Abstract
This article responds to the other contributions in this special issue, focusing on points of convergence among them. These include a shared sense that the media mishandled the trucker convoy; a common conviction that the protestors’ rhetoric often involved an ideological substitution of part for whole (or vice versa); and a shared interest in how mythic narratives of the past shape present actions. The response concludes by pointing to the salience of Canadian regionalism and the mythic image of the pioneer, and how this relates to the protestors’ construction of distinctive masculinities.
It would be a mistake to treat right-wing populism as an entirely new or alien phenomenon in Canada. In my own province, a distinctly Canadian and prairie version of the Ku Klux Klan had established 129 locals by 1929, with a membership of some 25,000 Saskatchewanians (Robin, 1992: 43–44). Or again, in Toronto in the 1930s, numerous ‘swastika clubs’ were formed, ultimately resulting in a notorious six-hour riot at a softball game in Christie Pits on 16 August 1933 (see Robin, 1992: 187–189). 1 But these and similar episodes belong to a distant and mostly forgotten past. So it has been an unsettling experience for Canadians of current generations to come face-to-face with the very public and disruptive demonstration of reaction, thinly dressed up in the language of freedom and rights, that was the trucker convoy. It should hardly come as a surprise that many Canadians have struggled to make sense of a phenomenon that feels alien to them and has its most obvious parallels in recent rightist populisms in the USA, including the 6 January 2021 riots at the US Capitol, the resurgence south of the border of what is (somewhat inaccurately) referred to as the ‘alt-right’ and, of course, Trumpism. The almost apotropaic orientation of much of the media and other popular discourse on the trucker convoy ends up presenting the phenomenon as lurid and, ultimately, irrational and incomprehensible. Our current ways of thinking about the convoy actively inhibit understanding and explanation, including understanding and explanation of how and why the event occurred in Canada.
The foregoing five articles serve admirably to rectify this deficiency and are, in my view, altogether persuasive in their central claims, to wit that
It is incumbent on scholars of religion to serve as public intellectuals and, in so doing, offer nuanced, sensitive and self-consciously contextual analyses of current events of concern to a broader audience than other scholars (Christopher Jensen);
At least some elements of the convoy group embraced a peculiar modality of biblical interpretation, one which, on the one hand, appeals to ‘plain reading’, innocent of histories of interpretation, but, on the other, in fact applies a kind of allegorical reading in which ancient stories refer to modern realities (Christine Mitchell);
The convoy adopted – and adapted to Canadian purposes – Americanized rights discourses focusing on individual freedom, in which religious symbolism served to provide affective weight to a politics of resentment (Hannah Dick);
The convoy’s efforts to appropriate the legacy of Terry Fox, among other things, not only reflect an egregious ableism, but also employ a classic ideological move that redefines who gets to count as a Canadian having rights (Melanie Coughlin);
Distinctively Canadian ideological sources – specifically Canadian evangelical Christianities in the Mennonite, Lutheran and Reformed (Kuyperian) traditions – provide Reformation-era ‘hidden transcripts’ that help explain the truckers’ behaviour and the discourses around them (Johannes Wolfart).
Beyond this very brief sketch, I will not attempt further summation, lest some readers be tempted to substitute summary for careful reading of these rich, detailed and rewarding articles. Instead, I will focus in what follows on several points of important convergence among the pieces and, finally, suggest an additional angle of analysis that might further advance our understanding.
