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The pope, the pandemic, the premier and the Christian left
60 Plays4 years ago
We speak with Dean Dettloff about his recent piece on how Jason Kenney is at odds with the Pope on carbon pricing, austerity and how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. We also touch on the history and the reality of the Christian left in a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Progress Report
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to The Progress Report on the Harbinger Media Network. We're one of just many excellent left-wing podcasts on Harbinger, and a new episode on the network that I want to recommend is one of my faves and a regular listen for me, Kino Lefter. It's a socialist film podcast hosted by Evan McDonald, and the latest pod is on a Michael Bay-produced COVID movie. And spoiler alert, Evan did not enjoy watching it.
00:00:23
Speaker
But it's always worth listening, I really do recommend it. And that's just one of the many shows you can get at Harbinger where we are building something that challenges right-wing corporate media dominance from coast to coast. Get access to exclusive shows and other supporter-only content at harbingermediatnetwork.com. Now, on to the show.
Meet the Hosts and Guest
00:00:55
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiskwitchi, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory. And today, we're very pleased to have Dean Detloff on the pod. Dean recently wrote a piece for us on the Pope, the premier in the pandemic with the headline, bizarre as it is to say, we could use a zealous Catholic Kenny.
00:01:17
Speaker
And Dean is a Catholic lecturer at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. And there he's a researcher on Christianity and the Left. He's also an editor at G's magazine and the Canadian correspondent for the Jesuit publication, America Magazine.
Examining Catholicism in Politics
00:01:34
Speaker
Dean, welcome to the pod. Thanks. Thanks for having Jan. Glad to be here. And thanks for the opportunity to write the article. I'm really happy with how it turned out.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's a fantastic article and it'll obviously be in the show notes. It's not a prerequisite for you to have read the article to get a lot out of this conversation. We don't want to just focus on the Pope and the Premier. We do want to talk about some broader issues as well. But the reason why I oohed at Canadian correspondent is just that just sounds so fancy. You're like, you get to cover the whole country.
00:02:01
Speaker
It feels fancy. It's a great gig actually because I do get to basically cover whatever I want within a certain reason. So lots of excuses to look around Canada and see what's going on. So I suppose, you know, one way to start off is like, you know, what's the thesis statement of your piece? What are you trying to say? You know, the headline is
00:02:21
Speaker
The headline is, let me find it here, bizarre it is to say we could use a zealous Catholic Kenny and that's a direct quote from your piece. So make the case, why could we use a more zealous Catholic Kenny?
00:02:33
Speaker
Yeah, you know, the title is kind of playful, right? Kenny made a career on projecting an image of being a zealous Catholic. That's kind of his origins. He has a storied career as a young, zealous Catholic convert and conservative. So zealous, in fact, that he's clashing with his own educators back at the University of San Francisco, which is a Jesuit school. So, you know, a textbook case of somebody who's trying to be more Catholic than the priests around. So the play in the title is to say, well,
00:03:03
Speaker
If Kenny was really a zealous Catholic, then what would that actually mean for something like governing through the pandemic? And as you mentioned, the Pope has been pretty vocal about his thoughts on how people should respond to the pandemic.
00:03:18
Speaker
And the weird thing about Kenny is basically every single thing that he is doing is the opposite of what Francis suggests. Not only letting people in his government travel and all that kind of thing without much consequence at first, but also privileging the economy over people's health, privileging extractive industries, all these kinds of things. Pope Francis has really made it a point to rail against that stuff before the pandemic and then especially now.
00:03:46
Speaker
The idea is it might seem strange to say that we want a zealous Catholic, Kenny, given his history as a zealous Catholic, but the point is to suggest, well, the Catholic Church is trying to do something different right now, actually, and this is the time when Kenny has decided, actually, he doesn't really want to listen to the Pope when it comes to governance.
00:04:07
Speaker
Yeah, like being a zealous Catholic for Pope Francis is cool because Pope Francis is the cool Pope, right? I mean, right. I am not a Catholic and I'm pretty alienated from, you know, my own Christian tradition, which I grew up in, which is like a very patriarchal, reactionary, evangelical tradition. But but, you know, whenever the Pope pops up in the headlines, I mean, it's always it's either for like he said something cool and good, you know, like the rich are bad, help the poor.
