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.

By Dennis Gruending

An exit poll conducted by Ipsos-Reid following the January 2006 Canadian election indicated that, outside of Quebec, people who attend regularly at evangelical churches were four times more likely to vote for the Conservatives than for Liberals or the New Democratic Party (NDP). This result was markedly different from that of Catholics and mainline Protestants, whose vote was divided much more evenly among the parties. A question in these waning days of the 2008 campaign is whether evangelicals will continue to provide overwhelming support to Stephen Harper and the Conservatives. Evangelicals account for only eight to 10 per cent of the population but their vote could well be important in close election races, particularly in suburbs and smaller cities. A second significant question is how Catholics and mainline Protestants will distribute their vote.

Professor Barry Kay, a political scientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, says the large sample in the Ipsos-Reid poll makes it a useful analytical tool. The poll was able to show, for example, that the vote among mainline Protestants in the United and Anglican churches was similar to that of Catholics. Those Catholics who were frequent church frequent attenders gave 36 per cent of their vote to the Conservatives, 34 per cent to the Liberals and 24 per cent to the NDP. In the United Church, the numbers were 38 per cent, 34 per cent, and 23 per cent respectively. Interestingly, Catholic, United Church and Anglican adherents voted for the Conservatives in roughly the same ratio as the voting population as a whole. The vote by Catholic, Anglican and United Church adherents for the Liberals and the NDP was actually four to six percentage points higher than it was among voters as a whole.

The results among evangelical voters, however, were radically different. “It is among the smaller churches, many of them more conservative doctrinally,” Prof. Kay writes, “where there is a much stronger trend to voting Conservative, by proportions approaching 4 to 1 Conservative to Liberal in 2006.”  Among evangelicals, 63 per cent voted for the Conservatives, compared to 16 per cent for the Liberals and 17 per cent for the NDP. Prof. Kay said in a telephone interview that polling in both the U.S. and Canada has shown consistently that most evangelicals vote for the Republicans or the Conservatives. Polls undertaken by the Pew Forum, an American research institute, show that in the U.S. white evangelicals are the single most supportive constituency for the Republicans.

A flurry of American media stories in 2007 and early this year reported on divisions and a changing of the guard among evangelicals in the U.S. An emerging group of leaders wanted to embrace issues such as poverty and climate change in addition to the old staples such as abortion, same sex marriage, and the teaching of intelligent design (creationism) in schools. But Pew now reports that any such movement appears to have stalled. “The selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican Party’s vice presidential candidate and Catholic bishops’ criticism of Joe Biden’s comments on when life begins have increased the attention paid to culture war issues,” Pew says in a recent posting.

In this country, the largest evangelical organization is the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. The EFC’s election kit pays attention to matters such as poverty and climate change, even as it maintains its traditional emphasis on issues such as abortion. There is no hint of nuance among other organizations, however, including the Canada Family Action Coalition, Campaign Life and a group called Defend Traditional Marriage and Family. They continue to insist that the issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and same sex marriage, are “non-negotiable” and should be ranked above all others in the political debate. It’s worth noting that these organizations are not members of the EFC.

Mr. Harper sees evangelicals and the religious right as essential to the conservative coalition that he wants to build. He has courted them by chopping women’s programs that many of his supporters considered feminist; shelving a universal child care program negotiated by the previous Liberal government and provincial-territorial leaders; allowing several private members bills to come forward regarding abortion; and presenting legislation to censor publicly-supported film projects that the government deemed morally offensive. These moves have, in turn, alienated Canadians who profess no religion, and many others who profess a more moderate and inclusive religious faith than that of religious conservatives. This is hurting Harper politically so he has taken to sending mixed messages. He promised during this campaign that he will not introduce or allow new legislation recriminalizing abortion. Following his recent ill-advised goading of the arts community, he has promised to withdraw his film censorship legislation.

If one is to believe right wing newspaper columnists and pundits, many religious conservatives feel betrayed. Rev. Alphonse de Valk, the editor of a magazine called Catholic Insight, says that Harper should be defeated in his riding and removed as Conservative party leader. David Warren, a self-described socially conservative columnist for The Ottawa Citizen, calls Harper “gutless” and predicts “there are several million electors of genuine conservative tendency who feel disenfranchised, and hesitate to vote for him even when the alternatives look worse.” This expressed disappointment could soften the social conservative and evangelical vote for the Conservatives on October 14. Religious conservatives may well conclude, however, that despite their disappointment with Harper the Conservatives remain a better option than the rest.

Churches that belong to KAIROS, an ecumenical social justice coalition, are urging their members to focus on questions of social and economic justice. The organization has issued a four-page election resource kit that highlights poverty, aboriginal rights, peace and the environment, particularly climate change. KAIROS includes mainline Protestant churches, as well as the Catholic bishops, Quakers, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. They easily comprise a larger group than do the evangelicals, a gentle sleeping giant if you will. KAIROS makes no partisan declarations, but a close reading of the KAIROS election kit provides little succour for the Conservatives.

