Juno News - Religious freedom and academic freedom are under threat

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:05.480 This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:00:12.880 Hello everyone, welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:00:16.820 This is the Andrew Lawton Show here on True North on Friday, June 9th, 2023.

00:00:22.860 We are coming to the weekend, so we always try to have discussions

00:00:26.160 that are a little bit more substantive, a little bit more in-depth,

00:00:29.080 not subject to the really nitty-gritty, horse-race-y news of the day or all that stuff,

00:00:34.060 but today I wanted to tackle two big freedoms, academic freedom and religious freedom,

00:00:39.500 the latter of which we'll start off with because I saw on CBC the other day

00:00:44.220 an article talking about the fundamentalist Christian movement

00:00:48.100 that wants to remake Canadian politics.

00:00:51.100 Now, if you get by the scary language in the sub-headline that talks about

00:00:55.580 an ambitious anti-LGBTQ group that's part of a populist movement,

00:01:00.100 they're getting all the buzzwords there,

00:01:01.700 the article itself is actually fairly substantive in nature.

00:01:05.200 It talks about some figures that we've had on this very show,

00:01:08.500 people like Pastor Aaron Rock and Pastor Jacob Rayom,

00:01:11.940 who are religious leaders that have decided to go full steam ahead

00:01:15.220 into the political world, which is not a particularly holy place,

00:01:19.440 but nonetheless, it's one that I think a lot of Christians and Canadians realize

00:01:23.540 is an important space to be in, because if you're not there,

00:01:26.660 you're allowing your rights to be trampled on.

00:01:29.640 And I think in the last three years, the church in Canada

00:01:32.500 and houses of worship in general have seen that in ways

00:01:36.400 that were probably pretty unprecedented to those who have only been around

00:01:40.640 for a couple of generations.

00:01:42.240 Despite the fact that worship is so safeguarded in law

00:01:46.600 that it's actually a criminal offense to disrupt worship,

00:01:49.900 we saw governments literally locking churches out of their buildings

00:01:53.680 because they dared to assemble when the public health edicts told them not to.

00:01:58.240 So, is the solution to this in the political realm?

00:02:01.780 Well, court cases have not been going well for people in general

00:02:05.580 that have been filing COVID challenges against the government,

00:02:07.840 and public opinion is often stacked against those who were critical

00:02:11.480 of lockdowns and mandates and restrictions.

00:02:14.580 Now, being the minority does not mean you're wrong,

00:02:17.500 but it does mean you have an uphill battle ahead of you.

00:02:20.380 So, I want to talk about that a little bit with Pastor Jacob Rayom,

00:02:23.440 who hails not far from me in southwestern Ontario

00:02:25.840 from the Trinity Bible Chapel.

00:02:27.980 He's been on the show a couple of times, at least, and joins us again now.

00:02:31.620 Pastor, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.

00:02:34.500 Always a pleasure, Andrew. Thank you.

00:02:35.940 Now, the story that I was just mentioning before I brought you in from CBC,

00:02:41.140 I actually think was generally pretty fair.

00:02:43.660 It gave ample opportunity for a lot of people within the Christian community

00:02:47.660 to comment on this, but I think that the premise of the story

00:02:51.860 is where I have some issues here, because it's clear that there are a lot of people,

00:02:56.160 and I think probably CBC journalists are among them largely,

00:02:59.440 that are very uncomfortable with the idea of Christians mobilizing

00:03:03.160 to get involved in politics.

00:03:05.940 Well, I guess that came out pretty clearly in the article,

00:03:09.000 and it came out in some of the response that we've received to the article.

00:03:13.280 And like you, I thought the article represented me fairly well.

00:03:16.900 They did say that there was only 200 people at church the day that he was there,

00:03:20.100 but we've consistently had about 1,200 people at church on Sunday.

00:03:23.640 So, that was one fact that was off.

00:03:25.400 There might be a few other little things here and there.

00:03:27.280 But, yeah, I mean, I was happy with how my views were presented.

00:03:30.380 So, let's talk about the politicization of the church, if you will.

00:03:35.300 And I don't mean that in a negative way, because one of my frustrations has always been,

00:03:39.400 as a Christian, that oftentimes people in my church communities have been very oblivious

00:03:45.540 to politics, often deliberately so.

00:03:47.600 And I think churches themselves have often been.

00:03:50.380 And I've talked to pastors about this that have said they don't want to alienate people

00:03:53.740 that have different political views in their congregation,

00:03:56.740 which I think is generally a very fair way of putting it.

00:03:59.600 But I don't know if any of those arguments hold when churches are targeted by politics

00:04:05.320 and churches are targeted by the state.

00:04:07.160 And I think we've seen that, especially in the last few years.

