Canada’s Greatest Need

 

It is 1 July, the anniversary of the day in 1867 on which the British North America Act came into effect establishing the Confederation of the provinces of Canada – the single province into which Upper and Lower Canada had been united in 1841, now split into two provinces again - New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia into the Dominion of Canada.   Between 1867 and 1905, the provinces of Manitoba, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Alberta would be added to Confederation, with Newfoundland joining in 1949.   Also part of Canada since 1870 are the territories, originally all the Northwest Territories, with Yukon becoming a distinct territory in 1898 and Nunavut much more recently in 1999.   Until 1982 the anniversary of our country was celebrated as Dominion Day, because it was the day Canada became a Dominion – a term our Fathers of Confederation chose themselves, out of the Bible, as a substitute for their original choice of title “Kingdom” - and which became the designation within the British Empire of a country under the reign of the shared monarch which governed herself through her own Parliament.   When the British Empire evolved into the British Commonwealth the term Commonwealth Realm took on the same meaning within the new arrangement but Canada is still designated a Dominion in what was renamed the "Constitution Act, 1867" in the same year that the holiday was renamed.   Although the change of the name of the founding document was accomplished legally – unlike the change in the name of the holiday which was snuck through Parliament on a hot summer’s Friday with less than a quorum present – traditionalists such as myself still call it the British North America Act, just as we continue to celebrate today as Dominion Day.

 

This year for Dominion Day we shall be looking at our country’s greatest need, something that while it would not make all of the problems that afflict Canada – social, economic, cultural, moral, political, etc. – go away, would provide a large degree of relief in many if not all of these areas.   No, I do not mean a change in our federal premiership for while undoubtedly the present Prime Minister has contributed significantly to making all of our problems worse for the last eight years, there is no guarantee that his successor and replacement would be much or any better.   Our greatest need is for something much deeper than that.  It is for spiritual and religious revival.

 

In North America the word “revival” has had certain associations since the eighteenth century.   Itinerant open-air preaching of the type John Wesley and George Whitefield specialized in, threats of hell-fire and damnation like in the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, all-week camp meetings, tents and the sawdust trail, coming forward to confess Christ and shake the hand of sensationalist and theatrical ball-player turned evangelist Billy Sunday, “I see that hand”, the uncompromising morality and theology of Bob Jones Sr., and most recently Billy Graham and “Just as I Am”.   All of these associations are the outward trappings of a kind of revival that centred around the conversion of either outright unbelievers or those whose Christianity had been merely nominal or formal to an active personal faith in Jesus Christ.   When used in this sense, revival so overlaps evangelism that the distinction between the two is in danger of being lost.   The two, however, are not the same and the difference is an important one.

 

Revival comes from the verb revive which literally means to live again or to bring back to life although we generally use it in the sense of restoring consciousness or energy rather than resurrection.   While passing from spiritual death to new life in Jesus Christ certainly fits the literal definition the concept of revival, which is derived from the Old Testament, is of the restoring to new life of God’s people rather than of individuals.   In the Old Testament, the idea of God’s people as a specific nation, Israel, and the idea of God’s people as a spiritual assembly, the Congregation of the Lord, were to a great degree interchangeable.   This is not the case in the New Testament, in which God’s people are the Church, a spiritual assembly drawn from every kindred, tribe, and nation in which the wall between Israel and the Gentiles has been broken down.   The New Testament is the substance, the Old is the shadow, and so on this side of the Cross and Empty Tomb, revival is primarily the revival of the Church rather than the national societies in which the Church is found.   Paradoxically, however, since the Church is a multi-national society, when revival comes to the Church in a particular national community, the nation experiences a renewal or awakening to some degree as well.

 

When I say, therefore, that revival is Canada’s greatest need, I mean that our country’s greatest need is for the Church to undergo a spiritual reawakening here that will spill over into a renewal of our general society.

