Canada’s Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, is not a hate speech law. It is a blasphemy law with a secular coat of paint.
The bill criminalizes speech that offends the sacred values of the new progressive orthodoxy. It removes the safeguards that once protected sincere religious expression. It deputizes police officers to determine which beliefs are acceptable and which are criminal. And it does all this while claiming to protect the vulnerable from hatred.
This is the oldest trick in the book. Every regime that has ever suppressed dissent has done so in the name of protecting someone. The Inquisition protected souls from heresy. The Soviet Union protected workers from bourgeois propaganda. And now the Canadian state protects marginalized identities from religious conviction.
The mechanism is identical. Only the sacred object has changed.
Christians need to see this clearly. Bill C-9 is not a well-intentioned law with some concerning provisions. It is the legal architecture for the persecution of the church. If it passes in its current form, quoting Scripture in public will be a prosecutable offense. Preaching the gospel will be a hate crime. And the state will have claimed jurisdiction over doctrine—a jurisdiction it does not possess and has no competence to exercise.
What the Bill Actually Does
Let’s be specific about what Bill C-9 proposes:
It creates standalone hate crime offenses. Previously, hatred was an aggravating factor at sentencing. Now it becomes a distinct criminal element—meaning the prosecution must prove not just the criminal act but the ideological motivation behind it. This invites the state into the business of adjudicating belief.
It criminalizes the public display of designated hate symbols. The bill explicitly names the Nazi swastika and SS bolts. Few will object to this provision in isolation. But once the state has authority to designate symbols as criminal, that authority will expand. Today it’s Nazi iconography. Tomorrow it may be any symbol associated with traditional religious teaching on sexuality.
It creates a new “intimidation” offense with a subjective standard. The bill criminalizes conduct intended to “provoke a state of fear” in another person to impede their access to religious, cultural, or educational facilities. This carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison. The standard is entirely subjective—it depends on whether someone feels afraid, not whether a reasonable person would be threatened. Peaceful protest outside an abortion clinic? Intimidation. Sidewalk preaching near a Pride event? Intimidation. The possibilities are endless.
It removes the requirement for Attorney General consent. Since 1970, prosecuting hate speech has required explicit approval from the Attorney General. This was a deliberate safeguard to prevent the criminal law from being weaponized against legitimate expression. Bill C-9 eliminates this check. Now any police officer or local prosecutor can initiate hate speech charges. The gatekeepers are gone.
It repeals the good-faith religious defense. This is the kill shot. Previously, Canadian law protected individuals who expressed religious opinions or quoted religious texts in good faith. An amendment passed at committee stage removed this defense entirely.
Let that sink in. Under Bill C-9, there is no legal protection for a pastor preaching from Romans 1, an imam reading from the Quran, or a rabbi teaching from Leviticus. If someone characterizes their religious speech as promoting hatred, they can be prosecuted—and the sincerity of their religious conviction is not a defense.
The bill makes the gospel illegal.
The Return of Compelle Intrare
Christians should recognize this pattern. We’ve seen it before.
When Constantine legalized Christianity, the church was a persecuted minority. Tertullian had articulated the first explicit defense of religious freedom in Western history: “It is a privilege inherent in human nature that every person should be able to worship according to his own convictions. One person’s religion neither harms nor hurts another.”
But once Christianity became the state religion, this expansive liberty evaporated. Augustine, facing the violent Donatist schism, formulated a theological justification for state coercion. His reinterpretation of Luke 14:23—compelle intrare, “compel them to come in”—became the proof-text for using force to save souls.
The logic was internally consistent: if heresy leads to eternal damnation, and damnation is infinitely worse than physical suffering, then the state’s use of coercion to suppress heretical speech is not tyranny but mercy. Better to burn briefly here than forever hereafter.
This reasoning powered the Inquisition. Thomas Aquinas perfected it: if counterfeiters of money deserve death, how much more do counterfeiters of divine truth? The Reformers inherited this apparatus and deployed it against Anabaptists and one another. Michael Servetus burned in Geneva with the approval of Protestant leaders across Europe.
We rightly condemn this history. Christians should never have handed the state authority to enforce doctrine. The state has no competence to adjudicate theological truth, and when it tries, it inevitably becomes a tool of oppression.
But here is the point that the modern secular mind refuses to see: they are doing the same thing.
The sacred object has shifted. Instead of protecting God from blasphemy, the state now protects marginalized identities from offense. But the mechanism is identical: speech deemed intolerable by those in cultural power is criminalized, and the state claims authority to adjudicate which beliefs are acceptable.
Compelle intrare is back. The inquisitors have returned. They’ve just changed their robes for business casual.
