Between America and Europe: Religion, Politics and Evangelicals in Canada

Abstract

While the United States and Western Europe are often presented as contrasting models of religion and politics, countries like Canada fit somewhere in the middle. This paper looks at evangelical Christian political activity in Canada, which features a modified version of American-style religious activism on a terrain closer to European politics, with parliamentary institutions, state church legacies and a largely secular political culture. It pays particular attention to developments since 2000 and links between evangelicals and the governing Conservative Party of Canada. It argues that, while these recent developments may signal a shift toward the American model, the Canadian case still suggests alternatives beyond a simple dichotomy between American and secular European models of religion and politics.

Notes

¹Marion Maddox, God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005); Marci McDonald, The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2010). The UK experience is also noteworthy but somewhat different; see Martin Steven, Christianity and Party Politics (London: Routledge, 2011).

²Among many works, see the comprehensive collection in Corwin Smidt, Lyman Kellstedt and James Guth (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

³A distinct body of work has examined evangelicalism in the arguably unique context of Northern Ireland, e.g. Steve Bruce, God Save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); Patrick Mitchel Evangelicalism and National Identity in Ulster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Gladys Ganiel, Evangelicalism and Conflict in Northern Ireland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Particularly notable are distinctions between fundamentalist Unionists like Ian Paisley and what Ganiel calls ‘mediating evangelicals’ who seek to bridge sectarian divisions. While the historic Northern Ireland context of sectarian strife is less comparable to the more secularized societies such as Canada described in this paper, this is an important parallel body of scholarship and I thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing it to my attention.

⁴For example, Terence O. Ranger (ed.), Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press: 2008); Paul Freston (ed.), Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and David Halloran Lumsdaine (ed.), Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

⁵Although see Corwin E. Smidt and James M. Penning (eds), Sojourners in the Wilderness: The Christian Right in Comparative Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997) and Ted Gerard Jelen and Clyde Wilcox (eds), Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

⁶Kenneth Wald and Clyde Wilcox, ‘Getting Religion: Has Political Science Rediscovered the Faith Factor?’, American Political Science Review, 100 (November 2006), pp. 523–537.

⁷Jonathan Malloy, ‘Bush/Harper? Canadian and American Evangelical Politics Compared’, American Review of Canadian Studies, 39:4 (2009), pp. 352–363.

⁸Mark Noll, ‘Whatever Happened to Christian Canada?’, Church History 75:2 (June 2006), pp. 245–273.

⁹Andrew Kim, ‘The Absence of Pan-Canadian Civil Religion: Plurality, Duality and Conflict in Symbols of Canadian Culture’, Sociology of Religion, 54:3 (1993), pp. 257–275.

¹⁰Steve Bruce, The Rise and Fall of the Christian Right (London: Oxford University Press, 1988); Steve Bruce, Conservative Protestant Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1998); Christopher Soper, Evangelical Christianity in the United States and in Great Britain (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

¹¹Kenneth Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States, 3rd edn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003) and Malloy, ‘Bush/Harper?’, op. cit.

¹²McDonald, op. cit.; Tom Warner, Losing Control: Canadian Social Conservatives in an Age of Rights (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2010) and Jonathan Malloy, ‘Canadian Evangelicals and Same-Sex Marriage’, in David Rayside and Clyde Wilcox (eds), Faith, Politics and Sexual Diversity in Canada and the United States (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011).

¹³Noll, ‘Whatever Happened to Christian Canada?’, op. cit., p. 251.

¹⁴Kim, op. cit.

¹⁵David Martin, ‘Canada in Comparative Perspective’, in David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die (eds), Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada Between Europe and America (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

¹⁶S.M. Lipset, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 88.

¹⁷Peter Beyer, ‘Modern Forms of the Religious Life: Denomination, Church and Invisible Religion in Canada, the United States and Europe’, in Lyon and Van Die (eds), op. cit., p. 207.

¹⁸Gregory Baum, ‘Catholicism and Secularization in Quebec’, in Lyon and Van Die (eds), op. cit.

¹⁹Michael Valpy, ‘A Simple Twist of Faith’, Globe and Mail, 23 October 2010, p. A9.

²⁰See, e.g., George Rawlyk (ed.), Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997).

²¹Smith, Christian America?, op. cit.; Rick Hiemstra ‘Counting Canadian Evangelicals’, Church and Faith Trends, 1:1 (2007), pp. 1–10.

²²Dennis Hoover, Michael Martinez, Samuel Reimer and Kenneth Wald, ‘Evangelicalism Meets the Continental Divide: Moral and Economic Conservatism in the United States and Canada’, Political Research Quarterly, 55:2 (June 2002), pp. 351–374.

²³Kurt Bowen, Christians in A Secular World (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005).

²⁴Jonathan Gatehouse, ‘Of Sex, Snacks and Grapes’, Maclean's (27 December 2004), p. 34.

²⁵Sam Reimer, ‘A Generic Evangelicalism? Comparing Evangelical Subcultures in Canada and the United States’, in Lyon and Van Die (eds), op. cit.; Sam Reimer, Evangelicals and the Continental Divide: The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003).

