REAL Women, Promise Keepers and the Promotion of Violence

I Burned my Bra For This? REAL Women of Canada and the Men Behind Them

It is a massive masculine shadow,
in a hall or crowded room,
lifting something indistinct up into the resonating night.
ROBERT BLY, "FIFTY MALES SITTING TOGETHER"

Robert Bly is an American author and poet who became the inspiration for the Mytho-poetic men's movement.

Fearing that the women's movement was turning men into "yogurt-eaters", Bly was determined to instead create a cabal of "wild men", who would seek traditional roles for the male species, many based on, believe it or not, Grimm's Fairy Tales.

The tales that portray the powerful king, the handsome prince, the beautiful maiden, and of course the witch determined to destroy them all. (He must have some mother issues)

No "round shouldered" men need apply.

Author Susan Faludi attended one of his few retreats that were open to women and asked why everyone was told in advance to bring a large stone. Bly's spokesperson explained that they were to build a monument to Hermes, but didn't want to go into too much detail, with women present.

An Olympic god. Of course. Patron of shepherds and cowherds. In fact, the spokesman, Walter Bliss, had legally changed his name to Shepherd Bliss, and his profession from army officer to psychologist.

Bly made his appearance to the sound of conga drums, and with the stance of a Viking, reminded those in the audience that he is Norse.

We no longer have images of "real men," Bly says, as the men continue the drum beat. Stereotypical sissies have replaced macho men. "Woody Allen is just as bad—a negative John Wayne," he says, raising his voice to a nasal squeak in imitation. "Men used to make models for what a man is from the Iliad and the Odyssey and places like that."

On the all-male weekend, he promises, he will bring back these role models for male edification: "One of the things we do is go back to the very old stories, five thousand years ago, where the view of a man, what a man is, is more healthy."(1)

A former peace activist, and strong opponent to the Vietnam war, Bly needed a new cause and found it in male bonding.

By the early '80s, he was, he confessed, starting to feel less than manly. "I began to feel diminished," Bly writes, "by my lack of embodiment of the fruitful male—or the moist male." It wasn't his loss of early prominence, however, that he identified as the problem. It was his "missing contact with men" and his overexposure to strong and angry women, including his own mother. (told 'ya)

He feared that he and men like him had allied them­selves too closely with such women, and consequently taken "a female view" of their fathers and their own masculinity. He de­cided he'd made a mistake with his earlier recommendation: "If someone says to me now, 'There is something missing on your feminine side,' I say, `No, what is missing is the masculine,' " Bly told Whole Earth magazine in 1988. He worried that he was only "superficially" manly. Men had awakened their feminine princi­ple only to be consumed by it. They had gone "soft." (1)

So he began running all-male workshops to reintroduce men to "the deep masculine."

This led to wilderness weekend retreats where men dressed in tribal masks and wild-animal costumes, beat drums and rediscov­ered "the beast within." His success inspired scores of imitators, creating a "cottage industry" for the men's movement.

And one of those "imitators" was the Promise Keepers. A New Age Journal article noted that Promise Keepers combined the secular men’s movement (founded by New Age poet Robert Bly) with the political evangelicalism of Pat Robertson. And the Atlanta Journal-Constitution stated that: "Promise Keepers combines the Jesus Saves preaching of Billy Graham with the male-bonding message of Robert Bly.

Promise Keepers was brought to Canada by Conservative MP David Sweet. In 2004, when he ran, he posted on his website, the fact that he had been instrumental in creating the Northern chapter.

Women read that, reminded us of what PK stood for, and he lost the election.

In 2006, he got smarter, and removed all mention of the "wildmen" club, only saying that he ran a non-profit organization. He continues to represent Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough- Westdale.

Bly's teachings also fit well with the anti-feminist groups, like REAL Women of Canada, who promoted so-called "family values". Bly attacked not only domineering women, but single mothers.

In short, the Great Mother's authority has become too great. "Men's societies are disappearing, partly under pressure from women with hurt feelings," he writes. Too many women are "raising boys with no man in the house." The single mother's son has become "a nice boy who now not only pleases his mother but also the young woman he is living with."

