Columns

CANADA AND THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

by Ted Schmidt

A religion which ends with the individual, ends.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Israel is the number one family-values issue," he says. "Where does marriage come from? God. Where does the Bible come from? Israel. The first family of Christianity --Jesus, Mary, and Joseph-- were all Jewish. Israel is the source of everything we have."
Charles McVety

If evangelicals believe that God cares about the fate of a fetus, it shouldn't require a huge leap in logic to surmise that God cares about people of colour or prisoners or immigrants or those with an orientation other than heterosexual.
Randall Balmer in Thy Kingdom Come

 

In previous columns, I have written about the extraordinary influence of the Christian right on the catastrophic presidency of George W. Bush, widely regarded as the worst in living memory. It is difficult to evaluate the harm done to Christianity at this time, but it is considerable. Not wanting to tar all stripes of Christianity with too negative a brush, nevertheless the overall abysmal performance of the "true believers" and their Christian standard bearer, George Bush, have left moderate Christians disheartened and depressed. By almost any biblical standard, the overt appellation of "Christian" as applied to the present American president and his cohort leaves too much to be desired.

     The surest standard and benchmark for any "Christian" presidency is the treatment of the poor and as the McClatchy group of newspapers showed, the number of people living in extreme poverty had grown by 26 per cent since 2000. It reported that, "poverty as a whole has worsened, too, but the number of severe poor is growing 56 per cent faster than the overall segment of the population characterized as poor --about 37 million people in all according to the census data. That represents more than 10 per cent of the U.S. population, which recently surpassed the 300 million mark."

     The UN Human Development Fund ranks the U.S. dead last in fighting poverty, near to the bottom in fighting illiteracy, one of the lowest levels of life expectancy in the developed world, the greatest income disparity and the highest number of citizens without health care, a child poverty level (22 percent) second only to Mexico. All this in the most religious country in the world.

     According to the National Priorities Project (http://nationalpriorities.org) the cost of the war in Iraq as of April 30, 2007 is a staggering $420 billion, which might have been creatively diverted to the hiring of 7,208,222 additional public school teachers for one year. Or "we could have built 3,745,119 additional housing units."

     In Iraq, a UN report states that one third of Iraqis live in poverty --a nation that enjoyed prosperity less than three decades ago. The report says: From a thriving middle-income economy in the 1970s and 1980s, Iraq has been reduced to a state where one-third of households live on the equivalent of less than $70 a week.

     "A country like Iraq which is blessed ... with the largest potential of natural resources [and] the highest quality of human resources, has been brought to its knees by human hands," said Paolo Lembo, the director of the UN Development Program in Iraq in early April.

     Evangelicals and the Christian Right were amply rewarded with plum posts at every level of the Bush presidency. Bush's brain, the cynical Karl Rove, discovered that "gay marriage" had overtaken "abortion" as a defining and dividing issue for the American right. This played well at home though the attempt to link gay marriage with "an assault on the institution of marriage" seemed far-fetched to most Americans. Esther Kaplan in her book With God on Their Side quotes respected researcher and past president of the National Council on Family Relations, William Doherty, who agreed with the Christian Right that heterosexual marriages were in trouble. But blame should not rest on homosexuals desiring marriage.

     Doherty wisely puts the blame elsewhere, on the several stress points in American culture --job loss, falling into poverty, addictions and so on. But the emerging culprit is overwork. The Religious Right who give their votes to Bush do not grasp that the market idolatry which the Republicans relentlessly promote is an active marriage wrecker. In this worldview, the market and work schedules come first and the abysmal public policies of the Bushites --the lack of access to decent health care and child care, terrible vacation policies, shockingly low minimum wages, mandatory overtime, assaults on the union movement, the loss of decent waged manufacturing jobs in the globalized economy-- all conspire to shatter family cohesiveness. The irony here is that divorce rates are higher in the Bible belt than the "liberal" Northeast.

