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

Fortunately, I do not think so (though the issue bears constant vigilance). Mackey identifies only two cases where the new grants, which are being doled out under the existing New Horizons for Seniors program, actually went to churches: respectively, St. Andrew’s United and Chilliwack Alliance, both in B.C. Both are getting $25 000 to renovate: one is fixing up its community kitchen, and the other is getting a new roof. Mackey is excited that other programs, including religious ones, will benefit from these renovations, including an Alpha evangelism program. However, I am happy to say that I do not see anything overly sinister in the Conservatives’ new funding. However:

On the other hand, there is still a bit of a slimy residue to the whole affair. Both church grants went to Conservative ridings – those of Chuck Strahl and Randy Kamp (I explored Kamp’s religious past here). What’s more, Strahl is a member of Chilliwack Alliance, the one that got the $25 000 kitchen grant. How nice for him and his congregation that they will soon be getting a cheque cut by his government.

One of the most interesting facets of this whole affair is that, according to Mackey, the funding contracts included a 60-day gag order, during which period recipients are not allowed to “publicize” their new money. That order doesn’t expire until May 18, but Mackey says he got special permission from the government to print his piece. Leaving aside his presumed connections, this raises the important question: what is it about this announcement that the government is trying to time properly? Could it be the handout to Strahl’s personal congregation, perhaps?

By the by, Chilliwack Alliance belongs to the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination. That’s the same denomination that the honourable Stephen Harper belongs to.

Terrible Depths. Used by permission.

It’s a group that appears to enjoy fomenting anti-Muslim hysteria. The organization even sucked in that indefatigable anti-Muslim campaigner and promoter of campus snitch lines, Daniel Pipes. Pipes was forced to retract comments he made about Liberal MP Omar Alghabra, which had been based upon misinformation received from CCD. (Pipes refers in his screed to Ezra Levant’s further smears of Alghabra, which I dealt with some time ago, and makes additional defamatory remarks that need not concern us here.)

CCD’s legal counsel has been none other than David Harris, whose inflammatory anti-Muslim commentary is notorious in its own right, and who has recently been fussing out loud about “out-of-control immigration.”Harris was in the news last year making some credulous public comments about a hilariously silly “bugged money” story emanating from the US Defence Security Service.

Dr. Dawg’s analysis prompted Buckets at Bouquets of Gray to point out that Kent’s Coalition was one of the supporting organizations in a bid to get Chief Justice Beverley Maclaughlin removed from the committee which gave Henry Morgentaler his Order of Canada – and to ask “whether Peter Kent… had anything to do with this ridiculous charade.”

McDonald explores the connections between the Christian right, a growing array of think tanks and advocacy organizations in Ottawa, and – somewhat disturbingly – the Reform elements now present in the Conservative Party of Canada.

Her analysis delves specifically into the religious background of Stephen Harper, who, despite years as our Prime Minister, remains something of an enigma on the personal level. Harper is a member of the Christian and Missionary Alliance church, having seemingly moved into evangelicalism through the influence of Preston Manning and other colleagues in the Reform Party. In 2003, he suggested at Civitas that the road to power lay through the cultivation of his friends in the religious right, whom he labelled the “theo-cons” – religiously motivated social conservatives.

McDonald hits many of the major highlights, including Charles McVety, the Manning Centre, Focus on the Family’s Institute for Marriage and Family Canada, the Canada Family Action Coalition, and the National House of Prayer. She also touches briefly on the role of Christian zionism and alliances between the Christian and Jewish right – such as McVety’s decision to have Orthodox Jew and B’nai Brith veteran Joseph Ben-Ami head up the Institute for Canadian Values.

At this point the greatest fault in McDonald’s account is really no fault of hers: the work is becoming seriously dated. A lot has happened in the last three years. However, her article still remains, in my mind, the best starting point for beginning an exploration of the Canadian religious right.

The Religious Right, Stephen Harper and The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada

Gary Goodyear’s suggestion that evolution was a theological issue of faith got several bloggers, including myself, interested in the growing influence of the religious right in Canadian politics. At the time of the comments, bloggers hit the roof. The issue died down very quickly, though – now there are just a bunch of leftists, atheists and agnostics quietly simmering and waiting for some other Conservative MP to make a misguided remark so that they can blow up again.

In the meantime, therefore, I thought I’d stir the pot again – and simultaneously extend my Following the Money series in new directions. The occasion for these remarks are a pair of op-eds which appeared in major newspapers last week, each written by Andrea Mrozek of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada: “Marriage Benefits Us All” in the National Post (since syndicated throughout the Asper network, e.g. in the Windsor Star and the Calgary Herald). Incidentally, Mrozek also writes at the conservative group blog ProWomanProLife, which, despite the name, doesn’t always seem overly pro-woman. But whatever. Both of these articles argue in favour of the traditional family – one against divorce, the other against gay marriage.