00:04:35
Speaker
you know, the environment, you know, you should think about it and not just throw it away for the economy. I think he even said something like abortion is like we probably shouldn't be focusing so much on abortion, which seemed like a pretty reasonable take. And or if he's appearing in the news, the other time I might see him in the news is when he's apologizing for some, you know, Catholic atrocity or crime that they committed in the past. But I mean, you know, it's the Catholic Church. But yeah, like the whole
00:05:03
Speaker
Pope Francis is actually, like the Catholic Church comes from a time from like before capitalism, right? And there is a whole plethora of teachings and thought about, you know, that just doesn't line up with, you know, 21st century, you know, neoliberalism that we find ourselves in today. And it seems that that's kind of what he's drawing on.
00:05:29
Speaker
Uh, in regards to like, you know, his current pronouncements, the things you talk about in the article,
Catholic Teachings vs. Neoliberalism
00:05:34
Speaker
right? Like the, the encyclical Laudato Si and the other one, uh, the one I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of the. Angelus what now, what was it? His latest one is a Fratelli Tutti, the Angeles blessing is where he was, uh, yeah, chastising people for traveling. That's the one.
00:05:51
Speaker
And is that fair to say that he is drawing on this, not anti-capitalist, but almost pre-capitalist tradition that is just a different formation of thought and approach to the world than what Kenny is dogmatically governing our province with?
00:06:09
Speaker
Yeah, you know, one wild thing about the Catholic Church, as you know, is it is still a medieval institution. We still have Roman laws on the books that govern how the church works. All that stuff is true. Bishops, some of their titles are the princes of the church. You know, it's all very bizarre. There's lots of pageantry involved. But the point is the church is kind of uncomfortably situated in all capitalist economies.
00:06:32
Speaker
over the years, especially since the 1800s, it's been trying kind of unsuccessfully to figure out what to do with capitalism. Sometimes it's more accommodationist than sometimes less. And as a result, the Catholic tradition, even in the papal teachings in the last century or so, are kind of all over the place. But one consistent thread is that the church clearly doesn't like the capacity for abuse within capitalism, and that's a sort of through line.
00:07:01
Speaker
And by the time you get to Pope Francis, you know, this is a guy who is formed by experiences in Latin America. Very complicated story of his life. They're not all good for sure. But as Pope, he's obviously imbibed a lot of liberation theology and
00:07:16
Speaker
sort of more progressive and radical understandings of how capitalism underdeveloped on purpose peripheral places. So he really sees himself as a pope formed on the underside of capitalism. And so he's punching up the radical parts of the Catholic tradition. And you're right. I mean, Kenny, you know, I think that the idea that the church is out of step with contemporary society is what appeals to conservatives like a young Kenny.
00:07:43
Speaker
you know trying to sort of play up the church's traditional morality or things like that is a an easy way for conservatives to make that case but of course they don't mind that or they don't seem to be bothered by the fact that the church also doesn't like contemporary capitalist economics or all the people that basically fund all that traditional morality activism so at the end of the day i do think there's a real confrontation between
00:08:09
Speaker
what Kenny thinks it means to be a Catholic in the world and what the Pope is actually trying to say, trying to teach as the authority of our church. And this is the heart of the conflict between like what the ostensible, you know,
00:08:24
Speaker
leader of Jason Kenny's church, the Pope, and what he is saying, what he is teaching, what he is trying to transmit to his followers, and what Jason Kenny is actually doing in practice as a political leader, and essentially as the fucking emperor of Alberta in his current stature, in his current status. And this is the conflict at the heart of this piece, right? The Pope says one thing, Jason Kenny does another, and Jason Kenny doesn't seem too troubled by it, right?
00:08:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. I point in the piece to a press conference that Kenny had in 2019, soon after being elected, I think it was, where Pope Francis had recently said that he supports carbon pricing or carbon taxing. And a journalist asked Kenny, what do you think about that since he's the leader of your religion? And a pretty reasonable question to ask someone like Jason Kenny. And his reply was, well, the pope doesn't have a vote in Alberta.
00:09:24
Speaker
Which, of course, is true. You know, if you ask me, I don't really want the pope to be determining what all states do either. But it's it's ironic, like I said, that when it comes to things like pro-life politics or marriage or whatever it is, Jason Kenney will happily and has happily appealed to the authority of the pope to chastise even the bishops in Canada who are already quite
00:09:46
Speaker
conservative themselves for the most part. But when it comes to issues of the economy or how to sort of think through what it means to govern in a way that's consistent with how Catholicism wants to see the world, privileging the poor, privileging the environment now with Francis, et cetera, those are things where Francis doesn't, or excuse me, Kenny doesn't seem to upset, right? The Pope doesn't have a vote in Alberta
00:10:10
Speaker
that matters when it comes to carbon taxing, but it doesn't matter when it comes to traditional understandings of marriage or something like that.
