Modern discussions often blur the lines between compassion and coercion, charity and compulsion. Many well-meaning Christians have been drawn to socialist ideals, thinking that they align with Christ’s concern for the poor and the call to bear one another’s burdens; but when we strip away slogans and examine core principles, Marxism stands in stark opposition to the heart of the Christian worldview.

At bottom, Marxism is a materialist ideology. It denies any spiritual dimension to human life and sees history through the lens of class struggle, economics, and power redistribution. Conversely, Christianity teaches that we are made in the image of God; that sin, and not economics is the root problem in society; and that salvation comes through Christ, and not via structural revolution. The writings of Marx and Engels specifically reject religion as “the opiate of the masses.” They saw Christian values such as humility, submission, and charity as tools of oppression rather than virtues. The goal of Marxism is not redemption, but revolution. It seeks to tear down hierarchies, including religious ones, and to remake man in the image of the collective state—not in the image of our Creator.

A key difference lies in how Christianity and Marxism view generosity. Christianity teaches voluntary giving as an act of love and worship. The early church shared possessions, but this was never coerced. In Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira were condemned not for withholding money; but for lying about a gift they claimed was total. Peter even says to them:

“Was it not yours before you sold it? And after it was sold, was not the money at your disposal?”

By contrast, Marxism depends upon state force. It confiscates wealth in the name of social justice, eliminating personal ownership and leaving no room for voluntary acts of generosity. This removes individual moral agency and replaces the Christian ethic of stewardship with government control. Marxists often appeal to the early chapters of Acts as Biblical precedent. After all, Acts 2:44-45 says:

“All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.”

Acts 4:32 adds

“No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.”

At first blush, these verses may seem to support collectivism; but once placed into proper context, they reveal an entirely different meaning. The generosity described was not mandated by the apostles or managed by the state. It was a spontaneous outpouring of love among believers in a time of unique crisis. Many of the new converts in Jerusalem had travelled from distant lands and chose to remain; thus creating urgent need for housing, food, and community support. The sharing that took place was a temporary Spirit-driven response, and not a long-term, universal economic system. This is elucidated in the account of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5. Peter tells them that their land and money remained their own and at their disposal, underscoring that ownership was not abolished. Their sin was deception, not capitalism.

Nor was the model in Acts ever imposed on other churches. Paul never commanded the Gentile churches to collectivize their wealth. He asked them to give cheerfully, not under obligation. The picture in Acts is of a people freely giving out of love, not a government confiscating and redistributing wealth in pursuit of equality. The epistles of Paul confirm this understanding. Far from promoting collectivism, Paul affirms private property, individual responsibility, and voluntary charity. In 2 Corinthians 9:7, Paul instructs believers to give “not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” Giving is treated as a personal spiritual act, not a state mandated policy.

Paul also upholds the dignity of work and the importance of providing for our families. In 1 Thessalonians 4, he encourages believers to live quietly, mind their own affairs, and to work with their hands. He does not call for wealth redistribution but for faithful stewardship. In Ephesians 4:28, he tells former thieves to work with their hands so that they may have something to share; again emphasizing both personal responsibility and voluntary generosity. Perhaps most clearly, Paul addresses the issue of idleness in 2 Thessalonians 3:10, stating:

“If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.”

This teaching directly contradicts socialist principles promising equal distribution, regardless of effort. Paul’s view of the Church is one where the strong support the weak, but where each person also bears their own burden when able. Paul organized collections for the Jerusalem Church, but he never demanded it as policy. He praised Macedonian believers for giving even beyond their means; not because of obligation, but because of joy. The New Testament presents giving as the fruit of transformed hearts, not the result of economic systems.

Christianity teaches that God is the ultimate authority and provider. Governments are given limited authority to reward good and punish evil, but they are never the saviour of society. By contrast, Marxism elevates the state into a messianic role. It promises utopia through revolution, economic control, and eradication of traditional religion—Christianity. In praxis, this had led to persecution wherever and whenever Marxism has taken root. From the Soviet Union to Maoist China, to modern day North Korea, Christian churches have been burned, pastors imprisoned, dissent censored, and Scripture banned. All of these are now happening in nations like Great Britain, Australia, and Canada which have embraced socialism. Why? Because the state cannot tolerate rivals, and Christianity presents a King who is higher than any earthly state.

Christianity also teaches that we all have intrinsic value because we are created by God. Christ died for each of us, not for collectives. The shepherd leaves the 99 to seek the one. Conversely, Marxism sacrifices the individual for the sake of the collective, the state. If one person is imprisoned or silenced for the Revolution to continue, then so be it. The blood thirsty history of Marxist regimes is littered with mass graves, gulags, and forced labour camps—all justified by the ideological belief that the end justifies the means. Christianity rejects such false justification. It holds that how we treat “the least of these” reflects how we treat Christ himself.

Nor is private property considered a sin by Scripture. The commandment “You shall not steal” presupposes the right to ownership. Proverbs praises the wise management of wealth and condemns laziness. Paul’s writings in the New Testament affirm that stewardship, hard work, and personal responsibility are Biblical values. Marxism undermines all of these, promising economic equality but invariably delivering misery and oppression. Its enforced equality ignores the Biblical idea of justice rooted in righteousness, impartiality, and the image of God—not in producing equal incomes. As Sir Winston Churchill so eloquently put it:

“Socialism is a political religion whose God is the state and whose priests are the bureaucrats…It is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal distribution of misery.”

Scripture teaches us to care for the poor, but not to abolish the concept of rich and poor entirely. The goal is compassion, not coercion. Christianity has always been countercultural; not seeking to overthrow governments but to transform hearts. When we forget this and become seduced by the siren song of political utopias, we lose the prophetic voice. Marxism offers us a counterfeit kingdom, one that denies sin, rejects God, and seeks redemption through force. As Christians, we are called to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and to care for the oppressed; but out of love, not out of compulsion. We follow a crucified Saviour, not a revolutionary manifesto. Our kingdom is not of this world.

In his inaugural address, controversial New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said this:

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

At first glance, that language sounds compassionate, right? Warmth. Community. Solidarity. But the contrast he draws also reveals something much deeper about the evil ideology lurking beneath. Collectivist thinking often frames the individual as the problem. It assumes that if we would simply surrender our independence to the collective—whether the state, the community, or the movement—society could finally become socially just and harmonious.

Christianity sees the world much differently. The Bible does not teach that the fundamental problem with humanity is too much individual freedom. It teaches that the problem is sin within the human heart; and history shows us what happens when collectivist systems try to solve the problem through centralized power. The collective does not eliminate human avarice. It simply concentrates power in a few greedy hands.

The Christian vision begins with a different assumption: that we possess inherent dignity because we are created in the image of God. That guiding belief is exactly why freedom, responsibility, and moral accountability matter at all. When society abandons the value of the individual in favour of the collective, it does not create warmth; it instead risks creating something much colder—systems where the individual is easily sacrificed for the “greater good.” Remember Covid 19? Christianity does not offer the warmth of collectivism. It instead offers us something far more powerful: transformation of individuals whose changed hearts are reborn to create real community.

Christianity and Marxism are not merely alternative theories about economics and governance; they are rival religions, resting upon mutually exclusive claims about metaphysics, morality, and eschatology. One begins with “in the beginning, God…”; the other with “in the beginning, there was nothing.” One exalts the triune Creator as the source of authority and blessing; the other enthrones the atheistic state as the final arbiter of law, conscience, and property. From this starting point, the paths quickly diverge until they arrive at entirely opposite destinations: the heavens and the new earth versus the gulag; freedom in Christ versus the hundreds of millions of graves Marxism continues to fill globally. To demonstrate this incompatibility, let us look at each position by beginning with the question:

“What does Scripture say?”

We find that the answers Biblical Christianity gives us are the very antithesis of those furnished by Marxism.

The Christian confession is succinct:

“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”—Psalm 24:1

Since creation belongs to God, every earthly ruler—from a small town mayor to the President of the United States—operates on delegated authority. Kings are warned and magistrates instructed that they “bear the sword”, not autonomously but as ministers accountable to the judge of all the earth. Property itself is not ours to redistribute at will. We are instead God’s stewards and must pass it on as a blessing to future generations.

This understanding is utterly opposed by Marxism. According to Marx,

“Communism begins where atheism begins.”

The God of Scripture must be declared non-existent so that the omnipotent state can step into the void. When “religion is the opium of the masses”, the state necessarily becomes the deity supplying earthly salvation by seizing, allocating, and forbidding. By design, not by accident, Marxist regimes outlaw churches or hollow them out into propaganda departments. The state thus claims the right to decide how many children we can have, where we can live, what we can say or think, or even how much food a farmer can keep to feed his own family. This truly is idolatry in its purest form.

Genesis 1:27 teaches that we are created in the image of God. This single sentence anchors human dignity, moral agency, and accountability. Sin has marred but not erased that image. Even after the fall, labour is redemptive; the electrician and the professor both glorify God by exercising dominion. A baker who invents a better loaf, a mother who cares for and loves her children with patience, or an entrepreneur who builds a cybersecurity firm, are all answering a divine call.

Conversely, Marxism reduces humanity to a bundle of economic functions determined by our class. Our moral worth equals our productive capacity as measured by abstract labour hours. The “new man” in Marxist theory is not transformed by grace, but reconstructed by sociology: re-education camps, struggle sessions and terror produce collective homogeneity. In Cambodia’s killing fields, the ideologues literally murdered anyone who wore glasses, based upon the obscene logic that literacy marked out a bourgeois trait to be surgically excised from the collective social body. Under Marxism, image bearers become replaceable numbers on an Excel spreadsheet; individuality is not honoured or respected, but is utterly destroyed.

Scripture however protects private ownership at every turn. The 8th and 10th commandments forbid both theft and coveting, affirming legitimate possession. From Abraham’s purchase of Machpelah to Naboth’s refusal to sell his vineyard, the Bible treats ownership as a sphere of authority entrusted to God and protected by civil law. Paul condemns thieves with the simple command:

“Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labour, doing honest work with his own hands.”--Ephesians 4:28

The Biblical remedy for sinful envy is repentance, hard work, and generosity—not confiscation. Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” openly calls for the “abolition of private property.” Every historical experiment in Marxism has produced the same results: first chaos, then tyranny. Once ownership is vested in the collective, this quickly becomes “the Party”, and the individual family is severed from its means of production and sustenance. When Stalin’s forced collectivization confiscated Ukrainian grain to feed cities of the USSR, the ensuing Holomodor Famine of 1932-33 starved nearly 4M people. Venezuela’s 21st century redux of the experiment has turned the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves into a hellscape where people are left to hunt small game for their daily supper. The lesson is clear, and history teaches us the truth:

“A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.”—Proverbs 25:28

A society without protected property is likewise defenceless against the tyrant.

Before sin entered the world, God placed Adam in a garden and commanded him to “work it and keep it”. Work is pre-fall, and therefore good; hard toil and weeds enter only after rebellion. Jesus Himself spent roughly 90% of his time on earth as a carpenter, honouring the calling to make useful things. The New Testament warns that “if anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat”, a principle presuming freedom to accept or refuse particular employment. Marxist economies on the other hand, lacking price controls and profit motive, substitute production quotas assigned by distant bureaucrats who do not know their right hand from their left. Initiative is criminalized as “speculation” or “hoarding”. The result is chronic shortages, shoddy goods, and environmental disaster. When it comes to stewarding God’s created world, the filthiest and most abusive nations in the world are Marxist ones. When labour becomes merely coerced extraction, productivity collapses, proving that God’s dominion mandate and liberty go hand in hand.

Scripture recognizes inequality as an inescapable feature of a world with varied gifts, times, and seasons. The farmer sows thirtyfold and the one who reaps a hundredfold are both honest; the difference comes from soil, weather, and providence. God’s command is not to erase the gap, but to ensure that generosity flows through the economy:

“If among you, one of your brothers should become poor…your shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need.”—Deuteronomy 15:7-8

The Biblical safety net is voluntary, relational, and moral. Not bureaucratic, politicized, or enforced by state threats. Marxism promises equality of outcome; but achieving it requires destruction of every reason to excel. When reward is identical regardless of effort, the diligent lose their work ethic and the sluggard turns on his bed. The economic pie then shrinks so dramatically that everyone—except of course the ruling elites—is reduced to poverty and subsistence. DEI programs in academia, the corporate world, and in government have demonstrated how destructive social justice can be. Biblical teaching on inequality points us toward grateful generosity and Christ centred contentment; but Marxism tilts us toward resentment, class hatred, and perpetual revolution.

Market institutions reinforce Biblical virtue precisely because honesty and excellence earn repeat customers. A businessman who inflates prices loses clients to a competitor. A craftsman who cheats on the quality of materials will destroy his reputation. Private wealth, when earned ethically, funds hospitals, schools, pregnancy care centres, orphanages, universities, and missionary service without coercion. By contrast, Marxist central planners replace voluntary charity with confiscatory taxation, leaving citizens spiritually and materially destitute. When government becomes our sole provider, it often becomes our executioner as well. The MAID program in Canada is an example of what can happen when it becomes cost efficient for the state to kill its own citizens. From Stalin’s purges to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the 20th century tallied at least one hundred million dead. That is not an accident; it is the logical fruit of an ideology that denies the triune God, treats people as mere economic agendas, and grants absolute power to corrupt bureaucrats who suffer no consequences for their own bad decisions.

The Apostle Paul defines the task of magistrates narrowly: to punish evil doers, praise those who do good, and to provide peace in society so that we Christians can experience:

“peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.” —1 Timothy 2:2

Scripture nowhere entrusts the state with redistributing economic production, deciding the level of wages, setting interest rates, inventing hate speech laws, or regulating every square inch of the economy, from housing to groceries to pipelines. Ancient Israel itself had no centralized planning board. The tithe supporting the Levites and the poor was a fixed percentage for everyone, not a progressive tax. Marxist regimes thus invert God’s proper order: civil governance metastasizes into a type of Leviathan, extending its tentacles into family life, education, health care, agriculture, and every area of the economy. The state even tries to regulate our thoughts, just as some of the new federal laws in Canada now seek to do.

A farmer who hides grain to feed his own children becomes a “class enemy”. An author like Solzhenitsyn whose writings offend the Communist Party finds himself murdered or exiled to the gulags. Total state control is not a regrettable deviation from Marxism; it is the consistent and logical outgrowth of the ideology. So that when the state claims divine prerogatives, it inevitably persecutes those who dare to affirm an allegiance higher than itself. The most threatening words to the Marxist are these:

“Jesus is Lord. Not Caesar.”

The Apostle Paul also warns:

“For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness.” —2 Corinthians 6:14

Attempts to construct a WOKE, Christian Marxism invariably attack Christ and His word. They take us in the opposite direction from Biblical revelation and Christian truth. Where Biblical truth has shaped nations—whether Old Testament Israel’s jubilee laws or the work ethic spawned by the Protestant Reformation—the result was Western prosperity. Humanity flourishing materially and spiritually. Where Marxist dogma has reigned—whether Soviet collective farms or present day Venezuela and North Korea—death, poverty, and tyranny have followed as night follows day.

Christianity provides not only the right diagnosis but the correct solution: repentance and forgiveness of sins, renewal of hearts by the work of the Holy Spirit; and responsible stewardship which, under God’s blessing, yields pressed down, shaken together, running over innovation and generosity. By contrast, Marxism can offer only the perpetual revolution of envy, culminating in a graveyard of “equality” and total tyranny.

As Christians, we must therefore reject the false gospel of a collectivist utopia. We must preach the true gospel of sovereign grace, labour faithfully in our homes, in our churches, and operate our markets as trustworthy stewards of what God places into our hands. We know that our true citizenship is in heaven—

“And from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body, by the power that enables Him even to subject all things to Himself.”

—Philippians 3:20-21

Watch the full commentary here:

Rupert Lowe’s Rape Gang Inquiry Report represents one of the most damning incidents of Western leadership failures in modern history. So much so, that PM Keir Starmer resigned from office within a week of its release. The Report documents the systematic rape, torture, and trafficking of at least 250k British girls, the vast majority of whom were white and working middle class. The perpetrators were organized networks of men predominantly of Pakistani Muslim origin.

This is not a tragedy born of accident or oversight. It is a preventable catastrophe manufactured by the deliberate decisions of political elites who chose forced cultural diversity over protecting the most vulnerable English citizens. The numbers alone should shake the conscience of every Western nation—including Canada, where human trafficking rings are known to be active. A quarter of a million girls. Not a few dozen isolated cases. Helpless kids subjected to horrors that would break the heart of anyone who has one. Girls as young as 11 were groomed with alcohol and drugs, transported between cities via taxis, imprisoned in houses, and gang-rapped by men who treated them as something less than animals. Here is the story of one such victim cited in the Report:

“During this period, she reports that she was subjected to repeated sexual violence, severe physical assaults, and sustained torture—including being raped by a dog as the men placed bets on whether it would penetrate her vagina or her anus.”

The perpetrator file is hardly ambiguous. Approximately 87% of those convicted in these group-based child sexual exploitation cases bore distinctively Muslim names. Experts estimate that around 95% of actual gang members were Muslim and predominantly Pakistani. There is no mystery here. There is no need for careful academic parsing or euphemistic language about “community issues”. The Report documents with absolute clarity that this was a pattern, a system, an organized assault on vulnerable British girls by men who shared a specific ethnic and religious background.

Yet when victims dared to name this reality, they were silenced. The Report exposes how political figures, police officials, and media talking heads responded to victims and whistleblowers not with protection, but with criminalization. Girls who identified their abusers were accused of racism and Islamophobia; parents who tried to protect their daughters from these dark networks were undermined by social services; whistleblowers who attempted to sound the alarm were retaliated against and dismissed. The message from every British institution was clear: that acknowledging the ethnic and religious patterns of these crimes was—incredibly—more dangerous than allowing the crimes to continue. Let that sink in for a moment.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan exemplifies this institutional betrayal. He repeatedly denied that grooming gangs operated in his city, despite possessing detailed case files documenting exactly these patterns. Last October, the Metropolitan Police reviewed 9k child exploitation cases, even as Khan continued his public denials. This was calculated deception. Khan prioritized his political capital with Muslim voting blocs and the progressive narrative of multicultural harmony of the basic duty to protect young girls from being tortured in London.

The Report makes clear that these were religiously motivated crimes. Gang members explicitly told victims that they were “white trash” or “kuffar”, non-believers who deserved punishment. Victims were forcibly converted to Islam as part of their abuse. They were compelled into Islamic marriages with their rapists. Religious indoctrination was weaponized to justify rape, torture, and human trafficking. These were systematic assaults rooted in a worldview that positions Muslim men as superior and white girls as legitimate targets for sexual exploitation.

The Report’s findings on institutional failure are equally damning. Police ignored reports and destroyed evidence. Social services placed vulnerable children in trafficking hubs instead of protecting them. Schools excluded victims rather than intervening on their behalf. The National Health Service (NHS) treated physical evidence of rape, including genital injuries, sexually transmitted infections in children, and pregnancies caused by assault—but did nothing. Every institution designed to protect children failed catastrophically because admitting the problem would have meant confronting inconvenient truths about mass immigration and failed cultural integration.

These gang rapes are the direct consequence of Third World mass immigration imposed upon British society by left-wing elites. They arrogantly viewed their own citizenry’s concerns about rapid and untenable demographic change as white bigotry. The British Nationality Act of 1948 opened the doors. Tony Blair’s government then accelerated the flow; and for decades now, the political and media establishment dismissed any concerns about integration, cultural cohesion, or the safety risks of uncontrolled immigration as “racism”. The cost of that dismissal was paid by these young, vulnerable English girls and their families.

The report should serve as a warning to Canada, the U.S., and every Western nation about the disastrous effects of open borders and mass migration without assimilation. Britain’s leftist establishment was willing to sacrifice the lives and safety of the nation’s children upon the altar of a Utopian multicultural dream. Is our own establishment willing to do likewise? Canada can learn from Britain’s civic and moral failure. We must demand leaders who will prioritize protection of our citizens over preserving progressive narratives. We must insist upon secure borders as well as cultural and values-based integration, rather than cultural relativism and suicidal empathy which accommodates the entire globe before our own people; and we must refuse to permit political correctness to silence anyone who speaks the uncomfortable truth about who is committing crimes against our children.

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report documents evil enabled by cowardice and denial. It was chaired by MP Rupert Lowe. More than 20k ordinary British citizens paid out of their own pockets to make this Inquiry happen, because the government refused to do it themselves. Sit with that for a moment. Over 20k people reaching into their own wallets so that somebody, somewhere, would finally investigate and record what happened to their daughters. The question now is whether Western nations like Canada have the courage to act upon its warnings before more children suffer the same cruel fate.

Consider the case of Beverly. That is not her real name. She was 11 years old. What happened to her is real, sworn into the public record by the Rape Gang Inquiry. Beverly was still in primary school when groups of Pakistani Muslim men began buying her alcohol and taking her for rides in their taxis. She had already suffered abuse at home by a stepfather her mother knew about but would not stop. She was young, isolated, and the men in cars were the first people who treated her like she mattered. She could not have understood what grooming looks like when it is done by professionals.

By the time she was thirteen, a social worker had taken her to a sexual health clinic. She was diagnosed with chlamydia in her throat and vagina, gonorrhea, genital warts, and pelvic inflammatory disease. The social work did not report any of this, nor did the clinic staff. Instead, they talked to her about contraception. When a man drove her to a graveyard, fed her whiskey, raped her, and forced a bottle into her body until it shattered, she admitted herself to hospital. They removed the glass, but nobody asked how it got there. She was just treated and then discharged.

Police found her in cars with Pakistani gang members on many occasions. They let the men go without even questioning them. When Beverly told one officer the full extent of what was being done to her by these men—on the street, to his face—he told her there was nothing to be done and walked away. Another time, officers asked whether she was consenting to sex with adult men and—despite her telling them she did not know what the word ‘consent’ meant—they recorded that she had.

Before we go any further in addressing what is a difficult topic, the Lord’s own words need to be placed here, over what was done to Beverly and to a quarter of a million girls like her. Jesus said it thrice. Matthew recorded it, Mark recorded it, and so did Luke. No single statement of consequence from our Lord appears with such consistency across all three synoptic gospels, outside of the passion narrative itself:

“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”—Matthew 18:6

Better. That is the word Jesus used. A drowning death is the better outcome for the man who destroys a child. The alternative He leaves unnamed is worse. Three gospel writers recorded that. The Lord considered it so important as to state it more than once. He was not speaking casually or with a soft voice.

This is not merely a story about a system that failed. In fact, the system did not fail. These were not accidents. They were the product of what these men believed. Before politics. Before the immigration numbers. Before parliamentary votes and the cover-ups and the whistleblowers left bankrupt in the street. We must start with what these men believed. They were not confused. They did not drift into predation through poverty or desperation or cultural displacement. They operated inside a coherent but evil theological framework which taught them, in explicit doctrine, that what they were doing was not only permissible—but correct and holy.

The Report documents 8 theological pillars drawn from Islamic doctrine. Not fringe interpretation or distortion invented by extremists who wandered from the text of the Quran. This is classical theology, codified in centuries of Sharia law, transmitted through cultures shaped by those texts across 1400 years. The first is Muslim supremacy. Sura 3:110 instructs:

“You are the best nation, raised up for humankind, commanding what is good and forbidding what is wrong, and believing in Allah. If only the people of the book believed, it would be better for them; some among them are believers, but most are perverted.”

Sura 8:55 describes non-Muslims as “the worst animals in Allah’s sight.”

Sura 9:28 labels them “unclean.”

These are not editorial asides in an otherwise tolerant scripture. They are foundational texts authorizing the Muslim believer to correct, compel, and even punish those outside the faith. Dr. Ella Hill, a Rotherham survivor who later became a physician, testified before the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. Her rapists told her that white girls are “lower than shit under your shoe”. They told her that Muslim men hold “maximum moral authority to command the people beneath them.” They were not improvising. They were applying a doctrine learned in childhood, repeated in community, and reinforced by texts that called their victims the worst of all creatures.

The second is al-wala wal-bara, the Islamic principle of loyalty and disavowal. Sura 5:51-52 commands Muslims not to take Christians or Jews as allies, warning that whoever does has become one of them. Sura 60:4 commands “enmity and hatred forever” toward unbelievers until they accept Islam. The practical effect documented in the Report? Speaking to outsiders about wrongdoing by Muslims is not merely discouraged under this doctrine. It is a betrayal against God. Community silence is not mere cowardice but is obedience. The taxi drivers who transported the girls, the restaurant owners who looked the other way, the family members who knew and said nothing, were not innocent bystanders. They were operating inside a malevolent framework telling them that the Muslim community came before the life of a kaffir child.

The third is Sharia’s treatment of rape. Under Islamic law, rape falls under the category of zina, meaning illicit sexual intercourse. To prove rape, a victim must produce four male eyewitnesses who directly observed penetration and non-consent. Failure to produce such witnesses risks conviction for the very act reported. Pakistan’s 2003 National Commission on the Status of Women documents that nearly 88% of women imprisoned in that country were rape or gang-rape victims who had failed to produce the requisite witnesses. The Muslim men raping British girls brought this legal tradition with them. Under the framework they imported, they were essentially untouchable.

Dr. Hill’s testimony is preserved in the witness statement of Professor Lisa Ruth Oakley and was submitted to the 2022 Jay Inquiry. It puts theology into human context. She was told that girls are old enough for sex once they begin menstruating. She was told that sex with a kaffir girl does not count as adultery. She was told that sex with a kaffir girl does not count as adultery. She was told to look at the floor in the presence of Muslim men because eye contact meant she wanted sex. She was gang-raped as punishment for making eye contact with a waiter. She writes:

“Every time they quoted scripture it was very hard to argue with; to them it was like I was arguing with God. To me it was actually like I was arguing with the devil.”

