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The Politics of Evangelical Identity
Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada
By Lydia Bean PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-5261-1
CHAPTER 1
COMPARING EVANGELICALS IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA
During Canada's debate over same-sex marriage, many commentators wondered if evangelicals were mobilizing to fight an American-style culture war. Leaders like Charles McVety stepped forward, representing themselves as advocates for a united evangelical perspective on gay marriage. Canadians wondered how to respond. Did McVety speak for evangelicals? Did rank-and-file members of local churches share his Christian Right political vision? Most journalists took McVety's leadership claims for granted. But I saw a different picture, by watching how McVety engaged his self-proclaimed constituency.
One drizzly March morning in 2007, I joined a group of Ontario Baptists as they attended Mission Fest, a weekend-long celebration of global evangelism and domestic mission to reach Canada for Christ. We carpooled there in a van from Hamilton, a mixture of church elders and bleary-eyed young adults who complained bitterly about the early start on a Saturday. Our trip was organized by Morton, a deacon in his late 60s who taught the New Member's Sunday school class. From morning to evening, we sampled from a dizzying array of workshops, worship events, and information fairs meant to equip us to share the gospel with Canada and "the nations." Mission Fest was not sponsored by any particular denomination or local church; it brought together a broad coalition of churches, denominations, and parachurch ministries under the wide umbrella of evangelical Christianity. Conspicuously missing were representatives from the United Church of Canada or from Anglican Church, the bastions of Canada's former mainline establishment. Nor did I meet representatives from the Catholic Church. Over the course of the day, I heard presentations led by Baptists, Pentecostals, charismatics, Christian Missionary Alliance, and a host of nondenominational Bible churches.
At the main plenary, we heard a message from Franklin Graham, the son of American evangelist Billy Graham, who shared his testimony and gave an uninspired presentation of the "plan of salvation." Though Graham himself did not address political issues, it became apparent that Christian Right activists hoped to use the event to rally attendees behind a conservative political agenda. After Graham spoke, he was thanked by Charles McVety, who rose to prominence in Canada's Christian Right during the fight against same-sex marriage, as leader of the Defend Marriage Coalition and president of Canada Family Action. McVety praised Graham as a model of evangelical orthodoxy, within a church that was losing its focus:
Franklin Graham is a man of moral clarity. Our church is under unprecedented attack, an attack greater than at any time since the early church.... Our church has gotten involved in so many issues. Sometimes we get away from the Great Commission. But Franklin Graham has stayed focused.
Then, after presenting Graham with an award from Canada Christian College, McVety instructed us to "Please rise as we sing our Canadian National Anthem!" A Christian vocal trio called His Season led us in a pop version of the national anthem. McVety, a self-described leader of Canada's Christian Right, seemed to be in command of a crowd of thousands, as we stood and pledged to "stand on guard" for Canada. Were Canadian evangelicals rallying an army to fight a culture war?
Watching from the crowd, I could see that the picture was more complicated. On stage, I saw a lineup of white men, all older than fifty, calling on Christians to defend themselves and their nation from cultural threats. But in the crowd, I saw stunning racial and ethnic diversity, and a mixture of ages that was not represented on the stage. From the crowd, I saw that Charles McVety wasn't just waging war on external enemies: homosexuals, secularists, left-leaning causes. He was fighting for the soul of evangelicalism itself. When McVety talked about the church's involvement in "so many issues," he was implicitly attacking the tone of most of Mission Fest so far. After all, the day-long conference had featured a variety of Christian social ministries that hosted booths and organized workshops on domestic poverty, human trafficking, creation care, and refugee assistance. By contrast, McVety defined orthodox Christians as people of "moral clarity," who stayed focused on defending their religion from attack, instead of being distracted by these social concerns.
McVety's doom-and-gloom narrative of defense was strikingly out of touch with the dominant narrative of Mission Fest as a whole, which emphasized growing churches and multicultural missions. At the end of the day, we met at the closing worship service, hosted by David Mainse, host of the Canadian Christian television show 100 Huntley Street. Mainse celebrated the ethnic diversity that we saw represented among workshop leaders and in the crowd around us. "The wealth of the world has come to Toronto! And we're blessed. Are we blessed?" he asked the crowd. The crowd roared back. The dominant narrative of evangelical identity was the celebration of the global, multicultural church: the Canadian church's unique mission to bring together Christians from all over the world.
