By Dennis Gruending

I have been posting to my Pulpit and Politics for just over two years now and it has been a rewarding project. Not long ago the trusty software that counts visits to my blog clocked 50,000 – not exactly a blockbuster but nonetheless significant. I am also pleased that in the Canadian Blog Awards for 2009, Pulpit and Politics placed second in the Religion and Philosophy category. In 2008, it placed first. The awards are based solely upon the number of votes received, so thanks to all of you who cast an online ballot for Pulpit and Politics. The blog is satisfying for a number of reasons. There is an intellectual challenge, which involves a lot of reading, watching and listening. There is the writing, which I love to do. Also, I enjoy the thoughtful responses that I receive from many of you. Often those remarks are posted to the Comments section on my blog, but even more often they take the form of personal email messages from those of you who do not want to have your comments or names posted for all to see. Each of your responses is welcome – including those that are critical of what I have written.

God is Back

I said that I enjoy the reading. Other than my occasional forays into the suspense novels of John Le Carre, Ian Rankin, or various Canadian writers, I like to organize my reading around social and political themes. My stated ambition in creating Pulpit and Politics was to explore the connection between religious faith and public life. This is a broad theme and there is much good writing to support its investigation. In one of my first blog posts, in November 2007, I reported on a special 18-page section in The Economist magazine called In God’s Name: A special report on religion and public life. Editor John Micklethwait said then, “In the 20th century people, particularly among the elites, tended to think that religion was disappearing. That obviously hasn’t happened.” With the exception of Western Europe, he said, “religion has forced itself dramatically into the public square.”

This year Micklethwait and a fellow writer Adrian Wooldrigde delivered a book called God is Back, which extends The Economist’s earlier investigation. The book opens by describing a meeting of Chinese Christians in a house church in Shanghai, attended by a group of young professionals with Blackberrys on their belts and their BMWs parked on the street outside. They believe, among other things, that religion and personal prosperity go hand in hand, because of the disciplined lives that Christians are called to live, and because co-religionists create communities in which people are prepared to support and help each other. There is some truth to that, I suppose, although I much prefer religious faith with a broader perspective. |God is Back then looks into the social and political effects of religious faith in Europe (where it is declining), in America (where it is reviving), and in the Muslim world (where it is thriving but uncertain how to deal with modernity). The authors are quite sanguine about the prospect of greater Christian involvement in the public sphere but they appear more concerned about Islam.

Black Mass

Another writer who I encountered (again) this year is British political philosopher John Gray. He is much more pessimistic in his critique. In his book Black Mass, Gray insists that totalitarian movements, including communism and fascism, were based upon utopian visions that have their roots in religion. “The very idea of revolution as a transforming event in history is owed to religion,” he writes. “Modern revolutionary movements are a continuation of religion by other means . . .With the death of Utopia, apocalyptic religion has re-emerged, naked and unadorned as a force in world politics.”

American Fascists

Another book that is dark in its reportage and analysis is American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges. He believes that the Christian right in the U.S. wants to turn the country into a theocracy governed by Biblical principles as they interpret them. The movement calls for Christian “dominion” over the nation and eventually over the earth itself. “Under Christian dominion,” Hedges writes, “America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, and the media and the government proclaim the good news to one and all. Labour unions, civil rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship.” Hedges believes that this movement in stronger than most of us think, and that it has fascist tendencies. Reviews of Hedges’ book in the New York Times and in the publication Foreign Affairs charge him with over-reaching in his analysis.

Gray makes the point that various religious utopian movements are relatively harmless to society when they consist of small and marginal groups, but become menacing when they achieve power and influence. Obviously, Hedges believes that with Dominionism that movement has arrived in the U.S. There are Dominionist groups in Canada as well although they remain marginal to public discourse. The youth group that organizes events called the Cry each year in Canadian cities is one example, as is a group called the Watchmen.

Feminist Theology

I used the In God’s Name article from The Economist in preparing a 12-week course that I gave at the Ottawa School of Theology and Spirituality early in 2009. (The school is offering winter courses again this year beginning on Monday, January 11 for the information of those of you who live in the Ottawa area). My courses in 2009 allowed me to pull together the disparate threads of much that I had read in the previous year or two and place it into the lecture and discussion sessions that we held. It became clear in my research that men dominate writing and scholarship about religion and public life in Canada. I began to look for a good resource that was written by women, and I found one in a book called Feminist Theology with a Canadian Accent. It’s a collection by a number of Canadian women writers, and one man.

I found the chapters on ecology written by Heather Eaton and Jessica Fraser to be excellent. Fraser, for example, talks about the importance of ecological literacy, arguing that each of us must learn more about the ecological context in the communities in which we live, whether it’s learning more about geology or biology, or measuring our ecological footprint — how much gas we use in our cars, how much we fly, how we heat and insulate our homes. These writers say that we must take heed of the ecological crisis and somehow make that central to our lifestyle, our activism and our theology. I believe that we have done a poor job of this in our churches and our society in general.

