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devoted to Canadian Politics last week, I saw someone make the claim that the old Conservatives have disappeared and been replaced by the Reform/Alliance types and that today’s Liberals are where the Conservatives were forty plus years ago.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.

The Canadian Right Needs to Reclaim its Roots and Stop Looking Southward for Inspiration

Over the past couple of weeks I have observed much online discussion among my countrymen over the recent drama in Davos over matters such as Krasnov the Orange’s threat to seize Greenland from Denmark by military force, Prime Minister Blofeld’s Churchillian oratory, and other related incidents that were I to list them all, the list would probably be as long as I intend this essay to be.  What follows is for the most part an expansion of a post on a social media platform that I had started to write until I realized that I didn’t wish to commit the time that would be necessary to following through if I got involved in the debate in that venue.  The particular debate was between Krasnov’s zombie cheerleaders purporting to be Canadian “conservatives” and Liberal Party supporters who think maintaining their party in government perpetually is necessary to protect Canadian sovereignty against American encroachments upon the same.

 

Before proceeding, a few observations are in order.  The first is that there will be some overlap between this essay and the previous two.  The second is that the most vocal among Krasnov’s “Canadian” zombie cheerleaders seem to be the Alberta separatists.  All that I have to say about this group in particular is that while they claim to speak for all of their province, I have too high a regard for the province named after Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter than to believe it to be entirely populated by inbred, knuckle-dragging, troglodytic, ass-tards as would have to be the case for these to be their legitimate spokesmen.

 

Now, let us turn to the subject of this essay which is that both groups, Krasnov’s zombie cheerleaders and Liberals who think their party to be the great defender of Canada and her ways, are wrong.  I have addressed the title to the Canadian right because, as unlikely as they are to listen to a word I have to say, I would consider trying to persuade such a lost cause as the Grits a violation of Christ’s command to not cast our pearls before swine.

 

First of all the Liberal Party has been the party of Americanization throughout all of Canadian history.  Confederation united the provinces of British North America into a single Dominion – a word chosen by the Fathers of Confederation from the Bible and given a meaning that is essentially the same as “Commonwealth Realm” today – and the Fathers of Confederation, led by the old Conservatives, recognized the biggest threat to the Confederation Project to be the United States and her dream of “Manifest Destiny.”  The Liberal Party, organized out of the pre-Confederation Reform movement which had considerable ideological overlap with the classical liberalism that the United States had been founded on, opposed the efforts of Macdonald’s Conservatives in the Dominion’s first quarter century to build a national economy strong enough to resist the economic pull of the United States, which Macdonald correctly saw as a stepping stone to the cultural and eventually political subjugation of Canada to the United States, and promoted free trade with the United States.  In 1891, when Sir Wilfred Laurier openly campaigned on a free trade – it was called reciprocity at the time – platform, an intellectual associated with his party, Goldwyn Smith published a book arguing that Confederation was a bad idea and that Canada should join the United States.  Freer trade with and closer ties to the United States were the consistent policies of William Lyon Mackenzie-King, Liberal party leader and Canada’s longest serving prime minister.

 

Second, the Liberals, although they underwent a significant change in policy under the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, never abandoned their essential nature as the party of Americanization.  Under Pearson and especially Trudeau, the Grits moved much further to the left than they had been, something that occurred again when the second Trudeau led the party, but they remained the party of Americanization even when they were mouthing left-wing slogans that in popular culture are often associated with an anti-American outlook.  The simple fact of the matter is that the leftism of the Liberal Party has always had a “Made in the USA” stamp on it.

 

Allow me to prove that point.