To restore the nice boy's male identity, Bly proposes, he must quit taking cues from mother and "go down into the psyche and accept what's dark down there." As a key guide to the journey, Bly offers "The Story of Iron John," borrowed from a Grimm's Brothers' fairy tale. In the story, a hairy "wild man" is locked up in an iron cage near the royal castle; the key to the cage is under the queen's pillow. One day the young prince loses his prized "golden ball" when it rolls into an abandoned pond, and he can only relieve it by stealing the key from mother and freeing the wild man. The young man, in the words of Bly's sidekick Keith Thompson, has to take back the power he has given to his mother and get away from the force field of her bed. He must direct his energies away from pleasing Mommy." (1)

At Bly's all-male weekends, the "wildmen" build lairs with plastic chairs, grunting and groaning, and whatever other male sounds they can muster.

Journalist Jon Tevlin, attended a weekend of frolic and fun, run by Bly, at a Bible camp in Mound, Minnesota. On the first night, Tevlin reports that Shepherd Bliss, dropped to his knees.

"Some of you may want to temporarily leave the world of the two-leggeds, and 'Join me in the world of the four-leggeds," he said. One by one, we slid from our orange Naugahyde chairs onto an orange shag carpet ripped straight out of the 1960s. "You may find yourself behaving like these four-leggeds; you may be scratching the earth, getting in contact with the dirt and the world around you."

As he spoke, people began pawing at the ground. . . . "You may find yourself behaving like the most masculine of all animals—the ram," Shepherd said in a coaxing voice. . . . "You may find unfamiliar noises emerging from your throats!" . . . There were gurgles and bleats, a few wolf calls. . .. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Shepherd coming toward me, head down, tufts of white hair ringing a bald spot. . . . Meanwhile, I felt a slight presence at my rear, and turned to see a man beginning to sniff my buttocks. "Woof!" he said. (1)

"Woof" indeed!

How to Handle Your Women

As men are given instruction on how to find their "beast within", they are also told how to treat their women, and "wrest the power from their hands".

Inspiration came from objects they were asked to bring from home, including a .380-caliber automatic pistol. A rather odd trophy for what was called a "battle on the domestic front".

And what if women are not so enthused with their new butt sniffing menfolk?

Promise Keeper's Tony Evans says “I am not suggesting that you ask for your role back, I am urging you to take it back. There can be no compromise here.” .

Robert Bly is not so subtle.

At one seminar, with more than a thousand men in attendance, a man in the audience told Bly, "Robert, when we tell women our desires, they tell us we're wrong." To which Bly responded: "So, then you bust them in the mouth." (1)

People are not taking this movement seriously enough. Stephen Harper is tearing down the Status for Women, and reversing gains made over the past decades.

But the media look at all the women in his caucus, and determine that he is not a misogynist.

If we had to select one photo that would define this period in our history, the following would definitely be in the running.

A frightened Diane Finlay making an announcement, with Pierre Poilievre in a Gestapo style stance, watching on. Women in Harper's party are mere window dressing. They have no power.

When Jason Kenney rewrote the citizenship guide, he all but excluded any contributions made by women.

Historian Margaret Conrad said of the new guide, that it “represents a new kind of Canada, one that is less sympathetic with my personal sense of a progressive, forward-looking nation, but the new slant is no doubt in keeping with the sentiments of the current administration in Ottawa ... It's kind of like a throwback to the 1950s, ... It's a tough, manly country with military and sports heroes that are all men."

We are being written out, reduced to the "witches" in Grimms Fairy Tales.

Sources:

1. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, By Susan Faludi, Crown publishing, 1991, ISBN: 0-385-42507-4, Pg. 304-312

Lorne Gunter's Attack on "Feminists" Has Gone Too Far

"[Gwen Landholt, President]... highlighted the takeover, by feminist ideology, of the judicial system in Canada, as well as its takeover of the UN. During the 60s, 70s and 80s, the radical feminist ideology was gradually instilled into the cultures of education, work, government and societal life." REAL Women of Canada

Isn't it wonderful that we feminists have so much power?

We've taken over everything and no longer have to worry about things like childcare and equal pay for equal work. We now rule the entire country. Hell to listen to Reform Party jargon (REAL Women were part of the Reform infrastructure from day one), we now rule the world.

