Political winds blow through pews
Dangerous to confuse faith with faction
A group called Families for Day is carefully but aggressively using church networks to sign up new members to support Stockwell Day in his bid to become leader of the new Canadian Alliance political party. It has recruited “church contact volunteers” to “serve as a bridge” between the campaign team and “the people in your local church or place of worship.”
A letter from campaign chair Garry Rohr reminds volunteers that churches cannot endorse a political party or candidate, but emphasizes that “individuals in the church are certainly permitted to be active as citizens and to encourage the involvement of others.” Families for Day literature asks its volunteers to distribute campaign literature (“as permitted by your church leaders”) to congregation members, and to use the church directory to make telephone calls (script provided). “The advantage of calling is that it comes from a church member who is part of the Stockwell Day team and it avoids politics on Sunday.”
The pitch is being promoted by at least two prominent Alberta clergymen. Roy Beyer, an Edmonton pastor who helped found the Canada Family Action Coalition, is circulating “a personal communication” to Christians. In it he hearkens to “the moral decline in our nation” and invites Christians to become involved politically–specifically to join the Canadian Alliance party and help it choose a new leader (hopefully Day, definitely not Tom Long). “We as Christians owe it to ourselves and our families to stand with men like [Day],” he writes.
And Christian television broadcaster Dick DeWert of Lethbridge is using his lists to forward Beyer’s letter. “Whoever wins this leadership race stands a reasonable chance at forming the next government in our nation,” he writes. “I and my family members will be exercising our privilege of participation in the process and encourage you to do the same.”
Worshiper beware
The impulse that prompts Christians to become active in political processes is on the whole a good thing, and churches do well to position themselves as centres of moral renewal. However, attempts to reform culture through politics suffer from at least two serious limitations.
First, they do not work. As former Ronald Reagan aide Donald Eberly recently concluded: “Politics cannot begin to put the connecting tissue back in society. It is ill-equipped to reconstruct traditional moral beliefs. The best policies cannot recover courtship or marriage, make fathers responsible for their children, restore shock or shame where it once existed, or recover legitimate social authority to institutions that have been hollowed out by a pervasive ideology of individual autonomy. The vast majority of moral problems that trouble us cannot be eradicated by law.”
Second, they diminish the church’s calling. Activists flirt with trouble when they inject partisan politics into congregational life. Worshipers are likely to feel pressured to political conformity, and the public perception of a given church may well become linked with a nonessential element of its mission. But the real danger comes when God’s followers confuse authentic Christianity with a specific candidate or party’s policies. Individual Christians can certainly be partisan, but God’s role is limited when his followers claim divine blessing on any one political ideology or movement.
While working for reconciliation at all levels of society is part of the church’s calling, leaders of Christian congregations must constantly be aware of their legal obligation to remain non-partisan, and to remember that the Kingdom of God follows an agenda much larger than our immediate political concerns. Christian citizens of the left or right have every right to be involved in politics; Christian voters have a duty to weigh matters carefully; Christian values will have tremendous social impact when they are firmly embedded in the souls and lifestyles of the people in the pews.