by Jim Coggins

"FREEDOM of religion, conscience and expression are among the most fundamental freedoms in a democratic society." They are also "under sustained challenge in Canada," according to the website of the Faith and Freedom Alliance.

The Alliance was established "to ensure that the Christian Faith can be advanced freely in our country." It is a challenging task, especially for an organization which is still in the process of getting established, board member Philip Horgan told CC.com.

The Alliance was recognized as a non-profit corporation in 2004 and gained status as a registered charity in 2007. It next hopes to hire a full-time executive director and increase donations to the point where it is financially stable and able to take more initiatives. That is something that is not easy to do in the current economic climate, Horgan admitted.

The Alliance was created with the encouragement and often the active support of a number of other organizations. These include the Catholic Civil Rights League (CCRL), the Christian Legal Fellowship, REAL Women of Canada, Focus on the Family and the Canadian Council of Christian Charities.

The idea for the Alliance arose as these organizations and others often found themselves working together as intervenors in various court cases.

The Alliance is not intended to replace any of these organizations but to work alongside them. It is also not formally connected to any of these organizations.

"We are an independent entity," Horgan said.

However, there are still close informal connections. Horgan himself is secretary treasurer of the Alliance and also president of the Catholic Civil Rights League. The Alliance board also includes Don Hutchinson, vice president and general counsel for The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. However, these board members do not sit on the Alliance board as representatives of these other agencies.

While most of the supporting agencies have worked together on various legal cases, they have never all worked on the same case. Usually only two or three are involved in any one case, depending on the mandate of the individual agency.

That will continue, Horgan said. In future, the Alliance will also likely get involved in specific cases, particularly those involving freedom of conscience and freedom of religion.

If the Alliance is going to be just one more agency, then why was it created?

On the Alliance website, board chair J. Scott Kennedy stated that the Alliance will protect freedom of religion, conscience and expression "by informing the Canadian public about these freedoms, by providing specialized training for Christian lawyers to equip them to advocate on behalf of the Body of Christ and by intervening in court proceedings where those liberties are at stake."

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It is particularly the second of these strategies where the Alliance has a unique role, Horgan suggested.

The Alliance hosted the 2010 Christian Legal Intervention Academy June 3-5 at St. Michael's College and the Sutton Place Hotel in Toronto. This was actually the fifth such conference but the first organized by the Alliance. Earlier conferences were hosted by several of the other agencies working together.

Such training is crucial, Horgan suggested. Much of the case law regarding freedom of religion and freedom of conscience has only been accumulating over the past quarter-century in relation to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This case law would not have been part of the formal training for older lawyers trained more than 25 years ago. Younger lawyers might have received training in this area, but that training might not have given much attention to the religious perspective.

The 2010 conference was originally scheduled for 2009 but was postponed due to the difficulty in raising funds in the current difficult financial climate.

The Alliance will likely offer further training conferences in future. The Alliance does not plan to have a stable of lawyers on its own payroll but only to enlarge the pool of lawyers able and willing to take on freedom of religion cases.

The Alliance will also serve as a repository of accumulated knowledge on issues relating to freedom of religion and freedom of conscience. It will help Christians, the public and the courts to look at issues in a broader perspective, Horgan suggested. It may also be able to give some advance warning about issues that might be coming down the road. For instance, it had not been predicted that the courts would read homosexual rights into the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1995.

The last 25 years of case law have not been uniformly negative for the Christian church. "We have had some victories," Horgan said. The courts have not necessarily been trying to restrict religious rights but rather to balance them.

However, there are some aspects of these issues that have not been fully understood, and Horgan sees the Alliance's role as providing "a more robust analysis."

For instance, there are often demands for the separation of church and state, but that is not a principle in the Canadian constitution. It might make more sense to talk about the cooperation of church and state, Horgan suggested.

Similarly, courts have begun to recognize that religious groups as well as individuals have a right to practise their religion. Courts have also sometimes recognized that having a secular society does not mean that religion is to be excluded from the public sphere but that religion is only one participant in the public sphere.

On the other hand, Horgan suggested, governments in Canada are increasingly a threat to Canadian religious freedom. In particular, there is a trend in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia to impose "a state-authorized view of sexuality" and other issues through the school system – both the public system and the private system. In the name of tolerance, "the state is often advocating intolerance."

June 10/2010