A Critical Analysis of the Role of Religion in a Canadian Populist Movement: The Energence and Dominance of the Social Credit Party in Alberta

Abstract

Common knowledge regarding the rise of the Social Credit movement in Alberta and the nature of its leadership in the ensuing years has led to the frequent identification of Alberta Social Credit with fundamentalist Protestantism. It was then supposed that there must have been an intricate relation between religion and politics in Alberta during the Social Credit administration. The veracity of this assumption was tested by the construction of hypotheses that would test the conservative 3nd radical contributions of religion to socio-political change, determine why the movement with its religious overtones failed to spread to other provinces, and explain the new role of religion with the advent of increasing secularization in the movements later existence. Attention was also devoted to a descriptive analysis of Social Credit in England, the land of its origin, to determine whether this perceived relationship in Alberta was indigenous to the province or an integral part of the British movement. In spite of some religious interests within English Social Credit, it was concluded that Aberhart's adaptation was his own and the movement he moulded assumed its own characteristics as a result of Alberta's own needs. It was determined that religion was an important variable within the early movement because it helped solve the multidimensional crises that the largely unorganized residents were facing. Aberhart's emphasis on the Bible particularly provided not only a source of legitimation but became a rallying point and a source of cohesion for a recently-migrated population by transcending traditional institutions and customs. The Social Credit movement fused social, political, economic, and religious goals into a special social phenomenon -- a crusade, whose compelling demands made life-long converts. The fact that the crusade failed to take root elsewhere in Canada was explained as a result of the movement being a specific and unique response to Alberta's own efforts to create meaning and order out of her environmental problems. Furthermore, as the pressures towards secularization increased, religion per se was compartmentalized from the political sphere but was indirectly linked through moral commitments. It was concluded that in Alberta Social Credit, religion functioned as an anchor amidst change, served as a vehicle for change, provided a framework of meaning to interpret change, and finally,furnished a basis for morality to ensure orderly change.