What Dominion Day Signifies

In the early 1980s, towards the end of the premiership of the first Trudeau, the name of the day celebrating the birth of our country was changed to “Canada Day.”  The change was made in a most underhanded fashion.  The bill underwent all of its readings in a single day.  The members of Parliament present were almost certainly too few to constitute a legitimate quorum – no count was taken, the speaker simply declared a quorum.  As dishonest and dirty as this was, in a perverse sense it was a fitting manner for this change to be accomplished.  This change was one more in a long series of attacks on the traditional symbols of the country that was born on 1 July, 1867.  The series had started with the replacement during Pearson’s premiership of the flag that had been baptized the Canadian flag in the blood of the soldiers who fought under it in two World Wars with one deliberately designed to not evoke the heritage of the Canada of Confederation.  It had continued throughout the almost two decades of Liberal government punctuated only by Joe Clark’s brief premiership.  The change of the name of the country’s birthday encapsulated all these previous changes.

 

The new designation of the holiday merely states the name of the country in conjunction with the word day.  As far as national holidays go, this is as minimalist as it comes.  The great Canadian novelist Robertson Davies mocked it in disgust as a “wet” designation, being one letter removed from the name of a brand of ginger ale.  The norm for countries that celebrate this kind of holiday is for the designation to say something meaningful about the country and the event celebrated on the day.  The United States and Mexico, for example, both call their holidays on 4 July and 16 September respectively, Independence Day (contrary to a popular misconception Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s national holiday and is more widely celebrated in Mexican communities in the United States than in Mexico).  The old designation of our holiday, Dominion Day, was such a name that said something about both our country and how she came to be.  1 July was the day when the British North America Act came into effect making Canada the first Dominion in the British Empire. 

 

The Liberals’ objection to this designation was based entirely on ignorance.  “Dominion” denoted neither colonial status nor subservience.  It was essentially the equivalent, prior to the Statute of Westminster, to what is now called a “Commonwealth Realm”, i.e., a country that governs herself through her own parliament under the reign of the shared monarch.  The designation spread throughout the British Empire as she transformed herself into the Commonwealth, with Australia becoming the second Dominion in 1901, but its origins were here in Canada where it was chosen by the Fathers of Confederation themselves.  They had originally planned on calling us “the Kingdom of Canada” but, advised by London that this might look to our southern neighbours like we were deliberately poking them in the eye they chose “Dominion” out of Psalm 72:8 to be a less provocative synonym for “Kingdom.”   Although “Commonwealth Realm” has succeeded “Dominion” throughout the Commonwealth, “Dominion” remains the official title of Canada for, although the Liberals removed it from the designation of the holiday they did not remove it from the designation of the country.  Contrary to another widespread misconception, the British North America Act was neither repealed nor replaced in the 1980s.  It was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867 when the power to amend it was transferred to Canada’s parliament, but it remains in our constitutional law where it continues to call the union formed by Confederation “One Dominion” with the name “Canada.” (1)

 

As a national holiday, Dominion Day was in one sense similar to the American Independence Day and in another sense the opposite of it.   The holidays were similar in that they both celebrated what made their respective countries what they are.  Dominion Day commemorated Canada’s becoming a self-governing Dominion within the Empire that was evolving into the Commonwealth.  Independence Day commemorated the Thirteen Colonies’ declaration of independence from the same Empire.  They were the opposite of each other because that which made Canada what she is and that which made the United States what she is were the opposite of each other.  The United States was born out of a revolution and it is a revolution that she celebrates every 4^th of July.  Canada became what she is by rejecting that revolution and this is what Dominion Day signifies.  In his Considerations on France (1796) Joseph de Maistre wrote "Le rétablissement de la monarchie, qu'on appelle contre-révolution, ne sera point une révolution contraire, mais le contraire de la revolution” which in English is usually shortened and slightly paraphrased as “what is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction but the opposite of a revolution.” (2)  The path that led from the parting of ways with the Americans over their revolution to Confederation and the formation of the Dominion of Canada could be described as “the opposite of a revolution.”

 

This is the real reason why the Liberals, big and small l, hated the word “Dominion” so much. It perpetually reminded them that Confederation was not a progressive project and that at the foundational level Canada was built in opposition to their philosophy and ideals.  In the twentieth century, they had put a lot of effort into deluding themselves that this was not so.  Just as they deluded themselves into thinking that the American capitalism that was uprooting families and communities, replacing the traditional surroundings of those families and communities (both countryside and buildings that looked like they were made for humans rather than machines) with a world of unfeeling steel and concrete, eliminating the sacred – the portion of time and space set apart from commercial activity for higher purposes -  while erecting altars to mammon, and mechanizing every aspect of life (3) was somehow a reactionary force in the world so they deluded themselves into thinking that the country that until the 1970s was far more rural than her southern neighbour, which resisted the secularizing and socially progressive trends that the United States succumbed to shortly after the Second World War until close to the end of the twentieth century, which has never had a separation of church and state and over which a traditional, hereditary, king reigns is somehow a more progressive product of the same Modern thinking that produced the United States.  The Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History which dominated the Canadian history classrooms of the twentieth century the way its ancestor the Whig Interpretation of History had dominated the history classrooms of the previous century taught that Canada’s national story is identical to that of the United States, the story of a country that forged a new identify for herself by breaking with the parent country, except that in Canada’s case this was done diplomatically and peacefully, rather than through revolutionary war.  Donald Creighton, who derided this as the “Authorized Version”, told Canada’s true story in such histories as The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, The Road to Confederation, Dominion of the North, Canada’s First Century and, of course, his masterful two volume biography of Sir John A. Macdonald.  Creighton laid waste to the Liberals’ cherished idea of Canada as a politer America-lite throughout his career as the dean of Canadian history.  That single word “Dominion” in our country’s title and the older name of her national birthday testified to the truth he spoke against the lies the Liberals told themselves. No wonder they hated that word so much.

 

That our country was born, not out of a revolution but out of “the opposite of a revolution” is very much something worth celebrating.  Indeed, we were very fortunate that we did not need the type of “opposite of a revolution” that Maistre had in mind, the type that restored Charles II to his throne and the status quo ante of the Church of England after the Cromwellian rebellion, but that our “opposite of a revolution” consisted of not participating in the American revolution and so retaining our ties to both Great Britain (and the larger Empire, now Commonwealth) and through her to the older civilization of Christendom. 

Sadly, many Canadians are not as appreciative of this as they ought to be.  After the Liberals resumed government in 2015 attacks on our country’s history and traditions resumed.  One conspicuous form these attacks took was attempts to “cancel” our historical figures, most notably Sir John A. Macdonald, the leading Father of Confederation and our first prime minister.  Neoconservatives rightly opposed these attacks and defended Sir John, but as these same neoconservatives are extremely pro-American to the point of often speaking and acting as if they preferred the United States to our country, valued America’s constitution and traditions over ours, there was always a question of how much they knew about and how well they understood what they knew about the man they were defending and what he stood for.   Would they understand the previous paragraph or the argument of this entire essay?

