Levi Minderhoud is a policy analyst for the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada.“Religion has played a central role in the development of Canada.” So claimed John S. Moir, the late professor of religious history in Canada, in 1980. But a lot has changed since then. Religious affiliation has declined precipitously in recent decades, and religious beliefs have been increasingly relegated from the public square in the same span of time. And so, it may be difficult to imagine how religion, specifically Christianity, profoundly shaped our nation. But that simply shows our current cultural amnesia.In his 1980 lecture, Religious Determinants in Canadian History, Moir aimed to dispel some of that cultural amnesia even in his day, listing five characteristics of Christianity in Canada that shaped our country.First, its centrality. “At least until a generation [or two] ago,” Moir says, “it was confidently assumed by most Canadians that Canada was a Christian country, and that this was God’s providential intention. Thus, the Canadian churches viewed themselves as the conscience of the state — politicians were expected to judge all matters by Judeo-Christian values.”In a Dominion predominantly populated by immigrants from an increasingly diverse range of countries and continents, national unity was difficult to build. (The presence of a culturally distinct province like Quebec didn’t help either.) Different ethnicities, cultures, and languages all mixed north of the forty-ninth parallel. The sheer size of the new country and the sparse population spread across much of it made cultural assimilation even more difficult..In this context, Moir argues that Christianity served as a kind of “surrogate nationalism,” reaching across the ethnic divides of Canadian society to unify the country. Modern Canada has a host of symbols, histories, and values that (potentially) bind us together today, but on the developing Canadian frontier, it was often the Christian religion that cemented the country together.Second, Christian missions and evangelism were constants from the very beginning of the Canadian story. One of the first things that Jacques Cartier did when he arrived in Canada in 1535 was to erect a cross. “A religious motivation — to convert the native Canadians — vied with French interests in exploration and profit,” Moir contends, even before this first French explorer set sail for the New World. A century later, a third of all Frenchmen in New France were missionaries to the First Nations. The church and the state together established schools to educate indigenous children from the earliest years of French settlement through to the residential schools of the twentieth century.After Confederation, Protestant churches sent a steady stream of missionaries across the Pacific to spread the good news of Christianity. But the churches were not concerned with their spiritual needs only: “By the turn of the century, Canadian Protestant churches could count over 400 missionary preachers, teachers, doctors, dentists, nurses, agriculturalists, etc., in foreign fields,” Moir notes.Third, Canadian churches quickly became “indigenous,” or locally led and governed. The Church in Canada began as “branch plants” of various denominations: French Catholicism, English Anglicanism, Scottish Presbyterianism, and American (and British) Methodism. In those early days, each of these movements in Canada was heavily influenced, if not outright directed, by spiritual leaders in other countries. But, with the exception of the Catholic Church, all of these churches became autonomous within Canada after only a few decades of significant Protestant immigration. The Anglican Church in Canada became self-governing by 1861. That same year, the Canada Presbyterian Church (of Upper and Lower Canada) was formed, followed by a union of almost all Presbyterian churches in the newly confederated country in 1876. Similarly, the independent Methodist Church of Canada was instituted in 1874.Perhaps the greatest example of a uniquely Canadian Christianity was the United Church of Canada. Born of a merger of most Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists in 1925, this was a made-in-Canada church rather than a self-governing appendage of a foreign church. Although they never quite reached this ambition, the new church aimed to be the national church of Canada, representing the plurality of Canadians from coast to coast to coast. (And indeed, even today the United Church still is the single largest Protestant church in Canada.)Fourth, Moir describes churchliness as an indispensable characteristic of Canadian history. By “churchliness,” Moir means the degree to which Canadians identified with only a few Christian traditions rather than being fragmented into innumerably more denominations as in the American experience. According to the first census following Confederation (1871), 84% of Canadians belonged to four denominations: Methodism, Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, and Catholicism. A century later (1971), still a full 75% of Canadians belonged to one of three churches: the United Church, the Anglican Church, and the Catholic Church..This attraction to the historical churches of Canada was both a cause and effect of the historical Canadian penchant for loyalism. The first significant wave of English-speakers to Canada was the United Empire Loyalists who refused to countenance the American Revolution. Canadians then rejected the revolutionary spirit again by defeating the Rebellions of 1837-38, with significant help from loyal local militia. Even in the constitution of the new Confederation, Canada was committed to being “united into One Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom… [in order to] conduce to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the Interests of the British Empire” (emphasis added).And finally, Moir posits that Christianity in Canada has always been characterized by social and political activism rather than withdrawal. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canadian Christians spearheaded solutions to the social ills of the day. Whether motivated by the more liberal social gospel movement or more conservative theology, Christians led the fight for prohibition, Sabbath regulations, minimum wages, fair wages, factory safety regulations, eight-hour workdays, an end to child labour, pensions, unemployment insurance, compensation for workplace injuries, and far, far more.Although not all of these policy changes have endured, we enjoy many of the fruits of this activism from Canada’s Christian heritage today.So what happened?A secular revolution happened. The secular revolution of the mid-1900s displaced Christianity from its central place in the public sphere of Canadian life. It cooled the enthusiasm for religious evangelism and looked to global political leaders for inspiration rather than domestic religious ones. It fragmented the “churchly” culture of Canada and, with it, undermined a pillar of Canadian identity. And although social activism is very alive today, the secular revolution birthed the socially progressive, or “woke,” activism that we see emasculating Canada today.In the wake of this secular revolution, we have largely forgotten the immense role Christianity has played in the formation of Canada. We need to recover the full story of our heritage not only to give credit where credit is due, but also to shore up the metaphysical foundations of our society. This recovery mission is aided by an ever-growing array of podcasts, books, and conferences (such as ARPA’s Foundations Conferences this fall) that do not shy away from recounting the necessity of rooting our laws and politics in something that transcends the whims of those currently holding political power. Such knowledge not only informs us of where our country came from and where we are today, but also where we could be headed.Levi Minderhoud is a policy analyst for the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada.
