Front Burner - Inside the fundamentalist Christian movement that wants to remake Canadian politics

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Warning: This story contains anti-trans comments and deals with suicide. Today on Front Burner, CBC investigative reporter Jonathan Montpetit goes inside a fundamentalist Christian movement deeply conservative in its social values and radical in its ideas for reform – one that came together in the pandemic, and has since joined the backlash to LGBTQ rights. You can read more on this story at cbc.ca/1.6793677 This documentary was produced by Jonathan Montpetit and Julia Pagel at CBC’s Audio Doc Unit. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jonathan Mobitsy, an investigative journalist here at CBC. Before going any further, I want to give listeners a heads up. This episode contains anti-LGBTQ comments, anti-trans comments in particular, and it deals with suicide.

A couple of months ago, I was doing a story about the school board elections in Ontario. We had noticed there were several dozen candidates who focused much of their campaigns on gender and sexuality issues. Several of them campaigned on promises like removing privacy protections for trans students or pulling trans-friendly books from school libraries. Many of them also spoke openly about how their faith inspired them to get involved in politics. This ideology stuff that's going on, teaching the children, you know, about, you know, transgender stuff and that sort of thing at a very young age. I felt a calling from God. I literally felt a calling from God. I felt that he said, OK, Paula, you know, try this out. As I dug deeper, I discovered there was a network of churches that was really invested

in trying to get these anti-trans candidates elected. They even organized an extended campaign training session for them. In the end, not many of these school board candidates were successful. But after the election, I felt like I needed to know more about these churches and why they were getting political. Because this is an ongoing issue. Religious activists have been pressuring towns and schools in Ontario to limit their support for the LGBTQ community. Just last week, a school board north of Toronto voted not to fly the Pride flag at its headquarters, even though it's Pride Month.

And in the Niagara District of Ontario, a video appears to show a school trustee comparing the Pride flag to the Nazi flag. to show a school trustee comparing the pride flag to the Nazi flag. The pandemic had a big impact on faith groups in Canada. Like just about everything else, churches and mosques, temples and synagogues were either closed outright or open only to a few people at a time. Most places of worship complied with public health orders. But a number of conservative Christian pastors did not. Most places of worship complied with public health orders. But a number of conservative Christian pastors did not. They seemed to openly defy the authorities.

In September of 2020, at a gated property in Grimsby, Ontario, a few of these pastors got together to draft what they called the Niagara Declaration, a petition saying the state has no business interfering with the church, pandemic or not. Several hundred churches around the country ended up signing it. And from that, they formed a political advocacy group called Liberty Coalition Canada, which tried to mobilize religious opposition to lockdowns and vaccine mandates. As governments remove these public health measures, the Liberty Coalition and many of the churches that signed the Niagara Declaration

shifted their attention to other issues, like criticizing efforts to deal with systemic racism or doubting the existence of climate change. But the one issue they kept coming back to, again and again, was gender. I spent hours listening to their podcasts and sermons, reading their blog posts and books, and the language they used to speak about trans people was so angry, so militant. This is what today's episode is all about.

Tearing down the Gnostic, Pagan, Satanic system that is the 2LGBbt aiq s plus worldview and the agenda and calling it what it really is a godless death cult that wants to disfigure the image of god in human beings and devour our children in the process well it is a it's a it's a it's a wicked ideology and i think that is the the thing absolutely to keep in mind front and center, that this is a religious assault. It's an ideological assault on the family, upon the church, upon specifically upon the Christian faith, and upon the society and the social order that has created the Western world. The crazy, inhumane, dangerous trans movement, which is a threat to humanity. It's a threat to the truth. It's a threat to children. It's a threat to anything good.

This way of thinking is a threat to all of those things. This was a fundamentalist Christian movement, deeply conservative in its social values and radical in its ideas for reform. So today on FrontBurner, I'm going to take you inside this movement. I'm going to show you how it came together in the pandemic, how it joined the campaign against trans rights, and how it's changing right-wing populism in Canada. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization,

empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups. In November, several leading figures in this fundamentalist Christian movement were attending a three-day event in Waterloo called the Church at War Conference.

