A Canadian journalist reflects on Christianity in modern life

Can Robots Love God and Be Saved?: Columns on Christianity in Modern Life

John Longhurst
CMU Press, 2024.

For decades, John Longhurst has been spilling gallons of ink in columns and sundry articles for The Winnipeg Free Press and many publications from North America to Australia and parts between. All deal in some direct or indirect way with faith and religion’s interaction with society. His 2006 book, Making the News: An Essential Guide for Effective Media Relations, offered churches and non-profit religious organizations guidelines for honestly and effectively engaging secular media.

Longhurst’s work has all been on top of day jobs – first at Mennonite Central Committee, later at Canadian Foodgrains Bank, the latter in marketing and fundraising. Recently, Longhurst was inducted into the Order of Canada, a pleasing complement to his Manitoba Lieutenant Governor’s Award for the Advancement of Interreligious Understanding in 2021. In 2024, Canadian Mennonite University Press gathered dozens of mostly Free Press columns in a marvellously readable and informative anthology curiously titled Can Robots Love God and Be Saved? (By the way, if you want to decipher that title, read the column. I didn’t deal with it here because it wasn’t among my faves.)

This anthology is smartly divided into nine sections. The brief essays run the gamut from church life, Christian and other faiths in Canadian and world society, social justice, and a particularly interesting section on the Bible’s historical and contemporary role in social consciousness. It is impossible to do justice to all 110-plus columns here; I will attempt to give a fair sampling by treating three columns that particularly struck me.

The late Pope Francis’s 2022 visit to Maskwacis, Alberta (formerly Hobbema) followed his earlier personal apology to Canada’s Indigenous people. Longhurst’s touching reflection on the visit showcases Longhurst’s mind at its sensitive and trenchant best. He turns a simple report into a moving column. First, he describes the deep emotion Francis demonstrated and evoked during the ceremony. Afterwards, a woman recalled the moment of the grand chiefs’ entrance in full regalia, “I felt so proud watching them come in. I felt proud to be Indigenous.” Longhurst ends the piece with a fitting challenge to “evangelical leaders . . . to issue their own apologies for seeing Indigenous people merely as a mission field, and not respecting their unique beliefs, customs and traditions.”

In “The Not-so-Late, Great Planet Earth,” Longhurst takes an ironic poke at Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book predicting the earth’s demise and divine judgment. Fifty years later, Judgment Day still hadn’t arrived. Yet that long delay didn’t keep Brother Hal from labelling, in The Lindsey Report, Covid-19’s pandemic a “pestilence” caused by “‘lawlessness’ . . . that accompanied some of the Black Lives Matter protests.” I can almost see Longhurst squinting suspiciously while reading that.

So, to balance the playing field a bit, Longhurst notes that more than Covid-19’s devastating societal effects were playing out in the world. He quotes George Monbiot of The Guardian, “Instead of turning us into flesh-eating zombies, the pandemic turned millions of people into good neighbours. . . . Something we have been missing: the unexpectedly thrilling and transformative force of mutual aid.” Longhurst concludes with a cunning jab at Lindsey: “Maybe this isn’t the end of the world. It could be the beginning of a new and better one.”

In a 2022 column, Longhurst seems to have helpfully anticipated CC Editor Angela Reitsma Bick and Peter Schuurman’s Blessed Are the Undone that they were researching at the time. In an interesting, but oddly titled “Some Good News About Religion in Canada,” Longhurst cites Sarah Wilkins-LaFlamme’s statistics about Millennials in Canada. Many have left the Christian faith because of perceived conflict between faith and science, sexual scandals in the church and residential schools. Yet while all churches are losing Millennials, conservative churches are declining more slowly than progressive churches. I’m not sure where the “good news” is in that, though.

Can Robots Be Saved? stands out as a tribute to Longhurst’s life’s work. This is a fine book to read a few columns at a time. In short, I recognize some solid Calvinistic-neo-Kuyperian foundational thought – intentional or not – in Longhurst’s perspective. In almost every column, he brings a wide-ranging eye and mind to Christian faith in society, noting organized religion’s failures, cheering events of faithfulness and integrity. Longhurst sees the need for the Christian faith to engage with, not flee from, society. Read this book morsel by morsel, maybe before bedtime; skip your late-night snack. It won’t put you to sleep, but might well give fascinating, if not always pleasant, dreams.