Good for us.

I wish.

Lorne Gunter is a right-wing journalist, who has had a lengthy association with the neoconservative movement. As a colleague of people like Ezra Levant and a "friend" of the Fraser Institute, I rarely read his stuff. I see Lorne Gunter and know that I've read it all before.

In every book written about Stephen Harper and the Reform Party.

Global Warming is a hoax, gays back in the closet, unions are ruining the country. Yada, yada, yada.

But a column published in the Edmonton Journal caught my attention and has made me furious: WikiLeaks founder victim of feminism.

A rather abysmal attempt to discredit the leaks, but then Gunter really out does himself with the bizarre.

Yes folks, us world ruling feminists are to blame.

He first refers to Julian Assange as an "effete lefty activist" ("flaming liberal homo" in neocon speak) and then attacks the women.

"Sarah," Assange's first conquest in Sweden, was an official with a centre-left political party, a known radical feminist, a disciple of one of Sweden's most vehemently feminist academics, a former campus sexual equity officer and a webmistress who, until recently, maintained a website devoted to "7 Steps to Legal Revenge," about how women can use the courts to get back at unfaithful lovers.

The leaks themselves are a separate issue from the rape allegations. However, if they were true, Assange needs to face charges. But the implication that "radical feminists" somehow encourage sexual assault is ludicrous.

Did you ever think that in the twenty-first century in Canada, that a mainstream newspaper would be publishing this tripe?

A Trip Down Memory Lane

"In November 1990 Reform assembled a 'women's work group' to examine such issues as employment and pay equity, family violence, and women's health care.
Shortly thereafter, however, a number of party supporters, including several with strong ties to REAL Women, declared their objection to both study materials being used for discussion and what they viewed as a typically feminist construction of specifically "women's problems.'

Stated Mary Lamont, a founding member of both REAL women and the Reform Party:"'I've been involved in the Reform Party from the start and I've always thought of it as a strong conservative party. I thought it stood for a different
approach. I expected it to do more on these family issues than give us feminist slogans, attitudes and agendas. The feminists get enough attention from other parties.' Under pressure, the controversial women's group folded." (1)

And:

[Reform founding member William] Gairdner (speaking at the 1991 Reform Party's Assembly) went on to attack the whole concept of human rights and the funding of advocacy groups that 'compete for government funding to get these rights.' The attack on the 'rights illusion' brought applause, but his attack on feminists brought a roar of approval: 'Furthermore ... we fund ... radical feminist groups all over the country .... (extended applause) ... that publicly support social revolution ... of the most Utopian kind and they vow to abolish the traditional family.' (2)

Sources:

1. Right-Wing Populism and the Reform Party of Canada, By Trevor Harrison Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-8020-7204-6, pg. 213

2. A thorn by any other name: sexist discourse as hate speech, By Donna L. Lillian, Assistant Professor of Discourse and Linguistics East Carolina University, 2007

Pro-Sex Feminists and a Feminized Curriculum are to Blame for Everything

We learned this week that Canada has slipped to 25th place in terms of gender equality,
most of that decline during the four years that the Harper government has been in power.

Much of that can be blamed on the anti-women movement REAL Women of Canada, and other faith based organizations, now driving the Conservative machine.

David Sweet, Reform-Conservative MP for Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale, is the founder of the Canadian branch of Promise Keepers, an organization that promotes male dominated households.

The National Organization for Women, an American feminist group has suggested that the Promise Keepers are a threat to women's rights:

The group encourages inequality within marriages and teaches a doctrine of male superiority. According to Amy Schindler, "the discourse of masculinity found within conservative religious movements, such as the Promise Keepers and the Victorian era movement 'muscular Christianity,' is inherently political. Any masculinity project aimed at restoring or reclaiming a 'traditional' male role for privileged white, heterosexual males has a political impact within the tapestry of class, race, and gender power."

This organization was founded by former football coach Bill McCartney, and according to the Canadian Encyclopedia:

A coalition of liberal clergy called Equal Partners in Faith condemns it as "divisive and potentially dangerous." And a New York City-based group called the Center for Democracy Studies warns that Promise Keepers is nothing less than the "third wave" of the religious right - after Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition. Alfred Ross, the centre’s executive director, points to close ties between Promise Keepers and such luminaries of the American religious right as Robertson and James Dobson of Focus on the Family as proof that McCartney’s movement is no spontaneous eruption.

