from A Heartland Cultural Warrior
Mark Shea provided an interesting link on his blog on Friday. This story breaks down the American electorate into twelve groups and attempts to analyze how they might approach the presidential election. For the record, I would regard myself as a 'Heartland Culture Warrior.'
As I was looking this over, I kept wondering to myself how it might apply to Canadian politics.
1) We don't have much of a 'Religious Right' here, outside of Alberta and perhaps a few of the small towns and cities in Saskatchewan and central / northern British Columbia.
2) The huge chunk of Canada that falls in the densely populated triangle around the great lakes and Toronto seems to me (I've never been there) to fall into what we might call the 'religious left,' 'secularists,' and 'spiritualists.' That last group can also be found in large numbers in Vancouver and in great swaths of Vancouver Island. Eastern Tories often seem to be 'white bread protestants.'
3) The biggest difference between the two countries is Quebec, for which no analogy to the US seems to hold. Quebec was Catholic once, but that does not seem to have much effect anymore. I'd put the belle province in the 'convertible catholic' and 'secular' categories.
4) I'm not too familiar with the Atlantic provinces' voting patterns, but I think I'd use the 'white bread protestant' label for them.
5) Canada's minorities are scattered throughout the country, but are clustered by and large in the major population centers. In my experience, people from India might have voting patterns roughly like 'Latinos', but the catholic / protestant thing does not apply. Other groups might be too hard to categorize without too much fuzzing.
#2 and #3 explain why it is so hard for Canadians to elect anything other than Liberal governments, and why Tories win power only when they court the mushy middle and the Liberals abuse us too much for even a good ol' central Canadian socialist to accept. It's not a subject I know a lot about but I can't help but wonder if there is a connection between #2 and the troubles in the Anglican Church.
Anybody have some suggestions? Are any of these off the rails?
Ecce Homo I haven't done a quote from Pope Ratzinger's Introduction to Chistianty in a while and even though I have finished the book there are still one or two passages I want to share, including - perhaps even especially - this one. When I first began to look over what Christianity teaches, to look at the gospel story and to try penetrate why it has been so compelling to so many for so long, this was one of the things that leapt out at me. I was happy to see our Pope confirm it. Expanding on the Apostles Creed where it says "... suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried," Ratzinger writes: The fact that when the perfectly just man appeared he was crucified, delivered up by justice to death, tells us pitilessly who man is: Thou art such, man, that thou canst not bear the just man - that he who simply loves becomes a fool, a scourged criminal, an outcast. Thou art such because, unjust thyself, thou dost always need the injustice of the n...
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