Western Standard - COVID-era pastor says Christians can resist government — but not through violence

00:00:00.000 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Hanna Ford, a weekly politics show of the

00:00:21.080 Western Standard. It is Thursday, June the 4th. With us tonight is COVID resistance hero Pastor

00:00:28.400 Tim Stephens of Fairview Baptist Church. Reverend Stephens, welcome to the show. It's good to be

00:00:33.960 here. Good to have you. We're talking this morning about the relationship between church and state,

00:00:40.020 which many people believe is becoming more difficult to manage in Canada. Pastor Stephens,

00:00:46.700 you have certainly had your own difficulties during the COVID-19 crisis. You initially

00:00:51.040 complied with public health orders by pausing in-person services. However, then you resumed

00:00:57.820 services in defiance of state orders, and that led to multiple arrests in 2021. You were arrested

00:01:04.200 twice, spent a total of 21 days in jail, including your wedding anniversary, and with June in mind,

00:01:13.240 Father's Day, and you faced charges under public health orders. One notable arrest involved police

00:01:19.960 tracking an outdoor service of yours, an outdoor service, using a helicopter.

00:01:26.320 So I guess my first question, are you just a bad person?

00:01:31.440 Were you ever found guilty of anything?

00:01:34.380 Well, I wasn't found guilty of anything.

00:01:35.760 There was a few charges that we defended successfully in court,

00:01:40.840 and then the other ones eventually were dropped along with the dropping of the health orders as well.

00:01:46.140 um so no i was not found guilty of anything during that time but that but the punishment

00:01:51.580 is the process that they put of course so the state said that you must close your church during

00:01:57.280 covid you said no you answer to a higher authority than the state and in the end the state was not

00:02:04.580 able to was not able to contest that successfully yeah well they never we never really finalize

00:02:12.560 everything in court we still have some court action that we've filed against the government

00:02:16.380 that we're in the process of doing but the the tension of course is well what the bible says

00:02:22.020 about submitting to our authorities and to the magistrate like it says in romans 13 but of course

00:02:27.600 there's the tension comes in whenever god commands us as the church to gather together not forsake

00:02:33.740 that assembly and so not just myself but our congregation became convinced that this was a

00:02:39.140 case where we must obey God and not men and still tried to conduct myself in a way that was honorable

00:02:45.620 toward the governing authorities hopefully that was seen during my arrest and other interactions

00:02:49.420 with the police but ultimately we had to continue to gather together and do what was right before God

00:02:55.060 well Tim COVID has come and gone and all charges as you say were either dropped or you were found

00:03:01.540 not guilty on those that weren't dropped now you spoke at a recent event the Dominion of Canada

00:03:08.260 a conference and you said that when god is separated from the state and the state puts

00:03:12.880 itself in the place of god i think your your phrase was we see a myriad of problems so

00:03:20.380 strikes me that your theology on all of this is a lot more than covid of course yeah covid was just

00:03:29.500 one expression so what are these problems what what is this myriad well see the issue is let's

00:03:37.020 say the government takes a neutral position when it comes to religions and we have a pluralistic

00:03:41.300 society well well then who is the one who says okay these are the common values that we have

00:03:47.360 well it has to be the state uh what what does proper accommodation look like what does what

00:03:52.840 does marriage look like what should the family look like and how it ends up the state is the

00:03:57.040 one that then is the authority that defines all those things so in in a pluralistic society you

00:04:02.100 have the state itself becoming the highest authority the supreme authority so essentially

00:04:05.540 essentially god but see what i was going to say is essentially making religious decisions of course

00:04:11.400 and we've seen of late is not the church becoming more political um but we've seen the state

00:04:18.320 becoming more religious as it seeks to define marriage as it seeks to you know rule on things

00:04:23.360 like abortion or euthanasia these issues that were typically the domain of of of church or

00:04:29.840 Christian values, now the state is entering into that area. And so the biggest issue, of course,

00:04:37.360 is just defining morality. And we live in a day and age where even things like a man or woman

00:04:42.520 is up for grabs in terms of how do you define that. And so the state has put itself in that

00:04:47.940 position of being the, you know, the determiner of those significant moral values. And so we

00:04:55.660 We live in a day and age now where we see so much moral chaos and confusion because there is no shared standard that we have as a society about what is right, what is wrong, what is up, down, what is male, what is female, what's marriage, what's family.