 

I pray that they and all my countrymen would come to a full appreciation of how due to the efforts of our forebears from the Loyalists through to the Fathers of Confederation our country has roots deeper and older than herself or the Modern Age.

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

 

(1)   Senator and constitutional expert Eugene Forsey was very pleased to realize that the Liberals had ultimately failed to remove Dominion from the official designation of the country.  See the chapter on him in Charles Taylor’s Radical Tories.

(2)   The full, literal, translation is “The restoration of the monarchy, which is called a counter-revolution, will not be an opposite revolution, but the opposite of revolution.”

(3)  This critical description of American capitalism is not from the perspective known as socialism but from a perspective in which capitalism and socialism are two sides of one coin.  While socialists see the uneven distribution of wealth as the problem in capitalism and diagnose the ownership of private property as the cause and liberals (liberal is to capitalism what socialist is to socialism, a capitalist is someone who owns and uses capital) see inefficiency and too little individual freedom as the problems caused by state control in socialism what the two systems have in common is more important than what distinguishes them.  They are both ultimately expressions of Modern man’s choice of mammon over God.

The Right Word(s) for Opposing Liberalism

In a social media group devoted to Canadian Politics last week, I saw someone make the claim that the old Conservatives have disappeared and been replaced by the Reform/Alliance types and that today’s Liberals are where the Conservatives were forty plus years ago.  She was half-right.  The part she got wrong, however, was the exact opposite of the truth, a fact of which I informed her. 

 

It is true that those who call themselves “Conservatives”, big or little c, today, are basically a watered down version of what the Reform/Alliance was in the final decade of the last century, which was a populist party that was “conservative” only in the American sense of the word, a sense which has no roots deeper than the (classical) liberalism upon which the United States was founded and which is not significantly different from the original philosophy and platform of the Liberal Party (which called itself Reform in the era of Confederation).  The shift from the old Canadian conservatism to American-style neo-conservatism is not however, as this lady seemed to think, adequately explained by the dropping of “Progressive” from the party’s title. “Progressive” was not part of the party’s title in Confederation but was added to it about a decade after the old “Progressive” party – a farmers’ populist party – dissolved.  This was done because John Bracken, the premier of my province at that time, had been asked to take over the leadership of the federal Conservatives and made this a condition of his acceptance.  Bracken had been premier of Manitoba since 1922 (he was the longest to serve in this office), initially governing as leader of the provincial version of the Progressive Party (which at first called itself the United Farmers of Manitoba), then after the party collapsed as leader of the Manitoba Liberals.  When “progressive” was added to the title of the Conservative Party therefore, it was with the sense of “western, agrarian, populist” and not the sense it normally has in politics.

 

It is not true that today’s Liberals, big or small l, are where the old Conservatives were prior to neo-conservatism.  On one important matter they are portraying themselves as taking the position of the old Conservatives, the matter of standing up for Canada against the threat of American takeover.  Note that the threat and their stance against it conveniently came at the time when they were facing an historical defeat in a Dominion election.  That Canadians bought this posturing from the Liberals - the reverse of their historical position which had been to push for closer economic, cultural and political ties between Canada and the United States – can probably be attributed to neo-conservatism’s takeover of the Conservative party, although the Conservatives having betrayed their old position for that of the Liberal Party by no means logically implies that the Liberals can be trusted to stand up for the old Conservative position.  For most of the past thirteen years, the Liberals have positioned themselves not where the old Conservatives were prior to neo-conservatism, but in territory that forty-some years ago would have been regarded as beyond the pale in the land of the looney Left.   They were taking positions on moral, social, and cultural matters that as recently as twenty years ago, liberals of my acquaintance insisted could not possibly be the direction towards which their movement was heading and which until about twenty years ago, would have been regarded as too far to the Left even by some members of the NDP. (1)  Indeed, the Liberals’ relentless insistence on shoving this looney-tunes nonsense down Canadians throats, no matter how unpopular it was, significantly contributed to the rapidly declining polls from which they were rescued by a change in leadership around the time the jackass that the Americans had recently returned to the White House started relentlessly threatening us with Anschluss.  The current Liberal leader, whom I call Blofeld due to his resemblance to the last actor to play that character in a James Bond film, (2) is not the exact replica of his predecessor, whom I call Captain Airhead for obvious reasons, that the neo-conservative media try to make him out to be.  Nevertheless the Liberal Party he leads, while perhaps somewhat closer to the centre than before, is still out there in left field.

 

In the same social media discussion I said that I am no longer comfortable describing myself as a “conservative” since over the course of my lifetime I have seen this word co-opted by the neo-conservatives and redefined to mean what it means in the United States, i.e., the older form of American liberal.  I am comfortable with the term “conservative” only in the older and better sense of the word, the sense associated in Canada with Sir John A. Macdonald and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, with humourist/economist Stephen Leacock, philosopher George Grant, and historian Donald Creighton.  The “conservative” whose conservatism is that of John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown and Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure rather than that of National Review and Fox News, a conservatism that looks back to Edmund Burke and better yet Richard(s) Hooker and Field, Dean Swift, John Dryden and Dr. Johnson rather than to John Locke and J. S. Mill.  A conservatism that is all about tradition, order, and continuity, which places honour, loyalty, and the virtues of Christendom and the age of chivalry above the values of commercialism and mercantilism. A conservatism which believes in freedom in community rather than in isolated and atomized individuals, which trusts the Westminster parliamentary system that has been refined during the course of a thousand years of history over any constitution drawn up on paper three centuries ago by revolutionaries who wanted a break from the past, and which believes in the institution of royal monarchy with its prescriptive authority and its superior representative ability due to its transcendence of partisan politics over the crass republicanism that makes the highest political office the prize of a highly divisive popularity contest and which is born out of thinking Satan’s thoughts after him.  Since the neo-conservatives have been so successful in divorcing the term from these associations I prefer the older term Tory and gladly self-apply the term reactionary, derived from the movement that put an end to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, that progressives (in the normal sense of the word, not agrarian populists) have long used of non-progressives who are not content with merely questioning liberalism’s most recent ideas.

