Growing to One World: The Life of J. King Gordon by Eileen R. Janzen (review)

J. King Gordon (1900–1989) was one of Canada’s most influential social democrats, and in this impressively researched and eloquently written biography, Eileen Janzen offers a subtle and nuanced interpretation of his life and work. The son of a legendary writer of western romances – as “Ralph Connor,” C.W. Gordon entranced much of the anglophone world with his tales of individualism and moral fibre on the Canadian frontier – Gordon was deeply imbued with his father’s “progressive Presbyterianism” (16). On this reading, Gordon was a consistent Social Gospeller – as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, United Church minister in British Columbia and Manitoba, graduate student at New York’s Union Theological College in the 1930s, flamboyant crowd-pleasing Montreal-based socialist and Christian radical, editor of the Nation of New York, proponent for and agent of the United Nations from the 1940s to the 1960s, and renowned professor of international affairs and public intellectual back in Canada.

Janzen argues that throughout all these various activities one can discern an “elegant arc” (390), that of a Gospel-based Christian socialism, a persistent quest for a “state of harmonious dwelling together,” a Kingdom of God “combining the creative and spiritual aspects of human experience with the fair distribution of those material goods necessary to sustain and nourish physical life” (159). In exploring Gordon’s consistent attempts to realize this ideal, Janzen explores new sources and offers fresh perspectives. Growing to One World represents a major contribution to the scholarship on Canada’s left, interpreted here as a great tradition encompassing J.S. Woodsworth, the ccf, Lester Pearson, and Pierre Trudeau, all advocates of an enlightened and “global ethic” drawing upon the ideals of “liberty, equality and fraternity” (384). Students of religious history will find particularly stimulating the chapter Janzen devotes to “J. King Gordon’s Christian Socialism,” in which she documents the profound influence upon him of Reinhold Neibuhr, and scholars of the ccf will note her important new information and insights into Gordon’s substantial influence on the Regina Manifesto of 1933. Anyone with an interest in modern Canadian history will find the book fascinating.

Janzen’s book, as is so often true of biographies, is overwhelmingly favourable to its subject, whose world view is reproduced with little critique or contextualization. Yet by amassing such an impressive range of evidence, Growing to One World should prove extremely useful for scholars who might want to probe the limitations of the left liberalism it documents and celebrates. For more critical readers, Gordon’s politico-ethical contradictions may seem glaring. A man who hated war and the devastating suffering it brought also justified and publicized armed intervention in Korea, which in this book seems almost to have been, not a brutal and inconclusive war conducted with near-genocidal fury, but a humanitarian exercise in relieving suffering. A man suspicious of colonialism nonetheless felt called upon to gently assist the people in Egypt and throughout the global south in the “building of a stable, enlightened, and efficient bureaucracy, to be repeated over and over in other developing nations” (288) and found an instantiation of “the old social gospel of the lsr and the ccf” in Ethiopia (293), all seemingly without wondering if his prescriptions for new and improved states might constitute new and improved forms of top-down governance or whether, in a capitalist world, such bureaucracies could possibly function as such neutral emissaries of enlightenment. A man of peace and civility found himself participating in and afterwards apologizing for the UN’s bloody mission in a Congo supposedly menaced by Soviets and a paranoid Lumumba, where (says the author) “all his gifts came together to make it a success” (307) – a sunny verdict not even Gordon would ultimately have returned (334). A man who pronounced his “devotion” to the ccf and its principles was associated in the Age of Trudeau not with the...