An Historical Note on Religion and Parties on the Prairies

An Historical Note on Religion and Parties on the Prairies NELSON WISEMAN This note examines the ·general historical relationship between political parties on the prairies and the religiOus bases of their popular support. Religion, like ethnicity and ideology, is helpful in understanding politics because it is part of the political culture. In historical terms, Western Canada's radical social gospel tradition pointed as strongly to the CCF as Catholicism pointed to the Liberals, Anglicanism to the Conservatives, and evangelical fundamentalism to Social Credit. In all cases, of course, there were important exceptions (e.g., Anglican CCF leader M. J. Coldwell), but the general pattern was undeniable. Most powerful in Methodist circles and weakest in Anglican ones, the social gospel frowned upon theological perplexities, deprecated other-worldliness, depicted society in organic terms, and represe_ nted a commitment to social, generally collectivist, objectives. I The Canadian social gospel had its greatest impact on the prairies and developed at a time when parallel movements were gaining strength in Britain and the United States. Radical Methodists played as important a role in the making of the CCF as they had in the making of the British Labour party. The application of the social gospel in Canada, like the application of socialism, was fundamentally British. Manitoba CCF MLA William Ivens, for example, had looked to the British Independent Labour party as his political model and the British Labour Church movement as the model for his Winnipeg Labour Church.2 The Prairie People's Churches represented a reaction to fundamentalism in religion. The intersection of the radical social gospel movement and socialism is best reflected in the biography of J.S. Woodsworth, the CCF's first leader.3 The social gospel even led one Manitoba MLA and Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 16, No. 2 (Ete 1981 Summer) head of Brandon's People's Church, A.E. Smith, to the Communist Party.4 Canada's major exponent of the social gospel, Salem Bland, taught at Wesley College, later United College, in Winnipeg. In the second decade of this century, when Bland's institution was producing preachers like William Irvine, Winnipeg was the most class-conscious city in the country. A concrete example of the link between the radical social gospel and the British laboursocialist tradition in that city was the appearance of Methodists Bland and Ivens at the founding One Big Union convention in Calgary.S Another example of the link wa~ Fred Tipping, a onetime Baptist preacher in.Alberta and president of the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council in 1918.6 That same year, only months before the Winnipeg General Strike, the Methodist Church denounced "the system of production for profits" and supported ''the policy set forth by the great labour organizations" respecting commercial and industrial relations in post-war Canada. The intimate relationship between Manitoba's urban based social gospel and its urban based British labour-socialism was, therefore, unmistakable. The size of Winnipeg and its large number of British-born immigrants contributed to its being a base for both labour-socialist politics and the Methodist-centred social gospel tradition. The social gospel had an impact in rural· Manitoba too, but 'it was of a much less radical variety. R.C. Renders, the social gospeller president of the Manitoba Grain Growers Association, ''rationalized his activities in terms of an emphatic socialism,'' according to one analysis.7 But there was little socialism in his thinking when he refused to quit the federal Unionist government and join the Progressives as almost all rural social gospellers did in 19191920 . Woodsworth, like Renders, was of the frontier, in the social gospel tradition, and a weekly contributor to the Grain Growers' Guide. Despite Woodsworth's stature as a nationally known, principled politician - a rare image in rural areas in the 1920s and 1930s - there was sufficient suspicion of Woodsworth's labour colleagues and his labourist past to keep the CCF from becoming a significant party in either rural 109 Manitoba or rural Alberta. Henders' version of the social gospel and his politics made him more acceptable than Woodsworth in rural Manitoba. Many farmer candidates for office ran on little else than the Bible in the 1922 provincial election. But their...