 

Shortly after the aforementioned discussion it occurred to me that in the sphere of religion and theology I feel largely the same way about the term “evangelical.”  When I first encountered this word as a young Christian it was used to mean something like “non-liberal Protestant”.  To clarify, “liberal” in the preceding sentence does not have its political connotation but refers to someone who holds to revisionist theology, that is to say, theology that has been revised in accordance with the mistaken notion that Modern discoveries of various sorts (scientific, critical, etc.) have placed such things as the historical accuracy of the Scriptures and the possibility of miracles outside the realm of the credible.  Think of the kind of person who says that he believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ but by this does not mean what Christians have historically and traditionally meant by this - that the eternal Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, at one point in history entered the womb of the Blessed Virgin, took a complete but sinless human nature at the moment into His own eternal Person from the moment it was formed and from that point forward was both fully God and fully Man in One Person, the Person Who upon His birth was given the name Jesus and Who fulfilled the prophecy of the Christ – but rather means that there is a spark of divinity in all people (as the ancient Gnostic heretics taught) that was bigger or more apparent in Jesus.  Or the kind of person who says that he believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ but who also thinks that His bones might be discovered some day.  From the moment I became aware of this kind of liberalism, I loathed it as much if not more than the political ideology by the same name. (3)

 

That having been said, even back in the ‘90’s I was not a big fan of using the word “evangelical” for Protestants who were “conservative” in the theological sense.  I learned fairly early in my Christian walk that this use of the word dated back to the 1950s when certain conservative Protestants – Carl F. H. Henry, Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today – started to use it to distance themselves from fundamentalists.  “Fundamentalist”, while now used by progressives to refer to anyone from any religion who has not compromised the traditional beliefs of his religion to their liking, was coined in the early twentieth century by Protestant theologians actively fighting the takeover of their denominations by liberalism and originally meant a kind of conservative pan-Protestant alternate ecumenism (4).   Those who chose the term “evangelical” to distance themselves from fundamentalism, although they claimed they wanted a more intellectual approach (5), really meant that they wanted a more compromising and less combative approach to liberalism.  Twenty years later, writers within evangelicalism were warning that some in the movement were abandoning sound theology, at least with regards to the infallible authority of Scripture. (6)

 

There are other connotations to the word “evangelical” than “theologically conservative Protestant”, of course, and when the new “evangelicals” of the 1950s chose this word to distance themselves from the fundamentalists it was because the word was older and had these other connotations.  In the sixteenth century, Dr. Luther and the other Reformers used the word to distinguish themselves from the papacy and its followers.  Used in this sense it was synonymous with Protestant and in much of Europe today it retains the meaning of “Protestant” and is used of anyone who is Protestant in ecclesiastical affiliation regardless of what his theology may be.  In the Anglican Church, which retained her Catholic structure through and after the Reformation, those who emphasized her ongoing Catholicity and those who stressed her Protestantism often sparred with each other and those stressed the Protestantism formed a faction and called themselves evangelical.  In the eighteenth century, evangelical took on yet another meaning in the English-speaking world as it became attached to the emphasis upon a personal conversion experience in the revivals that attended on the preaching of John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland, Ebenezer Erskine, Gilbert Tennent, Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, James Davenport, Jonathan Dickinson, Samuel Davies and others.  This became the primary meaning of the word in North America and is the meaning which the new “evangelicals” of the 1950s, who largely built their movement around the success of the Billy Graham evangelistic crusades, (7) most clearly had in mind.

 

My degree of comfort with the term varies in accordance with these connotations.  None of them is entirely unproblematic.  The one with which I am the most comfortable is Dr. Luther’s.  He used the word because he did not want his followers to be called by his own name (8) but by the name of the Gospel.  The implication, however, is that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is “the Gospel”, that it had been lost, and that he had rediscovered it.  Dr. Luther did not actually think this way, but since him it has been taken this far.  I know of some, for example, who think that all of the ancient Churches, not just Rome, but the churches of the East and the further East, lost the Gospel ages ago and that it was only rediscovered in the sixteenth century.  These are blissfully ignorant of the fact that their view of Church history is both heretical and identical with that of all the sects that they label “cults.”  The doctrine of justification by faith alone, important as it is, is not the Gospel.  If it were the Gospel, then Christianity would be saying to the world “we’ve got good news for you, all you have to do is believe” and worded that way the doctrine ceases to be a precious truth and becomes the noxious heresy of antinomianism. (9) Any truth can become a heresy if focused on to the point that we lose sight of other necessary truths.  In the early Church, the deity of Jesus Christ and His humanity, the oneness and the Threeness of God, were each twisted into heresies that denied their complementary truths.  The same is done to justification by faith alone when it is made out to be the Gospel, rather than ancillary to the Gospel.  The Gospel is that Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God become Man for us, died for our sins, according to the Scriptures and was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and was seen by a multitude of witnesses (1 Cor. 15:3ff). This message, the Good News that Christianity is commanded to preach to the world, is central to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Creed that is most truly universal being confessed by all the ancient Churches, including the Roman, and by the three main Reformation traditions.

 

I am less comfortable with the North American meaning of the word than with Dr. Luther’s.  The revivalist message, that each of us needs to internalize our faith, to repent of our sins and commit to personally following Christ, rather than relying upon external Church membership and attendance, is sound enough.  Unfortunately, it is often preached in an unhealthy way that has the opposite effect to that of Dr. Luther’s evangelical message.  Dr. Luther, in emphasizing justification by faith alone, directed the believer to look outside himself, through the eyes of faith, to his Redeemer proclaimed in the Gospel (that He died for our sins – it is finished – and rose again, objective, external, historical facts).  North American evangelicalism, by contrast, tends to turn the believer’s eyes back onto himself, to get him to constantly question whether his faith experience is real, and to answer the call of the evangelist repeated times, with decreasing levels of assurance each time.  If sixteenth century evangelicalism tended towards the error of confusing the ancillary doctrine of justification by faith alone with the Gospel itself, North American evangelicalism tends towards the error of confusing “ye must be born again” with the Gospel, a worse error because these words, by stating the need of the soul of fallen man, are closer in nature to Law than Gospel.  It lends to the problem of the inner-directed gaze by tying the re-birth, contrary to the Church Fathers, the ancient Churches, the three branches of the Magisterial Reformation, not to the Sacrament of Baptism which like the internal work of the Holy Spirit of which it is the outward symbol cannot (and need not) be repeated and in which the recipient is passive but to a personal act of repentance and (re-)dedicating oneself to Christ which is active on the part of the participant, which can be repeated, and which ought to be repeated as the need arises. (10)

 

The connotations of evangelical in the Anglican context, to the extent they are distinct from the previous two sets, are those with which I am least comfortable.  In the sixteenth century, evangelical as applied to the reformed Church of England had Dr. Luther’s meaning, today it is closer to the generic North American meaning, but in between it was the name of a faction or party within the reformed Church of England.  That forming a faction or party within the Church is a bad thing to do is one of the main themes of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians.  Of course, someone might respond that this point could be raised against the Anglican Church’s post-Reformation status as a distinct Church.  The answer to this, of course, is that in the New Testament there was a huge difference between the factions within the Corinthian Church declaring themselves to be “of Apollos”, or “of Cephas” or “of Paul” on the one hand, and the distinction on the other hand between “the Church in Galatia” or “the Church in Thessalonica” or between the seven Churches to whom letters are addressed in the second and third chapters of the Apocalypse.  In the English Reformation, when the Church of England in conjunction with Parliament declared herself free from the usurped authority of the Patriarch of Rome, she did not excommunicate said Patriarch nor did she excommunicate the Latin Church that remained under his authority.  The excommunication ran entirely in the opposite direction, demonstrating where the spirit of schism truly lay. (11)   Indeed, apart from its factionalism what I dislike the most about the Anglican Church’s evangelical faction is the low value it places on the efforts of the English Reformers to not be schismatic, to maintain continuity with the pre-Reformation Church, to keep the reforms moderate and conservative, and to be guided by how the Church of the first millennium and especially the early Patristic centuries interpreted the Scripture in making what reforms she made.  The evangelical faction of the Anglican Church has undergone many internal changes, (12) what has remained consistent about it is that it stresses things that we have in common with only the Lutherans, Reformed, and some of the separatist sects above the faith, spelled out in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds which we have in common with all of the ancient Churches as well as the Lutherans, the Reformed on their best days, and slightly fewer of the separatist sects and other things (liturgical worship, three-fold historical ministry with episcopal government, etc.) that we have in common with the other ancient Churches and some of the Lutherans.  The proper hierarchy of value is that the common faith is most important, followed by the other things we have in common with all the ancient Churches, followed by the things we have in common with the Lutherans and Reformed.

