The Gospel of Censorship
Kevin Boonstra July/August 2026Liberal politician Marc Miller has served in Canada’s federal cabinet for the past seven years, most recently as minister of Canadian Identity and Culture. In October 2025, while chairing the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, Miller suggested that certain biblical texts could be deemed “hateful.”
“In Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Romans, there are passages with clear hatred toward, for example, homosexuals. I don’t understand how the concept of good faith could be invoked if someone were literally invoking a passage from, in this case, the Bible. . . . How do we somehow constitute this as being said in good faith? Clearly there are situations in these texts where these statements are hateful. . . . There should perhaps be discretion for prosecutors to press charges.”1
The committee was studying a proposed law—Bill C-9—that the government calls the Combatting Hate Act.2 Miller made these comments while questioning a representative of the Christian Legal Fellowship, who was testifying about harm this proposed law would wreak on religious liberty in Canada.
At the time of writing, Bill C-9 is well on its way to becoming law—it has passed the Canadian House of Commons and the Senate.
Bill C-9 will amend Canada’s Criminal Code to create new offenses for intimidating or obstructing access to religious and cultural places. It will also establish a new hate crime offense and prohibit the public display of hate or terrorist symbols, including the Nazi swastika and SS bolts.
The government says this proposed legislation is necessary to protect communities in Canada that have been targeted by hate speech and hate crimes based on personal characteristics such as race, religion, or sexual orientation. It cites a “sharp increase in reported hate crimes between 2002 and 2023, followed by a further slight increase in 2024” “driven by increases in targeting based on religion or sexual orientation.”3 Most of these hate crimes, the government says, were directed at Jewish and Muslim populations.4
There is an obvious irony here. If the legislation aims to protect religious communities, it is odd—to put it mildly—that a federal cabinet minister would target biblical texts as a problem. It is not that Marc Miller is obtuse. It is that, in Canada, it is becoming increasingly acceptable to define Christians and Christian teachings and texts as hateful, thereby whittling away at freedom of religion under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Any restriction on speech, even hate speech, will have an obvious impact on freedom of expression. In recent rulings the Supreme Court of Canada has grappled with this reality, but its decisions have mostly upheld limitations on expression. While that is a significant problem, the focus of this article is on Bill C-9 and its direct attack on religion and religious speech within the context of larger trends in Canadian law and society.
Criminalized Speech
In Canada, all criminal law is within the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government.5 The Criminal Code contains offenses for promoting hatred against protected identifiable groups distinguished by their color, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or disability.6
In order to lessen the impact on free speech, there are certain codified exemptions in section 319(3), including proving the truth of statements, or if the statements are relevant to a subject of public interest and the speaker believes them to be true. One of the current defenses is specific to religion: section 319(3)(b). It says that no person can be convicted of hate speech “if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.”7 This protects against conviction for teaching or preaching that some may find to be hateful, provided it is done in good faith and is based on bona fide religious beliefs.
Bill C-9 explicitly repeals and removes this protection, which understandably set off alarm bells within religious communities in Canada. The removal of this protection makes Christian pastors vulnerable to criminal prosecution for hate speech if they rely on Romans 1 to preach against the sin of same-sex sexual behavior.
Really? Yes, really. This is what Minister Miller meant when he said that such biblical texts cannot be used in good faith and criminal prosecution is legitimate. His statement was that the texts themselves contain “clear hatred toward . . . homosexuals.”
History and Context
Some judicial and legislative history is necessary to explain how Canada got to this point.
In 1990 the Supreme Court of Canada considered section 319 in the context of a public school teacher who denied the Holocaust and was charged with hate speech.8 A majority of the court concluded that section 319 contravened the Charter’s protection of freedom of expression but was justified to prevent the harm caused by hate propaganda.
