A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada 9780773589292

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A C H U R C H W IT H T H E SOUL OF A NATI ON

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M cG i l l -Qu e e n ’s S t u di e s i n t h e H is to ry o f Religio n Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. s e ri e s o n e : g .a . r awly k , e di tor 1 Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson 2 Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario William Westfall 3 An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 Marguerite Van Die 4 The Dévotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France Elizabeth Rapley 5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau 6 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer 7 A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918–1939 Robert Wright

10  God’s Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson 11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 Edited by Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz 12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 Brian P. Clarke 13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States Edited by George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll 14 Children of Peace W. John McIntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution Joan Marshall 16 Padres in No Man’s Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War Duff Crerar

8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart

17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis P. Travis Kroeker

9 A Sensitive Independence Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 Rosemary R. Gagan

18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw

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19 Through Sunshine and Shadow The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 Sharon Cook 20 Church, College, and Clergy A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994 Brian J. Fraser 21 The Lord’s Dominion The History of Canadian Methodism Neil Semple 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau

23 Evangelism and Apostasy The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico Kurt Bowen 24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827– 1905 Eldon Hay 25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925 Johanne Selles 26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy William Lamont

s e ri e s t wo i n me mo ry of g e o r ge rawlyk d o n a l d ha r ma n a k e n so n , e di to r 1 Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640–1665 Patricia Simpson 2 Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience Edited by G.A. Rawlyk 3 Infinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature John Spencer Hill 4 The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada Edited by Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk 5 Labour, Love, and Prayer Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 Andrea Ebel Brozyna

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  6  The Waning of the Green Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 Mark G. McGowan   7  Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 John-Paul Himka  8 Good Citizens British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918 James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston   9  The Theology of the Oral Torah Revealing the Justice of God Jacob Neusner

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10  Gentle Eminence A Life of Cardinal Flahiff P. Wallace Platt 11 Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750–1870 Kevin McQuillan 12 Between Damnation and Starvation Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855 John P. Greene 13 Martin Luther, German Saviour German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 James M. Stayer 14 Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 William H. Katerberg 15 The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896–1914 George Emery 16 Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel Paul Charles Merkley 17 A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime Elizabeth Rapley 18 Households of Faith Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 Edited by Nancy Christie 19 Blood Ground Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 Elizabeth Elbourne 20 A History of Canadian Catholics Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism Terence J. Fay

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21 The View from Rome Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 Reports on the Ontario Bilingual Schools Question Edited and translated by John Zucchi 22 The Founding Moment Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College William Westfall 23 The Holocaust, Israel, and Canadian Protestant Churches Haim Genizi 24 Governing Charities Church and State in Toronto’s Catholic Archdiocese, 1850–1950 Paula Maurutto 25 Anglicans and the Atlantic World High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the Quebec Connection Richard W. Vaudry 26 Evangelicals and the Continental Divide The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States Sam Reimer 27 Christians in a Secular World The Canadian Experience Kurt Bowen 28 Anatomy of a Seance A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada Stan McMullin 29 With Skilful Hand The Story of King David David T. Barnard 30 Faithful Intellect Samuel S. Nelles and Victoria University Neil Semple 31 W. Stanford Reid An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy Donald MacLeod

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32 A Long Eclipse The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970 Catherine Gidney 33 Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics, 1787–1858 Kyla Madden 34 For Canada’s Sake Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s Gary R. Miedema 35 Revival in the City The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914 Eric R. Crouse 36 The Lord for the Body Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880–1930 James Opp 37 Six Hundred Years of Reform Bishops and the French Church, 1190–1789 J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields 38 The Missionary Oblate Sisters Vision and Mission Rosa Bruno-Jofré 39 Religion, Family, and Community in Victorian Canada The Colbys of Carrollcroft Marguerite Van Die 40 Michael Power The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier Mark G. McGowan 41 The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 Michael Gauvreau 42 Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665–1700 Patricia Simpson

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43 To Heal a Fractured World The Ethics of Responsibility Jonathan Sacks 44 Revivalists Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 Kevin Kee 45 The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Canada Edited by Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert 46 Political Ecumenism Catholics, Jews, and Protestants in De Gaulle’s Free France, 1940–1945 Geoffrey Adams 47 From Quaker to Upper Canadian Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends, 1801–1850 Robynne Rogers Healey 48 The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693–1796 Colleen Gray 49 Canadian Pentecostalism Transition and Transformation Edited by Michael Wilkinson 50 A War with a Silver Lining Canadian Protestant Churches and the South African War, 1899–1902 Gordon L. Heath 51 In the Aftermath of Catastrophe Founding Judaism, 70 to 640 Jacob Neusner 52 Imagining Holiness Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times Justin Jaron Lewis 53 Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774–1874 Calvin Hollett

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54 Into Deep Waters Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Calvinist Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855 Daniel C. Goodwin 55 Vanguard of the New Age The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891–1945 Gillian McCann 56 A Commerce of Taste Church Architecture in Canada, 1867–1914 Barry Magrill 57 The Big Picture The Antigonish Movement of Eastern Nova Scotia Santo Dodaro and Leonard Pluta 58 My Heart’s Best Wishes for You A Biography of Archbishop John Walsh John P. Comiskey 59 The Covenanters in Canada Reformed Presbyterianism from 1820 to 2012 Eldon Hay 60 The Guardianship of Best Interests Institutional Care for the Children of the Poor in Halifax, 1850–1960 Renée N. Lafferty

62 Contesting the Moral High Ground Popular Moralists in Mid-TwentiethCentury Britain Paul T. Phillips 63 The Catholicisms of Coutances Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France, 1350–1789 J. Michael Hayden 64 After Evangelicalism The Sixties and the United Church of Canada Kevin N. Flatt 65 The Return of Ancestral Gods Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation Mariya Lesiv 66 Transatlantic Methodists British Wesleyanism and the Formation of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec Todd Webb 67 A Church with the Soul of a Nation Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada Phyllis D. Airhart

61 In the Name of the Holy Office Joaquim Marques de Araújo, a Brazilian Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline James E. Wadsworth

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A Church with the Soul of a Nation Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada

p h y l l i s d . a ir ha rt

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 isb n isb n isb n isb n

978-0-7735-4248-8 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4249-5 (paper) 978-0-7735-8929-2 (ep df ) 978-0-7735-8930-8 (ep ub)

Legal deposit first quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Airhart, Phyllis D. (Phyllis Diane), 1953–, author A church with the soul of a nation: making and remaking the United Church of Canada / Phyllis D. Airhart. (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion. Series two; no. 67) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isb n 978-0-7735-4248-8 (bound). – is bn 978-0-7735-4249-5 (pbk.). – isb n 978-0-7735-8929-2 (ep df ). – is bn 978-0-7735-8930-8 (e p u b ) 1. United Church of Canada – History – 20th century.  2. Canada – Church history – 20th century.  I. Title.  II. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion. Series two; no. 67 BX 9881.A47 2014

