DON'T EXPECT THE CCP TO GO QUIETLY
Conservative religious groups enjoy a quiet boom due to issues like gay marriage. While the Harper era has not yet been all they hoped for, they see only broader horizons ahead, writes CHRISTOPHER DREHER
September 2006
They descended on Ottawa in the thousands, under the slogan "The Siege has begun!" At a rally in July, more than 6,000 people in the nation's capital, most of them in their teens and 20s, waved Canadian flags and cheered for nationalistic riffs. It was the type of turnout that political parties pray for in their youth-voter drives.But the organizers of this event -- 4 MY Canada: Motivated Young People for a Strong Canada -- aren't part of any regular political party: Rather, they may be Canada's first modern, politicized Christian-youth movement.
"We're concerned about where Canada is going, what type of crazy track it's on and what Canada's going to be like for my kids," says director and founder Faytene Kryskow, a 31-year-old Simon Fraser University graduate who conceived the idea while researching a book about Canada's Christian heritage. "The decisions [Pierre] Trudeau and his generation made are being felt now. The impact of the decisions made now will only be known in 20 or 30 years."
For a year-old grassroots non-profit organization, it has had unusual success: In July, its website recorded two million hits. It has held dozens of smaller rallies across the country, and met with hundreds of politicians. And it has purchased a six-bedroom house in Ottawa's Vanier neighbourhood to serve as an initial base of operations, from which Ms. Kryskow expects to have constant dialogue with MPs about committee-level legislation.
It's far from the only group that mixes religion and politics to set up shop in Ottawa lately. In the past several years -- and especially since the election of Stephen Harper's Conservative government in January -- dozens of well-organized and well-funded religiously minded think tanks, lobbying groups and grassroots organizations have started up, relocated or greatly expanded, all aiming at broader entrée into local and national politics.
Ms. Kryskow received start-up advice from the National House of Prayer, which opened its doors in 2005 with the idea that "the key to restore godliness in our land is to pray for all those in authority." Among her other new neighbours are the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada,
Social Conservatives United and the Institute for Canadian Values.
Although Ms. Kryskow's key legislative concerns include drugs, the age of consent and Internet pornography, the brightest flashpoint for religious activists is obvious: It's the law that made Canada the fourth country in the world to recognize same-sex marriage.While Bill C-38 passed more than a year ago, by a vote of 158 to 133, Mr. Harper has pledged to hold a vote in Parliament on whether to revisit the issue. It is expected to come early in this political season, perhaps as soon as this coming week.
Even the most optimistic advocates of traditional marriage expect their side to lose, since all 50 Bloc Québécois and 29 New Democrat MPs have agreed to vote against the measure, and even a few Conservatives have dismissed revisiting the contentious issue.
But the Prime Minister's decision might be more politically astute than it seems, in terms of keeping faith with the socially conservative part of his base. The passage of C-38 may have been a banner day for its advocates, but it wasn't a demoralizing failure for its opponents.
Instead, it was a rallying point. Its galvanizing effects could be compared to the centrality in the American right of the abortion-legalizing 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade.
Not that Canadian politics is about to follow the same script that brought the U.S. Christian right to such prominence. There are too many differences between the two countries. But neither is the movement here simply a knockoff or a collection of uneducated Bible-thumpers. Many of its leaders are seasoned, sophisticated political operatives with experience in the local and national political arenas.
And their efforts may be producing results. According to Andrew Grenville, a senior vice-president at polling firm Ipsos-Reid who has monitored the voting patterns of religious groups in Canada for 15 years, the last federal election brought the first indication of a distinct, national religious-conservative vote.
"What happened on that day back in January of 2006 was profound in terms of the role of religion and public life in Canada," he says.
Mr. Grenville explains that before this year, in each election, a slightly higher percentage of Protestants than Catholics would vote for right-of-centre candidates, while Catholics were consistently more likely to vote for Liberals.
But the 2006 data showed a 25-per-cent increase in votes for Conservatives from Protestants who attended church weekly, and no increase among those who did not. Among evangelical churchgoers, the jump was even greater.
