Last week I noticed a story titled “B.C. teacher fired for having the wrong opinion” running across my Facebook news feed. Sometimes titles like these are nothing but clickbait, but in this case it was accurate. A British Columbia teacher was basically fired for expressing an opinion that hurt the feelings of a student.

Canada has less robust free speech protections than the United States. Progressives hold near total control of the education system there, and have great freedom to control the hiring and firing of teachers. Still this event is instructive in that it may well represent a template for what progressive educators in the U.S. would like to see happen here.

The opinion that got this teacher fired was, “I find abortion to be wrong.” A student complained that this made her feel unsafe, and the teacher was dismissed for it. The topic of the opinion may be of little consequence, though, for it’s easy to believe he could have been fired for saying he does not believe in same-sex marriage, that he believes it’s better to wait for marriage before having sex, or that he thinks Jesus is the Son of God. Any of those statements could “trigger” some student and make him or her feel unsafe.

Episodes like this one in Canada illustrate what can happen to Christians’ right to express their beliefs in the public square when progressives are in power. My research on Christianophobia supports this impression, showing that persons in the United States who hate Christians do want to drive them from the public square. Many of those persons possess sufficient cultural influence to make the threat very real.

I know of no teachers in the U.S. who have been fired for saying they think abortion is wrong, but I do know of a physician who was fired from a government position due to his religious beliefs. A counseling student was removed from her degree program because of her religious beliefs. So is it really such a stretch to see a future in which teachers are fired for mentioning their Christian faith in passing, or for supporting some value embedded in that faith? And if our culture continues heading in that direction, could anyone whose beliefs go against an established progressive, secular norm be secure in any government job?

It has been well established that progressive activists are willing to go after Christians in private business, as seen in the cases of wedding vendors and television personalities. If Christians are not supposed to work in the government or private industry, where are they supposed to work and live in our society?

For many Christians, the key to reversing this alarming trend is in politics. Christians felt increasingly crowded out of society during the eight years of the Obama administration. They feared Hillary Clinton would bring more of the same. Her defense of Planned Parenthood, for example, and her plans to support it with public money, provided no reassurance to them that Clinton respected their perspective on life.

Now we have a new president-elect, but I am not so confident that politics is the key. I have in fact argued that Christian support for Trump would damage to our cultural witness, and was shortsighted for that reason. The election is over, so those debates are behind us, but now I fear that Christians might put their reliance on Trump to deliver them from consequences such as we see in Canada. If so, it is a false hope. The problem is deeper than politics. We have entered into long-term project of being a minority subculture in a post-Christian world. We must not let temporary political situations blind us to that fact. The best Trump could deliver for Christians from the White House would be a temporary reprieve.

We cannot rely on political processes alone. We must find our voice in cultural venues or we will eventually find ourselves in the same position as the Canadian teacher. We need to build support systems for each other, and especially to support and work with Christians of different races and denominations. We need to develop the sort of Christian community that does not depend on the approval of the larger society.

Christians must be cautious not to misread the times, and think that having Trump as president will permit a return to a Christian culture that no longer exists (if it ever did). That kind of complacency will not serve us well in the long run. Instead we must work harder than ever to become a vibrant Christian community that will not only survive attempts to marginalize us but will even thrive by providing a powerful witness to the world.