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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Troubling, incomplete look at right-wing Christians

Reviewed by: Michael Dudley

Posted: 06/12/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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The Armageddon Factor

The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada

By Marci McDonald

Random House Canada, 432 pages, $32

IN his book American Fascists, American author Chris Hedges made the case that right-wing "dominionist" Christians were actively seeking to overturn the constitutional separation of church and state, and remake the United States into a theocracy.

Now, in this troubling but incomplete investigation, award-winning Toronto journalist Marci McDonald argues that Canada's own dominionists, emboldened by the success of their American counterparts, have similar designs here, where no such constitutional separation actually exists.

Most Canadians, she warns, have been lulled into dangerous complacency by their over-confidence in our culture of liberal pluralism, and refuse to believe that such extremism could ever get a significant grip on our politics. According to McDonald, this transformation is already underway.

While she never refers to this pattern of influence as a conspiracy, she arrays considerable evidence that a small minority of highly politicized, socially conservative Christians poses a real threat to Canadian democracy.

Their intention, she claims, is to banish the despised secular values that have legalized abortion and gay marriage, and instead build a "Christian nation" governed by biblical principles.

McDonald is careful not to paint Stephen Harper with this brush, stressing that many conservative Christians regard him with mistrust for moving too slowly on their agenda. Instead, dominionists see Treasury Board President Stockwell Day -- who believes that humans and dinosaurs co-existed -- as their preferred leader.

However, what concerns her most is that many of the Christian groups she identifies also hold dispensationalist (or "end times") beliefs (popularized in the Left Behind novels), but with Canada playing a key role in biblical Armageddon -- making our country's fate closely tied to that of Israel.

That Canada has taken a rightward and socially conservative trajectory under the Harper government is indisputable, and McDonald demonstrates that the increasing influence of sympathetic Christian institutions and lobby groups on this government appears to be one explanation.

One of the strengths of McDonald's approach is that the extremist, homophobic, unscientific and anti-democratic rhetoric we encounter is all verbatim from the fundamentalists themselves, who granted her extensive interviews and welcomed her at their conferences and churches.

Unfortunately, the greatest weakness of the book is that she also treats their claims of influence a little too credulously. While she quotes other books on the subject of politicized Christianity, she doesn't subject her overall conclusions and assumptions to third-party analysts or experts -- critiques that might have minimized the harsh reception her book has so far received.

She also leaves it up to the reader to wonder what fuels these fundamentalist belief systems. At least in American Fascists, Hedges sympathized to some extent with his subjects.

As well, because so many Christian subcultures are covered here under the umbrella of dominionism, she essentially assumes monolithic belief, when this may not be the case. Not all evangelicals are end-of-times Zionists, for example.

McDonald has certainly done Canadians a favour by reminding us never to take democracy for granted; yet it is regrettable that her somewhat incautious and hyperbolic approach has undermined her otherwise valid arguments, providing an insufficient foundation for confronting challenges to that democracy.

Michael Dudley is a research associate and library co-ordinator at the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 12, 2010 H7

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