00:04:11.060 Well, I think one of the problems that we've had over the last few generations

00:04:14.260 is that people were comfortable living in, I guess, the fumes of a Christian culture. 1.00

00:04:18.860 So, Os Guinness called it, we're a flower pot, or a cut flower generation.

00:04:24.820 So, the flowers will only flower or blossom so long as there's water.

00:04:29.960 But when they're cut from the ground, they're going to die and wither eventually.

00:04:33.740 And we've lost our Christian roots as a society.

00:04:36.900 And one of the things that the churches have neglected to do is teach how Scripture itself

00:04:42.120 interacts with public policy, which is one of the roles of the pastor in discipling the people.

00:04:47.400 And so, that's something that I've been trying to work on with my congregation over the last several years.

00:04:52.600 And I know a few other pastors have awakened to the fact that this might have been a deficiency.

00:04:57.080 Has this always been something that you've been somewhat more alert to than some of your colleagues?

00:05:02.400 Or has this been a more recent revelation for you?

00:05:06.620 I actually thought my colleagues were more alert to it than they were.

00:05:11.060 So, consistently, I mean, I've had people in my church come back and say they've listened to my sermons from 10 years ago.

00:05:16.320 And they say, yeah, we can understand why you've taken some of the stands that you have.

00:05:20.100 Because you were saying the same things 10 years ago.

00:05:22.720 But I have been, I guess I've been broadsided by the deficiency that is there within a lot of churches.

00:05:29.640 And it's disappointing.

00:05:31.640 Yeah.

00:05:32.120 And one of the things I think I felt generally in society,

00:05:35.600 and I take this not just looking at churches or places of worship, but even businesses,

00:05:40.060 is that when liberty was taken away as swiftly as it was, going back to March 2020,

00:05:46.360 people started to be very content to settle for small things.

00:05:50.760 So, you know, for example, when people were allowed to eat on patios,

00:05:54.340 when restaurants were still shut down, they were all grateful because, well, at least we could do something.

00:05:58.980 And I feel that places of worship were very similar as well.

00:06:02.320 It's like, ooh, whoop-dee-doo, you get to gather in your parking lot.

00:06:05.420 But that's not a win.

00:06:07.100 But things were so bad that these small things were seen as legitimate compromises, I think.

00:06:13.560 Yeah, I didn't think that was a win at all back then.

00:06:16.700 And so when we were going through the first lockdown,

00:06:18.880 I was in the process of uniting our church around the idea that worship,

00:06:24.440 especially worship on the Lord's Day,

00:06:25.820 is something that is to be directed and controlled by the revelation of God and Scripture.

00:06:29.820 And so it's not the government's prerogative to decide how, when we get to worship.

00:06:35.960 It's really up to the Lord Jesus, and he's made clear what his expectations are in Scripture,

00:06:40.540 which includes a free gathering of his people together.

00:06:44.980 So I would definitely agree with you on that.

00:06:48.340 Did you find that there was a level of camaraderie with leaders from different faith groups?

00:06:55.880 Did you find that the emams and the rabbis and the pastors and the priests were generally united on this, or no?

00:07:03.380 I've had very little interaction with people outside, if any,

00:07:08.000 of our own kind of theological, I guess, grid or confessional statement.

00:07:14.440 So some of the men that were named in the article that is in question, I know them quite well.

00:07:20.380 But outside of that, the interaction has been minimal.

00:07:23.740 And I think that right there may be part of the problem.

00:07:26.340 I mean, ideally, people would have all been gathering together in the same way that I think a lot of atheist libertarians

00:07:32.160 may have gotten together with Christian social conservatives to resist lockdowns.

00:07:36.440 But I think that there should have been more of a push from people of all faith groups and people, I think, not even faith groups.

00:07:42.800 I mean, people of all groups in society to understand the importance of religion to people who are adherents to religion.

00:07:49.420 And that was, I think, the big problem is that you have a culture that, as you mentioned, 0.93

00:07:53.480 has been drifting away from any sort of spiritual grounding.

00:07:57.400 And it becomes very easy to just use COVID as justification, to just give it that final kick.

00:08:04.760 Well, the reality is, is our civil rights and liberties that we have inherited and that have been ours since time immemorial,

00:08:13.200 they haven't come to us from a smorgasbord of faith groups, as we might call them.

00:08:19.220 But they've come to us and they're deeply rooted within the fertile soil of biblical Christianity.

00:08:24.380 And so these have been passed down to us from, you know, our Christian forebears.

00:08:30.060 And if anyone should have stood up, and this was the greatest disappointment to me during the lockdowns,

00:08:35.380 if anyone should have stood up, it would have been, it should have been those Christians who believe the Bible.

00:08:39.120 But I'm afraid that perhaps our history has been lost and perhaps some very important teachings from Scripture have been lost.

