Last year, Albertan writer Michael Wagner published Standing on Guard for Thee: The Past, Present and Future of Canada’s Christian Right, in which he makes the unlikely case that the Canadian religious right is home-grown and not an offshoot of its American cousin, as well as the much more believable claim that it has almost entirely failed to achieve its central goals such as the criminalization of abortion and the prohibition of gay marriage.

Wagner holds a PhD from the University of Alberta; his MA thesis at the University of Calgary, was a defence of private schools from what he described as the ideologically motivated attacks of the “public education establishment.” Some of his shorter writings are scattered across the Web, including at No Apologies, the group blog of the religious right activist organization Equipping Christians for the Public Square. He now lives in Alberta with his wife and nine home-schooled children.

You may find it difficult to locate a copy of Wagner’s book. I certainly have – Chapters and Amazon don’t carry it. However, Michael Valpy wrote an excellent, critical analysis of the book for last fall’s issue of the Literary Review of Canada:

Wagner catalogues five decades of defeat on the battlefields of feminism, the sexual revolution, abortion and homosexuality… Conservative Brian Mulroney turns out to be as socially liberal as Pierre Trudeau. The few lower court decisions that support the Christian Right’s causes invariably get overturned on appeal…

Preston Manning, Alberta’s founding force of the conservative Reform Party, is a disappointment… In Stockwell Day, conservative Christians feel they have found their man but he is almost cruelly laughed out of office as leader of the Canadian Alliance. Ralph Klein lets them down by refusing to use the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to get around the Supreme Court’s decision requiring an amendment to Alberta’s human rights legislation forbidding discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. Stephen Harper punishes members of his caucus who speak out against homosexuality.

If nothing else, the book is useful as a view from the other side, a voice from within the Christian right movement. Assuming Valpy’s summary is faithful, readers might find similar arguments raised by a pair of disillusioned formermembers of the American religious right: Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson in Blinded by Might. While still firmly entrenched within the religious right philosophically, Thomas and Dobson argued in their 1999 book that politics and the pulpit could not merge without doing catastrophic damage to both, and that secular government leaders like Ronald Reagan, George Bush, or Stephen Harper could never be counted on to faithfully implement the hard line social agenda advocated by the Christian right.

Unless I am mistaken, this is not Wagner’s first venture into book publishing: he is, or at least was, a Reformed Presbyterian, and in 1995 published a most unusual book through Still Waters Revival Books: A Presbyterian Political Manifesto: Presbyterianism and Civil Government. In that volume, summarized here, he argued that the Presbyterian church should be made the official established church, and that we should be living in “a Christian state,” with an official church and a government willing to enforce the 10 Commandments among its citizens. This, he argued, should occur not just in Canada, but in “every society.”

Thus far, if Standing on Guard for Thee is an indication, the Christian right movement in Canada has had great difficulty making even the first steps toward the radical social transformation envisioned by Wagner.