Rendering Unto Caesar: Catholics, the State, and the Idea of a Christian Canada

Abstract

The recent Canadian federal election was filled with many surprises, including the marking of a shift in traditional voting patterns among Canadian Christians. On April 23, one week before the vote, an AngusReid Survey for the Toronto Star indicated that “50 per cent of selfdescribed English-speaking Catholics outside of Quebec” would vote for the Conservative Party on 2 May 2011. The Liberals, who historically had been the party of choice for Roman Catholics, and who had boasted at least four Catholic prime ministers since 1968, would glean only twentyfive percent support from English-speaking Catholics. The NDP and Greens could count on the support of nineteen percent of Catholics and four percent respectively. While the poll only surveyed 2,269 Englishspeaking Catholic adults, it still claimed a margin of error of plus or minus 1.8 percent. These numbers aside, it appeared that Catholics within Canada were not less interested in engaging in Canadian politics and the myriad of issues at play in the public square; they were simply moving to the right and placing their trust in a prime minister who was openly an evangelical Christian and whose party, at least in some quarters, proposed a more socially conservative agenda, informed by traditional Judaeo-Christian values. Therein, in the larger national debate about “What Canada Is, or What Canada Must Represent,” this poll signals, perhaps, that one of Canada’s largest religious groups is holding firmly to a more traditional notion of Canada as a Christian country and seeking new partisan ways to achieve this vision.