Marci The Victim

Marci McDonald complains about "right wing attacks"

Writing a column in the Ottawa Citizen, Marci McDonald -- of The Armageddon Factor fame -- complains that she's been treated rather unjustly by Canada's conservative media.

Citing sources of attack such as Ezra Levant, David Frum and Blazing Cat Fur, McDonald decries the injustice of it all, and insists that she had no malignant intent in mind.

She writes:

"I've found myself in a firestorm of controversy, the object of distinctly un-Christian invective and the unbridled wrath of the right-wing blogosphere. Charting the uneasy minuet of religion and politics in Stephen Harper's Ottawa appears to have given me a level of notoriety summed up in a current title on the best-seller list: I am, as one friend quipped, the girl who kicked the hornet's nest."

Others would argue rather differently: they would argue that McDonald invented the hornet's nest out of nearly whole cloth, then deliberately punted at conservative and Evangelical Christian Canadians.

If she didn't do so herself, she's clearly been content to decline to speak out against the numerous Canadian ideologues using her book as a tool of cultural warfare against conservatives.

She in particular identifies Ezra Levant as the alleged source of her woes. But within her complaints about Levant's admittedly-vociferous criticism of her comes an interesting admission:

"We clearly missed four errors among the litany he alleged and will correct them at the earliest chance.

But his zeal does raise an obvious question: Do four errors in 400 pages constitute what he calls an 'error-riddled' book?"

If ony there were only four errors in McDonald's book. But as many experts have pointed out, McDonald's work is indeed laden with errors -- factual, interpretive and conceptual.

One must turn again to the review of McDonald's book by Yale PhD candidate Molly Worthen, who points out the numerous follies of McDonald's book.

To start with, Worthen points out that McDonald has polarized Evangelical Chrisitians into two camps:

"She reduces their diverse beliefs to two extreme nodes: Christian Reconstructionism, a theocratic vision that seeks 'dominion' over society by reinstating Mosaic law; and dispensationalist premillennialism, a view of the end times in which human history tumbles into chaos until Christ sweeps up believers in the Rapture and fights the final battle of Armageddon."

Moreover, McDonald's source notes reveal an effort to simply transplant politically-motivated fear mongering from south of the border north of the 49th parallel:

"Her source notes reveal that her account relies heavily on a handful of books by American journalists who over-simplified evangelical thought in an effort to galvanize liberals during the George W Bush era."

Moreover, as it turns out, McDonald doesn't even have the most damaging insinuation of her book -- the suggestion of a theocratic bent amongst Canadian Evangelical Christians -- right:

"Some of her subjects may indeed dream of ruling Canada by divine mandate, but she paints all – from Dutch Reformed to Lutheran to Mennonite – with the same theocratic brush, despite the fact that many of these churches have either rejected or severely qualified their views of Christian 'dominion' and the Rapture-centred vision of end times. Although most evangelicals still believe that prophecy has something to do with current events, premillennialism has mellowed significantly in recent years."

In other words, McDonald suggests that the idea of premillienialism is becoming more dangerous at a time when it is, in fact, becoming less dangerous -- if there was ever any significant danger at all.

Worthen also points out that McDonald rushes to find any hint of Christian Reconstructionism so she ignores key elements of the philosophy of politically-engaged Christians:

"The Evangelicals that McDonald meets occasionally declare their 'biblical worldview' or denounce the myth of neutrality in the public sphere. What she takes for the language of Christian Reconstructionism is actually a feature of Reformed cultural theology, a broad tradition that urges Christians to engage in all spheres of life through a unified worldview. To miss this point is fundamentally to misunderstand the intellectual position of many evangelicals. They have critiqued secular ideas of objectivity and the exclusion of religion from the public square by suggesting that in this postmodern age – when even atheist philosophers doubt there is just one true understanding of reality – Christian presuppositions are no less valid grounds for a worldview than those of secular rationalism. McDonald does not take on this argument, nor give the reader any hint of this broader context."

