This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.
By Peter Menzies, April 23, 2024
Sure, some of this is natural.
As people age, they tend to worry that the values they lived by are no longer being upheld. Civilization, as the saying goes, is thousands of years old but never more than one generation deep—and that becomes more of a concern as people enter the contemplative phase of their lives.
But most of what’s going on right now isn’t natural at all—it’s self-inflicted.
Fears for the nation’s soul these days are heightened by roving bands of Islamo-leftists and their increasingly violent rhetoric. They freely express viciously anti-Semitic views and unashamedly align themselves with Hamas, a designated terrorist organization most accurately described by former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott at the recent Canada Strong & Free conference as an “apocalyptic death cult.”
Tolerance of this is new. Even more novel is that the extremist’s rhetoric is inflicted without consequences and with only occasional, tepid responses from politicians who have nothing to offer beyond banal “this is not who we are” or “there is no place for this” bromides. Most appear genuinely fearful of angering the Islamo-leftist coalition and its enablers in the labour movement. More terrifying is that many clearly share their despicable views.
This, in fact, is who we are; this is what Canada has become.
The prime minister, for instance, not only resisted noting the six-month anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas that started the war in Gaza, he had nothing to say on his social media accounts regarding the vandalism discovered at a synagogue in the early hours of April 19. The National Council of Canadian Muslims, on the other hand and to its enduring credit, swiftly condemned the incident, stating in an X post that “we are horrified to learn of an attack at the Kehillat Shaarei Torah synagogue in North York.”
Many media outlets also appeared to take a “meh” approach to the incident, a response that would have been unimaginable if the far right was holding daily mass rallies in the streets of our cities, terrorizing citizens and vandalizing their institutions of faith.
Then, of course, there is the very clear disinterest in the vandalism and burning—many to the ground—of 100 Christian churches in Western Canada in the past three years, something Prime Minister Justin Trudeau referred to as “understandable.”
When it is no longer politically important for the leader of a nation to condemn acts of intimidation, arson, vandalism, and violence against Jewish and Christian places of worship, it’s pretty obvious that the nation’s foundational moral and philosophical foundation—once referred to as Judeo-Christian values—is no longer in place.
What we have instead is unclear, but nature abhors a vacuum and, sooner or later, we’ll either have a new set of cornerstones based on people’s most deeply held beliefs or we’ll be a country that, like a “Seinfeld” episode, is about nothing at all.
The Jewish percentage of the population has always been tiny and is likely to remain so. Christianity, once dominant, is in a freefall. While the 2021 census showed 53.3 percent of the population adheres to that faith, that number is down from 67.3 percent in 2011 and 77.1 percent in 2001.
The fastest-growing belief systems in this century are Islam, which grew from 2 percent to just under 5 percent, Hinduism, which more than doubled to 2.3 percent, and Sikhism, which grew at roughly the same rate to 2.1 percent. The biggest-growing group involves people who report no religious affiliation whatsoever. According to the census, that cohort constitutes 34.6 percent of the population, up from 16.5 percent at the turn of the century.
Should those trends continue over the next two decades, the Christian percentage of the population will be around 35 percent. If the Muslim population maintains its pace of growth, it will be 12.5 percent. Move forward another generation—in the admittedly unlikely but possible event current trends continue—and there could be more mosques than churches. More certain is that a strong majority of Canadians will have no faith affiliation at all.
So, in the course of three generations, the number of people whose beliefs are formed through a Christian lens and the number of those whose values are developed absent faith-based instruction seem certain to reverse positions.
That doesn’t mean the majority of people won’t believe in anything. It’s human nature to seek meaning in life, which means all things are possible. As G.K. Chesterton famously said a century ago: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
And what will that anything be? Which “ism” will attract the most adherents? Environmentalism? Wokeism? Secularism? Individualism? Will it be capitalism, socialism, communism, or just good old-fashioned nihilism? What will be our common ground?
Or is that about to become a concept as old-fashioned as thinking lighting churches on fire is unequivocally bad?
At this stage, the only thing we know for sure is that Canada is no longer and never again will be the country our grandfathers fought and died for.
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an award winning journalist, and former vice-chair of the CRTC.
