Stephen Harper and the Theo-cons

Shortly after Manning recruited him, Harper began trying out the evangelical services that seemed to offer many of the party’s early players, especially his confidante Diane Ablonczy, such certainty. But Mackey fingers Manning himself as Harper’s chief spiritual mentor—a role that Reform’s godfather waves off. “I’d take that stuff with a little bit of a grain of salt,” Manning says. “Stephen was very unhappy about that book.” Still, Deborah Grey, Reform’s first MP and Harper’s boss during part of that period, confirms Mackey’s account. “Preston was key,” she says. “Stephen had some very long, very involved discussions with Preston in the late 1980s, early 1990s. He saw Preston and a faith that was real, and how you could marry faith and politics.”

Mackey points out that Harper is no George Bush—a traditional “born-again” who claimed a life-changing epiphany on the booze-sodden road to perdition. He calls the prime minister a “cerebral” Christian who read his way to belief. “When it came to his spiritual formation with Preston, he’d say, ‘What are the classics?’” Mackey explains. “And Preston would say, ‘Try C. S. Lewis’ or, ‘Try [Malcolm] Muggeridge.’”

At the time, Harper’s father, Joseph—the man he calls the most important influence on his life—was facing his own spiritual crossroads. In Harper’s interview with Drew Marshall, he recalled that his father “became quite an expert in theological matters as he grew older,” and after years as an ardent United Church–goer and elder, suddenly decamped to the Presbyterians. Harper sidestepped the question of why Joseph Harper had jumped ship but he pointedly noted that Marshall’s evangelical audience would get his drift. What he seemed to be referring to was the charged 1988 decision by the United Church General Council to approve the ordination of homosexuals—a decision that provoked thousands of defections.

In Calgary, Harper chose the same no-frills denomination that counted Manning on its rolls, but a different congregation across town: Bow Valley Alliance, which had opened modestly in the mid-eighties with seventy people praying in a public school. Three years ago, when Harper returned to Ottawa as leader of the Canadian Alliance, Bow Valley’s pastor recommended family-friendly East Gate, where a former Reform researcher, Laurie Throness—later chief of staff to Chuck Strahl, Harper’s minister of agriculture—happened to be a pianist and elder.

After word of Mackey’s book leaked out, conventional wisdom in the capital argued that Harper’s wife, Laureen, must have dragged him to East Gate. In fact, although she has attended services with her husband and two kids, Buitenwerf claims never to have met her. “She’s not interested in spiritual things,” confirms Grey. According to Mackey, it is Harper who makes sure their children, Ben and Rachel, get to Sunday school, not his wife. “Apparently, somebody in her family was a member of an evangelical sect which paid more attention to the church than to the family,” Mackey says. “It turned her off.”

Harper has been so careful not to reveal his faith that many voters were stunned when he capped off his election-night victory speech with “God bless Canada.” Was it a slip of the tongue—a case of rhetorical exuberance swamping his celebrated intellectual cool? Or, as some critics insisted, a shameless aping of every American president within recent memory, no matter their political stripe? Even New York Times correspondent Clifford Krauss noted that it was “an unusual line in a country where politicians do not customarily talk about God.”

In fact, Harper had already used the tag line as opposition leader, and he wasn’t the first prime minister to do so. On February 15, 1965, Lester Pearson jubilantly roared out the same benediction as he hoisted Canada’s first red and white maple leaf flag over the Parliament Buildings. “It’s just ridiculous to think that this is some novelty that was learned by watching Republicans on television,” scoffs Preston Manning. “This is a country that used to end every public meeting by saying, ‘God Save the Queen.’”

As pundits pondered the significance of Harper’s taste in exit lines, one thing seemed clear: a politician known for attempting to control his party’s every public utterance had chosen to invoke what National Post columnist Warren Kinsella dubbed “the G-word.” If, as suspected, Harper was sending a message to the country’s estimated 3.5 million evangelicals—not to mention the 44 percent of Canadians who tell pollsters they’ve committed their lives to Christ—what was he trying to tell them?

In his pre-election chat on the Drew Marshall Show, Harper managed to work in an undisguised plug: “I always make it clear that Christians are welcome in politics,” he said, “and particularly welcome in our party.” That invitation has not gone unnoticed. As Janet Epp Buckingham, director of the Evangelical Fellowship’s Ottawa office, notes, “In the last election, the media was pointing out that evangelicals are scary, and in the election before that the Liberals were doing quite a bit of fear mongering. It’s such a relief to have a party that says, ‘You guys are welcome here.’”

That relief translated into votes. According to an Ipsos-Reid poll in April, 64 percent of weekly Protestant churchgoers—the vast majority of them evangelicals—voted Conservative in the last election, a 24-percent jump from 2004. For the first time in the history of polling in Canada, Catholics who attend church weekly also shifted a majority of their votes from the Liberals to Harper’s party. While the Ottawa press corps has been preoccupied with Harper’s ability to keep the most blooper-prone Christians in his caucus buttoned up, he has quietly but determinedly nurtured a coalition of evangelicals, Catholics, and conservative Jews that brought him to power and that will put every effort into ensuring that he stays there. Last spring, when Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty could barely wangle an hour with him, Harper made time for dozens of faith groups, including a five-woman delegation from the Catholic Women’s League which hadn’t managed to snare a sit-down with any prime minister in twenty-four years. “Smile if you’re a so-con,” ran a headline in the Western Standard above a photo of the meeting. “Canada’s traditional Christian groups can’t say enough good things about the Tories’ social policies so far.”