Playing to His Base

In 2006, Marci McDonald wrote a well-known Walrus article called “Stephen Harper and the Theo-Cons,” documenting the rise of evangelical Christians in Canadian politics. Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells wrote a short rebuttal saying evangelical influence was exaggerated and these groups were “losers.” But three years later, after watching the push by Conservative backbenchers to cancel LGBT Pride funding, Wells wrote, “I’m not so sure I was right.”

McDonald notes this and much else in her book The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada. “Christian nationalists,” she says, are “a militant charismatic fringe with ties to Harper’s Conservatives that has gained influence out of all proportion to its numerical heft.” McDonald is joined by Tom Warner’s Losing Control: Canada’s Social Conservatives in the Age of Rights as the first to document the rising political involvement of evangelical Christians, who...