Playing to His Base: Two Books Track the Rise of Christian and Social Conservatism in Harper’s Ottawa
Literary Review of Canada, July/August 2010
by Jonathan Malloy
In 2006, Marci McDonald wrote a well-known Walrus article called “Stephen Harper and the Theo-Cons”, documenting the rise of evangelical Christians in Canadian politics. Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells wrote a short rebuttal saying evangelical influence was exaggerated and these groups were “losers.” But three years later, after watching the push by Conservative backbenchers to cancel LGBT Pride funding, Wells wrote “I’m not so sure I was right.”
McDonald notes this and much else in her book The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada . “Christian nationalists”, she says, are “a militant charismatic fringe with ties to Harper’s Conservatives that has gained influence out of all proportion to its numerical heft.” (10). McDonald is joined by Tom Warner’s Losing Control: Canada’s Social Conservatives in the Age of Rights as the first to really document the rising political involvement of evangelical Christians, who according to McDonald (18), comprise about 10-12% of the Canadian population. Disclosure – I’ve been trying to write this sort of book myself for some time. But among other reasons, it’s difficult to keep up with all that has happened since the struggle over same-sex marriage in the mid-2000s and Stephen Harper’s election in 2006. As McDonald said in a Toronto Star interview, “my problem was, as my book went to bed, headlines were coming daily” (May 11, 2010).
There’s little doubt that religion and social conservatism have a much higher profile under the Harper government. Evangelicals occupy powerful positions and the government has lurched in social conservative directions, such as the recent refusal to include abortion access in maternal-health development programs. Meanwhile, a range of new activists like Charles McVety, president of the Canada Family Action Coalition (among other groups), and charismatic preacher Faytene Kryskow have become familiar figures on the right-wing political scene. So, many Canadians glance south and are worried that we are replicating American politics, where states pass constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage and White House briefings on Iraq include vivid biblical quotations. In this vein, McDonald repeatedly refers to “the theo-con agenda” of the Harper government, and Warner writes that, under Harper, “social conservatives are hopeful that they are on the cusp of achieving a historic retransformation of Canada” (242).
This would be quite a switch for social conservatives, who for thirty years were on the losing end of abortion and sexuality battles in Canada. Losing Control is a meticulous study of these battles against lowering the age of sexual consent, gay and lesbian rights, legalizing pornography/erotica/prostitution/sex work, and of course, the liberalization of reproduction and abortion rights. Almost a sequel to his earlier Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada (2002), Warner’s book notes that the gains made by feminists, gays and lesbians in this country have been a spur and prime motivator to the social conservative movement. Warner chronicles the anger and intensity of socons as they see the world changing around them, and their sometimes-furious attempts to turn back the clock.
Warner’s book is impressive in both scope and detail. He reaches back to the 1970s and tracks struggle after struggle between progressive and social conservative forces on all fronts. To take just two examples of such clashes, in 1986 social conservatives unsuccessfully fought proposals to add sexual orientation to the Ontario human rights code; the struggle mobilized both opponents and supporters and “marked the first significant political defeat for the family values forces and a rare victory for gay rights advocates” (129). More recent is the long struggle over same-sex marriage, with advocates slowly prevailing in the courts and eventually Parliament, while their socon opponents “went all out” (179) and united across denominational and factional lines to a degree never seen before. Warner chronicles the movements and key figures at work here, all in the framework of how social conservatives have been losing control…at least until recently.
While Losing Control reaches back over three decades, The Armageddon Factor focuses mostly on the present, and McDonald goes on the road to explore what makes these people tick. She visits a creationist museum in Alberta founded by Harry Nibourg, a oil-field worker with no science degrees but a firm belief that humans and dinosaurs co-existed. She joins thousands of pumped-up teenagers in Hamilton’s Copps Coliseum for a mix of Christian rock, flashing multimedia displays and an American evangelist’s cries for “the men and women of God to rise up and shape our culture.” (147) And she visits the National House of Prayer in Ottawa, which hosts visiting teams from across the country that come to the national capital to meet and pray for – or with - MPs and cabinet ministers. These all paint a picture of an increasingly politicized set of believers ready to put their stamp on the national agenda.
