Christianity in Canada. Historical Essays (review)

Christianity in Canada is, according to editor Paul Laverdure, 'the best of Moir.' The volume contains a dozen essays written by historian John Sargent Moir during his four-decade career at Carleton University and the University of Toronto. Moir's scholarship on the role of religion in Canadian history led to his well-deserved reputation as a scholar who redefined a field. Yet Moir the scholar is only one aspect of this exceptional man. He is an outstanding and generous teacher and a highly sought after mentor. The collection, edited by one former student and introduced by another, gives the reader insights into the multi-dimensional nature of John Moir.

Before the reader is introduced to Moir through his own words, we meet him through the words of his students. Editor Laverdure's preface and Mark McGowan's foreword set a fine tone for the rest of the volume. Laverdure explains that the essays have been gathered from a variety of sources - some reprinted from elsewhere, some unpublished talks, and some previously unpublished materials - to create a collection that is accessible (add affordable) to students and scholars alike. Mark McGowan's foreword provides a fine scholarly and personal context that enables the reader to gain a sense of Moir the scholar and Moir the mind behind the pen.

The first of Moir's essays is a 1980 address, 'Religious Determinants in Canadian History.' It is a first-rate choice for an opening piece for it is an excellent introduction to Moir's scholarship. In it, Moir argues that 'centrality, mission, indigenization, churchliness and activism' (1) rather than their opposites (secularism, parochialism, catholicity, sectarianism, and withdrawal) are the five religious determinants in Canadian history. Using a critical lens (mediated with a wonderful sense of humour), Moir provides a series of examples to illustrate that one cannot understand the history of Canada without taking into account the role of religion in our past and present. The rest of the collection's essays can be viewed as analysing the roles of these determinants.

In 'A Search for a Christian Canada' (1991), Moir traces the multiple influences of religion on Canadian legal, social, and political life from New France to the present, explaining, by example, the Judeo-Christian roots of 'the Just Society.' Moir then delves into the numerous sects that contributed to the Christian mosaic in the 1960 essay 'The Sectarian Tradition in Canada,' arguing for 'a Canadian sectarian tradition of religious egalitarianism in a semi Erastian state' (38). Two papers written in 1966, 'The Canadianization of the Protestant Churches' and 'American Influences on Canadian Protestant Churches before Confederation,' and one previously unpublished paper, 'Towards the Americanization of Religion in Canada' (1980), explore Moir's cross-border comparative analysis of Protestantism in North America.

The three essays dealing with the churches and political issues - 'Loyalism and the Christian Churches' (1976), 'Egerton Ryerson, the Christian Guardian and Upper Canadian Politics 1829-1840' (1984), and 'The Canadian Baptist and the Social Gospel Movement 1879-1914' (1979) - allow Moir to look at the intersections among local and national political events and organized religion. In 'The Problem of a Double Minority: Reflections on the English-Speaking Catholic Church in Canada in the Nineteenth Century' (1970) and 'The Origin of the Separate School Question in Ontario' Moir turns his attention to the Roman Catholic church in Canada, and calls more scholarly attention to under-researched topics and themes such as the ones examined in the two essays.

Moir's work is not uncritical of the development of the field of Canadian religious history. The penultimate essay in the collection is one of the most provocative. In 'Canadian Religious Historiography - An Overview' (1991), Moir challenges the field to move beyond its present status. In his delivery before the American Theological Library Association, Moir argues that 'the writing of Canadian religious history has developed no discernible schools and few identifiable trends' (149), citing regionalism as a dominant cause of the former, and...