Many Canadians watching the pastor-politicians and “culture wars” south of the border think, with a sigh of relief: It could never happen here. Marci McDonald is out to prove them wrong.
The Armageddon Factor is an account of Canada's homegrown “Christian nationalism,” meant to startle secular citizens into vigilance. She argues that Stephen Harper has opened the way for conservative evangelicals to play an unprecedented role in Ottawa, but these “Christian nationalists” are not content with his dutiful pronouncements of “God bless Canada.”
Driven by a theocratic vision of government and an apocalyptic mania, they will, she is certain, stop at nothing short of a “Christian nation [in which] non-believers … have no place, and those in violation of biblical law, notably homosexuals and adulterers, would merit severe punishment and the sort of shunning that once characterized a society where suspected witches were burned.”
The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, by Marci McDonald, Random House Canada, 419 pages, $32
Through years of reporting at Maclean's and U.S. News & World Report, McDonald has demonstrated shrewd political observation, and she is at her best in narrating the Prime Minister's 10-year political tightrope. After Stockwell Day's credibility evaporated in 2000 amid ridicule of his belief in creationism, Harper emerged “as the determined voice of secularism.” Yet he soon began building a coalition that would yoke libertarians together with evangelicals and wrest Catholics and conservative “ethnic Canadians” from Liberal ranks. Harper handed key appointments to evangelicals and manipulated the judiciary advisory panels to “impose a long-term ideological stamp on at least a thousand federal appointments to the bench.”
To evangelical activists, these minor victories were no substitute for grand goals, like banning same-sex marriage and abortion. They took matters into their own hands, honing political networks on the model of American evangelicals' apparatus of influence in Washington. McDonald's examination of Canadian evangelicals' ambivalence toward their southern peers is particularly interesting. The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada distanced itself from Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, yet realized the importance of having a presence in Ottawa. Focus on the Family Canada has downplayed its association with James Dobson, the defender of “family values” who founded the American arm of the organization – yet continues to rely on American guidance (McDonald fails to note, however, that Focus on the Family forced Dobson to resign last year and has moved away from his militant rhetoric). Trinity Western University's leadership centre in Ottawa looks, to McDonald, an awful lot like Virginia's Patrick Henry College, an evangelical school famous for funnelling graduates into the halls of power in Washington – a comparison that makes Trinity administrators bristle.
Her account relies heavily on a handful of books by American journalists who over-simplified evangelical thought
Theses activists may insist they haven't turned Yankee, but, to McDonald, they are not truly Canadian, either. Evangelicals occupy a “parallel culture” that has infected its unsuspecting, liberal secularist host. “On one side [of the culture war] are those who inhabit what is regarded as the mainstream – sophisticated, secular, and urban. … On the other is an increasingly self-sufficient conservative Christian cosmos, largely planted in Canada's suburbs and rural outposts, which believes the world is going to hell in a handbasket and is preparing for that divinely ordained eventuality.” She notes modern evangelicals' ethnic diversity, which allows them to remain “hidden” among us.