An outside observer watching the crowd might have been terrified to see this Christian Right leader commanding a crowd of thousands of evangelicals to sing "Oh Canada." But looking more closely, Charles McVety's culture war rhetoric had fallen flat at Mission Fest, at least among members of Highpoint Baptist who attended that day. As we walked back to the van to return to Hamilton, Morton turned to me and shook his head, "Well, somebody should tell 'His Season' that the national anthem is not something you improvise on." I asked Morton if it was normal to end this kind of event with the national anthem. "No, that was highly unusual," said Murray, with great irritation in his voice. "We never sing the national anthem unless it's a Canada Day event or something," said his wife, Lori. Murray added, "But I would think that they'd end with a hymn or something to do with missions." It was clear that the event's awkward ending had rubbed Morton the wrong way. On the drive back, different members of our group shared the high points of Mission Fest, which for them included panels on outreach to immigrants, church planting among First Nations peoples, and global poverty.
It became evident that McVety was not just at war with secular Canadians; he was engaged in a cultural struggle with the evangelical movement itself. To rally Canadian evangelicals behind his American-style Christian Right agenda, McVety first needed to delegitimize the kinds of civic-minded social ministries that were already well-established within Canadian churches. The entire festival had been a day-long celebration of Canadian multiculturalism, where most speakers encouraged attendees using positive, forward-looking narratives about Canada's unique potential to "reach the nations." McVety seemed visually out of place: huddled behind the podium with a small group of aging white men, addressing a multi-ethnic audience that represented the racial and ethnic diversity of Toronto. For Murray, McVety's appeal seemed out of place because it distracted the focus from missions.
Since 2004, it has become increasingly obvious to American observers that the Christian Right is in a struggle with alternative evangelical voices. As a loose coalition, conservative Protestants have never had a centralized religious authority who could speak for the religious tradition, as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops speaks for Catholics. Christian Right leaders like Charles McVety represent themselves as the political arm of evangelicalism, characterizing this group's values and policy priorities in the public sphere. But it is never obvious who has the authority to speak for evangelicals, because this religious tradition is a loosely organized coalition within no single ecclesiastical authority. McVety is only one of a dizzying array of leaders who claim to speak for the evangelical tradition. And as he lamented, many of these leaders are not interested in fighting a culture war—they are too busy serving the poor, reaching out to refugees, and planting churches. At Mission Fest, McVety was desperately attempting to establish his moral authority to define the evangelical tradition by connecting himself to Billy Graham, framing his concerns as part of the core "gospel message," and disparaging other evangelical leaders who focused on "all these issues" that distracted Christians from the gospel.
This vignette illustrates that the Christian Right is a movement with two faces: one face that represents evangelicals in public debates and electoral politics, and another face that seeks to promote its particular vision of "orthodoxy" within the evangelical movement. The Christian Right does not just represent the self-evident values and policy priorities of evangelicals. It also functions as an internal movement to shape what these values and policy priorities should be. In the United States, this is readily apparent as an open struggle between the evangelical left, evangelical moderates, and the established Christian Right. But previous studies have understated the role of these internal struggles within evangelicalism as a critical dynamic in the culture wars. Previous work has explained how the Christian Right was able to mobilize resources and co-opt the religious institutions to build a political movement. But scholars have not asked how they were able to create a political consensus within evangelicalism, and keep alternative voices from gaining a following. Comparing the United States and Canada sheds light on the internal politics of evangelical identity: the ways that the Christian Right faced inward to wield power within their own subculture.
In this chapter, I compare the historical and institutional differences that made it more difficult to politicize evangelical identity in Canada than in the United States. These institutional differences set the context for local church life, leading to cross-national differences in how evangelical identity has been linked to politics in the United States and Canada.
The Politics of Evangelicals in Comparative Perspective
Before the 1960s, party conflict in both the United States and Canada pitted Catholics against Protestants. In the United States, Catholics have historically voted Democrat while Protestants have voted Republican. In Canada, Catholics have historically voted Liberal, while Protestants have favored the Progressive Conservatives. In a variety of Western democracies, this kind of "ethnoreligious" cleavage between Catholics and Protestants was locked into place during the nineteenth century, during partisan conflicts over the consolidation of a national identity and church-state relations. But in the 1960s, a wave of cultural change swept across the United States, Canada, and other Western democracies, a trend toward what public opinion researchers called "self-expressive" or "libertarian" values.
