Two questions - and it's too soon for answers

The aftermath of the 2011 Canadian election, left two interrelated questions, the answers to which would determine the shape of federal politics in Canada for a generation or more.

The first question was, "Can the New Democratic Party consolidate their historic breakthrough in Quebec and establish themselves as the principal alternative to the Conservatives?"  Within a few weeks, that question was tragically amended to add, "without Jack Layton."

The second question was, "Can the Liberal Party recover from it's worst electoral trouncing in history?"

With last weekend's coronation of Justin Trudeau after a pro forma leadership stroll, some commentators have misread the standard leadership poll bump as an indication that the two questions have both been answered with a "no" and a "yes" respectively.  These are the same commentators who breathlessly assured us that Paul Martin would crush both the Conservatives and the Bloc Quebecois, that Stephane Dion was a formidable opponent who thrived on being underestimated and that Michael Ignatieff's stature as a internationally known public intellectual would wow the Canadian electorate.

The consistently bad track record of the commentariat notwithstanding, it would be equally foolish to conclude that the questions have been answered with a "yes" and a "no."  Beyond a few broad generalizations, only a fool would try to handicap the next federal election more than two years out.

Each of the two parties have certain things that must be accomplished in order to be successful in 2015.  If only one of the two parties is successful, then it is highly likely that party will establish itself as the principle alternative to the Conservatives for at least a generation or two.  If neither party can effectively establish itself in that role, the Conservatives are destined to a whomping majority in 2015, Quebec will largely drift back to the Bloc and any other prognostication is a complete mug's game.

New Democrats need to establish their new MPs (especially, but not only, the Quebec MPs) as strong presences in their communities and establish effective constituency associations in traditional areas of organizational weakness (again especially, but not only, in Quebec).  The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, but certainly the party has been focusing its resources on these twin goals.

In the early days, the handful of mostly quite young placeholder candidates who were elected was seen as the party's greatest vulnerability.  While the so-called McGill Four were held up for a certain amount of derision, but the prime target for the corporate media attack machine was Ruth-Ellen Brosseau, the Ottawa campus pub manager who agreed to be a name on the ballot in the Quebec riding of Berthier - Maskinongé. Recent media features have highlighted how hard these young "accidental MPs" have worked to connect to their constituencies.  

The NDP organization in Quebec is stronger than it has ever been, and the membership at its highest level in history.  NDP leader Thomas Mulcair, a former Quebec environment minister and the architect of the NDP's Quebec breakthrough, is well respected in the province, and has managed to unite the party behind him following the leadership race.

For New Democrats, consolidation doesn't necessarily mean they need to hold onto all of their newly won seats, especially in Quebec where some shrinkage after a sweep is actually to be expected.  But if the NDP can retain the largest number of Quebec seats after the next election, it will be very difficult for the Liberals to overcome that inbuilt numerical advantage in the rest of Canada. 

The Liberals, who have seen their support steadily erode over the past five elections, have also seen their support become more concentrated in Atlantic Canada and in Canada's two largest cities.  In vast swathes of the country, the Liberals have no organizational depth, and the party would likely not even be competitive in any of its four seats west of Ontario were the incumbents to step aside.

In electing Justin Trudeau, the largely unaccomplished eldest son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, the Liberals have rolled the dice in the hope that a photogenic young(ish) leader with a famous name will garner them enough media attention to attract nostalgic former Liberals back to the fold and to recruit a handful of star candidates in areas outside their regional strength, while opening up the wallets of potential supporters.  Certainly Trudeau's initial poll numbers look good, but party poll standings generally improve in the immediate aftermath of a new leader.  Given the way the mainstream media have been fawning over Trudeau from the day he was born and the general reluctance of reporters (or Liberal leadership opponents) to challenge him with hard questions, one should expect the polling honeymoon to go on for a while.  However, continued and sustained Liberal recovery will depend on rebuilding the organizational infrastructure of the party, and vain celebrity is of limited value there.

