UNTIL THE RECENT massacre of Christians in Sri Lanka, it’s likely that most people in North America and Europe considered the idea of the persecution of Christians as little more than conservative hyperbole, a cry of wolf to defend those with reactionary views regarding equal marriage or abortion. In fact, those false claims from western Christians and their friends have done enormous harm, because the truth is that Christians are certainly persecuted in large parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, to a shocking and hideous degree. I’ve been writing and broadcasting about this issue for more than two decades and the problem has, if anything, become even worse.
A recent report commissioned by the U.K. government concluded: “The inconvenient truth is that the overwhelming majority (80%) of persecuted religious believers are Christians,” and that “forms of persecution ranging from routine discrimination in education, employment and social life up to genocidal attacks against Christian communities have led to a significant exodus of Christian believers.” Commenting on the report, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt stated, “What we have forgotten in this atmosphere of political correctness is actually the Christians that are being persecuted are some of the poorest people on the planet. In the Middle East, the population of Christians used to be about twenty percent; now it’s five percent.”
Father Nadim Nassar is a Syrian born to a Christian family in Latakia. He studied in Lebanon, and now lives in London where he is director of the Awareness Foundation, an ecumenical charity working in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Hong Kong to encourage diversity, acceptance, and peace. He is also an Anglican priest, the Church of England’s only Syrian clergyman. His latest book is The Culture of God (Hodder and Stoughton) and he is in Toronto to receive an honorary doctorate from the prestigious Trinity School of Divinity at the University of Toronto.
Were you surprised by what happened in Sri Lanka?
No, not at all, and the ignorance in the West of what is going on has annoyed me for decades. It seems that the more media we have, the more ignorant we have become. America declares that ISIS is defeated in Syria and Iraq. Total nonsense. ISIS is well, alive and kicking, in the form of an ideology. And if you think ideology can be defeated by a bullet you are mistaken. The ISIS ideology has been exported and nowhere is safe. I don’t want to sound polemical, but this is the truth. It’s not just Islam of course. Religious extremism is a virus that may have begun in the near east with Islam, but has now spread internationally to mosque, temple, church, everywhere. The Christian right in the United States, Hindu nationalism in India, and so on.
Yet in your country of Syria, and in Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan, Christians historically enjoyed a certain equality and even respect.
Yes, but there is a reason for that. No Christian would dream, for example, to be the President of Iraq or Syria. We were harmless, we weren’t seen as a threat. There were some exceptions. For example, we had a Christian Prime Minister once in Syria, one of the founders of the UN, but this was never taught to us at school. It was written out of our history. Christians also played a major role in pan-Arabism, or Arab nationalism, as long ago as the early twentieth century, but part of this was because the Arab identity was always seen as less dangerous than the Muslim identity — Arabism might include us, political Islam never would. We have always been between a rock and a hard place, but it was never as difficult and dangerous as it is now.
How did the Iraq War and western intervention in Syria influence the situation for Christians?
It made it much worse. No doubt. Arab Muslims see us as an extension of the west in the region, but in the west we’re invisible. Fanaticism was empowered by the chaos, and Christians suffered accordingly. Westerners might know of the road to Damascus and St. Paul, but they think of Damascus as some imaginary place, like Camelot, rather a city in my country. There are people who think that the west intervened to help Christians. Rubbish! They intervened to extend their own interests.
When I first came to Europe thirty years ago people would ask me when I became a Christian. Our faith predates Islam, predates Christianity in Europe and North America. Look, the entire situation is a stain on the world and it’s shameful how we have done so little to prevent such suffering and tragedy. A million dead in my country and so many more in Iraq. Twelve million people moving from place to place, frightened and in such terrible need. Within all of this is the plight of Christians, always under threat.
Do you think a fear of being labelled as Islamophobic has prevented people from speaking up about the Islamist persecution of Christians?
Yes, for sure. We have created no-go areas when it comes to comment. I don’t like to use the word “Islamophobia.” I am from the near east, I know Islam, most of my friends are Muslim, and the idea that I have an issue with them is ridiculous. I shouldn’t even have to say this. Yes, there is suspicion and even hatred of Muslims in the West, yes there is. But we need to be honest, we can’t be frightened of discussing certain issues. Muslim leaders point to ISIS and the jihadists and say, “These people aren’t Muslims.” No, that won’t do. Because those they condemn then turn around and say, “No, we’re the real Muslims, you’re not.” Muslim leadership has to deal with the fanatics, the killers, and the first step is to admit the truth. They are Muslims, and now deal with this problem.
But I also reject the term “persecuted Christians.” Yes, we are persecuted. But don’t think us as people are to be pitied, to be put aside as a group to feel sorry for and then forget. We have played an enormous role in Arab society, we still do. Work with us, as partners and not some victim group. We’re persecuted, but don’t simply label us and then conveniently reject us as victims.
Do you have hope or does the situation seem beyond repair?
I’m a Christian, I have to have hope, and I do. But if we take North Africa as a precedent it’s very discouraging. Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco — no Christians. That’s because the colonizers, the French, were brutal and once they withdrew so did Christianity. The French killed Christianity in North Africa. The issue now is that the bond of trust has been broken between Muslims and Christians in the region. When I return to Syria I wear my clerical collar, but I’m careful, members of my family who live there don’t wear crucifixes outside of their shirts. And this is now, with the war allegedly over and in areas that are supposed to be safe. Yes, the near east could become like North Africa, of course it could. All I can do is to try to make people aware, to never let go, never stop, and, as you asked me, to have hope.
Maclean’s, April 29, 2019
ISRAEL FOLAU IS one of the best, most highly paid, and famous rugby footballers in the world. He’s played more than sixty times for his country, is the fourth highest scoring Australian international player of all time, and even has a street named after him. He’s also a Pentecostal Christian who has gotten into trouble in the past for his public anti-gay statements, and has now posted on Instagram that “drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists and idolaters” are going to hell.
This was the last straw for Rugby Australia, the sport’s governing authority, who have terminated his contract for what they describe as a “high level” breach of the players’ code of conduct. This comes as Australia prepares for the rugby World Cup later this year. It’s been confirmed that Folau, a superstar who would make any national team, will not be selected.
The chief executive of Rugby Australia, Raelene Castle, has explained that there had been earlier warnings, and apparent agreements from the player that had then been broken. She insisted, “This is not a religious discussion, this is a discussion around the employee-employer relationship.” Folau has been condemned by many in the rugby community, but England player Billy Vunipola, also an evangelical, has been severely reprimanded for publicly supporting Folau and posting that, “Man was made for woman to pro create that was the goal no?”
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that adulterers, liars, and fornicators aren’t the people who are at issue here. Atheists are, but most particularly — and dangerously — is the LGBT+ community. Nor is this some academic or morally and politically neutral issue, because there are still seventy countries where homosexuality is illegal, and seven of them impose the death penalty for consensual same-sex acts. In two dozen other states gay relationships can lead to arrest and imprisonment. Just recently Brunei introduced new laws punishing gay sex with death by stoning.
As a Christian, I find Folau’s post to be painfully reductive, theologically flimsy, and totally contrary to the unconditional love not suggested, but demanded by Jesus. It pains me that a teaching so pristine in its gentleness and so affirming of the human condition should be twisted into a creed of loathing. Be that as it may, however, does this man have a right to say these things, and should he be penalized for so doing?
They are two different questions, of course. In a perfect world hideous statements like this would not be made, but both the law and our cultural and philosophical assumptions about free speech are designed precisely to respond to imperfection. People do offend and will offend, and beyond libel and direct calls for violence, most of us would allow the sewers to breathe. Partly because we can’t completely prevent it, but also because any attempt to over-police free speech would have deeply troubling and even authoritarian consequences.
The other aspect of this is whether such undoubtedly noxious comments should enjoy a special protection because they are made under the guise of religiosity. When, for example, in 2017 Kevin Pillar called Jason Motte a “faggot” he made a long and seemingly heartfelt apology and accepted his two-game suspension. It was a barroom slur, made in anger, and while unacceptable had none of the horribly eschatological underpinnings involved in the Israel Folau posting. The Australian has made similar comments in the past and gone unpunished, and even now there are many Christians and libertarians rushing to his defence. He himself is aggressively unrepentant.
It seems to me that the response to this latest situation is about right. The man does have a right, has to have a right, to believe and even proclaim that most of the world’s population is destined for hell, but similarly he has no special privilege to make such hideous predictions without reaction. Most of those who pay to watch him play, or buy the products he endorses, disagree with him, and many are members of the litany he claims will suffer for eternity. It is outrageous to insist that they remain passive in all this. There’s something else. Athletes who represent their country do exactly that — represent. There are many athletes whose religious beliefs are not of the mainstream, but they appreciate the need to separate what is their right to believe from what is their responsibility not to alienate and marginalize.
While Folau will now be lionized by the Christian right, along with the league of people who have refused to bake cakes, make dresses, or take photographs for same-sex weddings, his story is actually a tragic one. His sporting gifts will not be seen by the millions who used to watch him, and the faith he claims to embrace so deeply will once again be tarnished.
Perhaps the last and best word should go to the former captain of the Welsh rugby team, Gareth Thomas, who came out in 2009. “Telling teammates I was gay was the toughest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. His coach said to him, “You can’t go through it alone, and these people love you.” Love. Sounds just a little more Christ-like than what poor, misled Israel Folau has been saying.
iPolitics, April 23, 2019
THE MASS MURDER of Christians in Sri Lanka stunned many observers, not only because of the obvious barbarism of the act, but because the prime target was Christians, and during Easter and in church. For those of us who have been writing and broadcasting for decades about the persecution of Christians, however, this obscenity came as little surprise.
Back in 2012, I was hosting a nightly television show and on one occasion my guest was a Christian minister from the Middle East. He asked me if he could put a Bible on the desk in front of him during the interview. I politely told him that I’d rather he didn’t, because it might look like proselytizing. He replied that he understood, but that this particular Bible might be of interest to the viewers. It had been in Our Lady of Salvation Syriac Catholic cathedral in Baghdad on October 31, 2010, when a Sunni Muslim terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq attacked the church, murdering fifty-eight people and wounding more than seventy-five.
The book being held in front of me was almost beyond reading, as its pages were glued together in purple lumps, sticky with the blood of the men, women and children who had been slaughtered that warm evening in a place of peace, in a city where Christians had lived and flourished for almost 2,000 years. This was not a holy book to be preached from, but a holy book of martyrdom that preached. Its hardly legible pages spoke entire volumes, its red-turned-to-brown stains cried out to a still largely indifferent world.
The Baghdad attack, however, was merely one example of the war on Christianity. Even Pope Francis, hardly militant in these areas, told a group of forty Jewish leaders, including the then head of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald S. Lauder, “First it was your turn and now it is our turn.” In February 2014, U.S. representative Chris Smith, chairman of the congressional panel that oversees international human rights issues, told a congressional subcommittee that discussion of “anti-Christian persecution is not meant to minimize the suffering of other religious minorities who are imprisoned or killed for their beliefs,” but to make it clear that Christians “remain the most persecuted religious group the world over.”
More than 300 million Christians are threatened with violence or face legal discrimination, forced conversion, and daily threats. In countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and elsewhere they are frequently imprisoned and tortured on false charges of drinking and blasphemy, and in Iraq the exodus of Christians has been so great that the faith may even cease to exist in any meaningful sense in years to come.
But this is a good example of why we have to be very selective and informed in how and what we judge. Saddam Hussein was a brute, but he didn’t persecute Christians. It was the western invasion of Iraq that smashed the stability of the place, empowering Islamist groups and leading to the full-scale attack on the Christian minority. Similarly in Syria, Christians are generally protected, and in Palestine the national conversation was traditionally shaped by Greek Orthodox Christians. In Egypt the story is sadly different; in Turkey there is hardly even a concept of a “Turkish Christian”; and in Pakistan the once respected Christian minority is now intimidated and frightened.
This is not an issue of Islam refusing to accept Christianity, but of radicalized Islam and of ignorant, sadistic fanatics not accepting anybody but their own — they also slaughter Muslims who refuse to adopt their gruesome twisting of the Muslim faith. Yet Christians are without doubt the main victims of this systemic persecution and violence, and the western world says relatively little.
The reasons are complex, but one of the causes is that conservative Christians in North America and Europe so frequently claim victimhood, usually when they show intolerance towards LGBT+ people. This absurd boast of martyrdom leads to cynicism about the very real horrors experienced by Christians in other parts of the world. On a grander scale, when George W. Bush launched imperial campaigns in majority-Muslim areas and spoke of a Christian motive there was an understandable, if misplaced, anger. If Bush and his people were Christian, how could Christians be vulnerable and persecuted?
Then there is sheer ignorance, with the political and media class having so little experience of peoples outside of their comfort zone. There’s an assumption that Christians are somehow like them, are white and secure, powerful and prosperous, and thus not the correct demographic at all for sympathy. The middle-class solipsism of all this is nauseating.
The inescapable fact is that Christians are indeed a highly persecuted group in large parts of the world, and that Christianity even faces disappearance in the places where it was born. It is not a western faith, but one rooted deeply in the Middle East, and its adherents in much of that region, and in Asia and Africa, demand our help and solidarity. If we choose between marginalized groups, and ignore one for whatever reason we conjure, we are failing in our intelligence, compassion, and humanity.
The Globe and Mail, March 29, 2018
FOR MUCH OF its four decades on the air, 100 Huntley Street was a familiar address on the Canadian TV dial — a place where many people seeking a break from the cares of the world could feel they’d found a refuge. The show was founded by the late David Mainse, whom I knew well, and who, over the quarter-century that he hosted the show, made viewers feel welcome in one of the country’s most hospitable living rooms.
Although a product of a traditional Pentecostal background, David was a kind, tolerant, and forward-looking man. I remember him calling me in Britain in 2001, when my father died. He didn’t want to preach, only to tell me he was there for me. That combination of simple kindness, unalloyed by sermonizing, was typical of David’s Christianity, and under his guidance, 100 Huntley Street was far less political, less angrily conservative than its American TV counterparts. I was not the only one who thought so. Tony Campolo, a leader of the American evangelical left, once put it this way to me: “In the United States, every Christian television door was closed to me. But when I came to Canada, everyone at Huntley called me right away.”
That open-door policy was not to last. I had been a regular guest host of Huntley when, in 2015, I publicly endorsed equal marriage. Soon after, an email arrived from the show’s producers. “It is felt that with the high public profile you have in relation to gay marriage … we have to part our ways.” I responded that I’d never mentioned the topic on their show, and would never do so, out of respect for what I knew was their position on sexuality. The response: “People know what you think.”
In fact, had viewers known the full extent of my thinking, they would have had even greater cause for concern — concern about their community’s own survival. For I am convinced, as are many believers, that Christianity is challenged as never before.
But the challenge comes not from popular hostility — no matter how much Christians might see themselves as a persecuted minority. No, to my mind, the threat facing the Church is the very real prospect of public irrelevance. So many Canadians have turned away from Christianity. And yet, they are longing to turn toward it, if only Christians will stop judging them — and listen, instead, to their fears, hopes, and longings for a better world.
Whenever I discuss my faith publicly, the response is startling. When I argue that Jesus demands us to struggle for peace, to welcome the marginalized, to embrace the LGBT+ community, to reverse economic injustice, to smash down the doors of prejudice and oppression and to confront climate change, I am inundated with emails.
Not emails of anger or derision. Rather, they are missives expressing nothing less than fascination — tinged with delight — that this could be what Christianity is really about. A man as established and traditional as William Temple, who seventy-five years ago was Archbishop of Canterbury, once said, “Socialism is the economic realization of the Christian gospel.” How true his words ring today.
Party politics do not have the hold they once enjoyed. Traditional notions of social action have become clouded with cynicism. In the wake of their failure, we all — like it or not — harbour a faith-shaped vacuum deep in our being. What the good Archbishop knew then, we ought to know now with even greater certainty: If Canadian churches want to fill the pews with people longing for a truly better world, if religious leaders want to become a force for change once again, the way forward is absurdly easy: Be Christian — merely Christian, no more or less — and you will, by definition, be revolutionary in the truest, most pristine sense.
Many Christians would disagree with me, of course. Indeed, there is a battle raging and roaring for the soul of Canadian Christianity — between what we can broadly describe as the Church’s left and right flanks. And those on the right are winning the day.
Just a few weeks ago, Doug Ford, brother of the late Toronto mayor Rob Ford, became leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party, three short months before an election that will determine the direction of Canada’s most populous province. Although Mr. Ford does not appear to be religious himself, he swept to victory — employing the same divisive playbook that helped propel his brother to power in 2010, and that handed Donald Trump the White House in 2016 — with the zealous support of Christian conservatives.
Among them was Paul Melnichuk, who, in the run-up to the leadership race last month, stood on the stage of his Prayer Palace megachurch in suburban Toronto, a beaming Mr. Ford at his side, and intoned to his followers: “This is a man surely the Lord has visited in the ninth season” — the critical hour of temptation — “and granted him a dream, a vision, for the people in this land, in this province, for the glory of God.”
Mr. Ford’s own speech to the congregation that day, delivered in front of a giant video screen displaying the address of his website, concluded by beseeching them to “go online and register your family and friends, because that’s the only way we can make a change in this province.” In return for that support, he added, “I can guarantee you we’ll make sure the church has a voice. All the time. All the time.”
Among the promises Mr. Ford has made should that voice be unleashed in June’s provincial election: to readdress if not remove the province’s sex-education curriculum, which attempts to talk to students frankly, and without judgment, about sexual activity, gender identity and sexual orientation; to allow anti-abortion protesters closer access to legal clinics; to deep-six a carbon tax; and to give Christian doctors the right to refuse referrals in cases of abortion and assisted dying.
Mr. Ford’s political colleagues Andrew Scheer, Leader of the federal Conservatives, and Jason Kenney, who heads the United Conservative Party in Alberta, are, unlike Mr. Ford, intensely religious — both strict Roman Catholics. Yet while they claim to respect the separation of church and state, each is viscerally uncomfortable with much of the social progress that Canadians now take for granted. The star of Ford and both these men, whether it originates in the sky above Bethlehem or not, is solidly in the ascendant.
And they are far from alone in framing the “Christian” way forward as one that veers defiantly rightward — defiantly away from, and counter to, the social liberalism of many Canadians.
Christian Elia is executive director of the Catholic Civil Rights League (CCRL), an organization that regularly defends conservative Christianity. “Actual Catholics,” he says, “by following Church teaching and defending these teachings in the public square, do so because we honestly believe that we have a Christian world view shaped through 2,000 years of scriptural study, tradition and magisterial teaching that ought to be shared.”
“Actual Catholics.” Presumably, liberal Catholics do not qualify, being, as they are, among the very forces coalescing to ensure, in Mr. Elia’s words, that “the public square is increasingly being closed off to those of us with so-called conservative, religiously formed opinions” on marriage, abortion, gay rights and assisted suicide.
Mr. Elia’s is a difficult analysis to accept. Take the case of his fellow ccrl board member Tanya Granic Allen, who publicly fretted during the pc leadership debate that educating children about “anal sex” was taking their focus away from mathematics. When she ran for the Ontario PC leadership, Ms. Granic Allen was treated generously by most journalists, who gave her ample time and space to flesh out her platform, and who seldom asked challenging questions about her reactionary views on abortion rights and LGBT+ equality. Perhaps buoyed in part by that easy ride, she had the votes, come the party convention, to be a kingmaker for Mr. Ford — who is currently frontrunner to become Ontario’s premier.
But we hardly need to wait for Mr. Ford’s election to witness conservative Christian ideas finding their voice in Ontario politics. mpp Sam Oosterhoff, who used Facebook to denounce provincial legislation enabling same-sex couples to adopt children as “disrespectful to mothers and fathers,” is already an MPP, and at the age of twenty, the youngest member of the Ontario legislature. He is also an unapologetic champion of evangelical conservatives.
