A Tale of Two Churches by Dave Jaffe. Part Two.

   A Tale of Two Churches: Part Two.




   Churches have their uses which is something that the new aethiests like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Adams and Richard Dawkins sometimes ignore. To be fair to Hitchens, he did mention the positive role churches played in the U.S. civil rights movement. Yet even the hard core right wing politicians
sometimes realize that churches can help people.
    In late 1975, William 'Bill' Bennett became premier of British Columbia ousting Dave Barrett's short-lived New Democratic government from power. The hard-nosed, tough Social Credit premier at once started cutting the social programs the Barrett's government had set up. Eight years later, in 1983 Bennett wiped out the rest of Barrett's reforms.
      When confronted by irate demonstrators  in the B.C. legislature, Bennett gave no ground.
     "What will people do when you get rid of all the social programs?" Joe Arnaud, a demonstrator demanded of Bennett in 1975.
     ""Why they'll go to the church basements," said Bennett, a very wealthy son of a wealthy former premier, W.A.C. Bennett. "That's what they did when I was young." Maybe we'll need church basements again to feed many more of us as some church basements do now. If so, I recommend Canadian Memorial United Church and the Vancouver Quaker worship house. I like both these places and I've often eaten at both of them.
      Yet right now we live in  an age when most right wing governments often stay in power for a long time and shred one social safety net after another. Who will protect the poor and the homeless against the Bennetts, the Thatchers, the Trumps and the Doug Fords? Churches can play a small but useful role here. The United Church of Canada was formed after the first World War from three separate churches: the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists and the Methodists.
      As a result  of this merger, the United Church has often played a progressive role in Canadian history. Before the First World War, Methodist ministers like James Shaver Woodsworth pushed what was called 'The Social Gospel'. This was a religious platform with a progressive bent. Unfortunately after World War One, a right wing wave swept across the world and buried the Social Gospel. Woodsworth left the newly formed United Church and went on to sit in Parliament and then  help found the left leaning Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or C.C.F. in the 1930's.
       Despite the vanishing of the Social Gospel, United Church ministers have often spoken up for peace and social justice. To-day for instance, the First United Church still does wonderful work in the now slowly disappearing Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.  It certainly helped the poor after the right wing Liberal government swept to power in the 2001 B.C. election.
     "It was an aberration," one high level N.D.P. organizer said about  this event as he saw the Liberal party grab 77 of the 79 seats in the B.C. legislature. The N.D.P. government had run the province for the past ten years. Once in power, the tough, hard-nosed new premier and Liberal leader Gordon Campbell did what former premier Bill Bennett had done nearly 20 years before. He slashed social programs to the bone, fired thousands of government workers, and gave big tax cuts to the rich.
      Thousands of welfare recipients had their monthly cheques slashed or reduced to zero The amount of homeless people in the streets soared.  Yet many of the homeless huddled in the pews of the First United Church on the corner of Main and Hastings.
     "It's really crowded in there," one Downtown Eastside resident said at the time about the First United Church. "Without that place many people would be a goner." At this time in 2002 and at many others times, the United Church has saved many people from starvation and even an early death.