That said, vain celebrity can have some effect in holding the media's attention and creating at least the illusion of broader capacity.  Opponents would do well not to underestimate the nostalgic appeal of Trudeau fils who, while lacking his father's gravitas, actually exhibits stronger soft political skills than Trudeau pere. 

In 30 months we will have a much clearer sense of the real answers to the two questions. Those who pretend the answers are discernible now are either fools or partisan spinners - or possibly both.

Memo to Lord Carey: Loss of privilege is not persecution.

A poll was released on Easter Day which suggests about 40% of Britons do not trust clergy to tell the truth.  According to the YouGov survey, 54% feel the Church of England has "struggled" to give moral leadership and fully 69% believe the established Church is "out of touch."  A Barna Group study from the United States a few years ago showed similar negative perceptions, with 87% of young people saying Christianity is judgmental and 85% that Christianity is hypocritical.  Only 16% of non-Christians in their late teens and 20s had a positive impression of Christianity.

I'm always a little leery of commenting on polls based on superficial media stories, but it strikes me the loss of the Church's credibility in England (and elsewhere) is related to a quite credible perception that the Church is far more interested in institutional preservation and with recovering lost privilege than she is concerned with proclaiming good news about anything or about speaking in a way that is credibly prophetic.

The perception, though credible, isn't entirely accurate.  Unfortunately for Christianity, the majority of mainstream media reporters are more or less religiously illiterate.  Add to that the desire for conflict to sell papers, and you have an inbuilt tendency for the media to pass on thoughtful religious voices in favour of hacks and cranks.  As a result, the self-identified Christian voices that get the ink are all too often the least credible and the most obnoxious.  Thus it isn't a negative perception foisted upon us by some imagined secularist conspiracy.  We do it to ourselves.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey's lunatic screed over the past weekend is a prime example. In the face of major changes to the welfare state with as yet unknown effects on the poor (of whom scripture says much), Lord Carey chooses to ignore that and instead offer up a deluded dystopia of pretendy persecution. He advances the fantasy that the loss of unearned and unmerited privilege is the same as being killed for what you believe. In a country where the head of state must belong to his religious body, where 26 legislative seats are set aside for senior members of his religious body and where the past leaders of his religious body (himself included) are always offered a legislative sinecure on retirement, where simply being a retired Archbishop pretty much guarantees you front page coverage in all the major media for your every pronouncement, no matter how inane, to talk of persecution is both idiotic and an affront to those Christians who face real persecution elsewhere.

It is said that "every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket."  George Carey, Pat Robertson and the rest of the far right hacks and flacks would lead a reasonable person to conclude that Christianity has degenerated to racket long since.

Yet just a few weeks before the latest wittering from Lord Carey, 43 serving bishops of the Church of England signed a letter expressing serious and thoughtful concern about the UK government's plan to reform assistance benefits.  Sadly, this kind of substantive intervention pales in the media's attention next to the ridiculous figure of a retired bishop making a fool of himself and disgracing the Gospel.

When someone of this stature says something so addlebrained as this, it reinforces every negative stereotype of Christianity as a gang of angry old Major Blimps raging against the end of the Victorian era.  If there is some massive secularist conspiracy out there somewhere, they'd be well advised to keep their powder dry, in keeping with Napoleon Bonaparte's dictum that you should never interrupt your enemy when he is shooting himself in the foot.  George Carey and his ilk are a greater threat to British Christianity than Richard Dawkins, the National Secular Society and the entire readership of the Guardian combined.

"There is no alternative" is not an argument.

While he was talking about austerity as a failed economic and fiscal policy, the former head of the Canadian public service, Alex Himelfarb, could have as easily been talking about the undead failure which is the Anglican Covenant when he said:

When our leaders tell us that there is no alternative, it is a safe bet to assume that there is indeed an alternative and one that we would prefer were it on offer.

There is an alternative to the failed policy of austerity. Prudent fiscal spending on things like infrastructure replacement and improvement will "prime the pump," while responsible tax policy (ie, not "lower taxes uber alles") would both ensure adequate revenue while also ensuring the wealthiest pay their air share of the costs of a civilized society.

