By Dennis Gruending

The Economist magazine in a recent edition published a special 18-page section called In God’s name: A special report on religion and public life. Editor John Micklethwait said in an accompanying interview, “In the 20th century people, particularly among the elites, tended to think that religion was disappearing. That obviously hasn’t happened.” With the exception of Western Europe, the magazine says, “religion has forced itself dramatically into the public square.”

The article uses several examples to illustrate its point: a born again Christian sits in the White house; an Islamist party rules once secular Turkey; Hindu nationalists may return to power in India; in China, religion appears to be on the march, and Iran is a theocracy. All too often — from Northern Ireland through Lebanon, Iraq and Ceylon — these religious intrusions are violent and bloody. Canada, so far at least, is the peaceable kingdom but the culture wars so common south of the border are appearing in this country as well.

The Economist is secular and economically conservative - almost libertarian — in its outlook. It believes that church and state should be kept separate, and is thus alarmed about theocracies and even opposed to Western European countries subsidizing certain churches. On the other hand, the Economist is sanguine about what it describes as a growing “multiplicity of sects” — evangelical churches in the U.S., South Korea and elsewhere would fit this description. The magazine describes them as a “bottom up marketing success, surprisingly in tune with globalisation.”

American author Kevin Phillips is not nearly so positive about the Christian right. He argues in his 2006 book American Theocracy that the Republican Party has become captive to religious zealots who would propel the U.S. toward theocracy as well. That case is perhaps somewhat over-stated, but former president Jimmy Carter, in his book, Our Endangered Values, decries the embedding of right-wing Christianity in the Republican Party and administration. “Narrowly defined theological beliefs,” Carter writes, “have been adopted as the rigid agenda of a political party.” Carter believes that most Americans do not support policies that are isolationist, pro-war, anti-environment and hostile to poor people and women.

The actions of the Christian right in the U.S. might well resemble a hostile corporate takeover more than they do a “bottom up marketing success”. Beginning in the 1970s, the Christian conservatives infiltrated the Republic Party and became its single most important constituency. That support held firm even in the 2006 mid-term elections that saw the Republicans lose both houses of Congress. Christian conservative leaders are now busily engaged as Republican power brokers in the 2008 presidential race.

Early in November Pat Robertson surprised his cohorts by endorsing Rudolph Giuliani, who has supported of gay and abortion rights, as ‘’an acceptable'’ Republican ‘’who can win the general election.'’ Other Christian conservative leaders have threatened to bolt the Republican Party if it nominates Giuliani or any other candidate who supports a woman’s right to choose. In explaining his endorsement, Mr. Robertson said he was confident that Giuliani would defend the country against ‘’the blood lust of Islamic terrorists.”

The Christian right first came to political prominence when it mobilized the vote for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The movement has consolidated and grown in its sophistication, and religious conservatives in Canada may well be poised to do that as well. Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party have been courting conservative evangelicals, Catholics, Jews and others in an attempt to build an enduring political coalition and it has worked — at least in the short term.

An IPSOS-Reid poll reported, for example, that the vote of evangelical Christians and Catholics who attend church weekly was a deciding factor in the election of a Conservative minority government in January 2006. The question is whether this was a blip, or a new and permanent fixture in Canadian public life.

Harper is an evangelical Christian although unlike Preston Manning and Stockwell Day he has been guarded about discussing his religious motivation. Harper is arguably more of a social than a religious conservative but he is determined to embed the religious right in a political coalition that will remake Canada into a leaner and meaner state. For its part the religious right must decide whether to stick with the Conservatives, or to adopt other strategies if the Conservatives let them down, as they perceived Harper to have done following a vote held on same sex marriage in December 2006.

Chances are that support will remain firm, but in any event there is little doubt that the religious right is growing in power and influence. Other political parties, including the NDP, are attempting to mobilize a religious constituency on their own behalf while progressive religious groups are struggling to be heard.

Conservative Christians have every right in a democratic society to become involved in the public debate, to organize around their issues and to attempt to elect their candidates. But in that contest they can claim no monopoly on truth, wisdom or the common good. By engaging in the public and political sphere, they are open to the same analysis and scrutiny of their motives as anyone else who engages in democratic competition.

By Dennis Gruending

The Canadian Council of Churches (CCC) has released A Health Care Covenant, a short book that describes the involvement by churches in our country’s various debates about health care. The Ecumenical Health Care Network of the CCC says that it produced the book to “contribute an ethical voice to the ongoing dialogue and debate about the future of health care in Canada.” The publication is a timely antidote to yet another recent report by the Fraser Institute that calls for a parallel private health care system.

A Health Care Covenant is an encouraging book for a number of reasons. It contains clear information about our fundamental health care issues but also provides a moral and spiritual context into which we can place those issues. Beyond that, it is good to know that 21 of our churches are still working ecumenically after a number of years when it seemed those efforts were diminishing. Health care issues are so broad and deep that they demand an ecumenical response.