Likewise, for the first time ever in English-speaking Canada, Catholics who attended church voted for Conservatives more than Liberals. And in Quebec, the Liberal vote dropped to 29 from 56 per cent among weekly churchgoers, far more than among the less observant.
"I was shocked when I saw the data," Mr. Grenville says. "In 2004, there was the emergence of evangelicals coming out in one voice to vote about gay marriage. And then suddenly -- bang! Between 2004 and 2006, we see a difference. The fact that it grew as much as it did in two years, after being such a static pattern for so many years, that's really a jump."
It doesn't mean that Canadian priests and preachers are instructing their flocks on how to vote, he adds. "There's something around the people attending church. People have been coming together, there have been groups finding a common voice and saying, 'We're unhappy with these issues.' "
And more than that, he says, "it suggests a growing divide in Canadian culture where religion can become a wedge that pushes people apart."
In many ways, the same-sex-marriage debate is a clash of opposing narratives: Secular progressives advocate individual rights and equality, while religious conservatives uphold tradition and consider secular "social engineering" an aggressive threat to their most sacred tenets.
Charles H. McVety, president of Canada Christian College and the Canada Family Action Coalition, considers getting Christians involved in the political process one of his more important duties. He once arranged to have Jerry Falwell come to Canada to speak with 600 pastors about motivating Christians in the public square.
"My hope and prayer is that more people get involved, so no single interest group is overrunning the system," he says. "That's how we wandered along the path we're on.
"That's why the sleepy country of Canada is now a world leader in extremism -- of legalizing prostitution, decriminalizing child porn, redefining marriage, a push to decriminalize and fully legalize marijuana.
"These are things driven by extremists who become involved in the candidate-selection process and distorted electoral process. If we get more mainstream people involved, such distortion will never happen."
In most editorials and media commentary, the message on the same-sex-marriage vote this fall has been to "move on" -- opponents should simply concede defeat and politicians should focus on more important issues.
But rallies opposing same-sex marriage have garnered some of the largest crowds ever seen in Ottawa over a single issue. Some MPs have reported that constituent concern about it has far outweighed attention to matters such as the Afghanistan conflict.
"It's not a matter that's at rest. It's something people feel very deeply about," says C. Gwendolyn Landolt, national vice-president of the anti-feminist lobby group Real Women Canada, one of a dozen groups that make up the Defend Marriage coalition. The coalition has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in media campaigns against C-38.
"Same-sex marriage will never be accepted any more than abortion is. It will be a running open sore in the face of Canadian society."
Brian Stiller, president of Tyndale University College and Seminary and former president of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, says that despite signs of a "spiritual renaissance," politicians and the secular public still tend to tune "this sizable religious population" out.
"To me, it's un-Canadian for them to dismiss us out-of-hand and denies the pluralistic model that we've all considered appropriate for our country," he says. "Every community has a left, centre and right. The left has fundamentalists in their group as well, and I'm sure they're as embarrassed about their fundamentalists as we are of ours. But that's the way life is."
According to John G. Stackhouse, Jr., a professor of theology and culture at the University of British Columbia, the voting shift is the fault of the Liberals and NDP, which he claims have not tolerated dissent on these issues.
"The way the [marriage] issue was handled by Paul Martin made it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for religious conservatives to vote Liberal," he says.
"In Canada, it's not because evangelicals themselves decided to suddenly get involved in a culture war and skew to the right, but instead because the social elite of the parties drove them into the Conservative Party."It was not always this way. According to Mark Noll, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois who specializes in religion and politics in North America, in the past Canada allowed more overlap between church and state than the U.S., where there were constitutional barriers against it. But that all changed in the 1960s.
"Some time in the mid-sixties, Canada began to look more like Europe than the U.S.," Dr. Noll says. Church participation began to drop rapidly -- to two-thirds the level of attendance in the United States. In the early 1960s, he estimates, it actually would have been a third higher than the church-going rate south of the border.
