Western Christianity was and remains the main constituent element in European thought – including rationalist thought, which although it attacked Christianity, was also derivative from it. Throughout the history of the West, Christianity has been at the heart of the civilization it inspires, even when it has allowed itself to be captured or deformed by it, and which it contains, even when efforts are made to escape. To direct one’s thought against someone is to remain in his orbit. A European, even if he is an atheist, is still a prisoner of an ethic and a mentality which are deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. – Fernand Braudel[i]
Mankind in the Christian era possesses one huge advantage over the ancients: a bad conscience. – Egon Friedell[ii]
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Judaeo-Christian ethics and Christianity have shaped and have been a generally positive part of Canadian Aboriginal[iii] culture for 400 years.
In 2011 two-thirds of Aboriginal Canadians religiously identified as Christians.
The ultimately successful British and French conversion of Aboriginal peoples to Christianity began in the 17th century. Like all aspects of European culture, Christianity permeated and transformed post-contact Aboriginal culture. This “Westernizing” acculturation process ended in the mid-21st century, with Aboriginal Canadians by then almost totally assimilated into Canada’s modern, Judaeo-Christian ethics-based culture.
Now, as Canadian society has become increasingly secular, the percentage of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians who are “practicing” Christians has sharply declined, and Christianity itself is no longer the overt, dominant social and political force it once was.
Notwithstanding that, while Christianity as a practiced religion may no longer be the pervading influence that it once was, Judaeo-Christian ethics still form the basis of Canada’s national moral outlook, and present-day Aboriginal Canadians can call themselves lucky that these ethics have comprised such an integral part of their post-European contact history.
At the time of contact Christianity was the foundation of the fundamental moral and spiritual values of Britain and France and greatly informed their laws. In the long post-contact acculturation process experienced by Aboriginal Canadians, Judaeo-Christian moral values, practiced through ethically liberal British/Canadian government policies, have resulted in Aboriginal Canadians not only surviving, but numerically thriving, and being in the positions of significant power and relative material welfare that they are in today.
In view of all this the recent apology from Pope Francis to Indigenous Canadians, demanded by Canada’s Aboriginal leaders, was unjustified and illogical.
In an act both of virtual treason and ahistoricism towards his own Church, the Pope apologized for the Catholic Church’s proselytizing of its faith and doctrines to Aboriginal Canadians, despite the fact that such proselytizing has been its continuous, core, divinely mandated mission since its founding almost 2000 years ago.
Matthew 28, verses 19 and 20, exhorts Christians to:
“Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost:
Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”
In the 5th century, Augustine, reflecting the universalist aims and goals of the Church, wrote[iv]:
“The Heavenly City calls out to citizens from every nation, and thereby collects a society of aliens, speaking every language.”
History records in neutral fashion, as is appropriate for the unfolding of what distant posterity comes to correctly regard as natural and uncontroversial – of history being history and people being people- the early advance and triumph of Christianity over all the formerly “pagan” lands of Europe, Western Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.
(Just as was all of Spain, North Africa, the Middle East and present-day Turkey being “lost” to Islam in the 7th and 8th century an example of the history-being-history “tough breaks”.)
In the mid fifth century, St. Patrick led the conversion to Christianity of pagan Ireland. And for that, he’s still annually celebrated with a raised glass in many countries the world over!
In the seventh century Pope Gregory led the conversion to Christianity of the pagan Angles, Saxons and Jutes of England. There has never been an apology asked for from his Church, (it would have been and is still unthinkable), and he is still regarded as one of the Catholic Church’s greatest popes.
In the ninth century Charlemagne, with papal approval, led the conversion by both force and by persuasion of the peoples of the vast pagan Germanic lands east of the Rhine. Despite that – no, partly because of that– he’s still called Charlemagne – Charles the Great.
In the eleventh century one Stephen led the conversion to Christianity of the pagan lands of present-day Hungary. (Now called Saint Stephen, his sanctification was his Church’s posthumous recognition of his arduous and beneficial spiritual efforts in this regard.)