Based on all of this -- the assessment of an actual expert on Evangelical Christianity -- it's clear that McDonald's book is troubled by far more than simply four of the errors cited by Ezra Levant. Yet just as McDonald has yet to intercede against the Murray Dobbins and Dennis Gruendings of Canada who are intent on using her book as a weapon in a culture war that they are gleefully eager to fight, McDonald seems to have yet to respond to this criticism.

Better for McDonald to tackle the Levants and Frums of the world -- whom McDonald's target demographic already despise -- than the criticisms offered by experts. All while McDonald tries to pretend she's playing nice with the real experts on Canadian Evangelical Christianity -- individuals like Lloyd Mackey, who knows the subject far better than she does -- and insisting that she's a moderate.

Apparently, people are supposed to simply overlook passages such as this, in which she suggests that Canadian Evangelicals would transform Canada into a:

"Christian nation [in which] non-believers ... have no place, and those in violation of biblical law, notably homosexuals and adulterers, would merit severe punishment and the sort of shunning that once characterized a society where suspected witches were burned."

This, despite the fact that McDonald simply has it wrong. The extreme fringes of the far left, who so desperately want McDonald's conclusions to be true, will ignore simply ignore this. It's always been their modus operandi.

McDonald, in the meantime, will continue to aid them by playing the victim card.

It's a sad, sad gambit from someone whose work has been judged, tested, and found wanting.

Those Not-So-Scary Evangelicals

Yale PHD candidate offers her take on Armageddon Factor

Marci McDonald's The Armageddon Factor, the book which has set Canada's far left alight, is a mixed bag of fastidious research, misunderstood theology, and rhetoric leeched from politically-motivated works offered in the United States.

So says Yale scholar Molly Worthen, a PHD candidate who is an expert on Evangelical Christianity, and its relationship to politics.

Worthen takes issue with McDonald's treatment of Evangelical Christians. Her book doesn't seem to give them sufficient respect in the sense of being autonomous and thinking human beings.

"McDonald has spent hundreds of hours interviewing evangelicals, but still seems to view them as Christian zombies masked as ordinary citizens, who 'burble' and 'enthuse' rather than merely speak, and whose emotional prayers make them look like 'kung fu masters channelling spiritual vibes,'" Worthen writes. "She reduces their diverse beliefs to two extreme nodes: Christian Reconstructionism, a theocratic vision that seeks 'dominion' over society by reinstating Mosaic law; and dispensationalist premillennialism, a view of the end times in which human history tumbles into chaos until Christ sweeps up believers in the Rapture and fights the final battle of Armageddon."

In fact, McDonald's work suffers from an over-reliance on American works that actively sought to spread panic about the alleged theocratic agenda of George W Bush for political ends.

"Her source notes reveal that her account relies heavily on a handful of books by American journalists who over-simplified Evangelical thought in an effort to galvanize liberals during the George W Bush era," Worthen explains, noting that McDonald fails to give sufficient credence to the diversity of Canadian Evangelical demoninations.

"Some of her subjects may indeed dream of ruling Canada by divine mandate, but she paints all – from Dutch Reformed to Lutheran to Mennonite – with the same theocratic brush, despite the fact that many of these churches have either rejected or severely qualified their views of Christian 'dominion' and the Rapture-centred vision of end times," Worthen continues. "Although most Evangelicals still believe that prophecy has something to do with current events, premillennialism has mellowed significantly in recent years."

While Worthen notes that McDonald has spent a great deal of time researching Evangelical Christianity in Canada, she hasn't spent nearly as much time on the subject as Lloyd Mackey.

Mackey categorizes Canadian Evangelical Christianity into seven cores:

-Mainstream Evangelical Churches.
-Pentecostal Assemblies, who embrace emotion as the core of their worship.
-Evangelical churches of the Charismatic Tradition, who embrace Pentecostal worship techniques within a theological foundation derived from Catholicism.
-Reformed Evangelical churches, who embrace Calvinism.
-Evengelical churches of the Holiness Tradition, who embrace Christian charity via the Social Gospel.
-Ethnic Evangelicals -- Evangelicals who immigrate to Canada from abroad.
-Evangelicals within mainstream Christian churches.

