I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before.
Canada Christian College president Charles McVety, launches a rather vicious verbal barrage at The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.
In his word.ca program aired on The Miracle Channel and the IChannel (program #403) McVety hurls names at Christians who don’t accept his anti-science, climate change denial; more names in his commercial laden 1/2 tv sermon than most of us hear in a year.
Someone saw a ghosted image of Barak Obama in the tv on the word.ca set. Did you spot it?
McVety, who heads the secretive Evangelical Association started by his father in 1963, attempts to link The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s position on climate change with the mother earth movement.
Never one to shy away from hyperbole, exaggeration and division, McVety is known mostly for his rants against politicians and policies not conforming to his socially conservative, dominionist agenda.
A record snowfall has hit Washington and New York and many other cities in
the North-East part of the United States.
All the while the Government under Barack Obama’s administration is trying to implement Cap-and-Trade; a G20 program to force the Americans to pay a tax for climate change
Leighton Tebay rebutts McVety point by point here.
This is quite the performance even for McVety, a rotund Pat Robertson of Canada.
The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada was started in 1964. The association represents 160 denominations, educational institutions and approximately 1 thousand local churches. The EFC promotes awareness of social justice issues, encourages cooperation and advocates in areas of public policy. The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada is a member of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) . The counterpart in the US is the National Evangelical Association (NEA).
That is a large number of evangelicals to mock. In McVety’s fevered, fundamentalist, fear based world, fellow Christians are hyper-environmentalists, scammers, earthies, indulgence creators, apostates, slaves and servants of the earth, pagans, gospel distorters, green gospelers, vile reprobates.
Pause.
Breathe.
He is just getting warmed up.
This is funny in a pathetic way, if it was meant to be a dog whistle to the fundamentalist faithful, to fire them up, it doesn’t even spark. If it wasn’t Charles McVety, you’d think this was a parody, a skit to be relegated to a late night comedy cable show instead of some cheap air time on a religious channel.
In between copious self-aggrandizing commercials selling Mc-products, Charles McVety who has gone back to calling himself Dr., uses two bible verses in his bible thumping. The verses don’t have anything to do with climate care, climate change or climate denial, but why let the bible get in the way of a name calling, attention seeking rant?
Catholics, Ted Haggard, Barak Obama, Dmitriy Medvedev, Ted Haggard and Stephen Harper get railed on along side the EFC, the NAE and the WEA.
Trillions of dollars are at stake, along with God created carbon monoxide. And it’s all your fault. Nonsense, crazy, fallacy…
McVety is willing to play a persecuted buffoon when it suits his agenda. But lately it’s been a rut he’s stayed in. There is something about his angry crazy talk that has a wiff of sorry subliminal reality to it.
What does The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, his hyper-environmentalist earthies posit about climate care?
A thoughtful reasoned debate and deep informed discussion doesn’t put money in McVety’s pockets or eyeballs on his boob tube sideshow. The EFC:
These ecological facts present a challenging theological question. We know from Scripture that humans are the apple of God’s eye. He loves us with an everlasting, redeeming love through His Son Jesus Christ. But in our zeal to emphasize this central truth, we seem to have missed God’s love and care for the rest of creation.
When we read Paul’s paean of praise for the supremacy of Christ in Colossians 1, do we notice the expansive language? “All things have been created through him and for him . . . and in him all things hold together . . . and through him to reconcile to himself all things.” Nothing it seems is left out.
The evangelical thinker Francis Schaeffer put it this way nearly 40 years ago: “If I love the Lover, then I love what the Lover has made.”
Shalom is what we seek. But the biblical concept we call “peace” is so much more than a simple ceasing of hostilities between enemies. It is, as a number of theologians tell us, nothing less than the full flourishing of all of creation – the “webbing together of God, humans and all creation in justice,” as one has said following the sentiment of the psalmist.
In some ways climate change is only a symptom of a bigger challenge we face. We are being asked if we truly care for the entire creation – human and non-human alike, each in its appropriate place and role. Now that is a moral question.
2008 EFC poll:
2 in 10 evangelicals are increasing their use of public transit “very often”
7 in 10 evangelicals try to reduce home electricity use “very often”
3 in 10 evangelicals buy green products “very often”
Who is blogging about this?
Nobody. Ah, Shalom.
It’s hard work to be and to feel charitable to McVety; he does, after all, tax one’s patience.
I have stopped watching his program because it is so mind-numbingly predictable. Moreover, his circle of friends “guests” on his program has sharply reduced.
The so-called Dr. Rondo Thomas hasn’t been on the program for nearly 2 years and Grant Jeffrey is nowhere to be seen. Yet those people–and many more–figure prominently on the front page of the website. About the only regular now is Frank Dimant of B’nai Brith and that squares with McVety’s views of Israel and the endtimes. About the only other guests is the owner of Sunny Crunch Foods because he’s an advertiser in McVety’s magazine.
It’s hard to believe that anyone would listen to such crackpot-laden rhetoric–particularly since most of what he says is patently false.
His circle of influence is diminishing and he knows it. His broadcast is seen only on a few channels and usually at times for the miscellania of programming–in other words, not prime time.
Nearly every effort to gather media attention has ended in near failure. One year, he asked for one million “righteous” Canadians to go to their MP’s office on Labour Day to protest same-sex marriage or some other thing.
You do remember it don’t you? It wasn’t in all the newspapers but it was too big to ignore but the media did ignore it.
I e-mailed McVety to ask him how does one know if he/she is righteous. He never answered that one.
Another public caper was a demonstration in front of the Royal Ontario Museum to protest the Darwin exhibition. It got some coverage but the most mainstream TV did was show a crowd milling about the entrance to the ROM and gave McVety no mention.
Another time, he was on Parliment Hill with many other evangelicals and he had set up a literature table and alleged that people spat on him. There were no witnesses, of course, other than his own.
He is also a weekly guest on an all-talk and sports radio station in Toronto whose ratings are so low as to be nearly negligible.
He is also an occasional guest on Michael Coren’s program and that’s a program not widely viewed.
What I don’t understand about McVety and Faytene Kryskow et al. is why do they keep pushing themselves to the sidelines then complain about being marginalised?
The logic defeats this writer.
If enough people stop tuning in–even out of curiosity–then maybe he’ll and Kryskow and Coren will all go away and the real Message will come through.
Here’s my take on McVety: an complete fake Christian, could be called a “spiritual Bernie Madoff.”
Check it here:
http://mysteryworshipers.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/how-to-spot-fake-christians-or-spiritual-bernie-madoffs%E2%80%9D/