- Infidels and the Damn Churches: Irreligion and Religion in Settler British Columbia by Lynne Marks
British Columbia is in the vanguard of a secularizing trend that is afoot across the Western world. Nearly half of the province's inhabitants are religiously unaffiliated, a figure that is markedly higher than the steadily rising national average of twenty-five percent (5, 213). As Lynne Marks demonstrates in her impeccably researched book, Infidels and the Damn Churches: Irreligion and Religion in Settler British Columbia, this phenomenon is deeply rooted in the province's history — in 1901, for example, its denizens were ten times likelier to adhere to "no religion" than their counterparts elsewhere in Canada — attesting to the validity of the late nineteenth-century adage that Eastern Canadians who migrated across the Rockies in search of greener pastures on the West Coast often "left God behind" (4).
Men — especially unmarried, working-class white men involved in such industries as logging and mining — are at the centre of Marks's account, [End Page 574] which concentrates on the tumultuous stretch between the late nineteenth century and the advent of the Great War. Comprising a disproportionately large share of British Columbia's non-Indigenous population, these men proved reluctant to embrace the Christian ideals that exerted profound cultural influence across other parts of Canada around the turn of the twentieth century due to such phenomena as the abiding resonance of evangelicalism and the emergence of a Social Gospel movement that strove to eradicate societal problems wrought by urbanization and industrialization.
As Marks explains, these men's unwillingness to adhere to the dictates of conventional Christianity can be attributed to several factors. One was the tendency of working-class British Columbians — whether they were located in remote communities or expanding cities — to equate Christianity with capitalist oppression. The fact that many ministers were unwilling to denounce an arrangement wherein workers toiled amid unsafe conditions for meagre pay, and that British Columbia's captains of industry assisted churches financially served only to reinforce workers' suspicions.
Another factor was the allure of "rough" cultural pastimes, notably drinking, gambling, and patronizing prostitutes. For many, these stereotypically masculine pursuits were more appealing than activities linked to Christianity — attending church, say, or teaching Sunday School — due in large part to the notion that orthodox religion was virtually synonymous with effete, undesirable traits like meekness and docility.
Racism was a third factor fuelling working-class antipathy toward Christianity. While the province's Christian ministers occasionally expressed bigoted views regarding immigrants from India, China, and Japan, they also criticized discriminatory policies — for example, the Chinese Head Tax — and reached out to non-white peoples whom they attempted to convert, usually without success. The latter tendencies prompted many workers to conclude that religious standard-bearers were more interested in the spiritual welfare of recent arrivals from Asia than they were in the material welfare of embattled white workers who viewed these immigrants as unwelcome competitors.
To be sure, not all working-class men disdained Christianity. On the contrary, as Marks points out, certain male workers embraced Christian teachings wholeheartedly, while others, who were less enthusiastic, viewed Jesus as a moral exemplar and believed in the importance of receiving a Christian burial even though they did not attend church regularly. Still, Infidels and the Damn Churches persuasively contends that single, white, working-class men were integral to the culture of irreligion — an elastic term encompassing everything from strident atheism to tepid religiosity — that rook root in British Columbia in the half-century after Confederation.
What about women? Despite constituting a minority of the non-Indigenous population, white women, regardless of marital status, were often a majority within Christian congregations across the province. Their [End Page 575] motivations for engaging with Christian churches, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, were at least as complicated as men's motivations for rejecting them. They included the pervasive assumption that women, on account of such supposedly innate characteristics as piety and submissiveness...