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The first and most obvious point of convergence among the articles, and the one that requires the least elaboration, is the conviction of all five authors that the media and other treatments 2 of the convoy were lacunose, largely unhelpful and particularly bad at explaining the presence of explicitly religious elements, such as the use of scriptural quotations on signage, or the ‘Jericho Marches’ evoking divine judgment and intervention, or the prominence of evangelical involvement in the protests. Wolfart, I think, speaks for all of the authors in this collection when he complains that in the news treatments of alliance between the truckers and evangelicals, ‘a pressing need for analysis yielded to the easy benefit of presenting the public with an exotic curio – and normalizing a clean distinction between political protest and religious expression’ (Wolfart, this issue). The failure here is culpable: as Jensen observes, virtually none of the press bothered to interview, quote or cite any scholars of religion. The one exception is a version of Mitchell’s article on scriptural interpretation, published in The Conversation (2022), which was cited in a few instances. For Jensen, the citation of Mitchell’s piece is an indication that scholarly efforts at outreach really do work, and that therefore the culpability is not entirely one-sided. We, too, as public scholars of religion – that is, as faculty in public non-sectarian universities – have a duty to tackle the issues of our day. Our students live in a world in which religion is discussed and evoked in a wide variety of contexts. The trucker convoy is a particularly vivid example of the direct and overt salience of our expertise to current affairs, but, in my view, our potential area of contribution is even wider than the explicitly religious. After all, what is the study of religion if not the analysis of ideology? And so who better to trace the construction and history of ideological discourses of any sort than we? Or, to put it differently – as illustrated especially in the pieces by Dick (who demonstrates the profound influence of religion on politics and the law, especially in the USA), Coughlin (who uses the concept of ‘myth’ to make sense of non-religious social identity discourses) and Wolfart (who shows the religious roots of what appears to be political ideological discourse) – the boundary between those ideological discourses we identify as religious and those we do not is very porous indeed, giving religionists considerable scope to apply their expertise very broadly.
What is involved in the role of public intellectual is rather more complicated, however, and requires more from us than simply piping up in the town square. For starters, Jensen stresses, it might mean letting go of treasured disciplinary conversations. The scholarly – often technical and even terminological – debates that so animate us much of the time are often of little concern to outsiders. Indeed, they can be downright alienating, as when our scholarly obsession with the content and analytic utility of religion as a category inhibits meaningful conversation with the general public – a general public that knows perfectly well what it means by ‘religion’. The hyper-specialization and narrow scope of our academic conversations may have their own reasons and rewards, but are impediments to communication with a broader audience. Engaging with that audience will often mean placing the issues that motivate us on the back burner. The role of public intellectual also requires us to recognize that our subject matter connects us – in ways that we might not always like – to insiders. Recognizing this does not mean that we have to capitulate to insider views or give up our own analytic and explanatory frames, but it does mean, as Jensen stresses, that we need to acknowledge our own positionality, and give up any pretence to a lofty disinterest. Instead, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions about what it is we think we are doing: who we are writing for and why, and what we think the scholar’s role in the public sphere actually is. If we are meant to be doing something more than engaging in arcane disciplinary conversations, and teaching students to do likewise, what is that ‘something’?
These strike me as very good questions, not least because, on reading Jensen’s article, I was genuinely puzzled to answer them. After some thought, however, I ended up falling back on an idea associated with the work of Jonathan Z Smith: that our job as scholars and teachers is to make the strange familiar and, correspondingly, to make the familiar strange, thereby opening up new and creative ways of thinking about things we already thought we understood or had dismissed as incomprehensible in their essence (see Smith, 1982: xii–xiii, 104; 2004: 379–389). If I teach a course on the letters of Paul, and the content sounds to my students like what they have learned in church, I am not doing my job. And if, in an introductory religion course in Canada, I describe a Vietnamese woman burning mock paper money for her ancestors and I make this sound exotic and inexplicable, again, I am failing to do my job. This orientation – selective familiarization and estrangement – strikes me as exceptionally well suited to the education of, and dialogue with, the public, as a means for us to use or apply our expertise in a way that genuinely and usefully changes how people think about things while at the same time avoiding the hierocratic role Jensen warns against.
