There’s no separating faith from public life

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HERE'S MY TAKE

Last week, Ottawa came together to pray... and argued about whether prayer belongs in a public space at all. More than 1,500 people attended the National Prayer Breakfast in Ottawa on Tuesday—a new record. The head table included the prime minister, opposition leaders, senators, and the Speaker of the House—a cross-partisan gathering of public officials who, for a moment, set politics aside to read Scripture and pray for the nation. Adjacent to the official breakfast were more than a dozen events in which a cross-section of denominational, parachurch, and other religious leaders took the opportunity to dialogue on a range of issues where religion and public policy intersect.

Simultaneously, the Ottawa legislative and judicial agendas also prominently featured religious freedom issues. The Supreme Court of Canada heard four days of arguments regarding Quebec’s Bill 21, which enshrines a form of state secularism and prohibits certain public-sector employees from wearing religious symbols or clothing. Meanwhile, Parliament debated and voted on Bill C-9. Ostensibly, that bill strengthens protections against hate and obstruction, but in the process, it restructures parts of the Criminal Code’s hate-propaganda provisions, including repealing one existing statutory defence. That has raised concern among many religious communities about how good-faith citation of sacred texts will be treated in future cases. 

What happened in Ottawa this week points to something larger than any single bill, court case, or breakfast: a society working out, in real time, whether it still knows how to make room for the transcendent in public life. Even the Toronto Star headline writer noted the paradox: “Mark Carney invokes Christian values as top court holds religious beliefs don’t belong in government.” Religious freedom in Canada will ultimately depend less on laws than on whether Canadians can recover a shared vocabulary for why it matters and have the courage to use it.

We mostly talk about religious freedom as a political or legal matter to be resolved, making legislators, lawyers, and judges the key players in the narrative. The understandable result is that the issues get caught up in technical jargon and obscure debates. Someone needs to sort through whether Section 33 of the Canadian Charter (the “notwithstanding clause”) facilitates the enactment of Bill 21 in Quebec (“laïcité”) or whether Section 2(a) (“freedom of religion”) prevents it. But that’s not the stuff we typically talk about at the water cooler. The legal minutiae also easily lead to exaggerated discussion and the use of hyperbole in raising public awareness. Slogans help raise awareness, but they don’t help with precision. And sometimes the increased awareness ends up being a misdiagnosis of the problem and solution.

Make no mistake: I think Bill C-9 is a bad idea at all sorts of levels. But my concerns differ from most of what I read in my social media feed. I see multiple pastors raising alarm bells that the bill “criminalizes the reading of Scripture.” That is simply an inaccurate description. It will be just as legal to read a sacred text in post-Bill C-9 days as it was previously. It is just that if someone used that as a basis for hate charges, the religious defence clause is now worded differently. I agree with critics that the clause seems weaker and that the motives of those proposing the changes are not helpful to religion. The greater concerns regarding Bill C-9 regard the introduction of a new hate offence and penalties for ordinary speech. Inaccurate rhetoric is not helpful and potentially discredits important arguments from being taken seriously. In fact, as a few of my policy-minded Christian friends on social media have pointed out, the spread of the “jail for Bible reading” narrative may create a chilling effect. In the words of one friend: “Ironically, it won’t be the legislation that silences clear preaching but exaggeration from within our own community and the fear that it creates.”

Don’t misunderstand my point—I’m not minimizing the seriousness of the moment. At this week's events, I heard about real challenges to religious freedom in Canada. They do not compare with the experiences of Christians abroad. The release of the 2026 World Watch List documents how one in seven Christians in the world faces persecution, with almost 5,000 killed for their faith last year. But neither should we minimize the real challenges faced in Canada. I heard accounts of Jewish children in Canada afraid that wearing a kippa will attract violence and bullying; governments frequently dismiss such incidents as petty crime and fail to meaningfully protect places of worship from vandalism and intimidation. Governments dismiss rental applications for religious groups for public spaces through a maze of bureaucratic gobbledygook. Add to that the rethinking of constitutional protections as the courts consider them—a case the BBC summarized as potentially “the most important constitutional case in a generation”—and yes, there are significant reasons to be concerned about religious freedom in Canada. And who knows what a revised law will prompt regarding a new round of challenges? The legal and political stuff is not good news.

