A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970 (review)

Institutional and individually constructed forms of religion and spiritual beliefs that help people speak to their identities and environments are undeniably powerful. These subjective beliefs are rudimentary, mediated by time, place, and space, and serve to legitimize, or at least rationalize, one’s position and positioning in society and in the universe. Add to this the intricacy of historical context, the relativist inquiry into how past mentalities were shaped, and the picture becomes all the more involved and uncertain. This is a demanding and methodologically rigorous form of micro-history that goes beyond communities but seeks to uncover the very essence of agents and their relationship to the idiosyncratic cultures of institutions, including those of church organizations, and social, political, and economic establishments. These cultures are rarely overt, especially as manifestations of the heart and soul.

The contingent and intimate nature of these personal cultures that are essentially an act of self-reflection, coupled with their doctrinaire and constrictive codes of behaviour and character whose ephemeral basis – the belief in salvation – often challenge critical understandings, make A Long Eclipse all the more worthwhile as a contribution to the social histories of religion and higher education. The book strives to position religion within places of acceptance and resistance, specifically when the intransigent order of thought, values, and behaviour that were outlined and enforced by Protestantism, ploddingly moved into marginal spaces in peoples’ hearts and minds as the twentieth century wore on. Gidney contests some of the current historical scholarship about the impact and longevity, or perceived lack thereof, of liberal Protestantism in Canadian society up to 1970. Focusing on six institutions of higher education – some denominational, some not, and ‘selected for regional and religious diversity’ (xxi) – A Long Eclipse argues for the obstinate diffusiveness and social power of liberal Protestantism despite increasing challenges to it from within and without. Instead of relegating religion to the dustbin of twentieth-century Canadian history as, in the end, inconsequential and impotent, Gidney strives to expose its lingering impact in a place that would seem the most hostile to faith-based ideology – the university. Here, the abstract meets reason; feelings battle it out with the intellect.

A Long Eclipse succeeds in its goal of revising our understanding of religion as a historical dynamic in twentieth-century Canada, including even the bickering, fragmented forms of religion that existed during the rise of the ‘modern’ multiversity. Evidence is presented that religion managed to affect the university in several important ways, from its sway over intellectual and research cultures as early as the nineteenth century, to its envelopment of identities of university administrators, professors, and students, to the increasing utile agendas of the humanities and liberal arts curriculum whose task of moral development became increasingly susceptible to accountable agendas. Gidney does not deny the wane of religiosity on campus; rather she contends that it was far more resilient than previously thought. The organizations discussed, for example the ymcas and ywcas, the University Christian Missions, and the evangelical neo-conservative Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and the rise of chaplaincies in the universities that counterproductively deprived the universities of an ‘official’ religious voice, are vestiges of battlegrounds for authority over the hearts of critical academic agents. Their strident and unifying forces give way to theological inter- and intra-fratricide – perhaps not extinguishing, but rendering these organizations, in comparison to earlier in the century, faceless, directionless, and unimportant, and even worse, spiritually unconvincing to followers. In the main, however, the point of the work is not that religion’s power to control waned, but that it took so long to happen.

Constructing history with any certainty is specious at best, and A Long Eclipse offers much to debate. The source material in the book is judiciously selected and well balanced between primary and secondary material; nonetheless, in a study such as this, the evidence is susceptible to conjecture of motivation and...