by Dennis Gruending

Normally there would be little reason to compare and contrast Karen Armstrong, a wildly popular writer on religion and Tim Flannery, the Australian palaeontologist and author. The random occasion to do so was their appearance within half an hour of each other recently at the Ottawa Writers’ Festival. Armstrong is a rarity – someone who has actually gained celebrity status by writing more than 20 books about religion – but from my seat in the house Flannery had the far more compelling message. The writers’ festival occurs during the height of the promotional season for fall books and both Armstrong and Flannery were on the tour circuit. She was promoting her latest book, called The Case for God. Flannery was touting a short book called Now or Never: Why We Need to Act Now to Achieve a Sustainable Future.

Appropriately, for Armstrong at least, the event occurred in Saint Brigid’s Centre for the Arts and Humanities, which was until recently a Roman Catholic church in downtown Ottawa. When I arrived about half an hour before Armstrong was to appear, there was a queue of people starting at the door and spilling onto the sidewalk and around the corner. The wind was raw, the weather cold, and once inside I found the church was packed with an audience tending toward the older side, the sort of demographic you might find at a symphony concert. Jim Creskey, the publisher of Ottawa-based Embassy magazine, introduced Armstrong as they sat on a raised dais that formerly contained the altar. The plan was that Creskey would interview Armstrong rather than having her read at us from her book. It is a good concept but she interrupted Creskey during his first question to deliver the first of several lengthy monologues. She spoke them to the audience rather than to Creskey and used him more as a stage prop than a fellow conversationalist.

The Case for God

Armstrong told her audience that in The Case for God she is attempting to reframe how people understand and experience God. We cannot do that using post-Enlightenment rationality as our only tool, she said, because no human has seen or can adequately describe God. As Armstrong told journalist Michael Valpy in a Globe and Mail interview, “God is not a sort of thing. We can’t say there’s a God, as though he’s an item in a species. God is the all. God is being itself, St. Thomas Aquinas says.”

In that interview and her Ottawa appearance, Armstrong expressed her frustration with the unpleasant arguments between a group of militantly atheist writers — including Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, who deride anyone who has religious faith – and Christian fundamentalists, who think they know exactly what and who God is and will accept only a narrow creed. It is a tedious and infantile debate, she told her audience, in which people “want to defeat and crush their opponents.” As Armstrong went on about how difficult it is to describe God, I began to lose concentration despite my best intentions. Surely part of the difficulty here is that a verbal torrent, no matter how articulate, is inadequate to describe what Armstrong says is ultimately indescribable in words.

I did like her insistence that religious belief is not about debate but is about a way of living. “The doctrines of the church are a call to action. Religion is about practice, about compassion.” Every world religion, she said, is anchored in the golden rule that you must not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.” She said that unless that golden rule is applied globally “we are not going to have a viable world.” She mentioned the environment only in passing, saying that we have to rethink many things that have failed us – including the economy and the environment. She was received well by her audience and received a standing ovation. When she left for the church basement to sign books most people either followed her or filed out of the building into the gusty night.

Now or Never

The event featuring Tim Flannery began half an hour later and the audience was about half to two-thirds of what it had been for Armstrong and was, generally a younger group of people. Flannery’s previous book, The Weather Makers, was a best seller. Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described it was: “The finest account of the overwhelming science behind global warming . . . a terrifying glimpsed of the future.”

What I particularly enjoyed about Flannery’s appearance at the festival was its informality, its lack of pomposity and its practical aspects. Jay Ingram, a science journalist and the former host of CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks, interviewed Flannery and one had the sense that it was a genuine conversation. Flannery answered Ingram’s questions briefly and conversationally, and when he did not have an answer to a question he said so. His responses to audience questions were also brief and that allowed for a good dialogue, particularly with questioners frustrated with Canada’s growing reputation as an international laggard on policy and action related to climate change.

