What I heard (and didn't hear) at a talk about global religious persecution with Conservative MP Garnett Genuis
Jason Kenney was a no-show, but the event was nonetheless revealing.
I took a cab down to the People’s Church in south Edmonton to attend an event on global religious persecution on March 2 under the impression that former Alberta premier Jason Kenney would be speaking, as was originally advertised.
Kenney’s devout Roman Catholic faith, as I detail in my book Kenneyism: Jason Kenney’s Pursuit of Power, is a key part of his political identity, informing his uniquely moralistic approach to politics.
Little did I know, Kenney had been dropped from the lineup in the days leading to the event, but I decided to stick around.
Maybe he pulled out because he was devastated by the news of former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s passing.
Or, more likely, his attendance at an event on religious persecution caused an uproar in far-right circles, who turned on Kenney after he placed capacity restrictions on churches at the height of the pandemic and approved the arrest of scofflaw pastors.
He might have had to answer some hostile questions from attendees, something I know, as a Kenney biographer, that he’s adverse to.
Whatever the reason, Kenney and Voice of the Martyrs Rev. Greg Musselman were out, and Katherine Leung of Hong Kong Watch and David Bhatti of International Christian Voice were in, speaking alongside Conservative MP Garnett Genuis.
Saturday’s discussion focused on a very narrow conception of religious persecution.
“There's people that are persecuted that aren't flying the Christian flag, or they're not under the banner of Christianity. There's the Uyghurs. There's the Jews. There's different ethnic groups that we're all familiar with,” explained Pastor Laurence Hueppelsheuser at the event’s outset.
Each speaker gave individualized remarks before speaking on a panel moderated by Jesse Robertson, chief of staff to Alberta finance minister Nate Horner.
There was no talk of India’s Hindu fundamentalist government’s persecution of Muslims, Sikhs and Dalits, nor any word of the Christians and Muslims in Gaza who are being deliberately starved and attacked at their places of worship by Israeli forces.
The eradication of Indigenous forms of spirituality here in Canada? Forget about it, although Genuis did find time to speak about Canadian churches that have been destroyed or vandalized “in recent years,” bemoaning a “complete lack of political response to the attacks.”
This wasn’t an event about global religious persecution. It was an event promoting Western chauvinism, which spoke selectively of religious persecution to buttress its grand narrative.
Bhatti, a Pakistani Catholic, is the nephew of Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s first Christian minister of minority affairs, who was assassinated in 2011 by Muslim extremists.
In his remarks, Bhatti spoke of a desire to “restore Canada's reputation as a global leader in the fight for protecting and defending religious freedom for all” — a thinly veiled reference to the Office of Religious Freedom established by former prime minister Stephen Harper in 2013 as a sop to the Christian right.
Nobody could quite figure out what that office did. It was led by Andrew Bennett, who left the office before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shut it down in 2016 to “reaffirm the essential and foundational role of faith in our common life as Canadians”with the Christian think tank Cardus.
The rhetoric of religious freedom is often used as cover for the Christian right.
Leung spoke about the control the Chinese Communist Party exerts over religious practice in the country, which she acknowledged is looser in international cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Leung greatly undermined her argument, however, by invoking the Falun Gong, an ultraconservative cult which the Chinese government banned in 1999.
“The Chinese government conducts propaganda campaigns demonizing Falun Gong,” she said.
Perhaps the greatest asset the Chinese state has in demonizing the Falun Gong might be the Falun Gong itself.
Master Li Hongzhi, the group’s leader, lives on a 400-acre compound two hours outside New York City, with 100 other Falun Gong members.
Li opposes miscegenation and homosexuality, believes aliens live on earth and seek to “replace humans” through cloning, and claims he can walk through walls, make himself invisible and levitate.
The ubiquitous far-right Epoch Times rag, which dabbles in QAnon and anti-vaxx conspiracism, and supports Donald Trump and the German far-right, is a Falun Gong production.
Genuis, like this writer, is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. However, unlike this writer, Genuis is a Roman Catholic.
His grandmother who survived the Shoah was Jewish on her father’s side, meaning that while she was Jewish enough to be targeted by the Nazis, she wasn’t Jewish according to Jewish law. In fact, she was Catholic.
According to Genuis, his grandmother spent the Second World War in hiding, with which she was assisted by Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen.
“When people say, ‘Hey, religious leaders shouldn't speak about matters of politics and justice and human rights,’ I'm reminded of von Galen and how how grateful I am that he was willing to challenge injustice on the basis of his convictions about universal human dignity,” said the Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan MP.
I agree wholeheartedly with Genuis that religious leaders should discuss politics, justice and human rights. However, I find the selectivity with which they often do so troubling, which was on full display that night at the People’s Church.
During the panel discussion, Robertson asked a good question: What motivates religious persecution globally? While the answers left much to be desired, they were revealing.
Leung identified godless Communism as the culprit in China, where her work focuses. “In essence, it is so that people don't worship anything but the state,” she said.
For Bhatti, it’s a clash of civilizations. “It’s a war between the East and West, in many cases,” he said, identifying the West as the “greatest source of human flourishing in the world throughout the history of civilization.”
“That's why I believe that religious freedom is the most basic, most fundamental and the first freedom that we all have, because it's the easiest one in countries that are outside of the West to identify people to segregate people and to keep them oppressed,” he said.
Genuis agreed, pointing to Russia’s persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic churches in Ukrainian territory it occupies.
What he didn’t point to was Ukrainian parliament’s vote in October to ban the historically Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church, also known as the Moscow Patriarchate, despite its clergy having denounced Russia’s war and severed formal ties with the Russian Orthodox Church in May 2022.
This, no doubt, would have complicated the event’s overarching message that the West is a beacon of religious tolerance.
After the formal event concluded, I approached Genuis to ask if he believes Palestinian Christians and Muslims are facing religious persecution by the Israelis.
Suffice it to say, he doesn’t.
“I don't think Israel is targeting people on the basis of religion,” he replied, adding that he’s “very concerned about the impact on people’s lives there.”
I asked the practising Catholic about the two women — a mother and daughter — who were killed by Israeli snipers outside the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City on Dec. 16, where hundreds of Palestinians sought sanctuary from Israeli attacks.
According to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Israeli military “murdered” the two women, who without warning were “shot in cold blood inside the premises of the parish, where there are no belligerents.” Pope Francis called the killing an act of “terrorism.”
The Israeli military simply denied the attack happened at all.
“To me, the details aren’t clear in terms [of] what the context was,” Genuis said.
While he said it’s “very sad to see the impacts on people’s lives,” he wholeheartedly endorsed Israel’s stated war aim.
“My view of the conflict is that I hope to see Hamas defeated, and Palestinians be able to have a democratic, pluralistic government and a two-state solution,” Genuis said.
It’s hard to see how Palestinians who’ve experienced having their families killed over the past five months will simply lay down their arms whenever this ends, I told Genuis.
“It's not impossible that after a war, people say, ‘We need to do things differently.’ It happened to France and Germany after the Second World War. It’s not unprecedented,” he said, echoing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu before taking a more conciliatory tone about how a “transition to peace” needs to occur on “both sides.”
Yet Canada is buying and selling weapons with only one side.
Nothing, in my mind, was more revealing of the limitations of that evening’s discussion than this exchange with Genuis.
Okay, but how where Garrets dead haunted doll-esque eyes in person?