00:05:12.180 And so we have these ethics that are not, they're amorphous, they're not defined.

00:05:23.220 And so that's one of the issues.

00:05:25.040 And then, of course, along with that, with the state being in this position of authority and even defining morality, well, then you have the state reaching its tentacles into all facets of our life.

00:05:37.080 And so whether that's in the family or in education, welfare, health care, the state sees all of these things because on the landmass of our country, that it has jurisdiction and authority over all those areas.

00:05:51.260 And so we move into a situation where we have essentially a soft totalitarianism.

00:05:57.960 Now, totalitarianism is not gulags and those kind of things, but it just means the state sees itself as having total control or total jurisdiction over all facets of life.

00:06:11.700 And we see that increasingly, and people are responding, whether Christians or not, they're saying, hey, we're losing our freedoms.

00:06:18.360 We're losing our ability to choose.

00:06:20.780 As the government has rejected God and the Christian God, 0.94

00:06:27.020 we've seen the government increase in size and its authority 0.93

00:06:29.920 in the areas that it's seeking rulership.

00:06:32.200 And so we see an increase, actually, the tyranny of government.

00:06:34.900 So to me, that's a significant issue that affects everybody.

00:06:38.540 Well, how do other religions see it?

00:06:42.260 I mean, Islam, for example, or the Jewish religion,

00:06:45.340 And do they struggle under the same kind of irritations as we do?

00:06:55.280 Well, I think it's a human condition to want freedom and to want liberty.

00:07:00.020 When you consider the Western world, the Western world was formerly Christendom

00:07:03.480 and it was influenced by Christian values, not just in the church,

00:07:06.380 but how the government was run.

00:07:09.960 And so we don't see people flocking to majority Muslim countries for freedom

00:07:14.320 because their values, there's certainly some overlap with Christianity,

00:07:20.800 but their values on the whole are antithetical to what we see in the Christian worldview.

00:07:25.120 And so where you see the flourishing of prosperity, of free market economics,

00:07:34.280 where you see justice, freedom,

00:07:36.880 these are all countries that have been influenced by the Christian religion.

00:07:41.180 You seem to me, Tim, to be somebody who might remember a time when things were different.

00:07:46.640 Certainly I do.

00:07:48.140 How did we get here?

00:07:50.480 Yeah, that's a good question.

00:07:51.980 One of my kids asked my dad, you know, what was different from his childhood to theirs?

00:07:56.620 And he said, well, his childhood, he can go play in the playground without fear of finding a needle or being abducted.

00:08:02.540 And so there was much more freedom for children to be children in that day and age.

00:08:05.920 And it wasn't too long ago.

00:08:06.820 I think historically, with the 1960s, we see a change of religion here in Canada, where you have Pierre Trudeau and others talking about individual rights.

00:08:17.360 And what they meant by that was humanistic, secular values, and who can argue against individual rights?

00:08:23.960 But these were promoting the ideas of the individual as opposed to the values of God that had founded our society.

00:08:33.240 And so we see in the 60s a big shift in the morality, in the ethics. And now that has permeated through, you know, all of our institutions of higher learning into our governments, into our politicians. And so now we're groaning a little bit under the effects of that because ideas have consequences.

00:08:50.140 so to beg the question a little all right i think i agree with you that it started in the 1960s

00:08:58.300 but what was it that triggered that was i mean was it a reaction to the horrors of the second

00:09:05.460 world war was it the intentional action of activists who were acting out the things that

00:09:13.900 they learned at universities or novel theories of social organization is this the communist party

00:09:20.700 that was failing elsewhere working itself in there's many different theories that i've had put

00:09:27.420 to me what's your theory yeah i'm not sure yeah i'm not sure if you can point our finger into some

00:09:32.140 one facet but i'd say in terms of the ideas that undergird that that now are bearing its fruit

00:09:37.400 You have to look back to Karl Marx or Gramsci, these other Marxists. And in these world wars, we went to fight against these ideas. But now it seems that even some of the politicians that we vote for in our country and south of the border have the same values as those communistic leaders of yesteryear.

