ALBERS: When obedience becomes complicity — the Christian case for Alberta's constitutional defiance

James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.Nigel Hannaford's recent interview with Pastor Tim Stephens raises a question that ought to trouble any Christian with a functioning conscience and a passing acquaintance with the history of liberty. Pastor Stephens is unquestionably correct on one point: Christians are not called to settle their political grievances at the barrel of a gun. The faith does not licence insurrection, and no serious reading of Scripture has ever suggested otherwise.But to end the conversation, there is to answer half a question and congratulate yourself on your thoroughness.If unconditional submission is not demanded, and violence is forbidden, what precisely is the Christian to do? Fold his hands? Avert his eyes? Murmur politely into the void while the state arranges his conscience for him?The answer, and it is not a complicated one, though its simplicity has apparently eluded a great many people, is resistance. Lawful resistance. Ordered, principled, constitutionally grounded resistance. Not rebellion. Not passivity. Not the sullen compliance of the defeated. Resistance.That distinction is not a semantic nicety dreamed up by lawyers who bill by the hour. It is the very foundation upon which every free society in the Western tradition has been constructed.Modern political discourse has a peculiar habit of presenting the citizen with only two choices: obey or revolt. Submit to power or smash it. This is a false choice, a thoroughly dishonest framing, and the architects of constitutional government knew it was false when they designed something better.The genius of constitutional order, and it is a genuine genius, is that it creates lawful mechanisms by which power can be contested without the whole edifice coming down. Courts check legislatures. Provinces check Ottawa. Citizens challenge governments through elections, through the courts, and through the magnificent and underappreciated instrument of public argument. None of this is rebellion. It is the machinery of freedom operating precisely as intended..One need look no further than Alberta's sustained legal and political resistance to federal overreach in energy and environmental policy. You may agree with Alberta's position or you may not; that is a separate argument for another day, but the province is not engaged in sedition by asserting the constitutional powers Confederation deliberately placed in its hands. Federalism was never designed to produce provincial genuflection toward Ottawa. It was designed to disperse power. Balance it. Keep it honest.When courts strike down government legislation, no sensible person accuses the judiciary of staging a coup. When provinces resist federal encroachment, they are not attacking Confederation; they are, in the precise meaning of the word, preserving it.And here is where a great many Christians have thoroughly confused themselves.Romans 13 counsels respect for lawful authority. It does not declare every exercise of government power to be inherently righteous, beyond examination, or immune from refusal. Scripture is considerably more demanding than that. The Hebrew midwives defied Pharaoh. Daniel declined the king's decree with the serenity of a man who had thought the matter through. The apostles announced with admirable clarity that they would obey God rather than men, and then proceeded to do exactly that.What they did not do is equally instructive. They did not seek anarchy. They did not attempt to dissolve legitimate authority. They refused specific commands that violated higher obligations. Rebellion rejects authority itself. Resistance recognizes legitimate authority while refusing to extend its powers, which it was never meant to possess. The distinction is not subtle. It is everything.Francis Schaeffer addressed this with characteristic clarity in The Christian Manifesto, noting the proper course for the believer who has arrived at the sober recognition that his government has exceeded its legitimate mandate, that it has in fact become illegitimate. When the social contract that conferred authority upon a government has been shredded by that very government, the obligation of obedience does not automatically survive the shredding.Pastor Stephens would, for the most part, find himself in agreement with Schaeffer's framework. Resist, employ every legal and political instrument available, and bear the cost of that resistance with dignity. Which, as we know, Pastor Stephens was entirely willing to do and did..Here, however, is where a parting of ways becomes necessary.Scripture is plain: to obey a tyrannical government, one whose legislation openly violates scriptural mandates, strips citizens of fundamental freedoms, or presumes to override the conscience of the believer, is not neutral compliance. It is disobedience to God. The dutiful citizen of a tyrannical state is not a virtuous citizen. He is, in the most uncomfortable sense of the word, complicit.At that threshold, two paths remain. One may flee, remove oneself from the jurisdiction that has abandoned its legitimate purpose. Or one may resist by other means. Pastor Stephens would likely affirm the first option. The second may give him pause.That second path is this: resistance not as isolated individual defiance but channelled through other legitimate instruments of government. This is, with remarkable precision, how the American colonists conducted themselves in their quarrel with the Crown. They worked through local and state legislatures. They laboured mightily to remain under legitimate local authority. There was nothing wild-eyed about it, nothing anarchic. It was measured, structured resistance to a distant authority that they had concluded no longer held a legitimate claim over their lives. When every other avenue was exhausted, they resisted through the only government that still retained its legitimacy in their eyes. They did not tear the government down. They upheld it, at the level where it still meant something.Now consider Alberta, and do consider it carefully, because this is where the argument moves from the theoretical to the urgently practical.Albertans have endured the better part of a century of calculated condescension from a central government that never quite managed to see the province as a full partner in Confederation. Ottawa looked west and saw a revenue source. A cash cow to be milked at intervals, lectured at length, and consulted never. The National Energy Program alone, that magnificent act of central Canadian piracy, ought to have settled the question of Ottawa's regard for Alberta permanently.And yet Albertans were patient. They sent a Fire Wall letter. They said, with commendable restraint, that the West wanted in. Provincially, resistance grew in an orderly and entirely constitutional fashion. Aberhart pushed back. Lougheed pushed back harder and won. Klein pushed back with cheerful ferocity. And now Danielle Smith carries that same torch, not in rebellion, but in the grand tradition of premiers who understood that their first obligation was to the people who sent them to Edmonton, not to the preferences of whatever government happened to be occupying the Langevin Block..Now, Albertans are contemplating the exercise of a perfectly legal political right to determine through democratic means whether Alberta ought to remain within Confederation or chart its own course. Whatever one thinks of the merits, the process itself is lawful. It is democratic. It is, in the deepest sense, constitutional.Which brings us to the question Pastor Stephens ought to sit with for a while.What happens if Ottawa, confronted with a clear and legitimate democratic verdict from the people of Alberta, decides that the result is inconvenient and reaches not for the negotiating table but for something considerably less collegial? What happens when the political becomes military? When the Premier of Alberta, having pledged to honour the democratic will of her people, finds that will obstructed not by argument but by force?In that moment, and one prays it never arrives, the question is not abstract. It is immediate. Your local government is defending your freedom. It is upholding the expressed will of your community against an act of raw coercion by a central authority that has, at that point, forfeited whatever legitimacy it once possessed. Do you walk away? Do you leave your province to face that alone?It should never come to that. Every reasonable person must hope it does not. But should it, should Ottawa make that catastrophic miscalculation, then I would argue that resistance under the governance of our province would not merely be legitimate for believers.It would be our duty.James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.

ALBERS: When obedience becomes complicity — the Christian case for Alberta's constitutional defiance

Related Stories

STEPHAN: Does the MOU mean Alberta should now be quiet and be a good colony?

Israeli settlers accused of torching Christian Palestinian village

Victim of Belfast 'beheading' incident identified, suspect appears in court

HANNAFORD: Scripturally bound to gather – but not to take up arms