Crisis of Conscience: Conscientious Objection in Canada during the First World War (review)

In the midst of reading Amy Shaw’s Crisis of Conscience: Conscientious Objection in Canada during the First World War, my family discovered a series of letters written by my great-great-uncle, William King, describing his days “somewhere in France” as a Canadian soldier during the First World War. In a dozen or so letters from the front, a common theme emerges: his unrelenting desire to get back home. Promising to “appreciate life if we get back,” King admits that his greatest wish is for “a bath and bed and a real meal.” He never got that chance; he died, like so many others, in the mud of Passchendaele in the autumn of 1917.

Shaw tells of battles of a different sort. Early in 1918, Robert Clegg, Henry Naish, and Charles Matheson attempted to avoid conscription as conscientious objectors. Their applications denied by local tribunals, they continued to refuse military service. Beaten, starved, and immersed in ice-water showers by military authorities, the three men struggled to honour the principles of their creed in the face of violence. “We will either break you or break your heart,” the supervising sergeant bluntly told Matheson (p. 90). Shaw’s book is about Canada’s forgotten pacifist soldiers of faith of the First World War.

For law and society scholars, Crisis of Conscience will draw interest as an exploration of early-twentieth-century notions of religious rights and citizenship, and also because the mechanism to determine objection had been legalized in an elaborate administrative scheme under the Military Service Act of 1917. This legislation is chiefly remembered today for sharply dividing the country over the matter of conscription. But it also contained a number of exclusions, among them exemption for any individual who “conscientiously objects to the undertaking of combatant service and is prohibited from so doing by the tenets and articles of faith, in effect on the sixth day of July, 1917, of any organized religious denomination existing and well recognized in Canada, at such date, and to which he in good faith belongs” (p. 29). As Shaw points out, this purposefully restrictive definition ensured that “only members of established churches with non-resistant principles had a chance of recognition for their objection” (p. 4). In practice, this meant that members of Canada’s historic peace churches—the Mennonites, Doukhobors, Brethren in Christ (Tunkers), Hutterites, and Quakers (Society of Friends)—found much greater success in securing exemption from combat service than members of smaller or newer sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Those individuals professing a general ethical objection to war, even if that objection was rooted in religious principles, received only ridicule and scorn from the tribunals established to determine exemption status.

Great Britain, by contrast, tended to recognize conscientious objection more broadly as a matter of individual conscience, although critics still pilloried British objectors as fey intellectuals in the Bloomsbury mould. In Canada, military exemption had historically been treated as essentially a group right, a compromise extended to certain pacifist churches in exchange for immigration. There was little in Canadian wartime debates to suggest that pacifism deserved recognition as an individual right to religious belief and expression. As in Britain, popular discourses painted objectors as selfish, unmanly, timorous, and anti-democratic. But to this mix Canadians added a distinct stereotype extending from the origins and accents of many conscientious objectors: rather than attacking objectors as over-intellectualized, Canadian critics characterized them as foreigners with suspect loyalties and dubious intellect. Instead of a discourse of individual rights, it was a powerful rhetoric of citizenship, duty, democracy, and masculinity that shaped Canadian debates about conscription and the necessity and justness of war.

To administer its exemption scheme, the government established nearly 2,000 tribunals staffed with local lawyers. Decisions of a tribunal could, in turn, be appealed to one of 195 one-man appeal courts. As a final recourse, appeal could be made to the Central Appeal Tribunal and...