00:09:57.720 and so we've already seen the destruction of communism we've seen its tendency towards

00:10:03.320 totalitarianism even though its ideals are you know putting the means of production in the hands

00:10:09.920 of the people and this is going to be a society of equality and so this ideal egalitarianism is

00:10:16.100 still promoted today but but the method is is going through more this humanist that Karl Marx

00:10:22.660 all these other men, they hated God. They wanted society without God. They saw the family as an

00:10:27.780 hierarchy in the family as part of this tyranny, and that needs to be torn down. And so his idea,

00:10:34.760 along with others, was you tear down the structures of Christianity, and what will emerge from that

00:10:39.660 will be this utopian society. But it's obviously more dystopian than utopian.

00:10:44.680 Is this a new challenge for the church?

00:10:47.100 I think it's a new challenge for the church because many pastors, and myself included, in the past especially, we feel like, oh, we can't get involved in the area of politics.

00:10:58.320 And so whether that's Marxism or other areas, well, those are really ideas outside of our task of just teaching the Bible and helping people to live a moral life and find their way to heaven and be reconciled through Jesus.

00:11:12.520 and so many pastors feel really uncomfortable dealing with these these broader ideas but it's

00:11:19.000 important for us to realize as christians that uh jesus christ as king of kings and lord of lords

00:11:25.620 and his word it speaks to everything in our life it's not that you find a chapter and verse about

00:11:31.040 everything like changing your oil in your car or things like that but but the bible does speak to

00:11:35.760 everything if you're a mechanic the bible does speak about how you ought to operate as mechanic

00:11:39.920 If you're a politician, if you're a lawyer, the Bible has wisdom on how you ought to operate.

00:11:44.660 And we knew that in the past.

00:11:47.020 But then we've bought into the secular lie that really the Christian faith and other religions are just something between your ears and to keep private and internal and shouldn't impact how you live your life in the public sphere.

00:12:00.840 When I asked you if this was something new for the church, I actually had in the back of my mind the condition, the relationship between the church.

00:12:09.920 the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago when obviously famously many Christians paid with their lives

00:12:17.200 for their beliefs. But as you described what was happening to the state in Canada today,

00:12:23.640 assuming the moral authority to make decisions on what people thought believed and how they

00:12:30.020 behaved, I can't help thinking of the cult of emperor worship that defined the Roman Empire.

00:12:36.740 the state

00:12:38.860 the emperor was the state

00:12:40.240 and he defined morality

00:12:42.000 according to the beliefs

00:12:44.840 of the religion that they had at that time

00:12:46.900 and of course that made it very uncomfortable

00:12:48.500 for Christians

00:12:49.320 so

00:12:50.580 is there anything

00:12:54.000 that you would like to draw

00:12:56.560 forward about what Christians

00:12:58.660 experienced in the first

00:13:00.740 few centuries of this

00:13:02.020 of the Christian era

00:13:04.100 in their dealings with the Roman church

00:13:06.560 can it teach us anything? Yeah, of course. Christians were fiercely persecuted. It wasn't

00:13:10.840 necessarily across the entire empire to the same degree at all the time, but certainly there are

00:13:15.400 certain emperors in certain regions in Rome that persecuted Christians quite severely. And even

00:13:21.260 in the book of Acts, in the 17th chapter, as Paul and his companions are traveling,

00:13:27.740 they cause a bit of a stir. And the locals there are saying, well, these men who have turned the

00:13:34.160 world upside down have come here also and and they're talking about another king jesus um and

00:13:41.900 they're saying jesus is lord not caesar is lord and so immediately there was a conflict between

00:13:47.240 loyalties and like you mentioned the emperor worship that christians would not uh bow down to

00:13:52.180 or take part in and so that did put them on a bit of a collision course and in time through their

00:13:57.400 through their witness we we see a change throughout the roman empire and and that led not just to

00:14:02.860 a change in in religion but it led into a change in the morality um and how the empire was was run

00:14:09.740 but of course now you're seeing we are seeing in today's age a change in morality on how canada

00:14:17.840 is run and what is accorded respect in terms of opinions and uh and morality i mean draw your

00:14:26.520 attention to and comment please on one thing that came out just in the last couple of days

00:14:32.220 there is a bill going through the senate

00:14:36.220 it's under review

00:14:40.420 and yesterday I'm informed that the

00:14:42.960 senate voted to support a move

00:14:48.020 to criminalize residential school

00:14:51.960 denialism

00:14:53.140 that they are going to establish a certain truth

00:14:56.720 which so far has not been supported

00:14:59.860 by any physical evidence

00:15:01.800 but it will still be a crime to say no the the residential school

00:15:10.880 narrative is not supported by the facts now that sounds to me like the government