00:08:46.220 And it's my, it's one of my missions to help recover that.

00:08:49.220 Well, and beyond that, you actually had Christians that were not just declaring neutrality on this,

00:08:54.960 but some that were going out of their way to look at churches like yours or Henry Hildebrandt's fellowship in Elmer, Ontario,

00:09:02.900 the Church of God, and saying, well, they don't represent us.

00:09:05.680 They're not real Christians. 1.00

00:09:06.760 We're happy to go along with this.

00:09:08.100 We're happy to do this.

00:09:09.140 And I think you compound that with a media that wants to put a very, very decidedly pointed view of what a good Christian is forward.

00:09:18.720 And you have that very dynamic that led us here.

00:09:22.800 Yeah.

00:09:23.280 And that's, there's always people that will do that and they'll try to distance themselves from you.

00:09:27.840 If you're finding yourself in hot water and you become a little bit of a hot potato, I guess.

00:09:32.440 And we certainly found ourselves that way.

00:09:34.960 And there were people who I thought were on our team before we went into these lockdowns of the last few years,

00:09:41.300 starting in 2020, that we didn't, we haven't come out.

00:09:44.400 And, you know, let's just say I haven't gotten some Christmas cards in the last few years.

00:09:48.700 Let me talk to you about the road forward, because, you know, obviously in your case,

00:09:53.180 which we've covered at True North and I've talked about it on my show,

00:09:55.480 that the courts have not been kind to you and they have not been kind to a lot of these legal challenges

00:10:00.220 that have come up against COVID regulations in general, not just from, from churches,

00:10:05.640 the political class, you know, liberal, conservative, NDP, Bloc Québécois,

00:10:10.160 generally speaking, all united in support of at least some form of this.

00:10:15.000 Now, whether that changes now with a new conservative leader is something that I think people have debated

00:10:20.420 and should debate.

00:10:21.340 But the point is that generally speaking, it was very isolating being you, I suspect,

00:10:26.160 if you were looking around at the world, not your faith community.

00:10:30.060 And I'm wondering why on earth you would still have a level of hope or confidence

00:10:35.440 that you can make changes in that world, that you can actually get politically involved.

00:10:39.380 Because I think a logical outcome to what you've gone through would be that

00:10:42.580 we need to just retreat and be even more insular.

00:10:45.860 Right. I heard someone say this morning, I was listening to, I think it was a sermon from another pastor,

00:10:50.380 and he made the point in his sermon that throughout the 2,000 years of the church's history,

00:10:55.040 the church has died several times, but we serve a God who raises the dead.

00:10:59.360 And so my hope is ultimately grounded in a God who has the power to raise Christ from the dead.

00:11:04.360 And this wouldn't be the first time it looks like the church is down for the count.

00:11:08.660 And perhaps what's gone on in the last three years is a real gift from God,

00:11:13.380 because what it's forced us to do is it's forced us to purify as a church,

00:11:18.020 and it's forced us to reevaluate the way we think on a number of things,

00:11:21.220 and it's bringing forward what the Bible actually has to say about matters that intersect with public policy,

00:11:29.180 which are really our foundational rights is Canadians.

00:11:34.700 This is what they were grounded in.

00:11:35.780 They're grounded in the very scriptures and in the actual Ten Commandments.

00:11:40.220 So whether we're going to have a conservative party replace the liberal party in Ottawa,

00:11:46.000 that might slow some of the rot that we've seen in the last little while.

00:11:49.940 But my sense has been over the last decade or a decade and a half that we're either going over the cliff

00:11:56.380 at 100 miles an hour with the liberals or 75 miles an hour with the conservatives.

00:12:01.000 And what we really need is a grassroots reformation that grounds the country again in scripture

00:12:07.380 in a similar way in which we were founded.

00:12:11.180 Let me ask you then, Pastor, do you think that the Bible is politically prescriptive?

00:12:16.060 Do you think that a Christian who adheres to the Bible has to, along with that,

00:12:20.640 have a particular set of political views beyond, you know, views of, you know, the scripture themselves?

00:12:27.880 Well, absolutely, because Jesus said,

00:12:31.700 You render unto God what is God's, and you render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. 0.79

00:12:35.160 And that very statement is politically loaded,

00:12:37.900 because all of a sudden Jesus is declaring that he is the one that decides what belongs to Caesar,

00:12:43.300 and he is the one that decides what belongs to God.

00:12:46.360 And so Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, has delegated to Caesar a certain role.

00:12:52.700 And what is Caesar's job?

00:12:54.180 According to Romans chapter 13, Caesar's job, the government's job,

00:12:57.840 is to protect the good and punish the wicked.

00:13:00.900 And then you, well, who defines what is good and who defines what is wicked?