Similarly, there is an alternative to the failed Anglican Covenant. A commitment from all sides to stay at the table as a family even when we disagree - especially when we disagree - is how we should be functioning as faithful Christians who honour our Lord's desire "that they all may be one."

But there is one other point which Himelfarb makes about austerity which also applies to the Anglican Covenant.

What became increasingly clear was that austreity had never been driven by fiscal policy or economics or evidence. It was driven by ideology. Market fundamentalism. A desire to make government much smaller, eliminate or reduce, as much as politics allowed, so-called entitlements, create a “pro-business” climate of less regulation, less government, and, above all, lower taxes.

In the same way, the Anglican Covenant was never about creating structures to hold the Anglican Communion together in the face of disagreement.  It was always about centralizing authority in the Communion, to replace a family of Churches with one international and quasi-curial (if not quasi-papal) structure controlled from the centre.

In both cases, the proponents of radical change tried to stampede a consensus by claiming, "There is no alternative."  Of course, what they really meant was, "We don't want you to look at the alternative because we know the alternative is better for you and for your interests and it doesn't satisfy our desire for control."

"There is no alternative" is not an argument.  And it is virtually always a lie.



Time for the new broom to sweep clean

A recurring image used by populist politicians in opposition, "a new broom sweeps clean," perhaps also describes the opportunity presented to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev'd Justin Welby.  While Dr. Welby is unlikely to make any loud pronouncement against his predecessor's misguided project, he does have an opportunity, very quietly, to sweep the discredited Anglican Covenant into the dustbin of church history.



I was a little startled to realize that I had not made a single blogpost about the so-called Anglican Covenant since July, when I blogged daily from the Episcopal Church General Convention in Indianapolis.  In part, the extended silence was due to the lack of substantive developments. 

Indeed, having seen the Covenant go down in flames in England, Scotland and New Zealand, it is now pretty obvious that the thing is dead.  Yet because it was so incompetently drafted, it staggers on like some dessicated zombie or reflection-free nosferatu.  And in the background, its bewildered partisans try to pretend that everything is coming along swimingly.

A good example of how the ecclesiastical talking heads continue to delude themselves is the report prepared for the fall session of the Church of England General Synod which, while admitting that the draft Act of Synod had been defeated in the dioceses, tries to spin it out of the grave with a bit of fancy arithmetic and a spurious claim of moral victory. 

Of course the business committee completely ignores the unethical way in which the deck was stacked in favour of the Covenanters.  The fact that Church House refused to provide any material that was not 100 percent supportive of the Covenant is not mentioned.  Nor is there any mention of the refusal of many dioceses to permit such information to be distributed to synod members when other groups offered to cover the cost of distribution.  The fact that the debate in many diocesan synods was grotesquely manipulated to produce a pro-Covenant outcome is likewise blithely ignored.  Elsewhere I have used the analogy of a soccer match between Manchester United and the boys from the local grammar school.  If the grammar school wins the game, ManU can take no solace in having kept the score close.

Similarly, the fall meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council carried on in the best "nothing-to-see-here" manner.  The official report from the Anglican Communion Office attempted to spin the English result as a non-defeat, and unofficial commentary attempted to do the same regarding the unequivocal rejection by the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia.

It's all beginning to resemble the apocryphal tale of the Duke of Northumberland holding the dead body of Edward VI in the window so the crowd would believe the young king still lived.

It seems unlikely that Justin Welby will want to waste his ecclesiopolitical capital trying to revive a discredited and discreditable project which, whatever the intentions of its authors, has failed in its purpose.

The Sad Plight of the Religious Progressive

One of the frequent frustrations of being a progressive person of faith is having to read and listen to the false and malicious narratives of the religious right claiming that they and they alone represent the official religious viewpoint.

A less frequent frustration - though perhaps even a greater one - is having to read and listen to secular progressives who are so ignorant of the history of progressive political movements that they unconsciously parrot the false memes of the religious right.