Canadian churches, as Joe Gunn points out in his historical chapter, have been involved in health care since the beginning. It was a religious order of sisters who founded the first hospital in what is now Canada in 1639. Gunn also chronicles the participation of churches in more recent times. They appeared before the Hall Commission in the 1960s to propose a publicly administered and comprehensive health insurance program. Hall, a Supreme Court judge, recommended medicare for Canada in 1964 and the Pearson government, along with the provinces, put the program into place later in the decade.

The churches were there again, this time under the auspices of the EHCN, to make submissions to the Senate committee led by Michael Kirby and also to the royal commission led by former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romano. The churches asked Romanow to reaffirm the public health system and to call for improvements to it. The churches called as well for the federal government to develop a national pharmacare program. Romanow later told members of the ECHN that it was their brief that prompted him to propose a Health Care Covenant for Canadians in his report called Building on Values.

Nuala Kenny of Halifax is both a medical doctor and a religious sister. In her Foreword to the book she writes, “It is crucial that persons of faith understand that the future of the Canadian health and health care systems are matters of moral import. Visions of justice, compassion and community are at stake. Indeed we are at a cross roads for health policy. Challenges to the values of medicare are real and increasingly dominating the public and political agenda.”

Dr. Kenny continues, “There are many possible responses to these pressures. Most, in Canada, have looked to a careful systemic analysis of the system and suggested an agenda for reform. Others judge publicly funded health care as unsustainable and look to the market for answers.”

It is fair to say that Kenny and the others here believe profoundly that we should reform our public system rather than giving it up to market forces, as proposed by the Fraser Institute and some politicians. Janet Sommerville writes that public health care makes good economic sense. We spend proportionately less than does the United States and we provide care to everyone while in the U.S. perhaps 45 million people go without coverage. Sommerville says that the choice of systems is also a matter of what she calls applied ethics that appeal to Canadians.

Canada,” she writes, “still has a great many people who are religious believers. Even if most of us are shy about saying so in public, we think that the major tenets of our faith should affect our lives as citizens, not only our personal life. And the principles guiding our health care system have an unmistakable affinity with the love of neighbour urged on us by God’s word in Scripture.”

A Health Care Covenant is available from the Canadian Council of Churches for $10. The book can be ordered at admin@ccc-cce.ca and/or 1-416-972-9494 Ext. 21.

Note: This article appeared in a slightly altered form in the October 31, 2007 edition of the Prairie Messenger, a Catholic journal published in Saskatchewan.

By Dennis Gruending

When Donald Rumsfeld left the Bush Cabinet, he quickly found a new job at Hoover Institution, one of dozens of powerful and wealthy right-wing think tanks (such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute and American Enterprise Institute) that wield tremendous influence in US politics. Canada’s best-known counterpart is the Fraser Institute, founded in 1974. Over the years, it has been joined by others, including:

· the Manning Centre, created by Preston and his wife Sandra to train people how to succeed at conservative politics;

· the Ottawa-based Institute for Canadian Values, which has as its executive director Joseph Ben-Ami, a former political organizer for Stockwell Day.; and

· the Ottawa-based Institute for Marriage and Family, created by Dr James Dobson’s powerful US Focus on the Family (Canada), to provide socially conservative research and advice.

Now meet the Hamilton-based Work Research Foundation (WRF). In mid-October, the WRF sponsored a lecture by Dr Paul Marshall, Senior Fellow Hudson Institute, at Ottawa’s exclusive Rideau Club. His topic: “God, International Affairs and the Global Economy.”

On hand to facilitate this lecture, on the 15th floor of a downtown office tower, was WRF’s vice-president of research, Ray Pennings, an unsuccessful Canadian Alliance candidate in the 2000 federal election. His colleague, senior researcher Russ Kuykendall, is a former legislative assistant to Manitoba MP Inky Mark and a graduate of the Alberta Bible Institute in Calgary.

Paul Marshall’s talk reflected the position of the Hudson Institute, which, in its own words, is particularly interested in the war on terror and the future of Islam. A corporatist institution, it is also concerned with market reforms and the 21st century welfare state.

Marshall said that the role of religion has been all but neglected in international relations. That lack of knowledge is dangerous, he said, and was one reason that the US was caught off guard on September 11, 2001. He also talked about what he called the “striking relationship” between religious freedom and economic prosperity, particularly in Christian countries. On the other hand, he posited that “closed systems” such as those found in many Muslim countries stunt economic growth.

Marshall didn’t say much about Canada, although he did take a passing swipe at Louise Arbour, formerly a Supreme Court Justice and now the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He stated that in Canada one can be fined for speaking out against homosexuality, but he provided no example or corroborating detail.

Although Marshall’s talk was predictable, his presence in Ottawa was somewhat puzzling. Who, exactly, is the WRF and why did it feature a talk by someone from the Hudson Institute?

The WRF describes itself as a Christian-inspired think tank that seeks “an alternative model for industrial relations policy.” The group was created by the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC), which in turn arose from the Christian Reformed church about 50 years ago. The CLAC describes itself as both a “bona fide trade union” and an “alternative labour movement” - one based on Christian social principles. It claims to support no political party.

