It’s Ash Wednesday and Elizabeth May has a dirty forehead. She greets me cheerfully, as she does every member of her team that comes through the doors of her headquarters here in Sidney by the sea. I’m intrigued by May as she represents my favorite underdogs, idealistically anyway. Of course May would be quick to say that she does not represent the Anglican Communion, drawing a firm line between her role has the federal leader of the Green Party and her Christian practice. When I ask her how her faith informs her politics she walks the multicultural line, aware of her own story within a larger one.
“One answer is: in ever way possible. And the other is: as a leader of a federal political part which is not, and very clearly not, influenced by faith...” May’s been dumped by people who heard talking about her faith, and she’s hyper-congession about the tainted view people have of organized religion in these post-Dubya years. “[T]hey [the public] find out I’m a Christian or they see me talk about faith in a public forum and they say that well I was going to support you but not I’m not because I don’t like to see people in politics who are religious…so much damage has been done to public discourse, not to personify it too much, but it is quickly understood as George Bush style of a religious Christian right in the US [that] has driven a lot of people away from, and become very fearful, of a politician who says they’re Christian.
May’s all about the separation of Church and State, recognizing that government is a secular machine that should not be greased with any religious fervor. She does, however, think it important for voters to have a perspective on what drives an individual politician: “I think it’s appropriate for voters to know ‘What does this person believe in and why? What drives them?’ That’s where I think it’s perfectly appropriate for people to ask me what me religious beliefs are, I don’t feel as if I have to defend them.”
Still I look for intersections where the two may come together, like the press release the Greens issued “applauding the Church Council on Justice and Corrections for its opposition to the Conservatives’ incarceration and prison expansion project.” In it the Greens slam the Harper government for wanting to “spending billions of dollars to throw more Canadians in jail.” When I ask May about it she answers that “if that policy had been put out by the ‘Humanists of Canada’ we would have endorsed. It was a important policy statement regardless of where it came.”
It’s interesting speaking to May on these issues, she walks parallel to her faith careful not to trip into muddy waters least she disenfranchise potential voters. In many ways she is caught in the postmodern trap of our era, maintaining critical distance from what she personally believes and practices so that she can do her job in the secular world. Not much different from any other Christians in the workplace I suppose, still, it’s an odd thing coming from someone who studied for the priesthood - but then there are many odd priests out there.
I ask her about speaking to young generations, coming from this ‘tainted background’ she answers “…a lot of young people have grown up in a time when the awareness of their clout as consumers has over taken their role as citizens in a democracy. And in that confusion of consumerism versus citizenship, when you decided that the theater of politics looks so appalling…if you then decide that you are punishing the politicians and not voting it’s a conflation of that consumer notion with the citizenship notion and it produces the most perverse result of all…rewarding those people you wanted to punish.”
Personal confession time: It has been somewhere in the neighbourhood of 7 years or so since I last voted. I am the great unwashed cynical youth (if at 33 I can still get away with that title) who has plenty of faith in God and His intuition, and very little left over for worldly government. Yet May makes some compelling arguments: “if you look at the last election,” she tells me, “[In] 2008, 41% of Canadians didn’t vote…a larger block of voters than the number of voters who voted for the conservatives… if even half of the people who didn’t vote voted, we’d have a different government.”
Much of what May says is about getting over our disgust with the pettiness we see in the political arena, which I think is a Christian virtue; a learning to live with a falleness that is reflected in the secular powers-that-be, but then going that extra step to say that our participation can help to transform it into something better. I don’t know if I’ll vote in the next election, but I will at least pray for those on the ballot.
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