So I sent the organizers an email saying, hey, can I come by and check it out? This is the reply I got back. We have absolutely no media invited to this conference. As it turns out, many of the same people were attending another conference a month later in Windsor, Ontario. So this time, instead of asking whether I can attend, I just buy a ticket and stuff a tape recorder in my pocket. I'm not sure what to expect. It's a theology conference on a Saturday. I think maybe like 20 people will be there. I figure I'll stick out and be asked to leave. But I drive out to this conference anyway. It's in a church about 10 minutes from downtown Windsor, surrounded by post-war bungalows.

I walk inside, and there are hundreds of people there. You got a ticket to show me on your phone? Yeah. Okay, good to go. So there's two tables at the side, and you can fill out a name tag. Okay, great, thank you. Thanks. Harvest Bible is a large, thriving church.

It's in a newly renovated building. Inside, there's a cafe, a small gift shop, a gymnasium. It even runs a private Christian school. I take a seat in the Cavernous Chapel, which has space for 2,000 people and a state-of-the-art sound system. The conference starts with a couple of songs by the church's house band. The first speaker talks about how global warming is being exaggerated in order to control us. During a break, I walk around the exhibitors' hall,

where a handful of sponsors have set up booths. Take some coffee, take some stickers, take a pen, please. This is all free. Our sponsors have been tremendously generous with us. That's Andrew DiBartolo. He's part of a church in Kingston and co-hosts a podcast called The Liberty Dispatch, where he rails against, well, a lot. And this is The Liberty Dispatch. Confirm the narrative with the propaganda arm of the Canadian government. Now, they're the CBC.

Vaccines, vaccines, vaccines. If you want them, Canada is the place to get them. The firing squad covers the experimental gene therapy. to get him. The firing squad covers the experimental gene therapy. I see he's giving away coffee beans at his table and the label catches my eye. And the name of the coffee is defund the CBC. That's one of their roasts.

So this is their light roast. Liberal Tears is their medium roast. Empty Promises is their decaf. It's very good for decaf. Very, very good for decaf. It's very good for decaf. Very, very good for decaf. At another booth nearby, a young man in a suit is sitting behind a table.

The stall belongs to Liberty Coalition Canada, the Christian advocacy group I mentioned earlier. I notice on the title page of their booklet is written, Please Keep Classified, all in caps, highlighted in red. So I asked the guy behind the table. What are these? He points to a man standing nearby.

Maybe you didn't catch that. My recorder was in my pocket. But if you listen carefully, you can hear him say, It's a plan to help Christians infiltrate the political system. Back at my hotel, I flipped through the 40-page plan. The document claims Liberty Coalition Canada helped over 100 candidates to run in municipal and school board elections across Canada last year,

including dozens in Ontario. The language is folksy. There is talk of good guys and bad guys. It uses clip art of cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny and Eeyore to make its point. But the document is also quite extreme. At one point it reads, the perverts are organizing politically and they are getting the evil laws they want. It reveals the group's bigger ambitions, trying to raise 1.3 million dollars to recruit and train

hundreds of Christian politicians at all levels of government. The document says the ultimate goal is, quote, the most powerful political disruption in Canadian history. This appears to be a secret plan to turn Canada into something like on the left. The day after the conference, I drive from Windsor to the outskirts of Waterloo. I want to see what a regular Sunday service is like at one of the churches in this fundamentalist Christian movement. It's 11.30am, and I'm at Trinity Bible Chapel. The parking lot is filled with minivans and pickup trucks,

many of them sporting the Canadian flag. In the lobby, about 100 people are shaking hands, hugging each other, children running around before Sunday school. Trinity Bible is one of the churches that signed the Niagara Declaration, that petition for more church autonomy from the state. And it was here, just a few weeks earlier, that a group of Christians from across Canada gathered for the Church at War conference,