By the time of St. Stephen virtually all of Europe and Asia west of the Urals had been converted to Christianity from paganism.
“From east to west, from deepest forest to wildest ocean, from the banks of the Volga to the glaciers of Greenland, Christ had come to rule them all.”[v]
None of the descendants of any of these millions of converted, and thus permanently culturally transformed individuals – individuals who as a result, willingly or not, acquired new identities – who suffered what in today’s false, shallow Canadian parlance is called “cultural genocide”- have ever complained about what happened to their ancestors in this regard or about their or their ancestors’ allegedly lost or “stolen” pagan heritage. They’ve never thought to seek apologies from anyone for it, nor has anyone ever thought to offer one.
Again, this briefest of outlines of the first 1000 years of Catholic Church history highlights the inexplicable and illogical nature of Pope Francis’ recent residential schools apology (the similar apologies demanded by Canada’s Aboriginal leaders and given by other Canadian Churches were equally ridiculous) to Canada’s Aboriginal peoples.
It is made even more so by the fact that this Pope, a product of his Church’s colonization and conversion of South American Indigenous peoples, (part of the Church’s proselytizing and conversion undertakings the world over), failed to apologize to the Indigenous peoples of his own home country, Argentina, for the same conduct there- and he hypocritically failed to apologize for his own colonial, proselytizing self!
The commonplace historical phenomenon of cultural loss and transformation, evidenced by the conversions described above – these conversions being only one of the infinite ways that cultural loss and transformation has occurred in the long span of tragedy-soaked human history – has always been near-universally accepted by sensible people as part of the poignant, unchangeable and unavoidable reality of human life and human history.
“In tragic life…
No villain need be: Passion spills out the plot.”[vi]
But in the case of these aforementioned conversions to Christianity, because of its net positive fundamental ethics, the conversions themselves, as evidenced by the cultural similarities amongst European nations, have had net positive outcomes there, as is the net positive case with the early Canadian history conversions of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples.
Canada is and always has been a relatively liberal country, and its treatment of its Aboriginal peoples, in the context of and in comparison with more typical, morally dismal historical norms, because of its Christianity-based ethos, has been admirably conscientious in comparisonto these more negative historical norms.
The origins of this British/Canadian Christianity-based conscientiousness can be traced back to some of the monotheistic, moral teachings of the Old Testament, as incorporated into the New Testament, the latter, to believing Christians, their sacred texts, which in their minds supersede and “explain by the Cross of Christ”,[vii] the former. They have become part of our European Enlightenment heritage.
The Christian ethicist Marilynne Robinson writes[viii] that:
“Liberalism had its origins in the Old Testament…Cranky old Leviticus gave us- gave Christ- not only “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” but also the rather forgotten “Thou shalt love the stranger as thyself,” two verses that appear to be merged in the Parable of the Good Samaritan…The proper objects of our liberality are not limited to those of the same people and religion, because our enemies, those that abuse and injure us, are our neighbours, and therefore come under the rule of loving our neighbours as ourselves…with a recurrent, passionate insistence on bounty or liberality, mercy and liberality, on being kind and liberal, liberal and bountiful, and enjoying the blessings God has promised of liberality to the poor.”
These humanistic, caring and “neighbour”-directed liberal values emphasize the unique value of the individual human being. They were carried into and adopted and expanded by the New Testament, epitomized by Mathew’s Sermon on the Mount teachings in Mathew Ch. 5, which values, incorporating the moral teachings of the Old Testament, over the ensuing centuries, became those that primarily underly the best of Western civilization:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.”
The Canadian colonial experience involving Canada’s Aboriginal peoples was profoundly influenced for the better by these Christianity-based liberal values.
The 17th and 18th century French encounters with Aboriginal peoples were characterized mainly by hit and miss Jesuit proselytizing, based on the Christian notion that Aboriginal peoples had souls to save, and by the fur trade.
