State may limit religious harm by removing exemption to hate law

Garry Gutting was an American professor of philosophy who used to write The Stone, a regular feature in the New York Times. In an April 2016 column, Gutting — who died in 2019 — mused about the government’s role in limiting religious hate and violence.

“At certain points in their histories, both Christianity and Islam have been intolerant of other religions, often of each other, even to the point of violence,” Gutting said. For Christians in Europe in previous centuries, this included the persecution of Jews, the Spanish Inquisition and the persecution of Anabaptists.

Today, Christians and Muslims see killing of people who disagree with them as wrong. And why is that? Not because they received new revelation from God, according to Gutting. It was because governments enacted laws that said it was wrong to kill someone who believed differently from you.

It was a slow process, but over time governments in Europe accomplished this through toleration acts and by giving legal recognition to other forms of religious belief. They also abolished penalties for heresy, blasphemy and apostasy, and moved in the direction of freedom of conscience and worship.

They did not outlaw religion. But religious belief was no longer allowed to determine who should live and who should die, he said.

I mention this because the Canadian government may remove an exemption to the Criminal Code that says “no person shall be convicted of an offence … if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.”

They are open to doing that because, as a minority, they need the support of other parties to pass Bill C-9, the “Combatting Hate Act.” The Bloc Québécois has indicated it is willing to support the Bill — if the religious exemption is removed.

Although it is not clear at this time of writing if the proposal to remove the religious exemption will happen, various groups have registered their concern about it. This includes the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Canadian Council of Churches, the Canadian Council of Imams and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

Removal of the exemption, they say, could have a chilling effect on clergy, educators and others who fear the expression of traditional teachings could be seen as hate speech.

While preparing this column, I had a conversation with my friend Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, a theologian and dean at Tyndale Seminary, an evangelical school in Toronto. I asked his opinion about it.

Neufeldt-Fast, who is on medical leave from the seminary, agreed with Gutting’s view of how the state has played an important role in the past of limiting the harm done by religion.

For him, it’s ironic that the state once again has to remind Christians in Canada, and members of other religions, “not to weaponize their sacred texts to incite hatred.”

Removal of the exemption can keep “well-intentioned church folks from pursuing their most dangerous interpretive errors,” he said.

He went on to say that anyone who wants to keep a religious exemption clause to lawfully protect them if they use scripture to incite hate “is demonstrating a profoundly poor and dangerous Christian theology.”

Neufeldt-Fast cited what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, when many Christians used the Bible to justify persecution of Jews. “Hate speech, as history tragically demonstrates, has consequences,” he said. “When preachers and writers enlist the Bible to incite hatred, they make violent, hateful actions excusable and even theologically acceptable.”

All of this is brought into sharper focus by what is happening in the U.S., where some Christians are using the Bible to support Christian Nationalism, he observed. This makes what is happening in Canada feel incredibly timely, he said, adding “we are entering a social fog where many believe it is righteous to incite hate against any number of targets.”

Of course, there are questions worth asking of the government. Like, who gets to decide when something said in a church is hateful? Where is that line?

But there are also questions that people of faith can ask themselves. Such as, why would they want to use their scriptures to say anything that might make people feel anxious, fearful or afraid?

At the same time, they could ask why it is always the issue of homosexuality that seems to come up as the teaching, or “sin,” some want the freedom to preach about. Why not also some of the other things mentioned in the Bible like greed, gluttony, pride, gossip, slander, failure to welcome strangers or oppressing the poor? Those seem to never come up in a discussion about religious freedom.

Maybe, as Neufeldt-Fast said, we need government help to get us talking about these things. As he put it, sometimes a “good, clear law can protect the church from its worst, most self-destructive temptations.”

faith@freepress.mb.ca

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