Do the articles in this collection – notwithstanding that they are presented as an intra-disciplinary conversation rather than a public engagement – exemplify such an orientation? Emphatically, they do. They address various peculiarities associated with the convoy, or with the coverage thereof, and endeavour to make those peculiarities seem, well, a little less peculiar, a little less irrational, more accountable and therefore, as it happens, more human, more ‘like us’. Dick, for instance, addresses the peculiar and much-remarked-on invocation by protestors in Canada of American constitutional and legal language, such as appeals to their First Amendment or Miranda rights, or the use of Confederate flags by some truckers. It is easy to scoff at and mock this use of language and symbols as the product of ignorance, which has the additional benefit of delegitimizing those who adopt it. But Dick opts for comprehension over dismissal:
The Confederate convoy flag was one example of a mediated imaginary that grounded convoy disaffection with federal and provincial public health mandates within a larger, transnational regime of representation that is broadly anti-government, anti-elite and infused with radicalized connotations. In other words, the Confederate convoy flag [and the same applies to appeals to select American legal concepts] circulates within a symbolic order that transcends national borders and specific national histories even as it attaches a generic sense of loss to a highly specific historical account. (Dick, this issue)
The process is an affective one as much as, or more than, it is a logical or legal one. Or again, Coughlin addresses the bizarre and frankly offensive appropriation of the figure of Terry Fox. It is clear enough that there is a bitter irony in the act: the trucker convoy (at least nominally) 3 was promoting a cause – an end to COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates – that would have denied Fox himself, whose cancer treatments had impaired his immune system, access to the public sphere. Yet again, however, we are not left wringing our hands about how terribly hypocritical it all is. Instead, Coughlin relates this apparently outré discursive move to a long history of ‘mythic’ erasure of difference and diversity. This erasure involves creating a false picture of national origins in which the particularities of one dominant and privileged faction are assumed to stand in for the whole – a pattern that includes any number of all-too-familiar nationalisms and racisms. Do the articles equally estrange the familiar? I think so. Mitchell, for instance, demonstrates how ‘plain reading’ of scripture – surely an ordinary and even intuitive procedure – in fact, in the hands of the protestors, became something more akin to the rather unfamiliar process of allegorical readings of the Bible. Or again, Wolfart shows that a major model shaping the character and imagery of the trucker convoy was, of all things, the Reformation-era seizure of the city of Münster – which is to say, the ‘ordinary’ and ‘familiar’ face of (secular?) political protest as segregated from religion was turned on its head, and the religious transcript of political action exposed.
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What is probably the most significant point of convergence among the articles – one that all of them share, albeit in distinct ways – concerns one of the most basic and fundamental operations of ideology: the confusion, misrecognition and/or substitution of the part for the whole (or vice versa). All of the articles, in one way or another, touch on and analyse the ways in which the discourse, symbolism and various kinds of political action of the convoy take a specific and particular identity – say, that of Christian or of ‘able’ – and treat it as though it were the universal state of all Canadians. Or, to put it another way, ‘Canadians’ are redefined to include, and only include, those with these specific identities and characteristics. The matter is theorized most explicitly in Coughlin’s article in its treatment of Keiji Nishitani’s 1949 analysis of what he describes as the mythic erasure of difference and diversity in Imperial Japan by obscuring the ways minority groups had contributed to national identity. Nishitani describes a process in which
myth is used to evoke an antiquated age . . . [which] allows a dominant group to replace historical reality with a projection of their own identity back into the origins of the nation. This projection imaginatively replaces the historical reality of minoritized groups’ contributions to national identity . . . The antiquated age that the myth evokes obfuscates these contributions, as though the dominant group’s connection to the antiquated age represents a nation’s true origins. This replacement . . . allows a dominant group to place itself at the origin of a nation’s identity . . . Examples of such mythical equivocations include Nazi Germany’s uses of Teutonic imagery, which redefined German identity to exclude Jewish citizens. (Coughlin, this issue)
Interestingly, in spite of her use of the classic religious-studies concept of myth, the analysis Coughlin offers is not focused on the religious dimensions of the convoy at all (although she does emphasize the role religion plays in forming our affective identities) but rather on its ableism, the emplacement of the ‘sovereign subject’ as the norm of Canadian identity in lieu of the broad spectrum of abilities, vulnerabilities and disabilities that actually characterizes the population of this country. For those in the convoy, the lives that matter, the lives that share in Canadian-ness, are the lives of the able; anyone else constitutes merely that ‘bare life’, whose expendability is, per Agamben (1998), precisely how sovereignty is demonstrated. The use of the concept of myth to explain non-religious elements of the convoy demonstrates, of course, the salience of a religious-studies style of analysis to more general questions about ideology.
