A devastating loss

Historic St. Anne’s church with Group of Seven religious murals destroyed

Image from Henri Rumen - St. Anne’s Church in Toronto

By James Pew

It has been 36 months since the false claim of a discovery of an unmarked clandestine mass grave in an apple orchard of a former Indian Residential School in Kamloops, BC, made international headlines. After the Kamloops story, many more copy-cat claims concerning unmarked graves at other former residential schools also garnered much attention by a careless and sensationalizing woke legacy media. 

Even though the Kamloops claim was never substantiated, and has not been investigated by official authorities (the RCMP), the subsequent claims at other locations never-the-less picked up on the same false narrative that the former Priests, Nuns, and Oblates who ran the residential schools were guilty of torture, murder, and in an effort to hide the evidence, clandestine burial of indigenous children. The fact that the post-Kamloops unmarked graves claims all occurred in known former cemeteries where grave markings had been lost to time, and in many cases locals had come forward with information regarding the variety of former Canadians (many of whom were not indigenous) known to be the occupants of these newly discovered unmarked graves, did not deter the salacious anti-Anglo/anti-Christian narrative from gaining steam.

The result has been the vandalism, desecration, and destruction of over 100 Canadian churches. In the 36 months since the Kamloops story, just under 3 churches per month have been subject to acts of arson and vandalism. Over 30 churches have burned down completely. ‘The most recent,  St Anne’s Anglican Church in Toronto, had irreplaceable murals of the life of Jesus Christ painted on the chancel and the church’s Byzantine domed ceiling by Group of Seven artists. Lost forever.

St. Anne’s in 2012. A 1937 Globe and Mail article called the church 'one of the most beautiful in Canada.'DEBORAH BAIC/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Image from www.newliturgicalmovement.org

Many of Canada’s most well-known indigenous leaders, like Phil Fontaine, Murray Sinclair, Chief Casimir, Wab Kinew, Chief Willie Sellars, and many more, have for years, with little or no material evidence, made sensational statements indirectly (and directly) indicting Canada’s Christian ancestors for heinous crimes, including murder of indigenous children. The Kamloops story was perhaps the most successful of these yarns. Indigenous leaders have engaged in an outrageous form of propagandistic anti-Christian, anti-European story-telling. They have both emphasized and amplified stories cherry-picked from a vast orchard of experiences of indigenous Canadians, and they have weaved their own tall tales containing outrageous and uncorroborated claims, like when Murray Sinclair, as reported by CBC, claimed that student deaths at residential schools “could be in the 15-25,000 range, and maybe even more.”  

Was the truth and reconciliation commission and process nothing more than a vast exercise in uncorroborated, un-investigated story-telling? The author cannot find much more to it than that. The indigenous leaders mentioned, and many others, have used the Truth and Reconciliation findings as a foundation on which they have slowly built a narrative that grew more violent, murderous, and awful with every telling. The narrative they weaved even became unmoored from the conclusions of the Truth and Reconciliation’s final report, but most Canadians are fuzzy on those details, so it didn’t really matter.

Even after anti-Christian terrorists, credulous of the fallacious stories propagated by indigenous leaders, in their anger, began attacking and destroying churches, the same indigenous leaders had not a second thought about the ramifications of their story-telling. In fact, they continue unphased in their unsubstantiated indictment of Canada’s Christian ancestors, and seem un-bothered by the persecution of today’s Christian Canadians, even when they are indigenous Christians.

From the first day of the Kamloops story, the media has been gullible willing servants of the neo-tribal elites (the privileged indigenous leadership class, like Murray Sinclair). They understand the working mechanism of the anti-Anglo narrative: anti-Christian propaganda is good, evidence refuting the existence of clandestine graves of murdered indigenous children is bad. 

Our political leaders form a third group that seems to conspire to uphold the anti-Anglo narrative. Like the media, our political leaders know how to properly take their cues from influential indigenous leaders. When Murray Sinclair says white Christian Priests murdered indigenous children, Justin Trudeau says point me to the nearest unmarked grave to pose for the camera with a teddy bear and a solemn look.

And then there is the public who, when it comes to the unmarked graves story, appear poised toward a similar credulity found in CBC journalists and federal Liberal cabinet ministers. While Eric Kaufmann’s recent demographic survey of Canadians found them to be overwhelmingly not woke, Kaufmann did find that “60 percent of Canadians believe that ‘215 indigenous residential school children were buried in a mass grave on school grounds in Kamloops, BC,’ with just 15 percent disagreeing.”

