Douglas Farrow blasts new Quebec policies

I hope this essay is read far and wide. Douglas Farrow is one of the most prophetic voices speaking in Canada today. In yesterday's Montreal Gazette, he blasts the new religious education curriculum that Quebec will impose on all school children, whether they are in public or private schools. But in this essay are profound lessons that all Christians, wherever they are in the West, must take to heart.

Farrow writes:

When, I wonder, will we wake to the fact that the situation has changed quite fundamentally in the West? When will we take concerted action aimed at preserving our freedoms, so that they may be handed on to our children and to the next generation?

I think the advent of the new Québec school curriculum, Ethics and Religious Culture, should be a wake-up call. Let me tell you why.

It is not because I am against the teaching of children - older children - about religions other than Christianity. As I teach on a faculty of religious studies, you would hardly expect me to be against that. I am against the new curriculum because it is being imposed even on private and religious schools, and even on young children.

I am against it because - make no mistake about this! - it is intended to wean children away from traditional religious and moral commitments and to train them up in an ideology antipathetic to those commitments, the ideology of so-called "normative pluralism."

It is intended to teach them the Sheerman principle that faith is all right as long as people are not that serious about it. It is intended, in other words, to pry them away from their most basic communities of socialization - their families and their houses of worship - and to unite them in the state, with the state, and under the State, a state that regards itself as more fundamentally important than their families and churches.

It's this same pernicious statism that underlies the recent Ontario Human Rights Tribunal's Christian Horizons decision. The same fundamentalist secularism that animates ideologues like Ontario Human Rights Commissioner Barbara Hall.

This rabid new anti-religious form of fundamentalism is antithetical to religious freedom and antithetical to the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of all the civil rights and freedoms we enjoy in the West. And yet, this secularist fundamentalism is no match for radical Islam. As Mark Steyn has written, it is the vacuum into which radical Islam pours.

Please spread the word about this great essay, and while you are at it, pick up a copy of Farrow's book Nation of Bastards, and Divorcing Marriage, which he co-edited with McGill colleague Daniel Cere. Divorcing Marriage is the best non-religious collection of apologetics in favor of traditional marriage and family that I've read.

Arm yourself spiritually and intellectually for the battle at hand. These two books are essential reading.