FLASHBACK: Our Future: Bound Up in Religion

There's an old saying: "Every nation has an army—either its own or somebody else's." In that regard religion is like armies. Which one would you prefer to have? No religious vacuum is possible. Man is a rational creature. Ideology and beliefs drive his life. The country that neglects its own religion will sooner or later end up with somebody else's religion.

Today many, including professing Christians, are enamoured with the concept of a secular state and promote the dangerous myth of "separation of church and state." However, the "secular state" is a naïve and fanciful concept, manageable only in the end through ruthless totalitarian rule which suppresses all competing religious ideologies.

Rev. Stephen Boissoin, Mark Steyn, and Maclean's magazine are recent victims who clashed with the new emerging secular state in Canada, represented by the human rights commissions. Google their names for the full, scary picture.

Push religion out of the politics of the state and it will simply be replaced by an irresponsible, hedonistic and barbarous system of belief.

We as a nation once declared and confessed Christianity to be religion's supreme path, a sure road to heaven through Christ, "…the way, the truth and the life."  This same Christ warned, "No man comes to the Father except through me."

We once believed that foreign lands (including those of Islam) could sustain a peaceful, civilized culture and free and democratic process only by embracing a Saviour and Christian truth delivered through zealous missionary activity. Now, spiritually exhausted and corrupted, we and our Christian allies rarely mention missionaries yet expect the same outcome from military troops fighting a "war against terror" on Islamic soil. Far better to die for Christ and the Gospel in Kandahar or Baghdad than to die in a war designed to change no one's heart.

Having scorned God's gift of fertility and treated it contemptuously, Christians in the western world have successfully set in motion a ticking time bomb, an irreversible demographic crisis certain to subject current and future generations to severe societal instability if not dreadful collapse. Shockingly, too many Canadians would say in response, "As long as I don't see it in my lifetime I'm ok."

Once, we recognized and honored the unique, mysterious God given role which women shared with the Creator in conceiving and bringing forth life. Today we grant our highest honour—the Order of Canada—to a man whose life work was to rob women of the role of motherhood and heinously butcher countless thousands of God's littlest children.

Rarely discussed as the cause of our downfall is our abandonment of God and the concept of absolute truth which nowadays is said to exist only in the "antiquated" official teachings of the Catholic Church—but thankfully also still prescribed by at least a small fraction of Bishops worldwide.

Who then, in Canada, can rescue us from the fatal and demonic ideologies which possess us?

In human terms, only Canada's Bishops.

It should be obvious. They are God's spokesmen for our day, shepherds commissioned by Christ himself to preach and teach the Gospel, to shape society's thought and behaviour in accordance with God's own mind. Unfortunately, as a whole, they don't have a record of believing or defending the tenets of their own clearly defined religion.

And for that our nation perishes. Perhaps that is why St. John Chrysostom declared, "The floor of hell is paved with the skulls of Bishops." 

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From a community editorial July 2008