Now or Never

An Australian scientist named Tim Flannery, who appeared at the Ottawa International Writers Festival in October, buttressed that point for me.  Flannery has written a book about climate change called, Now or Never: Why We Need to Act Now to Achieve a Sustainable Future. Flannery writes, “With global food security at an all-time low, and greenhouse gases so chocking 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 appearance, 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. But what, exactly, do we do?  Flannery deals with practical 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.

I ended the piece on Flannery’s book by writing that “no church that I have attended has placed an emphasis upon the urgent need for environmental stewardship.” A number of you either left comments on my blog or sent me email messages to say that your parish or congregation is, indeed, making environmental sustainability a priority.  Someone even sent me a list of web addresses for faith groups and organizations working on environmental issues. Thanks for that. I hope that we will continue our conversations in the months to come. Happy New Year.

By Dennis Gruending

In October, I attended a fund raising dinner and auction at an Ottawa church to support development of a legal clinic to assist women in eastern Congo. In some of their stories, captured on a brief video, the women describe how they had been gang raped and brutalized by young men who fight in armies and militias. These women were the lucky ones. They talked about how others had been murdered during their ordeals or left to die afterward. The goal on that October evening was to raise $25,000, enough money we were told to support the clinic for one year. People that night dug deeply into their pockets for $22,000 and we were asked to make our cheques to KAIROS, the Canadian ecumenical social justice group. Now, a scant six weeks later, we learn that Bev Oda, the minister in charge of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), has cut all funding to KAIROS. The news arrived in a terse telephone call from a faceless official who said that the organization’s projects do not fit with CIDA’s criteria. Tell that to women in the Congo.

KAIROS acts on behalf of 13 of Canada’s major churches or church-based organizations, and it includes under its umbrella the Anglican, Catholic, Christian Reformed, Lutheran, Presbyterian and United Churches, as well as the Mennonite Central Committee, the Quakers and others. KAIROS, or its predecessor groups, have received money from CIDA for 35 years to support partners working in regions experiencing some of the world’s most serious human rights violations. The work of KAIROS is highly regarded in Canada and overseas.

CIDA’s “priorities”

KAIROS worked with its global partners to develop a program for years 2009-2013, focussing upon human rights and ecological justice.  The budget was for $9.2 million over four years, with CIDA contributing just over $7 million of that amount. The proposal was submitted to CIDA in March 2009, where it moved through various levels of approval before arriving on Bev Oda’s desk in July 2009. There seemed to be little cause for concern. KAIROS had received a positive audit report for its 2006-2009 work and a good evaluation. When, in September 2009, the agreement had still not been signed, KAIROS was granted a two-month extension on a previous contribution agreement. Sources say it was then that people at KAIROS began to worry. They were hearing that there was “trouble at the top”, which meant the minister’s’ office, or more likely with this government, the prime minister’s office.

On November 30, KAIROS was told that it had been cut off. The organization says in a new release: “We asked for an explanation and were informed that our program did not fit the government of Canada’s priorities. This was the last day of an extension to our current proposal.  No written explanation has been provided.” In one telephone call, the Canadian government appears to have terminated a long-standing relationship between CIDA and KAIROS or its predecessor organizations. KAIROS says the decision, if not reversed, “would cut funds to 21 ecumenical and citizen’s organizations in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and cut educational work that helps Canadians across the country to develop skills and knowledge in the exercise of their global citizenship.”

Minister Oda did not communicate with KAIROS about its fate — she rarely communicates publicly with anyone about her portfolio except in the most controlled of circumstances. But the “trouble at the top” may well have had more to do with the work of KAIROS within Canada than with its overseas projects. KAIROS has questioned, on environmental and hence ethical grounds, the rapid development of the tar sands in Western Canada. KAIROS hosted a forum in Calgary in October 2008 and organized a delegation of Canadian church leaders to visit the tar sands in May 2009. The Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance, prior to their takeover of the Progressive Conservative Party, were beneficiaries of generous support from the oil and gas industry. The Harper Conservatives exist on similarly friendly terms with the carbon industry and will not hear of any proposal that would scale back rapid development – despite the environmental problems such development is causing. The implied criticism from KAIROS may have excited the ire of Conservatives at the top, even though most of the KAIROS budget is provided by the organization’s own donors and not by CIDA.

Canada as petro state

The eyes of the world are upon Canada as 192 countries meet in Copenhagen to discuss measures that would start to slow the runaway train of carbon pollution that causes global heating. Canada, which used to be respected among nations, is becoming a pariah due to its stubborn insistence to do little to mitigate the creation of greenhouse gases – and the Canadian tar sands are among the largest emitters. George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian in Britain, recently wrote: “So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petro-state. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man.”

The treatment of KAIROS is not only a punishment; it is a warning. Citizens for Public Justice, another fine ecumenical organization, has also questioned tar sands development, albeit in a polite and almost tentative way. Might CPJ expect repercussions? The Catholic aid agency, Development and Peace, has had a multi-year campaign to bring attention to the corporate behaviour of Canadian mining companies abroad. D&P receives CIDA funding. Should the organization be looking over its shoulder?

