Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 12:31 pm
BENTLEY, ALBERTA; HELLFIRE, NEO-NAZIS AND STOCKWELL
DAY [Excerpts from NOW magazine, April 2000]
By Gordon Laird
...Bentley is a picturesque slice of central Alberta and the place
where Stockwell Day, who made his name as leader of a
renegade evangelical church, went from pastor to politician. Until
recently the treasurer of Alberta, Day is now a candidate for the
leadership of the Canadian Alliance party.
But despite the bucolic setting, back when Day was becoming a
public figure Bentley and nearby Red Deer and Eckville
percolated with Christian fundamentalism -- and a virulent, faith-
driven brand of anti-Semitism. This ideological weave of old Social
Credit conspiracy doctrines, religion and far-right politics explains
why to this day, despite Day's prominence in Alberta's cabinet,
there are still neo-Nazi sympathizers from back home who claim to
be his friends.
When anti-Semitic teacher Jim Keegstra got tossed from his
classroom in Red Deer in the early 80s for teaching about the
"Jewish conspiracy,'' he certainly didn't stop profligating his
message.
Rather, he headed to Bentley, where he set up the Christian
Defence Fund (CDL) and ran a mechanic's garage.
Eventually, Keegstra -- who calls Day by his nickname, "Stock,'' as
does everyone in town, attracted a bevy of notorious characters.
Visiting him in the garage or at his Eckville home were Aryan
Nation leader Terry Long, Douglas Christie, lawyer for almost
every major Canadian holocaust denier who's ever ran foul of the
law, neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel and various white supremacists from
south of the border -- all of whom lent their passions to the already
combustible area.
Indeed politics and religion in this central Alberta region have
always been intense. It is Reform country and before that Social
Credit country. The party ruled Alberta from 1935 to 1972 and
continually struggled with anti-Semitism within the party.
In the Day family, Stock's father, Stockwell Day Sr., ran for the
federal Socreds against the NDP's Tommy Douglas in Vancouver
in 1972. Later, he hooked up with the separatist Western Concept
Party, also dedicated to preserving "our'' Christian and European
heritage and founded by lawyer Doug Christie.
Following the Socred tradition, Day found his political calling while
at the controversial Bentley Christian Centre.
From 1978 to 85, Day was assistant pastor and school
administrator. And in 1984 he made headlines for defending
fundamentalist school curricula that a government commission
later found to hold "a degree of insensitivity towards blacks, Jews
and natives.''
Alberta senator Ron Ghitter headed the 18-month commission on
schooling in the wake of the Keegstra affair. His report raised
serious questions about the Accelerated Christian Education
(ACE), a curriculum imported by the Centre from the Texas-based
School of Tomorrow and a rigid set of prescriptions for
fundamentalist teaching on scripture and creation science.
"ACE schools were schools of dogma,'' says Ghitter, a former
cabinet minister. "They didn't follow official curriculum and the kids
who came out had sort of a twisted Christianity with anti-Semitic
overtones.''
Ghitter recalls one telling incident in a Red Deer Christian school
where he discovered an ACE book that argued "all kinds of
Buddhists and Muslims are evil.'' He took the book to the principal,
who promptly denied knowing anything about the literature, saying
that it was an old book. Ghitter checked the cover it was new.
"It's repulsive that people would be teaching this material,'' he
explains. "But in certain pockets of central Alberta - Eckville,
Bentley, Red Deer - they're good people but they sometimes take
the position that their religion is right and others are inferior.''
At the time Day fervently defended the material -- and the right of
his school to teach whatever it wanted --saying he was willing to
"go to jail, if need be.''
"God's law is clear,'' said an angry Day to the Alberta Report in
1984. "Standards of education are not set by government, but by
God, the Bible, the home and the school.''
But there was more to the ACE material than just Bible teaching.
Social studies lessons warned students that democratic
governments "represent the ultimate deification of man, which is
the very essence of humanism and totally alien to God's word.''
Science lessons taught pure creationism, noting that all
evolutionists were guilty of "depravity and sinfulness.''
In other words, the ACE material that Day so passionately
defended sometimes took an extreme and dismissive view on
secular society - a position that was radical even for religious
private schooling.
Moreover, there was the Jewish question. Paula Simons of the
Edmonton Journal, who interviewed Day at the time, recently
reported that the ACE materials were peppered with some
disturbing Keegstra-esque statements. In one reading lesson,
junior high students were asked "The Jewish leaders were
children of their father, the devil - true or false?''
The current pastor at Day's church, doesn't spare much sympathy
for the former Alberta treasurer.
Gregory Rathjen says that when Day left in 1985 to pursue a
political career, the assistant pastor left behind a community that
was deeply divided.
Rathjen arrived in 1986 to a disaster a demoralized congregation
had shrunk almost by half, allegations of fraud were afoot, and the
church owed $12,000 to creditors. Factions were warring. It was a
dark time in Bentley.
"The church leaders had risen to unquestioned authority,'' explains
Rathjen. "They had moved away from the congregational
government with the assumption "You're here to serve and not ask
questions.''''
Rathjen reports that, before its collapse, the former Bentley
Christian Centre was a renegade Pentecostal church that
instituted a divine mandate to replace grassroots congregational
representation.
