Can Canada return to its roots of Christian values? | David Haskell

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:03]The cultural battles continue across Canada and around the world as progressive values clash with traditional conservative values. Today's guest believes that unless Christian norms and values once again influence public life in Canada and the US, both societies face serious social and cultural decline. Joining us from the Waterloo, Ontario area is Dr. David Millard Haskell. He wears a lot of different hats. He's a former journalist, a sociologist at Wilfrid Laurier University, and the author of a new book called Christ or Collapse: The Case Against Godless Government. Great to have you with us today, David.

[00:00:37]>> Yeah, well, thank you very much for having me.

[00:00:39]>> Oh, you bet. And then the book apparently is doing well on Amazon, also available at collegepress.com, so that's good to hear. I mean, I found the book a very bold, thought-provoking, definitely that. And it's it's divided into like four parts, and you can get I guess individual parts parts as individual books, but can you give us like a brief snapshot of what you're trying to communicate to readers?

[00:00:59]>> Well, well, sure. What it was is a a revelation of sorts, Paul. What what was happening was I was looking at society and I was seeing that there was a particular unraveling. And the unraveling was really it was in the area of of our culture and our social values.

[00:01:21]And for me, I had been a sociologist and I'll I'll just let you know right now, I'd been kind of I pooh-poohed traditional Christian values. I'm talking about a decade ago. And I I thought that they were really something to be relegated to the dustbin of history. But then, as a sociologist of religion, I I began looking at these things, and it seemed that every area where our society was slowly going into ruin, it was where it had rejected what we called the traditional Christian values. And so, I looked at study after study. I even conducted my own. And every time it turned out that the extent to which someone embraced Christian norms and values was the extent to which they found individual or even societal flourishing. And I said, "Okay, uh this has to be talked about." And so, this book, Christ or Collapse, really takes that empirical evidence and says, "We have a choice.

[00:02:22]Uh we we can take these ideas that have been around for 2,000 years and we can begin implementing them again, or we continue on the road to social and cultural ruin."

[00:02:32]>> Hm, okay. I mean again, so people hearing you, they might be thinking, "Okay, here's a guy who probably wants Canada to be officially Christian, right?" But you're not advocating for a forced religious society, are you? Uh you're you're kind of thinking more uh as I as I I went through parts of the book here, it's more valuable, as you would put it, to restore, advance traditional conservatism. Can you unpack that a bit for us?

[00:02:54]>> For And And thank you for that question, because really this is not about a religious revival.

[00:02:59]Although, I'm going to out myself, and I do in the book, I'm a Christian, right?

[00:03:02]>> Yeah.

[00:03:02]>> But I'm saying in the book, let's make not a leap of faith, but instead a leap of logic. I'm going to show you the evidence, and then you should follow it.

[00:03:11]But I I I package it all under the notion of a political philosophy, not a religious revival. And this political philosophy, I'm calling it traditional conservatism. Now, traditional conservatism, it has been around since the earliest days of the founding of the West, and simply put, traditional conservatism is the norms and values of Christianity applied to governance. Now, this isn't anything new, right? This is a restoration.

[00:03:39]Uh and in chapter two of the book, for example, I go through all of the legislation from the early foundings of Canada and the United States. I go through court cases and and the legal procedures, and it was very clear that the founders of these countries intended for the norms and values of Christianity to be worked out in the laws of the land. So, now that we've moved away from that, really beginning in the 1960s, this is the aberration. This is This is something that we've never done before and we're paying the price. And so, just to get back to your point, I'm not advocating a What is a theocracy? I'm not advocating a theocracy. We have those today in Muslim-majority countries. And I I say that's not a model to follow.

[00:04:24]The model to follow instead is to convince people through evidence and then let them make their own rational choice.

[00:04:31]>> Okay. And your book is full of all kinds of studies, lots of them. So, there's you can look at the facts there and make your own decision. So, there's just tons of tons of different studies. And the book is undoubtedly going to offend a good number of people, I think. [laughter] They might be offended even for the first few minutes of this interview. I don't know. But But in fact, you're wondering if it may result in prosecution coming your way if Bill C-9, our combating hate act here in Canada, gets passed by the Senate, which, you know, it looks like it probably will.

[00:05:05]>> Yeah. Okay. So, for people who don't know about C-9, C-9 is this new combating hate act, as you mentioned, and it is actually going to remove the protections that Christians and others have that they can quote scripture to make an argument. It's going to remove that.