It is also possible that the frightening financial crisis will cause voting shifts that had not been anticipated. Ipsos-Reid is planning an exit poll of 15,000 voters following the election on October 14 so we will soon have new information about the relationship between our religious convictions and our voting preferences. If you have any information or even educated guesses about how the religious vote is likely to play out on October 14, please write about it in the Comments section below.

By Dennis Gruending

Some Canadian churches are posing earnest but polite questions for candidates and parties in the 2008 election campaign while religious conservatives are denouncing Stephen Harper for betraying them on abortion. The statements and election kits prepared by the churches fall into three broad categories: those that focus on questions of social and economic justice; those that give precedence to issues such as abortion and euthanasia but which acknowledge other issues as well; and those that focus solely on questions such as abortion and insist that they are the only issues which really matter.

Churches that belong to KAIROS, an ecumenical social justice coalition, exemplify the first category. The organization has issued a four-page election resource kit that highlights poverty, aboriginal rights and the environment, particularly climate change. The first in a list of questions that KAIROS recommends be posed to candidates asks,  “Will your party commit to the immediate ending of subsidies to oil companies and redirect these funds to energy conservation and sustainable, renewable energy?” The second question relates to aboriginal rights: “Will your party endorse the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and conclude treaties with Indigenous peoples that implement the rights contained in the Declaration?”

KAIROS includes mainline Protestants, including the Anglican, United and Presbyterian churches, as well as Quakers, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) along with Development and Peace, the Catholic organization tasked with promoting international justice, represent Catholics at KAIROS. Most of the KAIROS member churches and groups have also issued their own election statements or kits.

The Catholic bishops, for example, issued a document called Federal Election 2008 Guide in which they frame the political choices that Catholics should make under the heading of “Respect for the life and dignity of the human person.” Life, they say, must be protected at all stages, “from conception to death, no matter the circumstances.” They say that, in addition to questions such as abortion and euthanasia, protecting life includes “being present to people with disabilities and those who are elderly, ill, poor or suffering; promoting peace and ending violence as a way to resolve conflicts; and encouraging policies that help people balance their family and work responsibilities.”

There is little ecumenical crossover at the national level between evangelical Christians and mainline Protestants. The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) represents evangelical churches and organizations but does not belong either to KAIROS or the Canadian Council of Churches. The EFC has issued an election kit that is in some ways similar to that of the Catholic bishops, highlighting abortion but also including questions of poverty and justice. The kit also features a statement by EFC President Bruce J. Clemenger, who says: “There are a variety of important issues being debated in this election and at least one, abortion, will likely be absent as no party seems willing to dissent from the status quo.”

Clemenger’s comment signals the widespread disppointment that religious conservatives have come to feel toward Stephen Harper, who has made it clear during this campaign that he will not introduce or allow new legislation recriminalizing abortion. Perhaps the strongest denunciation of Harper has come from Rev. Alphone de Valk, the editor of a magazine called Catholic Insight. De Valk issued a news release on October 2 under the heading: “Prime Minister Harper betrays conservatives.” De Valk says that Harper should be defeated in his riding and removed as Conservative party leader.

The anti-abortion organization Campaign Life is rating the leaders based on what it calls a “party leader report card on life issues.” Harper is accorded a D, although he might take at least small solace because all other major party leaders receive an F. Campaign Life and several other organizations on the religious right, including the Canada Family Action Coalition (CFAC), have also prepared an online pamphlet called Election Guide for Serious Christians. This, of course, implies that some Christians are not serious about their faith. Charles McVety, CFAC’s president, has in past elections organized on behalf of right wing religious candidates seeking nominations for the Conservative Party. He has also led the Canadian section of a group Christians United for Israel. Brian Rushfeldt, CFAC’s executive director, says he wants churches to use the election guide as a Sunday bulletin insert and hopes that people in the pews use it as a guide to “vote the way they should.” The guide outlines five “non-negotiable issues” which it says, “should be ranked above all other issues that come up in political debate”. They include: abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, human cloning and same sex marriage. There is no mention of any of the social and economic justice issues raised by the churches involved in the KAIROS coalition or the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

Interestingly, the EFC’s election resource kit reminds its congregations of the rule that, as charitable institutions, churches must be non-partisan. The EFC says that, “a church may not endorse a particular candidate or political party, or use its resources to support a candidate or party (even if they attend your own church).”

All of this civic activity on behalf of churches exists against a backdrop of Canadians being wary of religious involvement in politics. A national Angus Reid poll conducted in July 2008, prior to the election being called, indicated that 82 per cent of respondents consider it inappropriate for religious leaders to urge people to vote for or against a political candidate, and that 66 per cent of Canadians believe it is inappropriate for political candidates to talk about their religious beliefs as part of their campaigns.