Why Cultural Christianity?
And why something should be done about Christian persecution in Canada
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We need to talk about Christian persecution in Canada.
The image above can be found at True North where a running tally of churches under attack is kept. The map above shows where the “112 Christian churches in Canada have been vandalized, burned down or desecrated since the announcement of the apparent discovery of graves found near a residential school in Kamloops, BC.” At the link above, True North also lists the names and locations of the churches along with brief descriptions of what happened to each of them.
On December 4th Conservative MP Jamil Jivani launched a national campaign called “Protect Christians Canada.” The campaign’s focus is a petition which urges government to act urgently and decisively to protect the religious freedoms of Christian communities. American vice president elect JD Vance voiced his support for Jivani’s initiative saying “Jamil is speaking the truth. Shame on journalists who refuse to see what’s obvious.” Vance was also refreshingly clear in his words when he qualified Christians as the most persecuted religious group in the world.
Indeed, around 360 million Christians are persecuted for their faith in Jesus. Much of it in the global south. However, today’s post concerns Christian persecution in the Western world. Persecution that often doesn’t register, or perhaps doesn’t interest. Either way Vance is right, the issue is obvious, so why the hell aren’t more people talking about it. For me, not talking about it, or not talking about it a lot more, ends today.
I’ve been writing about the unmarked graves scandal and the rash of church burnings and anti-Christian bigotry that has exploded across Canada since not long after the Kamloops story broke. However today is the first time I’ve ventured so deliberately into Christian persecution. Below is a fairly digressive, meandering introduction to a topic of grave personal concern. Readers will know I never just write about a topic. I start writing about a topic. I prefer things to be perpetual, I can’t just let the ideas go, and leave them to fend for themselves. In other words, for better or worse, there will be more of this.
Why Cultural Christianity?
And why something should be done about Christian persecution in Canada
By
According to the 2021 census, approximately 53% of Canadians are practicing Christians. However, the percentage of Canadians, and citizens of Western countries generally, who prefer to live in a Christian culture, as has been admitted by the world’s most infamous atheist Richard Dawkins, is likely to be an overwhelming majority. If this is the case, and I believe it is, how is anti-Christian bigotry and the persecution of Christians, including the burning and vandalizing of almost 600 Christian churches in Canada, permitted to grow and fester at such an alarming scale, with so little attention paid from the media, political leaders, or almost anyone else with few exceptions?
It is my contention that a fundamental disconnect, or misunderstanding, exists in the minds of many cultural Christians (most non-religious/secular Westerners), who clearly prefer the results of Christianity while often dissociating those results from Christianity itself. Like Richard Dawkins does. This post is not meant to convert non-believers into believers. I am not attempting to recruit readers into any specific church. I am asking readers to consider what it is that created and continues to uphold the traditions associated with cultural Christianity. It was not atheism, and it is not Islam.
As much as Canada is undergoing the same process of secularization as other Western countries, there still remains a strong pull, a majority consensus, that the ten commandments and the spirit of Christian doctrine, at least under a loose reading, leads somehow to peace and prosperity. This is why Richard Dawkins likes Hymns and Christmas and so much of the beauty engendered in Christian culture. And it is why so many atheists, even famous ones like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, often change their minds and decide that cultural Christianity is nothing more than an appetizer, although an eminently tasty amuse bouche, to a 12-course gourmet meal. But alas, not everyone finds their way to God like Hirsi Ali, some never will, and some need more time.
But either way, shouldn’t everyone who enjoys Western peace and prosperity give credit to its Christian foundations, and therefore appreciate the dire implications involved with dismantling them? Hirsi Ali does. Dawkins both does and does not. But do Canadians generally understand what Christianity has done to form our society? Can cultural Christianity be maintained in a secular environment run by atheists who might enjoy the occasional hymn at Easter? Since practicing Christians are the upholders of Christian culture, what do the cultural Christians, atheists, and the secular humanists think will happen if the faithful disappear?
It is hard for me to get into the minds of others. However, if I were an atheist, I would, along with the majority of sensible people, realize that cultural Christianity is an excellent and pro-human cultural configuration far more agreeable to the needs and wants of humanity than any tradition found outside the Christian sphere. And further, I would want to make sure that the upholders of that preferred culture, the practicing Christians of faith, were in no way impeded from performing the critical service of generating the cultural Christianity the entire nation enjoys.
I would for instance be very alarmed that since the year 2010 Canada has had almost six hundred churches burned or vandalized in acts of anti-Christian terrorism – many of them cherished historic structures, integral components of Canadian cultural heritage forever lost. Of course, it is well known that since May of 2021, after the break of the fake international story concerning unmarked graves at the former Indian Residential School in Kamloops B.C., church burnings and anti-Christian bigotry increased at a shocking rate.
But anti-Christian bigotry has both overtly, and in more subtle ways, been a manifest presence in the modern culture of Canada for at least the last three decades (probably longer). It was during that pronounced wave of 1990s era political correctness where I began to notice just how uncool it was to be a Christian. Things only got worse from there. Over this period regular people, good people, were subject in countless ways to the power of suggestion in the form of relentless anti-Christian propaganda — synonymous with anti-Western propaganda.
