Religious freedom is under attack in Canada. Most recently, the Liberal government passed Bill C-9, which removed a clause from hate speech laws that protects individuals from charges when the speech is expressed “in good faith” based on a religious text. This could potentially open the door for conservative Christians to be criminally charged for opposing the advocacy of “sexual minorities.”Worse yet, the whole idea of religious freedom itself is now coming under attack.This is explained by Prof. Steven D. Smith of the University of San Diego School of Law in his book, The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom. As he writes, the rationales for religious freedom protections are deeply rooted in Christian beliefs. Now that our society has rejected the place of Christianity in government and law, there are no longer any convincing reasons to offer special legal protection for religion.During the time of the Roman Empire, political authority and religious authority were united. The emperor was the supreme religious leader as well as the supreme political leader. The spiritual and political realms were not distinct from each other.Christianity introduced into this setting a brand new concept: the separation of temporal and spiritual jurisdictions. Each of those jurisdictions was independent and had its own legitimate authority. They were two entirely separate realms with separate administrations and separate officials.Christianity also introduced another relevant idea: only genuine, sincere belief mattered in religion. Unlike pagan religions where various activities and practices were enough to satisfy the gods, Christianity demanded unfeigned faith. What was believed in the heart mattered most of all.Since inward belief was so important, compulsion in religion made no sense. Smith writes that “the magistrate could force his subjects to confess the true creed with their lips, but if they did not sincerely believe what they were being made to recite, what was the point? So Christian innerness could support a powerful argument for freedom from coercion in matters of religion.”.Early in the fourth century, Christianity became a favoured religion and then the official religion of the empire.Over time, as the Christian conceptions of dual jurisdictions and the futility of government coercion in religion took root, notions about the role of government in religious matters fundamentally changed. The ideas of separation of church and state and freedom of conscience arose from the Christian conceptions that took hold after the Christianization of the Roman Empire.When the United States became independent, the federal government was forbidden by the First Amendment of the Constitution from making any laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”Unfortunately, beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, the US Supreme Court began to interpret the First Amendment in a unique and unprecedented manner. Through various decisions — especially those expelling prayer and Bible reading from public schools — the court declared that the government at all three levels in the US had to be secular and neutral towards religion.The Supreme Court’s attempt to make government secular and neutral created a problem that Smith explains as follows: “The fundamental difficulty is that the ostensible neutrality of the modern secular state turns out to be, on closer examination, little more than a sort of political optical illusion. That is because, to put the point crudely, genuine neutrality is impossible.”The modern secular orthodoxy that dominates American courts today claims to be neutral, but it is not. And, indeed, the secularists continue pretending to be neutral, even while punishing Christians like the florist who wouldn’t provide flowers for a same-sex wedding.Declaring the government to be secular and neutral creates a problem for religious freedom because the ideas of separation of church and state and freedom of conscience “descended from historic Christian commitments.”Since in the secular view the state cannot act on or endorse any religious views, “the state cannot act on the religious rationales — the dual-jurisdiction rationale and the voluntary-faith rationale — that produced the commitment to religious freedom in the first place.” In this way, the supposedly neutral view of secularism directly undermines the case for protecting religious freedom..Smith explains that this undermining of the rationales for religious freedom “is reflected in the increasingly common academic position (arguably influential within the Obama administration) that a special constitutional commitment to religious freedom is unjustifiable and probably unjust.”When California’s Proposition 8 — which amended the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage — was overturned by a court in 2010, the judge included the following determination: “Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.” The court said the beliefs themselves are harmful, not just “discriminatory” actions that result from the beliefs.The Bible’s teaching on matters of sexuality is now considered by secularists to be outright bigotry. In addition, historic rationales for religious freedom — which are based on Christian beliefs — are rejected because of their “religious” basis.With the current direction of secularist thought in academia and the courts, Christians must fight to protect religious liberty or it will be lost altogether.
