Jul 10
23
Christians and census long forms…
By Tim Bloedow
There has been a lot of controversy in recent days over the federal government’s decision to revoke the compulsory requirement for Canadians to complete the census long-form.
So what’s the Christian theological perspective on this matter?
Data collection is great. Many statistics are fun and useful. But in our humanistic, anthropocentric (man-centred) world, statistics fuel scientism and the idea that all decisions and moral determinations should be rooted in empirical evidence. This provides an additional driving force for data collection. Governments seek this data to provide the justification for laws and public policy.
The Christian position, in contrast to scientism and humanism, is that God’s law-word – the Bible – must be the basis for moral decisions, law and public policy. As Christians, we affirm that there is no inconsistency with God’s word and God’s world, so when God’s world is correctly interpreted, empirical evidence will support the rationality and moral superiority of decisions rooted in God’s word. But due to human fallibility and sin, we don’t always interpret the evidence correctly. Doctors used to chop out “vestigial organs” that were proven to be important as medical science improved. The best modern research shows how important fathers are in the lives of their children and how physically and psychologically damaging abortion can be to mothers. This contradicts supposedly science-based evidence to the contrary that was instrumental in forming harmful public policy several decades ago.
In today’s hyper-subjectivist age, we also find that more and more public policy decisions are based on personal feelings rather than on objective realities. This is foundational to human rights theory which, for example, is more concerned about how government school children feel in school than about how much they actually learn. Hurt feelings are also instrumental in human rights commission case analysis.
If making the census long-form voluntary plays a small part in crushing idols, even at the expense of losing some useful data, the decision will have benefited Canadians, probably doing more good than Prime Minister Stephen Harper imagined.