VAN MAREN: Onward Christian Canadians

Conservative writer Jonathon Van Maren provided this foreword to Michael Wagner's just-published book, Standing on Guard for Thee. A sample chapter will appear Monday

Michael Wagner’s Standing on Guard for Thee isn’t just an important book. It is both a corrective, and a reminder. Canada is now a post-Christian country by every metric — a mere 11% of Canadians attend any form of worship regularly — but it was not always thus. Our country was transformed in the decades between the two Trudeaus, and our new national narrative is now that our founding values had to be abandoned in order for Canada to become the bastion of secular progressivism that now defines our image at home and on the world stage.

Canadian history has been colonized by progressives who despise both our Christian heritage and those who fought to preserve our values. As a result, Canadian Christians have been cut off from our history.

In the progressive narrative arc of the nation, Christians who fought against the moral revolution that transformed Canada — the more than one million who signed a petition to Parliament asking for protections for children in the womb; the thousands who took to the streets to protest abortion; the tireless activists who fought the long and losing battle to resist the hijacking of our public schools and the elimination of Christian values from public life — are the villains of Canada’s story.

History, as the saying goes, is written by the victors — and thus in recent decades, the story of Canada has been largely told from the perspective of the cultural revolutionaries. When academics and historians turn their attention to the pro-life or pro-family movement, it is usually to celebrate their defeats or mock their failings. The story of Canada’s Christian counter-revolutionaries has been left largely unwritten — until now. Michael Wagner’s Standing on Guard for Thee: The Past, Present, and Future of Canada’s Religious Right offers the other side of the story.

Progressives like to present Canada’s history as a trajectory, with Canada slowly but surely becoming what she was always meant to be as we decriminalized abortion, redefined marriage, accepted the ubiquity of pornography, and left Christianity largely behind.

What Wagner’s book admirably demonstrates is that the cultural revolution represents not a progressive trajectory but a profound rupture with Canada’s past and the majority of those who have lived their lives here. We are not the same country that we were, and we are not the same people that we were.

History, of course, is messy, and Wagner does not shy away from this. To claim that the past was a golden age is a fool’s errand.

But it is important for us to remember that not everyone simply accepted the vast moral changes that convulsed Canada, most of them imposed from the top down.

Some spoke up in defence of Canadian children in the womb; others decried attacks on the innocence of children; still others advocated for Christian values in the halls of power. Wagner has restored those men and women to their rightful place in Canada’s history, and you will read about many of them in the pages of this book.

The story of Canada’s counter-revolutionaries is fascinating, heartbreaking, and ultimately inspiring. I am grateful to Michael Wagner for giving it to us.

Jonathon Van Maren is a communications consultant with The Acacia Group, a legal consultancy providing services to churches, charities, non-profits and religious institutions.