To say Canada is no longer a Christian country is merely to state the obvious. It has not been so for a long time.To deplore it however, and wish for a return to its biblical roots as inherited from British common law, certainly gets some people anxious, as though the sordid world of The Handmaid’s Tale was Christianity’s entire earthly goal.And if those people are drawn from the cadre of today’s progressive journalists, they write strange, angry and even illogical things.Last week, I had the honour of talking to 500+ people at the Calgary Leadership Prayer Breakfast. A report of it appeared on Global News shortly after which would be worth a read as an example of strange and illogical things designed to generate heat, rather than light, not to mention as a busy cocktail of carefully curated assertions, mixed with progressive opinion.My message however, was none of that..My point was that led by its government and courts, Canada was walking away from truth-based law, and this would pose a dilemma for Christians when law and conscience came into collision.When that happened, they would have to decide what was important to them, the good life made possible by accepting compromises with the truth, or standing on God’s Word and facing some penalty… possibly losing a job or not getting a promotion and all the downstream consequences of such decisions.Christian doctors for example, run into difficulty with abortion and assisted suicide, both of which may be considered a violation of the sixth commandment. It would be a problem for more people, but the baby prior to birth is treated by Canadian law as something other than a living being — foetal tissue, or some such euphemism — so that conveniently makes killing it something other than murder. It is, in other words, a lie we choose to believe and one evidence therefore of a country walking away from truth.Further, how can our courts decide assisted suicide is wrong in 1997, but alright in 2015? Clearly, we have no fixed moral reference point, just a shifting public consensus. For Christians who do have fixed moral foundations, changes of this nature present obvious challenges.Christian teachers meanwhile, believing what it says in the Bible that there are just two sexes, struggle with teaching today’s sex curriculum, which they do not consider truth-based.My remarks however, were not about abortion, nor even about trans issues, other than for the purposes of illustration.My point was that while Christian professionals may already be under pressure to compromise on matters of facts that many people no longer find convenient, anybody can and will find themselves put on the spot. And one illustration was the pressure to agree that indigenous children were murdered by priests and nuns at residential schools.Of abuse, we have evidence. We have records too of thousands of deaths, from tuberculosis, influenza and the childhood diseases that today we can handle, but which a century ago affected people of all classes, races and situations.Of murder, we have only allegations, some lurid. If children were indeed murdered, that has yet to be proven in court.Yet, it seems to have passed into popular understanding that it happened as alleged. That could, of course, be partly because news outlets fail to update stories about mass graves.Global News itself, continues to display without comment a two-year-old story known to be misleading almost from the start: “The recent discovery of unmarked burial sites containing 215 bodies at the site of the Kamloops Residential School in B.C. has highlighted how there is still a lot to learn about where these children are buried.”The ‘sites’ in question have not been confirmed as graves. Officially, they are ‘ground disturbances’ revealed by ground penetrating radar. The assertion that they contain ‘bodies’ has simply not been investigated and if it should turn out to be an unmaintained graveyard, it should not automatically be assumed that there was something sinister about the deaths of those interred there.But there it is and on 1st October this year, the Calgary Herald, like many Canadian newspapers in the last two years, repeated the error, speaking of how ‘the remains of 215 children were found at a former school site near Kamloops.’ (Upon being advised of the error, Herald editors discreetly changed that to ‘the potential remains of 200 children.’)So that was the challenge I put out to Christ-followers at breakfast, if you have to choose, will you go along to get along, or stand on what the Bible says and accept the consequences?Global however, heard only a ‘reactionary’ speech: “Calgary prayer breakfast hears anti-LGBTQ2 rhetoric, residential school denialism.”And then the tricks of the misrepresentation trade.“Calgarians are speaking out following a speech given by long-time journalist Nigel Hannaford.” How many Calgarians? A single person is interviewed, saying he felt ‘unsafe.’Murders… a professor talks of thousands of documented deaths. Yes. But how many documented murders? Bait and switch. See above.And in support of trans behaviour, the specious argument: “Snakes, lizards and beetles exhibit transgender behaviours.”And so beetles do something and human beings should therefore feel free to do likewise? Snakes also hibernate and some female spiders, having consummated the divine act of arachnid love, also devour the male.Perhaps that might catch on: Who could have foreseen Dylan Mulvaney’s meteoric rise to public notoriety? But right now, the spiders have that all to themselves. And jaded by modern society though I am, I don’t see it changing.In other word, Global produced a hit piece.As a free-speech originalist, I say they’re free to do that.But as an old-style journalist, I’d like to know what that lot was meant to be. For a news article, there was an awful lot of opinion. But for an opinion piece, it read like news.Kind of a trans piece, then.Cute.
