Three recent Supreme Court decisions have restricted the freedom of religion that was taken for granted by Canadians a half century ago when on Shabbat and Sunday, synagogues and churches were full.
The decision June 15 affirmed the decisions by the law societies of British Columbia and Ontario not to admit graduates of the proposed Trinity Western University (TWU) law school to the legal profession. The refusal is because of a student covenant at TWU that, among other things, asks students to refrain from premarital sex and defines marriage as between a man and a woman.
In a 7-2 decision the majority of judges found that the covenant infringes on the rights of gay applicants to the proposed Trinity law school because it goes against a judicial invention called “charter values.”
The “charter values” apparently do not apply to Section Two of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which formerly protected as fundamental the “freedom of conscience and religion."
It’s difficult to say what these charter values are and how far the court’s repudiation of religious freedom goes, because the judges had no evidence before them and decided the case on interpretation of a new legal preference called “charter values”.
However, by limiting religious freedom, the court is driving the church underground, as it was in Rome before 312 CE.
The court’s decision was hailed as a victory for the LGBTQ community, but LGBTQs should reflect on a future day when their lifestyle is deemed by judges to be contrary to those malleable “charter values.”
In November, the same court decided that the sacred Spirit Bear lands of the Ktunaxa Nation in British Columbia are not owed the same legal protection as the belief in the Spirt Bear.
In May this year, the court ruled that it had no jurisdiction over a Jehovah’s Witness shunning of Calgary realtor Randy Wall over alleged drunkenness and verbal abuse.
Taken together, the decisions say that in Canada, protected religious freedom exists only within the four walls of a congregation and can’t be carried into secular society.
There is a profound implication in these decisions for the future of Roman Catholic canon law, Jewish Halacha, and Islamic Shariah law in Canada.
These religious guidelines are protected as long as they are practised privately or within the four walls of the church, synagogue or mosque, as is the TWU student covenant, as long as you don’t want to study to be a lawyer.
In the “secular city,” as theologian Harvey Cox called it, faithful Christians who found the organized church confining, lived their faith scattered in a “diaspora.”
In post-secular society, faiths and those who rejected them, accepted the relation between faith and other knowledge that enabled them to live together, said German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas.
Now, after post-secular society, Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Sikhism are countercultures in an irreligious, a pagan, society.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