 

Americans, especially the Republicans, frequently accuse Canada (and Europe) of being “socialist.”  While there are other factors, such as, in the case of Canada, the supply management system (which is susceptible to criticism, but would more accurately be called a form of cartelism than socialism), the primary basis of this is the extensive network of social security programs often called “the welfare state”.  In the Great Depression, while it was the Conservatives who introduced relief measures towards the end of the Bennett premiership, the Mackenzie-King Liberals upon their return to government in 1935, after negotiating a trade agreement with the United States, began to implement measures based on the “New Deal” programs that FDR had introduced in the United States in the early 1930s.  Later, LBJ would expand the American welfare state as he introduced policies aimed at redressing social ills that went far beyond the poverty and unemployment targeted by FDR’s “New Deal.”  LBJ’s policies were dubbed the “Great Society” from speeches he made including this phrase as his goal and when Pierre Trudeau succeeded Lester Pearson as Liberal leader and prime minister a few months before LBJ’s presidency came to an end, he began introducing a similar welfare state expansion.  In seeking the Liberal leadership, he used the expression “Just Society” to describe what he sought to achieve.

 

In 1977, Trudeau introduced the Canadian Human Rights Act, a poorly titled bill because it had nothing to do with limiting government power and protecting people against the abuse of the same, which is what is usually suggested by the expression “human rights.”  This piece of legislation did quite the opposite of that.  It empowered government agencies created by the act, to investigate (Human Rights Commission) and adjudicate (Human Rights Tribunal) complaints about discrimination in personal transactions in everyday life.  Since it was classified as civil rather than criminal law, charges under this act do not have to meet the high standard of proof in criminal law (guilty beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt) although the act allows for penalties that far exceed what is normally allowed in cases of civil mitigation.  Although written as if any discrimination on a forbidden basis (race, sex, etc.) was prohibited, i.e., both white against black and black against white, the unwritten understanding by which the system actually operates is that it is entirely one way.  The worst clause in the bill, Section 13 which defined language communicated, originally over the phone, later extended to include all electronic communication, that was “likely to” expose someone protected against discrimination to “hatred or contempt”, as itself an act of discrimination, was repealed in 2013 and the Liberals have been trying to reinstate it ever since.  The CHRA, and its counterpart in the UK which Keith Starmer has been so egregiously abusing as of late, were both inspired by an American bill.  Specifically, the bill was the US Civil Rights Act of 1964.

 

Allow me a side note in this paragraph. This US Civil Rights Act was the chief accomplishment of the man the United States celebrated last Monday in a holiday signed into law by Ronald Reagan despite the fact that the FBI records on the man are so damning that they were long ago placed under a seal that doesn’t expire until next year.  Of course, what is known about him without access to those tapes is bad enough.  He was a total fraud in every possible way.  “Dr.” – he obtained his degrees through plagiarism – “Martin Luther” - his birth name was Michael - King Jr., was a Baptist minister who denied all the articles of the Christian Creed and who surrounded himself with Communist agents like Jack O’Dell and Stanley Levinson and called himself a Marxist.  The standard answer on the part of his cult of fawning adorers, which is much larger than that of Krasnov because it includes the whole of the left as well as the type of supposed “conservative” that rallied to Krasnov’s support when he abandoned everything that made him a fairly decent president in his first term and took to pissing all over every other country in the world except Israel in his second, whenever these things, and the failings in his, that is King’s, personal life which are likely what most of the FBI recordings pertain to, come up is that these cannot detract from the man’s accomplishments.  Those, however, like his degrees and his name, are fake.  His entire reputation is built on his career as an activist opposing segregation.  Segregation, however, was dealt a legal death blow in 1954 when the American Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.  King’s career as a civil rights activist, at least as far as his being in the public spotlight goes, began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott the following year.  Segregation, in other words, was a dead foe already at the time King’s public crusade against it began.  His chief accomplishment, the aforementioned Civil Rights Act, did not end segregation.  It did exactly what its imitations in Canada and the UK and elsewhere in the Western world did, sans the speech clauses.  It was a terrible law, not a good one.

