Religion, Roman Catholics, and the Decline of the Liberal Party

Has religion played a role in the decline of the Liberal Party? That was a question I explored in 2011 prior to that year’s Canadian election. As it turned out, a majority of voters from all religious persuasions voted for other parties, including Catholics, who historically voted Liberal. A majority of Protestants, including evangelicals, voted Conservative, while people of no religion mostly found a home with the NDP. The article below takes a look at how the shifting religious landscape back then led to a Conservative majority; in a future instalment, I’ll explore what might be happening in the current election. Note: This was a feature piece in the Free Press, and is longer than my normal columns and posts.

If the Conservatives get a majority on May 2, they may thank God—and Roman Catholic voters across the country.

“The Catholic vote is a key swing vote in the electorate,” Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, was quoted as saying in the Catholic Register in January.

Kenney, who led his party’s campaign to take capture those voters from the Liberals, described the swing to the Conservatives as “huge” and “unprecedented.”

“The Liberal Party dramatically abandoned its historic Catholic base and for a while seemed to almost go out of its way to insult Catholic voters and their values,” he said, adding that the Liberal Party “has become in many respects militantly secularist and inhospitable to people of faith.”

That’s a bold statement. But is it true? Does this election hinge on the votes of Roman Catholic Church members? And have religious voters fled the Liberal Party?

The answer seems to be yes—not that many noticed. 

While much has been written and said about the Conservative Party’s efforts to reach out to ethnic voters, much less has been reported about how successful that Party has been in reaching out to religious voters, or about how large numbers of churchgoing Canadians have abandoned the Liberal Party over the past ten or so years.

A Dramatic Shift

One person who did notice is Andrew Grenville, Chief Research Officer for Angus Reid Public Opinion.

Grenville, who specializes in researching Canadian religious trends, has noticed a profound change in the way Roman Catholics vote over the past few elections.

Since the 1950s, he says, members of that group have been consistently more likely to vote Liberal, both in and outside of Quebec. 

The 2006 election saw a change in this historic linkage.

At the time, “it was unclear whether this was a real shift, or a one-time punishment of the Liberals following the sponsorship scandal,” he says.

But subsequent research suggests “real change has occurred . . . the shifts we first observed in 2006 have, if anything, become more pronounced, both in Quebec and in the rest of Canada.”

The pollster found that the Roman Catholic vote for the Liberals outside Quebec fell from 54 percent in 2000 to 31 percent in 2008. Inside Quebec, the vote fell from 56 percent in 2004 to 22 percent.

And where did those former Liberal supporters go? Many ended up voting for the Conservatives; in 2008, 49 percent of Catholics outside Quebec who attended church weekly voted Conservative, Grenville says.

But the shift wasn’t unique to Catholics; something similar happened among mainline Protestants outside Quebec.

According to Grenville, support for the Liberals among weekly attenders of that group fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2008. Many of those votes also went to the Conservatives; 64 percent of church-going Protestants outside Quebec voted for the Conservative Party that year, compared to 51 percent four years earlier.

Others also noticed this shift. In 2009 academics Elisabeth Gidengil of McGill University, Patrick Fournier and André Blais at Université de Montréal, Joanna Everitt at the University of New Brunswick and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto explored this issue in The Anatomy of a Liberal Defeat.

In the paper the researchers noted that “Catholic voters, once a pillar of support that helped keep the Liberals a dominant force in Canadian politics, have steadily shifted their allegiances in recent years so that the party can no longer count on their votes.”

They went on to say that “controlling for other social background characteristics reveals that the drop in Liberal support among Catholics is even more dramatic than the loss of visible minority votes.”

In 2006, “Catholics were as likely to vote Conservative as Liberal,” they noted. “In 2008, they clearly actually preferred the Conservatives to the Liberals . . . the Liberals can no longer take the support of Catholics or visible minorities for granted."

What Happened?