[00:05:22]And I make a lot of arguments based on Christian doctrine. Now, I'm I'm always backing it up with the empirical evidence, but as you say, I'm I'm going to offend people. Because while I talk about the winner, in terms of what worldview will get you furthest in terms of individual flourishing and in societal flourishing, I also talk about the losers. And uh they're not going to be happy about that. And and it's almost every progressive claim that I debunk, and I do it with evidence. I It's not my opinion. I'm saying I'm bringing the receipts.

[00:05:56]So, in this post-C9 world, people could get very angry at me and say, uh we got to shut this guy down. I hope that doesn't happen because I am making a respectful argument. I'm making a truthful argument, but that doesn't seem to be something that can protect you anymore.

[00:06:14]>> Mhm. Yeah, yeah, it'll be very interesting to see what happens with Bill C-9. Again, that now that religious exemption has been removed. I mean, I know Sean Fraser, our uh you know, justice minister here saying, "Oh, no, your your rights are still protected under the charter."

[00:06:29]But this kind of opens the door, doesn't it, to our judicial >> and I mean, that's a bunch of bunk. Um and again, a lot of Canadians don't realize that our charter is written in such a way that it doesn't protect Christians. So, section 15b of our charter is this interesting little clause that says people can be discriminated against from a from the majority population. So, the majority population, as it's written in the constitution, are people like Christians, uh white people, um men. So, any kind of discrimination against Christians, uh heterosexuals, whites, it's legal in Canada under 15b.

[00:07:06]So, we've seen that again and again in every court decision in the last 10 years. When the rights of Christians were put against, for example, the rights of LGBT people, Christians have only lost. We've never won. So, this is all based on the lack of protections in the charter. The charter says in section one that the government can take away any rights given in section two, as long as it's for the purposes of uh democracy and the the uh good running of the country. Well, it seems to be the case that that always finding that democracy and the good running of the country involves suppressing the rights of Christians. So, in that regard, I'm not hopeful.

[00:07:49]>> Yeah, again, there's just so much judicial activism present these days.

[00:07:54]I mean, it's just that the the human rights for religious people seem to fall to the bottom of the human rights pile.

[00:08:01]So, now the the your book presents a lot of research actually on Christians as you're speaking here, devout Christians specifically in Canada.

[00:08:09]You say they're the country's strongest contributors to social stability and civic good. And again, you mean you you take out the you put out the evidence there, right? Who who makes the most donations and so forth. Who volunteers the most often, all these different kinds of good things, right? Now, some may say, "Well, yeah, but you know, you're a Christian and so, you know, the fact that you're spurting this stuff out just puts down non-Christians."

[00:08:33]>> Again, this is why my book is so heavily laced with empirical evidence because these aren't my opinions. We and I even show studies from across the world. No matter where you are in the world, no matter even in the last 10 years, you always find that Christians are the ones who volunteer most, they give the most to charity, they have the highest levels of forgiveness, they have the highest levels of honesty.

[00:09:00]And and other worldviews and religions don't match it.

[00:09:04]And so, I'm not trying to put down other religions in other countries. But I'm saying that in the West, we had this really unique experience. We had the highest levels of social trust. We had the highest levels of economic success.

[00:09:20]And we're losing it.

[00:09:22]And you can correlate it directly to the loss of our Christian norms in society.

[00:09:28]So, the National Choice is let's let's get back to that.

[00:09:32]>> Yeah, I I think so.

[00:09:33]And of course, there's many politicians, academics, mainstream media people who claim that DEI initiatives, and your book deals with this here, diversity, equity, and inclusion, they're making Canada a united, peaceful society, you know, Kumbaya, but you suggest that the opposite is actually true. And you you again forecut a lot of different studies on this that DEI policies are scientifically invalid and are actually doing harm. Do you want to just touch on that a bit?

[00:09:59]>> Yeah, I sure do. So, it's funny. It's like we live in the bizarro world. You know, if you're a fan of comics, Superman has a bizarro world where everything is the mirror image, everything that is good is bad. And we really have that here in Canada and and in the blue states in the United States as well, where they're promoting these policies such as diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and they're saying, "Oh, this is going to make everybody like each other better. They're going to be able to get along and we'll have better we'll better have better productivity in businesses."