James Dobson is one of the founders of the Council for National Policy, where Stephen Harper delivered his 'I really Canadians' speech in 1997, and was integral in the election of Harper in 2006, by buying radio ads against same-sex marriage; one of the hot button issues of the campaign.

Reformers Rob Anders, Maurice Vellacott and David Sweet are also members of Focus on Family, along with a large number of their colleagues.

One of the things that PK preaches is purity in men, much like the group that Stephen Woodworth promotes; Parliamentary Friends of Falun Gong. Both Jason Kenney and Rob Anders claim to be virgins, though I'm not really sure that's by choice.

Any of us who have been following politics at all, since the Reform movement first began in Canada, are not really surprised by the results of the study. This party has always been very patriarchal, pro-Anglo and Christian fundamentalist.

One of their mentors and co-founder with Stephen Harper of a right-wing extremist group, the Northern Foundation, William Gairdner; always had some very disturbing views on women.

In fact, in 2007, Donna L. Lillian, Assistant Professor of Discourse and Linguistics in the Department of English at East Carolina University, wrote a paper entitled: A thorn by any other name: sexist discourse as hate speech, which centered around Gairdner: "...analyzing Canadian neoconservative discourse as racist, sexist, and homophobic." According to author and journalist Murray Dobbin, Mr. Gairdner's The Trouble with Canada functioned as ‘the de facto manifesto for Preston Manning’s Reform Party’ (Dobbin, 1992: 134).

Another co-founder of the Northern Foundation was Link Byfield, who has spoken at REAL Women conferences. In a 2002 lecture he stated: "Women, men and families must be defended against those forces that enslave us as we speak. That's why it is necessary for REAL Women to exist and to persist in its work on behalf of the Judeo-Christian understanding of marriage and family life."

At that same conference, Jeffrey Asher, former Professor at Dawson College in Montreal, opened by saying:

The so-called New Male is a creation of classroom radical feminism, media hype and politically correct governments. For more than thirty years, our culture has rigorously censored information which shows that males and females choose and need sex-specific roles in life. Every parent knows that girls and boys behave differently. Boys choose to play noisy, competitive games that test one against the other, while girls prefer co-operative fantasies that develop emotional skills.

Co-operative fantasies that develop emotional skills? Wow. But wait, he's just getting started:

Men and women respond very differently to stimuli. The male alarm system is more protected from fear and panic. The male brain needs more stimulation than those of females ... Girls show more success in artistic, emotional, verbal and communicative subjects ... Men have superior vision compared to women. Almost all mechanical, chemical, electronic and cybernetic inventions were made by men ... .However, the lives of women have been transformed by independent work and income and the pill, allowing them freedom to choose motherhood and financial independence from fathers or husbands ... [and] can also lead to an increase in divorce, an epidemic of single-mother families, and rising unemployment for men. (Men define their lives by their ability to earn money through work to support a family.)

And he taught this crap at Dawson College, while claiming that by 1980, the women's movement was increasingly co-opted by the lunatic fringe.

The President of REAL Women, Gwen Landolt, also spoke in 2002, where she:

"... highlighted the takeover, by feminist ideology, of the judicial system in Canada, as well as its takeover of the UN. During the 60s, 70s and 80s, the radical feminist ideology was gradually instilled into the cultures of education, work, government and societal life.

Gwen traced the growth of feminism in Canada back to the Royal Commission Report on the Status of Women, which was tabled in the House of Commons in February 1970. It called for both federal and provincial governments to establish and fund Status of Women Councils to work for the "equality of women." This recommendation led to millions of dollars of tax monies being used to establish networks of women's groups across the country. These groups became paid "agents of change" to promulgate feminist orthodoxy.

So do you see what we're up against?

IS THIS REALLY YOUR CANADA?

Roots of Reform and the Battlefields of Feminism

It's interesting when you research the roots of the Reform Party of Canada (now calling themselves the Conservative Party of Canada), how much they really believe that women's rights have helped to destroy their country.

