Voting for Jesus: Marci McDonald’s ‘The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada’ – Nick Dion

If we are to believe Tuesday’s Toronto Star, the release of Marci McDonald’s The Armageddon Factor this past week was a much-anticipated event. Building on an article that she wrote a few years back for The Walrus magazine, McDonald’s book charts the rise of Christian nationalism in Canada and demonstrates the extent of its political influence over the current federal government. In this respect, I was expecting something similar to Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, which dealt with the influence of the religious right in US politics from Reagan onwards.My curiosity was sufficiently peaked to pick up a copy of the book on its release date. I was not expecting an academic text; McDonald made no pretensions of presenting one. This is not a theory-laden trudge through the relationship between religion and politics. Rather, the piece is a work of investigative journalism, prepared after years of research and interviews with key figures of Canadian evangelicalism and of government. As such, I have decided to deal with this book today for three reasons: 1) it remains relevant to the blog’s mandate, as a work of public interest dealing with the intersection of religion and the public sphere; 2) its topic parallels that of current academic work in the study of religion; 3) it could serve as a primary source of material for certain academic projects.

With the term ‘Christian nationalist’, McDonald denotes a heterogeneous brand of politically active right-wing Christian groups and denominations working behind the scenes to turn Canada into a distinctly Christian nation. Striving to achieve a political voice similar to that of American evangelicals (and often trained and/or sponsored by these same groups), ‘Christian nationalists’ want to create a country run by bible believers for bible believers, one in which the word of scripture takes precedence over that of secular courts. Ultimately, McDonald wishes to challenge those Canadians who look at the American political landscape and wag their fingers, convinced that ‘that could never happen here’. In fact, McDonald argues, we are much closer than we would like to think.

In a sense, I am much more interested in the public conversation that will (hopefully) result from this book than in the information that it has to present since, to be honest, this information is not likely to be as surprising as McDonald would like it to be, at least not to those of us who watch the news and pay attention to the legislative machinations of the Harper government. I remember discussing with colleagues, a few years ago, whether the fact that conservative MPs could attend bible study together on Parliament Hill respected the separation of church and state (however one might define it). McDonald takes these sorts of examples and builds on them. She describes prayer festivals, like TheCry, where evangelicals assemble on Parliament Hill and pray for Canada, decrying the moral perversion of legalised abortion and homosexual unions. She chronicles the rise of some of Canada’s most prominent evangelical leaders, laying out their ties to the American Christian right and to Harper cabinet ministers. And finally, she looks closely at the Canada that these groups are lobbying to create, one in which the gay marriage debate is reopened, in which the government continues to misdirect and misinform the Canadian public concerning issues of scientific import like climate change (since, when the world is already ending, what’s the point in saving it?), in which multiculturalism gives way to state Christianity, and in which courts do not uphold the Charter of Rights and Freedoms but rather turn to the bible for guidance.

Surprisingly, perhaps, if anyone gets off looking relatively clean in McDonald’s exposition, it is Prime Minister Stephen Harper. With a chapter carefully examining Harper’s own born-again experience, McDonald depicts him as a ‘rational Christian’ and a shrewd strategist, one who understands where his base is and tries to balance keeping them happy with respecting parliamentary procedure. He does, after all, only hold a minority government. The major difference between, say, Pierre Trudeau and Stephen Harper is the openness with which the latter is willing to speak openly about his faith and use it to justify political decisions, a shift never observed in Canadian politics until now, according to McDonald.

And, in a way, this relatively sympathetic presentation of the Prime Minister makes sense; McDonald is much more interested, I would argue, in drawing a portrait of the Christian nationalist lobby than she is in making the direct connection between this lobby and the Conservative government. The lobby’s agenda, unsurprisingly, does not differ too much from that of evangelicals down south: ban abortion, keep homosexuals from marrying, get conservative control of the courts, bomb the enemy, protect Israel, teach creationism in schools and train the next generation to keep the fight going. So when the government makes a move that seems to appeal to this lobby, by keeping abortion debate off the G20 schedule, by cutting arts funding to organisations that produce objectionable material, or by denying climate change, the reader is left to assume that the lobby was successful; the direct link is never made. Could there not be another, rational reason for opposing euthanasia? Must objections always be grounded in religion?

The prominence of Christian evangelicals – I have used the term frequently thus far – is obvious in McDonald’s text. She starts off the book, however, dealing with a much broader category; her ‘Christian nationalists’ can also be conservative Catholics, and share close affinities with other religious groups, conservative Jews, for example, who are equally influential on certain matters of foreign policy, Middle Eastern policies especially. These nationalists are not always born Canadians either. The worldwide spread of Pentecostalism guarantees that many immigrants will find a place within these nationalist groups as well.

The geographical scope of McDonald’s project is also worth considering. Religious groups in Quebec, despite Harper’s (momentary) popularity in the province and the (equally brief) rise of the conservative Action démocratique du Québec, are completely absent from McDonald’s picture. So are the Maritime provinces. In fact, McDonald spends much of her time out West in British Columbia (Abbotsford, the Fraser Valley) and Alberta (Red Deer especially), as well as in Ontario, largely in the Greater Toronto area and in Ottawa.

Reading The Armageddon Factor, I often felt as if I had picked up a book on the American evangelical lobby. In a way, I guess that was the point – to demonstrate that the differences between the political landscapes of the two countries are only perceived differences. But I also found my reaction to the book a bit disturbing; I did not shake my head in shame or gasp in horror nearly as often as I thought I might. Why? Somehow, the book failed to make the issue hit home. Granted, part of this stems from my lack of surprise at the book’s revelations; I could have told you five years ago that there were evangelical lobby groups in Canada. I was also unsure what McDonald wanted us to do about this. The obvious answer in any democratic society, of course, is to let the book’s revelations inform our vote. If democracies at best assure the representation of a motivated few, we have to make sure that Canadian evangelicals are not the only ‘motivated few’ voters. At the same time, there are plenty of government lobbies that I do not like; I would rather Big Oil or Big Pharma had less of a say than they do as well. Are they any less dangerous than Big Jesus?

Finally, McDonald should leave us considering what the place of a Christian Left (should such a thing exist) lobby might be in Canadian politics, and what positive role (if any) an intrusion of certain kinds of religion into politics can bring.