Phyllis Tickle and the Great Emergence

Author, speaker and theologian Phyllis Tickle died today (Sept. 22). She had been diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. It was my privilege to interview her twice, and meet her twice as well. Although we were never close friends, we stayed in contact from 2009 until early August, when she was no longer able to answer e-mail. In one of our last exchanges, we talked about how Tony Campolo had “come out” in favour of gay marriage and accepting gay people into the church. “Tony is a good man, married to a good woman,” she wrote of his decision. “It just may be that she wore him down, but whatever works, works. Let us be grateful.”

Below find my first interview with her, prior to her visit to Winnipeg in 2009.

Declining church membership, the breaking down of denominational loyalty and barriers, the rise of new "emergent" churches that blend ancient rituals, litanies and hymns together with contemporary forms of worship and calls for social action--something is happening out there. But what is it? And why is it happening now?

What's happening is as old as religion itself, says Phyllis Tickle, author of the book The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why.  In an interview with Free Press columnist John Longhurst, she explored the link between the church's history of change and the new face of the church today .

What is the Great Emergence?

Tickle: The Great Emergence refers to a monumental phenomenon in our world today that affects every part of our lives-religiously, socially, culturally, intellectually, politically and economically. The world is changing rapidly, and in so many ways, that we can hardly keep up with it.

In the religious sphere, many people have observed that these kind of changes seem to happen every 500 years-a period of upheaval followed by a period of settling down, then codification, and then upheaval again because we do not like to be codified.

For Western Christianity, the Protestant, or Great Reformation was about five hundred years ago. Five hundred before that you hit the Great Schism, when the church divided between east and west. Five hundred years earlier you have Pope Gregory the Great, who helped bring the church out of the dark ages.

During these 500-year episodes the church has what Anglican Bishop Mark Dyer calls a giant rummage sale--it takes a look at its old stuff and decides to sell what it no longer needs. We are going through this kind of giant sale today.

What happens to the church during this giant rummage sale?

Tickle: During these times of rearrangement and upheaval, the institutionalized church throws off things that are restricting its growth. When that mighty upheaval happens, history shows that at least three things always happen.

First, a new, more vital form of Christianity emerges. Second, the organized expression of Christianity, which up until then had been the dominant one, is reconstituted into a more pure and less ossified expression of its former self. During the Protestant Reformation, both the reformers, and those they are reacting against, ended up being better churches.

Finally, every time the incrustations of an overly established Christianity is broken open, the faith has spread dramatically, thereby increasing the range and depth of the church's reach. Following the Protestant Reformation, Christianity was spread over far more of the earth's territories than had ever been true in the past.

Every religion is subject to becoming encrusted and institutionalized over time. It appears to take the Abrahamic faiths—Christianity  Judaism and Islam—about 500 years before people rebel and seek reform. When that happens, new and vigorous expressions of faith break out, breaking the molds that have held them and scattering the pieces.

How is this change evidencing itself in the church today?

Tickle: Evangelicalism has lost much of its credibility and much of its spiritual energy of late, in much the same way that mainline Protestantism has. In their place is a new approach called the Emergent Church. This is a new gathering of believers that is not based on traditional denominations, creeds or beliefs.

It is a mix of Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, the mainline Protestant churches and the liturgical tradition, together with an emphasis on head and heart-not just one or the other-along with the deep commitment to social justice.

This new style of Western Christianity is not hierarchal or based on a certain doctrinal system. It's more about community and conversation, not about a set of beliefs and creeds. They are incarnational, not creedal. They are not interested in structures and hierarchies and buildings.

Does this mean the death of traditional mainline denominations?

Tickle: No! Just as the Protestant Reformation didn't spell the end of the Roman Catholic Church--it emerged stronger and more vibrant--mainline denominations won't disappear. They are losing their dominant position, but they can use this experience to reform themselves and become more relevant in the world.

How is this current upheaval different from what the church has experienced before?

Tickle: For the first time we are doing it in an age of instant media. The Internet makes it very easy to talk to each other across national and denominational boundaries in a way that wasn't possible before. But the Internet isn't causing this change; it is enabling it, just as the printing press assisted the growth and development of the Protestant Reformation.