Jason Kenny's Catholic Influences
00:10:20
Speaker
It's very easy for him to kind of just dismiss it because he's in power now. But back early in his career, Kenny's Catholicism was front and center, right? Like the video I sent you, I mean, this was a video that made its rounds during the election here and it was mined for multiple stories, right? This is an address, like an hour long, more than an hour long address that Kenny gave.
00:10:41
Speaker
to, I believe, the Catholic Homeschooling Association back in, I don't know, the early 2000s, the late 90s. The date is not exactly clear. This is the famous one where he brags about keeping, or the activism he did in San Francisco, keeping loved ones from seeing each other who were dying of AIDS.
00:10:59
Speaker
That was the story that made the rounds quite famously. This is the video that I came from. In that same video, he talks about how he came to Catholicism, how Canada's bishops needed to get with the program and start excommunicating these politicians who aren't doing the things that they should be doing.
00:11:19
Speaker
And it is quite a radical and even like fundamentalist case that he is making in this address. And this is his early support. This is his genesis as a politician is like, these are the people who supported him, who donated to him, who held him up early on his career to get him to the point where he could become someone like the premier of Alberta.
00:11:44
Speaker
And so it is relevant to the conversation. You know, he doesn't like to talk about his Catholicism much these days. I think within the piece you mentioned that, right, that he, you know, he's got to govern for all Albertans. What was the, how did he frame it?
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah, well he, in the lead up to the election, like he said, this video is going around, but also I think people were rightly, you know, mining his past and being troubled by that. And so he was grilled on a number of occasions by journalists. And it was fascinating to kind of read through all of that as I was preparing the piece and see how he was trying to kind of sort that through and navigate it.
00:12:17
Speaker
you know, the way that he puts it is that he regrets what he had done as a young Catholic activist. And I think that's fair, you know, I hope he does, right? Like, maybe he doesn't, but hopefully he does, his conscience is pricked or something. And I want to give him that credit if that's the case. But like I said, the irony is, kudos for regretting, you know, doing the absolute like,
00:12:40
Speaker
advocating the most vile policies you could to marginalize, especially LGBT people in San Francisco, you should regret that for sure. But he nevertheless still often talks about being a practicing Catholic and a Catholic whose faith is important to him, etc. And I think, you know, again, it just kind of comes back to me where it's like, if you finally decide that your Catholicism doesn't make a difference,
00:13:06
Speaker
how awful it must be to decide that it's it's on all the issues that actually make people's lives better. That's where you don't want to be a Catholic. So if it helps you like ruin people's lives, then you should invoke your Catholic faith in the most zealous way possible, you know, even down to criticizing the bishops. But if it comes to saying, hey, we should build a different kind of world where people don't have to suffer all the time so that other people can get rich. Well, then your Catholicism becomes a sort of private affair and you govern for all Albertans, which is code for
00:13:36
Speaker
you know, rich Albertans in Kenny's case. Yeah, I mean, the conflict here between Catholicism and capitalism is at the heart of this, right? Like, Kenny is a, I don't know what you want to call him, he's like a baron, an archmaester. He is a very senior figure when it comes to defending the concept of capitalism. He wholeheartedly believes in it and he minds
00:13:59
Speaker
the kind of language of free markets, the language of neoliberalism to buttress the arguments that he makes and the decisions that he makes in regards to whatever, tearing up the carbon tax or the latest round of austerity that is hitting Alberta.
00:14:14
Speaker
And, and so, you know, it's, it's not, there's Catholicism is complicated, right? There's a lot of dialogue within the church about, you know, how to interpret the teachings, what, what should be the focus of the church, et cetera, et cetera. And, but it's like, how do you just ignore the Pope? You know what I mean? Isn't he supposed to like, isn't the structure of the church, isn't he supposed to be the most important person in regards to the kind of like steering the Catholic faith?
00:14:44
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I think I'm kind of of of two minds about that issue. The first thing I want to say is, so there's this obvious conflict with Pope Francis, and I think that's clear. Like you mentioned earlier, Francis is kind of a media darling. He shows up in headlines a lot. He's been really good for the church in terms of, you know, PR and all that kind of stuff. And I think rightly so.