The CLAC claims to have 43,000 members in five provinces, with a concentration in Alberta and southern Ontario, and describes itself as having the third largest union presence in Ontario’s long-term care sector. The CLAC is no fan of the Canadian Labour Congress. The labour movement, in turn, sees CLAC as essentially a company union (or worse), which is making inroads into Alberta’s notoriously anti-union tar sands industry.

The WRF insists that it is an independent organization and is sensitive about its ties with CLAC even though two of its seven board members, and several of its staff, are drawn from that organization. The WRF recently admonished a sympathetic religion writer who had written that the two organizations were “affiliated.”

Peter Menzies, a former publisher of the Calgary Herald, is a senior fellow of the WRF, and acting in that capacity he wrote a recent op-ed article in The Globe and Mail warning the Alberta government not to raise royalties in the tar sand sands. Menzies also has a consulting company and lists as clients two other conservative think tanks - the Manning Centre and the Fraser Institute. The Fraser Institute’s senior research fellows include Preston Manning, Mike Harris and Ralph Klein.

Conservative think tanks have been very profitable ventures in the US. The National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy 1999 report, called $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s, concluded that, “the conservative policy establishment is perhaps the key generator and purveyor of public ideas.” Follow-up reports in 2004 (Axis of Ideology: Conservative Foundations and Public Policy) and 2005 (Funding the Culture Wars: Philanthropy, Church and State) traced the funding and influence of the ever-expanding field, in greater detail.

In Canada, too, the Fraser Institute has expanded beyond its initial Vancouver base to open offices in Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, and Tampa, Florida. The Institute offers tax-deductible receipts for donations, in the US as well as in Canada.

Together with the Manning Centre, the Institute for Marriage and the Family, and the Institute for Canadian Values, the Fraser Institute anchors a matrix of conservative organizations whose personnel attend each other’s conferences, write for each other’s newsletters and appear as spokespersons on sympathetic media to discuss the latest budgets, elections and court cases.

These organizations share a deep suspicion of government, an antagonism toward social programs and a dislike for the labour movement. They have taken ideas once considered to be on the fringe right and moved them into the mainstream debate.

News media regularly cover Fraser Institute news releases on topics like “Tax Freedom Day”, wait times in health care, and report cards on public schools. These terms frame the public debate and overshadow questions of corporate responsibility, human rights, and education as the foundation of democracy.

The emergence of all these organizations might indicate that Canada is now seen as fertile territory for the think tank industry. If so, we all (and unions especially) should brace for an onslaught of “free market” propaganda. The challenge for progressive groups is provide better information and to distribute it widely within the community.

Note: This article appeared in the October 31 edition of the online publication Straight Goods. 

I plan with this blog to explore the growing influence that religion is having upon politics and society in Canada and elsewhere. This relationship is not merely a topic of interest but rather it has an effect upon the lives of millions of people.

There has been a perception among academics, journalists and other opinion leaders that secularism reigns and that organized religion, not to mention private religious conviction, have become largely irrelevant to people. That was certainly the common belief among my professors when I was a university student and my journalistic colleagues in subsequent years.

But far from fading away, religion has come to play an increasingly prominent public role in contemporary societies. One has only to think about the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions; the impact of liberation theology in places such as Brazil; the role of the church in Poland; the rise of the evangelical right in the United States, Canada and elsewhere; the rise of militant Sikhism and Islamic extremism. If ever religion was a marginalized force, it has rebounded markedly, and not always for the better.

Canada does not exist in a vacuum. An IPSOS-Reid poll reported, for example, that the vote of evangelical Christians and Catholics who attend church weekly was a deciding factor in the election of a Conservative minority government in January 2006. The question now is whether that pronounced religious vote is a blip or an emerging reality in Canadian political life (please visit my website to read my article about religion and voting behaviour in Canada - www.dennisgruending.ca)

The religious right is growing in power and political influence in Canada. Mainline Protestantism, as represented in the United, Anglican and Presbyterian Churches, has been in decline although it is showing some signs of revival. Conservative Catholics and evangelicals, who once disliked and mistrusted one another, are now engaged in a growing collaboration.  Their political agenda is anchored in opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion, publicly funded childcare and a resistance to various other social programs.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are assiduously courting evangelicals, Catholics, and Jewish voters to join their political coalition. That has alarmed other parties, including the New Democrats, who are attempting to mobilize a religious constituency on their own behalf.

For their part, progressive Christians — in Protestant, Catholic, and even some evangelical congregations — have been marginalized in recent years and are now struggling to have their voices heard by politicians and the Canadian public.

I intend to deal with all of these topics on this blog.

There is a good deal of research and writing in the United States and elsewhere about how important it is to understand the motivation and tactics of religious groups that involve themselves in the political arena. Far less attention has been devoted to the topic in Canada. I am determined that Pulpit & Politics will help to fill that gap.