Among Mr. Oosterhoff’s own biggest champions is conservative Christian firebrand Charles McVety, president of Canada Christian College, and also, it turns out, another enthusiastic backer of Mr. Ford. In part because “two million Ontario children are being experimented on, as we speak, with radical gender sex education,” Mr. McVety urged his followers into the public square by providing a video guide to help them complete online voter forms during the pc leadership race. Then, upon Mr. Ford’s victory, he issued a tweet connecting the celestial and earthly dots as he saw them: “Praise God,” he wrote, “for the incredible victory of @fordnation …”
Mr. McVety’s invitation for people of faith to inject their beliefs into politics provides a mirror, of sorts, to Christian leaders’ mounting calls for politicians to openly fight for and defend issues close to the hearts of conservative Christians. Interim describes itself as Canada’s life and family-issues newspaper. “Many leadership candidates and other politicians will try to court pro-life and pro-family voters indirectly,” Interim editor Paul Tuns says. “But these voters want someone to champion their causes.”
And Mr. Tuns finds no shortage of politicians he says are doing just that. In Ms. Granic Allen, Mr. Ford and Mr. Kenney, as well as in former federal Conservative leadership contenders Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux, Mr. Tuns says, “religious conservatives have found champions.” Champions, it seems, in something like a zero-sum game, in which social progress is defined as defeat, plain and simple, for individual Christians. “Many pro-life and pro-family Canadians see their way of life and their values under attack,” he says, “and they will strongly support candidates who either share their values or simply speak up for them.”
It would be wrong, however, to assume that there are no prominent Christians in progressive circles. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and her partner are committed members of the United Church — I’ve preached at their church when they were present — and Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, were she not a politician, would likely have pursued Anglican ordination.
Still, such a public embrace of Christianity is the exception. There are numerous Christians in political life and in the media, but it’s too often seen as gauche, politically clumsy, or plain embarrassing for progressive believers to discuss their faith, or even simply to mention it, in the public square.
That’s partly owing to fear of blowback from a jarring coalition, however cleft, of angry atheists and right-wing Christians. I suspect it comes as well from a reluctance to be lumped in with American Christian politicians and their crass obsession with what seems like perfunctory prayer and Christian nationalism, not to mention their determination to use the levers of political power to wage all-out war on a range of liberal issues that even many Christians consider settled.
Too bad, because there is a middle way. Richard Coles is a Church of England priest who is openly gay and also a former member of the pop group the Communards, which had a series of hit songs in Britain in the 1980s (and whose name was a nod to the socialist revolutionaries of the Paris Commune). Hardly a typical priest, he is now a beloved bbc personality, and has never compromised on his beliefs.
“Part of my vocation,” he says, is “to go to places where I can almost uniquely go because of the peculiarities of my curriculum vitae, to try to witness there to the love of Jesus Christ, to seek out those in need of his love and give them the good news and simply to be a person with a public commitment to a life of faith in a place where you don’t often see it.”
Nor are such more-forward-thinking Christians without friends and allies. Roman Catholicism constitutes Canada’s largest Christian denomination; and while the Church remains solidly conservative on the issues of contraception, abortion and gay rights, Pope Francis is the most liberal and forward-looking pontiff in half a century — a genuine champion of the poor and dispossessed, and of planet Earth itself. The United Church, meanwhile, is decidedly on the left, a sort of liberalism or social democracy at prayer. The Anglican Church elected its first openly partnered gay bishop in 2016, and its Niagara diocese chose its first woman bishop earlier this month.
Still, forging a middle path on matters of faith and social justice — one nurtured by conversations of goodwill and openness among Christians — is anything but a given in Canada right now. The recent death of Billy Graham provided something of a test case. Known as America’s Pastor, to many people, he was also Canada’s Chaplain; his following in this country was enormous, and the mourning here that followed his death was sincere and widespread.
But so was the anger at anybody who exposed the man’s faults. I wrote a column praising Mr. Graham’s many qualities, but also pointing out that he had made repugnant anti-Semitic comments in what he thought was a private conversation with Richard Nixon in the Oval Office; had called for the bombing of civilian targets, including dikes, in North Vietnam (a war crime, by the way); was deeply opposed to Christianity’s acceptance of LGBT+ people; and, at the age of ninety-three, was still campaigning against equal marriage. He had apologized for the taped “Jewish conspiracy” rubbish, and also for calling AIDS a punishment from God — but he maintained, to the end, his homophobia, his bellicosity and his rigid theology.
That, one would have thought, was sufficient grounds for at least a conversation about the man’s Christian values.
Yet Mr. Graham’s Canadian supporters told me in the hundreds how appalling and heretical I was. Yet, there were just as many Canadian Christians who thanked me for what I had written, who wanted the non-Christian world to know that conservatism and Christianity are not interchangeable, and who lamented that their more progressive brand of the faith was so seldom highlighted. Christianity is not united, and never has been.
But it’s near impossible to see, in too many Canadian churches, the spirit and purpose of “the way” founded by a Galilean Jew living in occupied Palestine two millennia ago. Jesus himself said not a word about homosexuality or abortion, was far more concerned with justice and acceptance than with order and structure, warned the rich of the dangers of their wealth, praised and loved the poor and marginalized, and rejected the existing religious establishment. The Gospels sing rather than shout, and that song is of a shockingly different and liberated society, a world turned upside down from the one that Jesus lived in and that, in many ways, we live in still.
Conservative Christians do reach out to the poor on an individual, if not structural, basis. But for all that, they see Christian love more in terms of a moral code, emphasizing what they refer to — albeit incorrectly — as the traditional family, the sanctity of the unborn and consequent evil of abortion, the sinful nature of homosexuality, the immorality of assisted dying, the reality of spiritual warfare and the decline of Christian order and virtue.
What they lack is an understanding, or acceptance, of the need for more systemic change. Yes, they might have a deep faith that permeates all they are and do, and in that regard sometimes put other Christians to shame. Yet, underlying that absolute commitment to religion is a clinical, harsh code of right and wrong. They would do well, instead, to heed the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran martyr to Nazism: “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
Some are Protestant and embrace the literal truth of the Bible; others are Roman Catholic and look to the teachings of the Magisterium (the all-powerful teaching office of the Catholic Church). So we now have a strange unity — a strange ecumenism — where conservative Protestants and conservative Catholics have more in common with one another that they do with the liberal members of their respective churches.
This is nothing less than a startling development, one that Canadian poet and novelist Maggie Helwig, who has served as an Anglican priest in downtown Toronto since 2012, describes as “a different kind of protest movement” — one “based in a kind of panic fear about a situation in which Christianity is no longer hegemonic.” The result, she says, is a theology that “mobilizes the worst authoritarian and punitive tendencies in Christian theology” in the face of what its adherents have come to define as “terrific existential danger if certain rigid boundaries are transgressed.”
For liberal Christians, aware that many Canadians have come to define all Christianity as a movement propelled by rigidity and negativity, the frustration is profound.
And the challenge, says Jocelyn Bell, editor-publisher of the United Church Observer, is manifold. “Liberal voices do get heard, and among them are many committed liberal Christians,” she says — but those same people often do not share the fact that their opinions are informed by their faith.
Equally testing, she says, has been the passing of an era when “it was much more common for a news reporter to contact the moderator of the United Church of Canada for an opinion on an issue of national importance.” The upshot, in her view? “Liberal Christian leaders today have to work harder to make sure their voices are included in the conversation.”
“The scandal of the evangelical mind,” in the words of Mark Noll, one of the most respected historians of the evangelical world, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” It wasn’t always that way. The early Protestant movement prided itself on being the thinking branch of Christendom. The Puritans established universities in colonial America. And seventeenth-century British dictator Oliver Cromwell — who cut off the king’s head, and banned Christmas (too wasteful, too papal) — employed faithful John Milton as one of his secretaries.
While in Catholic circles, a belief in intellectual excellence still exists (although it’s far stronger among Jesuits and Dominicans), evangelical culture has retreated from the world — and, perhaps more disturbingly, is working to erect a parallel one that is run according to its own laws and logic. Which is why we see a new wave of Christian high schools and colleges, and the inevitable debates. Witness the battle between Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C., and various law societies over that Christian college’s desire to start a law school whose students must agree to forgo sexual intimacy outside of heterosexual marriage.
Or take the example of the Trudeau government’s decision to require groups seeking funding for the Summer Jobs Program to affirm their respect for a woman’s right to choose. The decision went to the epicentre of the church-state relationship (while also, it’s worth noting, making small “l” liberal Christians feel almost anonymous). An attempt to prevent tax dollars ending up in the hands of extreme anti-abortion groups was clumsily handled by the government, and thus played into the persecution complex so relished by the Christian right.
What wasn’t made clear by those complaining of being victims of liberal “discrimination” was that many of these same people would be the first to refuse to hire openly gay students — or even straight students living with a partner to whom they are not married. It all seems so ugly, and lacking in the gentleness demanded by the rebel Jesus.
Indeed, perhaps nowhere is the modern-day Kulturkampf more pronounced than on the issue of abortion, a litmus test on which Catholics and evangelicals have forged a common ground against all liberal comers. It is a tragic intransigence, because here is an area where common ground is not only possible, but desirable.
All Christians, and most people for that matter, would like to see abortion rates decline. That could be achieved, and has been achieved, by making contraceptives readily available, by insisting on modern sex education in schools, by reducing poverty, by funding public daycare and by empowering women more generally.
And yet, Catholics insist on remaining opposed to “artificial contraceptives” and, alongside their Protestant allies, lead the campaign against frank and healthy sex education, while framing state-funded daycare as an attack on the family and a form of social engineering. As for abortion itself, the Christian right wants it defunded, and ultimately — however much they may deny this publicly — banned and criminalized.
For, make no mistake: Such ideological tussles are anything but abstract debates about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The Halton Catholic District School Board, west of Toronto, last month passed a motion that bans it from facilitating financial donations to charities that support, “either directly or indirectly, abortion, contraception, sterilization, euthanasia, or embryonic stem-cell research.” Under the ban, the Hospital for Sick Children, the United Way and Doctors Without Borders would become charities non grata.
Indeed, for many Catholics, the loathing of abortion, no matter the circumstances, trumps even the most basic of Christian virtues. In 2015, in The Prairie Messenger, a Catholic newspaper in Western Canada, I wrote supportively about a ten-year-old Paraguayan girl who had been denied an abortion after being raped by her stepfather. I was promptly fired (albeit amid profuse apologies from my editor, who cited external pressure). Which in turn prompted Lifesite, the Canadian anti-abortion movement’s most prominent media platform — and one of the most influential conservative Christian sites in the world — to announce that they were “glad that The Prairie Messenger will no longer be a mouth-piece for Coren’s misplaced notions of compassion and love.”
And yet, who is welcome at that table? Donald Trump, a man who lies on a near-daily basis, who has given comfort to racist thugs, who has admitted to sexual assault and is by all accounts an adulterer. As with Christians in the United States, conservative believers in Canada are more than happy to defend the man.
And why not, they ask. He opposes a woman’s right to choose (after years of claiming otherwise), has fired every member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS, has renewed his call to ban transgender citizens from serving their country in the U.S. military and has promised to vigorously appoint “pro-life judges.” To a number of his religious supporters, he is a new Constantine, the deeply flawed emperor who allowed Christianity to flourish in ancient Rome: As Mr. Trump proudly champions all that is selfish and mean, these Christians accuse his opponents of being “demonic.”
Liberal Christians point out the contradiction in all this. And point out, as well, the dangers of turning to Scripture as a defence of right-wing moral codes. Genesis, after all, implies that human life begins when a baby takes its first breath — after birth, of course — which is a bit tricky for the pro-life crowd. When life in the womb is referred to in the Bible, it’s more figurative and communal than direct and specific, which is the case for so much in a book regarded by all serious Christians as inspired, but which many of us accept was never supposed to be read as a pedantic guide to daily living.
Or what of Christians who would deny equality to LGBT+ people — in a world where homophobia leads to persecution, family rejection, self-harm and even suicide? It’s another of those subjects that, while of concern to Christians on both sides of the aisle, is hardly touched on in the Bible. The Genesis story of Sodom and Gomorrah is less about homosexuality than about hospitality — protecting one’s guests and neighbours, and loving God rather than oneself. Remember, it features Lot offering up his teenage daughters to a rape mob in place of his angelic guests! Hardly family values.
When the Hebrew Scriptures — the Old Testament — do speak of homosexuality, it is condemned with other transgressions such as combining different cloths, eating the wrong foods and having sex with a woman when she is menstruating. As for St. Paul’s rejection of homosexuality in the New Testament, it is concerned with straight men using boys, usually young teenagers, for loveless sex, a practice common in Greek and Roman culture. And while Jesus doesn’t speak of the subject, it’s worth rereading his affirming and loving response to a Roman centurion who cares deeply for his slave. Many theologians are convinced that this is an account of a gay partnership.
The progressive Christian approach is to understand Biblical teaching through the prism of love, to regard the Bible as a living document that on certain subjects speaks differently to different ages. It is to acknowledge that the writers of the Old Testament knew little if anything of committed, loving same-sex relationships. As Ms. Helwig notes, “The radical left theological tradition, which goes much further back in Christian history” imparts a message of deep humanity, one in which “we don’t need to be afraid of the ‘other’ or, finally, of God, that God is constantly drawing us all into the vast mystery of love, and that we are, despite our many human failures, deeply, existentially safe. So we can be vulnerable, and open, and comfortable with difference and uncertainty.”
“It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery,” says Bishop Kallistos Ware, an English convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, and who for many years was a lecturer at Oxford University. “God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.”
That wonder is troubling for the complacent, who want their faith neatly packaged in catechismal certainty. But being born again is not the same as being born yesterday, and questioning is not the same as doubting. As scientific knowledge expands and public attitudes change, Christianity today must either respond intelligently and constructively, or retreat into an ever-shrinking, more hostile ghetto.
For Canadian Christians (and here, it is not solely the conservative among them) the newest battle front is assisted dying or, as opponents prefer to call it, euthanasia. Unlike abortion and homosexuality, this is more a work in progress, a conundrum whose resolution is still undecided for many people. Not for all, however.
Last year, German Roman Catholic Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, a hero to conservative believers, paid a visit to Canada. Once here, he delivered a public speech in which he described as “tragic” Canada’s moves toward a (it must be said: eminently sane, tightly controlled) policy of assisted dying. His comments were warmly lauded by the Christian right, who welcomed his introduction of moral triumphalism into an issue that is profoundly nuanced and complex.
To liberal Christians, it seemed that once again those on the right of the Church care most about people just before they are born, and just before they die. In between, not so much. In the process, those conservatives betray their indifference to economic systems that exacerbate suffering across the lion’s share of our time here on Earth.
There was a time when Christian social conservatives in Canada held to an economic gospel, when they were prepared to believe that the desire for more socialistic policies was compatible with conservative views on life and sexuality. Like so much that involves benevolence and mercy, that position has been largely suffocated. As Protestant evangelicals and conservative Catholics rally round right-wing politicians, they trade away kindness and generosity in exchange for a guarantee that Canada’s legislatures will call a halt to social progress.
Canadian Christianity is bisected, and — as the absolute numbers attest — in trouble. And while no faith should be measured exclusively by its headcount, without worshippers, there is no community, no money and, for that matter, no church.
The coming years will see a new generation of believers assuming positions of influence and authority in our churches and in our society. Those leaders will have the option of building walls or building bridges, of extending the circle so as to include as many people as possible or standing at the corners of their creeds and repelling all they see as a threat. Of lending a hand to the marginalized and needy, or withdrawing it once and for all.
James E. Wallis Jr. is a Christian writer and political activist, best known as the founder and editor of Sojourners magazine, a journal of the evangelical left. He writes: “Two of the greatest hungers in our world today are the hunger for spirituality and the hunger for social change. The connection between the two is the one the world is waiting for, especially the new generation. And the first hunger will empower the second.”
Whether Canadian Christians will listen to Mr. Wallis — or, for that matter, to Jesus Christ — remains to be seen. Their decision will influence all of us, whatever our faith or lack thereof.
And it will determine whether our houses of worship, and our houses of politics, are places of division and discord — or living rooms where love is always welcome and compassion finds a home.
iPolitics, March 2, 2017
THE FAMOUS EVANGELIST Billy Graham may not have been to everyone’s liking, but the man certainly tried to expunge politics — and even controversial and divisive issues — from his Christian preaching. He once said, for example, that one of his greatest regrets was being too closely identified with President Richard Nixon.
His son Franklin, however, is cut from a different cloth. Rather than distance himself from politics and sensation, he has positively embraced the divisive and the ultra-conservative. He has said that Muslims should be banned from the United States because Islam is “very evil and wicked.” He’s demanded that LGBT+ people be barred from churches because Satan “wants to devour our homes.” And he claimed that the election of Donald Trump was due to the “hand of God” at work.
These and other comments are why Graham’s appearance in Vancouver this weekend at the so-called Festival of Hope is being vociferously opposed by many local Christians. More than thirty leading Christian leaders have issued a public letter expressing profound concerns about his visit.
The list is an impressive one and includes Catholic Archbishop Michael Miller, Anglican Bishop Melissa Skelton, leaders of the United Church and (this is deeply significant) various evangelical leaders. This is arguably the first time such a broad grouping of Christian leaders has come together to stand against such a prominent co-religionist.
Having said that, an awful lot of Christians (I include myself here) see very little of the teachings of Jesus in the increasingly strident, reactionary and hysterical outpourings of the president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the charity Samaritan’s Purse. (For the latter position, by the way, he is paid one million dollars a year. There’s no business like the charity business.)
Yet Graham remains extremely popular and influential, with more than five million followers on his Facebook page and a sizeable base of support in Canada. It would not be at all surprising if he attracts more than 20,000 people to his proposed speech in Vancouver. His popularity is almost certainly not in spite of — but because of — the fact that he described Planned Parenthood as “Hitleristic,” defended Donald Trump’s immigration policy by comparing it to God using “extreme vetting” when He lets people into Heaven, and claimed that Barack Obama was controlled by dangerous Muslims and that his re-election was a sign that Americans had “turned their back on God.”
He praised Vladimir Putin for “protecting Russian young people against homosexual propaganda.” He calls abortion “murder” and — in sinister and hideous tones — stated in an interview that “homosexuals cannot have children … they can take other people’s children.”
If Franklin Graham’s opinions were coming from a secular politician, that person’s career would be over. Because Graham coats his bigotry in ersatz Christianity, and because he is the son of a famous man (never underestimate the place of hereditary influence and sheer nepotism in public evangelism), he not only gets away with it — he prospers.
Sensible Christian leaders are not calling on Graham to be punished. They’re merely arguing that in a country where, just weeks ago, six Muslims were murdered in Quebec City, messages of anger and discord are profoundly out of place — and extremely un-Christian.
Not everyone within the Christian community agrees. Globe and Mail columnist and Christian television host Lorna Dueck recently wrote that she and Graham are friends, and that while the two of them have disagreements, the controversy he generates is part of “a healthy dialogue on what the Gospel means for Canadians.”
Good Lord. Truth cries out to be heard. There is such a thing as bad publicity — and there is also such a thing as shaming the truth of a faith whose founder preached love, justice, inclusion, acceptance, tolerance, peace, and the welcoming of the stranger.
This is the reduction of a religion of revolution and equality into a set of far-right sound bites — the life of Christ twisted into the Gospel of Trump.
I don’t want Franklin Graham to be banned — but I do want him to shut up. For the sake of a fair society, for the sake of good people, and for the sake of Christianity. Amen.
iPolitics, October 16, 2017
LOOK OUT GRINCH — there’s a new misanthrope in town. Speaking to the Values Voter Summit in Washington last week, President Donald Trump pushed one of the so-con Right’s most reliable buttons — the so-called War On Christmas.
