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  • Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives
  • Michael Gauvreau
Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Marguerite Van Die. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Pp. xv, 385. $24.95

This group of essays is the product of a conference held at Queen's University in the spring of 1999, the result of an initiative by George Rawlyk who secured funding from the American-based Pew Charitable Trusts to explore the changing relationship between Christianity and public life in Canada. The suggested rationale for this approach is that while there has been a great deal of American social science literature devoted to the problem of religious belief in the public sphere, this [End Page 630] theme has not been adequately explored in Canada. The overarching intention, as presented by the editor, is to rethink and recast the historical relationship between the sacred and the secular in Canadian historical development, by examining how individuals, groups, and institutions have faced the redrawing of boundaries - between church and state and between the public and the private - associated with the process of modernization ... This collection examines the ways in which religious beliefs, traditions, and practices translated into public concerns during a time when Canadian and Western society was restructuring extensively through the formation of the modern state, the impact of science, the growth of the capitalist market economy, and the accompanying increased distinction between the private and the public spheres of life. (5)

How effectively do the essays in this volume respond to this ambitious agenda? As with any collective product, some papers exhibit a much stronger thematic focus. In particular, the studies of T.W. Acheson on the political activism of evangelical Protestants in mid-nineteenth-century New Brunswick; Roberto Perin's revisionist exploration of the ways in which ultramontane Catholicism redefined the liberal public sphere in Quebec between 1840 and 1870; and Mark Noll's finely drawn comparison of the divergent religio-political paths taken by the United States, Canada, and Mexico stand out as models in which the relationship between church and state are effectively problematized and contextualized. Other essays fail to measure up to this standard, either because they are too particular in focus or, as in the case of the essays on Stanley Knowles and Ernest Manning, traverse territory that is already well known to Canadian historians. In fact, the strength of the essays in this volume lies in the contributions dealing with the pre-1900 period, and one of the more puzzling gaps in this volume is the dearth of papers that analyse mainstream Protestant and Catholic public concerns for much of the twentieth century. In this respect, the claim that the volume connects religious change to transformations in the modern state, the capitalist market economy, and the rise of science falls considerably short of the initial promise.

Ironically, the best papers in the volume deal with an older question of the relationship of church and state, and this illustrates what is perhaps the central difficulty with this volume. The term public as presented in the introduction is at once too broad, as it is used to stand for the changing nature of the church-state relationship, as a foil for 'private,' as an indicator of the changing balance between sacred and secular, and as a determinant of 'modernization.' This arouses the suspicion that it is simply being used as a kind of catch-all to fill in gaps [End Page 631] where historical analysis fails. To give one example, the introduction emphatically eschews any examination of 'private' religion, and none of the essays critically explore what were historically the boundaries between 'private' and 'public' in religious terms. In this way, the use of 'public' becomes analytically devoid of content. As well, because of the relative lack of attention to mainstream public Christianities, it becomes difficult to generalize about the timing and nature of the transformation of the church-state relationship.

More problematically, apart from the fine essays cited above, this collection marks a narrowing of the agenda of religious historians. While there is certainly a good deal about 'politics' in the traditional sense of biography, connections between...

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