These cultural shifts were rooted in long-standing themes of modernity and liberal democracy, human equality and emancipation, but they were accompanied by new changes in gender roles, sexual behavior, and general orientations toward authority. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, sexual norms changed rapidly in both the United States and Canada, as women rejected double standards about premarital sexual behavior. This sexual liberation was made possible by growing access to and use of oral contraceptives and other reliable birth control methods, which made it easier to decouple sexual intimacy from childbearing and marriage. In both countries, women made rapid gains in higher education and workforce participation, and the feminist movement gained cultural visibility.
Cultural changes went hand in hand with policy changes in the regulation of sexuality and reproduction. Empowered by the Stonewall riots of 1969, the gay rights movement entered the public sphere to challenge discrimination against homosexuals. From 1971 to 1983, American states began to abolish or reform their sodomy laws. Between 1973 and 1974, homosexuality was removed from the DSM-II as a psychological disorder. In 1963, Colorado became the first state to legalize therapeutic abortion, and in 1973, Roe v. Wade struck down abortion laws nationwide as violations of the constitutional right to privacy. In Canada, both homosexuality and abortion were decriminalized in 1968–69 by the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau defended the bill in terms of individual freedom, claiming that "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation."
In both countries, these legal changes alerted religious leaders that they were losing authority in public life, as well as in the lives of individual citizens. But initially, Catholics and Protestants were divided about how to respond. The Catholic Church immediately opposed the decriminalization of abortion, but mainline and evangelical Protestants supported these reforms out of concern for women's health. From the 1960s to the late 1970s, evangelical leaders spoke out publicly against gay rights, but agreed that therapeutic abortion was acceptable in some circumstances. Abortion was still considered a narrowly Catholic issue.
But during the 1970s, American evangelicals began to think that Catholics were no longer the greatest threat to their Protestant Christian hegemony. Instead, their true enemy was "secular humanism," a shadowy set of elites who opposed their vision of a Christian America. Between 1973 and 1980, evangelicals embraced a hard-line position on abortion, as this issue became associated with secular humanism, feminism, and sexual license. The Christian Right movement burst onto the national scene, to battle secular humanism by brokering an alliance between evangelicals and the Republican Party.
In this book, I use the term "Christian Right" broadly to refer to all the key actors who built a strategic coalition between evangelicals and a partisan conservative agenda, not just the advocacy groups and leaders who claimed this label. This broad definition is important because many key evangelical leaders like Billy Graham distanced themselves from the so-called Christian Right, even as they worked behind the scenes to mobilize evangelicals behind a conservative political agenda. In the United States, this Christian Right movement united a broad set of activists around a shared narrative of Christian nationalism, a diagnosis of "secular humanism" as the problem, and the Republican Party as the solution. From 1980 to 2004, this national Christian Right movement took power within the Republican Party and unified rank-and-file evangelicals as a voting bloc.
By contrast, Canada did not experience the same kind of culture war polarization over moral issues from the 1970s through the 1990s, even though the Canadian public was privately divided in their attitudes toward abortion, sexuality, and gay rights. During this period, Canada still contained a homegrown Christian Right, networks of activists who sought to build a coalition between evangelicals and right-wing politics. As early as 1974, Baptist minister Ken Campbell founded Renaissance Canada to bring Canadian evangelicals into conservative politics and the pro-life movement. In the 1980s, Canadian evangelical activists founded two different political parties, the Reform Party and the Christian Heritage Party, which linked traditional morality to a broader conservative ideological agenda.
But Canada's would-be Christian Right failed to broker an American-style coalition for two reasons. Facing outward, social conservative activists found it more difficult to get their "moral issues" of abortion, homosexuality, and marriage policy onto the political agenda. Facing inward, Christian Right activists in Canada were less successful at pouring their national evangelical subculture into a partisan mold. For example, the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada was founded in 1964 as a parallel organization to the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals. While the EFC took a strong pro-life stance during this period, it also advocated on a broader set of issues, like poverty, that cut across partisan boundaries. Throughout the 1980s, the EFC deliberately defined their moderate, accommodating approach in opposition to the U.S. Christian Right. Gladys Ganiel has described the EFC as "mediating evangelicals," because they worked to find common ground between evangelicals and other groups in an accommodating spirit.
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Excerpted from The Politics of Evangelical Identity by Lydia Bean. Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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