Across North America, a counterfeit “revival” is spreading—a crusade that fuses hard-right politics with a punitive, triumphalist Christianity. In Canada, it is visible in pastors like Jacob Reaume of Waterloo, Ontario, who preaches a Maple MAGA gospel blessing misogyny, homophobia, and authoritarian power, even musing that annexation to the United States would be a holy cause. Young Canadians are forming Turning Point clubs on university campuses, importing the playbook of the late US Christian right culture war activist Charlie Kirk. What began as American outrage media now seeps into Canadian pulpits, podcasts, and student associations.

At the Kirk memorial in Arizona, retired US politician Dr. Ben Carson sneered about “changing the gospel to the social gospel.” He meant it as a warning to stay faithful to a gospel of grievance. But what Carson mocked as heresy is exactly what both the US and Canada need right now: a resurrection of compassion before the Jesus of the Gospels is taxidermied into a partisan trophy for white Christian nationalism and cruelty.^[1]

Carson’s comments matter not for his personal influence but because they crystallize a wider movement—one that sanctifies power and punishes empathy. His tribute to Kirk recast him as a martyr, declaring that a great religious awakening had begun in America. The subtext is clear: this “revival” weds Trumpism to hard-right Christianity in a creed that scapegoats LGBTQ people, vilifies immigrants, and glorifies the state. It is faith as domination, not deliverance. And its northern echoes are growing louder.

That is the gospel Christians in Canada must resist. And the lessons we need are already embedded in our history: even as the institutions of the social gospel have largely faded, its principles endure—compassion, justice, and neighbour love. These truths offer guidance for resisting the rise of a vile and vindictive version of Christianity in the form of white Christian nationalism.

Emerging at the turn of the 20th century, Canada’s social gospel tradition called on Christians to confront the inequities of industrial capitalism and to build the kingdom of God on earth.

Originating in the United States and Britain amid the social upheavals of the Industrial Age, the social gospel arose in response to urban poverty, overcrowded slums, and exploitative labour conditions. It mobilized a transnational Christian left—drawing together clergy, educators, medical professionals, labour organizers, and others—committed to social reform. In Canada, the movement gained strong, wide traction.^[2] Figures such as J.S. Woodsworth, William Ivens, and Tommy Douglas took seriously Jesus’ call to serve “the least of these,” translating it into the struggle for pensions, unemployment insurance, and universal health care. Expelled from pulpits and branded radicals, they carried the vision forward anyway. All three were unafraid to challenge the institutional church when it grew complacent. After Methodist church officials pushed out Ivens, he founded Winnipeg’s Labour Church, where he preached scorching political sermons against the greed of corporate elites, drawing workers by the thousands.

Yet even as it championed justice for workers and the poor, this Anglo-Protestant movement also preached a gospel of white civility. Many of its leaders saw Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and those outside the movement’s mainstream as “backward” souls to be uplifted through Christian civilization. Social gospel theology helped sanctify Canada’s colonial project—fuelling the residential school system and the broader mission to “Christianize” and assimilate Indigenous children. The same pulpits that thundered against sweatshops too often fell silent about genocide.

To remember the movement honestly is to hold its light and its shadow together—to see both its visionary courage and its complicity in empire. Its moral failures expose how easily faith can align with whiteness and power, mistaking moral reform for liberation. That alignment would have consequences: after the Second World War, as prosperity spread and congregations swelled in the suburbs, the social gospel’s prophetic edge dulled. Many mainline Protestant churches grew comfortable in their respectability—hesitant to speak boldly about God or about justice. Their critique of capitalism softened, and their faith became more therapeutic than transformative.

Still, the story didn’t end there. In the 1970s and 80s, a new generation of theologians, clergy, and lay leaders—many within those same mainline churches—began to reckon with the sins of their tradition. They listened to liberation theologians in Latin America, to Black and feminist theologians, to Indigenous voices calling for truth-telling and repair. Out of the ruins of the old social gospel emerged a humbler, more self-critical faith—one committed not only to social justice but to decolonization, to solidarity rather than saviourism, to healing rather than hierarchy. That evolution kept the embers alive. It’s what connects early reformers to today’s faith-based climate activists, reconciliation advocates, and sanctuary movements.