The other articles in the collection also point to the ways in which the participants in and allies of the convoy used symbol and discourse to superimpose a simplified and partial identity conception onto a complex, fractured reality and, in the process, erase difference in one way or another. Mitchell, for instance, points to the erasure of the difference between an ancient Near Eastern Achaemenid-era historical situation revolving around the rebuilding of a local temple in a Persian vassal state, as referred to in the text of 2 Chronicles 7:14, and the wholly different circumstances animating North American Christian nationalism. She also stresses that this passage is used by this faction (i.e. Christian nationalists) to ‘declare themselves as the only authentic Canadians’ (Mitchell, this issue; my emphasis) – that is, they replace the diversity of Canadian identity with the particularity of their own identity. Or again, Dick pays particular attention to the ways in which a discourse of persecution – a ‘cult of true victimhood’ – is used to prioritize one particular and partial (white, conservative, evangelical) identity over those of others; 4 conflict becomes a sign not of diversity but of the moral superiority of one’s own – allegedly long-suffering – group, leading to an inversion of the very essence of the idea of rights as freedom from constraint, to the collective (and factional) freedom to impose constraints on others, a ‘process through which the civil rights claims of minorities are disavowed as performative while those who experience backlash for speaking out against these claims are circumscribed as authentic sufferers’ (Dick, this issue). 5 Even Jensen’s article, which does not directly address the ideology of the convoy at all, offers analogous warnings about the recent interest in ‘religious literacy’ as a rationale and framework for teaching religious studies in universities (see now, especially, Wolfart, 2022). As Jensen frames it in his article, the religious-literacy approach, to the extent that it measures students’ memorization of facts about the theological and behavioural norms of individual traditions, threatens to reify good/bad and normal/abnormal dichotomies. To put this slightly differently, it threatens to make the beliefs and self-concept of one fraction of a given religious tradition (usually that fraction most amenable to Protestant liberalism) into a universal definitional standard for the ‘true’ or essential nature of the tradition as a whole.
One of the most sinister elements of the Ottawa protest was the phenomenon of Jericho Marches – symbolic (but still disruptive to Ottawans) re-enactments of the biblical account of the Battle of Jericho (Josh. 6:1–27), in which God miraculously demolished the walls of Jericho after the Israelites ritually circumambulated the city for seven days, blowing horns and shouting. Mitchell, Dick and Coughlin all make a point of discussing these distinctive actions, and view them as evidence of the religiously inflected character of the convoy and/or its links to American Christian nationalism. Coughlin further stresses the ways in which such a ritual helps form our affective identities and make (revised) norms feel real – a characterization that is akin to the claim of Bruce Lincoln (1989: 53) that rituals are instruments ‘for the evocation of those sentiments (affinity and estrangement) out of which society is constructed’. But it is only Mitchell who explicitly draws attention to the outcome of this battle in the Book of Joshua – a divinely endorsed massacre: ‘They devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys’ (Josh. 6:21). It is this detail that clarifies the relevance of the Jericho Marches for the issue of ideological substitution of part for whole. As Lincoln has argued, rituals are a vital instrument in the construction and deconstruction of social forms; they are integrative tools that serve to ‘promote social integration’ of ‘the complex amalgam of multiple subunits’ that underlie the ‘cleavages . . . and tensions’ in any society, even the most simple (Lincoln, 1989: 89). As Lincoln describes it, a bifurcated or otherwise divided social body – one for which unifying rituals have ceased to work – can reconstitute itself in a limited number of ways. They include integration, schism and massacre (Lincoln, 1989: 99). The fact, then, that the socially reconstitutive ritual of Jericho Marches intrinsically invokes extermination as a solution to division evinces both a consciousness of social cleavage – of irreparable tension between two different parts of a social whole – and the preferred manner of addressing it.
In the end, I think that it is this particular kind of ideological substitution or misrecognition that motivates the quite critical stance these authors express towards the convoy protestors. We can see the issue most pointedly in Wolfart’s fascinating comments, towards the end of his article, about how modernization appears in the west in (inter alia) the forms of a move from privatized to public policing and from public to privatized religion. The logic that links these moves together, in my view, is precisely that of adequate representation of the whole: private police serve private interests, while public religion risks imposing the norms of a fraction of the population onto the population as a whole. The convoy protesters sought to impose a fractional identity on the whole of the country by using a sense of religiously specific moral superiority to deny rights to other social subunits. In so doing, they erased the difference and complexity that are, in fact, constitutive of our society – an erasure that at least symbolically (via Jericho Marches) evoked liquidating, if necessary, unintegrated elements. Such activities represent a movement of counter-Enlightenment or of anti-modernism, at least one historical representative of which has been fascism. Interestingly, a similar but inverted appeal to representation marks the discourse of the protestors. As Wolfart and Dick highlight in different ways, the most powerful rhetorical move by convoyers is their false claim to lack of representation (i.e. persecution) in society as a whole. Once, however, we recognize both the particularity of evangelical identity and the continued and prominent role Christianity (especially Protestant Christianity) already plays in our culture, the power of these claims is significantly diminished. As Wolfart puts it: ‘Christian heritage advocates or Christian nationalists in Canada really have only one string in their bow: to bemoan the loss of European and/or Christian cultural legacy in Canada. Disprove that loss and what have they got? Absolutely nothing’ (Wolfart, this issue). In any case, an important element binding these articles together is their implicit shared endorsement of that modernist commitment to universalism or, differently, their opposition to particularizing counter-Enlightenment moves. Of course, claims to universalism have been the basis of powerful critiques of the Enlightenment, but what much of the critique really comes down to is that Enlightenment thinkers and institutions have failed to live up to their own standards – that by treating, for example, white European men as the exemplars of humanity writ large, they have shrouded a very narrow particularism in a cloak of universality. The problem is not the ideal itself but its defective realization.