E-mail, the Web and social media are allowing people to become connected in new ways. They allow this new form of church to be a self-organizing system-it is not dependent on central offices and structures. It's a leveler, it's egalitarian.

What are people looking for during this Great Emergence?

Tickle: People are looking for a new and different encounter with God. The strength of Protestantism was its rationalism; it took religion to the head. But today people want religion that also touches their hearts. It's not anti-intellectual; mind and reason are still very important. But people want more than just an intellectual challenge. They want something that moves them emotionally, as well. It is bringing the heart and the head together.

One characteristic of this emergent view of the church is a return to, and recovery of, liturgy and connectedness to church history. Many Western Christians have acted like the first 1,500 years of the church never happened-they start in the 1500s with Martin Luther and go from there. But there is a rich tradition of church fathers and mothers who lived faithfully and thoughtfully between those two events. The emergent church is going back to that time and finding deep meaning as they use those old prayers and litanies in worship, along with things like the Book of Common Prayer.

How might Christians respond to these changes?

Tickle: We need to respond prayerfully and carefully. This change isn't happening all at once-it will occur over many years. Like previous social, political, economic and religious upheavals, how we should respond is not always clear on a day-to-day basis.

It was the same during the Protestant Reformation, a time filled with reformers, protestors, puritans, pietists and others. We have to remember that it's not as if Protestantism came forth in one perfect or cohesive package; they didn't always know where things were going, or the consequences of their decisions and actions. Yet it all came together to create this new construct we have called Protestantism, the very thing that is under challenge today.

How do you feel about the changes you are seeing today?

Tickle: I am optimistic about the future of the church. For me, Christianity has never been more alive and vigorous than it is right here and right now. The kingdom of God is coming in many forms and many places these days. All I can say is: "Thanks be to God!"

Click here to read the second of my two interviews with Phyllis.

Click here to read the final interview that Phyllis gave after being diagnosed with cancer.

Health and Other Benefits of Religion

There are lots of studies which show the benefits of religion (like the ones below). But are the benefits due to something supernatural, or to how religion brings people together to help each other? Maybe it’s both. After all, challenges are more bearable when a burden is shared. And as church historian Martin Marty pointed out about the downside of being spiritual but not religious: “Spirituality doesn’t bring you a casserole when you are sick.”

Despite what some American televangelists like to say, having faith is no guarantee that life will work out perfectly.

  

Like everyone else, people who believe in God have bad things happen to them, too—they lose their jobs, get cancer, die in accidents or suffer any of the other maladies and afflictions that arise from simply being alive.

  

But if having faith doesn’t prevent these things from happening, it seems to help when problems and challenges come our way. At least, that’s what some recent studies are showing.

According to a German study, people who lost their jobs but attend church frequently reported they were more satisfied with their lives than non-attenders.

“This study asked whether religious attendance buffers the psychological impact of unemployment. The answer is yes,” researchers from the Center for Applied Developmental Science at the University of Jena, Germany, and the University of Amsterdam reported in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

A study in Poland found a similar result. That study of 1,600 workers who faced uncertain future employment discovered that frequent church attendance and having strong religious beliefs were related to fewer symptoms of depression and higher life satisfaction.

According to the study, by University of Jena and the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, highly religious individuals reported fewer signs of depression in the face of work and financially-related stress.

For the researchers, the study shows that “religiousness acted as a protective factor.”

When it comes to money, a U.S.reported by the July, 2010 issue of the journal of Social Science and Medicine found that going to church regularly and belief in the afterlife were related to lower levels of psychological distress for people experiencing financial hardship.

The reasons people of faith feel less stress, the study suggests, include belief in a loving God who cares for their well-being, and the belief in a rich and rewarding afterlife. This world isn’t all that there is, in other words.

Additionally, the study points to how religion often provides people with a supportive community. Not only does a faith community offer friendship and practical help, but people who are have lost their jobs or are facing money troubles feel their self-worth is validated by the community—it doesn’t matter if they have a job or a lot of money in the bank.

But faith isn’t only helpful to those who are in the workforce or worried about work; it can also be a benefit to people who are retired and aging.

That’s what a study by Lydia K. Manning of Duke University ’s Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development found. 