a celebration of pastors who defied public health measures in the pandemic. The service begins with baptisms. From my seat at the back, I watch as a shaggy-haired young man steps gingerly into a small pool of water. He tells the church he used to drink a lot, smoke weed, and watch porn. Then he got into some trouble with the law, developed serious health problems, and two of the people closest to him died. He says that's when he decided to repent and trust Jesus Christ. A pastor helps the young man

lean back into the water, and when he emerges, the church falls silent again as the lead pastor Jacob Riom approaches the pulpit. His sermons are posted every week on the church's website. If you're here today and you're in despair and you're walking through the valley of darkness, I want you to know that there's hope for you in Jesus Christ and feast on him for the good of your souls. There's no other real hope. It's just platitudes, superficiality, and cycle babble that the world is offering to you. Then, he starts talking about Beckett Noble. Beckett was a student at a nearby Christian university, and they were trans. Beckett Noble was, as they call, a member of the LGBTQ plus students at the university.

Why a Christian university would have a group for LGBTQ plus students is beyond me, but they do. Beckett died recently by suicide. The story was in the local paper. If you're going to live a lie to the point where you're willing to mutilate your own body, it's going to send you into dark despair. He uses a slur to refer to trans people and makes other insulting comments about the LGBTQ community. The more de-Christianized we are as a society, the more people plunge themselves into this miserable death. After the service ends, I wait in the parking lot,

hoping to ask people if they feel the same way their pastor does. I guess a little thank you for how you enjoyed the service today. I don't know. I'm not really... I don't know. I want to do that. I don't know. It was good hearing the Bible preached and seeing the truth of God. Sorry, I don't have much time to talk. Excuse me, sir. Yeah, hi. This is private property. I'm going to have to ask you to leave.

Okay, sorry. We just don't want our congregants to be... Yeah, I didn't want to... Yeah. With no one in the movement willing to speak with me, I was having a hard time answering some basic questions. Like, what to even call it. So I show a couple of religious scholars the Niagara Declaration.

They point out all this talk about sovereignty of the church and family seems to be inspired by a type of Christianity I had never heard of before. Christian Reconstructionism. That's John Stackhouse. He's a professor of religious studies at Crandall University in New Brunswick. This is a movement that arose in the United States about a generation and a half ago, and it's on the fairly strong right wing of Calvinism or Reformed Christianity.

Reformed Christianity is known for trying to stick as closely to the Bible as possible. Many Reconstructionists want to take this even further. They believe all aspects of society should be governed by the Ten Commandments. In the U.S., the early figures in the Reconstruction movement were a major influence on the Christian right. In the 1970s, for example, it was Reconstructionists who helped convince other evangelicals to make abortion access their main political issue.

And Reconstructionism has had a resurgence lately. It's known for being both ultra-libertarian and extremely socially conservative. A leading figure in the American Reconstructionist movement, Douglas Wilson, came to Canada in 2019 to speak with a conservative Christian think tank. came to Canada in 2019 to speak with a conservative Christian think tank. Jesus Christ commanded Christians in Canada to have as the direct object of all their missionary endeavor the evangelization and conversion of Canada. That's from a YouTube video of the talk he gave. So the goal is for Canada to become Christian.

And if you know your history, for Canada to become Christian. And if you know your history, for Canada to become Christian again, right? For Canada to repent of the way it's gone and return to Christ. But Reconstructionist ideas haven't won over as many evangelicals in Canada as they have in the U.S. So that the people who actually are observant, Protestants, I call those evangelicals, maybe 10% of the population.

