by Dennis Gruending

The Ottawa-based National House of Prayer (NHOP) is organizing a National Prayer Sunday for our government and its leaders on June 29. You may not have heard of the NHOP or its prayer list so I will take a brief look at both. You may be surprised – but first a brief bit of history.

Rob and Fran Parker are a couple from British Columbia who say they felt God calling them to set up a house of prayer in the capital. Mr. Parker has a long association with an organization called Watchmen for the Nations, and after a gathering of the group in 1996 he organized a prayer-walk from Calgary to Ottawa. In 2004, the NHOP purchased a former convent not far from parliament hill for $900,000. They’ve added staff and volunteers and regularly host groups, including youth, from across the country to engage in formation as prayer leaders. NHOP personnel appear to have ready access to parliament hill. They attend question period, sit in at committees and lead prayer meetings. They were invited by the National Prayer Breakfast in 2007 to participate in a workshop following the meal, and the publicity for this year’s event invited people to an NHOP open house.

Each week on its website the NHOP asks people to offer prayers on a variety of issues and for individuals in public life, and the group also posts other prayer requests and observations on a blog. The most prayed for piece of legislation in 2008 has been MP Ken Epp’s Bill C-484 (The Unborn Victims of Crime Act), which would create a separate offence for killing or injuring a fetus during an attack on a pregnant woman. The bill has passed second reading in the House of Commons and has been sent off to a committee for examination. It is controversial because many believe that if passed the bill could be used as a wedge to re-criminalize abortion. The NHOP blog posting on April 30 talked about “practical things” that could be done to support Epp and his bill. These included praying, organizing a national fast, signing a petition of support on Epp’s website, and writing handwritten letters to MPs in support of the Bill C-484.

Earlier in 2008 another blog entry requested prayers for passage of Bill C-2, the federal government’s anti-crime bill. Yet another recommended prayers that a conservative jurist be appointed to replace Mr. Justice Michel Bastarache, who has announced his retirement from the Supreme Court of Canada. The same blog entry expressed approval that the court appears to be turning back a growing number of charter cases.

Another entry requested prayers for “a total overhaul or abolition of the current human rights councils in this country” and referred readers to conservative pundit Ezra Levant’s articles for further information. The case provoking the prayer request involves a human rights complaint into comments made about Muslims by writer Mark Steyn in Macleans magazine.

The NHOP website is also requesting prayers for the success of an event called The Cry, which is to be held on parliament hill on August 23rd.  The website says: “Let’s intercede that thousands of believers will attend this wonderful event.” Similar youth rallies were held in 2002 and 2006 to dramatize concern about what organizers described as the moral and social decline in Canada. Guest speakers at those rallies included the Parkers from NHOP and David Demian, head of Watchmen for the Nations. Demian and his organization are dedicated supporters of the Israeli government and its policies.

Where does NHOP fit into the wider picture? In an interview with the Ottawa Citizen in January 2006, the Parkers describe the prayer house as a registered charity that welcomes Christians of all denominations. They say it is not an advocacy group and does not endorse political parties. The Citizen article also says that the NHOP “has the financial backing of churches and religious organizations with links to the grassroots evangelical groups that helped Stockwell Day defeat Preston Manning in the 2000 Canadian Alliance leadership race.”

The NHOP exists within a charismatic and Pentecostal movement known for its emotional and enthusiastic forms of worship. NHOP also leans toward Christian reconstructionism – a belief that government and all of society must submit to the Bible’s moral principles. It may be this strong Biblical focus that explains an NHOP blog posting following a demonstration at the Chinese embassy this spring calling for a free Tibet. “Some of our prayers go in that direction,” the NHOP blog said. “However, on another level, our deeper cry in prayer is ‘Free Tibet!’ Free it from the centuries of spiritual darkness and oppression that the Tibetan Buddhist priests exerted over the people. Free them from the power of blinded obedience to the Dalai Lama.” This statement is particularly odd because the government named the Dalai Lama as honourary Canadian citizen in 2007, one of only four people ever to receive that distinction.

The NHOP is just one of a number of conservative Christian groups to locate in Ottawa within the past few years, a development that indicates the growing influence in Canada of the religious right.

