Bill Blaikie kept the social gospel tradition alive within the NDP

National Post, 02 October 2022

A healthy common life needs the contribution of religious believers, not just those from one side of the partisan divide, lest the gospel be subordinated to politics

The death of the NDP’s Bill Blaikie, the longest serving MP in Ottawa, on Sept. 24, bears a greater public remembrance than has been given. He was the last giant of a tradition that a healthy public life needs, and the last torchbearer of the social gospel tradition in progressive politics.

Blaikie, who retired from the House of Commons in 2008, was first elected in 1979, the same election that marked the retirement of Tommy Douglas as an MP. Like Douglas, Blaikie was an ordained Protestant minister.

By the time of his retirement, the social gospel tradition that animated his life was dying, if not dead, in the NDP. A young Blaikie had taken up the torch from Douglas and the other NDP giants, the preachers J.S. Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles. Upon his death, is there anyone to hold the torch aloft now?

In 2010, the University of Winnipeg opened the Knowles-Woodsworth Centre for Theology and Public Policy, largely in recognition of Blaikie’s legacy in his hometown. The Prairie preachers brought the social gospel tradition to national politics.

In recent decades, religion in Canadian (and more so in American) politics has been considered a conservative phenomenon. But the tradition is broader than that. Religiously animated progressive politics is part of it, too.

It is impossible to understand Douglas’ drive for medicare or his opposition to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s War Measures Act apart from his deep Christian faith. But now, the left is thought of — and worse, thinks of itself — in largely secular terms. It has even become hostile to the role of faith in our common life.

In 2011, I launched a new Canadian magazine, Convivium, to examine “faith in our common life.” I was determined to include religious voices from the left and signalled that by including Blaikie as a contributor to our first issue. He wrote on the social gospel tradition.

We launched just after the death of Jack Layton, who did so much to vanquish the social gospel as a vital part of the NDP.

Recall that in 2003, Layton — the Montrealer who became a Toronto city councillor — was not expected to win the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party. The favourite, at last initially, was Blaikie, the highly respected MP from Winnipeg.

The contest between Layton and Blaikie was symbolic of a broader trend on the political left. Blaikie’s roots were in the Prairie social gospel tradition. Layton was from downtown Toronto, immersed in the hard left of the urban core, a secular libertinism married to identity politics.

Layton’s victory over Blaikie was both a sign and a cause of secular libertinism occupying the centre of gravity on the Canadian left. I quoted Michael Valpy at the time on that 2003 race.

“I went because I’m a journalist, of course,” Valpy wrote in 2011. “But primarily I went because I am attached to my country’s history and a westerner steeped in the West’s historical tradition of social gospel — the tradition of Baptist pastor Tommy Douglas and Edward (Red Ted) Scott, the former Anglican primate of Canada.

“Thus, I had a romantic attachment to the candidacy of Winnipeg MP and social gospel clergyman Bill Blaikie, who had the support of virtually all of the party’s parliamentary caucus as well as Ontario NDP Leader Howard Hampton, Manitoba NDP Premier Gary Doer and Shirley Douglas, daughter of Tommy. In that contest, Jack Layton was the pushy outsider, too brash and slick by half, a Toronto city councillor from the cosmopolitan downtown.”

Layton’s victory consigned the social gospel tradition to the margins of the NDP and our national politics. Blaikie himself rejected my reading of the significance of his defeat, as he remained a partisan who was loyal to his leader.

Something had changed, though. Blaikie became distant from the NDP’s centre of gravity. He served as deputy speaker, a nonpartisan role, and then retired in 2008. He evidently was not finished with politics, as he returned in 2011 as a member of the Manitoba legislature. But not as part of the federal NDP.

Continue reading at the National Post.