Evangelicals, the Liberal State, and Canada’s Family Values Debates: The Struggle to Shape Selves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the most pervasive challenges for liberal democracies is the ongoing tension between religious conservatives and the liberal state. Using as my central case study, the highly-charged debates over “family values” in Canada circa 1985-2015, I argue that despite claims that liberal democracy enables religious freedom, its values and extensive reach prove challenging to conservative religiosity. Heightening the stakes is that the rival worldviews I examine – liberalism and evangelicalism – are ambitious, struggling not merely over matters such as same-sex weddings but ultimately for the ability to shape selves. My research focuses on certain central nodes of family values politics, namely three conservative evangelical lobbies – the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, Focus on the Family Canada, and the Canada Family Action Coalition – as they enter political debates, confront state bodies and legislation, and try to gain a hearing in the country where liberal pluralism has achieved a cultural power perhaps unmatched anywhere else. This study examines the lobbies’ discursive output in order to: trace the ideological drivers of evangelicals’ family values focus; question liberal democratic theory’s emphasis on reason and freedom at the expense of affect and compulsion; and contribute to a rethinking of a central question in secularization theory, by suggesting that persistent disputes over American versus European exceptionalism overlook the most important factor – that Western societies’ ability to resist secularization has rested chiefly on the relative strength of its evangelical community. In short, America’s relative religiosity has depended primarily on the strongly held commitments that foster evangelical exceptionalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".