287.9'20904

C 2013-905843-5 C 2013-905844-3

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Dedicated to John Webster Grant (1919–2006) and N.K. Clifford (1930–1990)

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Contents

Figures and Tables  xiii Abbreviations xv Prologue xvii Illustrations follow pages 64 and 186 1  “Friendly Service” to the Nation  3 2  Controversy and the Construction of Identity  30 3  The Mission and the “Machinery”  73 4  The Search for a Faith for Sociable Souls  102 5  Christian Canada in a “New World Order”  126 6  Calling Postwar Canada to Christ  154 7  Uncoupling Christianity and Culture in Canada  196 8  Listening to the World  225 9  Reconceiving the United Church  255 Epilogue 292 Acknowledgments 301 Notes 305 Index 419

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Figures and Tables

F ig u r e s 6.1 Funds raised by the Woman’s Association and the Woman’s Missionary Society, 1926–61  168 8.1 Appointments and withdrawals of missionaries, 1928–65  242 9.1 United Church of Canada membership, 1926–75  257 9.2 Total funds raised for all purposes, 1926–75  257 9.3 Membership in Sunday schools and through-week organizations, 1926–75 264

T a b l es 1.1 Denominational strength before and after church union (as a percentage of the total population of Canada)  10 2.1 Chronology of church union in Canada  33 2.2 Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations before 10 June 1925 and United and non-concurring congregations after 10 June 1925  62 3.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1931 75 3.2 Disbursement of the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, 1928–38 98 6.1 Membership of Woman’s Missionary Society auxiliaries, bands, and affiliated c gi t groups  167 9.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1971 256

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Abbreviations

aots As One That Serves c g it Canadian Girls in Training c c ia Committee on the Church and International Affairs e&ss Evangelism and Social Service fc so Fellowship for a Christian Social Order ncc

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the u sa

n em National Evangelistic Mission rop

Record of Proceedings of the United Church of Canada

sc m

Student Christian Movement

sos

Summer of Service

uca

United Church of Canada Archives

uco

United Church Observer

u c r f United Church Renewal Fellowship u c w United Church Women wa

Woman’s Association

wms Woman’s Missionary Society wc c World Council of Churches y mc a Young Men’s Christian Association y pu

Young People’s Union

y wc a Young Women’s Christian Association

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Prologue Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a ­preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events. History is a construct, she tells her students ... Still, there are definitive moments, moments we use as references, because they break our sense of continuity, they change the direction of time. We can look at these events and we can say that after them things were never the same again. They provide beginnings for us, and endings too. Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“I look upon all the world as my parish,” Methodist John Wesley famously wrote in his journal as he braced himself for clashes with critics of his itinerant preaching that would flout the parish boundaries of his day. “In whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty, to declare unto all that are willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation.”1 Two centuries later, those who joined with Wesley’s spiritual descendents to create the United Church of Canada had a more modest mission in mind. “Canada is our parish,” wrote Presbyterian E.H. Oliver in the first issue of the new denominational magazine. Excited by what its “vision of Dominion-wide service” would mean for the Prairies, the principal of St Andrew’s College in Saskatoon predicted that there would “be not a hamlet or a rural community in the whole land where the United Church will not serve.” It aimed to make a difference in those communities, for it had “a large faith that all of human kind are not only redeemable but, as well, usable for, and in, the Kingdom.”2 Mobilizing those redeemable and usable persons for the sake of God’s Kingdom in Canada was the mission that inspired the church union movement of the early 1900s. Its leaders believed that their

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xviii Prologue

venture in ecumenism would not only improve the operational efficiency of the uniting churches but also create better persons, better communities, and a better nation – a Christian social order, as they often put it. In making the United Church, they envisioned a national church that would relate in a special way to communities across Canada. Historian Sidney Mead once described America as “a nation with the soul of a church,” borrowing a remark that G.K. Chesterton made after visiting the United States in the early 1920s.3 Those advancing the cause of church union had something different in mind for Canada: they were hoping to build a church with the soul of a nation. The church founded in June 1925 was decades in the making. The idea of uniting Protestantism in Canada was conceived after Confederation by Victorian evangelicals who were eager to co-­ operate in meeting the spiritual needs of the young nation. What began as a quest for Protestant cohesion was complicated by competition from the Roman Catholic Church in and beyond Quebec, as well as theological and tactical divisions within its own ranks. Fissures in Anglo-American Protestantism were already appearing by the time formal church union negotiations commenced at the turn of the century. In Canada some of the animosity between ­conservative and progressive evangelicals was transposed into the bitter debate over church union that ensued. Whether the United Church could still claim to be a legitimate heir to the evangelical tradition was a theological issue contested long after other matters were resolved. While the United Church prided itself on being ‘made in Canada,’ its supporters traded ideas freely with church leaders in other countries before and after church union. The views of theologians who promoted a united Protestantism in England and Scotland sounded just as relevant in Canada, where churches were facing the massive challenges of expanding to new communities. The case for church union on a grand scale featured the practical advantages of overcoming the unfortunate divisions that had befallen Christendom after the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Canadian version made much of the fact that dozens of Old World denomi­ nations had already united within their confessional families (as Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists) after their ar­ rival. The next step was obvious: to set aside the doctrinal differences of the past by professing a “common faith” that emphasized

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Prologue xix

their theological harmony. Opponents charged that unionists were creating a creedless church that was little more than a political club, and accused them of theological modernism. The United Church was determined to prove its critics wrong, insisting that there could be adaptation without apostasy. Church union was an ambitious undertaking that tested the limits of inclusion by bringing together networks of missionary enthusiasts, social reformers, and Christian educators. Rather than the theological modernists or social radicals their detractors made them out to be, the most prominent among them were pragmatic progressives whose liberal evangelical theology held that personal faith had social implications. Their commitment to extending the influence of Christian civilization was widely shared among Protestants in and beyond Canada – even by many who opposed union. The United Church in this sense proclaimed a social gospel – not an endorsement of a partisan political or economic agenda, but an orientation to life that connected faith and community. Critics rightly observed that there was a civic dimension to ‘being United’ that was particularly evident during times of national crisis. It rallied its members to  provide assistance to those hardest hit by the Depression, and supported the Second World War and postwar reconstruction as a defence of Christian civilization. For a time it looked as if the United Church was meeting, and even exceeding, expectations. During the 1950s, insiders and onlookers saw it as vibrant, growing, and confident. To be sure, its leaders fretted about secularism and the decline of moral standards that they saw as evidence that western Christendom was becoming “pagan.” And yet its congregations were undoubtedly making a mark on communities across the nation. “In many respects it is as Canadian as the maple leaf and the beaver,” wrote sociologist John Porter in The Vertical Mosaic as he surveyed Canadian society in 19654 – just as the United Church’s situation was about to change. By then the United Church was showing signs of a crisis of institutional identity, complicated by the circumstances of its founding. A century after Confederation, Canada’s political leaders were less convinced than their predecessors that Christianity was a source of cultural cohesion. The notion of a national church, especially one that would represent a shrinking proportion of the population (if postwar demographic patterns were any indication), was problematic in a nation that was becoming noticeably less Protestant. Like

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xx Prologue

efforts to suppress cultural differences by assimilation, even the strategy of blending theological traditions began to sound less laudable; such conciliation smacked of compromise to a youth culture that celebrated diversity and authenticity. One historian has convincingly portrayed Canadian baby boomers as “born at the right time.”5 The United Church, however, seemed born at the wrong time to appeal to them. A pluralistic and segmented world foreshadowed trouble for the liberal evangelical assumptions of its founders. The ‘unmaking’ of their vision of becoming a church “which may fittingly be described national,” as the Basis of Union had put it, occasioned a crisis of mission in the wake of a revolution that brought an end to Christendom in Canada. Its remaking was led by leaders who called for new ways to connect faith and community by “listening to the world.” Taking the secular world as their “parish,” they were convinced that the founding mission needed to be reconceived to meet the spiritual challenges of a New Age in a new Canada. And so the church once born with the soul of a nation found itself waiting to be born again.

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A C H U R C H W IT H T H E SOUL OF A NATI ON

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1 “Friendly Service” to the Nation You can make the argument that there’s no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past ... They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don’t know how it’s going to come out ... You can’t understand them if you don’t understand how they perceived reality and you don’t understand that unless you understand the culture. David McCullough, “The Title Always Comes Last”

The day after the inauguration of the United Church of Canada, author Lucy Maud Montgomery mulled dejectedly over glowing newspaper accounts of its “birth.” In recent years she and her husband, Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, had made no secret of their opposition to the proposed union. Nevertheless, one of his two pastoral charges had voted to unite with the insufferable Methodists in Zephyr, Ontario. They now faced the unwelcome prospect of packing up the family belongings and moving from the Leaskdale manse. Cynical about the claims made for union and embittered by the outcome of the vote, Montgomery wrote in her journal entry later that day: “in Nature the births of living things do not take place in this fashion ... No, ’tis no ‘birth.’ It is rather the w ­ edding of two old churches, both of whom are too old to have offspring.”1 The church that was ceremonially born in Canada on 10 June 1925 is usually cast as a new and youthful player on the international religious stage. Critics often panned it as modernist and depicted its founders as innovators who had been captivated by the novelty of church union. There was within the uniting traditions a strong progressive element, to be sure. Canadian churches were not the first to propose “organic union” between rival confessional families, but such a proposition had never actually been consummated

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4

A Church with the Soul of a Nation

elsewhere on such a large scale.2 Negotiations between the uniting traditions were underway and a Basis of Union outlining its theology and polity was essentially completed even before the international missionary conference in Edinburgh in 1910, widely regarded as marking the beginning of the modern ecumenical movement. Canada was several steps ahead of the rest of Christendom, or so it seemed. Montgomery detected another dynamic: to her the United Church was defective because its thinking was not modern enough. She was not alone in this observation. The conservative tone of the theological statement in the Basis of Union was startling to many at the time, an aberration attributed to the age and outlook of the members of the Joint Committee on Church Union assigned the task of formulating it.3 But another feature, that was in a sense backward-looking, was as crucial for the destiny of the United Church. Union was an effort to invigorate an old idea: the partnership between church and state in building a Christian society. The effort to unite Protestantism was, at least in part, an attempt to create a strong connection ­between Protestantism and patriotism among English-speaking Canadians that paralleled the presumed political influence of the Catholic Church in Quebec.4 An adapted form of Christendom thus lived on after the legal disestablishment of the churches in the mid-­ nineteenth century, preserving the traditional link between piety and place and lending plausibility to the plan to unite evangelical Protestantism in Canada. C.W. Gordon, a Presbyterian minister from Winnipeg better known to most Canadians as novelist Ralph Connor, did not mince words when asked why he supported the creation of a united church: “I’m a church unionist not because I like the union so well but because I am a Canadian and love my country and I see in this union what is best for Canada.”5 No less enthusiastic about the new church as a solution for the challenges facing the nation was Methodist general superintendent S.D. Chown. “If the major Churches of Protestantism cannot unite,” he warned, “the battle which is going on now so definitely for the religious control of our country, will be lost within the next few years.”6 The case for union often detailed the advantages in pragmatic political and economic terms, casting the negotiations in a non-theological light.7 Unionists were stung by the charge that their motives were not “spiritual,” but their enthusiasm for linking the new church’s destiny with Canada’s made them easy targets.

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“Friendly Service” to the Nation

5

Without union, one pro-union pamphlet asserted, “the Church is not able adequately to accomplish her task, which is to make Canada a really Christian nation.” Economics could not be separated from theology, its advocates insisted, and a united church would be “a more efficient instrument for the building up of God’s Kingdom in this land and beyond.”8 The story of church union as told by its supporters highlighted this mission to create a Christian Canada, and a sense of responsibility for the nation created a bond between them. The name they proposed for the church conveyed what they believed to be its promise: a commitment to the wider unity of Christianity and a unique role in Canada. Its founding mission was encapsulated in the words of the general preamble to the Basis of Union, added in 1914 at a meeting to choose the name and make the final revisions: “It shall be the policy of The United Church to foster the spirit of unity in the hope that this settlement of unity may in due time, so far as Canada is concerned, take shape in a Church which may fittingly be described as national.”9 In one sense, the term ‘national church’ spoke to an as-yet-unrealized institution of the future, one that, to borrow the language of the Basis of Union, “may in due time” take shape. But alongside that anticipation was the impulse to be, from the outset, an institution that would relate in a very particular way to the nation of Canada. It would, as one report confidently announced, be “a national Church, National, not in any sense State-controlled, or Statecontrolling, but for the friendly service of the whole nation.”10 A century before church union, a quite different notion of national church had prevailed. As he prepared his sermon marking the  death in 1825 of Jacob Mountain, the first Anglican bishop of Quebec, John Strachan (himself soon to become the first bishop of Toronto) worked from a premise shared by most of the first Europeans to settle in Canada: religious authority would be mediated through a national church duly established and financially supported by the state. To speak of a Christian nation without a national church was a contradiction, Strachan insisted. A country that did not provide public support for religion could hardly be called a Christian nation.11 Strachan had arrived in Upper Canada at a time when the Church of England was still regarded as the established church of British North America. Other religious groups were free to hold their services without interference, and a few enjoyed other privileges. In

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A Church with the Soul of a Nation

Quebec, for instance, the Catholic Church had permission to support itself by collecting tithes. Even after Presbyterians and others successfully argued that the state support they received in their old homeland should be extended to their new setting as well, the Church of England still received the lion’s share of public funding. There were Christians who vehemently opposed this arrangement, since it meant that Methodists, Baptists, and others branded as dissenters received no public funding. Those excluded were not required to pay tithes or taxes to support the established churches, but they chafed under regulations that, for instance, excluded them from some institutions of higher education and prevented their clergy from conducting marriage or funeral services. Eventually, such restrictions were removed; yet there was no agreement on the thorny issue of how to extend state support to all groups. The result was gradual erosion of the benefits that had been dispensed to some churches as a solution to the problem of Protestant pluralism. One by one, privileges were contested and lost as churches in effect shifted from public to private sponsorship. With the sale of the clergy reserves in Canada West (Ontario) in 1854 and the founding of non-sectarian colleges there and in the Maritime provinces, the legal dismantling of established religion in British North America outside Quebec was largely complete.12 Under these new terms, Canada’s churches appeared to flourish and functioned culturally, if not legally, as what historians have variously termed a plural, shadow, or voluntary establishment. In Ontario, for instance, the percentage of the population that indicated no religious preference fell dramatically from 16.7 per cent in 1842 to less than 1 per cent in 1871.13 In 1906, an observer from France, André Siegfried, noted that, to all appearances, “the independence of these churches in regard to the state has been absolutely established in the New World.” But perhaps, he continued, “it would not be safe to say quite so positively that the state’s independence of the churches, even the Protestant ones, is established to the same degree.” While the Protestant clergy did not aim to control the government in the ultramontane Catholic fashion that Siegfried had observed in Quebec, their efforts were directed toward “informing it with their spirit.”14 He judged Protestants incapable of thinking outside of religious categories, and although he was convinced that unbelief among them was common, it was not publicly expressed: to do so would be “almost an act of infidelity to the Anglo-Saxon race.”15

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“Friendly Service” to the Nation

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As Siegfried had discovered, there was more at stake in the complex relationship between church and state than distribution of tangible benefits. Little wonder then that politicians and civic leaders customarily courted churches as partners in promoting social wellbeing. For their part, churches were eager to demonstrate their social usefulness even without the state support once enjoyed by some.16 On the eve of church union negotiations, two entwined issues loomed large and made the United Church’s offer of “friendly service” appealing: uncertainty about Canada’s future as a nation and the arrival of huge numbers of immigrants. The creation of the ­Dominion of Canada in 1867 was a practical political agreement that had evoked little, if any, “national feeling” at the time. Critics dismissed talk of a Canadian identity as ridiculous since it was ­unimaginable to them that people would feel as attached to Ottawa as to London, Paris, Washington, Ireland, or even Quebec.17 Confederation brought together four provinces to form a British colony peopled by British subjects, but strong regional loyalties and cultural differences persisted.18 Quebec presented an obvious challenge, but anti-Confederation forces garnered support in the Maritimes as well. In Ontario Oliver Mowat promoted the cause of provincial rights, while the rebellions led by Louis Riel in 1869 and 1885 indicated resistance to the plan for a Dominion that reached from sea to sea. Political union was no guarantee of prosperity, and many people left to settle in the United States during the downturn of the 1880s. Even some who remained debated whether Canada should join the United States or, at the very least, negotiate a free trade agreement. As leader of the opposition, Wilfrid Laurier feared that “premature dissolution seems to be at hand” as he watched the events of the early 1890s unfold.19 Was it possible to ‘construct’ a nationality for Canada? Many who caught the nation-building fever that gripped the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western world thought so, even while conceding that the obstacles were formidable. Canadian nationalists wrestled to find an identity that embraced Britain’s imperial aspirations, while staking out a place of their own in North America.20 Canada pretended to be “a particularly British place” after Confederation, observes John Ralston Saul.21 New notions of racial  purity and the European inheritance displaced what he calls the “Métis civilization” of British North America, and the image of

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the melting pot supplanted the idea of a widening circle, which had characterized indigenous models of an interdependent society.22 Historians have suggested that even English-speaking Catholics became agents of Anglo-Saxon culture by siding with Protestants on language issues.23 Those who believed that Canada’s future depended on crafting a new Canadian identity found themselves grappling with the prac­ tical implications of scientific theories about racial and ethnic dif­ ferences. Misunderstandings arose, notes historian A.G. Bailey, as institutions and ideas “came to be looked upon as the mystical exfoliation of the genius of particular people.”24 One study of Victorian attitudes toward race concludes that by the mid-nineteenth century, the natural inequality of races was a widely published scientific ‘fact’: “One did not have to read obscure books to know that the Caucasians were innately superior, and that they were responsible for civilization in the world, or to know that so-called inferior races were destined to be overwhelmed or even disappear.”25 That the latter were doomed to extinction appeared to be borne out in North America by the rapidly diminishing numbers of indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada.26 Since scientific evidence also purported to show that mixing with inferior races might compromise racial superiority, the image of North America as a cultural melting pot came under scrutiny.27 The numerical growth of newly freed blacks and of immigrants raised difficult practical questions. How were those who were considered incapable of assimilation to be treated? Was it fair to admit ‘inferior’ races if doing so doomed them to extinction? Evolutionary theory further complicated questions about racial origins by popularizing the belief that certain characteristics were inherited. The eugenics movement, spouting its questionable scientific theories, warned that the present dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race was threatened, particularly when the higher fertility rates of the foreign-born were taken into account.28 Supporters of a more restrictive approach to immigration feared that Britain was dumping ‘unfit’ immigrants in Canada, and urged that they be turned away.29 Biological theories became competing metaphors of cultural assimilation, and attempts to persuade immigrants (at least outside Quebec) to adopt “AngloSaxon culture” vied with anticipation that a “new type” of Canadian was being constructed.