Carbon dioxide and other gases being pumped into the atmosphere as a by-product of our burning fossil are heating up the planet. Flannery provides information from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicting temperature increases of between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees Celsius in the 21st century. He says the IPCC estimates have proven to be too conservative and are already being overtaken. He says, too, that the difference between the low and high estimate for warming temperatures is profound. “Humanity can probably cope with a warming of less than 3 degrees, but a 10.4 degree warming would be truly catastrophic…”  Flannery goes on to write, “With global food security at an all-time low, and greenhouse gases so choking our atmosphere as to threaten a global climatic catastrophe, the signs of what may come are all around us.”

Flannery did not once mention God in his interview with Ingram, but upon purchasing and reading his book I was surprised by how clear he is that our scientific crises are at base deeply moral crises. “Any meaningful inquiry into sustainability must … be as much a philosophical and moral discussion as a scientific one.” But what, exactly, do we do?  The interview and question and answer session dealt with topics such as the practicality of electric cars; whether or not people should stop eating beef; about how we can bring back tropical rain forests; and upon whether the Canadian government’s focus on carbon sequestration rather than upon reducing our carbon emissions is responsible public policy.

Briefly, Flannery believes that there is a future for electric cars and points to their rapid development in Denmark. He argues that we should not exclude grass fed beef as a source of food in a hungry world, but says that feeding grain to cattle in industrial feedlots, as we do in North America, is an unsustainable and indefensible waste of resources. Canada’s announced intention to focus on unproven research that would store carbon underground rather than allowing it to escape into the atmosphere is not a  substitute for policy that would cap carbon emissions, then begin to lower them quickly and in absolute terms. Carbon sequestration, if it works, will be needed more in places such as China and India rather than in Canada, Flannery says, because those countries are building hundreds of coal-fired electrical power plants.

Talking about the unknowable

Perhaps it is unfair to compare two authors who just happened to appear in the same venue on the same evening, but Armstrong’s presentation and its reception reminded me that many people seem drawn to talking endlessly about the unknowable. Yet no church that I have ever attended has placed an emphasis upon the urgent need for environmental stewardship. We appear largely uninterested in discovering how our various religious traditions might speak to practical, but profoundly moral questions that could save millions of people from an existence that may well become ever more nasty, brutish and short.

By Dennis Gruending

(The following post was published in the 20th anniversary edition of The Hill Times newspaper on October 5, 2009):

 The Hill Times is a niche publication in the best sense of the word. It is preoccupied with everything that happens on (and around) Parliament Hill and that cuts a broad swath. I know, based upon my eight years as a staff worker and a Member of Parliament that the newspaper is read avidly by pretty well everyone in the precinct. The Hill Times is also characterized by a civility that provides at least some sense of community in a place where that is not easy to achieve. I have come to occupy a niche of my own since I left the Hill in 2004, returning to consulting, to writing books and now a blog called Pulpit and Politics. I am interested in the growing influence that religion is having upon politics and society in Canada and elsewhere. I am pleased that the Hill Times has published some of my articles on this topic.

God is back

In one of my first blog pieces in November 2007, I reported on a lengthy article carried in The Economist. The magazine’s editor John Micklethwait said, “In the 20th century people, particularly among the elites, tended to think that religion was disappearing. That obviously hasn’t happened.” This year Mickhlethwait has published a 400-page book called God is Back, in which he makes his point in even greater detail. Rather than fading away religion has come to play an increasingly prominent public role in contemporary societies. One has only to think about the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions; the impact of liberation theology in places such as Brazil; the role of the church in Poland; the rise of the religious right in the United States, Canada and elsewhere; the rise of militant Sikhism and Islamic extremism. If ever religion was a marginalized force, it has rebounded markedly and not always for the better. All too often, from Northern Ireland through Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel, religious intrusions have been violent and bloody. Canada, so far at least, is the peaceable kingdom but the culture wars so common south of the border have their echoes in this country as well.