Understanding the amount of theological diversity within Canadian Evangelical Christianity leads to a better understanding of Worthen's criticism of McDonald's work. Though McDonald may treat Evangelical Christianity as monolithic, it's anything but.

By doing this, McDonald commits another error: while she treats the Evangelicals she speaks to as representative of the whole, the choices McDonald has made in which Evangelicals she interviewed for her book further mis-coloured this representation.

"The Evangelicals that McDonald meets occasionally declare their 'biblical worldview' or denounce the myth of neutrality in the public sphere," Worthen writes. "What she takes for the language of Christian Reconstructionism is actually a feature of Reformed cultural theology, a broad tradition that urges Christians to engage in all spheres of life through a unified worldview. To miss this point is fundamentally to misunderstand the intellectual position of many evangelicals."

"They have critiqued secular ideas of objectivity and the exclusion of religion from the public square by suggesting that in this postmodern age – when even atheist philosophers doubt there is just one true understanding of reality – Christian presuppositions are no less valid grounds for a worldview than those of secular rationalism," Worthen notes. "McDonald does not take on this argument, nor give the reader any hint of this broader context."

McDonald also makes the error of mistaking many mundane political activities as exceptional.

"McDonald sees Christian nationalist conspiracy everywhere she looks," Worthen concludes. "Yet much of what she describes sounds merely like politics as usual, which perhaps makes it no less disturbing to some."

Worthen concludes -- quite rightly -- that in a country as characterized by religious tension as Canada has been, Canadians perhaps should be wary of politically-active believers.

"In a country where religious conflict has historically threatened the foundations of Confederation, where political culture is as much buttoned-up and British as it is non-American, and where most view the American zoo of politicized faith as the great exception of the civilized world, Canadian Evangelicals who set their minds on politics do not have to be zealots in order to be disconcerting," Worthen explains.

Clearly, those in a rush to believe The Armageddon Factor to be an exhaustive expose on any danger posed by Evangelical Christianity would be well-advised to curb their enthusiasm.

After all, if Marci McDonald has so clearly misjudged and misunderstood Evangelical Christianity, it's more than reasonable to wonder what kind of errors she's made in her treatment of other denominations.


Other bloggers writing about this topic:

Deborah Gyapong - "More on Marci McDonald's Bigoted anti-Christian Book

Strictly Right - "New Canadian Anti-Christian, Anti-Israel Book

Dean Skoreyko - "Goldstein Challenges Others in the Media to Cover Positive Christian Stories"

Hmmmm. Yeah. About That Whole "Religious Nonsense" Thing...

Arrogance and historical ignorance rarely combine well

Readers of the Nexus will almost certainly remember Audrey, the proprietor of Enormous Thriving Plants, hanging her intellectual rear end out for a good flogging.

In the post in question, Audrey takes aim at One Nation Under God, a painting by Jon McNaughton featuring numerous American historical figures receiving the US Constitution from Jesus Christ.

In particular, Audrey dismisses the painting as "religious nonsense", as if that alone were enough to dispell the message it promotes.

Some other responses to the painting accuse it of being historically inaccurate, as if McNaughton would be shocked to learn that Jesus himself hadn't written and delivered the American Constition to that country's founding fathers.

It's a facetious argument, and clearly intended to be as such. But with metaphor so frequently proving to be the lifeblood of art, one couldn't accuse the painting's criics of reading too much into the work. Indeed, they could be accused of reading far too little into it.

Factually, Jesus Christ did not deliver the US Constitution in person, and most certainly not before George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, JFK and various archetypical characters. But Christian values were deeply imbedded in the establishment of the United States from the very conception of the British colonies.

As it turns out, Audrey and the sleaze who tend to populate Wonkette are only a few among the many, many people who could benefit from familiarizing themselves with the work of Molly Worthen.