I wonder though, is the synonymity itself a source of confusion? Do readers realize that Christendom is a synonym for the Western world? Christianity and Western democratic liberalism are bound inexorably. If Christianity were to somehow be miraculously, impossibly, extracted from the Western milieu, the West would cease to resemble itself. It would become something at odds with its fundamental premises, and it would be unable to uphold the present dual conditions of peace and prosperity.
In a future essay, I will explicate on one of the key entry points of the “mind virus” that has led to much of the anti-Christian / anti-Western sentiment now normalized in culturally Christian societies: the Communist campaign of infiltration and subversion into Western democracies that took place during the Cold War, that was directed by COMINTERN (Communist International) from Moscow by the Soviets. Later, in 1960s America, there was a changing of the guard from the Old Left to the New Left. But the Soviets remain responsible for infecting the West initially with the anti-Christian Communist mind virus.
I feel that Canadians are vaguely aware of how the peace and prosperity of the West came about, but I do not think they often enough see, appreciate, or understand the extent of Christian persecution and what it implies for non-believers who benefit from cultural Christianity. If anyone listens to me. Anyone at all. Non-believers, believers, fence-sitters, whoever. Please just hear me out. Canadian Christians need advocates. Canadian Christianity has been undermined by the political class and the media, and sadly the education system for generations. Religious freedom is an important liberty that all Canadians are supposed to enjoy. But religious freedom in Canada is not respected in innumerable ways. Like everything else, our government wants to manage the nature of how people worship, so they have passed legislation dictating that Church leaders must uphold or support practices that are at odds with Christianity. Essentially forcing the faithful to do what Eve did – turn against the word of God and go their own way. This is a cruel form of Christian persecution upheld by Canadian law.
The government has spoken over priests and pastors, has spoken over the word of God, and has acted with a boundless level of arrogance matched only by a boundless level of apathy on the part of a near majority of Canadians, who, although reluctantly agree that the benefits of cultural Christianity are extraordinary, and who must know that this culture is so because of the works of Christians, also stand by silently, complacently, while the moral tradition of the nation, and the Christian Canadians who practice and preserve it, are dragged through the mud and desecrated. Strong words, I know, but made stronger by the painful truth of them.
Turning for a moment to related matters. Is anyone aware of the large percentage of people who belong to faith communities but have no real belief in the supernatural? It is quite surprising. In some cases, the rate is as high as ⅓ of congregants either have no faith in the supernatural, or they just don’t really think about it. They belong to a church community, and/or read the bible for other reasons. These people see the advantage, the vital importance of cultural Christianity, and their church attendance enables them to connect with an ancestral tradition while building community with neighbours under the auspices of moral instruction.
Churches are full of people trying to be good people, wanting to learn as much as they can about being good people, about serving others, about things beyond themselves. However, the faithful include those dedicated souls who run the church or who give countless hours of service to it, so that all people from the community might gather and commune around a tradition of moral instruction. But it is those committed and faithful who feel the sting of Christian persecution the most sharply, while other cultural Christians sometimes barely notice. Throughout history the faithful have always suffered in silence. This must change, we must come to the defense of Canadian Christians, literally, for God’s sake.
Faith, I won’t go into in any depth. Not here. I launched the Western Polemic as a place more friendly and open to the occasional confessional or foray into biblical exegesis. In these pages, I will only say that faith is not such a scary or outmoded concept as we are often led to believe. It is not something naive people believe. And it is not incommensurate with reason. I noticed some time ago that some of the brightest minds that have ever graced the planet were housed in the craniums of people of faith. Because of this, and a few other reasons, I do not think many people understand what it is that they don’t believe in. But faith cannot be forced on anyone and it would be cruel to attempt it. Arriving at faith by one's own volition, as I did, was a relief and a feeling of coming home. In my view, and why this is relevant to the larger point of today’s essay, faith, is a rewiring and a reorienting, a refocus of perspective in a way most amenable to cooperating productively in a peaceful prosperous civilization. This is glaringly obvious when viewed through the lens of history: Christendom is where the best attributes of Western liberal “cultural Christianity” were born, and upheld for centuries by dedicated faithful Christians.
I beg of readers to give some attention to the issue of Christian persecution and to do anything within reach and power to offer grace and protection to those keeping the flame of Christianity burning in Canada and the Western world.
God help us if it ever goes out.
Thanks for reading. Consider this your warning that more writing on Christian persecution in Canada is on the way. For something related, read this piece I wrote in 2023 about a Trustee at a Catholic school board in Kitchener, Waterloo named Wendy Ashby who posted on X that “The most dangerous creature on the planet is the White Christian Male.” The piece: Anti-Christian rhetoric and the creation of the safe LGBTQ space
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The most important role of cultural Christianity may be as a bulwark against totalitarian Islam. Christianity permits western values, such as freedom and individualism, because it is the source of those values. Islam permits little in the way of intellectual freedom and requires submission to the group. As James Pew suggests, cultural Christianity is a castle in a time of strife or siege.
CINOs (Christians in Name Only) need to reflect on their role in reaping the benefits of Christianity, while failing to defend the faithful who, for thousands of years, have upheld the values, principles and attributes of Christianity.