That sentence is the theological summary of everything that follows. Nor is Britain a unique case study. In the Netherlands, predominantly Moroccan Muslim men called “lover boys” lured Dutch teenage girls into prostitution. A 2001 report by Amsterdam based Child Right organization estimates that approximately 5k ordinary Dutch schoolgirls aged 13-14 from normal family backgrounds had been drawn into the ring. A 2021 Swedish academic study published in Forensic Sciences Research found that nearly half of all convicted rapists in the country were foreigners, predominantly from the Middle East and North Africa. In Australia in 2002, nine Lebanese Muslim men were convicted of gang-raping white girls. Police found a text message on a perp’s phone reading:

“When you are feeling down, bash a Christian or Catholic and lift up.”

Different postal codes, but the same Islamic doctrine applies in each country and in every case. Now consider what the one true God says about such men and what fate awaits them:

“But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death.”—Revelation 21:8

The millstone Jesus described is merciful by comparison. And for every officer and councilor or MP who covered for these rapists:

“He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, are both an abomination to the Lord.”—Proverbs 17:15

Not a policy failure; but an abomination. Same category. Same God. Same judgment.

Britain’s first recorded case of Pakistani rape gangs appears in the Bradford Observer on 27 August 1955. Four Pakistani men were charged with raping a 15-year-old girl. This was shortly after the British Nationality Act of 1948 granted former colonial subjects right of entry to the U.K. That is not coincidence and is relevant to the overall timeline.

Alexis Jay is independent chair of the Centre for Excellence for Children’s Care and Protection. Jay identifies the 1970s as the decade when organized immigrant rape gangs first began operating systematically. Individual cases became networks. Networks became industries. By the time Tony Blair won the 1997 UK election and threw open the immigration door to volumes Britain had never seen, the architecture was already built and waiting. The Report states plainly that “the root cause was immigration.” Those skeptical of this conclusion need only scale it out. The 2014 Jay Report documented at least 1400 girls abused in Rotherham alone between 1997-2013. The 2022 Telford Inquiry documented more than 1k children exploited in that single market town over decades. On 14 May 2019, Lord Pearson of Rannoch stated before the House of Lords that over 250k young white girls had been raped, mostly by Muslim men, several times daily for years. He added that this figure, extrapolated from known cases, was probably on the low side. The Rape Gang Inquiry confirms operations in at least 149 local authority districts—close to 40% of all such districts across the UK.

One national operation. Reproduced in town after town. The same method, same grooming sequence, same transportation network, same justification language, and the same institutional response everywhere it happened.

The UK Office for National Statistics data records rape offences in England and Wales at approximately 8,593 in the year 2000. By March of 2025, that figure had skyrocketed to 70,000 per annum. That is an 800% increase, against a population growth of roughly 15% over that same time frame. During that precise period, Poland recorded a much different story. They chose to maintain relatively controlled immigration levels and saw Poland’s rapes fall from 2,399 in 2000 to 1,127 in 2023. Poland’s per capita rape rate sits at roughly 3 per 100k residents. By contrast, Britain’s is over 100 per 100k.

One particular British community demonstrated what organized defense looks like. The Network of Sikh Organizations documented the targeting of Sikh girls by Muslim gangs. They addressed the Home Secretary directly in January of 2025 and organized collective male protection within their communities. The gangs withdrew from Sikh girls and moved on. White British girls were never afforded this kind of defense, because the state had spent 3 decades dismantling every structure which might have procured it.

Peter McLoughlin’s 2016 expose entitled “Easy Meat” contains research showing that approximately 87% of those convicted in rape gang cases bore descriptively Muslim names. Dr. Tam Harvey, imam of the Oxford Islamic Congregation, publicly estimated in January of 2025 that the actual proportion of rape gang members who are Muslim is closer to 95%. The Quillam Foundation’s 2017 analysis of 264 convictions between 2005 and 2017, found 84% of offenders were South Asian, with the overwhelming majority Pakistani Muslim. Muslims represent only about 6.5% of the total British population.

Every British institution knew about this pattern. Police, social services, NHS, schools, universities, licensing authorities, courts, and even Parliament. The pattern was documented, briefed, circulated, and placed before decision makers at every level of every agency responsible for protecting these children. What followed was thus not the result of ignorance. In fact, Scripture addresses this excuse directly:

“If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? And He that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? And shall not He render to every man according to his works?”—Proverbs 24:11-12

The 364 UK MPs who voted against commissioning a national inquiry cannot now plead ignorance before that verse. The officers who walked away cannot plead ignorance before it. The social workers who shredded the files cannot do so. God weighs the heart. He knows whether they knew. Proverbs 24 answers the excuse before it is even offered.

Police in Rotherham told parents who reported their daughters missing that the girls were making lifestyle choices. Social services placed girls in homes that functioned as trafficking hubs for rape gangs. Protective parents were stripped of their legal rights. Cases were closed despite clear evidence of ongoing exploitation, and professionals who raised alarms lost their careers. Records were not only lost; they were shredded. The NHS recorded genital injuries, multiple sexually transmitted infections in children as young as 13, pregnancies caused by rape, and suicide attempts directly linked to documented exploitation. Schools watched older Muslim men collect girls at their gates, heard disclosures in corridors, but responded by excluding the victims. Taxi licensing authorities, confronted with evidence that their drivers formed the logistical spine of a human trafficking network, simply renewed the licenses. Courts refused to apply racial or religious aggravation to rape gang perpetrators despite sentencing guidelines explicitly requiring it when racial or religious hostility is evident. Muslim men who destroyed dozens of children across years of organized predation received four-to-twelve-year sentences, serving a third to a half before being released. Foreign nationals among them were rarely deported. They were instead housed, fed, and returned to the communities they once preyed upon.

Scripture names what every one of these watchmen owe:

“But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand.” —Ezekiel 33:6

The sword came and the trumpet was blown. The blood of every girl in that Report is on the hands of every watchman who saw what was happening but remained silent. Ezekiel does not quality that because God does not qualify it.

PM Keir Starmer once served as Director of Public Prosecutions. The Daily Express reported on 22 February 2026 that during Starmer’s tenure, 13k suspected rape gang members and pedophiles were let off with warning letters. Starmer just resigned as leader of the government that produced an inquiry so narrowly constructed that it cannot, by design, examine the ethnoreligious pattern its own chair identifies as the defining feature of this scandal. Sadiq Khan, Mayor London, maintained publicly for years that grooming gangs did not operate there.

Whistleblowers were treated as criminals. Tommy Robinson documented grooming patterns after a close female relative was exploited at the tender age of 14. What followed were repeated arrests, dawn raids on his family home, fabricated charges, asset freezes, and forced relocations across years. He even spent 13 months in prison for live streaming outside Leeds Crown Court as defendants in a major grooming gang trial entered the building. Robinson was left bankrupt as the state apparatus protected the predators.

So, what is the lesson to be learned here?

Strip Christianity from a nation’s culture and the backbone goes out of its defenses. The institutional church cooperated with government. It reframed open borders as charity. It labeled concern about mass immigration a failure of love. It provided theological cover for a policy that Holy Scripture, read plainly, would have demolished. What the state will not do, Christian men are commanded to do. Here is what the full counsel of Scripture actually commands. A Christian man is commanded to be dangerous in service of the innocent:

“Blessed by the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.”—Psalm 144:1.

The night before his crucifixion, Jesus gave a direct command:

“He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.”—Luke 22:36

Jesus told his disciples that their physical comfort matter less than their readiness. A man who has no means of defense has his priorities out of order. That command has not been repealed. Nor does defense of a household against intrusion carries no guilt before God:

“If a thief be found breaking up, and be smitten that he die, there shall be no blood shed for him.”—Exodus 22:2

A Christian man is commanded to provide for his own or be counted worse than an infidel:

“But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.”—1 Timothy 5:8

A Christian man is commanded to conduct himself like one:

“Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.”—1 Corinthians 16:13

A Christian man is commanded to name the danger to his household:

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”—Proverbs 22:6

A Christian man is commanded to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves:

“Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction. Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.”—Proverbs 31:8-9

A Christian man is commanded to organize with other Christian men:

“And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”—Ecclesiastes 4:12

“Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together.”—Hebrews 10:25

A Christian man does not feed what is consuming his daughters:

“Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them.”—Romans 16:17

Every institution, every party, every media organization, and every academic establishment documented here served the suicidal tolerance ideology that protected Muslim gang rapists for 50 years. A formed man does not march against them; he instead stops funding them, stops sending his children to be formed by them, and stops treating their accusations of racism as having any moral authority over his obligation to protect his household.

Mark them. Avoid them. That is the Christian command:

“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitters in the seat of the scornful.”—Psalm 1:1.

The grooming gang inquiry is but a crack in the facade. It must not be allowed to close. Britain—and by extension the West—stands at a precipice. The enemy senses its opportunity in our divisions and moral exhaustion. Our response must be total clarity: name the evil, trace its mechanisms, and root it out unapologetically. Britain and the West can still be saved, but only if we first acknowledge the nature of the enemy—not merely its human agents, but the ancient, supernatural intelligence force behind them.

Watch the commentary here:

Therapy apps are everywhere. Marketing for apps like BetterHelp and Headspace in the video and podcasting space have exploded over the past few years, offering virtual, on-demand therapy—but why?

For anyone paying attention like we at GreyMatter, young people, especially young men, are clearly struggling. Many today are anxious and lonely, searching for meaning, direction, purpose—anything. Whether they know it or not, they are looking for someone who can help them figure out life. We may be tempted to diagnose this as just another health crisis. Our medicalized concepts of well-being lead us to prescribe fixes to symptoms but steer away from the deeper causes of our social malaise. After all, every generation has faced hardship. Previous ones suffered through wars, economic collapse, disease, and personal tragedy on a scale that most young people today will never experience. Yet our grandparents did not have on-demand therapy to talk through their problems. Instead, they relied upon something else entirely.

Enter Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the guide for the author through the hellscape of Inferno, the toils of “Purgatorio”, and the bliss of “Paradiso”. He plays the part of the wise mentor, the teacher to our lost protagonist. Virgil exemplifies what it means to guide another man in a way that has almost entirely vanished from modern culture. For most of history, guidance was integral to ordinary life, because past societies understood that young men do not simply mature on their own. They need intentional formation to fully develop and realize their true potential.

In ancient societies, young men often expected to undergo some form of initiation. This was a process or event, such as a big-game hunt or ritual ceremony, that tested them and marked transition from dependence into service and ultimately—leadership. These rites of passage ensured that future leaders of the tribe or village were able to meet the challenges of their times and could be deemed worthy of societal trust. This knowledge that maturity is cultivated has shaped nearly every major institution throughout history. Since many craftsmen were illiterate for much of history, learning was passed down from master to apprentice through on the job training. With that close relationship naturally came regular demonstration of the habits and virtues required for a particular trade: patience, diligence, discipline, honesty, and responsibility. The goal extended beyond producing just another skilled blacksmith; but eventually a trustworthy master capable of leading a new generation of blacksmiths for service to town and country. The apprentice was learning how to properly accept responsibility.

Religious education operated with a similar emphasis on character formation. Churches and religious schools, with early 20th century Jewish and Catholic schools as prime examples, did not not make transmission of information their primary aim. They instead prioritized formation of the conscience, informed by long traditions in Jewish and Christian culture. Scripture, theology, philosophy, and the lives of the prophets and saints provided models of virtue, of lives ordered toward higher purpose. The young student was not left on an island to invent his own concept of “goodness”. He inherited a vision of what a properly ordered life looked like, based upon timeless traditions.

Even among upper classes, intentional formation was built into the culture. The Grand Tour, undertaken by many young European gentlemen from the 17th-19th centuries, was designed as an education in civilization writ large. When young men traversed Rome, Vienna, and Florence, they were exposed to art, history, politics, and the great achievements of other peoples. They returned more cultivated, mature, and independent—ready to take up the multifaceted duties of Europe’s finest families. All these educational experiences promoted a common vision of the actualized human person. Western societies, particularly those shaped by Christianity, had a more coherent answer for what maturity means. A good man is not simply one who achieves personal satisfaction; but rather one who practices virtue, fulfills obligations, serves others, and orients life toward the highest good.

Modern societies have gained many things, including greater individual freedom and opportunity; but we have become far less aware of the need for intentional formation and how to go about it, especially for young men who often enter adulthood lacking clear expectations, meaningful responsibilities, and personal examples to emulate. We are much better at helping them acquire skills, to pursue material needs, and to manage symptoms of deeper problems; but we are much less certain about how to form people capable of acting with wisdom, virtue, and purpose.

This older understanding of guidance is what Dante places at the center of The Divine Comedy, and it precludes the need for therapy in the first place. Therapy is the rescue operation when things have gone awry. Mentorship and formation are the way we gain the wisdom and virtues necessary to avoid falling into mental pitfalls, sins, and personal problems requiring therapy. I am not saying that therapy is necessarily a bad thing, or that it does not help, or that it is unnecessary; what I am saying is that the entire industry is an avoidable fact in a culture that is properly formed.

Dante understood the need for guidance as inherent to living well. His “Divine Comedy” and the Inferno specifically begins with an admission—a midlife crisis—that he has gone astray:

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, where the right way was lost.”

Like Dante, many young men today are not necessarily lacking talent. Like Dante waking dazed in a wood, they are simply lacking direction. They have ambition, intelligence, and potential, but possess little vision of how to use such gifts. Dante does not discover the way himself; nor does he soon find the right way through introspection, or as we might say today, by “finding himself.” No, he must be led by a guide, and that person is the great Latin poet, Virgil. It may seem odd that a poet becomes Dante’s guide, but the poets of antiquity were not only revered because of their literary mastery; but because through artful language they could convey truths about the world and interior life. The best poets are truly philosophers in this sense.

Virgil however was given a special place in the Medieval Christian world. Chaucer described Virgil’s prominence as “on a pillar that was of bright tin-plated iron.” To many Medieval scholars, Virgil was considered a kind of pre-Christian prophet or an inspired pagan; more like a Hebrew figure of the Old Testament than a Greek or Roman polytheist. Virgil’s assignment as the guide through “Inferno” and “Purgatorio” reflects this privilege. And so, Virgil is Dante’s guide for much of his journey because he is the heaven-oriented torchbearer of earthly wisdom; a familiar guide to both the non-Christian and Christian milieu. More personally though, Dante credits Virgil as his door to a deeper understanding of not only the art of poetry, but also of the beauty of Christianity, saying to him:

“Thou art alone the one from whom I took the beautiful style that has done honor to me.”

Dante understands Virgil as more than just a poet. The great poet is his guide and moral instructor, teaching him how to see reality correctly—just as great poetry captures reality more viscerally than prose.

As the two descend through the circles of Hell, Dante often misunderstands the dismal scenes he encounters. Recognizing many names and faces, he often feels anger toward infamous individuals and confusion about particular punishments. Virgil corrects his understanding, showing him that Hell’s response to the sinner is always in alignment with ultimate justice. Sins that appeared attractive on earth are revealed in their fullness as ultimately hideous and destructive. The spiritual reality of the world is revealed in Dante’s journey—and Virgil proves essential to interpreting and safely guiding him through these dangers.

This is what makes the “Divine Comedy” a profound examination of conscience. It is a tour through the darkest vices of humanity and their just correction. Each circle of Hell reveals a different way that we can distort our own desires. Virgil’s goal as a guide is to impart a true understanding of the nature and gravity of sin, so that Dante is ultimately equipped to choose “Paradiso”. Sadly, far too few young men in our modern society have a mentor like Virgil in their lives.

Dante was pointing out how we can get lost along the journey to fulfill God’s mission for our lives. Modern self-improvement culture is a guiding our young men astray. Self-improvement culture has sold us a convincing lie: that the highest goal of our lives is to become the best possible version of ourselves. This is the basic message of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s bestselling book, Twelve Rules For Life, none of which tilt young men toward trusting the transcendent one true God.

Optimize your morning routine. Build your habits. Clean up your room. Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Read more books. Get stronger. Earn more. Become more disciplined. More productive. More knowledgeable. More impressive. Build up your self-esteem. Now, do not get me wrong here. I am not saying that any of these things are bad in themselves; but they are not the point. We can become highly disciplined and still be spiritually weak. We can get stronger, smarter, and more productive while avoiding every responsibility God has already placed in front of us.

A better man is not always a faithful one.

The question is not just whether we are improving. It is also what responsibility our improvement is helping us to avoid. Scripture does not demand self-optimization. Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jonah, and even David were pretty average people whom God chose to do great things. What God commanded from them and from us is faithful stewardship:

“And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it.”—Genesis 2:15

Work and responsibility are not consequences of the Fall. Before sin entered the world, we were made to cultivate, to build, to keep, and to serve. Dominion is the original design, not a self-improvement goal:

“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”—Ephesians 2:10

We are not created to become the best version of ourselves. We were instead created for good works God prepared for us in advance. Our growth is meant to be directed toward those works, not toward a private version of personal excellence that is nothing more than self-worship and idolatry:

“And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance; for ye serve the Lord Christ.”—Colossians 3:23-24

Every effort, every discipline, every skill is directed at Christ. Not at our self-image, not at our CVs, but at Him. Jesus spent roughly three decades in ordinary work before beginning his public ministry. The Christian life is not measured by how impressive our output looks. Faithfulness can be hidden. It can be ordinary. It can be repetitive. It can be slow. I rather doubt that God is impressed by our self-optimization, but He is honoured by our obedience to Him.

The Mission Audit is a simple exercise to examine whether our improvement is serving God’s mission or one’s ego. If done honestly, it can reorient personal growth back to God. The first step is to ask what God has already entrusted to us. Before chasing a vision of who we want to become, we need to first take inventory of what we already have. List actual responsibilities such as your wife, your children, your local church, your vocation, your neighbours, your skills, your financial resources, your bodily health, and your opportunities to serve. Do not list dreams or personal goals.

Matthew 25:14-30 records Jesus telling the parable of the talents. The servants were judged not on what they could have done with more, but on what they did with what had been entrusted to them. The faithful servant did not chase a different assignment; he was faithful with what was already in his hands. Start there, because your first mission is your current assignment.

The second step is to ask what we are improving and who benefits. This is where the audit can get discomforting. Write down every area you are actively working on: fitness, income, business knowledge, habits, spiritual disciplines, emotional control, technical skills, and communication. Ask whether this serves your household, your church, your neighbour, or only your status and comfort. Does the increased income make you more generous or merely more comfortable? Does my discipline make me more dependable to those who need me? Does my knowledge help you serve or merely help you win arguments? Does your fitness increase your capacity to work and protect your family? Does your productivity make you more present with your wife or children, or less so? If our improvement only makes us more impressive to ourselves, then it is not growth:

“Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.”—1 Corinthians 10:31

Every discipline, every skill, every habit is meant to pass through that filter. Does this glorify God by serving others? Anyone who gets stronger but not serving is just building a better idol.

The third step is to ask what faithful action we are avoiding. Look at your list of current improvements. Now look at your list of entrusted responsibilities. Where is the gap? What faithful action are you delaying by pursuing self-improvement? Sometimes the next step in our growth is not to learn something new. It is becoming faithful with what is already in front of us. David was anointed king as a teenager but spent years serving Saul, running from Saul, and waiting on God’s timing. He remained faithful in the ordinary while God prepared him for the extraordinary. Moses spent 40 years tending sheep before God called him to lead Israel out of bondage. Those were years of faithful stewardship in a small assignment. God used the ordinary work to shape a man who would carry an extraordinary calling. Our own avoidance of what is right before us by pursuing productivity will look respectable to the world; but God see our hearts, and He knows when our improvement is veiled disobedience.

The fourth step is to redirect one improvement toward service this week. Pick one area where you are actively growing and then find a way to serve God through it. If you are building a stronger body, then use that strength to serve someone. Such as carrying something heavy for a neighbour or playing with your kids until they are tired but you are not. If you are growing in knowledge, then teach someone. Disciple younger men or help your wife to understand something with which she has been struggling. If you are increasing your income, then give more now rather than later. Make the increase serve God’s kingdom rather than your own comfort. If you are building productivity systems, then use them to create margin for your family and to be more present.

The fifth step is to bring audit to the church. We were not designed to evaluate ourselves in isolation. Bring your mission audit to your pastor, an elder, or a trusted brother in your local church. Ask them to look at your list of improvements and your list of responsibilities and ask what they see. A man unaccountable is one adrift and astray. We will rationalize our own avoidance if no one is allowed to call it out:

“Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves: for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy, and not with grief: for that is unprofitable for you.”—Hebrews 13:17

Our elders are watching for the soul. Let them do their job and bring them your audit and listen carefully to what they say. Self-improvement culture will keep on telling us to become the best versions of ourselves. Scripture tells us to become faithful with what has already been given. We must therefore direct our strength toward service and aim our growth at obedience.

A better man is not necessarily a faithful man; but a faithful one, by God’s grace, becomes exactly the man God created him to be. Not being a ‘good man’, based upon the kind of counterfeit virtue that produces passive husbands and absent fathers. The ‘being a good man’ is actually killing Christian masculinity.

Modern society has sold Christian men a counterfeit. We have been told that the goal is to be a good man. Good husband, good father, good church member, and a good employee or boss. Just be good and keep the peace. Do not make waves; just smile, nod, apologize, and move on. That is not Biblical Christianity. It is moral niceness. It produces passive husbands, absent fathers, and men who have not confronted real sin in their own homes for a very long time.

“Good” is not the standard. God never called us to be good. He calls us instead to be holy. When the rich young ruler calls Jesus “good”, he is rebuked:

“And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? None is good, save one, that is, God.”—Luke 18:19

Jesus declined the compliment and redirected the man to the actual standard, which is God’s holiness rather than its counterfeit—human goodness. The rich young ruler wanted to seem good himself. He wanted to check the boxes and walk away, feeling righteous in his own eyes, but Jesus would not oblige him. He instead exposes the man’s idolatry in one sentence:

“Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and follow me.”

The man walked away grieving because he was “good” by the cultural standard of the day, but not holy in God’s eyes. This is precisely where many Christian men are living today. They are not cheating on their wives. They are not screaming at their kids. They show up to church most Sundays. By every cultural measure, they are “good men”; but they are all dying inside because in their hearts they know that merely being good was never the call.

The “good man” lie costs us everything that matters. It destroys marriages, because we will not confront sin in our homes and we leave our wives to carry burdens never meant for them. It costs our children, because they learn from our passivity that truth is negotiable and that courage is optional. It costs your church, since men who will not stand on truth leave the body vulnerable to every wind of false teaching that blows thorough the doors. Ultimately, it costs us our souls. We know that something is wrong. It is the nagging sense that we were made for much more than this. The quiet conviction that God did not save us so that we could be pleasant and inoffensive in the face of lies.

King Saul was a “good man” by every external measure. He looked the part. He stood head and shoulders above the people. He wanted to look good before them, and when Samuel confronts his disobedience, Saul confesses it:

“I have sinned: yet honour me now, I pray thee, before the elders of my people.”—1 Samuel 15:30

By contrast, David was not a “good man”. He was an adulterer and a murderer; but he was a man after God’s own heart. When Nathan confronts him, he does not manage his public image or spin it. He says:

“I have sinned against the LORD.”—2 Samuel 12:13

No excuses or damage control. Just repentance. That is the difference between being good and being holy. That is the difference between being WOKE and being a Christian. Good manages appearances, but holy obeys God. Paul did not write to the Corinthian church and say, “be good boys”. He said:

“Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.”—1 Corinthians 16:13

That is not the language of moral niceness. That is a declaration of war.

Peter wrote:

“Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy.”—1 Peter 1:16

He was quoting from Leviticus, where God repeatedly tells Israel to be holy as He is holy. The word ‘holy’ means to be set apart. This is quite distinct from the culture in which we are presently immersed. Not nicer than the culture, but more polite. Set apart means allegiance to God’s truth. To His Son. Holiness requires confrontation and courage. It demands that we stand on truth even when it costs us ease and peace.

Knowing this problem is only half the battle, however. Conviction fades by Thursday if we do not act upon it today. We need a plan to run this week, right now. Step one is to name the ‘good man’ lie that we have been sold. Then ask “where have you confused being nice with being godly?”, and “where have you chosen comfort over confrontation because a good man does not make waves?”

Name the specific conversations that you have avoided. Name the sins you have tolerated in your home. Name the truths you have softened to keep the peace. Most Christian men never stop to examine what standard they are actually living by. We assume that we are following Scripture, when we are just conforming to a sinful culture.

Next, we must replace good with holy. Biblical holiness for a Christian man means that we are set apart by God, living by His standard, and willing to confront sin in our homes, our churches, and especially in our own hearts. Holiness is allegiance to God’s truth, regardless of cultural expectations. Moses was not a good man when he confronted Pharaoh. He was a holy man obeying God. Joshua was not being nice when he told Israel to choose this day whom they would serve. He was calling them to covenant faithfulness. Paul was not making friends when he opposed Peter to his face over hypocrisy in Galatians 2. He was defending the truth of the gospel. Holiness makes us unpopular with those who want us to conform to the culture. When you find yourself in that situation, then rejoice—you are doing it right!

The third step is to identify when we have chosen comfort over confrontation. It might be a conversation you have been avoiding with your wife. Perhaps it is the sin in your son’s life that you have been pretending does not exist. It may be false teaching in your church that you have let slide because you do not want to be singled out publicly as a contrarian. Or it could be the truth you have softened with a coworker who needed to hear it straight.

