Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792-1852 (review)

Canada can be described as a schizophrenic nation sitting uneasily between the two poles of Britain and the United States. At some points in our past we have sailed close to the embrace of Her Britannic Majesty. In more recent generations we have preferred to risk the siren call of Uncle Sam, albeit carefully lashed to a mast constructed out of 'O Canada,' the maple leaf flag, and health care.

J.I. Little's book presents a case study of the early days of this bipolar existence. He describes 'how a common culture became differentiated on either side of an international boundary line' (xi). He sees a struggle between the 'republican and non-conformist culture of the American settlers' and the more conservative religiosity of the British imperial centre. The book is therefore also an examination of popular religious culture. A close study of religion in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, bordering on the United States and settled mostly by Yankees in the years from the American Revolution to the mid-nineteenth century, serve as a kind of social science test laboratory for his thesis.

The standard techniques of popular history are well utilized – copious statistical analyses, census records, church records, church newspapers, diaries, and personal letters. Little's use of local histories is admirable because these tenaciously detailed sources are too often ignored by academic historians. Little's principal source is, however, the records of church missionary societies, because most local church records have been lost, but the result produces an elitist tone to the work. He is not alone in this regard, suffering the same problems faced by all who attempt to do what the French historian Michel Vovelle, in Ideologies and Mentalities, calls 'cheating the silence.' His records are of necessity organized around particular denominations and present the views of the people in the pews only by inference rather than directly.

The secondary sources employed are less happily chosen. While he utilizes some very new work, J.I. Little spends much time criticizing the approach of studies such as the creakily ancient work of S.D. Clark from the late 1940s. In the past few years there has been more published in book and journal form on the religious history of this country than in the previous hundred years. It is an incredibly diverse field now, which could perhaps be better reflected here.

Borderland Religion is organized in a rough chronological fashion around the hinge of the War of 1812, but focuses mostly on each denomination in its turn. These denominational studies are grouped broadly into the American on the one hand, and the British on the other. The Congregationalists, the Baptists, and the Millerite movement, as well as a number of those that were never fully established on this side of the border, find themselves in the American group. The Wesleyan (as opposed to the American) Methodists and the Church of England comprise the British group.

The gist of his argument is a tale of attempts by these denominations to impose their singular ecclesiologies on the local population, and a concomitant story of resistance by these same people to being slotted into any one denomination. This impression may well be a result of the need to rely on mission records. Local people seemed to move easily among the various churches and church-run schools. The superior financial resources of the British-backed denominations, especially the Anglicans, enticed many from their American evangelical roots into these more settled and conservative bodies, producing a peculiar ecclesiastical polity of evangelical believers ensconced within the structure of the state church and its principal variant, Methodism. While this result indeed did add to the 'somewhat lumpy synthesis of American and British values' that came to characterize this country, it is less certain just how important religion was to the nascent cultural makeup of these people – and to what extent this conclusion can be extended to British North America...