Canada does not exist in a vacuum. An IPSOS-Reid poll reported, for example, that the vote of evangelical Christians and Catholics who attend church weekly was a deciding factor in the election of a Conservative minority government in January 2006. The question is whether that was a blip or an emerging reality in Canadian political life. The religious right is growing in its political influence. Mainline Protestantism has been in decline although it is showing some signs of revival. Conservative Catholics and evangelicals, who once disliked and mistrusted one another, are now engaged in a growing collaboration on issues such as same sex marriage. The Conservatives are assiduously courting those evangelicals, Catholics, and certain Jewish voters as well to join their political coalition. That has caught the attention of other parties. The NDP has responded by creating Faith and Social Justice Commission, which attempts to mobilize a religious constituency on their behalf. Michael Ignatieff has given Toronto-area Liberal MP John Mackay the task of reaching out on behalf of his party to evangelical Christians.

There is a good deal of research and reportage in the United States about the relationship between religion and politics. Journalists follow the power and the money and in the U.S. the religious right has been an important political player since the days of Ronald Reagan. Recently, for example, there has been coverage about what American religious groups are saying about President Obama’s proposed reforms to health care – the response from those organizations has, unfortunately, been mostly opposed to the reforms. Far less attention has been devoted to the relationship between pulpit and politics in Canada.

What the media misses

I have reported on my blog how several Catholic NDP MPs were denied full participation in their church because of their party’s support of same sex marriage legislation. This is an unfortunate regression on the church’s part to the 19th century when the bishops and clergy in Quebec tried to bring Wilfrid Laurier to heel. I have reported on the National Prayer Breakfast, which I believe should become an inter-religious rather than exclusively Christian event. Other of my blog stories have been about what churches had to say about issues in the 2008 election campaign; about how there has been a proliferation of socially and religiously conservative lobby groups in Ottawa in the past several years; about religion and multiculturalism; about how some MPs and senior bureaucrats see the connection between religious faith and their own public lives.

A story that the mainstream media both covered and missed was the Prime Minister’s promotion of two individuals to senior positions in the PMO in March 2009. Darrel Reid became chief of staff and Paul Wilson replaced him as PMO policy director. Reid and Wilson have deep roots in both religious and political organizations. Reid was chief of staff to Reform Party leader Preston Manning while he was leader of the opposition. Later he became the president of Focus on the Family Canada, a conservative Christian lobby group that has worked against public childcare, same-sex marriage, and against adding sexual orientation to a list of minorities protected from hate crimes.

Wilson has worked for Trinity Western University, which is based in Langley, B.C. and is one of the largest evangelical educational institutions in Canada. Trinity established an Ottawa “campus” in 2001 in an old mansion near Parliament Hill. It houses the Laurentian Leadership Centre, which places students as interns with Ottawa-based organizations, predominantly with MPs. Wilson co-ordinated that internship program but when the Conservatives won election in 2006, he left Trinity Western to become a senior policy advisor to Vic Toews, then the justice minister. Wilson later served in a similar policy role for Diane Finley, the minister of human resources.

There is nothing wrong with these individuals occupying senior positions but their combined political and religious connections are worthy of note and journalists reporting the promotions missed the religious side.

Potential stories

There are other potential stories that I have not had the time or resources to follow. For example, the government is rolling out grants under its infrastructure program and a number of them are going to religious institutions. These include grants to the above-mentioned Laurentian Leadership Centre, and larger one to its parent Trinity Western University. Other grants have gone to Atlantic Baptist University in New Brunswick, Redeemer University College in Ontario and the Briercrest Bible School in Saskatchewan. There is a long tradition in Canada of religious schools and hospitals receiving public support, but it would be interesting to see the full list of religious institutions receiving money under the economic stimulus package and a description of the projects involved.

Ultimately, I am interested in how religious faith informs our political decisions – the division of wealth in our society, education and race relations, the environment and foreign policy, to name just a few. People of religious faith should, like anyone else, be welcomed to participate in political debates and movements for the benefit of the common good. But that participation is worthy of journalistic scrutiny undertaken with a sense of detachment and at least some degree of skepticism.