Step four is to build one act of dangerous obedience this week. Speak the truth and stand firm when it costs you. One concrete action. This is where the holiness reset rises or falls. Your one act of obedience this week will look like you, in your own life, with your people, choosing God’s truth over the easy peace.

Step five is to find one man who will not let you settle for being “good”. Not a yes-man or a buddy who says that you are doing just fine; a brother who calls you to the Biblical standard and asks you hard questions. This is why the local church matters. We need brothers in Christ who know us well enough to see when we are hiding behind being good and call us up to be holy. If you have no such man in your life, then finding him is your first act of dangerous obedience. Go to your pastor or an elder this Sunday and ask them to hold you accountable. That conversation will feel like death but is really the dawn of a life lived in truth.

The standard for men was never “good”. The rich young ruler walked away from Jesus because “good” was not enough and he knew it. He had kept the commandments his whole life. He had done everything right by the culture’s standard; and Jesus asked him for the one thing that he would not give—everything.

God is not asking us to be good men. He is calling us to be holy men. Set apart and consecrated. Willing to confront, willing to stand, willing to obey when it costs us easy peace. The question is not whether we are good husbands, good fathers, or good workers; the question is whether we are holy.

Watch the full commentary here:

One of the most dangerous forms of confusion occurs when Christian language is used to sanctify ethnic anxiety. The happens when Biblical diction like mission, justice, providence, oppression, repentance, reconciliation, prophetic witness, heritage, and courage are applied in service of stoking fear. The language sounds Christian, but the controlling concern is not the glory of God, the authority of Scripture, the lordship of Christ, or the Great Commission. The dominating concern is protection, vindication, elevation, or preservation of a particular group.

We must therefore learn to discern not only whether someone uses Biblical vocabulary, but also whether such use is governed by a Christian worldview. A person may quote Scripture, speak about missions, condemn oppression, appeal to justice, invoke providence, and call for repentance; all the while reasoning from a non-Biblical perspective. Christian language can be used faithfully but can also be misused rhetorically. When that happens, it can baptize worldly fears and make them appear spiritually noble. A common example is the claim that white Christians built the greatest civilization in history, that Christendom made global missions possible, and that non-white people now refuse to admit this reality while seeking to replace whites. The argument then concludes that preserving the integrity of Western civilization that made gospel missions possible must be a primary Christian concern. The problem is not merely that ethnicity is mentioned in this context. The bigger problem is that it ties the Great Commission to preservation of white ethnic identity. In that argument, whiteness becomes more than simply an historical descriptor; it becomes a civilizational imperative. It becomes something that must be preserved for the sake of the gospel.

This is obviously not Biblical reasoning. Jesus did not say that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to one civilization, therefore preserve that civilization so the nations can be reached. He said:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” (Matthew 28:18-19)

Such authority belongs to Christ alone. Not to America, or to Europe, or to whiteness, or to blackness, or to any ethnic or national sect. The confidence of the church for mission is not based upon demographic control. It is based in the risen Christ.

This kind of argument also confuses providence with divine endorsement. It may be true that God used the West or white Christians in significant missionary efforts. It is also true that God has used African Christians, Middle Eastern Christians, and countless unnamed believers to spread the gospel; but even if God uses a civilization or a people in a significant way, that does not sanctify them. God used Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome in Biblical history; but their providential utility did not make them holy. God may use a nation without making that nation ultimate. God may use a people without making their ethnicity necessary to His redemptive plan for us.

This is precisely where Christian language can become dangerous. “Mission” can be used to protect ethnic dominance. “Providence” can be used to excuse national pride. “Heritage” can be used to preserve ethnic hierarchy. “Law and order” can be used selectively to condemn the sins of another group while minimizing the sins of another. “Christian civilization” can become a way of saying that our people must remain in control. When that happens, Biblical language no longer governs the argument. It is instead decorating an argument which has already been formed by ethnic fear.

This does not just happen among whites. A Biblical critique must be impartial. Christian language can also be used by blacks to sanctify ethnic anxiety. For example, one might say that God is on the side of the oppressed, black people have been oppressed, so that criticism of the black community is an attack upon God’s justice. There is truth in the first part. Scripture does show God’s concern for the oppressed. He heard the cry of Israel in Egypt and sent Moses to free them. The prophets condemned exploitation, partiality, and injustice. The Lord cannot overlook the suffering of the weak and vulnerable; but oppression does not make a group morally infallible. Israel was oppressed in Egypt, but it still sinned in the wilderness. Suffering may expose real injustice, but it does not remove the need for repentance, correction, wisdom, or accountability.

Another example is misuse of the Exodus as a total ethnic framework. The Exodus is a glorious display of God’s power, faithfulness, and justice. It reveals God as the One who delivers His people from bondage; but if the Exodus is turned into a permanent ethnic lens where black people are always Israel and whites are always Egypt, then Scripture is reduced to ethnic symbolism. The Biblical storyline is larger than that. The ultimate bondage is sin and death. The ultimate deliverance is accomplished by Christ. The people of God are not defined by ethnic suffering but by God’s covenant purposes fulfilled in Christ.

Christian language can also be misused through appeals to a ‘prophetic voice’. Someone might assert that because they speak from the black experience, their critique has prophetic authority. Experience can imbue us with insight. It can expose blind spots. It can help others listen more carefully; but experience does not create prophetic authority. In Scripture, prophetic authority comes from God’s revealed word. A claim is not Biblical merely because it is spoken with passion, moral urgency, or from a history of suffering. It still must be tested by Scripture.

Repentance language can also be misused. Native land acknowledgements are a fine example. One might say that if white Christians do not agree with a particular social analysis, then they have not repented of ethnic hostility or partiality; but Biblical repentance is not the same thing as adopting a sociological framework, an activist vocabulary, a voting pattern, or an historical interpretation. There might be real sins to confess. There may be real injustices to acknowledge. There may be real prejudice, neglect, cowardice, or indifference to be confronted. However, Biblical repentance requires truth. Charges must be specific, just, and scripturally defined. Repentance cannot be manipulated into ideological conformity.

Whether black or white, the pattern remains the same. A real concern is taken out of context and then made absolute. White Christians may take genuine gratitude for God’s providence in Western missions and turn it into ethnic preservation. Black Christians may take genuine historical suffering and translate it into moral impunity. White Christians may fear replacement and call it mission. Black Christians my fear erasure and call every critique complicity with oppression. In either case, the danger is not merely emotion; it is that ethnic anxiety will become the controlling lens through which Scripture, history, justice, mission, and love of neighbour are interpreted.

The Biblical worldview gives us a better way. It begins with Creation. All people are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). That means no ethnic group is superior, and no ethnic group is disposable. Human dignity is not grounded in whiteness, blackness, nationality, history, suffering, achievement, or social location. It is grounded in God’s creation of mankind in His image. The Imago Dei.

A Biblical worldview also includes the fall. We are all tainted by sin:

“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”—Romans 3:23

This means that no ethnic group gets moral immunity. Whites are not uniquely righteous because of missionary history or national achievements. Blacks are not pious because of historical suffering or oppression. Sin operates in every case. Pride, prejudice, bitterness, fear, resentment, envy, self-justification, tribalism, and deceit are not ethnically confined.

A Biblical worldview includes providence but understands it humbly. God uses nations, cultures, languages, institutions, migrations, empires, and even evil actions to accomplish His purposes; but providence does not make any nation supreme. God used Joseph’s betrayal to preserve life, but that did not justify the brother’s sin. God used Assyria as the rod of His anger but still judged Assyria’s pride. God used Rome’s roads, language and political order to spread the gospel, but Rome was not the kingdom of God. Therefore, Christians may give thanks for how God has used a people or nation without sanctifying them.

A Biblical worldview includes redemption. Christ saves sinners from every tribe, language, race, and nation. The gospel does not erase ethnicity but dethrones it. In Christ, no ethnic identity is supreme. The church is not a white project, a black project, a Western project, an African project, or a European one. The church is Christ’s blood-bought people. Paul says that Christ broke the dividing wall of hostility and created one new man, reconciling both Jew and Gentile to God through the Cross. If that is true of the Jew-Gentile schism, then Christians ought to be most careful about constructing new divisions around modern ethnic anxieties.

A Biblical worldview also requires impartial justice. Leviticus 19:15 says:

“You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbour.”

This verse is devastating to tribalism. God does not permit us to favor the powerful simply because they have power; nor does he permit us to favor the poor simply because they are destitute. Justice is not tribal revenge. Justice is not ethnic payback. Justice is not protecting “our side”. Biblical justice requires truth, righteousness, proportionality, and impartiality. As Dennis Prager puts it:

“Social justice means you favor one particular group. God’s justice means you favor no one.”

In other words, it is spiritually dangerous to place an ethnic narrative above the whole counsel of God.

So what is the solution to this problem?

The answer is not shallow indifference to ethnicity. Scripture does not require us to pretend that history, ethnicity, culture, and injustice are immaterial. Nor is the answer ethnic suspicion. Scripture does not permit us to interpret everything through the lens of ethnic power or grievance. The answer is Biblical maturity. Christians must learn to discern between true Biblical concern and ideological capture. We must ask “is this argument actually governed by Scripture, or is Scripture being misused to preserve prejudice?”

This is where the issue becomes especially important for internal apologetics. Apologetics is not only about answering atheists, skeptics, Muslims, cults, or secular ideologies outside the church. The church also needs internal apologetics: the work of defending sound doctrine, sound reasoning, and Biblical faithfulness within the Christian community. Internal apologetics helps us recognize when Biblical language is being misused by those claiming Christian authority. It protects the church from being discipled by rhetoric, rather than by Scripture.

This kind of apologetics is necessary because most of us are not deceived by openly anti-Christian arguments. We are fooled by arguments that sound Christian. We are moved by words like justice, mission, repentance, courage, oppression, reconciliation, and truth; but Christian words must be governed by Christian meaning. Otherwise, those words can be used to smuggle ethnic pride, resentment, envy, fear, or prejudice. The church must be able to boldly state that Christ is Lord, Scripture is supreme, sin is universal, justice is blind, and that no ethnic group is specially entitled to salvation.

The apologetic need of the hour is not merely to win arguments against outsiders, but to cultivate discernment among believers. Not merely to identify bad conclusions, but to expose faulty reasoning. Not merely to reject prejudice when it is obvious, but to recognize when ethnic anxiety is cloaked in Christianity. Internal apologetics trains the church to test every claim by Scripture, to resist tribal manipulation, and to keep Christ at the core—not ethnicity, nationality, history, grievance, or heritage.

The gospel does not need whiteness to endure. Nor does it need black grievance to remain morally sound. The gospel does not need America, Europe, Africa, or any nation as its saviour. Christ is building His church. He is gathering His people from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. The task of the church is not to sanctify ethnic anxiety with Christian language; but to bring every anxiety, every loyalty, every historical claim, every justice claim, and every national claim under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

The devil is not fighting religion. He is too smart for that. He is producing a counterfeit Christianity. One so much like the real one that good Christians are afraid to speak out against it. We can be religious without being godly. We can enjoy public worship without knowing God. We can like the thing itself—religion—preaching, singing, praying and all such things; but there is no real knowledge of God and no real thirst for him, and nothing is more terrible than that. That is why proximity to Jesus is not the same as following Him; and why the greatest danger to Christendom—is us.

We need to confront the flatteries of false teaching. That the pen is mightier than the sword is not just a fundamental principle of the West—it is a basic pillar of Christianity, apart from which there would be no West. The only reason we enjoy the freedoms we do is because our forefathers believed that the truth—ultimately embodied in Christ—provides the only stable basis for society; and that so long as truth is proclaimed, there exists the power to transform ourselves, our nations, and the world.

When reading Scripture, the first thing we notice is that the focus is very different from that of secular history books. Granted, the key events of various empires and powers are acknowledged, but even this is mostly incidental. One minute Babylon or Assyria or Egypt appear as a totalizing power; the next they are conquered or displaced. This is consistent with Christianity, which has always affirmed that the greatest power mankind can produce is nothing compared to the living, enduring Word of God. Consider that the good news of the Gospel did not come down as an edict from the king. Rather, it was a message spread by poor, powerless people, and has been ever since. What this means is that if we have the truth—if the Word of Christ “dwells in us richly”—we have everything; and that if we have everything but the truth, we have nothing.

We now live in an age when everyone is encouraged to believe whatever they like and no one is allowed to say anything against it. This is the language of secular pluralism. In contrast to this prevailing worldview, there is the church, which the Apostle Paul calls “a pillar and a buttress of the truth.” The church takes her marching orders from Jesus Christ. It is her duty to preach and teach that not all ideas are valid; that some are positively evil and must be condemned, and that others are so essential that they must be absolutely affirmed. One of the greatest threats to the life and witness of the church is false teaching. This makes sense if you think about it for a moment. If all we have is the truth, then whatever would threaten and undermine that truth must be opposed. The other thing to keep in mind is what Paul states in 1 Timothy 4:1:

“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and following deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.”

In other words, false teaching is not something that just existed in the first centuries of the church. It remains an ever-present threat until Christ returns. What this means for Christians is that we must assume a continual posture of humble vigilance. Towards the world, yes—especially toward ourselves, toward the monster lurking within our own corruptible hearts.

The New Testament reveals that the greatest threats confronting the church do not come from without, but from within. One of the unique features of Christianity is that unlike the base tribal impulses that come naturally for fallen humanity, Christians do not locate evil exclusively in some other person or group. Instead, we recognize that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The problem is that we have become so accustomed to hearing this that we can lose all sense of its originality; we can start reciting it as a mantra rather than clinging to it as bedrock reality. Yet the Bible places particular emphasis upon putting off our own individual sin. Does this mean that we are unconcerned with the external world? Certainly not. To love God and our neighbour requires us to do justice, to care for the poor, and to give voice to the voiceless; but the humility and desire to do these things starts with acknowledging and confessing the corrupt propensities of our own hearts.

Authentic Christianity is characterized by a perpetual desire for holiness—an ongoing quest to be like Jesus. Christians realize that even though we are reborn, the old nature is constantly fighting against us. There is always lingering sin to confess and put to death. As it says in 1 John 1:8:

“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make Him a liar and the word is not in us.”

Many think that Christians are people who go around pretending that they are better than everyone else. That is surely one of the easiest ways to cover our own guilt, by talking about the flaws and failures of others. This is the essence of Wokeness. In setting up a moral standard apart from God’s Word, we leave off comparing ourselves to his righteous standard and instead compare ourselves to others; but a true Christian is one who recognizes that apart from Christ, we are just as prone to do evil as everyone else. We know that there was only one human being who ever perfectly loved God and others, and that He died the death that we deserve for our own sins. A Christian acknowledges and lives in the reality that nothing good dwells in our flesh; that we are just as reliant upon God’s grace on year 90 as in year one. Only those who become less aware of their need for Christ fall away from Him and thereby reveal that they never truly knew him. Without humble acknowledgement of sin in our hearts, we blame and accuse others, and so there is no Christ in us:

“And then will profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.”—Matthew 7:23

In recent years, there has been a massive shift away from humble acknowledgement of our own sin to inordinate focus upon the sins of others. Prior to Covid, I honestly paid little attention to politics. Like many of you, my life was taken up with the immediate concerns of my family, my career, and myself; and then there was a shift. Suddenly, forces from outside were having a huge impact upon my life to such an extent that I needed to stop and figure things out. That is what spawned by writing and then, eventually, the GreyMatter Podcast. What I have noticed since the Pandemic is that so many of us have become more aware of the wolf at the door and far less aware of the one living inside each of us.

There is a way to engage in the so-called culture war that is just a cover. By joining the “right side” of a certain movement, we begin to believe that this somehow makes us righteous; but no one is justified before God merely by participating in the right cause or by opposing the right thing. The real battle lines are drawn between those who recognize the sin in our own hearts and those who do not. Frankly, I think that there are many engaged in culture war who think they are on the good side when in fact they are not. Which is why, increasingly, we see that “left” and “right” are just the same team with different jerseys. They are both fighting the same war and relying upon the same old failed strategies.

A chief trait of false teaching is that it lets us draw lines other than where God’s word does. “I am white”, “I am Canadian”, “I affirm traditional gender roles”, “I want beautiful architecture”, “I lift weights”. Such things become what sets us apart from others; but according to Scripture, the only distinction that matters is faith or unbelief. The only thing that matters is worship of the one true God as opposed to false idols—including ourselves. One day, we must all stand before the Lord of Hosts. He is not going to ask if we were of European descent, married to a white woman, or if we voted conservative. His only question will be: “Did you love my son?”

When we blame and condemn others at the expense of being honest about ourselves, we become hypocrites and frauds. True Christians recognize that the greatest commandments —to love God and our neighbours—are the only moral standards by which we are judged. The advance of Christendom will only occur once we subject ourselves to the scrutiny of this standard, confess where we fall short, and seek His grace and power to be transformed. Put simply, false teaching is whatever contradicts the standard of the Word of God and produces the fruit of ungodliness. These things always go together. False teaching necessarily affirms our sinful desires. How do we know when we are living contrary to the truth? Well do you ever find yourself being challenged? Confronted? Contradicted? Today, we are told to view whatever contradicts us as a threat; but according to Scripture, feeling challenged or confronted indicates that God is at work in our lives—as the lifeline we never knew we needed. Conviction feels awful when we suddenly realize that we have been wrong about a lot of things. That we might have to change our minds and so change our own lives; but godly grief that brings repentance is the only path forward.

Recall what it felt like to be reborn to Christ. We go through this very uncomfortable phase of being confronted by all kinds of things that we never knew were problematic. The truth is that the Christian life never stops being about that. It is about becoming comfortable with discomfort; but false teaching does not do that. It never confronts us. In fact, it flatters us. It makes us feel proud. It affirms us in our sin. Now, it can be difficult sometimes to predict the consequences of ideas. Not everyone is able to identify a logical contradiction all of the time. What we can do is observe the fruit of ideas. Does a certain belief or doctrine make us godlier? Does it make us more like Christ? Does it make us love others more? Does it make us despise our own sin and cry out to God for mercy? Does it produce peace amongst brothers, or does it sow discord?

In Timothy, Paul says that sound doctrine is healthy doctrine. He uses the word “healthy” because false doctrine produces bad fruit, while sound doctrine produces good fruit:

“It agrees with the sound words of Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness.”—1 Timothy 6:3

Here we have the correct standard, the words of Jesus Christ; and the fruit, the teaching that aligns with godliness. False doctrine claims to be Christian but contradicts the teachings of Scripture and produces ungodliness: envy, discord, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction with our neighbours. Those who cling to false teaching, especially the kind that is currently circling in popular culture, reveal a paucity of godliness, total disregard for authority, and a base unwillingness to listen or acknowledge their own wrongs. All of which brings us to the real danger of false teaching.

It spreads like wildfire because it not only affirms our sinful desires, but also because it rebrands them as righteous. “I am a defender of Christendom!” “I am a defender of the West!” “I care about my ancestors!” “I care about orthodoxy!” All lies. The reason it spreads so quickly is explained in Proverbs 17:4:

“An evildoer listens to wicked lips, and a liar gives ear to a mischievous tongue.”

And in 2 Timothy 4:3:

“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”

Why do we entertain lies? Because we are liars. Why do we listen to evil? Because we are sinners. It is not complex. Evil people love evil teaching, and false teaching lets us justify ourselves rather than confess our corruption and our need for the true and better righteousness of Christ. The result is what we are experiencing today: rampant sin and division between brothers, families, churches, and nations.

So what should our response be to all of this?

In the initial few chapters of Revelation, Jesus sends 7 letters to 7 churches, each containing a series of rebukes, encouragements, and warnings. In , Jesus says:

“Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: There are some among you who hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality. Likewise, you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.”

Notice here that it is not the entire church that holds to these things—it is just some of them. Yet Jesus includes the entire church in his warning. He says that if such things are tolerated in your midst, you are not going to be able to make the excuse, “well, it was them, and not me.” He promises to wage war against them. We cannot love what Jesus hates. We cannot poison His people and still be on His side. We cannot have peace with Him while we wage war upon his flock; and make no mistake—to tolerate false teaching is to wage war against His sheep.

In all of us, there is a proclivity to listen to lies; because lies tell us the things about ourselves that we want to believe. That we are awesome and that nothing needs to change, especially not us. This is not just false teaching—it is anti-Gospel. It is opposed to Christ and everything He accomplished for us.

By God’s grace, and with His help, we can and must reject it.

Watch the full commentary here:

To discover the solution to this little conundrum, stay with us until the end!

A new report on sports betting from Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) policy analyst Chloe Lawrence shines a light on the sports betting industry’s damaging effects. The report explores the problem of online and app-based sports betting, examines its consequences, and describes how policymakers, schools, parents, and churches can respond.

We need no longer travel to Las Vegas or Reno, down the road, or even outside our bedroom to bet. The casino has assumed a new form: a six-inch smartphone screen. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association lifted the federal ban in 2018, sports betting has skyrocketed online—especially among young men and even boys. Today, 94% of bets are placed online using smartphones. In 2017, before the USSC ruling in Murphy, Americans bet roughly $5B annually on sports. Last year, that number rose to $160B—a 32-fold increase in less than a decade.

The EPPC report captures the damaging effects that this massive expansion of sports betting has had upon society. This includes increases in crime rates, detrimental mental health outcomes, suicide rates, gambling addiction, and much more. As online betting increases in prevalence, its negative effects have become too obvious to ignore. There is a path forward to reverse our descent into gambling, and policymakers, schools, parents, and churches all have key roles to play. The sooner we recognize and address the problem, the fewer of us will be targeted and victimized by a predatory industry whose goal is to destroy our lives for profit.

In 2026, 27% of Americans report having an active online sports betting account, a statistic that applies equally to Canadians. That percentage has steadily risen from 22% in 2025 and 19% just two years ago. 22% of adults in the U.S. have actually bet on sports in the past year, up from 19% in 2022. That increase has been driven entirely by the convenience of online betting. The upward trend in online sports betting is particularly strong with young men. 52% of men under 50 have an active online sports betting account, compared to the 27% general population figure. A 2023 survey by the NCAA found that 67% of 18–22-year-old men had engaged in sports betting.

Most unfortunately, gambling is not isolated to this young adult demographic. Although the legal age for gambling ranges from 18-21, 36% of boys aged 11-17 report gambling in the past year. Among teen boys who gamble, more than 34% participate in sports-related betting; and those who bet on sports do so frequently. 60% of boys who bet on sports do it monthly or more often, and among higher loss gamblers, 89% gamble at least once monthly.

These high rates of gambling by young men and boys have led to higher rates of problem gambling within those demographics. The term “problem gambling” describes gambling behaviour accompanied by signs of harm or disruption of the gambler’s life, like obsessing about betting, feeling a need to bet more money and more often, or gambling despite negative consequences. 10% of young men in our society now exhibit problem gambling behaviour, more than triple the rate within the general population. The ratio of high school students with a gambling problem is double that of adults, and 5% of all those aged 11-17 meet at least one of the criteria for a problem gambling diagnosis. Psychologically, these numbers make sense. Those in their teens and early twenties are more vulnerable to problem gambling due to ongoing brain development, limited emotional control, susceptibility to peer influence, and heightened impulsivity.

The data clearly show that sports betting increases rates of problem gambling, compared to betting at casinos or buying lottery tickets. Betting online rather than in person is also associated with higher problem gambling rates. Online sports betting incorporates two modes of gambling that are particularly harmful, especially for developing young brains.

In an interview, the executive director for the U.S. National Council on Problem Gambling said:

“We believe that the risks of gambling addiction overall have grown 30% from 2018 to 2021, with the risk concentrated among young males 18-24 who are sports bettors.”

This is no accident. Sportsbooks like FanDuel have done their homework. They have their eyes on the under 25 crowd because these young gamblers are the ones bringing in all of the money. Sportsbooks use strategic and often predatory methods to reel people in, hooking users who bet more often and habitually lose. Like the addictive design of social media apps, sportsbook apps are engineered to keep a user’s attention by spiking dopamine levels in a way that mimics substance abuse. In 2024, The Wall Street Journal found that 0.5% of the customer base at one sportsbook generated over 70% of its revenue. This illustrates how these companies profit from the biggest losers. An ESPN report even found that bookmakers severely restrict or close the accounts of people who bet well and actually win.

Research shows that the rise in online sports betting is disastrous for bettors and those around them. The most obvious of these problems is financial. A study in the U.K. found that half of students there reported gambling in the past year, and 17% used their student loans to gamble. Male gamblers spent an average amount per week equal to their grocery budget. Another study in the U.S. found that households that put money into online sports betting accounts reduced their financial investing by 14% on average. In states that legalized online gambling, one study found increases in personal bankruptcy rates of up to 25%; with credit card and auto loan delinquencies of 25% and 27%, respectively. This rise in bankruptcy rates translates to roughly 30,000 more personal insolvencies in the U.S. each year. The households which experienced the most adverse effects from this were those with existing financial constraints when gambling was legalized.

Gambling, including sports betting, is clearly linked to mental health issues that can become severe. 20% of severe gambling addicts attempt suicide, a rate higher than any other addiction. In adolescents, gambling disorder leads to academic problems, impaired relationships, low self-discipline, substance use; and to mental health concerns like depression, anxiety, ADHD, and suicide. Young adults who sports bet report increased symptoms of depression, anxiety, psychological distress, and loneliness. One survey found that nearly half of sports bettors or their partners report mental health issues like depression. That same survey found that 23% of all bettors reported a gambling addiction, compared to an even higher ratio of 37% for Gen Z. Sports betting also triggers other harmful behaviors. One study found that legalization of sports betting was associated with a 19% increase in credit card spending at mass-market alcohol merchants.