[00:10:32]It's just not true. And again, I bring the empirical evidence to this, and I show that study after study, including meta-analyses, which is this aggregation of all these studies, hundreds of studies, to look at whether or not something is valid. And in the case of DEI, it simply isn't. So, while it doesn't do anything good, and I show this in my book, it is clearly doing harm. We can see that people who embrace DEI ideology the most, they actually suffer from the greatest levels of diagnosed mental illness.

[00:11:03]So, it it's this this kind of thing that I'm exposing, but at the same time, I don't want people to think, "Oh, it's going to be such a black pill. It's going to be negative." I'm saying, "No, no. There's also the solution." So, even though I debunk DEI, I say we really have a model. We have a model of what Christian justice has looked like for 2,000 years, and it's this notion of impartiality, and I work through that as well, because I don't want to just point out the problem. I want to point out the solution. And each time that I'm attacking something that doesn't work, I also offer what does work. And the the thing about this is 2,000 years ago, they knew what worked.

[00:11:47]And then we just slowly appropriated that, and we enjoyed the success. We just have to get back to it.

[00:11:53]>> Mhm.

[00:11:55]You also wrote about immigration. Boy, lots of different opinions on that, or Canadian >> [laughter] >> Canadian immigration policy, right?

[00:12:01]Especially over the last decade or two here. A lot of Canadians saying, you know, it's actually created significant social and economic strain. You look at the price of housing and so forth. And you suggest that some cultures are not compatible with Western values. You you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you got you got blowing up people's minds right now across the country with that statement, right? Uh because again, you know, we're we all want to be equal. Um you know, and some people would say that statement makes you racist. Um but you know, you look at different cultures across our our world, would would be ludicrous to say they're all equal. Obviously not.

[00:12:37]>> Right. And and I would anybody who's listening or watching, I'd say, "Facts can't be racist. Facts are facts."

[00:12:44]>> That's good. I like that.

[00:12:45]>> And so and again, I'm not bringing my opinion to this. I mean, I I bring some understanding and I bring some clarification.

[00:12:54]But I let the the facts speak for themselves, because that's what's going to convince people. And on the topic of immigration, we don't have any studies showing that it does anything good anymore. For the last 10 years, whether it's studies of the economy and immigration, or if it is social trust and immigration, or it's crime and immigration, it is all trending to the negative, and significantly negative. And this idea that diversity is our strength, I I actually have a chapter, I think it's chapter eight, where I say no, sameness is our strength.

[00:13:32]And I am not talking about skin color sameness, because in fact, the studies, when they look at it, skin color isn't an issue. I mean, there are some people who truly are racist, both people of color and white people who are racist. I don't deny that. But when it comes to the fracturing of society, it's not skin color that's causing the problem. It's a difference in culture.

[00:13:55]And there are some cultures that simply are not compatible. And I'm showing that in the data.

[00:14:04]>> Yeah, so the question is, what do you know, do we want more of that into Canada? And no, we don't. We want people here with similar values, right? So and I I apologize for interrupting here, Dr. Haskell. It's just the clock is ticking here and it doesn't respect any people either, does it? It just keeps on going, you know? But let me ask you this before we run completely out of time.

[00:14:24]How is it possible to get Canadians to turn away from this woke ideology we're talking about and start to live according to the biblical principles that you're talking about here. What needs to happen?

[00:14:34]>> Well, I I think my book, Christ or Collapse, is really the starting point for this. And it's a starting point because I'm saying, listen, you don't have to be a Christian to to understand this argument, to appreciate this argument. And I and even though I'm a Christian myself, I intentionally took the route of going with empirical and historical evidence. And it's the best empirical and historical evidence. And I've showed what doesn't work.

[00:15:00]And then I show what does work.

[00:15:02]And then I want people to decide for themselves. Are they going to have Christ or collapse?

[00:15:08]>> Mhm. Yeah, and just look at the facts and then just give it some serious thought, absolutely. I am out of time.

[00:15:15]Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and ideas with us, David. Really appreciate that.

[00:15:19]>> It was a pleasure. Thank you.

[00:15:21]>> You bet. All right. Thought-provoking, isn't it, huh, guys? Uh Dr. David Millard Haskell, he's the author of Christ or Collapse: The Case Against Godless Government. That's available at Amazon or at collegepress.com.