The federal Liberals are making a deliberate attempt to woo religious groups after years of “benign neglect” by the party, Liberal MP John McKay says.
Mr. McKay, an evangelical Christian, said Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff asked him to start meeting with religious leaders across Canada to find ways of including them in the national discussion.
Observers, however, say the courting of religious groups can pose tricky political questions, and recent history shows Canadian parties have distanced themselves from religion, not embraced it.
Is this not another sign that we’ve indeed entered a Post-Constantinian, Post-Christendom era?
David Handy+
Let me add that it only APPEARS that “recent history shows Canadian parties have distanced themselves from religion, not embraced it.” But appearances can be deceiving.
Yes, Canada’s political and social elites have distanced themselves from FORMAL ties with traditional religions like Christianity. In this they’ve gone along with similar social elites in Europe (which is even more advanced in the de-Christianization process), and they’re moving that way together with cultural elites in America, which is stragling behind but is headed in the same disastrous direction and trying hard to catch up.
But that doesn’t mean the public square is empty. No, not at all. And it doesn’t prove that there is no favored religion in the political realm. It’s just that the new favored religion is promoted in a new way. A hidden, covert way, which makes it all the more insidious and dangerous.
And that new, virtually established religion goes by many names: secular humanism, or relativism, or post-modernism, etc. Those who are anxious to push institutional Christianity out the front door and out of public life, are (sometimes unknowingly) welcoming in a rival religion through the back door (suitably disguised in secular trappings, of course).
And along with that new secular religion comes a new morality, which is really the old immorality in disguise as well. Just as the new secular humanism is really the old Gnosticism clothed in a new garb.
The famous ideal of the separation of church and state has mutated into the divorce of Christianity (in any biblical form) and culture or public life. And not only that, but western cultural elites have divorced the Christian fiath in order to take a new spouse that they’ve fallen for head over heels, i.e., secular humanism, or neo-paganism, or whatever you want to call it.
That’s why we must wake up, face reality, bite the bullet, take the bull by the horns, and overhaul Anglicanism, transforming it from a state church kind of religion, into a genuinely post-Christendom, believers’ church kind of Anglicanism.
David Handy+
The key factor is that the Liberals are a classic ‘brokerage’ party — that is, their primary interest is attaining and [i]retaining[/i] power in order to distribute benefits and spoils to the assorted groups backing them.
Since they are currently out of power, narrowly escaping majority Tory rule, it is logical that they seek other groups to assist in brokering their push to power. Modern Democrats are the same. Carter showed a few signs of the transition. Kennedy, however, was a man of political principles, as (for the most part was the party he led).
Liberals in Canada have been a brokerage party since the days of Laurier, a century ago. They used to have Quebec locked up solid, but the 1984 election changed that and ever since they’ve floundered around looking to re-construct their old overwhelming power base.