Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850-1940

T.D. Regehr is a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan and
the author of For Everything a Season: A History of the Alexanderkrone
Zentralschule and Mennonites in Canada, Volume 3, 1939-1970.

Science, industrialization, urbanization, and increased material
prosperity created a crisis of faith for clergy who regarded the
supernatural and the miraculous as religion’s essential and
distinguishing but obviously unscientific feature. In an effort to
remain relevant and to retain their authority and influences in an
increasingly secular society, many Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist
clergy accepted the major methods and findings of science and began to
preach a social rather than a traditional evangelical gospel. However,
the Great War, followed by the Great Depression, and the disappointing
results of overseas missionary endeavors, destroyed the confident and
optimistic expectations of those who had made Jesus a moral example, and
his social teachings and ethical values the focal point of their
sermons. Even the union that created the United Church of Canada could
not overcome the growing confusion and pessimism. As the promise faded,
churches wavered and the drift continued.

Church archives provide the primary documents for this study. The title
of the book, however, is not quite accurate. Essentially this book deals
with Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist clergy who accepted the basic
tenants of liberal or modernist theology. Each of those denominations
had heresy trials and fundamentalist factions. Marshall explains how
fundamentalists and evangelicals affected the thought, work, and
activities of the liberal and modernist clergy, but fails to clearly or
coherently explain fundamentalist ideology and influence. There were
also a significant number of other Protestant clergy outside the
Methodist, Presbyterian, United, and Baptist churches who opted for
radically different strategies. Their story is not told in this book.

The clergy whose ideas and responses to the problems of modern, urban,
industrialized, and secular society are discussed in this book tried,
with only limited success, to define a gospel to which people in a
modern secular society would respond but which did not compromise
essential Christian principles. The response of most Canadians to the
secularized Gospel of the mainline Protestant churches, however, was
disappointing, and elements long considered essential to Christianity
were in fact compromised. This is a sad and pessimistic but
well-documented, cogently argued, and persuasive scholarly work.