 

Canada, like the United States, and indeed all of Western Civilization experienced a shift towards social liberalism after World War II.  A number of factors contributed to this.  This was the period that saw the explosion of new communications technology that altered how popular culture was created and transmitted.  Prior to the development of what Richard Weaver called “the Great Stereopticon”, popular culture was fundamentally conservative due to tradition being its primary instrument of transmission.  Afterwards, however, as popular culture was replaced with “pop culture", a commodity produced for mass consumption in the factories of Los Angeles, California it became the instrument for the rapid dissemination of liberal attitudes on culture, religion, sex (both the thing and the act), and the like.  Demonstrating the truth of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message”, even television shows as far back as the Andy Griffith Show, which would be almost universally regarded as conservative by today’s standards, were used to preach messages that subtly subverted traditional ways in a way that was a step towards the “woke” liberalism of the present day.  Watch the show, starting at the beginning.  You will not need to go beyond the tenth episode of the first season before my point will have been made. 

 

The spread of Hollywood “pop culture” and its liberalizing message throughout Western Civilization was, of course, facilitated by the United States’ having assumed the position of first power in the West as a result of the two World Wars and the necessities of the Cold War which commenced almost immediately upon the end of World War II.  It should be observed here, although this pertains more to Europe than to Canada, that American assistance in rebuilding after World War II was tied to the acceptance of Americanizing propaganda.  While obviously this was more the case in militarily occupied former Axis countries where the Americanization was introduced under the guise of denazification, it was also part of the package of assistance to war-devastated Allied countries.  Remember that in the muddled thinking of the American government of the 1930s and 1940s, Nazism and European traditionalism, although they had little to nothing in common except an opposition to Communism, were frequently confused, although the American government of those days did have a considerably clearer understanding of the relationship between the founding American ideology and Communism than American governments of subsequent decades.

 

This was a huge factor in the European shift to the left after the war.  While American neoconservatives like Leo Strauss (What is Political Philosophy?) and Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) attributed the shift to the left in American culture to the influence of ideas from European philosophy, a thesis of which American paleoconservatives like William Lind (Marxifying America) and Pat Buchanan (The Death of the West) offered a rather more accurate version (hence its being dubbed a “conspiracy theory” by the ADL, $PLC, and other members of what Murray Rothbard called the Smearbund) in which the European neo-Marxists who fled to America during the ‘30s and ‘40s influenced the left-ward movement of post-war American academia, that the influence moving in the opposite direction has contributed more to the kind of leftism prevalent in the last part of the twentieth century moving into the twenty-first has been persuasively argued by American paleoconservative Paul Gottfried in Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy (this book especially, but see also the entire trilogy of which it is the middle volume).

 

If you consider the different movements that made up this shift to the left throughout Western Civilization it is evident that they spread out from an epicentre in the United States.  The second wave of feminism, the wave which introduced the demand for the legalization of abortion, for government provided day care (the idea behind which was that it is better for strangers to look after young children than for mothers to stay at home rather than rejoin the workforce as soon as possible after birth), and the like began in the United States with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and the founding of NOW a few years later.  True, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in 1949, but this was hardly a movement starter since, unlike Friedan’s mass-marketed for popular consumption, best-seller, the half-crazed existentialist musings of Sartre’s long-suffering love-slave was written for an academic audience.  Let us also not overlook the strong likelihood of American government involvement here.  When Ms. was founded in 1971 one of its many co-founding editors and the one with which the publication was most associated in the popular mind was Gloria Steinem.  I call her “the Spook Bunny” in allusion to her previous positions as a cocktail waitress in Hef’s New York club (as research for an article, she was already a journalist) and, more relevantly to the point at hand, a CIA operative. 

