By Dennis Gruending

The electoral marathon between Barack Obama and John McCain has provided a unique opportunity to compare and contrast how Canadians and Americans approach religion and politics. What is striking about the American campaign is the extent to which religion intrudes into the political sphere. Obama and McCain made only one joint television appearance prior to being nominated by their parties in the summer of 2008. They were interviewed not by an anchor for a major news network, but by Pastor Rick Warren at his Saddleback mega church in Orange County, California. There were more than 5,000 church members in the audience and an unknown number of others watching the live broadcast at churches around the country.

Obama talked about his certainty that “Jesus Christ died for my sins, and I am redeemed through him.” McCain indulged in less God talk but did describe an encounter with a Vietnamese prison guard who discreetly revealed himself as a Christian when McCain was a prisoner of war. “For a minute there,” McCain said, “ there was just two Christians worshipping together.” John F. Kennedy, when he was a presidential candidate in the 1960s, said that, “I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair.” Kennedy was a Catholic trying to allay fears being stoked by the Republicans that he would take his orders from the Vatican. Kennedy also said, “I believe in an American where the separation of church and state is absolute.” American politics have obviously changed since Kennedy’s time, as the pilgrimage to Saddleback would indicate.

With only a few exceptions, Canadian political leaders have dealt with their faith in a very different way. We know that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is an evangelical Christian but he is extremely guarded in what he says about his convictions. Former Reform Party leader Preston Manning says that evangelicals dare not speak about their faith publicly for fear of being ridiculed. Perhaps, but there is a long tradition of discretion among Canadian leaders when talking about their faith, or lack of it. They have understood how religious divisions could stir up controversy and ill will in a country where Anglophone Protestants and Francophone Catholics had to coexist. Wilfrid Laurier made a celebrated speech in which he stared down those (including bishops) who supported the creation of a “Catholic” political party in Quebec in the 1870s.

I am researching former prime ministers for a book that I am writing on political speeches. One can read stacks material on Sir John A. Macdonald without finding any comments by him about religion. The Quebec bishops and clergy regularly pilloried Laurier as a liberal and a revolutionary. He continued to attend mass but refused to be drawn into any public discussion about his personal religious convictions. We know that Lester Pearson’s father was a Methodist minister, that John Diefenbaker was a devout Baptist, that Pierre Trudeau, to the surprise of many, was a committed (but private) Catholic. CCF-NDP leader Tommy Douglas was an ordained minister who continued to make hospital visits even after becoming premier. All of these people chose to say very little about their faith although they were no doubt motivated by it.

It is difficult to imagine anyone in Canada summoning political party leaders, as Pastor Rick Warren did, to appear at an evangelical church to be interviewed. The reasons are both cultural and demographic. In Canada, evangelicals comprise only about eight to 10 per cent of the population, compared to 20 to 30 per cent in the U.S. Catholics in Canada account for more than 40 per cent of the population but it is also difficult to imagine a bishop interviewing the leaders. The task is much better left to the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge or CTV’s Lloyd Robertson.

Much has been made in the American media about a new evangelical leadership coalescing around Pastor Warren and others. In the past 18 months, I have read articles with titles such as “The Evangelical Surprise” or “The New Evangelicals” in major U.S. magazines and newspapers. The thesis is that a new generation of leaders is replacing religious hardliners such as Pat Robertson and James Dobson. The new group is said to want to move away from the cultural wars and from a strict preoccupation with issues such as same sex marriage and abortion.  They want to add to those staples of the religious right their concerns about poverty, AIDS and climate change. There have been toxic battles within the National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention over these questions. The emerging leadership is also said to be uncomfortable with the unwavering support provided by evangelicals to the Republicans since the days of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The desire to become less vitriolic in posture, more inclusive on issues, and less predictably Republican was largely the result of disappointment with George W. Bush and the lack of a candidate of choice among Republican candidates for the presidency in 2008. Many evangelical leaders were lukewarm toward John McCain but much of that changed when he named Sarah Palin, a right wing Pentecostal, as his vice-presidential running mate. White evangelicals gave Bush 78 per cent of their vote in 2004 but it appeared that vote would soften in 2008. Palin’s appearance on the ticket appeared to solidify that vote again and it has ended, at least for now, most talk of a new evangelicalism concerned with a broader set of issues. A Pew Research Centre poll taken from October 23-26 reported that Obama was surging ahead across most voting blocs, but that McCain continued to lead among white evangelical Protestants by a margin of 65 to 22 per cent.

