Dennis Gruending. 2010. Used by permission. All rights reserved
I wrote in a recent post about Marci McDonald’s book The Armageddon Factor, which traces the growing political influence of Canada’s religious right. McDonald has clearly struck a nerve – two bodyguards accompanied her at a recent Calgary event to promote her book. Reviews and interviews with her (and her critics) have been everywhere since the book was released in mid-May. On the week ending June 5th, The Armageddon Factor was ranked second on The Globe and Mail’s list of hardcover sales among Canadian titles. McDonald and her work have also been the object of close attention among reviewers, Op Ed writers and bloggers. Let’s look at some of the comments.
Charge from the right
The charge from the right was led by the National Post and featured some of its regular polemicists. They included the ubiquitous Ezra Levant, who in his subtle and gracious way described McDonald as a “bigot” against Christians, Jews and Sikhs. On his blog he called her a “Christian hater” and described her as “bigoted, sloppy, error-prone, smug.” On his Twitter feed, Levant said this: “Watching Marci McDonald on TV. What a hateful bigot. If she spoke this way about Jews, she’d be run out of town as an anti-Semite.” Levant and some others throw this latter accusation rather casually these days.
Levant points to a list of factual errors in the book and suggests that may have occurred because McDonald “spent her career in Washington, D.C.” and is out of touch with Canadian political reality. McDonald indicates that she worked as a journalist in the U.S. beginning in 1984 and that she returned to Canada in 2002. For a good deal of that time she was bureau chief for Maclean’s magazine in Washington.
David Frum has spent most of his adult life studying and working in the U.S., but that does not appear to disqualify him from commenting regularly on matters Canadian in the National Post. He also weighed in on McDonald’s book, describing it as “weirdly clueless” and McDonald as “breathless” in her description of “a sinister conspiracy by militant evangelicals to reach into the very centre of Canadian government.” But what appears to bother Frum most is McDonald’s contention that the Harper government has taken pro-Israel policy positions at least partly in order to reward a supportive coalition of religious conservatives. Frum concludes: “It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that McDonald’s real grievance against the Harper government is not that it is too pro-Christian, but that it is insufficiently anti-Jewish.”
Gerry Nicholls, who worked with Harper at the National Citizens’ Coalition, also attacks McDonald in the National Post, describing her book as “great propaganda,” and “pure and utter nonsense.” He makes the following claim: “For one thing, Harper is by no means an Evangelical Christian; he’s not even a social conservative.” This would come as news to Lloyd Mackey, a Parliamentary Press Gallery reporter who has filed for religious publications for years. In 2005, Mackey published a book calledThe Pilgrimage of Stephen Harper, in which he described Harper’s religious faith and his gradual move from mainline Protestantism to his becoming a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
In the Saskatchewan farm country where I was raised, people used to say that if you throw a stick into the bush and hear a yelp that means you have hit something. In this case, McDonald obviously has hit something at the National Post. In their exaggerated personal attacks and their fevered rush to discredit and destroy, these writers undermine whatever credibility their critiques may otherwise have had.
Thoughtful critics
There are critics of McDonald’s book who are more thoughtful and plausible than those mentioned above. Paul Wells, who writes for McLean’s as McDonald once did, describes the genesis of her book. “In 2006, she wrote a long article for The Walrus,” Wells writes. “In it, she took an obvious and interesting fact — the Harper government pays a lot of attention to the concerns of evangelical Christians — and turned it into a risible fantasy: the Harper government is a plaything of wild-eyed end-timers who would transform Canada into a soul-saving factory in anticipation of the Rapture. The Armageddon Factor is the book-length version of that article…” Despite his criticisms, however, Wells accepts as fact McDonald’s claim that the religious right has influence with the Harper government, but believes she overstates it.
John G. Stackhouse, Jr., a professor of theology and culture at Regent College in Vancouver, provides a detailed three-part critique of The Armageddon Factor on his blog. He faults McDonald for “frequently [failing] to pass even minimal journalistic standards,” and says that her conclusions are largely mistaken. He claims, for example, that she confuses “a generic concern to influence Canada according to Christian principles with the extremist agenda of establishing a theocracy that would stone homosexuals.”