 

However, the real clincher of the overall argument is that by far the most effective instrument of accomplishing the ends of second-wave feminism was not the activist movement itself, whether in the less radical version organized by Friedan, more radical version represented by Steinem’s journalist, or totally nutbar version found in the women’s studies departments of universities, but in an ally that successfully marketed feminism’s ideals and values by not presenting them as angry demands even if it was not always recognized as an ally by feminism.  The year before Friedan’s book was published, Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl became a best-seller and in 1965 she became editor-in-chief of Hearst media’s Cosmopolitan.  She gave it a total makeover into the magazine it has been ever since.  What is not always recognized is that Cosmo as Brown remade it became essentially the women’s counterpart to the magazine Hugh Hefner had founded in 1953.  The reason this is not always recognized is because Hefner illustrated his magazine with erotic nude photographs placing it, correctly enough, in the category of pornography in a public mind that has always been reluctant to admit that almost 100% of literature mass-marketed to adult females is pornographic, albeit verbal more than visual.  If you look at the message preached in the two publications – and, as I have said before the message of Hefner’s magazine has always been the most dangerous part, so that ironically, somebody who actually does “read it for the articles” is more likely to have his mind polluted than somebody who just looks at the pictures – Brown’s message to women is the exact complement of the “Playboy philosophy.”  Friedan, who did recognize this, failed to see that Brown, preaching to women “you can have it all” (career, sexual freedom, etc.), was accomplishing her, that is Friedan’s, ends far more effectively than Friedan ever could, by her more attractive packaging and larger platform. 

 

Note that whether marketed to males or females, the Playboy/Cosmo philosophy was a fundamentally American message.  It was not thought up by agents of international Communist disloyal to the United States (Friedan, as Daniel Horowitz later revealed, hid her Marxist past when presenting herself as a typical American middle-class housewife, but no such claims have ever been made to the best of my knowledge against either Helen Gurley Brown or Hugh Hefner, nor would they have been remotely credible if they had been) but by individuals who embodied capitalism and the American dream and who had no qualms about tying their message of sexual liberation to both of these things. 

 

Americanism – or at least Yankeeism, the culture of the American northeast that crushed the rival culture of the American south to become the ruling culture of the entire United States in the 1860s, more about which will be said later – began life its life as a secularized Puritanism, and while Puritanism’s reputation is that of a strict, Pharisaical, killjoy moralism with the world’s largest pole stuck up its rear end, which it was, it was also a revolt against the traditions and order of Christendom which were usually firmly grounded, both on the Bible and the Church’s interpretation of such on the one hand and human nature and common sense on the other.  Before it was secularized, Puritanism was the rejection of anything in Church tradition that could not be shown to be explicitly spelled out in the Bible as an offense against Christian liberty which rejection the Puritans translated, without noticing the irony, into harsh rules against these traditions, which, like the celebration of Christmas, were usually joyous ones.  As it transitioned into its secular form, Puritanism rejected traditional Christian rules limiting the pursuit of wealth so as to constrain the vice of avarice, most conspicuously the rules against usury, and so paved the way for capitalism.  The sexual revolution was merely the next logical step in the path of secularized Puritanism, the rejection of traditional rules limiting the pursuit of sexual desires.  It is all wrapped up in that phrase “the pursuit of happiness” that Thomas Jefferson substituted for “property” in the three basic rights recognized both by the Lockean liberalism Jefferson obtained the concept from and by Tory jurist Sir William Blackstone. All that was needed for it to enter this phase was the pseudo-scientific justification provided by American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s research in the South Pacific (later debunked by New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman) and the attempts by notorious American quack sexologist Alfred Kinsey, to pass off the findings of research done primarily with prostitutes and prisoners as representative of the larger population.

 

If, as I have just shown, second-wave feminism and the sexual revolution of which second-wave feminism could be regarded as a manifestation, began in the United States and spread throughout the rest of Western Civilization, this basically establishes this to be the case with the post-World War II shift towards social liberalism in general for, with the exception of the American Civil Rights movement, all the other movements within this shift took their cues from either the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, or the American Civil Rights movement.  The gay rights movement, for example, which took its cues from all three, began with the demonstrations and riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in Manhattan in 1969.  I give this example, both because many, probably most, of the other movements in the general shift to the left are either variations of it or closely enough related to be included in the constantly expanding alphabet soup umbrella designation and because American conservatives often portray this as being particularly and distinctly un-American.  I don’t know who they think they are trying to kid.  Although I have refused to watch it since it started cheering on Krasnov’s threats against my country, before that it seemed like every second guest on Fox News was gay.  San Francisco, the last time I checked, was in the American state that was governed by Reagan at the time the city first gained its reputation as the world capital of this sort of thing.  Fran Lebowitz, whose witticisms I have always appreciated even if her political and religious views couldn’t possibly be further removed from my own, basically summed up the matter when she said “if you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would pretty much be left with Let’s Make a Deal.”

