You can listen to the first segment of our interview with Marci McDonald, author of "The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada" via the audio player at right.
The entire interview - including phone calls from our audience after the fact - is available at our podcast page.
For me, as a non-believing, pro-secular, libertarian-leaning conservative, I've got little time for the religious right and its agenda, and particularily for those who would attempt to blur the lines between church and state - be they Christian, Muslim, or whatever.
There is no doubt that a religious right exists in Canada, and Marci's book does lay out the names and organizations that comprise that movement.
There is also no doubt that within the Conservative caucus or within the backrooms of the Harper government there exist people whom one would describe as social conservatives or even religious conservatives. The question is: so what?
Much of this book - or at least the reaction to it - seems more about resurrecting the old "hidden agenda" canard against the Conservative Party. Look, judge the Conservatives on what they've done - judge their policies on the merits, or lack thereof, of those policies.
What exactly do all of these allegedly influential Christian conservatives have to show for all of their efforts? Very little.
What's more, Marci McDonald seems to conflate all religious and social conservatives together without explaining at what point she believe such views cross a line and become a sinister agenda.
I agree with Jack Layton and the NDP on very little, but I would consider them to be mainstream. You can disagree with social conservatives all you want (and I do on many matters), but I would consider them for the most part to be mainstream.
If social conservatives are mainstream, what is so sinister about them stating their position or organizing to advance their positions?
There are those more fundamentalist Christian conservatives who do want to make this country an explicity Christian country - to ban abortion, scale back gay rights, ban the teaching of evolution, etc.
Ironically, Canada is a country that once banned abortion, banned homosexuality, banned Sunday shopping, and banned blasphemy. Those who still support such policies are very much on the losing end of things.
This is where McDonald's approach becomes muddled and convoluted. On the one hand she talks about these Christian conservatives, who in her words, have a "vision of Canada ...(that) is both retrograde and exclusionary". She states that "on their watch, multiculturalism would be expunged from the policy books" and that they seek "the enshrinement of Christianity as the nation's official belief system".
Yes, such people clearly exist.
However, she then speaks of the Harper government's approach, which as she says, involves reaching across faith and ethic lines to a broad range of social conservatives.
Even Harper's 2003 Civitas speech, which McDonald frequently cites, she quotes Harper as saying, "the social conservative issues we choose should not be denominational but should unite social conservatives of different demoninations and even different faiths".
Reaching out to Jewish, ethnic, and immigrant Canadians hardly seems like an exclusionary agenda.
When McDonald gets to the chapter which shares the name of the book - "The Armageddon Factor", she is entirely unconvinving in laying out the alleged influence of fundamendalist dispensationalists - those End-Timers pre-occupied with The Rapture.
On the one hand, McDonald muses "to what extent is this country’s role in the Middle East being influenced by ... the idea that the end of the world is at hand?”
However, when it comes to identifying influential people - or any Canadians - who hold that view, she fails miserably. She speaks of Americans like John Hagee and Hal Lindsey and Jerry Falwell. She spends a lot of time discussing someone named John Tweetie, who appears to be a fringe figure, as is even quoted in the book as saying "we don't find it profitable to get too specific about end-times prophecy".
Again, judge the Harper government on its policies, not wild conspiracy theories about who might have influenced these policies. I see much merit in the government's pro-Israel position - others see it differently. Reaching a conclusion either way is possible based on the facts of the matter not whether or not there are some crazy evangelicals whose support for Israel is tied to Biblical prophecy.
As for the broader point of the status and influence of religious conservatives and/or social conservatives on the Harper government, Gerry Nicholls makes some important observations:
I worked with Harper for five years (1997-2002) at the National Citizens Coalition. During all the time I knew him, he never displayed an ounce of zealotry. He never even talked about religion. He did, however, talk a lot about the intersection of religion and politics. And his views in those days would probably shock Marci McDonald.
Harper did not have much affinity for social conservatives. He viewed them as "culturally isolated" and a dwindling political force in Canada. That's why he also believed a conservative political party would be successful only if it talked less about social and moral issues, and more about economic and fiscal issues. In other words, he was a libertarian.
(...)
Harper's strategy has been pretty simple. To keep social conservatives happy, he likes to make symbolic moves. These please religious types, but doesn't set off alarm bells in the rest of the country.
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Overall, for the Christian right, it's pretty thin gruel. Indeed, many social conservatives I have talked to have expressed frustration at Harper's failure to promote their agenda.
Others reviews of Marci's book have been less than flattering:
Ezra Levant points out a number of factual errors McDonald has made.
In The Globe & Mail, Moll Worthen accuses McDonald of missing some important fundamentals:
The evangelicals that McDonald meets occasionally declare their “biblical worldview” or denounce the myth of neutrality in the public sphere. What she takes for the language of Christian Reconstructionism is actually a feature of Reformed cultural theology, a broad tradition that urges Christians to engage in all spheres of life through a unified worldview. To miss this point is fundamentally to misunderstand the intellectual position of many evangelicals. They have critiqued secular ideas of objectivity and the exclusion of religion from the public square by suggesting that in this postmodern age – when even atheist philosophers doubt there is just one true understanding of reality – Christian presuppositions are no less valid grounds for a worldview than those of secular rationalism. McDonald does not take on this argument, nor give the reader any hint of this broader context. McDonald sees Christian nationalist conspiracy everywhere she looks. Yet much of what she describes sounds merely like politics as usual, which perhaps makes it no less disturbing to some.
Maclean's magazine columnist Paul Wells is equally unimpressed:
First, it’s irresponsible to write a book about a phenomenon that systematically overstates the extent of that phenomenon. All the more so if you adopt a constant tone of near-panic.
Which leads us to the second, bigger problem: McDonald nowhere specifies which religious attitudes, or which secular policies derived from religious attitudes, she finds unacceptable. Bill Blaikie ran for the NDP leadership on a platform explicitly derived from the social gospel; is that OK? McDonald quotes Scarborough Liberal MP John McKay saying he finds the Harper gang scary. Wow. Really? Why? What are the specific differences between John McKay’s okay Christian nationalism and Dave Quist’s scary terrifying Christian nationalism? ‘Cause it was kind of hard to tell the difference during the Commons vote on abortion in international development assistance.
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