00:13:04.600 And that's where you get back to, as Paul teaches in the book of Romans,

00:13:08.300 right where that passage is found, it's defined by the Ten Commandments.

00:13:12.160 So all of scripture applies to all of life,

00:13:15.800 and there's not one square inch of this world that doesn't belong to Jesus Christ.

00:13:19.700 And I think for too long, Christians have thought,

00:13:22.880 Well, my Christianity is relegated to my heart.

00:13:25.720 It's relegated to me in a relationship with Jesus.

00:13:28.160 It's relegated maybe to the church if we're not in a lockdown.

00:13:30.820 But at the end of the day, either Christ is Lord of all, or he's not Lord of at all.

00:13:37.320 And so I believe that Christ is not one God among a pantheon of gods.

00:13:41.720 He is the Lord God of all.

00:13:44.420 And that absolutely intersects with all spheres of life, especially political life.

00:13:51.400 I mean, even the statement, Jesus Christ is Lord,

00:13:54.580 that was a political statement when that statement was made in the first century.

00:13:58.320 Because by that point in time, as you know, Rome had become essentially a dictatorship.

00:14:04.580 They didn't call it that, but Caesar was the de facto God of the Roman Empire

00:14:09.060 and declared that he was Lord of all.

00:14:12.560 And so when Christ was born, he was born under the nose of a dictator.

00:14:16.500 And essentially declaring his lordship was a political threat to the Roman system of governance,

00:14:22.000 which, by the way, was absolutely fine if you practiced your religion in your little sphere of Roman life,

00:14:28.260 so long as your religion folded under the orders of Caesar.

00:14:32.960 He gets final say in what goes on in your church or your whatever, your synagogue.

00:14:37.760 And so the early Roman Empire in the first century had a hard time with Christians for that very reason. 0.89

00:14:42.600 And we need to recover that heritage, I think, as believers.

00:14:44.940 Well, to approach my question a different way, I mean, one of the challenges of politics

00:14:49.700 is that so much of what comes up and so much of what's debated is really irrelevant to most people.

00:14:56.820 And even things that are relevant to some are irrelevant to others.

00:15:00.220 So, you know, there are debates on what percentage the corporate tax rate should be

00:15:03.940 and what salaries members of parliament should take home.

00:15:06.680 And I don't think that the Bible is prescriptive on the very intricacies of, you know,

00:15:11.280 what percentage of corporate tax, for example.

00:15:13.660 So I guess the question I'd ask is how much political latitude is there

00:15:17.540 for a Christian, in your view, within our political system?

00:15:21.840 Because on the stuff that does matter, on the stuff where the Bible and other religious texts do speak out,

00:15:28.140 those are often the issues that our political system doesn't want to go near.

00:15:32.020 Well, I think that absolutely.

00:15:35.420 So I think you're in reference to gay marriage or abortion or something like that.

00:15:39.800 Those are issues that are almost perceived as third rail issues.

00:15:42.700 But I also do think that the Bible does have something to say about economic policy.

00:15:47.240 But it does provide an arena in which to operate in.

00:15:51.120 So it provides a fence and then there's freedom within the fence.

00:15:53.960 It provides a fenced yard and there's freedom within the fenced yard.

00:15:57.220 But if you look at the commandment, you shall not steal.

00:16:00.760 Well, that commandment applies to the government.

00:16:06.920 You have to understand that the Ten Commandments were given to a people who had just been released from slavery in Egypt.

00:16:13.720 And the pharaoh was claiming ownership, not just over all private property, but over all persons.

00:16:20.040 And so the whole concept of you shall not steal is that means that just as the commandment, you shall not commit adultery means, you know, a man's not to share his wife with another woman.

00:16:31.840 The commandment, you shall not steal means my property is my property.

00:16:35.380 I can't, you know, you can't come and say, well, my name's Caesar and or my name's Doug Ford or Justin Trudeau.

00:16:41.120 And I get to take your property and do what I want with it.

00:16:43.340 This like free enterprise is wrapped up within that commandment.

00:16:46.780 So this this modern kind of secular socialism that we're living under is a concept that is completely foreign to economic policy that is rooted and founded in Scripture and the economic policy that we've inherited as English speakers.

00:17:01.260 Because our history is so deeply rooted in Scripture itself.

00:17:04.440 But but to jump on that, I mean, one of the things that I found so because you are correct about that.

00:17:08.200 And I say touche on on on that because of your answer.

00:17:11.060 And I will say that it's been infuriating to see so many people try to recast Christianity as inherently socialist.

00:17:17.700 And there's been this this weird wave emanating from sort of the United Church, Anglican Church of Canada orthodoxy that Christianity inherently necessitates state control because, you know, of all the things that Jesus commands us to do as individuals, people think, well, the government should do that.

00:17:34.020 Right. Well, we have to understand that the United Church abandoned biblical Christianity a long time ago.