 

One of the primary instruments for the spread of social liberalism in both the United States and Canada has been judicial activism.   In some cases, traditional laws were liberalized by legislation.  This is how the liberalization of divorce law was accomplished.  Here in Canada, this started in 1968, the transition year between the Pearson and Trudeau premierships, when the Liberals passed the Divorce Act.  This made divorce more easily accessible after a marriage had effectively already broken down as evidenced by three years separation.  The following year, the Family Law Act introducing no-fault divorce (the most liberal kind) was signed into law in California by, interestingly enough, Ronald Reagan. Other states followed suit over the course of the following decade.  Also interestingly, New York was the last state to go fully liberal on this.  In Canada, the 1968 Act was amended to allow no-fault divorce by the Mulroney Conservatives in 1986.  The difference seen here between what jurisdiction divorce law falls under in the two countries, the federal Dominion in Canada versus the individual states in the United States, partially explains why liberalism has historically preferred the courts to make this sort of change in the United States. 

 

This aspect of the matter is further illustrated by the difference in how liberalism accomplished the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples in both countries.  In this case, it was accomplished by legislation at the Dominion level in Canada but by the Supreme Court in the United States.  Liberals in both countries first attempted to achieve this goal piecemeal, state by state in the USA, province by province here, but in the end relied on federal legislation here and on the Supreme Court in the United States. 

 

This was one of the very few instances where Canada anticipated the United States in a move to the left (in terms of changes to the law, that is, see the Lebowitz quote above and the paragraph in when it is found).  More often than not, the social liberal changes were made in the United States long before they were made in Canada.  Prayer and the Bible were banned from public schools in the United States, for example, in Supreme Court rulings in 1962 and 1963, in which years my parents were 12 and 13.  The Upper Canadian Court of Appeal did not rule against mandatory prayer in school until I was 12 in 1988 and while this became the precedent that gradually spread through the provinces the 1988 ruling affected only the one province at the time.  When I was in high school in rural Manitoba in the early 1990s the Lord’s Prayer was still recited – those who objected to participation, were allowed to leave the classroom – and it was not until two years after I graduated that the practice was discontinued throughout the Dominion. 

 

This is not merely one big post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The reason this happened so much later in Canada than in the United States is the same reason why the Canadian Supreme Court ruling of Morganthaler v. The Queen happened in 1988, over a decade later than its American equivalent Roe v. Wade.  The reason is that prior to 1982 the courts simply were not available to Canadian liberals as a weapon in the same way they were available to American liberals.  1982 was the year that Pierre Trudeau repatriated the British North America Act of 1867 – renaming it the Constitution Act of 1867 – and added to it the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  This entire incident is glorified in the Liberal Theory of Canadian History, that Canadian version of the Whig Interpretation of History that Donald Creighton derided as “the Authorized Version”, which, contrary to Canada’s true history, depicts Canada’s story as virtually identical to America’s story – an emerging nation, breaking from the mother country and forging a new identity for herself on the basis of a rejection of the past – but accomplished diplomatically rather than by violence.  By contrast, Canada’ true story is that of a country built on the opposite foundation to that of the United States, by retaining ties to the mother country and accepting and incorporating the past.  I mention this because it is relevant to the overall point.  In the immediate context the point is that the Charter empowered the Canadian Supreme Court to act in the same way as the American Supreme Court.  The US Supreme Court had already been given the power to strike down laws older than itself by the American Constitution in the eighteenth century, although it was the amendments to the American Bill of Rights that the Republican Party forced through in the Reconstruction period that provided the court with the tools it used for this purpose in the second half of the twentieth century, especially after Earl Warren was named chief justice by Dwight Eisenhower (about whom, see my previous essay “Is Orange the new Red?”).