The group that you're talking about is quite a small minority of that small minority. They make a lot of noise and their message is quite sharply focused so that they can be easily listened to and noticed. Stackhouse says many evangelicals, including himself, feel Canada became a secular society quite rapidly. Consider that abortion was only fully legalized in 1988. Same-sex marriage was legalized in 2005. Trans rights were given added protection in 2017. And a ban on conversion therapy went into effect last year. I'm literally old enough to remember the Bible being read at the beginning of my school day in high school in Ontario. So there's been a kind of whiplash for a lot of Christians, both Catholic and Protestant in Canada, and we've had to rapidly get used to the

fact that the culture doesn't back us up. You know, it doesn't basically endorse us. Most evangelicals have made their peace with these changes. They might object to them, wish things were otherwise, but they know there is no turning back from secularism. But some Canadian evangelicals, like those inspired by Reconstructionism, aren't willing to give up on their dream of a society run according to biblical laws. They feel more and more the governments don't represent their interests. In fact, the governments, the courts, professional colleges of medicine and pharmacy and law are one after another deciding to repress what they see to be their Christian heritage and

their Christian liberties. And with the coming of COVID-19 and the extension of the state into all of our lives much, much more, this has been a kind of breaking point for people that were already unhappy about the modern state being more and more controlling and less and less compatible and consonant with their beliefs. During the pandemic, these fundamentalist Christians found common cause with other groups who felt they too had reached a breaking point with government oversight. Several pastors, for instance, joined the Freedom Convoy protests last year. They've also been building closer ties to the Reconstruction Movement in the U.S.

And Jacob is also one of the pastors in Canada who's been standing up to all the communist tyranny that's been going on. And his church has about $50 million in fines assessed on their church right now. That's from CrossPolitik, a Christian podcast recorded in Moscow, Idaho. The host is introducing their in-studio guest, the Waterloo pastor you heard earlier, Jacob Riom. The church is going well, though. It's unbelievable. I've never experienced anything like it. In a short time, this network of fundamentalist Christian churches

has organized itself to the point that it's now playing a role in Canada's populist right-wing movement. And we know, from the document I picked up in Windsor, that it dreams of playing an even bigger role in the future. So I keep trying to find someone willing to talk to me, but I keep getting turned down. I even call the guy who wrote the Liberty Coalition's secret plan to infiltrate Canadian politics. I want to ask him about some of his ideas, like creating a Christian political training school and a rapid response unit to fight the culture wars.

Yeah. Hi, my name is Jonathan Mopetzi. I was hoping to ask you a few questions about your work for Liberty Coalition Canada. But he also doesn't want to talk and quickly hangs up. I'm worried I won't be able to speak with anyone from this movement. But then... My name is Aaron Rock and I've had the privilege of serving for 22 years as the lead pastor of Harvest Bible Church, the church in Windsor that hosted the conference I went to. He was one of the first pastors in Ontario to be charged with breaking public health orders. He was one of the first pastors in Ontario to be charged with breaking public health orders. He also helped write the Niagara Declaration.

At first, Pastor Rock is reluctant to agree to an interview. It appears you have ideological leanings at variance with my own, he tells me in an email. So I propose something different. What if we exchange voice memos instead? And that's what we do over the span of several weeks. Hi, Dr. Rock. I hope you had a nice weekend. I wanted to say I hope you have a Merry Christmas. Hey, Pastor Rock. Greetings from a very snowy Montreal. This daughter, who's our second born, gave birth to a 10-pound, 11-ounce baby boy. From the start, Pastor Rock is pretty open about how he sees the world.

There's this line in the book of Judges that says, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes. And the nation just spiraled downward as everyone did what was right in his own eyes under this supposed virtue of pluralism or secularism. And it became chaotic. And I see that in our country, where literally the word family means nothing anymore.

Human sexuality, we can express ourselves in almost any way we want, and we're not even allowed to say, actually, that's not the way we were designed. That's destructive. It's like taboo to even say that. In December of 2020, while hospitals in Windsor were struggling to cope with a surge of COVID-19 patients, Pastor Rock held a large gathering at his church. I asked him why he didn't follow the lockdown rules. I was increasingly convinced that it was a massively exaggerated response and that there was a focus solely on biotic health and virtually no consideration for the economic or spiritual or social, emotional, mental impacts that lockdowns were having on people. At one point, Pastor Rock was facing several thousand dollars in fines, though most of those charges were eventually dropped.

