All the candidates showed up except for the Liberal, Conservative, and, People's Party ones. I gave it my best shot to be as open and reasonable as possible. This was complicated by the fact that one of the fellows had a tendency to argue with the people asking questions, several candidates were significantly late, and, at one point in the process another left to invite people in another part of the building to the event. But a lot of the people present liked what happened. As Adam Donaldson quoted one participant:
"The last debate of the 2019 election in Guelph was a wild affair that made all the other debates feel like “going to bed with a mannequin” by comparison."One of the impressions I had from this exercise was how frustrated two of the candidates were with modern Canada. Gordon Truscott (Christian Heritage Party) and Michael Wassilyn (Independent) both represented themselves as representing "traditional Christian values".
Wassilyn repeated several times that Canada was built on "Biblical values". He also talked appreciatively about women in his childhood who had very large families with eight or nine children. Truscott had a similar rap complete with fond memories of his mother doing many loads of laundry in one single day. Both were adamantly opposed to abortion, with Wassilyn promoting the film Unplanned and Truscott waving books that suggest that all women who have abortions suffer from long-lasting trauma for the rest of their lives.
Both of these men were very, very committed to the idea that abortion should be outlawed. But after a period of very animated conversation on the issue, I got the impression that the audience had lost all interest in the subject. When I asked for a show of hands from people who didn't want to hear any more on the subject, a forest of hands instantly shot up. This pretty much immediately sucked the air out of both Truscott and Wassilyn.
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I don't want to talk about abortion, but I do want to discuss about the role that religion has had on politics during my lifetime, and, where it seems to be going now.
The first thing to remember is that traditionally religion has had much, much less to do with Canadian politics than it has with American. Primarily, this is because Christian churches in Canada tend to be more "traditional", whereas American ones are more of the "evangelical" type.
The word "evangelical" has become more common in recent years because of the negative associations that come with the older term "fundamentalism"---mainly because of unpleasant comparisons being drawn between "fundamentalist Christianity" and "fundamentalist Islam", which is often seen as the motivation for Islamic terrorism.
As a general rule, evangelical Christians say that they believe in the literal, historical truth of the Bible, have a body of beliefs that they believe are "orthodox" and "traditional", and, believe that the call to "evangelize the nations" involves getting directly involved in politics. The key "traditional politics" that they mostly manifest---as in the case of Guelph's last election---is deny women access to abortions and make sure that homosexuals and transgender people don't gain rights to live the way they want. More recently, they have also tended to believe that any concern about environmental issues---such as the climate emergency---shows a lack of willingness to trust in God's "plan".
(I've probably offended some folks at this point. I've met people who call themselves "evangelical" who would be really annoyed at being lumped in with these people. I'd ask folks to just ask themselves the following question: "would you at least admit that there are a lot of people who call themselves 'evangelical' who do fit my description?" I'm trying to make a statistical definition, not a theological one. It might be true that the religion I'd describing has very little to do with what is suggested by the Gospels---but that's not the sort of claim I am making.)
The willingness of evangelicals to willingly and enthusiastically submit to the authority of their churches has meant that these groups "punch above their weight" in American elections. Indeed, 80% of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump and were absolutely key to his election. But increasingly it looks like the commitment to non-liberal causes---like opposing abortion and gay rights, refusing to deal with the climate emergency, and, treating refugees like crap---is driving people away from the church. In other words, they are sick of being told that Jesus wants people to vote Republican because they don't see that party upholding the values of the Gospels.
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Let's put this story into a bigger context. All forms of American Protestant Christianity are in decline. Take a look at the following graphic from an ABC News story.
As you can see in the above poll, every other major religious group---including "no religion"---has been either holding it's own or increasing but Protestants have declined from 50% of the population to 36%.
The conventional wisdom is that it's the more mainstream Protestant churches that are suffering the brunt of this decline, but here's a graph that shows something very different.
Here's something that really surprised me, the number of people who describe themselves as "evangelical Christians" in the USA has declined faster than the number who associate with a more liberal denomination (8 percentage points for evangelicals versus 6 points for more liberal Protestants).