 

A genuine spiritual awakening of the Church does not have to outwardly resemble the revivals of the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.   Historically, revivals of this type have been more associated with American expressions of Christianity than with those in Canada although an examination of revivals in the two countries reveals that differences in regional culture are just as important as differences in natural culture in determining the shape of revival.  In the early eighteenth century, before the American and Loyalist traditions broke from each other, with the Loyalist merging with the French Canadian tradition to become the national tradition of the Dominion of Canada, the revival known historically as the Great Awakening took place in both the colonies of New England which would become the core of Yankee culture and in what would become the Maritime Provinces.     In New England the Great Awakening proved to be less a revival of Christianity – the Churches in which it occurred would apostasize into deism, liberalism, and Unitarianism in less than a century – than of Puritanism, the schismatic, extremist, form of Calvinism that spawned that trio of Modern Age evils, liberalism, Americanism and Communism.   This was not the case with the same revival in the Maritimes which remained Loyal.  The difference was, perhaps, due to the less stringently Calvinist character of the revival in the Maritimes.     The Wesleyan revival in England is often credited with having had the opposite effect of the Puritan revival in New England and sparing the United Kingdom from experiencing the sort of bloody, Puritan-inspired, proto-Communist revolution that introduced murderous totalitarian republicanism to France in the late eighteenth century.  In North America, however, in pre-Confederation days, the United States sponsored Methodist revivalist meetings in English Canada for the purpose of generating class strife and undermining the Loyalist establishment.   This undoubtedly added significantly to the suspicion of revivalism already held by the more traditional expressions of Canadian Christianity – French Roman Catholicism, English Anglicanism, and Scottish Presbyterianism – on the grounds that it was unbalanced and placed too much weigh on personal experience.   These suspicions were hardly unfounded.   While John Wesley and George Whitefield had laid an orthodox foundation for the revival movement in the eighteenth century, their influence was eclipsed in the nineteenth century by that of Charles G. Finney, a converted lawyer whose anything-but-orthodox theology resembled the early Church heresy of Pelagianism and who taught a rationalistic, mechanical, doctrine of revival in which it was the automatic outcome of following a prescribed method or technique, prompting B. B. Warfield to harshly, but not inaccurately, say of his theology that “God might be eliminated from it entirely without changing its essential character”.

That notwithstanding, the North American evangelistic style of revival is not entirely foreign to Canada.   The best known distinctive Canadian revival of this sort is likely the one that began in Saskatoon in October of 1971 when Bill McLeod, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist, invited twin evangelists Ralph and Lou Sutra to hold a week and a half of meetings.   By the end of the week the crowds coming to the meetings had swelled to the point that they surpassed the capacity of the Baptist building, were moved to a larger Anglican Church, then to the larger yet Christian and Missionary Alliance building, before the Saskatoon Centennial Auditorium with a capacity of over 2000 had to be rented.   The week and a half, of course, had to be repeatedly extended and in the end went for seven weeks in total.   The revival spread from Saskatoon to the Saskatchewan provincial capital of Regina, then here to Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba which was McLeod’s home town, eventually spreading across the prairies and into British Columbia.   The story of this revival was told at book length by Kurt E. Koch in Revival Fires in Canada (1973), then again by Saskatoon-born Erwin Lutzer in Flames of Freedom (1976).  Note that this revival began in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, spread east to the prairie province of Manitoba, and made it to the west coast but was largely a prairie phenomenon.   This further illustrates what was said previously about regional cultural differences being as important as national ones.   It does not mean that the prairie provinces are more “American” than the rest of Canada – as a lifelong Manitoban and a lifelong Loyalist Tory, I would very much resent such a suggestion.   The prairies, however, and the American Midwest, share elements of a regional culture that may explain why revivals of this particular form are more common in these regions than elsewhere in both countries.