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A third area of convergence among several of the articles appears in their analysis of the ideological operations of what I would call ‘myth’. I must stress that I am using this loaded term in a manner that is rather different than that employed by Coughlin, not because I disagree with her analysis but because I am focusing on something a little different than she is. At issue is the manner in which privileged narratives of the past (historically accurate or not) are used to shape conceptions and emotions about present action. Here, the convergence of ideas is obscured somewhat by the use of differing terminology. A primary focus of Mitchell’s article is the treatment of biblical text, and especially the appearance of a text from 2 Chronicles 7:14 on a banner flown as part of the convoy protest. Mitchell notes that participants in the protests claimed a ‘plain-reading’ approach to biblical texts, one rooted in the Reformation emphasis on Sola Scriptura, and one they apply also to the interpretation of legal texts. She argues, however, that what the protestors are actually doing, when, for example, they see in texts like 2 Chronicles 7:14 reference to their own circumstances, is very far indeed from plain reading. Rather, it is an allegorical approach to scripture, one that asserts a (mystical? symbolic?) correspondence between details of the text and desultory elements of the current situation. While in no way questioning the accuracy of Mitchell’s basic point (that whatever is happening, it is not ‘plain reading’) or her analysis of the hermeneutical artificiality of making ancient texts into coded references to modern realities, I think that the use of the term ‘allegory’ to describe this process obscures more than it illuminates. I would prefer, as a description of this interpretive technique, the idea of narratives of the past serving as paradigms for present actions. That is to say, I strongly suspect that the protestors do not actually believe that the original text of Chronicles is a divine code in which specific but hidden reference is made to events of the future, such that the divine authorial intent of the reference to ‘my people’ in the text in question is actually not the Israelites but today’s Canadians, and the reference to ‘their wicked ways’ is not a reference to particular sins of the Israelites but an esoteric reference to anti-COVID measures – this would indeed be allegory as I understand the term. Instead, I believe that the protestors, if pushed on it, would indeed concede that the text is really about the ancient Israelites and about their use of the Solomonic temple, but would regard this story, these events, as representing a pattern to which contemporary events can (and should) be compared – a paradigmatic use of the text (or, really, of the past generally, especially the religiously significant past). I also happen to think that the deployment of this passage, with its (contextual) reference to the temple, in the particular service of protest is significantly aided by an uncited intertext – namely, the gospel accounts of Jesus’ so-called ‘cleansing’ of the Jerusalem temple. The unstated but undeniable presence of this story in (Christian) memory allows for other biblical references to the temple to stand in for ‘the man’ – whatever allegedly powerful force is opposed to, or being opposed by, God’s people (the story also, of course, serves as a major textual source for Christian anti-Judaism).
