Marci McDonald’s The Armageddon Factor gets a review in the US publication Religion Dispatches.
The Canadian Christian Right is a complex constituency. It is made up of a lot of western Canadian evangelical men, former Reform Party people. Some deeply conservative new immigrants. Some funding magnates. There are a lot of organizations with American roots and even sponsorship. There are some educational institutions which distrust modern science, especially on the topic of evolution. There is a theology of end-times, rapture and a country gone bad. Add some anti- choice women and some politically savvy youth.
Fair enough: life views are life views. But crucial to Canadian society as a whole is the fact that the present government of Stephen Harper knows, sympathizes with and cultivates the Christian right wing. Alarmingly, writes McDonald, a small band of conservative Christian activists with ties to government has won a series of policy and personnel concessions designed to change the Canadian political landscape in ways that will be difficult to reverse.
Not that McDonald in any way demonizes this group of Canadian citizens. She believes in their sincerity. It is their goal of “re-christianizing†Canada that is problematic, of creating and legislating retrogressive social policies, in the belief that Christ is coming again soon and secular society will be in trouble then.
Mc Donald is familiar with the divisive wedge issues in both the US and Canada: same- sex marriage, abortion, the rejection of evolution, a distrust of environmentalism and a belief in the superiority of Christianity over other religions. Her central charge is that Harper has been determinedly secretive about the inroads into Parliament Hill made by the Christian Right, out of all proportion to their numbers in the country.
The mainstream media receive a full measure of criticism from McDonald for being blind to the growth of the movement, which advances, she argues, “with a mixture of stealth and obfuscation.â€
Former Catholic New Times editor Rosemary Ganley gives Religion Dispatches readers names, of people who are familar to Canadians and applauds McDonald’s  book as ‘ a great contribution to Canadian self-understanding and to the choices before us.’
“There are some educational institutions which distrust modern science, especially on the topic of evolution”
Here we go again with the “Evangelicals are anti-science” myth. Other than evolution, I wonder what science they are referring to?
As someone with an undergraduate degree in Chemistry and was a major university chaplain, I know first hand how evangelicals think about science: Pretty much the same as everyone else.
I have to disagree with Mike S (above).
In the US, the National Parks Service rewrote
some of the literature for the national parks
in order that the geological information would
accord more to Biblical teaching. In other words,
any reference to anything before the “Creation”
is not permitted. As a result, the geological
histories of Yellowstone and Zion and other
national parks are lacking in accuracy and in
depth.
_____
I recently bought the Blu-Ray series called Life
narrated by David Attenborough. There is an
American narration and I wonder if the 15-minute
discrepancy between the two narrations is
because of consideration of Biblical teaching.
Attenborough uses phrases like “millions of years ago”
and “in the last 100,000 years”. Such phrases
don’t square with Biblical teaching and I wonder
if the evangelicals in the US have got at the
production and made those changes.
I’m still looking for the existence of any
firm-believing Pentecostal who’s a worthy scientific
researcher or specialist in ancient studies like
proto-geology or proto-anthropology.
Still looking.
Torontonian.
Since when was all of “science” reduced to matters dealing with the age or origin of the universe? It is unfortunate that this myth has become so commonplace that people would think Evangelicals distrust all science for religious reasons.
I tried for 15 minutes to find any reference to the changes made in the National Parks Service literature, and something so radical should have at least minimal news coverage. In any event, the NPS missed this page in the Yellowstone website.
http://www.nps.gov/yell/naturescience/geotower.htm
As for the excellent Life series, I seriously doubt that any American Evangelicals groups would have any legal jurisdiction over privately owned videos.
As for your last question, how about Evolutionary Biology? Dr. Bev Mitchell, now a professor emeritus, is a noted entomologist and taught evolutionary biology at the University of Alberta for years. Dr. Mitchell is also a long time member of a local Pentecostal church, sings in the choir, and serves as an elder. He is one of those old timey Pentecostals.
Another great example is U of A professor is Don Page. is a very well known cosmologist and gravitational theorist who is the most published co-author with Stephen Hawking. While not a Pentecostal, he is a card-carrying conservative Evangelical who supposedly is anti-science according to the current political folklore.
http://www.folio.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?v=94250&i=95162&a=2
There is my friend, Dr. Denis Lamoureux, who is the religion and science professor at St Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta. He is, what might be called, a charismatic Baptist and an evolutionary creationist. He has 3 earned doctorates in dentistry, Old Testament and Evolutionary Biology.
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dlamoure/1_beyond/index.html