 

The last century also saw a new branch spring from the roots of the older revivalism.  Pentecostalism was born from the Holiness movement, the branch of Wesleyanism that stressed the most unfortunate false doctrine of perfection in this life, in the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles that began in 1906.   This was a different type of revival that in one very limited sense was closer to the Scriptural concept of revival.   That sense is that it was primarily something that occurred among those who already professed Christian faith, rather than the mass evangelism of the unconverted.   The Holiness movement already taught the idea of a “second blessing” in which the Holy Ghost comes upon a Christian after conversion and eradicates the sin nature.  Pentecostalism modified this concept of a “second blessing” into one in which the Holy Ghost comes upon the individual Christian and bestows upon him the sign-and-wonder working power exercised by the Apostles in the early days of the Church, this “second blessing” – “third blessing” at first, because the original Pentecostals were still Holiness believers – manifesting itself in the gift of tongues and being identical in Pentecostal thought, albeit not in orthodox truth, with baptism of the Holy Ghost.    Since the Pentecostal movement split into multiple schisms pretty much from its inception some of which revived not Christianity but ancient heresies like Sabellianism, those of us who are skeptical towards identifying this as a genuine revival might be pardoned for so being.  The Pentecostal movement developed into a denomination – or rather class of denominations – of its own.  Later in the twentieth century the distinctive doctrines of Pentecostalism and, more relevantly the associated concept of revival, was borrowed by the Charismatic movement that at first was distinguished from Pentecostalism primarily by its taking place in other, more traditional and mainstream, denominations of Christianity.  Eventually it too produced new denominations and out of one of these, John Wimber’s Vineyard Movement which began as a schism from Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, itself a schism from the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a Pentecostal sect founded by the American celebrity female evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, a string of revivals of the Pentecostal/Charismatic type broke out in the mid-1990s.   One of the first of these, and the one which attracted such international attention that its name is sometimes used synonymously with this entire wave of revival, took place in the provincial capital of Upper Canada.   This was the “Toronto Blessing” that began in what was then called the Toronto Airport Vineyard in January of 1994.   These revivals proved controversial among Christians, even more so than previous versions of this phenomenon.  Hank Hanegraaff, director of the Christian Research Institute took the position that rather than being genuine movements of God they did more harm than good, a position he argued at book length in his 1997 The Counterfeit Revival.   James A. Beverley, a professor at Tyndale Seminary, took a more nuanced approach in his Holy Laughter and the Toronto Blessing: An Investigative Report (1995).   As for myself, I was in my last semester in high school when the Toronto Blessing started and by the time I started my theological studies in the fall of the same year it was spreading.   Here in Winnipeg the phenomenon was dubbed “Prairie Fire” and it was very much the talk of the campus at the time.   I was a skeptic then and am a skeptic now.   I do not mean that I question those who say they experienced God and grew closer to Him through this.   What I mean is that when I compare how revival supposedly manifested itself in the 1990s – laughing, barking like a dog, collapsing, shaking – with how it manifested itself in Saskatoon in 1971 – people coming to faith in Jesus Christ, confessing their sins to the very large congregation and asking for forgiveness, confessing their crimes to the police, abandoning divorce proceedings and restoring their marriages – my impression of what happened in the ‘90s is best expressed in the words of Canadian country and western superstar Shania Twain, “that don’t impress me much”.

 

Which brings me back to the point that led in to this discussion and comparison of these well-known Canadian examples of evangelical and Charismatic revivals.   The genuine spiritual awakening within the Christian Churches that is our country’s greatest need will if it comes not be limited to although it may include these evangelical types of revival.   In Lower Canada, the decline into its lamentable present condition of secularism, welfare-socialism, and a language-based nationalism that is needlessly hostile to the unity of the country and the interests of other Canadians was directly tied to the decline of Roman Catholicism in the province into a surface nominalism, both declines culminating in the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s.   Revival there would be more likely to take the form of a mass return of the province’s Roman Catholics to the authority, beliefs, ethical teachings and traditions of their Church.   It would be something along the lines of them all becoming SSPX Latin Mass types, probably sedevacantists too, and finally demanding and obtaining the excommunication of the Trudeau family if not demanding that the Trudeaus be turned over to the Holy Office or Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or whatever name the Inquisition now goes under with the request that it go Medieval on their derrieres.  

