Reply #56: that "evangelical/Christian socialist bent"

[iverglas]

It's what we call "the social gospel", of course. ;)

The Church of England = the Tory party at prayer
The United Church of Canada = the NDP at prayer

The NDP is my present party, and the UCC is my long-ago church. The church was a major factor in my becoming the atheist socialist I am!

The UCC is one of the Cdn churches currently active in campaigns around water -- to ensure clean drinking water for everyone in the world, and to fight the commodification of water.

Tommy Douglas, father of Cdn medicare etc., was a Baptist clergyperson. Not, one must assure our southern colleagues, anything like the Baptists of their acquaintance.

The NDP and mainstream protestant Canadian churches oppose any criminalization of abortion. The NDP and mainstream protestant Canadian churches were active protesters in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Several mainstream Canadian churches have less than honourable things in their past (the residential schools that First Nations children were forced into being the big one), but at present there is very little that they can be reproached for, in terms of social justice issues.


Oh -- and of course the United Church first ordained women the better part of a century ago, and accepted gay and lesbian clergy a couple of decades ago, and was a player in the fight to have same-sex marriages recognized, as was the NDP, and performs same-sex marriages.