By Dennis Gruending

 Citizens for Public Justice is an Ottawa-based church group with a difference. At a time when the word religion has come to be associated mainly with social conservatism, CPJ provides a Christian perspective regarding public policy debates on poverty, housing, aboriginal rights, immigration and the environment. At its annual meeting in Ottawa on June 9, CPJ invited John Hiemstra, a professor of political studies at The King’s University College in Edmonton, to highlight issues surrounding development of the Alberta tar sands. Hiemstra has spent a sabbatical year studying the boom from what he calls a public justice perspective, which he described as being “rooted in the Christian narrative of God’s good creation.”

The Prime Minister is a proponent of rapid tar sands development and Hiemstra quoted Stephen Harper as describing the project as “an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger.” Harper has described Canada as an emerging “energy superpower.” Hiemstra also quoted Alberta premier Ed Stelmach as saying, “There’s no touching the brake. The economy, growth – that will sort itself out. We just want to make sure we’re globally competitive.”

The size of the project is astonishing, something that Hiemstra believes few Canadians understand in detail. He showed aerial photos of giant earthmovers working in open pit mines carved out of the boreal forest. Bitumen is scooped up and later hot water (heated by natural gas) is used to separate oil from the sand. Indeed, Hiemstra said that Alberta will have the world’s second largest dam, after Three Gorges in China, to provide the water needed for tar sands development. Northern Alberta contains the second largest petroleum reserves in the world (after those in Saudi Arabia) and the area to be mined is twice the size of New Brunswick. There was a gasp from Hiemstra’s audience when he showed aerial photos of toxic tailings ponds located immediately adjacent to the Athabasca River.

Hiemstra said that the existing model, which promotes development at all costs and relies solely on the market to dictate the speed and scope, is deeply flawed. That model submerges a host of important issues about climate change, air and water pollution, and the health, particularly aboriginal people in the area. Those issues, in turn, raise basic questions about the consumption and often-wasteful lifestyles that the project supports. Almost all of the refined product will be used for transportation purposes such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuels, and the major market is in the United States.

Hiemstra said that most often a “modernist” approach is taken toward problems associated with the development. The problems (everything from toxic tailings to high home prices and housing rental rates) are divided into small component parts to be studied.  All of those problems are assumed to be amenable to technological solutions. “ Most people don’t ask if the boom is a good thing to start with,” Hiemstra said. “Governments support it and hope for a technological silver bullet.” He said that what is needed is a “more integral and sensitive” analysis, one that he said Citizens for Public Justice has been using for many years. “We need alternative ways to focus debates about policy and action. We must question the deeper reality when dealing with concrete problems. We assume that God’s good creation should work and if it doesn’t we must dig deeper in examining the paradox.”

Hiemstra was once a Calgary-based staffer for CPJ, which arose from the merger of two organizations — the Alberta-based Christian Action Foundation and the Committee for Justice and Liberty based in Ontario. Both groups had Calvinist roots in the Dutch Reformed Church (now the Christian Reformed Church). Gerald Vandezande served as CPJ’s first staff person and until his retirement in 1999 he was a familiar figure representing the organization in public and the media and on many visits to Parliament Hill. A writer once described Vandezande as occupying the “soft liberal left” of the Calvinist tradition. Vandezande attended the June annual meeting in Ottawa along with about 50 others.

CPJ has developed a reputation over the years for providing excellent research and analysis and for being non-partisan in its approach. The organization is scrupulous in its relationships with MPs from all political parties but it can occasionally be daring as well. CPJ appeared before the National Energy Board (NEB) in 1975 to call for a moratorium on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, and in 1976 it went to court with other groups to disqualify the NEB chair from ruling on the issue on grounds of his perceived conflict of interest. The call for a moratorium became a major recommendation of the Berger Inquiry into the proposed pipeline. CPJ’s work on this and other public justice issues brought it into contact and alliance with other groups, broadening its experience and its base.

CPJ is membership-based and comprised of both individuals and organizations. Those members are now distributed among Christian Reformed, mainline Protestant, Catholic, and evangelical churches. Late in April CPJ’s board announced that Joe Gunn, an experienced Catholic and ecumenical activist, had been hired as its new executive director. Gunn’s hiring followed CPJ’s relocation last fall from Toronto to Ottawa so that CPJ could be closer to the federal political actors that it hopes to influence. One of CPJ’s major recent efforts is a campaign calling on Canada to create a poverty reduction strategy that includes an action plan along with measurable targets and timelines.