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Complicating matters was a mix of religion, language, and politics that boiled over from time to time. Protestants feared that migration from Quebec meant that the French language and the Catholic r­ eligion were seeping into northwestern Ontario and the Prairies. Catholics likewise worried about demographic trends. Manitoba had entered Confederation in 1870 with Catholics in the majority, but an influx of settlers from Ontario fortified Protestantism in ­western Canada, at least for a time.30 Public school systems became arenas for testing the strength of religious influence. In the 1890s, Manitoba’s decision to replace its dual system of Catholic and Protestant schools with nondenominational schools was controversial enough to become an issue in the federal election of 1896. The question of schools for religious minorities was still contentious when Saskatchewan and Alberta became provinces in 1905.31 As Protestant churches raced to provide pastoral care for new communities, the Catholic leaders complained about “proselytism.” Other disputes hit even closer to home. A papal declaration, Ne Tereme, that came into effect in 1908 stated that only marriages performed in the presence of a Catholic priest were valid, raising questions about the legitimacy of “mixed marriages” performed by Protestant clergy.32 Whether the Catholic or Protestant side would be able to claim the advantages that came from statistical dominance was far from clear at the turn of the century. Sweeping demographic changes added to the uncertainty about ­Canada’s future. Between 1881 and 1901 the percentage of the population born outside of Canada held steady at 13 to 14 per cent, almost identical to the number of foreign-born in the United States. Perhaps the most troubling demographic trend for many years after Confederation was the number of people leaving Canada for the United States, which had resulted in a net loss in the migration process. The 1911 census figures indicated a welcome change: for the first time since Confederation, Canada showed a net gain in migration. But some found cause for concern as they scrutinized the population profile. Continuing a trend in the census figures issued ten years earlier was a startling increase in the number of immigrants, many of them speaking neither French nor English. The percentage of foreign-born in Canada had jumped to 22 per cent, an even more shocking number when compared to U.S. statistics for the same period, which showed only a slight increase from previous levels of immigration.33

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Table 1.1 Denominational strength before and after church union (as a percentage of the total population of Canada) 1901 Congregational

1911

1921

5.27

4.73

3.50

Methodist

17.07

14.99

13.19

Presbyterian

15.69

15.49

16.04

United Church of Canada

1931

8.39 1 19.44

1  The strength of the Presbyterian numbers came as a surprise, since the final vote on church union would have projected a lower number relative to the size of the United Church. C.E. Silcox suspected that many members of United Church congregations, especially in areas of western Canada where the controversy had not reinforced the distinctions, continued for a time to think of themselves as ‘Presbyterian.’ For a comparison of the census of 1931 with church statistics on membership, Sunday school enrolments, funerals, etc., and an analysis of what he called the “lost battalion,” see Silcox, Church Union in Canada, 438–43. Source: Census of Canada (1931), Table 36.

For Protestants there was even more cause for anxiety. Between 1901 and 1911 the Catholic Church had increased its membership by 603,441, to nearly 2.3 million. The Church of England, too, could feel pleased that its membership had grown by 361,523 to just over a million. However, other Protestant groups had not fared as well: Congregationalists increased membership by 5,761 (to 34,054), Presbyterians by 272,882 (to 1,115,324), and Methodists by only 163,006 ­(dropping them, at 1,079,882, to second place among Protestant churches).34 Evangelical Protestants who were leading moral crusades to make Canada “God’s Dominion” were enjoying what John Webster Grant describes as the peak of their power and influence; but as he wryly puts it, just when they seemed to have succeeded in implanting the ideals of temperance and discipline, they saw Canada “inundated with people who had never heard of the virtues of total abstinence and threatened the rigid Canadian Sunday in the bargain.”35 These new immigrants landed at a time when a more militant Catholicism, linked to a nationalist movement in French Canada and energized by ultramontane values, had a different vision for the nation’s future.36 Assessing the situation in 1881, Thomas-Alfred Bernier, the mayor of Sainte-Agathe, Manitoba, was optimistic: “Happily for all, for immigrants as well as for children of the soil, there is in the Dominion of Canada a fruitful and vigorous race, with

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a common origin, identical interests, glorious traditions, a common language and a common faith, believing itself to have been called to a great mission and living under God’s protection.” His Protestant co-religionists would have taken exception to his prediction that “this race, which is to be found in all the provinces of Confederation, and which is its keystone, is the French-Canadian people. It is the one that will prove to be the dynamic element in this empire which will be neither English nor French, but solely and gloriously Canadian.”37 Protestant church leaders imagined that the new type of Canadian would bear far more resemblance to the values and virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race. However, even the progressives among them struggled to come to terms with the myriad issues raised by nonAnglo-Saxon immigration.38 Historian Jackson Lears finds that social Christianity in the United States was tinged with both idealism and imperialism: “Progress and Providence converged in the rhetoric of empire.”39 That was the presumption in Canada as well, with progressives hopeful that changing the social environment would ameliorate social problems; ethnic differences could and should be transcended, and moral and social uplift would result in racial uplift.40 As Methodist lawyer Newton Wesley Rowell told those who gathered in Toronto at Victoria University for a meeting of the Laymen’s Missionary Movement, settlement of new territories in the north and west provided “a home not in a southern clime which may breed a weak and effeminate race, but under skies and a c­ limate which must develop a strong, a progressive and a conquering people.”41 Like many of his day, Rowell believed that the greater part of the population of Canada might soon be found west of the Great Lakes, and the ideals of that region would determine the future of the nation. At first glance, this was a disturbing prospect. Rowell noted that the social, political, and religious institutions of non-English-s­peaking immigrants differed from those who had come from the British Isles or the United States. Men with little previous experience of representative government would soon be able to vote and, he warned, “their votes will be just as potent as yours and mine in ­determining the character of the men who shall represent us in Parliament and the nature of the laws under which we must live.” However, as a progressive, Rowell believed in the power of the new environment: “Many of these people have now, for the first time, a real chance for social