“They don’t use the word Christmas because it is not politically correct. We’re saying Merry Christmas again,” Trump brayed as the gun-loving, gay-hating, born-again crowd stood up and roared its approval. Yes, it’s Christmas again in Trumpland.
Personally, I hear people saying “Merry Christmas” quite a lot during the season. But the important point about Christmas is living it — not talking about it. And that’s where Saint Donald and his flock face a few challenges.
Christmas, after all, is meant to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ — whose politics would not have been popular at the Values Voters Summit, which invited National Rifle Association champion Dana Loesch, war-monger Oliver North, right-wing fanatic Steve Bannon, and a host of the country’s other leading ultra-conservatives.
Here’s the thing: Jesus was a snowflake, a virtue-signaller and a liberal. He believed in turning the other cheek, putting down weapons, embracing one’s enemies, giving away wealth, feeding the poor, welcoming foreigners and ejecting profiteers from the temple. Ouch.
He was especially harsh on those who had too much money. From the Letter of James: “Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire.” Again, ouch.
Here’s Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” Make the wording a little more specific and you’re looking at a demand for socialized medicine, open immigration, and the welfare state.
I happen to believe that Jesus was the Son of God, who came to change the world, liberate us from sin and bring universal peace and love. Contrary to what Trump and his followers constantly claim, I am allowed to say that — even shout it — wherever I want.
There is no war on Christmas in North America, no war on Christians. The former is a mere holiday, secularized by capitalism generations ago and now having as much to do with sales and Santa as with beatitudes and Bethlehem. The latter is a faith that demands personal reformation and a rejection of selfishness and worldly ambition. As such, it stands in direct contrast to Donald Trump’s bombast, arrogance, aggression, dishonesty, sexual bullying and his attempts to divide people and replace informed debate with screaming platitudes.
If anything, Trump stands as the very personification of the attack on genuine Christian values and virtues — a living example of so much that the radical Jesus opposed, and for which He eventually died.
When the president told the excited, angry crowd on Friday that, “we are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values,” he was reciting a line, an empty phrase from a conservative mantra that was developed just a few years ago. The “Judeo” bit was added only relatively recently, and considering Trump’s reluctance to condemn the Jew-hating Nazis in Charlottesville in August, his use of it is particularly fraudulent.
The audience drank it up because, for so many of them, the Christian faith has become a hiding place — an excuse for homophobia, racism, an obsession with violence, support for American triumphalism and adoration of the free market.
How tragic that the prince of peace has been perverted into the god of war, a champion of the poor twisted into the hero of the rich. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven,” said Jesus. “I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.”
By the way, the original Santa, Saint Nicholas, was born in Turkey to a Greek family, and Jesus was a poor Galilean Jew. I can’t imagine either of them would have been allowed entry into the U.S. these days. And as for those elves …
Maclean’s, November 23, 2017
ONE OF THE first things Christians are taught in catechism class is that the Son of God is not a sausage roll. It’s part of a deeper theology, of course; other pastry snacks are not specified, but He is never, ever a sausage roll.
I mention this because the British bakery Greggs has just been obliged to apologize after it produced an ad depicting a nativity scene with the assorted worshippers praising not the baby Messiah but the afore mentioned sausage roll. It was part of the company’s Advent calendar, entitled — with a splendidly eponymous leap of imagination — “Merry Greggmas.”
Little did the good people at Greggs realize what an uproar this would cause, with the extraordinarily powerful British tabloid press joining forces with various conservative Christians to denounce yet another example of the ongoing “war on Christmas.” But here, reality cries out to be heard: This was merely a slightly insensitive and crass campaign to sell meat products. More than this, there is not and never has been a war on Christmas, whether it’s the appearance of Happy Holidays cards (so what?), multicultural television commercials (surely a good thing), or carol singers allegedly being banned from shopping malls (they aren’t). But the sausage roll reveals a sorry irony. If there is a religious war, it is not on the season we have somewhat arbitrarily and relatively recently chosen as the date of Jesus’s birth. Rather, it is an attack against the Christian, egalitarian virtues that the child and the event are supposed to epitomize — a charge led by some Christians and churches themselves.
Truth be told, some of the loudest and most active Christians tend to be socially conservative and harsh in their opinions of what is new, novel, and challenging, often obsessed with issues such as abortion and homosexuality. The latter is a subject I myself wrestled with for a long time, and I once accepted — albeit somewhat reluctantly — that same-sex marriage was forbidden in Scripture. A deeper reading of the Bible, however, and a less anachronistic grasp of its meaning, led me to question what I had considered self-evident. I also saw first-hand the love and commitment of so many same-sex couples, often Christian same-sex couples, that must lead God to smile with delight.
We must remember, however, that these are not issues that Jesus explicitly mentioned in the Bible. Yes, he did respond to the Pharisees’ question about divorce by noting that marriage was between a man and a woman, but we also read of his dealings with a Roman centurion and a slave whom the said Roman loves — a romantic love, according to some textual readings. St. Paul does mention homosexuality — a word not used as it is today until the nineteenth century — but this is more about heterosexual men using boys than loving, adult relationships. And while some of the stories in the New Testament are certainly up for debate, Jesus’s emphasis on refusing to judge others, especially where sexual sin is concerned, is not.
What is expressed repeatedly in the Gospels, however — with a virtual monomania — is love for the neighbour. Christ teaches that authentic devotion to God can only by demonstrated by this love, this fraternal romance, and such a love demands social justice, a passion for the poor and marginalized, and a revolutionary understandingof power and morality. If Jesus does condemn anyone, it is the reactionaries, those who have authority, who obscure love under law, and who disguise the kingdom behind formalities and regulations. Instead of opening the doors wide, they close them and bolt them tight.
I have no doubt that those Christians who complain about the ostensible war on Christmas and have such right-wing attitudes about so many subjects still believe in their religion, and I certainly have no right or ability to look into their souls. But it has all reached a crisis point now, particularly for those of us who embrace a more progressive, but nevertheless committed, belief in Christianity. Quite frankly, the antics of the Christian right also turn people away from Christianity, and understandably so. If that’s what Jesus is about, some people say, I want nothing of it.
Don’t forget that one of the leaders of the battle against this chimerical war on Christmas, and a powerful leader of North American Christianity, is Franklin Graham, the son of Billy. He believes that Islam is “very evil and wicked,” admires Vladimir Putin, and demanded that lgbt+ people be barred from churches because Satan “wants to devour our homes.” He also claimed that the election of Donald Trump was due to the “hand of God” at work. Imagine putting all that on a card for Santa.
What he and his friends seem to consider as Christmas is the stuff of tinselled nostalgia mingled with the self-prescribed absolute right of Christians to dominate the public square and dictate the private conscience. And if anything should anger followers of Jesus at Christmas time, it shouldn’t be some irrelevant commercial for food, but rather the fact that millions of people go without food altogether; it shouldn’t be that Jesus’s name is taken in vain, but that His teachings are taken in vain; it shouldn’t be that we don’t say “Merry Christmas” as often as we did, but that we so seldom say “I forgive you,” “You are loved,” and “All are welcome in church.” After all, per the once-ubiquitous question, “What would Jesus do?” the answer would probably be, “Tell everyone to grow up, re-read what the New Testament says, and then go and turn the world upside-down” — not just at Christmas, but every day of the year.
And while I still watch Frosty the Snowman every Yuletide and love the Dickensian fantasy of the season, if I forget the authentic, revolutionary, life-transforming meaning of it all, I might as well genuflect to the great sausage roll in the sky.
Toronto Star, May 16, 2018
MANY OF US had not heard of the Canada Summer Jobs program until the government decided to reform it.
It’s designed to fund short-term contracts for secondary and post-secondary students and for years went largely unnoticed, until the revelation that groups opposed to abortion — some of them vehemently so — were receiving generous financial support.
A woman’s right to choose, of course, is one of the fundamentals of Canada’s health care, legal, and moral framework. So to correct matters, a clause was added asking applicants to attest that their “core mandate” respected Charter of Rights values.
Hardly draconian stuff. And remember, some of the groups involved compare abortion to the Holocaust, distribute flyers containing graphic and bloody images to people’s homes, even when children might see them, and refer to abortion as murder. Their language is violent, extreme, and directly contrary to Canadian virtues.
Even so, there are now several legal challenges to the government, with those opposed to the amendment claiming that it’s an attack on religious freedom and human rights. The actual results of the new policy, however, paint a radically different picture.
Official documents show that of the 2,728 faith-based organizations that applied for summer jobs funding this year, 58 percent were willing to sign the attestation. Of the 115 Anglican groups that applied, only 10 refused to sign, and only 2 of the 199 United Church-affiliated organizations refused. Even more startling, none of the 89 Jewish or 130 Muslim groups withheld their support. Which leaves evangelical groups and, of course, Roman Catholics.
Opposition to abortion has become an absolute of conservative Catholic opinion even though, it should be noted, Canadian Catholics in general do not share this view and progressive Catholics have a far more nuanced approach.
Also, there is far more ambiguity in the Catholic response to the program than we have been led to believe. Contrary to what many critics of the policy have claimed, of the 365 Catholic organizations applying for funding, the overwhelming majority signed on, with less than a third (32 percent) refusing to do so. When we break down those figures, a clear pattern emerges.
In all of Quebec, only 9 Catholic groups refused to sign and a massive 108 agreed to the attestation. In Ontario, 63 groups refused to sign, with 32 agreeing to do so, and the vast majority of dissenters, 52, in Toronto. Why so many refusals from one denomination, and in one area? The only distinguishing and exclusive feature is that Cardinal Thomas Collins, one of the most outspoken critics of the government’s action, is the Archbishop of Toronto and represents eighty-three per-cent of all of the Catholic organizations that refused to sign. He recently told a Vatican press official that, “No government has the right to have an ideology test on anyone. That just isn’t fair.”
Truth cries out to be heard! If this genuinely were an ideology test, it wouldn’t have been signed by so many Roman Catholic and religious groups. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that this may have as much to do with the imposition of authority as with an independent religious response. When the attitude of the Catholic groups not under Cardinal Collins is juxtaposed with those within his influence, the contrast is quite extraordinary.
We also need to ask whether the reason these groups refused to sign the agreement is principle, or whether some might have wanted to direct the summer program money into the very anti-abortion activities that provoked the government in the first place. If the latter, this would be extremely duplicitous behaviour.
One last point, and it involves hypocrisy. One of the rallying cries of opponents of the attestation has been that the government is indulging in discrimination. Yet how many of the organizations refusing to sign the clause would hire LGBT+ students or those in same-sex relationships or, for that matter, straight people living together outside of marriage? Judging by their records, statements, and religious ideas, very few indeed. Nobody is going to claim that the new policy has been altogether smooth, in design or implementation. But there is logic and law to its reasoning, and its opponents are, to say the least, being extremely selective with the facts.
Toronto Star, January 22, 2018
I HAD NO idea there were so many right-leaning columnists and activists in Canada who cared so passionately about human rights, and the freedom of Christians. That must be the case, because it has been impossible to pick up a newspaper or look at social media in the last few days without seeing outrage and anger at the government’s reforms to the summer jobs program.
It’s all largely a sham of course, just a convenient vehicle to drive at Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. The premise is that Ottawa’s reform of the summer jobs program discriminates against Christians.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, answering questions at a town hall meeting in Lower Sackville, N.S. this month, has been criticized for restricting funding to the summer jobs program.
In fact, it’s a reaction to the revelation that sizable amounts of public money were being given to militant anti-abortion groups across Canada, some of which describe women’s choice as murder, compare abortion to the Holocaust, and put leaflets with bloody, graphic pictures on them through people’s doors.
To prevent this, the government inserted a new statement in the application form, stating: “To be eligible, the core mandate of the organization must respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter) as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.”
It’s not quite as draconian as critics have been making out, and there’s something else here. Many of us would like to see abortion rates reduced, but still believe that women’s choice is a fundamental right and that “safe, legal, and rare” is a pretty noble aspiration. We can support this text without rejoicing at the idea of abortion; or is it that some of the groups involved want abortion to be criminalized? I can tell you from extensive personal experience that they do, even in cases of rape and incest.
Of course there are far more moderate organizations that are caught in the middle of all this, and that’s a problem, but we must define who the real discriminators are. Opponents of the government have singled out the abortion issue, but many, if not most, of these same groups would not hire someone who was in a same-sex relationship.
In other words, young LGBT+ people — those most at risk of persecution, suicide attempts, and depression — will be told by those complaining of the unfairness of the new policy that they are not acceptable as employees, and this policy often extends to straight people living together outside of marriage.
They often have what are known as “morality clauses” to which they demand signatures, and I for one have been fired from a major evangelical media organization because of my support for equal marriage. So it’s not quite as simple and linear as some would have you believe.
Then there is consistency. In 2010 Stephen Harper’s government removed seven million dollars in funding from KAIROS, a Christian aid organization representing eleven major churches. The Conservatives claimed it was because they were reforming their foreign aid approach, but it soon became public that it was actually because they thought, wrongly, that KAIROS supported boycotts of Israel.
The Harper government also removed funding from fourteen women’s groups that were pro-choice, and to Canadian organizations that included abortion as part of their maternal care policy in the developing world, even though these were often life-saving procedures. I suppose that hypocrisy shouldn’t surprise us.
What does surprise, and disappoint, are how so many conservatives are playing the Christian card, and portraying the Liberals as oppressive. These same accusers have often been silent over the years when social programs are trashed, inner-city education reduced, homelessness explained away.
These are the genuine Christian issues. Abortion isn’t really mentioned in the Bible, and when there is a reference it’s vague and about God’s communal plan rather than abortion as we know it today. Poverty, refugees, and the marginalized are constants, however, and Jesus seldom shuts up about them!
Frankly, the government has been a little clumsy in all this, and played into the hands of those who care far more about scoring points than preserving freedoms. Nobody, however, is arguing that conservative Christians shouldn’t be allowed to oppose abortion and LGBT+ equality, just that financing them to do so is going too far.
Toronto Star, November 2, 2017
STARBUCKS HAS UNVEILED its new seasonal cup and this time it comes with the message “Give Good.” Customers are encouraged to colour in the cardboard container and even draw some pictures on it. Oh, what fun. The banality of the slogan aside, it is what it is. A coffee cup. But just as last year and the one before, it’s seen by some as the first shot in the war on Christmas, that chimera built by conservatives so that they can claim persecution and argue that their rights are being curtailed.
On an immediate level, the Christian complaint about Starbucks shouldn’t concern the design of their coffee cups, but that their workers are being paid minimum wage while the company’s owners and directors earn millions. And that what are often immigrants and the less privileged open stores at five a.m. and work awful hours for an income that will never pay their rent and properly feed them.
But on a grander scale it goes to the very heart of the religion-based politics that did so much to elect Donald Trump and is solidly behind Andrew Scheer at a federal level and Jason Kenney in Alberta. Put simply, the Christian right has developed a new and rather unholy trinity. They campaign and mobilize in the name of the free market, the unborn child, and homophobia.
Such a distortion of faith has always held enormous power in large parts of the United States, but has expanded to a worrying degree in Canada. Christmas is merely a battlefield of course and the war is seen as being far more long-term. One of the ironies of the yuletide moaning, however, is that it’s not atheism but capitalism that has exploited Christmas and thus ripped apart its meaning. Yet that very capitalism is revered by the same people who complain about the war on Christmas.
In Canada the Christian right, while solidly economically conservative, has coalesced around issues of sex and sexuality. Oddly enough there’s something decidedly pagan about the movement’s obsession with these issues, and their worship of the fetus god and what they see as the virtual sanctity of procreative sex. Perhaps they’ve got their revolutionary Jewish thinkers mixed up — more Freud than Jesus?
The logical and moral discrepancies don’t end there. That olive-skinned first-century Galilean never refers to abortion or homosexuality, seems delightfully unconcerned about how and why people make love, and is eager to understand and forgive those accused of sexual sin. But my golly, He does go on and on about social justice, the plight of the poor, the sins of the rich, the corruption of power, and that the problems of the world are hypocrisy and self-righteous religiosity.
That pristine, sparkling teaching of hope seems to have been lost somewhere along the way by many in the Church, although it’s still flowing through the world’s body if we look for it. Thing is, those who live the authentic message tend not to make a lot of noise about what they do.
Christianity should be defined not by what it opposes, but by what it affirms, not by its anger, but by its joy. At heart it’s about a terrifying and colossally challenging reclassification of love, demanding that we embrace those who we would prefer to reject and even despise. The option of hatred is no longer available — it was thrown out 2,000 years ago, just as were the money men in the Temple.
The paradox of all this bites away at a creed that should be life changing and world transforming. As an example, I have probably learned more about my faith from gay Christians than from any other people. They’ve stayed true even though they’ve faced discrimination and sometimes worse from those around them. Yet those wonderful people who have inspired me are even now thought to be hell-bound by so many of the men and women who become visibly upset by the myth that they’re not allowed to wish others Merry Christmas in November!
If the Christian right were more Christian and less right, not only would the world be a better place, but also people would have far more regard for Christians. It’s surely not so difficult to understand and we shouldn’t need a double espresso to grasp its truth, whatever the packaging.
iPolitics, December 20, 2018
POLITICIANS ALL OVER Canada are wishing people Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas, sending out greetings cards, and trying desperately to evince the Christmas spirit to anyone who will notice. Fair enough, I guess, but Christmas is supposed to be about the birth of Jesus. So how are these political types living up to the commands and demands of Christ, whose followers claim is the son of God, and whose name is used by Tory, Liberal, and New Democrat alike every December?
There are numerous accounts in the Gospels, those mini-biographies of Jesus, of how he wanted us to regard wealth and materialism, and how we should treat the poor. “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.” Then we have, “I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Camels aside, when a rich man who asks Jesus how he can follow him, he is told, “Go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
In Ontario, Doug Ford’s government has: stopped any further increase in the minimum wage for the lowest-income workers; cut twenty-five million dollars to specialized school programs for those most in need; cancelled grants to the Indigenous Culture Fund and the Ontario College of Midwives; scrapped rent control for new buildings; and removed the Basic Income Project. Oh dear. Not a good score at all on the Jesus ranking.
The Prince of Peace was also pretty adamant about welcoming strangers and accepting newcomers, knowing as he did the Old Testament rule that, “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself.”
The feds have been quite good on this one, but less so the various provincial governments, whose policies and statements have sometimes been downright xenophobic. No administration, however, has made any serious progress dealing properly with the way Canada treats Indigenous people. Remember: “The entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: Love your neighbour as yourself.” We became neighbours, less when we moved in next door to First Nations, more when we stole their entire neighbourhood!
Peace is a recurring biblical theme, and there’s not much room for manoeuvre here from He who was born in a Bethlehem manger. “Do not take revenge on someone who wrongs you. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also,” and, of course, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Jesus insists that we expose hypocrisy and injustice, and the Old Testament says we should turn swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, and “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” I don’t think this is reflected in selling armoured cars to Saudi Arabia, while the country bombs children in Yemen and has dissident journalists slaughtered in Turkey, or when we are extremely selective when it comes to condemning war crimes committed by foreign regimes.
The Bible repeatedly tells us to honour the world that God created, and to respect the splendour and purity of nature. We are stewards, not owners, of the planet. Yet almost every provincial leader is opposed to a carbon tax, pays little more than lip service to the horrors of climate change, and still bends the knee at the altar of fossil fuels. The environmental disaster we face is caused largely by exploitation and greed, two things Jesus exposed and opposed throughout his ministry. “Blessed are the oil magnates” is something he never said.
The verdict on all this is a little worrying. “For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me. … I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least among you, you did not do for me.” For those who get this one wrong, there is the “eternal fire prepared for the devil.”
