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.

The Albertan controversy, which has been discussed previously on this site as well as at other blogs, is being covered regularly by Big City Lib, who writes that the Stelmach government now seems open to looking at some amendments to address concerns from teachers over chilling effects in science classrooms:

You know, one thing politicians know how to do better than anyone is count votes. The Stelmach government looked around and realized that the over-haul of their Human Rights Act would involve balancing the demands of the Gay and SoCon communities. If Speechies got stiffed (and they did), that’s because the Stelmach government realized there weren’t enough of them to be worth the fuss.

Another perspective, critical of the implications of Bill 44, has also been offered in the Calgary Herald by pundit Rob Breakenridge. Views from the other side have been offered by blogs such as No Apologies, which recently accused a Religious Right Alert author of being “McCarthyite.”

Meanwhile, over in Québec, religious right forces are gathering in opposition to
the new Ethics and Religious Culture which is intended to replace existing religious instruction on morality with a new comparative look at various world faiths’ approaches to moral questions. The course has been controversial among many parts of society, not just the religious right, but it is from religious sources that a pair of legal challenges have recently originated.

Several organizations have emerged in support of the legal cases. One, naturally, is the Catholic Civil Rights League, which recently released a press release on the matter here, in which it defends “the right of parents to direct the education of their children, and in particular to choose the religious education of their children” (thanks to No Apologies for the link).

Another supportive organization is the Canadian Constitution Foundation, currently led by former Reform candidate John Carpay. In a Globe and Mail op-ed, he argues that the course is superficial, “inherently anti-religious,” and a case of “state-imposed… relativism.” As RevDave of Terrible Depths observed, Carpay’s foundation is funded by the Donner Foundation and Aurea Foundation, and draws personnel from Civitas, the Physicians for Life, the Montreal Economic Institute, and the Fraser Institute.

Religious Right Alert will continue to follow developments in both these disputes.

If “religion” was going to be defined in the broad Gary Goodyear-ian sense, then it wasn’t hard to imagine what sort of trouble could result from this legislation: sexists objecting to women’s equality, atheist parents with kids in Catholic schools, or just “legal and administrative chaos.” In retrospect it’s not surprising that the government decided to cut its losses and get out of the “evolution is religion” game before things got out of control.

Even if evolution was out of the picture, though, “parental rights” – and by implication family authority – is near and dear to the religious right, so it wasn’t surprising to see a swarm of enthusiastic endorsements from that sector. The Canada Family Action Coalition is now in the game, for example. Equipping Christians has also leaped to the government’s defence.

There is, however, a deep irony here. The parental rights law is being introduced via the Human Rights Act, so presumably it would be enforced – if necessary – by the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The Chumir Foundation, to its credit, has opposed the amendment for this reason. However, the Christian right is going to run smack into a wall on this issue.

The Human Rights Commissions first attracted the ire of the religious right on gay rights issues, and many organizations have more recently hitched their wagons to Ezra Levant’s public relations crusade against the Commissions. With the fallout from Shakedown, it actually looked like the anti-HRC battle was beginning to make some gains. The Commissions haven’t been totally discredited yet, but they’re probably closer than ever before. And now the religious right might have to defend the Commissions, after all!

Just this morning, Catholic right-writer Raymond de Souza was expounding on the “abuses” of the Commissions in the National Post. He also points the way to a factless but possibly effective way out of this problem for the religious right: he advances the rather paranoid notion that on the basis of “parental rights” the Alberta Human Rights Commission might be pushed by gay activists or other evil-doers into “radicalizing the curriculum.”

Cross-posted at Birchbark Bible.

Religious Right Alert and Slap Upside the Head have in the past couple weeks been covering some surprisingly petty social conservative policies of Ed Stelmach’s government, like the official statement that the government is not going to recognize public-sector employees’ same-sex spouses as legally married because it believes gay people shouldn’t have that right. Now, however, it’s getting even more bizarre. And I thought creationism was just something that Americans had to worry about.

Years behind everyone else, the provincial government is only now getting around to passing an amendment to the Human Rights Act to protect sexual orientation from discrimination. Culture minister Lindsay Blackett offered the odd explanation that the move is being done to promote tourism and that much of the Conservative caucus was opposed to the move altogether. (Despite the fact that according to the Supreme Court the province has no choice in the matter anyways.) So, a compromise was reached. A particularly Orwellian one.

You see, in the midst of the bill that would grant equality to gay people is a clause that would require schools to give parents advance notice, and an opportunity to pull their kids out of the classroom, if any of the following topics will be discussed (see text of Bill 44 here):

1. Religion
2. Sexuality
3. Sexual Orientation

It should go without saying that if your sexual orientation is something that can’t be discriminated against, it doesn’t make sense to say that parents are going to be allowed to yank their kids from a school classroom where the issue is just being discussed. Using a human rights bill to chill classroom discussion of sexual orientation is pretty Orwellian, and pretty terrible.

In the title of this post, I mentioned creationism. I did that deliberately. You might think that this list of parental rights is irrelevant – science is still science, after all, and not religion. The Albertan government, however, does not agree. Blackett in fact has specifically stated that, at least under his interpretation of the law, “parents would have the right to opt out of evolution classes.”

Are there connections between the religious right and the Stelmach government in Alberta?

• Pope Benedict XVI has issued a statement of “sorrow” but not an apology, after meeting with First Nations leaders to discuss the residential school system. (h/t Dammit Janet!, Unrepentant Old Hippie)

• David MacDonald and 4 My Canada director Faytene Kryskow have presented a 18 222-signature petition to the Governor-General, demanding she revoke Henry Morgentaler’s Order of Canada (h/t SoCon or Bust)

• Martin Cohn of the Toronto Star reports on Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation, which recently brought him to speak in Toronto.

• The Liberal policy convention will apparently consider overturning the Harper government ban on organ donations from gay men (h/t Slap Upside the Head

• On the National Post blog Holy Post, John Stackhouse argues that evolution has taken an unacceptable turn and become “a religion, an all-encompassing wolrdview and a ‘myth’… – the governing story of a people.”