Searching for God # 129

 Liberty Coalition Canada, a conservative Christian advocacy group, is trying to raise $1.3 million to recruit hundreds of Christian politicians and campaign staff to run at all levels of government. Working alongside Liberty Coalition Canada are dozens of churches across the country, a number of small media outlets and at least one well-funded think-tank. While theological and political differences exist among them, many supporters of this movement share a vocal opposition to LGBTQ rights and other social justice causes. Several Canadian pastors in the movement also have ties to a controversial branch of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. known as reconstructionism. Scholars say reconstructionist ideals — often linked to Christian nationalism, the idea that the United States is a Christian country — are influencing how some Canadian evangelicals are responding to issues like legalized abortion, same-sex marriage and added protections for gender minorities. CBC, June 5, 2023, Janathan Montpetit, in a podcast entitled: Inside the Fundamentalist Christian Movement (in Canada) 

The Christian ‘right’ is no longer a whisper but is becoming a rather loud roar in Canadian public life. And its purposes, objectives, goals and hatred need full exposure! The fact that mainline churches, (Presbyterian, Anglican) have issued statements calling for the freedom and dignity of everyone, while noble and honourable, will do little if anything to confront the rigid, fundamentalist, doctrinaire, and ultimately bigoted movement and to dissuade it from its obssession of controlling the laws and the ethics and morality of the country. 

Quoting scripture in ‘whereas’s’ as justification, from an exclusively literalist reading, and undergirding the verbiage, sermons, activities and ambition with a level of emotional self-righteousness, as if to ‘clean-up’ the sin of the nation and make it pure, in the sight of God, is, not only on the surface, but also in its intent, a direct contravention and confrontation of the history of religious freedom, as well as freedom of speech and the charter of rights, not to mention a perverse, distorted and, frankly, both an untenable and unconscionable un-Christian theology. 

The real danger, however, in attempting to both expose and to denigrate any fundamentalist movement is that, because of its depth of fanatacism and passion, it, like other radical movements, becomes even more emboldened in the face of criticism. Another difficulty in confronting such a movement is that it offers to those who chose to contribute, and to become supporters, a profoundly deep and comforting degree of religious ‘certainty’. Indeed, such movements are always grounded on the most absolute convictions, mostly of detestation of apostasy in pursuit of religious, ethical, moral and even political absolutism. And, of course, movements like this are the sole arbiters of what comprises apostasy. 

In their case, LGBTQ+, for starters, gay marriage, abortion, even public schools funded by governments through citizen taxes, are on the cusp of apostasy. Apostasy is defined: an act of refusing to continue to follow, obey, or recognize a religious faith (merriam-webster.com) 

From The Tyee, June 2, 2025, in a piece by Donald Gutstein, entitled, ‘The Christian Movements that Want to End Canadian Self-Rule,’ after introducing the New Apostolic Reformation roots in the United States, continues on the Liberty Coalition Canada, which has picked up the baton here: 

NAR appointed prophet Cindy Jacobs is one of the world’s leading proponents of spiritual warfare, in which believers fight against territorial demons that rule geographical locations. It’s no longer fighting for individual souls but for whole nations...Jacobs has been prophesying about the fate of Canada for years. Her first prophetic words for Canada occurred in 2001. She emphasized the importance of Psalm 72:8 in a Canadian context: ‘He shall have dominion from sea to sea. From the river to the ends of the earth.’ God told her, ‘I said it at the foundation and I have never changed my mind.’ It’s inscribed on the arch over the window of the Ottawa Peace Tower. The Fathers of Confederation called the new nation the Dominion of Canada. It was a sign from God....The Liberty (Coalition Canada) pastors have solidified connections with a radical form of evangelicalism call Reconstruction, in which Christians seek to reconstruct society to biblical principles, including areas like law, education and government. It claims the Bible provides a comprehensive framework for living, and Christians should strive to implement these principles in all aspects of life....The state would become a theocracy and would punish wrongdoing with severity that God’s law in the Old Testament did. This would include capital punishment for homosexuality, adultery and abortion. Reconstruction is presently associated with Pastor Douglas Wilson and Christ Church in Moscow Idaho. His goal is the creation of a theocratic state in which traditionalist Christian men (highlighting mine) lead essential government institutions. Liberty pastors have many connections with Wilson and Reconstructionism. A document that was supposed to be secret but was exposed to CBC reporter Jonathan Montpetit says it wants to align Canada’s laws with biblical principles, following Reconstruction goals. 

Whether this movement might or might not be even unconsciously reacting, defensively from a paranoid perspective, to the spectre of any hinted or openly avowed intention of Islam and Muslims in Canada to impose Sharia law, irrespective of how long that might take, such a movement is irresponsibly and in a sinister and somewhat scurrilous manner, putting their ‘brand’ of fundamental, evangelical, literal, ‘christianity’ on top of the Canadian metaphoric totem pole of religious, ethical, moral and political religions. On that basis, it is to be seen and framed as a ‘political’ movement using religion as its justification. 