Not encouraging reading for some of our elected representatives, unless they like it incredibly hot. But then, I suppose that’s what spin and fake news are for. It’s less certain if that will work with the Almighty.
iPolitics, May 12, 2018
I’VE KNOWN CHARLES McVety, the President of Canada Christian College, conservative Christian leader, and obsessive campaigner against almost all things progressive, for a long time.
The last time I actually saw him was on a CBC panel, when he roared against Ontario’s then new sex-ed program, and I defended it. Because of that, on live national television, he said that, “Michael used to be a family man, now no longer.”
He then proceeded to discuss Ben Levin, the convicted child pornographer who worked for three years for the Ontario Liberal government.
Many of the opponents of the province’s sex-ed curriculum argue that Levin was responsible for the policy, when in fact it’s almost identical to what is taught in most of Western Europe. It was an outrageous thing to say and do, but when I confronted McVety, he refused to apologize.
This is pretty standard operating procedure for the man who routinely accuses people of such horrors. Just this weekend on Twitter, he wrote to and of me: “I am stating the fact that you frequently defend the teaching of Ben Levin as you frequently do,” and “He was convicted to three years in prison for preparing parents to offer their children for sex and his material should be expunged. Stop defending this horror.”
It’s difficult to know how to react to such vile polemics, and some people have recommended that I sue him, but I chose long ago to dismiss the man as a fringe fanatic, supported only by the gullible and the grim.
So it was a surprise to see McVety as a personal guest of Doug Ford — likely to be the next Premier of Ontario — in the small audience at the CityTV debate last week. When Ford was asked why he had invited McVety, the pc leader replied, “There’s nothing wrong with social conservative views if respectful.”
Good Lord, truth cries out to be heard! Ford had dismissed Tanya Granic Allen as the party’s candidate in Mississauga Centre just days before the debate, and McVety has surely said far worse than her, which is quite the boast.
I worked at CTS (Crossroads Television System) in 2010 when McVety was taken off the air after the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council ruled that some of his comments violated their code of ethics. Even CTS, who would later fire me because I publicly defended same-sex marriage, concluded that McVety had refused to comply with their own internal guide of what’s acceptable public discourse.
McVety had said at the time, “It is now a crime to speak against homosexuality,” and that Ontario’s sex-ed policy intended to “teach homosexuality.” Untrue of course. The ruling also found that he had implied that gay men prey on children, and had made remarks that were, “excessive, inappropriate, disparaging, and abusive.”
In 2011, the National Post and the Toronto Sun pulled an ad from the Institute for Canadian Values (ICV) about Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum, and the Post even went so far as to issue an apology. The ICV was based at Canada Christian College, and very closely associated with McVety. The ad contained misleading quotes from an optional Toronto District School Board anti-homophobia curriculum, and demanded that the programme be ended. It also featured a large photograph of am obviously nervous young girl, with the caption, “Please don’t confuse me.” It was horribly exploitative. If only McVety’s politics would stop at bizarre views about sex and sexuality, but, alas, they don’t.
In 2011, he invited highly controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders to Canada Christian College, to discuss his highly provocative views about Islam and Muslims. He said that Wilders had a great deal to teach us, “about a lack of free speech here.” Wilder has called for The Qur’an to be banned; McVety has said that Islam, “is not just a religion, it’s a political and cultural system as well and we know that Christians, Jews and Hindus don’t have the same mandate for a hostile takeover.”
This, then, is the man who the National Post claim will play a significant role in the Ford campaign, and who Ford himself believes, states his ideas in a “respectful” way.
McVety used to be ubiquitous on Canadian television and radio, but in recent years many media outlets seem to have become tired of the shock tactics and shallowness of the man. But he does have a following, and does enjoy financial support, and now a powerful and potentially extremely influential comrade in Doug Ford.
This weekend McVety invited people to a three-day conference entitled Answers in Genesis, led by Ken Ham, who “built a full size $120 million replica of Noah’s Ark and Museum.” Sounds great fun. Perhaps it’s worth a visit, because if McVety achieves any power the world may well come to an abrupt and watery end.
iPolitics, December 4, 2018
SOMETIMES MAILING LISTS can be worryingly out-of-date and inaccurate. This weekend, I received an emailed letter from Charles McVety, president of Canada Christian College, addressed to “Pastor Michael.” (No, I haven’t suddenly been elevated to clerical status.) “I want to extend a personal invitation to you and your pastoral staff to come to the platform and pray for Premier Doug Ford at the Christmas Celebration on Sunday Night,” it announced. “It is my hope that we can surround the Premier with pastors on the platform and pray for him … After the prayer sessions and musical concert, the Premier wants to meet pastors at a reception.” The letter continued with references to biblical calls to pray “for all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.”
I’ve a feeling I wasn’t supposed to be on the list, but I’d be more than happy to pray that Doug Ford change his ways, stop making life more difficult for the poor and marginalized, and inject some civility, decorum, and moderation into Ontario politics. But my views aside, this email and the event itself — which has now led to questions from the opposition at Queen’s Park — provoke some very worrying questions about the nature of the relationship between Doug Ford and one of the most high-profile and radical social conservatives in Canada.
Charles McVety is no ordinary or mainstream Christian. He has been at the centre of, and often led, many of the most unpleasant campaigns in Canada against LGBT+ equality and modern sex education, and is considered on the right-wing fringe, even within the evangelical church. He also disputes evolution, is fiercely opposed to campaigns against climate change, and wrote in 2009, “I believe this taxing and trading of air will fund the one world government of the Anti-Christ.” He also has radical opinions about other faiths, once stating that, “Islam is not just a religion, it’s a political and cultural system as well and we know that Christians, Jews and Hindus don’t have the same mandate for a hostile takeover.”
For more than twelve years, I hosted a nightly television show on cts, a faith-based station managed by people with strong conservative beliefs. Even so, they removed his show from their lineup after the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council found it made “malevolent, insidious and conspiratorial” remarks about the gay community. I also worked at Sun News Network between 2012 and 2015, and even though that television station was vehemently conservative, it effectively banned McVety for being too extreme and even a caricature.
If his ideas are raw and harsh, his presentation of them is equally sharp. He once tweeted about me, for example: “Michael Coren defends Dr. Ben Levin’s radical sex ed teaching in Toronto Star.” This was because I dared to support the new sex education curriculum. Ben Levin, of course, is a convicted child pornographer. The implications were vile and hurtful.
So the litany of the man’s extremism is long and proven, but while he may be outrageous in so many ways, he can’t be discounted. McVety attracts numerous followers and substantial support, and his college in Toronto is about to be replaced by a twelve acre multi-building campus in the Port of Whitby, just outside the city. It will include a 4,000-seat auditorium, 80,000 square feet of classrooms, and a number of soccer fields and basketball courts. It is also, apparently, debt-free.
For an Ontario politician who wants to mobilize his right-wing base, this is an irresistible package, and Doug Ford and his people made this abundantly obvious during the election campaign, when McVety could be seen sitting as a special guest during a public debate, and when he was invited to the ceremony when the Progressive Conservative leader was sworn into office. Some commentators have argued that Ford’s jettisoning of former leadership rival and hard-right Roman Catholic Tanya Granic Allen was a sign that his interests were purely economic, and that he was indifferent to social conservatism. The coming weekend’s Christmas party would indicate otherwise.
In 2006, former Tory MP Garth Turner claimed, in reference to then prime minister Stephen Harper, that McVety had once boasted: “I can pick up the phone and call Harper and I can get him in two minutes.” McVety denies he ever said that, and it may not have been the case. But one wonders how long it would now take for him to reach the current premier of Ontario. Not, it would seem, very long at all.
iPolitics, October 12, 2018
THIS WEEK, THE Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled on an issue involving the limits of religious freedom, one that could have direct consequences in numerous other western nations, including Canada.
In a unanimous decision, Britain’s highest court concluded that a Belfast bakery managed by evangelical Christians had the right to refuse to make a cake with the words “Support Gay Marriage,” and reversed an earlier decision that found against the store and fined them almost $1,000.
It’s not the first such clash, most of them occurring in the United States, where conservative Christians are more numerous and certainly more aggressive. This case, however, was different in tone and content. First, the owners of Ashers bakery, Daniel and Amy McArthur, presented not as raw fanatics, but as moderates looking for compromise. Second, and more important, this was said to be not about refusing to provide services for a same-sex wedding, but about not wanting to support what was defined as “a political statement.”
Which is where, of course, it all becomes rather complex and messy. In 2014, Gareth Lee wanted to celebrate International Day Against Homophobia with a cake featuring the Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie supporting gay marriage. Same-sex marriage is legal in all of the United Kingdom apart from Northern Ireland. So the slogan could be interpreted as a political statement, which is a delicate subject in a region so troubled by sectarian division.
The McArthurs refused, insisting it had nothing to do with Lee being gay. Which is somewhat disingenuous, in that one’s sexuality and views on marriage equality are inevitably entwined. A Belfast county court and a court of appeal both ruled that the company discriminated against Lee on the grounds of sexual orientation. The Supreme Court has decided differently, finding that the Ashers didn’t refuse to fulfil Lee’s order because of his sexual orientation and, therefore, there was no discrimination on those grounds.
“It is deeply humiliating, and an affront to human dignity, to deny someone a service because of that person’s race, gender, disability, sexual orientation or any of the other protected personal characteristics, but that is not what happened in this case and it does the project of equal treatment no favours to seek to extend it beyond its proper scope,” said the court.
“Freedom of expression, as guaranteed by article 10 of the European convention on human rights, includes the right not to express an opinion which one does not hold. This court has held that nobody should be forced to have or express a political opinion in which he does not believe. The bakers could not refuse to supply their goods to Mr. Lee because he was a gay man or supported gay marriage, but that is quite different from obliging them to supply a cake iced with a message with which they profoundly disagreed.”
The case has cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, over a cake costing less than one hundred dollars. But that is not the point. As Gareth Lee said, after the ruling, “I’m very confused about what this actually means. We need certainty when you go to a business. I’m concerned that this has implications for myself and for every single person,” adding that he now felt like a second-class citizen. The McArthurs, on the other hand, smiled broadly and thanked God. The Almighty was not available for comment.
But in all seriousness, there is a fundamental, even fundamentalist, disconnect between what Christianity teaches and how so many Christians behave around this subject — which, if we’re honest, is not about civil and commercial rights, but the ability to discriminate against a specific group. Jesus never mentions homosexuality. Lesbianism is never referred to at all in the Old Testament. The story of Sodom concerns lack of hospitality and rejecting the stranger rather than sexuality, and the mere handful of verses from St. Paul are about straight men exploiting boys rather than loving same-sex partnerships.
Divorce, however, is indeed condemned by Christ. Would the owners of Ashers bakery have refused to bake a cake emblazoned with a pro-divorce statement, or would they have provided one with a slogan opposing same-sex marriage? As in similar cases in North America, there seems to be an obsession with one theme, one that is largely irrelevant in scripture, but indifference to the central calling of the Gospels, which is love, inclusion, and justice.
One freedom has triumphed in this ruling, but another has been defeated. Whatever the logic of the British Supreme Court, and I do not doubt their integrity and legal consistency, a mere opinion has taken precedence over an innate sexuality that has long been rejected, detested, and oppressed. Time will tell, but it’s likely that equal marriage will be legal in Northern Ireland before too long. And that will be the icing on the cake.
iPolitics, March 26, 2018
CHRISTIANITY RESTS HEAVILY on the notion of redemption. We’re all sinners, as it were, but we can all be saved. Which might be the get-out-of-jail-free card for President Donald Trump among conservative Christian voters.
The so-called “religious right” supported Trump in enormous numbers in 2016, even after it was revealed that he was horribly profane, and also abused his celebrity status to make unwanted sexual advances toward women. Now, following two agonizing television interviews with women who claimed to have had adulterous affairs with him, they continue to think the man a wonderful President.
In Canada, we see this to a lesser extent with the conservative Christian adoration of PC leader Doug Ford. He may not be an alleged adulterer, but his life and career are drenched in accusations of drug dealing, and the making of misleading statements and comments. His daughter Krista’s participation in Lingerie Football may be irrelevant to most of us, but from other politicians such a family connection would have sent shudders through the Christian right.
So, why the consistent allegiance to such men from the usually puritanical? It won’t do to merely dismiss tens of millions of people as being stupid or uninformed. Some of them might be, some simply refuse to believe the “mainstream media”, and then there is the “We’re-electing-a-president-not-a-pastor” defence. The latter is a dreadfully hypocritical justification of course, because these are the very first people to condemn personal indiscretions in politicians of whom they disapprove — Bill Clinton being an obvious example.
But others have adopted a specific and extraordinary defence. For them, Trump is the new Emperor Constantine, or the modern equivalent of the ancient King Cyrus. It may seem ludicrous, but these comparisons are now ubiquitous in right-leaning Christian media.
Constantine was the emperor of Rome in the early fourth century, the first emperor to convert to Christianity, whose official tolerance and support for the faith gave it enormous impetus. We’re not sure when he himself became a Christian, and it could even have been as he was dying, but he was certainly a deeply flawed man. Yet whatever his faults, runs the argument, he enabled the rise of the Church.
The vehemently conservative Christian “Lifesite” media platform is a good, and Canadian, example of this approach. It ran a long article arguing the Constantine case, concluding that: “America doesn’t need a president to make arguments for us. America just needs a president to give us the freedom to make our arguments without fear of being shouted down by the politically correct brigade. Whatever else you might say about Trump, he is definitely politically incorrect, and prides himself on that attribute. He refuses to back down after making controversial statements. He does not apologize for offending groups after making arguments. He stands up to the media. He is defiant in spite of being vilified by political elites, journalists, and academics.”
Lifesite also happens to be one of the strongest backers of Tanya Granic Allen, the Tory leadership candidate who became the kingmaker for Doug Ford, and who is now running to become the PC candidate in Mississauga Central. The Christian right may not agree with everything the new Ontario Tory leader does and says, but he has promised to withdraw the province’s sex education curriculum, give anti-abortion protestors closer access to clinics, and allow doctors to refuse referrals for abortion and assisted dying. Those three policies alone make the man a hero to most evangelicals and right-wing Catholics.
The other ancient used to justify support for Donald Trump is — breathtakingly — Persia’s King Cyrus II, who ruled 2,500 years ago. He may have been brutal, but he also allowed the conquered Jewish people to return to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple.
Israel’s newspaper of record, Haaretz, puts it like this: “Trump was already a hero to a wide swath of evangelicals but the role he’s playing in what many believe is the fulfilment of divine prophecy has gotten him promoted to king for some of them — an ancient Persian king to be precise. For his willingness to confront conventional diplomatic wisdom, shrug off dire warnings of triggering Middle East unrest and declare Jerusalem Israel’s capital, Trump is increasingly being compared by evangelicals to Persia’s Cyrus the Great.”
So there we have it. Whether Donald Trump, or Doug Ford, have even heard of Constantine or Cyrus is open to question. What they do know is that the Christian right is on their side, is well organized and financed, and votes in big numbers. That’s more than enough for any would-be Caesar.
iPolitics, February 21, 2018
I AM SORRY for the death of Billy Graham, partly because all death involves pain and sorrow, and also because this world-famous minister and preacher certainly did a great deal of good. But he was ninety-nine years old, and lived a full and enjoyable life. I am also not at all surprised by the tributes being given to the evangelist, because he did indeed reach an enormous number of people, especially in Canada. As well as the often compelling sermons, the noted charity work, and his support for some that was progressive and good in society, there were other sides to the man.
He was long regarded as a friend of the Jewish people, largely because he was a vehement champion of Israel, and defended the Jewish state against its neighbours. But just as it’s repugnant and inaccurate to say that all critics of Israel are anti-Semitic, it’s similarly absurd to assume that all of that country’s friends love the Jewish people. In Christian Zionist circles in particular, there are many who look to the end times, a morbid and bloody eschatology where Jew and Arab fight to the finish so as to hasten the second coming of Christ. It has little to do with Jewish safety and dignity.
This paradox was revealed in Billy Graham’s case when secret tapes of his 1972 conversation with Richard Nixon came to light. “A lot of Jews are great friends of mine,” he told the President. “They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them.” He also told Nixon that there is a Jewish “stranglehold” on the media, and that it “has got to be broken or this country’s going down the drain.” He would later apologize for those remarks, but only when they were made public.
On homosexuality, Graham said far worse and never showed any contrition: “Let me say this loud and clear, we traffic in homosexuality at the peril of our spiritual welfare.” In 1993 he stated that AIDS was a “judgment from God,” and he did all he could to combat equal marriage. In 2012 in his native North Carolina he worked to amend the constitution around the marriage issue, writing that, “At 93, I never thought we would have to debate the definition of marriage. The Bible is clear — God’s definition of marriage is between a man and a woman.”
He condemned homosexuality as being “detestable” and “a sinister form of perversion” that destroyed civilized society, and gave his backing to the various “gay cure” therapies that have done so much damage to LGBT+ people over the years.
While he cannot be held directly responsible for his son Franklin’s views, it would be naïve to deny the connection. Franklin Graham has said, “The country is imploding. We are seeing a moral implosion. Just like we saw the World Trade Centre on 9/11 when the planes hit the tower, they imploded, they fell from within, and this is what’s happening to our country, we’re falling within … So many school districts now are controlled by wicked, evil people, and the gays and lesbians … I keep bringing their name up, but they are at the forefront of this attack against Christianity in America.” In 2015 he was interviewed by a Russian newspaper, and explained that Vladimir Putin was on the right track, and that the country’s homophobic laws were absolutely necessary.
Billy Graham brought countless people to a deep Christian faith, and to better lives; and unlike so many other high-profile evangelists, he was not financially corrupt or vainglorious. But his theology was rigid and conservative, and he was unable or unwilling to allow experience to temper his fierce resistance to the new and non-traditional. On issues of sexuality in particular, there are too many broken relationships, too much pain and suffering, too many suicide attempts, and children thrown out of parental Christian homes, for the complete man not to be exposed. He had so much influence, and knew so many world leaders, and could have done so much better. Rest in Peace sir, but let us pray that in the afterlife you think again.
iPolitics, December 23, 2016
LIFE IS FILLED with paradox, even at a time as delightful as Christmas. When our children were small we would convince them that the NORAD Santa Claus tracker was real, and they would listen to the voice at the end of the phone — usually that of a woman serving in the U.S. Air Force — explaining the movements of St. Nicholas.
NORAD, of course, is part of the American defence network, and the U.S. military implemented a foreign policy in the Middle East that caused anarchy in Iraq, destabilized Syria and directly led to the hell of suffering that exists there now.
On Boxing Day we spend what money we have left from the previous year in mass sales, presenting an image of the most vulgar and inexorable capitalism. It’s actually St. Stephen’s Day, commemorating the first Christian martyr. He died for his belief in Jesus, who preached peace, love, and equality and condemned materialism and gain as immoral and un-Godly.
Three days later, on December 29, is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, when we remember King Herod massacring all the children he could find in a failed attempt to murder the infant Jesus. This comes at a time when children are still being directly targeted in Aleppo by snipers in the service of various terror factions. Generally speaking, the western world — nominally Christian — does as little as the Muslim world to try to stop the carnage.
The point is this: We’ve got Christmas terribly wrong, and the rot set in fairly recently. The commercialization is regrettable, but the usual moaners and religious pedants really should have a “silent night” once in a while. As for the alleged “war on Christmas,” that’s mostly, to quote Ebenezer, “humbug.” It might be annoying for a Christmas tree to be banned or for a nativity scene to be removed from a public square, but that’s hardly the stuff of persecution.
No, we got it wrong when, ironically, we thought we were getting it right. In 1914, for example, there was a temporary, but sublime Christmas truce between British and German soldiers. In 1946 Hollywood made It’s A Wonderful Life, in which unbridled capitalism and urban development were portrayed as cruel and soulless.
