OttawaWatch: What did David Sweet really say?
By Lloyd Mackey
WINNIPEG FREE Press writer Frances Russell, in a February 1 column, revisited a theme she tackles occasionally.
Russell, as is happens, leans toward fiscal conservatism, but believes social conservatives have little or no place in either a conservative or a liberal party. I believe that is a fair reflection of her stance.
And she has every right to that stance. Indeed, many journalists are quite sincerely persuaded -- and with, perhaps, a modest degree of accuracy -- that social conservative men insist on their right to lead society and let women follow.
The difficulty with that kind of stance is that it allows for the caricaturizing -- and demonizing -- of all social conservatives. And it means that the usefulness of such people to the larger society is nullified by a distortion of what they really believe.
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All this came to mind as I chatted with David Sweet, the new member of parliament for Ancaster-Dundas-Flamborough-Westdale, just west of Hamilton, Ontario.
Sweet used to be president of Promise Keepers Canada, a Christian men's organization that challenges its members to keep their promises to their wives, families, churches, communities and nation.
Sweet asked me if I had received any feedback about a widely-circulated excerpt from an article that he had supposedly written for ChristianWeek newspaper back in 2001. The excerpt was the subject of a press release from some of his ADFW political opponents, bent on using his PK presidency as a way to reduce his rise in the polls prior to the June 23 election.
As it happened, I remembered a reference to the CW quote in the Frances Russell piece.
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Russell's point was that Prime Minister Stephen Harper will find it a challenge to manage social conservatives such as Sweet, with their apparently out-dated views on women.
Permit me to quote Russell's reference to Sweet in full, then offer what Sweet told me in response. And, after that, I would like to like to offer a few gentle suggestions for both Russell and Sweet.
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Russell's quote:
The most prominent addition to the Conservative Christian Right is Hamilton-area MP David Sweet.
Until 2004, Sweet was the president of Promise Keepers Canada, an offshoot of the U. S. patriarchal evangelical Christian organization. It believes the Bible decrees men must "take" their place as the head of the household; it calls homosexuality a sin and it describes "those in the womb" as "some of the most defenseless of all human beings."
In a 2001 ChristianWeek article, Sweet wrote: "(M)en are natural influencers, whether we like it or not. There's a particular reason why Jesus called men only. It's not that women aren't co-participators. It's because Jesus knew women would naturally follow."
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Sweet maintains that he is at a disadvantage, because he has not been able to track down the original 2001 CW quote. But he recalls the point he was making to have been quite different from the way that Russell has picked it up.
He says his intention was to suggest that women are, because of their natural inclinations, more capable of following Jesus than are men. Men, he suggested, go running off in their own directions, rather than paying close attention to the life and teachings of Jesus.
Jesus had to give men the specific advice that would turn them into disciples -- or followers. Women did not need as much of that kind of clear direction, he suggests.
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Now, here are a few thoughts from the pen of a ready, albeit somewhat reluctant writer.
For Russell: you disclose a certain bias, by describing the American PK as "patriarchal". In so doing, you miss some of the culture that led to its establishment. In American evangelical Christian circles, in the '70s and '80s, many women's leadership organizations has grown up, some of them intriguing evangelical adaptations of feminist ideas and beliefs.
Evangelical men, for their part, were perceived as having lost their way, failing to keep promises to the various people and movements around them. A Colorado football coach became quite exercised about this situation, so he organized a rally in a football stadium, and the PK movement mushroomed from there.
I can recall covering a PK rally in a baseball stadium in Portland 11 years ago. I was helping a group of people there to start a Christian newspaper similar to BC Christian News, which I had a hand in founding in 1982. (The Portland paper, Christian News Northwest, has done well, under the leadership of John Fortmeyer, who has been a real champion of the Christian newspaper movement in the United States. But I digress.)
As a Canadian journalist, I was watching for men who had slipped south to take in the Portland PK event. There were about 600 of them, and they marked their spots in the crowd of 35,000, by waving large Canadian flags.
I asked the American PK leaders at the time what they wanted to do about Canada. They wisely answered that they would help, on request, Canadians who wanted to do something in their own nation. But their view was that anything the Canadians might do needed to be "contextualized" in the Canadian setting. Otherwise the movement would not be authentic.
Indeed, the Canadian PK movement did grow and develop for several years. Symbolically, perhaps, its big events were in hockey arenas, not football stadiums. And their philosophy reflected the nature of Canada, and its emphasis on "peace, order and good government" as over against, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
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In the late '90s and the first few years of the 2000s, David Sweet led PK Canada. More recently, prior to his election to parliament last month, he has been business vice-president of Work Research Foundation, a Calvinist-based think tank. During all of his Christian ministry experience, he has been growing his faith and his interest in community and public affairs.
To Sweet, I would suggest that there will be times when his past statements or associations will come back to haunt him. Especially, when spiritual, religious or motivational language is being used in the pursuit of leadership development, such statements will be subject to purposeful or inadvertent misinterpretation or misunderstanding by people with a different world view.
I would gently suggest that Russell's interpretation of Sweet was, perhaps, inadvertent.
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Perhaps a good way to wind this up is to talk about a "mirror image" situation. I refer to the fact that some Conservatives are angry about David Emerson's jumping fence from the Liberals, in order to accept the international trade portfolio.
If their anger comes from their belief that Emerson is a Liberal who will wreak havoc in a Conservative cabinet, they could well be mirroring Frances Russell's seeming perceptions about David Sweet.
Emerson was well-known as a non-partisan deputy minister in British Columbia, as well as an outstanding leader in the forest industry. He seemed much more a conservative than a liberal -- a common occurrence in BC, where the provincial Liberal party is a fair mixture of both Conservative and Liberal federal card-carriers.
Before Paul Martin recruited Emerson to run for the Liberals in 2004, the Conservatives had tried but failed, for whatever reason, to make the connection.
Those who understand Canada's role on the North American continent and in the world suggest that Emerson is one of the few people who will be able to get a permanent settlement to the softwood lumber dispute.
And, for purposes of OttawaWatch readers, a bit of faith-based information: Emerson is a convert to Buddhism, and takes that faith pretty seriously. As such, he is the only person of that religion in the new federal cabinet. Permit me to waggishly suggest that Frances Russell might want to analyze that particular faith-politics interface.
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Lloyd Mackey is a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery. He can be reached at lmackey@christiancurrent.com.
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