Churches are all that stands between Canada and tyranny

History shows that when churches are silenced, freedom falters. Calls to revoke their charitable status are a threat to liberty

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Progressives are not shy about their endgame with religion.

Step by step, they seek to strip churches of their civic standing, reduce them to private clubs, and eventually banish them from public life.

In Canada, the latest salvo comes in the form of recommendations before Parliament to revoke charitable status for the advancement of religion. Pierre Gilbert, in a recent paper published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, warns that if this campaign succeeds, it will saddle congregations with crushing tax burdens and drive many into closure.

This is no accident. Secular activists are working to cut off resources and delegitimize faith itself. The reason is clear: churches remain one of the last institutions that uphold the idea that there is a law above the state, a truth that cannot be legislated away.

History shows that religious freedom has long served as the canary in the coal mine for liberal democracies, warning of threats to liberty.

The 20th century proved this with blood. Against Nazi and Communist totalitarianism, no secular institution matched the witness of a religiously formed conscience.

Take Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the young Lutheran pastor, who saw what many Germans preferred to ignore. Hitler’s regime demanded obedience, conformity and silence in the face of mass murder. Bonhoeffer refused.

He preached Christ over Führer. Arrested in 1943, he spent two years in prison writing letters that still inspire courage against evil today. In April 1945, he was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp. His last words: “This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.” His conscience, tuned to a higher authority, made him incapable of surrendering to a murderous state.

In the Soviet Union, figures like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Natan Sharansky stood firm.

Solzhenitsyn was a novelist whose writings exposed the brutal realities of Soviet totalitarianism, most notably through works like The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. His Christian Orthodox faith became central to his resistance. His faith provided the moral clarity and the courage to frame his resistance as a defence of human dignity and divine order against the inhumanity of atheistic materialism.

Sharansky, a Jewish activist, spent nine years in Soviet prisons, much of it in solitary confinement. What sustained him was prayer, the Psalms and the conviction that his jailers could shackle his body but never his soul. He later wrote that inner freedom, rooted in faith, was the foundation of political freedom.

Romania saw the same courage in Lutheran pastor László Tőkés, who refused to bow before dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. Armed only with Scripture, he helped topple one of Eastern Europe’s most brutal tyrannies. In December 1989, his parishioners formed a human shield around his church when the regime tried to silence him. Their courage spread across the country, culminating in Ceaușescu’s downfall.

Poland offers perhaps the clearest case of faith undermining empire.

Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul II, drew millions into the streets during his first pilgrimage back to Poland in 1979.  “Be not afraid,” he told them. The words electrified a nation and emboldened a movement that ultimately cracked Soviet power in half.

Lech Wałęsa, an electrician at the Gdańsk shipyard, responded to the call for change. His Catholic faith anchored his commitment to human dignity in opposition to the oppressive Communist state. As he led the Solidarity movement, he proudly wore an image of Our Lady of Częstochowa on his lapel.

Even in democratic societies, religious conscience has proven indispensable. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist preacher, anchored the American civil rights movement not in the shifting sands of public opinion but in the conviction that all are equal before God.

His sermons drew on Amos, Isaiah and the Gospel of Christ. From Montgomery to Memphis, he taught that unjust laws lose their claim on conscience. The state could jail him, but it could not silence the truth he proclaimed.

What unites these figures is not politics but faith. Their consciences could not be traded as commodities for safety or position. They were attuned to higher ideals than obeying political leaders or fashionable orthodoxies.

Human dignity is upheld not by bureaucratic decree but by truths that governments cannot grant or revoke. This is why churches remain indispensable to Western civilization. They nurture nonconformists and people who can look at a prevailing ideology and say, “No.”

That role is not comfortable, least of all for politicians, but it is invaluable. In an era when governments govern increasingly by whim, cloaked in progressive slogans, the presence of institutions that point beyond the state serves as a safeguard against soft tyranny.

Gilbert’s warning is therefore timely. Revoking charitable status is not a bookkeeping measure. It is the deliberate weakening of the institutions that, time and again, have given birth to the men and women who resist tyranny.

A Canada that silences its churches will not long remain free.

History shows us the choice: societies with independent churches and followers who put their faith in transcendent truths produce Bonhoeffers, Solzhenitsyns, Wałęsas and Kings. Societies without them encourage conformists and tyrants.

Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author, with Barry Cooper, of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).