It was in the 1960s that the conservative Christian world, while screaming about Christian values, wove the cross into the flag, glued God to alleged “family values” and attached Christ to an aggressive foreign policy, American exceptionalism and a suspicion of all that was not “like us.”
An ugly coalition of right-wing Catholics, militant evangelicals, Fox News, Republicans, elements of the “new right” in Canada, and various influential Canadian blogs and personalities has produced an implosion. Whether they knew it or not, whether they cared or not, they’ve allowed a genuine war on Christmas to take place. A war not against greeting cards and carol singing, but against the quintessential virtues that are at the heart of the Christmas message.
For those of us who believe, those virtues are forgiveness, compassion, social justice, economic fairness, stewardship of the planet, care for the marginalized, empathy with the despised, a stale world turned upside down. A baby born in occupied Palestine 2,000 years ago grows up to give the ultimate answers, before being executed by the rulers — the wealthy, the privileged, the conservative, and those terrified of change and revolution.
It has long mystified me that a religion so tied to the poor and the powerless should have become — in North America in particular — so linked to the rich and the powerful. During the Christmas season that jarring reality becomes all the more obvious and disturbing.
People like to say (and a rock group once sang it) that they wish it could be Christmas every day. I agree. But what sort of Christmas? The Christmas it was supposed to have been, or the one it has become? The Christmas of suburban indifference hiding in the politics of Donald Trump and Kellie Leitch, or a Christmas layered in the teachings of the man whose birth it’s supposed to celebrate?
Enjoy the holidays, and try to remember not only the people of Syria, Iraq and Egypt — and the vast majority of the world’s population who live in conditions we could and would never tolerate — but also the forgotten and broken in our own country. They’re the very people that baby was born to remind us of.
iPolitics, October 12, 2017
THIS WEEK, THE government of Ontario passed a law banning protests outside abortion clinics. The law creates picket-free “bubble” zones of between 50 and 150 metres around abortion facilities; inside those zones, no one can stage an anti-abortion protest, advise a woman not to get an abortion, or intimidate or interfere with people passing in and out of a clinic. The bubble expands to a full 150 metres around the homes of people who work in these clinics.
While some of these restrictions already apply, this was a long over-due move — one that gives the police more control over potentially volatile situations, and protects medical staff from having to run a gauntlet on their way to work.
A women who visits an abortion clinic is likely to be deeply apprehensive, maybe even terrified. No one in such a situation should have to cope with fundamentalist fanatics screaming at her for obtaining a legal and necessary medical procedure. In any free and civilized society, those who oppose abortion have a sacred right to their point of view. And in any free and civilized society, women have the right to control their bodies without being browbeaten by angry zealots.
As a journalist, I’ve reported on several such demonstrations; it’s not an experience I can recommend. Those who protest outside abortion clinics tend to come from the right-wing fringes of Christianity. Their arch-conservative views go far beyond abortion; some of the opinions they express about, for example, the lgbt+ community are quite terrifying to hear.
These are the people who insist on distributing millions of leaflets showing graphic, bloody pictures of abortions — even putting them through the front door mail slots of private homes when they know that children will see them. They believe abortion is always wrong — even in cases of rape, incest or a threat to the life of the mother — and while they claim to be non-violent, it’s not always easy to be convinced.
In 1992, for example, Dr. Henry Morgentaler’s Toronto clinic was hit by a firebomb, following several less successful arson attacks. Morgentaler himself was repeatedly threatened with violence and even murder, and was sometimes physically attacked. In 1997, Dr. Jack Fainman — an obstetrician who performed abortions — was shot by a sniper as he sat in his living room. Winnipeg police called the sniper-style attack “terrorism against doctors.” He survived, but his injuries meant that he could never work as a doctor again.
But the violence directed at abortion providers isn’t limited to attempted murder. The humiliation and degradation inflicted on women outside clinics is violence of a different sort. I have watched protesters howling at vulnerable women walking into clinics, calling them “murderers” and predicting that “God will not forgive” them. Even the quiet ones hold up accusatory placards or plead with young women “not to kill your baby.”
Two high-profile female anti-abortion activists in Toronto are routinely arrested for breaking existing no-protest zones, prompting conservative columnists to complain that they eventually will spend more time in prison than various murderers and rapists. Maybe that’s true; if so, it’s regrettable, but it’s not the point. For many of these protesters, getting arrested is exactly what they want. One of them, Mary Wagner, actually walks into abortion clinics and tries to convince women not to continue with their procedures.
What all of these tactics have in common is an ironic obsession with “birth” over “life” — an opposition to abortion that overwhelms any commitment to human dignity. If we genuinely want to reduce abortion rates, we should make contraception free and widely available, and we should demand comprehensive, science-based sex education for our children. How tragic it is — and how telling — that both of these policies are vehemently opposed by most of those who demonstrate outside abortion clinics.
Final point: This new law is not designed to shut down debate or limit dissent. It’s meant to protect women. It’s hard to understand how any compassionate person could oppose that.
iPolitics, August 31, 2017
IT HAS BEEN almost four years since I left the Roman Catholic Church. There were many reasons for my move to Anglicanism, but the wedge issue was sexuality and the fact that homosexuality is still seen as sinful by conservative Christians.
My only regret is that I didn’t leave earlier. My faith has blossomed without the shackles of discrimination and judgment. But I can’t pretend that it was always easy. The bruising anti-gay attitudes on the Christian right are an open wound in the Church. It has seemed, however, that in North America, the Christian attitude to the LGBT+ community was reforming and softening. Perhaps celebrations were somewhat premature.
This week, more than 150 evangelical leaders issued The Nashville Statement, outlining in 14 points their commitment that marriage is “between one man and one woman” and that homosexuality is “immoral.” The group behind the declaration is The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and it has influence, numbers, and money behind it. Co-founder John Piper, one of the more significant voices in the evangelical world, claims that the statement “speaks with forthright clarity, biblical conviction, gospel compassion, cultural relevance, and practical helpfulness. It will prove to be, I believe, enormously helpful for thousands of pastors and leaders hoping to give wise, biblical, and gracious guidance to their people.”
Here’s the problem: he may have a point when he speaks of thousands of pastors. Those who’ve signed on include James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council in Washington, and several members of Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory board.
It’s all very severe stuff but one particularly disturbing aspect of the document is Article 10:
“We affirm that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness. We deny that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.”
Layman’s translation: anybody who is even open to discussion of gay equality is no longer a Christian, and that homophobia is now a Christian prerequisite.
This excommunicates most Archbishops of Canterbury, countless Anglicans, numerous Roman Catholic clergy and even bishops, and millions of Christians who consider themselves faithful and devout. It is nothing less than a declaration of war. This is what happens when raw literalism is empowered, and when what should be giving and inclusive is swamped by an unkind and even cruel fundamentalism.
In fact, of the 200,000 words in The New Testament a mere 40 refer to same-sex attraction and many experts question their genuine meaning. The Old Testament never refers to lesbianism, and the stories of David and Jonathan and the Roman centurion and his slave are certainly open to discussion!
The Bible does, however, obsess about the need to help the poor, fight for justice, bring peace, and fill every moment with love and charity.
As for Jesus, He doesn’t mention homosexuality, but does repeatedly condemn divorce — it’s interesting how many of the most strident anti-gay Christians are themselves divorced, sometimes more than once. It’s as though in some morbid effort to hold on to the past and preserve a comforting patriarchy the Christian right has abandoned any sense of Jesus the revolutionary and instead cherry-picked and then misinter-preted what they find to be comfortable words and phrases. Born again has become born yesterday.
One last point. Many Canadian churches have already embraced the Nashville Statement and while they have an obvious right to hold these views, the time may have come to question their privileged status as tax-exempt institutions. This, by the way, applies to Roman Catholic churches too. If an organization is so opposed to a fundamental value of the state — the equality of sexualities — and indeed raises funds on its unconstitutional message of intolerance, why should the state feel any compunction over demanding it pay its fair share in taxes.
It’s tragic that it’s come to this, but in an age when the more sinister forces in society feel empowered by a sympathetic U.S. president perhaps it’s inevitable. In Canada as well as Nashville.
iPolitics, June 19, 2018
NORTH AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY is not monolithic. That, of course, should be self-evident when we look at the number of denominations that exist. But beyond the theological differences, some profound and some bewilderingly cosmetic, there are the political divides. I’ve long argued that the Gospel values of justice, equality, and love should make churches natural allies with the left, but the reality is that in Canada as well as the United States, the loudest and most organized of Christians collect around conservatism.
That’s vehemently the case in the U.S., and has been dragged into ever-sharper focus by the Trump White House. This President has polarized the Church as never before, and now the policy of removing children from parents who enter the country illegally has forced a visible split. Just this week more than 600 United Methodist clergy and leaders announced that they were bringing charges against Attorney General Jeff Sessions, accusing the church member of “child abuse, immorality, racial discrimination and dissemination of doctrines contrary to the standards of the doctrine of the United Methodist Church.”
It’s doubtful that very much will happen, as this is a church whose polity rejects central authority, but it’s a powerful statement of resistance. It came after Sessions had the audacity, and the scriptural ignorance, to quote the Bible to justify his government’s policies.
“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order,” he said. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”
It’s not only a childishly callow understanding of St. Paul’s reasoning, but also reminiscent of when conservative Christians abused scripture to defend slavery and colonialism. Yet it would be naïve to assume that Sessions and Trump do not enjoy widespread support among the Christian right. Fox News host Laura Ingraham is a Catholic convert, and a major speaker at Catholic and anti-abortion events. She recently said on television, “Kids are being separated from their parents and temporarily housed in what are essentially summer camps … the American people are footing a really big bill for what is tantamount to a slow-rolling invasion of the United States.”
It will be interesting to see what Catholic bishops have to say about that, as one of their number has suggested that Catholics who carry out President Trump’s policy of “zero tolerance” should face church law punishments, such as the denial of Communion. Once again, it’s highly unlikely that will happen, but it does show that even church leaders who have generally been very quiet about domestic policy are at least and at last speaking out.
American Catholicism has actually been progressive on immigration for some time, partly because of its ethnic composition, but also out of genuine concern. The same applies to mainstream Protestant churches. But the eighty-one percent of white evangelicals who voted for Trump show no signs of abandoning their man, and they’re joined by millions of lay Catholics who — often understandably when we look at recent history — pay no attention at all to the politics of their priests and bishops. Then there is the powerful “family values” and “pro-life” movement; it’s been largely silent on this entire issue. The family only has value, it seems, when it’s American!
But beyond this, there is a genuine awakening among a great number of U.S. Christians, many of whom could tolerate a Bush or a Reagan, but who have suddenly seen behind the door of conservatism and realized how challenging it is to reconcile the teachings of Jesus with the views and actions of Donald Trump and his people. He may mention the name of God and hold prayer sessions, but the face of this administration is angry rather than angelic.
Numerous Christians have long voted Democrat, but the more politicized the believer, the less likely they were to do so. Today something different is emerging. The hardcore evangelical community will remain camped where they are with the Republicans, but less committed. Traditionally right-of-centre Christians are thinking again. It’s less that they’re embracing the Democrat party, more that they are abandoning the Republicans.
The coming year will be difficult and challenging for the U.S. church. Christians are identifying with the “resistance” movement, asking questions of their ministers, and are in shock at this latest action in particular. The conservative electoral coalition that relied on the Christian vote is under more strain than at any time since the 1960s, and that, paradoxically, could be Donald Trump’s greatest contribution to organized faith.
iPolitics, September 12, 2017
IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN. Once more, a group of conservative Christians is working to make a revolutionary faith based on social justice, egalitarianism and caring for the poor appear stale, reactionary and obsessed with how, why, and when people make love to one another.
(I’d like to write that Jesus would be turning in His grave, but those of us who believe in Christ also believe that the tortured and executed first-century Jewish preacher from despised Galilee was resurrected from the tomb. From there, he went on again to not address sex, abortion, contraception, pornography or any of the other topics that seem to so obsess the Christian right. Odd, that.)
The latest eruption from our local religious right involves the proposal by Trinity Western University of Langley, B.C., to establish a law school. Trinity is an evangelical college that requires students to sign a “community covenant” promising, among other things, that they will forego sex outside of marriage. And since the university does not recognize the legitimacy of same-sex marriage, this effectively prohibits gay relationships.
The Supreme Court of Canada has set aside two days this fall to hear arguments on whether law societies may refuse to accredit law students from Trinity on the grounds that the covenant violates the Charter rights of non-heterosexual students. The Ontario government is one of more than two dozen interveners in a case; Ontario’s law society, along with the one in B.C., refused to license any graduates of the planned law school.
“Ontarians have a right to expect that they or their children can seek to become lawyers without facing impediments because of their religion, gender or sexual orientation,” the Ontario government argues in its submission to the court.
Trinity has responded by claiming that its freedom of religion is under attack, and that refusing their students permission to practise law in B.C. and Ontario infringes on their Charter rights. Which is a pretty bold argument, when you think about it, since a great many supporters of Trinity Western believe the Charter to be problematic in itself — that Canada was a more just society before it existed.
Thing is, nobody is trying to prevent anyone from establishing a law school at Trinity Western, or to bar anyone from attending the place. The question is whether those future graduates should then be permitted to work as lawyers within the public square, to participate in a legal and social framework where the equality of LGBT+ people is the law — a fundamental human right.
Trinity’s advocates respond by claiming the covenant is about protecting the sanctity of marriage, not homophobia. That’s a rather disingenuous claim, to say the least. What if a heterosexual student had a sexual relationship while enrolled at the college? Would that student be expelled? Maybe forced to wear a scarlet letter?
Trinity’s argument is ethically inconsistent and morally flabby — but that’s not even the real problem with it. No respected law firm would hire Trinity’s graduates for the obvious reason: They would be graduates of an institution that sees no problem at all in ignoring a fundamental law, and therefore could be expected to have a severely limited grasp of the law and of reality itself — to be bad lawyers, in other words.
To allow Trinity to express its prejudice in policy would be to cause unnecessary pain to its victims — and to encourage those charged with upholding the law to brazenly break it.
Prejudice is what it is, by the way, and I’m sick and tired of people trying to use and abuse Christianity to justify their own baser feelings. Homosexuality is hardly mentioned in the Bible. Jesus doesn’t refer to it at all. The Old Testament never mentions lesbianism, the story of Sodom is more about rejecting the stranger than gay sex … and let’s just say that David and Jonathan might have had a tough time becoming law students at Trinity Western.
Frankly, scripture is vague on the issue. But sex and sexuality simply do not figure largely in the Bible story, particularly when Christ becomes its centre. It would make far more sense for a Christian college to have strict rules against admitting wealthy students, for example, or barring admission to people who are unforgiving, insufficiently loving, or too judgmental.
The Supreme Court will make its decision and we will all move on … until the next Christian baker or dressmaker decides they don’t want to serve gay people. In time, all of this nonsense will evaporate and bigotry will lose its ersatz religiosity.
As a Christian, however, it breaks my heart. What should be liberating and empowering is instead presented as small, dark, and monomaniacal.
It’s not atheists who are pushing Christianity out of Canadian life. It’s conservative Christians. May God forgive them — because for the life of me, I find it difficult to do so.
iPolitics, May 10, 2017
IN A SCENE that could have been a page torn from one of the great British writer’s novels, Stephen Fry was (until recently) being investigated by the Irish police on charges of blasphemy. The case was based on remarks made by the author, actor and television personality two years ago on Irish television; if convicted, Fry could have faced a fine of 25,000 Euros.
Irish police have since halted the case (apparently, they couldn’t find enough people outraged enough to file a complaint), though Fry rather hoped that they would carry on. But it speaks volumes, or perhaps bibles, that a member of the public in a modern, western, liberal, and democratic country can still initiate proceedings over being offended by comments about their God and faith.
(I should declare at this stage that I know Stephen and am immensely fond of him. But that’s hardly the point.)
During the interview that started the fuss, Fry was asked what he would say if he met God after death. His reply: “How dare you create a world in which there is such misery? It’s not our fault. It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?”
He continued: “Because the god who created this universe, if it was created by god, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish. We have to spend our lives on our knees thanking him. What kind of god would do that?”
The interview has been watched online more than seven million times. I’m sure that number will continue to multiply.
As a seminarian studying for ordination to the priesthood, I can assure you that what Stephen Fry said would be a perfect starting point for a systematic theology class. He was eloquent and perceptive; his words force you to think.
I don’t have to agree with him to admire him, though much of what he said was compelling. Faith is a dialogue and tough, challenging questions can’t be strangled or ignored simply because they are difficult. That way lies oppression, bigotry, and intolerance.
And who knew that Ireland — a member of the European Union no less — still had blasphemy laws? This particular law is not some stale anachronism; it was passed as recently as 2009. The so-called Defamation Act prohibits the “publishing or uttering [of] matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion.”
Two days after the Fry debacle something far more serious occurred when Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, Jakarta’s Christian governor, was sentenced to two years in prison in Indonesia for blasphemy. He was accused of insulting Islam while running for re-election, even though he has repeatedly denied the charge.
Here we have a senior politician sent to jail for allegedly making a remark about Islam, in a country with the largest Muslim population in the world, but one that claims equality for the thirteen percent of its citizens who are not Muslims.
And before we start congratulating ourselves by assuming that blasphemy laws are the preserve of a handful of national oddities, observe that such laws still exist in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Denmark — considered a model of pluralism and freedom — has just brought its first blasphemy charge in forty-six years. A staggering sixty-six percent of the Danish population supports the blasphemy law — and in case anybody assumes that this is an idea imported from the Muslim world, less than five percent of the Danish population follows Islam.
Similar laws still exist in Poland, Austria, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Russia. In much of the Islamic world, of course, the notion of blasphemy is not only part of the political and social fabric, it can lead to deadly consequences.
In Canada blasphemous libel is, surprisingly, still a crime — but earlier this year the government announced that it was currently under review. It’s difficult to imagine many Canadians supporting such a law, but polls in various northern European countries with similar values reveal surprising results.
Something deeply troubling is occurring. As freedoms expand, reactionary fears of those freedoms develop.
Insult for its own sake is childish and pointless, but strong words — to make a point or to oppose a creed — are not only acceptable, but also absolutely vital in a healthy democracy. I remember that every time I sit down to pray.
Toronto Star, October 25, 2016
DONALD TRUMP IS a winner. Not that he’s likely to win the election, but his style, approach, and entire persona are about winning. Glamour, strength, ostentatious wealth, and raw, callow gratification, be it in terms of power, sex or material.
Jesus Christ, on the other hand, was a loser. Turning the other cheek, charity, sacrifice, leaps of empathy, solidarity with the poor, barking with the underdog, and the final clawing humiliation of a criminal’s agonizing death on a cross.
So at first glance it’s a little difficult to understand how millions of evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics can still be committed to Trump and ignore or justify his repugnant actions. Right-wing Christians even form much of his inner circle, and there are Christian Republicans who argue a victory for Hillary Clinton will be a triumph for the Antichrist.
But back briefly to Jesus the Loser. That claim will shock and offend some people, but the divine paradox of the despised rural Jewish preacher in occupied Palestine is that the world can only be properly understood if it is first turned upside down. There is absolutely nothing conservative, but everything revolutionary about what Jesus the Loser said and did.
How, then, do so many people who genuinely see their Christianity as the central meaning of their lives embrace a man who acts so contrary in so many ways to the basic tenets of the faith? Loath as I am to sound judgmental, I can’t help thinking of the remark of the great Renaissance scholar Thomas Linacre after first reading the New Testament in the original Greek, “Either this is not the Gospel, or we are not Christians.”
It’s pointless trying to delicately step around reactionary sensibilities, as though every Christian conservative policy was eggshell-like in its pristine delicacy. The reality is that myriad Christians — Americans in particular, but many Canadians follow the trend — want Jesus to become more like them rather than they more like Him. Whether it be abortion, equal marriage, euthanasia, climate change, unbridled capitalism, immigration, or government intervention, they have transformed Jesus the Loser into Jesus the conservative, Jesus the businessman, Jesus the bumptious reality television personality.