He went on to help organize other religious leaders who were also opposed to the health measures. We ultimately secured the signatures of about 445 churches and synagogues that at the time were concerned about ongoing lockdowns. And what that successful initiative led to is kind of drawing out of the woodwork various allies, politicians, church leaders, institutional leaders that were on board. He says it felt like a new Christian political movement was being consolidated. I would describe the movement as a movement of people that have observed that the historical values that undergirded much of Western civilization are under attack and are in fact being replaced by various destructive ideologies and therefore we want

to bring about reformation. And Pastor Rock is not shy about what its goals are. and their roles, who aren't ashamed or afraid to consult God's eternal laws when it comes to the decisions that they make. Pastor Rock seems to find it offensive that a society would legislate rights for sexual and gender minorities. We don't really live in a culture where there's an opportunity for proponents of biblical sexual ethics to have a meaningful dialogue with others. Instead, we find ourselves in a place where the dominant narrative, this radical, sexual, hedonistic, all holds are off, you can do whatever you want, love is love kind of culture within which we live in, is constantly being forced upon us. You can't go through very many Canadian cities without seeing the flags on the city flagpoles during Pride Summer. They're on our school flagpoles this ideology has crept into our sexual education curriculum

it's commonplace for people to be forced to take courses in their workplaces and it and it's a one way conversation it's like this is what you have to believe in In our last exchange, I asked him about the biblical teaching to love thy neighbor as thyself. I cannot truly love you unless I tell you the truth as I understand it. And for me to permit you to, let's say, live a lie or to believe something that isn't true because I don't want to ruffle your feathers, is the antithesis of love. That's actually an act of hatred. Passivity towards sin, the inability to call out sin, is an act of hatred. Earlier, I told you about a church service I went to in Waterloo,

where I heard the pastor speak about a trans student named Beckett Noble, who died by suicide. It was tough hearing the pastor deny Beckett's identity and then use their life story to argue against trans rights. So after that sermon, I make the one-hour drive to Hamilton, where the city's LGBTQ community was still mourning Beckett's death. Beckett had been studying at a Christian university called Redeemer when they died. Beckett was trying to make the school a safer space for queer students, part of a broader effort in

the Hamilton area to counter the influence of conservative Christian groups. Beckett's death was a blow to activists and allies. Hello. Hi, you must be Jess. Yeah, I am. John, you must be Jess. I am. John, so nice to meet you. You almost feel like I could have done something. Why did I not do more?

That's Jess Russell. She co-founded Spectrum Hamilton back in 2017. And even today, it's one of the few LGBTQ advocacy groups in the city. She says her life has changed as religious groups have become more vocal in their opposition to LGBTQ rights. Jess grew up in an evangelical household and went to evangelical schools. We were all wearing uniforms, very gendered. And for me, people definitely caught on way before I did

that I was part of the queer community. 14 years ago, when Jess was 18, she moved to Hamilton and found a city where she could be herself. When I came here, I thought I was just a straight kid, going to do some science at McMaster. And then, yeah, I really turned into the adult I am now. I met my partner, and we've been together for, yeah, 10 years now. Really made a home in Hamilton, made a community in Hamilton, And this is where I am and this is where I'm staying. At first, the idea behind Spectrum was just to host social events like picnics and barbecues. There were some people showing disdain for her community, but it felt like they were a fringe minority.

