FocusOnTheFamily

Foundations of faith in Canada

Written by Frank Stirk

Here’s a Canadian history lesson your kids probably aren’t getting in school:

In December 1866, the men we now call Canada’s “Fathers of Confederation” were attempting to hammer out a law to bring our country into being. But they were stumped for a name for this new nation.

One of the men at the table was Leonard Tilley, a former premier of New Brunswick (1861-1865) and a strong Christian. One day, during his regular morning devotional, he read Psalm 72:8 – “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea . . .”

What a splendid name to give Canada! he thought. Everyone else agreed. And so was born the Dominion of Canada.

In a letter to Queen Victoria, Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald explained that the name was “a tribute to the principles they earnestly desired to uphold.”

Is God mentioned in the Constitution Act, 1867? No. But not because the people who wrote it didn’t believe in Him.

“I think they just presumed a generally Christian outlook,” says John Stackhouse, who teaches theology and culture at Regent College. “Religion was pretty important to these Canadians.”

It was also important to dozens of godly men and women who’ve left their mark on Canada going all the way back to the first European explorers.

The Christian thing to do

Many left a legacy that’s still with us today.

John Strachan was Toronto’s first Anglican bishop and founder of three universities – McGill, Toronto and Trinity College.

Egerton Ryerson was a Methodist missionary and the founder of the Christian Guardian newspaper and the Methodist Book Concern, which later became the Ryerson Press. He also founded Canada’s public school system.

Tommy Douglas was a Baptist minister and five-time premier of Saskatchewan (1944-1960). He helped launch the Social Gospel movement on the Prairies and is responsible for universal Medicare.

Timothy Eaton was a Methodist convert with an evangelistic drive and genuine compassion toward those in need. He introduced shorter working hours and paid welfare and pensions in his Eaton’s department stores.

Agnes Macphail was Canada’s first female Member of Parliament and campaigned to have young offenders treated apart from the adult population. Originally a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she left for a mainline Protestant denomination toward the end of her life.

“There’s quite an array when you start adding them up,” says former Reform Party leader Preston Manning. And that’s just to name a few.

“From roughly the middle of the 19th century till roughly the middle of the 20th century, Canada was a Christian county,” says Stackhouse. “There’s a lot of good evidence to believe that the values of the Kingdom of God were sought, and, to an extent, realized, in Canada for those 100 years.”

Recently retired NDP MP Bill Blaikie, M.Div., says, “I remember seeing a quote from M. J. Coldwell, who was the leader of the political party that preceded the NDP, in the ‘50s that [said] ‘this is the Christian thing to do.’ ”

Essentially secular

But no longer. People in power used to pray and seek the Lord’s will before making any decisions. Now it’s assumed that faith is a personal and private matter – believe what you want, but please keep it to yourself.

“It’s gone in the closet,” says Ed Hird, Anglican rector and author of the book Battle for the Soul of Canada. “A lot of things that used to be private have gone public and a lot of things that were public have been driven into the private realm.”

Even some churches, trying to keep up with the times, got caught up in this God-less way of thinking.

“I remember one local minister decided publicly that he rejected the deity of Jesus Christ. And instead of being disciplined by his denomination, they brought him into a theological school to give a lecture,” he says. “So people started wondering, ‘Why am I going to church?’ Our Christian roots became a heritage that basically hadn’t been unpacked.”

In the 30 years after World War II, weekly church attendance fell 30 per cent. In 2000, just 22 per cent of Canadians were showing up regularly. And yet Statistics Canada reported last year that of those adults who never go to church or only go once in a while, one-fifth said they still regularly engage in private religious practices.

“The privatization of religion affects all of us,” says Blaikie. “To the extent that people take the view that religion is a private matter, then my faith-based politics isn’t anymore welcome than Preston Manning’s, even though we don’t agree with each other about what that looks like.”

Making things worse for people of faith has been the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As we’ve seen time and again, it’s given unelected judges the clout to create new laws. That’s meant a loss of power not only for elected lawmakers, but also for Christians, says Manning. “The judiciary and the law schools, the elites, tend to be more secular than the population. So if you move the decision-making into those arenas, you lessen the religious influence.”

In 1994, the Supreme Court debated whether Canada should give people with a terminal disease the right to ask their doctor to help them commit suicide. By just one vote, the Court said no – but not before Antonio Lamer, the Chief Justice, said he believed they should not let ideas about God and philosophy influence their decision. All they needed to remember, he said, was that “the Charter has established the essentially secular nature of Canadian society.”

So while Canada’s Christian heritage has slipped out of public sight, other realities have taken its place, such as the redefinition of marriage and of a parent, unregulated abortion on demand, a loosening of what’s obscene, and so on.

Even Christians on the Left, who have scored some major political successes, tend to keep their faith out of the pubic eye. “The Social Gospel actually helped to form a lot of policies like Medicare, for instance,” says Blaikie. “But Canadians don’t see it as the Social Gospel anymore, they see it as Canadian.”

Starting point

But for all that, there’s no reason to think that Christianity in Canada is dead or even dying. It may not be out in the open, but our Christian heritage is still very much alive.

“The research shows,” says Hird, “that most Canadians still believe in Jesus’ resurrection, they still pray, and they still believe in God. Does that mean they’re converted Christians? No, but it’s a starting point.”

For years, the experts kept telling us that nothing could stop the number of people who went to church from dropping until there was no one left. And yet last year, Reg Bibby, a sociologist who’s been studying Canada’s religious landscape for decades, found that it had actually gone back up a little.

“This is the first time since we began tracking national trends every five years in 1975 that the numbers have gone up,” he wrote in The Globe and Mail.

In fact, Bibby believes many people with little or no church involvement would be open to getting seriously involved as long as it met their spiritual, relational and personal needs. “The bridge to those people,” he says, “is ministry to family. Nothing is more important than family life to this group.”

A work in progress

So where do we go from here? How can we still impact Canadians for Christ? The best place to start is in Scripture. Jesus gave instructions to His disciples to “be wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). As Manning sees it, what we need are some new “inspired tactics.”

That can mean simply finding people where they are and offering our friendship. Soon, there will be more older people in Canada than children. More and more people are going to be in failing health. They’ll be fearing death and wondering about life after death. Here’s a chance for Christians to come alongside the widows, the sick and the dying, to offer them care and comfort in this life and hope for the next. “That’s an enormous opportunity to make a great contribution and it’s certainly an opportunity to affirm faith,” says Manning.

There is no better way to make a difference than to identify with suffering, as Jesus did. Don’t just say you’re against abortion; love and accept the woman who’s had an abortion and is grieving the loss of her baby. Don’t just say everybody should have a roof over their heads; love the homeless and give them your spare bedroom. Don’t just say you’re against child abuse; love the abused child and try to become his or her foster parent.

And above all, let’s keep believing that God’s not finished with us yet.

“I’m trusting God for revival,” says Hird. “God is using many groups to plant churches all across our nation. God is creating niches, particularly among the various ethnic groups. I think maybe God is sending Christian Asian and South American and African people to Canada to really re-evangelize us. A lot of young people are hungry for truth.

“And we’ve got a wonderful heritage we can claim and bring back out of the closet.”

Freelance writer Frank Stirk lives in North Vancouver, B.C.

© 2007 Focus on the Family (Canada) Association. All rights reserved.