What caused this shift? Why did large numbers of people flee the Liberal Party for the Conservatives?

For Grenville, it started with the sponsorship scandal in 2006. “The cheating and corruption really hurt the Liberals,” he says, adding that Liberal Party support for same-sex marriage and abortion widened the gap.

The academics behind Anatomy of a Liberal Defeat suggest something similar, although they say same-sex marriage was not the deciding factor for Roman Catholics in the 2004 and 2006 elections (although abortion played a role in 2006). But that all changed in 2008.

That year, they say, “Catholics who oppose same-sex marriage were less likely to vote Liberal.” And, for the first time, “Catholics who believe the Bible is the literal word of God were significantly less likely to vote Liberal."

For Catholic journalist and blogger Debra Gyapong, it wasn’t just the issue of same-sex marriage that cost Liberals support from Roman Catholics, but their “ramming the redefinition of marriage through Parliament.”

She also points to the Liberal Party’s “partisan messaging that painted traditional marriage supporters as un-Canadian and anti-Charter, and that attacked Christian voters in general.”

“Self-inflicted” wounds

John McKay, the Liberal Member of Parliament who represents the Ontario riding of Scarborough-Guildwood, agrees with those sentiments.

McKay acknowledges that support from Catholics and other church-goers for the Liberal Party is “bleeding away.” What’s worse, he adds, the wound was “self-inflicted.”

“You can disagree with someone, but you don’t have to insult them,” he says of the times when the Liberal Party had different views from some religiously-inclined Canadians. “There are times that the Liberal Party has been disagreeable in its disagreements.”

Not only did the Liberal Party take support by religious voters for granted, he acknowledges, it also treated them dismissively over issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion. 

Attacking Conservatives as religious zealots who could not be trusted on social issues didn’t help, either.

That includes the infamous pre-election poll question the Liberal Party commissioned in 2004 asking if voters would be more or less likely to vote for the Conservatives if they knew the party had been "taken over by evangelical Christians."

McKay, who attends an Evangelical church in Toronto, was quoted at the time as saying the tactic was "antithetical to everything I believe as a Liberal."

"Either we think that we have an inclusive notion of pluralism in this country where we accept people based upon their religion or we are hypocrites," he said. 

“I just think it has no place in Canadian politics and, in addition to being offensive ideologically, it is just plain stupid politics."

In 2009 Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff asked McKay to start the work of rebuilding bridges between the Party and Canada’s faith communities. 

Since then, he’s been busy visiting various faith group leaders and attending religious events—and also arranging meetings between Ignatieff and the leaders of Canadian faith groups.

When it comes to attracting religious voters, McKay admits that the Conservatives have done a better job. The Liberal Party, he says, “need to be more attuned to the religious community. We have a lot of catching up to do.”

A “fatal flaw” for Liberals and the NDP

Ron Dart isn’t surprised that Conservatives and Liberals are reaching out to religious voters.

“Religion has a profound effect on the way people vote,” says Dart, who teaches political science, philosophy and religious studies at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C.

The “fatal flaw” for the Liberals—and the NDP, he adds—is that members of those two parties “assume we live in a secular society,” or that “religion is dying, a relic of the past.”

They acted, he says, like religion “was going to disappear,” or that it was fine as long as people kept it “to their private life”—an assumption that can hurt them at election time.

Conservatives, on the other hand, “never bought into that. They have explicitly courted these folks.”

McKay agrees.

“We think we live in a secular society—we don’t,” he says. “Lots of Canadians expect their faith will play a role in public discourse. We have to come to grips with that as a society.”

People of faith, he adds, “want to be listened to, and speak freely. They don’t want to be denigrated and devalued with they speak from a faith basis.”

Will Liberal efforts to win back Roman Catholics, and other religious voters, pay off? Grenville isn’t sure.

“Will Catholic voters change back during this election? I’m not sure they will,” he says, citing the “clear pattern” of the previous two elections.

