by Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridgehead
On June 10, the United Church of Canada (UCC) turns 100 years old. As the Calgary Herald put it on June 7: “What’s next?”
Well, probably nothing. The Herald reports that, “statistically, the UCC closes a church a week and some predict it may be extinct within 15 years. The membership of the denomination is half what it was in the 1960s, approximately 1.2 million people.”
Many of those people never attend services. A survey of realtor listings also reveals many old UCC buildings are up for sale. In Ontario, it has become popular to turn them into trendy new houses.
The UCC was created in 1925 when several Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian churches amalgamated to create a new Canadian denomination. As the Herald pointed out, it swiftly became “a church that people claimed as their own whether they attended Sunday services or not. It was the church a community would turn to for rituals: funerals, weddings, baptisms.” The UCC, in other words, was a utilitarian religious establishment for people who weren’t particularly religious.
The UCC, however, served another national function: It baptized, and indeed helped to midwife, the sexual revolution in Canada. Even in my community in rural Ontario, it is easy to identify a UCC building — they are festooned with a wide range of LGBT flags, the garish secular symbolism of cultural collapse. Decades ago, the UCC earned itself the nickname “the NDP at prayer” for the social activism that defined it.
Indeed, when Canada’s abortion activists launched the Abortion Caravan from Vancouver in 1970 and headed across the country with vehicles featuring slogans such as “Smash Capitalism” and “Abortion is Our Right,” the UCC assisted with what would become the defining event of the abortion crusade by hosting the activists on their journey to Ottawa, where they dumped a black coffin on Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s front lawn and shut down Parliament for the first time in its history by chaining themselves to its railings.
By the 1980s, the UCC explicitly supported the decriminalization of abortion, essentially signing the death warrants of the more than four million unborn children who have died by abortion in Canada since 1969. As the sexual revolution evolved, the UCC evolved, too. The “Gender, Sexuality, and Orientation” section of their website currently states, “We affirm that gender and sexuality are gifts of God, and welcome people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.” It also takes aim at Christian churches that still cling to biblical truth: