By Dennis Gruending

Stephen Harper and the Conservatives won election in Canada with a minority government just over two years ago. The vote of evangelical Christians and Catholics who attend church weekly was a deciding factor in that election. The question now is whether that was a blip or an emerging reality in Canadian political life.

Andrew Grenville, then a senior vice president with IPSOS-Reid, conducted a web-based poll of 36,000 voters on Election Day — January 23, 2006. He found that 64 per cent of weekly Protestant church attenders voted for Conservative candidates. By definition, the majority of those Protestant voters were evangelicals because they are much more likely to attend church weekly than are mainline Protestants. In contrast, Grenville reported that Protestants who attend once a month or less showed no real change in their voting habits. “As usual about 45 percent voted Conservative — that shows no great affinity for the new right.”

Grenville also found that for the first time in recent memory, more Catholics who are weekly church attenders voted for the Conservatives (42 per cent) than for the Liberals (40 per cent). Traditionally, there is something about being a Catholic that has predisposed voters to support Liberals. If that golden chain is broken, as it was in 2006, the results could have a profound influence on future Canadian elections.

There was once serious scholarship about the relationship between religious affiliation and voting preference. But most academics and journalists came to believe that secularism reigns and that organized religion, not to mention private religious conviction, has become largely irrelevant in influencing voting or any other behaviour. But interest is reviving. A group of Canadian academics has collaborated in a project called the Canadian Election Study (CES) to explain how people have voted and why in the past four federal elections. The investigators, among others, include André Blais of the University of Montreal and Elisabeth Gidengil of McGill University.

Speaking in 2005, Blais said that religious cleavage remains important in Canadian elections and it has not significantly weakened over time. He said, as well, that the core strength of Liberals outside of Quebec consistently “hinges on the support of Catholics and Canadians of non-European origin.” Blais added that no one knows why Catholics have traditionally provided their support to the Liberals.  Jokingly, he suggested “the creation of a special prize for the individual or team that solves the mystery.”

Blais and his CES colleagues found that 54 per cent of Catholics supported the Liberals in the Canadian election of 2000. But the CES researchers noted a slippage in the Catholic vote for Liberals in the 2004 election, which reduced the party to minority government status.

There is also something about being an evangelical Protestant that predisposes support for the Conservatives or for other right wing parties such as Social Credit. With the arrival of Preston Manning and the Reform Party in the late 1980s, evangelicals had a new option. Religious historian John Stackhouse wrote that, “Not one but two political parties (Reform and Christian Heritage) were formed with evangelical support in the late 1980s and fielded dozens of candidates in the federal election of 1988.” Manning is an avowed and proud evangelical Christian. Reform and its successor, the Canadian Alliance, have struck a continuing chord with evangelicals.

After the 2004 election, the Canadian Election Study researchers reviewed the elections of 1993, 1997 and 2000. They were struck by the extent to which the Reform-Alliance and NDP votes were polarized along fundamental ideological lines. “The NDP did best among secular voters who take liberal positions on issues relating to sexual mores and lifestyles, while the Conservatives fared best with moral traditionalists,” the CES researchers reported. “Given the importance of Christian fundamentalism in Conservative voting, the 2004 election could mark, not the return of brokerage politics, but a foreshadowing of the cultural divisions that are appearing in U.S. elections.”

In the U.S., white evangelical Protestants comprise the single most loyal constituency for the Republicans. Their vote held even in the mid-term elections of 2006, when the Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress. Republican candidates received support from 54 per cent of voters who identified themselves as weekly churchgoers and from 70 per cent of white evangelicals, just slightly less than the 74 per cent who supported Republican candidates in 2004.

The CES researchers also focused on the “gender gap” in the 2006 election. They found that women were less likely to vote for the Conservatives than are men. But the 2006 gender gap would have been even wider had it not been for the vote of religious women. “Clearly,” the CES researchers wrote, “any understanding of the gender gap in Conservative voting has to take account of the powerful effect of being a Protestant who believes that the Bible is the word of God and is to be taken literally word for word.” The research team also concluded that “being a Protestant fundamentalist is the single most important predictor of a Conservative vote in our models. Like the party’s western base, this is an important element of continuity between the Alliance and the new Conservative party.”

The support of Canadian evangelicals for right wing parties comes as no surprise to political scientist David Laycock. “With their evangelical Christian leaders,” Laycock wrote, “Reform and the Alliance have also appealed to social and moral conservatives uncomfortable with what they have seen as an over-secularized society. Such voters have worried about the threats both to the traditional family and to citizens’ sense of personal responsibility that they attribute to the modern Canadian welfare state.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are courting evangelicals, Catholics, and Jewish voters to join their political coalition and it has begun to alarm other parties. The New Democrats, for example, have created a Faith and Justice Commission in an attempt to mobilize a religious constituency on their own behalf. The social gospel tradition lives on in people such as MP Bill Blaikie, a United Church minister, and social Catholicism continues to be represented by MPs such as Charlie Angus, Joe Comartin and Tony Martin. But that flame is burning only weakly in contemporary Canada.

MP Martin told the Faith and Justice Commission in December 2007 that there is a faith-based social justice initiative building in the U.S. “They recognize that all of their big movements, including the civil rights movement, have been rooted in religious traditions, he said. “We have to try and do what they are doing.”