²⁶William Katerberg, ‘Consumers and Citizens: Religion, Identity and Politics in Canada and the United States’, in Lyon and Van Die (eds), op. cit.

²⁷Reimer, ‘A Generic Evangelicalism?’, op. cit.

²⁸Lipset, op. cit., p. 79.

²⁹Reimer, Evangelicals and the Continental Divide, op. cit.

³⁰Hoover et al., op. cit.

³¹George Rawlyk, Is Jesus Your Personal Saviour? In Search of Canadian Evangelicalism in the 1990s (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996).

³²Reimer, Evangelicals and the Continental Divide, op. cit.

³³Mark Noll, ‘Canadian Evangelicalism: A View from the United States’, in G.A. Rawlyk (ed.), Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997).

³⁴Lipset, op. cit.

³⁵Trevor Harrison, ‘Populist and Conservative Christian Evangelical Movements: A Comparison of Canada and the United States’, in Miriam Smith (ed.), Group Politics and Social Movements in Canada (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2007).

³⁶David Marshall, ‘Ernest Manning, “Back to the Bible Hour”, and Fundamentalism in Canada’, in Marguerite van Die (ed.), Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

³⁷Alvin Finkel, The Social Credit Phenomenon in Alberta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989).

³⁸The Social Credit Party remained in power in British Columbia off and on until 1991, but with a steadily dwindling religious dimension.

³⁹James H. Farney, ‘Social Conservatives and the Boundary of Politics in Canada and the United States’ (unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Toronto, 2009).

⁴⁰Wald, op. cit.

⁴¹Bruce, Conservative Protestant Politics, op. cit., p. 164.

⁴²Soper, op. cit., p. 3.

⁴³Farney, ‘Social Conservatives’, op. cit.; James Farney, ‘The Personal is not Political: The Progressive Conservative Response to Social Issues’, American Review of Canadian Studies, 39:3 (2009), pp. 242–252.

⁴⁴Farney, ‘The Personal is not Political’, ibid.

⁴⁵R.K. Carty, William Cross and Lisa Young, Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000).

⁴⁶L. Marvin Overby, Raymond Tatalovich and Donley T. Studlar, ‘Party and Free Votes in Canada: Abortion in the House of Commons’, Party Politics, 4:3 (July 1998), pp. 381–392.

⁴⁷Leslie Pal, ‘How Ottawa Dithers: The Conservatives and Abortion Policy’, in Frances Abele (ed.), How Ottawa Spends, 1991–92: The Politics of Fragmentation (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991), p. 298.

⁴⁸C.E.S. Franks, The Parliament of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987).

⁴⁹John G. Stackhouse. ‘Bearing Witness: Christian Groups Engage Canadian Politics Since the 1960s’, in Van Die and Lyon (eds), op. cit.

⁵⁰Malloy, ‘Bush/Harper?’, op. cit.

⁵¹Carty et al., op. cit.

⁵²Trevor Harrison, Of Passionate Intensity: Right-Wing Populism and the Reform Party of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Tom Flanagan, Waiting for the Wave: The Reform Party and Preston Manning (Toronto: Stoddard Press, 1995).

⁵³Deborah Grey, Never Retreat, Never Explain, Never Apologize: My Life, My Politics (Toronto: Key Porter, 2004).

⁵⁴Colin Campbell, ‘The Church of Stephen Harper’, Maclean's (26 February 2006), pp. 17–18.

⁵⁵McDonald, op. cit.

⁵⁶David Akin, ‘Spendthrift Consumers Caused Global Recession: Harper’, Ottawa Citizen (13 March 2009), p A3.

⁵⁷Malloy, ‘Evangelicals and Same-Sex Marriage’, op. cit.

⁵⁸Don Hutchinson and Rick Hiemstra, ‘Canadian Evangelical Voting Trends by Region, 1996–2008′, Church and Faith Trends 2:3 (2009), pp. 1–25.

⁵⁹William P. Irvine, ‘Explaining the Religious Basis of the Canadian Partisan Identity: Success on the Third Try’, Canadian Journal of Political Science (1974), pp. 560–563.

⁶⁰André Blais, ‘Accounting for the Electoral Success of the Liberal Party in Canada’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 38:4 (2005), p. 829.

⁶¹See also Barry J. Kay, Andrea M.L. Perrella and Steven D. Brown, ‘The Religion Enigma: Theoretical Riddle or Classificational Artifact?’, Paper prepared for the American Political Science Association Conference, Toronto, September 2009.

⁶²Dennis Hoover, ‘The Christian Right Under Old Glory and the Maple Leaf’, in Corwin E. Smidt and James M. Penning (eds), Sojourners in the Wilderness: The Christian Right in Comparative Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); see also Lydia Bean, Marco Gonzalez and Jason Kaufman, ‘Why Doesn't Canada Have an American-Style Christian Right? A Comparative Framework for Analyzing the Political Effects of Evangelical Subcultural Identity’, Canadian Journal of Sociology, 33:4 (2008), pp. 899–943.