 

With these misgivings about these three historical uses of the term and especially since the one with which I am most comfortable, Dr. Luther’s, has decayed into the contemporary European usage in which it is a synonym for Protestant regardless of theology, I would very much prefer that another term be used for a theological conservative.  Fundamentalist would be better except that around the time that the new evangelicalism was distancing itself from fundamentalism, fundamentalism was narrowing its own self-identity in less-than-desirable ways (13).  Catholic would be better yet were it not for the fact that most Protestants have conceded it to Rome making it impossible for anybody else to use it without a disclaimer as long as the Oxford English Dictionary.  This leaves us with orthodox, which has never been conceded to the Eastern Church the way Catholic has been to the Roman (traditionalist Roman Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants have always used it and it has long been the preferred term of those Anglicans who stress the importance of maintaining continuity in doctrine, structure, worship and practice with the Church of the first millennium, especially the first five centuries), and would have been the best option regardless since it has been the term for doctrinal soundness since the very beginning.

 

 

 

 (1)   It was roughly twenty years ago that one NDP member, Bev Desjarlais, voted against Bill C-38, which established the legal fiction of same-sex marriage across the Dominion, although it cost her the nomination of her party in the next election. The Liberals of the last thirteen years have moved much further down the slippery-slope from the Civil Marriage Act.

(2)   The resemblance is almost as remarkable as that between David Bentley Hart, the lay Eastern Orthodox theologian whose liberal Protestant views pass as traditional Eastern Orthodox ones to Westerners who are not sufficiently read in the theology of the East to know the difference and the late M*A*S*H actor David Ogden Stiers (after Stiers grew a beard in the mid ‘90’s) or between Captain Airhead’s current girlfriend and actress Zooey Deschanel.

(3)   The term “liberal” in both instances refers to the acceptance of Modern ideas over older, classical and traditional ideas.  About a century ago “liberal” theologians were called Modernists which is more accurate label.  The term “liberal” comes from the Latin word for “generous”.  Whether in the realm of politics or theology, it is a form of self-flattery and those who do not themselves identify as “liberals” seldom see in “liberals” the generosity and broad-mindedness they claim for themselves, quite the opposite.

(4)   As represented, for example, by the volumes The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited by A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, and R. A Torrey, originally published in twelve volumes from 1910 to 1915, then rebound in the four volumes they have been published as ever since in 1917.  Dixon was a Baptist minister, Meyer a Reformed Presbyterian, Torrey a Congregationalist, and the contributors included Presbyterians such as James Orr, A. T. Pierson, and B. B. Warfield, Baptists such as E. Y. Mullins, G. Campbell Morgan, and Thomas Spurgeon, Anglicans such as Dyson Hague, W. H. Griffith Thomas, Handley Moule, G. Osborne Troop and C. T. Studd, Methodists such as A. C. Gaebelein and John L. Nuelson, Lutheran Frederic Bettex, A. J. Pollack of the Plymouth Brethren, and various other contributors from these and other denominations.

(5)   A laughable claim since they were hardly more scholarly then the men who contributed to The Fundamentals, note 4 vide supra.  Mark A. Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) was a tremendous indictment of the movement’s efforts in this regards after four decades.  Perhaps if “intellectual” is taken in the uncomplimentary sense with which Tom Wolfe used to use or as is used by historian Paul Johnson in his Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) it might be defensible.

(6)   Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1976) followed by his The Bible in the Balance (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1979) for example.  A decade later Francis Schaeffer addressed the declining doctrinal standards of evangelicalism in his last book The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton: Crossway, 1984).

(7)   Apart from doing what he was most famous for doing, Billy Graham was the founder of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of the new evangelicalism.  Carl F. H. Henry was the magazine’s first editor.

(8)   As Robert Burns said “the best laid scheme o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”

(9)   Gospel means “good news”.  If “justification by faith alone” were the Gospel this would mean that it is itself the central content of the message of Christianity.  The very wording, “justification by faith alone”, however, should make it obvious that this is not the kerygma but a theological formulation.  If you try to express what “justification by faith alone” means as a message addressed to people in the second person then you end up with “all you have to do is believe”.  There is a huge difference between saying that “all you have to do is believe” is Christianity’s message to a fallen and sinful world and saying that Christianity’s message is “God has given us a Saviour, His Only-Begotten Son, Who became a man just like us except without sin, Who died for our sins upon the cross that He might take them away and defeat the enemies that have held us in spiritual bondage since our first parents, Who after He was buried showed His triumph over these enemies of sin and death by rising again from the dead, leaving the grave behind, showing Himself to His followers, and ascending back to His Father” and that we are to believe this message and trust this Saviour rather than in our own efforts to please God.

 

The second wording shows where the doctrine of justification by faith alone belongs, in the unrolling of the implications of the Gospel for us, that because the Saviour God has given us is so perfect and the salvation He accomplished for us so complete, He and not our own efforts is the proper object of our faith, just as He and not our own faith, is the proper content of the Gospel.  The first wording, however, expresses what you get when you make justification by faith alone itself out to be the Gospel.  This is not what those who call justification by faith alone the Gospel usually intend to convey, they have just not thought through the implications of what they are saying. 

 

In the text of the essay I identified the heresy which they unintentionally make themselves guilty of by sloppy thinking as antinomianism.  This is because if “all you have to do is believe” is itself the “good news”, this translates into “you don’t have to do good” which is the historical meaning of antinomianism (more precisely, antinomianism is the idea that Christians do not have to obey the moral part of the law), whereas justification by faith alone in its proper place, does not tell you that you don’t have to do good, it tells you that your efforts to do good cannot save you or assist in your salvation, and that you are to trust in Jesus Christ rather than them. 

 

Anti-protestant apologists, usually for Rome, like to refer to the heresy of “solafideism”.  This suggests that “justification by faith alone” is itself, and not merely its being placed in the centre of the Christian kerygma bumping out Jesus, His death, and resurrection, a heresy.  This, however, ignores the very nature of heresy.  At the core of every heresy is a truth which has been misplaced, taken out of its proper context, so that other truths are diminished or denied.  The truth at the core of Sabellianism (modalism, the denial of the distinct Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is the unity of God.  The truth at the core of Tritheism (the denial of the unity of Being of Father, Son, Holy Spirit so as to make them three Gods) is the distinction of the Persons.  The truth at the core of Nestorianism (the separation of the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ so as to divide His Person) is that His human nature remains distinct from His divine nature even though they are united in His Eternal Person so that whatever is true of either of them is also true of Him, the Person. 

