The Many Rooms of This House: Diversity in Toronto's Places of Worship since 1840 by Roberto Perin (review)

In The Many Rooms of This House: Diversity in Toronto's Places of Worship since 1840, Roberto Perin, professor of history at York University's Glendon College, seeks to correct the neglect of religion in histories of the evolution of Canada's largest city. He focuses on places of worship in Toronto's West End from 1840 to 2000 by looking, first, at what was built and why and, second, at what he calls fellowship–that is, what people did in those buildings.

Cutting across these two topics are a number of interrelated themes pertaining to the modernization of Toronto: industrialization, immigration, suburbanization, imperialism, and consumer capitalism. For example, Perin explains that industrialization gave Torontonians more money to build more, larger, and more elaborately decorated churches. Church worship became more "dignified"; that is, it conformed more closely to bourgeois values and sense of decorum. Industrialization also meant that the downtown residential neighbourhoods were invaded by factories in the late 1800s and early 1900s, forcing wealthier Torontonians to move to the suburbs (what is now Toronto's West End, the area under study), emptying out downtown places of worship. Moreover, the growth of industrial cities from 1880 to 1920 helped to drive the demand for more immigrants, who then moved into the now-dingy parts of Toronto's downtown, taking over the elegant houses of worship abandoned by their former occupants, mostly British-Canadian Protestants. Economic development made these new arrivals (mostly Roman Catholics, but also many Protestants and Eastern Christians) wealthy, and after 1960, they too moved out to well-appointed suburbs, abandoning their places of worship to yet newer immigrant groups (which included many more non-Christian, non-European religious communities). Finally, industrialization drove the new consumer capitalism that promoted individualism and materialism, values that challenged and often replaced religious ones.

Perin divides his study into four time periods, roughly spanning the period of Toronto's modernization–that is, its emergence as a multicultural, industrial (and later, post-industrial) city: 1840–80, which saw the evolution of Toronto from colonial outpost to nascent industrial city; 1880–1920, marked by the development of economic power coupled with consolidation of British Protestant public culture, and a close identification with the British Empire; 1920–60, which included the dramatic social transformation brought on by the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the postwar prosperity and baby boom, events that challenged religious institutions to evolve even as they were being surpassed and supplanted by secular agencies and institutions; and, finally, 1960–2000, during which economic prosperity, consumer capitalism, multiculturalism, and secularization led to the decline of religious membership and church attendance.

Across the chapters, Perin examines the desire of religious people to gather together in communal worship; their attempts to convert, educate, and encourage followers; and their programs to address the day-to-day problems of members of their communities, sponsoring everything from soup kitchens, daycare facilities, and community centres, to credit unions, libraries, and youth groups (more than a few churches in the 1950s had bowling alleys in their basements). Perin is careful to analyze the pragmatic challenges they faced; he discusses building costs, salaries and wages, personnel issues, donations and grants, and mortgages, as well as architects and construction companies. While this is mostly a story about Christian churches, he provides much information about synagogues and Jews (the largest religious minority group before 1990), as well as the places of worship of other non-Christian groups that sprang up after the liberalization of Canadian immigration policy in the late 1960s. Perin also addresses issues of racism, hostility toward immigrants, religious and ethnic intolerance (as well as multiculturalism), militarism, gender inequity, and socio-economic chauvinism.

Perin's major contributions are one, demonstrating that we cannot understand the history of Toronto without understanding its religious history; and two, showing that the evolution...