⁶³Harrison, Of Passionate Intensity, and Flanagan, op. cit.

⁶⁴Michael Lusztig and J. Matthew Wilson, ‘A New Right? Moral Issues and Partisan Change in Canada’, Social Science Quarterly, 86:1 (March 2005), p. 111.

⁶⁵Ibid., p. 121.

⁶⁶James Guth and Cleveland Fraser, ‘Religion and Partisanship in Canada’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 40:1 (2001), pp. 51–64.

⁶⁸Elisabeth Gidengil, Patrick Fournier, Joanna Everitt, Neil Nevitte and Andre Blais, ‘The Anatomy of a Liberal Defeat’, Paper presented to the annual meetings of the Canadian Political Science Association, Ottawa, May 2009, p. 4.

⁶⁷The 2011 federal election was held as this article was being finalized for publication.

⁶⁹Hutchinson and Hiemstra, op. cit., p. 21.

⁷⁰Kay et al., op. cit.

⁷¹Laura Stephenson ‘The Catholic–Liberal Connection: A Test of Strength’, in Cameron D. Anderson and Laura B. Stephenson (eds), Voting Behaviour in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

⁷²Richard Johnston, ‘The Reproduction of the Religious Cleavage in Canadian Elections’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, 18:1 (1985), pp. 99–113.

⁷³Stackhouse, op. cit.

⁷⁴Personal communication with Janet Epp Buckingham, former director of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada's Centre for Faith and Public Life, February 2011.

⁷⁵Stackhouse, op. cit.

⁷⁶Michael Lindsay, ‘Is the National Prayer Breakfast Surrounded by a ”Christian Mafia”? Religious Publicity and Secrecy Within the Corridors of Power’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 74:2 (June 2006), pp. 390–419.

⁷⁷Gloria Galloway, ‘Christian Activists Capturing Tory Races’, The Globe and Mail, 27 May 2004, p. A.1.

⁷⁸McDonald, op. cit.

⁷⁹For example, Christopher Dreher, ‘In Canada, Faith Takes a Leap to the Right’, Globe and Mail, 23 September 2006), p. F6.

⁸⁰Malloy, ‘Canadian Evangelicals and Same-Sex Marriage’, op. cit.

⁸¹Dennis R. Hoover and Kevin R. den Dulk, ‘Christian Conservatives Go to Court: Religion and Legal Mobilization in the United States and Canada’, International Political Science Review, 25:1 (January 2004), pp. 9–34.

⁸²McDonald, op. cit.

⁸³Lawrence Martin, Harperland: The Politics of Control (Viking Canada: Toronto, 2010).

⁸⁴Bill Curry and Gayle MacDonald, ‘Evangelist Takes Credit for Film Crackdown’, Globe and Mail, 29 February 2008, p. A1; Omar El Akkad, ‘Tax-credit Crackdown on Films Puts Spotlight on Evangelical Community’, Globe and Mail, 4 March 2008, p. A3.

⁸⁵David Akin, ‘Tourism Minister Loses Funding Program after Grant to Gay Pride Week’, National Post, 7 July 2009; Kevin Libin, ‘Grants and Drag Queens Don't Mix’, National Post, 11 May 2010.

⁸⁶Anne McIlroy, ‘Science Minister Won't Confirm Belief in Evolution’, Globe and Mail, 17 March 2009.

⁸⁷Warner, op. cit.

⁸⁸Libin, op. cit.

⁸⁹Malloy, ‘Harper/Bush?’, op. cit.

⁹⁰Maddox, op. cit.

⁹¹Rodney Smith, ‘How Would Jesus Vote? The Churches and the Election of the Rudd Government’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 44:4 (December 2009), p. 614.

⁹²John Warhurst, ‘Religion and Politics in the Howard Decade’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 42:1 (March 2007), pp. 19–32.

⁹³Smith, ‘How Would Jesus Vote?’, op. cit.

⁹⁴Hoover et al., op. cit.; Reimer, Evangelicals and the Continental Divide, op. cit.

⁹⁵Smith, Christian America?, op. cit.

⁹⁶Andrew Grenville, ‘Church, Conscience, Corruption and the Conservatives’, Faith Today, 24:2 (March–April 2006), pp. 24–27.

⁹⁷Stephenson, op. cit.

⁹⁸Hutchinson and Hiemstra, op. cit.

⁹⁹Amy Sullivan, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap (New York: Scribner, 2008).

¹⁰⁰Jim Wallis, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (New York: Lion, 2006).

¹⁰¹Lipset, op. cit.

¹⁰²Warhurst, op. cit.

¹⁰³Martin Steven, Christianity and Party Politics in Britain (London: Routledge, 2010).

¹⁰⁴Gladys Ganiel. ‘Explaining New Forms of Evangelical Activism in Northern Ireland: Comparative Perspectives from the USA and Canada’, Journal of Church and State, 50 (2008), pp. 475–493.