Epiphany: the conversion of Michael Coren

[Anonymous]

Before his change of heart, he was one of the most famous conservative catholics in Canada.





Coren, 56, has long been considered a darling of the political and religious right — and a thorn in the backside of the left. He first emerged on the public scene in the early 1990s as a belligerent right-wing pundit for the satirical news magazine Frank. His career as a professional provocateur grew to include stints as a TV host on Crossroads Christian television and the Sun News Network (now defunct); as a columnist with the Globe and Mail and the Sun newspaper chain; and as a radio talk show host and chief grenade thrower on stations like CFRB in Toronto. He's also the author of over a dozen books, from literary biographies to polemical works like Why Catholics Are Right. For years he hewed the anti-same-sex-marriage line of evangelical Catholics.



But it's the latest resumé entry that's most surprising: Coren is now an Anglican and a supporter of same-sex marriage. A milder Michael is emerging, one who regrets many of the punches thrown in his past, who has gone on rounds of expiation, in a kind of sackcloth and ashes of gay-positive contrition. The new Coren is even considering becoming an ordained Anglican priest. (He was accepted to seminary, but deferred for a year. His book Epiphany: A Christian's Change of Heart and Mind Over Same-Sex Marriage is due to be published next spring.)



I'd always suspected Coren's often abrasive nature stemmed from some kind of youthful drama or unhappy home life, but it's not so. He describes his childhood in the east London suburb of Ilford, U.K., as a happy one.



His roots are working class. His father, a Jew, was a London cab driver; his mother had no religion. Educated at the University of Nottingham, Coren wrote literary biographies and worked at the New Statesman magazine.



He came to Catholicism in his 20s, he tells me, "when I felt an undeniable presence in my life, all around me." His Catholicism deepened with age and with love: he moved to Oshawa, Ont., in 1987 to be with Bernadette (Bernie) Barber, a Canadian Catholic whom he married later that year.



In Canada, he staked out a career in writing and media. His British taste for satire and cheekiness helped him land a job at Frank magazine, where he adopted the persona of an insufferably right-wing snob, "the Aesthete."



"Really, it just grew out of the fun of puncturing some of the posturing of the self-important left," he says. The character fed on its own energy, stoked by praise and more paid assignments, until Michael Coren, lye-mouthed gargoyle, had been created.



Whether he was penning columns or hosting TV panels, Coren was deliberately incendiary, writing things like, "Why is AIDS so special? . . . At its most simple, stop fornicating." He called anti-Israel Jews at a pro-Palestinian rally "mentally handicapped." On the debate over sexual orientation in the church, he wrote, "As for Jesus not condemning homosexuality, nor did He condemn bestiality and necrophilia. . . . Christ did indeed condemn homosexuality, as does the Old Testament, St. Paul, the church fathers and all Christianity until a few liberal Protestants in the last decades of the 20th century who, frankly, are more concerned with political correctness than truth."



He's written nasty things about the United Church and former moderator Mardi Tindal: "Do Mardi and her friends not realize just how dated and daft they sound? They toss around all of the old cliches like 'new paradigm,' 'participate relationally' and 'safe place' and then wonder why worshippers have abandoned their church quicker than a liberal Christian in a shoe store that has run out of Birkenstocks!"



If Coren's arguments often seemed of a piece with the shirt-ripping lunacy of his contemporaries on the far right, it's usually because of the viciousness of the tone, not the laziness of the thinking. His method was to sting with a reductive and sensational gibe, then follow it with something more qualified, more measured — balm on the wound, so as to be covered if challenged. Best of both worlds: he got the sound bite, the bang and the headlines but could comfort himself that, in context, he was a reasonable man. It was clever.



I've known Coren since 2006 when I began appearing, supposedly wearing the laurels of the secular left, on the now-discontinued Michael Coren Show, carried by Crossroads TV. In the green room before and after the show, another Michael Coren materialized. This one sowed a general teasing bonhomie among guests and panellists that did not differentiate by ideology. As he dressed for air, he would encourage a rolling ask-and-answer group colloquium — news of the day, personal updates, ideas considered.



I found it increasingly hard to dislike him quite as automatically as I should have, or even dislike him at all. Was I being buffaloed? If so, I wasn't alone. One writer, in 1994, said, "It would probably come as a shock . . . that in private Michael Coren is quite personable. Likable even." Broadcaster Daniel Richler called him a "softie" underneath the shell. Behind the scenes, Coren's face changed. He looked less the Bond villain and more the Shaolin monk.



Even on air, I sensed this tugging in him: simultaneous but warring impulses to infuriate and to please, both feeding a need for attention and perhaps for love.



More than anything, I suspected that he was in deeper on the right than he wanted to be. "Lorrie Goldstein [the Toronto Sun columnist] would say it about me, if you looked at my positions, you could hardly call me a neo-con," Coren says. He was anti-Iraq war, anti-death penalty and pro-union on various issues. "People just assume, but I was always a so-con [social conservative] more than a neo-con."

http://www.ucobserver.org/faith/2015/11/michael_coren/">http://www.ucobserver.org/faith/2015/11/michael_coren/

[Anonymous]

Michael Coren was a social conservative not a bible believing Christian.

[Anonymous]

I have read some of his editorials on Islam that I thought were informative. I never cared about his or anyone else's religious convictions.

[Anonymous]

I have read some of his editorials on Islam that I thought were informative. I never cared about his or anyone else's religious convictions.

I never cared about his politics.

[Anonymous]

I have read some of his editorials on Islam that I thought were informative. I never cared about his or anyone else's religious convictions.

