By Dennis Gruending

(The following post was published in the 20th anniversary edition of The Hill Times newspaper on October 5, 2009):

 The Hill Times is a niche publication in the best sense of the word. It is preoccupied with everything that happens on (and around) Parliament Hill and that cuts a broad swath. I know, based upon my eight years as a staff worker and a Member of Parliament that the newspaper is read avidly by pretty well everyone in the precinct. The Hill Times is also characterized by a civility that provides at least some sense of community in a place where that is not easy to achieve. I have come to occupy a niche of my own since I left the Hill in 2004, returning to consulting, to writing books and now a blog called Pulpit and Politics. I am interested in the growing influence that religion is having upon politics and society in Canada and elsewhere. I am pleased that the Hill Times has published some of my articles on this topic.

God is back

In one of my first blog pieces in November 2007, I reported on a lengthy article carried in The Economist. The magazine’s editor John Micklethwait said, “In the 20th century people, particularly among the elites, tended to think that religion was disappearing. That obviously hasn’t happened.” This year Mickhlethwait has published a 400-page book called God is Back, in which he makes his point in even greater detail. Rather than fading away religion has come to play an increasingly prominent public role in contemporary societies. One has only to think about the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions; the impact of liberation theology in places such as Brazil; the role of the church in Poland; the rise of the religious right in the United States, Canada and elsewhere; the rise of militant Sikhism and Islamic extremism. If ever religion was a marginalized force, it has rebounded markedly and not always for the better. All too often, from Northern Ireland through Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Israel, religious intrusions have been violent and bloody. Canada, so far at least, is the peaceable kingdom but the culture wars so common south of the border have their echoes in this country as well.

Canada does not exist in a vacuum. An IPSOS-Reid poll reported, for example, that the vote of evangelical Christians and Catholics who attend church weekly was a deciding factor in the election of a Conservative minority government in January 2006. The question is whether that was a blip or an emerging reality in Canadian political life. The religious right is growing in its political influence. Mainline Protestantism has been in decline although it is showing some signs of revival. Conservative Catholics and evangelicals, who once disliked and mistrusted one another, are now engaged in a growing collaboration on issues such as same sex marriage. The Conservatives are assiduously courting those evangelicals, Catholics, and certain Jewish voters as well to join their political coalition. That has caught the attention of other parties. The NDP has responded by creating Faith and Social Justice Commission, which attempts to mobilize a religious constituency on their behalf. Michael Ignatieff has given Toronto-area Liberal MP John Mackay the task of reaching out on behalf of his party to evangelical Christians.

There is a good deal of research and reportage in the United States about the relationship between religion and politics. Journalists follow the power and the money and in the U.S. the religious right has been an important political player since the days of Ronald Reagan. Recently, for example, there has been coverage about what American religious groups are saying about President Obama’s proposed reforms to health care – the response from those organizations has, unfortunately, been mostly opposed to the reforms. Far less attention has been devoted to the relationship between pulpit and politics in Canada.

What the media misses

I have reported on my blog how several Catholic NDP MPs were denied full participation in their church because of their party’s support of same sex marriage legislation. This is an unfortunate regression on the church’s part to the 19th century when the bishops and clergy in Quebec tried to bring Wilfrid Laurier to heel. I have reported on the National Prayer Breakfast, which I believe should become an inter-religious rather than exclusively Christian event. Other of my blog stories have been about what churches had to say about issues in the 2008 election campaign; about how there has been a proliferation of socially and religiously conservative lobby groups in Ottawa in the past several years; about religion and multiculturalism; about how some MPs and senior bureaucrats see the connection between religious faith and their own public lives.

A story that the mainstream media both covered and missed was the Prime Minister’s promotion of two individuals to senior positions in the PMO in March 2009. Darrel Reid became chief of staff and Paul Wilson replaced him as PMO policy director. Reid and Wilson have deep roots in both religious and political organizations. Reid was chief of staff to Reform Party leader Preston Manning while he was leader of the opposition. Later he became the president of Focus on the Family Canada, a conservative Christian lobby group that has worked against public childcare, same-sex marriage, and against adding sexual orientation to a list of minorities protected from hate crimes.