00:15:06
Speaker
He's a good pope. I'm happy with him for the most part. Not perfect, but I'll take him. But it's not just Francis that Kenny disagrees with on this point either. Pope Benedict, who was quite a culture warrior and a Cold War warrior himself, he was also very critical of unchecked free market capitalism.
00:15:26
Speaker
He wrote really famously in a conservative journal called First Things that he thought democratic socialism is probably the closest thing to Catholic social teaching in a political sense. He was really critical of capitalism to the point of saying that we need a whole different world system of economics.
00:15:45
Speaker
Which, you know, people like Rush Limbaugh got really upset about that, saying Benedict is a Marxist, which is such a bizarre thing, if you know anything about Benedict. And the same goes for John Paul II, which would have been Kenny's kind of darling pope. John Paul II is a saint now in the church, which is really complicated, but was famously conservative on all kinds of points. I mean, he's really responsible for characters like Kenny kind of emerging in a lot of respects. But even with that said,
00:16:11
Speaker
John Paul II himself was critical of unchecked capitalism and unregulated capitalism and had lots to say about how it builds a kind of culture of death, as he put it. So in that sense, I think it's important to recognize that it's not even the case that the church has made this massive pivot and now Kenny is kind of out of step.
00:16:29
Speaker
It's like his particular brand of Catholic fundamentalism was always out of step with what the Vatican has said about capitalism. So that I think is an important thing to kind of keep in mind. The second thing that I'd add here is, you know,
00:16:44
Speaker
Yes, when the Pope says something, it's the duty of Catholics. We understand ourselves to, you know, take that into consideration and metabolize it and see how it fits with our own conscience. And that's kind of the key. Your conscience is meant to sort of allow you to navigate things that you might disagree with. You know, you're allowed to disagree with the Pope as a good Catholic, provided you kind of do your due diligence. And I think whatever, Kenny is free to disagree with Pope Francis too.
00:17:10
Speaker
But if his conscience is the reason for that disagreement and his conscience is telling him that actually when it comes to neoliberalism, Pope Francis is wrong. I mean, my feeling is that that's a pretty profoundly malformed conscientious judgment. Again, that's a conversation that we have in the
Liberation Theology and Its Challenges
00:17:28
Speaker
church all the time. So it's not like I'm a pope or authority either. But that's my sort of knee-jerk reaction as a sibling in the faith who might be in the same pew as Jason Kenney in a cathedral or something.
00:17:40
Speaker
And you brought up John Paul II, and he's an interesting figure, especially with regards to left-wing thought within Catholicism. And I'm by no means a scholar or an expert on this. I leave the exact points to you. But liberation theology is this idea that was quite popular, especially in South America, Latin America.
00:18:04
Speaker
And John Paul II was not necessarily a fan of that, and he decided to elevate kind of more reactionary, more conservative figures within the Catholic faith in his time in power. But liberation theology is always kind of bubbling in the background, especially in kind of poorer parts of the world and in the global South. Can you kind of explain what liberation theology is and its kind of relationship to kind of left wing Catholicism?
00:18:31
Speaker
Yeah, of course. Liberation theology, I think, is the reason I'm still Catholic, so I'm always happy to talk about it. In the Catholic Church, I should say there's lots of different kinds of liberation theology. For instance, there's black liberation theology that really flourished in the US and across Africa in the 60s with people like James Cone. There's lots of great feminist liberation theologians, so it's important to mention that.
00:18:55
Speaker
For me, in Latin America, the Catholic expression of liberation theology really starts in Peru with this guy named Gustavo Gutierrez, really amazing priest. And it explodes in the academy, at least, with lots and lots of people all over that continent. Brazil, Venezuela, many other countries, Nicaragua, famously, really thinking hard about not only what it means to be a politically engaged Christian, but what it means to
00:19:25
Speaker
think through other people who are not Christians analyzing systems of injustice. So liberation theology famously had a very productive dialogue with Marxism and with sort of world systems theory in sociology. So the big question for all these priests running around in Latin America and nuns and lay people too was
00:19:47
Speaker
You know, we're upset about the fact that there are so many poor people here, so many people that are getting abused every single day by these systems that are providing us no way out, no reason for hope. And how are you supposed to preach a gospel that says, you know, God proclaims good news to the poor in a society where the poor are getting anything but good news?
00:20:09
Speaker
So that led them to ask questions about why people are poor, which created all these really productive dialogues. That's the kind of academic side. On the other hand, I think it's always important to say liberation theology is primarily a movement. So all these theologians are reflecting back on things that are happening around them.