They wrap the Messiah not in a funeral shroud, but a national flag, worship Him not with sorrow for their sins, but pride in their accomplishments. Once again, they don’t want losers, but winners. They are instinctively conservative and suspicious of liberalism, they have embraced the conspiracy narrative about the Clintons, they associate their religion with a traditional racial and gender dominance, and they obsess about opposition to abortion and gay equality to a terrifying degree.
Actually the Bible doesn’t really specifically mention abortion and speaks of homosexuality, and then deeply ambiguously, a mere four or five times. Yet both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament repeatedly call for radical economic justice and the militant welcoming of the stranger. Listen to the calmer, quieter voices of many Catholic bishops and mainline Protestant church leaders and you’ll hear this but, alas, the right is louder and the media lazy.
The notion of Hillary Clinton appointing Supreme Court judges who advocate reproductive choice and equal marriage appalls the Christian right, as does the liberal left’s increasing rejection of American exceptionalism, which they see as prophetic. Public medicine would, they are convinced, lead to assisted dying legislation or “death panels” and any restriction on gun ownership is perceived as a dent to their freedoms, which are God-given.
They further argue that taxation and welfare are anti-Christian. This is based on a misinterpretation of the theory of predestination, and also on a misunderstanding of one or two of Jesus’s parables. They seek a bellicose foreign policy partly because they confuse faith with patriotism and also due to a Christian Zionism, which is not supportive of the Jewish people but founded on a twisted vision of the end times. Wrap this up in good old-fashioned fear of change and self-interest and you have the perfect storm … on the Sea of Galilee.
I can understand resistance to the Clintons and people feeling disenfranchised and uncertain, but for the life of me I cannot understand Christians voting for Trump. Stick with Jesus the Loser. That’s the way to win.
Toronto Star, February 13, 2019
MY BREAKFAST IS appallingly predictable and repetitive: oatmeal with hemp, and a few nuts and berries. It’s supposed to be good for my cholesterol. But not, alas, especially good for my soul, and for that sort of morning spiritual sustenance I’d need something like the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, the most recent of which was held last Thursday. I can only assume that my invitation was lost in the mail.
Originally started in 1953, it was always the preserve of evangelicals and conservatives, but at a time when both words signified something far more moderate. Back then it was Billy Graham who ostensibly dominated American Christianity rather than people like his extremist son Franklin, or the hysterical Jerry Falwell Jr. The most recent gathering did feature one or two progressive voices, but the theme and tone of the event is overwhelmingly traditionalist, especially when the President is a Republican, and never more so than when that Republican is Donald Trump.
He is, after all, ordained by God. We know this because Sarah Huckabee Sanders — daughter, remember, of minister turned politician Mike Huckabee — told us so. “God,” she proclaimed, “wanted Trump to become president.” Thing is, I speak to the Almighty on a regular basis and she told me that she’d voted for Hillary Clinton. When I asked her why, she said it was because Bernie Sanders wasn’t on the ballot.
The White House Press Secretary’s consistent daftness, obfuscation, and downright dishonesty aside, Sanders did speak for millions of people when she revealed what she was convinced were the Almighty’s voting choices. The eighty-one percent of white evangelicals who supported Trump agree with her. And while they might not be sophisticated, neither are they all fools. Many of them know that their man is an adulterer, a liar, often cruel, and likely personally indifferent to religious faith. But he delivers.
Two new judges appointed to the Supreme Court who are solidly anti-abortion, a ban on transgender people who want to put their lives on the line by serving in the armed forces, the overturning of a tax-code provision that prevented religious organizations from backing political candidates, and support to so-called religious freedom campaigns, meaning the rights of institutions and businesses to discriminate against LGBT+ people and claim holy justification for their bigotry.
In foreign policy there was something that many people wrongly attributed to diplomatic pressure, namely the official recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. This was designed to please evangelical Christians far more than the Jewish community. American Jews generally vote Democrat, and often take a liberal view of Israel; indeed, Jewish pro-Israel groups in the U.S. seldom made the moving of the embassy a major issue.
Christian Zionists, however, most certainly did. Their eschatological fantasies involve the return of all of the Jews to Israel, the rebuilding of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, an end-times total war, and thus the second coming of Christ. Silly me — I thought Jesus just wanted us to love one another, be gentle and kind, turn the other cheek, and help the powerless and rejected.
Thus whatever Trump may or may not be on a personal and spiritual level, he is just what the Christian right had hoped for politically. So whenever CNN and the rest hold yet another inflated panel of angry experts incredulous at what the man has done, Trump sits back in the comfortable knowledge that evangelicals will guarantee that any Republican-primary challenger will be eviscerated, and that in election swing states such as Michigan, Florida, and Georgia their votes will likely carry the day.
It’s all colossally embarrassing and shameful for those of us who try to convince an understandably sceptical world that Christianity is by its nature forward-looking and committed to social justice, and even more painful for those who are victims of Trump’s policies. The Golden Rule for Trump Christians appears to be that if you’ve got the gold, you make the rules.
In reality none of this should come as any genuine surprise to political commentators, but it often appears that they just don’t see the bigger, bible-sized picture. Proving that they should have listened to their mums … and eaten their breakfast!
Maclean’s, December 28, 2018
THE WORD “EVANGELICAL” comes from the Greek language, meaning “gospel” or “good news” — and up until the twentieth century, the sect was not considered to be especially conservative. Instead, these were people committed to the Christian gospel message that Jesus Christ is the saviour of humanity, and that often meant campaigns for social welfare, and against injustices such as child labour and slavery.
That’s not what they’re known for anymore in America. The highly active U.S. evangelical movement — with its schools, colleges, magazines, publishers, television and radio stations, enormous financial capacity, and mega-churches — has become the most influential religious group within America’s mainstream body politic. Evangelicals, especially white Americans who constitute the majority, punch above their weight at the voting booth: at least one out of four voters in the past four national elections has been a white evangelical, even though they now constitute around fifteen percent of the total American population.
Since the 1960s, the Republican Party has held a monopoly on this bloc, when American Protestants rejected what they saw as the progressive and too-permissive shift of their country away from their church’s values. The Democrats emphasized a new America — liberalized and more open — and so the Republicans became the only viable alternative for a group that increasingly embraced the uniquely American idea that the United States was a God-given enterprise. If the party of Eisenhower was too secular and moderate, it would have to be changed by force.
Now, it’s an expected rite for Republicans to take pains to make their faith a core facet of their campaigns. Evangelicals’ core political ambitions have become twinned to the Republican agenda — no abortion, no same-sex marriage, an unquestioning support of Israel that’s unrelated to an actual love for the Jewish people, and the appointment of Supreme Court justices who can make these goals happen — and if those are on the docket, evangelicals are happy to vote that way. More than a third of Republicans now identify as a white evangelical.
Even Republican President Donald Trump, who has boasted of his many sins in the past, has managed to woo this group. His arrival on the scene has coincided with a shift in white evangelicals’ worldview of politicians: in 2011, the Public Religion Research Institute found that thirty percent believed “an elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life,” but by 2016, that number swelled to seventy-two percent. Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the presidential election; in the 2018 midterms, effectively a report card on the presidency, seventy-five percent felt Republicans still deserved their vote.
That’s about to change.
Trump, who is not an evangelical himself, but eagerly bends to their will, has delighted the old guard — but appalled their children. After the midterm elections in November, the New York Times took an extensive survey of young evangelicals, finding that young evangelicals are questioning the ties that bind their church and Republican politics: “Many said it had caused schisms within their families. And many described a real struggle with an administration they see as hostile to immigrants, Muslims, LGBT+ people, and the poor. They feel it reflects a loss of humanity, which conflicts with their spiritual call.”
They may not be on the political left, but they have grown up with gay friends and are aware of a tolerant culture. They have known about climate change since they were children. They defend Israel, but understand the plight of the Palestinians. And they’ve rejected a Fox News that screams ultra-conservatism because, put simply, young people just don’t watch what has become a pulpit for Republican evangelicals.
A new generation has come of age. Generation X and millennials now make up fifty-one percent of evangelicals in America, according to Pew. Many may have been able to hold their nose under George W. Bush, but Trump, with his proud vulgarity, roaring exploitation of hatred, and execrable personal behaviour, is something altogether different. The discomfort is palpable: How, this generation asks, can the Jesus who condemned the judgmental, hung out with the poor and marginalized, never actually mentioned homosexuality or abortion, and told us that if we don’t love others we won’t meet God, be the Jesus of a repugnant bully who empowers racism and fascism, and splashes around in the political gutter? How can those who claim to love Him ardently and loudly be so blind to Trump’s sinful foibles?
There’s increasing evidence that younger evangelicals are not voting because they can’t bring themselves to vote for either party. This offers an opportunity for the Democrats who, as the older generation of evangelicals inevitably passes away, could reshape the party to lure away members of this long-time Republican bloc. As Christian author Rachel Held Evans wrote, “Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.”
And even as Trump finds strength in the white evangelical vote, the face of evangelicalism is itself changing. While seventy-six percent of evangelicals remain white, the arrival of immigrants have introduced more diverse congregants who tend to be less stridently conservative on many of these political issues. The number of non-white evangelicals is growing, from nineteen percent in 2008 to twenty-four percent in 2014.
Change is on the way, even if it’s slow. But Donald Trump — a bellicose, self-styled disruptor responsible for tending to a powerful, but shrinking flock — has a habit of expediting things. And if this president’s troubles continue, it could be, as Evans writes, a very uncomfortable year indeed.
Maclean’s, December 27, 2017
IT’S ALWAYS COMFORTING to assume moral superiority. The Greeks did it when they lost dominance over the ancient world to the Romans; the British did the same when Washington replaced London as the centre of power. Canada has this, too. We travel, and Americans don’t, we like to say; they are insular, we’re not; we elect moderates and intelligent people, they don’t; we’re not extreme in our religion, and they are. There are elements of truth in all this — as well as risible leaps of mythology.
Certainly, in some areas, an informed criticism is in order. American Christianity, for example, is dangerously nationalistic, and the Americanization of the faith has genuinely distorted its meaning. More than eighty percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, while the Christian right leads battles against abortion rights and LGBT+ equality, and conservative Roman Catholics have proven to be enormously influential in right-wing politics and media. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but while high-profile conservatives announce their Catholicism, high-profile liberals seem almost embarrassed to speak of their Catholic faith — creating a false impression of authentically Catholic Christianity. There is a vibrant Catholic as well as mainstream Protestant left — but as is so often the way, the loudest noise comes from the shallowest end of the pool.
In Canada, meanwhile, Christian conservatives are simply not as powerful as their siblings to the south. In numbers alone, evangelicals compose around ten percent of the population of Canada, whereas more than a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical. Indeed, when it comes to the power of Canada’s religious right, I once heard Ian Paisley — the late Northern Irish firebrand who, for all his bigotry, had the spark of wit — refer, in his thick Ulster accent, to Canada’s evangelicals with an “emphasis on jelly.” In other words, he considered the Canadian Christian right to be, well, rather Canadian in its meekness.
But the truth is that Canadian Christianity is more nuanced and less polarized than in the United States. One reason is that while Americans are rightly proud of their separation of church and state, Canada’s variation is less codified and formal. Ironically, this has proven to be a liberating and empowering influence on American Christianity, as though they feel obliged to try to influence and shape the state because they’re outside it.
Another reason is that almost forty percent of Canadians are Roman Catholic, which is both extraordinarily high and, perhaps surprisingly, trends against conservatism and uniformity. While in theory Rome doesn’t tolerate theological dissent, in reality, individual Catholics have all sorts of moral and political positions. Catholicism is often cultural rather than religious, and so while bishops may make statements about public issues — usually marriage, abortion, euthanasia, or sex education — they know that they speak for a limited number of their flock.
So with the exception of a handful of hardline groups on the Catholic fringe, this leaves Christian conservative politics to Canada’s evangelicals — and they’ve come relatively late to the game, with their origins being far from reactionary. After all, Tommy Douglas — the first leader of the New Democratic Party — was a Baptist minister. And Canada’s social democratic tradition was strongly flavoured by non-conformist Protestants, much in the way that the British Labour Party was said to owe more to Methodism than to Marx. There are also more than 200,000 Mennonites in Canada, and their Anabaptist and pacifist origins mean that while they can be conservative on certain subjects, they also embrace a powerful social-justice theology.
Still, conservative evangelicals and Catholics in Canada do champion campaigns against equal marriage, abortion rights, assisted dying, and modern sex-ed curricula. They also advocate for publicly funded faith schools, home-schooling, and so-called parental rights, referring to the conceit that Christian parents should be able to decide what their children learn at school, especially when it comes to sex, evolution, and other religions. They’re also prominent in rejecting accepted wisdom concerning ecology, with polls revealing that the highest rate of denial of human-made climate change is among evangelicals.
The two most influential conservatives in Canada — Andrew Scheer and Jason Kenney — are both orthodox Catholics and owe much of their success to right-wing Christians and their well-funded, well-organized pressure groups. Even at a less senior level, the 2016 election of Sam Oosterhoff, the youngest MPP in Ontario’s history, owed much to the activism and voting of the Christian right; his riding of Niagara West — Glanbrook is, after all, in the buckle of the eastern Bible belt. (The west’s belt stretches across southern Alberta.)
It’s also home to a vibrant and political Dutch community, an important element of Canada’s religious right. The Canadian army liberated a number of Dutch cities at the end of the Second World War, and with a large Dutch population already here, immigration to Canada was inevitable. Those who came to Canada in the 1940s and ’50s were both Catholic and Protestant, of the political left as well as right, but the themes of Calvinism — which emphasizes a traditional interpretation of Scripture, and the need for the faithful to be politically engaged — were enormously strong. Many look to the inspiration of Abraham Kuyper, an early twentieth century Dutch prime minister and theologian, whose approach is summarized thus: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’”
More recent immigration has also affected the Christian right in Canada, as political parties work to court various religious ethnic communities. While many are Muslim, those who are Christian often come from churches that are at the less progressive end of the scale, a fact that certainly hasn’t escaped white conservative Christian leaders. I reported on three demonstrations against Ontario’s new sex-ed curriculum, and the encouragement — or was it manipulation? — of Asian and Middle Eastern Christians by a more traditional leadership was obvious.
The enigma of this is that while any religious text is open to interpretation, the central writings of Christianity — the very handbook, if you like — are the four Gospels, and they depict a Jesus who says little and often nothing about the social, moral, and sexual issues that seem to obsess conservative Protestants and Catholics. He does, however, speak and teach consistently about the evils of social injustice, and the need to reject wealth and power and embrace the marginalized and broken. The Christian right rests its case more on the prohibitions contained in the Old Testament and in the letters of St. Paul, but often with far too little acknowledgement of their context and when they were written. Paul is simply not the misogynist or homophobe that some of his modern followers like to think he is.
It’s patronizing to completely dismiss this wing of the Church. But at the same time, their monomania and approach to the Bible can be frustrating; it’s a little like trying to understand a novel by only reading the semi-colons. It’s also harmful because it hurts many who are already under attack, and it also makes Christianity appear loveless — even cruel.
The real testing ground for the political power of Canada’s religious right will be the next federal election. In spite of what his critics might think, Stephen Harper was always careful to keep social conservatives at a certain distance. Scheer, however, is far more of a true believer, and while some of his advisors are recommending caution and his public comments suggest that he will keep his faith out of the House of Commons, this son of a Roman Catholic deacon is perceived as the great hope of the Christian right. His campaign in 2019 could be buoyed — or broken — by their support.
Then again, Lethbridge is not Alabama, Niagara is not Texas, and Canadian Christianity has no Franklin Graham or Mike Pence. When Canadians next go to the polls, it may well be the great litmus test of just how much influence religious conservatives have. The answer is probably less than they like to think — but more than the secular world thinks it likes.
Toronto Star, August 15, 2015
SOME YEARS AGO I was asked to deliver a lecture at Wheaton College in Illinois, perhaps the premier evangelical university in North America. My particular areas of expertise were the authors C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. As it happens, beyond their genius these men were also heavy drinkers, but the college was teetotal and I had to agree not to drink any alcohol on campus or bring any onto the premises. Odd, perhaps inconsistent, even hypocritical.
I mention this because of the ongoing case of Trinity Western University in British Columbia and the evangelical Christian college’s proposed law school. Various bar associations have refused to recognize any future graduates because of the college’s rules about sex and effective ban on gay students. Now the Canadian Bar Association has asked for intervenor status in a case to argue against Trinity Western.
The fact that Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, could demand accreditation from various bar associations while openly contradicting the very law that it is asking to teach is baffling.
The college’s Community Covenant that has caused the problem speaks of Biblical principles and outlines some often entirely admirable if intrusive ways of life for students. It does, however, spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with issues of sex and while careful not to specifically name homosexuality the meaning is obvious. There are at least three references.
The first says students must “observe modesty, purity and appropriate intimacy in all relationships, reserve sexual expressions of intimacy for marriage, and within marriage take every reasonable step to resolve conflict and avoid divorce.” The second forbids “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.” And a third states, “According to the Bible, sexual intimacy is reserved for marriage between one man and one woman, and within that marriage bond it is God’s intention that it be enjoyed as a means for marital intimacy and procreation.”
Here’s where it all becomes rather murky. Jesus never even mentions homosexuality, but He does repeatedly condemn divorce in a Roman, Greek and Jewish culture that readily accepted it. So while Trinity Western — and for that matter pretty much every other evangelical university with a similar code — requests “reasonable” steps to avoid divorce it does not forbid it and divorce would be no barrier to enrolment.
It’s difficult not to conclude from this that there is something of a double standard on display and perhaps even an attempt to disguise social prejudice as religious dogma. Remember, some conservative Christians also tried to use Scripture to oppose interracial marriage, to support slavery, and to fight against female equality.
The reality is that modern theology is increasingly revising the view that homosexuality is sinful and several churches in Europe and North America are not only fully accepting of openly gay people, but bless and even conduct same-sex weddings. The time when certain Christians could comfortably rely on archaic and crassly literal interpretations of words written millennia ago to bolster a reactionary attitude is long gone, and I say this as a serious and committed Christian.
As much as every Canadian has a right to object to equal marriage, to refuse to attend a same-sex wedding and, in the case of churches, to refuse to hold one, an entirely different equation applies in this case. Trinity Western wants to open a law school where they will educate Canadian lawyers, whose job is to administer and uphold Canadian law. Yet the law of Canada not only approves of same-sex marriage, but also includes legislation to protect gay people from discrimination.
Thus the fact that Trinity Western could demand accreditation from various bar associations while openly contradicting the very law that it is asking to teach is, quite frankly, baffling. More than this, while no evangelical is banned from attending a secular law school, even one with numerous gay staff and students, gay men and women are effectively banned from attending this proposed evangelical school. That’s not fair, not Canadian and not the law.
The truth of the matter is that very few gay students are likely to apply to Trinity Western’s law school and that many evangelicals will never change their views about homosexuality whatever the arguments and whatever the truth. But the law must apply equally to all of us whatever our faith or sexuality, and lawyers in particular must believe that sparkling reality in their minds as well as in their souls.
iPolitics, December 2, 2016
IT’S BECOMING COMMONPLACE now. The latest flap involves Chip and Joanna Gaines (who, I must admit, I’d not heard of before all this), stars of an HGTV show called Fixer Upper. It seems they’re beloved by legions of people obsessed with home improvement.
They are also members of a homophobic evangelical church whose pastor thinks he can “convert LGBT people into being straight.” The celebrity couple’s views aren’t known, but it’s reasonable to assume they attend a church that makes them feel comfortable and affirmed.