According to Manning, people who are spiritual have a tool that can promote and maintain health and resilience in later life.

The benefits of increased spiritual activity ranged from “battling loneliness through personal faith and church, synagogue and mosque attendance to reducing death anxiety through religious music,” she says, adding that spirituality “serves as a promoter of healthy aging.”

The role religion plays in combating loneliness is echoed by a study by Sunshine Rote and Terrence Hill of Florida State University and Christopher Ellison of the University of Texas at San Antonio .

“We find that religious attendance is associated with higher levels of social integration and social support,” they wrote.  

“Taken together, our results suggest that involvement in religious institutions may protect against loneliness in later life by integrating older adults into larger and more supportive social networks.”

Getting a benefit from religion isn’t limited to being part of a faith community; apparently just listening to religious music can help.

Research by Christopher Ellison, Matt Bradshaw and Collin Mueller of Duke University and Qijuan Fang of Bowling Green State University found that listening to religious music is associated with increases in life satisfaction, a greater sense of control and a decrease in anxiety about death.

“This study shows that listening to religious music may promote psychological well-being in later life,” the researchers say, although they don’t say what kind of religious music may be best.

So there you have it; if being religious won’t protect you from problems and suffering in life, it seems to help people weather them better.

From the Sept. 19, 2015 Winnipeg Free Press.

Of Whiskey Priests and Ragamuffins: Brennan Manning & Living By Grace

It was author Graham Green who popularized the idea of the whiskey priest, a flawed member of the clergy who, despite failings, still manages to inspire others in their relationship with God.

In his novel The Power and the Glory, the unnamed fictitious priest at the centre of the story is a fugitive in Mexico in the 1930s, on the run from the authorities during a time of persecution.

He’s not a very good priest; he drinks too much, he has doubts, and he has fathered a child. But when a dying man in another village needs a priest to hear his last confession, he comes out of hiding to help him—despite knowing he will likely be caught and executed. And that is exactly what happens.

In the end, the whiskey priest achieves a sense of dignity, nobility and holiness; villagers are heard to be talking about whether he could even be declared a saint.

Thoughts about whiskey priests came to me after reading All is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir, a book by a real-live whiskey priest by the name of Brennan Manning.

Manning, who died in 2013, was the author of 21 books including the popular The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, the Beat-Up and Burnt Out.

Born and raised in a tough Catholic home in Brooklyn , New York , Manning enlisted in the U.S. Marines during the Korean War. Upon return to the U.S. , he enrolled in journalism school but left after a semester in search of something more.

“Maybe the something ‘more’ is God,” an adviser suggested. Manning agreed, and decided to study theology.

In 1956, while meditating on the Stations of the Cross, he had a powerful experience of the personal love of Christ that confirmed God’s call on his life. After additional studies, he was ordained a Franciscan priest in 1963.

Following his ordination, Manning served as a campus minister and teacher before dedicating himself to living and working among the poor. He also spent time alone as a contemplative, living alone in a cave in a desert for six months.

Through his books and public speaking, Manning became a respected, appreciated and much-admired teacher and inspiration for many people who were seeking a deeper and richer relationship with God.

But behind his public persona was a man who struggled mightily with alcoholism. In his memoir, he recalls how he would drink a dozen beers every night by the age of 18—and also how later, as a spiritual mentor and teacher, he would sometimes drink himself into a stupor after presentations.

In 1982, Manning left the priesthood to get married. The marriage ended in divorce 18 years later, partly due to his drinking.

Yet despite his flaws and up-and-down personal life, he still had a positive impact on the lives of many.

“He held audiences spellbound,” recalls his friend and fellow-author Phillip Yancey. “One university chaplain told me that no speaker had ever had more impact on his fickle students than this aging, alcoholic failed-priest from New Jersey .”

To the end, Manning maintained that anything good that came through his ministry was due only to God’s grace in his life.

“To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark,” he wrote. “In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.” 

For Manning, it was all about what God did for him, not what he could do for himself. And what God did for him, God could do for others, too.

In Ragamuffin Gospel, he wrote about the many people he expected to see in heaven—prostitutes, addicts, criminals, those with doubts, the insecure, the scared, all the flawed and fearful people who were just like him.

