Is Christian Nationalism Rearing Its Head in BC?

This article was originally published in PressProgress on 5/13/26.

At a BC Conservative leadership debate hosted by the Canada Strong and Free Network last month, the concept of “Christian values” was brought up more than once, with one candidate asserting that “Christian values have an absolute place in this party.”

Experts consider it a sign of a growing Christian-nationalist presence in Canada’s conservative politics.

In the debate, Caroline Elliott was pressed by her opponents about remarks she made on a Global News panel during the province’s 2020 election, in which she’d called the anti-LGBTQ views of two BC Liberal candidates “abhorrent.” 

Leadership candidate Yuri Fulmer asked Elliott if she had in fact “called social conservative values ‘abhorrent.’”

In response, Elliott affirmed that “social conservative views, Christian values, have an absolute place in this party. I will always defend that. I welcome social conservatives, Christian values into this party. I truly do. And I think, in fact, there’s a great deal of alignment between those values and conservative values. I’ll defend that any day of the week.”

One of the BC Liberal candidates whose views Elliott decried in 2020 was Laurie Throness, who as MLA for Chilliwack-Hope had been criticized for his comments on the 2SLGBTQ+ community and views on conversion therapy. In 2016, Throness claimed the 2SLGBTQ community had become a “powerful lobby” that discriminated against people whose views on gender were “rooted in Christian faith.”

Later in the debate, another of Elliott’s opponents, former MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay, directly equated Throness’s beliefs with Christian values. 

“You were on a public channel, on video, in public saying that Laurie Throness’s beliefs, Christian values, and him not believing in gender ideology were personally abhorrent to you,” Findlay said.

Elliott responded by saying that, as someone who grew up Catholic, she found the suggestion that she finds Christian values abhorrent to be “ludicrous.”

However, as the BC Conservative hopefuls debate whether or not Christian values are being defended within the party, experts say it shows how the line between Christian nationalism and conservatism is becoming increasingly blurred.

“Now we’re seeing it where elected officials are engaging with [Christian nationalism] much more vocally and using some of the coded language that is important to these groups. There is definitely, globally, a rise of the far right linking itself to religion,” Carmen Celestini, a lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Waterloo, told PressProgress.

Ian Bushfield, the executive director of the BC Humanist Association, says that this kind of nationalism is being imported from the US, under the pretence that Christianity is under attack.

“What I think we’ve seen recently, particularly with the rise of the MAGA movement in the US and related movements in Canada, especially after the convoy, is this willingness to parade it, to really trumpet this framing of ‘Christianity is under attack and we need to stand strong for Christian values or to promote religious freedom,’” Bushfield told PressProgress, noting that “they don’t often mean religious freedom for everyone.”

“What was once maybe a dog whistle or a little bone here or there is becoming more normalized and more central to the debate.”

Bushfield says it’s important to remember that the message of Christianity being pushed or used by politicians isn’t necessarily a notion of Christianity that is representative of the religion as a whole. 

“The way we have to look at this movement of Christianity in politics is white Christian nationalism. It’s not just simply about opposing social progress, but about a hierarchical worldview that is paternalistic, that does have this idealized culture,” Bushfield said.

“Some of this is threatening to remove people’s rights that are hard-fought and hard-won.”

Celestini says that “Christian values” are being used as an umbrella term to mobilize support for conservative causes.

“It’s something that people can engage with, defining themselves, but know they need to fight for,” Celestini told PressProgress.

“It can be something that mobilizes people to fight for what they think is on the right side or on the eternal side, or that God is supporting them in what they’re fighting for. It’s an ambiguous term, but something that people can relate to when they attach it to their religious faith.”

Neither Elliott, Fulmer nor Findlay responded to questions from PressProgress.

But while the recent comments were made in a debate in British Columbia, Celestini says that the roots of Christian nationalism and white supremacy exist across the country.

“This is a national movement, it’s not provincial, and it’s something that we really need to pay attention to to protect communities who are on the margin, or communities who could be victimized by this notion of white oppressiveness or victimhood,” Celestini said, naming groups like Action4Canada and the Liberty Coalition as among those peddling these ideas.

Groups like Action4Canada have claimed it was their lobbying that helped get 2SLBTQ+ resources removed from Saskatchewan schools. The group also tried to similarly mobilize in BC, and regularly platforms anti-immigrant and anti-DEI rhetoric. 

“We have these groups that are not just putting up the mantle of Christianity,” said Celestini, “but training people who want to engage in politics to be involved in teacher associations, to be involved in municipal politics, to get in on the smaller sort of lower level of politics and then work their way up.”

In 2023, a CBC News investigation revealed that a right-wing evangelical group called the Liberty Coalition was trying to raise $1.3 million to recruit hundreds of fundamentalist Christians to run for office at all levels of government, with the goal of “calibrating the laws to align with Biblical principles.”

In these spaces, “Christian values,” as defined by some members of the far right, are being held up as license to discriminate. 

“They’re redefining some of these things to really push this narrative of not just Christianity, but also whiteness, and attacks or the moral panics that we’ve seen for the last 10 years rising globally against LGBTQ, against critical-race-based theory, against immigration” Celestini said.

In the BC Conservative leadership race, vows to “remove ideology from education,” posited by many candidates, have to do with pushing back against resources related to the 2SLGBTQ+ community.

In addition, many of the candidates have vowed to remove land acknowledgements from classrooms, claiming that they teach students to be “ashamed of their past,” which both Bushfield and Celestini say stems from a different interpretation of Canadian history.

“It positions whiteness and Christianity coming here and building what we have, which is now perceived as being under existential threat by progressiveness, by LGBTQ, by feminism, by immigration,” Celestini said.