Gruending On What's Really Going On With Evangelical Voters

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a study entitled "Canadian Evangelical Voting Trends by Region, 1996-2008", done by several authors from the Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelism. This study purported to show a slow drift away from the Liberal Party of Canada due, the authors claimed, to attempts by the LPoC to ridicule and marginalize Evangelical voters for short-term political gain.

Now, Dennis Gruending has written a nice response to these arguments. Here is a sample:

Among those examples is the Liberals’ handling of legislation regarding same sex marriage. By 2002, the courts had begun to rule that the existing definition of marriage was unconstitutional, or, described in another way, that the laws must be changed to allow for same sex marriage. The authors say: “The government chose not to appeal the [court] decision and announced it would introduce legislation to redefine marriage. . . and the government became an advocate for the redefinition of marriage, contending same-sex marriage was a human rights issue and required by the Charter.”

Same sex marriage was (and remains) a contentious public policy issue but I fail to see why the Liberal government’s acting in accordance with the court rulings should be understood as an insult to evangelicals. To use a parallel example, many Christians are opposed to Canada’s war in Afghanistan, but should they consider themselves to be personally insulted because the Conservative government has not stopped waging the war?

Mr. Gruending has suggested that this will be the first of a series of posts on this topic. I will link to them as they become available.