 

If there is a heresy of Solafideism this can only be because there is a truth of Solafideism.  If there is a heresy of Solafideism  which denies James 2:24 (and the larger passage in which it is found), then the truth Solafideism is the affirmation of Romans 4:3-5 (the wording of verse five is much stronger than what could be conveyed by the word “alone” or “only”), the entire chapter in which it is found and those before and after, the epistle of Galatians, Ephesians 2:8-10, Titus 3:4-8 (notice how the last two passages make the good works, the need for which they declare in the final verse, rest upon the foundation of their not having contributed to salvation by grace) and all the passages in the Johannine corpus (far too numerous to list but take the best known verse of the New Testament, John 3:16 as an example) which promise everlasting life to “whosoever believeth” in Jesus. 

 

Historically, if the Reformers placed too much importance on justification by faith alone by carelessly speaking as if they had recovered a lost Gospel, this is because Rome, despite having been officially committed to Sola Gratia since the days of St. Augustine of Hippo, had in practice been denying all the “to him that worketh not” and “not by works of righteousness which we have done” and the like found in these passages by exaggerating the importance and value of good works to the point of having created a treadmill theology in which people were kept on the treadmill of good works by having the carrot of salvation dangled in front of them, tantalizingly just out of reach, while they are whipped from behind with threats of hellfire or its unscriptural second cousin once removed purgatorial fire.  When challenged by the Reformers on this, Rome doubled down on this error, denied any truth to Solafideism (thus carelessly denying the truth of the passages just referenced) and made herself guilty of a far bigger and worse heresy than the one of which they accused the Reformers.

 

“Not by works”, which expresses what the “alone” in “faith alone” means much more strongly than the word “alone” ever could, occurs throughout the Pauline corpus of the New Testament.  It cannot be explained away by saying that the works in question are merely the ceremonial works of the Mosaic Law.  Titus 3:5’s “not by works of righteousness” clearly excludes this explanation.  So does St. Paul’s explanation of why justification is not by works – “that it might be by grace” (Rom. 4:16), that is to say, a gift.  Faith can receive a salvation that is freely given, works cannot, if they enter the picture then what they receive is a reward or a wage not a gift.  All “faith alone” was ever supposed to mean is that faith does not share its role in God’s order of salvation, the role of the hand that receives the freely given gift of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, with anything else.  Works cannot perform this role, neither can repentance which has the ancillary role of preparing the soul that it may trust in God’s grace, nor can the Sacraments which like the preaching of the Word are the hands of the Giver not of the recipient.  Anyone who considers that to be heresy, is himself the heretic.

(10)                       Note that the word “conversion”, while it can often mean accepting the faith for the first time, such as when we speak of someone from another religion (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.) or from a secular faith that masquerades as a non-religion (atheism, Communism, etc.) converting to Christianity, in which case it has the same one-time, not-to-be-repeated connotations of baptism and the spiritual work of regeneration, it is also  used in Scripture for occasions when a Christian is restored after a fall (see Lk. 22:32, in which Jesus speaks of St. Peter’s restoration after denying Him as a future conversion, St. Peter having already confessed the saving faith of Jn. 20:31 at Caesarea Philippi in Matt. 16:16 and been told that he was blessed because he had been enlightened by the Father Himself) and so denotes something that is repeatable (despite the nonsense which some early Christians held and which, due to the influence of the Shephard of Hermas, it took a couple of centuries for the early Church to fully repudiate, that each Christian is allowed only one big screw up and do-over after his baptism). 

(11)                       To make the point even clearer, dialogue between the reformed Church of England and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, more specifically between the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, at the time Cyril Lucaris, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, first George Abbott then William Laud, took place in the reigns of James I and Charles I in the early seventeenth century, long before Constantinople and Rome lifted the mutual excommunication they had pronounced upon each other in the eleventh century.  Although the leadership of the English Church never formally put this into writing, this early dialogue demonstrates that they regarded the excommunications of the eleventh century as political rather than valid and did not see themselves as bound by the papal excommunication of the East now that they had repudiated Rome’s usurped authority (Dr. Luther had a similar attitude).

(12)                       When the faction first formed it was very hard-core Calvinist to the point that it accused orthodox Churchmen who did not think that the canons of Dort should be binding on Anglicans or double predestination the subject of every sermon of “Arminianism” although few if any of those so accused were adherents to the tenets of the Remonstrance.  In the eighteenth century, the preaching of the Wesleys – although they were not of the evangelical faction themselves but are considered to have been evangelicals because they were among the first of the North American sense of the word – brought both a form of Arminianism that was quite modified from the Dutch original into Anglican evangelicalism.  The Calvinists remained, now as a sub-faction within the evangelical faction, somewhat ironically (the evangelicals had historically been the liberal faction of the Church) considered the more conservative sub-faction of Anglican evangelicalism.  Some of these seem to think that the Forty-Two Articles (the Reformed aspects of which were moderated when revised into the Thirty-Nine that have been the actual standard of Anglicanism for centuries) and the Lambeth Articles (which, due to Queen Elizabeth I’s wise veto, never became official the doctrine of the Church) are genuinely Anglican but that the 1549 Book of Common Prayer (mostly the work of Archbishop Cranmer) is not.  The Calvinist evangelicals are at their best today when insisting on strict adherence to the Book of Common Prayer and other classical Anglican formularies (this should include the 1611 Authorized Bible but often doesn’t) in worship, although this insistence is somewhat one-sided being the more vehemently protested against the inclusion of more traditional ceremonies and rituals than against slimming down the liturgy and making the sermon and music more resemble what you would find in a generic evangelical “non-denominational” mega-church. 

(13)                       What began as a cross-denominational cooperative movement against liberalism, became a movement which preached schism from other conservative Protestants (even within the same denomination) for not being schismatic enough (they called this second-degree separation).  While the movement remained theoretically neutral on eschatological interpretations, in practice it became even more dispensationalist than evangelicalism.  This may be due to non-dispensationalists (and non-pre-millennialists in general) moving over to the evangelical movement, but it is just as likely that dispensationalism’s bad ecclesiology appealed to their new hyper-separatism.  This, of course, meant that they became more committed to the “two peoples of God” nonsense than evangelicalism. Interestingly this did not necessarily mean they became more prone to the practical error of “Christian Zionism”, i.e., giving carte blanche support to the present state of Israel, than dispensationalist evangelicals.  Bob Jones Jr., president then chancellor of the fundamentalist university his father built for much of the second half of the twentieth century and certainly a dispensationalist devoted several pages of his memoirs, Cornbread and Caviar, to debunking Jerry Falwell’s more uncritical support of Israel by explaining that the country was secular and ungodly, persecuted Christians, hypocritically treated Arabs and Muslims the way they complained about having been treated themselves by everyone else throughout history, and at the time - as also today - were governed by a party formed and led by the leaders of the organizations that waged terrorist war against the United Kingdom in the 1940s prior to the partition of the Holy Land and their gaining independence in 1948.  He spelled out several of the crimes of the Irgun and Stern Gang in detail – can you imagine any evangelical dispensationalist doing this?  Similarly, John R. Rice of Sword of the Lord failed to get the memo that all dispensationalists must uncritically support Israel.  