 

The two largest Protestant denominations in Canada are according to the latest statistics still the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada.   These are what have become of the two main Canadian Christian traditions other than French Roman Catholicism from before Confederation.   The United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 by the strange wedding of Presbyterianism with Methodism.   Until 1955 Canadian Anglicanism was still formally part of the Mother Church of the Anglican Communion, the Church of England, but in 1955 the Church’s ecclesiastical provinces in the Dominion of Canada were federated into the Anglican Church of Canada  in a process that rather resembled how the country was formed in Confederation.   That these are still the largest denominations other than the Roman Catholic Church may seem surprising to those familiar with the work in the sociology of religion done by the University of Lethbridge’s Reginald W. Bibby.   In a number of books, including Fragmented Gods (1987) and Unknown Gods (1993), Bibby has analyzed the decline of religion in Canada and one of his observations has been that Churches that remain conservative or orthodox retain their membership and even grow better than those that embrace liberalism.   Yet liberalism has so permeated the United Church that there is not much of anything else left and it has heavily infiltrated the Anglican Church as well although not quite to the same extent yet.   Part of the explanation, no doubt, is the gap between what people identify as their religion on surveys and their actual active involvement in the Church.   The vast majority of my relatives are either United Church or Anglican in affiliation but this does not mean that you will find most of them in the pew regularly or in some cases ever.   In one of Sir Kingsley Amis’ novels he says of a character that he always filled in the blank on forms for religion with “C of E” to indicate the Church whose door he never darkened and whose services he never attended.  This gap is much larger for the United Church and Anglican Church than for denominations in which liberalism is not such a problem.   Another part of the explanation is that conservative or orthodox Churches are divided over a large number of denominations no one of which is as large as the United or Anglican.

 

Liberalism in this context means a Church’s accommodation of her beliefs and teachings to ideas that spring from rationalist presuppositions that it is popularly but mistakenly assumed have been confirmed by science or some other form of Modern inquiry, the idea that science and Modern inquiry in general have the potential to confirm such presuppositions being itself a mistaken assumption.   It varies in extent and degree with the most severe being the kind that regards the supernatural or miraculous as primitive superstitious ideas that have been debunked by Modern technique and so rejects all the tenets of the Christian faith confessed in the ancient Creeds or reinterprets them in such a way that to confess them with the new interpretation would be to confess unbelief rather than faith.   It is a thought poison that kills Churches and the larger societies in which those Churches are found.   Since this is the disease killing the two Churches representing the Christian traditions other than the Roman Catholic that have played the most significant roles in our country’s history, the revival we need is a revival that brings these Churches back to life with an uncompromisingly orthodox adherence to and proclamation of essential Christian Truth against Modern and rationalistic ideas.

 

In the 1830s, the Church of England underwent a revival led by men seeking precisely this, to combat the encroaching influence of rationalism, Modernism, and liberalism.   This revival was very influential in pre-Confederation Canadian Anglicanism.   It began with a sermon entitled “National Apostasy” preached by the Rev. John Keble against the Reform Act from the University Pulpit at St. Mary’s, Oxford on 14 July, 1833.   It was spread through a series of “Tracts for the Times” published from 1833 to 1841.   The leaders of this revival, such as Keble, Edward B. Pousey, and John Henry Newman were associated with Oxford University.   Accordingly, the revival is known as “The Oxford Movement” or alternately the Tractarian Movement after the publications.   The Movement promoted primitive – in the positive sense of belonging to the early centuries of Christianity – orthodox Christianity, the practice of reading the Scriptures while sitting at the feet of the Fathers (1), frequent – and by this they meant daily not weekly – participation in Holy Communion, practical holiness, a renewed recognition of the authority established in the Church by Jesus Christ through His Apostles and that this and not that bestowed by the state is the Church’s true authority and establishment, and worshipping God liturgically in the “beauty of holiness” (Psalm 96:9).   Calvinists saw all this as a betrayal of the Reformation and were, unfortunately, given plenty of ammunition for making this accusation by Newman’s crossing the Tiber and receiving a cardinal’s cap.   They missed the point, as Calvinists usually do.   It was not the heritage of the Reformation, at least the English Reformation, that the Tractarians fought against but rationalism, liberalism, and Modernism, and they believed that the best way to combat these things was to renew their Church’s connection with the pre-Modern heritage and tradition of the entire Church.  

