Ten years earlier, Harper admitted to the now-defunct Ottawa Times that when he was a teenager he "would have been an agnostic central Canadian liberal," but "life experiences" had led him to the Alliance church. He did not elaborate on those experiences, but according to others, Harper's evangelical conversion dates back to when he was helping Preston Manning hammer out the Reform Party's credo. Harper was fresh from his first stint in Ottawa as an aide to Conservative Member of Parliament Jim Hawkes, a solitary, disillusioning year that had shattered every certitude about the machinery of policy making that he'd cherished. He'd fled back home only to face a traumatic breakup with his fiancée. Throwing himself into his master's in economics, he addressed that dark night of the soul by embarking on a private intellectual quest: a crash course in philosophy.
Shortly after Manning recruited him, Harper began trying out the evangelical services that seemed to offer many of the party's early players, especially his confidante Diane Ablonczy, such certainty. But Mackey fingers Manning himself as Harper's chief spiritual mentor — a role that Reform's godfather waves off. "I'd take that stuff with a little bit of a grain of salt," Manning says. "Stephen was very unhappy about that book." Still, Deborah Grey, Reform's first MP and Harper's boss during part of that period, confirms Mackey's account. "Preston was key," she says. "Stephen had some very long, very involved discussions with Preston in the late 1980s, early 1990s. He saw Preston and a faith that was real, and how you could marry faith and politics."
Mackey points out that Harper is no George Bush — a traditional "born-again" who claimed a life-changing epiphany on the booze-sodden road to perdition. He calls the prime minister a "cerebral" Christian who read his way to belief. "When it came to his spiritual formation with Preston, he'd say, 'What are the classics?'" Mackey explains. "And Preston would say, 'Try CS Lewis' or, 'Try Muggeridge.'"
http://www.xtra.ca/public/National/Stephen_Harper_and_the_Theocons-5501.aspxSadly, I'm one of the few heterosexuals in Canada who will have been exposed to this article.
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