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Just a reminder, writing this blog involves a lot of work---even if it must be invisible to many of my readers. If you like it, consider supporting me on Patreon and PayPal. It's easier than you probably think. (Thanks Al for being so awesome!)
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Again, it would be easy to suggest that this is just a question of young people leaving the church. This probably has a great deal to do with it, but there also seems to have been another factor involved.
Evangelical Christianity has gone through various demographic shifts over my lifetime. When I was young, there was a strong split along racial lines. Indeed, Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o'clock on Sunday morning”. When King said this, church goers went to their local, small church. And just like everything else in the Jim Crow era, they were strictly split apart on racial lines.
As America entered the era of "happy motoring", people's new mobility eventually created an opportunity to create huge "mega churches" (think Guelph's Lakeside Church) that offered people many of the social services that America's successive conservative governments refused to give through government programs. Increasingly, these were the institutions that white evangelicals joined. And eventually, increasing numbers of black evangelicals also joined as a way of "integrating" themselves into what they hoped would eventually become a "post racial" Christian community.
Unfortunately, this attempt at integration seems to have failed because blacks felt that the culture and teachings of white evangelical mega-churches fail to take into account and accommodate the experiences of people-of-colour. As reported in a New York Times article by Campbell Robertson that seems to be illustrative of what I've read in several others, black congregants found that white church members simply didn't understand how pervasive racism is in American society. This manifested itself in things like an inability to understand why anyone would support the "black lives matter" protests, be upset about the shooting of Trayvon Martin, etc. For many it appears that the "straw that broke the camel's back" was the decision by evangelical white churches to strongly urge their members to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. As Robertson relates, one woman who attempted to reach out to white fellow congregants over the endorsement had this experience.
One of the couples invited her to come to their house. Sitting in the living room over a plate of brownies, Ms. Pruitt explained to the wife how disturbed she had been by the clear inference from the pulpit that she should support a candidate whose behavior and rhetoric were so offensive that she could not bring herself even to say his name.
The woman explained that a Trump victory had been prophesied and handed Ms. Pruitt a two-page printout, which began: “The Spirit of God says, ‘I have chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this.’” Barack Obama, the woman continued, should never have been president, since he was not born a United States citizen. The visit ended with the woman suggesting that Ms. Pruitt’s discomfort at the church was God telling her it was time to move on.
Ms. Pruitt never went back.(Please note that I didn't find any statistical evidence one way or the other about the above. This is understandable because concepts like "evangelical", "mega-church", and, even "black" are very difficult to define. Moreover, outside of very broad, self-reported categories---as in the ABC news polls I quote above---it is hard to accurately define people as members of a specific "church". For example, is someone who used to be active, but only shows up once a year still a member? Some congregations inflate their numbers by only adding new members and never subtracting people who've stopped attending. Consider the above as a "anecdotal evidence that might suggest a future line of research".)
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We all know that young people are far less homo-phobic, racist, and, religious than older people. They are also far more concerned about poverty and the climate emergency. This certainly can explain why the membership of evangelical Protestant churches are in decline. We also know that America is increasingly becoming a nation where whites make up a declining percentage of the population. By choosing to tie themselves to a Republican Party and president that is widely felt to be racist, homophobic and unconcerned about both poverty and the climate emergency, the evangelical movement seems to be dooming itself to a catastrophic decline in both numbers and relevance in American society.
Will history show that the 2016 election was the "last hurrah" of evangelical Christianity as a premier force in American politics?
If so, let me make a bit of a suggestion for my Christian friends. The Gospels suggest that people of faith should be "the leaven" in society. That is, Christians should be the "yeast" that help society "rise". As I see it, that means that they should be content to always be a very small minority who remain hidden and work to make the entire population into better people. The idea that the church should get so invested in politics that it finds itself repelling individuals who support the "wrong" party just seems to me to be attempting to take on Caesar's due as well God's.
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