From the Diocese of New Westminster To Bountiful, BC To VDES: A Lament

One of the biggest battles in Canadian history took place in Vancouver Downtown East Side during the late 1960s and early 70s when government planners endevoured to implement an “urban renewal” program. These bureaucrats overlooked the fact that there was a genuine community in DVES and to bulldoze it and build a cluster of high-rises and an expressway was to destroy a neighborhood. A coalition of community organizations succeeded in saving the neigbourhood from being strip-mined. In more recent years the empty building of what was once Woodward’s Department store became the focus of neighborhood preservationists. It too was saved from the wrecker’s ball. What DVES has not been saved from is societal decay. Sunday’s Vancouver Courier described one area of Vancouver in the following way:

The dealers, prostitutes, are back…two years after a concentrated police crackdown moved them away. Pedestrians move quickly out of the area to escape the people hanging outside the stations. Clutches of youths in gangsta rap outfits loll about on the street corners, clutter the bus stops, and intimidate commuters. Litter lines the streets. More and more, the area is dotted with police car lights and the night is filled with sirens.

While this is a description of another nearby part of Vancouver, it could easily be applied to DVES. This downward spiral is due largely to massive cultural upheavals stemming from the 60s. The outcome has been the fragmentation of Canadian familial life with the result that significant numbers of young males do not become domesticated and assimilated into everyday life. Christian activists, who do invaluable work in DVES, will no doubt challenge me on this pointing to socio-economic root causes and I would agree with them to a limited extent. However, one only needs to look back to the 50s when Oppeneimer Park was a place where families could picnic. Instead it is now an urban space that has been commandeered by drug addicts. Back then soccer games did not need to be preceded by needle searches on fields in DVES. I would argue that economically times were a lot more hardscrabble in the 50s than today. Back then the social “safety net” had many more gaping holes than today. The difference was that the Canadian social fabric was a whole lot stronger than today. And, whether or not Canada was a “Christian nation,” the Church certainly had a lot to do with the strength of this social fabric. This was a reality that cannot be simply dismissed as “back then” thinking.

Present day Canada faces a much larger strip-mine operation than the one that threatened DVES in the 60s. Like 16 year old drivers, an odd assortment of clerical and governmental elite types have presided over the bulldozing of that societal superstructure called marriage which stood as a landmark long before the Woodwards building rose from the ground in DVES. First, Michael Ingam, Bishop of the Diocese of New Westminster, eagerly hopped on the giant Caterpillar ‘dozer and giddily took the controls, obliterating two millennia of Christian tradition and instituting “same-sex blessings.” Since then Prime Minister Paul Martin, albeit more hesitantly, resolutely turned his back on his Roman Catholic heritage, and with a cabal of activist judges cheering him on, climbed aboard a second machine and put the blade of the Cat in gear. On December 9, 2004 with the Canadian Supreme Court decision, the familial legal structure, as we have known it, came crashing to the ground.

Many Christian clerics and thinkers have chosen to duck their heads on this one. Not so, Douglas Farrow, Regent grad and now a professor of Christian thought at McGill University. Doug has been an outspoken critic of our government and courts as they have travelled the road towards same-sex “marriage.” From writing in the Globe and Mail to appearing on the CBC, Doug has worked tirelessly in works of compassion and goodness in seeking to alert Canadians of all beliefs to the danger of governments seeking to re-engineer marriage and family. This coming Monday, December 13 at 10:00 am, Doug will appear on Vancouver’s popular talk show hosted by Rafe Mair, 600 AM on the dial. Monday evening at 7:00 pm he will speak here at Regent College in conjunction with the release of the new book that he has co-edited, Divorcing Marriage: Unveiling the Dangers in Canada’s New Social Experiment. Hats off to Doug Farrow! Interestingly, the book was turned down by a Christian publishing house and instead published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. We are giving away the CD of Doug’s talk with a purchase of the book. (Or watch for the recording at the appropriate time on regentradio.org.)

Will Canada be overrun by gay marriage? I doubt it. But to use Tom Wolfe’s term, “hooking up” will take on new meanings that are alien to our culture. In Bountiful, BC I understand that there is an 80-year-old Mormon elder with 20 wives. Like a veritable beehive, the fundamentalist, splinter Mormon community there has allegedly been forcing adolescent males to pack their bags and head out so as to restrict male competition for “wives.” Given the changing nature of marriage and family, all that BC’s Solicitor General, Rich Coleman, can do is wring his hands. It will be no surprise if some of the young men of Bountiful end up on the streets of DVES. We now face the moral equivalent of 10,000 Watertown tragedies.

There is a place for a lament for a culture. There is also a temptation to sign off and have this lament be mistaken for just another neocon jeremiad. But there is hope. Not least is the work of young (and old) Christians who have chosen to work in the midst of poor, urban communities. One of them, Barrett Lee, sang a timeless Christmas carol at this year’s Regent Christmas event. Modified appropriately for all of us he sang:

O Come All Ye Faithless

O come, all ye faithless, beat up, and defeated
Come ye, o come ye to Bethlehem
Come and behold him, born the Friend of Sinners
O come, let us adore him
O come, let us adore him
O come, let us adore him, Christ, the Lord

Sing, choirs of vagrants, sing in desperation
Sing, all ye denizens of streets below,
Glory to God, glory in the highest!”
O come, let us adore him O come, let us adore him
O come, let us adore him, Christ, the Lord

Yea Lord, we greet Thee
born this dreary evening
Jesus, to Thee be all glory given
Hope for the Hopeless, now in flesh appearing

O come, let us adore him
O come, let us adore him O come, let us adore him, Christ, the Lord

- J. Barrett Lee

Bill Reimer December 9, 2004 bookblog@regent-college.edu