Or “Satan.” And despite postmodern pretensions, words have meanings because ideas have consequences. Including that you can’t not have a moral code. You can be muddled about it. But way deep down, you either think a supreme being punishes evil or you don’t, and it matters.
The “Movement laïque” judgment reads like typical McLachlin sociological meandering. But it was actually Clément Gascon, with McLachlin and six others concurring, and Rosalie Abella concurring in part. And even the rule of law is out the window because the “evolution of Canadian society,” not Canadian law, “has given rise to a concept of this neutrality according to which the state must not interfere in religion and beliefs … it must neither favour nor hinder any particular belief, and the same holds true for non-belief.” Except the bit where it militantly excludes any discernible traces of belief, including a Menorah to admit some people are celebrating Hanukkah.
The justices have not thought it through. McLachlin once said the court was “trying to create a space within the rule of law in which religious beliefs and practices can manifest.” Big of her. But as John Polkinghorne wrote in “The Faith of a Physicist,” “to ask an adherent to give up what are perceived as the central truths of a tradition in order to find accommodation within a sufficiently unfocused universality is ‘akin to asking a native speaker of English to please try and do without nouns, since we have reason to believe that using them leads to an inappropriately reified view of the world.’”
Thus the Canadian Human Rights Commission recently argued for abolishing Canada’s “identity as a settler colonial state,” including ditching Christmas as an official holiday. It may be acceptable, briefly, to have a tree or Santa, especially if they mock Christmas like the Soviet “Grandfather Frost,” as exciting as chewed paper, instead of hinting that the Nativity might matter. But probably not, and pro-Hamas protesters have been going after the trees too, because the CHRC and Supreme Court have a point. Just not the one they think.
As Tom Holland argues in “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World,” we embrace values we mistakenly think are universal, like compassion for the meek. But they’re actually so deeply rooted in the Christian faith, and the Judaism it claims to fulfil, that to dispose of those faiths is to dispose of those values. And we ditched “Dominion Day” in 1982.
Polkinghorne cautioned that the “inclusive” impulse to stamp out all specific religious symbols risks making Enlightenment principles the precondition for participating in public life. But it’s worse, because all that 18th-century “enlightened” deist and theist denatured Christianity that tried to toss the Messiah but keep the Sermon on the Mount instead yielded slowly but relentlessly to nihilism, Bolshevism, Naziism, abortion, and euthanasia. Far from being holy, to pagans suffering is just annoying and we stamp it out.
So when they come for the Menorah, don’t think it’s only about Jews. It’s about replacing God with atheist morality. And you won’t like it.