It’s clear the Harper government is in tune with key socon priorities and there are individual connections between the Conservative government and evangelicals. For example, both Warner and McDonald note that the former head of Focus on the Family Canada, Darrell Reid, is now a top staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office; meanwhile, Focus’s Ottawa office, the Institute of Marriage and the Family Canada, is run by a former Conservative staffer and candidate. Harper keeps his own religious beliefs fairly quiet, but he has said enough to suggest he shares the basic evangelical conviction that religion and politics can mix.
But does this make for a massive social conservative agenda? I don’t know, because this is a very secretive and unpredictable government that does all kinds of strange things. It broke its own fixed-election date law. It delivered a defiant speech from the throne that created a constitutional crisis. It even prorogued Parliament by phone during the Christmas holidays. Even the most seasoned journalists can’t get access to the inner debates and deliberations of the Harper government, much less identify competing factions and personalities.
We know the Harper strategy, laid out by Tom Flanagan and others, is to build a coalition of rural and suburban middle-class voters that will deliver a solid 40%-45% of the national vote, rather than try to be all things to all people in the manner of Brian Mulroney. Religion is an important aspect of this, since many of those target groups are religious. But they are also active supporters of the military, concerned about crime, and consider themselves “fiscal conservatives”, and so the government has focused on priorities that cut across all these values. Take Harper’s early cancellation of the Liberal national child care program. Warner simply notes this as the socon agenda at work (231), but McDonald shows (41) how it resonates with other target groups as well – cutting down a big new federal program while promoting stay-at-home moms.
But it’s easy to overstate the case. The government may be no friend to abortion rights or Pride parades. But observers need to be careful not to exaggerate the unity of the religious right.
II.
Last Christmas I was at a farmer’s market in Kitchener-Waterloo with my father. He said “Merry Christmas,” to a vendor, who replied “Thank you, but I don’t celebrate Christmas. The Lord Jesus said to commemorate his death, but said nothing about his birth.” He was a member of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, whose website (http://www.fpchurch.org.uk/) is taken down on Sundays, “in recognition of the observance of the Lord's day.”
That is real fundamentalism, and it’s quite different from the suburban megachurches with their rock bands, PowerPoint sermons, all-out nativity pageants and flashy websites up seven days a week. While there’s no single dividing line between fundamentalists and evangelicals as a whole, fundamentalists are more concerned with doctrinal precision in all matters large and small, and are quick to turn on each other. It’s hard to find a genuine “fundamentalist” megachurch, since they split too easily over issues like which translation of the Bible to use or whether women should cut their hair (see I Corinthians 11).
Both fundamentalists and more laid-back evangelicals generally oppose same-sex marriage. But as religious activists get more zealous and extreme, they start turning their firepower on each other. This is largely unexplored in both books, particularly The Armageddon Factor (although it notes some disputes and fallings-out). McDonald discusses creationism, including young-earth creationists and “intelligent design” theories, but doesn’t directly explore how these groups are sometimes in mortal combat with each other (basic difference: did God create everything from scratch in an instant 6000 years ago, or did he or some other unnamed deity guide much of life through some type of pre-planned evolution?). She notes, but without much comment, “the assortment of fractious organizations” (217) lobbying on behalf of private Christian schools and how even a kindergarten teacher has to navigate between the different creationist theories held by families. Keeping my market vendor in mind, imagine how these schools try to handle Christmas.
McDonald is going for the bigger picture here, with her fixation on “Christian nationalism” and a “theo-con” agenda. The theo-con reference – used repeatedly in the book – stems from a 2003 Harper speech citing Alberta Report founder Ted Byfield’s distinction between “neo-cons” who focus only on market freedoms and “theo-cons” with a more social conservative or moral agenda. McDonald loads an awful lot on this apparently onetime reference, referring again and again to Harper’s “theo-con agenda” and implicitly equating it to something close to Iran-style theocracy.