After that shift, social liberalism arguably began legislating its ideals. According to Dr. Noll, the implementation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms under Pierre Trudeau was "immensely significant," along with the birth of official multiculturalism. "It meant that Canada was caught between its long tradition of church-state co-operation and the much more recent tradition of multiculturalism."
"The autonomous individual became the federal government's preoccupation," Dr. Stiller says. And the effect, he contends, has been to devalue the "communitarianism that has respect for values and concerns of community. So our society was constructed, legally, on the model of the individual. When you go in that direction, anything that doesn't have an individualistic component to its nature loses before it begins."
Subsequent legislation on abortion, divorce and other social issues stirred many religious conservatives, but same-sex marriage was the real catalyst.
"For the first time there was a crystallizing bill for evangelicals to rally around," notes Jonathan Malloy, an associate professor in the political-science department at Carleton University who has done recent studies on evangelical groups in Canada.
"Gay marriage was no longer a theoretical issue, but something that's here, and for a lot of evangelicals it's given them very clear focus and a very clear direction of who to vote for."
As with Roe v. Wade for U.S. Christians, he says, "sometimes you need an opponent more than a supporter to mobilize the troops."
In this context, religious conservatives are working overtime. For example, the membership of the Ottawa-based Canada Family Action Coalition, which has the self-described mandate "to provide strategies, networking, training and tools to enable ordinary Canadians to influence their government," has doubled in the past five years and their mailing list tops 100,000.
Executive director Brian Rushfeldt, a long-time registered lobbyist, says the group organizes voting drives and has "key contact people" -- activists who organize locally -- in 300 to 400 communities across the country. The tactics of U.S. religious organizations have provided some inspiration.
"We've looked at what they've done and how they've done it, to see if it'd be effective or not," he says. "There's a significant difference in cultural tone and some things may not work here at all. So we examine: 'What principles did they apply? How did they go about this?' "
One American trend being reproduced is the creation of religious think tanks and policy institutes, which provide advocacy groups with research and studies to support their positions. They can be a crucial bridge to the secular world, helping groups frame their arguments in ways that will be taken seriously by the media and the public.
Focus on the Family Canada, founded in 1983 by the influential U.S. evangelical organization Focus on the Family, opened the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada in February, 2006, which its literature claims is "a think tank and research resource for Canada's decision makers."
Another recent addition is the Institute for Canadian Values, founded in 2005: One of its first major actions was to invite Ralph Reed, the U.S. Republican political adviser and former head of the influential Christian Coalition, to speak about grassroots activism at the institute's 2005 Embrace Democracy Conference. It is also organizing the first annual Canadian Family Congress, which takes place in November.
Although Preston Manning's recently founded Manning Centre for Building Democracy is a more secular-conservative think tank, its mandate also crosses into the divine realm: It held a three-day seminar called "Navigating the Faith/Political Interface" in association with Trinity Western and Tyndale universities, discussing effective strategy and comportment for aspiring religious conservatives. A second seminar takes place in early October in Vancouver.
There is also a new wave of advocacy education. Trinity Western University set up the Laurentian Leadership Centre, where Christian students learn about bridging the gap between Christianity and politics. Both 4 MY Canada and the National House of Prayer offer internship opportunities for students to study political workings in Ottawa, and 4 MY Canada holds workshops around the country to train youths to be grassroots advocates on faith-related issues.
Until the 1980s, religious Canadians relied on the output of the wealthier and more abundant U.S. Christian media outlets. But in recent decades the Canadian Christian media have grown significantly, thanks partly to changes in broadcasting laws in the late 1980s, which allowed more faith-based TV and radio stations on the air. Today's economical publishing technology has also enabled great advances in Canadian Christian publishing.
But perhaps the single most powerful new tool has been the Internet. For example, the Toronto-based Campaign Life Coalition's newspaper hit a circulation of 30,000 after almost two decades; after putting its Web portal, LifeSite.net, on-line in 1997, it now gets 20 million page views a month (not all, of course, from Canada).