Online sports betting even has disturbing effects upon crime and family safety. One study found that crime increases 30-70% during and immediately following professional sports games in places that legalized sports betting. Such increases include larceny, vehicle theft, and assaults—which jumped by up to 93% after unexpected home game outcomes. Crime levels rose the most when game outcomes defied fan expectations. Another study found that after sports gambling became legal, upset losses by NFL home teams triggered a 10% rise in reports of violence by intimate partners. These increases were larger in places with legal mobile betting and where higher bets were placed. Legalization of sports betting is also associated with a 7.5% increase in child abuse reports, driven almost entirely by mobile or online betting.

For the sake of those ensnared by online sports betting and impacted by its negative consequences, lawmakers and other civic institutions must take steps to limit its practice.

Society is turning into a casino. We are repeating an ancient pattern: economic desperation leads to political horrors. You have no doubt been bombarded with the constant stream of adverts for sports betting apps, online casinos, and prediction markets. Popular podcasters are promoting them, and they are plastered across supposedly family-friendly TV networks during prime time like the recent Stanley Cup Playoffs or the World Cup of Soccer.

Gambling is absolutely everywhere, and it is completely hijacking our culture.

At first glance, the rise in gambling looks like it is simply the result of technological advancement. The internet and instant news updates make betting on sports, politics, and world events easier than ever before; but widespread gambling is really a symptom of a much darker reality. Whenever a civilization embraces extreme risk as a legitimate way to get rich, it is a clear signal that desperation has set in. We are witnessing this play out right now, especially amongst young people who feel that the traditional paths to success have been permanently blocked. Many are turning to risky behaviours like online betting or cryptocurrency speculation instead of safer career paths.

So what happens to a society when we stop investing in the future and start betting on it instead? To understand where we are headed, we must look at what happens when power structures become so stifling that vice appears the only plausible path for the despondent.

As a starting point, we should ask the moral question: is gambling wrong?

There is no Biblical verse which says “Thou shalt not shoot up heroin”; yet we know it is sinful because of Bible principles. Likewise, the Bible is filled with principles which make gambling undeniably sinful.

Firstly, gambling contradicts God’s principle of honesty. According to Scripture, there is a right and a wrong way to get money:

“As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool” —Jeremiah 17:11

Gambling also violates the spirit of God’s command in Exodus 20:15:

“Thou shalt not steal.”

In gambling, for every winner there must be a loser, often many of them. It is predicated upon getting what belongs to someone else. Gambling is one person attempting to get another’s property. Psalm 37:16 teaches:

“A little that a righteous man hath is better than the riches of the many wicked.”

Secondly, gambling contradicts God’s principle of love. According to Matthew 22:36-40, the Christian is to be governed by love for God and his neighbours. Nothing could contradict the spirit of that commandment more than gambling does. Gambling is pleasure and profit at another’s expense. First Corinthians 10:24 teaches us to seek our neighbour’s profit, not our own:

“Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth.”

We are therefore to use our resources to help others, not to take from them.

Third, gambling contradicts God’s principle of work. In the Bible, honest work and wages always go together. Nowhere does Scripture support the idea of getting something monetarily for nothing.

Fourth, gambling contradicts God’s principle of trust. Christians are to look to God to meet our needs, not to Lady Luck. Gambling thus strikes at the root of our belief in an all-wise God who provides for our every need.

Finally, gambling contradicts God’s principle of contentment. The antithesis of contentment is covetousness and envy. Covetousness means that we want something that does not belong to us which we did not earn. Gambling is a species of covetousness. In gambling, the emphasis is upon gaining material wealth:

“And he said unto them, take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth”.—Luke 12:15

According to Proverbs 21:26, the wicked are always seeing what they can get, but the righteous look for ways to give:

“He coveteth greedily all the day long: but the righteous giveth and spareth not.”

Gambling therefore undermines Christian values, mocks work, finances crime, robs children, enslaves people, and poisons whatever it touches.

That said, the temptation of sports gambling remains seductive. Who won the game last night? When do they play next? You open your computer to check the scores, and along the way, the adverts are inescapable. You could not avoid them if you tried. Sports betting has arrived in full force.

The advertisers are not wasting their money, either. In February 2024, an estimated 68M Americans were expected to wager over $23B on the Super Bowl. That is just one sporting event. This comes as no surprise since just under $120B was bet on sports in 2023 alone. That is $360 per person in the United States alone. Sports betting has most likely arrived in your own church, and it might even have set up shop in your home. If it has not done so yet, then beware: the bookies are pounding on your door. Sports betting has infiltrated the sporting ecosystem. So how then should Christians respond to this evil?

Some respond by suggesting that gambling in any form is reckless and fails to contribute anything useful to society. The money wagered also belongs ultimately to God, so failure to manage it well amounts to embezzlement. Additionally, He gives us each but one life to live, and better investments abound for the money and time expended to engage in gambling. Sports betting has also become something of a Trojan horse for more nefarious forms of gambling, as well as gambling addiction. Sports betting functions as a door into the wide hall of internet gambling—particularly for young people who ordinarily would never set foot inside a casino. Gambling companies, driven by their bottom line, see a return on investment of 500% when they convert a sports bettor into a casino gambler. It is called ‘grooming’.

Nor should we be surprised that the desire for thrill and gain can escalate game-specific sports betting into 24-hour-per day forms of online gambling. Remember that Paul warns Timothy:

“Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evils.” (1 Timothy 6:9-10)

The stewardship argument certainly carries weight, and sober-minded Christians should have a category for the slippery slope, especially in activities so closely related to avarice; but increasingly, a common rationalization comes to the fore: what about ‘responsible’ sports betting? It is now legal in many places, so the social stigma has waned. Do we not spend money on other hobbies and activities? So what could be wrong with betting on a limited budget, especially while remaining focused on enjoying the sports experience with friends? Is there no room for carefully enhancing and intensifying the sports fan experience?

Beyond the stewardship problem and the risk of gambling addiction, several other aspects of sports betting point to a serious, sobering reality; namely that sports betting wagers more than just our resources. Given how it shapes our view of risk, how it corrupts the nature of sports, and how it fails to love our neighbour, sports betting is both unwise and frankly, sinful.

Sports betting distorts our view of risk and dulls our capacity for true and lasting joy. While betting companies pitch sports betting as a risk to enhance enjoyment, the practice ultimately encourages risk for immediate financial reward. Scripture warns us about betting slogans like ‘the more you play, the more you earn’:

“Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little makes it grow.”

—Proverbs 13:11

Proverbs 28:20 instructs that

“A faithful man will abound with blessings, but whoever hastens to be rich will not go unpunished.”

Sports betting conditions our hearts to love risk for the sake of immediate financial gain and chasing such wealth leads us into ruin. We should not conclude, however, that there is never a time to take risks. The farmer who “observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap”, declares the preacher in Ecclesiastes 11:4. Rather than seeing dismal prospects and refusing to take God-honouring, entrepreneurial risk, the Preacher calls for humility and faithful labour before the “God who makes everything” (Ecclesiastes 11:5-6).

Two factors distinguish the faithful entrepreneur from the gambler. First, whereas the gambler aims to gather quick wealth, the faithful entrepreneur creates wealth. Christian business seeks to love our neighbour by providing a good or service at a competitive price. Gambling fails to love anyone but self—and it even fails there.

Second, the faithful entrepreneur embraces risk but also seeks to mitigate it in the areas he can control. By doing so, we embrace risk with wisdom and faith; whereas gambling increases risks for the sake of higher payouts. Put simply, betting teaches us to embrace risk in wrong, sinful ways.

Christians on the other hand take gospel risks for the sake of eternal joy. Jesus calls upon us to surrender our life to gain it. Paul calls death in Christ gain for the one dying. Acts 15:26 describes Paul and Barnabas as “men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Whereas betting conditions us to take risks for immediate dopamine hits or rapid financial reward, Christians take risks with Christ and immortal souls in mind. We must therefore avoid activities that train us to think of risk improperly. Sports betting not only distorts our view of risk, it also corrupts God’s holy purposes for sport. The same God who created the Leviathan to play in the depths of the ocean conceived humanity to enjoy the world He made for us. Holy play today, as momentary rest from our daily burdens, helps us to look forward with hope to the new creation awaiting us tomorrow.

Though not essentially utilitarian, sports still benefit humanity. Competition can cultivate self-control and skill—though we should be wary of the envy lurking at the door. At its best, sports can bring out the very best in competitors. That said, sports betting corrupts both imaginative play and athletic competition. By reducing sport to wins and losses; or worse yet, point spreads or in-game betting—the result of the game supersedes the competition itself. Certainly, the bettor has more on the line relative to the outcome, but they can no longer enjoy the game for the simple beauty of play or the sublime nuances of honest competition. Not only this, but more and more players in professional sports have been swept up by the sports-gambling flood. Fans of sports like the NHL have reason to be concerned when players are found to bet on their own sports, bet on their own team, and bet on their own personal performance; sometimes even betting that they will not perform well and then checking out of the game with an injury. When role models like Connor McDavid begin doing adverts for betting sites, it sends a false signal to young men especially that sports betting is a net social good.

Sports betting corrupts the nature and purpose of sports. It also incentivizes players to participate in that corruption, making it unwise for Christians to participate in such a broken and detrimental system. Let us say for example that you are a successful sports bettor. You can game the system and make decent money doing it. The question arises about who is losing? Sports betting is not a zero-sum game; it is a negative-sum game. The house, by definition, must win. To do so, sportsbooks subtly stack the odds so that if gamblers wager even money on both teams, the sportsbook still profits.

Scripture commands us to “love your neighbour as yourself.” Christ affirms this as one of the two commands, along with love for God, upon which all the law and the prophets depend. Paul calls upon Christians in Philippians 2:4:

“Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

The bookies cannot lose money. Consequently, for you to win, your neighbour must lose; and as you take your neighbour’s money, possibly contributing to a destructive gambling addiction, you make profit for the predatory sportsbook too. Sports betting lacks love for our neighbour. This lack of love requires repentance, even if done intentionally or ignorantly (see Numbers 15:27-31).

What about guarding our hearts? Proverbs 4:23 issues a warning to all who seek the path of wisdom:

“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life…Ponder the path of your feet; then all your ways will be sure. Do not swerve to the right or the left; turn your foot away from evil.”

Sports betting and indeed all gambling beckons us down a crooked path. One that will reshape our hearts away from life. It promises pleasures; but they are at best fleeting and fraught with unholy risk. That path strays from the deep and enduring joys that can only come through following God’s designs, in God’s ways, according to His laws. Yes, sports betting has arrived in full force; and how shall we as Christians respond? It may feel like sports betting is inescapable, or at least the adverts; but because betting distorts our view of risk, corrupts, and lacks love for our neighbours, participating is unwise and even sinful. Do you really want to risk your heart, and your neighbour, for quick financial gain?

As a body of believers, the church needs to guide youth and young men away from sports betting. The first step is for church leaders, parents, and communities to be aware that online sports betting is a growing problem among boys and young men. Those who work with youth, young adults, or men in general should openly discuss sports betting and its negative effects; ask boys and men about their involvement in sports betting; and counsel them to avoid it. Churches should be aware that the financial and social devastation that can come from problem gambling has downstream impacts on future marriage and career prospects. They should educate the young men in their congregations about this risk.

Where appropriate, parents and church leaders should also teach financial responsibility. We must encourage congregants to steward money responsibly, to avoid needless risks and to prioritize saving and generous giving. We also need to consider mention gambling—along with other unhealthy or addictive behaviours—wherever relevant in preaching, teaching, mentoring, and prayers as a way to shepherd impressionable young men.

For the believer in Christ, there should be no appeal to take part in gambling. It clearly violates several Biblical principles central to the Christian way of life. A Christian lifestyle is one that expresses faith in the loving care and provision of Almighty God, not in chance or luck (see Matthew 6:33). Christians seek to love our neighbours, not to profit from their losses. Christians avoid every form of greed and covetousness and seek contentment with what we have (see Hebrews 13:5). Christians also realize that everything we possess has been given in stewardship by God and must only be used in a way that honours Him. In the words of the renowned evangelist, Dr. Billy Graham:

“Gambling is nowhere approved in the Bible. Instead, the Bible stresses that the Christian should earn his living by honest work and effort, and this would exclude relying on chance (2 Thessalonians 3:10-12). The Bible tells us to ‘abstain from all appearance of evil’ (1 Thessalonians 5:22). Gambling has often done untold evil to people by making them lose money that could be used for good purposes or even the necessities of life. Money is given to us by God to be used for good, not evil. Anyone seeking to do God’s will should not be involved in gambling…gambling is wrong because of the motives involved. Some people gamble for thrills and excitement. Others gamble because they have a greedy and covetous attitude about money. Some gamble out of a false belief in luck. All these motives are wrong for the Christian, for they are all self-centered and materialistic.”

And now, for those of you who have not yet solved the Devil’s Wager, here is the solution:

Watch the full commentary here:

We must begin with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the principle of Parliamentary Sovereignty. Canada’s Parliament and provincial Legislatures are fundamental institutions of our government. They take as their template the British Parliament in London. So to understand the role of our Parliament and Legislatures, we need to caste our gaze across the Atlantic for a little English history. It is a gripping tale of clashing ideas laced with ambition and bloodshed. It may seem strange at first blush that a great part of our Constitution derives from English history. But the Parliamentary principles arising from that chronicle are as much a part of our Constitution as the better known Charter, and are no less important.

The full story of the Stuart Kings, the English Civil War, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution that gave birth to those principles is beyond the scope of this discussion, but a thread of this story must be retold here. It begins way back in the Middle Ages. Gradually, the Magna Carta and a Parliament evolved. Eventually, its consent was necessary to enact laws. But when Charles I became King in 1625, the relationship between the ruling potentate and his Royal Prerogative on the one hand, and Parliament’s power to enact laws on the other, was unsettled. For a decade, Charles I governed without a sitting Parliament; he was effectively a dictator, an ‘absolute monarch’. =ning Parliament. When circumstances finally compelled Charles to reconvene Parliament in 1640, it was flooded with petitions denouncing the imposition of taxes (ship money) through the prerogative, the invasion of liberties through prerogative courts (the notorious Star Chamber), and other capricious laws. Complex financial, religious, and social turmoil boiled over during this period, and those who dared challenge Charles I risked disputing the Crown’s prerogative.

When the rift between Charles and Parliament sparked Civil War in 1642, the ultimate issue was whether the king should govern as a god by his will, and the nation be governed by force, like beasts, or whether the people should be governed by laws made by themselves and live under a government derived from their own consent. The Parliamentary army, led by Oliver Cromwell, swept all aside. Charles I surrendered. By then, the army was master and it purged those in Parliament who had the temerity to question its authority. They were arrested or barred from their seats. The “Rump” that remained demanded the king’s trial. He was charged with, among other things, “tyranny”, and making war against Parliament. He was famously tried in the House of Commons.

Charles cleverly contended that his judges had no legal jurisdiction to try him. The transcript of the charges leveled against him and his answers were recorded for posterity. They reveal his haughty retort to his accusers that they were ‘exercising power without law’:

“For if power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life or anything that he calls his own…I see no House of Lords here that may constitute a Parliament…a king cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth.”

Charles’ complaint was directed at the lack of authority which the House of Commons held to try him. Charles was on firm ground in challenging the jurisdiction of his adversaries. Parliament was not properly constituted by the House of Commons alone, and in the tradition of the British Parliament, could not enact law without the House of Lords and the king. The House of Lords refused its consent to prosecute their king. The principle raised by Charles is also broader than the narrow jurisdictional point. His remarks remind us that there are fundamental laws in our legal tradition, and that these must be respected. Law made absent proper regard for such fundamental laws is illegitimate. It is instead an exercise of raw power, which alone provides no assurance of life or property. It lacks legitimacy and cannot command our respect. Power alone, unbridled by law, is the very tyranny of which Charles stood accused.

The words of Charles I still resonate today. They require us to recall that power and law are two distinct things. They recognize that state institutions can exercise power unlawfully. They acknowledge that there are still fundamental laws which even the powerful must obey. What makes these words particularly relevant is that they were uttered as the constitutional relationship between Parliament and the king was being shaped. Soon after this trial, Parliament’s role would be confirmed as fundamental law.

Charles’ defense was futile. Power triumphed. He was beheaded on 30 January 1649. The House of Commons did away with the king and the House of Lords. Then in 1653, Cromwell even dispensed with the House of Commons. His soldiers emptied the Chamber. England was then ruled by one man and his army until the Lord Protector Cromwell died in 1658, leaving the future government in doubt. Civil war threatened again, but a new Parliament was elected. It sent for Charles’ son, waiting in exile since his father’s execution. The issues that gave rise to the original conflict remained unresolved, so that when Charles II died without an heir in 1685, his brother James assumed the throne. James II was a converted Catholic in a country that had broken away from Rome during the reign of Henry VIII. Like his father, he determined to rule without Parliament and override its religious laws. Once again, the Royal Prerogative clashed with the law made by Parliament. The English under James II came to fear popery and slavery. Civil war again loomed, but leading men supported a Protestant grandson of Charles I. The Dutch William of Orange and his wife Mary landed in England in November of 1688. The army abandoned James, who fled and spent his remaining years in exile.

The great issues which had occupied England for a century were finally resolved. When William and Mary ascended the throne in 1689, they accepted a Declaration of Rights later enacted in a Bill of Rights, limiting the Crown’s prerogative powers. The preamble to the Declaration of Rights accused King James II of endeavouring to “extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom”. It went on to declare a number of ancient rights, many of which were directed at controlling the prerogative and confirming the primacy of Parliament:

1. That the pretended power of suspending of laws or the execution of laws by regal authority, without consent of Parliament, is illegal;

2. That the pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws, by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal;

3. That levying money for or to the use of the Crown by pretense of prerogative, without grant of Parliament, for longer time, or in other manner than the same is, or shall be granted is illegal;

4. That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;

5. And that for redress of all grievances and for the amending, strengthening and preserving of the laws, Parliaments ought to be frequently held.

This Glorious Revolution settled the great constitutional question of 17th century England. The Revolution made Parliament supreme. The Crown could not rule without Parliament. Parliament made laws. The king could not alter or suspend them, or make his own. These constraints upon the Crown prerogative migrated overseas to the English colonies. There were differences in Crown authority to rule by prerogative depending upon whether a colony was obtained by conquest, treaty, or settlement, but once the Crown authorized a colonial assembly, the king was precluded from exercise of prerogative legislative authority.

All of this is as foundational to the Canadian Parliament and provincial Legislatures today as it was to England in 1689. Parliament and Legislatures enact legislation which becomes law with the assent of the Crown, given through the governor general in Ottawa or the lieutenant governors in each province. The prerogative power of the Crown does not extend to making laws. Of course, much remained to be done after 1689 before our present system of government fully evolved. The vote had to be extended to a broader electorate. The administration had to be drawn away from the monarch and made subject to Parliament. The Prime Minister and his office were yet to be conceived. All that lay in the future. But the fundamental role of Parliament was finally settled in 1689, and that is the bedrock of our Constitution to this very day.

The Constitution Act, 1867, or as it was once called, the British North America Act, was a statute passed by the British Parliament to establish Canada in 1867. It is another fundamental part of our Constitution. Most Canadians know the story of Confederation, or at least they once did in a less self-flagellating time in this country. The Constitution Act contemplates both provincial Legislatures and a federal Parliament. There is no national government. These institutions were modeled after the British Parliament. The Constitution Act also provides for the division of powers between Ottawa and the Provinces. Jurisdiction is allocated to one or the other.

In 1982, Canada experienced a revolution that was no less profound than the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Whereas the Glorious Revolution confirmed the supremacy of Parliament, the Canadian revolution of 1982 dramatically increased the powers of judges at the expense of Parliament and Provincial Legislatures. Before 1982, our Constitution was based upon the described British traditions. The central pillar of the British Constitution is Parliament, which is supreme. Parliament can pass whatever law it likes, and that becomes the law of the land until Parliament decides that it should be changed. Judges cannot change that law. They cannot overrule it. They can only interpret and apply the laws that Parliament enacts. This is not to say that under the British system, judges are unimportant. For example, questions often arise about what Parliament intended by passing particular laws, and these issues are determined by judges. But under the British Constitution, Parliament has the supreme power to decide what the law shall be. Nobody but Parliament can challenge Parliament or change what Parliament has done. If Parliament thinks judges have not properly interpreted laws, then it can pass another law to set things right.

An important difference between England and Canada is that our nation is a confederation. Canada has provinces with their own Legislatures. England never had other Legislatures, only the Parliament at Westminster in London. The Constitution Act divides legislative jurisdiction in Canada between Parliament and the Provinces. But before 1982, within their respective jurisdictions, Parliament and the Legislatures were still supreme. All of that changed in 1982 with adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The rights and freedoms set down in the Charter are constitutionally guaranteed. By reference to those rights and freedoms, judges can now strike down laws made by Parliament or the Legislatures. In a very real sense judges, and not our elected representatives, are now supreme. Herein lies the danger that was vividly revealed during the Covid-19 Pandemic, during which individual rights and freedoms were consistently disregarded by courts singing a chorus fed to them by governments imposing lockdown measures. Elected representatives are accountable to those of us who elect them. Judges are politically appointed and accountable only to themselves. In applying the Charter, they wield enormous, unchecked law making power. This is basically elitist and undemocratic.

After the adoption of the Charter in 1982, and after a number of early Charter decisions, a debate gradually emerged concerning the new, expanded role of the judiciary in Canadian democracy. Critics suggest that activist courts are pre-empting legislatures and the executive branch of governments, making decisions that were properly those for elected officials, rather than unelected judges selected for their political leanings. Critics were disturbed that because these decisions were constitutional law, they could not be overruled easily—and sometimes not at all—by legislatures. Others responded by saying that judges are not activist, but are merely applying the principles set out in the Charter, a duty imposed upon them by the Constitution.

The democracy gap at the Supreme Court starts with the Prime Minister, who hand-picks the justices appointed to the top court based upon recommendations received from his justice minister. The SCC influences public policy most directly in two ways: by choosing which cases to hear, thereby setting policy priorities, and by striking down or redrafting government laws, policies, and actions. Most years, the SCC hears only about 10 per cent of the appeal applications it considers. In the past several years, the SCC has increasingly embraced the contextual approach to statutory interpretation, which counsels that laws and regulations must be interpreted flexibly, with due regard to diversity and perceived social context.

Even if it does ultimately side with the government on legislative interpretation, as it has done increasingly in recent years, the SCC can still lay the groundwork for future activism by using social context to breathe life into radical ideas that were never approved by legislatures, that were deliberately omitted from the Charter, and that were voted against at the ballot box. One example is the carbon tax reference case. The AB government and other provinces received a clear mandate from their constituents to oppose the federal carbon tax. The Federal government took the Provinces to Court to have the SCC uphold and enforce the carbon tax, and thereby succeeded in effectively expanding the powers of the Federal government into the realm of exclusively Provincial powers such as natural resources and health.

For some, this increasing judicial creativity is cause for celebration rather than concern. After all, is it not the Court’s role to scrutinize executive action, and to advise against laws injurious in their purpose or effects? This judicial responsibility is key to operation of the rule of law; it is enshrined in the Constitution itself, which grants individuals the right to obtain such remedy as the court considers appropriate and just in the circumstances.

The real problem is therefore not with judicial activism, but with the lack of any accountability for such activism. This is especially problematic in the case of activism that advances positive liberty, whereby Charter claimants are rewarded with new, positive rights that carry heavy demands on the public purse in terms of compliance costs, that expand the power of the state, that treat racial or gender groups differently, or that create new categories of discrimination, beyond those which were deliberately established by Parliament.

Greater accountability starts with changing the appointments process. It is inevitable that any such process will be political (as is the current system), and so the challenge is to make it a more democratic and transparent mode of selection. Next comes the need to invite greater resort to the notwithstanding clause as a way of tempering judicial excesses. One way to rehabilitate this clause is to put its use to a referendum at a subsequent provincial election.

Many Canadians are justifiably frustrated at the increasing power of the judiciary, and say that judges have too much power. They think that legislatures and not courts should be making our laws. Meanwhile, the judicial branch continues to grow stronger relative to other means of shaping the direction of public policy in Canada. To point this out is not to judge bash, but rather to call upon judges to defend their activism and for parliamentarians to defend their inactivism.

Perhaps most of all, judges should be held to account for their public statements, like the one made by Chief Justice Wagner in the wake of the 2022 Freedom Convoy in Ottawa:

If you’d like to watch this commentary, please click this link:

Why would someone with her astronomical wealth, prestige, and influence risk everything to enter a highly controversial public fray?

In our latest episode of Grey Matter, I sat down with a truly remarkable young man, 22-year-old prodigy historian and author Solomon Schmidt. Solomon has already written ten books, and his latest work, A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling, is the first complete, objective biography of her life.

We released a quick preview of this heavy-hitting conversation in a new YouTube Short. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it right now:

👉 Watch the YouTube Short Preview Here

(Be sure to look out for GM049 Solomon Schmidt Thumbnail attached to our latest media releases!)

Canceled by the Right, Canceled by the Left

One of the most fascinating insights Solomon shares is the sheer historical irony of Rowling’s career.

Twenty years ago, it wasn’t the far-left trying to cancel J.K. Rowling; it was the far-right. Religious groups were burning her books, claiming Harry Potter was a dangerous gateway to witchcraft. Today, the tables have completely turned. She is being blacklisted by progressive institutions, independent bookstores, and even the very actors she helped make famous—all because she refuses to back down on her defence of the reality of biological womanhood.

