I just finished reading Jonathan Van Maren’s biography of Ted Byfield, “Prairie Lion” which is a very good rendering of Mr. Byfield’s life and remarkable accomplishments. I might have preferred a more, over the top, encomium of Mr. Byfield, but balance is important to real writers like Mr. Van Maren. I don’t consider myself similarly constrained. In fact, in 2011 I nominated Mr. Byfield for the Wilberforce Award given by the Colson Center in the United States. Canadians are not often honoured by American institutions. Nevertheless, I thought that it was worth a shot.
But I am ahead of myself.
During a period of unemployment in 1994, I placed an advertisement in a community newspaper promoting my new “company”, Minstrel Press. I was offering to write encomiums, obituaries, speeches and anything else that might make a bit of money. I received two responses. One from a woman who thought I was looking for writers and one from someone who wanted money for their writing/activism career.
The person who wanted money was the eldest son of Ted Byfield and our meeting was the start of a most interesting friendship with periodic forays into “activism”. Mike wanted to create a team to run for the local school board elections and, at a dinner with our wives asked, was I in? I was so surprised that I said yes.
I have written about the school board experience (So ya wanna be a school board trustee, eh?) before and won’t relitigate that very rewarding experience but this began my association with the Byfield family. I hasten to add that, other than my friendship with Mike, I never considered myself an intimate of the family. I saw myself as a voyeur standing on the edges of their lives, happy to periodically catch their glow.
As trust was developed, I was introduced to Mike’s mother, Virginia, then his brothers, Link and Vince, and finally to Ted himself. At one point I worked part time for Virginia writing a monthly column of book reviews. Some might consider this small potatoes. I was over the moon writing for what I considered the most prestigious weekly newsmagazine in Canada. And I was being edited by one of the world’s best editors who, unlike what I had been told, was very kind even as she shred and reconstituted everything that I produced.
The Byfield family magazine started out as the St. John’s Edmonton Report, and it was designed to provide a funding source for the St. John’s Boys Schools. The restless energy of Ted Byfield was such that he created two boarding schools for boys and then flanged on institutions to finance and maintain the schools. Eventually the two disparate institutions were separated, and the family efforts coalesced around the magazine which became Alberta Report with a cover design that suspiciously resembled that of Time Magazine. So suspicious that Time sued Ted for copywrite violations until it became obvious that nothing was to be gained if they won.
During my family’s sojourn in Colombia in the 1980s, we maintained contact with the English-speaking world via a subscription to William F. Buckley Jr’s National Review and to Ted Byfield’s Alberta Report. To this day, I can’t identify one magazine as being better than the other, but I maintain that Ted was more important to his readership than Mr. Buckley was to his.
When Pierre Trudeau attacked the Alberta economy with his National Energy Program, when Peter Lougheed fought off the worst elements of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, when Brian Mulroney was such a disappointment to westerners, and when the nuclear family came under withering attack, we looked to Ted and his back page editorials to make sense of it all and to be encouraged in the fight. Fortunately, Ted was not content with back page encouragement.
In the mid-1980s he started agitating for a political solution and from his creative genius and frenetic activity was born the Reform Party of Canada. There were others, of course, who helped build the party, but it was Ted who overcame the Sisyphean forces and pushed the baby to the top of the hill. In 2011, the Reform Party, having been transformed into the Conservative Party of Canada, formed its first majority government under the leadership of Steven Harper who subsequently gave considerable credit for this formidable achievement to Ted Byfield.
The context in which I knew Ted and deepened my friendships with his family was the production of a true Magnum Opus – the 12-volume publication of “The Christians: Their First 2000 Years”. Only Ted and Virginia could have conceived and then accomplished such a feat. The books were written and edited by a team of Canlit’s best and original art was used in the illustrations. Nothing was spared to produce the highest quality books.