     On the global stage the only funding available to fight the AIDS pandemic was for abstinence programs. This strategy while laudable in its idealism and genuinely needed in a sex-obsessed, overheated North American culture (largely created by corporate Republican free marketers) is surely short-sighted, unrealistic and hardly comprehensive. Any group which does not play ball with the Bushites is visited with the full force of the state, usually tax audits. At an international gathering in Bangkok (2002) the United States, in concert with the Vatican, aggressively attempted to strong-arm poor nations (some of whom are in receipt of U.S. military aid) into an "abstinence" approach to AIDS. The Bush "pro life" program was defeated 32-1. Groups like the powerful Focus on Family cheered on this shortsighted policy of the Bush presidency despite the massive undoing of years of diplomatic cooperation in this area.

     Perhaps the most deleterious effect of the Religious Right and the Bush White House is their promotion of junk science, the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political (read "religious") ends. Lies about pregnancy prevention and condom use, unproven links between abortion and breast cancer, rejection of virtual unanimous scientific opinion on global warming and anything else which contradicts corporate or Religious Right principles, have become epidemic here. Scientific committees have been stacked with those who see the facts through their narrow evangelical prisms. This is the same embarrassing anti-intellectualism which sunk Stockwell Day's run for Prime Minister years ago. When Paul Hunter of the CBC revealed that Day believed humans walked the earth with dinosaurs, Canadians unanimously decided they did not want a man who harboured such beliefs as their leader.

     Hundreds of these true believers have been hired by the Bush administration. Their professional qualifications are secondary to their hard right beliefs. The strategy is always one of quiet infiltration. Televangelist Pat Robertson, an end timer believer in the coming apocalypse, boasted that 150 graduates of his Regent University are now in the Bush White House. Robertson's great comrade-in-arms, Jerry Falwell, two days after the attacks on the Twin towers blamed the attack on "the pagans, and the abortionists, the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," as well as "the Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way." Robertson's response? " I totally concur." One wonders at the quality of civil servants educated in this worldview.

     In a chilling book With God on Their Side (St. Martin's Press), Michael Weinstein, 1977 graduate of one of the military academies and a lifelong Republican, describes a fundamentalist takeover of the armed forces, turning it into a taxpayer-supported Evangelical institution. Religious events are shamelessly presented, new recruits proselytized and evangelical interests conflated with America. Weinstein's book should send chills up and down everybody's spine. God the warrior is on the job cleansing evil!

Catholics move right

Since statistics show that pro-fetus Catholics are strongly attached to the Church, many adopt an absolutist position on abortion and its elevation to almost a sole litmus test for the appellation "Catholic." In the United States, the Machiavellian Rove, has managed to swing enough Catholics over to the Republican Party on the guise that it is only the Republicans who are guardians of morality, protectors of life and the family. Sadly, pro life Catholics end up buying his whole package and an anti-abortion position suddenly gets translated into --anti gay rights, anti feminism, forget the poor, war making, pro death penalty and silence on the environment as a serious ethical concern.

     In the last election, spurred on by nine Catholic bishops, who publicly stated that they would not give communion to John Kerry because of is "pro choice position," these manipulated Catholics, gave the election to George W. Bush with predictable disastrous results. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Robert Kennedy's daughter and the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, represents many Catholics, in particular women, when in her recent book Failing America's Faithful (2007) she stated: "These faith-based movements have cheapened our churches. They have diminished our civic life. And they have ultimately failed our spirit."

     Austin Ruse, President of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute at the United Nations (C-FAM), and the Vice President of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, is fairly typical of the astonishing positive evaluation of President Bush and his presidency. "I do believe he is a true man of Faith, unlike maybe any president that we have ever had, in my life time. He knows when he is with family --that is to say, people who are true believers." Presumably this would include the true believers of Iraq whose lives and families Bush has played havoc with. At present there are two million Iraqi refugees, both inside and outside the war-riven country.

The Religious Right in Canada

Now it is no secret that Stephen Harper, Canada's Prime Minister, is a great lover of the American president and the cowboy capitalism of our neighbours to the south. A compendium of Harper quotes, from his support for the Iraq war ("We support the war effort and believe we should be supporting our troops and our allies and be there with them doing everything necessary to win." April 2, 2003) to his low opinion of our country ("Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status December 12, 2000) to his rejection of the Kyoto Accord puts the Prime Minister out of synch with most Canadians. But that is no crime. Canadians will make their own determination on Mr. Harper at the appropriate time. But Canadians should be worried about the influence of the religious right, given the damage it has done to the common good south of the 49th parallel.

