Common ground for church and state
It’s easy to forget the Social Gospel beginnings of the New Democrat Party.
Long before he became medicare’s prophet, Tommy Douglas was a Baptist preacher. Before he was Jack Layton’s house leader, federal NDP MP Bill Blaikie was a minister of the United Church of Canada.
So it’s not entirely surprising that church and state appeared to agree last week, when Premier Rachel Notley’s voiced concern over climate change the same day Pope Francis issued his new declaration touching on the same issue.
The 78-year-old pontiff’s new encyclical, Laudato Si’, preaches to Catholics and non-Catholics alike. The state of “our common home” is a pressing moral and theological problem, said Francis, named for the patron saint of ecology. Planet Earth belongs to all of us.
Francis’ message is unavoidably political, a judiciously timed message in advance of November’s United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Alberta’s new premier has more immediate dilemmas: a skittish energy sector, health and labour sectors hungry for royalty revenue dollars, and a watching world wary of what flows from Alberta’s northern reaches. Yet Notley has begun to press a moral argument, saying she’ll need to be there for the Paris talks, new prime minister or not, to represent a province perceived as a global laggard.
“Nobody trusts what we say on this issue,” said Notley. “We can’t simply put out a press release saying that we have a world-class program when we don’t.”
Alberta Environment Minister Shannon Phillips has promised a new strategy by month’s end. Notley will press the issue at a premiers meeting next month. For a province that promised a strategy for years, then stalled and postponed repeatedly, this new government has shown remarkable urgency.
Pope Francis and Notley are sharing some common ground. A pluralistic democracy might demand a separation of church and state, but that doesn’t mean outright segregation.
Conversations need to go further, reach wider and incorporate more of us. Katharine Hayhoe, a Canadian climate scientist named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2014, devotes her energy convincing fellow evangelicals that the evidence demands a verdict. Similar voices can be heard in Islam, Judaism and other religions.
Our new premier isn’t one for sermonizing, unlike her Socred predecessors, but in one postelection interview, she remembered her devoutly Anglican mother’s affinities with liberation theology. Argued from the perspective of the poor, the theology flourished in South America in the ’70s and ’80s, reaching Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentine chemical technician who became Pope Francis.
The great argument of our time, argues New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, isn’t religion or secularity or science. It isn’t liberal or conservative. It’s between “dynamists” and “catastrophists”: those who see modernity as a success story, and those who believe in its imminent demise, barring a major transformation.
In Douthat’s scheme, Francis is the latter, the latest pontiff to emphasize destructive facets of capitalism, consumerism and a balkanized world. Notley would be the former, believing governments can still find answers through energy efficiency programs, improved carbon levies and other fixes.
It’s remarkable that both are preaching a similar message. Our future will not be salvaged by sitting idle, separating into factions and plugging our ears. Take it from Notley and Francis and the long history of the Social Gospel: We’re in this together.