The Canadian Red Ensign

The Canadian Red Ensign

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Worse than Infidels

“Take heed”, the Lord Jesus Christ told His disciples “and beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” (Matt. 16:6) It was not, as His disciples initially supposed, literal bread against which He was warning them, but the teachings of these first century Jewish sects. The frequency with which He told His disciples not to follow the example of the Pharisees suggests that He recognized in this a temptation to which His followers would be particularly prone.

When, therefore, we consider the Christian duty enjoined upon us by the Great Commission, whether we interpret that commission in a high church sense as speaking of the ministry of Word and Sacrament of the organized Church or in the evangelical sense of the duty of all believers to tell others about the Gospel (1) we ought always to keep in mind as a warning Christ’s declaration:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. (Matt. 23:16)

Clearly there is a right and wrong way to evangelize and we ought to be wary of the kind of theology that subordinates all other concerns to the very real need to bring the Gospel to those who have not yet heard it.

Consider a popular evangelical response to the present migration situation. For some time now a massive wave of migration has been going on as thousands of people from what used to be called the Third World but which the politically correct word police now insist we call the Global South have been moving into the countries of what used to be Christendom but is now known as Western Civilization. Some are coming claiming to be refugees or asylum seekers, legitimately and illegitimately, some are going through the proper channels to immigrate legally, whereas many others are just swarming in, but refugee or immigrant, legal or illegal, they are coming. A standard evangelical response is to say that we should look upon this as an opportunity and welcome them, because they here are the unevangelized arriving on our doorstep.

There is truth in this response. Yes, these people need the Gospel, yes, most of them have not heard the Gospel, yes, we have a Christian duty to share the Gospel with them, and yes, their having come to where we are certainly makes evangelizing them more convenient for us. This is not the whole side of the story however, and it is going too far to say that because of the evangelism opportunities it creates we ought therefore to welcome this wave of migration as a blessing.

When a country experiences immigration on a large enough scale to noticeably alter the ethnic and cultural composition of the country’s population this will have a number of negative effects on the country. Some of these negative effects will be economical and these will be felt the most by the poorest people in the country as the influx of newcomers increases the labour supply, driving down wages, and increases competition for jobs. This will especially be a problem if the country already has a high rate of unemployment. There are other ways, however, in which large scale, demographic-transforming, immigration negatively affects a country. The trust in one’s neighbours and countrymen, the social capital so essential to a sense of community – a sense of who “we” are – has been demonstrated to be seriously compromised by the diversity that this kind of immigration brings. (2) Furthermore, a country’s most basic rights, freedoms, and legal protections of the same, can be placed in jeopardy by this kind of immigration if the cultural tradition in which these things are rooted is seriously threatened.

These are exactly the negative effects this kind of immigration has been having in my country, the Dominion of Canada. When Canada was founded in Confederation 150 years ago as a self-governing Dominion within the British family of nations, it already was culturally plural with three basic ethnic communities – English-speaking Protestant Loyalists, French-speaking Roman Catholics whose religion, language, and culture had been protected by the British Crown after the Seven Years War and the Indian tribes of various religious persuasions, Christian and otherwise, who had signed treaties with the British Crown. A common allegiance to the British Crown, albeit for different reasons with each group, was the sole factor uniting these different communities – which is the reason why immigrants ever since have had to swear allegiance to the Crown to obtain citizenship. Our parliamentary form of government and our Common Law rights and freedoms are rooted in the cultural tradition attached to the Crown. The Liberal Party of Canada has, since the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, waged an assault on that cultural tradition using mass immigration of the type we have been discussing as one of its chief weapons. With the weakening of the British tradition in Canada has come a weakening of our basic rights and freedoms, one which was not successfully repaired by the Liberal Party’s attempts in 1982 to shift these onto the new basis of a written Charter. (3) Since the Liberal Party regained control of Parliament in 2015, it has set immigration targets at a record high, despite Canada’s having an unemployment rate of just under 7% which the Party seems determined to drive even higher with its ill-conceived, economy-killing, environmentalist schemes, such as the carbon tax.

For an evangelical Christian to endorse this sort of thing, just because it makes evangelism more convenient is an act of impiety in the extreme.