Ramifications to both Canadian politics as well as to the Christian church are, whether or not they care or are even aware, predictable, indeed, inevitable. From a political perspective, their brand of fanaticism seeks to erase the history, tradition and legal framework of moderate, progressive, inclusive, respectful, and sustainable laws and their interpretation and enforcement that has defined this country for well over a century. From a religious perspective, it will foment debates and dissension and division far more intense, dogmatic, doctrinaire, and both racially and socially bigoted than this scribe is even open to contemplating. As is currently and has been happening in the United States for at least a decade, this kind of pseudo-religion can and will only inflame religious passions, divide churches, families and align associates of the movement with projections on leaders of the ‘saviour’ archetype. And while those projections will of course be unconscious and thereby both undisclosed and unacknowledged, they will pass as part of the ‘literal, empirical, militaristic and self-righteousness of absolutism, and potentially of its fascistic political application. 

Rather than taking only my word for this perspective, we might read some of the words, perspective and creative care of men like Robert Funk in his Honest to Jesus, a book that would likely fall under the classification of apostasy by those in the Reconstruction and Liberty right. Funk and his Jesus Seminar colleagues acknowledge the growing atrophy and potential extinction of what was once the Christian church. 

For an embattled and embittered shrinking minority—yes, that is what it is—who want to retreat into contrived mental ghettos as a way of maintaining some hypothetical past, the issue does not matter. But for the rest of us, it does: we cannot continue to traffic in sedimented theological language, or in the ancient worldview at selected, discreet levels, chosen carefully as defensible religious preserves....The advent of a ‘new age’ has brought with it the chance to start over. The quester should think of how it must have been in those first, tentative decades, in the thirties and forties of the common era, when the Jesus movement was young amorphous, a fledgling struggling to find its wings. That is the correct perspective from which to view the present challenge. (p.298)...What would happen if ‘the dangerous and subversive memories’ of that solitary figure (Jesus of Nazareth) were really stripped of their interpretive overlay? Were that to happen, the gospel of Jesus would be liberated from the Jesus of the gospels and allowed to speak for itself. The creedal formulations of the second, third, and fourth centuries would be de-dogmatized and Jesus would be permitted to emerge as a robust, real, larger-than-life figure in his own right. Moreover, current images of Jesus would be torn up by their long affective roots and their attachment to p-it causes severed. The pale, anemic, iconic Jesus would suffer by comparison with the stark realism of the genuine article. (p. 300) 

Based on the concept, as deduced and agreed upon by the Jesus Seminar that Jesus was the messenger of and for a ‘kingdom’ of and from God, as a future to be both imagined and aspired to, this view sustains the foundational perspective of ‘a future’ along with the hope that humanity could, would and perhaps even will ‘move’ in that direction (Tolstoy’s ‘oppose evil abuse of power in whatever form with force when and wherever we find it!’ as expressions of that ‘kingdom of God within’!). 

Compare those attitudes, perspectives, aspirations and theological premises with the document that birthed, and sustains the Liberty Coalition of Canada a document entitled The Niagara Declaration. 

THE NIAGARA 2020 DECLARATION  ON THE LIBERTIES OF THE CHURCH IN CANADA FROM SEA TO SEA. In view of various culture-abandoning errors and a broad decline presently inflicting and marginalizing the Church, and at a time in the Dominion of Canada when our civil society is renouncing, both in law and socio-cultural life, its historic Christian heritage in pursuit of liberty without the Gospel, justice without God’s law, truth without the Scriptures, flourishing without obedience, atonement without the cross, love without faithfulness, peace without repentance, salvation without Christ, and a world without creational norms, it is incumbent upon a faithful Church to set forth to all powers and authorities, the claims of Christ and the freedom of His Kingdom people, the Church (Matt. 28:18-20; Eph. 3:10; Col. 2:15; 1 Tim. 1:9-11, 17; 3:15; 1 Pt. 2:16-17; 5:11). In a national cultural context in which ultimate sovereignty is rapidly being seized by – or readily surrendered to – the State, imperilling inherited liberties and exposing our civil government to divine judgment, we must be mindful that freedoms not fought for are soon forfeited. Therefore, in response to our national spiritual crisis, we declare: 

