Around Town: Brandon Lake, MAiD win, Religiosity Predicts Prosociality

Brandon Lake will be in Vancouver March 14; this image is from ‘Coat of Many Colors,’ released in 2023.

Several good concerts are coming up in the next week, including that of high profile singer / songwriter Brandon Lake. He will be at the Pacific Coliseum with his Tear Off the Roof tour March 14.

An article in PEOPLE last October included this:

During a week when tensions were high and the world seemed to be falling apart, Christian artist Brandon Lake welcomed a group of songwriters to his home in Charleston, South Carolina to write some songs.

“I found myself singing about heaven,” Lake, 33, tells PEOPLE quietly. “The emotions were just building up and building up, and then we just wrote this song about our final destination, which is heaven.”

It was a song that the five-time Grammy winner says freed up his soul a bit as the violence overseas continued to play out thousands of miles away.

“I’m not someone to ever watch the news, but the past few days, I have probably had the TV on or my phone on nonstop,” he reflects. “Writing a song about heaven and how God is still holy and sovereign was just the medicine my heart needed.”

Joining Lake will be special guest Jon Foreman, solo performer and lead singer of Switchfoot; his newest album In Bloom is set to release this spring. Gospel Artist, DOE will open for Lake; his first album, a self-titled EP, is available now and features her hit single ‘Brighter.’

Lake sounds good from what little bit I’ve heard online. Foreman’s solo work is terrific. Doe I don’t know.

Three other concerts to look out for– all, unfortunately, on the same night, Friday, March 8:

• Jon Bryant at St. James Church

A Music Night with Jon Bryant will be an intimate evening which will also serve as a fundraiser for Jacob’s Well, a faith-based ‘living room space’ on the Downtown Eastside. it is currently at risk because their building is up for sale. They rely on donations (and concerts).

• Worship Concert Fundraiser at North Lonsdale United Church

Well, this one’s not quite like the other two, but the NLUC Worship Team will be performing for a good cause – their church.

• Jordan Klassen, Zaac Pick & Cassidy Waring at The Anza Club

“We will be presenting an incredible headliner Jordan Klassen (Singer-Songwriter/Fairy-Folk). Supporting Jordan is Zaac Pick (Folk/Singer-Songwriter) and Cassidy Waring (Folk/Americana/Singer-Songwriter).”

MAiD: mixed news

First the good news. MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) will not become available for people with mental illness – at least not for that reason alone, as has long been planned by the Liberal government.

In its March 5 Update newsletter, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada states:

A bill to delay MAiD for mental illness for three years became law on February 29. This bill also requires a parliamentary committee be set up within two years to study the eligibility of those whose sole medical condition is mental illness to receive MAiD.

The work is not finished, but we are thankful Bill C-62 has passed. While this is not the complete stop we believe should happen, this delay means people in vulnerable moments will be better protected for longer and slows the rapid expansion of MAiD. We thank all of you who prayed, contacted your MPs and encouraged your network to engage. We’re so grateful for your partnership and prayers.

The bad news is the big picture. MAiD may still become available for people with mental illness. But whether that happens or not, a new documentary film reminds us that MAiD is euthanasia, and that euthanasia – which is already widely available – is always bad news.

Two of the interviewees in The Story of Euthanasia are quite well known locally for their consistently life-affirming stance – Dr. Will Johnston and Angelina Ireland.

Many of the shots between interviews are Vancouver scenes. Dr. Dannie Lu, Pastor Shang-Jen Chen and Dr. Pei-Ning Wang bring in a Taiwanese perspective, while Abbot Tryphon is at the All-Merciful Saviour Monastery on Vashon Island in Washington.

Dr. Will Johnston explained how quickly the Supreme Court of Canada shifted its position on euthanasia.

Johnston begins by describing how, not so long ago, in 1993, the Supreme Court of Canada refused (albeit only by a 5 – 4 margin) to allow Sue Rodriguez access to euthanasia. By 2015 the same court unanimously voted in the Carter case “to allow doctors to kill their patients.”

There were to have been many safeguards around the practice of euthanasia, but the guidelines “don’t protect people because they can be circumvented.”

Johnston says

I tend not to use the acronym MAiD because it’s a euphemism. It’s a way of papering over what is really an evil thing that is going on, which is affecting our society with a kind of mind virus, a kind of a virus that stops people from thinking clearly about the problem that is being managed.”

Angelina Ireland is President of the Delta Hospice Society.

Also featured is Angelina Ireland, who first entered the Delta Hospice Society in 2014. She came as a cancer patient, but in time became President of the organization.