“There they are,” he wrote. “There we are—the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life's tribulations, but through it all clung to faith. 

“My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.” 

For more information, go to www.brennanmanning.com

From the Sept. 5, 2015 Winnipeg Free Press.

Helping People in the Developing World Have Safe Surgery: "This is my Purpose Now"

Christina with friends and a pressure cooker.

In spring I met Christina Fast, a remarkable young woman from Calgary who has found a passion to help people in the developing world have safe surgery. Her story reminds me of the quote by Mr. Rogers about what to do when the world seems an overwhelming place: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” Christina is one of the helpers.

There's a lot of bad news in the world today—conflict, terrorism, refugee flight, not to mention worries about natural disasters and the economy.

Sometimes, things can seem so hopeless.

But now and then you hear something that gives hope. That’s what I felt recently when I talked to a young woman from Calgary who is making surgery safer for patients in some of the world’s poorest countries. .

Christina Fast, 28, is a sterile process technician and teacher at a college in that Alberta city. In 2011 she volunteered to serve with Mercy Ships, an international faith-based charity that provides medical services to some of the world’s poorest people in the developing world.

At first, she thought her job would only be sterilizing equipment on the ship, which was docked in  Sierra Leone . But one day she went ashore to visit a local hospital in Freetown . She was shocked by what she found.

“There were no functioning sterilizers,” she says. “It was probably the worst conditions I could ever imagine. I was in disbelief at what I saw.”

In Canada , medical instruments are routinely sterilized after each use in sophisticated machines called autoclaves. As a result, all patients in this country can expect to leave surgery without picking up an infection—it would take a serious breakdown in procedures for anyone to get sick.

But what Fast saw in the Freetown hospital was things like scalpels, clamps, retractors and other items simply put in a plastic pail of chlorine, rinsed, dried and used on the next patient.

The result? Most people got sick, and many died.

“One doctor I spoke to said that 90 percent of patients developed infections after surgery,” she says.

Shaken, Fast went back to the ship with a new idea—and a new sense of calling and resolve. God’s plan for her, she decided, was not just to sterilize instruments on the ship, but to help African hospitals learn how to do it, too. 

And so a non-profit organization called SPECT—Sterile Processing Education Charitable Trust—was born.

With help from a Grand Challenges grant from the Canadian government, and support from her family and friends, Fast is exploring ways to help hospitals in the developing world cheaply, sustainably and effectively sterilize medical instruments.

At first, she wasn’t sure how to do it. Autoclaves are expensive. And even if a hospital in the developing world could afford one—or was given one free—there’s no one qualified to operate them or fix them if they break.

Plus, since electricity in many places in the developing world can be spotty, even if they had trained technicians a power failure would render them useless.

For a while, she was stumped. But then she and a colleague came up with a simple, low-tech idea: Pressure cookers.

After rounds of experimentation, they discovered that ordinary pressure cookers could produce enough heat and steam for a long enough time to sterilize surgical instruments.

“I didn’t think it would work, but it did,” she says of the simple method, which finds instruments suspended in a wire container above the water.

Not only do they work, they are inexpensive, easy to buy in Africa , have no moving parts and don’t require electricity—they can be used on a gas stove or a wood fire.

Now Fast is on a mission to raise enough money to provide pressure cookers to as many hospitals as she can in Africa, and to provide training for people about how to effectively use them.

She finds fundraising to be a daunting task—much harder than actually doing the work she loves in Africa ..

“I’m not a good salesperson,” she says. “I tell my stories and let them speak for themselves. If it moves others, I invite them to help.”

Despite the challenges, Fast feels she’s where God wants her to be.

“Lives are being saved,” she says. “This is my purpose now.”

So there’s your good news for today—proof that there are some good things happening in the world. And you can bring hope to others, too, by donating to SPECT so that patients in the developing world, just like patients in Canada, can expect to go home from hospital after surgery in better shape than when they arrived.

For more information, visit www.spectrust.org. 

From the Aug. 29, 2015 Winnipeg Free Press. 

New Orleans, Ten Years After Hurricane Katrina

Destroyed homes in the Lower Ninth Ward.