Worthen's historical work has traced the influence of Christianity through the development of the United States in the form of the civil religion.

A civil religion is a political discourse that takes on the sacred elements of religion.

According to Worthen, the American civil religion is built around establishing the American colonies, and later the United States, as "God's model society", a social bluepint that could then be exported back to Britain and to the rest of the world. She identifies Reverend John Winthrop, the original Governor of Massachussets, as a central figure in the establishment of the American civil religion, the first man to speak of the American colonies as a "shining city on the hill", that enduring vision of American exceptionalism.

The spread of the Puritan religion westward in the wake of the Puritan's disillusionment with Britain led first to the undermining of religion as the central focus in people's lives by more imperative matters of survival, but eventually to various religious revivals -- which, according to Worthen, actually originated in Canada -- and eventually to the rise of Evangelical Christianity.

The influence of Evangelical Christianity can be found in notions such as the separation of Church and State -- Evanglical faith did seek to conversions, but demanded voluntary conversions, as opposed to conversions mandated or encouraged by the state.

In this, Secular Humanists and Evangelical Christians worked closely together.

As many of the critics of McNaughton's painting have pointed out, the US Constitution indeed doesn't explicitly refer to God or Christianity at any point.

But this doesn't mean that Christian principles -- particularly those promoted by Reverend Winthrop -- didn't deeply embody these values.

For example, in his speech "A Model of Christian Charity", Winthrop called upon his congregation "first to hold conformity with the rest of his world, being delighted to show forth the glory of his wisdom in the variety and difference of the creatures, and the glory of his power in ordering all these differences for the preservation and good of the whole."

There is clearly a message of religious tolerance -- which is enshrined within the US Constitution in its support of religious freedom -- in this message.

Winthrop continued: "as it is the glory of princes to have many officers, so this great king will haue many stewards..."

Herein there is clearly support for the division of powers between the branches of government, as mandated by the US Constitution.

"That every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the Bonds of brotherly affection. From hence it appears plainly that no man is made more honourable than another or more wealthy, out of any particular and singular respect to himself, but for the glory of his creator and the common good of the creature, man."

If one were surprised to find how similiar this seems to "all men are created equal", as it is written in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, they really shouldn't be.

In fact, the influence of Christian thought -- especially that of Reverend Winthrop -- runs deeply through the Declaration.

As others have noted, this doesn't justify any use of the Declaration to suggest that the United States should inherently prefer Christianity to any other religion, or that Churh and State should be intertwined. Once again, American Evangelical Christians of the 18th century worked stridently to prevent this.

Uniting the various figures appearing in the painting -- many of whom are notably atheists, or are at least suggested to be believers in other religions -- is a religious inclusivist view of the United States, written in the tradition of not an American thinker, but rather of a British one: CS Lewis.

Lewis' philosophy regarding other religions was that any good work performed by the believer of another religion contributed to the Christian God's benevolent purpose, and so was actually done in the name of that God, even if purportedly done in the name of another.

What emerges from this particular strain of thought is the notion of multiple paths to the same God -- one that McNaughton hints at with his explanation of the intended meaning of the archetypical immigrant featured in his painting.

For those well-educated enough and open-minded enough to examine McNaughton's work for what it is, it becomes evident that McNaughton's work is not in favour of "theocracy" (as the sensationalist charge has been), but is rather simply symbolic of what Jon McNaughton sees as the state of the United States of America, both at present and historically.

Not everyone will agree with him. Not everyone will agree that Roe v Wade or Everson v Board of Education have been damaging to the United States.

But to ignore history is to forfeit heritage, and vice versa. To pretend that Jon McNaughton should be faulted for painting about the demonstrably deep Christian heritage of the United States is to demand that the history books be rewritten.

As much as the knee-jerk reaction to McNaughton's painting carries deep streaks of Philistinism, it's also akin to historical revisionism, and that is the real nonsense.

Obama Completes the Messiah's Journey

Barack Obama solidifies his place in American Civil religion by retracing Lincoln's footsteps

With just two days before his Inauguration as the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama has arrived in Washington.

