Shoring Up the pillars of Democracy
Freedom Convoy 2022
Whose authority do we want more of? This is the key question that all Canadians must answer for themselves before the next election. I’ll tell you why.
Freedom Convoy 2022 in Canada got worldwide attention last month and it has revealed a lot by the various reactions it has gotten, from governments, media and average folks. No one would have guessed that the government in Canada would have gone this far. It would be difficult to guess how far this pattern will continue in Canada, and other countries that are following suit.
Maybe we will be able to see into the future a bit by looking at some of the forces at play in the levels of authority in a democracy. We can discover our options for doing something about it. How we live our life publicly may determine what kind of life we have in the not-so-distant future!
It came to a head when a group of truckers got together and decided to protest the government removing the vaccine exemption that truckers had for crossing the USA border in January. If you haven’t seen any video of what I’m talking about, here are two great reviews for you, or see my blog describing it.
The federal government refused to even acknowledge them, and just got the police to remove them. In my previous blogs, I explain the incredible difference between the legacy media and independent media coverage of this truckers convoy and reveal an emerging pattern in the government’s response to dissent, and the possible effects on democracy.
Regardless of what the government or media do, it is vital that citizens of a free and democratic society stay vigilant.
The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.
- Alexis de Tocqueville
Spheres of Authority
Let’s look at what types of law govern each part of our life, and how that stays in balance. As explained in my last blog, there is the head of the state, head of the church and head of the family, who each have their spheres of authority. However, what happens when the state decides to mount an invasion into one of these other sovereign spheres?
However you personally view the Church is not important. For now, let’s assume that we don’t want a President or Prime Minister (PM) acting as if he thinks he’s god.
But what IS important is that Trudeau (PM) and Freeland (Deputy PM ) have revealed their type of authority
At the beginning of pandemic, May 2020, they made a play to get unlimited spending for 2 years without prior House approval. At the end of the pandemic, Feb. 2022, they applied heavy handed pressure on police, and the freezing of bank accounts of anyone who dared to protest against their policies. And there have been many other such examples of authoritarianism over his term in office.
In a healthy democracy, neither police, nor the banks should be told what to do by government. This is why these things are carefully spelled out in our constitutions and protected by our Charter of Rights.
It’s Our Choice
If we expect to keep out rights, we must exercise our concomitant responsibilities. If we abdicate our responsibilities, we get whoever wants power the most as our leader. That will inevitably be a tyrant — a bully. That is exactly what cultures have had for millennia, before we fought for democracy. How badly do we want to make sure we don’t go back to that?!! In a democracy, we have that choice.
However, choose wrong, and it may be a long time before we (or maybe our grand kids) get the opportunity to choose again. Ask anyone from Eastern Europe. In a democracy, we use it or lose it. It is our responsibility to choose.
In order to do that, we must first inform ourselves. An independent media is an integral component of that in a democracy. It is supposed to keep an eye on our governing class for us and expose any corruption, present opposing views and give them a voice, show the options available, besides what the government is proposing. We need to be able to find out when the government starts crossing the line into these other spheres of authority.
Coincidentally, since the Trudeau government provided bailout money of billions of dollars to legacy media, is seems to be falling far short of doing that. To show you how far it has slipped in the past few years, some journalists have even quit their well-paying jobs to be able to write their conscience, on an independent platform.
Public, Civil and Non-Civil Spheres of Law
Similar to what I said in a previous blog about politics and science, the government and church need to stay out of each other’s lane. So, where is that line ?!!
Well, a just state will recognize three spheres of law within society:
- Public law concerns the constitution, penal law and laws of criminal justice.
- Common law, or civil private law, exists to guarantee our freedom of thought and expression, association and so forth.
- Non-civil private law concerns the existence and freedom of non-political spheres of law, like the family, church, business, educational institutions.
If the lines dividing the state and this third sphere are abolished, we have a totalitarian state.
For atheists, all power and authority proceeds from man alone. There is no higher power, as in the French and German republics.
In contrast, in the British parliamentary systems, the Head of State swears an oath, under the sovereignty of Christ the King, to uphold the law and invites elected leaders to form a government. The American Pledge of Allegiance is to, “one nation under God.” In the Canadian national anthem, they ask, “God keep our land glorious and free.” The first line of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the Rule of Law….”
For these countries, and from the Christian standpoint, all authority is delegated, limited and under God in the various spheres of life. When the state tries to determine critical elements of the church’s existence and worship that have nothing to do with penal, constitutional or administrative public law, the state has overreached beyond its sphere into non-civil private law.
In the following quote, you may appreciate your government doing one or more of these things. However, we have to be aware of the inevitable consequences of allowing the state out of its sphere of authority, as we see in these examples.