 

To summarize, the Liberal Party of Canada when during the Pearson-Trudeau premierships it pushed Canada in the direction of the new social liberalism that was spreading throughout Western Civilization in the post-World War II era primarily through the medium of American pop culture manufactured for mass consumption in Hollywood, it did so with legislation inspired by American precedents, the Canadian Human Rights Act, an imitation of the US Civil Rights Act, and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, an imitation of the American Bill of Rights designed to give the Supreme Court of Canada the same powers to undermine tradition that the American Supreme Court had been exercising long before 1982.

The Liberal Party, therefore, when it took a massive leap to the left in the 1960s and 1970s and pushed Canada in the same direction, remained the party of Americanization that had been from Laurier to Mackenzie-King.  It remained the party of Americanization during the premiership of the second Trudeau, Captain Airhead.  Captain Airhead often seemed like he spent more time in the United States than in Canada, was a strong believer in free trade, and being incapable of original thought, was basically an imitator of the forty-fourth president of the United States, in whose second term in office, Captain Airhead became leader of the Liberal Party and then prime minister.  He heavily subsidized the far-left Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which was founded during his premiership on the model of the American Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), which provided the start-up funds.  CAHN specializes in the same kind of smear tactics its American parent and counterpart engages in.  It claimed that concern about the erosion of personal rights and freedoms and their constitutional protections during the Bat Flu scare was an extremist position and branded the Canadian Red Ensign, which was baptized our flag in the blood of the Canadian soldiers who died fighting for God, King, and Country against Hitler, a hate symbol.  That is the sort of idiocy one can only expect from an organization whose founding chairman was Bernie Farber. 

 

The only reasonable conclusion from all of this is that the Liberal Party does not deserve the trust of Canadians, especially when it comes to dealing with the threat of an American takeover.

 

Let us turn now to the Conservatives. 

 

Canada’s original Conservatives fought against the forces that sought to pull Canada closer to the United States and Americanize her.  Confederation took place in the years immediately following what is conventionally called the US Civil War, although it was not a war between two factions for control of the same country, as is usually what the expression “civil war” denotes, but rather a second war of independence on the part of eleven states who declared their secession from the United States after the election of the first Republican president.  In this second war of independence, those fighting for their secession lost as the Republican government in Washington waged total war against those who by their way of thinking were still their own countrymen to prevent them from leaving.  It is most unfortunate that in the last couple of decades, there has been a push to suppress all discussion of this conflict other than the naïve narrative that reads it entirely through the lens of the toxic American racial politics that was a very predictable by-product – or perhaps, primary product – of the mass media manufactured Civil Rights Movement, led by the phony discussed in the side note several paragraphs back.  At any rate, the war ended with the triumph of the Republican north and when the first Republican president was assassinated and replaced by his vice president, a weaker man than himself, he was dominated by the far more radical Republicans who controlled Congress.  In British North America, the triumph of the Union represented a threat, a threat that the same Republicans who had just so mercilessly consolidated their own power by subjugating their own countrymen would turn their sights northward and once again try to take Canada by force of invasion as the United States had attempted in the War of 1812.  One of the purposes of Confederation, which was led by Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservatives was to protect against this threat.  As Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald implemented the National Policy, a policy of protecting new industries and investing in infrastructure, of which the most obvious example was the construction of the Canada Pacific Railroad, so as to build a strong national economy on east-west internal trade that would make for greater national unity and resist the economic pull of the United States.  Resisting Americanization and being in general very wary of the United States, remained official Conservative policy from Sir John A. Macdonald through to John G. Diefenbaker.

