VANCOUVER SUN columnist Douglas Todd has received more than 50 journalism awards for his coverage of faith-related subjects. This was recently acknowledged by Church and Faith Trends (C&FT), an online publication of the Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelicalism -- which is an initiative affiliated with The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Following is an abridged version of the C&FT interview with Todd.

Church & Faith Trends:

How did you come to cover religion in a profession where it isn’t common, outside of journals for religious communities?

Douglas Todd: I was brought up in an atheist family, kind of a strict one, where all religious people were characterized as kooks.

And then of course I got older, into my late teens, and started bumping into people who were Christians, were evangelical, were religious. I realized, well, some of them are kooks, but many aren’t.

As a matter of fact, many of them had something going for them that my family didn’t. Part of my attraction was to religious people’s sense of hope. I think I wanted that and needed it. You know how everyone of my generation rebelled against the church; I rebelled against atheism. I’m glad I [did]. 

C&FT: How did you come to write on religion for a major Canadian daily?

DT: I studied world religions – that was my bachelor’s degree – just because I was so fascinated by it all.

And then I went to postgraduate studies of religion, and I realized I wasn’t really a philosopher type – although now I wonder if I could have been – and I didn’t want to be a minister, because the church still felt kind of unfamiliar for me to make that kind of commitment.

So I went into journalism because I enjoyed writing for the UBC student newspaper, and I’ve always been really interested in how the world works. 

C&FT: Has there been an editorial change in receptivity to stories on religion? 

DT: Yes, it has changed. About the mid-90s or late 90s the word ‘spirituality’ became kind of trendy. And that opened it up, so that even hard-bitten journalists could think maybe there’s something here that’s interesting, which is more than just writing about popes and religious leaders and televangelists. 

My first encounter with an evangelical was a high-school counsellor-teacher named Ernestine Young, who was from Utah in the United States. She was kind of square-looking, but she was really dynamic and she took about a dozen of us Argyle high school students under her wing. I think she saw us as young people who were intelligent and had a lot of potential, but were maybe struggling a bit.

She was totally hopeful and into rattling the cages of the school. She was also into psychology at the same time. Basically, she wanted to change society for the better. She was an unusual mix of Christian evangelicalism and kind of 60s radicalism. I had a huge admiration for her. She was probably my first mentor, and she might have saved me, a little bit, from my own upbringing. 

C&FT: If you had to very succinctly define evangelical Christians for your readers in a column how would you do that? 

DT: I’d just say they represent 8 – 12 percent of the Canadian population – and they’re similar to, but more moderate than, their American counterparts. 

C&FT: What are the two most common reoccurring storylines involving Canadian evangelical Christians, and have these changed over the course of your career? 

DT: Obviously the homosexuality storyline has been there strongly for a long time. And it continues, especially now that it’s manifesting itself in the Anglican church. It’s been a long-term storyline that doesn’t seem to go away. I think there are actually three storylines. The second would be evangelical involvement in politics. The third storyline revolves around the claim that evangelicals are being persecuted by the wider culture. 

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C&FT: Is that a storyline that evangelicals are putting out there?

DT: Yes, definitely. And you know there’s even some truth to it, in terms of evangelicals being somewhat stigmatized. But sometimes I think it’s a bit overdone. In some instances, evangelicals’ vague sense of feeling persecuted can be manipulated to strengthen support for the cause – and even in its worst manifestations, used as a way to raise money.

I wonder that when I hear certain evangelical leaders claim, “Here’s the bad liberal culture attacking us again.” Andrew Grenville, a pollster who looks at Canadian evangelicals, has reflected on this problem as well. 

At the same time, I think it’s true that there is some stigmatization of Christians in Canada, including both mainline and evangelical Christians. Non-evangelical Canadians do not at all understand the complexities of the evangelical movement. 

For that matter, a lot of evangelicals don’t understand the subtleties and diversity of their own religious community. Too many have simplistic beliefs about what it means to be an evangelical. Fortunately, evangelical groupthink is not nearly as strong in Canada as in the U.S.

C&FT: If you could offer a piece of advice to Canadian evangelicals on how to participate constructively in the public square, what would it be? 

DT: Two pieces of advice. The first would be to emphasize new topics; get away from sex-related topics. Don’t ignore them, but don’t emphasize them so much.

That is, don’t emphasize them unless you want to create a wedge issue that divides conservative Christians from the rest of the public – which, unfortunately, is how I think some religious leaders use sex-related issues.

I would suggest toning down issues of abortion, homosexuality, and even debates over age of consent.

I’m getting a bit theological and biblical here, but I think John Stackhouse would confirm Jesus had 10 times more to say about the economy and money than he did about sexuality. So the emphasis on sexual issues seems a bit out of whack with what was going on in early Christianity. 

The other bit of advice to evangelicals would be to try to find some common cause with other faith groups and even non-faith groups. That’s starting to happen on the environment and other things. There are people out there doing it.

I wrote a column a couple of years ago about the ‘crunchy conservatives,’ the conservative-but-ethical-and-ecological types who don’t want to shop at Wal-Mart and want to protect Creation.

Why not work with Buddhist groups on certain common issues? I think it would be really creative for evangelicals, and the public would definitely take notice.

They would see that evangelicals aren’t just pitting their camp against all the others, and that evangelicals do care about far more than just sex. 

I know they do because of my work writing about different religious groups – but evangelicals are not too good at getting that message out to the wider public. 

The complete Douglas Todd interview can be found here (pdf).

September 2008