As a historian, Solomon didn’t approach this project to write a partisan defense or a takedown. Instead, he spent years tracking down firsthand sources—including tracking down her first husband in Portugal—to understand the roots of her fearlessness.

What he found was a deeply ingrained worldview forged by massive personal trials:

• The Messianic Subtext: Despite being viewed as secular today, Rowling grew up taking herself to church, was baptized of her own volition, and explicitly built Harry Potter around profound themes of self-sacrificial love inspired by the story of Jesus.

• A History of Survival: Her fierce stance on protecting female spaces and womanhood is directly informed by her past survival of domestic abuse and sexual assault.

• The Fight for Free Speech: Rowling isn’t just defending biology; she’s drawing a hard line in the sand against compelled speech and totalitarianism. As she famously noted, if you believe your political opponents shouldn’t have the right to speak, you are illiberal.

Standing for Truth in a Culture of Compromise

Whether looking at the cancel culture surrounding J.K. Rowling or the constitutional legal battles fought by figures like Alan Dershowitz (the subject of Solomon’s previous biography, Legal Gladiator), a common thread emerges: Western civilization is facing a deep spiritual and intellectual crisis. When our institutions stop pursuing objective truth and start enforcing ideological conformity, free society begins to crumble.

In this episode, Solomon and I don’t just look at literary history; we talk about faith, the grand narrative of Scripture, and what it takes for the next generation to stand firm when the culture demands absolute surrender.

Head over to our channel to watch the preview short, and stay tuned for the full release of Episode 049.

Join the Conversation: What do you think of J.K. Rowling’s stand for free speech? Let us know in the comments below.

If you value these weekly defences of our civil liberties, traditional values, and Christian truth, consider supporting Grey Matter today. You can pick up a copy of my book, Trials, Tribulations, and Truth on Amazon, or drop us a line at Gray Matter Connect to join our growing community of truth-seekers.

In our latest episode of the Grey Matter Podcast, I had the privilege of sitting down with the best play-by-play man in the business to talk about everything from his broadcasting mentors to the heavy questions currently weighing on every Oilers fan’s mind.

We’ve just launched the full video interview on YouTube, and trust me, you’ll want to see this one.

👉 Watch the Full Interview with Jack Michaels on YouTube Now!

What We Discussed:

• Is the Championship Window Closing? With the core getting older, some fans are starting to sweat. Jack gives a brutally honest, definitive take on whether Edmonton’s time at the top is running out.

• The Massive Coaching Rumour: In a fascinating projection, Jack drops his personal prediction for who will step behind the bench as the next head coach of the Oilers, and explains exactly why Edmonton’s veteran roster is uniquely equipped to handle a big personality.

• Behind the Magic with Louis DeBrusk: Discover the real-life friendship and decades-long history that powers the best broadcast chemistry in the NHL today.

• The Burden of Generational Greatness: How do you call games for Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl every single night without making humanly impossible plays sound completely routine?

Jack’s passion for the city, the province, and the sport shines through in every single answer. Whether you’re an die-hard member of Oilers Nation or someone trying to navigate the shifting currents of Canadian culture, Jack’s perspective on dedication, family influence, and excellence is incredibly grounded.

Join the Conversation on YouTube

The video version of this episode captures the incredible energy Jack brings to the booth every day. Click the link below to watch, leave a comment with your thoughts on the coaching situation, and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel!

📺 CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE EPISODE ON YOUTUBE

Support the Mission: If you value our weekly conversations on Grey Matter defending civil liberties and traditional values through the lens of truth, consider picking up a copy of my book, Trials, Tribulations, and Truth, available now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0H23BHMRY

Talk ,as we all know, is cheap, in this context especially.

Alberta is playing all sides .

I don’t know if Mr. Manning is advising Premier Smith or not. They were close . She hired him to Chair a covid inquiry a couple of years ago.

If advocates of more Provincial autonomy within the existing Constitution are serious the Province of Alberta should right now:

Project 1

A. Move to a Provincial Policing Force like Ontario and Quebec already have. The Province of Newfoundland and Labrador has Provincial Policing in its major population centres.

B. Assert the Province’s Existing Jurisdiction over Health Care . Be as assertive here as the Province is on non renewable resources and the Environment. This year ( 2026-2027)the Province is accepting over $7Billion in health transfers from the Federal Government under the Canada Health Act. Is this behaving like a Sovereign Province in a United Canada?

C. Make specific proposals for Federal Provincial Agreements on Immigration and Agriculture or propose Specific Constitutional Proposals under the Amending Formula Re: Project 2 below.

D. Present a specific proposal to the Federal Government on a pension transfer to the Province. If Alberta can devise , develop complex tax proposals re the oil and gas industry it surely can develop a credible pension plan for the Province. Quebec already has such a plan . So if Quebec can do it , why can’t wealthy Alberta?

Constitution Change

Project 2

Constitutional Amending Formula Section 38 of Constitution Act 1982.

Why has this been ignored. One of the chief purposes of the 1982 Constitution was to get a amending formula so that we could change our own Constitution. Now that we have it , we ignore it.

So Alberta should propose a constitutional conference laying on the table specific proposals for reform . The Province can propose this using Section 46 of the Constitution Act 1982:

• 46 (1) The procedures for amendment under sections 38, 41, 42 and 43 may be initiated either by the Senate or the House of Commons or by the legislative assembly of a province.

Items that Alberta has often referenced and criticized could include :

A. Clarity on non renewal resources wording .

B. Changes to the Equalization system .

C. More Defined lines on Federal /Provincial Jurisdiction on Environmental issues and Immigration and Agriculture issues.

D. More definition on Section 35 ,Aboriginal Matters.

Alberta has not used its existing authority under the Constitution . If these actions , Project 1 , were taken Canadians outside of Alberta would be more understanding of its position . And if it used the existing Constitutional provisions , Project 2 , for Constitutional change they would even be more understanding, I submit.

Hon. A. Brian Peckford

Parksville, British Columbia

From: Preston Manning: Will Premier Smith Have the Last Word on the Best Path Forward for Alberta and Canada?

Contact Lawren Wowk: LWowk@gwsllp.ca

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But the deeper battle isn’t just political or technological. No, it is profoundly spiritual. Leighton directly addresses the frequent secular claim that Christianity is the root of historical evil, bringing forward the peer-reviewed data of political scientist Rudolph Rummel to compare the historical tallies of Christian conflicts against the catastrophic toll of 20th-century atheistic regimes. When a civilization slowly removes its foundational moral capital, what rushes in to fill the vacuum? “History does not show that religion is the greatest source of evil. It shows quite the opposite. Authentic Christianity, centred upon loving God and loving every human being as yourself, restrains evil and produces measurable good.”

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In our recent series of commentaries, we have been examining how and why modern civilization has entered a period of unprecedented psychological and technological transformation. Never before in human history have governments, corporations, media institutions, universities, digital platforms, activist organizations, and surveillance systems possessed such extensive influence over the perceptions, emotions, and behavior of entire populations. Most people continue viewing modern society through the language of diplomacy, freedom and open communication; but a deeper examination reveals emergence of something far more complex and troubling. It is a civilization increasingly organized around perception management and behavioural control.

The mechanisms shaping this transformation are often subtle. Control no longer depends primarily upon visible force, public censorship, or overt authoritarian rule. Instead, modern systems operate psychologically and spiritually. They influence us through fear, social pressure, emotional conditioning, technological dependency, algorithmic visibility, defamation, and institutional coordination. The result is a society like Canada has become today, we often regulate ourselves voluntarily out of fear of social consequences or even legal punishment.

One clear example of this shift is the rise of cancel culture and its later rebranding into what activists and institutions now call ‘consequence culture’. At first blush, these movements appeared to represent social accountability; but they soon evolved into mechanisms for ideological enforcement. Individuals expressing politically inconvenient opinions, questioning institutional narratives, or challenging dominant social ideologies were increasingly subjected to public humiliation, censorship, professional destruction, financial ruin, and organized harassment campaigns.

The key issue was never moral consistency. Standards were applied selectively according to ideological utility. Certain individuals received institutional protection despite serious misconduct. They aligned with approved narratives. Others faced severe punishment for merely expressing skepticism or dissent. This exposed the deeper function of cancel culture. It was not designed primarily to create justice—it was designed to spread fear.

Fear remains one of the most powerful tools of social control ever discovered. It is the go to move for our spiritual enemy, the father of lies, Satan. He knows that human beings are deeply social creatures. Throughout history, all the way back to Eden, social exclusion has threatened individual survival. Modern systems exploit these ancient instincts through digital technology. Social media transformed public shaming into a global psyop, where thousands of strangers can participate simultaneously in reputational destruction. Every public cancellation serves not only to punish the target, but also to warn millions of us watching from the sidelines. The message is simple: conform publicly or risk isolation. Fight back or cow tow to the mob.

Over time, large corporations and political systems adapted. Social media platforms morphed into managed environments where algorithms determine visibility, search engines control informational access, and recommendation systems shape public perception. The internet gradually transformed from an open communication network into a curated psychological milieu. Visibility itself became a form of power. Information no longer need be openly banned in order to vanish. It could simply be buried algorithmically, hidden from search results, demonetized, throttled, or excluded from recommendation systems. This created a new form of invisible censorship. Individuals technically retained the right to speak, but increasingly lost the ability to be heard.

Meanwhile, institutions began coordinating narratives across multiple sectors simultaneously. Media organizations repeated identical ideological frameworks. Corporate advertising adopted synchronized political messaging. Technology companies partnered with governments to combat ‘misinformation’ and ‘hateful content’ through censorship laws imposing criminal sanctions. Activist organizations received extensive media amplification and institutional protection. The result? Manufactured artificial public consensus.

Most of us naturally assume that if every major institution promotes the same narrative, then it must represent objective truth—or at least broad public support. Yet consensus can be engineered through repetition, visibility control, emotional framing, and suppression of dissenting voices. As Nazi Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels once wrote:

“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”

Once we believe that a viewpoint is universally accepted, we stop questioning it publicly out of fear of isolation. This creates societies where millions privately doubt official narratives while publicly pretending agreement. Such conditions produce collective dishonesty across society. Conversations become performances rather than authentic exchanges of ideas. We censor ourselves automatically. Fear contaminates discourse. Public debate collapses into ideological theatre where we repeat approved slogans to protect reputations, careers, and social standing.

Psychological manipulation is vital to maintenance of these systems. Modern propaganda rarely resembles crude government posters or overt state broadcasts. Instead, it functions through emotional conditioning. Fear based narratives dominate media cycles continuously because frightened populations are easier to guide. Emotional language replaces rational analysis. Disagreement becomes associated with danger, extremism, and hatred. Once these emotional associations are deeply entrenched, we stop evaluating evidence independently. We instead become psychologically reactive rather than reflective.

Social media dramatically intensifies this dynamic because digital platforms reward emotional engagement above all else. Outrage spreads like wildfire. Fear generates clicks. Conflict drives attention. Consequently, modern information systems have evolved toward constant psychological stimulation rather than thoughtful analysis. This produces societies increasingly addicted to outrage, distraction, and emotional volatility.

At the same time, technological dependency now permeates every aspect of our lives. We rely upon centralized digital systems for communication, navigation, finance, entertainment, employment, information access, and social interaction. Smartphones track our movements continuously. Algorithms monitor our behavior. Platforms collect immense amounts of psychological and behavioral data from billions of us every single day. This data carries enormous political and economic value. It allows institutions to model and predict human behavior with remarkable precision.

We increasingly exist inside continuous surveillance loops while perceiving ourselves as ‘free’. The danger is not simply that institutions observe us. The deeper danger is that human behavior itself becomes manageable through technological systems designed to shape our attention, our emotions, and our perceptions. These systems are behavioral conditioning environments. We adapt psychologically to digital reward systems involving likes, shares, followers, and visibility metrics. Over time, identity itself becomes performative as we unconsciously modify behavior to gain algorithmic approval. This weakens authentic human interaction while increasing dependency upon digital validation.

Meanwhile, media propaganda and information warfare continue eroding objective reality itself. We are flooded with endless streams of contradictory information, emotional narratives, outrage cycles, and selective framing. Rather than merely promoting one narrative, many modern systems create confusion deliberately because confused societies are easier to control.

We no longer know what to trust. Institutional credibility collapses because media organizations increasingly function as ideological actors rather than as neutral investigators. Governments openly pressure technology companies regarding ‘acceptable’ speech. Universities prioritize ideological conformity over critical inquiry, banning scholars like Dr. Frances Widdowson from even setting foot on campus, let alone speak there. Corporations adopt political activism as branding strategy. Remember the Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light adverts? Every major institution appears increasingly synchronized. As a result, large numbers of us sense instinctively that something artificial has emerged within modern society.

The deeper issue underlying all of these developments is the struggle between centralized control and human sovereignty. Modern systems increasingly encourage individuals to outsource perception itself to institutions, algorithms, experts, and ideological authorities, rather than rely upon direct observation and independent judgment. This creates psychologically dependent populations vulnerable to manipulation. Yet despite the scale of these systems, resistance remains possible. We have begun recognizing these patterns. Public trust in media, governments, universities, and corporate institutions continues to decline. Contradictions have become too visible to ignore independently. There is a meme online vividly explaining this. It shows a snake eating a fish under the headline: “brave snake saves fish from drowning.” This is how the media reports the news these days. Independent communication networks continue to emerge, despite censorship efforts. Increasing numbers of individuals are rediscovering the importance of direct human relationships, local communities, decentralized forms of cooperation, and most of all—faith. Ultimately, the defining struggle of the modern age is not merely political; it is psychological and ultimately, spiritual.

The central question facing civilization is thus whether we will retain the capacity for independent thought inside systems increasingly designed to shape our consciousness. Will we continue drifting toward technologically managed existence where behavior, opinion, and emotional responses are regulated through algorithms, surveillance, social pressure, and institutional manipulation? Or will we reclaim sovereignty over our own perception, attention, and moral judgement? The answer depends upon millions of individual decisions, including yours.

Everyone choosing honest inquiry over ideological conformity weakens artificial consensus. Everyone who resists fear based control fortifies the possibility of authentic discourse. Every community built upon trust, direct human connection, and independent cooperation reduces dependency upon centralized systems. History demonstrates repeatedly that no structure built entirely upon illusion can remain stable over the long haul.

Systems of manipulation require constant maintenance. Propaganda requires repetition. Fear based control depends upon psychological exhaustion and social fragmentation. Once we recognize these mechanisms operating around us, the illusion dissipates rapidly; and once we rediscover the ability to think independently, speak honestly, and perceive directly, the foundations of manufactured consensus collapse. This can only come by first turning our hearts and minds toward transcendent objective truth, which explains why those who seek to control us constantly claim that the biggest source of evil is—of course—religion.

I have heard this claim more times than I can count. It usually aimed at Christianity. It sounds devastating at a dinner party, but crumbles from its own falsity once we ask someone for the receipts. So, let us look at the numbers. Actually look at them.

Famed Hollywood director Ridley Scott made this claim in a 2012 Esquire interview promoting his film, entitled Prometheus. He is not alone in this. The three heads of the so called “new atheism”, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, built their careers on selling their own versions of this canard; but Kirk Durston, drawing on the research of Rudolph Rummel—former professor of political science, 2007 winner of the Genocide Scholars’ Award, and frequently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize—actually went and checked. Rummel spent his career studying democide: government-sponsored mass killing, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder. His findings are peer-reviewed and exhaustive. They are also inconvenient truths for the enemies of truth.

Here is what Rummel credits to Christianity. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the full greatest hits package. Rummel estimates:

Crusades: 1M

Spanish Inquisition: 350k

Witch Hunts: 100k

Total: 1.45M over a millennium or so.

Before we move to the other side of the ledger, a deflection arrives right about here. Someone mentions Hitler. The Nazis were Christian, the argument goes, so we must add the Holocaust to the Christian body count. There is just one problem with this. It is categorically false. Naziism never presented itself as Christian. Hitler despised Christianity. His own writings describe it as ‘meek’ and ‘flabby’. He sought to destroy it ‘root and branch’ and openly complained about Germany being stuck with what he called ‘feeble minded’ Christianity. He preferred, in his own words, ‘strong-arm’ systems. His writings and speeches contain so many passages dripping with contempt for Christianity that arguing he was a Christian amounts to claiming that Mark Carney is a conservative. All evidence runs entirely the other direction. His private comments, recorded by those closest to him, make it clear that he found militant, conquest-oriented religion far more suited to his purposes than anything the Sermon on the Mount could offer. The Holocaust therefore does not belong to the Christian column.

That said, let us be honest about the Christianity side of the ledger. The question worth asking is not whether people committed atrocities in the name of Christianity. They did. The question is really whether those atrocities represent authentic Christianity or a perversion of it. Ask any atheist what Christ’s two great commands were and they are unlikely to know. Love God with everything you have. Love your neighbour as yourself; and by neighbour, Jesus explicitly meant every human being on the planet—even our enemies. So does killing 1.45M people square with the Lord’s second commandment? Clearly not.

There are quack doctors in the world, but that does not make all medical science quackery. There are crooked lawyers in the world, but that does not indict the entire legal system. Similarly, a person who carries out a Crusade while violating Christ’s explicit command to love their neighbour is not demonstrating Gospel teachings. They are demonstrating what human nature does when it is handed institutional power and left without accountability to the actual teachings it claims to follow. Sort of like the Carney government and its captured courts.

Jesus said it plainly: “you will know them by their fruit”. He also said that on Judgment Day, many would say Lord, Lord, did we not do great things in your name? And his answer would be: “I never knew you.”

A root cannot deny its fruit.

Now here is what gets credited to the atheist states in the 20th century alone. Not religion. Not Christianity. States that made atheism a core value, promoted it through their education systems, enforced it in daily life, and worked effectively to eradicate religious belief entirely:

People’s Republic of China (1949-1987): 77M

U.S.S.R. (1917-87): 62M

Total: 139M in seventy years.

Christianity killed 1.45M in a thousand years. Atheist states killed a hundred times as many in less than 1% of the time. To equal what godless regimes produced in the 20th century alone, Christian wars would need to run constantly for approximately 98,000 years. Nor were most of these atheist deaths battlefield casualties. China starved more of its citizens to death in a single year of peacetime than Christian wars killed across ten centuries.

The Khmer Rouge, operating in a considerably smaller country, killed 31% of their own population. Cambodia? 31%. Both were atheistic, communist regimes. Even granting every number in the Christian column at full value, you cannot reach 10% of what godless regimes produced. The Inquisition resulted in fewer then 5,000 deaths over approximately 300 years. The Salem witch trials lasted four months and killed 19 people, none of them sentenced by the church, which had no such power. The full Christian atrocities column, tallied generously over a thousand years, does not come within shouting distance of what atheistic states accomplished in a single century.

Some atheists attempt to shift the blame to Communism rather than atheism. It is worth asking what specific feature of the Communism practiced by these states permitted such unholy slaughter? The Hutterites are a communal society. As are the Amish. They are both exceptionally peaceful (and Christian). The philosophical difference between they and Maoist China is not economic structure. It is that the Hutterites and Amish worship God. Communist countries less zealous about eradicating religious belief, like Cuba and Nicaragua, had considerably lower mass murder tallies. The pattern therefore holds. The more aggressively atheism was promoted and enforced, the greater the atrocities.

Here is what makes the atheism side of this argument genuinely chilling, and it is not simply the body count. It is the reason the body count is at all possible. One thing God provides is an objective moral standard transcending human civilization, history, or whoever is currently in power. Remove God, and morality becomes relative; it is whatever the society in power decides it to be. A guardrail that society carries in its own hand, anchored to nothing but itself. As society drifts, the guardrail drifts with it. There is no final accounting. There is no right or wrong beyond the powerful decree.

Does this not sound like the state of affairs in Canada today?

Not believing in God is not a neutral act without consequences. Author Barak Laurie, a former atheist, puts it plainly. It is like not believing in the police, the judiciary, medicine, or fire stations. You need not believe in them; but living in a world without them has dire consequences. Journalist Matthew Paris is another atheist. He wrote the following in The Times in 2008 upon returning from Africa:

“Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa. Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write…Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone, and the machete.”

An atheist. Writing that Christianity is irreplaceable. Because he went and looked.

Statistics Canada data, summarized in a MacLean’s piece entitled “Do Atheists Care Less?”, found that the average annual donations of churchgoers more than tripled that of the rest of the population; and that churchgoers volunteered twice as many hours in their communities. A charity launched specifically to showcase atheist generosity raised less than $19k from 447 members in its first four months. That equals what only 18 churchgoers give in a year. Again, judge the tree by its fruit.

Who fought against and ultimately defeated the institution of slavery? Christians and Jews. Who stood against eugenics, the forced sterilization of those the state deemed unfit? Christians and Jews. Who pushed back against China’s draconian one child per family policy when everyone else looked away? Christians and Jews. Who led pro-freedom resistance of Covid-19 lockdown measures and vaccine mandates? Christians and Jews. The people most routinely credited with history’s worst atrocities have also produced its most consistent record of resistance to institutionalized evil. Those who cling to the murderous ideologies that produced such atrocities have the nasty habit of projecting the bad fruit of their own making upon those who make them look bad by comparison. That is no coincidence. Judge the tree by its fruit, and see what happens when a civilization anchored to a God declares every human being made in His image.

History does not show that religion is the greatest source of evil. It shows quite the opposite. Authentic Christianity, centred upon loving God and loving every human being as yourself, restrains evil and produces measurable good. Atheistic states, freed from any transcendent moral compass, have produced the largest mass murder events in recorded human history. This is not to say that individual atheists are evil. Many live decent, generous, admirable lives. What they are living on, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, is the moral capital of a civilization built by people who believed in the Imago Dei. That capital does not replenish itself, however. It was deposited by centuries of Christian influence into the foundations of Western law, charity, medicine, education, and the very concept of human dignity. Remove the foundation slowly enough, and most people never notice it leaving….until it is gone for good.

And when it is lost, the society that replaced it with nothing does not stay empty for long. Nature abhors a vacuum. We are not preparing our children for this contingency. We are not even preparing them to recognize it. So, the next time someone announces at a dinner party that religion is the source of all evil, ask them if they have actually looked at the numbers. Ask them what Jesus actually taught. Ask them which philosophers were running gulags. Ask them what fills the space when the last Christian remnants wear off on a culture. Then wait for an answer. If that does not work, then just share this commentary with them.

The God haters do not have numbers. They have an emotion dressed up in the language of reason. That is what Bill C-9 is. Or they were simply never asked to question what they have been taught. In which case they are taking it on faith—exactly what they accuse Christians of doing.

This is what Christianity actually teaches. Every word is straight from the text. If you think that a Christian is not living up to it, then you are welcome to use it. Read it once and see if you can find a more demanding or more generous moral code anywhere on earth. This is not the pathetic passive absence of harm. This is Love in action:

“Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you…Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you…Give to every man that asketh of thee, and of them that taketh away thy goods ask them not again…As ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise…Bear ye one another’s burdens…Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice…If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink…Be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good…Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy…Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God…Pure religion and undefined God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in affliction…Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; for the rights of all who are destitute…The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself…What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God…Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things…Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

I invoke you to hold every Christian to this standard, because that is exactly what Jesus taught us to do in His name.

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Augusto Del Noce (1910-89) was an important Roman Catholic Italian philosopher relatively unknown to English readers. Two of his works recently became available in English: The Crisis of Modernity and The Age of Secularization. Both are collections of essays based upon the premise that ideas determine political and cultural reality. Del Noce believed that our concepts regarding the relationship between God and the self are the most determinative for social, cultural, and political reality.

Writing in the 1960’s while the U.S.S.R was at the height of its power and when Marxism was the preferred perspective for European intellectuals, Del Noce actually predicted collapse of the Soviet Empire and consumerism in what he called “the society of well-being.” He contrasted the affluent society of well-being—focused on this world—with the good society of traditional philosophy and theology. The good society seeks to understand the nature of the good, the true, the beautiful; and to conform the self and society to these transcendent norms. In the society of well-being, all transcendent norms are fully deconstructed and relativized. Del Noce predicted that one of the characteristics of such a society would be reduction of sex to a value-free commodity, resulting in a culture of eroticism. This would lead to disappearance of all modesty, a social movement for same-sex marriage, and a metaphysical attack upon the family—all of which are fully operational today throughout the West.

The metaphysical attack upon the family flows from modernity’s false understanding of freedom. In traditional thought, freedom consists of the ability to achieve the proper telos or purpose of human life; one that is ordered toward God and what is eternally good, true, and beautiful. For modernity, freedom instead means autonomous self-creation, liberated from all moral constraints. Radical atheism is thus not a conclusion of modernity but a moral premise. God must not exist, or else we cannot be truly free. Tradition is seen not as the handing on of soul liberating wisdom, but rather a set of arbitrary constraints. On this perverted view of freedom, God’s laws are chains binding exercise of free will, rather than the means by which—through obedience—we are extricated from the bondage of sin.

Our most basic traditional institution is the family. That is where ideas about God, human nature, and meaning are instilled. All utopians know that for the revolution to succeed, children must be saved from the malignant influence of their parents. For the society of well-being to replace the good society, the family must be totally deconstructed and then replaced by the state. The realities we face in the 21st century West were all accurately predicted by Del Noce 60 years ago: declining fertility rates, breakdown of the nuclear family, destruction of the working class, diseases of hopelessness such as depression and drug addiction, and concentration of political power in the grasping hands of an increasingly wealthy technocratic elite.