One thing he is certain of, though, is that religion plays a key role in Canadian politics.

“It’s an underground issue, like a river under a city,” he says. “Most people don’t know it’s there.”

Most people might not know about it, but it’s clear that both the Conservative and Liberal parties are well aware of it—and the party that does the best job of reaching out to religious voters may well be the one forming a majority government after May 2.

Also check out my post Religion and the Canadian Election: Will the Liberals Pro-Choice Stance Hurt Them?

What is the Future of the United Church of Canada?

The United Church of Canada is holding its General Council this week under the theme of "behold I make all things new." On the agenda are many issues, but the most important is the future of the 90 year-old denomination—what new things can it do to survive a decline in funding and membership? What does the future hold? That's the question I raised in my Aug. 8 Free Press column.

United Church of Canada members from across Canada are gathered this week in Corner Brook, Newfoundland for the forty-second General Council—a week-long assembly that could potentially re-shape and re-imagine the 90 year-old denomination.

While there, they will discuss and vote on almost 200 proposals. Many are procedural, but others deal with substantial issues like missing and murdered indigenous women, nuclear proliferation, the arms trade, the treatment of prison inmates, fossil fuel divestment, climate change, proportional voting for Members of Parliament, and the Trans Canada Pipeline.

Delegates—called Commissioners—will also elect a new Moderator out of 12 nominees. This time, none of the nominees are from Manitoba .

But the major issue on everyone’s mind will be the future of the United Church .

The need for a new vision and structure for the Church has been brewing for some time, fueled by declining membership (down 26 percent between 2002 and 2012), declining attendance at worship services (down 38 percent), and the closing of churches (565 churches closed or merged).

All this has resulted in a decline in donations—in 2012 the church had an operating deficit of $7.1 million for its general fund. At the Council, Commissioners will be asked to vote on a proposal for the Church to “live within its means,” which will mean cutting $11 million from its $30 million budget.

Before the Council began, I asked two local United Church members what they hoped might happen in the coming week at the Council.

James Christie, who attends Westminster United Church and teaches at the United Centre for Theological Studies at the University of Winnipeg , hopes that the Council will focus on the strength of the denomination.

“We have forgotten that lifeblood of church is in local congregations,” says Christie, who will not be attending this Council.

A proposal to eliminate one level of government in the church is “a hopeful sign,” he says. But he hopes Commissioners will go further by reducing the national office to “a ceremonial function” and emphasize the importance of the regions and congregations.

Christie hopes the Council will “start to break down the inward-looking hidebound denominationalism to which we have drifted over the past 40 years. What does it mean to be a liberal protestant Christians in North America in twenty-first century? What part of God’s mission can the United Church do? Where is God taking us?”

Jeff Cook, pastor of Memorial Transcona Memorial United Church, is going to the Council—although unlike last time, he isn’t a candidate for Moderator.

For him, the big issue is the need to restructure the denomination.

“If we don’t do something, it will decide itself,” he says of the declining donations and falling membership.

For Cook, the big question is what it means to be the church today, and “what kind of staffing levels, and how many levels of church governance,” are needed to accomplish that.

He also sees the need to support local congregations.

“Jesus invited people to the table,” he says, and local congregations “are our table.”

I also spoke to David Wilson, editor and publisher of the United Church Observer.

Wilson, who has read all of the over 1,000 pages in the Council workbook, says that if  the proposals for restructuring are accepted it could “drastically alter the shape of the Church . . . it depends on the willingness of Commissioners to recognize that the United Church of today is very different from the Church in 1925 [when it was created].”

From his vantage point as editor of the national publication, he says “there’s not much unanimity” going into the Council, but there’s one thing there’s no disagreement about: Declining membership and donations means doing things as usual is “unsustainable.”

“We need a new vision for the future,” he says, adding that a big question for him is how the Church can “re-capture the attention and imagination of an increasingly secular society.”