He writes, “Ms. McDonald uses weird literary camerawork to zoom in on people she admits are on the fringes of evangelicalism only to widen out to include other evangelicals, Roman Catholics, ‘conservative Christians’ and even Jews as if they’re all connected. But where are the basic definitions we need? What is fundamentalism or evangelicalism or Pentecostalism or charismatic Christianity? What is a ‘Christian Right’ or a ‘Religious Right’ versus simply orthodox Christianity or politically conservative religious people? Ms. McDonald never defines any of these key terms . . . so we literally don’t know what she’s talking about.”
Despite his criticisms, Stackhouse sees an inherent value in what McDonald has produced. “Ms. McDonald, despite her evident trouble understanding quite what she’s looking at, has nonetheless found something to which the rest of us ought to pay attention. There are, it appears, people in Canadian public life and in the federal government in particular whose views and associations ought to trouble not just the Marci McDonalds but even card-carrying, bona fide evangelicals like me.”
Reporting on faith and politics
Few academics in Canada have shown much interest over the years in exploring the interface between faith and public life and most journalists are unequipped to report knowledgeably on these connections. The topic was clearly not an easy one for McDonald to master either but she has rendered us a great service. There is a religious right in Canada, it has political influence and we should be reporting on this development. I would observe that there is a religious left too, whose flame burns only weakly these days, and we should report on it as well.
Just wanted to thank you for your work here on this book.
I am an ardent libertarian that finds myself coming down on the “right” side of the spectrum more often than not. That being said, with baggage up front, I found your critique of the critiques an unexpected breath of fresh air.
However (you knew this was coming, eh?), I have to point out two minor points:
1. The Christian Left is a far more influential force in Canadian politics than the Christian Right could ever hope to be, it is far from your weakly burning flame, but huge swaths of both the Liberal and NDP parties draw kinship from “liberal” Christianity.
2. The vitriol from the first to comment (being surprised that Ezra was overblown? Methinks this was more for rhetorical device than true surprise) I don;t actually think were from a place of “people used to say that if you throw a stick into the bush and hear a yelp that means you have hit something.” It is far too soft an intellectual position, and one I know that you can’t hold based on some of your musings that if someone critiques something, then by that very action of critiquing proves the opposite of their case.
That is, it is like being charged with a crime, and when you defend yourself, someone asserts, “See? If he wasn’t guilty, he wouldn’t be so worked up!”
Rather, MacDonald was actually wading into subject matter and literature that scholars across the nation had been working through for decades in Canada and the USA, and she managed to get published, only to demonstrate to even the most casual observer that she had not even the most bare grasp on the subject matter nor methodology of reasoning in her work. I think THAT accounts for the vitriol.
This all being said, I again want to thank you, aside from these two minor points, your work was a pleasure to read.
(saw following on the net)
PRETRIB RAPTURE POLITICS
Many are still unaware of the eccentric, 180-year-old British theory underlying the politics of American evangelicals and Christian Zionists.
Journalist and historian Dave MacPherson has spent more than 40 years focusing on the origin and spread of what is known as the apocalyptic “pretribulation rapture” – the inspiration behind Hal Lindsey’s bestsellers of the 1970s and Tim LaHaye’s today.
Although promoters of this endtime evacuation from earth constantly repeat their slogan that “it’s imminent and always has been” (which critics view more as a sales pitch than a scriptural statement), it was unknown in all official theology and organized religion before 1830.
And MacPherson’s research also reveals how hostile the pretrib rapture view has been to other faiths:
It is anti-Islam. TV preacher John Hagee has been advocating “a pre-emptive military strike against Iran.” (Google “Roots of Warlike Christian Zionism.”)
It is anti-Jewish. MacPherson’s book “The Rapture Plot” (see Armageddon Books etc.) exposes hypocritical anti-Jewishness in even the theory’s foundation.
It is anti-Catholic. Lindsey and C. I. Scofield are two of many leaders who claim that the final Antichrist will be a Roman Catholic. (Google “Pretrib Hypocrisy.”)
It is anti-Protestant. For this reason no major Protestant denomination has ever adopted this escapist view.
It even has some anti-evangelical aspects. The first publication promoting this novel endtime view spoke degradingly of “the name by which the mixed multitude of modern Moabites love to be distinguished, – the Evangelical World.” (MacPherson’s “Plot,” p. 85)
Despite the above, MacPherson proves that the “glue” that holds constantly in-fighting evangelicals together long enough to be victorious voting blocs in elections is the same “fly away” view. He notes that Jerry Falwell, when giving political speeches just before an election, would unfailingly state: “We believe in the pretribulational rapture!”
