Parts of a Whole Worth Defending

In the first of a two part series, Jonathon Van Maren and Peter Stockland, of The Acacia Group’s communications department, discuss what drew them to the firm and its potential to bring change to Canada legally, politically and culturally.

Peter Stockland: What made you say ‘yes’ to working for Acacia, Jonathon?

Jonathon Van Maren: I think the first thing is that Albertos was very hard to say no to, and I just really enjoyed working with him and with (co-founder Faye Sonier). I worked with Albertos in a bunch of different capacities through my work in the pro-life movement. For a very long time, Albertos was one of maybe three lawyers at the forefront of defending freedom of speech for pro-life groups. He very quickly became the go-to guy for everybody. There’s a bunch of great lawyers who work on the pro-life file. In my view, Albertos was the best because of the way he would give you advice but wouldn’t just say fight, fight, fight. He would be very honest and say things like: “This might be worth doing but you’ll probably lose.” That level of honesty is hard to come by. I just really, really admired him. I was fortunate enough to become friends with him over the years because obviously the Canadian social conservative circle is not particularly large, and in it Albertos loomed very large. When he asked me to join Acacia, I was honored. He was my friend, but I also really looked up to him.

Peter Stockland: When I interviewed our colleague Lia Milousis, she mentioned that Albertos encouraged her when she was at law school. He told her “Don’t worry, if I can make it through law school, you’ll be fine.” Lia said, “I think he was probably underselling himself.” I said, “You might be one of 10,000 people who’ve ever used “underselling himself” and Albertos in the same sentence.”

(laughter)

Jonathon Van Maren: Oh, man. He didn’t undersell himself, but he didn’t oversell himself, either. Over the last 10 years especially, I became keenly aware that in all these stories I was covering for a wide range of social conservative publications there was evidence of a huge lack of preparation on the part of churches and Christian communities in general to prepare for what is coming. Cases individually would get covered, incidents would get covered, but there wasn’t any kind of cohesive strategy or single place that you would go to when you needed a good defense and when you needed somebody to tell you what was happening and what might happen next. So, his project, which I know he developed with you and Faye, is probably one of the most badly needed projects to be launched in Canada within the Christian community in my lifetime.

PS: When you said it was hard to say ‘no’ to him, was it hard to say “no” to him because he had confidence that somehow, some way, things would get done? That he would just make them happen?

JVM: I would agree with that. He was both self-deprecating and brash (because) he was incredibly good at his job. I have to say, a lot of times we’re thinking: What would Albertos do? And the answer often is what we’re doing, but he would just have been way more confident.

PS: When he pitched this idea to me on a golf course at Montebello, we were with two other friends who are very astute people. They immediately started weighing the pros and cons and how could that work and what would it be. I was just, like, yep, I’m in. I thought it was a natural idea to bring communications work and legal work under the same roof. You didn’t need to hop from one foot to the other to figure it out. What about the explicitly Christian dimension of it, though? Did it give you any pause that Acacia, while it doesn’t exclude anybody, is very proudly and explicitly Christian?

JVM: The extent to which we wear our creeds on our sleeves is determined by what kind of situation we’re in. So, if you’re discussing abortion with somebody, it might make sense to just lay out the arguments as they can understand them in the moment. It’s different in our sort of post-Christian Canadian society where only 11 per cent of Canadians attend any form of worship even monthly. Not just churches. Synagogues, mosques, temples. But when Christians are looking for somewhere to go, they’re looking for somebody who understands their arguments. They’re looking for people who understand the situation they’re in. When they talk about conscience rights, it’s important the people they’re talking to understand what a conscience is and why conscience rights are a valid concept rather than a chief excuse for bigotry. A libertarian lawyer might believe in the right of his client to have freedom of speech, might be fighting for him as best he can, but may privately think that in, fact, a lot of Christians’ deeply held convictions are an excuse for bigotry. What Christians have badly needed are lawyers who speak their language so that when they call Acacia’s number, they know the people on the other end of the line are actually going to believe many of the things that they believe, understand why they believe them, and defend them, not just because they have the right to freedom of speech, but because we want them to have the right to say the specific things that they are saying. My view of the ministry of Acacia is that we do the work that we do in both comms and law as if Christianity were true.

