On politics and religion

Editorial

As teapots go, this one seems pretty tempestuous. Last Friday, the Globe and Mail reported in a blaring front-page headline: "Christian activists capturing Tory races." The gist is that conservative Christians, most of them strongly opposed to abortion and equal marriage, are being nominated to run for the Conservative party in the election that will be coming up one of these days.

John Reynolds, a West Vancouver Conservative MP, told the Globe that the nominations were won fair and square and he's absolutely correct. Then he added that, if reporters were to "insert the word Jew everywhere you've put Christian, do you think they would let you print it? I doubt it."

But as a writer from Richmond made clear in the next day's letters to the editor, when Jews run for public office, they do not do so with the intent of remaking government policy in the image of Jewish theology. With barely one per cent of the country's population, any democratic Jew would require strong powers of persuasion to convince the other 99 per cent of Canadians to vote for such a proposal. But Christians, who at least nominally make up a majority of the Canadian population, could theoretically gain enough public support for a policy remake that conforms to Christian values.

Specifically, it is conservative Christians whose success in politics raises concern. Similar fears are rarely if ever expressed when liberal Christians (or Jews) seek or gain public office. The New Democratic party would not exist in its current form were it not for liberal and socialist Christians and Jews who founded, nurtured and sustained that movement since the 1930s, yet this hardly stirs a ruffle. What's the difference?

Conservative theology, by definition, is exclusivist and ideological. Right is right and wrong is wrong, as determined by divinely inspired law. The difference between fundamentalist Christianity and liberal theology is that conservative religions (of any sort) believe that laws are created by God and cannot be debated. Liberal Christians, as a general rule, believe that laws are made by humans. Their theology tends to be more willing to accept disagreement, which is the very essence of democratic pluralism.

What we are debating is not so much the presence of religion in politics as the presence of a certain type of religion – conservative Christianity. If this seems to unfairly isolate and vilify this particular form of faith, when other, more liberal, theologies are welcomed (or ignored) in politics, this is not a totally unreasonable state of affairs.

The fear some Canadians have is not that religion is entering the public sphere. It's always been there. The fear is that a certain type of religion – one that does not recognize the pluralism of multicultural Canada – is gaining ascendancy in at least one political party.

^TOP