 

I don’t include KJV-Onlyism in the list of undesirable elements of fundamentalism’s new self-definition.  The Authorized Bible is the preferred English translation of fundamentalism, actual KJV-Onlyism is held by some fundamentalists not by all.  While I am not a KJV-Onlyist in the sense of thinking that the Authorized Bible could not even hypothetically be improved on and that only someone involved in a Satanic New Age conspiracy or Alexandrian Cult would try I would say that until principles derived from orthodox faith are made the basis of textual scholarship again (such as, at the very least, that the correct text will be found in what has been read in the Church all along and not in manuscripts, regardless of their age, hidden away in obscure monasteries and libraries for centuries, see nineteenth century High Anglican Dean John W. Burgon for more such principles) and translators found who are at least the equals in scholarship of Bishops Andrewes, Overall and their co-translators (extremely unlikely, considering that the explosion of new translations coincided with the period of which Joe Sobran remarked “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college”) a snowball stands a better chance in hell than of this happening.  By contrast with fundamentalism, evangelicalism went from a general preference for the New International Version to a general preference to the English Standard Version.   This took place because of the 2011 “update” to the NIV that made it “gender-neutral”.  Even before that, the value of the translation of which Rupert Murdoch’s company has owned the copyright since 1988, was grossly exaggerated.  In second-year Greek, one of my classmates remarked about how first year Greek had ruined the NIV for him.  I don’t remember there being much if any dissent to this opinion.  A few years after that I remember attending a service where the sermon was preached from the NIV with the text on a screen behind the preacher.  I happened to have my Greek New Testament with me, and looked up the same text.  The differences were far more than can be explained by the difference between “dynamic equivalence” and “literal” (nor could they be explained by differences in the underlying text, even if it were not the case, as it happened to be, that the Greek NT I had with me that day was not my Textus Receptus but the UBS fourth edition). Something that was a statement of fact in the Greek was a question in the NIV.  Proper names not present in the Greek were in the NIV.  As for the ESV it is the Revised Standard Version, a translation notorious for its liberal slant, the use of which was purchased from the National Council of Churches, then edited by J. I. Packer et al. sufficiently to allow for it to be sold under a different name and marketed as a “conservative” translation.

Kenney Gets it Backwards Again

Jason Kenney, the former premier of Alberta who had been a Cabinet minister in the Dominion government during the premiership of Stephen Harper, has recently attracted attention again for his criticism of Candice Malcolm and her Juno News.  On Monday, 16 February, Malcolm hosted Daniel Tyrie, who at one time was the executive director of Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party and who is currently the chairman of the Dominion Society of Canada which he co-founded last year, on her podcast, the Candice Malcolm Show.  The topic of the interview was immigration and national identity, unsurprisingly as this is the focus of the Dominion Society, and in the course of the interview creative solutions to the problems created by the aggressive promotion of mass immigration in recent decades were discussed. 

 

That Kenney objected to this is also not surprising.  While the Liberal government under its previous leader Captain Airhead highly publicized its aggressive promotion of mass immigration the actual policy was virtually identical during the Harper premiership in which Kenney was the minister responsible for this sort of thing.  The most significant difference is that Harper and Kenney did not peacock what they were doing to the extent that Captain Airhead later did.

 

Kenney responded to the interview on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.  He opened by accusing Tyrie of being a racist, then included a self-righteous mini-rant about the immorality of racism, then asked what “remigration” meant as if the term wasn’t self-explanatory and suggested an interpretation that presented the concept in the worst possible light.

 

Malcolm, defending the interview from this and similar criticism from progressive sources, correctly argued that her job as an interviewer wasn’t to agree or disagree with her interviewee and that the topic was an important one worthy of discussion.  Later that week in another tweet – or whatever you are supposed to call that now – Kenney stated “they are getting more attention from ostensibly sane right wing media.  We have to maintain hygiene within the conservative movement by calling this stuff out.”  The spirit of Bill Buckley lives on!

 

In my right opinion, Kenney has got things backwards.  He thinks that Malcolm has tainted her platform by allowing Tyrie to appear on it.  On the contrary, I think that a better case can be made that it is Tyrie who risked tainting himself and his organization by appearing on the Candice Malcolm Show.   Over the course of the past year Juno News has promoted all sorts of odious things such as the Alberta separatist movement.  If Malcolm can be charged with giving a platform to someone who ought not to be given one it should be over her interview with Diane Francis last year, right at the time when the American president was shooting his mouth off daily about making our country “the 51^st state”, over Francis’s repugnant vision of a business-merger type joining of Canada with her country of birth.  Juno’s continuing admiration for Krasnov the Orange despite his degeneration into a petty tyrant who completely disregards the constitutional limitations of his office or the fact that it does not come with jurisdiction over the entire world and of the MAGA movement despite its having turned into a cult for whom its leader can accomplish anything but can do no wrong, is utterly disgusting.  This is a pity, because on many matters from  pretty much everything concerning the bat flu scare to the false narrative concerning the residential schools to the wave of arsons and other vandalism of church buildings, Malcolm and her organization have been far more reliable and trustworthy than the legacy or mainstream media. 

 

It was not entirely unexpected, however.  Malcolm and True North/Juno are neo-conservative which means that they consider the American conservative movement to be the measuring stick of conservatism.  The American conservative movement, however, unlike the classical Canadian Toryism expounded in John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown, the essays of Stephen Leacock, and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker’s speeches collected and published as Those Things We Treasure, was never authentically conservative but was rather eighteenth to nineteenth century liberalism resisting liberalism’s twentieth century convergence with socialism.  Long before last year, neo-conservative organizations like Malcom’s displayed an extremely unpatriotic preference for the country built on liberalism, the United States of America, over our own country with her genuinely conservative, Loyalist, foundation. 

 

Lest you think I am being unfair to the neo-conservatives allow me to point out two ways in which this preference has long been evident.  The first is the way in which negative attitudes towards the United States are treated as compared to negative attitudes towards Canada.  On Malcom’s Juno News, as on its predecessor True North and their sister organization, Ezra Levant’s Rebel News, anti-American attitudes are treated as being something akin to mental disease. (1)   This is rather ironic when you consider that authentic conservatism, in Canada and elsewhere, historically has been highly suspicious of and skeptical towards the United States.  Diefenbaker, the last authentic Canadian conservative to hold office as prime minister, responded to criticism from the left that he was too negative in his views towards the United States by saying “I am not anti-American, I am very pro-Canadian.” The point, however, is that anti-Canadianism is not similarly treated as mental contagion by the neo-conservatives.  Some forms of it, like the attempts by progressives to “cancel” historical figures like Sir John A. Macdonald, they have rightly opposed, but other forms, such as that of the Alberta separatists get a free pass from them. 