The society has been offering palliative care for 30 years. She notes that it raised about $8.5 million to build two buildings – a 10-bed hospice and palliative care facility and a 7,500 square foot supportive care centre (where she had gone as a cancer patient).

They entered into a service agreement with the Fraser Health Authority. The Delta Hospice Society provided the 10 beds and the government provided the funding.

Following a fraught, and somewhat complex, process (which I covered in several articles from 2020 – 2022), the society lost financial support from the provincial government, lost its buildings and had to endure much nasty commentary from politicians and the public when they refused to provide euthanasia.

The Irene Thomas Hospice was built by the Delta Hospice Society, but is now run by Fraser Health.

The Delta Hospice Society continues from a roughly 200 square foot space.

Johnston is not sanguine about immediate prospects for combatting MAiD / euthanasia. He says there has been some public resistance, as in the case of a mentally ill man up the Valley who was killed – even though he was not dying, and despite the fact that his family was not informed – change for the better is not imminent.

He adds:

Until parents wake up to the idea that their depressed, unhappy teenagers could suddenly fall into the hands of doctors and nurses who would think nothing of arranging for a state-provided death for their child – until parents wake up to that real and present danger – I don’t think we’re going to see enough push-back to reverse what’s going on right now. So I think it has to get a lot worse before it gets better.

The film would be very suitable for home groups to watch and discuss. The Story of Euthanasia is available free here and here – until March 22.

Willoughby Church in Langley will also be hosting a March 16 morning seminar with a presentation by Pastor John Tsang of First Baptist Church in Vancouver. Go here to register; numbers are limited for the seminar.

Religiosity Predicts Prosociality

Azim Shariff is a professor at UBC.

A social psychologist who teaches at the University of British Columbia is part of a three-person team which released a major report published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin February 26.

Dr. Azim Shariff, a professor in the Department of Psychology, tweeted March 4:

Are religious people really more prosocial? [John Michael Kelly] @jmkelly91, [Stephanie R. Kramer] @_StephKrame and I spent years meta-analyzing the massive amount of research on this question. Synthesizing over 700 effects spread over 60 years of study, the answer looks very much like a “yes.”

The study begins:

Are the religious more moral than the nonreligious? Debates about the relationship between religion and moral behavior have stirred since at least the times of ancient Greece and continue in earnest today. As of 2020, almost half of those surveyed in an international sample agreed that it was necessary to believe in God to be a good person (Tamir et al., 2020) – in other words, that the nonreligious cannot be moral.

Naturally, others contest this claim, asserting that religion is – at best – unrelated to virtuous behavior. The question of whether the religious participate in more prosociality than the nonreligious has enjoyed decades of empirical scrutiny, but a firm answer has remained elusive.

Here, we report a meta-analysis that integrates the findings from almost 60 years of research on the empirical relationship between religiosity and morality – and more specifically prosociality.

The authors point out that even coming up with a definition of ‘prosociality’ is a challenge, because, for example, “religiosity itself determines which issues are placed in the moral domain.” They state:

Fortunately, despite these discrepancies in moral judgment, there are areas in which the religious and nonreligious tend to agree (Shariff et al., 2014). Prosocial behaviors, which Batson (2012) describes as “a broad range of actions intended to benefit one or more people other than oneself – behaviors such as helping, comforting, sharing and cooperating,” (p. 242) are morally valued by religious and nonreligious people alike. Prosociality is therefore an area of morality, albeit a limited one, in which people may legitimately be compared across the religiosity spectrum.

The study concluded:

Many philosophers, clerics and researchers alike have long argued that religiosity has an important role to play in morality – and that the religious are more prosocial than the nonreligious. In a world in which the societal roles of religiosity are rapidly changing, it is important to understand the extent to which this belief is true.

In the present work, we conducted a meta-analysis to investigate whether, and how strongly, dispositional religiosity related to prosocial and antisocial behavior at the individual level. Indeed, we found a positive correlation suggesting that more religious people are more prosocial than the less religious.

Yet interpretation of the correlation was complicated by significant heterogeneity of effect sizes. The correlation was moderated by the specific behavior being assessed and by the aspect of religiosity being assessed. And, most notably, it was moderated by whether prosociality was assessed behaviorally or by self-report.

We propose that this moderation may be due to three compatible explanations:

• • First, behavioral measures may fail to fully capture religious prosociality.
  • Second, religious people may be exhibiting self-enhancement in their self-reports.
  • And third, the relationship between religiosity and self-reported prosociality may be a tautological relationship explained by common method bias.