Christian Churches and their Peoples, 1840–1965: A Social History of Religion in Canada (review)

In Christian Churches and their Peoples Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau successfully demonstrate that Christianity was integral to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canadian society. Their interpretations flow from the belief that the objectives and activities of religious institutions are by no means synonymous with the broader phenomenon of religiosity. Rather, Christie and Gauvreau maintain that expressions of ‘popular religion’ – as seen, for instance, in acts of private worship by devout laypeople – frequently differ from clerical understandings of what constitutes Christian piety, which typically focus on such quantifiable criteria as rates of church attendance. Emphasizing the diverse – and often unquantifiable – ways in which ordinary peoples have manifested their religious convictions, Christie and Gauvreau contend that Christianity’s contributions to Canadian history involve substantially more than the initiatives of churches and ministers. Dismissing the ‘secularization thesis’ – which posits that religion is incompatible with modernity, and thus fated to obsolescence – they ultimately argue that religious beliefs and practices have exerted a degree of influence on Canadian society that is ‘unparalleled among industrialized nations’ (pp. 6–7).

Central to Christie and Gauvreau’s argument is Christianity’s capacity for adapting to various social, economic, and political circumstances. This capacity, they explain, allowed it to occupy important positions in diverse settings for the better part of two centuries. For example, they assert that, while Christianity provided mid-nineteenth-century immigrants in sparsely populated backwoods communities with ‘a sense of order, psychological ease, and cultural integration,’ it also offered early-twentieth-century workers in expanding industrial cities a comforting respite from ‘the conflictual world of workplace politics’ (pp. 10; 77).

Christianity also exerted influence among Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. Christie and Gauvreau’s sensitive discussion on this topic is one of their book’s greatest accomplishments. They note that, until recently, two competing approaches have dominated the historiography on Christian missionaries and their impact on indigenous communities. The first portrays missionaries as heroic standard-bearers who endured countless hardships in seeking to propagate the gospels among benighted heathens. The second, by contrast, portrays missionaries as Euro-Canadian agents of assimilation whose activities undermined the foundations of Aboriginal culture. Christie and Gauvreau advocate an alternative outlook, one that recognizes the crucial contributions to the missionary enterprise made by indigenous people like Peter Jones, and that takes into account the ways in which Aboriginals ‘were able to . . . reinvent the Christian message in order to fashion an indigenized but no less authentic expression of Christianity’ (pp. 107–108). Such an approach differs from the other perspectives in that it acknowledges the active part played by Aboriginals in disseminating and interpreting Christianity. While they do not deny the harmful impact that Christian missionaries were capable of having on indigenous culture, Christie and Gauvreau make a convincing argument that the evangelization process was one in which Aboriginals – for good or ill – were very much involved.

Christie and Gauvreau concede that, for all of its adaptability and influence, Christianity’s impact on Canadian society eventually began to wane. Yet unlike scholars who suggest that this process occurred in the late nineteenth century as a result of such developments as the rise of Darwinian science, they maintain that Christianity’s influence in Canadian society did not decline in a major way until the 1960s. Contributing to this phenomenon, they argue, were controversies surrounding the ‘sexual revolution’ – which prompted large-scale departures from the Roman Catholic Church and aggravated cleavages between conservative and progressive Protestants – and the emergence of a ‘new nationalism’ characterized, in part, by an emphasis on cultural pluralism that rendered Canadian Christians ‘one among many interests who sought a claim upon the multicultural . . . state’ (198).

If one were to offer a criticism of Christian Churches and their Peoples it would be that the authors’ arguments occasionally seem overdrawn. Consider their discussion of the low levels of church membership for unmarried men during the nineteenth century. Christie and Gauvreau state that...