Whether or not the United church can do that is a big question. But, as Cook notes, the future of the United Church isn’t just up to the Commissioners.

“God is the wild card,” in all of this, he says. “It may look like the ship is going down, but we are a resurrection people.”

Religion and the Canadian Election: Will the Liberal's Pro-Choice Stance Hurt Them?

There's an election in Canada. What role will religion play in the voting? Last year I reflected on this after Liberal leader Justin Trudeau announced that all candidates for that party must be pro-choice. What effect might that have on the Liberals? Perhaps not a good one.

"If the Conservatives get a majority on May 2, they may thank God — and Roman Catholic voters across the country."

That's what I wrote in this newspaper in 2011, before the federal election in which the Conservatives did, in fact, win a majority.

If the Conservatives are re-elected in this election, they may want to thank God and Roman Catholics again—and Justin Trudeau, for his comments about all Liberal party candidates needing to be pro-choice.

But first, some background.

Four years ago, when researching the potential impact of religion on voting in the 2011 federal election, I discovered that religious voters—especially Catholics—were seen by the Conservatives as important to the outcome of that election.

Jason Kenney, then immigration minister, stated bluntly that "the Catholic vote is a key swing vote in the electorate."

Kenney, who led his party's campaign to successfully capture many those voters from the Liberals, described the swing to the Conservatives as "huge" and "unprecedented."

His observation was confirmed by Andrew Grenville, chief research officer for Angus Reid, who specializes in researching Canadian religious trends.

Although Roman Catholics both inside and outside of Quebec had consistently voted Liberal since the 1950s, by the 2006 election that historic tie was fraying.

By the 2008 election, the Roman Catholic vote outside Quebec for the Liberals fell from 54 per cent in 2000 to 31 per cent; inside Quebec, it fell from 56 per cent in 2004 to 22 per cent.

Many of those former Liberal voters ended up voting for the Conservatives; in 2008, 49 per cent of Catholics outside Quebec who attended church weekly voted Conservative, Grenville said.

Something similar was happening among mainline Protestants outside Quebec, he added, with support for the Liberals in that group falling from 28 per cent in 2004 to 16 per cent in 2008. Many of those votes also went to the Conservatives.

What caused this shift? The sponsorship scandal was one reason. But the Liberal party's support for same-sex marriage and abortion widened the gap.

Grenville suggested that the flight by religious voters away from the Liberal party would continue in the 2011 election, citing the "clear pattern" of the previous two elections.

And that is what appears to have happened. The result was "pretty much what we predicted," he told me last week, noting that a majority of Evangelicals and 39 per cent of other regular church-goers voted Conservative.

Unlike the Conservatives, the Liberals were late in noting the importance of the religious vote.

Prior to the 2011 election, Michael Ignatieff, who was the party's leader, asked Liberal MP John McKay, who attends an evangelical church in Toronto, to try to rebuild bridges with religious voters across Canada.

In an interview before that election, McKay acknowledged that support from regular churchgoers was "bleeding away." 

This was due, he said, to how his party had dismissively treated religious voters over issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion. The wounds, he added, were "self-inflicted."

Which brings us back to Trudeau's statement that all new candidates for the Liberal party must be pro-choice.

McKay, who is still the "very unofficial" representative from the Liberal party to religious groups in Canada (especially to Catholics and Evangelicals), said a year ago that this position "won't help me with the constituency I've been working with.”

Further, the announcement is a "vote mover," something that could have serious implications for party in this election.

Reaction to Trudeau's announcement suggests he was right. The decision was immediately denounced by anti-abortion groups, many of which are religiously-based.

A participant in Winnipeg's 2014 March for Life was quoted as saying "it's going to hurt his chances at getting votes." In Edmonton, Roman Catholic Archbishop Richard Smith voiced "outrage" over Trudeau's comments.