Hamilton Pride, there used to be one person and they'd come with a little like tenfold like thing. They'd walk around and it was like wonderfully pathetic. You know, it made us feel like, okay, we are still fighting against something. But Jess soon started seeing a rise in hostility against the queer community. But then it grew and it grew to organizing and it grew to people being trained,

like bringing in people from the States to train people on how to protest against prides. In 2018, several pride events in the area were disrupted by small groups of so-called street evangelists. Things got worse in 2019 when a larger group of religious activists showed up at Hamilton Pride. We're here! We're queer! We're fabulous! Don't mess with us! We're here! We're queer! We're fabulous! Don't mess with us! Several people were arrested and several others injured when the religious activists and the counter-protesters confronted each other. To Jess, it seemed like homophobic and transphobic attitudes were suddenly finding more support.

In recent months, anti-trans activism has only grown more visible. Libraries are now routinely targeted by protests for holding events where drag performers read books to children. We don't know how many of these anti-trans protesters subscribe to what religious scholars call Christian Reconstructionism, but we do know the current wave of protests against drag shows and trans rights in general is supported by the network of churches in Ontario that I've been investigating.

A few of these pastors are even organizing anti-drag protests themselves. We wanted to be there as a principled kind of objection to the normalization of destructive sexuality to children. That's one of the pastors who helped organize a protest in Peterborough last fall. He's talking about it with the other organizers on a show called The Dominion Podcast. So when I was there and following this, I thought that the drag story hour is really a synthesis of a unbelieving progressive worldview.

It is a coming together of, you know, in a sense, all of their beliefs. It is their sacrament, their religious ritual. For people in the LGBTQ community, the purpose of these anti-drag protests is pretty clear. People are trying to force us to go underground, just like we were underground before. It's like we're, you know, groundhogs, that we're finally, February comes up, we were able to pop our heads up a little bit, and now they're trying to play whack-a-mole

when we do pop up and try to claim who we are. The secret plan to infiltrate Canadian politics that I found at the conference in Windsor, well, it doesn't look like it's about to become a reality anytime soon. If last year's election results are any indication, this conservative religious movement is too small and its views too radical to have much chance of large-scale success. But that's not the only way to gauge the impact this movement is having. It has already helped organize dozens of fundamentalist churches around a common set of goals. It also has wealthy backers and a network of media outlets which, while small,

freely broadcast vicious messages about the LGBTQ community. And at a moment when anti-trans sentiment is rising, freely broadcast vicious messages about the LGBTQ community. And at a moment when anti-trans sentiment is rising, these fundamentalist Christians are stoking this hostility in the name of religious belief. Jess says that makes them difficult to ignore. With so many other things happening in our world and the news being so depressing, I understand why people tune out. I understand. But at the same time, there are many of us who cannot tune out because we need to be aware. Just today,

you know, as you came by, literally up the street from me is a protest against a drag show. And I need to be aware of that because that was where I was going to go get my groceries today. We are sitting on the couch in Jess's living room. We've been talking for nearly two hours and it's getting dark outside. She looks tired when she speaks about the impact of Beckett Noble's death. But like a lot of these things right it turns from you know being devastated and sadness to rage um and to anger and to what can i do about it it really reminded me of the reasons why i started doing this it really reminded me of how far we need to go. Thank you. In the web story, you can read about the ties some Canadian Christians have with a controversial church in the U.S. You can also read about the think tank that's at the heart of the fundamentalist movement in Canada,

and the Ontario millionaire who's one of its biggest supporters. In this episode, you heard extracts from Terri Reckar on the Exit 425 podcast. You know, transgender stuff and that sort of thing. Paula D'Ameto Giovannosi on the Liberty Dispatch. I literally felt a calling from God. I felt that he said, OK, Paula, you know. Andrew DiBartolo on the Liberty Dispatch. Tearing down the Gnostic, pagan, satanic system that is the two LGBTI. Joseph Boot on Relatable with Ali Beth Stuckey. This is a religious assault. It's an ideological

assault on the family. And Alex Kloisterman on the Dominion podcast. It's a threat to the truth. It's a threat to children. It's a threat to anything good. This episode was produced by me and Julia Poggle at CBC's audio doc unit, with special thanks to Imogen Burchard at FrontBurner. I'm Jonathan Mopci. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.