August 29 is the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. In 2008, three years after the disaster, I was part of a Mennonite Disaster Service work team from River East MB Church in Winnipeg that went to New Orleans to help repair homes in that city. I wrote the following article about that experience for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Bourbon Street was rocking, the bars and clubs filled with people enjoying one of New Orleans' most popular tourist spots. A cacaphony of jazz, blues, rock and country filled the narrow balcony-lined avenue, giving the area a bright and festive air.

Almost three years after Hurricane Katrina, the city is back in business--as far as tourism is concerned.

Marks on the house indicate it has been
searched, and if bodies were found inside.

But down in the city's lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly neighbourhood, where Mennonite Disaster Service (MDS) is rebuilding houses damaged or destroyed by the devastating storm, it was a different story.

The only sounds there were that of hammers and saws as volunteers from Winnipeg's River East Mennonite Brethren church toiled in the heat to frame, drywall, tile and finish houses for residents anxious to return to their homes.

"I know that tourism is the lifeblood of this city," says Robert Green, 53, an accountant who lost his home, mother and a granddaughter to the flood that followed the storm.

"People see places like Bourbon Street and the French Quarter and they think the city is healed. But there's still a lot to do in this city to help the residents."

Inside an abandoned home.

Almost three years after the storm, there's still lots to do in New Orleans.

Green's once-vibrant Ninth Ward community is mostly a collection of empty lots and a few abandoned houses—the whole neighbourhood was swept away by the wall of water that broke through the Industrial Canal levee a few hundred yards behind his house. 

In other sections, house after house is boarded up, the owners still trying to decide whether to move back and rebuild. It's the same for businesses; a drive through the hardest-hit areas reveals empty and abandoned banks, hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, strip malls, department stores and gas stations.

It is hard to comprehend the scope of the disaster. Eighty percent of the city was submerged and destroyed and 9,368 businesses were closed or moved. Over 700,000 people were acutely impacted, with many forced to evacuate for safety to cities across the U.S.

"It wasn't a disaster—it was a catastrophe," says Steve Zimmer, Vice President for Community Mobilization for the United Way of New Orleans.

According to Zimmer, who supervises the hurricane recovery efforts for that agency, no city in the U.S. has ever experienced destruction this severe.

"There is no modern model for what has happened to New Orleans," he says, noting that in a normal disaster, it usually takes two to three years for a community to recover.

"This one will take 11 to 15 years. We've got to blow up the old models and start thinking in new and different ways."

Houses gone, almost as far as you can see.

In a normal disaster, the goal is to get people back to "where they were" before it happened, Zimmer says.

"But that's not possible here, where a whole neighbourhood was destroyed," he says.

"People didn't just lose their homes, they lost their community--the grocery store, their church, the library, the school, bank and the usual services." 

Adding to the challenge of the recovery has been the at-times ineffectual and uncoordinated response from various levels of government. 

"Our government failed us," says Zimmer. "There was colossal failure at the core."

Despite the problems, things are slowly improving. 

Figures vary, with reports indicating that between 67 percent and 87 percent of residents have returned, and people in the city are beginning to move out of trailers and back into houses. School enrolment is increasing, and 6,368 businesses have started back up. 

But down in the parts of the city hardest-hit by the storm, attention is focused on much the smaller details of repair and reconstruction. For residents, the sounds of rebuilding is the sound of hope.

"After I saw what the storm had done to my house, I cried a lot," says Catalina Blosseau, who lives with her disabled husband and daughter in a small trailer.

"I wondered if there was anyone who could help me. I was losing hope."

Blosseau sought help from Helping Hands, the disaster recovery arm of Catholic Charities. After reviewing her case, the agency asked MDS to supply volunteers to rebuild her home. On August 7 she'll move in.

"Now I am so happy," she says of the work of the MDS volunteers. "I got my life back again."

When it comes to helping New Orleans get back on its feet, volunteers are a huge part of the story.

"Without volunteers, we wouldn't be as far along as we are," says Paul Cook, Senior Project Manager for Helping Hands. "We really have been blessed."

"If it weren't for the volunteers, sometimes I think nothing would be getting done at all," adds Zimmer.

