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.

First, You Must Kill Warren Kinsella...

...if you (the LPoC) want to get back the Evangelical vote.

From "Canadian Evangelical Voting Trends by Region, 1996–2008", on why Evangelical voters have trended Tory:

First, when the Canadian Alliance was formed in 2000, it elected Stockwell Day, an evangelical Christian, as its leader. During the 2000 general election campaign, Liberal Party representative Warren Kinsella appeared on Canada AM, a popular national television program, with a Barney the Dinosaur doll and mocked Stockwell Day’s creationist beliefs, saying, “I just want to remind Mr. Day that The Flintstones was not a documentary.”13 Kinsella would go on to boast, “Of all the things I have done in politics, over many, many years, probably nothing has had the impact of those few seconds on Canada AM.”14 While Evangelicals hold various views on Creation, most understood this as an attempt to denigrate their faith.

While this and other explanations offered in the paper seem a list of the authors' personal set of bitches, whines, and complaints, the fact that Evangelicals have trended Tory over the past ten years seems unassailable. Gruending, for example, has made the same point from a different perspective.

IMHO, the real questions are:

1) are there enough Evangelicals out there to justify a special attempt at outreach?

2) Have the Libs abandoned Evangelicals, or vice versa? Stockwell Day/Preston Manning sold their Evangelicalism as part of the political package you would get out of Reform if you voted that way. Most were unimpressed, but some bought into a point on the ideological spectrum that was not, if I am remembering correctly, previously on offer in Canada, at least not federally. To me, that explains most of the shift (and why, with Evangelicals now firmly in their camp, the Tories cannot break the 40% majority level).

The Rise Of The Canadian Evangeliban?

From The Harper Index, itself a product of the Golden Lake Institute (which I've never heard of), comes this interesting piece of the rise of the "religious conservative" voter in Canada:

Andrew Grenville, a senior vice president with IPSOS-Reid in Toronto, led a survey of 36,000 voters via the internet for CanWest/Global on Jan. 23, 2006, the day of the general election. Grenville wrote about those results in the March-April 2006 edition of Faith Today, a publication of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. He found that 64 per cent of weekly Protestant church attendees voted for Conservative candidates. By definition, the majority of those Protestant voters were evangelicals because they are much more likely to attend church weekly than mainline Protestants.

"In the predominantly English speaking parts of Canada, Protestants who attend church weekly embraced the Conservatives with a fervour never seen before," Grenville wrote. "Clearly, a line has been crossed and a population mobilized."

The article claims, among other things, that the traditionally Liberal "Catholic vote" has begun to leak away to the Harper Conservatives, and that "being a Protestant fundamentalist is the single most important predictor of a Conservative vote in our models. "

It is, however, a bit on the alarmist side, especially in the thesis that what we are seeing in Canada is a delayed echo of the United States in the 80s and 1990s. My own view is that the "Big Blue Wave", as it were, has moved in sync within both countries, and in fact crested at the same time. The "ferver" of Canadian evangelicals has left Harper's Tories stuck at about 30 per cent in the opinion polls, and there are simply not enough bible waving bodies out there to drive those numbers higher. Whereas in the States you can add another 10 points to that total.

I am also of the opinion that the article's conclusion is entirely unjustified:

The religious and cultural wars that have enveloped the United States since at least the time of Ronald Reagan have arrived in Canada and they may well intensify.

Oh really, over what? SSM and abortion rights are essentially in the bag in this country, ascendant Environmental issues tend to split the Right rather than the Left, and on such matters as the HPV vacine , our Fundys show a streak of Realism far beyond the mental capacity of their U.S. counterparts. So where is the trigger to this cultural war?