In groundbreaking move, Poilievre campaigns among evangelical Christians

globalnews.ca:

Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre went to church last Sunday, not once, not twice, but three times  — to three evangelical churches in the Toronto area where he briefly participated in the services, made a short political speech and moved on.

The three churches are all in ridings held by Liberal MPs and the congregants are mostly members of ethnic minority communities, which makes these visits smart politics for a campaigning Conservative leader.

But observers say these visits are also groundbreakers if only because leaders of mainstream Canadian political parties have long avoided public events with evangelical Christians for fear those appearances might become a political liability.

“The trick is to do that without being tarred with the brush that you are an extremist, that you’re an American-style Christian right ideologue, which I think is toxic in Canadian politics,” said sociologist Lydia Bean, the author of the 2014 book The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada.

Even Stephen Harper — a member of an evangelical church himself — avoided public association with evangelical Christians due to political considerations.

To Enns, the fact Poilievre is able to campaign where Harper was not able to — in evangelical churches — is a significant development in Poilievre’s command over his party and his current position in the Canadian political firmament. “It tells us that he’s fairly comfortable and he’s feeling fairly confident right now that he’s got a message that Canadians — doesn’t matter where they are — they’re reacting well to.”

But is Poilievre saying one thing to evangelical Christians that he’s not saying elsewhere? Are there — as Stephen Harper was