Culture wars: The commoners versus the end-timers

Posted on May 17, 2010 by murraydobbin

Christian end-timers welcome Armageddon and The Rapture that follows for them. If you’ve ever heard them go beyond defending Israel to hoping for an all out conflagration in the Middle East you could almost be forgiven if you dismissed them as marginal whack-jobs good only for a kind of black humour entertainment.

I said almost forgiven. Because as Marci MacDonald points out in her new book, The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, if you don’t take these people seriously you may be quietly contributing to the demise of democracy and all the social democratic programs it has created in the past 50 years. (See her 2006 article on the subject here.)

Stephen Harper takes them very seriously, to the point where he has encouraged and facilitated the rapid build-up of a powerful Christian right political machine on Parliament Hill and beyond, a machine that is getting its way more and more with the Conservative government. The way McDonald explains it, Harper suffered a serious erosion of support from the neo-liberal crowd when in 2008 he buckled to NDP and Liberal pressure to spend billions to stave off a serious recession — and brought the country its worst deficit situation in decades.
Read more here.