00:15:18.340 exercising a religious right to define an ultimate truth or am i just being a little overreactive

00:15:27.800 well i would agree with you you know it's it's one thing for the government to make laws that

00:15:33.040 would legislate morality that's all laws can really do is legislate what is right and what

00:15:37.160 is wrong and put proper sanctions just a second people people say you can't legislate morality

00:15:42.500 did you just say you can well that's all you can do all laws are value statements and and the

00:15:48.840 penal the penalties that we put on that law like for instance when rape today doesn't get the the

00:15:53.940 death penalty as it used to in Canada. Well, that's a value statement. And depending on how

00:15:59.460 long someone might serve in jail for a particular crime, we're saying how much worth it is that

00:16:07.080 thing that is then hurt or jeopardized because of that crime. So all laws can do is give value

00:16:14.340 statements on what's right and what's wrong, their moral determinations. The problem is, of course,

00:16:19.380 is whether you have a secular government or religious government,

00:16:22.960 we know intuitively, but that's because of the Christian worldview,

00:16:26.160 that it's wrong to legislate people's thoughts. 0.53

00:16:31.720 It's one thing to put limits on actions,

00:16:35.140 but to begin to legislate on people's speech and people's thoughts,

00:16:39.960 we see that as an egregious overstep of the government.

00:16:42.920 But we have to ask, why is that?

00:16:44.220 Well, that's because of the influence of the Christian faith.

00:16:46.160 uh if you go to iran for instance well that's that's fair game uh so in other in other cultures

00:16:52.140 and customs yes you you can legislate what people think and say but in in the christian world we say

00:16:58.920 no that's wrong because of what the bible says about you know individual freedom and responsibility

00:17:03.520 and we're made in the image of god and you shouldn't legislate people's thoughts or ideas

00:17:08.620 so this whole development seems to be playing out in the background i mean obviously you're

00:17:15.780 very aware of these things, which is why you led your congregation in a certain direction

00:17:20.780 in 2021.

00:17:23.400 I would wager a bet, but a lot of people who might chance on this really haven't a clue

00:17:29.140 what we're talking about.

00:17:31.420 So how then, as somebody who cares about these things, do you get other people to care about

00:17:42.100 these things which although they may not articulate that straight out are actually

00:17:47.080 fundamental to what they think is their right to live the way they want to live right and i think

00:17:52.880 that's a that's a key way to think about it is we think of the ideas of of liberty and freedom

00:17:59.980 and justice we want to live in a society of peace and harmony we want to live in a society of high

00:18:06.200 trust where you're you're not putting bars on your windows to protect you from your neighbors like

00:18:11.840 uh we know what it means to live in a society like that because we've we've seen a society like that

00:18:17.340 and so well the question the question then becomes well what it what are the ideas the

00:18:22.540 founding values that that give rise to that kind of society and and i'm i'm convinced and in history

00:18:27.960 but bears that out it's that the influence of the christian faith wherever it goes

00:18:31.580 it produces a society of of freedom um of individual responsibility which then leads to

00:18:38.700 trust prosperity and so it's in my mind it's helpful to lead with some of those values that

00:18:44.460 people see as values and then demonstrating how the christian faith that leads those ideas that

00:18:51.220 we so desire i hope people give you the time to consider what you're saying um you recently

00:19:01.000 addressed the dominion conference and there you argued that separating the state from god turns

00:19:10.680 the state into a short-sighted weak incompetent demigod and yet this is the state that can say

00:19:20.860 you are not following the prescribed set of beliefs you believe that there are only two sexes 0.96

00:19:28.800 You don't believe that there were murders in residential schools on the scale that indigenous people are claiming. 0.56

00:19:39.720 That may well seem to me or you to be short-sighted, weakened, and incompetent, but they're very serious about it, and they have the power of the sword to enforce it.

00:19:49.640 So, tell me something that can give Christians and other people who are not Christians,

00:20:03.060 but also who find this kind of government dictating of what they are to believe and hold as truth, to be highly objectionable, where do they start?

00:20:14.020 I think people need to realize that there's no such thing as neutrality. There's a few ideas that we need to grasp. There's no idea of neutrality. When someone says secular, they are feigning neutrality, but it's not actually neutral.

