By Lloyd Mackey

IN a few weeks, Alvin Esau will pack his bags and head for a three month sojourn in his home town of Winnipeg. Hopefully, before the snow flies in Manitoba, he will be back in Victoria with his wife, abstract landscape painter Sandra Fowler, and their two youngest children.

Esau is a teacher and writer on law and ethics issues, with tenure at the University of Manitoba. To Christians interested in legal, ethical and church-state issues, Esau’s work is well-regarded.

He comes from a Mennonite-Anabaptist tradition, but, like many of his persuasion, he ‘married outside the tribe.’ So, for most of the years he has taught law, he and Fowler have attended evangelical Anglican churches in Winnipeg and Victoria.

In his Winnipeg Anglican setting, he served as chancellor of the Keewatin diocese from 1993 to 1998. He has provided periodic comment on residential school abuse issues.

The state-church part of his legal writing is not part of his teaching at U of M. There, his courses relate mostly to law and ethics. But it is easy, he allows, for observers of the Christian scene to see that the dots are there to connect.  

Probably his best known work in this field was a 2004 book entitled The Courts and the Colonies: The Litigation of Hutterite Church Disputes (UBC Press). He describes the tome as “a substantial tracing of the relationship between the courts and various Hutterite communities in Manitoba.”

Esau says it is common for him to get feedback from people who think he is writing about the oppression of Christian groups in Canada, particularly Mennonites and Doukhobours.

The point he made in that material – as well as in counsel he would give to a wide range of Christian groups – is that the state needs to legislate carefully “on human rights regarding church life,” so as not to interfere with what may well be a church’s “robust lifestyle requirement.”

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When a religious group has a “comprehensive world view . . . and (accompanying) ethical regimen,” then the state needs to avoid “endangering churches.” Simply put, he suggests, the state needs, if anything, to “protect the church to be the church.”

And, hopefully, the protecting of the Anabaptist vision of state and church separation will help Christian people to “know how to live in Babylon.” He is referring to the biblical account of the people of Israel – who were in captivity in Babylon, and complained that they could not “sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.”

Esau encourages Christians to recognize that there are ways to accommodate differences in the larger society. “We live neither under a Taliban, a Christendom or a ‘Seculardom,’” he suggests – pointing rather to what he sees to be the reality of a pluralistic society.

Esau recalls attending a conference of Christians grappling with those issues on the west coast a few years ago, and observing that there was a sharp division between people who took the “witness” ethic – communicating faith values to a larger society – and  those who wished for a “takeover approach.”

His leaning, he indicated, is to opt toward the witness approach, as being less invasive but more effective.

As to the lifestyle transition represented by their upcoming move, he and Fowler look forward to remaining effective in their chosen interests of law, the arts and their commonly-held faith.

And, from their Victoria base, they hope to do some Third World stuff which grows out of those interests.

But that is still to come.  Stay tuned.

September 2007