The rising clout of Canada’s religious right

While it may not be obvious from the title, Stephen Harper and the Theo-cons, this article by Marci McDonald in The Walrus looks at rising tide of political power wielded by the religious, largely evangelical, right. Well worth taking the time to read. An excerpt really doesn’t do the piece full justice:

What could a dispensationalist worldview mean for global politics? In the 1980s, Washington’s foreign-policy establishment worried that Reagan’s flirtation with end-time beliefs, including branding the Soviet Union “the evil empire,” would hasten the nuclear apocalypse that he periodically referred to as inevitable. To speed the day, dispensationalists like Falwell who helped bring him to power were among the loudest voices urging Reagan on a course of brinkmanship.

George Bush has reignited many of the same fears with his rhetoric of righteousness in launching the invasion of Iraq and his war against the “evil-doers” of global terrorism. Congress has become controlled by ardent Christian Zionists like former majority leader Tom DeLay, who opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and once told an Israeli audience, “I don’t see occupied territory; I see Israel.”

Writer and TV journalist Bill Moyers, himself an ordained Baptist minister, has raised another equally urgent fear about the dispensationalist hold on domestic policy. In a speech to Harvard’s Center for Health and the GlobalEnvironment last year, he warned that millions of Christian fundamentalists have no interest in protecting the environment or putting the brakes on global warming. “They believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded,” Moyers said, “but actually welcomed — even hastened — as a sign of the coming apocalypse.”

That thesis might sound alarmist, but last year when superstar pastor Rick Warren, author of the bestselling The Purpose Driven Life, joined other evangelical leaders calling for action against global warming, they were slammed by James Dobson, who declared that the scientific evidence against carbon dioxide emissions remains unproven. Besides, Dobson said, the issue was a distraction from the more pressing evangelical preoccupation with family values.

For Charles McVety, any mention of the environmental movement sparks a tirade against the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. “The Bible talks about a false religion and one-world government, and what we have developed is exactly that,” McVety rages. “The false religion is the worship of Mother Earth — I call them earthies!” He dismisses Rio’s Earth Charter as “that pagan document.”

Did those same views colour Stephen Harper’s decision to bow out of the Kyoto Protocol? Have Harper’s private spiritual impulses as an evangelical shaped any of his policy decisions, whether on child care or boosting the defence budget and backing Israel unequivocally in the Middle East? The answer isn’t clear, nor may it ever be. Not only is Harper notoriously guarded about his motivations, but many of the items on his agenda that have won the applause of the religious right in Canada so far have coincided with the demands of other more traditional groups in the expanding tent of his new Conservative coalition.

In the end, it may not matter to what extent Harper himself buys into the beliefs of his evangelical backers. By wagering his political fortunes on their goodwill, he is already, like Bush, to some extent their captive. It may be less important to know whether Harper personally cares about avoiding an epic clash in the Middle East than to discover what political ious he has to a core constituency that has no interest at all in peace for the region—at least until the Second Coming.

That last paragraph reasonates strongly with me. Having watched Harper for years, been a small part of the fight against him as a Progressive Conservative, and noted the thuggish tactics he used on his road to power in the new Conservative party, I’ve always believed that Harper was driven by his goal to achieve power and would use anything and anyone who could help him get there. His real objective happens to overlap with the religious right in some areas but its the process of policy that matters more to him, not specific outcomes.

Ultimately Harper wanted power so that he can start taking apart the overall concept we call Canada and he’s been driving that agenda forward since he took office earlier this year.