"More traditional views of family or culture were not being represented in the mainstream media," says co-founder Steve Jalsevac, managing director of LifeSite news. "The new medium helped us restore a balance that been missing for decades."
This "balance" means that an alternative culture is now able to develop in Canada, receiving its own version of news and information. Although 4 MY Canada has been written up briefly in a number of mainstream newspapers, it's unlikely the general public knows about the group. But it was covered extensively in the Christian media, and Ms. Kryskow appeared on the Christian talk-shows Lifeline, 100 Huntley Street and It's A New Day.
As well, the number of Christian schools and the practice of home-schooling have risen as conservatively religious parents try to shield their children from a public curriculum they find objectionable. Fifteen years ago, when Dr. Stiller began at Tyndale, it was the only Christian college in Canada. Now, there are as many as 10.
The religious political advocacy groups display varying degrees of piety and nationalism. On the more strident end of the spectrum are groups such as Concerned Christians Canada, which has a Web page that opines: "We have neglected the biblical principles of sound government that God ordained for Canada. God expects us to take part in the political process so that righteous men and women are placed in positions of authority."
But others have developed a more secular-friendly public-relations strategy. "Christians haven't always represented themselves in a way that's been palatable in the mainstream," says 4 MY Canada's Ms. Kryskow, saying that in the past groups would often speak "Christianese," their arguments thick with theological jargon.
"But that's changing. We're not going to go in and beat anyone up with the Bible but be genuine and authentic."
As Derek Rogusky of Focus on the Family Canada has put it, "We're 10, maybe 15, years behind where the United States is, in the sense where we're starting to develop the expertise and the organizations that can help mobilize Christians to make a difference. That will come."
Of course, there is a difference in tone between religious conservatives in Canada and the rhetoric around what U.S. author Michelle Goldberg describes south of the border as "the melding of evangelical Christianity and the authority of the state."
In her book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, she describes a Sunday-morning service in Ohio before the 2004 American presidential election, where amid thundering music and strobe lights, a 10,000-member congregation listened to "how Jesus wanted them to save marriage from the hell-spawned forces of homosexuality on Nov. 2 . . ."
The pastor warned of Christianity under siege and that secular democrats had invaded Ohio "going door to door, knocking on doors so we can continue to murder babies and further strip the church of its First Amendment rights through hate-crimes legislation," all of which he called "the annihilation of a civilization."
As Ms. Goldberg sees it, although the U.S. Christian right continually complains of a warped and ungodly society, their decades-long struggle has reversed the country's direction on issues such as gay rights and science and legal abortion, as well as stacking the federal government and judiciary with like-minded advocates.
This is not quite the picture that is developing in Canada, and some activists here would not want it to be.
"We struggle with cultural gatekeepers dismissing us . . . by equating us with the American religious right," Dr. Stiller says. "First, we aren't. Second, it's unfair that we're dumped into that category. Thirdly, it's inappropriate in the pluralism of our culture to dismiss a group with an ad-hominem label."
One noteworthy aspect is the Canadian movement's ecumenical pragmatism: It includes dozens of independently operating groups and organizations that make up a spectrum of conservative religious faiths -- Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims -- and even people who aren't religious yet advocate social-conservative values.
As an Orthodox Jew, the executive director of the Institute for Canadian Values, Joseph Ben-Ami, is hardly a Christian fundamentalist. But he has had many years experience working for religious causes in public policy. In 2000, he was director of operations on national leadership for Stockwell Day's Canadian Alliance campaign, and then a policy aide for Stephen Harper.
On banding together with members of different faiths, Mr. Ben-Ami explains: "On 95 per cent of issues, set aside the theology and we agree on everything. So it's important for us to find common ground and build coalitions and work together."
However, there is a parallel to the U.S. evangelical-Republican connection in the Canadian movement's close ties to Mr. Harper's Conservative Party and its precursors. The director of Focus on the Family Canada's new think tank, Dave Quist, was director of operations in Mr. Harper's office when he was leader of the Opposition, and the group's former head Darrell Reid was a Conservative candidate in the last election. Like Mr. Ben-Ami, Dr. McVety campaigned for Stockwell Day.
