During the early 2000s, the New Atheist Movement – led by the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the lesser-known Daniel Dennett – championed the idea that “anti-theism” was the ticket to enlightenment. That is, it wasn’t just true that God didn’t exist – it was good that it was true, because the Bible was a wicked book and, as the title of Hitchens’ most famous book posited, “religion poisons everything.”
In many ways, these men wanted the West to look like Canada – at least, in terms of rates of religious practice. According to polls, a full 89 percent of Canadians do not attend religious worship regularly (regardless of whether they identify with a religious tradition of some kind). According to data released this year by Cardus, when asked, “How often, if at all, do you read the Bible, Qu’ran, or other sacred text?,” 56 percent of respondents said never, 21 percent said rarely, 7 percent said a few times a year, 10 percent said at least monthly but less than daily, and 6 percent reported reading a sacred text daily.
And what has been the result of this? The same month, Polling Canada released a survey of Canadian moral values. According to their data, 21 percent support polygamy; 20 percent believe suicide is morally acceptable; 19 percent were in favor of using illegal drugs (I thought that one was low); 18 percent thought it moral for married people to have affairs; 11 percent supported cloning humans, and an unthinkable 7 percent were willing to tell a pollster that they thought pedophilia morally acceptable. When religious values are abandoned, they do not leave a vacuum – other values rush in to take their place.
Data released in 2022 by Research Co. doesn’t paint a much brighter picture: 73 percent believe divorce is morally acceptable; 69 percent believe sexual relations between the unmarried are morally acceptable and that having a baby outside of marriage is acceptable; 59 percent believe that sexual relations between the same sex are morally acceptable, which is down three points from the year previous, and conversely, 27 percent (up three points) consider it morally wrong, with moral opposition rising to 36 percent among Canadians of South Asian origin, 39 percent amongst those of East Asian origin, and 41 percent among Conservative Party voters. This explains the fact that immigrant Canadians dominate the parental rights movement.
Interestingly, as I’ve noted before, the only good news is on the abortion debate, where 29 percent believe abortion to be “morally wrong,” up four points from the year previous and significantly higher than a decade ago.
On other topics: 66% support same-sex “marriage”; 30 percent support prostitution (down three points); 55 percent support embryonic stem cell research, the practice of destroying living human beings to use their parts for research; and 31 percent support the moral acceptability of pornography. That number is very interesting – a large majority of Canadians use pornography, and so this indicates that many users recognize that pornography is a negative force in their lives and affirms, once again, that a broad consensus on the damage perpetrated by the pornography industry exists and could be used to pass legislation that, at a bare minimum, keeps pornography away from children.
Overall, the picture we get is of a nation with no moral compass. We disagree strongly on nearly every single major moral issue; high margins of support exist for the very practices that have done so much to shred the communities that built our nation and the families that made up those communities. The last bastion of many moral values comes from immigrant communities who hail from more traditional countries, and mass immigration – Canada imports hundreds of thousands of people every year and must do so due to our high rates of abortion and our rock-bottom birth rates – comes with its own challenges.
On the West Side of Parliament’s Peace Tower, a verse from Scripture is carved. It is Proverbs 29:18: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” It is a prophecy as well as a proverb.