 

In Canada, the Right Reverend John Strachan who was consecrated the first Bishop of Toronto in 1839, while the Oxford Movement revival was underway, and who died the year of Confederation after a long career in which he arguably did more than any other single person to shape the form of Upper Canadian Anglicanism, was a man very much in sympathy with the Oxford Movement and expressed as much in his correspondence with John Henry Newman although strangely, considering his admirable and fierce opposition to Americanism, it was the Right Reverend John Henry Hobart, Episcopal Bishop of New York who had first influenced him in this direction before the Oxford Movement even began (Hobart died in 1830).   The Oxford Movement’s influence in Upper Canadian Anglicanism did not end with Bishop Strachan’s death but continued to spread.  John Charles Roper, who had studied in Keble College – founded in 1870 and named after John Keble – at Oxford, became the Professor of Divinity at Trinity College, the last of the many schools Bishop Strachan had founded, in 1886 and in this capacity promoted the vision of the Oxford Movement as he did as rector of the parish of St. Thomas.   He would later be consecrated Bishop of British Columbia before being translated to the See of Ottawa where he would serve for a quarter of a century and would become the Metropolitan Archbishop over the Ecclesiastical Province.   So yes, the Oxford Movement, the Anglican Catholic Revival, was very influential in the development of the Anglican Church of Canada and this influence can still be seen in the architecture, vestments, and practice of regular Communion even in parishes that would not wish to identify with the Oxford Movement.

 

The problem is that just as the sawdust trail, camp meetings, etc. were merely the outward trappings of the North American evangelistic revivals and not the inner essence which was the preaching of the Gospel and conversion of unbelievers, so the forms, rituals, etc. were the outward trappings of the Anglican Catholic Revival and not the inner essence, which was the renewal of the Church’s spiritual connection with the ancient, pre-Schism, Church to renew her to stand against the errors of Modernity.   I say this not to disparage these outward trappings – smells and bells are far more to my taste and liking than making “worship” as indistinguishable from a nightclub as possible, but because our  Anglican Church of Canada, I am afraid, has not been near as faithful to the inner essence of the Oxford Revival as it has to the outward trappings.   This is why our Church is in desperate need of the same kind of revival as is needed by the United Church – a revival of belief in the truths of Christianity as confessed in the ancient Creeds and taught by the Church Fathers rather than some watered down and explained away with rationalistic gibber gabber version of the same, and a revival of the courage to proclaim these truths, to proclaim Christ Crucified, in an uncompromising manner, rather than to preach social justice, recycling, cutting carbon emissions, the racist idea that racism is the worst of evils and that all whites are guilty of it and everybody else is the victim of it, gender ideology and the whole alphabet people agenda, and all the other garbage that apostate ministers fill their sermons with when they won’t preach Christ.  

 

Churches that preach every sort of liberal and left-wing clap trap imaginable but not Christ bleed members and die.  Their message does not meet the basic needs of the souls of men, it does not touch the human heart, and it does not have the blessing of the Holy Ghost.   When Churches commit suicide in this way, the larger society becomes increasingly secular.  When this happens, the country’s civil religion, for lack of a better expression, can become similarly corrupted, and a healthy patriotic respect for national traditions, institutions, and history be eroded and replaced with a cult of national self-loathing, endless apologies for the actions of our founders and past leaders as judged by the standards of today rather than their day, a disgusting violation of both the fifth and the ninth commandments in which our ancestors who are no longer around to defend themselves are defamed with an ugly lie in which the humanitarian educational efforts of the Churches and State are portrayed as “genocide”, and this sort of thing.

 

This is why a revival of sound, orthodox, Christianity in our Churches is what Canada needs the most.

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

 

(1)   This wording is not original with me.   Hans Boersma used a variation of it in a recent article, I have encountered other variations of it in the writings of Ron Dart, and I am fairly certain elsewhere, although exactly where eludes me at the moment.