The majority specifically cited the exemptions in section 319(3), including the one related to religious texts, as reflecting a “commitment to the idea that an individual’s freedom of expression will not be curtailed in borderline cases.”9 The criminal law will be used only when an individual clearly intends to cause harm in extreme circumstances by intentionally causing the vilification and detestation of identifiable protected groups.10
In other words, the criminal prohibition on hate speech was upheld as constitutional because, in part, the defenses in section 319(b) keep it proportionate and avoided the improper prosecution of religious leaders for good faith religious statements.
A related Supreme Court of Canada case is Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott.11 The respondent, Whatcott, was pursued under provincial human rights (not criminal) legislation for exposing persons to hatred or ridicule on the basis of their sexual orientation. He had publicly distributed flyers on behalf of the “Christian Truth Activists” and was brought before the human rights tribunal for hate speech. He defended himself, in part, by arguing that the human rights law infringed his freedom of religion and freedom of expression under the Charter.
The court again found that the law breached freedom of expression but was saved as a proportional limitation. However, the court partially disagreed with the human rights tribunal on some of Whatcott’s statements, saying that they could not reasonably be seen to “expose persons of same-sex orientation to detestation and vilification,” even though they were offensive.12 These included an excerpt from the Bible. The court unanimously held that a “biblical passage, in and of itself, cannot be taken as inspiring detestation and vilification of homosexuals. . . . It would only be unusual circumstances and context that could transform a simple reading or publication of a religion’s holy text into what could objectively be viewed as hate speech.”13
These Supreme Court of Canada decisions supported the constitutional and philosophical validity of the section 319(3)(b) defense in respect of good faith use of religious texts.
A Solution in Search of a Problem
So if biblical passages themselves should not be taken as hate speech, has religious speech been a problematic source of hate in Canada? The evidence would suggest otherwise. In fact, section 319(3)(b) has hardly ever been used in response to hate speech prosecution. There is no evidence that a religious text defense has ever obstructed prosecution of genuine hate propaganda.
One of the very few times that the defense was invoked was R. v. Harding,14 a 2001 decision of the Ontario Court of Appeal. The court ruled that while sincere, bona fide expressions of religious belief are protected, a person cannot use religious opinion as a Trojan horse to smuggle in prohibited hate speech. Communications are not shielded from prosecution because they are contained in the same message or used to bolster a hateful argument. This means that the good faith requirement is strictly enforced as an essential and necessary part of the defense. Religion cannot be smuggled in as an artificial loophole to allow hate to flourish.
Political Realities
At the time, the Liberal government had a minority in Parliament, which meant that it needed another party to support the Combatting Hate Act. The Bloc Québécois is a separatist party in Parliament, electing members of Parliament only from Quebec. It had enough seats and votes to ensure the passage of the legislation. Its price was the elimination of the religious defense to hate speech.
The Bloc Québécois advocates for a strict form of secularism (laïcité), and its leader, Yves-François Blanchet, made the elimination of section 319(3)(b) a red line for supporting Bill C-9. To secure the necessary votes, the Liberal members of the House of Commons Justice Committee voted to adopt the Bloc’s amendment.15
But that realpolitik explanation conceals something deeper happening in Canada, as evidenced by the comments of Marc Miller. There is widespread antipathy toward traditional Christian beliefs, particularly in respect of sexual morality. This is revealed in the history of Bill C-9, but also in the unanimous passage of Bill C-4 by Parliament in 2021. That legislation added an offense to the Criminal Code against conversion therapy.
Conversion therapy is defined extremely broadly, as any “practice, treatment or service designed to” change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual or change their gender expression to conform to their sex at birth. But it also includes any practice that is designed to “repress or reduce non-heterosexual . . . sexual behaviour” or their “non-cisgender gender identity.” This has arguably16 placed a criminal ban on, for example, pastoral counseling or structured discipleship to help an adult wanting to bring their behavior in line with traditional Christian teachings on sexual behavior.
Earlier versions of the legislation criminalized conversion therapy only if it was forced upon an adult against their will. The Criminal Code in Canada now bans providing such counseling to a person who seeks it out, even for religious purposes. This has yet to be challenged constitutionally.
