Religious freedom in Canada

Fr. Raymond J. de Souza writes in Canada's National Post: Bringing soft totalitarianism into the classroom. An excerpt:

Ill winds are blowing across the land when it comes to parental rights, religious liberty and education policy.

Quebec's new "ethics and religious culture" curriculum aims to promote religious tolerance by teaching that religious differences don't matter. If you are a Muslim parent who wants to teach your child that Islam is superior to being an atheist or being a witch, the education system will be undermining that view in class. Quebec will brook no exceptions to the new groupthink: No child is permitted to be exempt from class when the teacher instructs her that her pious parents are teaching her falsehoods. The Supreme Court of Canada affirmed this soft totalitarianism last month, saying in effect that parents ought to get with the program and get over their religious, moral and cultural obligations to instruct their children. That is the narrowing of liberty to the point of eliminating it; everyone is free to teach his kids what he wants at home, just as long as the state gets to teach the little ones the opposite at school.

After reading Fr. de Souza, I am reminded of this quotation from the great christian statesman Abraham Kuyper with more than a little relevance for current developments on both sides of the 49th parallel:

When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith.

Two Kingdoms and Cultural Obedience

In recent decades, many Christians have been drawn to the Reformed understanding of the faith due to its holistic approach to the life in Christ—an emphasis found especially in the neocalvinist revival in the nineteenth-century Netherlands, led by Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck and others. Transplanted to North America in the twentieth century, neocalvinism has led to the establishment of a number of confessionally-based organizations, including a network of Christian day schools, universities, labour unions, think tanks, political movements and farmers' associations. The Kuyperian influence has expanded over the last three decades due to the efforts of, among others, the Center for Public Justice, the Coalition for Christian Outreach, Redeemer University College, the Christian Labour Association of Canada and, of course, Cardus. It is now more common to hear ordinary evangelical Christians speak in terms of all of life belonging to Christ and of grace restoring nature, though they may differ in the practical implications they draw from this basic confession.

However, not all evangelical Christians are necessarily on side of this neocalvinist revival.

Read more here.

Making too much of a good thing

One of the characteristics of an ideology is that it takes a genuine good and makes too much of it, that is, it effectively makes it into an idol. Thus it becomes difficult for those liberals emphasizing the validity of free markets to resist the temptation to claim a near universal efficacy for them. Case in point: Murray Rothbard, in For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, where we find this revealing remark:

Piper on Kuyper

I do not know John Piper's works at all well, though I had some contact with him personally during his stint teaching at my undergraduate alma mater, Bethel College (now University), some 35 years ago. I do know any number of people who have benefited from reading his many books. Up to now, however, I have not usually associated cultural critique with Piper and his followers. This could be changing, if the following is any indication: America's debt to John Calvin. Where he might go from here I don't know, but it is encouraging to see him recommend Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism. Might this form the basis for a fruitful dialogue between Kuyperians and Piperians?

Kuyper and the psalms

The famous Dutch polymath stands corrected: Kuyper on the Genevan melodies

Normed tolerance

At the weekend I was privileged to attend a conference on Civil Society and Sphere Sovereignty, sponsored by the Abraham Kuyper Center for Public Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. The current holder of the Kuyper Chair is John R. Bowlin, whose full title is the Rimmer and Ruth de Vries Associate Professor of Reformed Theology and Public Life. Bowlin delivered a lecture titled: "Here the Shoe Pinches: Kuyper, Tolerance and the Virtues." (A taste of his approach can be had here.)

Is tolerance a virtue? Bowlin believes it is, and he attempts to defend this on Aristotelian grounds. Nevertheless, even if tolerance is in some sense a virtue, virtue itself is not an adequate place to start in any attempt to determine a right course of action. As a quality ascribed to human beings, virtue is necessarily ancillary to God's call and our obedience to that call. To obey his call is to respond to something quite specific rooted in the general command to love God and neighbour (Mark 12:29-31). This love has different implications for the various social and communal contexts in which we find ourselves. It cannot be adequately understood or practised unless we are in tune with the norms God has built into his creation. Otherwise, to tolerate an activity harmful to the practitioner, not to mention the larger community, is to perform a most unloving act!

To confess or deny the resurrection of Jesus Christ has different meanings within the institutional church and within the political community. Tolerating denial within the state might be seen as a political virtue in so far as it is based on a recognition that to regulate citizens' ultimate beliefs lies beyond the competence of political authority. Yet to tolerate this rejection of a cardinal christian doctrine within an ecclesial body can hardly be a virtue, since it would harm the confessional integrity of the church. Therefore, what might be a virtue in the state must be recognized to be a vice in the church body. The only way to determine the difference is to gain a grasp of the respective norms governing state and church. A general appeal to tolerance will not take us very far.

North American protestantism in particular is filled with church denominations that tolerate all sorts of heterodox views, yet take firm positions on highly contestable social and political issues. This represents a general failure to grasp the norms most applicable to the institutional church and can only produce a skewed tolerance scarcely to be labelled virtuous.

In summary, there is simply not enough substantive content in the notion of tolerance to justify it being categorized amongst the virtues, even if we accord virtue a modest place within a larger ethical framework.