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Public Theology
The following is our latest issue of Respectfully Submitted, a series of policy reports for Parliamentarians. It is best viewed as a PDF (attached). We are printing and shipping this one to all MPs and Senators and encourage our readers to follow up with their MP in the coming weeks to ask for their thoughts about this document. “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law” - Preamble to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms Who is supreme in Canada? Some will point to the justices of the Supreme Court of Canada, others to the Prime Minister’s Office and still others to the people who elect the politicians. But all of them, and all of us, are here today and gone tomorrow. We may argue that it is ideas which shape a society because ideas don’t retire or die – they have the power to overthrow an empire. Our Chief Justice once wrote that law itself is supreme.[1] But laws change and ideas are like the wind. Progressivism, the unarticulated goal of many legislators, becomes a self-defeating enterprise as the next generation looks upon it with the same disregard that it looked on those ideas before it. Canada is a nation in search of an identity. We don’t publicly recognize any god as supreme, let alone the Christian God. We follow leaders and ideas for a time, only to move on to the next person or thing that stirs us. But hockey, donuts, and beer aren’t exactly symbols on which to build a nation. Over the decades Canada has divorced the Christian God from our public institutions and replaced Him with self-worship, state-worship, and earth-worship, among other things. Yet we continue to lay claim to, and benefit from, many of the political and legal by-products of the Christian faith, including fundamental human rights, much of the Criminal Code, and the concept of rule of law.