The Sacred Objects of the New Regime
Every civilization has sacred objects—beliefs, symbols, identities that cannot be questioned without social or legal consequence. The presence of sacred objects is not unique to religion. It is a feature of every human society.
The question is never whether a society will have sacred objects but which objects and who decides.
In medieval Christendom, the sacred objects were God, the church, and the sacraments. Blasphemy against these was criminal. As Western societies secularized, formal blasphemy laws fell into disuse. The U.S. Supreme Court effectively gutted American blasphemy statutes in 1952.
But the impulse to punish offensive speech did not disappear. It mutated.
Legal scholars observe that as blasphemy regulations declined, they were “rapidly replaced by hate speech laws.” The structure is identical—restricting undesirable speech to protect core societal values—but the sacred object shifted from the Divine to protected identity groups.
This is not conspiracy theory. The Hoover Institution traces the aggressive promotion of international hate speech legislation to the Soviet Union during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Soviets’ motive was not protecting minorities but creating legal mechanisms to legitimize internal repression of political and religious dissent.
Eleanor Roosevelt warned that such language was “extremely dangerous” and would be exploited to punish criticism under the guise of protection. She was right. Today, concepts originally deemed arbitrary and dangerous by free-speech advocates are embedded in the legal codes of most Western democracies.
The new sacred objects are race, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Speech that offends these objects is blasphemy. And blasphemy, as always, must be punished.
The Gospel Is Now Illegal
Let’s be explicit about what Bill C-9 means for Christian proclamation.
The gospel declares that all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory. This includes sins that the new orthodoxy celebrates as identity. The Bible teaches that sexual ethics are not matters of personal autonomy but divine command. It teaches that there are two sexes, that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that sexual activity outside this covenant is sin.
Under Bill C-9, publicly proclaiming these truths can be prosecuted as hate speech. There is no religious defense. The sincerity of your conviction is irrelevant. The authority of Scripture is irrelevant. If someone feels that your words promoted hatred, the state can bring the full weight of criminal law against you.
This is not hypothetical. In the United Kingdom, which has already traveled this path, Christian street preachers have been arrested for quoting the Bible. Michael Overd was convicted for quoting Leviticus during a street sermon. Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen faced years of criminal prosecution for posting Romans 1:24-27 on social media.
The pattern is clear. First, they define traditional religious teaching as hatred. Then they criminalize hatred. Then they prosecute the faithful.
Bill C-9 is step two in Canada. Step three is coming.
The Secular State Cannot Ground Its Own Standards
Here is the deeper problem that secular hate speech advocates cannot solve: on what basis does a secular state define “hatred” at all?
Bill C-9 attempts to codify hatred as emotion involving “detestation or vilification” that is “stronger than disdain or dislike.” But who determines where dislike ends and detestation begins? How does one measure internal emotional states? And more fundamentally: on what philosophical grounds can a secular state adjudicate which moral convictions constitute acceptable belief?
The bill imports moral categories it cannot justify. It assumes human dignity is inviolable—but cannot explain why arrangements of atoms possess inherent worth. It assumes hatred is objectively wrong—but has no grounding for objective moral claims. It assumes protecting certain groups is good—but cannot coherently explain what “good” means in a universe of blind physical forces.
Christianity can ground these convictions. Human dignity derives from the imago Dei—all persons bear God’s image because their Creator declares it so. Hatred is objectively wrong because it violates God’s command. Protecting the vulnerable is good because God himself defends the fatherless and widow.
But once the Christian foundation is removed, secular hate speech regimes float untethered. They become exercises in raw political power: whoever controls the definition controls the discourse.
And the definition always shifts. Yesterday it was racial slurs. Today it’s “misgendering.” Tomorrow it may be teaching your children that boys cannot become girls. The ratchet only turns one direction.
The State Has No Jurisdiction Here
Christians must be clear about the fundamental issue: the state has no authority to regulate doctrine.
This is not a “balance” to be struck between religious liberty and public safety. It is not a spectrum where we negotiate how much persecution is acceptable. The state simply does not possess jurisdiction over the church’s proclamation.
The state bears the sword to punish evildoers and commend those who do good (Romans 13:4). It has legitimate authority to prosecute violence, incitement to imminent lawless action, and true threats. These are already crimes under existing law. Canada does not need Bill C-9 to prosecute someone who threatens to bomb a synagogue.
But the state is not competent to adjudicate theological truth. It cannot determine which interpretation of Scripture is correct. It cannot decide whether traditional Christian sexual ethics constitute “love” or “hate.” When it attempts to do so, it has exceeded its commission and become an idol—claiming an authority that belongs to God alone.
The church does not ask the state’s permission to preach the gospel. We do not submit our sermons for government approval. We do not accept that bureaucrats in Ottawa have authority to determine what we may say about God, sin, salvation, or the human condition.