Considering the messiah narrative surrounding Obama -- a narrative wrought with racial overtones -- it may only be fitting that Obama arrived in Washington via a six-city train trip that followed the same route Abraham Lincoln used to travel to Washington in 1861.

As anyone with even a passing familiarity with American politics knows, Lincoln is revered in the United States for ending the civil war and for ending slavery.

However, as Molly Worthen notes, Lincoln's significance to American political culture goes deeper than this simple reverence. In fact, Lincoln is a central figure in what Worthen describes as the American civil religion -- a term coined by Jean-Jacques Rosseau to describe political narratives that embued with the sacred character normally reserved for religion.

According to Worthen, a civil religion inherently is not a theistic religion, but draws many of its roots from a theistic religion.

In the case of the United States, according to Worthen, the American civil religion finds its origin in the notion of American exceptionalism that seems to find its ultimate origin in a 1630 sermon given by original Massachussets Governor Reverend John Winthrop.

Winthrop, a Puritan, was leading his colonists to America in order to build a "shining city on a hill" -- God's model society that they can then export back to Britain. However, as they became disillusioned with the Purtian movement in Britain, who compromised their beliefs in exchange for political power, Winthrop and his American Puritans decided to focus on spreading their religious ideology throughout the United States, including westward.

The Puritans, the most educated and literate of the American colonists, had a decided advantage in disseminating their ideology.

Spreading westward, however, compromised the Purtians' religious beliefs not in the name of political power, but in the name of survival. Faced with more and more rugged and dangerous terrain and the other perils of westward expansion the Puritans eventually came to focus their efforts on simply surviving.

In time this focus on survivalism mixed with various religious revivals -- which Americans of the day oddly enough believed originated in Canada -- to create uniquely American brands of Christianity: namely, Baptism and Methodism, the leading evangelical religions in the United States today.

Interestingly enough, as the United States approached the time of the Revolution at the formation of the United States, evangelicals worked closely with secular humanists to ensure the separation of church and state. For secular humanists, the reason why they desired this is fairly obvious. For evangelicals, however, the matter was not quite so transparent. Evangelical religions demanded a voluntary conversion. The idea of state coercion into their religions was anathema to the evangelical leaders of the time.

The American Civil War and slavery led to a splintering of the American civil religion. After the war, many of the freed slaves viewed the war as an act of liberation. Reconciliationists from the northern states regarded the civil war as a redemptive act, in which the sins of the American state -- slavery -- were erased via a baptism in blood and fire.

In the south, however -- which many southern religious leaders had described as "God's model society" before the war -- the narrative that emerged was very different. They saw the civil war as a "noble defeat", and organizations such as the Ku Klus Klan were born in the belief that they needed to protect white women from sexual advances from freed slaves, and redeem the blood spilled in the war.

Lincoln's assassination in 1865 ensured his place of martyrdom in the American civil religion. His Gettysburg address and Inaugural address have been canonized in the minds of the American populace, right along with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

With Obama's election, however, this generation may be witnessing an integration of the emancipatory and reconciliationist narratives of the American civil religion. The ascension of the first black president in American history could be argued by many to finally redeem not only the crime of slavery, but also the overt racial oppression of African Americans for more than a hundred years after the Civil War, and more pervasive forms of racial oppression for many decades after that, reflective of inequalities that continue to exist today.

Whether or not Obama will actually deliver on the promises percieved by the emancipatory narrative -- a perception based on the demands that many African Americans place elected African American leaders, acknowledged by Obama himself in Dreams From my Father -- only time can tell.

But considering the effort the Democrats have put into building a pervasive political mythology around Obama -- including Ted Kennedy's health-defying speech at the Democratic National Convention -- there's no question that Obama's journey to Washington was an extremely calculated move.

As calculated as the journey was, however, it may actually fit. Obama may well be able to fill Lincoln's mythical shoes -- but only time, and his performance in office, will tell.