The governing Liberals, allied with the Bloc Québécois, have been contemplating a move to eliminate religious exemptions from Canada’s hate-speech laws to help pass Bill C-9 targeting hate and terror symbols. Such a move would be ill-informed and threaten religious freedom in Canada. Just as importantly, it would also reveal a completely flawed understanding of hate, of reasonable limits on freedom of expression, and even of personal responsibility. Whether the government ultimately decides to eliminate these restrictions or not, it’s worth fleshing out why doing so would be a bad idea.

The Bloc’s desired amendment to Bill C-9 poses a threat to religious freedom, but not because removing exemptions from hate-speech laws would effectively “ban the Bible,” as some critics have claimed. It’s subtler than that, though no less serious. Those exemptions are what keep the government in its place. Without them, government, which neither understands religion nor sacred texts like the Bible, can end up being the ultimate arbiter of religious speech, deciding on whether it is acceptable to express it. Religious teaching and worship, whether public or private, must remain beyond the reach of government.

This has been the constitutional understanding at least since the first Magna Carta in 1215.

More fundamentally, Canada has ended up in this debate because we seem to have largely lost a proper understanding of what hate is. The essential difference between views informed by earnestly held, peacefully expressed beliefs and hate speech is intent. The first type of public expression has an honest intent. It can be atheistic or theistic, theological or philosophical, politically partisan or politically neutral. In Canada, we encounter daily a seemingly endless array of beliefs and ideologies. We ascribe to some, are indifferent to some, and with some, we likely disagree deeply.

Hate speech is very different. Its motivation is not honest, but malicious. At its most potent, the goal of hate speech is to harm fellow human beings, often members of an identifiable group, through violence or threat of violence. At a minimum, hate speech seeks to denigrate targeted persons so that they face public scorn, marginalization, and dehumanization. Hate is the failure to see our shared humanity. It is a denial of the inherent human dignity we all possess. Hate places you above, over, and against your neighbour, your fellow citizen.

Unchecked, hate can burn like wildfire through our society and contribute to its self-destruction. We need only look to numerous examples in human history to understand that frightening trajectory.

So, our first line of defence against hatred isn’t government; it’s each other. Before government need ever get involved, our first responsibility as citizens is to recognize the humanity and inherent dignity in one another. Recovering this understanding places natural limits on freedom of expression.

As a devout Catholic informed by faithful adherence to church teaching about the human person, I have an inherent freedom to speak against abortion and euthanasia as moral evils, if I so choose. However, I absolutely do not have the freedom to call on my fellow Catholics to physically assault doctors known to perform abortions. As a devout Catholic who believes that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God who rose from the dead on the third day for the salvation of the world, I have an inherent freedom to publicly reject as wrong the beliefs of those who, for example, would reduce Jesus to just a man who taught us to be nice to each other. I absolutely do not have the freedom to call for their deaths as godless heathen.

So, let’s get to the nub of things in Canada today by citing the most pernicious form of hate we currently face. You are free to disagree with the precepts of Judaism on a theological, philosophical, or other grounds. You are free to disagree with the government of the State of Israel and how it is waging war against Hamas and Hezbollah. You are not free to publicly call for the death of Jews. This is the red line between honest disagreement in public debate and hate.

All of us as human beings have our views shaped by some belief system, whether we acknowledge it or not. Our thoughts and how we express them come from somewhere. Each one of us as citizens has a duty when exercising freedom of expression to understand the first reasonable limit: to hold our own tongues. How true it is what our parents told us: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Such wisdom. Yet, we have forgotten this in our country, and the depersonalized arena of social media has only worsened the misuse of our freedom, fooling us into thinking we have a social licence to hate others and call for their destruction. We do not.

But we do have the freedom to disagree based on peacefully held beliefs. This understanding is our first and best line of defence against hate speech. But if government eventually must get involved, it too needs limits, which is why we still need religious exemptions to hate speech laws.

• Rev. Dr. Andrew Bennett is the director of faith community engagement at Cardus.