 

The second way in which the neo-conservative anti-patriotism has long been evident is itself a form of anti-Canadianism.  Neo-conservatives have long seemed incapable of criticizing the Liberals when they, the Liberals, are in government, without framing it as an attack on Canada and her institutions.  During the previous premiership, instead of “the Grits are incompetent, Captain Airhead is an ass, and this party and its leader should not be entrusted to look after a broom closet let alone govern our country” what we kept getting from the neo-conservatives was “Canada is broken.” 

Ironically, of course, in their anti-patriotism, the neo-conservatives do not resemble the American conservatives they admire so much but rather the Hollywood liberals who keep threatening to leave their country whenever they lose an election.

 

Let Sir Walter Scott’s timeless judgement be the final word on those of this ilk:

 

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

 

This sort of aggressively pro-American anti-patriotism is something that Tyrie and his organization can ill-afford to be associated with.  While the Dominion Society was only founded last year and I cannot pretend to have followed everything it has said and done, I am familiar enough with it to be confident in saying that it is best described as an advocacy organization dedicated to a single issue, that issue being the preservation and restoration of historical Canada from the deleterious effects of mass immigration.  There are two reasons why activists for this cause cannot afford to be associated with neo-conservatism.  The first is what we have already discussed about the nature of neo-conservatism.  A movement that has long wanted Canada to be more like the United States can be no friend to the cause of preserving and restoring historical Canada.  If the Dominion Society and its founders don’t understand why this is the case they would do well to read the works of the dean of Canadian history, Donald Creighton and learn to distinguish Canada’s true story from the Liberal Version shared by the neo-conservatives.

 

The second reason is that the neo-conservatives continue to admire the current American president who has been poisoning the public mind against the correction of the excesses of mass immigration through association with himself.  I have come to suspect that this is deliberate on his part.  A little under twenty years ago a crack opened up in the wall that had kept criticism of mass immigration and the deliberate and rapid increase in diversity outside the Overton Window.  This was about the time that Harvard University professor and political scientists Robert Putnam made public the findings of a five-year research project that showed that, in the short term at least, increasing ethnic diversity within a community reduced its social capital so that people had less trust, not merely in the other but in members of their own group.  Putnam did not intend this as criticism of immigration or diversity and, indeed, delayed publishing his research because he did not want it used as such, but it opened a crack which grew wider and wider until it appeared that the wall would imminently collapse and sane and open discussion of this topic would enter the sphere of public and polite discussion from which it had been excluded for decades.  Then Krasnov the Orange, the real estate developer turned public entertainer, made another career change and entered politics.  Claiming to be a political outsider, he ran for president of the United States on the issue of immigration.  In actuality, his position on immigration was not significantly different from that of the mainstream Republicans.  He did not promise to undo fifty years of a failed experiment in social engineering by means of mass immigration.  He merely promised to enforce the United States’ immigration laws and keep people from entering illegally.  Nevertheless, his supporters and opponents alike mistook him to be taking a much stronger stand on immigration than he was, and in other Western countries experiencing the consequences of the aforementioned failed social experiment immigration reformers were emboldened and inspired by him.  Then came his second term in office.  Perhaps something snapped in his brain forming the thought “they keep calling me Hitler, I’ll give them Hitler.” (2)  Perhaps, and more likely in my opinion, it had been the intention of his controllers in the international Communist movement all along to use him to discredit the growing opposition to their mass immigration social experiment.  Either way, his actions upon his return to office have put any idea or cause associated with him in the public mind, no matter how good or necessary it may be on its own merits, in danger of being set back for decades to come.

 

No, Tyrie and his society would do well, if they wish to go anywhere with their cause, to avoid any association with either the anti-patriotic neo-conservatives in Canada or the American MAGA cult.

 

I would recommend that they look to Enoch Powell.  Powell was a British classical scholar turned World War II military intelligence officer turned Tory statesman.  Although in some ways, primarily monetarism and free market economics, he was a forerunner to Margaret Thatcher, his was a more authentic Toryism.  He did not admire the United States the way Thatcher did, but referred to her as “our terrible enemy” in a letter written during World War II and in his subsequent career always distrusted her and opposed her efforts to flex her muscle around the world.  In one well-known incident, he showed Thatcher what true Tory patriotism looks like when he told her “No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a Communist government.”  

 

Powell is most remembered, however, perhaps unfortunately considering his long list of achievements, for a speech he gave in 1968 in which he condemned the way the Labour government of Harold Wilson was needlessly importing American-style racial strife into the United Kingdom by bringing in immigrants in numbers far in excess of what British communities could absorb without friction and by trying to force harmony on everyone with heavy-handed legislation in imitation of the US Civil Rights Act something which anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together would recognize as doomed to accomplish the opposite of what was intended.  Powell, like all sane men of his and all previous generations who grew up without being brainwashed into the cult of diversity, knew instinctually what it took Putnam five years of research to discover.  The speech instantly made Powell the most popular man in the UK, but it was immediately condemned as incitement of racial hatred by progressives in the media and the Labour Party and its orator was labelled by the same a “racialist.”  In reality, of course, it was Wilson’s policies which were generating racial strife and so by opposing them, Powell was doing the exact opposite of inciting racial hatred. 

 

Kenney’s accusations against Tyrie are the same as those that were made against Powell after his 1968 Birmingham speech.  They ought not to be taken seriously.  In the 1960s, all the countries in the civilization formerly known as Christendom embraced the insane and absurd idea that increasing ethnic diversity as much as possible and as fast as possible can have only beneficial and no deleterious results.  They did this because the United States had emerged from the two World Wars as the dominant power in that civilization and everyone else thought they had to imitate her even though she at the time was obviously in the midst of a pendulum swing from one form of toxic racial politics into an equally toxic opposite form.  This idea, which is the basis of the social experiment to which the former Christendom has been subjected ever since, is so obviously wrong that it could not withstand even the slightest of scrutiny and so it has been protected ever since by ad hominem attacks on anyone who dares express dissent, attacks designed to prevent people from considering what the dissident has to say by imputing to him irrational prejudice and hatred, subscription to some odious racial ideology or another, or both and while irrational prejudices and hatreds undoubtedly exist as do odious racial ideologies, rarely do these accusations have any basis in fact.  The interesting thing about the word “racist” which Kenney called Tyrie is that it seems to have actually been coined to be used in this way and so has never been a word that admits of good faith usage but could actually be called an anti-word because it exists, not as the means of conveying information and ideas, but as the means of stopping discussion and debate.  Kenney professes to be a Roman Catholic Christian.  Perhaps he ought to think long and hard about whether using this word is an automatic violation of the eighth commandment by his Church’s method of numbering. (3)

 

I very much doubt, however, that Kenney lies awake at night worrying about whether he is bearing false witness against his neighbour or not.  I have long observed that those who consider themselves to be on a moral crusade against racism think truth to be an acceptable sacrifice in the name of carrying out this endeavor and that the more committed they are to this crusade, or at least the more prominently it is featured in their own self-promotion, the less compunctions they have about telling falsehoods about those they consider to be racists.  Twice in Canadian history, people who wanted the government to aggressively clamp down on racism assisted some stooge in founding a neo-nazi organization that in reality resembled the World Council of Anarchists from G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (it consisted entirely of undercover policemen rather than actual anarchists) in order to generate public fear of a threat that was obviously non-existent if it required such measures in order to create the scare.