In addition to “The Rapture Plot,” MacPherson’s many internet articles include “Famous Rapture Watchers,” “Pretrib Rapture Diehards,” “Edward Irving is Unnerving,” “America’s Pretrib Rapture Traffickers,” “Thomas Ice (Bloopers),” “Pretrib Rapture Secrecy” and “Pretrib Rapture Dishonesty” (massive plagiarism, phony doctorates, changing of early “rapture” documents in order to falsely credit John Darby with this view, etc.!).
Because of his devastating discoveries, MacPherson is now No. 1 on the “hate” list of pretrib rapture leaders who love to ban or muddy up his uber-accurate findings in sources like Wikipedia – which they’ve almost turned into Wicked-pedia!
There’s no question that the leading promoters of this bizarre 19th century end-of-the-world doctrine are solidly pro-Israel and necessarily anti-Palestinian. In light of recently uncovered facts about this fringe-British-invented belief which has always been riddled with dishonesty, many are wondering why it should ever have any influence on Middle East affairs.
This Johnny-come-lately view raises millions of dollars for political agendas. Only when scholars of all faiths begin to look deeply at it and widely air its “dirty linen” will it cease to be a power. It is the one theological view no one needs!
With apologies to Winston Churchill – never has so much deception been foisted on so many by so few!
[I agree with the above. And pretribulation raptiles hate MacPherson's "The Rapture Plot" - which I bought at Armageddon Books online - more than any other book! Into 2012ism? Google "The Newest Pretrib Calendar."]
Stackhouse says McDonald needs to define terms such as “Christian right” and “evangelicalism.” Even without those definitions, I could still understand what McDonald was talking about. Perhaps Stackhouse had his academic blinders on, but my mind was open and adaptable enough to wade through the literary confusion
I can recognize a Christian rightist or evangelical when I see one, even if I can’t give you a precise definition. If it walks like a duck…
Hal Lindsey’s Pretrib Rapture “Proof”
Is Hal Lindsey’s proof for a pretrib rapture “100 proof” – that is, 100 percent Biblical?
In “The Late Great Planet Earth” (p. 143) Lindsey gives his “chief reason” for pretrib: “If the Rapture took place at the same time as the second coming, there would be no mortals left who would be believers” – that is, no believers still alive who could enter the millennium and repopulate the earth.
We don’t know if Lindsey’s amnesia is voluntary or involuntary, or if he need amnesia rehab, but earlier (p. 54), while focusing on chapters 12 through 14 of Zechariah, Lindsey sees “a remnant of Jews in Jerusalem” who are mortals who will become believing mortals at the second coming and then become repopulating mortals!
During the same discussion of Zech. 12-14 Lindsey overlooks some of the final verses in Zech. 14. They reveal that some of the tribulation survivors “of all the nations which came against Jerusalem” will refuse to go there “to worship the King, the Lord of hosts.” Here’s what will happen to those “heathen” rebels: “upon them shall be no rain.”
So the facts about the repopulating mortals, in unbelieving as well as believing ranks, cancel out Lindsey’s “chief reason” for opposing a joint rapture/second coming – the ONLY rapture view to be found in official theology books and organized churches prior to 1830!
(See historian Dave MacPherson’s “The Rapture Plot,” the most accurate and most highly endorsed book on pretrib rapture history – available at online stores like Armageddon Books etc. Also Google “Scholars Weigh My Research” and “Pretrib Rapture Dishonesty.”)
Although Hal Lindsey claims that his “Late Great” didn’t set a date for Christ’s return, many of his followers – including copycats Bill Maupin (“1981″) and Edgar Whisenant (“1988″) – did view Lindsey as a date-setter, and his later book “The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon” (the sort of title that date-setters and their ga-ga groupies love) became another fizzle – unless we’re still living in the 1980s!
In Old Testament days false prophets were stoned to death. Now they’re just stoned!
(Spied the above web piece.)
Isee, so this is the sequel of the previews event. Thanks for the update. Still looking forward for the updates.
Thanks for taking this opening to talk about this, I feel strongly about it and I benefit from learning about this subject.