The latter, introducing world-changing European weaponry, tools and trade objects of personal and domestic convenience into the lives of Aboriginal peoples, started an irreversible process of Aboriginal cultural transformation that has now ended, as stated, with the almost complete cultural assimilation of Aboriginal peoples into modern, urban-based Canadian culture.
The positive and beneficial ethical effects of European colonization on the lives of Aboriginal peoples only began to be strongly manifested in the early 19th century, after the end of the War of 1812. This event marked the end of the need for military alliances with Aboriginal tribes and bands, and the beginning of the increasingly tragic period of Aboriginal military, political and social decline, and their ever-increasing dependence on Euro-Canadians and Euro-Canadian governments and institutions for their wellbeing.
Again, in what became a classic narrative of worlds colliding, Canada’s Aboriginal peoples were lucky that their fast-waning, technologically inferior, pre-literate hunting and gathering cultures were colliding with Christianity-based, conscientious, “neighbour”- oriented, British/Canadian culture, rather than with the more violent, rapacious and merciless money and raw power cultures of other colonial powers of the era, such as that of the United States or Spain.
Through centuries of gradual constitutional and institutional evolution, British/Canadian culture, by the mid-19th century, had become characterized by a form of political and philosophical liberalism comprised of factors such as individualism duly restrained in the public interest by elected, sovereign legislatures and other state institutions, unfettered Crown sovereignty, gradualism as the approach to change, upholding the rule of law, equality under the law, and an educated, responsible and morally conscientious elite class, all suffused with the Judaeo-Christian ethos.
In Queen’s University Professor Arthur R. M. Lower’s 1954 book, This Most Famous Stream -The Liberal Democratic Way of Life,[ix] Professor Lower wrote of this ethos as tempering and restraining the rank, Darwinian pursuit of simply making money at all costs, and, relevant hereto, as creating in Canada a generally positive and empathic attitude towards Aboriginal peoples:
“Protestantism became marked by… humanitarianism, that concern for less fortunate people, which give it its major modern characteristic. The Evangelical revival in eighteenth century England, which produced both Methodism and the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church and which eventually softened Calvinism into modern Presbyterianism, brought forth a momentous change of attitude. Instead of exploitation, the doctrine of trusteeship; instead of haughty superiority, frank recognition of the brotherhood of all mankind. In the nineteenth century, Protestantism overtook and leapt ahead of Catholicism, in its practical application of Christianity. The old excellent attitudes of the Catholic Church were hardly able to cope with the exploitive equipment of its nineteenth century children. Dark spots in plenty are there in both pictures but Protestantism, in its doctrine of trusteeship, with responsibility transferred to the state, had more effective means of painting them out.” (italics added)
Professor Lower wrote further, describing evangelical Protestantism as:
“… a potent inner corrective (which) exerted one of the most powerful influences on the course of the Industrial Revolution. At its frailest it was a mere aider and abettor of the successful man, surrounding him…with an atmosphere of respectability. At its strongest, it shaped society and acted as a powerful brake on selfishness….One needs to be neither eulogistic nor pious on the subject but to name, along with countless other examples (each of which has its dark side as well as its bright), the abolition of slavery, the missionary movement, social reform in a dozen aspects and, in modern times, the progress of the doctrines of trusteeship for weaker peoples, internationalism as an objective transcending nationalism, and a genuine, if as yet minor, attempt to realize the brotherhood of man through getting rid of racialism.”
The felt obligation inherent in evangelical Protestantism’s morally conscientious “trusteeship for weaker peoples” principle manifested itself in the Indian Act, which necessarily formalized the terms by which Canada’s trustee obligations to Aboriginal peoples would be carried out, and in the creation of Aboriginal training schools, day schools and residential schools.
