Canada Day, Inglis, and the gift of a liberal constitutional order

In his excellent Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (2019), Andrew Davison notes that the English legacy of "the organic weaving of statute, precedent, and tradition within a common law tradition" can be understood as an expression of "a participatory understanding".  Such a participatory understanding reflects the need for "human creativity and discernment ... since the natural law does not stipulate how to work out principles of human flourishing in detail, particularly as that pertains to individual human societies".  The process of "promulgation by parliament and Crown, observation of precedent, and interpretation by the judiciary" also has the character of "a common participation", a seeking out and discerning of the "the objectively just and good".

In other words, there is a significant theological rationale for recognising and giving thanks for these political, constitutional, and legal structures, and the means they offer for securing human flourishing.  There is a rich historic tradition of Anglican sermons on civic occasions which exemplify this.  On this Canada Day, we can turn to one example of this, words from 'Steadfastness in Religion and Loyalty Recommended: In a Sermon Preached Before the Legislature of His Majesty's Province of Nova-Scotia', a 1793 sermon of Charles Inglis, the first Bishop of Nova Scotia:

Of the British Constitution it may be affirmed, that it is the best calculated to procure political happiness, of any that was ever framed by human wisdom. Indeed we might be deemed partial to our Civil Constitution, and too much prejudiced in its favour, to form a just estimate of its value; were it not that foreigners - and those the most enlightened, and best qualified to decide on the point, who could be under no other bias than that of truth - have spoken of it as highly as any British subject [a footnote states: See particularly Montesquieu's 'Spirit of Laws', and De Lolme on the 'English Constitution']. They saw, and acknowledged the superior advantages it possessed above any ancient or modern form of government. Its spirit is mild and generous. It guards, as far as human wisdom can, against every species of oppression and wrong; it affords equal justice and redress to all; no one is too powerful to be above the control of its laws, nor too low or mean to be out of their protection; it effectually secures the subject's life and property; with the amplest liberty, both civil and religious, that is consistent with the social state, and under no other restraint, than what the welfare of society indispensably requires. 

This celebration of the British constitutional tradition - Crown, parliament, common law - in North America not only reminds us of the good of human flourishing in the polity, it also offers an important response to two contemporary issues.  

The first is the revival of Integralism.  There is a need for an alternative Christian political vision which does not compromise and contradict Christian public witness by associating it with the illiberality of the Integralists.  An Anglican gratitude for the limited monarchy, parliamentary government, and common law offers such an alternative, rooted in the liberality celebrated by Inglis: "Its spirit is mild and generous ... with the amplest liberty, both civil and religious". The references to the "enlightened" Montesquieu and De Lolme emphasise that Inglis was celebrating a liberal constitutional order, a dramatically different genealogy to that invoked by the Integralists.

Secondly, as recent discoveries have grimly confirmed, the historic treatment of the peoples of the First Nations in Canada has fallen grievously short of the "equal justice" celebrated by Inglis: "oppression and wrong" was experienced by the First Nations.  The ecclesial celebration of the liberality of the British constitutional tradition - if it is to be a meaningfully rooted in the just and the good - must also stand as a call to repentance and reparation, a duty to secure for the First Nations the "equal justice and redress" which is their right.  

The Anglican tradition of sermons on civic occasions celebrating the gift of constitutional order has, therefore, both a profound theological rationale and a contemporary importance: a vision of human flourishing which commends the Christian faith, challenging illiberal orders and ambitions, and calling for repentance and reparation for failures to secure and protect flourishing for all in a polity.