If we grant this slight adjustment of language, we can see more clearly the striking similarity between the ideological process described by Mitchell and that described by Wolfart. For Wolfart, there is a remarkable and detailed continuity between the events of the trucker protest and representations or narratives of the 1534–1535 Anabaptist takeover of the city of Münster during the Reformation. The continuity is no coincidence, and no American imposition; it is a reflection of the persistence in Canada of evangelical Christian groups such as the Mennonites, Lutherans and neo-Calvinists, who trace their ideals and identities back to that era. The similarities between then and now, he claims, have been mediated by a ‘hidden transcript’ of evangelical protest. But we might equally say that the model or paradigm of Reformation events has been used to inform, to shape and to interpret current circumstances and appropriate responses thereto. The effectiveness of this kind of mythic appeal to the past lies in its simplicity. If one can map events of the religiously consequential past onto circumstances, details and especially actors in present conflicts, then one can establish both the virtue of one’s own identity and behaviours and the promise of (some kind of) victory, both of which help account for the affective force of this use of myth. We may use a narrative about the past to describe, for example, a typical pattern of human behaviour and divine response: the people have sinned, and God demands a change of heart that will lead to a change of behaviour, or he will destroy them, as in 2 Chronicles 7:14. Insofar as we can plausibly parallel the sinning of the text to the behaviour of our enemies (which will depend on at least some correspondence of symbolic details) and the repentance required with our own demands, then we can confidently establish that, in conformity to past patterns, God sides with those seeking such changes, that therefore we who seek them are on the side of God, and that we and our righteous demands will prevail. Or again, we may use a romantic narrative in which evangelical trekkers seize civic control of an otherwise hell-bound polity to establish the appropriateness of (our particular 21st-century) popular cultural subversion when it is wielded against the ungodly, and may expect at least some kind of positive result. The rebels of Münster hardly won the day, but the Anabaptists and other evangelicals did establish long-lived successor communities, as well as provide valiant examples for those seeking to do the will of God.
This use of what I am calling ‘myth’ intersects with Dick’s article as well. It establishes something of the logic behind the otherwise-peculiar appeals to American legal concepts like the First Amendment and American historical events like the Civil War. These concepts and events are paradigms, establishing a general pattern in which the righteous rise against the forces of tyranny and either eke out a glorious win or fall in tragic but inspiring heroism. Or, in Dick’s words, ‘it attaches a generic sense of loss to a highly specific historical account’. The logic is even more evident when it comes to the deeply rooted motif of persecution that pervades Christian rhetoric and identity construction. As Dick notes, drawing on the work of Candida Moss and Elizabeth Castelli, the literary motif – as Moss (2014) argues, a highly fictionalized motif – of early Christians being violently martyred by the (Roman) state established a pattern or paradigm in which opposition is taken as direct evidence of moral superiority. 6 If, therefore, one can find any grounds for claiming discrimination or mistreatment, even with respect to the most innocuous opposition or the simple failure to agree with or endorse one’s opinions, one has established that one is akin to the newly liberated Israelites crossing the Red Sea (thus appropriating the symbolic resonances of this story not only from one historically persecuted minority, Jews, but also from Black American claims on this trope) or the bold martyrs who asserted their Christian identity in the face of a horrible public execution. Often, this is a real stretch, as with the perennial (American, conservative) appeal to a non-existent ‘war on Christmas’ perpetrated by anyone who audaciously refers more generically to ‘the holidays’. It is probably this odd feature of Christianity – especially but not exclusively Protestant Christianities – that accounts for the perversion of rights jurisprudence around ‘religious freedom’ in the USA, which Dick comments on, such that the collective religious ‘right’ to impose one’s (usually Protestant) views on others trumps the individual’s right to be free of religiously motivated oppression. Mere demurral from specific doctrinal views and/or symbolic practices comes, through the inflationary lens of mythic persecution, to be viewed as outright assault, on a par with being fed to the lions, and therefore evidence of the iniquity of one’s opponents, as well as the moral rectitude of one’s own (religious, doctrinal) position.
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One final point. It is a bit much to ask, with a phenomenon as complex and multifaceted as the Freedom Convoy/trucker protest, that the kind of careful and deliberately modest analysis so superbly exemplified in the foregoing articles be comprehensive, and I make no such demand. I do want to point, however, to a factor that is not given much consideration in the articles. It is a factor that I suspect is apparent to me precisely because of my own personal context – an Ontarian uncomfortably transplanted, as an adult, to the western prairie. That quintessentially Canadian factor is regionalism, and especially the burgeoning sense of distance and resentment fostered on the prairies (including quite deliberately by provincial premiers such as Danielle Smith and Scott Moe) towards central Canada (Ontario and Quebec) and the federal government. The convoy, after all, did not begin in, say, New Brunswick; it came out of the west and travelled towards the east. It did not run, like the Terry Fox marathon Coughlin discusses, from east to west, nor did it aim for a complete cross-country, sea-to-sea, route. Instead, it terminated in Ottawa, the national capital and a city straddling (along with Gatineau) the two ‘central’ provinces of Ontario and Quebec. It is western regionalist resentment, I think, that made appeals to the Christian myth of persecution so natural for the protesters; a political sense of marginalization was already present and could easily be mapped onto paradigmatic narratives that stressed the beleaguered status of God’s people. And this further suggests that at least one element of the convoy’s ideological process of substituting a part for the whole comes through casting a particularistic western and prairie identity – an identity that is normatively white, evangelical Christian and able-bodied, among other things – as the universal authentic Canadian identity.