Wilson has worked for Trinity Western University, which is based in Langley, B.C. and is one of the largest evangelical educational institutions in Canada. Trinity established an Ottawa “campus” in 2001 in an old mansion near Parliament Hill. It houses the Laurentian Leadership Centre, which places students as interns with Ottawa-based organizations, predominantly with MPs. Wilson co-ordinated that internship program but when the Conservatives won election in 2006, he left Trinity Western to become a senior policy advisor to Vic Toews, then the justice minister. Wilson later served in a similar policy role for Diane Finley, the minister of human resources.

There is nothing wrong with these individuals occupying senior positions but their combined political and religious connections are worthy of note and journalists reporting the promotions missed the religious side.

Potential stories

There are other potential stories that I have not had the time or resources to follow. For example, the government is rolling out grants under its infrastructure program and a number of them are going to religious institutions. These include grants to the above-mentioned Laurentian Leadership Centre, and larger one to its parent Trinity Western University. Other grants have gone to Atlantic Baptist University in New Brunswick, Redeemer University College in Ontario and the Briercrest Bible School in Saskatchewan. There is a long tradition in Canada of religious schools and hospitals receiving public support, but it would be interesting to see the full list of religious institutions receiving money under the economic stimulus package and a description of the projects involved.

Ultimately, I am interested in how religious faith informs our political decisions – the division of wealth in our society, education and race relations, the environment and foreign policy, to name just a few. People of religious faith should, like anyone else, be welcomed to participate in political debates and movements for the benefit of the common good. But that participation is worthy of journalistic scrutiny undertaken with a sense of detachment and at least some degree of skepticism.

By Dennis Gruending

There is much speculation about when we will have a federal election in Canada. Columnist Sheila Copps, a former MP, predicts that it will be before the snow flies. For who will people identifying themselves as belonging to a religion cast their votes? This is a question that most pundits and academics did not bother to ask for many years because they thought it was irrelevant, but that is changing. A new study called Canadian Evangelical Voting Trends by Region, 1996–2008 looks into the recent voting behaviour of evangelicals. The authors, Don Hutchinson and Rick Hiemstra are both associated with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC).

The study begins on a defensive note, saying that some journalists and researchers borrow the concept of a “religious right” from the United States and apply it to Canadian evangelicals in an attempt to show that they form a “right leaning voting block”. Hutchinson and Hiemstra say those researchers exhibit a “misunderstanding of the changes in evangelical voting intentions [in Canada] over the past decade.” They include me as being among those who are attempting to force an American template on Canadian reality and of being one of those who does not understand. They cite, in a footnote, a paper that I delivered to an academic conference in 2008. Actually, they appear to misunderstand what I wrote. I do believe that there is a religious right in Canada but it not comprised only of evangelicals. It includes many evangelicals, to be sure, but also right wing Catholics, some Jews and others. Given that more than 40% of Canadians identify themselves as Catholics, the voting intentions of that group are potentially more significant than those of evangelicals, who comprise about 10% of the population. Hutchinson and Hiemstra focus on evangelical voters while my interest has been more broadly based.

Evangelicals voting Conservative

Beyond their initial observation about other researchers, Hutchinson and Hiemstra have a two-fold thesis. They admit that there has, indeed, been a growing support among evangelicals for the Conservatives and other parties of the right during the past decade, but they say this trend mirrors a growing support among other Canadian voters as well. In other words, evangelicals aren’t all that different in the way they vote. Secondly, they argue that evangelicals are more upset with the Liberals than they are predisposed to the Conservatives. Hutchinson and Hiemstra write, “The Liberal Party repeatedly tried to marginalize Evangelicals for short-term electoral gain, mocking their beliefs and styling those beliefs as a danger to ‘Canadian values.’” Since there is no disclaimer here, I must assume that they are speaking on behalf of the EFC when they describe the Liberals in this way.

To support their analysis of voting behaviour, the authors draw upon a series of electoral polls done by Ipsos-Reid and Angus Reid Strategies over the years. Those polls measure the voting intentions of individuals, and in other cases use exit polls to ascertain how individuals actually did vote, controlling for their religious affiliation.

Hutchinson and Hiemstra do not provide national data but rather focus on regional voting patterns. They admit that the poll samples were so small as to be potentially unreliable in Quebec (where there are few evangelicals) and in the sparsely populated Atlantic provinces.