     What then is the relationship, if any, with the U.S. Religious Right?

     James ("Homosexuality will destroy the earth") Dobson an influential pontificator (Focus on Family) in the U.S. is now making inroads in Canada. Supported by its American parent, Focus now has an eleven-person office in Ottawa. Former head Darrell Reid, a policy wonk for Preston Manning, is now deputy director of policy and research in Stephen Harper's office. A failed Tory candidate in two elections, Reid also was part of a group (FOTF), which consistently denied the reality of climate change. This is the consistent pattern of this brand of Christianity. Their legitimate focus on the family more than often leads them into less than Christian positions on other matters of serious importance. The Catholic variant is a mixture of two strains. The first are the Market Catholics.

     Market Catholics are those who vote their economic privilege. They have no interest in Catholic social teaching, which is a strong defender of the Common Good. The second group one might call Right to Life Catholics. These are most often sincere people with a genuine concern for life in the womb. This concern for fetal life sadly and too often, does not translate into the "seamless garment" of other life issues. As well, they are unable to admit that abortion is a deeply complicated and tangled issue. They have little time for those who hesitate to condemn those who agonize over this terribly difficult decision.

     In a remarkable piece of investigative journalism, Marci McDonald wrote an exhaustive article in Walrus magazine (October 2006) on the topic of the influence of the Religious Right in Canada. It is obvious that institutional Catholic and evangelical concerns converge in the area of "family values." There is no reason why Catholics should not be engaging in dialogue with all stripes of Christians, and no reason why we should not converge on issues of mutual importance, and indeed the support of the family is one such issue. But as McDonald infers in her article, some of these people are strange bedfellows.

McVety and Hagee cheerleaders of Christian Zionism

Charles McVety is one such person. President of Canada Christian College, McVety headed up the Defend Marriage Coalition, an umbrella organization cobbled together to defend "traditional marriage." Catholic groups included here were Real Women of Canada, Campaign Life, and the Catholic Civil Rights League. As I wrote in part one of this series, McVety was totally out of his league debating journalist Chris Hedges on the University of Toronto campus. A vigorous defender of America's religious right, McVety continually elicited groans from the audience with his literalist interpretation of scripture, and his embarrassing and sarcastic attempts to ridicule the theologically trained Hedges, himself the son of a Presbyterian minister.

     In the recent past, McVety has invited John Hagee, the Texas televangelist and apocalyptic endtimer to Canada. The latter, whose fantastic scriptural interpretations places him beyond the pale of Catholic biblical scholarship, has a huge TV following south of the border. Both Hagee and McVety share the dispensationalist beliefs of Christian Zionism, which has been absolutely rejected by the Christian leaders of Israel/Palestine. This coalition includes the Catholic patriarch, Michel Sabbah. In part the leaders said that this is "a worldview where the Gospel is identified with the ideology of empire, colonialism and militarism. In its extreme form, it places an emphasis on apocalyptic events leading to the end of history rather than living Christ's love and justice today."

     It is the Religious Right's unqualified and blinkered support of Israel, under-girded as it is by a comic-book phantasmagoria of Armageddon violence, which is a major stumbling block to peace in the Middle East. Despite the implied putdown of Judaism (Jews must convert before Armageddon in this scenario) Israel has embraced this theologically discredited movement as trusted allies. As the mainline Christian denominations gradually discovered the legitimate rights of the Palestinians, Israeli politicians went fishing for allies elsewhere. This new unholy alliance with men like Hagee and McVety is bad news for Christianity. Those interested in a justice position on the Middle East would do well to read Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.

