How much real influence do these advocacy and lobby groups have at influencing public policy, such as the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada; the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies; the Institute for Canadian Values, the National House of Prayer, and 4MyCanada, Campaign for Life, the Catholic Civil Rights League, and REAL Women of Canada?

“Well, they believe they have much more traction with the Harper government than they had with the Liberals. I have seen a number of statements to this effect. But they win some and they lose some on the issues. The Institute of Marriage and the Family provides research and strategic advice for conservative causes and lobbied hard on the issue of same sex marriage, but they lost that one.

“They did win, however, on having the Conservatives ditch the public childcare initiative negotiated by Paul Martin with the provinces and territories, replacing it with a tax credit to middle class and wealthier families. REAL Women lobbied the Conservatives to have the Court Challenges Program eliminated and it was. They also wanted the Status of Women offices shut down. The Conservatives did not eliminate Status of Women entirely but they did cut them back severely and weakened their mandate. Religious conservatives seem to be getting pretty well everything they want on crime and Canadian support for Israel.

“But they should be careful. They have cast their lot with the Mr. Harper but he is playing a game with them. He wants them to think he is solidly on their side but he can’t give them everything that they want because that would turn off a majority of Canadians who want nothing to do with religious conservatives or with their agenda. Mr. Harper has disappointed religious conservatives on both the same-sex marriage and abortion issues. Some of them are beginning to believe that he is taking them for granted.”

Hill Times: Competition among religious ideologies will continue with ‘an enduring intensity,’ says Gruending

Pulpit and Politics: Competing Religious Ideologies in Canadian Public Life is available at Alpine Book Peddlers and will be available as an ebook .

Dennis blogs at Pulpit and Politics

How come I can’t get a copy from Chapters Indigo?
It’s a fair question I posed to a clerk from my local outlet.
(The book is available at independent booksellers)

The clerk was unaware The Armageddon Factor was out in paperback and told me that their shipping takes about 3 weeks, which is normal for this time of year.  Because Chapters Indigo is a chain, the stores put the books out when everyone else in the chain gets them.

She offered that as far as she knew her employer was waiting on the publisher to ship them.

Okay. Chapters Indigo is owned by Heather Reisman (CEO). She is married to Gerry Schartwz who is the Board Chair, President and CEO of Onex. They are friends of Stephen and Laureen Harper, and have been Conservative Party backers since 2006.
Nigel Wright, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, is on loan to Harper by the Onex Corporation. Wright’s appointment is noted in the afterword of the updated and revised trade paperback.

Given the paperback was updated and out in time for the election I have a question.
Where is it? Is the revised edition sitting in  Chapters-Indigo warehouses?  The chain is in approximately 131  cities across Canada and I can appreciate delays, but the next obvious question is this.

Is Chapters Indigo holding back stocking this book until after May 2nd?
As asked in the post headline. Is this bookstore chain playing politics?

How would you like to help out? Give the nearest Chapters Indigo store a call and ask if the paperback is in. If it isn’t ask why not.  If you have an independent bookstore in your location, give them a call and see if they have it on the shelves, or if they can get it to you within the next few days and post your findings in the comment section.

The e-book is available, since, as far as I can tell Random House released it, and online sales aren’t held up in warehouses. The paperback edition is also available from Amazon Canada. The unrevised hardcover is also available at my local store.

Unfortunately the Chapters Indigo non-fiction blog does not allow comments, so readers willing to find out if their Chapters Indigo has the revised edition on their shelf will have to leave their information in the BDBO comment section.  When you use the online store finder, every location you can key in, lists the availabilty as 0. Zero. Go ahead, try it.

Given the kerfuffle with the hardcover release of The Armageddon Factor last year, the delay reaching Reisman’s bookstore shelves deserves an explanation.

If you were able to purchase a copy of the paperback from a Chapters Indigo outlet, pop into the comments and let us know.

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.

Pulpit and Politics

Losing Control takes a hard, critical look at Canada’s social conservative (religiousright) movement and its efforts to re-establish Canada as a nation predicated on the supremacy of God. It explores the nature of social conservatism’s holy war on homosexuality and its promotion of family values and traditional marriage. It delves into the movement’s efforts to secure more morality-based state regulation of sexuality and reproduction. For social conservatives, the ideal Canada would be a place where there would be no separation of church and state, or of faith and politics.

Losing Control dissects the movement’s campaigns to eradicate secularism and “moral relativism” as defining features of contemporary Canadian governance and raises disturbing questions about the enormous political influence of the movement on Canada’s political parties—in particular, the Conservative Party government of Stephen Harper.