This revelation has led to calls for a boycott, and was partly dealt with by the show’s producers announcing that they would welcome a same-sex couple onto Fixer Upper to have their home improved. (Not, one hopes, to be prayed over so that they can be miraculously “fixed up” and become heterosexual.)
It’s all rather absurd really, and the best way to deal with these people is simply to not watch their show. They have a right, as it were, to be wrong. But immediately after this story emerged, the Christian right went into overdrive — in Canada as well as in the United States — claiming that this was yet another example of persecution of Christians, that Christians can no longer live their faith, that the state and the body politic are at war with the Church.
This claim is grotesque, irresponsible, dishonest, and exploitative. Let’s be quite direct here: Christians are not persecuted in North America. They are persecuted in large parts of the Muslim world, China, and North Korea. As someone who has visited many of these communities I can tell you the grim facts of that persecution — of the rapes, murders, forced conversions, beatings, humiliations, and ethnic cleansing perpetrated on Christian communities.
How dare these comfortable, well-fed evangelicals and conservative Catholics claim even for a moment that they are persecuted?
What they actually mean by “persecution” is this: These days, they can’t be as nasty towards gay people as they would like to be. That might sound crass, but that’s really what this comes down to. A marriage commissioner who refuses to obey the law and issue licenses to same-sex couples, dressmakers who refuse to make wedding gowns for lesbians, confectioners who turn away gay couples who want a cake for their wedding, hotels denying rooms to same-sex couples, colleges insisting that their students at least pretend to be straight — it’s always about discriminating against gays, and always done in the name of Christianity.
I am a Christian. It’s the quintessence of my life and I like to think that, even though I’m a coward, I would die for my faith if I had to. (Frankly, I’d rather spend my last moments in bed surrounded by chocolate and beer.) What that means, however, is that I try to live by the teachings of a man who never referred to homosexuality — but was obsessed with love, justice, forgiveness, inclusion, tolerance, economic equality, and the need to turn the world upside down.
Of the 200,000 words in the New Testament, a mere 40 refer to same-sex attraction. None of them were uttered by Jesus, and many people question the genuine meaning of those references.
So this is about something other than faith. It’s about abusing a religion to justify a prejudice. Remember, while Christ doesn’t condemn homosexuality, He does have harsh words for divorce. Not that I’m recommending it, but do these same cake-makers and hoteliers ask their clients if they’re divorced? Or if they use condoms, support abortion, or live together?
Of course not. Because this is only about one thing — homosexuality.
If you break the law, if you withhold a service or deny someone an education due to race, gender, religion, or sexuality, there are consequences. This isn’t about freedom of religion. This is about equality under the law — and you have no more right to reject a same-sex couple than you do a mixed-race couple.
There are, mind you, Christians being arrested on a regular basis because they protest economic and social oppression — but they don’t whine about persecution and they certainly don’t have the media connections and financial clout of their conservative co-religionists. Faith has a vital part to play in politics, just as it did in the struggle against slavery and child labour and for civil rights and the welfare state.
But to wrap hatred up in the cloak of a humble and world-changing Jewish revolutionary from 2,000 years ago isn’t only pernicious. It’s the greatest heresy of them all.
iPolitics, January 19, 2018
THE SELF-DESCRIBED “PRO-LIFE” movement is ecstatic right now. Today, Donald Trump addresses the March for Life in Washington D.C. live by satellite from the Rose Garden — the first sitting U.S. president to do so.
Other presidents have sent their best wishes and support, or have addressed the march via telephone or a radio hook-up. Never before has the occupant of the White House made such a determined effort to show solidarity with a gathering that in past years has numbered more than 600,000 people.
March for Life President Jeanne Mancini said that “since his first day in office, President Trump has remained steadfast on his campaign promises to the pro-life cause and has actively worked to protect the unborn … Over the past year, the Trump administration has significantly advanced pro-life policy, and it is with great confidence that, under his leadership, we expect to see other pro-life achievements in the years to come.”
The moral disconnect here is staggering. Trump’s numerous insulting statements about Third World countries, about refugees and immigrants, and even about reporters with physical disabilities show that he has a severely limited respect for life. His repugnant comments about women (and about sex), his ambivalence towards white supremacists and his cruel abuse of critics and rivals reveal a disregard for other people, and for basic standards of decency, that is unparalleled in American politics.
Donald Trump is not supportive of “life” in any sensible or rational sense — but he is now a vocal supporter of the pro-life movement. It’s a recent position for him; not long ago he described himself as being “pro-choice in every respect.”
People can change their minds about such matters, I know — but to be genuine, such a change has to have its foundation in something more substantial than a desperate desire for votes. Absolutely nothing in Trump’s character or record indicates that he has undergone any serious moral transformation. If anything, his ethics and attitudes have become worse, not better, in the past year.
If this is obvious to most of us, why does the pro-life movement — composed overwhelmingly of conservative Christians — not also see the contradiction?
In fact, they do. They may often be intolerant and extreme; they’re not necessarily fools. But their obsession is not with life, but with birth — they are opponents of abortion, not advocates for humanity.
It’s quite simple. Pro-lifers are prepared to forgive — even to deny or ignore — Trump’s degradation of women, the allegations against him of adultery and sexual assault, the credible evidence that he paid off a former porn star to conceal an affair. They’re willing to wink at his bellicosity and the copious evidence of his racism — because he has won them over with his policies on abortion.
It’s a deal with the devil, a political pact that likely will see Trump hold on to most of the eighty-one percent of white evangelicals, and the large majority of conservative Roman Catholics, who voted for him in 2016.
One of the many tragedies of all this is that Barack Obama, who is roundly detested by abortion foes, has a profound commitment to the Christian faith — and also wanted to reduce abortion rates. He, however, was a realist and shared Hillary Clinton’s opinion that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” That response angers rather than satisfies March-for-Life types, who want the procedure banned and see any compromise as evil.
So Donald Trump — arguably the least ethical and life-embracing president in American history — has become the hero of those who parade their puritanism at every opportunity, and are the first to condemn pro-choice politicians who lead upright and principled lives.
This is a sad day for public discourse, for integrity and for the public face of Christianity. And Donald Trump must be loving every moment of it.
iPolitics, December 19, 2017
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT has announced that it is reforming the regulations through which employers hire students for the Canada Summer Jobs program. It’s an effort to prevent government financial support from going to groups that oppose abortion rights and LGBT+ equality, and it comes after reports that various hardline anti-abortion groups have long been beneficiaries of the program.
Organizations applying for government support will now have to sign a statement guaranteeing that they support human rights in Canada. “To be eligible,” the new policy states, “applicants will have to attest that both the job and the organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights.”
The program itself — designed to give workplace experience and training to students aged fifteen to thirty in non-profits, the public sector and small businesses — is well worth preserving. MPs decide on funding on an individual riding basis; most of the money is allocated to non-political groups. But there have been exceptions to that rule: more than three million dollars has been channelled to anti-abortion organizations in the past five years. Most of that money (but not all of it) came from Conservative MPs’ offices.
One of the groups that has been particularly successful in gaining funding through the program is the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform. This ground was responsible for the No2Trudeau campaign — which sent hundreds of thousands of flyers to Canadian homes containing deeply disturbing, bloody and graphic images of mangled fetal body parts.
Parents complained that their small children often saw the flyers first and were sometimes traumatized. Their protests were ignored. This militant organization also holds public displays in which it juxtaposes abortion images with those of the Holocaust and the lynching of African-Americans. It describes abortion as genocide.
The group’s communications director, Jonathon Van Maren, is a columnist for Lifesite News, which stated recently that Donald Trump’s opponents were “satanic” and is obsessed with sinister cabals and dark conspiracy theories.
It’s also morbidly concerned with what it sees as the sinister social and political influence of homosexuality. Van Maren himself wrote that “LGBT activists are already hard at work rooting out heretics in politics, media, and academia.” He is now attacking the government over these changes to the summer jobs program, which should come as no surprise.
He wasn’t alone. Many Conservatives joined the pile-on. “What the Liberals are doing here is terrifying,” MP Candice Bergen tweeted. “No tax payers $ if you don’t believe/act the way the government dictates. Sounds more like China than Canada. Thought/belief control by the State, in its worst form. What’s next for these organizations? Charitable status denied?”
Communist China routinely employs torture, ignores human rights and has executed more people than the rest of the world combined. When I respectfully challenged Ms. Bergen on Twitter over what she said, she refused to withdraw her comparison and labelled me an extremist.
Critics also have claimed that this is all an attack on religion. That’s disingenuous, to say the least. The new policy states that applicants’ “core mandate” must “respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.”
In other words, while abortion rights are mentioned, so is freedom of religion. The Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform and the other anti-abortion outfits that have received public financial support through this program are indeed mostly composed of ultra-conservative Christians — but the groups themselves are not specifically religious, and are not faith-based charities serving the needy. Countless religious people (myself included) are liberal in their views about life and sexuality and have nothing in common with the extreme anti-abortion culture.
In fact it’s all rather simple. Nobody — thank goodness — is trying to prevent people from holding anti-abortion views and campaigning against abortion rights. This is not China, Ms. Bergen.
What the government is suggesting is that it’s absurd for the public to directly fund and support groups that oppose the laws followed and the values held by the vast majority of Canadians. A very modest, very Canadian idea indeed.
The Globe and Mail, June 15, 2018
ON FRIDAY THE Supreme Court of Canada delivered a ruling that many conservative Christians are condemning as an attack on religious freedom and LGBT+ groups are applauding as a robust defence of civil rights and social equality. In a seven to two decision, the justices concluded that the law societies of Ontario and British Columbia have the right to deny accreditation to graduates from the proposed law school of Trinity Western University (TWU), an evangelical college in Langley, B.C. The court judged that it was “proportionate and reasonable” to limit religious rights in such a case – to guarantee the rights of gay students.
The case has its origins in TWU’s plans to train law students, but at a university where a “Community Covenant” is in place. That covenant outlines some often entirely laudable, if somewhat intrusive, ways of life for students, but then spends a startling degree of time and space discussing sex and sexuality. It’s euphemistic in its language, but while not explicitly referring to homosexuality, the references are inescapable. Students must “observe modesty, purity and appropriate intimacy in all relationships, reserve sexual expressions of intimacy for marriage, and within marriage take every reasonable step to resolve conflict and avoid divorce.” They have to sign their names to the statement that condemns, “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.” Finally, the covenant insists that, “According to the Bible, sexual intimacy is reserved for marriage between one man and one woman, and within that marriage bond it is God’s intention that it be enjoyed as a means for marital intimacy and procreation.”
Law Societies in Ontario, Nova Scotia and B.C. all refused to accredit the Trinity program, but in Nova Scotia and B.C. the courts supported the university. Ontario disagreed, describing the covenant as, “deeply discriminatory to the LGBT community.” Thus, the appeal to the Supreme Court and Friday’s long-awaited decision.
The case has been reduced by TWU’s supporters as being one of freedom of religion, but that obscures some of the realities of what this is all about. Canadians have every right to disagree with — and even campaign against — equal marriage and indeed there are still numerous churches that hold to this teaching and enjoy political and financial protection. The TWU dispute, however, is more nuanced than that.
The college can enforce their covenant and they can also teach law. What they cannot do is demand that their graduates are accredited by various provincial bar associations. This, of course, would mean that they could not work as lawyers. Not because they are conservative Christians, not because they oppose same-sex marriage, not for any of their religious beliefs. The reason is that the college that trained them — in spite of how they may try to obfuscate — refuses to accept students in what are legally recognized same-sex marriages or open gay relationships.
The legal issues aside, there is reason to question the allegedly religious underpinning of all this. Jesus never actually speaks of homosexuality, which was certainly well known and often discussed in first century Palestine. He is revolutionary in his concept of acceptance and love, and when he is presented with sexual “sin” — the story of the woman caught in adultery — his disdain is for the accusing hypocrites rather than the object of their anger.
He does, however, condemn divorce more than once, partly because it left women destitute and powerless. Yet, conservative Christian colleges that enforce morality clauses almost always take a firmer stand against potential students who may be LGBT+ than those who are divorced. In the case of TWU, it speaks of merely “reasonable” steps to avoid divorce. In other words, if you’re divorced we’ll find a way to accommodate you, but if your marriage is not between a man and a woman and intended for procreation, you’re not welcome on the ark.
So, the consistency of the Christian argument is deeply flawed and so are the precedents. We ought to remember that some, though certainly not all, Christians used scripture to justify and defend slavery, to oppose female equality and to be on the wrong side of history on multiple occasions. I say this as a committed Christian and with a heavy heart.
The reality is that those people who wanted to qualify as lawyers at TWU will find alternative arrangements and that there will still be lawyers who oppose LGBT+ equality. But a reminder has been sent that harmful discrimination is unacceptable, even if tenuously framed in theological language. And that’s rather godly.
Toronto Star, June 5, 2017
WITHIN MOMENTS OF Andrew Scheer being elected as the new leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, his opponents began to criticize his opinions. That’s politics of course. But this time the analysis went a little deeper.
Scheer may have said that he will not reopen debates around equal marriage or abortion, it was argued, but he doesn’t believe in same-sex marriage or a woman’s right to choose and that matters a great deal. And on issues such as euthanasia and trans rights, it was claimed, he will certainly be politically involved. But his defenders responded that this was an “anti-Christian” attack and that the new champion of the Tories was being condemned for his religious beliefs. Now just hold on one Bible-believing moment.
Contrary to what social conservatives have tried to tell us, there is nothing especially Christian about these issues. Jesus didn’t mention homosexuality, abortion, or euthanasia but He did speak a great deal about peace, love, justice, the dangers of wealth, the sin of materialism, and a preferential regard for the poor.
So Mr. Scheer and his friends, with all due respect and humility let me take you on a magical mystery tour of what that Jesus fellow actually did say.
There was the worryingly egalitarian, “Servants are not greater than their master,” and the snowflake nonsense of, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged,” and “Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”
Then we have the lefty silliness of, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God,” and “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone,” and “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”
Moving on there is, “In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.”
Not very conservative at all! Even worse there is, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Or the nastily socialistic, “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”
So in a way we could say that every time someone on the right attacks a Liberal or New Democrat calling for a higher minimum wage, stronger welfare, increased funding of socialized medicine or an end to war, it is they who are being attacked for promoting Christian ideas.
In other words, Christianity is not what politicians who wear their faith on their sleeve have led us to believe. Both Old and New Testament scream for social and economic fairness and the story of the Christian God is a seamless garment of care, not for some, but for all, especially those least able to look after themselves.
I’m one of those odd, unfashionable people who want more and not less mingling of church and state, but a church informed by the authentic teachings of its founder and not the sex-obsessed monomania of the new Catholic and evangelical right.
Sorry Mr. Scheer, but the criticism of you had nothing to do with your faith and everything to do with your fanaticism. God bless you.
Maclean’s, June 8, 2018
BACK IN 2013, I was struggling with one of the most significant decisions in my life. I was known as a conservative Roman Catholic, having written best-selling books on the subject, and been a columnist for several Catholic newspapers as well as a highly successful speaker in conservative Christian circles. As such, of course, I opposed same-sex marriage. But over the previous years, it had become harder and harder to defend that position as well as many other conservative teachings. I felt compelled to leave the Catholic Church, to make my support for equal marriage, progressive Christianity, and full LGBT+ equality public, and to suffer the severe career and personal consequences. One of the people who made that move possible — and who reminded this straight, middle-aged man that truth and love were everything — was a woman named Vicky Beeching.
She has been described in The Guardian as “arguably the most influential Christian of her generation,” partly due to her many appearances on British television and radio, as well as her substantial following on social media. Beeching was an extremely popular singer, musician, and recording artist on the North American Christian music scene. But one of the main reasons for that prominence is that in 2014, she announced to the world — and to the evangelical Christian world, in particular — that was she gay.
Hiding her sexuality for many years had caused Beeching to develop severe health problems, and she struggled with the demons of intolerance, hatred, and enforced secrecy; within the world of North American Christian music, after all, homosexuality is considered profoundly sinful. But when she came out, her career was promptly destroyed — and to this day, she is still routinely attacked in the most severe and hurtful ways.
She’s now back in London, a highly respected speaker and writer, and at forefront of reminding the conservative Christian world that Jesus preached love rather than judgment. Her long-awaited memoir, Undivided, comes out on June 12.
Were you surprised at the reaction from evangelical Christians to your coming out, or was it expected?
It was actually a real shock to face such vitriol and rejection from that part of the Church when I came out, back in 2014. Honestly, I’d hoped deep down that they might react differently. I knew the majority of evangelical Christians around the globe believe same-sex relationships are sinful, shameful, and wrong. But because my songs were sung in congregations around the world every Sunday, and because I was loved and respected by that entire community, I’d wondered if they might react in a slightly more open-minded way. But they didn’t.
How did that negative reaction make you feel?
It was immensely painful. Almost all the evangelicals I’d known and worked with told me I was “choosing sin” and stepping away from God in my decision to come out. They also told me I was no longer welcome to sing, or speak, or continue in any of the leadership roles I’d held at evangelical conferences and events. It was extremely damaging to my mental health to feel so excluded from my former community, as they’d felt like family to me since childhood.
Have you ever wished you’d remained silent?
No, I have absolutely no regrets about coming out. It’s incredibly healing and liberating to be my authentic self at last. I was thirty-five when I came out, so it took a long time to find the courage. The cost was high though; I lost my career in Christian music, my livelihood and financial security, and my sense of belonging within the evangelical world. But overall, it was absolutely worth it. The fear I battled every day was so intense and the toll it was taking was too great — I had to step into the freedom of being the person I was meant to be.
You’ve been interviewed many times about what happened, but why write this book?
A publisher approached me and said they’d like me to tell my story in more detail, as they believed it could help others walking through similar challenges. So I signed with HarperCollins and began writing the memoir. My goal was to write the book that I’d needed, back when I was a teenager or in my twenties — a book that could’ve helped me choose a more authentic and less fearful path. Beyond that, I also hope it’s a book that appeals to anyone and everyone, as it deals with broad themes like facing your fears, choosing to be authentic, and learning that vulnerability is actually a strength. It’s a book for anyone who wants to become more fully alive.
What does your life look like now, four years on from your coming-out announcement?
It’s been a huge change. My former job as a singer and recording artist, working in churches in the U.K., the U.S., and Canada, is over. I haven’t played music or sung publicly since I came out. I had to totally re-imagine what I wanted to do with my life when I was no longer welcome to lead worship anymore. Now, my work centres around writing and speaking, much of which is focused on LGBT+ equality and mental health awareness. I speak in a lot of corporate environments, helping companies become more skilled at making LGBT+ staff feel welcome and safe. I also work with pastors and churches, helping them step towards LGBT+ inclusion in their congregations. Often I pop up on radio or TV here in the U.K., sharing my perspective on these topics when they come up in the news. I’m also doing a part-time Ph.D. too, as I am a geek who loves to study! Overall that makes for a very varied portfolio of work, as I rebuild a new career to replace the one I lost in church music.
The Pope allegedly said recently that he believes God creates some people to be gay — what did you think about that?
It’s wonderful that the Pope might genuinely hold that view, but at the same time, it’s something spoken behind closed doors while the official teaching of the Catholic church remains unchanged. That makes it painful for those of us who are waiting for official teachings to change and creates a strange tension where one thing is said privately, but a different thing is preached publicly from the pulpit. It feels disingenuous and damaging, as we are left in limbo, unsure of what the Church truly thinks.
In your book, you write that you’re still a believer in the Christian faith, and still love the Church, despite its failings. What are your hopes for the future of Christianity and LGBT+ equality?