Throughout this period, Stockwell Day was assistant pastor and
school administrator.
"They changed their by-laws so that the people would have no say
- leaders to be appointed by other leader, as determined by
scripture,'' explains Rathjen. "It was a haughty, arrogant, pride-
filled success story that led to disaster.''
Fuelled by American-style revivalism, the church emphasized
radical gospel practices - such as speaking-in-tongues - that
whipped worshippers into a frenzy.
"They have emotional experiences and then try to build a doctrine
around it,'' explains Rathjen. The intensity of the church and
constant stream of visiting American pastors gave Bentley an
international profile within fundamentalist circles.
But the church eventually succumbed to its own extremes. "I would
say that it was as close to a cult as you can get," says pastor
Rathjen.
"They were still holding on to the Christian teaching - but with
manipulation and control. Very few people knew. It's not
acceptable,'' says the pastor who outright rejected Stockwell Day's
old ACE curriculum after a trip down to ACE's Texas headquarters.
And Stockwell Day? "Stock wrote me a letter saying he had
nothing to do with it - but he lived off of it and enjoyed it,'' says
Rathjen, frankly. "That's what this church was - a bully. They
bullied people and won.''
It is impossible to avoid religion in Bentley. On a per capita basis,
Alberta's self-described "model community'' has more places of
worship than most towns - six churches for 900 residents.
Day's church comprised one-third of Bentley's population, with
nearly 300 people. And just to keep things interesting, Bentley
reportedly had a practising witch - and a coven - for a number of
years.
...Few Canadian politicians have a rap sheet of gaffes as long as
Stockwell Day. When he won his first election in 1996, his
acceptance speech was full of ambitious moral prescriptions that
had nothing to do with his new job as a provincial legislator.
He "railed against homosexuals in the armed forces and
pornography,'' reported the Red Deer advocate at the time. "He
called for harsher penalties for violent crimes, and attacked other
issues that belong in the federal domain.''From early on, Stockwell
Day had big aspirations.
"As a Christian, I acknowledge the lordship of Jesus Christ over
the whole universe,'' explained Day in 1998, in response to a gaffe
made against single-parent families. "I believe that the Bible is the
infallible word of God and every word in it, cover to cover, is true.''
With this literalist belief in the Bible comes some unusual ideas
that rarely gather press. As one educator made notes in an
informal presentation Day made in Red Deer during 1997, the
Treasurer claimed the following things to be true 1) The earth is
6,000 years old; 2) Adam and Eve were real people; 3) Humans
and dinosaurs co-existed; and 4) There's as much evidence for
creation as evolution.
The educator declines to be named because he believes Day to
be vengeful and worries that a public comment could affect local
school funding.
Around Keegtra's Bentley garage, fundamentalism was the
common thread in learning how to love God better, some of these
men somehow learned how to hate, too.
Day and Keegstra might not agree on Christian eschatology or
conspiracy theory, but the fact of the matter is that Stockwell Day
won the respect of men who have, more or less, decided that
everyone is against them.
Not just because Stock is a local boy done good, but because, as
Jim Green put it, "he's a good Christian.''
Green and Keegstra attended a few 6am prayer meetings that
pastor Day led for local menfolk.
"I realized that Mr. Day had a certain quality it is the knowledge
and experience in his life - from his Dad, too,'' says Green.
"The people in North Red Deer [where Day was elected
provincially in 1986], the Christian people, they liked what he
stood for and talked him into moving there,'' says Green. "He was
always pushed people wanted someone with strong principles. I
paraded [protested] with Day and his people in front of a school in
Red Deer --against sex education.''
Self-avowed libertarian Gary Botting describes Day as a friend.
"Stock and I would pick each other's brains,'' he recalls. "Politics, a
lot to do with education, a bit to do with what was going to happen
with Keegstra. I found him very much down to earth.''
Botting is a fascinating figure despite articling with Doug Christie
as a lawyer in 1991, by 1996 Botting had completely disavowed
Christie's "anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi agenda,'' as he put it.
Throughout the 1980s, Botting prepared briefs for the local RCMP
about the activities of Keegstra, Long and other members of the far
right. But at the same time, Botting maintained extensive
correspondence with -- and sometimes hosted -- insurgent
racialists from the Western Guard and the American Anti-
Communist Federation.
In 1991, Botting championed the case of Howard Pursley, a 250-
pound Texan neo-Nazi - in his bid for political refugee status.
His dismissal from Red Deer college was based in his
controversial support of Keegstra - as a civil liberties case - and his
own curious attempt to bring Keegstra's favorite book, The Hoax of
the Twentieth Century, into his own college classroom.
Nevertheless, Botting remains convinced that his motives were
pure and that both he and Day were above the repugnant but
legitimate views of the Christian Defence League.
"Day was concerned about the notion of free speech - the principle
of free speech of where I was coming from. He understood. Not
everyone did.''
Botting is emphatic "Day didn't by into Keegstra's anti-Semitic
platform at all. Put it this way, if it had to be a Christian world - God
help us - you'd want Day there.''
Gordon Laird is an award-winning journalist and author of
Slumming it at the Rodeo the Cultural Roots of Canada's Right-
wing Revolution, Douglas and McIntyre.
From NOW Magazine, April 13-19, 2000
