Each Canada Day, we celebrate the remarkable fact that a country stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific has endured for nearly 160 years. We speak of Confederation, the Constitution, Parliament, and our institutions as the foundations of our political life. Yet these alone cannot explain why a nation holds together. Laws may govern a people, but they cannot, by themselves, sustain a common future.
One of the 20th century’s greatest political theorists believed the answer lays elsewhere. Hannah Arendt, a secular Jew who fled Nazi Germany, argued that political life depends upon two indispensable human capacities: the ability to make promises and the ability to forgive. More surprisingly still, she believed these were articulated most clearly in the teachings of Jesus Christ.
At first glance, this religious tradition may seem an odd place to look for political wisdom. We have become accustomed to speaking of Christianity as a private faith, concerned with personal morality rather than public life. Politics, we assume, belongs to constitutions and legislatures, not to the Gospels. Arendt rejected this assumption. She believed Jesus uniquely identified something politics could not survive without.
Political communities are built upon promises. Thomas Hobbes argued that a commonwealth is constituted through covenant: People bind themselves to one another under common rules so they may live together in peace. Constitutions, treaties, elections and even ordinary citizenship all depend upon the expectation that our commitments today will remain meaningful tomorrow. Every political order, in other words, rests upon promises directed toward the future.
Yet human beings inevitably fail to keep their promises.
This is the political significance of forgiveness. Arendt observed that every human action possesses a certain irreversibility. A word once spoken cannot be unsaid. A betrayal cannot simply be erased. A broken promise leaves behind a debt that no compensation can fully repay. If politics depended upon perfect faithfulness, every society would eventually collapse beneath the accumulated weight of resentment.
Forgiveness provides another possibility. It does not deny injustice or excuse wrongdoing. Rather, it releases us from allowing yesterday’s failures to determine tomorrow’s possibilities. Forgiveness makes new beginnings possible precisely because it acknowledges that the past cannot be undone.
Canada’s own history illustrates both of these realities.
Confederation itself was an extraordinary act of political promise. Former colonies committed themselves to a common future while preserving their distinct identities through federalism. English and French Canadians, despite generations of political and religious conflict, agreed they could build something together without requiring complete uniformity. The Dominion was not founded upon the absence of disagreement but upon the willingness to bind themselves to a shared future despite it.
That work, of course, remains imperfect and unfinished.
Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples stands as one of the clearest reminders that promises can be broken and that political communities must confront the consequences of their failures. Treaties were neglected. Cultures were suppressed. Residential schools inflicted profound and lasting wounds upon generations of children and families. Justice requires honest acknowledgement, meaningful restitution where possible, and a continued commitment to repair.
Yet justice alone cannot answer the political question Arendt poses. Once the truth has been spoken, restitution pursued and responsibility accepted, how does a people move forward together? No policy can reverse history. No court can restore what has been lost. At some point, the possibility of a shared future depends upon the difficult work of forgiveness — not as forgetfulness, nor as the abandonment of justice, but as the refusal to let the past become the final word about our common life.
Forgiveness is necessary for a new age of promise.
This was the remarkable insight Arendt found in Jesus. Christianity’s contribution to politics is not confined to moral instruction or charitable service. It offers an account of how fractured communities become capable of beginning again. Promise without forgiveness eventually dissolves into resentment; forgiveness without renewed promise cannot build a future. Each requires the other, and together they reveal one of Christianity’s deepest political insights.
Perhaps this Canada Day, that is worth remembering. We often speak as though Christianity has little to say about public life in a secular democracy. Yet every time Canadians ask what sort of country we hope to become, we are already relying upon two political capacities to which Christianity uniquely witnesses: making promises to one another and forgiving when those promises are broken. To look forward together is, in no small measure, to see through Christian eyes.