The authenticity of this particular vision of Canadian identity is inextricably tied to the mythological standing, for westerners, of the (carefully constructed) figure of the pioneer. 7 It is notable, for instance, that the convoy also promoted a rather specific sort of masculinity – one that was brilliantly exemplified in the image of trucks crossing the Red Sea that appeared on convoy websites and newsletters (see Dick, Figure 1). The miraculous nature of the parting of the Sea is rather vitiated by the image of gigantic, shiny, sleek and manifestly powerful – overwhelmingly powerful – heavy machinery; one almost gets the sense that the trucks, not God, parted the waves. And indeed it was large trucks that were the primary weapon of the convoy, the mechanism by which the ‘occupation’ became effective. It is one thing, as with the Occupy Wall Street movement, to set up tents and signs in an urban park. It is quite another to snarl traffic and block streets with vehicles whose primary shared characteristic is that they are unmoveable and, of course, have loud horns. What is on display here is an aggressive masculinity, but of a distinctly working-class variety, a kind of can-do, common-sense-oriented masculinity that shuns sophistication or ambiguity as effete and emphatically rejects the rather ‘metrosexual’ identity associated with urban centres that is so well embodied by Justin Trudeau (helping to account for the vitriol of the ‘Fuck Trudeau’ stickers and flags that appear on so many pickup trucks in the Prairies). It is also a version of masculinity that has come to be associated here in the west with the petroleum industry (the carbon tax being a major fulcrum in leveraging anti-federal feeling), though its origins, as noted, lie further in the past.
The impact of the image of the pioneer on this particular version of masculinity has significant ramifications for the presentation of femininity as well. Typically, we imagine an assertive masculinity to be naturally coupled with a submissive femininity. This is not so for the pioneer, where the appropriate womanly behaviour and character are associated with a pragmatic spirit, with strength and with full female participation (in gender-appropriate ways, of course) in the difficulties and labours of taming, cultivating and civilizing the western wilds. Hence, in the pioneer monuments one sees in western North America, for example, the women are portrayed as fully sharing the men’s work of ‘westward expansion and the white civilizing project’ (Prescott, 2019: 32). 8 Women appear in these monuments, often gender-specifically with children in their arms, alongside men bearing arms, pulling wagons with them and generally accompanying them in their pioneering work (see especially the plates in Prescott, 2019: 81–96). The ease with which women assumed effective leadership roles in the convoy protests, as described in several of the articles here, reflects this regional – specifically western Canadian – valorization of the pioneer and pioneer identities.
The force of the pioneer as another kind of paradigm for the convoy helps account for at least some of the resonance of the central symbolic elements of the convoy protest. I do not, for example, doubt that Wolfart is fundamentally correct to adduce remarkable and extensive parallels between Reformation-era evangelical protest and the Freedom Convoy, nor do I doubt that the ‘hidden transcript’ from which the truckers’ behaviour emerged offers the most significant explanation especially for the ways in which they fused political protest and religious enthusiasm. But these elements of the behaviour and symbolism of the convoy may be overdetermined. It is difficult to deny some kind of symbolic overlap, too, between a convoy of trucks from the west and the image of the wagon train coming from the east to tame the savage land for (white, Christian) order and civilization. Indeed, in the pioneer monuments analysed by Cynthia Prescott, the most common accessory depicted is a gun; however, the second most common is a cart or wagon. At some level, then, once we factor in our stubbornly persistent Canadian regionalism, the convoy may be read as the return of the righteous and able Christian pioneers, who, having tamed the west, have now returned to do likewise – to impose pragmatic common sense – in the east, whence first they came. The incredibly impoverished and uncreative vision from which these images and symbols are drawn should serve to remind us just how limited and repetitive the phenomenology of reaction really is.
