The recent arrest of Grace Life Church pastor James Coates in Alberta is not just a travesty because it violates freedom of religion in Canada, but because it is a harbinger of the church to come. From mandatory mask mandates to the banning of indoor church services what we are seeing is the destruction of the old Jeffersonian principle of a separation of church and state (though this was never meant to be construed as a separation of religion and civics). Now instead of a separation of church and state, we have the suppression of church for state.
Pastor James Coates has been enduring incarceration in a Canadian prison until he agrees not to hold church services which violate the provincial health department’s health and safety guidelines.
Coates, who has been an outspoken advocate of the civil liberties of Canadians and a proponent of exercising those liberties, had been holding in-person church services which were in violation of a direct order issued by the Alberta Health Services on December 17, 2020.
According to the document Alberta Health Services directly addressed to James Coates, titled Order Of An Executive Officer, there were physical distancing violations by ushers, church goers without masks on in both the lobby and auditorium, people who were not wearing masks making physical contact while socializing after the services, and apparently nobody was making sure that the occupancy limits of 15% set by the fire code were being observed.
In January, Alberta Health Services issued another order to Coates, demanding that the church be immediately closed until Grace Life Church come into compliance with the December 17th order. According to a report from Faith Wire, Coates continued to hold church services and allowed church goers to make their own decisions about the risks associated with COVID-19.
According to the same report, Coates was informed after he preached services on February 7 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) that he was under arrest for violation of the health ordinances. The pastor responded that to follow the health ordinances he would violate his conscience, which he could not do. The RCMP left without taking Coates into custody, but informed Coates after preaching the following Sunday that he was going to be arrested, advising him to turn himself in. Coates turned himself in on Tuesday.
According to a report from Disrn, the Grace Life Church pastoral staff has taken a stand in defence of the pastor and all Canadians right to assembly. The statement in part reads::
“Given the attention our church has received in recent days, we want to address the broader public on our reasons for gathering as a local church. What follows is not a theological defence. We have already addressed that sufficiently . . .We are gravely concerned that COVID-19 is being used to fundimentally alter society and strip us all of our civil liberties. By the time the so-called “pandemic” is over, if it is ever permitted to be over, Albertans will be utterly reliant on government, instead of free, prosperous, and independent.
As such, we believe love for our neighbor demands that we exercise our civil liberties. We do not see our actions as perpetuating the longevity of COVID-19 or any other virus that will inevitably come along. If anything, we see our actions as contributing to its end- the end of destructive lockdowns and the end of the attempt to institutionalize the debilitating fear of viral infections . . .We believe (people) should responsibly return to their lives. Churches should open, businesses should open, families and friends should come together around meals, and people should begin to exercise their civil liberties again. Otherwise we may not get them back. In fact, some say we are in the cusp of reaching the point of no return. Protect the vulnerable, exercise reasonable precautions, but begin to live your lives again.”
Now, understanding that all of this is happening in a jurisdiction that the United States Constitution does not govern, this case is still illustrative of the general Western trend towards a state which demands total obedience to its law over the law of God. The old Jeffersonian principle of the primacy of conscience over that of positive law, let alone bureaucratic edict, is not just the right of the individual to follow a right-ordered conscience, it is the foundation of a people’s freedom.
Even though there are American cases of states imposing unheard of demands on churches and the faithful under the guise of public safety, even going so far as arresting individuals for participating in church services without a mask and being closer than six feet apart (the inanity of it all!) the fact that a Canadian minister now languishes in prison until he agrees to make sacrifice to the emperor and swear to the emperors primacy over God is beyond troubling. What is happening in Canada, a Western country which supposedly believes in the primacy of conscience, is tyranny. It is the worst kind of tyranny too.
Not only are they demanding that an individual violate his conscience for the sake of compliance, they are demanding that he swear that he will cease placing God first in his life as his ultimate ruler and start worshiping the state on Sundays instead.
James Coates’ situation is instructive for Americans insofar as it shows us what will happen here if the government is allowed to prosecute its self-anointed mission of protecting us from ourselves at all costs to its logical end point. We have already allowed the government too much intrusion on our civil liberties and rights by mere compliance with occupancy limits and “social” distancing guidelines in our churches. If the conviction of religious conscience, which James Coates is in jail for right now, is not a sufficient reason for the government to incarcerate dissidents, then how much longer until those same conscientious beliefs are sufficient reason to incarcerate everyone who shares them? Where does this end?
In communist China, people are thrown in jail routinely for not belonging to the state sanctioned church or who have the wrong religious beliefs in general (and who knows what happens to those who disappear into the Chinese prison system). Take the members of the underground Catholic Church in China, who disagree with the state sanctioned Patriotic Church for example. Or the dissident Uyghurs in the western part of China who are currently experiencing genocide for their religious and cultural beliefs. Incidentally, Joe Biden recently brushed the Uyghur genocide aside as just a “cultural difference.” Or take the practitioners of the Falun Gong as another example. In every case, the Chinese Communist government is jailing and exterminating individuals for the high crime of mere belief in a different god other than the state. How are we in the West any better now? True, we are not actively committing genocide against religious dissidents, but if that is the measure of a free society, what about the unborn?
Thomas Jefferson is often cited as being the father of secularism in the United States. Scholars always turn to Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association as the preeminent defense of the separation of church and state, even though it does not necessarily mean that (separation) in that case. Even if that were the case, Jefferson’s letter clearly shows that a man’s social duties do not have primacy over his duties to God, as dictated by a right-formed conscience.
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & His God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”
Interestingly enough, Jefferson’s letter to the Baptist Association was in response to their fear that the government would infringe on their particular forms of worship. Baptists were not very well liked in 1802 and they feared that they would be persecuted. Jefferson’s views on freedom of religion, however, were not only concerning the ability of a particular congregation to worship freely according to their beliefs.
In a less well known letter to a convent of Ursuline nuns in Louisiana who were concerned that the government would cease to provide the same benefits to their convent as had been provided under French rule, Jefferson, in his response letter written in 1804, not only defended their right to worship according to their conscientious beliefs, but assured them that the government would continue to provide the same benefits they had been receiving under the Catholic French government.
“The principles of the constitution and government of the United states are a sure guarantee to you that it will be preserved to you sacred and inviolate, and that your institution will be permitted to govern itself according to it’s own voluntary rules, without interference from civil authority. Whatever diversity of shade may appear in the religious opinions of our fellow citizens, the charitable objects of your institution cannot be indifferent to any; and the furtherance of the wholesome purposes of society, by training up it’s younger members in the way they should go, cannot fail to ensure it the patronage of the government it is under. Be assured it will meet all the protection which my office can give.”
Jefferson’s reassurance that they have every right to worship God as they see fit under the Constitution of the United States without deference to the dictates of the state has been the resounding majority opinion of American jurisprudence since. So why are we now allowing the state to mandate that we congregate at only 15% to 50% depending on which state you live in? Health considerations are irrelevant to the much higher considerations of the individuals conscientious convictions.
We have given the government far too much power, and in the case of James Coates, he has appealed to the rights of conscience which command himself and his congregation to worship as a community in fellowship; no community-killing masks or social distancing if they choose. That is their God given right and yet the pastor of Grace Life Church sits languishing in a prison cell.
We are moving as a society towards being more like China everyday that we allow the government to dictate how we worship and congregate. James Coates’ case is a blaring example of just how far a once freedom loving people has allowed their government to go in the name of the god of public health. Jeffersonian principles are the principles of societal freedom based on the individual’s right to worship the God of Abraham free of governmental mandates and restrictions. We must return to those principles if we expect to survive this battle for the soul of freedom itself.
In Defense of Man 