 

The True Church is not Electronic

In 1987, Augsburg Publishing House, the publishing arm of the American Lutheran Church which the following year would join with Fortress Press, the publisher of the Lutheran Church in America as part of the merger of the Lutheran bodies into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, published a book entitled Television and Religion: The Shaping of Faith, Values and Culture.   The release of such a book could hardly have been more timely – it went to print just as the various scandals surrounding Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were breaking.   The author of the book was the Reverend William F. Fore, who was the acknowledged expert at the time on the matter of religious broadcasting.    For the next couple of years he was a guest on pretty much every major radio and television talk show discussing the scandal and his book.  Rev. Fore, who passed away last July, was a minister of the United Methodist Church, and served as the Executive Director of the Communications Department of the National Council of Churches in Christ for a quarter of a century, retiring from this position shortly after his aforementioned book came out.   The fifth and sixth chapters of the book address the message and audience respectively of what he called “the electronic church”.    He had already been sounding the alarm about this “electronic church” for over a decade.

 

Indeed, in August of 1978 Fore gave an address by that very title – “The Electronic Church” – to a meeting of the Seventh Day Adventist Broadcasters Council in Oxnard, California, which was published in that denomination’s Ministry Magazine in its January, 1979 issue.   In that address he noted some interesting statistics.   Gallup had just conducted a survey of the religious views of both the “churched” and the “unchurched” in the United States.   “Surprisingly”, Fore commented, “religious beliefs and practices have undergone remarkably little change during the past 25 years.”   What made these findings surprising was that while beliefs in doctrines like the deity of Jesus Christ and practices such as daily prayer did not appear to be declining among Americans, even among the “unchurched”, the self-evaluated importance of organized religion in their lives was.   Fore suggested that the incongruity between these two things could be, at least partly, explained by the growth of religious broadcasting and that this was cause for concern.   He said:

 

What worries me is whether this electronic church is in fact pulling people away from the local church.  Is it substituting an anonymous (and therefore undemanding) commitment for the kind of person-to-person involvement and group commitment that is the essence of the local church?

 

As we shall shortly see, this was a legitimate concern and there is far more cause for alarm on this front today than there was back then.   First, it needs to be noted that there was another, far more obvious, reason why steady belief in such basic Christian truths as the deity of Jesus Christ might coincide with a decline in confidence in organized religion – and a decline in church attendance, for when Fore was speaking and writing about the danger of “the electronic church” we were already several decades into a period of drastic decline in church attendance, one which began shortly after the Second World War and which continues to this day.  

 

That reason was simply this – that in this same period of time, a great many of the churches had stopped preaching and teaching the basic Christian truths.   For everyone who could still truthfully recite everything in the Apostles’ Creed from “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth” to “The Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting. Amen”, churches whose ministers taught that Jesus was God’s Son only in the sense that He exemplified the way in which we are all children of God and that He rose again from the dead only in the sense that He lived on in the memory of His disciples, and who similarly explained away everything else in the Creed so as to make its opening “I believe” into an “I don’t believe”, were rapidly losing their appeal.   Nor did they have much of an appeal to anybody else.  Anybody out there who actually wanted to hear a lecture every week about racial and gender equity, recycling and reducing our carbon footprint, and other such trendy codswallop had plenty of opportunity to do so that did not involve getting up early on Sunday morning.   Others have certainly noticed the contribution of this factor to the decline in church attendance and affiliation.   Here in the Dominion of Canada, where the decline had been much larger than in the United States, two Anglican priests, George R. Eves, Two Religions: One Church (1998) and Marney Patterson, Suicide – The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada (1999), attempted, to little avail, at least with regards to the upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to warn the Anglican Church of Canada that this kind of liberalism was killing the church.   Others, such as the eminent Canadian sociologist of religion Reginald W. Bibby, have addressed this factor in a more detached manner.    Now, the United Methodist Church and the NCCC were both noted bastions of liberalism.   The late Dr. Thomas C. Oden had been well within the mainstream of the United Methodist Church  prior to his journey back from theological liberalism and political radicalism to “paleo-orthodoxy” through a study of the great theologians of the Christian tradition beginning with the Church Fathers prompted by a challenge from his Drew University colleague, Will Herberg, who had had to make a similar return to the roots of his own Jewish tradition in the Talmud and Midrash after his own break with his early radicalism.  The National Council of Churches in Christ is the American organized expression of ecumenism which, as Joseph Pearce has recently observed, “appears to be the willingness to dilute or delete doctrine in pursuit of a perceived unity among disparate groups of believers (irrespective of what they actually believe)” and thus the opposite of what it originally meant when applied in the early centuries to the General Councils that defined orthodoxy and excluded heresy for the entire church throughout the “whole inhabited world”.    My point in bringing this up is not to cast aspersions on the personal orthodoxy of the late William F. Fore but to show that for someone in his position, unless he wished to make waves, he had strong personal reasons to turn a blind eye to the connection between liberalism and declining church attendance and to tie the latter to religious broadcasters who, whatever else they might be legitimately accused of -  aggressive and dishonest fundraising, the sacrilege of reducing religion to popular entertainment, etc. – were seldom if ever liberals.