00:17:39.940 And if you want to look at, you know, one of the reasons our country is in a sorry state that it is right now, it's largely because of the United Church of Canada and their rejection of biblical orthodoxy.

00:17:48.660 Because if you go back 120 years, the turn of the 20th century, 95 percent of non-Catholic Ontarians were in a were in a Protestant evangelical church.

00:17:58.520 And a lot of those churches were were England or were United churches.

00:18:02.120 And so but there was a shift in the 60s and the 50s where they went from being clearly and definitively evangelical to something that is completely foreign to biblical Christianity.

00:18:11.900 So and in every age that you live in, in the history of the church, there is always people who are trying to synthesize the spirit of the age.

00:18:21.680 So the culture of the age with Christianity and call it Christianity. 0.93

00:18:26.240 So you're getting some type of hybrid or some type of mutant between it's it's a mixture of the two.

00:18:32.820 But but that but that is you look at scripture is always considered a compromise.

00:18:37.180 We're not supposed to do that.

00:18:38.760 And you even look at the kings in the Old Testament.

00:18:40.680 He said, well, he did this good, but he kept the high places to the the worship of Baal or the Ashtar of Poles. 0.99

00:18:46.580 And that's nothing more than a synthesis.

00:18:48.320 And that's exactly what these people are doing, whereas the job of the faithful pastor is to put biblical Christianity in antithesis to the spirit of the age, the prevailing sins of the time.

00:19:01.080 And that's really something that I'm I've been trying to do.

00:19:03.640 And there's a number of other pastors who you who you know and are aware of who are trying to do the same thing.

00:19:09.380 Yeah, it's funny.

00:19:10.180 As I was even thinking about what I was going to talk to you about today, I was like, you know, I think there's a much bigger conversation we need to have.

00:19:16.940 So let me know in the comments if you want to have this, because one idea I had would be to bring back some of the folks in this story we were talking about, to bring back Jacob and Pastor Aaron Rock and Pastor Michael Thiessen and have it out on this on a much larger frame.

00:19:30.320 So if that interests you, let me know.

00:19:31.500 I hope we can get you back for that as well, Jacob.

00:19:34.260 That's great.

00:19:34.920 Thanks, Andrew.

00:19:35.560 It's a pleasure talking to you.

00:19:36.820 All right.

00:19:37.180 Pastor Jacob Rayom, keep up the great work.

00:19:39.080 And thank you.

00:19:39.700 God bless you.

00:19:40.200 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:19:51.520 Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show here on True North.

00:19:55.060 Good to have you with us.

00:19:56.100 We started off talking about religious freedom, and now we are going to move into academic freedom, which you may recall reared its ugly head.

00:20:04.640 Not academic freedom, but the threats to it.

00:20:07.140 A few weeks back in my own city, when the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, of which I'm a member, was trying to bring Joanna Williams in for a lecture, and the local library would not rent them a space.

00:20:18.960 They said she would violate every policy they had, their workplace harassment, sexual harassment, their policy on damage to the venue, all this sort of nonsense.

00:20:27.460 And I did file a freedom of information request with the library when that happened.

00:20:32.100 I've not yet gotten that back, but I will certainly have a full report and publish those documents when I do.

00:20:38.860 But I do want to delve into the idea of academic freedom a little bit more, and also talk about the idea of rights.

00:20:44.440 Because this has been one of the most complicated and sometimes annoying trends in our modern political discourse, where someone will say,

00:20:51.980 I have a right to do this.

00:20:53.180 I have a right to do that.

00:20:54.260 I have a right to a safe space.

00:20:56.060 I have a right to this.

00:20:57.200 But there are also things that are very important rights that I would argue are non-negotiable.

00:21:02.300 The right to life, the right to freedom of expression, academic freedom, press freedom, all comes along in that.

00:21:09.300 So at that very event that I was talking about, the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship meeting,

00:21:15.780 I had the chance to hear Patrick Keeney, who is a visiting professor at Chiang Mai University, but he is Canadian,

00:21:21.320 speak about this idea of what he called rights talk, of this idea, as it sounds, just talking about rights.

00:21:28.440 And he'll explain it a little bit more eloquently than me.

00:21:31.500 But I wanted to interview him about that and delve into that idea a little bit further and also talk about some of the broader issues with academic freedom.

00:21:39.080 And Patrick Keeney actually wrote about academic freedom in an interview he did with the C2C Journal,

00:21:45.400 a great publication that is a very good friend of True North and a very good example of independent media.

00:21:51.140 And he actually talked about it with SAF's president, Mark Mercer, on his way out about the broader themes of academic freedom and what's going on in the world.

00:21:59.000 So I wanted to delve into that and lots more with Patrick Keeney.

00:22:02.440 You'll have to excuse my wardrobe change.