And yet McDonald never explicitly defines the difference between a mild-mannered evangelical and a true “Christian nationalist.” This allows her to put pretty much anyone she wants in the latter category while implying they all seek “the enshrinement of Christianity as the nation’s official belief system” (10). But it’s not clear what this means, especially vis-à-vis other religions. McDonald’s subjects are overwhelmingly concerned with the general lack of religious fervor in Canada and consequent moral drift, and don’t seem very concerned about the rise of Islam and other competitors in Canada (though for some the Middle East is a different story). McDonald focuses on people like Faytene Kriskow, a charismatic dynamo leading a thousand-person event on Parliament Hill called TheCRY that prayed for the sins of the nation and to “reclaim Canada for Christ” (15) - and included an effusive though noncommittal letter to the crowd from Stephen Harper. McDonald notes the meaning of “reclaim Canada for Christ” is unclear and can only speculate on Harper’s motivations (much less the number of similar bland letters cranked out by the PMO for all kinds of events). The Armageddon Factor tends to make loose connections like this, being elusive on exactly who agrees with what.
Some people even appear on both sides. Liberal MP John McKay is noted for hosting a reception for a “Christian nationalist lobby” (244) and founding the Christian Legal Fellowship, which gets a rough ride from McDonald. But he is also noted as a critic of Harper's foreign policy, especially on human rights. McKay opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, but is he a “Christian nationalist”? It’s not clear, and this is the problem of The Armageddon Factor. Not all social conservatives are fervent adherents of J.N. Darby and his seven dispensations (look it up), and not all dispensationalists think Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (or maybe Barack Obama) is the AntiChrist.
Even though both McDonald’s book and Warner’s Losing Control are talking about many of the same people and events, there’s an important difference. Warner keeps a tight focus on social conservatives and sexuality/reproduction issues, and notes how activists have often dropped their religious references and tried to make their case in secular terms. This means Losing Control doesn’t get sidetracked into theology. But The Armageddon Factor is all about religion, and McDonald has difficulty navigating through its doctrinal battles and complexities and relating them to real-life politics. Discussing the Rapture or the Battle of Armageddon is pretty fascinating, but it’s much harder to connect these back to Stephen Harper and the PMO.
So what role should religion play in a plural society? This is a crucial question left unanswered in The Armageddon Factor. While Warner acknowledges his own activist background and makes clear his grudging respect for social conservatism as “an impressively organized and dynamic opponent” (vii) McDonald presents herself as the reasonable, secular, observer with no particular bone to pick with religion. But she seems concerned that Barack Obama is even more openly religious than George W. Bush (338), and doesn’t say whether she feels religious references have any place in the public sphere at all. This leaves unaddressed not just the “theo-con agenda” but questions of “reasonable accommodation”, hijab and the niqab, atheist bus ads, accreditation of religious colleges, kirpans, etc. At what point does expression of religious beliefs or behaviour become an imposition on others or otherwise unacceptable? This book on “Christian nationalism” offers no guidance.
As McDonald notes, evangelicals consider secularism to be a set of beliefs; and if secularists are allowed to express themselves publicly, then they themselves should be allowed to bring religion into the public square. Some do so very aggressively; others are more circumspect, and there’s a rich and serious discourse within Christian communities on these themes. But The Armageddon Factor’s lack of nuance leaves it unable to make these distinctions or otherwise explore these important questions about religion and Canadian society.
The Harper government has been the best thing to happen to social conservatives for a long time, and Losing Control and The Armageddon Factor are the first books to really try and document all that’s going on. But that doesn’t mean Stephen Harper has a theocratic agenda to impose on all Canadians, taking us down the apocalyptic road to the New Jerusalem. Critics like McDonald can easily overstate their case, while presenting themselves as nothing more than the reasonable mainstream observer. This only feeds the evangelical suspicion that secularism is a hostile enemy, and probably convinces a few more of them that maybe they really are in a holy war.