How did he do it? By perceiving the wide influence of Marxist ideas in the West and an inherent instability in philosophical Marxism. Del Noce focused on Marx not because everyone had read him; but because Marx is the representative thinker of modernity, whose ideas became so popular that they are now part of the shared vocabulary of contemporary discourse. Del Noce focused on two elements of Marxism: historical materialism and dialectic materialism. Marx rejected traditional metaphysics. He famously said that the purpose of philosophy was not to understand the world, but to change the world—to cause revolution. Religious faith, truth claims, ethics, and aesthetics were artifacts of bourgeois, capitalist culture. They served as the controlling ideology of the ruling class. Marx’s historical materialism relativized and marginalized all objective truth claims save for his own about dialectical materialist history. Dialectical materialism expressed the romantic and revolutionary side of Marxism. There was even a religious quality to dialectical materialism, designed to replace the biblical kingdom of God. The secret dynamic of history revealed by Marx would be fulfilled via revolution of the proletariat, spawning the godless utopia of communism.

Del Noce understood that this combination of destructive skepticism and romantic optimism was unstable, and that skepticism and relativism were bound to defeat the revolutionary side of Marxism. When we did not rise up in revolution but instead were able to buy toasters, appliances and cars unavailable behind the Iron Curtain, the doom of the Soviets was sealed. Del Noce also says, however, that Marxism was defeated in the East because it won the West. Skeptical ideas unleashed on society by Marxism defeated traditional thought and created a culture where the sphere of economics could be increasingly free of traditional constraints. But the revolutionary side of Marxism did not simply vanish. According to Del Noce, the fervour was transferred to a culture of eroticism.

Del Noce takes seriously the writings of Wilhelm Reich, the eccentric Austrian psychoanalyst who authored “The Sexual Revolution”. Del Noce writes about Reich not because he considers Reich a serious thinker, but rather because he is a representative thinker. Reich translates Marxist class struggle into sexual terms. Del Noce calls Reich’s book the Mein Kampf of eroticism. The new humanity and the new society will appear not when then the class system is upset, but only once we achieve true sexual liberation. For Reich, belief in God is the product not of economic oppression but of sexual repression. He wrote that when sexual liberation is achieved, political and personal violence would disappear along with belief in God.

Reich died in a federal prison in 1957. In life, he was branded as a con man. However, his ideas remain powerful and explain the religious zeal characterizing the so called sexual revolution. Del Noce predicted that the sexual revolution would also produce the opposite result of its utopian vision. Why? Because it suffers from the same metaphysical contradictions of Marxism. Rather than ushering in a new kind of humanity and a better society, it only adds to the nihilism and despair which are the crisis of modernity. The sexual revolution promises sexual happiness but delivers sexual misery. Del Noce also predicted that the perceived enemies of the sexual revolution would suffer social ostracism and be consigned to moral concentration camps. The intrinsic totalitarianism of Marxism is therefore expressed in its latest reincarnation as the sexual revolution.

At the heart of the effort to enslave humanity is and always has been a war against God, Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, and all that He has ordained. According to the Prophet Isaiah, the rebellion began when Lucifer—drunk with pride—sought to usurp the Almighty throne. Scripture says a third of the angels followed. Cast down to Earth as Satan, this once-glorious being tempted Adam and Eve to question God’s Word and defy his simple decree…and the rest is history.

Today, this same battle rages on. From God’s Word and His followers to the institutions and morals He ordained, all are in the crosshairs of this diabolical movement dating back millennia. As the Apostle Paul explains in Ephesians 6:12, the saints struggle

“Not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in heavenly realms.”

Even a brief look at the rituals of so many elitist secret organizations reveals the truth of Paul’s assertions; but of course, there are also men who have willingly joined in this war against God and His Word. God divided mankind into nations, and so the plotters believe that nations must be destroyed in favour of a utopian global order like the one Marx envisioned. God ordained marriage and the family, and so these divinely decreed institutions must be overthrown in favour of atomized individuality and technocratic collective control. By prohibiting murder, theft, kidnapping, and other moral abominations, God endowed us with a right to life, liberty, and property. By contrast, those working to undermine these God-given right have done so since time immemorial.

From the shadowy corridors of power in Washington, New York, London, Paris, Brussels, Beijing, Moscow, and even Ottawa, this conspiracy has been unfolding for generations. The insidious plot, so deeply rooted in darkness, threatens the very foundations of human freedom and divine order. Just as Satan in his pride sought to overthrow God and claim His throne, these conspirators wage endless war on their Creator. In the long run, they will lose; but the damage wrought in the meantime is incalculable. It must be understood clearly that, at its core, this crisis of modernity is not merely political, economic, or even religious. It is profoundly spiritual—literally a satanic rebellion against God Himself.

Three millennia ago, King David warned in Psalm 2:2:

“The kings of the Earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, ‘Let us break their chains and throw off their shackles.”

Today, this ancient prophecy continues to play out on the world stage, including right here in Canada. Thankfully, believers can be assured that God, as verse 4 explains, scoffs at the rebels. In verse 5, David says that God “will speak to them in His wrath.” But as these powerful forces wage an all out war on God and His Truth, substituting counterfeit faiths and occult deceptions in their place, the rotten fruit is evident in modernity; it is destroying lives, families, communities, and even nations.

The architects of this crisis of modernity are hidden in plain sight. They are in the halls of the UN, the WHO, the WEF and other elitist foundations, deep state organizations, in political parties, in the media, and even many religious institutions. They have long understood that to control humanity, they must first dethrone God—or at least turn most of humanity against Him. They promote Marxism, secular humanism, globalism, moral relativism, multiculturalism, and more. At the same time, they peddle New Age mysticism, paganism, occult practices, and “left-hand path” counter-religions like Wokeness which invert biblical truth, elevating man as god and Satan as liberator. This is no fringe theory anymore. It is a calculated strategy to erode faith, family, and freedom; paving the way for totalitarian control. This war is real, but so is the hope of resistance and ultimate victory.

In a recent commentary entitled “Towering Tyrants”, we cited the historical and spiritual relevance of the Babel story in Genesis. The Tower of Babel prefigures every subsequent attempt at a godless, one world government.. From the Marxist revolutions of the past century to modern globalist institutions pushing for centralized political, economic, and even religious control, the template remains the same. Just as Nimrod’s Babel sought to unite humanity in rebellion, today’s architects of the New World Order seek a global community opposed to God. Through thegcttf UN Agenda 2030 “sustainable development”, the UN Pact for the Future, climate idolatry, and other technocratic schemes—all of which have now been adopted into Canadian law—they seek a borderless, homogenized world; one where national sovereignty, individual liberty, cultural distinctions, and biblical faith are eroded in favour of man-centric “oneness”. As we have seen, the ideological threads of anti-God rebellion were woven directly into the fabric of Marxist $teaching. Marx and his co-author, Friedrich Engels, did not act alone, however. The League of the Just, a secret society of German emigrants in Paris and London, infused egalitarianism and irreligion into “The Communist Manifesto” they commissioned Marx to compose.

Marxism, at its core, embodies a satanic war on God and His created order. This point is convincingly argued in Richard Wurmbrand’s 1986 book entitled “Marx and Satan.” Wurmbrand was a Romanian pastor tortured for years by communists. He cites Marx’s own poetry as clear evidence of a deliberate pact with darkness, far beyond merely economic or political ideas. In “Invocation of One in Despair”, for instance, Marx declares:

“So a god has snatched from me my all,

In the curse of rack and destiny

All his worlds are gone beyond recall.

Nothing but revenge is left to me!

I shall build my throne high overhead,

Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.”

Sound familiar? It should. It echoes Lucifer’s rebellion to exalt his throne above God’s, as well as Nimrod’s pledge to avenge the wrong done to humanity by God through the flood. Another poem by Marx entitled “The Player” is even more clear on this point:

“The hellish vapours rise and fill the brain,

Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.

See this sword?

The prince of darkness

Sold it to me,

He chalks the signs, beats time for me

I play the death march fast and free.”

Wurmbrand and many others interpret this as a literal satanic initiation, where Marx forfeits his soul for destructive power via a Faustian bargain. In “The Pale Maiden”, Marx suggests that he understands the implications of what he is doing:

“Thus heaven I have forfeited

I know it full well.

My soul, once true to God

Is chosen for hell.”

This satanic movement was bankrolled by elite financing from the very start, exposing Marxism’s anti-capitalist facade as a mere smoke screen. Stanford historian Antony Sutton’s 1974 book entitled Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, documents how U.S. capitalist magnates such as J.P Morgan, Rockefeller, and others funnelled millions to Lenin and Trotsky to fund the Bolshevik revolution. How different is this from how proxy wars like the one in Ukraine are being funded, or the way that NGOs like the Tides foundation finance leftist terrorism? This “big money” conspiracy, rooted in diabolical principles, made Marxism a powerful tool for destruction, one-world tyranny, and slavery.

While these political and economic movements appeared secular on the surface, many of their intellectual currents were intertwined with deeper occult and spiritual currents. Marx and Engels are mostly remembered as secularists; but the godless materialist paradigm was, in many cases, only a cloak for the occult war on God. These satanic movements are increasingly coming out of the closet as they actively rebel against divine order. Modern Satanism, for instance, as articulated by Anton LaVey in The Satanic Bible, inverts Christian symbols and mocks God’s commandments; celebrating pride, lust, and vengeance. But the crisis of modernity is that it is no longer just fringe groups doing this. Occult themes permeate Hollywood, the music industry, corporate logos, university curricula, and even the halls of government.

The UN’s own meditation room features a black stone altar and abstract artwork. These were designed by the Lucis Trust to symbolize a “new religion” for the globalist modern age. Indeed, the UN’s World Core Curriculum (UCC)—which it insists must be taught to every child around the world—was based upon writings from Lucifer Publishing Company. This is according to no less a source than WCC author and then Assistant UN Secretary-General Robert Muller.

This infiltration also extends to religious leaders. Some Protestant pastors embrace “progressive” theology downplaying and even redefining sin, while condoning everything from same sex marriage to child mutilation and abortion. Much of this echoes New Age moral relativism. Catholic figures such as certain Jesuits have flirted with liberation theology, blending Marxism with faith—a subtle occult fusion. Even recent Popes have pushed globalist agendas such as open borders, multiculturalism, climate change, and Islam. At UN climate summits like the annual one at Davos, leaders of virtually all world religions have come together for years to redefine sin and save “Mother Earth”. Groups such as Religions for Peace—whose leader described it as “the UN of religions” bringing together “all the religions of the world”—are openly uniting diverse and even conflicting faith traditions behind the architecture of global governance being erected by conspiring elites.

We are far from immune from the crisis of modernity here in Canada. The truth is quite the contrary. Before leaving office in 2015, Prime Minister Stephen Harper recognized the emergence of the moral principles that clash with so many faiths in Canada:

“Conservatives need to reassess our understanding of the modern Left. It has moved beyond old socialistic morality or even moral relativism to something much darker. It has become a moral nihilism—the rejection of any tradition or convention of morality, a post-Marxism with deep resentments, even hatreds of the norms of free and democratic western civilization.”

In his book entitled The Battle For the Soul of Canada, Alberta politician and lawyer Grant Abraham elucidates what Harper only hinted at in his 2015 address:

“Little by little, Canada is being turned into a perverted version of itself. This diabolical transformation is being accomplished through a strategy to deconstruct the existing value framework, rebuilding it again as a distorted edifice for darkness, poverty, captivity, and tyrannical control rather than light, truth, justice, security, opportunity, prosperity, and freedom…The Canada we were born in, or embraced a new life, is being radically undermined and destroyed. Whether you are an old-stock Canadian or a new(er) Canadian, we must be aware of what is at stake and take action now so that this nation does not surrender to this agenda. We are dealing with a threat to our way of life, our sovereignty as an independent nation and our very existence as a people.”

This crisis of modernity seems hopeless because it is designed to seem so. There is hope, however. The historical failure of both the socialist and sexual revolution that is now in its final stages has birthed a counter-revolutionary moment. The way out of this crisis is to understand clearly the history of ideas that caused our current chaos and, by God’s grace, for the church to recover its mission to point us to the transcendent God; to the contemplation of that which is true, good, and beautiful.

And so, amid this darkness, there is profound inspiration. As the conspirators plot, Psalm 2:4 declares that “The One enthroned in heaven laughs.” God is sovereign, and His people are called to resist evil. There are many ways that God-fearing men and women can do this, starting at the individual level and then working outward into our communities, the state, and the entire nation.

The first step is to reclaim education. Homeschooling rooted in Scripture and transcendent truth equips children with a biblical worldview. Millions of children today are thriving in classical Christian programs. In Alberta and in many other provinces, parents can remove their children from supposed educational institutions actively waging war on God and His Truth by indoctrinating impressionable young minds.

The next step is to expose the darkness. As Ephesians 5:11 urges:

“Have nothing to do with fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.”

We must therefore engage in politics—from local to Provincial legislatures and Parliament—to defund UN agendas and restore liberty, truth, and righteousness.

Third, we must unite behind biblical truth. Alliances of believers from various traditions against occult globalism and the modernist conspiracy can be powerful forces for good, without compromising core truths. We must pray fervently, as James 5:16 promises:

“The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”

Finally, we must all live boldly for God. Canadians can and should share the truth with others, proclaiming the Good News while discipling others and building communities that can and will resist tyranny. The modernist conspiracy seeks enslavement, but God offers us freedom. In fact, God is the very author of liberty.

The crisis of modernity caused by the war on God rages, but we Christians know that victory is assured. In the meanwhile, we must stand firm and resist evil here on earth—if only because the promise of eternity awaits us.

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Every week on this program, we aim to pull back the layers of the cultural, political, and spiritual battles facing Canadian families today. In an era dominated by top-down directives from unelected global bodies, finding voices committed to objective truth and human autonomy is rarer than ever.

That is why it is always a privilege to welcome back a true friend of the show: world-renowned immunologist, virologist, and mRNA pioneer, Dr. Robert Malone.

In our latest episode, Dr. Malone and I sat down for a sprawling, uncompromising look at the structural decay of our public health institutions, the rise of scientific “grifting,” and the urgent need for a return to traditional self-reliance.

Exposing the Fear Machine: Hantavirus and the WHO

We began our conversation by unpacking a recent maritime incident that caught the attention of the international press: an outbreak of the rare Andes strain of hantavirus aboard the exploration cruise ship MV Hondius.

Dr. Malone applies Occam’s razor to the event, contrasting the classical, low-probability rodent-dust transmission routes against the high-octane fear narratives blasted by mainstream media and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“The frequency, the probability of a North American resident... getting hantavirus, is about seven times lower than the probability of being struck by lightning,” Dr. Malone notes, providing some much-needed context.

Yet, despite the low systemic risk, global health leaders have immediately seized on the outbreak to demand more funding and push a massive, centralized vaccination agenda. Dr. Malone pulls no punches when discussing the structural corruption within the WHO, mapping out how private billionaire foundations and pharmaceutical interests have fundamentally compromised global public policy. What we are witnessing isn’t just bureaucratic overreach—it is an outright global power grab through proposed pandemic treaties.

The Moral Blindspots of Modern Science

Beyond international politics, Dr. Malone exposes the profound ethical erosion occurring within government-funded laboratories. We discuss the horrific, taxpayer-funded “de-barking” experiments performed on sentient beagle puppies simply to spare researchers the moral discomfort of hearing the animals cry.

We also dive into standard regulatory failures hitting closer to home, such as the FDA turning a blind eye to popular benzoyl peroxide acne medications that degrade into benzene (a known carcinogen) when exposed to sunlight. It is a stark reminder that federal regulators are routinely refusing to do the very job they exist to perform.

Homesteading for Health: Building True Resilience

If the first half of our conversation exposes the brokenness of the current system, the second half offers the antidote.

Dr. Malone and his wife, Jill, have recently released their new book, Homesteading for Health. Drawing from their own deep, ancestral connection to the land on their Virginia farm, Dr. Malone shares a blueprint for what he calls the “Great American Food Delusion.”

In the face of shifting global alliances and skyrocketing supply chain costs, he walks us through a vital thought experiment: Can the average family can not just survive, but thrive, by stockpiling simple, traditional dietary staples like rice, beans, oats, and eggs?

The answer is a powerful yes. True health and autonomy don’t come from a pharmacy or a corporate grocery chain; they begin by respecting the soil as a living organism and taking responsibility for our own survival.

“Don’t Give Away Your Soul”

We closed our discussion with a piece of parting wisdom from Dr. Malone that applies to every single one of us facing ethical pressures in our daily lives:

“Every time you make one of those compromises, you give away a little part of your soul. And when you reach old man status or gray hair status like me, you can end up really hollowed out. So think hard about whether those compromises are really worth it.”

Watch or listen to the full episode to understand the spiritual and moral crisis facing Canada today and what it takes to defend the truth.

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What do you think about Canada’s shifting alliance toward the EU? How are you and your family preparing to build local resilience against global institutional overreach? Let us know in the comments below.

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To understand how we arrived at this moment, we must first honestly assess what is going on around us. Across Canadian mass media and social media, a coordinated narrative has been built around what is being called the problem of ‘empty bedrooms’. On the surface, this sounds like a housing conversation; but if we look closer, we discover that it is something else entirely. The pressure being applied, particularly to elderly Canadians and grandparents who have occupied their homes for decades, is to downsize. To surrender their multi-bedroom homes. To turn their large bedrooms into apartment blocks. Glorifying sea cans as desirable dwellings. To downsize not just our homes—but our very expectations about what life will be like in the New World Order.

This is not housing policy. This is foundational housing reform; in the same sense that Chairman Mao used the term ‘land reform’ in China in the 1950’s. In China, land reform meant state seizure and redistribution of all private property, which is already beginning to happen here. It meant destroying the extant ownership class. It meant collectivization. And it meant mass murder and genocide. One in six Chinese died as a direct result of Maoist “reforms”.

Now I realize that no one is sending soldiers to our doors just yet. That might actually spark a revolt amongst Canadians who are actively resisting confiscation of their guns. Instead, what is being deployed is a technique which the CCP perfected, called the ‘mass line’. The mass line is a propaganda technique whereby the state manufactures a demand, presents it as a grassroots movement, and then uses the illusion of public consensus to implement the oppressive policy it always intended to impose. The masses did not actually demand it. The party created the demand, packaged it, and handed it back to the masses as our own idea.

There is a cultural weapon being used against Canadians specifically in this operation. In the U.S., cultural identity is built around individual liberty. In Canada, our identity is being built around the collective. We are Canadians. We are awesome. We are better than the Americans, so “Elbows up!” The beautiful Canadian sense of Christian community, that instinct toward cooperation and shared purpose, is being weaponized against us. The ‘we’ is being used to ensure compliance. Our national sense of belonging is being turned into a tool of state coercion. This is where Canada is today; but to understand how we got here, we have to go back to the late 1960’s.

Most of us assume that the housing crisis, the energy restrictions, the cost of living collapse, and the economic stagnation stem from bad policy and economic leadership; but what if I told you that these were not mistakes at all? What if I told you that they planned Canada’s decline in 1968, and that there is a paper trail to prove it? Consider exhibit “A”, the Cloward-Piven strategy. The Cloward-Piven strategy is a political theory outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. It is the strategy of forcing political change to societal collapse through a series of orchestrated crises. The Strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, amassing massive unplayable national debt and other methods such as unfettered immigration, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse. Sound familiar? It should.

There is a documented history that mainstream Canadian media has almost completely ignored or deliberately obscured. Government memoranda. Meeting records. Academic journals. The Club of Rome’s own published records. What they reveal is a direct line from a private meeting in Rome in 1968 to the policies destroying Canada today. Pierre Elliot Trudeau met with the Club of Rome (now the World Economic Forum) long before we had a Department of the Environment. He had Canada sponsor the meeting where the blueprint for global degradation was first developed, and the agenda that Trudeau embedded into Canadian institutions over 50 years ago is still being constructed right now by the Carney Liberals.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau actively collaborated in the Club of Rome in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, sponsoring the second full meeting in Montebello, Quebec, in 1971. This partnership was instrumental in developing the “Limits to Growth” report, which introduced systems of analysis and holistic policy modelling to the Canadian government. Trudeau met with Club of Rome founders Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King many times before the Club was formally established in 1970. Trudeau implemented these ideas into Canadian law by creating the Department of the Environment and promoting a shift away from pure economic growth toward sustainable development and the Marxist concept of societal well-being.

The influence of this collaboration extended through the Trudeau era, which ended in 1984, affecting institutions like the Ministry of State for Science and Technology and the International Development Research Centre. The Club of Rome’s direct influence upon Canadian policy waned significantly after 1984 due to a political paradigm shift and aging of its key contacts. However, with the election of Justin Trudeau in 2015, these nefarious policies experienced a Renaissance that we are living through today. The Carney version of this agenda is far more dangerous than anything envisioned by Pierre Trudeau and reveals where this is all heading next.

We do roughly 75% of our trade with the U.S. They share our border, our culture, our history, and frankly our entire economic reality. They help us to protect the north from Chinese and Russian invasion. Whatever you might think about President Trump and the current tension with Washington, the idea that Canada’s future lies with Brussels instead is not a rational trade argument. The EU is our second largest trader partner, but it is not even close to what we do with the Americans. The mathematics alone should end this conversation; so why is it not doing so? Well, because this is not about trade. It is about something far more sinister.

The explanation begins with an understanding of who Mark Carney was before he was installed as our PM. Not the central banker biography or his actual CV. Goldman Sachs, Bank of Canada, Bank of England, WEF Foundation Board, Bilderberg Steering Committee, Brookfield Asset Management, United Nations Special Envoy, and now the highest office in the Canadian government. Every single step on that ladder shares a single guiding core belief which comes right out of the Club of Rome playbook: that the problems of the modern world are too large for individual nations to solve on their own. That the future belongs to institutions that sit above domestic governments or their puny constituents, whom we call voters. That sovereignty, as we have traditionally understood the term, is a relic of a world that has been “ruptured”, which no longer exists.

The notion that national sovereignty is an obstacle to solving global problems is not something Carney developed recently. It runs through every institution he has ever been a part of, every framework he has ever built, every speech he has ever delivered—including his famous “New World Order” address at Davos earlier this year. He did not spend two decades building a $130T net zero financial alliance and propose replacing the U.S. dollar with a synthetic global currency managed by central banks because he believes in the power of individual nations to govern themselves. Carney has a particular worldview that is entirely consistent—and now he runs Canada.

Once we understand this, the proposed EU move stops looking like foreign policy and starts looking more like something else entirely. The EU is the most advanced experiment in supranational governance ever. It has its own courts, its own parliament, its own currency, its own regulatory bodies that override domestic laws in 27 member states. It also happens to have been the primary institutional home for the exact policy agenda Carney has been building since 2015. Carbon disclosure frameworks. Net zero financial commitments. Central bank digital currencies. ESG integration into capital requirements. The EU did not borrow these ideas from Carney; no, he was building them as fast as the EU could institutionalize them. They are Carney’s brain children. Do not forget either that Carney’s time as Governor of the Bank of England was spent installing such policies, which the British people rejected them via Brexit. Aligning Canada with the EU thus has nothing to do with trade diversification. It is instead Canada being plugged into the architecture that Carney spent two decades constructing. An architecture with a sluggish economy, energy self-harm, and creeping authoritarianism that make it a terrible alternative to U.S. dynamism.

President Trump’s careless comments about Canada becoming the 51st state have certainly stirred latent Canadian patriotism; but it might also result in an economically moribund Canada further aligning itself with the permanent EU bureaucracy. As we have seen, a tilt toward Europe would be natural for PM Carney. He is an advocate of the very environmental, social and economic polices that led the EU and Canada into economic and social decline. Carney is the ultimate product of the Euro-Atlantic elite. He holds British and Irish passports and has even self- identified as “European”.

In the PMO, we can only expect Carney to epitomize the bureaucratic spirit of the profoundly dysfunctional EU. The central planning principle of the EU disdains nation-states. Recent anti-democratic moves to remove troublesome populists in Romania, France, and now Hungary show how Europe’s most outspoken defenders of democracy and freedom are being strategically removed, sometimes even by ignoring election results. The rest of the EU agenda is no bargain, either. It prioritizes an ever-expanding welfare state, as well as climate, social and immigration policies that the Trump administration has thoroughly rejected. The EU’s politics and economics focus upon sustainability, and not growth.

This is a siren song that Canadians must resist. Under Justin Trudeau, Canada was already succumbing to the essentials of Euro-politics: high trade barriers, net-zero climate policies, essentially open borders, and the systemic undermining of our nation’s proud history. Climate is particularly challenging. Carney has a long and sordid history, including as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action, of steering investment to preferred “green sectors”. American investors have already rejected such failed ESJ commitments.

Many Canadians, especially intellectuals and mass media actors, may find this appealing; but it is a recipe for disaster. It is MAID on a national scale. A declared war on oil and gas production, mining and industry presents serious drawbacks for a country whose chief exports are energy and raw materials. Cutting off exports to the U.S. will have little impact, since the Americans are now, under Trump, suddenly the world’s leading energy producer. While Carney’s aristocratic and progressive demeanour may thrill Laurentian elites, this is hardly the case for Canadian miners, oil producers, truckers and other blue-collar workers. His first year in office has already fomented growing unrest in places like Alberta, whose economy propels the remnants of Canadian competitiveness internationally.

