Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

T.D. Regehr is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan.
He is the author of Mennonites in Canada, 1939–1970: A People
Transformed, The Beauharnois Scandal: A Story of Canadian
Entrepreneurship and Politics, and Remembering Saskatchewan:

The 17 essays in this book examine the changing role of religion in
Canadian public life. All but two were first presented at a conference
held at Queen’s University in 1999. That conference was, in many ways,
dominated by the memory of George Rawlyk, the late and highly esteemed
Canadian religious historian whose most influential work documented the
role of Canadian Evangelicals. It is therefore not surprising to find
that the first essay in this collection focuses on the important role of
Evangelicals in the Anglican Church after that church failed to become
the established church of Canada. Trinity College and St. Paul’s
Anglican Church, both in Toronto and both strongly influenced by
Wesleyan Evangelicalism, became the sites of a new, vibrant, and
powerful form of respectable religion.

The role of Evangelicals in public life in southern New Brunswick and
in Protestant Toronto, and of reform-minded Roman Catholics in Quebec,
complement the essay on Anglican developments. Essays on the role of the
state and the church in Indian residential schools, the place of
overseas missionary endeavors, and contrasting Canadian and American
religious responses to the American Civil War focus on the ambiguities
of religion in the public sphere. There are several essays on the
changing sphere and influence of women in Canadian religious life, and
on the political careers of two populist prairie preachers—Stanley
Knowles and Ernest Manning. The role of religion in post-1960
developments, including that of Roman Catholics in the Quiet Revolution
in Quebec, demonstrate that religion remains a powerful force in
contemporary Canadian life.

The volume concludes with several essays on what are called religious
outsiders—Jews, Mennonites, and Sikhs—all of which, perhaps not
surprisingly, demonstrate considerable congruence with developments in
the churches of the religious insiders.

The essays are carefully researched, well documented, and meticulously
edited. They are placed in the broader context of Canadian religious
developments in the editors’ excellent introduction. They document and
explain the important influence of respectable Evangelicalism in
Canadian public life. They do not, however, provide equally valid
insights into the influence of more traditional, authoritarian, and
conservative religious influences; or of what might be called the
less-respectable manifestations of Evangelicalism. The volume tells us
very little about the wilder aspects of Methodist camp meetings in
19th-century Ontario; about the public role of some contemporary
preachers who cast out demons and claim divine power to heal the
physically, mentally, or spiritually afflicted without benefit of modern
medicine; or about the hate-mongering fundamentalist and
tele-evangelists who completely disillusioned George Rawlyk when he
spent the winter of 1994-95 in South Carolina studying the
Evangelicalism of the so-called American Bible belt. The essays, in
short, provide excellent scholarly and well-researched but somewhat
biased insights into the role of a particular, and certainly important,
strand of religion in Canadian public life.