Not alone naturally. Their other pet peeves are non-whites, homosexuality and Human Rights Commissions.

Most of their grievances, however, are now being channelled through the Religious Right, who have not only found a voice in the Harper government, but also legitimacy.

I recently stumbled across a book review for Michael Wagner's Standing on Guard for Thee: The Past, Present and Future of Canada’s Christian Right, that helped to sum up the movement.

The reviewer Michael Valpy, suggests that perhaps moderating their message to adapt to mainstream Canadians would be far more effective than simply trying to force these beliefs on a nation that does not share their goals.

The endorsements on the book jacket also reveal further ties to the Harper Government. Link Byfield, REAL Women and Tristan Emmanuel of Equipping Christians for the Public Square. All, with the exception of Tristan Emmanuel, helped to form the Northern Foundation, that originally fought against the end of apartheid in South Africa, but eventually became part of a 'white brotherhood' movement. Then of course the mention of William Gairdner, another NF founder, whose book The Trouble With Canada, helped lay the groundwork for Reform Party policy.

The Noisy Christian Right
In this country, it seems, we really do like our religion kept private.
By Michael Valpy
September 1, 2008

(Standing on Guard for Thee: The Past, Present and Future of Canada’s Christian Right Michael Wagner Freedom Press 274 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780973275773)

What is startling about reading Michael Wagner’s valuable, original account of the Christian Right in Canada in Standing on Guard for Thee: The Past, Present and Future of Canada’s Christian Right is the realization that, from the inside, where Wagner is, it is a really hard place to be. Indeed, what he reveals is the existence of two fundamentally opposed narratives about conservative Christianity in this country.

From the outside looking in — that is, from prevailing news media accounts and alarmist secular warnings overly influenced, I believe, by what is happening south of the border — the Christian Right is presented as an increasingly muscular and well-organized force, holding the ear of the Conservative parliamentary caucus and some of its ministers, its hand poised to turn off the federal tap for funding inappropriate films, skillfully battling for “family values only” books in school libraries and keeping alive campaigns against abortion and homosexual marriage.

Yet from the inside looking out, the Canada that Wagner shows us is the Canada that most sociologists of religion say exists: a country far more a part of the spiritual cold belt of western Europe than of the hot flashes of America’s current Great Awakening, and a country whose history of the past half-century, in the words of one testimonial writer for Wagner’s book, has been “a gore-filled account of … spiritual decline,” in which the Christian Right has experienced unmitigated failure in promoting its agenda.

In Wagner, a more supportive chronicler the Christian Right could not hope to find: an Edmonton freelance writer with a Ph.D. in political science from University of Alberta who has home-schooled his nine children. He has endorsements on his book jacket from a pantheon of the Christian Right: the powerfully articulate editor and writer (and Alberta senator-in-waiting) Link Byfield, REAL Women’s Gwendolyn Landolt and Tristan Emmanuel of Equipping Christians for the Public Square.

Wagner has not written a scholarly book. He has not written a book that could be said to meet standards of good journalistic analysis, setting events in historic context and perspective. I don’t think that flaws it a whole lot, because what he has written is an exceptionally useful and interesting book, a detailed compilation of the Christian Right’s activities since the 1960s seen through the movement’s own lens that allows the reader to feel what the Christian Right’s leading activists have felt over the past half-century and to have a glimpse into their minds without mediation by some scholar’s or journalist’s filters.

He begins with a definition of the Christian Right that is satisfactory: “A collection of people, organizations and publications which, because of their conservative Christian principles, are determined to oppose the effects of the Sexual Revolution [his capital letters]. Many of these people, organizations and publications are evangelicals in their outlook and theology, but others are not. Thus the Christian Right in Canada should not be confused with the broader evangelical Christian community” — a very important distinction to make.

If his label still seems ambiguous, it is because a major difficulty with defining and understanding not only the Christian Right but all religious behaviour in Canada lies with the dearth of academic study of the subject outside the depressingly underfunded work of a handful of scholars such as Reginald Bibby, David Seljak, Peter Beyer, Jean-Philippe Warren and Solange Lefebvre (and any others to whom I apologize for omitting). Religion is not a subject that interests Canada’s academic granting agencies.