Tom Warner has been a gay activist for over thirty-five years. He got started in 1971 by helping to found the Gay Students’ Alliance at the University of Saskatchewan and, in 1971–1972, the Zodiac Friendship Society, which later became the Gay Community Centre of Saskatoon. After moving to Toronto in 1973, he helped to found the Gay Alliance Toward Equality and served as the group’s president from 1976 to 1977. Tom is the author of the widely acclaimed Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada.

If you have questions for the author, please add them to the comment section and we’ll ask  if Mr. Warner will stop by to answer.

“Last night’s dominant CBC story – a full eight minutes in length – featured an attack on the religious affiliation of some Government members and supporters,” reads the memo. “Apparently the CBC thinks it newsworthy that some Conservative Ministers and MPs practise their faith. Even more scandalous, some members of the Prime Minister’s Office go to church!”

Though the memo never mentions the book or its author by name, McDonald, a former bureau chief for Maclean’s in Paris and Washington, feels it was a slight to her as much as to the network. But, she says, because her book is a work of independent journalism, it would have looked too suspicious to point a finger at her.

“Indirectly, I guess the intention was to intimidate me. I can’t imagine they were thrilled at my book,” says McDonald, who first read about the memo on the blog of Globe and Mailcolumnist and Ottawa correspondent Jane Taber. “It’s hard to take on just straight reportage without asserting that there’s something wrong…. I think it was convenient they could hit at the CBC.”

Quill & Quire

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

And Macleans Magazine:

For moderate and left-leaning evangelicals who have seen their faith expropriated by hostile forces, such moves come as a relief. Watching the antics of Chariles McVety as he demanded Beverley McLachlin’s removal as chief justice of the Supreme Court, many shared the sentiments of Kitchener author James Bow.
“Speaking as a Christian, I just want to say I am embarrassed that social conservatives like Charles McVety claim to represent who I am and what I believe,” Bow declared on his website. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Another group of evangelicals have created Religiousrightalert.ca, a collection of investigative blogs devoted to tracking the extremism of this country’s aspiring Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons.

pp: 351-352 The Armageddon Factor Marci McDonald Random House May 2010

This blog is a collaborative effort between evangelicals, atheists, and those inbetween; bloggers who see the militancy driving what is our politicized Canadian religious right.
I think social conservatives who chose to dismiss this book as dishing and dismissing people of faith will do so to their detriment. It’s a given dispensationists and dominionists firmly camped on the fringe of orthodox belief, and actively engaged in political co-opting, are going to disparage no matter what evidence is put in front of them.
The divisive, disdainful domineering language used to frame pet issues will not find a home here.

Full disclosure – Random House gave rra a copy of this book and it has been gratefully received.

Marci McDonald explains her new book today on The Current.
As well she will be on The Drew Marshall Show May 22nd.

Who is blogging?
The Politics of Reading: The Armageddon Factor
Moose Squirrel: The Christians are coming, The Christians are coming! So sayeth Marci McDonald

No Apologies found the error in The Toronto Star excerpt May 8, 2010

Click here to read what appears to be a lengthy excerpt from Marci McDonald’s book, “The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada,” due to be released Monday. One of the many illustrations of the absurdity of Ms. McDonald’s conspiracy theories is her labeling of the Canadian Constitution Foundation as a “Christian advocacy group.” One of CCF’s leading representatives and in-house lawyers is outspoken atheist libertarian, Karen Selick. How much credibility is Random House Canada going to get for publishing this book?

Book author Marci McDonald responded:

You were right about the mistaken reference to the Canadian Constitution Foundation as a “Christian” advocacy group in the Toronto Star’s excerpt of The Armageddon Factor. The book itself states no such thing and, in fact, describes the foundation as “legal advocacy group,” which has occasionally acted on behalf of Christians such as Stephen Boissoin. The error occurred when the newspaper was editing the text for excerpting and in no way reflects on the accuracy of the book. – Marci McDonald No Apologies comment May 8, 2010 Marci McDonald May 8, 2010

The Canadian Constitution Foundation’s Litigation Director was not convinced and responded:

Marci, that’s not a very convincing explanation. The Star’s reference to the CCF arose in connection with a reference to Shona Holmes, the plaintiff in litigation challenging the Ontario government health care monopoly. Shona’s case has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity or any other religion, so why would you have mentioned her at all, except because you wanted to introduce some tie-in to the allegedly Christian advocacy group, the CCF?

Would the Star not have let you proof-read the “excerpt” before they publish it? The National Post always lets me proof-read any changes they propose to make to my op-eds.

I’ll be checking your book when it comes out to see what you really said.