Literary Review of Canada, July/August 2010
by Jonathan Malloy
In 2006, Marci McDonald wrote a well-known Walrus article called “Stephen Harper and the Theo-Cons”, documenting the rise of evangelical Christians in Canadian politics. Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells wrote a short rebuttal saying evangelical influence was exaggerated and these groups were “losers.” But three years later, after watching the push by Conservative backbenchers to cancel LGBT Pride funding, Wells wrote “I’m not so sure I was right.”
McDonald notes this and much else in her book The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada . “Christian nationalists”, she says, are “a militant charismatic fringe with ties to Harper’s Conservatives that has gained influence out of all proportion to its numerical heft.” (10). McDonald is joined by Tom Warner’s Losing Control: Canada’s Social Conservatives in the Age of Rights as the first to really document the rising political involvement of evangelical Christians, who according to McDonald (18), comprise about 10-12% of the Canadian population. Disclosure – I’ve been trying to write this sort of book myself for some time. But among other reasons, it’s difficult to keep up with all that has happened since the struggle over same-sex marriage in the mid-2000s and Stephen Harper’s election in 2006. As McDonald said in a Toronto Star interview, “my problem was, as my book went to bed, headlines were coming daily” (May 11, 2010).
There’s little doubt that religion and social conservatism have a much higher profile under the Harper government. Evangelicals occupy powerful positions and the government has lurched in social conservative directions, such as the recent refusal to include abortion access in maternal-health development programs. Meanwhile, a range of new activists like Charles McVety, president of the Canada Family Action Coalition (among other groups), and charismatic preacher Faytene Kryskow have become familiar figures on the right-wing political scene. So, many Canadians glance south and are worried that we are replicating American politics, where states pass constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage and White House briefings on Iraq include vivid biblical quotations. In this vein, McDonald repeatedly refers to “the theo-con agenda” of the Harper government, and Warner writes that, under Harper, “social conservatives are hopeful that they are on the cusp of achieving a historic retransformation of Canada” (242).
This would be quite a switch for social conservatives, who for thirty years were on the losing end of abortion and sexuality battles in Canada. Losing Control is a meticulous study of these battles against lowering the age of sexual consent, gay and lesbian rights, legalizing pornography/erotica/prostitution/sex work, and of course, the liberalization of reproduction and abortion rights. Almost a sequel to his earlier Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada (2002), Warner’s book notes that the gains made by feminists, gays and lesbians in this country have been a spur and prime motivator to the social conservative movement. Warner chronicles the anger and intensity of socons as they see the world changing around them, and their sometimes-furious attempts to turn back the clock.
Warner’s book is impressive in both scope and detail. He reaches back to the 1970s and tracks struggle after struggle between progressive and social conservative forces on all fronts. To take just two examples of such clashes, in 1986 social conservatives unsuccessfully fought proposals to add sexual orientation to the Ontario human rights code; the struggle mobilized both opponents and supporters and “marked the first significant political defeat for the family values forces and a rare victory for gay rights advocates” (129). More recent is the long struggle over same-sex marriage, with advocates slowly prevailing in the courts and eventually Parliament, while their socon opponents “went all out” (179) and united across denominational and factional lines to a degree never seen before. Warner chronicles the movements and key figures at work here, all in the framework of how social conservatives have been losing control…at least until recently.
While Losing Control reaches back over three decades, The Armageddon Factor focuses mostly on the present, and McDonald goes on the road to explore what makes these people tick. She visits a creationist museum in Alberta founded by Harry Nibourg, a oil-field worker with no science degrees but a firm belief that humans and dinosaurs co-existed. She joins thousands of pumped-up teenagers in Hamilton’s Copps Coliseum for a mix of Christian rock, flashing multimedia displays and an American evangelist’s cries for “the men and women of God to rise up and shape our culture.” (147) And she visits the National House of Prayer in Ottawa, which hosts visiting teams from across the country that come to the national capital to meet and pray for – or with - MPs and cabinet ministers. These all paint a picture of an increasingly politicized set of believers ready to put their stamp on the national agenda.