Impiety is the name of the sin with which Christ charged the Pharisees when He accused them of getting around the commandment to honour their fathers and mothers by declaring the portion of their wealth that could otherwise have been used to support their parents to be corban, i.e., dedicated to the temple treasury. (Mark 7:1-13) It is, as its name suggests, the opposite of piety, the ancient virtue which consisted of showing proper and dutiful respect and devotion to God and to one’s parents and ancestors. That devotion to God and to one’s parents/ancestors were so closely connected as to be a single virtue is recognized in virtually every ancient tradition – Plato made this the focus of his Euthyphro, the Romans regarded pietas as one of the chief virtues, and C. S. Lewis provided several examples of the same thought recurring in other traditions in the appendix to his The Abolition of Man. (4) In the Hebrew Scriptures, the commandment to “honour thy father and mother”, in addition to being the first commandment with a promise, as St. Paul notes, is placed immediately after the commandments outlining duties to God and before the commandments outlining duties to one’s fellow men, making it possible to link the commandment with the first set. The ancients understood that duty to one’s parents and ancestors involved looking out for the good of their descendants as well and so piety by extension includes devotion to one’s entire family and household. Devotion to the spiritual household – the family of God, the church – and patriotism, devotion to the national family, are further extensions of this duty.

St. Paul, in his first epistle to Timothy, pronounced the judgement of Christianity upon impiety. Having instructed Timothy to regard elder men in the church as fathers, younger men as brothers, elder women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, he tells him to honour widows, saying that if a widow has children or nephews they should “learn first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents: for that is good and acceptable before God.” (5:4). Of those in the church who refuse to do this, he writes “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (5:8)

The same judgement applies to those who sanctimoniously cite evangelistic opportunity, as a reason for supporting and welcoming immigration and refugee policies that have harmed and are harming – perhaps irreparably – their countries.


(1) The Great Commission is worded differently in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, St. Matthew’s wording lending itself to the high church or catholic interpretation, St. Mark’s to the low church or evangelical interpretation.
(2) Dr. Robert D. Putnam, Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, and author of the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, conducted an extensive study on the effects of diversity on social capital. He published his findings in 2007, writing that “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’-that is, to pull in like a turtle” which means that they “tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century”, Scandinavian Political Studies, 30:2 (June, 2007), pp. 137-174.
(3) See my “Civil Libertarians of Canada: The Charter is Not Your Friend”: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2015/05/civil-libertarians-of-canada-charter-is.html
(4) C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), in which the first example under “Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors” is “Your father is an image of the Lord of Creation, your mother an image of the Earth. For him who fails to honour them, every work of piety is in vain. This is the first duty.” Hindu. Janet, i. 9 is cited as the source. In this appendix, Lewis is providing examples of what he, borrowing the term from Chinese philosophy, calls the Tao, i.e., universal natural laws underlying traditional moralities.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Speaking For and About Myself

It has been my tradition, for as long as I have been writing and self-publishing essays, to write an essay summarizing my basic convictions and positions for New Year's Day. This is a practice I picked up from one of my own favourite writers of opinion pieces, the late Charley Reese.

I am a conservative Christian. I came to faith in Jesus Christ when I was fifteen, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church as a teenager and later as an adult was confirmed in the Anglican church. I believe the Bible to be the inspired and authoritative Word of God and hold to the orthodox doctrines of Christianity as stated in the ecumenical Creeds - Apostles', Nicene-Constantinopolitan, and Athanasian.

I am a patriot of the Dominion of Canada, established 150 years ago in Confederation in 1867. I love my country, especially its British traditions and institutions, including our monarchy and parliamentary form of government, and Loyalist history and heritage. I hate everything the Liberal Party, falsely claiming that we needed "to grow up as a nation", has done to rob us of this rich heritage since the 1960s. They robbed us of the flag our soldiers fought and died under in the Second World War, sneakily and without the proper Parliamentary quorum required changed the name of our national holiday from the majestic "Dominion Day" to the lame "Canada Day", and worst of all seriously compromised our traditional Common Law rights and freedoms. This last thing was accomplished both by adding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which gave the government greater power to act in violation of the most basic of our traditional rights, and by introducing Soviet style thought police in the form of the Human Rights Commissions.