Karen Selick, Litigation Director, the Canadian Constitution Foundation (and atheist)

Perhaps we can help clear this up.
On pages 342-343 The Armgeddon Factor in the chapter Here to stay:

Moreover, pundits who predicted those networks would vanish in the wake of the same-sex marriage defeat have instead seen them proliferate. Amid the stormy U.S. health-care debate of 2009, most Canadians were stunned to discover that one of their own was the star of a 2- million-dollar television campaign warning Americans about the perils of this country’s publicly funded medical system. Shona Homes, the poster girl for that attack, turned out to be fronting a lawsuit against Ontario’s health ministry spearheaded by a Calgary-based legal advocacy group named the Canadian Constitution Foundation. Orginally created by Conservative MP John Weston, the Foundation was at first not considered part of the Christian Right, but one of it’s board members, Dr. Will Johnston, is president of Canadian Physicians for Life, and Weston himself is an evangelical who once told christian law students that what set his Vancouver law firm apart was ” the regularity and informality of prayer practised by the partners.”  Although Weston’s initial focus was on pet libertarian peeves like medicare, since he stepped down to run for Parliament, the foundation has devoted many of it’s resources to defending evangelicals like former Alberta pastor Stephen Boissoin, in freedom-of-speech cases against another perceived incursion of the state: human rights commissions.

Nor is the foundation the only new presence on the evangelical political scene. In 2008, it was joined by the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) founded by Mark Penninga, a Laurentian Leadership Centre alumnus and former spokesman for Focus on the Family Canada, whose mission is to ” bring a biblical perspective to  civil governments.” Both ARPA  and the Canadian Constitution Foundation are working with more established evangelical groups in a new push to co-ordinate their campaigns for greater effect. Nowhere has that joint strategizing been more evident than on the issue that has been pegged as the next flashpoint in the values wars: the de-criminalization of assisted suicide, or, as the religious right prefers to call it, euthanasia.

I commend No Apologies for bringing this to the public’s attention and the swiftness of author McDonald in providing an explanation and correction.

It will be a long week for Ottawa’s Christian conservatives next week, thanks to former Maclean’s staffer Marci McDonald. And thanks to the fact that I have obtained her new book, The Armageddon Factor three days before its formal release on May 11, I can give you a quick peek at her book through a short summary of what she writes about. And you will know in advance why the national press will be—by my guess–running stories targeting Christian politicians and their friends in think tanks and lobby groups in a few days.

The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism In Canada seeks to argue that Canada is developing its own version of the American Christian Right, complete with various support structures and a network of influential supporters. McDonald, a winner of seven National Magazine Awards, first began to look at this subject when she wrote an October 2006 story for the Walrus magazine, Stephen Harper and the Theo-Cons, which began to look at the relationship between Harper and his conservative Christian supporters.

Although I just came from the bookstore…I shall try and hit as many high points as I can, wanting to post today.

As I used to work for the conservative Report newsmagazines in Western Canada, I suspect that I would be part of McDonald’s own personal “Axis of Evil” if the magazines were still publishing. But, in order to try to be fair to her work as I just got the book, what I will do is try to mostly report on her work in this post. At a very first glance, I fear that she will beg questions and add two and two together to make five…but what I shall do is wait until I have read the book to offer a more concrete comment, after this post.

It will probably hit the best seller list quickly. Curious? Read on…While I would probably qualify as a member of the “Christian Right”(and admittedly inclined to disagree with her thesis) , I do recognize the value of a little scoop, so I will pass on to you what I can gather from a quick overview.

McDonald approaches her subject from a position that the Christian right is likely to be scary. The introduction to her preface—I wonder if she has read Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here–reads like this:

“She stared at me across the table as if I were out of my mind. A publisher had asked me to write a book on the rise of the Christian right in Canadian politics and hearing the news, one of my closest friends was questioning my sanity for even contemplating such a task. “Why would you want to do that?” she asked. “Surely you don’t think that it can happen here. This is a profoundly different country that the United States.”

It would seem not, McDonald continues, but in her years reporting in the U.S. she found that the Christian right always develops a hidden resilience. Returning to Canada, she writes that she found clues, as argued in her Walrus feature, that there was a “burgeoning religious right [in Canada]—a coalition not limited to Christians” and that moreover the secular media—and even most non-Christians seemed not to be paying much attention to it. Her book is an attempt to redress that.

She then has a brief mention of The CRY in Ottawa introducing a friend of BDBO, Faytene Kryskow, to her readers. (What about Faytene? Please see my accompanying post.) This allows her to then talk about Stephen Harper’s born-again faith, which the media found quite odd, and Preston Manning’s role as a mentor to him. Harper’s home church is looked at. When discussing Harper’s career, there is a general sense on McDonald’s part that Harper values conservative Christian support and values, but a bit less than he values the possibility of getting a majority government.

Her political approach then leads her to looking back to the 1980s, and the difficulties that conservative Christians had passing abortion legislation. The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’ s Brian Stiller was probably the most noted so-con of the era, so she speaks to him as well.  This leads naturally to a short profile of Charles McVety (who Bene D has written on) Brian Rushfeldt of the Canadian Family Action Coalition, and Joseph Ben-Ami who now do much of the same sorts of things that Brian Stiller used to do. The journey of Darrell Reid from Focus on the Family Canada president to Stephen Harper advisor is focused on.

Being from central Canada, McDonald knows about the National House of Prayer, which allows her to spend a chapter talking about what it does, along with David Demian.

The next chapter stood out to me, as it is mostly about BDBO’s “perhaps favorite youth evangelist”  , Faytene Kryskow. I’ve taken the liberty of doing a separate post about that, but I do want to mention here that McDonald does cite her dominionist views as central to the Christian nationalist movement she decries in her book. Bet that is a surprise to many of the other Christian figures I’ve cited so far, but I explain all that in that post.

And then, McDonald looks at academia and the related issue of creationism/intelligent design. What follows this is a chapter beginning with Murray and Peter Corren, two gay teachers who gained the ability to screen everything in B.C. schools, which leads to a discussion of the issue of homosexuality in Canadian schools and how the Christian right tries to have its own influence on the issue.  This leads, naturally, to the question of Ontario’s Christian schools and public funding, homeschooling, and the tales of B.C.’s Christian Trinity Western University and the Laurentian Leadership Institute.

Canada’s “electronic pulpit” leads to a talk about Canada’s religious broadcasting history including discussions of pirate TV broadcasting100 Huntley Street the Miracle Channel and Crossroads Broadcasting. (Tim Bloedow is quoted herein.)

Gerry Chipeur, a former Alberta Report source and Calgary lawyer features in the next chapter about how conservative Christians approach the courts and the judiciary. The Boisson case, naturally, is discussed, as well as the controversies about the “human rights tribunals” and their treatment of the press. (This struck me as interesting as a central figure here—Ezra Levant is not Christian—rather Jewish. Given that she says in the beginning of her book that Canada’s religious right is not uniformly Christian—why does Levant’s mention on page 303 stand out?)

Names of various Americans have been standing out in the book thus far, though, perhaps in an attempt to argue that Canada’s Christian right is an American creation.

In my quick scan of the book, I have not been able to find anything that jumps out at me as obviously newsworthy, such as “Stephen Harper, whose parents raised him as a druid…” (large ). But I think that McDonald, knowing the ways of a newsroom, realizes that reporters who have been wanting to write on a subject, such as the “Christian right in Canada” need what is called a “news peg”—a new excuse to write about a topic. “A new book…” is perfect for such a purpose. McDonald, to be fair to her, dislikes the Christian right, as would many assignment editors and reporters across the country. So, I would expect her to appear in your newspapers and on your TV next week.

The last two chapters are tailored for such a media push. The chapter called “The Armageddon Factor” targets “Christian Zionism” and links it to Stephen Harper’s friendly stance towards Israel. Instead of pointing out, as Ezra Levant has on his blog, that there are many prominent conservative Jews in the Conservative Party who have Harper’s ear on this subject, McDonald instead attributes this to the dispensationalist beliefs of some on the Christian right. She reasons that they want to hasten the return of Jesus and therefore need to hasten the events of the end of the world for this to happen—which include pestilence, famine and war. Merv and Merla Watson, two sweet Christian musicians with an interest in the “messianic” church are part of the scheme. (I’ve met the Watsons and can attest that they do not have nuclear weapons hidden in their autoharps.) (Fair warning– I will probably have issues with this chapter.)

Hinting that Christians wanting to cause the end of the work have Harper’s ear is useful red meat for the media. As is the last chapter, which discusses in a general way Christian conservative efforts to establish an institutional presence in Canadian politics—if you are a media reporter with an already skeptical bent about the Christian right, to have them be entrenched would be scary.

In Bene D’s own teaser post about the book earlier today, he writes that the book would be an encyclopedia on this subject. As someone who might have a good knowledge of all this—if not as thorough as Bene D’s—I can say at first glance that McDonald’s book seems quite thorough, and addresses the people and events that I would, were I to do a book length treatment of Canada’s Christian right. I might even say that it is comprehensive.

I fear a bias though…but will hold off on declaring that I see one, in my view, until giving the book the careful reading it deserves. (As I mentioned, I will address any comments to that effect in a comment on this post.)

I do know, however, that this book serves up this subject, on a plate, to those editors who want to pursue it. Given that the reporters will be primed by McDonald’s own unfriendly towards the right point of view on this, I can imagine conservative Christians having to face questions with a bit of a spin on this subject.

If you have a progressive view on all this, I can imagine you thinking “Rightly so!” But I can agree with you that there will be some very interesting stories sparked by this book, whatever you might think of what McDonald has to say, after you finish reading it.