Industrial workers in places like southern Ontario, already facing the consequences of Trump’s tariffs, are particularly threatened. Europe’s energy leadership on climate and its net zero policies are undermining its fading industrial economy, all to the benefit of China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Speaking of China, in January of this year, Carney flew to Beijing, shook hands with Xi Jinping, called China a strategic partner, and signed 8 agreements in just four days. Most of us heard about canola tariffs. What we did not hear about was the police cooperation MOU between the RCMP and China’s Ministry of Public Security, the full text of which has never been publicly released. Nor did we hear about the cultural cooperation deal signed with China’s evil propaganda ministry, or the financial regulatory working group, or the commitment to jointly implement UN Agenda 2030; and we certainly did not hear that a 2025 Parliamentary inquiry concluded that China was the most active perpetrator of state-based foreign interference targeting our democratic institutions—including our federal elections. These are people whom Carney now calls our “strategic partner”.

Meanwhile, in Europe, strict adherence to climate zealot policy amounts to energy suicide. Late last year, Germany’s economy suffered mightily due to a combination of cold weather, cloud cover, and light winds, forcing it to import power from Scandinavian nations. Germany, once the industrial engine of Europe with its nuclear and coal powered economy, has been brought to its knees by the same insane climate policies that are crippling Canada. The really troubling thing is how economic collapse in the EU and here at home feels normal to so many people. There is a strange calm that settles over a country once they begin accepting the unacceptable, which is precisely what we have been doing in Canada over the past decade. Quite apart from all of the political and economic impacts of what the Carney Liberals are doing, completely demoralizing us might actually be the true agenda.

It is really more of a quiet resignation than a peaceful calm. It is the product of systemic indoctrination through our education system, media, and institutions—just as the Club of Rome planned. We have now been trained since childhood to believe that truth flows from authority, and that authority is innately good and incorruptible. Paired with this deception is the reality that any serious dissent is met with swift punishment. Disagreement with obvious absurdities, or objection to baldly authoritarian behaviour is met with censorship, accusations of misinformation, or outright cancellation and personal ruin. Over time, that does something to a people.

Canada’s collective moral consciousness has been worn down by a persistent deluge of lies, ideological radicalism, and managed chaos. At its core, this is what it feels like to spend years spitting into the wind. We get tired. We grow weary of fighting while obvious truths are denied, and of watching institutions reward cowardice while punishing courage. Eventually, many of us simply cower and adapt. That is how the spiritual decline becomes normalized and accepted. This reality was not purely ushered in by those we have voted into office since 2015. Rather, it is a symptom of a deeper moral and spiritual dysfunction in our society as a whole. As it says in Proverbs 23:7:

“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

A healthy, culturally united, and patriotic society cannot be easily conquered. That is why we have seen persistent attacks on all of these fronts over the past 20 years or so. The family unit has suffered heavy damage. Women were sold a counterfeit version of equality—one that taught them to see men less as complementary partners and more as competitors or even oppressors. Traditional roles like motherhood, homemaking, and building strong families were quietly devalued. Meanwhile, men were attacked in their traditional roles as leaders, protectors, and providers. They were recast in popular culture as bumbling fools and comic relief. The sanctity of marriage was also targeted, first by normalizing and then demanding cultural and legal affirmation of gay marriage. Now, our children are being subjected to some of the most absurd and disorienting ideologies imaginable. Any attempt to intervene in a child’s confusion over their supposed gender identity can land parents in serious legal trouble. They can even lose their kids. And that was just on the family front.

Canadian cultural identity and patriotism were attacked just as vilely through the deceitful leftist slogan that “diversity is our strength.” It has a bit of that “war is peace” flavour from Orwell’s “1984”, no? On the surface, it sounds all nice and inclusive. It also happens to be a perfect lie. Strong countries are generally built around a cohesive cultural core, shared loyalties, and a history that people can both know and honour. In Canada, we have a rich shared history and genuine stories of courage: the march West of the NWMP, the Hudson’s Bay Company, construction of our national railways, navigation of the NW passage by the RCMP, and countless others. The average Canadian teenager knows next to nothing about this history, and is taught not to care about it. We cannot celebrate our heroes. We cannot teach national pride with confidence. Instead, we must teach our youth to look inward, to doubt themselves, to apologize, and to loathe their own shared history. We teach them to habitually navel gaze.

To further erode our cultural cohesion, mass immigration has been pursued at a scale no serious country can absorb without severe consequences. Many newcomers now arrive from cultures with very different understandings about God, law, liberty, women, family, and the relationship of citizen to the state. Historically, most immigrants came from nations which broadly shared our ideals, our legal traditions, and our moral framework. A high-trust society cannot remain so when the people running it actively dissolve the moral terms that made it all work. What we are now witnessing is a demoralized society that barely recognizes itself and has little collective memory of where it came from or where it is going. That is an apt description of a post-nation state. This is what demoralization of a nation looks like. A people cut off from our shared memories, uncertain and ashamed of our national identity, and increasingly unable to defend the conditions that made our country livable.

It was ex-KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov, who was given asylum in Canada by Pierre Trudeau back in the 1970’s, who described this process. His warning was not merely about propaganda, but about the gradual demoralization of a people. The goal was to alter a population’s perception of reality so completely that even an abundance of information would no longer help them arrive at rational conclusions to defend themselves, their families, or their nation. The point was not just to deceive people, but to disarm them mentally, morally, and spiritually.

The Covid-Pandemic ought to have been the moment when millions of Canadians awakened to distrust concentrated power. It should have been the time when we recognized how quickly rights, livelihoods, dignity, and basic honesty could be cast aside in the name of public safety. Instead, many Canadians learned the exact opposite lesson. They learned to keep quiet and comply faster. They also learned that if they repeated state approved slogans, avoided asking the wrong questions, and reported dissenters, they might be spared the worst treatment by our governments. We saw people informing on their own neighbours for seeing family at Christmas. We watched healthy people lose their jobs because they refused injection with an experimental drug they did not trust and which was dishonestly presented to them as a safe and effective cure to a deadly virus. We saw world renowned subject matter experts censored and cancelled, dissent criminalized, and obvious contradictions mount week after week. We saw fear become policy and coercion become virtuous; and instead of learning that abusive power must be resisted early, many concluded that survival depends upon blind obedience. Some of these people included political leaders, judges, and police officers, all of whom wielded significant societal influence.

That is the true legacy of Covid in Canada. Not merely the mandates, lockdowns, or censorship, but the psychological lesson so many of us absorbed from it—keep your head down, say as little as possible, and just do what we are told. Once a population internalizes these lessons, it becomes much easier to govern through panic, intimidation, and social pressure than through truth.

Bezmenov put it even more bluntly:

“A person who is demoralized, is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, authentic proof, documents, pictures, even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him the concentration camps, he will refuse to believe it…until a military boot crashes his balls, then he will understand, but not before that.”

In Canada, we have become so attached to comfort, security, and social acceptance that we refuse to face what is plainly in front of us. This is true not only of the public, but of professionals, officials, and authority figures who know better and still choose compliance over courage. The cost of dissent feels too high, so we keep our heads down and go along with it. Canadians have always been known as nice folks. That sounds complimentary, but it is actually an insult. Nice people are appeasers who are easily manipulated. They agree outwardly to keep the peace, even when they privately know it is wrong to go along. They are deeply afraid of standing apart from the consensus on any controversial issue. They are not prepared to pay the cost of discipleship, so they conform to the strongest social pressure in the room and go with the flow, regardless of whether it takes them over a waterfall. A nice, people-pleasing population is one ripe for ideological capture.

Canada does not only punish dissent formally. It also sanctions it socially, which for most people is more than enough to make them fall into line. Justin Trudeau described vaccine holdouts as extremists who “don’t believe in science” and are “often misogynists and racists.” He even questioned whether the unvaccinated should be tolerated in society. The media did its part, too. One famous Toronto Star headline told readers that the unvaccinated could die and deserved no sympathy. Now remember, we have been conditioned to believe that truth only comes from authority. So when PM Carney, the media, and every institutional loudspeaker is pushing the same line, ‘nice’ people collapse immediately under that pressure.

It is painful to see Canada in this sorry state. A beautiful and blessed country has been corrupted by ideological extremism, institutional cowardice, and a ruling class which profits as working class Canadians foot the bill. It is truly tragic. If this sounds overly pessimistic, then so be it. I am no people pleaser or appeaser. Sir Winston Churchill once described appeasement as keeping a pet crocodile, hoping that it will eat you last. What we must understand is that demoralization begets passivity, and passivity invites abuse. That is why ideological subversion is such an effective weapon. It does not merely confuse us; it renders us morally and spiritually unable to defend ourselves while our society is quietly dismantled around us. Once we begin adapting to the changes instead of resisting them, the planned decline accelerates.

This where we are in Canada today. Not merely in political trouble, but in a deeper moral, civilizational crisis. We are ruled by corrupt and dangerous people, yes; but that is only half the problem. The other half is a population so conditioned by comfort, by conformity, by fear, by sin—that many no longer respond to obvious danger as free men and women. We can be shown the evidence, the lies, the corruption, the coercion, and still reject any conclusion which demands courage. That require us to confront what has been done to us, what we allowed, and what it will cost to resist. Worst of all, what we tolerate long enough, we eventually accept.

The EU is a cemetery for states who have given up the ghost of their best dreams of nationhood. That is why Carney and company want to take us there for a proper burial; but a free society does not perish once the first lie is told, or when the first freedom is violated. It dies when its people lose the nerve to defend truth. Long before the official obituary, a moment arrives when a nation’s collapse is already visible in the character of its people. That is the greatest danger in Canada today. Not simply that the country is broken, but that so many of us have been demoralized enough to watch it happen and still call it ‘normal’.

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In the latest episode of Grey Matter, I sit down with Rabbi Michael Barclay, a pioneering voice in modern Judaism and ethics. We move past the surface-level political debates to discuss the uncomfortable realities shaping our world today.

Rabbi Barclay provides a lot of food for thought:

• The Rise of “Jew-Hatred”: Why he views the recent surge in hatred of the Jewish people not just as an attack on their culture and land, but as a “canary in the coal mine” for the decline of Western civilization.

• The Theology of Conflict: An thorough explanation of why the struggle in the Middle East is rooted in a 1,400-year religious mission, and how that differs from the Western pursuit of peace and prosperity.

• The “Grift” of Modern Conservatism: He critiques the ideological shifts within the right, including why he has publicly called out popular influencers for dangerous performative activism.

• Building Bridges: First, how Christians and Jews can come together in a world that seeks to divide them. Second, why integrity in our faith is the ultimate defence against chaos.

This is an honest, and thoughtful conversation that you won’t find pushed on mainstream media.

[Link to Video:

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Join the conversation. Watch now and share your thoughts in the comments.

As the leader of the kingdom of Babel, Nimrod is of course connected with the infamous Tower described at Genesis Chapter 6. Hebrew lore holds that Nimrod swore revenge upon God, so that if God had a mind to drown the world again, Nimrod would build a tower too high for the waters to reach, and that Nimrod would thereby avenge God himself for destroying his forefathers. The motive for building the Tower was thus to protect humanity against another flood, ignoring of course that the reason for the first great deluge was humanity’s own wickedness and rebellion, from which mankind had refused to repent.

Nimrod was therefore rebellious against God, just like his forebears. He espoused a form of Old Testament secularism, persuading his people not to ascribe their strength to God as a means of fulfillment, but to believe instead that it was their own courage which procured such happiness. Construction of the Tower ended inexorably with a typical Old Testamentary demonstration of God’s power: He conflated the languages of those working on the Tower, making it impossible for them to communicate effectively to complete construction. And so Nimrod was proven a colossal fool: all of mankind’s strength and abilities, even the mightiest among them, are bestowed by a God who can rescind such emoluments at any moment.

Nimrod has therefore lent his immortal name to our lexicon, and remains a character in the mythology of many ancient cultures. He shows up in Hungarian, Greek, Arabic, Syrian, and American legends. He is even mentioned as the Lord of Christmas and connected to the legend of Hercules. Nimrod was indubitably a powerful, charismatic hero of the ancient world who actually attempted to build a Tower to heaven, hoping to thwart God himself. In the end, however, Nimrod’s power and glory came to nothing. Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord, but he proved once again that humility before the Lord is the proper posture of the wise. In short, Nimrod was a Tyrant, and therefore worthy of derision.

There is a popular meme on the internet about the cycle of tyrants. It looks something like this:

Our modern tyrants are not giants like Nimrod, but they are every bit as arrogant, vain, and foolish. Many of us are living under the delusion that God is sending another King David to rescue us, and that we simply need to hold out until such a person is democratically elected. I do not think that this kind of help is on the way, and that may appear on the surface to be rather pessimistic. On the contrary, it may just be that we are now a nation once established according to the supremacy of God and the Rule of Law that has since permitted weak, evil, wicked leaders to steal our heritage from us. We have adopted their secular religions: CRT, DIE, environmental extremism, gender fluidity and child mutilation, multiculturalism (note the word “cult” in the middle of that one), pandemic hysteria, and globalism. We have bowed down to these false idols and worshiped with them, rather than calling down God’s judgment upon them for their treachery.

The best news is that since we have ignored the problem and become so open minded, God Himself may remove the wicked from their positions of power and handle their judgment as to guilt, innocence and suitable punishment. God does not need an election or anyone to accomplish His Will. He does not require the help of a Trump, a DeSantis, a Pollievre, or a Danielle Smith. The Tower of tyranny can be easily and swiftly swept aside, just as it was at Babel.

Sadly, many progressive Christian churches no longer believe this to be so. Such churches went along with government closures and other dictates during the Covid 19 lockdowns and have worked assiduously to render themselves indistinguishable from the secular world, in the vain hope of becoming more broadly accepted by the masses. These progressives and their congregations also openly attacked courageously inspired faith leaders like James Coates and Timothy Stephens, who stood up to overt government oppression of Christianity. In so doing, these progressives became estranged from Christianity and of little or no use in the eternal battle to save people from evil and hell. These Churches developed a form of godliness, but denied the source thereof, just as Nimrod persuaded his subjects to do when they built his vaunted Tower.

What these progressive churches have entirely forgotten is that God does not act on a natural human scale. That is not who He is. Mankind cannot build a Tower high enough to withstand His judgment. God acts on a supernatural level affecting everything within and without Creation— the physical and the metaphysical—to align His desires and His will. God does not require humanity to accomplish His Will upon the earth or anywhere else.

God has told us this in His Word from the outset. He spoke the world and everything there is into existence. Put simply, God’s words become His Will, which becomes everyone’s reality. Today, mass media and government are trying to mimic God’s effect with their words, but are aligned with evil, speaking a Satanic agenda into existence through lies supporting the false secular idols they have come to worship. This is precisely how the Chicken Little “everything is going to get worse and worse, and then Armageddon will come” crowd serves the tyrants, by repeating their desired outcome, affirming these words in defiance of what God has already told us through his own Word. UN Agenda 2030 is but one such example: “you will own nothing, and be happy”, which is anathema to our Lord’s command to “be fruitful and multiply.”

We all have access to God’s Word and His Will as revealed in the Holy Bible. How then did the Big Bang (time, chance and natural causes) come to be taught to young school children in our publicly funded schools? How then did it come to be educational to frighten children into acceptance of the absurdity that CO2 emissions will hasten our destruction? That the very basic laws of nature regarding sexuality are nothing more than playthings in the hands of those who would usurp them, confusing developing minds into the fallacy that they can self-identify as cats or even venal house plants? The scientific method is an important and useful tool discovered by mankind to reveal the mysteries of the natural world. It has also been subjected to incredible abuse by power lusty government experts and their tyrant masters, who seek to destroy all knowledge of God, truth, and objective reality, and to replace their memory with the dark ideologies they falsely worship to gain dominion over us. The minds of these tyrants are hideously and hopelessly corrupted by what they worship. This is the moral turpitude of political leaders who fly on private jets from all over the world to meet and plot mass extermination of human beings upon the altar of psychopathic climate policies and Covid hysteria. Why would we imagine that they have anything to teach us, let alone our children? How could we permit them to use our tax dollars to force converts among our own children, who are being mutilated for the sake of radical gender theory in the name of “gender affirming healthcare”?

The Tower of Tyranny is being built before our very eyes, and we are carrying their bricks for them. Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden, and weak men of their ilk have supervised the construction. Only our Faith, our Love, our Vigilance, and the Mighty Hand of God can topple it. Calls for Freedom, equality, dignity, prosperity, and justice will not get the job done; not until we understand and know that the important work must be done by our Lord, and is not a project befitting the hands of the weak men and women who now serve as our elected leaders.

The 20th century libertarian economist, Friedrich Hayek summed this point up rather well:

“Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understood that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.”

This commentary is available on Apple Podcasts, Podbean, Rumble, Spotify, & YouTube

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” — Victor Frankl

In our most recent live stream, we tackled a moment of profound significance for the future of Western Canada. For months, volunteers braved the elements—minus 25-degree winds and blowing snow—to gather over 300,000 signatures in support of a referendum on Alberta’s independence.

Yet, in a single stroke of the pen, a court ruling has attempted to silence those 300,000 voices.

I was joined by Bruce Scholl, the tireless creator of Unscrew the News, to dissect this decision and what it reveals about the state of Canadian democracy. If you missed the live broadcast, you can watch the full replay below.

The Ruling: A Masterclass in Judicial Activism

Justice Shaina Leonard recently ruled against the approval of the independence petition, citing a failure to consult with First Nations. While the province and legal teams are already filing appeals, the underlying issue is much larger than a single petition.

We are living in an era of “Juristic Park,” where activist judges play fast and loose with the rule of law. As I discuss in the episode, we are witnessing a surreptitious transference of power from elected legislatures to unelected, politically appointed judges. When a fraction of 1% of the population can use judicial power to shut down the democratic aspirations of hundreds of thousands, we have moved from a parliamentary democracy to something far more elitist and anti-democratic.

The “Globalist Trojan Horse”

A central theme of our conversation was the role of UNRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). Bruce and I explored how these international frameworks are being used as “globalist Trojan horses” to undermine domestic law and property rights.

In British Columbia, we are already seeing the fallout: economic instability, housing uncertainty, and a flight of capital. Alberta remains a “tough nut to crack” for these agendas, but the machinery of the judiciary is being used to bring these policies in through the back door.

The Rise of “Maple MAGA”

What we are seeing in Alberta isn’t just a political movement; it’s a grassroots response to globalism. I’ve started calling it “Maple MAGA.” Like the movement in the U.S., this is a rejection of the “feudalism 2.0” being pushed by globalist avatars—characterized by Digital IDs, Universal Basic Income (UBI), and technocratic control.

Alberta is the “tip of the spear” in this fight. We aren’t just fighting for a border; we are fighting to conserve a way of life that values personal autonomy, community trust, and the freedom to speak truth without fear of “techno-fascist” censorship.

What Comes Next?

As Bruce noted during the show, there is no “second gear” or turning back. This judicial setback is merely a bump in the road that is firing up the movement even more. We must remember the lessons of history—such as those found in the story of Gandhi—that non-violent, principled resistance is a powerful force.

Watch the full episode for a deep dive into:

• [00:12:37] The analogy of the “rotting carcass of feudalism.”

• [00:20:05] Why UNRIP is designed to destroy nation-states.

• [00:38:46] The looming threat of Digital ID and social credit.

• [00:57:41] Why we must choose hope over procrastination.

Watch the Replay on YouTube

The Grey Matter Podcast is dedicated to exploring the ideas that define our culture and our freedom. If you value these conversations, please consider sharing this post and subscribing to our Substack.

There once was a time when justice meant something simple in this country: impartiality, fairness, and equal application of law; but in Canada today, that notion is collapsing in real time. A non-violent protestor like Tamara Lich can face seven years in prison for mischief—while men convicted of raping children, shooting at police, or killing entire families in drunk driving incidents often receive shockingly lenient sentences.

Frederic Bastiat saw this coming nearly two centuries ago. In his 1850 treatise entitled The Law, he warned that once the state starts to use law not to protect life, liberty, and property—but to redistribute, punish, and re-engineer society, then the law itself becomes criminal:

“When plunder is organized by the law for the profit of those who make the law, all plundered classes try somehow to enter…into the making of laws.”

Canada is now firmly within this phase. What we call law is often nothing more than legally sanctioned theft, favouritism, and political persecution. Bastiat’s central thesis is disarmingly simple: law is the collective use of force to prevent injustice. It is not the creation of morality, wealth, virtue, or equality. It is a negative force—a shield against coercion, not a tool to impose dreams.

So what happens when such force is no longer used to defend, but to redistribute? What happens when the law no longer protects property, but becomes the method for violating it? Bastiat called this “legal plunder”, and he warned that when this happens, society becomes divided into two classes: those who exploit the work of others, and those whose work is exploited.

Nowhere is this legal plunder more visible than in Canada’s tax and transfer regime. According to the Federal government’s own 2025 Report on Federal Tax Expenditures, recent immigrants receive 205% more in child benefits than native-born Canadians. Transgender and non-binary recipients receive 1,343% more than men. Women receive 3,157% more. These are not distributions based upon need. They are formulas based solely upon identity politics. The law in Canada now functions as a tool of engineered outcomes—not of justice. Bastiat described this as socialism masquerading as virtue:

“As the result of systems and of its efforts, it would seem that socialism can scarcely help perceiving the monster of legal plunder. But what does it do? It disguises it cleverly from others, and even from itself, under the seductive names of fraternity, solidarity, organization, association…It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility.”

Bastiat thus saw right through transparent leftist language games. Take for example the case in a Quebec court which reduced a drug trafficker’s sentence based solely upon his race. The judge cited systemic oppression and cultural context as mitigating factors. This is the death knell for the Rule of Law. If one person’s punishment is reduced based upon his identity, then another’s may be increased for the same rationale. Suddenly, we have a two tiered justice system. Rules for thee but not for me. Two sets of laws for two sets of people—a moral order shattered by leftist ideology. As Bastiat foreboded:

“When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”

Today, we are forced to choose between trusting a system that rewards criminals and punishes dissenters, or else rejection of the system altogether. Neither produces peace, which is the main purpose of the law in the first place.

The law thus becomes a weapon. When we resist, we are told that we are opposed to solidarity, anti-progress, against decency. In truth, what we instinctively oppose is not the concept of charity or clemency, but being coerced into acceptance of what we know to be morally repugnant. Not freely given consent, but forced extraction. Bastiat called this ‘false philanthropy’. A legislator may sincerely believe that they are building a better world, but the result is still theft when the law is used to take from one to give to another.

This reveals the fatal flaw in modern Canadian governance: the arrogance of central planners. Bureaucrats believe that they can engineer fairness, equity, and moral uplift from above. They do not view citizens as agents of our own lives, but as material to be molded by ideology. Bastiat mocked this mindset:

“The socialist thinks, in all sincerity, that there is the same difference between himself and mankind, as between the gardener and his trees.”

In Canada, this is now the ethos driving disparate sentencing, identity preferences in tax credits, and ideological coercion within institutions like our law courts. It is not enough that we are equal before the law; the law must now ensure equal outcomes. Never mind that pursuing this course destroys actual justice. Bastiat warned that positive law—that which tries to do good rather than prevent evil—leads to endless conflict:

“Depart from justice, and you will be lost in vagueness and uncertainty…The law becomes the battlefield for everybody’s dreams and everybody’s covetousness.”

On such a battlefield, law is no longer a neutral ground. It is a prize to be won. And every group, be it racial, sexual, or political, fights to seize it for their own exclusive benefit. This is why Freedom Convoy organizers face stiffer sentences than violent criminals. They are not being punished for mischief. They are being persecuted by the state for challenging the system. For revealing its corruption. For having the temerity to exercise their Constitutionally guaranteed right to express public dissent.

Meanwhile, organized crime flourishes in Canada. Political elites share addresses with drug traffickers. Justin Trudeau reportedly took a private meeting with Paul King Jin—a suspected kingpin of transnational Chinese organized crime. Conveniently, prosecutions of such persons collapse. RCMP financial crime units are inexplicably disbanded. Nothing is done.

Why? Well, because in a regime of legal plunder, law enforcement is not concerned with justice. It is about optics, power, and protection. Those who warrant investigation host boxing events with politicians. Those who should be gaoled are waved through airports, flagged by border security. Meanwhile, those who dare to protest this corrupt regime risk frozen bank accounts, surveillance, and even prison.

This is not just an erosion of our law. It is its inversion. When the law no longer punishes crime but rewards it, and sanctions the innocent for exposing it, then we are not living in a state of justice. We are living in a criminal empire where law becomes crime. As Edward Snowden puts it:

Bastiat saw the destination clearly. Once plunder becomes legal, every group organizes to participate in it. The law becomes a tool of every ambition, every envy, every ideology. Eventually, it must collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

Canada is now a nation where legal plunder is not only public policy—it is the state’s guiding principle. It is the foundation upon which our politics are now built. That is why every crisis becomes pretext for more re-distribution. Why peaceful protestors are “far-right extremists”, and every bureaucrat is our saviour. Why facts no longer matter and why silence is now far safer than dissenting speech.

But silence will not save us. The only antidote to plunder is actual justice. Not performative justice. Not politicized justice. Actual justice: the equal and impartial application of law to all of us, regardless of class, race, sex, creed, or political views.

Frederic Bastiat was not just a critic of socialism. He was a prophet of tyranny. His message is clear: if we seek freedom, then we must return to the law as it was meant to be—a shield for all, not a sword for the few. But how can we possibly get there, unless our courts adopt this principle? What hope do we have when our courts of law are agents of legal plunder?

To understand how politicized Canada’s courts have become, we must first appreciate how judges once viewed their role—not as policymakers, but as interpreters of laws and the Constitution. In 1982, the late SCC Chief Justice Bora Larkin said that judges have

“No freedom of speech to address political issues that have nothing to do with judicial duties…Absolute abstention from political activity is one of the guarantees of impartiality, integrity, and independence.”