Fighting the cuts

KAIROS and its supporters are not going down quietly.  The organization is asking its people to contact their MPs, requesting that the decision be reversed. A variety of NGOs and churches, including the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, which does not belong to KAIROS, have criticized the government’s decision.

The issue appears to have some political legs as well. All opposition parties, including the Greens, who do not have a seat the House of Commons, have called for the move to be reversed. Liberal MPs Bob Rae and John McKay, as well as other opposition members, have raised the issue in Question Period in the House of Commons. As I wrote this, church and NGO Leaders  announced that they would convene a news conference on Parliament Hill to address what they call” the unprecedented decision” to cut all funding to the human rights program of KAIROS.

KAIROS is asking its supporters, in addition to contacting their MPs, to send email messages to: Prime Minister Stephen Harper, pm@pmo-cpm.gc.ca; Bev Oda, minister of international cooperation, oda.b@parl.gc.ca; and Margaret Biggs, president of CIDA, Margaret.Biggs@acdi-cida.gc.ca. KAIROS asks that those who write also copy their letters to KAIROS at info@kairoscanada.org.

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

He would be called an icon if he was in business, sports or even politics but in the world that he inhabits 85-year-old peace activist Murray Thomson is just quietly and deeply respected. This night he speaks about militarism to a group of about 50 people at the modest Quakers House in Ottawa as part of a two-week peace festival. There is a video and some music provided by a middle-aged group who (tongue-in-cheek) call themselves Grateful We’re Not Dead — but Thomson’s 15-minute speech is the centrepiece. “Militarism is bad for the global economy, terrible for the environment, hugely destructive of human rights and of life itself, and it poses a major risk to the future of humanity,” Thomson says.

He has a deeper appreciation than most about both the attraction and repulsion of militarism. He was a student at the University of Toronto when the Second World War began. He enlisted in the air force and became a pilot although he never actually flew a combat mission. He was still in the military when, in 1945, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. “Hiroshima made me a pacifist,” Thomson told Embassy magazine in June 2008, and now, 63 years after that unspeakably violent event, he is still spreading the word about resisting militarism and building peace.

Militarism, Thomson says, is fed by the recruitment and training of armed forces, nourished by military alliances, such as NATO, and supported by the well-funded secret intelligence agencies. “Militarism grows in a social climate characterized by nationalism, patriotism, denigration of women and an over-emphasis on authority, buttressed by attitudes which stress the perversity and weakness of human nature. Militarism is fostered by economic, political and military interest groups which benefit materially from the arms trade.” Canada, for example, plans to spend $490 billion on the military over the next 20 years, and the U.S. spends $700 billon each year. Thomson says the tentacles of the defence establishment and its lobby are everywhere and that militarism is deeply etched into our individual and collective consciousness.

Canada’s Department of National Defence (DND), he says, spends millions of dollars on think tanks and scholars and in return expects them to provide supportive commentary. Citing research by University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran, Thomson says that eleven universities receive between $580,000 and $780,000, and Queens University obtained a grant of $1.5 million. “He [Attaran] claims that DND sponsors policy scholars who create the ideas, news and views that shape Canadians’ perceptions of the military and war.”

Militarism is also associated with the acceptance of violence in films and videos, and our use of language in sports and other community events, Thomson says. “Who of us is not embarrassed by the rants of Don Cherry on Hockey Night in Canada, the champion of both hockey brawling and a tougher military?” Many professional sports teams “use military terms to describe and promote their activities and at last year’s football final in Toronto, the Grey Cup was brought into the Rogers Centre by the Canadian military. It could be seen, riding on a tank, followed by a recruitment detachment from DND.”

Thomson may be discouraged but he is not deterred. He has been an active pacifist and remains so. He’s worked for the Quakers and internationally for CUSO. He was the co-founder of the inter-church peace group Project Ploughshares, a founder of Peace Brigades International and of Peace Fund Canada, a campaign aimed at allowing conscientious objectors to have their tax payments spent only for non-military purposes. For his unceasing efforts, he has received the Order of Canada, the Pearson Peace Medal and other awards.

Thomson provides his Quaker House audience with a checklist of practical ways to challenge militarism. They include:

- Keep on doing what we are doing. Work to rid the world of weapons: land mines, cluster bombs, automatic weapons, arms technology or weapons of mass destruction.

- Ask questions of academic presidents about the research done because of grants received from the Department of National Defence.

- Advocate for a [Canadian] Department of Peace which puts peace, the environment and disarmament priorities into foreign policy and seeks to train thousands of youth and others in conflict resolution, in Canada or elsewhere.

- Campaign to end the war in Afghanistan and to support war resisters seeking to live Canada.

- Support couragaeous Africans seeking to end civil conflicts in their countries, or Israelis and Palestinians seeking a just solutions to the never-ending conflict in the Middle East.

- Keep on working to creating global structures that strengthen international law and human rights.

- Challenge NATO’s nuclear policies and the existence of NATO itself.

- Find the means to coordinate efforts, pool financial, human and spiritual resources and speak with one voice.

Then, having delivered his speech, Murray Thomson picks up a fiddle and plays a tune along with the evening’s entertainers. All they are saying was give peace a chance.