 

Unfortunately, in the 1980s the Conservatives abandoned their essential nature as the party of resistance to Americanization and standing for Canada’s own traditions when, under the leadership of Brian Mulroney, they negotiated the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  By doing this, they betrayed the historical essence of their party in a way that the Liberals, the party of Americanization, never had.  The result was that they became a second Liberal Party, a Liberal Party lite, and hence a redundancy.  The Reform Party which was organized in the late 1980s as a Western protest party criticized the Mulroney Conservatives for being just this.  Unfortunately, although this criticism was correct, they did not understand their own criticism.

The Reform Party, which merged with much of the old Conservatives to form the Canadian Alliance in the late 1990s, failed to see that it was by signing the Free Trade Agreement that that the Conservatives betrayed their essential nature and became a second, redundant, Liberal Party.  The Reform Party, which took the name of the movement that gave birth to the Liberal Party of Canada, was in favour of free trade with the United States and wanted more Americanization not less.  Consider their position on Senate Reform.  All that would be needed to make the Senate function much better and as intended by the Fathers of Confederation, would be for the nomination of whom the Crown appoints to the Senate to be taken away from the prime minister, the rest of the Cabinet, and anyone who sits in the Lower House and given to a nomination committee to which the provincial governments appoint the members.  This would fix the main problem with the Senate as it currently stands while preserving it as the same body established in 1867.  The Reform Party, however, demanded that the Senate be remade on the Triple E model, which would essentially remake it into the image of the American Senate.

 

The Reform Party was a populist party that considered itself to be small-c conservative and to be exerting a right-ward pull to counter the left-ward pull of the Trudeau era Liberals in a way the old Conservatives had failed to do.  The problem with that is that they took their entire idea of what it means to be “conservative” or on the “right” from a country that was consciously built on the ideological foundation of liberalism and which never had a “right” in the truest, political, sense of the term.  The United States was founded in a left-wing revolution.  There is no other kind of revolution, the right’s response to revolution is found in the words of Joseph de Maistre, “What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.”  The quotation comes from Maistre’s Considerations on France, written, like Burke’s Reflections, in response to the French Revolution, which was born out of the same ideas and in some cases with the support of the same individuals – Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette are the obvious, but not the only examples – as the American Revolution.  The term “left” first took on its political sense in the French Revolution when it was used of supporters of the revolution based upon where they were standing in the French Chamber of Deputies.  Similarly, “right” first took on its political meaning, basically the continental equivalent of what had been called Toryism in England for over a century at this point in time, in the French Revolution based upon where the opponents stood.  The “right” in North America at the time of the American Revolution, were the Tories, the Loyalists who, persecuted by the triumphant revolutionaries, fled the new republic and became the first English Canadians who a century later, along with the French Canadians who had been spared going through the French Revolution by having been ceded to the British Crown at the end of the Seven Years’ War and were at the time more to the right than the English Canadians, founded the Dominion of Canada on a foundation of preserving and adapting the old order.

 

