Pigeonholing evangelicals a political error
Political scientists and politicians love to put people into neat, little boxes. With Parliament in election mode, pundits of all stripes talk about "ethnic voting" and "voter blocs" based on everything from gender, sexual orientation, ethnic/racial origins, even consumer preferences.
Given the choice, many Canadians would rather eat glass than endure another useless election that will scandalously cost $300 million and likely produce another pizza-Parliament with another minority government. But common sense and politics are rarely used in the same sentence.
Still, it will be interesting to see what the pundits who live for electoral warfare do with religion and specifically the alleged "evangelical" bloc of voters. A new study on the voting trends among Canadian evangelicals from 1996 to 2008 by Don Hutchinson and Rick Hiemstra should provide lots of fodder for Christians and secularists alike.
Hutchinson, vice-president and general legal counsel for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC), and Hiemstra, director of the Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelicalism, put the boots to the stereotype that the chattering classes in Ottawa and the media love to promote of evangelicals as irrational, frothing-at-the-mouth bigots.
Their study, published in the August 2009 issue of Church and Faith Trends, makes for fascinating reading. Especially interesting is their main conclusion: that the Liberal Party of Canada has sacrificed its evangelical base.
One could argue that the screaming headline in EFC's news release—"EFC Study Shows Liberals Have Sacrificed Their Evangelical Base"—shows a bit of true colours; that is, that evangelicals naturally support Conservatives. But a read of the study makes it hard to support that stereotype.
For years we've been told that Catholics largely support the federal Liberals while Protestants leaned to the Conservatives, especially those of an evangelical bent (which, of course, discounts the fact that evangelicals were at the forefront of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner of the NDP). The study finds that those stereotypes are largely myths. However, the rise of politicians like Preston Manning, Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper resulted in the equation of such conservative evangelical politicians with the religious right politics of the United States. It was an easy way to paint all evangelicals as Moral Majority-types.
Hutchinson and Hiemstra analyzed voting patterns over the last 12 years and found that while the Conservatives have picked up more evangelical voters during this period, the NDP and Greens also gained evangelical support at the same rate as they gained support from the general voting population. So, while some evangelicals and other conservative Christians may have been swayed by political and moral issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion to go Tory, they did not stampede into the arms of some new Canadian "religious right."
The fact that evangelical support for the Liberals declined during this period would seem to have more to do with Liberal attempts to paint Manning, Day, and Harper as rabid rightists taking Canada down some American road than with trying to demonize evangelicals.
Some of these tactics clearly alienated evangelicals: attacks on Day for his "weird" religious views on evolution, a 2004 "push poll" (where respondents are asked a question in such a way as to elicit a particular response) which suggested the Conservatives were being taken over by "evangelical Christians," raising questions over the Conservatives' supposed attempt to blur the "separation of church and state" (ironically an American concept never adopted formally in the Canadian body politic).
What is evident in the study is that Canadian evangelicals are not the Neanderthals the media often like to portray them as. They generally vote along the same lines as their non-evangelical neighbours, care about many of the same issues and generally have developed the same general dislike for the rotten state of Canadian politics as the rest of society.
Politics is a dirty game. Stereotyping, slanderous allegations, bending the truth, and breaking promises is all part of it. We don't have to like it. But we live with it.
It is important for people of faith to participate in our political process and bring their beliefs to bear on the public square, both individually and collectively. But people of faith are diverse. Should people of faith band together to support a particular party or political program? Whose views are more relevant: the evangelical who is concerned with abortion? The mainline Christian who is worried about global warning? The Catholic who opposes same-sex marriage? Can any one party champion the myriad views within any religious group?
If the Liberal Party of Canada or any other party engages in tactics that divide people based on who they are or what they believe, they will reap what they sow. Unfortunately, those types of tactics will do nothing to build a better, more inclusive Canada.
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