Regional breakdowns

Let’s look, using Hutchinson and Hiemstra’s data, at how evangelicals voted in the 2006 and 2008 elections. In Western Canada, 69% of evangelicals voted for the Conservatives in 2006, compared to 49% among all voters. In the 2008 election, 71% of Western evangelicals voted Conservative, compared to 42% among all voters. These are 20% and 29% spreads respectively and represent a massive advantage for the Conservatives.

In Ontario, the Ipsos-Reid exit poll in the 2006 election showed that 55% of evangelicals voted for the Conservatives, compared to 35% among all voters, a 20-point spread. In 2008, Ipsos Strategies surveyed voting intentions prior to the election. Hutchinson and Hiemstra calculate that on Election Day “almost half [50%] of Ontario Evangelicals could be presumed to have supported the Conservatives.” The authors conclude that this decline in Ontario evangelical support, from 55% to 50%, is evidence that “Conservative evangelical support levels seem to have stalled or retreated from their 2006 highs.” Perhaps, but having 50% of evangelicals vote for the Conservatives in an election contested by three major parties and the Greens represents a huge advantage for the Conservatives.

In Quebec, 45% of evangelicals voted Conservative in 2006, compared to 25% among all voters, a 20-point advantage. In 2008, because of the small sample, the authors do not attempt to provide a comparable number for Quebec. In the Atlantic provinces, again with small samples, 54% of evangelicals voted Conservative in 2006 compared to 35% among all voters, a 19-point spread.  In 2008, the authors estimate that 30% of Atlantic evangelicals voted Conservative compared to 19% among all voters, an 11-point advantage.

Hutchinson and Hiemstra reach the following conclusion based on their research: “While the voting tracks of Canadian Evangelicals and their regional neighbours still run more or less parallel, they have moved farther apart in 2008 than they were in 1996.” This is really quite an understatement. They go on to say that, “As of 2008 the growth in evangelical support for the Conservative Party appears to either have  reached a plateau or begun to decline.” I would argue, using the authors’ own numbers, that in 2008 the Conservatives remained overwhelmingly the party of choice for evangelical voters, particularly in Western Canada (71%) and in Ontario (50%). In fact, I would, indeed, characterize the Western Canadian and Ontario evangelical vote on behalf of the Conservatives in 2006 and 2008 as a “right-leaning voting block.”

Evangelicals and Liberals

I want now to return to the claim that evangelicals are not so much attracted by the Conservatives as they are repelled by the Liberals, who the authors say have ridiculed evangelicals for short-term political advantage and attempted to marginalize them and even to portray them as “un-Canadian”. The authors provide no evidence for this claim other than their own opinions and in one case an anecdote from radio talk show host Michael Coren. The authors recognize this deficiency, although they give it only a passing reference: “While the data are not available to tell us definitively why evangelical voter support for the Liberal Party fell off rapidly,” they write, “the most plausible explanation is a reaction to the party’s electoral tactics.” The authors provide six narrative examples of what they describe as “Liberal attempts to marginalize Evangelicals and stifle dissent for political gain…”

Among those examples is the Liberals’ handling of legislation regarding same sex marriage. By 2002, the courts had begun to rule that the existing definition of marriage was unconstitutional, or, described in another way, that the laws must be changed to allow for same sex marriage.  The authors say: “The government chose not to appeal the [court] decision and announced it would introduce legislation to redefine marriage. . . and the government became an advocate for the redefinition of marriage, contending same-sex marriage was a human rights issue and required by the Charter.”

Same sex marriage was (and remains) a contentious public policy issue but I fail to see why the Liberal government’s acting in accordance with the court rulings should be understood as an insult to evangelicals. To use a parallel example, many Christians are opposed to Canada’s war in Afghanistan, but should they consider themselves to be personally insulted because the Conservative government has not stopped waging the war?

The authors conclude that, “The Canadian Evangelical vote is currently fluid.” It is perhaps less fluid than they suggest, but I do agree that we cannot predict the future. Individuals and groups obtain influence by exercising what the sociologists describe as “agency.” We are not merely spectators in history but can have an impact on it. 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 of that activity.

I will, in a future posting, comment upon another study of religious voting behaviour, mainly as it relates to the Liberals. The authors are McGill University’s Elisabeth Gidengil and a number of her colleagues from different campuses who have co-operated through various elections in a project called the Canadian Election Study (CES).

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.