00:20:29
Speaker
For years before the 60s, there were lots of Christians building radical trade unions, peasant federations, literacy programs, all these kinds of things, and they really provoke, in a lot of respects, their religious leaders to take stock of that and eventually endorse it. So there's lots more to be said about it, but I think the biggest thing is it's this really incredible popular movement
00:20:52
Speaker
that kind of crashed like a huge wave all across Latin America and the Caribbean, especially in the 70s into the 80s. And as you say, John Paul II, that was one of the biggest flashpoints of his entire papacy was disciplining a lot of those folks.
00:21:08
Speaker
And correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of the liberation theologians or people who are adherents of liberation theology, they grew out of a reaction to a lot of repression, like anti-communist death squads in Nicaragua, or pick your South American country that had a US-backed coup or whatever. It is fundamentally a reaction to imperialism.
00:21:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think that's also important too because in large part, John Paul II, he was from Poland and he had a whole complicated relationship with communism as a result of that. And he kind of saw the specter of repressive communism as he saw it everywhere around the world. So when it came to a place like Latin America, in Brazil, just to take one famous example, which had a brutal military dictatorship,
00:22:02
Speaker
Brazil was not just, the government was not just repressing the Catholic Church. I mean, they were like murdering priests with the help and support of the US for sure. And in the midst of all that, the bishops of Brazil became slowly radicalized. I mean, even to the point of many bishops becoming Marxists to themselves. And in that time, one of the saddest things in the history of the 20th century Catholic Church is
00:22:31
Speaker
Pope John Paul II would constantly get in arguments with these bishops over whether or not they were getting a little too Marxist to which the bishops would always say, well, what do you expect us to do? The priests that we are in charge of are being imprisoned and murdered, and it's the Marxists that are actually trying to do something about this.
00:22:49
Speaker
So there's this really tragic kind of confrontation there. I will say John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger at the time who became Pope Benedict later, Ratzinger was sort of the police officer of theology in the Vatican. The two of them, they tried first to beat liberation theology in a lot of respects, silencing some pretty prominent theologians. But I think over time they realized they just couldn't.
00:23:15
Speaker
So they did end up kind of imbibing some of its teachings and filtering it in ways that definitely watered it down. But by the time you get to somebody like Francis now, I mean, he's inheriting that entire conversation and really rehabilitating a lot of liberation theology, too, and sort of confirming that all these people who suffered through those repressive regimes and responded the way that they did. Francis is saying, you know, we understand that struggle, even if maybe we didn't at the time.
00:23:44
Speaker
That brings us to today. What does left-wing Christianity look like in North America these days? Liberation theology is a movement that's quite popular in South and Central America. In my mind, there isn't a real solid conception of a Christian left. I know that's something that you think about a lot and that you've
00:24:07
Speaker
research and write about a lot. But in your mind, like, what is the state of the kind of Christian left at the moment, you know, in say, Canada and the United States?
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great question. I spend a lot of time kind of agonizing over how to answer it. Yeah, you know, in Latin America, it's really easy to find the Christian left, you throw a stone on the streets of Brazil, and you'll probably hit some priest at a union meeting or something, right?
The Christian Left's Decline
00:24:31
Speaker
It's kind of just in the air. Canada and the US are different for a variety of reasons. You know, they're largely Protestant countries barring Quebec, which has its own history of the Christian left.
00:24:42
Speaker
very fascinating history, I should say, extremely interesting stuff. But in any case, you know, the Protestant context makes a big difference. Protestants think differently than Catholics, for better and for worse, when it comes to politics. And the Christian left in these two countries was extremely powerful in the 70s and 80s.
00:25:03
Speaker
And then kind of like the left itself, you know, it fizzles out for a variety of reasons, government repression, encroaching neoliberalism, people like Ronald Reagan, all that kind of stuff really takes a toll on the left as a whole. And so the Christian contingent or component of that left kind of naturally follows those trends. I'll say, though, that I think a lot of people sort of
00:25:25
Speaker
misunderstand the Christian left in ways that I find sort of endlessly unfortunate because it's so interesting. In the US right now, and I think this discourse kind of bleeds into Canada, there's a lot of talk about the rise of the religious left by which they usually mean the Christian left. Unfortunately, it erases a lot of other people. But people like Joe Biden, he's a Roman Catholic,
00:25:50
Speaker
Everybody who spoke at his inauguration was Catholic, even the people singing were Catholic. You know, Ralph Warnock just got elected in Georgia, definitely an inheritor of Black liberation theology, so there's a lot of talk about it in the air. I think the unfortunate thing about it is the Christian left historically has also been out of step with Christian liberalism.