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and moral improvement. They provide the raw material out of which we may make good citizens if we but do our duty.” The public schools, the press, and government had a role to play, but only the church, with its Gospel of Christ, could make an appeal “to the deepest impulses or the most powerful motives.”42 For progressives like Rowell, confidence that old differences would be transcended in a new land was a widely shared egalitarian notion. By 1908, W.B. Creighton, the new editor of the Methodist denominational paper, was using the columns of the Christian Guardian to send the same message. The church had a responsibility to work with the state to provide educational and religious services for the immigrant today; otherwise, they were likely to become a burden tomorrow. Creighton praised city missions like the ones run by C.T. Scott in Montreal and J.S. Woodsworth in Winnipeg for “conforming to our type multitudes of alien races, and making of great motley groups a unified and coherent people worthy of the name ‘Canadian.’”43 Principal J.W. Sparling of Wesley College in Winnipeg wanted to leave no doubt in young readers’ minds about the enormity of the task facing the churches. Penning a foreword to J.S. Woodsworth’s Strangers within Our Gates, a study text for the youth department of the Methodist Missionary Society, he wrote in 1909: “I can with confidence commend this pioneering Canadian work on the subject to the careful consideration of those who are desirous of understanding and grappling with this great national danger. For there is a danger and it is national! Either we must educate and elevate the incoming multitudes or they will drag us and our children down to a lower level. We must see to it that the civilization and ideals of Southeastern Europe are not transplanted to and perpetuated on our virgin soil.”44 Sparling’s apprehension was broadly felt, even among Protestants who rejected church union as the most effective way of meeting the challenge of immigration. Speaking to the Presbyterian Pre-Assembly Congress in 1913, Rev. W.D. Reid of Montreal announced to those gathered that Canada was facing “the greatest immigration problem that has ever confronted any nation.” The problem, he explained, was that over 20 per cent of the newcomers were non-Anglo-Saxons, “who can not speak our language, have no sympathy with our ideals, and are foreigners in every sense of the term.” His address painted a bleak picture of the foreigner: illiterate, intemperate, ignorant,

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diseased, oppressed, draining charitable resources when unemployed and undercutting wages when employed, carrying unhelpful political baggage such as atheistic socialist ideas, and disproportionately tending toward crime, insanity, and pauperism. While he conceded that they were “often deeply religious,” he described their practices as “a mere caricature of religion.” Reid gave his audience something to ponder: “The question we have to ask ourselves seriously at this moment, is will the foreigner paganize us or shall we Christianize him?”45 Many worried that the churches were doing far too little to Christianize such foreigners. Presbyterian J.R. Mutchmor lambasted members of downtown churches for dealing with the ‘problem’ by moving away from it and faulted theological schools for failing to equip ministers to assimilate people from other cultures. In his master’s thesis, written while preparing for the ministry in New York City, the young Canadian wrestled with the “question of the nonassimilating Canadian,” specifically those from continental Europe and Asia. He wondered, “How can these people be Canadianized when the Canadian workingman hates a dago or a bohunk? How can the church help when so many so-called Christians thank God that they are not as other men are nor yet as this dago?” Still Mutchmor’s opinion was not atypical of early twentieth-century progressive opinion when he insisted, “Our King, our flag and our throne must remain uppermost in the hearts of the people of Canada at any cost, and the wages and standards of Canadians must increase and develop and the British ideals must be our ideals forever.”46 Few presented the new Canadian more sympathetically than Congregationalist William Gunn. He identified the obstacles that immigrants routinely faced: transition to a new way of life, low wages and slum conditions, exploitation, corrupting influences, alienation from their children who adapt more easily to their new home, competition with other immigrants for jobs, ridicule, and loss of faith. The question for Gunn was not whether the immigrant would be assimilated – that was assumed – but what values would be transmitted in that process. He recognized the power of materialism to bind together those who otherwise seemed to have little in common. To his list of what he called the five great assimilating forces (the church, the railway, the school, politics, and daily life), he added “one little one” that showed him to be a perceptive observer of new cultural trends: “the mail order catalogue which, from Vancouver to

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Cape Breton, with its illustrations and prices, speaks all languages and tends to reduce us all to one dead level of outward uniformity.” Against the negative assimilating power of consumerism stood the church, which had the potential within itself to become “the greatest assimilating agency of all” with its belief in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.47 The differences between evangelism, social service, and assimilation were sometimes small. Writing as Ralph Connor, C.W. Gordon often used his stories to convey the message that immigrants (even Scottish Highlanders) should abandon their old ways and be assimilated to a more ‘universal’ identity.48 The fictional Prairie missionary in Gordon’s The Foreigner expressed these values well. He couldn’t preach much, he admitted, but his “main line” was “the kiddies.” “I can teach them English, and then I am going to doctor them, and, if they’ll let me, teach them some of the elements of domestic science; in short, do anything to make them good Christians and good Canadians, which is the same thing.”49 Supporters of church union hoped that many would draw a further conclusion: constructing a new type of church was the best way to make them both good Christians and good Canadians.50 The formula for building a united church mirrored the blueprint for building a united country. Unionists considered religious identity, like national identity, malleable; assimilation was a tactic for managing differences, whether cultural or theological. Widely shared assumptions about cultural homogeneity made the idea of a united church plausible in the context of early twentieth-century Canada and shaped its founding narrative. Those who made the case for union were convinced that they would build a strong church by overcoming the limitations of difference; they sought unity in what they could believe and accomplish together. In this sense there was nothing mysterious or new about making a united church: it would be built from the stuff at hand. And at hand were networks of support for the mission of building a Christian nation – indeed, a Christian world. Robert Falconer, president of the University of Toronto, credited the surprisingly swift formulation of the Basis of Union (once negotiations got underway in 1904) to a movement that was already “subconscious in the minds of many.” Writing in 1913, he described the overextended churches as caught in a crunch that manifested a

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broader national problem. “Canada is calling herself a nation and is boldly claiming to be judged by the national standards of the most highly developed Western civilization,” he observed, yet needed to “provide at extremely short notice for all the organization of nationhood.” Church union was not unlike Confederation in its pragmatic nature, he argued: just as federal union was the result of provincial necessities, so church union would be “the result not of theory but of practical urgency.”51 But the ‘theory’ of union was not new either; it had been the topic of theological discussion for decades. Underpinning Christian nation-building (and often overlooked as a cradle for social Christianity) was an influential Victorian movement that saw Christian unity as pivotal to its vision of a better world.52 A plan for a national church in England that would include all but the Catholics and Unitarians was described in Principles of Church Reform (1833)53 and vigorously promoted in Anglican circles by Thomas Arnold, a prominent leader in the Broad Church movement.54 Later William H. Fremantle, another leading proponent of a national church, blended Arnold’s principles for Christian unity with theologian F.D. Maurice’s Christian socialist concerns.55 In Fremantle’s view, having “one great Church” in Western Europe was a step toward a universal church that would assimilate “by degrees the more backward nations.”56 His call for a national church caught the attention of American Episcopal priest William Reed Huntington, who put it in terms better suited to the disestablished North American context in A National Church, published in 1898.57 In Canada, the notion of a national church was, in John Webster Grant’s assessment, a “spectacular success” by the end of the nineteenth century.58 Topping any list of those deserving credit for its currency was George Monro Grant. For over a quarter of a century, first as minister of St Matthew’s Presbyterian Church in Halifax and later as principal of Queen’s University in Kingston, he sowed the idea of a united Protestant church.59 Whether he had read the writings of Arnold or Fremantle directly, or was introduced to the argument for a national church by his mentor Norman Macleod,60 the ideas of the British movement for Christian unity were familiar to Grant. His enthusiasm was evident in his widely reported and oftenquoted keynote address at the first meeting of the Canadian branch of the Evangelical Alliance in Montreal in 1874. Speaking on the theme “The Church of Canada – Can Such a Thing Be?,” he pictured

