This article presents an account by Preston Manning about Alberta, Canada, and how religion and reform affected the region. In 1943, when I was less than a year old, my father, Ernest Manning, became premier of Alberta, a job he held for the next 25 years. I thus had the privilege of growing up with an inside view of Alberta during a period of momentous change, and access to a political gene pool of politicians and public servants who had known Alberta from its very beginnings as a province. At 27, he was the youngest minister in the government, but his deputy, Eddie Trowbridge, had been clerk to the territorial government before Alberta became a province and had known every premier of Alberta and Saskatchewan from 1905 to 1935. He never tired of telling my father that the best leader the West ever produced was Frederick Haultain. Fred Haultain should have been the first premier of either Alberta or Saskatchewan. Instead he was relegated to the political sidelines. But his sound and principled ideas--responsible government, constitutional equality, and the importance of a united West--entered Alberta's political psyche, and profoundly affected the attitudes and actions of citizens and politicians (myself included) from that day on. At a critical time in Alberta's history, religion and politics became closely entwined as folks leaned on both to see them through the hard times of depression and war. Today, Alberta is considered a "conservative" province strongly committed to a favourable climate for free enterprise, balanced budgets, low taxes, free trade, and universal health care via a two-track (public and private) delivery and payment system. In recent years, Albertans have continued to champion federal democratic reforms, especially by pushing Ottawa to adopt an elected and accountable Senate.