From the perspective and through the lens of my family and career stories, your insightful article has resonated with me. I was raised within that conservative white evangelical tribe by two loving English immigrant parents who as teenagers and young adults fell-under-the-spell of that North American ‘militant fundamentalist’ preacher of the first half of the 20th century, T.T. Shields (1873-1955), pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto, ON, from 1910 until his death in 1955. Fortunately for my parents – and later me and my siblings! – they escaped from under that ‘demonic spell’ when they transitioned out of ‘Toronto the Good’ at the end of the Second World War in 1945.
Living north of the 49th parallel and as a Canadian history/civics teacher/educator since 1968 – the year of ‘Trudeaumania’ in Canadian political history, which became ‘Trudeauphobia’ by 1972! – I have been fascinated and have struggled with that toxic legacy ever since.
Agreeing with you that ‘the history of evangelical Christianity’s complicity with abusive power [has] led to hideous cultural sins,’ three recent books have been significant for my understanding of the present and ongoing crisis you describe:
• Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020),
• Allan Bartley, The Ku Klux Klan in Canada: A Century of Promoting Racism and Hate in the Peaceable Kingdom (2020),
• John Bowen, The Unfolding Gospel: How the Good News Makes Sense of Discipleship, Church, Mission, and Everything Else (2021), for which you wrote the Foreword!
From the perspective and through the lens of my family and career stories, your insightful article has resonated with me. I was raised within that conservative white evangelical tribe by two loving English immigrant parents who as teenagers and young adults fell-under-the-spell of that North American ‘militant fundamentalist’ preacher of the first half of the 20th century, T.T. Shields (1873-1955), pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto, ON, from 1910 until his death in 1955. Fortunately for my parents – and later me and my siblings! – they escaped from under that ‘demonic spell’ when they transitioned out of ‘Toronto the Good’ at the end of the Second World War in 1945.
Living north of the 49th parallel and as a Canadian history/civics teacher/educator since 1968 – the year of ‘Trudeaumania’ in Canadian political history, which became ‘Trudeauphobia’ by 1972! – I have been fascinated and have struggled with that toxic legacy ever since.
Agreeing with you that ‘the history of evangelical Christianity’s complicity with abusive power [has] led to hideous cultural sins,’ three recent books have been significant for my understanding of the present and ongoing crisis you describe:
• Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020),
• Allan Bartley, The Ku Klux Klan in Canada: A Century of Promoting Racism and Hate in the Peaceable Kingdom (2020),
• John Bowen, The Unfolding Gospel: How the Good News Makes Sense of Discipleship, Church, Mission, and Everything Else (2021), for which you wrote the Foreword!
Stay strong, keep up the ‘good works’!
I think, from years of personal experience, that Donald Dayton is smiling down on your use of his work.