 



Last month, Saskatchewan New Democratic Party leadership candidate Ryan Meili laid out a plan for reaching out to faith communities, and in particular to progressive people of faith.  His plan explicitly offers a counternarrative to the false claims of the religious right, pointing to global examples like Martin Luther KIng and Mahatma Ghandi and to more local examples like former CCF-NDP leaders and Saskatchewan premiers Tommy Douglas and Lorne Calvert.

The key point in Meili's plan is the establishment of a Faith and Social Justice Commission, modeled on a similar initiative in the federal NDP.  This commission would "open a space for dialogue within the party on the intersection of faith and politics," leading to the implementation of an outreach strategy to religious voters.

Meili's proposal is endorsed by former Premier Calvert:

"faith has inspired many of us to seek justice through political action.  To provide an opportunity of dialogue for those who arrive from the intersection of faith and politics will serve the party and the province well."

It is also endorsed by Dr. Mateen Raazi, a leader in Saskatoon's interfaith group Multifaith Saskatoon:

“While duly recognizing and respecting the diversity of religious opinion, this policy emphasizes the commonality of communal and social justice themes across various religious traditions. Adoption of such a policy further provides political common ground to the many whose social justice work is inspired by their religious traditions."

Unfortunately, political blogger Scott Stelmaschuk seems to miss the point, offering up a bit of secular fearmongering and the veiled hint that any outreach to religious progressives would mean compromising the party's principles.

"I fear I've editorialized this post more than I meant to, but I do think there are valid concerns to have over such a commission as this. There is nothing wrong with having a discussion, and attempting to do better to connect our values with those of faith-based groups throughout Saskatchewan; but at the same time, we must take heed to ensure that we are not crafting party policy that compromises on our own social values."

Like many secular progressives these days, Scott is woefully ignorant about the strong tradition of progressive religious political activism in western Canada and in Saskatchewan in particular, and he apears to be oblivious to the significant role religious progressives played in creating the CCF-NDP.  He assumes that people of faith who support the New Democratic Party do so despite their religious beliefs rather than because of them.  And he assumes that virtually all religious voters are anti-choice, even if some set that aside to vote for pro-choice politicians.

Scott seems to be completely unaware of the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of whose members were deeply involved in the formation of progressive political movements, especially the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (the forerunner to today's New Democratic Party.  He appears to have forgotten that for nearly one-third of the party's history in Saskatchewan, it was led by ordained Christian clergymen (Tommy Douglas 1942 - 1961 and Lorne Calvert 2001 - 2009).  (If we include the first Saskatchewan CCF leader, Anglican Lay Reader M.J. Coldwell who successively led the Independent Labour Party 1926 - 1929, the Farmer Labour Party 1929 - 1932 and the Saskatchewan CCF 1932 - 1934, we're well over the one-third mark.)

Somehow, according to Stelmaschuk, getting too cozy with religious people risks undermining the party's principles.  We are led to the ridiculous conclusion that those religious activists (mostly Christian activists, given the demographics of the day - though Jewish progressives played a significant role in other parts of Canada) had nothing to do with shaping the existing principles of the party.

Stelmaschuk also seems completely hoodwinked by the religious right's claim that there is only one authentic religious view on the abortion issue.  He appears to be unaware that the anti-choice consensus on the evangelical right is a recent development - indeed, it isn't as old as the McDonald's Happy Meal.  He seems similarly unaware that religious views on the abortion issue run the gamut from ardently anti-choice to as ardently pro-choice.

I grant you, many of the loudest religious voices these days tend to be pretty reactionary.  That's pretty discouraging for those of us who see ourselves as part of the long tradition of progressive people of faith.

The problem with the kind of superficial, knee-jerk reaction of people like Stelmachuk is that it plays right into the strategies of the religious right.  It alienates potential political allies, leaving us, at best, disenfranchised.  It isn't like the Saskatchewan NDP is so flush with electoral support we can discard religious progressives as an inconvenient constituency.

Indeed, Stelmachuk's shoddy analysis may be the best evidence of the need for a deliberate outreach to religious communities, and for the establishment of a Faith and Social Justice Commission within the Saskatchewan NDP.