It’s clear the Harper government is in tune with key socon priorities and there are individual connections between the Conservative government and evangelicals. For example, both Warner and McDonald note that the former head of Focus on the Family Canada, Darrell Reid, is now a top staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office; meanwhile, Focus’s Ottawa office, the Institute of Marriage and the Family Canada, is run by a former Conservative staffer and candidate. Harper keeps his own religious beliefs fairly quiet, but he has said enough to suggest he shares the basic evangelical conviction that religion and politics can mix.
But does this make for a massive social conservative agenda? I don’t know, because this is a very secretive and unpredictable government that does all kinds of strange things. It broke its own fixed-election date law. It delivered a defiant speech from the throne that created a constitutional crisis. It even prorogued Parliament by phone during the Christmas holidays. Even the most seasoned journalists can’t get access to the inner debates and deliberations of the Harper government, much less identify competing factions and personalities.
We know the Harper strategy, laid out by Tom Flanagan and others, is to build a coalition of rural and suburban middle-class voters that will deliver a solid 40%-45% of the national vote, rather than try to be all things to all people in the manner of Brian Mulroney. Religion is an important aspect of this, since many of those target groups are religious. But they are also active supporters of the military, concerned about crime, and consider themselves “fiscal conservatives”, and so the government has focused on priorities that cut across all these values. Take Harper’s early cancellation of the Liberal national child care program. Warner simply notes this as the socon agenda at work (231), but McDonald shows (41) how it resonates with other target groups as well – cutting down a big new federal program while promoting stay-at-home moms.
But it’s easy to overstate the case. The government may be no friend to abortion rights or Pride parades. But observers need to be careful not to exaggerate the unity of the religious right.
II.
Last Christmas I was at a farmer’s market in Kitchener-Waterloo with my father. He said “Merry Christmas,” to a vendor, who replied “Thank you, but I don’t celebrate Christmas. The Lord Jesus said to commemorate his death, but said nothing about his birth.” He was a member of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, whose website (http://www.fpchurch.org.uk/) is taken down on Sundays, “in recognition of the observance of the Lord's day.”
That is real fundamentalism, and it’s quite different from the suburban megachurches with their rock bands, PowerPoint sermons, all-out nativity pageants and flashy websites up seven days a week. While there’s no single dividing line between fundamentalists and evangelicals as a whole, fundamentalists are more concerned with doctrinal precision in all matters large and small, and are quick to turn on each other. It’s hard to find a genuine “fundamentalist” megachurch, since they split too easily over issues like which translation of the Bible to use or whether women should cut their hair (see I Corinthians 11).
Both fundamentalists and more laid-back evangelicals generally oppose same-sex marriage. But as religious activists get more zealous and extreme, they start turning their firepower on each other. This is largely unexplored in both books, particularly The Armageddon Factor (although it notes some disputes and fallings-out). McDonald discusses creationism, including young-earth creationists and “intelligent design” theories, but doesn’t directly explore how these groups are sometimes in mortal combat with each other (basic difference: did God create everything from scratch in an instant 6000 years ago, or did he or some other unnamed deity guide much of life through some type of pre-planned evolution?). She notes, but without much comment, “the assortment of fractious organizations” (217) lobbying on behalf of private Christian schools and how even a kindergarten teacher has to navigate between the different creationist theories held by families. Keeping my market vendor in mind, imagine how these schools try to handle Christmas.
McDonald is going for the bigger picture here, with her fixation on “Christian nationalism” and a “theo-con” agenda. The theo-con reference – used repeatedly in the book – stems from a 2003 Harper speech citing Alberta Report founder Ted Byfield’s distinction between “neo-cons” who focus only on market freedoms and “theo-cons” with a more social conservative or moral agenda. McDonald loads an awful lot on this apparently onetime reference, referring again and again to Harper’s “theo-con agenda” and implicitly equating it to something close to Iran-style theocracy.