By Dennis Gruending

The religious right in Canada is growing in power and influence but that development appears to be news to many political scientists and pundits. As mentioned in this space last week, I presented a paper on the religious right to a conference at the University of Western Ontario early in May (see http://www.dennisgruending.ca/). In the United States, religious conservatives have been important political actors for the past 30 years and there is a good deal of research and writing about it. We in Canada have paid less attention. In fact, a number of respected academics believe that there is no identifiable religious right in this country, at least not in overtly political terms.

Some researchers argue that religious conservatives in Canada are gentler and less political than their political cousins south of the border. Others contend that religious conservatives spread their vote among political parties and that even if they didn’t, there are not enough of them to make that much of a difference in the voting booth. Political scientist Jonathon Malloy of Carleton University is among those who make that argument. It’s time to revisit certain of these assumptions. Religious conservatives may 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. My conclusions are based upon not only upon what I have read, seen or heard but also upon my experience as a candidate in four federal elections and time spent as a Member of Parliament.

The growing influence of the religious right manifests itself in several ways, including religiously driven voting behaviour. A large exit poll taken on Election Day (January 23, 2006) indicated that the vote of evangelical Christians and Catholics who attend church weekly was a decisive factor in the election of a Conservative minority government. One can argue that a poll of that sort is only a snapshot, but there is also longer-term work being done as well. A group of researchers have collaborated in a project called the Canadian Election Study, investigating how people have voted in the past four federal elections. They have found that religious conservatives – evangelicals and increasingly Catholics — have shown an inclination to support the Reform, Alliance and now the Conservative party. One informed journalist in the Parliamentary Press Gallery estimates that at least half of Stephen Harper’s 98-member caucus are religious conservatives.

A second indicator of mounting influence is the growing cooperation among conservative Christians, particularly in evangelical and Catholic churches, based on a shared agenda anchored in opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion, publicly funded childcare and other social programs. Derek Rogusky heads the socially conservative Ottawa-based 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.”

A third indicator of growing influence is the expanding network of advocacy and lobby groups aimed at influencing public policy and changing the intellectual climate in Canada. Many of these groups have come into being in the past four or five years. In Ottawa they include: the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada (mentioned above); the Institute for Canadian Values; the National House of Prayer and 4 My Canada, self-described religiously conservative youth group. One can add to this Ottawa-based list a variety of other organizations across the country: the Calgary-based Manning Centre for Building Democracy, the Work Research Foundation, Watchmen of the Nations; the Centre for Cultural Renewal; the Christian Family Action Coalition, led by Reverend Charles McVety of Toronto; and a group called Equipping Christians for the Public-square Centre, a St. Catharines-based organization that describers its members as “apologists for social conservative Christians.”

A fourth indicator of growing influence is access by the religious right to those in the halls of power, particularly since the election of the Conservative minority government.  “There’s a great sense of relief among many in these circles that the Conservatives are in power,” according to Doug Koop, the editor of Christianweek, a Winnipeg-based church newspaper. “For the first time in 10 years Christians and people of faith that have cared about issues such as marriage and families are expecting to be heard on Parliament Hill, and not necessarily attacked for their values.” Not long ago some of these groups would have been considered on the right wing fringe but they now appear to be courted by the Harper government. This apparent cultivation raises questions about how much influence religious conservatives have with the prime minister. Mr. Harper may be more of a social than a religious conservative, although we are not sure about that. We do know that he is determined to embed the religious right in a political coalition that will put a Conservative majority government into power and keep it there.

There is little doubt that the power and influence of the religious right is growing. The question is whether this represents a blip or a longer-term trend. There is no way of predicting the future. Individuals and groups obtain influence by exercising social and political agency. Churches and religious organizations are not monolithic in their thinking and action. Progressive Christians — in Protestant, Catholic, and evangelical congregations — have been marginalized in recent years but are now struggling to have their voices heard by politicians and the Canadian public. Religion appears poised to play a larger role upon the public stage in the foreseeable future than has been the case for a good number of years but no one can easily predict the outcome.