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Some of my best friends are evangelicals My mother's friends have been calling her all a-tizzy about the havoc Stockwell Day is bound to create in our civil society. Needless to say, things have got a lot more, well ... bohemian ... around the house since my father's death. In fact, the old goat is probably still twirling around on a cloud so happy he would be about this turn of events. Nor do I discount his ability to influence from beyond the grave. Last month, I found myself, almost in a trance, buying a Jeep. When a friend commented it looked like a military staff vehicle, I realized, to my horror, that I had bought it in his regimental colours. Plus, switching from the Globe to the Post was one of his last wishes, and lo and behold here I am, so I would have to say he is one Dead White Male still getting his way. But nearly everyone else in my life, dead or alive, is in a state of mild hysteria. I am resigned to the fact that on Saturday morning, the man I love will launch into a caffeinated rant about evangelical Christians and how they are going to ruin everything and take away his freedoms. On just what these restrictions might be, he is vague, but passionate enough for me to sink further into my chair and wish that the travel section was big enough to crawl under. You see I like evangelical Christians. I even have preferences, for instance I favour Charismatics, but I adore blood-of-the-lamb Baptists too and confess to being fascinated by Mormons. Stockwell and his crew don't scare me, in fact I think they are probably quite a lot of fun. I spent two months living with assorted emotional Christians a year or so ago, and they were the nicest bunch of people I'd ever met: kind, funny, smart, prosperous, devout, passionate and joyful. Most attractive of all, they lived bang up against the mythic, they could reach their hand through the veil and grab a miracle, which made them extremely humble. They were not racist, they were not sexist, they had the most effective (and massive) charitable operations I'd ever come across, and they had some good, if not excellent ideas about how to hold marriages and families together. It had been a very long time since I had met people who used all their energy trying to be good and who managed to succeed, at least some of the time. Believe me, it was refreshing. But all this information, this wisdom, is shut out of the mainstream by shrill (and extremely boring) accusations about pro- life and anti-gay bigotry, two discussions that send me into a coma of tedium. This mostly because the conversation is framed for us by crack-pot murderers and gay-bashers who, to a man, ought to be in jail, like forever, and screeching idiots on the left who tar all Christians with the same brush. Even the relatively sane among us have come to think that born-again Christians are demented provincials, missing a great whack of IQ points, about to drag us back into the Dark Ages. This short-sightedness ignores our cultural history and the debt we owe to people just like Stockwell Day. Let's, for a moment, take my great-great-great-great grandfather, Oliver Phelps. One morning in 1826, overlooking his canal works at Lockport on the Erie Canal, he was the reluctant recipient of a lightning-bolt revelation from God. Within months, he had packed up his 17 children and a thousand canal workers and moved to St. Catharines where he dug the first deep cut on the Welland Canal. In short order, he became an officer on the Underground Railway. Underneath his house he dug a series of tunnels where he and his family hid runaway slaves, he donated the land for the "coloured" village, funded Poor Relief, built the first American Presbyterian Church, co-founded Grantham Academy and started the first girls' school, travelling around the countryside each morning in his buckboard, wrenching little girls out of the fields and whisking them off to school. These are not the actions of a backwards-leaning bigot, nor was Oliver considered all that unusual for his time, though the criticism he received was virulent. In fact, evangelical Protestantism is one of the foundation blocks of North American culture. The emotional end of it, that is to say churches unaffiliated to any hierarchy, has fuelled just about every movement for radical social change and popular democracy in the last 400 years, including abolition and women's rights. The Social Gospel of the late 19th century instituted most of the reforms that created modern society. However, despite the many successes of that movement, the Social Gospelers' effort to reform human nature, crush evil and create God's kingdom on Earth, using income redistribution, has failed. While the poor in our world are materially rich by the standards prevailing a century ago, drug addiction, alcoholism, births to unmarried teenage girls, rape, battery, broken families, violent teenage death and crime are much more severe. Nobel Economist Robert William Fogel in his recent The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, suggests that we are in the midst of a fourth spiritual awakening, wherein religious conservatives of every stripe are insisting that we return to spiritual values, which include first and foremost, personal responsibility. They believe that the assignment of blame for everything on "society," and the belief that government can cure all our ills, has led to the glorification of hedonistic impulses and the endless accumulation of consumer goods. They want us to reorder our priorities from instant gratification to a sense of purpose and community, a strong work ethic, a strong family ethic and high (earned) self-esteem. I suspect that were the discussion about these values, rather than about the fantasy diminution of rights that so upsets my friends and relations, we could all pretty much agree. And my Dad would be way happy.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.