If we violate Sphere Sovereignty and bring the properly coercive character of state law and power into all the organs of societal life, the character of human society changes. If civil government runs and funds education, you get radical secularism and the imposition of LGBTQ curriculum and Gay/Straight alliances in schools — like it or not. If you bring state power into the sphere of family, you get the redefinition of marriage, bans on discipline, and the seizure of our children if we don’t give them affirmative therapy, hormone blockers and surgery for gender dysphoria. If you bring the state into the sphere of welfare provision and charity, you cultivate a radical dependency on state welfare, promote entitlement, and sponsor state redistribution in the form of socialism and progressive taxation, along with the steady collapse of real charity. If you bring the state into the heart of the church, you get a politicized church that is unwilling or unable to speak the truth of the gospel to political authorities, and frequently religious persecution. If you bring the state into the heart of the economy, with an ever-expanding state bureaucracy as the largest employer, you get socialism, a ‘managed/planned’ economy, price fixing, state interventionism, powerful unions, and the collapse of free markets.
Close to the heart of the current crisis, if you bring the state into the heart of medicine you get coercive tax/state funded abortion, state funded euthanasia, state funded sex-change surgery, the denial of the conscience rights of doctors and the mass lockdown of society in the name of public health and saving the institutions of socialized medicine like the NHS (British Health Ministry). If you bring the civil government into the heart of media through state-funded broadcasting, you get state media and a monopoly on the narrative, an attack on the free press, and the attempt to control the dissemination of approved “news.” All of this is inevitable when the state moves beyond its sphere of competency and authority into other sovereign spheres because the state, by its very nature, is a coercive institution.
Our Options for how to Renovate our Democracy
We’re starting to see an obvious blurring of lines between these spheres. In a democracy, it is our responsibility as citizens to keep those lines intact. When we realize that, we can act to influence the nation state, directing policy toward the desired ends. This attempt at taking responsibility can take two forms.
Revolution:
Citizens engaged in revolutionary politics seek to directly undermine or overthrow the politics of the nation state, likely because the politics of the state are so broken or evil that the political status quo has to be replaced wholesale and immediately. Western democracies are nowhere near that point yet.
As a Canadian, I tend to agree with Jesus’ saying.”He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” Unlike the Americans, we don’t have any right to bear arms listed in our constitution. Rather than an all out war of Independence, we just talked them to death, with endless negotiations and compromises. Sure, it took an extra 100 years, but no blood was shed! Elsewhere in the world, we have examples like Czech and Polish revolutions against communism that were very successful despite being out gunned a million to one. Some journalists tried to paint the Freedom Convoy 2022 as being the same as the Jan 6 demonstration on Capitol Hill. The commentaries I saw in the legacy media failed to note the distinctly Canadian style — no guns, zero violence.
Realism:
Citizens can engage with the politics of the state as it exists, accepting that political progress is incremental and that political arrangements between fallible human beings will never be perfect.
People participating as voters, community organizers, and activists, seeking political change have to adopt this mindset. They seek to avoid corruption personally, while acknowledging that it exists, and is unavoidable in a fallen world. Their attitude is, “That isn’t the way it is supposed to be, but we are working towards getting there.”
Abstinence
Some wish to stay out of direct political action entirely, finding it too corrupt and evil an environment to work in, without risk of becoming corrupted themselves. These people can still change their society, in one of three ways:
- Individual Light to the World
Rather than taking on the whole world, some people find it a better use of their limited energy to just make the world a better place to live, one by one. These are the people who are a joy to work with, because they are intentional about acting compassionately in their workplace. These are the people who do the Christian charity and advocacy work in their town and throughout the world.
- An Old World inside the New
These people forget about trying to reform the world at all. They know that they are not forgotten, but are a witness to the outside world that there is a better way to live. Amish furniture is well known for its quality. Groups like the Amish and many new Christian monastic communities have formed intentional communities as a counter culture in the midst of the world. Not only do they find politics too evil or the World Economic Forum controlling technology too anxiety provoking, they even stay away from cell phones!
- Sacramental Witness
Some feel that their ritual and sacramental life makes visible the spiritual in the midst of the physical world. Examples of this would be the celebration of Mass, lighting prayer candles, or artistic acts of protest. These individuals find Church is Essential (there were many marches making this point in winter 2021) to their way of helping the world to see the light. You may have seen video clips of demonstrators singing worship songs, and saying prayers for the Members of Parliament at Freedom Convoy 2022.
“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”
John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St Andrews, 2/1/1867
Don’t Just Do it — Be it!
Regardless of what we choose to do, we can be that agent of change in our sphere of influence. Too often, these different sorts of action are often pitted against each other, as if one is right and the others are misguided. Each individual citizen will have their own reasons for preferring one form of political action over another, in each season of life. But we are free to engage in many different forms of political action — mix and match, so to speak.
We just need to be aware of the different assumptions, goals, and ‘metrics of success’ of each of these forms of political action. Hopefully, this can help to heal some of the animosity and confusion we have all experienced in this political debate. Many unintentional wounds will need healing between friends and colleagues after this challenging time of pandemic.
Surely, there is something we can do. There are alternatives to living in fear. People who put their faith in new government systems will undoubtedly be disappointed.
Rather than mere tolerance, human beings are called to live life by loving each other. Don’t we all want to work in that department with the compassionate person. Don’t we want to BE that person?
Which model of renovating our democracy suits you best this year? Are you doing it?