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a new church that would capture the best qualities of the major Protestant denominations: order and conservatism from the Anglicans; enthusiasm, zeal for missions, and adaptability from the Methodists; insistence on the rights of the individual from the Baptists; the love of liberty from the Congregationalists; and the  well-knit strength and high regard for the Word of God from the Presbyterians. He went so far as to hope that even Catholics might someday be drawn to such a church by their love of unity.61 After playing a leading role in uniting his own denomination in 1875, Grant saw union with the Methodists as an obvious next step. Writing in the Canadian Methodist Magazine after Methodism consolidated in 1884, he observed that in matters of Christian unity, the Canadian churches were, thanks to their environment, already in advance of their counterparts in “the mother land” and even “the go-ahead United States.”62 Prospects for such a union were promising since Methodist polity was, in his view, essentially Presbyterian, and “verbal differences” were insignificant when gauged against problems facing both. Union would, furthermore, be “a step towards the formation of that regenerated society for which we pray.”63 In Grant’s approach, creating a regenerated society through cooperation in missions and social reform was pivotal to overcoming debilitating theological and organizational differences. Preaching before his synod in 1866, he called for a “large liberty” and “cooperation in labour, and labouring together with God, rather than enforced agreement of opinion on subjects that may be relegated to the domain of philosophy, politics or science” as the “true and scriptural basis” for unity.64 Such co-operation, suggests historian Carl Berger, is the key to understanding both Grant’s imperialism and his ecumenism. The formation of a national church in Canada that would become a model for the reunification of churches worldwide was his most profound conviction, adds Berger: “Just as the union of the churches was the precondition for the Christianization of the social order, so too the unity of the Empire was necessary to maintain a political power making for righteousness on earth.”65 Grant’s imperialist ideals were couched in religious terms; his evolutionary view of history saw the imperialist advance as part of God’s design for bringing those it protected under its Christianizing and civilizing influence.66 An eager, energetic, and optimistic man, described by his first ­biographer as being gifted with “consummate cleverness,” Grant

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exerted, by all accounts, remarkable influence over others: “His ­fiery purpose inspired their ardour, his strong wisdom compelled their respect, his personal charm engaged their liking.”67 Remembered as one of the most influential Presbyterians of his day and one of the most significant leaders in the country,68 Grant inspired both his own generation and the next through a network that was interdenominational and intergenerational in character. His writings and the Queen’s Theological Alumni Conferences that he organized once he moved to Kingston influenced ministers from his own denomination and appealed to others, like Methodist Salem Bland.69 When he died in May 1902, it was reported that an even larger and more diverse group of persons came to Kingston to  mourn his passing than had gathered there years earlier for Sir John A. Macdonald’s funeral.70 Whether through coincidence or contrivance, many of Grant’s friends and associates found themselves in positions of public influence as the new nation of Canada and its Protestant churches were weighing their options for the future. A generation of leaders receptive to his influence became what John S. Moir dubbed “one of the most important exports of the Maritime provinces to the rest of Canada.”71 In the fall of 1894, a group of mostly young Presbyterian ministers resolved to meet several times as “The Round Table” to enjoy each other’s intellectual and social companionship.72 At the head of the table, in the place of “King Arthur,” was Daniel Miner Gordon, Grant’s friend and junior, who earlier that year had been appointed principal of Presbyterian College in Halifax. The other dozen or so theological “knights” were, as one of them later put it, men of “obscure beginnings” who went on to “positions of great prominence and responsibility in the wide Dominion.”73 Among those seated around the table were Alfred Gandier, Clarence Mackinnon, Robert Falconer, Walter Murray, and A.S. Morton, who first used their publications and later their positions to air their views on Christian unity, and promoted ideas that would become the core of the rationale for church union.74 Unlike most of the other knights, Alfred Gandier had not been raised in the Maritimes. His link to the ideals and traditions of the region was his relationship with Grant. His biographer speculated that Gandier, a graduate of Queen’s University, might well have heard one of principal Grant’s frequent challenges to those who

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studied theology there: “You and I are not responsible for the existing divisions of Christendom, but I beg you not to accept ordination until you are convinced that should you by word or deed perpetuate these divisions by one unnecessary day you will have been unworthy of your ordination.”75 Grant’s influence was decisive in landing Gandier the position as pastor of Fort Massey Presbyterian Church in Halifax in 1893. There had been a difficult two-year search to fill the position. Grant’s recommendation of Gandier as one of Queen’s most brilliant graduates was behind the congregation’s decision to issue the pastoral call to him.76 Gandier’s approach to resolving theological differences later became the basis for finding agreement among the uniting traditions: focus on a common faith. “The time has actually come,” he wrote in the Presbyterian magazine Theologue in 1899, “when Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists can sit around a table and deliberately agree to a common statement of faith in relation to every doctrine of fundamental importance.”77 His mentor Grant had made a similar point in an article published shortly before his death, predicting that “as preliminary to organic union,” churches would “rewrite their confessions, adapt them to our own time, and find out the extent of the common ground on which Christians now stand.”78 Clarence Mackinnon, who would one day become principal of Presbyterian College, presented Theologue readers with the skeleton of a proposal for how to find that common ground. He conceded that union between confessional families was more complex than the Presbyterian or Methodist unions had been. Churches were happy to unite, “provided the other denominations would only be so obliging as to lay aside their peculiar beliefs and practices, and to stoop to its yoke, if not actually to make a humble confession of their errors and do a flattering penance for the schisms of the past.” He enunciated an organizational principle that was assumed in later negotiations: “If there is to be union, it must take place along the only possible lines on which great bodies can unite, a readiness to abandon individual peculiarities and a willingness to appropriate whatever has proved itself effective in the work of other churches.” Mackinnon believed that without a willingness to sacrifice old identities, talk of union, however eloquent, would be futile. Presbyterians would have to modify their approach to church administration, he predicted, and even their confession of faith would have to be “thrown into the crucible and melted down.”79