I never cared about his politics.

He can rather condescending with people he disagrees with.

[Anonymous]

I have read some of his editorials on Islam that I thought were informative. I never cared about his or anyone else's religious convictions.

I never cared about his politics.

He can rather condescending with people he disagrees with.

He had people on his show that had deserved it.

[JOE]

In reference to the man's views in the article, I think gay people should have gotten their own institution of marriage rather than same sex and hetorosexual marriage being defined as one and the same. These people want it both ways. They want to be recognized as distinct and different from the rest of the population, but then they want marriage to be recognized as one and the same regardless of orientation. Something distinct from another cannot be one and the same as the other. That is illogical.

[Anonymous]

In reference to the man's views in the article, I think gay people should have gotten their own institution of marriage rather than same sex and hetorosexual marriage being defined as one and the same. These people want it both ways. They want to be recognized as distinct and different from the rest of the population, but then they want marriage to be recognized as one and the same regardless of orientation. Something distinct from another cannot be one and the same as the other. That is illogical.

The thought of homosexuality sickens me, but gay marriage is the law of the land here and most of the Western world. It does not affect me, so I do not lose sleep over it.

[JOE]

In reference to the man's views in the article, I think gay people should have gotten their own institution of marriage rather than same sex and hetorosexual marriage being defined as one and the same. These people want it both ways. They want to be recognized as distinct and different from the rest of the population, but then they want marriage to be recognized as one and the same regardless of orientation. Something distinct from another cannot be one and the same as the other. That is illogical.

The thought of homosexuality sickens me, but gay marriage is the law of the land here and most of the Western world. It does not affect me, so I do not lose sleep over it.

Yeah, but it extends to other parts of society too. The feminists and LGBTQ crowd formed an alliance to push their respective agendas through & now its come back to bite the former in the ass. Ie - not LGBTQ want transexuals allowed in women's washrooms or the girls washroom at your local high school. So in essence, they prey on the well meaning sympathies and kind hearted individuals such as Fashonista to get their way.



And it doesn't end there, Herman. Bakers who refuse to decorate wedding cakes for same sex couples are getting sued, fined or shut down. Then the bakers who didn't go along with this agenda are ordered to take 'sensitivity training'. Cripes, how is that different from Communist dictatorships like North Korea sending its citizens to 're-education camps' lest they step out of line?



Also, this sense of entitlement extends to others who flee nations because of religious persecution, and then demand to impose their own religious imprint on our society by insisting their faces be covered during citizenship ceremonies and driver license photo takes.

[Anonymous]

In reference to the man's views in the article, I think gay people should have gotten their own institution of marriage rather than same sex and hetorosexual marriage being defined as one and the same. These people want it both ways. They want to be recognized as distinct and different from the rest of the population, but then they want marriage to be recognized as one and the same regardless of orientation. Something distinct from another cannot be one and the same as the other. That is illogical.

The thought of homosexuality sickens me, but gay marriage is the law of the land here and most of the Western world. It does not affect me, so I do not lose sleep over it.

I do not care what the state says is marriage.

[Anonymous]

In reference to the man's views in the article, I think gay people should have gotten their own institution of marriage rather than same sex and hetorosexual marriage being defined as one and the same. These people want it both ways. They want to be recognized as distinct and different from the rest of the population, but then they want marriage to be recognized as one and the same regardless of orientation. Something distinct from another cannot be one and the same as the other. That is illogical.

The thought of homosexuality sickens me, but gay marriage is the law of the land here and most of the Western world. It does not affect me, so I do not lose sleep over it.

Yeah, but it extends to other parts of society too. The feminists and LGBTQ crowd formed an alliance to push their respective agendas through & now its come back to bite the former in the ass. Ie - not LGBTQ want transexuals allowed in women's washrooms or the girls washroom at your local high school. So in essence, they prey on the well meaning sympathies and kind hearted individuals such as Fashonista to get their way.



And it doesn't end there, Herman. Bakers who refuse to decorate wedding cakes for same sex couples are getting sued, fined or shut down. Then the bakers who didn't go along with this agenda are ordered to take 'sensitivity training'. Cripes, how is that different from Communist dictatorships like North Korea sending its citizens to 're-education camps' lest they step out of line?



Also, this sense of entitlement extends to others who flee nations because of religious persecution, and then demand to impose their own religious imprint on our society by insisting their faces be covered during citizenship ceremonies and driver license photo takes.

The first one you are referencing North Carolina. There are some extremists saying denying boys who think they are girls from girls locker rooms is this generations Jim Crow laws. Give me a frickin break.



As for bakers who refuse to make gay wedding cakes, I do not get that. Why would they refuse business? They do not have to watch them kiss.

[Anonymous]

I am a Christian, but the bible does tell me not to sell cake to people living in sin.



As for transgender people using washrooms and change rooms, I have problems with that, but not on biblical grounds.

[Anonymous]

I am a Christian, but the bible does tell me not to sell cake to people living in sin.



As for transgender people using washrooms and change rooms, I have problems with that, but not on biblical grounds.

The United States Supreme Court might decide that case in North Carolina.

[Anonymous]

There are some extremists saying denying boys who think they are girls from girls locker rooms is this generations Jim Crow laws. Give me a frickin break.

That is a bit much.

[Anonymous]

There are some extremists saying denying boys who think they are girls from girls locker rooms is this generations Jim Crow laws. Give me a frickin break.

That is a bit much.

A bit? What's next, comparing the governor of North Carolina to Hitler.