 

The ethical reasoning that seems to justify this sort of deception to those who perpetrate it, although it may not always be consciously formulated as such in their own minds, is something like this: a) the world is divided into good people and evil people, b) racists are evil people, therefore c) anything done in the name of fighting racists is justified.   While that conclusion would not follow even if both premises were completely true because that does not even come close to being a valid syllogism the thinking that underlies at least the first premise is not sound by the standards of orthodox Christian moral theology and, indeed, in it can be recognized a form of the dualism of the third century Persian false prophet Mani, against whose heresy St. Augustine wrote extensively having been drawn to it himself prior to his conversion. (4) 

 

Many, probably most, of those who joined Kenney in decrying Tyrie’s appearance on the Candice Malcolm Show relied upon a single authority for their idea of what the Dominion Society and its founders are all about.  That authority is the Canadian Anti-Hate Group.   With this group, as with all others of its kind, nothing they say should be believed unless they can prove it, down to the minutest detail, with evidence that would meet the standard of proof in a court of criminal law, that is, beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt. This group, founded early in the premiership of Captain Airhead who heavily subsidized it, was based on the model of a similar organization in the United States that funded its founding.  The parent organization, once the go to when American media needed an “expert” to pontificate on racism, has been largely discredited in the last ten years as the organization lost a number of defamation suits, its founder was ousted after being accused of, among other things, racism, law enforcement agencies began to disassociate themselves from it, and the public came increasingly to see it as a racket that was more about using the fear of racial hatred to raise funds rather than raising funds to combat racial hatred.  I have seen no evidence that would suggest that CAHN is any better and everything that I have seen suggests the exact opposite of that.  Its founding chairman, in his previous role with the new defunct Canadian Jewish Congress (5), first came to my attention when he was lobbying the government to strip several Ukrainian and German refugees from Communism of their citizenship in their old age and have them deported to stand trial for war crimes.  The men in question, had been captured by the Nazis when they overran their countries (the Germans were ethnic Germans who lived in countries other than Germany) during World War II and forced to serve by means such as holding their families captive and threatening harm to them if they did not comply.  To sane people, like the late Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun, these men were clearly victims of the Third Reich.  To Bernie Farber, however, the fact that they served under duress and the fact that they served mostly in roles such as translator, meant nothing, he considered them to be collaborators, culpable in the crimes of the regime that forced them to serve at gunpoint, literal and metaphorical. 

 

This blindness and/or indifference to the difference between the actual historical Nazis and people they forced to serve them is more than sufficient to justify dismissing claims to expertise on such matters from this source and completely disregarding what he and his ilk have to say about contemporary individuals and groups like Tyrie and the Dominion Society.

 

So no, Candice Malcom was not tainting her platform by allowing Tyrie to speak for the Dominion Society on it.  Challenging the idea behind the experiment in social engineering through mass immigration that has been ongoing from the ‘60’s to the present that the more you increase ethnic diversity and the faster the better, an idea that has far too long been protected from scrutiny, is more like a breath of fresh air than a contagion. (6)  If anything, the contagion went in the other direction, the contagion that is, of Americanist neo-conservatism.

 

.

 (1)   Indeed, the only country negative attitudes towards which are more quickly condemned by the neo-conservatives than those towards the United States, is Israel, the tail that has wagged the American dog since the Lyndon Johnson administration.

(2)   When the left likens Krasnov to Hitler, as they have been doing since before his first term, it is because in their fevered brains his immigration policies resemble Hitler’s racial ideology.  The two are nothing alike.  In Hitler’s thinking, the races were involved in a Darwinian struggle against each other that was a winner-take all zero-sum game.  Krasnov’s is a civil, not a racial, nationalism.  This remains true in his second term.  Where he has begun to resemble Hitler is in the following areas: a) disregard for constitutional limits on the powers of his office, b) threatening other countries and making territorial demands, c) the optics of his crackdown on illegal immigration.  With regards to the last mentioned, illegal immigration has been a problem demanding a crackdown for decades, but the way it is being done seems to be deliberately evoking images of Nazi or Soviet secret police – faceless, unaccountable, demanding to see one’s papers.

(3)   My own Church, the Anglican, like the Jews, the Eastern Orthodox, and all other Protestants except the Lutherans, consider it as the ninth commandment.

(4)   Mani’s dualism erred by reifying evil which in orthodox Christian theology “exists” not as a thing but in the way the hole left in a wall after you accidentally drive your car through it might be said to “exist” in the wall.  God created everything good, evil is a defect in goodness not a created “thing”, it possesses neither form nor substance.  The idea of an eternal struggle between an equally or almost equally matched good and evil, light and darkness, while a popular theme in Hollywood, is false.  There is a conflict in the spiritual realm, but this conflict is not eternal, it had a beginning and it will end in the total defeat of the evil side, the two sides are nowhere near being evenly matched, and evil, even in the being that initiated the conflict by rebelling against God, is a self-imposed defect in the goodness with which he was created.  The idea that the world is divided into good and evil people is ultimately derived from Manichean dualism.  In orthodox Christian theology, such a division is the result of the Final Judgement at the end of time, not a description of the state of affairs in time.  Note that St. Augustine was not merely the great opponent of Manichaeism but of Pelagianism as well and in opposing Pelagianism he upheld the orthodox doctrine of Original Sin, that in Adam all fell so that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”, from which condition the Son of God entered human history in order to rescue and redeem us.  When the final division into the “righteous” and “wicked” takes place at the end of time, the latter will be those who rendered their sinful condition incurable by finally rejecting redeeming grace.  A system that divides people into good and evil in time and demands repentance from those it considers to be evil while offering them nothing in the way of redemption, forgiveness, and cleansing is fundamentally Manichean and must be recognized and condemned as such by all orthodox Christians. 

(5)   This organization features in the first of the Man Who Was Thursday incidents.  Farber was not involved, of course, since it took place in 1965, almost two decades before he started working for the CJC and while he was still a teenager. In this year a man named John Beattie started a “Canadian Nazi Party” which the CJC hired an ex-cop named John Garrity to infiltrate.  There was not much more to this group than the two of them.  When Ezra Levant wrote about the incident in his 2009 book Shakedown the CJC denied that their purpose had been to facilitate the passing of hate speech legislation.  They had long been lobbying for such legislation, however, and 1965 had begun with Lester Pearson appointing the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada to look into the matter.  This committee, called the “Cohen Committee” after its chairman Maxwell Cohen of McGill University included among its members Saul Hayes, then executive vice president of the CJC and Pierre Trudeau who would succeed Pearson and Liberal leader and prime minister and who early in his premiership would act upon the committee’s report and pass the first hate propaganda legislation.  Given this historical context, does the CJC’s denial decades later seem at all credible?

(6)   It should go without saying that the challenging ideas should not just be accepted uncritically either but should be weighed and allowed to stand or fall on their own merits.