00:20:33.820 because when we come down to those questions of morality what what is what is your source of

00:20:39.000 of authority is it shifting human opinion is it something transcendent is it based upon scripture

00:20:44.100 what what what is your source of authority and so when you understand that secularism is not

00:20:51.720 just the absence of religion it's it's another religion it's another worldview there's ideas

00:20:57.980 about right and wrong there's ideas about what happens after we die there's ideas about our

00:21:02.940 origins the very questions that that religion um deals with also secularism and materialism

00:21:10.300 deals with those same same questions and has its own answers and so when people realize that it's

00:21:15.520 not as if canada presently is just a religious now we've adopted another religion and it's hard

00:21:24.120 to define because it doesn't have churches but it's in our institutions or schools it's on the

00:21:29.080 tv and media and so to be able to identify that and then to understand that in this clash of

00:21:34.560 worldviews well ultimately it's it's it's it's the one true and living god who has made us or

00:21:41.580 it's is a lie it's truth or it's error and um and so people first need to recognize that

00:21:48.920 religious ideas ideas of origin ideas of life after death ideas of morality

00:21:54.460 they're unavoidable and they impact our society they impact our government and so we must first

00:22:03.500 realize that and then we can start asking okay now what is the truth behind some of these worldview

00:22:10.200 ideas you have a big task before you you and the others at the dominion conference

00:22:17.500 i only wish i could say that most people were listening and thinking about that but the what

00:22:23.160 you have just described in the last 20 minutes is foundational for what happens to this country

00:22:28.540 in the next 100 years um back 100 years and you can you can see the benefits of the the kind of

00:22:35.900 christian worldview that prevailed um i'm going to give you the last word and i don't want you

00:22:43.520 to be pessimistic give us some hope here but what is the next 100 years going to look like

00:22:49.660 Well, I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball. God knows. But I am hopeful. And the reason why I'm hopeful is because I believe many people, whether religious or not, are realizing that the direction of our country and other Western countries is heading in a bankrupt direction.

00:23:05.700 It's like we're a bouquet of flowers and we're cut flowers and we're starting to wilt and wither.

00:23:13.240 We recognize we have no root, no foundation.

00:23:15.820 I've seen recent polls that demonstrate that church attendance for the first time in decades is now increasing.

00:23:21.880 And especially among young men, our church is full of young men.

00:23:24.180 And so the future to me, the next generation, I believe is aware of the lies of secularism, is looking for truth, looking for a firm foundation.

00:23:36.240 They want someone to tell them what a man is, what a woman is.

00:23:39.180 They know that intuitively and to live according to that principle and recovering some of those ideas and history that we've forgotten.

00:23:45.400 So I'm very encouraged and hopeful, and I would encourage Christians and pastors especially to speak up, use your voice, and teach God's word as it pertains to all aspects of our life, whether family or government affairs.

00:23:58.640 One last question, Pastor Tim.

00:24:00.660 I think many Albertans, Christian Albertans, are so offended by what they see as Ottawa's 0.93

00:24:08.400 godless dictates that they see independence as the only solution. 0.73

00:24:14.180 Now, you have personally resisted Caesar in the matter of COVID, so you are no stranger

00:24:21.180 to standing up to the government. 0.93

00:24:23.800 But in good conscience, how far can a Christian take this?

00:24:27.760 Could, for example, a Christian actually take up arms in pursuit of a free Alberta and still be on the right side of God? 0.94

00:24:39.120 Well, I don't think so. I think the Bible is clear that the way of Christ is a way of peace.

00:24:45.620 If you think about Christian movements in the past, they have gained their influence through persuasion, not through force or through violence.

00:24:53.500 even you think about christians in rome like you mentioned uh earlier the the whole idea of the

00:25:00.240 roman empire eventually being converted is because christians suffered well and they did so with uh

00:25:06.480 with love and with truth and so the way of christ is the way of love the way of self-sacrifice

00:25:10.500 and i believe that's what we need to be focusing on even here now well thank you and on that note

00:25:17.640 i think we shall end appreciate you coming in to share your thoughts with us about alberta

00:25:22.940 independence god king and country it's been a pleasure thank you very much pastor tim

00:25:28.680 thank you for the western standard i'm nigel hannaford

Western Standard - June 04, 2026

COVID-era pastor says Christians can resist government — but not through violence

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript