Anglicans in Canada face second term with concern
Amid the rising international tensions and overwhelming flood of executive orders under the new Trump administration, it is the duty of Anglicans in Canada to speak up for the marginalized and vulnerable, says Canon Maggie Helwig, rector of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Church in Toronto. In a phone interview she took while multitasking on preparations for the church’s homeless drop-in program, Helwig told the Anglican Journal her goal was to bring that message to her parish.
“We need to keep speaking so that people understand that welcoming the stranger is a fundamental Christian value, so that people understand that vulnerable people—including trans people, who are being heavily targeted—are the people the church is most called to value and protect,” she says.
Helwig is one of many Anglicans in Canada who are deeply concerned about the effects Trump’s presidency will have both in the United States and Canada. Like Helwig, Archbishop Anne Germond, acting primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, encourages Anglicans to speak up on behalf of marginalized people. Asked by the Journal what she thought Anglicans should bear in mind during the Trump administration’s early days, she encouraged those suffering and struggling to remember God has not abandoned them.
“As Christians, the gospel imperative is for us to love and to show mercy to others. We continue our vital ministries of caring for the poor and the outcast, extending hospitality to refugees and strangers,” she responded in an email.
“The gospel challenges us to be like those who are ‘blessed’ in the kingdom—who do not hate when hated but rather do good to those who hate and pray for them.”
Helwig’s parish is in a poor, inner-city neighbourhood, and it focuses on outreach to homeless and street-involved people. The congregation includes Black, neurodiverse and gender-diverse people, and she says that in that context it makes sense to preach about the sin inherent in Trump’s uncompassionate policies toward the vulnerable. And while fighting the administration on the policies themselves is not a task for the church in Canada, Helwig says, pushing back against the attitude it promotes certainly is.
“We are already seeing a harder, meaner attitude here in Canada, too: things being blamed on immigrants, things being blamed on trans people, things being blamed on homeless people, on ‘drug addicts.’ Blame and targeting and othering.”
Helwig says she wants parishioners to know the church will speak out against that attitude. She believes churches should also expect a wave of demand for services like food banks, homeless drop-ins and other supports, both for Canadians affected if and when the tariffs land and for a potential wave of asylum seekers rebuffed by the United States.
Meanwhile, Alongside Hope, formerly known as the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, is seeing its partners affected by the administration’s massive cuts to development funding through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), says Janice Biehn, Alongside Hope’s communications and marketing coordinator. For example, Church World Service, an agency that provides food assistance and refugee aid in conflict zones in East Africa, has had to suspend its refugee settlement program in the United States.
Andrea Mann, director of global relations for the Anglican Church of Canada, says she agrees with a February call by the Canadian Council for Refugees for Canada to withdraw from the Safe Third Country Agreement, which refuses refugee protection to many would-be refugees entering Canada via the United States on the reasoning that there is no need to travel to another country once they have arrived in the presumed-safe United States.
In a blog post on Alongside Hope’s website, Will Postma, the charity’s executive director, wrote that the charity would continue to embody kindness, justice, mercy and walking humbly with God. “At such a time as this, wrenching and uncertain as it is, may we continue to protect lives and uphold the dignity of all.”
Divergent ideas of Christianity
On Jan. 21, his first full day in office, Trump attended a national prayer service at which Bishop Mariann Budde of the Episcopal Church diocese of Washington D.C. gave a sermon outlining some basic principles of the Christian faith. She endorsed unity between the increasingly polarized political factions in the U.S. and honesty, humility and the dignity of every human being, founded on the image of God in every person. She concluded with a plea for Trump to have mercy on those who were afraid of what he might do during his term.
Trump responded by demanding an apology. Online, some of his supporters called Budde a false Christian, demanding her deportation and more. One post which was widely shared on X by Ben Garrett, whose bio identifies him as a deacon at Refuge Church in Ogden, Utah, warned Americans not to commit “the sin of empathy,” adding, “This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response.” Garrett had about 13,100 followers on X as this story was being posted.
To Helwig, this backlash to what she calls a mild summary of Christian teaching is more than a little worrisome.
“There are now two extremely different things in the world which people are calling Christianity,” she says. “[There are] many people who are more conservative than me or more liberal than me and we’re clearly all still part of the same faith, religion. But whatever Donald Trump means when he says ‘Christianity,’ it has nothing to do with Jesus or Scripture.”
She compares it to the kind of religion practiced in pre-Christian Rome. “It is remarkably like the context of power worship in which Christianity emerged as an alternative,” she says.
The Rev. Michael Coren, an author and pastoral associate at St. Luke Burlington, Ont., has a similar opinion.
“I do think that Christian nationalism—which is an oxymoron, really—has developed as an alternative to Christianity,” he says. “It’s actually pagan, it’s non-Christian.” He thinks many Christians who voted for Trump originally took the view that he was a flawed man who might nevertheless allow Christianity to flourish, a character in the vein of Roman emperor Constantine. Now, however, he says, it seems many have convinced themselves Trump is a believer himself.
Here in Canada, Coren says, he has seen few signs of similar inclinations. Evangelicals and conservative Christians here tend to be of a more moderate and thoughtful bent, he says.
Left, right and ‘social toxins’
The Rev. Ephraim Radner, retired professor of theology at the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College, says he believes U.S. politics has become increasingly defined by both left and right wings trying to enforce moral principles in their governance and force changes that cannot happen at the speed they want on a national scale without significant upheaval. These duelling philosophies have left people outside the hardcore Democrat and Republican bases—himself included—feeling increasingly alienated. Radner is an American citizen, self-described conservative Democrat and the author of Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty, a 2024 book advocating a Christian political ethic that would focus on simple, pragmatic approaches rather than trying to force society to fit ideologies.
“Both parties, in my mind, do not understand the nature of social existence in this era: huge populations, utterly complex networks of economic and communal survival,” he says. “Everything can only operate at the most grindingly slow and tentative levels. While societies can be ‘changed’ rapidly, this can happen only at the cost of tremendous upheaval, and mostly of a destructive kind.
“Progressives have ignored this reality from their own direction, and brought enormous social toxins into our midst in their efforts to remake societies according to their ideal principles,” he says. “Now it is the turn of the Republicans, in a far different register.”
Radner compares Trump and Musk to Grade 7 students who have taken over a school to spite the teachers. “They’re having a lot of fun right now! Whee!” he says. “But very soon, the cafeteria won’t have any food, the toilets won’t work, and the heating will break down. Then the adults will have to take over again—assuming the school hasn’t burnt up in the meantime.”
Coren emphasizes that while it would be easy to villainize people we disagree with, Jesus’ teachings require Christians to pray for their enemies and their leaders—even Donald Trump.
“You have to pray for people who are suffering under Donald Trump, but also see the humanity in the man. And there is humanity there,” he says. To have any hope of convincing Trump’s voters to change their minds or the president himself to make a compromise, he adds, it’s necessary to first treat them as people, not just enemies to attack.
