Some two months ago, Dalton McGuinty, the premier of Ontario, was pressured by religious conservatives to back down on his proposed changes to the sex ed curriculum. Around the same time, the federal government refused to fund abortions as part of a global maternal health care initiative. In recent months, the federal government has also slashed the budgets of several feminist groups, including Status of Women Canada.
For Marci McDonald, these events would point to the invisible and alarming influence the Christian right holds over Canadian politics, as is made clear by her new book The Armageddon Factor. And although the book does not refer to these specific events, the cultural context McDonald is referring to ought to be resonant to Canadian readers.
As McDonald refers to her book as a “wake-up call” to the influence of the religious right in Canadian government, trigger-happy critics of the book may dismiss it as fear-mongering—and acceptably so. McDonald introduces readers to some of the sleaziest and most abrasive social conservatives, including Faytene Kryskow (a right-wing Christian activist), who claims to regularly hear the voice of God and encourages her followers to throw “prayer bombs” at Parliament in hopes that MPs consider adopting their pro-life and anti-gay politics. Others include a Baptist minister who prophesizes that the Canadian government has three years to reverse same-sex marriage legislation or be condemned to hell, as well as the founder of Crossroads Television, David Mainse, whose sons were involved in a Ponzi scheme south of the border. McDonald reveals a number of thread-thin links between these figures and several members of our current government. All in all, many of these cases may lead naive readers into making a guilty-by-association verdict about our current government. To be honest, the book certainly didn’t pique my interest in voting Conservative anytime soon.
To McDonald’s credit, however, the book carries a more important non-partisan message. By going straight to the sources of the Reform movement and Canadian social conservatism, The Armageddon Factor does for all voters what Food Inc does for health freaks. We are inclined to question where our politicians’ ideas and beliefs are coming from, and, in what I think is the most important question posed by this book, what is becoming of our country’s separation between church and state. Although McDonald devotes most of her focus to the religious right, she does give a page to the religious left--a movement she finds equally troubling for reasons I won’t elaborate on lest I spoil the book for you.
The other pearl of wisdom to take away from this read is that our federal government holds a lot more power than we’d like to think. Probably one of the most common assumptions made by disillusioned voters is that it doesn’t matter which way you vote—all parties effectively do the same thing. McDonald deftly quashes this mistaken belief through the case of the current party, uncovering funding cuts, donations, and court and senate appointments, most of which can be traced back to the demands of some of the nastiest religious conservatives. Agree or disagree with their politics—the point is, there are people speaking up whom most Canadians would consider to be distastefully radical.
Political agenda aside, The Armageddon Factor reminds us of the importance of a healthy political conscience in a time when our naiveté renders us pliable.
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