This is not civil disobedience. It is jurisdictional clarity. The state is trespassing where it has no right to be.
A Coalition of the Alarmed
What is remarkable about opposition to Bill C-9 is how broad it is. This is not a Christian grievance. Civil liberties organizations, labor unions, Muslim groups, and LGBTQ+ organizations have all raised alarms.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association warns that the bill’s vague language could criminalize peaceful protest and was rushed through Parliament without adequate study.
The Canadian Labour Congress notes that broad prohibitions could criminalize legal strike actions and picketing—a direct attack on freedom of association.
The Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council warns that removing Attorney General consent eliminates a key institutional check and creates conditions for selective enforcement.
The Barreau du Québec recommends restoring the requirement for Attorney General consent for all hate-related offenses.
Even LGBT Alliance Canada opposes the bill, viewing it as “thought-policing” that risks jail time for merely offending someone.
When the CCLA, the CLC, CMPAC, and LGBT Alliance Canada all oppose the same legislation, something has gone badly wrong. These are not natural allies. They agree on almost nothing—except that Bill C-9 is dangerous.
The government’s response has been to invoke time allocation and ram the bill through committee in two days. When you have to silence debate to pass legislation about silencing speech, the irony writes itself.
The Pattern of Soft Persecution
Christians in the West are accustomed to cultural marginalization. We are mocked in media, excluded from elite institutions, and dismissed as bigots for holding views that were mainstream a generation ago. This is uncomfortable, but it is not persecution.
Bill C-9 represents something different. It is the legal infrastructure for actual persecution—not imprisonment for faith (yet), but criminal prosecution for proclamation.
The pattern is predictable. First, traditional religious teaching is redefined as hatred. Then hatred is criminalized with vague, subjective standards. Then enforcement is decentralized to sympathetic local authorities. Then high-profile prosecutions send a message. Then self-censorship does the rest.
You don’t need to imprison every pastor. You just need to prosecute a few. The rest will get the message. Most churches will quietly stop preaching the controversial passages. Most Christians will learn to keep their convictions private. The faith will become culturally invisible—which was the goal all along.
This is not speculation. It is the documented experience of Christians in the UK, Scandinavia, and increasingly across Western Europe. Canada is following the same playbook.
What Is to Be Done?
Christians must respond with clarity, courage, and defiance.
Clarity means calling Bill C-9 what it is: a blasphemy law for a secular religion. It is not a reasonable regulation of speech. It is the state claiming authority over doctrine. We should not pretend this is a good-faith effort to protect the vulnerable that merely has some concerning provisions. The concerning provisions are the bill.
Courage means refusing to self-censor. If the law passes, pastors must continue to preach the whole counsel of God—including the parts that the state has declared criminal. If Romans 1 is hate speech, then the Apostle Paul was a hate preacher, and we are in good company. The church has survived Roman persecution, medieval inquisition, and communist suppression. It will survive progressive censorship too.
Defiance means making clear that we will not comply. Not out of hatred for our neighbors—we are commanded to love them—but out of allegiance to a higher authority. The state may pass whatever laws it wishes. It may prosecute faithful Christians. It may imprison pastors. But it cannot compel the church to stop proclaiming the truth.
We do not hate those who identify as LGBTQ+. We do not wish them harm. We pray for their flourishing and their salvation. But we will not lie about what Scripture teaches to avoid prosecution. We will not pretend that sin is righteousness because the state demands it. We will not surrender the gospel to keep the peace.
The early Christians were not martyred because they hated Rome. They were martyred because they refused to pinch incense to Caesar. They would not confess “Caesar is Lord” because they knew that Jesus is Lord.
Bill C-9 demands the same confession. It demands that Christians acknowledge the state’s authority to define acceptable belief. It demands that we submit our doctrine for government approval. It demands that we treat the new sacred objects with the reverence they require.
We will not comply.
Christ is Lord. Caesar is not. And no legislation passed in Ottawa changes that fundamental reality.
The Invitation
The church has weathered worse than Bill C-9. We have been fed to lions, burned at stakes, shot in gulags, and imprisoned in labor camps. A committee of progressive politicians in Ottawa is not the most fearsome enemy we have faced.
But we must be clear-eyed about what is happening. The window of religious freedom that has characterized the modern West is closing. The assumptions that protected Christian proclamation for generations are being systematically dismantled. The state is claiming authority it does not possess, and it will use that authority against the faithful.
This is a moment for courage, not accommodation. For clarity, not nuance. For defiance, not dialogue.
The question is not whether Bill C-9 is a good law with some concerning provisions. The question is whether the state has authority to regulate the church’s proclamation.
It does not.
And no act of Parliament can make it so.