The occupation of Ottawa: Canadian rupture,American rapture or Reformation tradition?

Abstract

The key practices of the Freedom Convoy/trucker protest – prominently, truck-borne pilgrimage and truck-based occupation, but also ‘hot-tubbing’ – as well as the discursive practices of observers – notably, intimations of moral depravity, including child abuse – bear a remarkable resemblance to the behaviours often associated with the ‘popular’ or ‘radical’ protests of evangelicals in the 16th-century European Reformation. This suggests that the presence of diverse aspects of Christian evangelicalism in the Freedom Convoy (placards, rhetorical performances, etc.), generally considered exotic by those members of the press who did not just ignore them altogether, was deeply rooted in several histories of European immigration and settlement in Canada. This article argues that the Freedom Convoy, far from representing a rupture in Canadian political culture (possibly due to an invasive influence of contemporary American political culture), demonstrates long cultural continuities mediated by religious communities firmly established in Canada. Several Canadian evangelical subcultures present at the Freedom Convoy actively maintain a strong sense of European Reformation heritage, apparently along with what J. C. Scott once termed ‘hidden transcripts’ for evangelical political protest.