00:26:11
Speaker
Right. Like the Christian left doesn't really want another Joe Biden. Right. If you if you came up with a good analogy when JFK the last Catholic liberal president in the United States was elected. One of his biggest sets of opposition was Catholics who were like burning you know like draft documents
00:26:32
Speaker
for the Vietnam War and like stealing them and breaking into nuclear facilities and like pouring their blood all over nuclear weapons, right? This was like what it meant to be a Catholic or Christian leftist at that time. I think today it's harder because the left is so fragmented and we've lost that kind of memory of what the Christian left must look like. So people kind of conflate it with its most public expression, which is liberalism.
00:26:56
Speaker
that ignores and erases all kinds of other Christians who are doing things in way more radical ways. I think of people like Christian Peacemaker teams here in Canada, for instance, they're a nonviolent organization that in Canada has been really focused on indigenous rights and indigenous justice in really incredible way. I mean, they show up in ways that
00:27:18
Speaker
lots of people don't. They're also very influential on like the anti-fascist movement here in Toronto, for instance. So, you know, there's lots of Christians who are showing up as Christians, but people don't know where to look for them or don't know how to find them because our political imagination kind of stops at like public expressions of liberal politics.
Local Christian Left Initiatives
00:27:38
Speaker
So a lot of my understanding of the Christian left is it's out there, it's very important, but you kind of have to have the eyes to see it or else it's easy to miss.
00:27:46
Speaker
And so that was the big macro question that I asked. And you did get a little micro at the end, but I think it's worth kind of contemplating the micro, where is the Christian left in your community question? And so, I mean, I'm in Edmonton, you're in Toronto. I mean, the most kind of Christian left I can kind of summon
00:28:04
Speaker
Uh, you know, in my mind is, is like, you know, if the churches that are involved, uh, in, you know, the greater Edmonton Alliance, which is like a, an outcropping of the industrial areas foundation and like Saul Alinsky style organizing.
00:28:18
Speaker
And to give a bit of context, like I wouldn't necessarily frame that as super left. I mean, I think that they're definitely working towards a better world. You know, they're allying with labor, but like the foundations of like, you know, the industrial areas foundation and kind of Saul Alinsky's style of organizing is, you know, anti-communist in nature. And also just like not interested in
00:28:44
Speaker
uh really exercising or flexing power uh is at least that's my kind of like surface level analogy or analysis of kind of that type of thing have you ever been to one of these industrial area foundation style events where they like they drag a politician in front and it's it's very prepared they like it's it's something you should you should make an effort to get to one at some point they're they're interesting um
00:29:08
Speaker
Yeah, we have an outcropping of that here. It's called the Greater Edmonton Alliance. It was around for a while, and then it faded away, and it came back recently. I went to one of their events last year, probably before the pandemic, about a year ago. It's funny, they dragged out a couple of politicians, a couple of city councilors, and they had a couple of demands around, I think, mental health and a living wage or something, so pretty whatever. I mean, good things on their own.
00:29:34
Speaker
And all the churches who are there, they stand up and they say, I'm with X Church, and we have X many members. This is where we're located. And the union stand up and say, I'm X union, and we have this many members, and this is what our workers do. And then they let the politician give a short speech. And then they essentially put the politician on the hot seat, and they ask a bunch of questions centered around their demands. And it's an interesting model.
00:29:57
Speaker
And again, but that's as like, as, as kind of radical Christian left as I've ever seen here in my own kind of context here in Alberta. So I'm curious about your own micro situation. You just mentioned one, is there any other examples you can bring to mind of the kind of like the Christian left in practice and action?
00:30:15
Speaker
Yeah, you know, like I said, the Christian left follows the problems that the left has all over the place, right? It's not special in that respect that it's hard to find the radical left everywhere right now, but they're out there, right?
00:30:32
Speaker
I'll say two things about it. One is anywhere that there are a bunch of radical leftists getting together, there's probably some Christians there. Whether or not they show up, you know, with a collar or with a big sign that says, I'm at ex church, it's important to recognize they may be there nevertheless because of their faith. You know, like I go to a lot of a lot of demos and protests and organizing meetings here in the city. And when I go there, I'm not usually like, it's me, the Catholic here as a Catholic leftist.