 

All of that having been said, Fore’s concern that for many people “the electronic church” was taking the place of local churches was a legitimate and valid one.   In his address to the Seventh Day Adventists in 1978 he said the following:

 

Radio and TV – especially TV – tend to produce a substitute for reality that eventually can begin to take the place of reality itself.

 

He illustrated this point by referring to an article in Broadcasting Magazine that described a television program entitled “Summer Camp” that purported to give kids the “summer camp” experience “without leaving home”, a particularly poignant example as it is difficult to conceive of an experience further removed from that of watching television than summer camp or a greater exercise in missing the point than trying to translate that experience into the television medium.   He went on to say:

 

My point is that exposure to the media tends to separate us from the world of reality, creating for us, in fact, a new reality…The situation, I predict, is going to get worse.

 

Before we take a look at just how true that prediction has become, let us consider the contrast he drew between the local and the electronic church.   He said:

 

[The purveyors of the electronic church] are building huge audiences that bring them fame, wealth, and power, but which in doing so substitute a phantom, a non-people, an electronic church, for the church of real people, with real needs and real gospel to share in the midst of their real lives.

 

It is no accident that the local church, the koinonia or community of believers, is such a central part of our Christian faith and life.  This is where we find Christ; this is where we confess our sins and find forgiveness and regeneration; this is where we act out our faith and where we shore up one another when we slide back in the faith.

 

The years since 1978 and now have seen an explosion in the development of electronic communications technology.   Personal computers and cellular phones have become more compact and affordable and therefore ubiquitous and, indeed, have now merged into smart phones that place the internet, which itself has evolved rapidly and exponentially in this period, at one’s fingertips wherever one happens to be.   The “electronic church” has evolved along with these media and in 2021 the “online church” – services viewed over the internet either while they are occurring through livestream or later if, as is usually the case, recordings of the stream remain available – has become a much larger part of it than the services broadcast on radio and television forty years ago.   Indeed, for almost a year now, the “online church” has been the only “church” available throughout most of the world as governments everywhere have used the pretext of the spread of a coronavirus notable more for its novelty than its severity to throw off the shackles of constitutional restraints and protected rights and liberties and conduct an insane social experiment in which they forbade in-person social interaction in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to contain the spread of the virus.   The leaders of the churches have, for the most part, opted to obey man rather than God and support this vile experiment by closing their doors and making services available to their parishioners only via the internet.   Thus, for the last year, the “electronic church” has more fully and completely replaced the real church, than Rev. Fore would have imagined possible in his worst nightmares back in the eighties.  

 

What is most troubling about this, apart from the whole submitting to godless totalitarianism aspect of it, is that whereas forty years ago, church leaders whether orthodox or liberal, would have largely shared Fore’s concern that for many people the “electronic church” was becoming a substitute for actual churches in which real people meet and worship and fellowship together and would have agreed with him that this was not a good thing, today, the church leaders who are saying “Amen” to the government officials who insist that we must sacrifice the mental and social wellbeing of all members of our communities, and the economic wellbeing of all except the most wealthy, in order to prevent people who are already at the end of their natural lifespans from dying a natural death a very short time earlier than would otherwise be the case, are now developing theological arguments for why the “electronic church” is a real church after all.    While the idea of a spiritual fellowship existing between all believers in different places is neither new nor unsound – this is a part of the meaning of “the communion of the saints” in the Creed – it is a different matter entirely to treat the act of praying and singing along, from your own home, while you watch a service that is taking place elsewhere through your computer screen, as if you and those actually participating in the service were somehow together in some virtual “place” that the internet has generated.   Doing the latter is far closer to living in the kind of artificial “reality” from which in the movies a “red pill” is required in order to escape than it is to the orthodox doctrine of the “communion of the saints”.