     Hagee's book Jerusalem Countdown is a preposterous mix of literalist proof-texting, which flies in the face of current biblical scholarship. "We are facing a countdown in the Middle East," Hagee says. "It is a countdown that will usher in the end of this world." Both Hagee and McVety are unrepentant cheerleaders for Israel. Prime Minister Harper, in last year's Lebanon conflict, was pictured with an Israeli flag outraging Canada's larger Muslim community. Canadians have every reason to be concerned with the current government's embrace of such fellow travellers.

     One legitimately wonders about the newfound embrace of the Catholic community with evangelicals like this. On the one hand, it is not wrong to gather together in a common cause such as bolstering the family. The Catholic Organization for Life and the Family (COLF) now leads the advocacy work of the Catholic Church in Canada. COLF is mostly funded by non-Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) monies, largely from the U.S. Knights of Columbus.

     In the halcyon days of the 1970s the Canadian church supported the justice coalitions in vigorous ways, often out-front as spokesmen on justice issues of vital importance to Canadians. Now they seem to have expended most of their moral capital on "family values" and issues of personal morality --areas where they arguably have less credibility.

     Theologically the episcopal decision to back off peace and justice issues in favour of "Catholic identity" has been poorly thought out. Quite simply, you cannot have a "Catholic identity" based on externals which differentiate us from others. There is no Catholic identity outside of solidarity with the poor and beyond the pursuit of God's reign of peace and justice. As Pope Paul Vl said in his 1975 encyclical On Proclaiming the Good News. "As an evangelizer, Christ first of all proclaims a kingdom, the kingdom of God; and this is so important that, by comparison, everything else becomes 'the rest,' which is 'given in addition.' Only the kingdom therefore is absolute and it makes everything else relative."

     The pursuit of the reign of God got the Church in trouble just as it got Jesus in trouble. This was especially true in Latin America and in the Reagan White House. Serious discipleship will do that. As Catholics ascended into middle-class normalcy, many were disturbed by this new justice advocacy, and as the rise of neo-conservatism advanced, a failure of nerve afflicted the Church and a new institutional fundamentalism appeared. Cowed by the criticism of the dominant classes, the Church backed off on justice issues, retreated back to the safety of the institution, substituted charity for justice and became obsessed with pelvic orthodoxy, a topic hardly central to the biblical witness.

     Now church activities and "spiritual matters" gained the ascendancy. Rather than being concerned with getting the Church into the world, she became concerned with getting people into the church. A new traditionalism appeared threatened by diversity and pluralism. The institution cut back on "kingdom" activities and instead offered God's hungry people a pale religious services church coupled with a strange popolatry. There was a real backing off world engagement, and aside from nominal funding of groups like Kairos there has been little passion for ecumenical peace and justice work.

     Since 2005 the bishops have not given any of their own money to Kairos, leaving it up to Development and Peace (the Catholic development agency to fund the coalition). For many years the CCCB was hobbled by the astronomical debt which the last papal tour incurred. This money certainly could have been used to fund justice initiatives in Canada.

     A veteran observer of the nexus of faith and politics is former Member of Parliament Dennis Gruending. An Ottawa writer, Gruending is also a former director of information for the CCCB. In an article he wrote for the online journal Straight Goods (January 2006), Gruending concluded that some evangelical groups, some Catholic groups, and some bishops (through the selective positions they were taking), were, in effect steering voters toward the Conservatives in the last election.

     Gruending's piece was followed by an Ipsos-Reid poll, which stated that 67 percent of Protestants who attend a weekly church service voted Tory. For Catholics the number was 42 percent. Gruending believes this is significant given Catholics long association with the Liberal Party. His questions would certainly be mine: "1) Why did these people vote as they did --did churches per se (in the case of evangelicals) and the hierarchy (in the case) of the Catholics nudge people over to the Conservatives, or were there other reasons for this? 2) Was this a blip or an indication of a new reality in Canadian politics? There is much to think about."

     Indeed there is.

     On the one hand we should not be too alarmist. Canadians seem less than impressed with the American Religious Right. Our culture has a much stronger separation of church and state than our American cousins. We have looked askance at the failed attempt of George W. Bush to "evangelize" America. Previous articles have attempted to point out that, by virtually every yardstick, the Gospel's evangelical values find little or no resonance in the Republican world of Bush and Rove.