In his 2003 speech to the neo-conservative group Civitas -- one that made headlines for promoting an "incremental" approach to any ideological agenda for the sake of political success -- Mr. Harper pointed out the importance of the faith-based vote: "The truth of the matter is that the real agenda and the defining issues have shifted from economic issues to social values, so conservatives must do the same"Rebalancing the conservative agenda will require careful political judgment. First, the issues must be chosen carefully. For example, the social-conservative issues we choose should not be denominational, but should unite social conservatives of different denominations and even different faiths. It also helps when social-conservative concerns overlap those of people with a more libertarian orientation."
Mr. Harper is himself an evangelical Protestant, a member of the church the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He is the first evangelical to become prime minister since John Diefenbaker. Not surprisingly, then, religious conservatives were cheered by his victory in January, which gave them reason to hope their causes would get more attention.
But in the main, his government has hewed more to the fiscal-conservative line than the social one, though there are exceptions, such as its hard-line support for Israel in the Lebanon conflict this past summer.
While he is carrying through with his campaign promise to revisit the marriage issue, some religious conservatives worry that the early vote on the issue will short-circuit their extensive plans for public campaigns and lobbying MPs.Some say it indicates a wavering on the part of Mr. Harper to support those who, according to Dr. McVety, were the reason he gained his minority government.
Of course, it remains to be seen how things will change if Mr. Harper wins a majority in the next federal election. Socially conservative policies may "incrementally" take a larger place on the agenda -- and religious conservatives certainly have positioned themselves to help it happen.
For all their differences, the religiously motivated political movements in both Canada and the United States mark a break, as writers such as Ms. Goldberg have pointed out, with the theological thinking of previous generations. As little as three decades ago, there was a common idea that the truly faithful would remain at some distance from secular society, to avoid falling into its sinful ways.
This belief was more intense among evangelical Protestants than Catholics (who make up a much larger proportion of Canadians than of Americans) but the sentiment of keeping one's sights set more upon Heaven than Earth was widespread. The watchword was to "be in the world but not of the world."
That basic question -- to what degree Christians and other religious citizens should involve themselves in worldly affairs -- remains a debate within many denominations. In the American religious right, there is a strong strain of dominionism, which asserts that it's the responsibility of Christians to make society ready for the second coming of Christ.
In Canada, as Dr. Stiller puts it, things developed differently: "We recognized that the theology and public stance was counterproductive," he says. "Our theology had served to exempt us and was not serving our sense of country."
Scholars note another impetus that drove religion back into the public square. "The reason the political agenda changed was because of the growing secularization of these societies," says John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in Washington, D.C. "Although the details differ, you see the same pattern."
As a result, Mr. Green says, traditional denominational categories have become less important than the social-issue liberal or conservative distinction -- as evidenced by Canada's ecumenical religious right.
"This new theological division," he says, "has the potential to redraw the religious landscape."
Yet there is still a significant communication gap between the political and religious worlds. Prof. Stackhouse says he doubts "baby boomer" politicians will be able to develop any sort of constructive dialogue or working relationship: "The current generation of political leaders was formed at a time when white liberal politicians didn't have to share power. The younger generation hasn't interiorized that situation yet."As for the future, after the marriage issue cools, Mr. Ben-Ami says religious-conservative groups are moving into a new phase of development.
"The movement is evolving and what's emerging is more sophisticated and professional than in the past," he says. "We have a more methodical and calculated approach to public policy.
"For example, everything before was reactive, dealing with issues after they already happened. But now we're more pro-active. We deal with the issues before there's a crisis, before they become big issues."
For her part, Ms. Kryskow believes that religious activism on the national stage is only going to increase. "If Canada's really a democracy, then for a democracy to function it has to have every voice heard, including Christians," she says.
"The reality is that we're here and it's our nation as much as anyone else's."