By Dennis Gruending

Reverend Lois Wilson has described recent spiritual and cultural history in North America as follows: “The cups rattled in the 1960s and 70s. The cupboard doors fell off in the 80s. The kitchen door came off its hinges in the 90s. There was deep crack in front yard by 2000, and by 2006 we knew that the earth had moved.” Rev. Wilson attributed the quote to her colleague Rev. Herb O’Driscoll, a retired canon of the Anglican Church of Canada, when she gave a keynote address earlier in May at a conference called Sacred and Secular in a Global Canada. It was held at The University of Western Ontario’s Huron College in London. She was an ideal choice to deliver such an address, given her previous tenure as moderator of the United Church of Canada and later as an independent member of Canada’s Senate.

Rev. Wilson spoke in a dining room following breakfast and seemed unfazed about having no microphone, no podium and having to look at her audience over a table containing the buffet remnants of bacon, eggs and pancakes. Nor did she appear overly concerned about the diminution in power and prestige of once mighty religious institutions. That occurred, she said, with the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, Protestant sectarianism, immigration from non-European countries, feminism and the increasing militancy of Canada’s aboriginal peoples.

“Canada has become global,” Rev. Wilson said. “We meet peoples of different race and religion in grocery store line-ups and children of different cultures and religions meet at school. The world has come to us, bringing with its peoples cultural understandings, traditions, customs with which we who had been settled here were unfamiliar. And familiar assumptions regarding the sacred and the secular have become blurred and unclear.”

“What will it mean,” she asked, “for the secular state to guarantee ways for people to live in just and responsible ways with their neighbours who are so different from themselves? What accommodations must be made? That, I take it, is the purpose of this conference.”

The event, with its approximately 50 presenters and guest speakers, provided what one might call an informed focus group. I was unable to attend all of the panels, which overlapped, but a number of presenters and questioners are obviously struggling with some issues raised by Rev. Wilson.

There was, for example, a palpable resentment among some toward liberal democracy and what they believe to be a secular state that ignores or devalues the sacred impulse. Dr. Robin Lathangue, an assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University (Brantford) and an expert on the late Canadian political philosopher George Grant, described a “state oppression” in that forces people into a private practice of religion. The state, he said, “defines religious freedom as freedom from coercion to have a certain religion but that really means no community and no belonging. There is a comprehensive silence about God. . . an anthropology of indifference . . . public atheism is privileged.”

Dr. Gary Badcock, an assistant professor at Huron University College, cited British political theorist John Gray in describing liberalism as “a surrogate religion but a shoddy replica . . . a secular fundamentalism.” Badcock said Gray prefers a political conservatism of no grand visions and a theory of “non-progress” which understands that “humans and history cannot be perfected  . . . that all human politics is compromised in the lust for power.”

It was left to Dr. Dennis Klimchuck from The University of Western Ontario’s faculty of law to argue that Canada’s liberal democracy has performed quite admirably in cases that deal with the hiring policies of religious groups. “Can religious institutions engage in discrimination in hiring?” he asked. “The answer is yes if they are hiring a priest and not a janitor. Broadly speaking a religious organization is exempted from the duty not to discriminate in hiring.”

He said that Canada has followed an “exemption approach” allowing religious organizations to make their own decisions, with the courts ruling on them only when necessary. He described this as wise and tolerant. A middle-aged woman approached Klimchuk as he left the room following the panel. “I am a lawyer,” she said, “and you are the only person here that I could understand.”

I presented a paper describing how the religious right is growing in political power and influence. I described, by way of example, how the Catholic Church had refused full participation in the church to several MPs to punish them for voting in favour of same sex marriage legislation. I was asked during the question period if I agreed with the church’s actions (I do not). Most members of the audience expressing an opinion, including another panellist, believed that the MPs should have obeyed the church’s dictates.

There were several presentations on Islam in Canada and a speech by Dr. Wael Haddara. He is a medical doctor, an assistant professor in the school of medicine and dentistry at The University of Western Ontario, and also a director of the Muslim Association of Canada. He said that when Canada’s first mosque was built in Edmonton (by a Ukrainian Canadian architect), it was considered a proud moment for the entire community. Similarly, when a mosque was built in London, Ontario, by Lebanese Canadians in 1955, local dignitaries were on hand for its opening. He talked about many young Muslims who came to Canada as students planning to return home but who eventually remained in this country. This is a commonplace Canadian immigration story but Dr. Haddara said that Muslims were more integrated in that earlier era than is the case today. In the post 9/11 period, he said, there has been more discrimination and a “fear of the other that focuses on differences rather than commonality.”