I am a Tory. By that I do not mean either a supporter of the Conservative Party, a neoconservative who is almost indistinguishable from an American republican, or a "Red" Tory who acknowledges the differences between the older British/Canadian conservative tradition and American republicanism but tends to distort that tradition to make it seem closer to the progressive liberal left and to reduce its noble principles to the ignoble "a larger role for the state." When I say that I am a Tory I mean first and foremost that I am a royalist, both a supporter of the institution of hereditary monarchy and one who loves and reveres royalty. It also means that I think of society as a living organism in which past and future generations unite with the present into an organic whole rather than a mere association of convenience for individuals, that I believe in the Platonic and Christian concept of justice as harmony in a hierarchical order rather than the modern, demonic, ideal of equality, and that, while I see church and state as being different institutions with distinct roles, I reject the liberal idea that the two must be seperated, holding instead that along with the family they make up the basic components of the organic whole of society and must cooperate harmoniously for society to enjoy even an imperfect, earthly, kind of justice. Which brings us back to royalism for it is in the institution of monarchy, in which the head of state is consecrated in an inherited office by the church that the family, church, and state come together in harmonious unity.

While I loathe pacifism on principle, I do not care for unnecessary war and regard most if not all of the wars of my own lifetime to have been unnecessary.

I believe that it is our responsibility to look after our environment and resources because we hold these in trust as stewards for the sake of future generations. Nevertheless, like all thinking people I can recognize the hoax of anthropogenic climate change for the pseudoscientific balderdash that it is and have nothing but contempt for hypocrites like David Suzuki and Al Gore who like to lecture the rest of us about how our habits are destroying the planet while raking in profits from investments in energy companies and consuming far more energy than the average person. I regard climate change alarmists, like most green, tree-hugger types, as seriously disturbed wackos who ought to be locked in a padded cell for their own protection and ours.

I believe in private ownership, private enterprise and economic freedom in the market but not at the expense of a country's common good. I hate the globalist, neo-liberalism that regards borders as mere lines on a map which should not be allowed to impede the flow of either labour or capital and which promotes the importation of workers through mass immigration and the exportation of factories and jobs through free trade and outsourcing. I also despise socialism, Communism, and social democracy in all their forms.

I believe in family, community, rootedness and tradition as the basis of the good and happy life rather than science, technology and the satanic illusion of progress.

I believe in the personal rights and freedoms that are part of our Common Law heritage under the Crown but reject the false, politically correct, rights manufactured by progressives which always seem to trespass on the long-established, time-honoured, real rights of others. I believe, for example, in the rights of all of the Queen's free subject-citizens to be informed of criminal charges against them when arrested, to be quickly brought before a magistrate to have the legitimacy of their arrest determined, and to be considered innocent until proven guilty in a trial conducted within a reasonably short time frame in which they are entitled to professional counsel and defence. I consider the limitations that Pierre Trudeau's evil Charter placed on these rights to be outrageous and indefensible. I think it is absurd, however, to say that each person has the right to decide his, her or its own gender, regardless of the facts of biological sex, and to impose acceptance of this decision upon the rest of us through anti-discrimination laws.

I believe than man is prone to turning away from the true God and the higher good and to making idols out of the lower worldly goods. While I recognize race and nation to have been among the darkest and most dangerous of the idols so constructed in the past, I believe that today the greater danger and evil lies in the opposite direction, in making an idol out of our common humanity, as progressive liberalism has clearly done in its determination to usher in a post-racial, post-national era. Liberalism has embrace mass immigration as the solution to the fertility problem in the West caused by its own anti-natalist agenda of materialist, me-first consumerism and complete sexual liberty backed by effective contraceptive technology and easily accessible abortion. The effect that this has been having on Western nations and the Caucasian race can only be described as autogenocidal. To anyone who still possesses a modicum of moral sanity to ethnically cleanse one's own people as liberalism is doing is a worse form of genocide than when an enemy tribe or nation is slaughtered in war and I condemn it as such. Liberals, progressives and other leftists will undoubtedly call me a lot of nasty names for doing so but I don't care because they are all unbearably stupid and my judgement on the matter is sane, intelligent, sound, righteous and true, even if I do say so myself.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen