There was an article in The Toronto Star the other day on the Liberal Party of Canada following the US election closely: US race fills grits with envy:

“It gives us hope that people are seeing right-wing social conservatism as falling out of favour,” says Leslie Swartman, communications director for the Liberals.

I recommend reading the full article for context.
That belief and hope is a common myth.
 Religious right groups politically push social conservatism, I don’t believe they are falling out of failure in the US or Canada.
The religious right comprises many groups, holding various  importance on  ideologies and by far the main goal they tend to have in common is their push into political circles - change from within and an opposition of pluralism.

Canada has a small but active religious right, from Tristan Emmanuel, Charles McVety and Timothy Bloedow of Christian Government.ca  (who links other fundamentalist Canadian groups).
Lloyd MacKey of Canadian Christian has  complied lists of  Canadian moderates/evangelical and religious right groups in Ottawa lobbying or working to enter Canadian government on local, provincial and federal levels.
Many Canadian para-church right activist groups are  connected with US  conservative  religious right groups.
MacKey is the only writer I know who wrote a book on Harper’s religious beliefs and influence. If you know of others which have focused on key political leaders right leaning religion and ties to relgious right in the US, please  pipe up  in the comments.

I don’t know of any groups in Canada monitoring our home grown religious right’s creep into Canadian politics.

If you know of  sites and blogs that monitor Canadian religious right personalities, groups or sites , I’d be grateful if you’d pipe up  in the comment section below. 
While The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada has conservative right groups under it’s umbrella, I think their voice are blended in with the considerable number of moderate affiliates.

There are writers in the US who also come out with pronouncements on the fracturing or decline of the “religious right” regularly, despite evidence to the contrary.  Time after time they have been proven wrong.

thefamily.jpg

From the  book-jacket of Jeff Sharlet’s book: The Family:

They are “the Family”—fundamentalism’s avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the “new chosen,” congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential “cells,” to pray and plan for a “leadership led by God,” to be won not by force but through “quiet diplomacy.” Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have written from inside its walls.

The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the Far Right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a “family” that thrives to this day. In public, they host prayer breakfasts; in private they preach a gospel of “biblical capitalism,” military might, and American empire.

Sharlet’s discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the Cold War, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not “What do fundamentalists want?” but “What have they already done?”

You can now pre-order this book.
Sharlet is well known for his grace in addressing critics and nationally known for his outstanding pieces in Rolling Stone, Harpers… diverse articles from his years of religious coverage on people like Sam Brownback, or the new chasity, Theocracy political groups like The Family, Clear Channel Media, Colorado New Life Church and Ted Haggard.

He has also written about religion, culture, and politics for New York, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, Oxford American, Forward, The Baffler, Feed, The Chicago Reader, The San Diego Reader, Washington City Paper, Salon, Nerve, and other publications, and worked as a senior writer covering the humanities for The Chronicle of Higher Education and as editor-in-chief of Pakn Treger, a journal of Jewish writing and history.

 Jeff Sharlet is  also well known for role as editor of The Revealer, a  sharp, informed daily review of religion and the press.


2 Responses to “The Family”

  1. 1 Jeff Sharlet 

    Bene D — this is a very helpful round up of the Canadian religious right. I’d blog it if it wouldn’t look like I was plugging my own book secretly. Thanks for the notice.

  2. 2 Bene Diction 

    I wish you all the best on the launch.:^)

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