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Russia a year after the Bolsheviks, a murderous gang of criminal revolutionaries, fanatically devoted to building what they believed would be an ideal society based upon collective ownership, materialism, science, and atheism regardless of whatever cost in human lives and suffering had to be paid in order to bring this about, seized control of that country, murdered the Tsar and the rest of the royal family, and began its long, but mercifully unsuccessful, war of extirpation against the Russian Orthodox Church.   His mother raised him, as best she could, in the Orthodox faith, while the Bolshevik state did its worst to indoctrinate him in its ideology.   Ultimately, after Solzhenistyn was arrested while serving in the Red Army in World War II for criticism of Stalin, and sentenced by a secret tribunal of the NKVD to the work camps administered by GULAG, his Orthodox rearing won out, and in his writings he became a fierce critic of the oppression of the Soviet system.   While his writings were initially well-received in his home country while Khrushchev was repudiating the legacy of Stalin, when he turned his pen against the Communist system and underlying ideology as a whole, he became persona non grata, and soon his writings had to be published by samizdat in Russian, or smuggled out and published in translation in the West where they helped remove the blinders from the eyes of many who still thought of the Soviet experiment in romantic, idealistic, terms.   Eventually, the Soviet regime tired of him and on the twelfth of February, 1974, he was arrested again and sent into exile.

 

On the day of his arrest he released a notable essay, advising that in the face of a violent, oppressive, totalitarian ideology such as that which then ruled in Russia, the least that people could do was refuse to participate in the lies by which the totalitarian ideology of the state covered its violence.

 

“And this is the way”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies.   For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist”.

 

The title of Solzhenitsyn’s essay, “Live not by Lies”, was borrowed last year by Rod Dreher, for a book advising Christians about how to live in the face of a new soft totalitarianism.   While Dreher admirably strained out many of the totalitarian gnats of “woke” ideology, he swallowed in its entirety the camel of masks and lockdowns and public health orders.

 

We can and must do better than that.

 

Sadly, I expect that very few of our church leaders will be willing to show the same faith and obedience to God rather than man as Pastor James Coates of GraceLife Church in Edmonton, Alberta, who was arrested by the RCMP last week for holding regular church services and remains in police custody as of the time of this writing, or Pastor Tim Stephens of Fairview Baptist Church in Calgary, who held a service last weekend in solidarity with Pastor Coates.   While Coates’ arrest demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that I have been right in everything I have been saying since last March about how these public health orders are the latest manifestation of the anti-Christian, anti-freedom, atheistic and materialistic, spirit of Communist oppression and are utterly out of place in a Commonwealth Realm in which the basic rights and freedoms these orders treat as inconsequential are supposed to be the guaranteed Common Law property of citizens as Her Majesty's free subjects, this is not really my point here.   If most Christian leaders can’t find the balls to do what Pastors Coates and Stephens have done, a rather predictable consequence of the widespread ordination of women due to a previous generation’s departure from the clear teachings of the Scriptures and church tradition on that subject, then the least they can do, to borrow Solzhenitsyn’s language, is to refuse to participate in the lies covering up the totalitarian violence and oppression of the lockdown measures.   Specifically, they can reject the lie that the “electronic church” of today is somehow different and better than the “electronic church” of forty years ago, because it is online rather than on television.   This lie rests upon the underlying notion that the internet is an actual space where people can really meet and actively participate in something together rather than the mere passive viewing which is all that the voyeurism of television makes available.   I am inclined to say that this notion, too, is a lie, although it contains the element of truth that the internet has an interactional element that was not there in television.   Along with that element of truth, however, it contains the assumption that this is an improvement rather than something that moves us closer to the dystopia of the Matrix.   That assumption, I would say, is at the very least, highly dubious.