Canada Declares: No, Your Religion Is Not an Excuse for “Hate”

This month, the Canadian Parliament – persistently one of the most activist and progressive such chambers in the world – decided that one legal protection for religious expression shall no longer apply to laws governing hate speech and hate crime. It is a decision that has potentially monumental consequences for people of faith who still adhere to traditional Abrahamic teachings around sexuality, identity and morals.

The legislation – Bill C-9 – was passed on 17 June and is intended to act as a nationwide amendment to the Criminal Code. Advocates describe the legislation as being designed to tackle “hate propaganda, hate crime and access to religious or cultural places”. As the Daily Caller reported: “The bill will repeal parts of the Criminal Code recognizing a ‘good faith’ religious exemption for statements that could otherwise be punished as hate speech in Canada.”

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The US outlet also reports comments from one of the bill’s supporters, Culture Minister Marc Miller, who explicitly described passages of the Bible as hateful, citing the passages concerning homosexuality in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. “Clearly, there are situations in these texts where statements are hateful. They should not be used to invoke … or be a defence. There should perhaps be discretion for prosecutors to press charges”, Miller said.

Legislative Intent

The comments from Miller are significant because, when analyzing laws, many judges in the Western common-law tradition examine the statements of legislators at the time of the passage of legislation for what they term “legislative intent” – that is, whether lawmakers, when drafting a law, specifically intended to criminalize a particular act. In Minister Miller’s comments, it is abundantly clear that he intends for the authorities to view quoting scripture as potentially criminal in some circumstances.

This is likely to be particularly troublesome for religions with a specifically evangelical aspect. Many Christian or Christian-adjacent denominations, for example, require believers to engage in missionary outreach work and to spread the message of their faith in early adulthood.

It also raises the specter of preaching within religions being criminalized: a pastor or priest, for example, who gives a sermon to a congregation of his or her own faithful, in which nothing said is controversial in the eyes of his or her audience, could still risk prosecution if the comments are regarded as hateful by others who were not even present to hear them.

Separation of Church and State

The American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson is often credited as the father of the notion that church and state should be entirely separate – a position that has been adopted by progressives for decades. However, less well known is his assertion that the reason for separation between government and religion was not to protect government from religious influence, but precisely the opposite: to protect religious practice from state interference.

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In the case of Canada – and indeed in many other Western states where the hunger for similar laws is palpable – the state is now interfering, in that it is essentially declaring that only some elements of ancient religions may be publicly deemed acceptable for expression.

Religion Is Supposed to Challenge

It is, of course, in the nature of religion to offend. Many prominent religions insist, for example, that only the believers will receive salvation, which is surely inherently offensive to those who must, by implication, be damned to eternal separation from God. Further, many of the social progressions fueled by religious belief were inherently offensive to those on the wrong side of those debates.

There is a reason that Emperor Nero found expressions of Christian belief so offensive and politically threatening that he sought to have those he considered heretics burned. Christianity’s core tenets of universal human dignity and value were starkly at odds with and offensive to a Rome in which the emperor was divine and slaves were seen as equal to property. Jesus Christ himself was a deeply offensive figure to some of his contemporary Jewish religious leaders for asserting things they believed contrary to scripture.

A religion that does not offend, by its nature, does not challenge: the very purpose of religion is to preach to the non-believer that things the non-believer does not consider immoral in fact are. The world has seen a practical example of this in recent times with the dispute between Leo XIV and the US president, in which the Roman pontiff has explicitly and calmly challenged the settled foreign policy of a democratically elected leader in ways that the US president quite clearly found offensive. Notably, Canadian politicians did not express any discomfort with that particular example of religion causing offense.

Hate and Offense Are Subjectively Interchangeable

Supporters of the Canadian law will, of course, argue that there is a fundamental difference between causing offense and expressing hatred. However, interpretations may vary – particularly in a societal context where the difference between the two concepts is regularly blurred by those who seek to accuse their political opponents of hatred.

For example, a preacher who says that homosexuality is immoral – a core tenet of many religions – may not be saying that homosexual people are immoral, but it would not be hard for a prosecutor to argue that describing a person’s conduct as immoral is designed to inflict public opprobrium, scandal and loathing upon them.

Further, the creation of such laws is nearly guaranteed to provoke “test cases”, such as those the world saw when various equality laws induced some groups to, for example, start targeting Christian-owned premises and demanding that those businesses produce materials – most famously cakes – celebrating gay marriages or weddings.

European believers are also intimately familiar with the consequences of such laws. The case of Paivi Rasanen in Finland provides an example of what happens when Bible verses end up in court. Rasanen – a former government minister – criticized church leaders for taking part in “Pride” celebrations. The result was a years-long legal battle which ended with her and a Lutheran bishop receiving criminal convictions under obscure laws concerning “crimes against humanity”.

Separately, in Spain, several – so far unsuccessful – attempts have been made to censor and de-platform bishops for sermons deemed offensive.

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The Chill Factor

Finally, the true problem with the law is that even if prosecutions do not arise from it for the expression of historically uncontroversial Christian beliefs, that may well be because the vast majority of those who hold such views simply err on the side of caution to avoid prosecution. This – often referred to as the “chilling factor” – creates a scenario in which people self-censor to avoid potential prosecution, even if their words might not have actually led to a prosecution. In this way, laws regulating speech often go even further in effect than their drafters intended.

The lesson for those across the West who value free speech is to be on alert: Canada is often at the vanguard of progressive initiatives – see assisted suicide – and its laws are often copied by sympathizers in other Western nations. What has happened here is, therefore, a matter of grave concern.