The following article was published in Pundit Magazine (http://www.punditmag.com/) on September 27, 2000. It has also been published in the Toronto Star and the Christian Courier.

DEBATE OVER DAY'S FAITH HAS BEEN MISGUIDED

Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day's ‘Christian Conservatism' has been the subject of considerable debate since his arrival upon the federal stage. But, according to Member of Parliament Bill Blaikie, Day's religious convictions have little to do with many of his policies, and his attempts to associate his faith with his political views do little to explain how Christianity actually influences his brand of conservatism.

The election of Stockwell Day as Leader of the Canadian Alliance, and his subsequent assumption of the role of Leader of the Official Opposition, was the occasion for much debate about the relationship between faith and politics. The debate has subsided somewhat with the opening of the parliamentary season, but it is a debate that has yet to grasp what I think may be critical to understanding Day's own concept of the role of faith in politics.

Too much of the debate centred around the very appropriateness of someone with Day's religiosity being involved in politics at all, as if someone with strongly held religious views was not admissible in Canadian politics. To some extent this was a disingenuous question. People who don't share Day's particular religious views, but didn't want to engage the issue at that level, sought refuge in a generic argument against religion in politics.

At the same time, the debate about Day was an expression by many of an objection to religion in politics that is very generic, in so far as it is one of the many manifestations of the dominant view that religion is a matter of private belief and is unwelcome in the language of public discourse.

These reactions to Mr. Day raise two questions, one about the relationship between his faith and politics, and more particularly his politics, and one about the relationship between faith and politics in general in a society that has largely privatized religion.

In response to the latter question, Day has defended the appropriateness of persons of faith participating in politics, and rightly so. (He even quoted me in making his argument). But what he has not done is give an account of how his faith actually informs his politics. Where, for example, does he find justification in the scriptures for uncritically accepting a view of the economy as one in which, as an ideal, people compete, rather than co-operate? And if competition isn't the ideal, then where is the justification for accepting something less than the ideal, rather than resisting it or seeking to transform it?

In answering this question, with respect to Day's faith and his politics, it is important to note what Stockwell Day has said about his own beliefs. In an article in the Globe and Mail this summer, in which he addresses these issues, and in a speech given earlier this year to the Fourth Annual National Conference of Civitas, Day spends far more time explaining his views as a "conservative" than he does his Christianity.

He proclaims his Christian faith, but tends to justify his public policy positions, not by arguing from biblical principles, but rather from what he regards as conservative principles. For example, in the Globe and Mail article, after saying that he would plead guilty if charged with being a Christian (as would I), he then goes on to say "But as a conservative, with a strong belief in a limited state that respects individuals, I have absolutely no intention of making my religion into someone else's law."

This double-barrelled confession to being both a Christian and a conservative omits a third dimension which is relevant to the anxiety Day has created in some circles, but which is not relevant to my immediate argument, and that is that he is also a conservative Christian.

One can be a conservative Christian and a socialist or social democrat, a liberal Christian and a conservative, or a liberal Christian and a socialist. There are many more combinations. Stockwell Day is a conservative Christian and a conservative.

My point here is that, in large part, it would appear that by his own way of describing his belief system, a great many of Day's public policy positions emanate from his adoption of conservatism rather than Christianity. There are things he appears to believe as a Christian, presumably his beliefs on abortion, sexual orientation, independent schools, etc., and things he believes in as a conservative, presumably his beliefs in the flat tax, in a decentralized Canada with a very limited federal government, etc. It also needs to be said, of course, that there are Christians and conservatives who would disagree with him as to whether these are the positions on these issues that should be drawn from Christianity and conservatism, respectively.

The point that I am trying to make is not just that it would be a mistake, or perhaps even an insult, to many evangelical and conservative Christians to assume that Day's politics are their politics. The point is that by accounting for many of his policy choices as an emanation of his political conservatism, by talking about being a Christian and being conservative in a non-causal way, and by not trying to justify his general conservatism on biblical or faith based grounds, Stockwell Day may well have a politics much less informed and instructed by faith than is generally thought to be the case.

It could be argued, instead, that what we see in Mr. Day is a very small subset of issues that are faith-based, and a very large subset of issues that are shaped by his beliefs as a conservative, or, as I also believe to be the case, by his beliefs as a political strategist.

As a Christian on the left I would want to argue, for instance, that there is a vast realm called ‘the economy', and all the values and practices that it explicitly and implicitly reinforces, that should be judged, in the Christian mind, by whether or not it conforms to the teachings of Jesus Christ, whether any false gods, like the market, are worshipped therein, whether the poor and the oppressed are given priority, and whether, environmentally speaking, creation is being looked after.

That this realm seems to be left outside the purview of Day's faith-based political choices and faith-based rhetoric is not unique. It is characteristic of the religious right in general, and most certainly in Canada. The exception is the Buchananesque right-wing American critique of NAFTA and the WTO.

Like almost everyone on the religious right, Day has already privatized or removed from the public realm the possibility of religion being a true source of spiritual and intellectual inspiration when it comes to thinking about the economy. The secular right worships the market, and the religious right has a totally non-prophetic stance towards this idolatry.

Recently, I was struck by just how entrenched this non-prophetic stance is when I attended a talk by Richard John Neuhaus, intellectual guru of the religious right. Mr. Neuhaus authored a book called The Naked Public Square, which laments the absence or removal of Christian values from American culture and civil society. There will be no sequel called ‘The Naked Marketplace'. For him, much to my shock, the economy is a variable something like the weather - a given, rather than an object of human freedom and ethical reflection.

Finally, when it comes to some of those issues that he and others openly associate with his religious views, Day now appears to be assuring Canadians that he will not impose his views on them, or that such issues will be dealt with by referendum or by a free vote in Parliament, the latter being the way that some so-called "moral" issues have been already dealt with in the past. (The difference, as I see it, is that the economy is also a "moral" issue).

How should one characterize Day's approach to such issues? Is it, in the best-case scenario, a welcome accommodation to the realities of a pluralistic society?. Is it an unwillingness to publicly debate his own faith-based stances?

Or is it, in the worst possible scenario, a strategic retreat that has the look of Pontius Pilate - the original populist who freed Barabbas instead of Christ because that was what the crowd wanted?

By Bill Blaikie, MP