     Randall Balmer, a well-known American evangelical,iest Americans, the prosecution of a war in the Middle East that has enraged our longtime allies and would not meet even the barest of just war criteria, a re-jigging of social security which most experts agree would fray the social safety net for the poorest. Public education is imperiled to the evident satisfaction of the Religious Right which seeks to replace science curricula with theology thereby transforming students into catechumens. America's disproportionate consumption of energy continues unabated, the Kyoto Protocol has been jettisoned, corporate interests are treated with the kind of reverence reserved for the deity." And so the list goes on.

     Balmer continues: "The gap between the rich and the poor accelerates, torture of human beings, God's creatures, has been justified. I never missed Sunday school as a kid but I must have missed the lesson that said it was OK to despoil the environment by sacrificing it on the altar of free enterprise", the author sardonically comments.

     Balmer expresses his frustration with evangelical leaders whom he describes as friends. Silence all around.

     And what about abortion? "They have never tried to outlaw it. Why? It is a very potent political weapon. One guaranteed to mobilize their base and get out the vote."

Wise as serpents

That increasing numbers of Catholics have fallen for the above on the grounds of "family values" is indeed sad on almost every level. That several members of the U.S. hierarchy de facto blessed the Bush campaign is simply further proof that the clerical hierarchy is not reading the signs of the times with much clarity.

     Canadians have seen the canary in the coalmine and so far have rejected it. Marci McDonald in her Walrus article states that there are about 75 evangelicals in the Conservative caucus, most from the West. Preston Manning is brought in to tutor these political neophytes on how to fly below the radar of Canadian public awareness. She describes a seminar Manning gave to these MPs in Ottawa. Manning chose Matthew 10:16, the classic text which advises disciples that they are going out "like sheep among wolves" and they must be "Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves." As Manning says," In other words, be shrewd --be as smart as the other guy-- but be gracious. Be non-threatening."

     That is the strategy born of experience. Many of these true believers have shown their true colours when speaking about homosexual people, the end times, or humans walking with dinosaurs. This makes Canadians very nervous.

     That the master giving the class is Preston Manning should make Canadians doubly wary, certainly not because of Manning's fine personal qualities. The theology, however, is pure individualist. Social Credit scholar Alvin Finkel (in Murray Dobbin's book on Manning) described the former Reform leader's theology as "the gospel of individualism...humans are essentially alone in the struggle to achieve eternal salvation." This privatized and truncated gospel sees little room for the state in ameliorating social inequities. Finkel stated: "A collectivist state belittled the struggled for salvation...giving in to the individual societal benefits such as free medical care breeds idleness...causing a breakdown in his relationship with God. The Mannings, père et fils, of course embraced the gospel of free enterprise. Ernest Manning, the father, firmly opposed Medicare, and Preston, as we know, has spent his political career trying to disabuse us of our need for a social safety net. Given his long service to huge oil companies as well as his stint in the U.S. doing research for the U.S. military, Manning in Dobbin's words, "wishes to take us back to the world of the free market and the survival of the fittest where the individual in his evangelical view must be 'essentially alone to seek the grace of God.'"

     For Catholics whose vision is profoundly communitarian, this individualist lens is badly out of focus. Indeed it is true that we need always to be in a deep dialogue with all members of the human community, but forging too close an alliance with those who define family in such a blinkered and ungenerous way is surely perilous. Once again we need to wear the many coloured "seamless garment" cloak of a myriad of social justice issues. When a preoccupation with abortion and "pelvic orthodoxy" narrows our gaze we rapidly lose our credibility both inside and outside our faith family.

     Kathleen Kennedy Townsend with her long experience in public life has good advice for Canadian Catholics: "For the Catholic Church that means beginning to preach a more balanced vision of the earthly ethics our faith requires --a bold, broad form of Christian virtue....it means amplifying the voices of leaders who understand the moral authority of the Church expansively, not narrowly."

Ted Schmidt is the former editor of Catholic New Times. He can be reached at jtschmidt@rogers.com. His blog is http://theologyinthevineyard.wordpress.com/