The series is the story of how Christianity informed and was informed by the development of Western civilization. A story told through the eyes of eyewitnesses who were contemporaneous to the foundational events that resulted in the 21st century. A new volume was produced every six months, and I bought and devoured them as they were made available, educated by the factual record and thrilled by the first-person delivery. When the publishing company went bankrupt after Book 6, I was devastated. It was worse than when Bernard Cornwell stopped writing about the US Civil War after his book on Gettysburg. Certain things in life should just not be allowed.
When Ted reorganized and started to publish through a not-for-profit corporation, I was asked, and readily agreed, to serve on his Canadian Board of Directors. I am pretty sure that Ted hoped that I would be a rainmaker for him, but he never chided me for the modest financing I was able to bring to the business. In my defense, it was not easy to convince people to contribute to an enterprise run almost single-handedly by a man in his 80s who was no longer a household name.
I decided that my role was instead, to come up with a marketing plan that would not just sell the books but, more importantly, lift the information off the pages and plant it in people’s minds. Reading a 12-volume history series is not for the faint of heart and there was a low probability of book buyers converting to book readers and history knowers. We investigated feature film production and study guides. We toyed with a Youtube series. For a time, Ted ran a program to train young writers based on their reading of history and have them write news reports for an internet website.
It turns out that converting two-dimensional written information into synaptic knowledge at scale is hard to do. You can evaluate the current marketing efforts by Ted’s son Vince at www.thechristians.com. If you like history, you can do no better than to buy the complete set.
Another of the marketing efforts was to sell the books to private schools and I accompanied Ted on some of his sales trips. They all went pretty much the same way. The school secretary would meet us and say that the principal was addressing a pressing need now, but would we like to wait here, and it won’t be long. After fifteen minutes, the principal’s door would open and a red-faced and slightly shocked kid would emerge and, ignoring us, stomp by. We would be ushered into the principal’s office who, after necessary introductions and pleasantries, would dig into what we were peddling. About this time a light would go on and the principal would say something like,
“Are you THE Ted Byfield?”
Ted, who, in my experience, always had a smile on his face, would chuckle and say,
“Don’t tell me. Your grandfather used to talk about the Alberta Report. Up until a few years ago it was ‘my father talked about you’ but time moves on, and I have graduated to ‘my grandfather’.”
Everyone would laugh and the conversation would turn serious. Almost without exception, the principal would say something like,
“We have these kids from Christian homes for twelve years and within eighteen months of graduation, by our tracking, seventy percent of them have left their faith. Maybe these history books will give kids the confidence they need to defend their faith instead of collapsing at the first challenge.”
And we would enthusiastically agree with him or her. Sometimes we would make the sale and sometimes not but the concern about the kids’ incapacity to defend their faith was universal. I find this very interesting and suppose the phenomenon is an artifact of,
living in a post Christian culture,
a lack of education in history, and
harried parents who are mostly unaware of the first two points and haven’t fully addressed the issue at home.
This substack is a product of having read Ted’s books about “The Christians” and the conversations we had about the importance of history and its absence from modern education. Mike and Ted and the rest of the family contributed significantly to my current worldview particularly as it integrates my understanding of history and, to them I owe a debt of gratitude.
As a result of this influence and subsequent reading, I am of the view that history and science are the best defenses of the Christian faith. But first they must be taught and demonstrated. Ted, it seems to me, lived the better part of his life to remedy the disconnect between that fact and the inadequate distribution of knowledge about it. I don’t think he was a frustrated proselytizer of the Christian faith as much as he was upset about the lack of foundational knowledge of how our civilization was developed.
Perhaps I am reading too much into the things Ted told me but just as politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of knowledge and, particularly, knowledge of history. The issue is less about what one concludes regarding the veracity of Christianity and more about the knowledge base on which that decision is based. Ted spent a lot of his energy pointing out the logical consequences of such a vacuum of knowledge and, sadly, many of his prognostications came true.
With a smile and in good humour, a few years ago Ted Byfield tossed his torch to a great many people. I flatter myself in thinking that I was one of them.
Beautiful! A credit to the subject and his family, their accomplishments, and to the humor and humility of the writer. Thank you.
Thanks for a good article about Ted Byfield! I wonder about your path to Chuck Colson