And yet McDonald never explicitly defines the difference between a mild-mannered evangelical and a true “Christian nationalist.” This allows her to put pretty much anyone she wants in the latter category while implying they all seek “the enshrinement of Christianity as the nation’s official belief system” (10). But it’s not clear what this means, especially vis-à-vis other religions. McDonald’s subjects are overwhelmingly concerned with the general lack of religious fervor in Canada and consequent moral drift, and don’t seem very concerned about the rise of Islam and other competitors in Canada (though for some the Middle East is a different story). McDonald focuses on people like Faytene Kriskow, a charismatic dynamo leading a thousand-person event on Parliament Hill called TheCRY that prayed for the sins of the nation and to “reclaim Canada for Christ” (15) - and included an effusive though noncommittal letter to the crowd from Stephen Harper. McDonald notes the meaning of “reclaim Canada for Christ” is unclear and can only speculate on Harper’s motivations (much less the number of similar bland letters cranked out by the PMO for all kinds of events). The Armageddon Factor tends to make loose connections like this, being elusive on exactly who agrees with what.
Some people even appear on both sides. Liberal MP John McKay is noted for hosting a reception for a “Christian nationalist lobby” (244) and founding the Christian Legal Fellowship, which gets a rough ride from McDonald. But he is also noted as a critic of Harper's foreign policy, especially on human rights. McKay opposes abortion and same-sex marriage, but is he a “Christian nationalist”? It’s not clear, and this is the problem of The Armageddon Factor. Not all social conservatives are fervent adherents of J.N. Darby and his seven dispensations (look it up), and not all dispensationalists think Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (or maybe Barack Obama) is the AntiChrist.
Even though both McDonald’s book and Warner’s Losing Control are talking about many of the same people and events, there’s an important difference. Warner keeps a tight focus on social conservatives and sexuality/reproduction issues, and notes how activists have often dropped their religious references and tried to make their case in secular terms. This means Losing Control doesn’t get sidetracked into theology. But The Armageddon Factor is all about religion, and McDonald has difficulty navigating through its doctrinal battles and complexities and relating them to real-life politics. Discussing the Rapture or the Battle of Armageddon is pretty fascinating, but it’s much harder to connect these back to Stephen Harper and the PMO.
So what role should religion play in a plural society? This is a crucial question left unanswered in The Armageddon Factor. While Warner acknowledges his own activist background and makes clear his grudging respect for social conservatism as “an impressively organized and dynamic opponent” (vii) McDonald presents herself as the reasonable, secular, observer with no particular bone to pick with religion. But she seems concerned that Barack Obama is even more openly religious than George W. Bush (338), and doesn’t say whether she feels religious references have any place in the public sphere at all. This leaves unaddressed not just the “theo-con agenda” but questions of “reasonable accommodation”, hijab and the niqab, atheist bus ads, accreditation of religious colleges, kirpans, etc. At what point does expression of religious beliefs or behaviour become an imposition on others or otherwise unacceptable? This book on “Christian nationalism” offers no guidance.
As McDonald notes, evangelicals consider secularism to be a set of beliefs; and if secularists are allowed to express themselves publicly, then they themselves should be allowed to bring religion into the public square. Some do so very aggressively; others are more circumspect, and there’s a rich and serious discourse within Christian communities on these themes. But The Armageddon Factor’s lack of nuance leaves it unable to make these distinctions or otherwise explore these important questions about religion and Canadian society.
The Harper government has been the best thing to happen to social conservatives for a long time, and Losing Control and The Armageddon Factor are the first books to really try and document all that’s going on. But that doesn’t mean Stephen Harper has a theocratic agenda to impose on all Canadians, taking us down the apocalyptic road to the New Jerusalem. Critics like McDonald can easily overstate their case, while presenting themselves as nothing more than the reasonable mainstream observer. This only feeds the evangelical suspicion that secularism is a hostile enemy, and probably convinces a few more of them that maybe they really are in a holy war.
