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More and more, progressive politicians and their supporters are willing to impugn observant Christians as inherently worthy of suspicion. “Evangelicals believe in X,” “conservative Catholics believe in Y,” ergo that’s probably what Mr. Z is really up to, never mind if he swears that he’s not. It’s an ugly game that would rightly be deplored were it turned against politicians of other religions, and if we want people of faith — which is most Canadians — to have a place in public life, it’s a game no one should want to play.

But it is what it is. Progressives are willing to weaponize their opponents’ religious beliefs even when they have to be mostly inferred, as was the case with Stephen Harper. Someone like Scheer, who is much more openly religious, is all the more vulnerable — and he failed utterly to protect himself.

Progressives are willing to weaponize their opponents’ religious beliefs

The question of “sin” takes us into new and dangerous territory, however. There is what politicians do, and then there is what they think, and then — buried way down under many layers of irrelevance — there is their personal relationship, if any, with higher powers and their associated scriptures; there is the question of what they think that higher power would make of other people’s behaviour; there is what they believe will happen to those people’s immortal souls.

These are not topics the secular media should be concerning themselves with, and nor should the average voter. No one would approve of someone they like being put through such an inquisition. Liberals would be aghast if their avowedly Catholic leader were asked if his faith played a role in his government not eliminating restrictions on gay and bisexual men donating blood, for example. Liberals often speak glowingly of the days when politicians set aside religion and pursued the greater good — politicians like Pierre Trudeau, a devout Catholic who famously said “what goes on in private between two consulting adults is their own private business,” but who somewhat less famously spoke of “separating the idea of sin and the idea of crime.”

Trudeau Sr. was absolutely right that the state should have no dominion over sin, in any sense of the word. That should go for politics, too. Politicians of known faiths and devoutness have advanced many of progressive Canadians’ most cherished causes — public health care, most notably — and politicians of unknown faiths and devoutness have taken us down dark alleys. And vice versa. There is nothing we can do with information about a politician’s personal metaphysical views except raise new barriers to entry into a politics that needs fewer.

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