National Affairs

No matter how pathetic your marksmanship may be, if you try hard enough to shoot yourself in the foot, eventually you're going to hit your target.

Take the United Church of Canada, for example.

While it continues to bill itself as Canada's largest Protestant denomination - a claim the Anglicans might dispute - it has been shedding members for decades because of its' radical liberal theology and, at the rate its going, could disappear altogether over the next 20 or 30 years.

Rather than focusing on the traditional scriptures, the United Church - in concert with the rapidly declining Anglicans and Presbyterians - have apparently come to believe that targeted, leftof centre political action is more important than spreading God's message to everyone. It's not that Canadians are giving up of God. They're giving up on the Protestant Churches.

In the 2001 Canadian census, for example, some 70 percent of respondents identified themselves as either Protestants or Roman Catholics. Roman Catholics totalled 12.8 million Canadians, or 43 percent of the population, down slightly from 45 percent 10 years earlier. The Protestant total was 12.8 million,or 29 percent of all Canadians, a drop from 35 percent in 1991, a decline that has continued to escalate since, particularly among the socalled mainline Protestant churches.

But the real story is not just in the dwindling numbers of church membership - the United Church has dropped from a high of 1.1 million in the 1960s to about 545,000 today - but also in the shrinking percentage of their memberships who actually show up for Sunday services. In the 1950s, about 70 percent of all Canadians attended a weekly service.

Now, it's somewhere between 17 percent and 25 percent, depending upon which polling numbers you read and believe.

Your correspondent, for example, was raised in the Presbyterian Church - as a kid, we went twice each Sunday - and even though I absolutely believe in God and His message, I stopped going to church years ago because I was sick of listening to what amounted to political diatribes from a minister who knew a lot less about both politics and the real world than I did.

The last time I went to church I told my minister bluntly that if I wanted to listen to NDP speeches, I'd go to a political rally. But that's not what I went to church to hear.

And I suspect that more and more believers have also thrown up their hands, a dramatic loss of not just conservative voices but even moderate voices, leaving the churches in the clutches of the radical left-leaning zealots who, marching arm and arm with the politicized union movement, are leading those churches into oblivion.

How else to explain the fixation within significant elements of the United Church on blaming Israel for all the woes of the Middle East? To be sure, Israel - like any country - isn't perfect.

But as we saw in the publicity leading up to the recent United Church gabfest, once again a host of seriously anti-Israel and yes, anti- Semitic resolutions were being pushed by church activists. To be sure, they didn't get the church body as a whole to approve them, but then again, the church did the old typical United Church cop-out, and rather than denouncing some rather hateful resolutions, simply set them aside for further study.

They'll be back. You can bet on it.

So what does the United Church leadership think of their problems? Mind you, this is a Church which not that long ago elected a moderator who openly declared that he did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God.

But at least he was an ordained minister. The latest moderator, Mardi Tindal, is a lay person, and was accurately characterized in a weekend National Post article as sounding like somebody who "works for Greenpeace or at a clinic that teaches team building exercises for executives."

Typically of the breed, she has little to say about Christ - she dismisses the word "faith" as "too static..." - and pooh-poohs the reality of a rapidly declining church membership.

"When we think we're looking at scarcity we tend to create the conditions that create scarcity," she said. "My inclination is to look at the abundance, people and resources, with which the church has been gifted."

Ah yes, it's the quality, not the quantity. No need to fret about a decline of about 50 percent in membership since the 1960s, not as long as the "right" - or more accurately, "left" - people are hanging in.

They've got the formula for eventual extinction, and they're sticking to it.