Wagner catalogues five decades of defeat on the battlefields of feminism, the sexual revolution, abortion and homosexuality. He records how, time and again, the hopes of the Canadian Christian Right are raised only to be dashed. Conservative Brian Mulroney turns out to be as socially liberal as Pierre Trudeau. The few lower court decisions that support the Christian Right’s causes invariably get overturned on appeal. The rise of human rights commissions created by federal and provincial legislation blunt the movement’s campaign against homosexual rights.

The immensely popular Charter of Rights and Freedoms enacted in 1982 turns out to be the constitutional entrenchment of the Antichrist. Preston Manning, Alberta’s founding force of the conservative Reform Party, is a disappointment. Christian social conservatives are shocked to learn that two thirds of delegates to the Reform Party’s 1992 national assembly respond to a questionnaire by saying they believe abortion is a private matter of choice between a woman and her doctor. (I'm shocked to learn that as well. So why are the reform MPs so intent on taking away a woman's right to choose?)

In Stockwell Day, conservative Christians feel they have found their man but he is almost cruelly laughed out of office as leader of the Canadian Alliance. Ralph Klein lets them down by refusing to use the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to get around the Supreme Court’s decision requiring an amendment to Alberta’s human rights legislation forbidding discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. Stephen Harper punishes members of his caucus who speak out against homosexuality. (Until he gets his majority, which we need to prevent from happening)

A number of nominal allies prefer to keep a distance: the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, for example, while sharing many of the Christian Right’s beliefs, declines to be identified with its public campaigns (Wagner points out that Brian Stiller, president of Toronto’s Tyndale University College and Seminary and former EFC president, categorically rejects the Christian Right label as applying to himself or to the EFC).

The Christian Right itself fractures and re-fractures on issues such as state support for low-income single mothers and the use of U.S. televangelist Jerry Falwell and singer Anita Bryant (subsequently shunned by many fundamentalist Christians because of her divorce and remarriage) in the Canadian campaign against feminism and homosexual rights.

The movement’s own political party, Social Credit (one of whose leaders, Robert Thompson, declared he had been foretold that God would influence the deliberations of Parliament), dies in 1993. Its sprightly, clever and influential voice, Alberta Report, edited by Link Byfield and his son Ted, dies a decade later. Its warrior-heroes burn brightly in the media for a few months, maybe a year if they’re lucky (the Alberta Report’s Byfields are durable exceptions), then flicker out, slide from the stage in where-are-you-Tristan-Emmanuel evaporations. Canada becomes one of the only countries in the world without an abortion law. Its parliament — one of the first national legislatures in the world to do so — enacts same-sex marriage under a minority Liberal government and votes not to revisit the issue under a minority Conservative government.

Wagner’s account provides solid evidence of the error in assuming American experience can be automatically replicated on this side of the border. We are a different country with a different cultural history. In fact, Wagner himself makes this point in trying to demonstrate that the Canadian Christian Right is an indigenous phenomenon and not some American branch plant, a factor he might usefully have explored further but does not.

As University of Montreal theologian Solange Lefebvre once memorably said (at a symposium on the spirituality of Pierre Trudeau), “to be Christian in Canada is to be discreet.” And as Michael Adams states in Fire and Ice: The United States Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, Canadians, unlike Americans, are remarkably cohesive in their values.

There are no great value polarities in this country comparable to what divide, say, liberal New Englanders and bible-belt Southerners or Texans. Remarkably little, when you come down to it, divides Albertans from Quebeckers. You can’t point to one demographic or one piece of the national geography in Canada and say this is the pond in which the Christian Right swims because, in Canada, the Christian Right, rightly or wrongly, seems not to swim in the pond of mainstream culture.

Wagner takes 200-odd pages to recount the Christian Right’s failure to block abortion and liberal sexuality and 20 pages to say that the movement will eventually triumph because the effects of the sexual revolution are universally bad, in support of which he quotes several American, Australian and New Zealand sources — but not one Canadian — and cites the commonplace social science wisdom that divorce is bad for children, which it is.