MDS volunteers from Winnipeg building a new house.

Nobody knows how many volunteers have come to New Orleans to help; one estimate puts the number at about one million. Of that total, about 16,000 have volunteered with Helping Hands, while 1,160 have done reconstruction work with MDS. 

But progress is frustratingly slow.

"It's a slow and tedious process," says Cook, who spent 25 years in the construction business.

"Even in the best of times it can take four to six months to gut and repair a house. Add in the lack of services and the large demand on trades, and you see why this takes so much longer."

It doesn't help that getting funds and loans from the state is an arduous experience for many.

"There's a lot of red tape," Cook says, adding that it can also take time to process insurance claims, and that the amount provided by insurers often is insufficient to cover the damage.

"We don't have a lot of money to donate to make up the shortfall, but we do what we can," he says.

Adding to the problem is what he calls the "second wave" of people needing help because contractors they hired to repair their homes did shoddy work, failed to complete the work, failed to comply with local building codes--or simply ripped them off. 

"Unfortunately, this kind of thing was not uncommon," he says, noting that his agency recently assigned MDS volunteers to re-gut and re-build a home that had been repaired incorrectly.

But those issues aren't the main concern for the volunteers from Winnipeg—they just wanted to do as much as they could in the week they were in New Orleans to help a few families. And their work is appreciated.

"We like working with MDS," says Cook. "They're very good at everything." 

"MDS has been a wonderful partner," adds Zimmer. "I'm really impressed by the people they bring down here."

For Robert Green, the presence of so many volunteers in his neighbourhood has a more personal effect. 

"So many people from around the world have responded to our need," he says. "It helps me get over the anguish I feel over the loss of my mother and granddaughter. It’s made it possible for me to move on.” 

A hope still being realized.

Today New Orleans is well on its way back from the hurricane, but there’s still a ways to go, especially in the poorer areas of the city. MDS finished its work in the Gulf Coast in 2012; over 17,000 volunteers worked 126,400 days at 194 cleanup sites, rebuilding 122 homes.

Click here to read a thank-you editorial from the New Orleans Times-Picayune to all those who came to the city to volunteer with the recovery effort.

What Can the 2011 Canadian Election Results Tell Us About Religion & Voting in 2015?

What role will religion play in this election?

With two months to go, it’s too soon to say. But an exit poll by Ipsos Reid following the 2011 election might provide some clues.

That poll, which probed the relationship between the religious affiliation of 36,000 Canadians and how they voted, found that Protestants and Jews were more than likely to vote for the Conservatives, people with no religious affiliation were more likely to vote NDP, and that of all the religious groups, only Muslims were more likely to vote Liberal.

Specifically, the poll found that 55 percent of Protestants voted Conservative, as did 52 percent of Jewish voters. 

The NDP attracted 40 percent of Catholics, but this is mainly attributable to its success in Quebec. The Conservatives attracted 30 percent of the Catholic votes, 16 percent voted Liberal.

For Muslims, 46 percent vote Liberal, 38 percent voted for NDP, and only 12 percent voted for Conservative. 

Of those who attend worship services regularly, 50 percent voted Conservative, 24 percent voted NDP, and 18 percent voted Liberal. Overall, the Conservatives received the votes of 42 percent of Canadians who say they have a religious identity.

(See chart below for full details.)

What does this mean for the coming election?

First, the Conservative strategy of reaching out to religiously-inclined voters, including immigrant groups and Jewish voters, seemed to pay off in the last election--and it may pay off in the next one.

Second, the NDP is attracting more people who say they have no religion—which is a big change for a Party that was founded by prairie Baptist preachers and supported for decades by Christians who embraced the Social Gospel.

Third, the loss of religious voters seems to be hurting the Liberals. Catholics and Jews, who have historically voted Liberal, are moving away from that Party. With its third party status right now, the loss of every potential vote is significant.

Will these trends continue? Perhaps. One wonders what effect all the scandals will have on the many Protestants and evangelicals who supported the Conservatives in the last election.

For those who prize integrity, honesty and probity, it could have an effect when it's time to cast a ballot on October 19.

For the NDP, which has actually made small gains among evangelicals, the way Thomas Mulcair attacked Crossroads, the church-based humanitarian organization that was accused of being anti-gay in 2013, could affect the way some of them might vote.

