Get ready for open persecution in about five years, Christians warned

Such nonsense, I thought, but then Canada’s Supreme Court lent it great credibility

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I had read very little of Dr. James R. White of Phoenix, who heads the much respected Alpha and Omega Institute. He is a notable speaker, a Calvinist Christian and a skilled apologist, who makes the Christian case more rationally than emotionally. Imagine, therefore, my shock earlier this month when I saw a video in which he quietly predicted that within five years Christianity will be under open persecution in the United States.

It will begin, he said, with the closure of property tax exemption given to churches from the founding of the country, and it will seriously reduce the size of Christian congregations. He even portrayed bureaucrats waiting at the doors of churches on Sunday mornings asking for the identity of the worshipers who will be subject to special taxes if they continue into the church.

Such nonsense, I thought. I’m duly pessimistic about the prospects of Christianity everywhere in the western world, but five years? I certainly wouldn’t agree with that. Surely, things aren’t moving that fast.

The following day I read the Canadian Supreme Court decision on Trinity Western University’s projected law school. Pressured by the gay lobby, the law societies in British Columbia, Ontario and Nova Scotia had decided to refuse membership to any graduate of the TWU law school because the university requires all its students to restrict sexual activity to married male and female unions. It was immediately hailed as a magnificent victory for gay rights.

It was considerably more than that, though you could scarcely discover this from the media coverage. Of two points, I could find no mention whatsoever. They were:

First: Fifteen years ago. the same court, by an equally heavy majority, refused the efforts of the teachers’ unions to prevent TWU on the same grounds from running a faculty of education. The two cases — the teachers then, the lawyers now — were virtually identical. So why the about-face? What do we know now about the particular sexual deviations involved that we didn’t know then? If the court had an answer, it was keeping awfully quiet about it. Plainly the only thing that changed was public opinion. So in effect the court has abandoned all pretext of assessing law, and is now functioning as a kind of juridical Gallup Poll. How are the mighty fallen!

Second: The code of behaviour that TWU imposes on all its students, is not confined to homosexual activity. It also precludes couples living together or engaging in sex unmarried, and the use of alcohol and pornography on campus. I don’t know the statistics, but I do know that many if not most people live together before they’re married. I would therefore bet that for every student applicant barred by the homosexual rule, there will be two dozen or more barred by the male-female married-only rule.

Now I could find not a single mention of this in the coverage. In every news medium it was a great victory for the gay lobby. What does this signify? Obviously, if the gays face discrimination, that’s a frightful miscarriage of justice, But if the straights face discrimination, that’s not worth even a mention. Thus have our media been duped, brainwashed and manipulated.

Something else should be noted. In totally reversing an earlier Supreme Court decision, the present court would appear to be setting a precedent. Does that precedent establish grounds for some future Supreme Court to undo what this court has done? By the old theory of case law, each further ruling is supposed to act as a refinement of its predecessor so the law evolves, much as a physical body. But are we now entering an era where the judges make all the laws, based on their reading of current public opinion, and successive courts flip back and forth into ever deeper confusion?

And exactly how do the judges assess public opinion? Will the Supreme Court develop a polling facility? If not, then how can they determine their course? From the media, naturally. So the media run the country. What a fate!

What will ultimately determine the outcome of the western world’s current leap into sexual hedonism will not be determined by politicians, judges, or journalists. but by the consequences of the venture. Perhaps what we’re conducting may not turn out as an advance in social freedom, but as the disintegration of a once noble culture into a cesspool of debauchery. Such things, always hailed initially as liberating, inevitably turn out to be utterly corruptive. Some societies survive it. Many do not.

Ted Byfield was founder and publisher of Alberta Report news magazine, general editor of Alberta in the Twentieth Century, a 12-volume history of the province, and general editor of The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years, a 12-volume history of Christianity. His column on education appears in The Christians.com, a web journal. He has recently authored two little books on modern pedagogy: Why History Matters and The Revolution Nobody Covered. You can order both copies here.