For her part, Rev. Wilson wasn’t able to remain at the conference for long after her speech. She was leaving to attend a Muslim wedding and suggested that all of us take any such opportunity whenever it might present itself.

By Dennis Gruending

Hundreds of people participated in the National Prayer Breakfast in Ottawa on May 15th. Last year, the featured speaker Serge LeClerc described his personal journey from the depths of despair to personal salvation. He said that he was born to a teenaged single-parent, aboriginal mother, drifted into years of drugs, crime and incarceration, then had a religious conversion in prison that led to a career as a motivational speaker and the director of a teen addiction program in Saskatchewan.

It was a moving story but also one that fits a template that focuses on individual fall and redemption. As we filed out of the room following the speech one MP said to me quietly, “I’m waiting for the day when our speaker is a corporate polluter who stands up and repents for his sin.” The breakfast’s message in recent years has tended to fit within a religious tradition that focuses upon an individualistic view of faith. The event has done less to reflect the more communal thrust that has that has been central to both the social gospel and social Catholicism, to name just two Christian movements.

The invited speaker at this year’s breakfast, however, may represent that more communal dimension. Judy Graves has worked with the poor and the homeless in downtown Vancouver since 1974.

David Anderson, chair for the 2008 breakfast, is a Conservative MP from Saskatchewan. In a newspaper interview he described the breakfast as “non-partisan”, “non-political”, and “Christ-centred.” Let’s consider those in order. Just a few months after Serge LeClerc was the featured speaker in 2007, he was nominated as a candidate (and later elected) for the Saskatchewan Party, a provincial cousin of the federal Conservatives. The optical frame here approaches partisanship.

The breakfast in 2007 also featured a closing prayer from Lt. General Walt Natynczyk of the Canadian armed forces. He invoked God’s care for the troops in Afghanistan, who he said were “protecting Canada.” Praying for the safety of Canadian troops is fine but to say that the troops in Afghanistan are protecting Canada is a contested comment in the debate surrounding the Afghan mission, and one with which many Canadians and MPs would disagree. The Lt. General’s words go beyond a frame that is non-political at a time when the Afghan debate was very much alive in Canada.

MP Anderson says the breakfast is a “Christ-centred event” and it is. There were no individuals at the podium from any other of the world’s religions to offer commentary, prayers or readings from their holy books at either the 2006 or 2007 breakfasts. This is an odd omission when a number of MPs and Senators are drawn from those religions and serve in a country that is increasingly diverse. This frame can’t help but convey an exclusionary message. This is the more puzzling since smaller multi-faith prayer meetings do occur among parliamentarians throughout the year. Why, then, are individuals of other faiths not represented at the podium at the annual gala?

The prayer breakfast literature makes no comment on gender but appearances are difficult to ignore. Of the 24 individuals who came to the podium in 2006 and 2007 only two were female. MP Karen Redman offered a prayer in each of those years and in 2007 Melanie Hart sang a gospel song. It should not be difficult to include female parliamentarians more prominently in the event since there are 96 of them serving in the House of Commons and the Senate. The choice of this year’s speaker offered a welcome antidote to the paucity of women at the podium.

There are other outstanding Canadians associated with religion who would be excellent choices to speak or offer prayers at the breakfast in future years. Here is my short list: The Most Reverend Dr. Lois Wilson, who served as the moderator of the United Church of Canada, and was also an independent member of the Senate. Dr. Tyseer Aboulnasr is a former dean of engineering at the University of Ottawa, and a respected Canadian commentator on Islam. Mary Jo Leddy is a former a former Catholic sister and the founder of Romero House in Toronto, which became a home and a haven for refugees. Ernie Regehr, who was a founder of the inter-church peace group Project Ploughshares and continues to serve the organization as a senior advisor. Former MP Douglas Roche was Canada’s ambassador for disarmament to the United Nations. James Loney served on the front lines with the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq, where he was kidnapped and held for months prior to his release.

Members of Parliament, including Bill Blaikie, Karen Redman and others have lamented that for many people the very word religion conjures the image of social and moral conservatism. That is only one side of the religious frame and in future the National Prayer Breakfast could play an important role in balancing the picture.