00:30:58
Speaker
But but that's why I'm rocking your like six inch cross that's all around your neck. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think like people know, I guess like those who know me know that that's why I'm there, I guess, including all my communist comrades and all the rest of them. But, you know, the fact is I'm I'm there because I'm a Catholic. I'm inspired by my Christian faith, but I'm I'm not, you know, I'm not there to convert everybody else. So I guess in that respect, the Christian left is hard to find because it's kind of like, you know,
00:31:28
Speaker
Jesus says you should be like the leaven in the dough of the world, right? So I think a lot of Christians see themselves that way too, just trying to sort of lift everybody up. So that's one side. It's hard to find the Christian left because we're not always on purpose. We're not always out there saying here we are. The second thing though is
00:31:44
Speaker
Liberation theology has been decimated for sure in Canada, but it has been internalized in some interesting ways that still exist. So a couple things I'd mentioned like the United Church of Canada, which is still the biggest Protestant church in the country, although it's declining like everybody else.
00:32:02
Speaker
A lot of people don't follow what the United Church does around the world, but it is very interesting in terms of how it relates to foreign policy in Canada. And I'll give you just one example. The United Church has all these relationships with Christians in other parts of the world on purpose. They've cultivated these solidarity relationships over decades.
00:32:22
Speaker
And they have paid staff that goes to places like Nicaragua, or places like Cuba and Venezuela, or the DPRK, or China, all these countries. And they talk to Christians in those countries and they ask them, what do you think about sanctions, or what do you think about Canadian foreign policy?
00:32:42
Speaker
And, you know, surprise, most poor Christians in Venezuela do not want Canada to be organizing the Lima group, right? So the United Church brings that information back to Canada, and they do put out all kinds of actually pretty good statements about anti-imperialism in this country.
00:32:59
Speaker
Now, does the United Church have a tans on the livers of power? No. Do all of its members necessarily know that the Church is doing that? No. But I think it's important to recognize that institutionally the Church has kind of retained some of that memory. The same is true of the Catholic Church. I mentioned the bishops can be a bit conservative, but they do have an organization called Development and Peace, which is their kind of global justice organization, and they do much the same as the United Church.
00:33:28
Speaker
they have these relationships with Christians and poor people that are not Christians in other parts of the world. And, you know, they shape their kind of messaging in light of all of that. In light of the pandemic, for instance, for the last year, they've been talking about the impact of sanctions and also the impact of war and funding arms trades and things like that. So I would just say there's a non-institutional side of the Christian left that's very hard to see, but there's also, there is an institutional side that is still very important
00:33:57
Speaker
and more radical than most people might expect.
00:34:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting about the United Church. My partner grew up in the United Church and it's fascinating to have a conversation to her because our relative experiences with Christianity are extremely different. I grew up in the Christian Missionary Alliance, Stephen Harper's church and very focused on essentially settler colonial style mission work, very patriarchal, very reactionary, very intertwined with conservative politics, really kind of proto mega churches.
00:34:31
Speaker
The Alliance Church in any big city, the first Alliance Church in any big city is quite often one of the largest Protestant churches in that city. It's always very interesting to compare the two. I definitely went through a phase where I was like an atheist and a dick about religion and just reading Richard Dawkins. I think that that's something that people have to grow out of because I don't think that's a very helpful
00:34:57
Speaker
thing if you want to actually start organizing and start making the world a better place. If you're going to be a Richard Dawkins style dick about religion, you're just never going to succeed or get anywhere, right? Right, right. Yeah, that's a classic Marxist advice too. Marx famously an atheist for sure, but most people will forget that in the critique of the GoTo program where he's talking about what a social society looks like, he thinks that
00:35:24
Speaker
freedom of religion is actually a pretty important bourgeois thing, even if it's bourgeois. He clashed with Bakunin even over the question of whether or not the international should be opposed to religion. So lots of complicated stuff there. There's a difference between your own theoretical commitments and your political strategy. I'll say one very funny story is when I was flirting with really getting into political action here in the city, I've been here for almost a decade now,
00:35:53
Speaker
Early on, I went to a rally and there was this Trotskyite guy selling a bunch of newspapers. I guess that's the stereotype. Anyways, we got to chatting and he asked why I was there. I said, well, I'm a Christian. I want to show up for this. I think it was like a water protector thing.