Mrozek works for the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, an Ottawa-based think tank, and in fairness, her pieces are a far cry from the work that the IMFC used to do. That’s because, a year and a half ago, the organization officially stopped its lobbying program on gay marriage. Director David Quist, at the time, suggested that there were few gay marriages going on and that the issue was done and dead, so his little advocacy group was moving on to other issues. The fact that polygamy is now in the Canadian courts, thanks to the fundamentalist Mormons out in B.C., presumably gave them the window they wanted to jump back into the fray.

So, who is the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, anyways? The connections it holds are intriguing and disturbing: American family groups, Canadian right-wing think tanks, and – wait for it – the Conservative Party of Canada, right up to the level of Stephen Harper:

The IMFC is the offspring of the American-controlled pro-family, anti-gay marriage lobby group, Focus on the Family, until recently controlled by evangelical power figure James Dobson. It was founded in 2006 with an agenda that could basically summed up as “everything the religious right cares about”: family laws, age of consent laws (those went up under the Conservatives, incidentally), divorce, euthanasia, taxes, and palliative care. Its founders gave some interviews to the sympathetic evangelical periodical Christian Week at the time, and the weekly reported that these positions would be approached “all from a Christian perspective.” Interestingly, the IMFC itself is no longer in any hurry to promote its Christian background; its official introductory pamphlet says merely that it exists to take “a growing body of scientific research” and turn it into “practical ideas.”

In 2006, the Edmonton Journal covered the creation of the new group and wrote that “their mobilization was not ignited by Harper.” Oh, really? Well, maybe not directly. But let’s move through the list of employees. The first is executive director Dave Quist. For six years, Quist was the executive assistant to Alliance and then Conservative MP and former Baptist pastor Reid Elly. He ran for the Conservatives in 2004, lost, and then spent a year working as Stephen Harper’s director of operations. There’s about a five-month gap between the time he left Harper’s office and the time that the new think tank was announced in the media. Quite a number of his old Conservative colleagues were in attendance at the grand opening, including Stockwell Day and Jason Kenney.

Mrozek, the author of the recent newspaper op-eds, is listed as the Manager of Research and Communications. Her background is in journalism, but her recent work was at the right-wing Western Standard (her bio on IMFC generalizes to only “an independent news magazine in Calgary,” just to make sure people don’t make that connection), and at the even more right-wing Fraser Institute in B.C.

The researchers are a mixed bag of right-wing evangelicals. Peter Jon Mitchell is actually imported from the parent Focus on the Family organization in the U.S. – he used to work at their Institute in Colorado. Kelly Dean Schwartz is a psychologist in Calgary. Frank Jones is a retired StatsCan number cruncher who is also listed at another religious right think tank, the Christian Commitment Research Institute.

Derek Miedema, the last researcher, used to work for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, with its own possible ties to the Harper government. His bio on the Institute webpage says merely that that was preceded by a stint as a legislative assistant for an unnamed MP. I instantly suspected Conservative, and my suspicions were confirmed by a jog over to the website of Miedema’s alma mater, the religious school Redeemer University College, which is less circumspect. Miedema was the legislative assistant for Mr. David Sweet, the Conservative MP for Ancaster-Dundas. Sweet, not incidentally, is the former CEO of Promise Keepers Canada, in which function he told a journalist in 2001 that men were “natural influencers” and women were “natural followers” (his explanation for the notably unbiblical claim that “Jesus called men only”).

Interestingly, both Miedema and Jones have links to another evangelical group, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. That group has its own ties to the Conservative government – and one of their former anti-gay marriage lobbyists in Ottawa recently got appointed to the Immigration and Refugee Board. Jones served on the Fellowship’s Advisory Council on Research, and Miedema was a researcher for them.

Sunday March 29, 2009
Terrible Depths Used by permission

Have you blogged about The Institute of Marriage and Family Canada? Drop us a line and let us know if we can use and link your post in full or in part.

Blogs:
Pulpit and Politics: Harper promotes religious rightists
Douglas Todd, The Search: Evangelicals promoted to top jobs by Harper
Chyco: The Evangelicalization of The Conservative Party
Bene Diction Blogs On: 2008 Ottawa Focus on the Family fellow rebuked by American Anthropological Association
Slap Upside the Head: 2008. Anti-Gay Lobbyists warn Canada not to sign UN Initiative

Frank Stirk ChristianWeek, February 3, 2006. Focus on the Family Opens Ottawa think-tank
Richard Foot The Edmonton Journal, Febrary 18, 2006. Christians eager to flex political muscle
Gudrun Schultz Lifesite, February 2006 Focus on the Family Opens Institute of Marriage and Family Ottawa