Stephen Leacock and George Grant: Faith and Politics by Ron Dart

Stephen Leacock was perhaps the greatest English Canadian intellectual of his generation.
Damien-Claude Belanger

George Grant was Canada's most significant public philosopher.
Graeme Nicholson

Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) and George Grant (1918-1988) were men of deep religious faith and passionate about politics. Both men were firmly rooted and grounded in the Anglican tradition, were committed to the classical Canadian conservative political vision and were prominent professors at public universities and in public life. These men did not retreat into private institutions to protect a fragile faith that could not stand up to the challenges of serious and substantive intellectual thought.

Leacock and Grant were classical Canadian Anglican conservatives. They could be called High or Red Tories. Both were suspicious of the USA at the level of philosophic principle and imperial ambitions. Both men were critical of the dogma of free trade and were at the forefront of opposing closer ties with the USA at economic, cultural, military, religious, philosophic and political levels. Both men held high the importance of a strong centralized state and the role of higher taxes to distribute wealth in a meaningful and just manner. These men were not liberals of an economic and religious sort that waved the flag of liberty, individualism, equality and choice as do most protestants. Leacock and Grant understood the older roots of fragmentation and schism.

Leacock and Grant, in short, sought to conserve an older tradition than the protestant, calvinist and puritan way that emerged in the 16^th century and came to dominate the American landscape with the coming of the puritan pilgrims to Plymouth Rock in 1620. Such a tradition highlighted such principles as liberty, conscience, equality and individuality. The State was seen as suspect and the protestant work ethic held high. The Bible was, in principle, the formal authority, but the real authority were the rights of individuals, in good conscience, being equal, to interpret the Bible as they saw fit: liberty demanded as much. The birth of liberalism can be located in the 16^th century, and we, in our ethos, are merely picking the late autumn fruit from such a tree. The hot button issues might be different, but the principles remain the same. Leacock and Grant saw this most clearly, hence their distrust of the varied and fragmentary forms of protestantism.

There are two questions we might ponder by way of conclusion: First, how is the High Tory Anglican tradition of Leacock-Grant different from the view of conservatism in the Fraser Valley and Prime Minister Harper’s view of conservatism? It might be more honest to call Fraser Valley conservatism and Harper’s conservatism a form of American republicanism. This is what the older Toryism of Leacock-Grant saw through, opposed and resisted. It is ironic that the very language that once opposed  Canadian integration into the American way is now used to justify it. Orwell would do more than smile.

Second, where would Leacock/Grant’s High Tory Anglicanism agree yet part company with the Anabaptist realism that we find so well articulated in John Redekop’s Politics Under God?

We err seriously when we ignore the intellectual and religious giants that have gone before us. They still have much to teach us about faith and politics if we have but the ears to hear.

Ron Dart

Comments

[manifest wealth]

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[attract more money]

I found your post really interesting and it has really improved my knowledge on the matter. You’ve assisted my understanding on what is usually a hard to tackle subject. Thank you!

[Bob Burkinshaw]

I agree with Ron that we need to learn from older conservatives such as George Grant and Stephen Leacock. Their traditional conservativism does have much to teach modern Christians. But, I am afraid that in his eagerness to totally disassociate these conservative giants from modern Canadian conservatives, Ron simplifies and distorts the picture.

Yes, both men taught in public universities (though they had been founded as colleges with Christian purposes) but Grant was highly critical of the modern university. William Christian, in his biography of Grant, summarizes Grant’s view of the education in these “large and powerful institutions” as “mass technological education…..which produced rudderless people who had never been taught to think deeply about the philosophical and theological traditions of the west.” (207)

Grant resigned from the York University in 1960, even before beginning to teach there, for several reasons, including the fact that he would be required to use a textbook that he felt “misrepresents the religion of my allegiance.” (Christian 203). His reason for choosing formerly Baptist McMaster University instead was that it had “kept a certain connection with the church.”

It is even possible that Grant contributed to the rise of private Christian universities in recent decades when he spoke publically that “the young faithful cannot be left like lambs among the ravishing wolves of secularism” in the public universities and when he worked to warn Christians of “what gates of evil these secular universities can be.” (Christian 206 & 207)

Leacock indeed campaigned against free trade with the US in the election of 1911. But his opposition was more from his passionate imperialism than from anti-Americanism. He was a leading spokesman of those who wanted to see Canada be a leader – militarily, politically and economically – in the British empire. In his eagerness for Canada to rearm the British empire before World War I, he showed that felt Canada’s true destiny lay on the broader stage of a mighty world empire and that it should not deviate from that path to pursue mere ‘continental’ relationship, as represented by the Reciprocity Treaty. One can laud aspects of his loyalty to Britain over commercial gain from trade with the US but it is hard to imagine many Canadians viewing his brand of imperialism as an instructive option for the twenty-first century.

Certainly both men felt that Canada should have a strong central government – but not too strong. For example, Grant, believed that Trudeau’s centralizing went much too far and wrote to a friend “Trudeau’s centralist policies just fill me with anger. Why Newfoundland, Alberta, P.E.I. etc. should be run from Ottawa, I do not know.” Like many modern conservatives, Grant came to favour decentralization.

Finally, Grant did alert Canadians to the dangers of what he saw as American-style modern liberal individualism and was at least indirectly responsible for much of the anti-Americanism which came to the fore in Canada during and after the 1960’s. In the last fifteen years of his life he came to believe that one of the worst results of that liberalism was the movement for abortion on demand and was discouraged by Canada’s eagerness to accept it. Irononically, given his views of the US, he confessed to admiring American conservative Christians and to view them as allies in the struggle against abortion. The American conservatives’ “consistent, principled stand persuaded him that, although American civilization was in inexorable decline, it might not be decaying as quickly as he had earlier feared.” (Christian 344). Certainly, his own expression of faith was different from these, largely fundamentalist Christians, but he seemed far more sympathetic to them and willing to work with them than does Ron in this and other articles.

So, Ron , let’s learn from our former ‘giants’ but let’s not oversimplify the picture in order to support our own views of modern politics and the church.