Professor Kaufmann can teach us something else about all this credulity and willing acceptance of implausible unsubstantiated stories. In his new book, The Third Awokening, Kaufman details the history of an ascendent anti-majority culture that has its origins in the early 1900s. This anti-majority culture, Kaufmann holds, is part of the political left. However, anti-majority sentiment expresses itself differently among different segments of the left. The radical activists on the far left, the “cultural socialists,” are not the majority and they are not necessarily the main drivers of wokeism, or of Kaufmann’s “cultural socialism.”

Anti-majority culture is described as an ethos Kaufmann calls left-modernism. This is where the needs and interests of those deemed historically marginalized are prioritized over the majority. Also, it is where a care/harm framework is deployed, often infringing on the liberties of those in the majority (i.e. affirmative action), in order to protect marginalized “equity deserving” groups from the relentless oppression the shadow of the majority is said to cast over them. This exercise essentially sacralizes those deemed equity-deserving, making it impossible for members of the majority to deviate from the boundaries condescendingly established as protection for the minority groups so blessed.

The rules and boundary lines concerning left modernism manifest in our moral politics; in what we decide is and is not taboo. Kaufmann places the anti-racism taboo, what he refers to as the “big bang” (which occurred in the mid 1960s New Left era) of the woke identity politics movement at the center of the modern discourse-limiting social rules around acceptable speech regarding race relations and other areas of concern for the so-called marginalized. It’s worth pointing out that it is almost never acceptable for a member of the majority to question a member of an equity-deserving minority. The majority is to listen, believe, apologize, and pay up.

In February, conservative MP, Corey Tochor, brought a motion before the house asking for  unanimous consent to condemn an attempted arson at the Blessed Sacrament Parish church in Regina, Sask, that occurred earlier that month. Before Tochor had completed reading his proposed motion, Liberal and NDP MP’s yelled “No.” 

There was no protest or hesitation two years earlier when NDP MP Leah Gazan, with no material evidence, brought forward a motion condemning Canada for committing genocide against the indigenous. It was unanimously agreed by all 338 MPs. Kaufmann’s anti-majority left-modernism, specifically the most recent almost religious expression of it called wokeism, is the only reasonable explanation for this.

We rush to condemn our white Christian ancestors. We have almost made a sport of it. It is nothing less than gross self-serving luxury beliefs expressed by those not wishing to be canceled out of polite society. If only the culturally liberal left-modernists would realize that the woke will come for them eventually, selling out our nation and our ancestors can only delay the inevitable.

The reporting on the destruction of St. Anne’s Church, and the priceless Group of Seven Murals contained within, has been typical: disturbing. Few reporters have brought up the cause of the fire, and even fewer have situated the destruction of St. Anne’s into the wider context of over 100 acts of church vandalism and arson. How is it possible that so many legacy media reporters have neglected to mention the one thing that is on so many Canadians minds? The media seems to wish to move on from this story even before an investigation has taken place. For them, it doesn’t compute.  It just doesn’t fit the woke anti-majority left-modernist narrative. 

Some reporters even claimed there is no evidence of arson, but how can that be determined before an investigation has been completed? If a Mosque had been destroyed, would journalists prematurely report that arson was ruled out? You can safely bet they would not, and that the term “Islamophobia” would be liberally deployed (pun intended).

In one of several podcast interviews featuring Eric Kaufmann discussing The Third Awokening, he expanded on his conception of the modern left - which he generally divides into two groups: the smaller far-left radical group, he refers to as cultural socialists, and the more predominant moderate lefties, he refers to as cultural liberals. Kaufmann used a great analogy when he compared the modern left to an electric guitar. The radical cultural socialists are like the guitar, but the cultural liberals are the amplifier. Through their adherence to the dominant anti-majority ideology of left-modernism, the moderate cultural liberals are responsible for amplifying the most insane woke nonsense, while thinking they are acting in the service of the historically marginalized.

If someone could just pull the cable that connects the guitar to the amplifier, wokeism would be finished. Then maybe the anti-Christian terrorism and destruction of Canadian churches might come to an end.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, checkout James Pew's Guest Appearance on Viewpoints

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Woke Watch Canada Essentials:

1. James Pew contributed a chapter to the best-selling book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers

2. A long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy

3.  For evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!