Few embodied that continuity more clearly than the late Rev. Bill Blaikie, a United Church minister and an NDP MP for Winnipeg’s Elmwood-Transcona from 1979 to 2008. Unashamed to bring scripture into politics, unafraid to stand with workers, the environment, peace, and justice, he declared: “The good news of the ‘social’ gospel is that the God of the Bible is a God who wants to redeem the whole of human existence, our social as well as our individual lives. The bad news is that this involves Christians in the world of politics… taking the same side as God is reported to have taken—the side of the poor, the needy, the fatherless, the vulnerable, the oppressed.”^[3]

For Blaikie, faith was not ornamental; it demanded risk. He warned that Canada stood as an example of a society many powerful interests would gladly see annihilated in a world ruled by concentrated wealth and privilege.

But by the early 2000s, the NDP—descendant of the old CCF and once an incubator of social gospel ideals—had grown wary of religious language altogether. Blaikie lamented the turn. In an increasingly secular political culture, moral appeals grounded in faith were seen as liabilities. That reticence left the field open, at the turn of the millennium, for conservative evangelical leaders such as Stockwell Day to claim Christianity for the right. The mainstream media amplified that shift, spotlighting voices like Day’s while overlooking the many progressive Christians, like Blaikie and his predecessors, who had long shaped Canada’s moral landscape.

In his memoir, The Bill Blaikie Report: An Insider’s Look at Faith and Politics, Blaikie takes issue with the Canadian media’s almost exclusive focus on the Christian right in Canada—as if the Christian left, where he had spent his life, did not exist. More progressive publications tended to focus on the dangers of the Christian right in Canada (The Walrus, for instance), he wrote, while faith-based publications generally celebrated its influence (Faith Today), leaving little room for the kind of Christian witness he represented (only one progressive Christian magazine currently exists in the country: Broadview—formerly the United Church Observer—a lonely voice in a media landscape that too often treats faith as the right’s exclusive domain).

In today’s secular political culture, progressive Christians feel immense pressure to downplay the spiritual roots of their moral commitments. That hesitancy has left a vacuum—and into that vacuum, figures like Carson and Reaume step in, preaching revivals that are really crusades. Their “revivals” weaponize scripture, rebrand Jesus as the mascot of an angry political faction, and mistake raw power for righteousness. But the truths glimpsed in the social gospel legacy survive, and they speak urgently today: the Jesus who healed the sick, fed the hungry, and welcomed the outcast—the one who sided with the poor and the marginalized—is not the mascot of capitalism. He represents a radically inclusive vision of love and justice that challenges the powers of our day.

Those truths are not slogans. They are guidance—for Christians and for anyone willing to oppose the weaponization of religion. The early social gospel preachers called it building the kingdom of God on Earth, but what they were really talking about was love organized into policy, compassion made durable. Today, that remnant survives in groups like KAIROS Canada, in the United Church’s Faith in Action initiatives, and among clergy—like Rev. Alexa Gilmour, the NDP member of provincial parliament for Toronto’s Parkdale—High Park, and Rev. Christine Boyle, the minister of housing and municipal affairs for David Eby’s NDP government in British Columbia, who speak out for climate justice, reconciliation, affordability, and migrant rights unfailingly, persistently, with the aim of living out their faith through public service.

But even non-Christian Canadians have a role to play here. When friends, relatives, or politicians invoke scripture to justify exclusion or hate, we can all remind them what the Christian story actually says. Jesus never spoke about guns or gay people. His words sounded nothing like Conservative Party talking points. He spoke again and again about loving one’s neighbour, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and welcoming the stranger. You don’t need to be Christian to insist that those who claim that faith honour its core message.

The only way to fight a counterfeit revival is with the real thing: scripture that flat-out refuses the logic of power and profit. The gospel, at its heart, was never on the side of conquest or capitalism but of liberation. It’s time for Canadian Christians to remember their prophets—and to say, clearly and without apology, that politics should be about loving our neighbours, not taking revenge and practicing hate, as Trump and his minions would have us do.

Julie McGonegal is the author of Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation. She writes from Elora, Ontario.

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Endnotes

^{1. In their short primer, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry explain that white Christian nationalism fuses many of the traits typically associated with populism: “scapegoating of minorities; distrust in science, the media, and ‘establishment’ politicians; corresponding trust in strongman leaders; and conspiratorial thinking.” In a follow-up interview in the New Yorker, Perry further explains that the “Christian” in white Christian nationalism functions not only as a religious category but also as an ethnic and cultural one. This ideology, he adds, “tends to be anti-democratic” and is linked to support for political violence and restrictions on democratic participation.↩}

^{2. The social gospel movement was limited to English Canada while French Québec had its own progressive Catholic currents that were influential in the post-war period.↩}

^{3. These words of Blaikie’s can be found on his personal website, still live at billblaikie.ca despite his passing in 2022.↩}