That was then, and this is now. In the post Charter era, too many judges have internalized the leftist “living tree doctrine”: the progressive idea that the Constitution continually adapts to evolving social and political contexts. Consequently, judges increasingly advance expansive positions based upon leftist political ideology. Governments elected to pass legislation are unable to tackle important issues without being overruled by the courts. They are spending millions in taxpayer dollars fighting Charter challenges—often brought by only a handful of complainants.

Just recently, Ontario’s Superior Court sided with just two University of Toronto students to stop the provincial government from dismantling bike lanes to ease chronic traffic congestion. Under the Charter’s Section 7, protecting the right to life, liberty, and security of the person, the court ruled that the Ontario government cannot “knowingly make the streets less safe.” Talk about begging the question. Meanwhile, an effort by the Ontario government to remove drug injection sites, including near schools and daycare centres, has been paused by the court pending another s.7 Charter challenge.

In yet another case with major national precedent impact, Ontario’s Superior Court held in 2023 that homeless encampments must effectively remain in place until shelter spaces are found for each resident. The City of Waterloo attempted via municipal bylaw to remove a 70 structure homeless encampment on city property. That bylaw was once again held in violation of s.7 of the Charter:

“The constitutional right to shelter is invoked when the number of homeless exceeds available and truly accessible shelter spaces.”

That same court agreed in 2023 with just seven environmental activists challenging Ontario’s climate plan. It took judicial notice of the “indisputable fact that Ontarians are experiencing an increased risk of death” from climate change. According to Ecojustice lawyer Fraser Thomson, who represented these activists, the ruling “effectively boxes Ontario in and subjects its climate record to full Charter scrutiny.” The Supreme Court recently denied Ontario’s appeal request in the case, which is now heading back to court. This, as similar youth-led climate cases are making their way through the courts in other Provinces.

Meanwhile, last month’s International Court of Justice ruling that a clean environment is a basic “human right” was hailed by climate zealots as a major victory which will inform future court decisions and legal challenges—including the new federal major projects Bill C-5.

Courts cannot be the exclusive arbiters of social and economic policy. Judges are unelected elites appointed through a highly political process by reigning federal and provincial governments.

So what to do?

Premiers are increasingly looking to the Notwithstanding Clause. Routinely called the ‘nuclear option’, it is actually a quite legitimate use of s.33 of the Charter. It is also the most powerful tool governments have to assert parliamentary sovereignty over law making.

Let us not forget that from 1982 to 1985, Quebec “notwithstood” everything. More recently, Quebec and Alberta have considered forming an “autonomy alliance” which could create a “special deliberation mechanism for legislative bills and include the Notwithstanding Clause to dissuade court challenges.”

If only such a mechanism could reform federal catch-and-release bail laws. In 2023, Justice Harrison Arellano released violent offender Randall McKenzie, citing Criminal Code embedded bail rules mandating “vulnerable population” considerations:

“It’s a very iffy case. I appreciate all the violence in his record, but part of that is his native background, education and employment opportunities.”

Six months later, McKenzie murdered OPP Constable Greg Pierzchala. The shocking case highlighted 2018 federal Criminal Code amendments ushered in by Jody Wilson Raybould, which codified the “principle of restraint”: the idea that bail must be granted at the “earliest possible opportunity” on the “least onerous conditions”. Despite limited subsequent tweaks to the Criminal Code by the Liberal government, nothing fundamental has changed. When asked whether Canada is soft on crime, Canada’s new Minister of Justice and Attorney General replied that “we cannot operate in the space of slogans and sound bites.”

Having created an environment in which the property of Canadians is unprotected from theft, vandalism, and destruction, our courts have now gone one step further—to vitiate our property rights altogether. In early August of 2025, the British Columbia Supreme Court issued a decision that will ripple far beyond the Pacific Coast. On 7 August 2025, Justice Fitzpatrick released an 863 page judgment in Cowichan Tribes v. Canada. It recognizes Aboriginal title for the Cowichan Tribes on Lulu Island in Richmond. The court also confirmed a constitutionally protected food fishery on the southern arm of the Fraser River.

The judgment did not come with immediate seizure of homes or commercial buildings. Instead, it suspends enforcement for 18 months to allow governments to negotiate with Cowichan leadership. Yet within that same order, the court declared certain Crown and municipal interests “defective and invalid”. It directed both Canada and the Province to reconcile Crown grants and third-party titles with the newly recognized Aboriginal title.

This was not an isolated rural tract. The affected lands overlap industrial port terminals, container yards, municipal lands, golf course areas, farmland, and sections of Richmond’s valuable waterfront. The decision punctures the assumption that urban, developed land is exempt from historical title claims. How did this happen?

Since 2019, B.C has been legally committed to aligning all provincial laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), through its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. This statute obliges the province to “take all measures necessary” to align its laws with UNDRIP and to implement an Action Plan across all ministries.

Key UNDRIP provisions relevant to this ruling include:

Article 26–Recognizing rights to lands traditionally owned, occupied, or used, and requires states to give legal recognition and protection to those rights.

Article 27–Requires a fair process recognizing Indigenous laws, traditions, customs, and land tenure systems.

Article 28–Prefers restitution of land over monetary compensation when land has been taken without consent.

These are not symbolic statements. They create a policy lens through which every government decision, legislative act, and court interpretation is now filtered in British Columbia. The 2023 decision in Gitxaala v. British Columbia held that the Declaration Act does not, without more, make UNDRIP directly enforceable in Canadian courts. However, it did clarify that provincial law must now be amended to comply. In other words, the Declaration Act is a policy spine; once bent toward restitution, the system must follow.

The clearest precedent for how this may unfold is the 2024 recognition of Haida Nation title over Haida Gwaii. That agreement between BC and the Haida Nation was ratified through legislation affirming Haida title across the archipelago. Private property continued under existing ownership, but the jurisdictional authority gradually shifts to the Haida Nation through structured reconciliation.

Haida Gwaii demonstrated that it is possible to integrate Aboriginal title into the modern legal and economic system without triggering a market collapse. It also showed that once a recognition framework is negotiated, the precedent can be adapted to other rural or urban regions. This ruling is a seismic shift in Canadian law and life. Taking a 10,000 foot view, the pattern becomes visible:

(1) Legal foundation—UNDRIP embeds the principle that indigenous title exists wherever historical use can be proven;

(2) Legislative alignment—The Declaration Act commits BC to aligning its laws and policies with UNDRIP;

(3) Judicial recognition—Courts, interpreting evidence through the UNDRIP lens, grant declarations of title, even in densely populated urban areas;

(4) Negotiated authority—Governments then negotiate implementation frameworks allowing private property to continue, but under a dual-authority system.

Repeat this process across multiple regions, and you normalize a structural shift in what “ownership” means. We move from Crown-rooted title to layered sovereignty. We forge a reconciliation pathway to international governance.

While reconciliation is often framed as a domestic process between governments and indigenous nations, the Richmond ruling also reveals how this pathway can serve as a bridge to international oversight and influence under the United Nations system. The trajectory begins to look something like this:

(1) Local recognition—Courts establish Aboriginal title and dual authority over land;

(2) Embedding UN frameworks—Domestic law incorporates UNDRIP, binding local decision to an international instrument authored and maintained by the UN;

(3) Expansion and replication—The model spreads to other jurisdictions, rural and urban, establishing a multi-regional network of UNDRIP based governance;

(4) International oversight—Disputes over rights and jurisdiction can be reviewed by UN human rights bodies or Special Rapporteurs on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, giving international actors a role in interpreting our domestic land laws; &

(5) Sovereignty erosion—Over time, national governments retain nominal ownership frameworks, but the standards, enforcement mechanisms, and ultimate interpretations rest with a supreme international authority.

This is hardly theoretical. In 2019, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) formally warned Canada over the Trans Mountain Pipeline, Site C Dam, and Coastal GasLink projects. It urged suspension of these major national infrastructure projects pending free, prior, and informed consent from impacted indigenous groups. In effect, an unelected UN body with no domestic legal authority applied pressure on huge projects impacting millions of Canadians.

In New Zealand, the Whanganui River and Te Urewera forest were granted legal personhood under Māori governance, embedding a parallel authority system into their national law.

In Australia, the landmark Mabo decision and the Native Title Act of 1993 have created a framework where indigenous claims can reshape land use and governance at scale.

The Richmond case follows the very same structural template—but not in a major North American port city. This poses serious risks for property ownership, finance, and infrastructure projects in Canada:

(1) Mortgage security—a mortgage is only as strong as the certainty of its collateral. Counsel for the Cowichan Tribes indicates that some future transactions within the declared title area may require Cowichan consent or interaction with the Crown. That introduces new approval timelines and potential conditions precedent, altering lender risk profiles;

(2) Permitting and public works—The Richmond title lands overlap industrial corridors and municipal properties. Once the title is recognized, any Crown authorization, whether for infrastructure upgrades, dyking, or port expansion, requires consent from the titleholder or constitutional justification. Even with an 18 month suspension for “orderly transition”, the friction cost for projects will be magnified;

(3) Market perception—Premier David Eby has said private property with a clear title remains foundational. Those assurances are aimed at market stability, but are not legal guarantees. The Haida Gwaii model shows that private titles can remain intact whilst the underlying jurisdiction changes hands; &

(4) Western allies and ripple effects—If you live in the U.S., then you must understand that this is not a merely Canadian phenomenon. The precedent set in Richmond shows how UNDRIP and related reconciliation frameworks can be domestically seeded to alter property regimes, without legislative plebiscites on sovereignty transfer.

The immediate impact that is most important to understand is that the Richmond decision brings Aboriginal title into an urbanized, port-adjacent environment. It suspends immediate enforcement but establishes the legal fact of title, directs reconciliation of Crown and third-party interests, and sets a procedural path for all future claims. Primary documents such as the full judgment and legal commentaries make it clear that this is both an historic recognition and a live test of how urban Aboriginal title will interact with modern markets.

So what comes next? Appeals that may delay but not reverse the trajectory? Official mapping of the title lands for lenders and insurers? Negotiated frameworks modelled after Haida Gwaii? Replication of this reconciliation model in other jurisdictions such as the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand? This case serves as a reminder that property law can be altered without changing a Constitution by embedding international frameworks into domestic law and interpreting them through national courts.

The Richmond ruling is a clear warning that even land long assumed to be secure, urban, developed, and fully titled can be brought under new jurisdiction—without public vote or legislative change. Property rights that once felt absolute can shift beneath our feet through a combination of court decisions, international agreements, and negotiated governance frameworks.

The Richmond ruling is more than a local legal decision. It is a live demonstration of how the state can re-engineer society by fundamentally altering property rights, redistributing jurisdiction, and introducing international governance into local land management. It shows how very prescient Bastiat was two centuries ago, when he described the right to hold personal property as vital preservation of our civil liberties and to curtailing the growth of an all-encompassing, expanding, authoritarian state.

In an authoritarian state, rights derive from government and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from God and are granted to the state. In the former, people are subjects, only allowed to own property, pursue an education, work, speak, and pray when and how their government permits. In the latter, people are citizens, who agree to be governed in a covenant of consent that must be periodically renewed and is conditionally revocable. It is this clash between the authoritarian and the democratic that is the major ideological conflict of our time—not some concocted, prejudiced notion of an East-West divide, or of a resurrected crusade against Christendom or Islam. Politics, religion, and culture are merely battle grounds on which the main theatre of war is waged.

Authoritarian states are typically not governments of laws, but of leaders, who demand loyalty from their subjects and are hostile to dissent. Democratic states, by contrast, make no or few demands, but depend almost entirely upon each of us voluntarily assuming the responsibility of protecting the freedoms of everyone else around us—regardless of race, ethnicity, creed, ability, sexuality, or gender. This is what it means to be equal before the law. That equality consists not only of rights, but of freedoms, essential among which is to be protected from legal plunder by an oppressive state populated by greedy, evil men.

Listen to this commentary here: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-rgddq-1947f5c

Though the modern tradition of Mother’s Day is only about a century old, various cultures throughout history have set aside time to pay homage to mothers. The earliest Mother’s Day celebrations can be traced back to the Spring festivals of Ancient Greece, honouring Rhea, the mother of Zeus. The Romans called their version of the event “Hilaria”, celebrated on the Ides of March via offerings in the temple of Cybele, the mother of gods. For Christians, this celebration involves paying homage to maternity through the lens of God’s revelation and is at the very heart of our faith.

Early Christians celebrated the festival on the fourth Sunday in Lent in honour of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ. In England, King Henry III (1216-39) officially established the first “Mothering Sunday” to commemorate the church as the symbolic religious mother. In 17th century England, the festival was expanded to include all mothers with “Mothering Sunday” or “Mid-Lent Sunday”, celebrated on the 4th Sunday in Lent, which is of course the 40 day period leading up to Easter. Besides attending church services in honour of Mary, children returned home with gifts, flowers, and special Mothering Day cakes that were important parts of the celebration. When Mothering Day was originally kept in England, parishioners delivered gifts to the church where they were baptized. They would also bring gifts such as cakes to their mothers. These became known as “Simnel Cakes”, marked with a figure of Christ or Mary to show their religious significance. Gradually, the custom was applied to honouring our own mothers as well. However, the religious concept of Mothering Day was emphasized throughout that period of European history.

The foundation for the most recent edition of Mother’s Day is fairly well known. American philanthropist Anna Jarvis (1864-1948) originated Mother’s Day to honour her own mother, who died on 9 May 1905. Jarvis initiated a campaign leading to a resolution passed by U.S. Congress on 10 May 1913, making the second Sunday each May a national holiday “dedicated to the memory of the best mother in the world—your mother.” The following year, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation designating the second Sunday each May as “Mother’s Day”. This contemporary tradition was quickly adopted in Canada, prompting Pastor George Kerry of the Central Methodist Church in Calgary to deliver a famously touching sermon on Alberta’s own inaugural Mother’s Day.

The Christian connection with and influence in establishment of Mother’s Day is indubitable. The movement began in the Methodist-Episcopalian Church through the efforts of Jarvis, and it had to be celebrated on a Sunday. It was by design that the early way of keeping Mother’s Day in the 20th century would revive and honour the English Mothering Day rites, including Sunday attendance at the church of one’s baptism. As we know, gradually, more commercial sentiments were added, such as flowers, gifts, greeting cards, candy, and the like. But this in no way negates the Christian tradition at the core of Mother’s Day, or prevents us from choosing to observe the day in a way that is closely connected to profession of our Faith.

Our scriptural narrative discloses the inclusion of mothers in God’s divine purposes from creation to new creation. That great project is both unsustainable and unimaginable without mothers giving birth to mankind to cultivate God’s good creation. Indeed, God’s first command to us was made in Eden, with the exhortation to go forth, be fruitful, and to multiply. Such propagation is necessarily through the maternal womb, the very incubus for all humanity. Even after the first of us tarnished the goodness, beauty, and simplicity of that plan through disobedience and the Fall of Eden, God never gave up on Eve or the plan.

God’s exaltation of mothers is consistent throughout the Bible. God could have chosen a different person to lead the Exodus than a man who was saved by the protective intuition, faith, and wisdom of his mother. God could have communicated the necessity of humbly bold faith through someone other than the persistent mother from Syrophoenicia, whose fierce commitment to her daughter prompted Christ to praise her faith and heal her daughter (see Matt. 15:28). It is her bold humility—both kneeling at Christ’s feet but also expecting God to be who God is, just as in the psalmists laments (Ps.42)—that exemplifies the kind of faith which pleases God. Her faith, like that of so many others in the Gospels, sets the stage for Christ’s restoration of God’s good creation.

The fact that God freely chose to communicate to and accomplish the divine plan through motherhood tells us that the imago Dei in mothers is expressed by their participation in building God’s Kingdom. The plan to redeem an errant and corrupted creation by entering into it as the Word made flesh took shape when God became human in the person of Jesus Christ—the essential act enabling our redemption. Genesis 3:15 is often called the protoevangelium, or “pre-gospel.” In it, God says to Eve that the tempter will attack her and her offspring—but that her Son would crush the enemy’s head.

God could have chosen to redeem the world in any way aligned with his omnipotent divinity, but selected incarnation. He chose to invite Mary, a poor young Jewish woman, to participate in that process. The triune God of Heaven chose the peasant girl Mary of Nazareth to be the mother of Jesus, the eternal and only begotten Son. From her body, God took flesh. From her milk, God received sustenance. Under her guidance, God the Son grew in wisdom and favour with his Father and fellow men (Luke 2:52). The body and soul investment of her motherhood was indispensable to a divine redemptive plan realized in Jesus the Messiah—the Son of God and Son of Mary:

Motherhood is not something we as Christians should regard as a mere cultural or familial issue. Motherhood is the vehicle through which God chose to redeem the world. Women and mothers are thus not ancillary to Christianity; they are instead at the very heart of the story. Seen in this light, motherhood is a Christian act. Not only do we give thanks to God for our very lives, made possible by our mothers, but we also praise God for accepting Mary’s tenacious faith—and designating her body to bear the fount of eternal life.

Mothers: God honours you. The silent sacrifices that no one else sees—of your body, soul, and spirit—are seen and celebrated by your Father in Heaven. These are the very ingredients the Lord uses to accomplish his ongoing reconciliation of all things. To honour or remember our mothers on just one particular day each year, without also doing so in everyday living, would of course be wrong. The secular world tries to repair such failure to always honour our parents by dedicating a singular Sunday to mothers. As Christians, we are to honour our parents at all times, just as Jesus did:

My own mother, Lorraine, turned 79 years of age on the 2nd of May. Her birthday got me thinking about how I could possibly honour her on this “Mothering Day”? Last year, upon my father’s passing, I eulogized him by penning “Five Lessons From My Father”. This year, I decided to share Five Gifts From My Mother:

(1) Life—What a blessing it is just to be alive. To breathe, to think, to move about, to work, to play, to be part of a family, to have friendships, and most of all, to give thanks and praise to God for it all. Just like everyone else, without my mother, I simply would not be here. Everything I have written, every thing I have done, all of the clients I have helped, the law firm that employs many great people, my own children, and yes—even GreyMatter—only exist because my mother bore great physical pain and emotional strain just to birth me. In a world where the number one killer of human beings is now abortion, that is no small thing. My mother loved me before I was ever born, and has never stopped, even though I have not always honoured her in the way that she deserves, in the way that God commands, or which Jesus demonstrated for us;

(2) Classical Music—My mother has always loved classical music and the great hymns. This comes quite naturally to Lutherans, since the founder of our church was an audiophile. Luther sang, wrote many hymns, and inducted congregational singing into liturgy. Mom taught herself to play the organ 50 years ago and has continued playing these hymns ever since. My father never shared this love for the classics, nor do any of my four siblings. I was mom’s fourth child, the odd one, a mostly non-verbal pre-schooler who learned to read from comic books, the English dictionary, the Bible, and a set of used World Book Encyclopedias that ended at 1969. For a time, I actually wondered whether the practice of recording human knowledge was actually carried forward into the 1970’s! I spoke with a terrible stutter and so spent more time thinking than talking. I was taunted mercilessly and learned that it was safer to live inside my own mind palace than to risk conversation with fellow Homo sapiens. We had little money and so my mother had to be quite frugal. She stretched dollars like the elastic bands that banks once used to bundle them. I remember a promotion that Safeway had back in the 1970’s whereby customers could get an LP record from a collection of great composers if they spent a certain amount on groceries. Since we had a family of 7 with 4 growing boys, there was never any trouble with cresting this threshold. I will never forget being in Safeway with my mother, helping her to select the next record album. Sometimes, she even let me do it. We would bring them home and listen for hours: Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and on and on. I had such a busy mind that I grew to love the calm that these inspired composers granted through their musical genius. Anyone who has listened to Handel’s Messiah, for example, with its libretto drawn from the Book of Isaiah, understands that such majesty can only come from God. To this day, I still delight in classical music and have it always on in my office while working. In fact, I am listening to Bach as I write this. It is only through my mother that I received this incredibly sustaining gift, and I shall never listen to classical music without instantly thinking of my mother;

(3) Charity—My mother is frugal, but she was never cheap. She taught me the value of Christian charity, and to be generous whenever and wherever possible. Our Lord tells us that it is better to give than to receive, and my mother was always this way. She worked at sewing our clothes. She would go without to ensure that we had everything we needed, from home made pizza, to shoes, to birthday cakes with spare change baked inside. She also volunteered in the church, teaching Sunday School, serving in executive roles on church council, transporting elderly and infirm congregants to and from Sunday service, and tithing for the offering plate. When I left home to attend Camrose Lutheran College at barely 17 years of age, it was my first time being away from my parents. There was an active party life on campus into which I was quickly initiated and then engulfed. Within a short time, I had squandered all of the money I saved during the previous Summer. I did not have any more $ for groceries. During one two week period in the dead of Winter, I lived on a diet of one Chef Boyardee can of Beefaroni and a slice of bread per day. When that $ ran out, I was living on Crunchie chocolate bars. When my mother discovered my predicament, she instantly began sending me weekly care packages filled with nutritious food. She met me with charity rather than chastisement. She did not blame or punish me. She just loved me so much that she wanted me to be able to eat and to pursue my education, despite my evident stupidity. Mothers have this innate, God-like ability to love their children unconditionally, no matter how far they stray from the straight path;

(4) Christian Education—Those of us raised in the Lutheran church must study. Martin Luther is without peer as a Protestant theologian. He was a gifted and prolific scholar. When I read the brilliant Eric Metaxas biography of Luther in preparation for my interview with Eric earlier this year, I was astonished by the depth and breadth of Luther’s scholarship. He actually translated the very first German Bible, which is still being published and read today. My mother gifted to me an introduction to Lutheran theology and its discipline. Luther was, after all, an Augustinian monk prior to authoring the Reformation which would reshape Christendom, both within and without the church. My mother consulted her Bible daily, read theological texts, digested daily devotionals, and participated in Bible groups. She was a fine example of Christian devotion to study and to the Word. In my turn, Sunday school, three years of confirmation, and then two years of study at Lutheran college all helped form the directing mind of GreyMatter. The eclectic nature of our guests and the variety of topics we address on the show are in no small part due to the intense curiosity about the world of ideas with which I was imbued from a very young age. I still consume 2-3 books each week, maintain a full-time law practice, host the podcast, own and operate a Junior A hockey club, and most recently have written a book of essays—some of which are featured in our weekly commentaries. That level of dedication to study would not exist without my Christian education, which I owe entirely to the influence of my mother. But as priceless as this was and is, it is still not her greatest gift to me;

(5) Faith & The Power of Prayer—One of the earliest memories I have of my mother is her saying nightly prayers with myself and my younger brother, with whom I shared a bedroom. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” That was the very first prayer we learned to recite. Later, we also memorized and nightly prayed the 23rd Psalm:

And of course, there was the Lord’s Prayer, recited at home, at church, and even at school:

We also said grace at every meal. But more than these traditional prayers, we were taught to take everything to God in prayer, and to have faith that He would listen. One shining memory of my boyhood is the time when The Billy Graham Crusade came to Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton. I had seen Crusades like this on television many times, and was even named after an evangelist on the crusade, named “Leighton”Ford. The memory of being in that stadium on a bright sunny day, with 60,000 people praying together is indelibly emblazoned on my memory. There is great power in prayer that only the faithful get to experience, which is precisely why we are all constantly driven to share it with others. This is the very essence of evangelism. It is this sharing of the Holy Spirit which founded, built, and sustains all of Christianity. The power of prayer is at once inscrutable, inspirational, aspirational, restorative, comforting, and especially—real. My mother taught us that Faith led prayer makes real changes in our own lives and in those around us. It gets us through tough times and makes us grateful for all that is good about our lives. Picture if you can her look of astonishment when mom heard my eldest son, Lexton, recite the Lord’s Prayer at only 2 years of age; to know that the gift of faithful prayer that she shared with us had been bequeathed to her progeny.

If you are a thinking person, then you can see the evil forces at work to destroy Mother’s Day and even motherhood itself. It is a concept far too exclusive and limiting for the left. The Woke cult holds that if we celebrate one group, class or person, then we risk offending everyone else, especially their chosen disadvantaged intersectional communities (LGBTQA+, BIPOC, etc.). Put another way, we cannot give mothers a trophy without aggrieving the rest of humanity.

But the point of is that mothers deserve to be honoured. They are special. They are unique. They are praiseworthy, even before God. We do not demean childless women by celebrating those who bravely undertook the long, arduous path of motherhood. We do not disgrace anyone when we exalt others; we simply celebrate individual human beings.

My appeal to churches, pastors, politicians, and all those who are pressured to repeal Mother’s Day traditions is this: do not succumb to yet another WOKE assault based upon victimhood mindsets or pretended concerns for social justice. Celebrate Mothers on 14 May. They are remarkable and laudable. We would do well to practice gratitude for mothers without permitting the self-proclaimed wounded and needy among us to ruin what ought to be a special day for mothers. Let us instead focus upon celebrating maternity and even matriarchy by resisting the temptation to appease those who would denigrate Mother’s Day. Let us give “honour to whom honour is due” (Rom. 13:7b) by celebrating the incredible people in our lives whom we get to call “Mom”.

I pray that what I have shared here will give pause for reflection upon motherhood, upon some of your own cherished experiences, upon the continuing cultural relevance of Mothering Day, and most of all, why we must at all events keep it—wholly.

You can listen to this commentary on Grey Matter’s PodBean: https://www.podbean.com/eas/pb-cs3ek-18a85d9