WHEREAS Jesus Christ claims total authority over the nations as the Creator and Ruler of the kings, judges, and governors of the earth (Ps. 2:7-12; Ps. 110; Luke 23:3; John 19:11; Acts 17:7; Eph. 1:20-23; Phil. 2:9-11; Col. 1:15-17; 1 Tim. 1:17; Rev. 1:5) AND WHEREAS the one, holy, catholic (i.e. universal) and apostolic Church has been founded by our Lord Jesus Christ long before all temporal authorities of this Dominion of Canada came into existence (Matt. 16:18; Mark 3:13-19; Eph. 1:22-23; 4:7-13; Col. 1:18); AND WHEREAS the Church of Jesus Christ does not have her position in the nation assigned her by the permission of civil government, but jure divino – she has her own organization and she possesses her own office-bearers (Matt. 10:1-15; 18:15-20; 28:18-20; Acts 14:23; 1 Cor. 5:9-13; 6:1-7; Eph. 1:22-23; 4:9-13) AND WHEREAS the sovereignty of the State and the sovereignty of the Church exist side by side, instituted by God and in service to God, mutually limiting each other as recognized in the Scriptures and applied in Magna Carta (Mark 12:13-17; Acts 5:29-32; Rom. 13:1, 4; 1 Cor. 6:1-7; 2 Cor. 10:3-6; Eph. 1:22; Phil. 2:9-11; 1 Tim. 2:1-4); AND WHEREAS various kings and queens of the Dominion of Canada have confirmed in the British Parliament the Great Charter which grants that the Church “shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable” (Magna Carta, 1297); AND WHEREAS our Head of State, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, in her Coronation Oath (1953) swore that to the utmost of her power she would “maintain the Laws of God and true profession of the Gospel”; AND WHEREAS the Royal Coat of Arms of Canada invokes the universal dominion of the Lord’s anointed King, Jesus Christ, over the land in its national motto: A mari usque ad mare (taken from the Latin Vulgate translation of Psalm 72:8: Et dominabitur a mari usque ad mare, et a flumine usque ad terminos terrae, meaning “He shall have dominion also from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth”); AND WHEREAS the Supremacy of God over the Dominion of Canada is clearly acknowledged in the preamble to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law”; AND WHEREAS freedom of conscience and religion, expression, thought, opinion and belief, peaceful assembly, and association is enshrined in the international law common to all civilized nations and as fundamental freedoms in section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; WE THE UNDERSIGNED, representatives of various confessionally orthodox churches, denominations, organizations, and fellowships, DECLARE that the following God-given and historically inherited liberties of the Church are to be observed, maintained, and protected in the Dominion of Canada today and forever: 

The overt and passionate determination to insert, impose, engineer, and both support and sustain a ‘template’ based on a dogmatic, doctrinaire, inflexible, predetermined and absolute ‘theocracy’ as conceptualized, legalized, notarized and promulgated by the people who signed the declaration cannot be either overlooked, diluted, dismissed or tragically, taken seriously by men and women in government, and especially by those interested and committed to a ‘kingdom of God’ that refuses to be imprisoned in a pseudo-theocratic formula. Intensively moralistic, the declaration presumes to know what God must see enacted in Canada, bringing a doctrinaire set of rules of behaviour, based on the presumed, assumed and indisputable superiority and privilege of those declaring their intent. Not from a rhetorical perspective, one is prompted to ask, ‘Is this primarily a theological document or a political manifest of a highly reductionistic, highly militaristic, power-hungry, power-driven, power-obsessed group of men and women? Wrapping their manifesto in an iron-clad image of what the state, the world of Caesar in history, as well as metaphor is nothing short of a declaration of a religious war. 

If ever there was a moment when Tolstoy’s exhortation to confront the evil abuse of power with force it is this moment. And, paradoxically, given decades, if not centuries of ‘pastoral’ and ‘caring’ and ‘integrative’ and ‘inclusive’ dialogue and debate between and among the various world faith communities, in an attempt to recognize, and elevate common themes, images, histories and aspirations of each unique ‘search for God’ a serious risk is that mainline churches will adopt a less than overt, less than muscular, and less than confrontative approach to this demonic declaration.  Just as the ‘external saviour’ image of Jesus needs a transformation so too does the Christian faith need a transformation from a fixation and obsession with outdated and long-past-due-date myths, such as the immaculate conception and the resurrection, as well as a shedding of dependence on Creeds engraved as much or more as political necessities as theological visions..And then there is the apocalypse. 

Here is Robert Funk: The action precipitated by the external redeemer is regularly violent and usually apocalyptic: since creation is defective and humans helpless, God must intervene as the only way to right wrongs and guarantee rewards for the faithful. Apocalypticists themselves are not infrequently tempted to assist God by applying military muscle. (Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.308) 

Here is another caution from Funk: 

Jesus condemned the public practice of piety. Jesus makes sport of displays of piety. He regards religious posturing as hypocritical. He advises his followers to conceal the acts of charity performed by the right hand from the intelligence of the left hand. ..The football player who kneels in the end zone and says a prayer for their success before millions of admirers have received the only reward they will ever get. (Ibid, p. 311) 

The Canadian clone of Christian dogmatic, fundamentalist, militaristic ‘religion’ (rather than theology and the search for an unknowable and ultimately unknown God) from the American model is invasive, repulsive, abhorrent and dangerous. It has to be seen as such!