With respect to these necessary and effective schools, to the generally beneficial operation of which the Catholic Church made the largest contribution, not attempting to teach Aboriginal young peoples to read and write and learn other modern skills, which would have kept them permanently “weaker peoples”, and would have deprived them of the means to survive and thrive in the new industrial world that was upon them, would have been a cruel and inhuman breach- an unchristian breach– of Canada’s moral, trustee obligations to them.
(Just as, in the 20th century, not employing such dedicated public servants as Duncan Campbell Scott to improve the operations and reach of residential schools, so as further the fulfilment of Canada’s moral, trustee obligations to strengthen Aboriginal peoples, would have been an unchristian breach of those obligations.)
Protestantism’s trusteeship principle, a basis for the Royal Proclamation of 1763, manifested itself in the signing of treaties with Aboriginal peoples for the surrender of their land, rather than Britain or Canada, merely applying the age-old, amoral principle of might makes right; just taking the lands.
The evangelical missionary John McLean, who lived amongst the Blood Indians of Alberta, in his 1889 book, A Distant Mirror -The Indians of Canada, wrote of the good intentions and good works of evangelical Protestantism towards Aboriginal peoples. Like all such missionaries, he was concerned not only with the salvation of their individual souls, but with the improvement of the society in which they lived.
McLean wrote of Christian missionaries who learned the native languages and invented script for them, so that they could be preserved, and so that the words of the Bible could be taught more effectively. McLean, an expert on native languages himself, closed his book with the Lord’s Prayer printed in Cree syllabic.
He described in detail some of the practical benefits of Aboriginal people accepting Christianity and the Canadian rule of law, which no Aboriginal leaders today would deny that they improved the lives of their peoples: the ending and outlawing of human sacrifice, hereditary and monarchical-style government, female infanticide, the abandonment of weak and old people, scalping, slavery, ritual torture, blood-drinking, banishment, wife-beating, cannibalism, polygamy, kidnapping and forced adoption.
Joseph Brant, the revered Mohawk leader, was a strong Christian and was absolutely loyal to Canada and Britain.
Evidencing the general buy-in of 19th century Aboriginal Canadian leaders to the new universalist, self-reliant, brotherhood of man, evangelical aspirations being preached, McLean wrote that Brant’s advice to his Aboriginal followers was “to live as good subjects, to fear God and to honour the King.”
He further wrote of Brant:
“He labored earnestly for the welfare of the Six Nations and sought to prevent the introduction of intoxicating liquors amongst them. The education of his own family and the Indians, the directing of his people towards a life of industry and self-support, and the supply of religious influences, employed the last days of the noble chief of the Mohawks.”
Dr. Peter Jones, a famous Aboriginal Christian missionary and Crown loyalist of the mid-nineteenth century, praised by McLean, summed up one of Joseph Brant’s essential, uncomplaining, “stiff upper lip” messages to his fellow Aboriginal Canadians: “Forget sorrow and do your duty.” (How times have changed for the worse.)
Sadly, for today’s Aboriginal peoples, the liberal and universalist spiritual and legal aspirations of these evangelical Protestants of old, including Aboriginal leaders Joseph Brant and Peter Jones, have not come to pass. Their Christianity-based, assimilationist imaginings of Aboriginal spiritual, legal and social integration with all other Canadians, while still remaining culturally distinct and proud, is a more distant and seemingly unreachable brotherhood of man goal than ever before.
The Indian Act and the reserve system were meant to be only temporary, trustee way stations on the road to Aboriginal self-sufficiency, where Aboriginal legal “wards”, though education and integrated living in the physical midst of their fellow Canadians, would shed the weak and dependent status that wardship implies, and would acquire the status of civically adult, self-supporting Canadians, fully able to assume the equal privileges and the equal burdens of that civically adult status.
In this fondly imagined scenario, the trustee purposes having been fulfilled, there would no longer be any need for the trustee obligation, and, following that, no longer any need for the Indian Act or the reserves.
This has not happened.