00:36:11
Speaker
He said, well, you know, Christians can't be Marxist. And I said, well, that doesn't sound right to me because there's all these Christian Marxists running around in Latin America. And he couldn't comprehend that at all. And sort of fortuitously, or maybe through divine guidance, the next people that I met at that rally happened to be a bunch of Leninists in the Communist Party of Canada, who the first thing that they said to me was, oh, you're Catholic. That's great. Like, have you ever heard of Oscar Romero and El Salvador, all this kind of stuff? And I was like, OK, cool. Like, I can hang with these folks.
00:36:40
Speaker
They were not dicks. Exactly. They were good Leninists, right? You shouldn't let the disagreements about heaven get in the way of what you're doing on earth. Of making our lives better and in tearing down the terrible injustice systems that we live under currently, right? Yeah. Go ahead.
00:37:02
Speaker
Well, I think we have this kind of story that we tell about religion, and this is kind of the Dawkins story, but it's other people's too, where Christianity in particular is often identified with conservative reactionary politics, and understandably so. I mean, oftentimes it is, no need to erase that. But people will say things like, well, Christianity, even Jesus is a great guy, but once Christianity is actually materialized in the world when it's actually being practiced, that's when it gets bad. And I think that
00:37:32
Speaker
It's important too to affirm if we want to think about how Christianity can factor into the history of radicalism, we should look also at people like when Louis Riel opposes the Canadian state or when Nat Turner or John Brown are opposing slavery. I mean, one thing that they're doing is exercising their understanding of what it means to be a Christian in the world. This is also Christianity in practice and it's mobilized against a different Christianity in practice for sure.
00:37:59
Speaker
But it's important to kind of affirm that religion is a side of struggle. And if you want it to be on your side, then you should make the effort to understand it and try to pump up the radical parts of it and not shy away from that side.
Inclusivity in Social Movements
00:38:15
Speaker
Yeah, don't be a dick. People come to a struggle from all sorts of backgrounds, including religious ones, and to discount those folks is just a great, you're just doing a grave disservice to your own cause. And there's a lot when you dig into those religious traditions, and we've obviously focused on Christianity today, because that's my upbringing, and that's obviously where you come from as well, but all religions, you dig into them, there is a radical undercurrent there, because like you said, they all come from struggle, right?
00:38:46
Speaker
And so I think this is an interesting way to leave the conversation. I really appreciate you coming on. Now is the opportunity to plug your pluggables. How can people follow you on the internet? What are the podcasts that you do? Give us your pitch.
00:39:04
Speaker
Sure. You can follow me on Twitter, like everybody else, at Dean Dettlaff. I am, like we said earlier, the co-host of this podcast called The Magnificast, which is about Christianity and the left. It's really fun to do. I hope that it's not alienating for people who aren't Christians, but definitely you'll be helped if you are. Lots of probably too many bad references to evangelical popular culture, et cetera. Both Matt and I had some stints in Bush era evangelicalism when we were adolescents.
00:39:33
Speaker
You can come for that and stay for the Marxism. Let's see, anything else? Oh, Jeez Magazine, I always plug. Jeez was actually born in Canada. It's now based in Detroit. A lot of people don't know about it, but it is the most fun thing I've ever been able to work on. It's a quarterly print magazine. It's a
00:39:51
Speaker
It comes out of a Christian tradition, but it's open to lots of spiritualities, and it's a progressive print magazine, just really beautifully done. Most of the editors are in a Catholic worker community in Detroit now, and just lots of incredible stuff. I think you guys probably know James Wilt if you're in the Canadian Left scene.
00:40:13
Speaker
He's great, by the way, but he had my job at Jeez before I have it, so editing a section on civil disobedience and faith. So anyway, it's a fantastic project. More people should know about it. They don't have any ads and need a lot of help. So Jeez magazine, that's the one thing. If you don't hear anything else, go check them out.
00:40:30
Speaker
Oh, well, I will. And yes, James Wilt is, is a friend of the show and has written for the progress report before, just like you have. So yeah, thanks again, Dean for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. And folks, if you like this podcast and you want to join the nearly 400 or so folks who help keep this little independent media project going, you can do that. You can make that a reality and help keep us going by going to the progress report.ca slash patrons.
00:40:54
Speaker
putting your credit card, whatever you can give a month, five, 10, 15, hell, $50, I don't know, whatever you got lying around that you can afford every month really helps us out. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear, you can reach me on Twitter at Duncan Kinney, and you can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAlberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communist for the amazing theme. Thanks again to Dean for coming on this really interesting conversation. And thank you for listening, and goodbye.