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Faith in NDP

NDP director of communications Shawn Dearn had hell to pay when his anti-Catholic tweets surfaced recently during the campaign. 

But the uproar obscured the history of the Christian left, especially in the NDP, which has a long tradition of aligning itself with progressive-minded Christians.

It is that heritage that makes Dearn’s attacks so surprising. He was forced to apologize after referring to the Church as “misogynist, homophobic, child-molesting” in a series of tweets he posted two years ago. Dearn has since been granted absolution by NDP leader Tom Mulcair, raised a staunch Catholic himself. 

Dearn isn’t the only New Democrat to be forgiven a serious faux pas. Hamilton West NDP candidate Alex Johnstone was allowed to stay on after it came out that in 2008 she had compared the fences around Auschwitz to phallic symbols – and last week said she had no idea what Auschwitz was. 

Unitarian Universalist minister Stefan Jonasson wasn’t so lucky. The former Manitoba NDP candidate was forced to drop out of the race last week for linking to an article three years ago that compares the teachings of a branch of Orthodox Judaism to the Taliban’s. The party once led by Taliban Jack now jacks candidates who refer to the Taliban. (Jonasson is also the editor of the Lögberg-Heimskringla, the newspaper for the Icelandic community in North America. I am an associate editor of the paper).

Lost in these incidents is a proud history of spirituality and social activism in the NDP. 

The only two Catholic priests to serve in the House of Commons – Andy Hogan and Bob Ogle – were New Democrats. They can be grouped with the radical Protestant preachers who represented the NDP, including Bill Blaikie, Dan Heap and Jim Manly.

The roots of the CCF (the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation), the NDP’s forerunner, can be found in the organizing of the Antigonish Movement, which arose out of co-operatives and rural community development in the Maritimes. 

Two priests, Moses Coady and Jimmy Tompkins, were distraught at the poverty they saw in the Maritime provinces in the 1920s. The two cousins began an far-reaching education campaign to let people know about their economic and social options. Co-ops and credit unions, already an alternative to the big banks, became popular. Union cards were signed. The movement’s ethos contributed to the election of Clary Gillis, a Catholic trade unionist who became the first CCF MP east of the Prairies when he took the Cape Breton South seat in 1940. He would hold the riding for four terms.

And of course there was Tommy Douglas. After being ordained a Baptist minister, Douglas applied for a position with a parish in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. He got the job, and later ran as a CCF candidate in the 1934 provincial election. Told by the church’s board that he had to choose between religion and politics, he resigned on the spot and announced his intention to run in the 1935 federal election, a contest that he won. One of the elders who had championed Douglas’s fellow student, Stanley Knowles, for the parish job, couldn’t resist saying I told you so to his fellow board members.

But Knowles, of course, would himself spend several years as a CCF NDP Member of Parliament. The man he succeeded, party founder J.S. Woodsworth, was a Presbyterian preacher and advocate of the social gospel.

While Protestant progressives gravitated to the party that preached the social gospel, the Catholic Church was warier. Although there were a handful of Catholic MPs in the CCF, clerical denunciation of socialism kept most devout Catholics from supporting the party. In Quebec, it never gained ground due to the hostility of the priests. But the 1960s and the Vietnam War changed everything. 

At the same time that social movements were overthrowing old ideals, the Second Vatican Council was modernizing the Roman Catholic Church. 

Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan were repeatedly imprisoned for their actions opposing the Vietnam War. The Catholic Worker movement, founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, continues to fight today for pacifism, workers’ rights and LGBT issues.

But along the way the Christian left was drowned out by the religious right, which used the same organizing tactics for anti-choice and anti-gay campaigns that the left had used to support workers and combat militarism. Progressives found themselves leaving religion. 

There is still a coterie of progressive Christians in the NDP, but you wouldn’t guess it from recent events.

Ottawa freelance writer Paul Park spent eight years as a parliamentary press gallery reporter and 11 years as an altar boy.

news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto

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