In his criticism of how the Canadian government provided funds for that organization’s foreign aid work, Mulcair called Crossroads "un-Canadian," and "against not only Canadian values, but Canadian law."

For some evangelicals who might be considering the NDP over the Liberals, those comments might still rankle.

And the Liberals did themselves no favours when Justin Trudeau announced that all candidates for that Party must be pro-choice. Anti-abortion groups, many of them supported by churches, are ratcheting up their attacks on the Liberal Party in advance of the election, and calling on their members to park their votes elsewhere.

As Raymond de Souza, a Roman Catholic priest and editor of Convivium Magazine put it following Trudeau's announcement, the message being sent to Catholics is that “you’re not welcome.”

But with Canada becoming an increasingly secular country, does religion even matter that much today when it comes to voting?

For many observers, the answer seems to be yes. Although religion is only one of a number of factors that shape decisions about politics, it is still an important one. In their 2010 study of Canadian voting behaviour, Cameron D. Anderson and Laura B. Stephenson wrote that “outside of religion and class, religion has been found to be one of the strongest vote determinants in Canada.”

At the same time, they acknowledge, “in many ways, the issue of religious voting in Canada remains one of the least understood aspects of Canadian voting behaviour.”

Adds Will McMartin, a long-time political consultant and commentator in they July 15 issue of The Tyee: “Religion today may or may not be as vital to Canadian politics and elections as once it was, but it remains an important consideration nonetheless.”

Religion, he goes on to say, “almost certainly will be an important factor for a sizeable number of Canadians as they ponder how to vote in the looming federal general election. Whether it will be decisive in determining the outcome remains to be seen.”

We'll have an answer in a couple of months.

Religion and Voting: Does it Matter?

As Canada grows increasingly more secular, does religion matter when it comes to voting in federal elections?

First off, it’s important to note that when it comes to voting, religious groups are not monolithic. It’s hard to speak of a Protestant vote, a Catholic vote, a Jewish vote or a Muslim vote.

Second, when talking about the religious vote it can be hard to distinguish it from what has been called the “ethnic vote.”

Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are all minority religions in Canada, and are also comprised of many people who are recent immigrants to Canada.

But even apart from those two things, for many Canadians religion plays a role in determining how they vote.

One way is by how individuals “bring their worldview to the voting booth,” according to Ron Dart, who teaches political science, philosophy and religion at the University of Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, B.C.

So it’s no surprise, he said, that they “tend to vote for someone who shares their values.”

Then there is the corporate dimension. 

Even though attendance at worship services is down, millions of Canadians still gather every weekend at churches, synagogues, temples, mosques and gurdwaras.

While there, they are apt to be reminded about the election, pray for political leaders, hear sermons about their responsibility as citizens, or be encouraged to consider their values when deciding how to vote.

One way church groups help members with voting is through election kits. Groups that have made kits include the United Church of Canada, the Canadian Council of Churches, Development & Peace (Roman Catholic) and Mennonite Central Committee.

These kits focus on issues such as domestic hunger, poverty, homelessness, Aboriginal issues and other things, along with climate change and international relief and development.

Church groups are the only ones to produce election kits, of course, but unlike other organizations that do so, they have the ability to promote them or use them on a weekly basis with large numbers of people.

Contrast all this with people who say they have no religion. Unlike religious people, they don’t gather in groups on a regular basis. It is harder for their opinion to be shaped collectively, as a result.

Then there is the matter of voting itself.

According to Andrew Grenville, Chief Research Officer at Vision Critical, people who attend worship services regularly are more likely to vote than other Canadians.

“Religious people tend to be more community-minded and more engaged in the community,” he said, adding that these are factors that can also lead people to be more likely to vote.

But will all this make a difference? Eric Mang thinks so. 

Mang, who served as a political aide in the Harris government in Ontario and the Campbell government in B.C., said in 2009: “What should interest political junkies is that, next to regional reasons for voting patterns, religion is the most powerful predictor of voter behaviour in Canada.”

As more and more people say they have no religion, this could change. But for now, it could still make a difference. We'll know in a couple of months.