The Christian Right is an authentic voice in the Canadian social fabric, but a small voice that possibly has won more media attention than its numbers can lay claim to because of the media’s addiction to controversy and because of the size of the American Christian Right next door. What is unfortunately problematic about Wagner’s book is that there is no real attempt to provide context, no attempt to assess the efficacy or lack of efficacy of particular Christian Right political strategies. There are also, with respect to the author, apparent gaps in his thesis.

When, for example, he writes about “the growing attack against Christians in Canada” — meaning the advance of homosexual rights and the acceptance of abortion — he leaves unaddressed the fact that the majority of Canadians supporting homosexual rights and the right to abortion also self-identify as Christian.

Moreover, having devoted a chapter to establishing that the Christian Right in Canada is indigenous and not an American offshoot, Wagner then treats the Canadian stage on which the activists of the Christian Right pursue their agenda as largely being no different from the U.S. stage. He may argue it is not the purpose of his book to explore that distinction. Yet to do so might have led to some useful suppositions about why the Canadian Christian Right has not been more successful.

Would it have done better if it had not brought Anita Bryant into the country at the apex of English-Canadian nationalism in the 1970s, or brought in the too-American Jerry Falwell a few years later?

Would it have done better if it had not demonized the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which most Canadians place at the top or near the top of their list of prized Canadian symbols? Would it have done better without the strident evangelical Toronto pastor Ken Campbell as its leading figure through the 1970s and ’80s, refusing to pay public school taxes because he considered the recommended — not the mandatory — reading list of books in the English department of his children’s high school to be immoral?

Might it have advanced its cause further without Campbell campaigning against municipal council candidates who were homosexual and making statements such as “one out of three sexual assaults on children are committed by homosexuals”? Or without other campaigns to have Margaret Laurence’s books removed from school libraries?

Would it have done better without attacking the arts — or Vancouver’s nude Wreck Beach? Or non-Christian multiculturalism? Or endorsing books written by former English professor and Olympic athlete William Gairdner and their attack on feminism?

Would it have done better without the crude demonstrations outside Henry Morgantaler’s abortion clinics? Or without its persistent claims of conspiracies by government, the courts and the media?

Would it have been more successful if it had tried to blend its voice and agenda with the voices and agendas of like-minded groups such as the thoughtful and more strategically adept Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church and even the right-wing flanks of the mainline Protestant churches? Would it have done better if it had been less jarring? Is the Christian Right’s message so out of step with the country, or is its packaging?

The unknown answers to those questions are important to the ongoing narrative of Canada, and regrettably Canadians are too much in the dark about what role religion plays in their private and public lives. The fascinating thing about the 2003 symposium held at Waterloo’s St. Jerome’s University on the spirituality of Trudeau was the revelation of how much the former prime minister’s thinking, and that of many members of his cabinet and many leading opposition politicians at the time, had being shaped by theological teaching. That symposium, organized by St. Jerome’s then president Michael Higgins, was a rare and ground-breaking public examination of religion in Canada’s national political life.

We know that religious worship attendance in Canada began dramatically to collapse in the 1960s and went into free-fall over the next two decades from which it never recovered. But we still do not know why for sure, despite the diligent efforts of scholars such as Bibby and others. We know that in Britain, from academic research done there, the exodus from the church was led by young women who found it an institutionally hostile environment. (Not the women's fault but the church's patriarchal views)

Empirically the same thesis appears to apply in Canada, but we cannot be certain. We know there are books upon books written on the sociology of religion in Europe and the U.S., but so few written here.

We are not a godless society. Rather we are a society that, because of its history and culture, as Roger Hutchinson, principal emeritus of University of Toronto’s Emmanuel College, says, has privatized its piety. A society where to be Christian is apparently to be discreet, as Lefebvre says.

Logic suggests that any religious movement that appears forcefully indiscreet, that rejects iconic values, institutions and behaviour central to the fabric of Canadian cohesion — multiculturalism, the equality of women, the Charter, civility, acceptance of the Other — is going to have a hard time expanding its support and strengthening its message. Which is what Wagner so usefully tells us has been the case with the Christian Right.

But there is still so much about the faith and religiosity of Canadians that Canadians do not know about themselves. Michael Wagner has presented a rich portrait of the Christian Right from within. Frustratingly, it does more to pique curiosity than to satisfy it.

Michael Valpy is a journalist with The Globe and Mail.