Instead, the Indian Act and the reserves unintentionally created a massive state of Aboriginal learned dependency. Rather than Aboriginal peoples being put on a road to individual independence, equality with all other Canadians and self-reliance, the Indian Act and reserves have put them on a road to permanent, civically infantile, quais-segregationist dependency.
Aboriginal leaders, clearly hooked on the short-term personal benefits accruing to them from this situation, despite the clear, permanent damage occasioned to their peoples by it, selfishly resist all efforts to allow their people to civically grow up and become equal with all other Canadians.
Instead of the whole of Canada being the aspirational New Testament “Heavenly City” comprised of equal “citizens from every nation… speaking every language”, (Augustine), Canada can be better described as a bifurcated, non-Aboriginal/Aboriginal country- another iteration of the old “two solitudes”, French/English Deux Nations idea.
The non-Aboriginal part of Canada is indeed approximating, at least aspirationally, the New Testament Heavenly City, with its culturally and racially diverse citizenry generally united in the universalist spirit of liberal, individual self-reliance and equality under the law.
Professor Lower, in This Most Famous Stream, is at pains to always acknowledge the “dark spots” of Christianity. I acknowledge the same, and go further, asserting that, necessary, desirable and “true” though they may be for their adherents, all religions, including the Old and New Testaments of Christianity, are basically unhistorical and myth-based, and are a great challenge to accept as truthful in any literal sense.
But given that, because they are believed, they are real. In the Canadian context the issue or question raised by their existence, to this writer, is: Which particular set of religious values and beliefs most accords with liberal democratic values, and thus is most useful and beneficial in terms of bringing about social harmony and civic unity amongst Canada’s racially divided citizenry?
With respect, the Old Testament of the Bible has a particular “dark spot” that the New Testament generally lacks.
The Pentateuch divinely ordains one human group- Jewish people – as God’s “chosen” ones, to whom God promises permanent and sole possession and control of the land mass of Israel, to the God-authorized, (see for example, Deuteronomy), genocidal exclusion of all others.[x] It has an obsession with physical territory.
It proscribes Jews from marrying non-Jews.
Read literally, it is expressly not universalist.
In addition to the acknowledged positive moral teachings in the Old Testament there’s a great deal of blood and land-belonging, exclusionary, tribal thinking in it, (playing out tragically – “no villains there be”), in the Middle East every day), that is nowhere to be found in the much more universalist, pan-human spirit-focussed New Testament. This reality, while, acknowledging what Professor Lower calls the “dark spots” in both, (see the dark and absurd Revelations in the New Testament), constitutes a large part of the fundamental split between Judaism and Christianity.
Yet diaspora Judaism, focussing more on a religious as opposed to a tribal idea of Jewish identity, was and is generally more politically and culturally assimilative, while still preserving Judaism’s cultural distinctiveness.
The establishment of the State of Israel, and then the unfolding of its precarious history since 1948, has caused a return of Judaism there to its original Old Testament, exclusionary, tribal roots.
Necessary though that may be, this has caused complex, contentious and seemingly intractable consequences for both it and the Arab populations of the area.
Tribal passions are spilling out the plot in the Middle East.
In the Canadian context, (taking no position on the Israeli Arab situation), as evidenced by those complex, contentious and seemingly intractable consequences happening there, the modern, diaspora idea of Judaism as primarily a religious, civically assimilative identity is to be preferred and emulated as the Judaeo-Christian model for Canada going forward.
But tragically for Canada, and especially for the vast majority of powerless, marginalized Aboriginal people, their leaders are rejecting this civic assimilation model. They are rejecting all the liberal, universalist aspects of our Judaeo-Christian heritage.
Encouraged by such illiberal legislation as UNDRIP and by illiberal Supreme Court of Canada rulings, (manifestations of our elite classes’ present rejection of many of the universalist principles of classical liberalism and of the New Testament), Aboriginal leaders have embraced the tribal, exclusionary Old Testament blood and belonging model. They have embraced a tribal approach to their peoples’ relationships with their fellow Canadians, to their relationships with the Canadian land, (which they are now often saying is not Canadian land but rather is their land), and to their relationships with the Canadian state.