By Dennis Gruending

Evangelical Protestants and Catholics have a history of mutual mistrust and suspicion but they are now engaged in a growing collaboration in the United States and Canada. Mark Noll, a Canadian religious historian who teaches at Notre Dame University in Indiana, published a book in 2005 called, Is the Reformation Over? Noll focuses particularly upon the U. S. since the 1960s, a time when leading evangelicals opposed John Kennedy’s candidacy for president because they believed he would take his orders from Rome. The situation has changed immeasurably since that time. “Especially on pro-life and pro-family questions,” Noll writes, “the difficult thing to imagine now is how evangelicals and Catholics could ever have been at odds.”

Noll points to cooperation on a number of fronts and at varying levels. Following the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Catholic Church began discussions with other world religions and denominations, including evangelicals, Pentecostals and Baptists. In the U.S., Charles Colson and Father Richard John Neuhaus launched a group called Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) in 1992. Years earlier Colson had been sentenced to prison for his activities on behalf of the Nixon administration and later he experienced a religious conversion. Father Neuhaus is a convert from Lutheranism and a leading neo-conservative thinker and writer.

Noll also refers to Canadian research that places the evangelical-Catholic collaboration into a social science perspective. In the 1990s, Queen’s University history professor George Rawlyk and pollster Andrew Grenville measured the presence of evangelicalism in Canada and the U.S. They found, for example, that about 20 per cent of Canadian Catholics could be described as evangelical Christians according to a widely accepted definition of that term, which includes having had a born again conversion experience. Rawlyk referred to those people as “Catho-evangelicals”. His research also indicated that many evangelical Protestants feel more at home with conservative Catholics than they do with mainline Protestants.

Religiously conservative Catholics and evangelicals in the U.S. and Canada have made their definition of sexual and family issues the litmus test of orthodox belief. Among Catholics, this has arisen to a great extent from the deliberate emphasis that Pope John Paul II and his successor Benedict XVI placed upon issues such as same sex marriage, homosexuality, abortion, and family planning. The bishops’ conference in the U.S. decided in 1994 that individual bishops could refuse communion to any politician who supported a pro-choice position. Same sex marriage was later added to the list of prohibitions. Some Canadian bishops have also attempted to force politicians into line with church teaching. Three New Democratic Party MPs were denied full participation in their church because of the position they and their party had taken on the same-sex marriage legislation. The bishop of Calgary also talked about Catholic politicians, including Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, jeopardizing their salvation. More recently Ottawa’s Catholic archbishop told an audience that he would refuse communion to any Catholic politicians who support access to abortion if they couldn’t be persuaded to change their mind.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops once participated in coalitions with mainline Protestant denominations on a range of social justice initiatives. In recent years that collaboration has withered to be replaced by a growing partnership with religious conservatives on so-called family issues. The bishops and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC), for example, have cooperated in the Inter-faith Coalition on Marriage and the Family, appearing jointly as intervenors in court cases regarding legislation on same sex marriage.

There are other on-the-ground connections as well. Derek Rogusky heads the Ottawa-based and socially conservative Institute of Marriage and the Family Canada. The group has been deeply involved in research, messaging and lobbying on a number of political issues, most notably the same sex marriage legislation. Rogusky says, “We’re seeing a real coalescing of between evangelicals and conservative Catholics. We’re starting to see them engage in issues much more than they did 10 years ago.” This co-operation is based on a shared agenda anchored in opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion, publicly funded childcare and other social programs

The prime minister and other Conservative politicians have courted evangelical, as well as conservative Catholic and Jewish voters. Religious conservatives account for only a minority of Canada’s voters and they are distributed among diverse denominations, but groups that are organized and committed can have a significant impact on public life, particularly in an era of fractured parliaments and minority governments.

Despite these trends, there is no way to predict the future. Churches and religious organizations are not monolithic in their thinking and action. For example, the inter-faith group Citizens for Public Justice (CPJ) is a progressive organization that focuses on issues such as poverty and the environment, but it was created through the Christian Reformed Church, which is considered to be religiously conservative. CPJ has just hired well-known Catholic activist Joe Gunn as its executive director. The Catholic Church in Canada is divided along ethnic and ideological lines and contains many individuals who do not agree with the focus of its hierarchy on moral conservatism. The Canadian Religious Conference, for example, has taken progressive positions on a number of issues on behalf of its members in religious congregations of sisters, brothers and priests.

Progressive Christians, in Protestant, Catholic, and evangelical congregations, have been marginalized in recent years and are now working diligently to have their voices heard by politicians and the Canadian public.