By Lloyd Mackey

EVANGELICAL voters have been turning away from the Liberal party in droves over the past dozen years, with about two-thirds of the former Liberal voters turning to conservative parties and one-third turning to the New Democrats, according to a research paper published by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC).

The paper, entitled 'Canadian Evangelical Voting Trends by Region, 1996-2008,' was written by Don Hutchinson, the EFC vice-president and director of its Centre for Faith and Public Life, and Rick Hiemstra, the EFC's director for research on Canadian evangelicalism.

Senator David Smith, a Baptist and a major Liberal strategist for three decades, allowed that, in more recent years, his party has lost a lot of support from evangelicals. Much of the party's difficulty, he said, has related to evangelical mistrust of Liberal policies and actions through the years, with respect to abortion and same sex marriage.

"These have been polarizing issues. I would hope that with the work (Toronto Liberal MP) John McKay is doing, (many former Liberal voters) will come back," said Smith, who, as a member of the Trudeau cabinet in the early 1980s, once persuaded the late Liberal prime minister to include a reference to God in the preamble to the Canadian constitution.

Smith said he has seen a number of churchgoing Catholics abandon their support for the Liberals over these same issues.

He also suggested that the "adscam" scandal and the resulting Gomery inquiry did not help Liberal standing among evangelicals who held to high fiscal moral values.

Bill Blaikie, a United Church minister and former New Democratic MP who now serves in the provincial Manitoba legislature, said many young evangelicals have "moved beyond the culture wars and see their commitment to be acting out the gospel, preserving the environment and fighting AIDS."

Evangelicals, said Blaikie, are "principled voters" for the most part. If they are strongly opposed to abortion or same sex marriage, they will find more acceptance for their views in the conservative parties. Conversely, if their principles leaned toward poverty reduction and social justice, they would naturally seek out a home in the NDP.

No Conversatives or former Reformers had answered CC.com's request for comment by press time, but Conservative leaders with evangelical ties, from the prime minister on down, often quietly go out of their way to encourage evangelical Christians -- and devotees of other faiths, as well -- to bring their perspectives to the public policy table.

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The EFC paper itself noted that the creation of the Conservative party, out of what had become a fragmented conservative movement, "brought a greater degree of clarity and coherence to Canada's right-of-centre political options." Along with that, the authors suggested, was the hope among evangelicals that marriage and life issues, including a stance against the legalizing of euthanasia, would follow conservative governance.

The paper also noted that "it has been suggested that higher support for, first, the Reform Party, then the Canadian Alliance and finally, the Conservative Party, could be attributed to the evangelical faith of the party's respective leaders. This is a difficult thesis to test because in the time period under consideration, these parties have never had a non-evangelical leader."

Further, it suggested, "the growing evangelical support for the Conservatives had more to do with the Conservative' offering a viable alternative to the Liberals, whom many perceived as corrupt and hostile, than with a hope for potential policy gains."

The EFC research alsp suggests that support for the Liberals may have fallen off rapidly because of the party's electoral tactics, rather than any particular policy change.

The paper cites six specific actions:

1. Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella's 2000 mocking of the creationist beliefs of then Canadian Allliance leader Stockwell Day, an evangelical Christian. Kinsella said, among other things: "I just want to remind Mr. Day that The Flintstones was not a documentary."
2. After supporting traditional marriage in 2002, parliamentary Liberals opted to press for a redefinition of marriage as being "between two persons" rather than "between a man and a woman."
3. Before the 2004 election, the Liberals commissioned a 'push poll' that asked Ontarians: "Would you be more or less likely to vote for the Conservatives if you knew they had been taken over by evangelical Christians."
4. In 2005, in the midst of the same-sex marriage debate, Liberal cabinet minister Pierre Pettigrew mused: "I find that the separation of church and state is one of the most beautiful inventions of modern times."
5. During the 2006 election campaign, then Liberal prime minister Paul Martin suggested that he would amend the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to bar federal use of the notwithstanding clause. "Many evangelicals saw (Martin's) promise (as) . . . characterizing those who supported a traditional view of marriage as a danger to 'Canadian values'."
6. Stephane Dion, after becoming the Liberal leader, exhibited a "clumsy" attempt to reach out to religious voters. For example, in 2007, when asked by Christian talk show host Michael Coren why he was peppering his conversation with references to God, Dion replied, "I have been told that this is important to the people who watch this show."

September 17/2009