Aboriginal leaders now seem to be saying, as is literally said in the historical books of the Old Testament, that Aboriginal peoples are somehow especially “chosen” by God – “the Creator”- and are thus somehow humanly different in some vaguely superior way to the rest of Canadians.
In doing so, they illiberally reject the evangelical, universalist ethos that has been the basis of their survival and their present relative well-being.
This illiberal rejection has occurred despite the fact that our historically “weak” Aboriginal peoples have been prime beneficiaries of this New Testament-based, Christian brotherhood of man, Sermon on the Mount- inspired generosity and liberality on the part of successive Canadian and provincial governments throughout the 20th century and increasingly in the 21st century.
Aboriginal peoples, as stated, have been culturally re-shaped and transformed by this generosity and liberality.
The unprecedented, radical political and legal demands now being routinely made by Aboriginal leaders are, in ironic fact, completely rooted in evangelical Protestant, “social justice”-style, Western political and philosophical ideas and practices.
Their demands for quasi- separatist “nation-to-nation” status, for veto powers over federal and provincial laws possibly affecting their “aboriginal rights and territories,” for reparations, for ownership stakes in resource projects and for co-management with the Crown of public lands and natural resources, are all demands that would be inconceivable to pre-contact Aboriginal tribal cultures.
Aboriginal leaders mock and destructively consume the “meat”[xi] they have fed on for the past 200 years.
Canadian Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relationships can now be fairly characterized as estranged, dysfunctional, divisive and harmful to the national interest.
Harmful, tribal race-talk and race-thinking are everywhere on the increase, and any kind of “reconciliation”, as the word is reasonably understood by ordinary Canadians, is an increasingly unattainable goal.
Romans 10:12 says: “There is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, (referencing Canada’s situation, the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples of their biblical day), for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.”
Current Aboriginal leaders would appear to differ with and reject Romans 10:12. By their words and demands they say in effect that there is a difference between the Jew and Greek; between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians.
This is tragic and cannot lead to social harmony and civic unity.
Inhabiting for a moment the Christian, New Testament imagination, if the Second Coming happened, and Jesus came back and saw the situation in Canada today, He would summons Joseph Brant and Dr. Peter Jones to his presence, and they would all retire to the Garden of Gethsemane to weep together.
Peter Best
Sudbury
March 26, 2025
[i] From A History of Civilizations, Penguin Books, New York, 1993 (original in French, 1987)
[ii] From A Cultural History of the Modern Age, Volume 1, Routledge Publishers, New York, 2017 (originally published in German in 1927)
[iii] The writer uses the term “Aboriginal” instead of “Indigenous” because, according to section 35 of the Constitution, Aboriginal is the correct legal term to use.
[iv] Quoted in Tom Holland’s Dominion -How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Basic Books, New York, 2019
[v] Ibid, at page 219.
[vi] English novelist George Meredith, quoted in Alexander Solzhenitsyn – A Century in His Life, by D.M. Thomas, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1998
[vii] Dominion -How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, above.
[viii] From her essay, Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origin of American Liberalism, from her collection of essays on Christian thought, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Harper Collins Publisher Ltd. Toronto, 2012
[ix] The Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1954 (out of print) The title is taken from a sonnet of Wordsworth:
It is not to be thought of…
That this most famous stream in bogs and sands
Should perish…
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.
[x] See Deuteronomy 7:1-6:
- When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Pezzizites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;
- And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shall smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them;
- Neither shall thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.
- For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the Lord be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.
- But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their alters, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.
- For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are on the face of the earth.
[xi] From Othello’s statement about jealously and from George Herbert’s Christian poem, Love, the last two lines of which are; “You must sit down”, says Love, “and taste my meat”: So I did sit and eat.”