00:22:04.440 I actually did this interview a couple of days ago, so it's a bit disjointed.

00:22:08.000 Normally on the big film sets, they have a continuity director who makes sure that everyone's wearing the same shirts and the windows are shut to the same way.

00:22:15.140 But we don't have a continuity director on The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:22:17.740 So I just point out that I'm wearing a different shirt and you're going to have to live with it.

00:22:21.780 But this was my interview with Patrick Keeney of Chiang Mai University.

00:22:25.660 And joining me now is the professor himself, Patrick Keeney, who wrote that fantastic piece in C2C Journal,

00:22:33.340 is also a visiting professor at Chiang Mai University.

00:22:36.640 I've been to Chiang Mai. I've not been to the university.

00:22:38.940 It's a lovely little spot.

00:22:41.520 Patrick, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.

00:22:43.780 Well, thank you, Andrew. It was delightful meeting you at the SAF's meeting.

00:22:47.340 That was already, what, a week ago, 10 days ago, something like that?

00:22:50.260 Yeah, the time is just flying by here.

00:22:52.880 And it was interesting because I want to talk about SAF's itself.

00:22:57.180 You wrote this great piece in C2C Journal in which you talked to Mark Mercer,

00:23:02.500 who's been on this program very recently, about SAF's and about the broader landscape of academic freedom.

00:23:08.920 And I was wondering for you how that's been, because obviously every academic has their own path on this issue, it seems like.

00:23:16.780 And academic freedom increasingly means different things to different people,

00:23:21.260 especially when you decide it has to be balanced against things like diversity or equity or, you know, oppression and whatever.

00:23:28.820 So what's been your relationship with the academic freedom discourse?

00:23:33.080 Well, I've had a mixed relationship, shall I say.

00:23:36.620 I mean, I wound up in Chiang Mai, probably because of situations here at UBC Okanagan.

00:23:46.240 I mean, I think Mark has been absolutely a national leader in all of this, and I'm happy to say that I followed in his path.

00:23:55.080 But there's always been a little bit of tension in the academy about how we ought to proceed, shall we say.

00:24:03.080 So, yeah, I think I've had, as I say, a mixed bag with academic freedom.

00:24:10.340 Yeah, I'll leave it at that for now, Andrew.

00:24:12.280 Yeah, and obviously in your interview with Mark, here's a guy who's a very mild-mannered, even-keeled, I don't like the word moderate,

00:24:21.380 because it implies a level of political classification that I don't think is necessarily appropriate.

00:24:26.980 But he's not a firebrand.

00:24:28.480 He doesn't court controversy for the sake of it.

00:24:31.020 But he's also been in the thick of this himself.

00:24:33.280 And I think that's one of the most cautionary tales when you hear these stories,

00:24:37.260 is that even people that think they're safe from going through what many professors have gone through often aren't.

00:24:44.320 Indeed.

00:24:45.020 And Mark is, to me at least, the epitome of civil discourse.

00:24:50.240 I mean, he exudes the kind of tolerance and capacity to entertain opposing ideas that I think all of us professors should take on board.

00:25:03.280 It's sometimes difficult.

00:25:04.740 I know we all have strong views about a lot of things.

00:25:08.260 And when we hear people who have opposing views, who are equally passionate about those views,

00:25:15.580 it's difficult sometimes to maintain your composure, shall we say.

00:25:20.600 I think Mark has been exemplary in showing us how to do that.

00:25:25.260 His book, by the way, is a fabulous book.

00:25:28.380 I'd like to plug it right now in praise of dangerous universities.

00:25:31.360 I can't recommend it highly enough.

00:25:35.020 I think Dr. Mercer has brought into the public domain the kinds of ideas that weren't all that radical even a few years ago.

00:25:45.880 I mean, my first professorship, my first appointment was in 1991.

00:25:49.680 And in the space from 1991 to today, the institution, the academy, has changed fairly radically.

00:25:56.400 The kind of ideas that Mark espouses are, to my way of thinking, should be just sort of uncontroversial, shall we say.

00:26:09.920 I was thinking today, you know, my dissertation supervisor was sort of an unapologetic, unreformed utilitarian.

00:26:17.980 And I'm not.

00:26:20.660 And so my dissertation was basically an attack on utilitarian ethical theory, shall we say.

00:26:26.720 And my supervisor was just brilliant at showing me how to construct my argument,

00:26:33.640 to bring it out as forcibly, as rigorously as I could,

00:26:39.160 despite the fact that he was, in his essence, if you will, opposed to what I was writing about.

00:26:46.060 And, I mean, I think that kind of ability to sit back, listen to your interlocutors and say,

00:26:56.320 yeah, I disagree with you, but you are entitled to that kind of idea.

00:27:01.660 We seem to have lost that thread somehow.

