LANGLEY—Christians need to make defence of religious freedom their top priority in public life, says Canada’s former ambassador for religious freedom.

“Without robust religious freedom in this country, our other freedoms such as assembly, expression, and association, will come under challenge,” Deacon Andrew Bennett told about 80 people at Trinity Western University March 9.

“Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants must now make the defence of upholding religious freedom for all people the primary concern in our public lives in Canada,” said Deacon Bennett, a senior fellow at the faith-based think tank Cardus. He is program director of Cardus Law, which focusses on the role of law and religious freedom in Canada, and a senior fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute in Washington, D.C.

Deacon Bennett praised TWU as a “great witness” to the “foundational nature of freedom of religion and conscience in our country.” He was delivering TWU’s annual Mel Smith lecture.

The university applied to open a law school in 2012, but began to face various legal battles in 2014 over a “community covenant” it asks students to sign. At issue is a short section that asks students to abstain from sex outside marriage between a man and a woman while attending the university.

TWU fought for its rights to open the law school while maintaining its covenant all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada; a decision is expected this year and is expected to have  implications for the religious freedom of other institutions.

Deacon Bennett said contrary to some opinions, a healthy democracy requires pluralism and acceptance of different views to thrive.

“Increasingly, we must reject an illiberal totalitarianism in the public square that seeks to establish socially correct and acceptable beliefs, treating any peacefully held contrary view as deviant or something to be silenced,” said the Byzantine Catholic deacon.

“There must be no totalitarianism of accepted belief or accepted opinion in our country.”

He cited the Canada Summer Jobs program, which requires applicants to check a box saying they support abortion and other controversial issues, and efforts to force euthanasia into care homes as additional examples of recent challenges to religious freedom.

“Religious freedom can perhaps be more fully defined as the ability to contemplate the metaphysical. Who am I? Who am I in relationship to you? To the world in which I live? To created order? How do I fit in? Who am I in relationship to God? Or, if I don’t have a theistic belief, who am I in relationship to a particular philosophical belief to which I subscribe?”

Denying various groups or individuals their rights to think and believe freely in public presents a grave danger to their fundamental rights, he said.

“Thought necessarily precedes action. If we do not have the freedom to think and exercise beliefs, how then do you possibly move to a full expression of freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of assembly? They are bound together.”

To police the sincerely held beliefs of others “is to risk divorcing thought from action” and push them outside the public square.

“If people in our society, whether they be Muslims or Christians or Sikhs or Jews or people of no religious faith, are constrained in living out their faith in practice and how that faith defines their conscience and profoundly shapes their understanding of the human person,” he said, “they will be increasingly marginalized.”

That has tragic consequences for democracy, said Deacon Bennett, who worked in the Canadian civil service for 14 years.

“As people of faith feel increasingly vulnerable … they may choose to check out of mainstream society altogether,” which would be a “grave loss to our common life” and “a failure of our common society to embrace those citizens.”

He said people of faith must obey and pray for their governments – insofar as they are just. While religious people are citizens on earth, they must obey their consciences and the moral law.

“Canada is our country, and we love it. The Kingdom of God is our homeland, and we desire it earnestly, for there is the fullness of peace, order, justice, mercy, love, and our salvation.”

TWU president Bob Kuhn.

Deacon Bennett gave the keynote speech as part of the university’s 19th Mel Smith lecture, an annual gathering in honour of a man of faith with a long career in politics and public service.

The lifetime achievements of Smith, who was appointed a Queen’s Counsel in 1983, “reflects the tension, yet symmetry, between public and private life,” said TWU president Bob Kuhn.

Kuhn said Deacon Bennett’s presentation “occurs at the very time when the calling of TWU has been questioned and criticized.”

Far from being grim about the possible outcomes of the Supreme Court ruling, Kuhn said this time in TWU’s history offers a unique “vantage point” for its members to “discern the horizon and determine the path forward.”