Strengths and weaknesses
Many of the groups and individuals that 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 focussing 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. Dennis Gruending Pulpit and Politics
She’s probably being roundly attacked because she gives facts like “1/3rd of new Canadian immigrants are Christian” and then the following page writes that “under their watch multi-culturalism would be expunged.” Does that sound like a responsible award winning journalist or someone with an agenda? She focuses on Charles McVety, a dispensationalist who attacks the EFC for being to focused on the enviroment. Yet she tries to pair McVety and the EFC in the same camp. Additionally, she posits that Christian Reconstruction theology and Dispensational theology are complimentary even though they are teleologically opposite. Gary DeMar and Gary North complain regularly that the Christian Reconstructionist theology is marginalized by dispensationalists. McDonald is clearly drawing conclusions from her own imagination, not facts!