00:27:04.600 And as we discussed at the conference, I mean, I think all of us were scratching our heads as to what happened.

00:27:10.660 How did we lose what was, I think, at bottom, the essence of the university,

00:27:16.200 this ability to sit and disagree with each other civilly, have conversations.

00:27:22.160 And Mark and I both share an interest in the political philosopher, Michael Oakeshott.

00:27:27.160 And, of course, for Oakeshott, education is the conversation.

00:27:31.660 That's how we learn about our world is through entering into different kinds of conversations.

00:27:37.400 And part of learning those conversations is learning as well the virtues and the nuances of having a conversation,

00:27:45.460 which means, in essence, as you're doing now, I'm just going to sit and nod and listen

00:27:49.980 and take on board what others are saying without having to demonize them

00:27:56.840 and understand that they, too, have passions and they, too, have differing ideas

00:28:02.100 and that they, too, have good reasons for holding the views that they do do.

00:28:06.620 What was it Churchill, I think, said, what was his line about a heretic as somebody who,

00:28:16.940 or dogmatist as somebody who can't change the subject and won't change his mind, I think, was the quote.

00:28:23.580 Yeah.

00:28:24.400 So, yeah, so I think my experience in the academy has been sort of mixed, as I say.

00:28:30.420 I had the great privilege of having a dissertation supervisor who was, as I say, the essence of Millian liberalism.

00:28:40.300 And then, of course, as my career progressed, one stumbles on certain individuals who don't take that view, shall we say.

00:28:50.360 You briefly mentioned a few moments ago the path that led you to where you are now, Chiang Mai University.

00:28:57.080 And I guess that sparks the question of these phenomena we've been discussing,

00:29:01.220 the issue of institutional wokeness in the academy, the issue of academic freedom in peril,

00:29:06.880 of not being able to sit down and have the conversations.

00:29:09.860 Is that exclusively a Western phenomenon?

00:29:13.180 I mean, how, in your experience working for an Asian university, has that issue manifested, if at all, there?

00:29:19.720 Because I think on a lot of things, political correctness has tended to be a Western creation,

00:29:24.360 but I don't know if in the academic setting that's held as well.

00:29:28.480 You know, the language of instruction in Chiang Mai is, understandably, it's Thai.

00:29:36.700 And I was hired primarily to help with English language instruction.

00:29:41.780 So I'm not really in a good position to talk about it, except to say that I haven't particularly noticed any sort of wokeness,

00:29:50.280 except to say that all of the kind of trends that we see in North America do eventually sort of filter out into Asia at some point.

00:29:58.780 But I'm a little insulated from, as it were, the hurly-burly of the daily discourse.

00:30:05.140 My job in Chiang Mai is basically to assist PhD students in writing their dissertations in English.

00:30:13.380 The Thai government, some years ago, in order to improve the English fluency scores in the country,

00:30:19.340 demanded that all dissertations in every discipline be submitted both in the Thai language as well as in English.

00:30:25.480 And, of course, this is a huge stumbling block for most PhD students.

00:30:30.500 And my task is to help them with their English dissertation.

00:30:36.220 One of the things I really wanted to talk to you about was what you were actually speaking about at that SAFSS meeting you mentioned,

00:30:42.200 which was this idea of rights talk and the perils thereof.

00:30:46.360 But just to give people in the audience a bit of a primer here, what is rights talk?

00:30:50.500 Well, rights talk is a form of political discourse.

00:30:53.780 Well, let me start that sentence again.

00:30:55.740 It's a form of ethical discourse that has, I think, seeped out into the political realm.

00:31:03.940 Rights talk has evolved into a kind of fundamentalist language, shall I say.

00:31:11.080 And it wasn't always thus.

00:31:13.960 I think if we look at the history of rights talk, it goes really right back to the 13th century canonical law.

00:31:21.140 But subsequent to World War II, and in particular the 1948 Declaration of the Universal Rights of Man,

00:31:27.480 and I think we've seen over the past, what shall we say, 50 years, the evolution of a highly individualistic,

00:31:39.120 legalistic, adversarial understanding of rights that sees the world in terms of a black and white,

00:31:49.540 your rights versus my rights, which I think is enormously unhelpful for so many issues, political issues, certainly.

00:31:58.340 But just in terms of speaking of ethical, moral concerns that all of us have,

00:32:05.100 I'm not sure it's entirely helpful to couch every ethical concern in terms of rights.

00:32:10.260 One of the signal problems with rights that was first noticed by Edmund Burke back in the 18th century

00:32:19.460 was their abstract quality lends to them a kind of absolutism,

00:32:24.980 so that when one asserts one's rights, there is a kind of assertion that this is non-negotiable,

00:32:33.460 like rights are just what they are, rather than the kind of nuanced sort of political things that they ought to be.

