A central feature of Canadian history since the mid-twentieth century has been ‘the rights revolution,’ the quest to articulate and give legal protection to human rights and fundamental freedoms. In many ways, as with other Western nations, this struggle has become the country's defining metanarrative, giving identity, normative ideals and purpose to Canadian nationhood and jurisprudence, especially with the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Canadian Constitution of 1982. It is the intention of this article to study historically the complex role of religion in an early phase of the human rights narrative in Canada. The focus is on the religious dimension of the passage in 1960 by the Progressive Conservative Government of John Diefenbaker of Canada's first national human rights instrument, the Canadian Bill of Rights. It will be argued that the churches played an important but ambiguous role in relation to the human rights movement which, in some ways, presented perceived challenges to their own religiously-grounded metanarratives of Canadian history, identity, and destiny. A central thesis advanced is that the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights reflected and legislated a pluralism which was religiously-positive in integrating the nation's principal religious and political values under the formula affirmed in the bill's Preamble: “that the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions (…).”