Three Years of Church Burnings
For more than two and a half years, since June 2021, a particular group of Canada has been targeted with a series of terrorist hate crimes: non-white churchgoing Christians. Beginning with the churches of indigenous people, starting in 2021 but soon branching out to include Filipinos, Copts and other racial groups, this group of Canadians has seen ninety-seven of its churches targeted by arsonists.
And yet only one has been brought to justice. Recently, another was captured on video, a young white man in a white hood who attacked a Catholic church in Regina, whose entire public-facing board of directors are non-white community leaders.
When the church-burnings began, supposedly staged as revenge for mass graves allegedly detected by ground-penetrating radar near former residential schools, indigenous leaders formed a united front in condemning the burnings. From the most woke-sympathetic neo-traditionalist conservationists to the most pro-development Christians, the leadership of indigenous Canada spoke with a single voice and called for an end to the targeted arsons of on-reserve churches.
They pointed out that indigenous people are one of the most Christian groups in Canada and that their churches are often the oldest and most sacred buildings in rural First Nations communities. Buildings that have served as every kind of community space, for political meetings, education, major gatherings and, of course, generations of weddings and funerals.
But Woke Canadians, especially white Wokes, continued to applaud the burnings until there was such palpable disgust among mainstream Canadians that a few of the most enthusiastic pro-arson civil society leaders, like Harsha Walia, were sacked. Funny how, when push came to shove, the sacrificial victim selected by progressive Canadian civil society leaders was one of the few non-whites publicly endorsing the burnings.
Although the full-throated enthusiasm for this targeted campaign of terror in the progressiverse has died down, it has not been replaced by any actual opposition to the burnings. As in 1960s Alabama and Mississippi, the respectable civil society leadership of the establishment may have stopped publicly cheering for their burnings but they are not saying a bad word about the continued campaign of arson by their irregular militia and instead work to suppress mainstream media coverage of ongoing efforts to keep non-white people of faith terrorized and intimidated.
And how have Canada’s so-called Anti-Hate groups responded to the targeting of a particular religious subset of racial minority groups in nearly one hundred separate acts of domestic terror? They refuse to talk about it and change subject if pushed. Like the rest of the progressive establishment, they work to ensure that while racialized people of faith know about this campaign, the volume is turned down in the public square and instead whitter-on about how it is people of faith who are violent hate-mongers planning to visit a reign of violence on trans-identified youth, funded by the Trump movement and leavened by ‘Russian disinformation’ any day now.
Why is this?
I want to make clear that I am not making the case that there is any kind of conspiracy directing these events, no grand puppet-master or thought-out plan. I am not even suggesting that there is any real coordination. (Although I cannot imagine that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network facilitating the networking of chapters of Antifa, the violent street militia, and maintaining lists of targets that they will not let the media see, is helping matters.) Nor am I suggesting that police and prosecutorial inattention is part of any sort of policy, just the natural outcome of Woke culture capturing police forces.
Instead I want to suggest that there is a set of incentives, a logic that encourages the present state of affairs. Today, when you look at those mobilizing against the sexualisation of children, the destruction of women’s spaces, the rights of parents, etc. You see Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus strongly represented, punching above their demographic weight. And you see white working class anti-authoritarian activists also throwing in strongly.
There is constituency who tell each other, their faith leaders and pollsters that they share the concerns of those mobilizing but you are largely demobilized in this fight: non-white Christians.
Because in the 2020s, everything is about everything else, and people are amazed that someone like me can see the Greenhouse Effect as an existential threat and yet not believe women have penises, this happy coincidence serves the Canadian establishment. The large-scale mobilization of non-white Christians in Canada’s culture wars would radically tip the balance. But this group receives messages every month that it is already outside the protection of the law and, if it looks uppity, the campaign extralegal violence is likely to intensify.
The New Democratic Response
It is in this context that we need to examine two extraordinary events that took place last week following the church-burning. The first took place in parliament when a Conservative MP rose and sought the leave of the house to make a unanimous motion condemning the ongoing burnings. No division was required because he was immediately shouted-down with “nay” from Liberal and NDP MPs.
My former party, the NDP, originally founded and led by churchmen, Tommy Douglas and J S Woodsworth, who believed that their policies were the expression of what was then called “the Social Gospel,” refused to condemn the burning of the churches. The party whose representatives once included civil rights activists from the Mississippi, like Sadie Kuehn, who hosted the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, now deems it wrong to condemn arson targeted at racialized people. The only party whose MPs spoke against Japanese internment in the 1940s wants non-white Christians to know they do not enjoy the equal protection of the law.
In the days that followed, many people of faith in British Columbia reached out formally and informally to the David Eby government asking the BC NDP to do better, given how disproportionately many arsons have taken place in BC. What followed was a slap in the face. Eby’s attorney-general, Niki Sharma, announced a new set of instructions to crown prosecution services to more aggressively target, not arsonists, not those bigoted against religious people but against people opposing the government’s doctrines on gender and child safeguarding.
People like Eby and Jagmeet Singh understand perfectly well the—for them—serendipitous effect of these burnings in suppressing the growing wave of opposition to their key social policies and will use them even if that use is absolute affront to everything generations of New Democrats have believed.