Liberal democracies, as we have inherited the tradition, expect the state to be impartial among citizens and communities. It does not require citizens to shed their convictions when they enter public life. The confusion of state neutrality and public secularism is at the heart of many contemporary religious-freedom disputes. Religious freedom is not a privilege for believers. It is a constitutional and civic good that protects believers, minorities, dissenters, and non-believers alike by limiting the state’s power to define which commitments may be publicly expressed.

Advancing religious freedom doesn’t just depend on how politicians and judges resolve these issues. It has as much to do with how it is exercised and normalized in day-to-day civil life. Whether your faith is conventional enough to tick a box on a census form (which includes atheist or agnostic), the way you answer the ultimate questions of life shapes how you treat your neighbours. Religion is not merely a set of discrete behaviours, whether reading contested passages from sacred texts or wearing distinctive clothing. It is better understood as a combination of belief, behaviour, and belonging. At its core, religious freedom is about identity and authenticity: the freedom to live in accordance with who we truly are.

If religious freedom is to remain meaningful in Canada, three things are needed that go beyond the strict purview of courts and legislatures:

First, we need a more robust articulation of our national identity that embeds religious assumptions. Many current tensions stem from the assumption that the public square can be neutral. But even the concept of freedom is not neutral. A society that preserves freedom—something desired by both those who value religion and those who do not—depends on a deeper account of human dignity and responsibility. In Western democracies, these foundations are historically rooted in moral and often religious understandings of the person. Recovering the substance behind Canada’s founding aspiration of “peace, order, and good government” requires more than procedural fairness; it requires us to renew our attention to the moral vision the law is meant to serve.

Second, we must recognize that individual religion is inherently public. Different traditions articulate variations of the golden rule, and even secular frameworks like John Stuart Mill’s liberalism arrive at similar ethical conclusions. But the social goods we often take for granted (the care of the vulnerable, the cultivation of community, the provision of education and charity) are deeply shaped by religious practice. The idea that religion can be confined to private spaces, with no broader social impact, is mistaken. Like a rainforest that shapes the air far beyond its borders, the religious life of citizens—both individually and within the religious communities through which they live and act—contributes to the social ecology we all inhabit.

Third, this requires a renewed narrative about religion itself and an expanded vocabulary. This is not a plea for religious jargon. Each generation needs to find a way to authentically express what they hold within. However, as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has reminded us, the modern secular project has stripped a generation of a vocabulary that makes room for the transcendent. Fifty years of the presumption that society would become more rational and secular have proven not only ineffective but have also resulted in a public life that is less rational and civil.

But there are also hopeful signs. Baby boomers, who largely moved away from the religious traditions they inherited, tend to exhibit the highest levels of skepticism toward religion. By contrast, Gen Z, who have been raised in a more secular environment, is showing a growing openness to existential and spiritual questions. In fact, recent Canadian data suggest that younger adults attend religious services weekly at higher rates than some older cohorts.

A record attendance at a prayer breakfast may be as much a nod to history and officiousness as a reflection of their personal convictions. Promoting religious freedom is not creating a religious test for office. Unlike some previous years in which the breakfast was sparse and the prayer even sparser, the expressions of faith of most of the participants seemed authentic, not just an official duty. I was particularly moved when, at the adjacent leadership dinner, five parliamentarians (across partisan lines) spoke candidly about how faith sustains them through personal and political challenges in tangible ways that are not ordinarily seen by the public. This included a very personal story shared about dealing with scandal and public sin and experiencing forgiveness, seeking to understand how that fit into the witness and responsibilities of leadership.

Still, as the juxtaposition in the Star headline suggests, public gestures of faith—whether prayer, Scripture reading, or participation in civic rituals—do not, in themselves, secure religious freedom.

The real question is not whether comprehensive convictions will shape public life. They always do. The question is whether Canada will make room for a genuinely plural public square in which citizens and communities can bring those convictions to bear openly, peacefully, and persuasively. A society that asks religious citizens to participate in public life only after translating their deepest commitments into supposedly neutral language is not creating neutrality. It is privileging one moral vocabulary over others.

But recovering a vocabulary is not an exercise that can be subcontracted to a certain subset of leaders. It is a challenge for all of us—a cultural as well as a legal question. All Canadians, but especially those with religious commitments, need to find ways to better articulate “why” questions, such as: Who am I? Who is my neighbour? What do justice and mercy require of us? We must do so in ways that show our neighbours, through both words and deeds, that the foundational building blocks of our constitution are a protection, not a threat, to the freedom every citizen desires. God keep our land, glorious and free.