Canadian trends often lag behind those in the U.S. The American religious right has been an important political player for the past 30 years. Religious conservatives in Canada are  on their way to doing the same thing. But progressive Christians, in Protestant, Catholic, and even some evangelical congregations, are struggling to have their voices heard as well.

By Dennis Gruending

Reverend Charles McVety says that he has many friends among the Harper Conservatives who govern in Ottawa. This week he will testify before the Senate banking committee in support of legislation that he says occurred partly as a result of his lobbying. It would deny tax credits to films that the government deems offensive. It’s a move that critics say is an affront to freedom of speech and a threat to the Canadian film industry.

McVety is a busy man. He is president of the Canada Christian College in Toronto. He leads the Canada Family Action Coalition (CFAC), a group that he says has 40,000 members. The CFAC describes itself as a Bible-centred organization “with a vision to see Judeo-Christian moral principles restored in Canada.” This is code for Christian reconstructionism, a belief that “God governs” and that government and all of society must submit to the Bible’s moral principles, as interpreted by the reconstructionists. Others call this theocracy.

McVety also leads the Defend Marriage Coalition, which is comprised of several religiously conservative groups: McVety’s Canada Family Action Coalition belongs, as do Campaign Life, the Catholic Civil Rights League, and REAL Women of Canada. Campaign Life is an ardent anti-choice organization with a traditional base among Catholics but increasingly it is attracting evangelical support. The Catholic Civil Rights League is a self-appointed watchdog protecting Catholicism against what it considers unwarranted attacks, particularly in films, books and popular culture. REAL Women is an anti-feminist organization with Christian reconstructionist overtones. The group has joined McVety’s campaign regarding films and lobbied in 2006 to have the federal government abolish Status of Women Canada, and to eliminate support for the Court Challenges Program. (The Harper government quickly granted many of REAL Women’s wishes).

In the 2006 federal election, the Defend Marriage Coalition produced a pamphlet titled Returning Stability to Canada and had it distributed in various churches across the country. The pamphlet served as a skewed report card on the political parties, a tactic that is commonly used by the American religious right. This pamphlet attacked Liberal and NDP candidates for supporting same-sex marriage, and then accused them of being in favour of physician-assisted suicide and child pornography.  McVety and his coalitions also helped a number of religious conservatives in attempts to win contests for Conservative nominations in 2006, including an unsuccessful run by Rondo Thomas, vice-president of McVety’s Christian College.

McVety is active on other fronts as well. When hostilities broke out between Israel and groups in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, he emerged as the Canadian chair of a group called Christians United for Israel, an offshoot of the Christians United for Israel - America. That organization included prominent evangelicals such as the late Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as well as Reverend John Hagee. He is a prominent Texas televangelist and author of Jerusalem Countdown, a book predicting that the world will soon end in Armageddon. Hagee was guest speaker at an Israel support rally that McVety organized at his college in Toronto. At about the same time McVety also appeared on television news to say that that the fighting in Lebanon created conditions that resembled end times as predicted in the Bible. (The belief in end times is common among Christian reconstructionists).

McVety made common cause with several Canadian Jewish organizations lobbying the Harper government to take a pro-Israel position in the conflict. The prime minister did not disappoint, when he described an Israeli campaign that took 1,000 Lebanese lives as a “measured response” to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers.

Not along ago McVety’s organization and other groups participating in his Defend Marriage Coalition would have been seen as occupying the fringe right. Today the Conservatives appear to be courting them in an attempt to build an enduring political coalition that includes religiously conservative evangelicals, Catholics, Jews and others. When federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty presented his first budget in May 2006, McVety was his guest in the House of Commons VIP gallery. He had been drafted to help sell the government’s child care policy - one that scuttled the Liberals’ plan to provide a national child care program and replaced it with a tax break for families with children.

McVety is a religious entrepreneur of the American variety. The creation of overlapping coalitions and organizations (such as the Canadian Family Action Coalition) is another tactic long used by the religious right in the U.S. It aims at garnering publicity and creating the impression of numbers and momentum. Such groups are now becoming increasingly common in Canada. All of this must be frustrating for mainstream organizations such as the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC), which was created in the mid-1960s to represent evangelicals in the halls of power. The CFAC does not belong to the Evangelical Fellowship and nor does McVety’s Christian College. Don Hutchinson, an EFC director, has been quoted as saying: “There’s a broad spectrum on the evangelical meter. Charles may be the representative of one end, probably the extreme end, of that spectrum.”

McVety’s apparent cultivation by the Harper government raises questions about how much influence social and religious conservatives have with the prime minister. Harper attends a Missionary Alliance Church but he is arguably more of a social than a religious conservative. He is determined, however, to embed the religious right in a political coalition that will remake Canada into a leaner and meaner state. The strategy is to put a Conservative majority government into power, but beyond that to move Canadian public opinion away from its liberal and social democratic tendencies toward a rock-ribbed conservatism. McVety and his supporters have played along but he, at least, is beginning to sound disappointed with Harper’s failure to deliver on issues such as rescinding the legislation enshrining same sex marriage. Religious conservatives remain largely allied to Stephen Harper but the relationship is becoming wary.