Of course, Catholics, Evangelicals and other religious groups aren't monolithic on the issue of abortion. And no matter who wins the next election, the issue will likely never be brought to a vote in Parliament.

But many religious groups are officially pro-life; they will be reminding their members of this come election time.

This could pose a challenge for both the NDP, which is officially pro-choice, and the Liberals. 

Of the two parties, the Liberals have the most to lose since anti-abortion voters would likely not vote for the NDP, anyway; for those who want an alternative to the Conservatives, the Liberals were the only option.

That door is now closed.

"This government is at the end of this natural life cycle," says McKay of the Conservative Party. Members of Catholic and Evangelical churches were starting "to give the Liberals a look again."

Now he is worried they may stop looking.

God, Faith and Identity from the Ashes: Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors Share Their Stories

In July Oskar Groening, the “accountant of Auschwitz ,” was found guilty of 300,000 charges of accessory to murder. His trial is considered to be one of the last trials of the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust.  

Already, most who experienced the Holocaust are dead. Soon, all will be gone. But one group of people who were impacted by it remains: The children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. 

Their experiences are captured in God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors, a new book edited by Menachem Z. Rosensaft.

In the book, 88 children and grandchildren of survivors share how the Holocaust shaped them theologically, politically, culturally and in terms of identity, education and careers.

Although none of them experienced the Holocaust first-hand, all were deeply affected by it.

“We did not see our families murdered, we were never cold, we were never starved, we were never beaten,” says Rosensaft, a child of two survivors.

“We grew up in comfort. And yet what we do have, what sets us apart, is that we grew up with our parents and grandparents. We absorbed their stories firsthand.”

The book is divided into four sections: God and Faith, Identity, A Legacy of Memory, and Changing the World for the Better.

In the first section, the writers reflect on how the Holocaust affected their faith. Some choose to believe in God and kept their faith, while some dismiss the idea of loving or caring God completely. Others have landed somewhere in between.

Eric Neilson’s grandfather lost his parents and two brothers in the concentration camps, yet he kept his faith in God.

“It strikes me that, for all my doubts and questions, if my grandfather can go on thanking the God of Israel . . . then surely I ought to consider doing so as well,” the Harvard professor writes.

“God was not present in the survivor’s home in which I grew up,” writes Israeli artist Aliza Olmert. “The missing niche of faith was filled by a socialist worldview and uplifting patriotism.”

“Both the God of consolation and the accusation against God live within me,” says Rabbi Moshe Waldoks. Adds former New York Times reporter Joseph Berger: “What God’s culpability or at least responsibility was remains a mystery that I’ll never resolve.”  

While reading the book, one thing I found unexpectedly moving was how so many children of survivors grew up without any relatives—in Rosensaft’s case, both his parent’s entire immediate families were murdered.

“Like many children of survivors, I have been haunted by faceless phantoms of dozens and dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins,” writes Waldoks.

Growing up, Karen Friedman realized her family was different from her friends.

“Their family dynamics and experiences were just different from the rest of ours,” writes the grandchild of survivors. “I was always aware that my mother never knew what it was like to have grandparents.”

In 1984, Elie Wiesel, who survived both Auschwitz and Buchenwald , delivered the keynote address at the first conference of children of Holocaust survivors. 

“It was you that the enemy sought to destroy,” he said. "We were only the instruments. You were the enemy’s obsession. In murdering Jews, he wished to prevent you from being born.”

It would have been natural and logical for their parents to turn their back on the world, “to have opted for nihilism,” he went on to say. “And yet we have chosen you.”

And now, as the last trials of Nazis are held and the few remaining survivors pass away, these new chosen ones have the task of preserving the memory of their parents and grandparents for future generations.

“A generation will soon come of age having never heard firsthand testimony from a living Holocaust survivor," says Rosensaft. "The preservation and transfer of memory is the most critical mission that children and grandchildren of survivors must undertake.”

The stories in God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes show that many of them are taking that mission seriously.

