PULPIT & POLITICS
By
Dennis Gruending
Investigative
reporter traces the religious right
A book by veteran
investigative reporter Marci McDonald about the religious right, The Armageddon
Factor, has been four years in its gestation. It had its origin in a long
piece called Stephen Harper and the Theo-cons, which she wrote for The
Walrus magazine in October 2006.
It’s high time someone wrote such a book and in doing so McDonald
has performed a significant public service. Her thesis is that in recent
years the religious right has moved, incrementally, from the margins to
the centre of influence in Canadian political life, and has lent its best
efforts to Stephen Harper and the Conservative government. Harper, in
return, has courted a constituency of conservative Protestants, Catholics
and Jews in an attempt to embed them in his political coalition.
I have written
about this many times on this blog and elsewhere but never as comprehensively
and systematically as McDonald has done in her book. She recounts how,
upon her return to Canada in 2002 following some years in the United States,
she was surprised to find how successfully the religious right had been
in establishing itself in this country. This is a development that mainstream
journalists in Canada have missed almost entirely. In the US, there has
been a good deal of writing and discussion about the influence of the
religious right, which hitched its political wagon to Ronald Reagan in
the 1980s presidential campaign and has remained a bulwark of support
for the Republicans ever since.
Journalists
have a responsibility to probe these connections but in Canada they have
been either reluctant or not competent to do so. They may be content to
believe those Canadian academics that say there is no discernible religious
right in Canada. They are wrong. Any Liberal or NDP candidate for election
will tell you that the religious right is usually adept at lending a hand
to the Conservatives.
A detailed
narrative
McDonald covers
the waterfront in a narrative that stitches together her reading, her
interviews, and her attendance at the conferences, workshops, churches
and classrooms of the people and organizations she has followed. She writes,
although too briefly for my liking, about partisan politics — for
example, there were estimates back in 2006 that half of Harper’s
new caucus were conservative Christians. She writes about the growing
web of religiously and politically conservative organizations that has
come into being in Canada — Preston Manning’s Centre for Building
Democracy; the Canada Family Action Coalition; the National House of Prayer;
the group, Equipping Christians for the Public Square; Faytene Kyrskow’s
ultra-conservative youth group 4MYCanada — to name just a few.
She also writes
about the television, radio and Internet media developed by the Christian
right, including the beleaguered 100 Huntley Street, presided over by
David Mainse. She writes about the schools, including Trinity Western
University, which are placing their undergraduates into service in MP
offices, most often the offices of Conservatives, and how these graduates
are fanning out through the civil service.
One might ask,
and some of McDonald’s critics have, what is wrong in having a group
of people motivated by conservative religious principles engaging in public
life? The answer is that there is nothing wrong with it, but it is also
completely legitimate for a journalist to cover that phenomenon, as McDonald
has done. If religious faith were simply a matter of personal piety or
private devotion, it would demand far less scrutiny. But faith is inherently
social, and, yes, political.
Ultimately,
the question to be answered is where these people want to move our nation.
I believe that they want a leaner and meaner state where individuals and
religiously based organizations take back much of the responsibility for
education, adoptions, social welfare and many other services, and do it
on their own terms. On these and other policies, whether it is their response
to global warming, to crime, or to our government’s policy toward
Israel, the religious right can be judged both on what it says and what
it does.
Strengths
and weaknesses
Many of the
groups and individuals McDonald writes about are what she describes as
“Christian nationalists.” They are people who want their country
governed by biblical principles, as they define them, and there is little
room for diversity, tolerance, secularism or faiths other than their own
fevered brand of Christianity. McDonald’s focus in the book is both
a strength and a considerable weakness. A strength because it is important
that we know just who is bankrolling the Institute of Marriage and Family
Canada, or Faytene Kryskow’s youth group, or the openly theocratic
group Equipping Christians for the Public Square.
The weakness
is that McDonald spends much of her time and energy focusing upon people,
like the custodian of a creationist museum in Alberta, who appear to be
on the fringe. McDonald may well argue that people who were once considered
fringe are now accepted as mainstream, but I would have preferred that
more attention be paid to groups such as the well-established Evangelical
Fellowship of Canada or to members of the Conservative cabinet and caucus.
Still, McDonald
is the first writer to have provided us with a baseline study of the religious
right in Canada. Perhaps it is for that reason that she is being so roundly
attacked in the National Post, that house organ of the right, religious
and otherwise.
This is a book
that should be read by journalists, as well as academics, people in political
parties — and people in churches. We should use it as a resource
to help us watch carefully what is happening in Parliament, on the airwaves
and in our schools and universities. The religious right is here and it
is not going to go away. Further, it is not some alien force wholly transplanted
from elsewhere, despite the significant American influence at work.
There are members
of my extended family that fit the religious right description, some who
could even be called Christian nationalists. We must learn to understand
these people from the inside out and to engage them. On that score, too,
the book comes up a bit short. One has the feeling that McDonald is examining
a species that she can describe but does not really understand.
Another
story to tell
Finally, there
is another story to tell, although I realize that it was largely beyond
the focus of McDonald’s book. It is the story of religious progressives
who have been marginalized as their churches, synagogues and faith-based
organizations have become more conservative. These are people influenced
by faith who have an agenda very different from that of the religious
right. If we are our brother’s and our sister’s keeper, as
candidate Barack Obama reminded us in his successful run for the Democratic
nomination in 2008, then we have to care about child poverty, peace, the
environment, and economic justice at home and abroad. This is a faith
superior to anything the religious right has on offer and one of these
days it will make a comeback.
Gruending is an Ottawa-based writer and a former member of Parliament. His blog can be found at http://www.dennisgruending.ca/pulpitandpolitics
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