I think there’s a long road ahead before we see major change. In the Church of England, for example, same-sex marriages are not permitted to take place within their buildings. Also, if you are a priest or a Bishop, you are barred from entering a same-sex marriage yourself. You can only enter a civil partnership, and you must vow to remain celibate within it. The Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken about the “stunning quality” of some gay couples’ relationships, but any official change seems a long way off. I remain hopeful though! The global church changed its mind when it formerly opposed William Wilberforce and the ending of slavery. The Church also changed its mind when it previously opposed the suffragettes and the right of women to vote. Eventually, we’ll see that same equality and social justice extended to people who are LGBT+ — and I’ll do all I can to play my small part in moving the Church toward that goal. I hope my book can help change minds and hearts and bring greater awareness. LGBT+ equality is not something the Church can ignore. I hope books like mine can help spark the conversation and change minds and hearts.
CBC, April 18, 2018
PARENTAL LOVE OF a child is one of the strongest, most poignant emotions known. It is visceral, inexorable, even exquisitely irrational. So it’s difficult to imagine just what Tom Evans, and Kate James, the parents of twenty-three-month-old Alfie Evans are feeling right now. Alfie passed away early Saturday, nearly a week after his life support was withdrawn.
Their baby spent most of his life dependent on mechanical ventilation, in a neonatal intensive care unit in a Liverpool hospital in England. He suffered from a progressive neurodegenerative disorder, one so rare that it hasn’t yet been labelled, and may even be referred to by Alfie Evans’s name in the future. It decayed his brain to such an extent that he was in a semi-vegetative state. He also became, tragically, a figure of world debate and discussion.
After months of care and intervention, and with evident sorrow and regret, the hospital finally decided to withdraw treatment, thus allowing Alfie to die. Doctors argued that further medical intervention would be pointless and cruel. This is, alas, far from unique; there comes a time when babies, children and adults in such wretched conditions simply have no future.
Alfie’s parents, however, wanted to take their baby out of the country for further treatment and so, they took their case to the courts.
The family division of the high court rejected multiple legal challenges, and so on Monday, Alfie was detached from his ventilator with a palliative care team ready to ensure his comfort.
There were two equally compelling narratives here: that of the parents of baby Alfie, who were of course desperate not to let go of their child, and that of the doctors and nurses, who cared for the boy for so long, and who spend every moment of their working lives giving aid and comfort to the sick and dying. Put simply, there were no bad guys among those directly involved.
Where genuine love and commitment may perhaps be questioned is in the wider discussion and activism around the case. The Roman Catholic Church, in Britain and internationally, had made this their latest cause célèbre. Alfie had been given Italian citizenship, and a request had been made to fly him to Bambino Gesù, a pediatric hospital in the Vatican. The Pope even put a military helicopter on standby to bring the boy to Rome.
IT WAS A campaign that had not gone unnoticed by the Church’s critics. While the Church has been largely consistent in its defence of individual vulnerable life in such cases, it appears highly selective when it comes to human suffering. When the Catholic Church in England, Scotland, and Ireland was asked to admit and apologize for its generations of sexual and physical abuse, for example, it took years of campaigning and countless legal cases for contrition and compensation to be offered. Now, however, the Church moves with lightning speed.
Beyond organized conservative Christianity, the reaction of many on the political right has been equally disturbing. Commentators who have shown no support for — or even opposed — public medicine were suddenly crying out for state support for the life of a dying baby.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who, for example, opposes insurance for people with pre-existing conditions, commented that, “Brits have decided some kids just aren’t worth that much and are disposable.” Former Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, once described so wonderfully as a “sad vampire,” and who campaigned to raise the age of Medicare eligibility so as to save money, explained that, “It is a grim reminder that systems of socialized medicine like the National Health Service (NHS) vest the state with power over human lives, transforming citizens into subjects.” Truth cries out to be heard.
Actually, the NHS spent a fortune to make sure that Alfie remained alive for as long as he did and received the best and most modern care available. All of this through the type of socialized medical service that many of this child’s recent advocates so oppose. In the United States, a family such as Alfie’s would never have had the financial resources or insurance coverage necessary to receive such exemplary care.
The reality, in Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, is that parents and doctors do usually concur in such dreadful situations, and their pain is mutual and shared. It’s incredibly unusual for the courts to be used, and when that happens, judges hear expert opinions from all concerned and come to informed decisions. That is what has happened here, with numerous doctors from many countries agreeing that the child’s illness was terminal.
It was no longer about trying to prolong life, but making sure that death is as gentle and painless as possible. Those who argue that the parents should have the final say in all this forget that without hospital facilities, what remained of this child’s short life could have been extremely unpleasant, and his death terrible. Parents have a duty to provide care, even in such challenging circumstances, and in Alfie’s situation could not do so alone.
Even so, Alfie’s doctors still received death threats, with crowds assembled outside the hospital to protest, block vital roads and even try to storm the doors. There was a mob-like anger on display, partly fuelled by tabloid hysteria and online talk of the hospital wanting to perform “a court-ordered execution.”
We saw something similar with another baby in England, Charlie Gard, and with the Terri Schiavo case in the United States in 2005. But in many cases involving their most vocal defenders, it was less concern for a vulnerable and suffering human being than religious and political extremism, and an attempt to appear noble by seeing callousness in others.
There was never going to be a happy ending to all this, but perhaps there is a lesson to be learned. Sometimes suffering is inevitable, but exploitation of that suffering is not. Shame on those who fail to see it.
United Church Observer, February 2017
I ONCE WORKED with a delightful, if earnest, young man from a strict Calvinist background who lived his faith in a manner that often did me shame. He saw the entire world through the prism of Christianity, and while this sometimes irritated an old cynic like me, it could also be downright inspiring. He took the Ten Commandments very seriously indeed, but when it came to the third — not taking God’s name in vain — he could be a little pedantic. Which is a kind way of saying he was obsessive. He would twist and reshape the language to avoid using “God” in any form that might be even tentatively disrespectful.
I can’t help thinking that this is not what we’re being warned about in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, where the commandments are listed. Obviously the third commandment is about respect and reverence for God, but language is a means and not an end. In other words, how we communicate does matter, but how we act matters so much more. Expletives are regrettable; evil is inexcusable.
So, for example, we have countless conservative Roman Catholics and evangelicals using God’s name to justify discrimination against LGBT+ people. From denying equality to refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, the Christian right seems to view excluding the queer community in the name of God as a virtual sacrament.
Then there are zealots holding banners and placards outside abortion clinics. These men and women repeatedly and aggressively take God’s name in vain as they shout and try to shame and humiliate the women walking past who have just made one of the hardest decisions of their lives.
Or we have the appalling exploitation of God’s name when opponents of any form of assisted dying insist that those in agony and despair have no right to decide the time and means of their passing because God is opposed to this.
Invasions of other countries, forced conversions and even ethnic cleansing — all manner of atrocities have been committed in the name of the Lord.
Pretending that climate change isn’t real, while claiming all such concerns are pagan and God is in command, endangers not only our ecosystem, but our very survival on this planet.
Proclaiming unbridled capitalism as “God’s will” and rejecting social democracy as “un-Christian”; persecuting religious minorities and restricting freedoms — all are defended in the name of the Almighty.
These, all of these, are the taking of God’s name in vain. God is love, and while a moral code is vital and Christ’s teachings do not lack judgment, we diminish the greatness and goodness of the Creator if we think that using God’s name in a meaningless phrase is what this is really all about.
In the name of God, we have to do better. God help us, we have failed. For God’s sake, we need to get it right in the future. And, oh my God, what the hell is wrong with Christianity when it doesn’t see this? So I’m probably damned, but so be it.
United Church Observer, March 2017
AT THE END of 2017, the New Zealand singer Lorde suddenly became known not only for her music, but for her opinions. After hearing from various supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, who work to change Israeli policy, especially around the country’s settlements in the West Bank, the twenty-one-year-old musician decided to cancel her proposed concert in Tel Aviv.
Within a few days, a full-page ad appeared in the Washington Post, accusing her of bigotry and of participating in a culture of “Jew hatred.” It was harsh and unfair, and indeed the Jewish community in New Zealand condemned its tone and approach. But many others rushed to justify the ad and further attack Lorde and the BDS movement.
So how should Christians react to this? What should be the attitude to an issue that, whatever zealots on both sides may argue, is complex and nuanced? The United Church calls on members “to become involved in the search for a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis by contributing to the end of the occupation of the Palestinian Territories.” It agrees with most of the international community in believing the settlements to be illegal, and in 2015 its forty-second General Council passed a motion encouraging divestment “against all corporations and institutions complicit in and benefitting from the illegal occupation.”
A few facts. First, the Jewish people have suffered almost unparalleled persecution throughout their history, often at the hands of alleged Christians. Jews did not leave the European homes they had known for centuries for the Middle East just for fun. Never forget the blood libels, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. And if you think anti-Semitism is of the past, I’d invite you to spend some time on this half-Jewish writer’s social media feeds!
Second, the notion that Israel was a land without people given to a people without land is a myth. While the Jews have a historic attachment to Israel, so do the Palestinians. Arab Muslims and Christians — and Jews for that matter — lived in sizable numbers in the region long before the first waves of Jewish immigration in the nineteenth century and the establishment of Israel in 1948.
As for the boycotts, that should be left to each person to decide. There are opponents of Israeli policy who disagree with the BDS movement, and others who actively support it. One of the most prominent of the latter is British musician Brian Eno. He told me recently, “I’m not in it for a fight with Israel, but for a result for everyone. I really think there are a lot of people on both sides who prefer the fighting to the result-getting — especially if the ‘fighting’ is being done from the cozy comfort of a computer.”
Quite so. Sweeping generalizations are easy and dangerous. Informed and sensible efforts to bring peace and coexistence to two valid, but clashing narratives are much more difficult — but much more necessary.
United Church Observer, July 2018
THIS APRIL, A massacre occurred in Toronto when a van was driven through crowded sidewalks, killing ten people and injuring sixteen. What can be said about such a grotesque, pointless crime? That our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, that we are in shock or tears, that we should all hug one another? Much of that might be true, but I’m not sure what is achieved by making our feelings so public. It’s easy to play the cynic in this, but the one absolute is that it’s the dead, the wounded, and their loved ones who matter. The rest of us are simply not the story.
I reported from Northern Ireland more than thirty years ago and saw violence and suffering first-hand. On one occasion, someone was shot dead just a few steps away from me. It took almost forty-eight hours for me to react, and when I did I sat in my hotel room and sobbed. As awful as this experience was, however, life did reset astoundingly quickly.
So when reporters constantly ask people with no direct involvement how they feel and demand to know what the traumatic event means to them, we must ask whether this is easing the situation, aiding the victims, or merely magnifying public emotion for its own sake. Of course I care, of course I feel, but I’m not sure if genuine compassion and meaningful empathy are helped or hindered by this culture of public grieving.
When Princess Diana died in 1997, for example, Britain sank into paroxysms of sorrow. It was indeed terrible that a young woman, a mother of small children, should die like that. But this mass reaction was for someone most people had never met and knew only through media. I hosted a radio show at the time, and while expressing sympathy for Diana and her family, mentioned a recent story about a person from London who had died in their home, and none of the neighbours even noticed for almost a month. Real community, I suggested, is about caring for all and not concentrating love on one lionized figure.
The Toronto horror and other attacks are different from the death of Diana, of course, but our reaction to them still provokes some questions: Do we react the same way when countless innocent people are murdered in the Middle East? Do we show such emotion when yet another homeless person dies? I think we know the answer.
Part of the problem is that we’ve forgotten how to grieve. The decline of organized religion has removed much of that collective solidarity, whether it’s the Roman Catholic wake, the Jewish shiva, or any other ordered process of trying to deal with passing. Public vigils do take place, of course — and the one in Toronto brought various faith leaders together — but while the intentions are noble, the results are often varied. Remember, cameras abound, and there is “being at a happening” as well as genuine mourning taking place.
Please grieve, please feel, and please share in the pain of others. But for all people. And never forget that it’s never about us; it’s always about them.
United Church Observer, October 2017
BACK IN JULY, the Omar Khadr case became a national controversy. For those who’ve forgotten, Khadr, a Canadian, was taken as a boy by his father to Afghanistan, where he fought and was wounded. He was captured, delivered to Guantanamo Bay by the Americans, and tortured. Then he confessed — his lawyers say under duress — to throwing a grenade that killed an American soldier.
He later said he doesn’t know if he threw the grenade, so we have no idea if that actually happened. What we do know is that the Canadian government did nothing to prevent his incarceration and mistreatment, and that our Supreme Court ruled his rights had been denied and he was owed an apology. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did apologize and also provided ten and a half million dollars in compensation, most of which is likely to go to Khadr’s lawyers.
So much was written at the time about the case that I will not reiterate the arguments now. I believe the government acted properly, and that one can detest jihadist terrorism and still support Khadr.
What interests me now is the profoundly angry reaction from many Christians. From senior politicians to social media warriors, legions of people who describe themselves as orthodox Roman Catholics, Christian patriots, evangelicals and the like accused those who were sympathetic to Khadr as being supporters of terrorism, of not caring about the family of the deceased soldier, of being in favour of Islamic radicalism and of insulting our own military. (By contrast, The United Church of Canada released a statement that said it “respects” the federal government’s decision to apologize to Khadr.)
There was certainly room for civilized disagreement over what happened, but this was not the spirit of the debate at all. It was no longer right and wrong, but good and bad. I certainly felt the sting of accusation from countless conservative Christians, and I couldn’t help but think of the prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon,” and so on.
I realize that politics doesn’t always lead to easy and comfortable consensus, but I am convinced that the damage done to informed and respectful debate by social media and twenty-four-hour news has inflicted colossal damage on the Christian conversation.
When we are astounded, upset or even hurt by something that is said, we too often reject the speaker rather than the argument. That’s bad enough in secular life. But if we are convinced that everybody is made in the image of God, how dare we act this way? Instead of trying to find the possible merits of an opposing opinion or understand the reasons why the argument was made in the first place, we reduce it to a caricature and then attribute base motives.
We must do better.
And no, that’s not me being Pollyanna. That’s me trying to listen to Jesus Christ.
United Church Observer, July 2017
WE PRAY FOR Christian unity, but in all honesty, while hatreds have thankfully declined, separation is still a gnawing reality. I’m reminded of this each time I visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, regarded as the spot where Jesus Christ was crucified and buried and where the resurrection took place.
So it’s particularly tragic that monks from various factions have made coming to blows over who owns the place something of, well, a bad habit.
In 2008, the police arrested two clergymen who were punching and kicking each other as part of a brawl between the Armenian and Greek Orthodox contingents in the church. Four years earlier, during an Orthodox festival, a door to the Roman Catholic chapel was left open, almost certainly by mistake. The open door was regarded as disrespectful, and a fight ensued. Yet another brawl occurred during a Palm Sunday service when a Greek monk was thrown out of the church by rival clergy. When the Israeli police arrived, they were attacked by everyone present (a rare instance of Christian unity!).
Ancient, dark, and layered in shrines and compartments, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is nothing like a conventional church and more a building constructed piecemeal over what was originally an outdoor execution site and a tomb built into a cave. Western pilgrims tend to be shocked by the overwhelming gaudiness, the sheer confusion of the place.
But this is still the centre of Christianity, surviving in the middle of a place dominated by Islam for more than a thousand years. That it exists at all is a miracle; that it is a magnet for dispute is almost inevitable.
Six denominations control the church, and their internecine disputes can be absurd to the point of hilarity. A ladder that was put over an entrance in the eighteenth century remains there today because the sects cannot agree on who has the authority to touch it.
Some of these groups are aggressively nationalist and still fighting battles that have more to do with geopolitical struggles than with the teachings of Christ. Many evangelicals prefer to think of the Garden Tomb, in another part of the city, as the authentic place of the crucifixion. It isn’t, but it looks like it should be. And what is significant, of course, is that Jesus is in neither of these places. He is risen indeed.
I prefer to recall one of my many visits to this church during the height of the 2006 war in Lebanon. I sat down next to a French Franciscan priest, and we communicated in broken English, French, and Hebrew. I asked him if he still had hope that Christians, and for that matter Muslims and Jews, could eventually find resolution and peace. “Of course,” he answered. “It’s why I am here, why I’m a priest and why I’m a Christian.” Quite so.
iPolitics, July 15, 2019
CONSERVATIVE LEADER ANDREW Scheer is in a very difficult position.
A genuinely decent man, considered by many to be far too timid for the cut and thrust of party politics, he’s a devout and orthodox Roman Catholic leading a party that is divided on socially conservative issues, hoping to govern a country that is largely progressive when it comes to life and sexuality. He treads a fine line on abortion, trying to disguise his personal and theological opposition to women’s choice with all sorts of obfuscating language, and struggles to justify his repeated refusal to march in Pride parades with the flimsy excuse that it’s not necessary because he and his party already support lgbtq+ equality. In fact many in his party certainly do, but Scheer is being a little disingenuous when he allows MPs Lisa Raitt or Michelle Rempel to wave the rainbow flag. You’re the party leader and the gay community is well aware of your absence.
Now comes Scheer’s announcement that he wants to learn more details before he supports a federal proposal to ban what is known as gay conversion therapy. The Liberal government wrote last month to the provinces and territories asking them to stop the discredited and dangerous “therapy” and they want to use the Criminal Code to make it impossible or illegal. In that an international consensus of experts and doctors — as well as politicians from most stripes — agree with this approach, Scheer’s reluctance to support the government roared his ambivalence.
When I was writing my last book, Epiphany, I interviewed a number of men and women who had undergone various forms of conversion theory, and there are perhaps as many as twenty thousand in Canada alone. All of those who I spoke to were still gay, of course, some of them still suffering trauma because of what they had gone through. One tried to take his own life and almost succeeded.
“What you have to realize,” said Gerry, who is now happily married to his long-time partner, “is that they call this a therapy to give it a varnish of medical respectability. But there is nothing medical or scientific about it. The premise of it all is that you are broken, wrong, ill, need help, have to be fixed. Imagine being told that. Imagine what that does to you.”
There are various forms of this alleged therapy, but they are all based on the premise that homosexuality is undesirable, a product of nurture rather than nature and that people can be “cured.” The implication is obvious, and runs against all that Canada embraces scientifically, morally and politically. Yet Andrew Scheer argues that he needs more time and more details before he comes to a decision. That simply doesn’t make sense.
The spin machine went into action only hours after the Leader of the Opposition’s position became clear last week. This had nothing to do with opposing equal marriage, this was not a product of homophobia, if elected the Conservatives would never dream of reopening the marriage debate and so on. Frankly I don’t think a Conservative government would reopen the discussion because the country has moved on, Toronto and Quebec in particular would be aghast and even a large part of Scheer’s party and caucus would be outraged. But that doesn’t mean that back-benchers wouldn’t be allowed to try to initiate a new debate.
There is still a vocal and powerful social conservative bloc within the Conservative party in Ottawa and even more so within the rural and suburban rank-and-file. It was these people who enabled Scheer to defeat Maxime Bernier, just as they pushed Doug Ford past Christine Elliot in Ontario. They probably have a hold of fifteen percent of the membership, and punch well above their weight.
Then there is Scheer himself. The son of a Roman Catholic deacon, he is a committed and conservative believer and like Jason Kenney is on the right of the Church. The catechism of that institution teaches that, “homosexual acts” are “intrinsically immoral and contrary to the natural law,” and that even such tendencies are “objectively disordered.” In other words, those in same-sex relationships are immoral and unnatural and even those who are gay but celibate are disordered. It’s an ugly and jarring language, and while Canada holds to an informal separation of church and state, if a politician’s faith is directly influencing his politics, surely the electorate has a right to know what he believes.
Justin Trudeau is also a Catholic, of course, as was his father and several other prime ministers, but far more on the progressive wing of the Church and, in Justin Trudeau’s case, obviously a major supporter of the LGBTQ+ community. Andrew Scheer has been given several opportunities to silence his critics on these issues and to show that LGBTQ+ Canadians have nothing to fear from his becoming prime minister. Once again, however, he has failed the test, and in spite of his champions rushing to his defence, the repeated pattern is leaving a mark.