When something that called itself a “right” emerged in the United States in the period between the two World Wars, it did not stand for the things the right had historically stood for in Europe, which can basically be summarized as the political and religious heritage of pre-Modern Christendom, but was basically eighteenth century liberalism protesting against how twentieth century liberalism was moving away from its roots and converging with Communism, or at least socialism.  This first American right, similar if not entirely identical to what is called libertarianism today, was correct to be alarmed at the direction in which liberalism was moving, although the new liberals had a better perception of the related nature of liberalism and Communism, both of which grew out of Modern man’s turning away from the older order of Christendom and embracing abstract ideals which, while not all necessarily bad in themselves – “freedom” and “equality” were the main two such ideals, and while “equality” is a perversion of the good that is “justice”, “freedom” is itself a good (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn has shown how, contrary to Modern assumptions, the two are contrary to each other and cannot be maximized at the same time) – in the hands of both liberals and Communists, became what Edmund Burke called “armed doctrines”, destructive weapons to be used by ignorant revolutionaries against the old order.  FDR, therefore, was correct to see America’s founding liberalism and Communism as being on the same side of history, although his opponents in the first American right were correct to see that what that side was moving towards was the opposite of the Golden Age of Utopia of which FDR dreamed.  In 1948, ideas from the more authentic European right entered the American right when, in response to the development and employment of the atomic bomb – something that the American right of the 1940s unanimously condemned as atrocious – Richard Weaver, wrote Ideas Have Consequences, tracing the moral, intellectual, and civilizational decay that could lead to such a monstrous occurrence, back through the centuries to Occam’s nominalism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  Except that his title, chosen by his editor rather than himself, stuck around as a slogan, Weaver’s influence on the American right was short-lived.  Today, his most obvious intellectual heir in the United States is Wendell Berry, the poet, novelist, and organic farmer from Kentucky, who defies categorization as “left” or “right” in either the American or the proper sense of these terms.  Meanwhile, the American right has abandoned his abhorrence of the atomic bomb and of America’s wartime use of it, an abhorrence shared by Russell Kirk (“we are the barbarians within our own empire”), Colonel Robert McCormick, Henry Regnery, and basically by everyone on the American right prior to William F. Buckley Jr., for the lunatic position that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “saved lives” (the reasoning used to arrive at that absurd conclusion is easily rebutted by the testimony of General Douglas MacArthur if anybody wishes to look into it).

 

In other words, although the American “right” from its beginnings in the first half of the last century has never been a true right but rather a form of liberalism, the original American right-liberalism prior to William F. Buckley Jr. was preferable either to the mainstream of American liberalism which was moving left-ward or to the mainstream American right after Buckley became is self-appointed gate-keeper.  It is not, however, to the original American right that the Reform/Alliance looked for its definition of “conservatism” but to the Buckley brand, and especially to the later editions of that brand which incorporates every sort of vile argument for the United States going around the world, shaking it member in the face of every other country, and whacking them over the head with a stick, to prove how big and powerful it is. These arguments are fundamentally at odds with orthodox Christianity.  They include the view of good and evil of the Manichean heresy (formed in the early centuries of the Church by reading Christianity through the lens of Eastern dualism), as reflected in Hollywood movies and comic books.  They also include “might makes right”, an ancient notion revived by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, the refutation of which notion as expressed by Thrasymachus by Socrates in Plato’s Politeia (misleadingly translated “The Republic”) was a basic foundation stone of civilization, ancient and Christian.

 

Even, however, if those who saw the Conservative Party moving towards liberalism under Mulroney had looked to Robert Taft, John T. Flynn, William Henry Chamberlin, and Albert Jay Nock rather than William F. Buckley (at best) and Rush Limbaugh for their ideas of what conservatism is it would have been a mistake on their part.  True Canadian conservatism, as expressed in such neglected volumes as John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown, John G. Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure, the essays of Stephen Leacock, the histories and essays written by Donald Creighton and W. L. Morton, the philosophical treatises of George Grant, and in the family saga of novels about the royalist, Anglican, Whiteoak family of Jalna written by Mazo de la Roche the most read Canadian novelist of the 1930s, whose books remained extremely popular well past her death in the early 1960s, is more authentic, being a Canadianized form of British Toryism, itself an early form of the European right, which stood for the order and heritage of Christian civilization, for kings and the Christian religion and the Church against Modern rationalistic and liberalizing tendencies.  This is the well of inspiration from which a movement that wished to exert a pull to the right in Canada to counter the leftward pull exerted by the Americanizing Liberal Party and the liberal drift in the Conservative Party, should have drawn.   You cannot counter a “Made in the USA” left-liberalism, with a “Made in the USA” right-liberalism, that has no roots deeper than the origins of liberalism in the early Modern era, and it is foolish to try to do so when you have available a domestic Toryism, which had absorbed some of classical liberalism but still had roots that extended back to pre-Modern Christendom, to utilize instead.  Attempts to counter the “Made in the USA” leftward pull of the Liberal Party, with a “Made in the USA” “conservatism” will only further the leftward drift of the country.

 

God Save the King!