From the July 25 Winnipeg Free Press.

Gretta Vosper, the United Church and the Honourable Thing

My friend Doug Todd, the spirituality and ethics writer at the Vancouver Sun, has started quite a conversation about Gretta Vosper, the self-identified atheist minister in the United Church. “Why on earth, outsiders ask, would a Christian church allow someone who has long been an outspoken atheist to remain in the clergy?” he writes. That’s exactly the question I asked earlier this year, and seven years earlier, in my column for the Winnipeg Free Press.

If you worked for the Winnipeg Jets, but openly cheered for the Maple Leafs, wouldn't it seem a bit awkward?

What if you were a member of Parliament for the Liberal party, but thought that the Conservative policies were far superior -- and you publicly told everyone so. Wouldn't that be disloyal?

If you did either of those things, your boss would either ask you to change your allegiance, or leave your workplace.

Or you'd do the honourable thing, and quit.

That’s what most people would do.

So you'd think that Gretta Vosper, the United Church minister in Toronto who has openly and frequently made it clear she doesn't believe in God, might want to step down from her job and seek another line of work -- especially after she publicly criticized a prayer posted by the United Church on its website in response to the Charlie Hedbo killings.

In the prayer, posted on the day of the attack, United Church members were asked to pray to a "gracious God" to respond to the needs of those who were injured, those who responded to the wounded and to everyone in Paris mourning the death of loved ones.

"God of Epiphany," it concluded, "we humbly offer you our pain, our bafflement, and our cries for peace, seeking your gift of transformation and your promise of hope."

In response, Vosper -- who describes herself as a "Minister/author/atheist" -- wrote a blog post addressed to United Church moderator Gary Paterson, questioning "the merit" of such a prayer.

For her, such a prayer "underscores one of the foundational beliefs that led to the horrific killing in Paris: the existence of a supernatural being whose purposes can be divined and which, once interpreted and without mercy, must be brought about within the human community in the name of that being."

These beliefs, she went on to say, "has led to innumerable tragedies throughout the timeline of human history and will continue to do so until it fades from our ravaged memory... I urge you to lead our church toward freedom from such idolatrous belief."

Let’s be clear: Vosper, author of the book With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, is free to hold these convictions. She is free to question the existence of God.

It’s a right that all Canadians enjoy, and that many practice.

But it seems strange to hold those convictions and, at the same time, receive a paycheque from an organization that actually believes there is a God, and that Christians should pray to that God.

I’m not the only one who feels that way. So does the Rev. David Ewart, a United Church minister in Vancouver.

In an open letter on his website, Ewart acknowledges the provocative role Vosper plays in that denomination. He says he is happy to belong to a church that encourages such conversations.

But, he added, "I can't help but wonder what sort of example she herself is setting. Wouldn't her personal integrity be far more clearly demonstrated by admitting she is no longer in accordance with the church's understanding of her ordination vows?"

Perhaps, he went on to say, her personal integrity could be "far more clearly demonstrated” by leaving the United Church.

Another person who found Vosper's position and perspectives to be unusual is Doug Todd, the spirituality and ethics reporter at the Vancouver Sun.

In a blog post on that newspaper's website titled “Will Gretta Vosper do the Honorable Thing?” he wondered why the United Church had never "publicly taken on Vosper or suggested she stop accepting the money and benefits of the denomination."

The reason, he suggested, might be because church leadership "fears, justifiably, that attempting to terminate Vosper will be a messy affair that simply draws more attention to a woman who does not mind, to put it mildly, the spotlight.”

But even if the church is unwilling to ask her to leave, Doug couldn't help wondering if "it isn't a little gauche" for her to denounce all forms of theism from a Christian pulpit.

In 2008, I wondered the same thing in my column.  And now, seven years later, has she gone too far?

Perhaps the United Church, a denomination famous for tolerating a wide range of belief and opinion, might even be starting to think so.