00:32:42.800 So my talk was—

00:32:43.840 But just to interject there, are certain rights not non-negotiable,

00:32:47.120 and do they not have to be viewed as such to have any relevance or any weight?

00:32:52.240 Well, certainly that's the way that our rights talk has evolved now.

00:32:55.660 But I think, yes, I think there are some rights that are non-negotiable.

00:32:59.920 For example, the right to freedom, the right to liberty, the right to freedom of expression.

00:33:04.960 But what quickly happens with the vernacular of rights talk, if I might put it that way,

00:33:10.280 is that the grammar, our English grammar, allows us to assert practically anything,

00:33:16.900 any desire, any whim, any sort of idea that pops into our head as a right.

00:33:23.060 And again, this was first noticed by Edmund Burke, and Jeremy Bentham said the same thing,

00:33:29.940 that by opening up rights talk, we are really opening up a Pandora's box.

00:33:35.160 And famously, Bentham, the 18th century philosopher, said that rights are nonsense on stilts,

00:33:42.520 by which he meant that rights have to be tethered to an idea of the good.

00:33:48.120 That is to say, there has to be a tethering of rights to some understanding of the common good.

00:33:54.600 And again, I mean, what I said at the conference was hardly original and nothing new,

00:34:00.300 but it seems to me that we've lost sight of this idea that rights have to be tethered to a common good.

00:34:06.880 I live in Kelowna, and like a lot of communities these days, we have a lot of homeless in our community.

00:34:15.840 And the conversation around the homeless is almost exclusively framed in the context of their rights,

00:34:25.500 the rights of these individuals to be on the street.

00:34:27.600 And one understands that every individual, homeless or not, is entitled to dignity and should be respected.

00:34:38.840 But there's another part of the equation that rarely gets articulated,

00:34:42.960 and that's the idea of the commonality, the commonality of the citizens of this city or any other city

00:34:48.900 to enjoy their city without fear of interference.

00:34:53.740 And I think I use that only as a small example of the way that our rights talk seems to have evolved

00:35:00.460 over the last 50 years or so, that it's become highly individualistic and very legalistic,

00:35:07.300 so that now our problems, our political problems, are solved not through the legislature or through parliament,

00:35:15.740 but rather through advocacy in the courts.

00:35:19.120 So, embedded in rights talk, I think, is this adversarial notion.

00:35:24.060 It's your rights versus my rights, and we'll have the judge figure it out.

00:35:28.760 And that creates, I think, a very unhappy situation for society in the sense that one of us is going to prevail,

00:35:36.120 your rights or my rights, and you or I, one of us, is going to be the loser.

00:35:40.240 And unlike the sort of compromises that politicians are forced into,

00:35:45.500 the sort of black and white, win-lose nature of rights talk, I think, is unhelpful for the political, for our polity.

00:35:54.660 I don't think it's a healthy development.

00:35:57.380 A lot of people share this view.

00:35:59.400 And indeed, I think it was Michael Ignatieff, years ago, who wrote a little book called The Needs of Strangers.

00:36:08.460 He said, one of the signal failures of rights talk is its inability to talk about virtues

00:36:15.900 that are important for the commonality, but which can't be captured in rights talk.

00:36:22.980 Things like love, compassion, honour, friendship, all of those are important ideas in the political sphere,

00:36:30.300 but yet rights talk precludes us talking about them, at least in any meaningful way.

00:36:35.680 Those are the kinds of old-fashioned virtues that seem to me to have been sort of thrown back into the private sphere.

00:36:42.660 I mean, you and I, and I think all of us, want to have love and friends and all the rest of it in our private life,

00:36:49.940 but where in our political conversations do we find time to talk about those very important ideas, I think?

00:36:57.880 Yeah, they're harder to quantify, I think, which is why the more difficult work of holding those things up

00:37:03.480 really becomes in focus here.

00:37:06.100 Well, it's a fascinating talk.

00:37:07.320 I think people should hopefully have the opportunity to see it.

00:37:09.880 You should take the show on the road.

00:37:10.980 But in the meantime, definitely check out Patrick Keeney's great piece in C2C about academic freedom

00:37:16.460 and the Society for Academic Freedom, that interview with Mark Mercer.

00:37:21.040 Patrick, thanks so much. Good to talk to you.

00:37:22.980 Thanks, Andrew.

00:37:24.180 That was Professor Patrick Keeney here on The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:37:27.760 My thanks to all of you for tuning in today.

00:37:29.860 We will be back next week with more full strength of Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North.

00:37:35.540 Have a great weekend, everyone.

00:37:36.940 Thank you, God bless, and good day to you all.

00:37:39.200 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:37:42.200 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - June 10, 2023

Religious freedom and academic freedom are under threat

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