Evangelicals in Canada versus Evangelicals in the USA

I’m only going to say this one more time. Canadian evangelicals are not identical with our American cousins and not all aligned with the political right.

Along with a couple of others, I’ve been saying this publicly now for almost thirty years, and our fellow scholars have gotten the word. The textbooks read differently than they used to when they describe evangelicalism in Canada.

Most of the news media, however, along with most of the courts, political parties, and educational leaders, seem to have missed the memo. So here goes.

Canadian evangelicals are not clustered on the right wing of our political spectrum. Many of them support the Conservative Party and doubtless some are attracted to the People’s Party of Canada. But as professors David Rayside, Jerald Sabin, and Paul Thomas show in their recent book on Religion and Canadian Party Politics (UBC Press, 2018), evangelicals have long voted and continue to vote right across the political spectrum.

Take a look at Canada's largest churches. I can't think of one of them being allied with the political right.

Give a listen to Canada’s major evangelical broadcaster and Canada’s most-read journalists—which, conveniently, publish on this website—and see if you can credibly link them to right-wing politics.

Visit the website or read the magazine of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and note the complete absence of what you’d look for if you were trying to spot a conservative cabal.

Pastors of Vancouver’s main evangelical churches couldn’t even agree to support Franklin Graham—noted American preacher and apologist for Donald Trump—when he recently came to town to evangelize.

I’m not entirely unsympathetic to at least some journalists getting the story wrong and assuming that evangelicals are all on the right. The prime minister’s open hostility to anyone holding views anywhere to his right might nudge one to wrong conclusions.

But Canadian evangelicals in general are not single-issue voters, so they look across the political spectrum for leaders who will care for the poor, work for justice, spend wisely, tax fairly, and make Canada better as best they can. There is no single evangelical political position in Canada—nor in the USA, for that matter, but that’s a topic that must await another time.

I appreciate that many Canadian journalists hanker for an exciting villain in the Canadian political narrative. I know that many of them wish they were in the United States covering the larger-than-life circus that is American politics. But as long as they’re here, responsible to give an accurate account of what’s going on in Canada, I respectfully request that they tear their eyes away from the southern spectacle and do their job.

And that means, among other things, refusing the easy, and gratifying, but mistaken, identification of Canadian evangelicals with the worst of our American counterparts.