Searching for the Christ Child



The traditional Simple Massing Priest Christmas story - as told each year since 2007.

The title isn't quite so allegorical as you think. We actually spent about ten minutes before the Christmas Eve service desperately seeking the Baby Jesus for the main creche at the parish where I serve as interim priest.  

It is actually a very interesting creche, set up inside the altar itself. A simple wooden chevron suggests the stable, while the remaining figures stand on black satin.  

It was already in place on Sunday last. Actually in the Sunday before last as we compromised the calendar in the interest of the children's pageant. But Sunday last the creche had only its minimalist roof, one ox and one ass. Mary and Joseph were not far away - standing on the altar pavement - but they hadn't arrived yet. The shepherds weren't there yet either, out tending their sheep on the edge of the pulpit. And the magi were in the middle of the aisle at the back of the church, still some ways away.  

Tonight, Mary and Joseph, and after some panicked moments, the Baby Jesus, were all installed in their places. The shepherds were "summoned to his stable" during the gradual hymn. And the magi were now half way up the aisle - accompanied by a helpful "Mind the Camels" sign prepared by my good wife.  

It was a good celebration in a community which seems increasingly hopeful and future oriented. And generally united. There is no parish on earth that doesn't have some divisions and tensions. But this little parish seem quite determined to be a family together.  

We found Jesus tonight at St. James - literally, allegorically and eucharistically. We all came to the same table, together. That is where we belong in worship - at the same table, together.

A Voice is Heard in Ramah

When I was in Indianapolis this summer, I had the privilege of meeting Ian Douglas, the Bishop of Connecticut.  I have been thinking of Bishop Ian a great deal over the past 36 hours as he, his suffragans, his clergy and his diocese respond to the act of terror which occured yesterday.

Ian has been posting regular updates, including the most recent I've seen, here.

He mentions the messages of support and the assurances of prayer that he has received from around the world.

The Diocese of Connecticut has been blessed by sisters and brothers in Christ across The Episcopal Church and from around the Anglican Communion who are holding us all in their hearts and prayers. We have heard from colleagues in almost every province of The Episcopal Church and from around the Anglican Communion. We are being remembered in prayer and in specific worship services in churches as far away as: Australia, Canada, Congo, Dubai, England, Guyana, Myanmar, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, and others. Never before have we felt the importance and efficacy of our common bonds in the Anglican Communion than we do now in this time of need and in the prayers received.

Bishop Ian's diocese is the oldest Anglican bishopric outside the British Isles.  In 1784, the Bishop of Aberdeen and two other Scottish bishops consecrated Bishop Ian's predecessor, Samuel Seabury, establishing an enduring link between the Episcopal Church in Scotland and the Episcopal Church in the United States.  Today, there is a formal Companion Diocese relationship between the Diocese of Connecticut and the Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney.  The following prayer was written by the present Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney, Robert Gillies, in response to the events of yesterday.

Sustaining and redeeming God, 

In sadness and in the tragedy of awful loss, we offer before you those young lives lost as a consequence of human violence this past week. 

We raise in the distress of this time the families of whose children are no longer to share life and joy with them. 

We mourn those other families also fractured by the needless killings of that day. 

As Jesus first came to his people and lives of the young and innocent were lost in the cruelty of one individual upon others, so now 2000 years on we stand alongside those whose similar grief is beyond our imagining. 

Holy and loving God bring all consolation that can be brought to those most in need of your presence today, and never cease to make your presence real in this their hour of need.

To you we voice this prayer, Amen.

Bishop Robert's prayer makes reference to the now often forgotten story of the Holy Innocents as related in Matthew 2: 16 - 18.  Herod, terrified at the prospect of a new King in Israel, orders an act of mass murder and state terrorism.  This aria relates to the the scriptural account:

A voice is heard in Ramah ... Rachel, weeping for her children.  She refuses to be comforted because they are no more.

The selection does not speak of hope, for the hope which Jesus brings is not yet known.  We pray that the Rachels of Newtown may know a greater and more immediate comfort.