PS: True, but I find people often don’t get how it’s possible to bring that Christian truth together with what is supposed to be a secular occupation. I’ve always been a Catholic journalist but become a very explicit Catholic journalist while publishing Convivium magazine and then taking over the publisher-editor job at their Catholic Register. So, I’ve been in a Catholic oriented journalist context for going on 15 years now. I still run into people who ask “What’s a Catholic journalist? What’s the difference between a Catholic journalist and any other kind of journalist?” And I always say – you could use the word Christian or Catholic – I think that the principle’s the same – that’s it’s like a Venn diagram. It’s the image I always used to explain to people that I’m a Catholic and I’m a journalist. They’re parts of a whole. I don’t have two heads. They’re connected within the Venn diagram of journalism and faith. What distinguishes the image is that at the center is Christ. The center of the Venn diagram always has to be Christ. So, whatever I do, however I think, it would be totally incoherent to think outside that Venn diagram, outside that context, without that center. That’s certainly applicable in terms of Acacia. I don’t just think it’s applicable. I know it’s applicable. It is what we do: Christ is at the center. It doesn’t mean you have to say Christ in every other sentence. It means that Christ is assumed in every sentence. Would you agree with that?

JVM: The Venn diagram analogy is quite interesting because I see the work, the comms work of Acacia, very much as recognizing a number of historical realities that Christians have been slow to recognize. Canada’s multicultural patchwork means that most Christian communities are pretty isolated. You’ve got Ukrainian Catholics, you’ve got Dutch Reformed, you’ve got Chinese Evangelicals. Because of the nature of Canada, people came here, they set up communities, they worked hard to build independent communities. And that was kind of the allure of Canada to a degree. But in the meantime, during the (Justin) Trudeau years, we saw a number of pieces of legislation, including the so-called conversion therapy ban that could actually prohibit some private conversations between pastors and their parishioners. And so, I think the taskification is to function as translators for these Christian communities who don’t speak the language of the culture. And when they speak, the culture doesn’t understand their language either. Our job is to communicate the actual motives and the convictions of Christians in a culture at large that has long moved past those convictions and doesn’t understand them very effectively.

In the concluding segment of a two-part dialogue between Peter Stockland and Jonathon Van Maren, Jonathon explains, through his own experience as a Christian in an often hostile secular environment, how The Acacia Group and its communication arm can provide cultural translation across the legal, political and cultural divides.

PS: With so many of the Christians we’ve helped with our communications services over the last couple of years, I thought there would be more certainty about how to deal with what they face. But many, when they get drawn into the world, say to us, “Okay, what do I do first?”

Am I being fair?

JVM: I think it’s entirely fair, and it gets back to the role of communications consultants as sort of functioning as cultural translators, because I think that people underestimate the extent to which many Christian communities in Canada function entirely as islands. They have their own schools. They have their own institutions. They’ve created ecclesiastical polities, and people can live their entire lives inside these communities, literally from cradle to grave. Many churches have their own assisted living care facilities.

So, you can go from the Christian preschool all the way to the Christian care home without really having to interact with the outside world except in the commercial sector. As long as you did a good job and treated people properly, you didn’t really have to get into prolonged discussions about your convictions unless you wanted to. And if you were discussing your convictions, you probably weren’t picking the specific trigger issues that have created so many problems for so many Acacia clients.

I was less surprised, I think, than you were, because I’ve realized that my own experience growing up in the Christian community was…In university, I realized that the way that I had grown up was utterly foreign to almost everybody I went to school with. They would say to me “Oh, you’re one of five siblings? How many cousins did you say you have? Over a hundred?” When they would ask me questions about how I grew up they sort of got this “Jane Goodell with the chimps” look on their faces. Their fundamental assumptions, which most of them had never particularly questioned, were utterly different from mine.

In conversation with even my classmates at university, I had to navigate how to even discuss those issues because I held assumptions about the other person’s views as well that weren’t necessarily true. I didn’t come to conclusions the way they did, and vice versa.

My view is that every Christian community in the country should have an awareness of what Canadian culture is actually like: what Canadian politics actually means for their individual communities. They should be preparing for the fact there are activists who intensely dislike the existence of communities in which hostile, anti-Christian movements have no sway whatsoever. And they would really like to establish beach heads inside these Christian communities. A lot of the policies we’ve seen over the last decade – from the NDP attempt in Alberta to force gay straight alliance clubs into Christian schools to Trudeau’s conversion therapy ban – are oriented towards doing that.

The multiculturalism of Pierre Trudeau could be charitably articulated as people kind of leaving each other alone. The State had no formal view on a range of issues. Communities interacted in a commercial way without really getting bothered by what the Hindu couple down the road thought of my relationship or what the Baptist or Reformed or Catholic family across town thought about the way we teach our kids. But the reality that many Christians are waking up to in Canada today is that the government actually does have its own dogmas. It defends those dogmas fiercely and is, in many cases, even more evangelical than the evangelicals and the Christians.

PS: We referenced our colleague Lia earlier, and she acknowledges the power of the dogmas and propaganda you’re talking about. She went into women’s studies thinking it was necessary to be able to take back to her community exactly what was going on in those university classes. What she discovered is totally in line with what you’re saying, Jonathon. She’s 28 now, so about 10 years ago, she’s a young woman who goes off to university. She wants to bring home a message of “Okay, here’s a report from the front lines; we’ve got to wake up and open our eyes.” But she in turn, a savvy young woman, is aghast at what’s going on. She had no idea it was that far gone. I don’t want to scare people or be pessimistic, but Lia goes into the women’s studies world and she comes out saying, “Oh my goodness, this is way worse than I thought.”

But in line with that, one thing that really resonated for me right from the beginning on that golf course with Albertos proposing the idea for The Acacia Group was how emblematic of hope it is. We can give information, but one of the things we need to be there to do is offer hope. We know the language. We can, if you want, deconstruct the language or help reinterpret the language. Most importantly, we bring to the table a sense of hope that if you fight it the right way, progress can be made, or at least our point of view can be defended.

JVM: Albertos was always very circumspect in that he wasn’t someone who said, “there’s hope for this case and hope for that; if truth is on your side, you’re going to win,” because anybody who says that isn’t very familiar with the history of Christianity for the last 2000 years. Just because you’re right, doesn’t mean that you’re going to win at all. If that was the case, there wouldn’t be 380 million persecuted Christians around the world. But I do think that a lot of discussions are avoided by Christians on the assumption that our arguments have no persuasive power. And that is not the case.

When it comes to communication, I am genuinely optimistic. I also work for a pro-life organization. We see people change their minds about abortion every single day. So much of the consensus that we see in post-Christian Canada exists in part because everybody thinks it’s rock solid. But if we believe the consensus is built on shifting sand, maybe we should act like it.

PS: An example is the work we’re doing through Acacia for the Christian Heritage Party, which gave us permission to talk about their matter. They ran bus ads in Hamilton which show a picture of a woman bordered by a sentence which says “Woman: An Adult Female.” They retained The Acacia Group to assist them in defending their right to free speech. Absolutely, to your point, what CHP is doing over the banned bus shelter posters in Hamilton, is to strip it down to its basics and ask: “Why can’t we say what it is we want to say by stating a simple biological fact here?” In other words, putting the ball in the other guy’s court by saying, “Tell me why I can’t state biological facts as a registered political party in a public place. The onus is on you to show me why I can’t say it.” It’s flipping the table around and saying, okay, you’ve staked your claim, but you need to tell me why I must assume it or agree with it. I do invest a lot of hope in it as being one of those sorts of catalysts that it starts that long process of rethinking what it is we’re doing.

JVM: In that sense, there isn’t anybody else who’s attempting to do what Acacia is doing, I think very successfully. I think that Albertos’ vision is obviously proving itself over and over again already. Sometimes things have to get really bad before people can recognize what they’ve given up.

PS: There’s a practical dimension to this in that we don’t want to just fight to fight. We want to fight to win in court. We want to fight to help people win arguments. We want to fight to do those things, recognizing that the ultimate fight has already been won for us. Does that make sense to you?

JVM: The truth is always worth defending.

Peter Stockland leads the Strategic Communications division at The Acacia Group and is the author of The Acacia Arc newsletter. He has decades of experience as a Canadian journalist, including as editor-in-chief of the Montreal Gazette, editorial page editor of the Calgary Herald, vice-president of English language magazines for Reader’s Digest Canada, and Publisher of the Catholic Register. Peter also enjoys writing short-stories and other fiction, which have been featured in numerous publications across Canada.