Evangelical churches in Canada lack the critical mass of those in the U.S. and have been less able, perhaps less willing, to become as deeply involved in a right wing political coalition. There is in Canada no apparent parallel to the divisive debate among evangelicals in the U.S. about whether to focus on a broader set of issues. A kit prepared by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada for the 2008 federal election dealt with tried issues such as abortion but also posed questions about climate change and poverty. Yet in recent elections Canadian evangelicals have been almost as ardent in support for the Conservatives as their American counterparts have been for the Republicans. In the January 2006 election, 64 per cent of evangelicals supported the Conservatives, compared to about 16 per cent who supported each of the Liberals and New Democrats. The Ipsos-Reid polling company promised to  undertake an exit poll following the 2008 Canadian election. We will soon know whether the vote among evangelicals in Canada this year mirrors that in the United States.

By Dennis Gruending

He would be called an icon if he was in business, sports or even politics but in the world that he inhabits 85-year-old peace activist Murray Thomson is just quietly and deeply respected. This night he speaks about militarism to a group of about 50 people at the modest Quakers House in Ottawa as part of a two-week peace festival. There is a video and some music provided by a middle-aged group who (tongue-in-cheek) call themselves Grateful We’re Not Dead — but Thomson’s 15-minute speech is the centrepiece. “Militarism is bad for the global economy, terrible for the environment, hugely destructive of human rights and of life itself, and it poses a major risk to the future of humanity,” Thomson says.

He has a deeper appreciation than most about both the attraction and repulsion of militarism. He was a student at the University of Toronto when the Second World War began. He enlisted in the air force and became a pilot although he never actually flew a combat mission. He was still in the military when, in 1945, the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. “Hiroshima made me a pacifist,” Thomson told Embassy magazine in June 2008, and now, 63 years after that unspeakably violent event, he is still spreading the word about resisting militarism and building peace.

Militarism, Thomson says, is fed by the recruitment and training of armed forces, nourished by military alliances, such as NATO, and supported by the well-funded secret intelligence agencies. “Militarism grows in a social climate characterized by nationalism, patriotism, denigration of women and an over-emphasis on authority, buttressed by attitudes which stress the perversity and weakness of human nature. Militarism is fostered by economic, political and military interest groups which benefit materially from the arms trade.” Canada, for example, plans to spend $490 billion on the military over the next 20 years, and the U.S. spends $700 billon each year. Thomson says the tentacles of the defence establishment and its lobby are everywhere and that militarism is deeply etched into our individual and collective consciousness.

Canada’s Department of National Defence (DND), he says, spends millions of dollars on think tanks and scholars and in return expects them to provide supportive commentary. Citing research by University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran, Thomson says that eleven universities receive between $580,000 and $780,000, and Queens University obtained a grant of $1.5 million. “He [Attaran] claims that DND sponsors policy scholars who create the ideas, news and views that shape Canadians’ perceptions of the military and war.”

Militarism is also associated with the acceptance of violence in films and videos, and our use of language in sports and other community events, Thomson says. “Who of us is not embarrassed by the rants of Don Cherry on Hockey Night in Canada, the champion of both hockey brawling and a tougher military?” Many professional sports teams “use military terms to describe and promote their activities and at last year’s football final in Toronto, the Grey Cup was brought into the Rogers Centre by the Canadian military. It could be seen, riding on a tank, followed by a recruitment detachment from DND.”

Thomson may be discouraged but he is not deterred. He has been an active pacifist and remains so. He’s worked for the Quakers and internationally for CUSO. He was the co-founder of the inter-church peace group Project Ploughshares, a founder of Peace Brigades International and of Peace Fund Canada, a campaign aimed at allowing conscientious objectors to have their tax payments spent only for non-military purposes. For his unceasing efforts, he has received the Order of Canada, the Pearson Peace Medal and other awards.

Thomson provides his Quaker House audience with a checklist of practical ways to challenge militarism. They include:

- Keep on doing what we are doing. Work to rid the world of weapons: land mines, cluster bombs, automatic weapons, arms technology or weapons of mass destruction.

- Ask questions of academic presidents about the research done because of grants received from the Department of National Defence.

- Advocate for a [Canadian] Department of Peace which puts peace, the environment and disarmament priorities into foreign policy and seeks to train thousands of youth and others in conflict resolution, in Canada or elsewhere.

- Campaign to end the war in Afghanistan and to support war resisters seeking to live Canada.

- Support couragaeous Africans seeking to end civil conflicts in their countries, or Israelis and Palestinians seeking a just solutions to the never-ending conflict in the Middle East.

- Keep on working to creating global structures that strengthen international law and human rights.

- Challenge NATO’s nuclear policies and the existence of NATO itself.

- Find the means to coordinate efforts, pool financial, human and spiritual resources and speak with one voice.

Then, having delivered his speech, Murray Thomson picks up a fiddle and plays a tune along with the evening’s entertainers. All they are saying was give peace a chance.