WHAT I’M READING

Are the US and Canada Still Friends?

Opinion polls on either side of the border document the extent to which the disputes between the Canadian and American governments over the past year have impacted the regular citizen’s view of their neighbours on the other side of the 49th parallel. Brian Lee Crowley, Managing Director of the MacDonald Laurier Institute, made the case in a Wall Street Journal piece that there is a logic to the American strategy, understood as a determination to be “the top nation, not merely the dominant member of the Western alliance,” a rebalancing of the costs of global defence, and an American economic renaissance. Crowley is very critical of Canada’s approach—“Canada has a lot to offer America—if only we had a government clever enough to do so”—arguing that a different approach “could set an example for the rest of the free world on how to deal with America and Mr. Trump.”  

Empathy or Rational Compassion 

Paul Bennett reviews Gad Saad’s provocative new book on empathy at thehub.ca, which argues that “Western culture is actively choosing its own demise by extending empathy to those who threaten its foundational values.” It’s not an original argument: Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy: How the Left Exploits Christian Compassion stirred controversy when it was published in 2024. The challenge with this debate, which tends to be conducted with a binary frame, is that the tension between distinctive goods is rarely handled in a way that appreciates the merits of both; the case is presented that the achievement of one must come at the expense of the other. It’s not easy, but the virtues of justice, truth, and love need not come at each other’s expense, a reality that many of us have a long way to go in learning and exercising. 

Religion and Western Separation

John Longhurst provided some summary insights regarding the religious dimensions that have entered into the Western separation debates. Some religious leaders are explicitly arguing that the “soft totalitarianism” of the federal government and an independent Alberta would not only be economically better off but also a freer place. I’ve encountered some of these arguments in my Alberta travels, although they seem to overlap with more political subgroups and ideology than theologically-based thought. Those who object to their arguments are being a little less noisy about it. As the separation debate gains momentum, I expect we will hear more of this. 

Euthanasia with 50/50 Odds?

John Ivison’s column reports on the evidence presented to the Parliamentary committee studying the expansion of Medical Assistance in Dying scheduled to take effect in March 2027. Dr. Sonu Gaind, professor at the University of Toronto and Chief of Psychiatry at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, testified that “assessors are wrong more often than they are right when it comes to predicting whether mental disorders are irremediable. And, "proceeding with 'psychiatric euthanasia' in that circumstance would be 'the height of irresponsibility,' he said." 

MEANINGFUL METRICS

Measuring Global Religious Persecution 

Open Doors, an organization dedicated to documenting and supporting Christians who are persecuted around the world, released its 2026 World Watch List in Ottawa this week. Based on an index measuring six dimensions of life (private, family, community, national, church and violence), the World Watch List ranks the fifty countries of most intense persecution. North Korea tops the list, followed by several North African countries, the Middle East, and Far Eastern countries. While North Korea is officially atheist, much of the opposition is from officially Islamic states. India ranks 12th on the list, where the anti-Christian animus seems motivated by a religious nationalism that is rooted in Hinduism. 

TAKE IT TO-GO

Winter Has Ceased

“Opening Day” has a popcorn-and-Cracker-Jack energy for baseball fans. The exciting 2025 season for the Toronto Blue Jays has only heightened anticipation for 2026, which officially kicked off Friday night. Kazuma Okamoto is our new third baseman and adding a bit more international flair might just soy-prise some of the naysayers. Throw in new pitchers Tyler Rogers and Dylan Cease and we have a real end to winter with a Springer in our steps.

I’m ready to pitch the Jays for top spot in the division—though it may take a few steals to get there. It’s too early to talk about relief, but over a 162-game season, an injury or two is inevitable, and some sacrifice will be required. Tuesday nights will once again feature hot dogs for a toonie, and with two Schneiders in the lineup, we’ve got all the mustard you can relish—leaving the rest of the league playing from behind, trying to ketchup.

Enough of the pun-filled pregame meeting. Time to call “play ball” and enjoy the season. Beam me up, Kirkie, the stars are back in season!

With that, I’m signing off. Next week is Easter, and on long weekends we provide a re-run special, saving our next regular edition for April 11th. Wishing all Insights readers a blessed Easter.