Another example is the case of Trinity Western University v. Law Society of British Columbia,17 which dealt with a rejection of evangelical TWU’s law school because of its community covenant. The community covenant required students to abstain from sex outside of traditional marriage. The majority of the Supreme Court of Canada expressly stated that TWU’s beliefs were “degrading and disrespectful,”18 apparently not recognizing the irony that their decision profoundly disrespected the religious commitments of the TWU community.
Belief as the “Problem”
The removal of a defense to hate speech based on good faith religious communication was completely unnecessary. It had never operated as a meaningful litigation tool, and there is no evidence that religion was being used to evade responsibility for truly hateful communications or propaganda. The exemption was a constitutional guardrail or safety valve, ensuring that religious beliefs that have become unpopular in a secularist society were not targeted for their content.
The fact that a federal cabinet minister expressly targeted portions of Scripture as a problem reveals a deeper problem than hate speech. It reveals hostility toward religious beliefs that do not fit within a modern humanistic narrative. That is exactly the reason the defense and constitutional protections of religious practice exist: to protect the religious minority against the tyrannies of the majority.
The passage of Bill C-9 will not result in an instant rash of prosecutions against evangelical pastors who publicly read and preach from Romans 1:24–27. But it will have an immediate and significant chilling effect on religious speech and expression. Of that I am sure. Pastors, when planning their weekly sermons, will simply opt for topics other than sexual sins. Criminal prosecution will be too frightening for all but the bravest, or perhaps most reckless, of pastors and laypeople.
Canada is moving from a “religion is worth protecting” stance to one that views religious belief as a problem. This is happening in the name of tolerance. In particular, conservative and evangelical Christians have been cast as the intolerant villains, refusing to concede on the morality of sex outside of opposite-sex marriage. The primary source of their intransigence is Scripture. So now the Canadian government will remove the protection otherwise accorded to good faith interpretation and exposition of scriptural texts with which it disagrees.
Second-century Christians were also regarded as intolerant for refusing to accept and participate in the worship of Roman gods. Christians were, in that limited respect, exclusionary even though they taught a radical form of equality.19 The Roman state accused them of “hatred against mankind,”20 which justified persecution of Christians. This is starting to sound familiar.
1 Parliament of Canada, House of Commons, Minutes of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, Number 011, 1st Session, 45th Parliament, Thursday, October 30, 2025.
2 Formally, it is “An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Hate Propaganda, Hate Crime and Access to Religious or Cultural Places).” I’ll just refer to the law as Bill C-9.
3 Robert Mason, “Preliminary Version: Legislative Summary ‘An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Hate Propaganda, Hate Crime and Access to Religious or Cultural Places),’ ” March 26, 2026, Library of Parliament.
4 Ibid.
5 Under section 91(27) of the Constitution Act (1867), the federal Parliament has exclusive power over the criminal law. Provinces can create regulatory offenses, but not criminal ones.
6 See section 318(4) for definition of “identifiable group” and sections 319(1) and (2) for the creation of the offenses.
7 Subsection 291(3)(b).
8 R. v. Keegstra, [1990] 3 S.C.R. 697.
9 Ibid., at p. 779.
10 Ibid., at p. 777.
11 [2013] 1 S.C.R. 476, 2013 SCC 11.
12 Ibid., par. 196.
13 Ibid., par. 199.
14 [2001] 152 O.A.C. 230.
15 Darren Major, “Liberals Back Bloc’s Proposal to Remove Religious Exemption From Hate Speech Laws,” CBC Canada News, December 9, 2025; Christopher Nardi, “Liberals Support Bloc Move to Remove Religious Exemption From Hate Speech Laws,” National Post, December 9, 2025.
16 I say arguably because there have not yet been any reported prosecutions.
17 2018 SCC 32. The writer was counsel for TWU and argued the case in the Supreme Court of Canada.
18 Ibid., par. 101.
19 Galatians 3:28; Philemon 16; Acts 2:17, 18; 1 Corinthians 12:13; John 13:13, 14; Romans 2:11.
20 Tacitus, Annals, 15.44.