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Grant’s death in 1902 set in motion a chain of events that scattered members of the Round Table across Canada as they moved into new positions of responsibility. The first to go was King Arthur: Daniel Gordon left Presbyterian College to succeed his mentor as principal of Queen’s University. Robert Falconer turned down an opportunity to teach New Testament at Knox College in Toronto, instead replacing Gordon as principal of Presbyterian College; when he moved in 1907, it was to become president of the University of Toronto. According to his biographer, Falconer was nominated for the university post by J.A. Macdonald, an acquaintance who was editor of the Toronto Globe. The summer before, the two had joined efforts to promote the cause of church union at the Presbyterian General Assembly.80 Connections with other influential networks were forged in Toronto. Living next door to Falconer was Joseph Flavelle, an enthusiastic Methodist supporter of church union. Falconer was also reunited with his old friend Alfred Gandier (whose sister he had married), who had accepted a call to St James Square Presbyterian Church in 1900. Members of Gandier’s new congregation included J.A. Macdonald and William Caven, then principal of Knox College (and a strong supporter of church union as well).81 Eight years later Gandier would succeed Caven as principal of Knox College and hold the position until church union saw the creation of a new faculty of theology; he was the first principal of what became Emmanuel College in 1928. Some members of the Round Table moved even further west. ­Walter Murray, a member of St Matthew’s Presbyterian Church in Halifax, left his teaching position in philosophy at Dalhousie University in 1908 to become the first president of the University of Saskatchewan.82 A.S. Morton accepted Murray’s invitation to join his faculty. Morton would decisively influence how the church union movement was remembered and interpreted with publication of The Way to Union in 1912.83 Clarence Mackinnon accepted a call to Westminster Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg in 1905, but returned to Halifax in 1909 to become principal of Presbyterian College.84 The power of the Round Table network in Presbyterian circles is suggested by N.K. Clifford’s observation that the Presbyterian minister who supported union was typically a graduate of Presbyterian College in Montreal, Queen’s, Presbyterian College in Halifax, or one of the colleges in the West. If a graduate of Knox supported

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union, he likely attended the school after 1908.85 (It is perhaps more than a coincidence that Gandier had arrived as principal that same year.) Similar networks of support for Christian unity were forming within Methodism and Congregationalism, often criss-crossing denominational lines. When Nathanael Burwash addressed Methodists from around the world who gathered in Toronto for the 1911 Ecumenical Conference, he suggested that God had used “union revivals” to ­prepare the churches in Canada for unity. Fifty years earlier, he recalled, “Methodists thought Presbyterians without much religion and Presbyterians thought Methodists ignorant and fanatical.” Uniting for revival meetings brought their religious world views together for at least a few weeks each year. “The old dividing dogmas were forgotten by us all as our hearts were quickened and filled with the central vital truths of the common gospel.”86 Burwash also witnessed the impact of collaborative theological education on inter-denominational ventures. With the organization of federated t­heological colleges in Toronto, Montreal, and later Winnipeg, the classroom experience was a concrete reminder of common ties that mitigated denominational particularities. Writing in 1894, a few years after Victoria College moved from Cobourg to federate with the University of Toronto, he described co-operation between denominational schools as the “divine leaven of unity” that was challenging “polemical theology.”87 Thousands of men and women who joined voluntary associations to promote missions and social reform formed similar bonds across denominational lines. Their hope of infusing public life with Christian ideals found concrete expression in evangelistic missions and reform movements at home and abroad. The Evangelical Alliance; Bible and tract societies; Sunday schools; home and foreign missionary societies for laymen and laywomen; temperance societies; the Lord’s Day Alliance; and youth organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (ym ca), the Young Women’s Christian Association (y wc a ) , Christian Endeavor, and the Student Volunteer Movement were among the organizations that offered opportunities to work together for a common cause.88 These coteries of future unionists, many of them lay leaders in local congregations, were linked to burgeoning denominational bureaucracies comprised of church executives who were charged with the responsibility of making Canada “His Dominion.”89

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Among their ranks was S.D. Chown, a Methodist minister later dubbed the architect of church union. By the time he was appointed first secretary of Methodism’s Department of Temperance and Moral Reform in 1902, he had already served as president of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity.90 Chown’s new position put him at the forefront of efforts to regenerate society, and he easily grafted church union to social concerns. What set the Canadian social gospel apart from British and American varieties, argues William Magney, was its passionate nationalism and eagerness to rise to the new social and economic challenges facing Canada. In fact, he suggests, Methodism’s approach to moral and social reform “might better be termed a ‘National’ than a ‘Social’ Gospel.”91 Either way, Chown’s variety of evangelicalism fit easily with the enhanced role in the life of the nation that unionists saw for a national church. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists across the country found themselves working together and thinking about their mission in similar terms. Before and during the time that the Basis of Union was being formulated, a web of inter-denominational connections linked leaders of evangelistic, missionary, and social reform movements; theological educators; and church executives.92 The extent of their rootedness in the religious world of late-Victorian Canada is important in the story of church union; however, it’s a point often left out in favour of an emphasis on the novelty of their position. Equally significant in launching church union (and thus provoking the controversy that ensued) was that these homegrown proponents effectively tied the mission of ‘Christianizing’ the West to an old and widely shared evangelical assumption: religion was essential to national and global well-being. Novelty was not the only charge brought against the church union movement; it was also dogged by criticism that efficiency was uppermost in the minds of its supporters and theology of comparatively little consequence. Detractors missed an important theological conviction that unionists shared: that the great truths of Christianity could be framed in terms of a common faith. Burwash’s advice to his colleagues on the Doctrine committee echoed Gandier’s earlier suggestion in the Theologue: that the statement be short, summarizing essential beliefs rather than formulating them dogmatically in either Arminian or Calvinist terms.93 Burwash and those who worked with him to craft the doctrinal section of the Basis of Union were not

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offended to hear their work described as a reflection of the theological idiom of their day; after all, they were not attempting to write a creed for all time but for their own time. Burwash would have had little quarrel with Presbyterian T.B. Kilpatrick’s interpretation of their task: “Creed revision is the inherent right, and the continual duty, of a living Church.” He described the standing of the newly minted articles in modest terms: “We have sought, humbly and earnestly, to serve our own generation; and now we hand on the result of our toil, with prayer and hope, to the generation following.”94 The importance of building on common principles, rather than preserving of peculiarities, was at the forefront of discussions from the outset. Gandier later recalled the Joint Committee’s attempts to find common ground. “Have we a common faith?” was always the key question. Early on, the founders had realized that “to be real and effective it [church union] must be based on common convictions and deep spiritual affinities.”95 This was a theme sounded three times in the short theological preamble to the Basis of Union: the articles were “the substance of the Christian faith as commonly held among us”; they affirmed the evangelical doctrines held in common by the uniting traditions; and the statement itself was “a brief summary of our common faith.” Reiteration of the virtues and values associated with this common faith punctuated the long process of negotiation, voting, and legislation.96 The uniting churches had come to Canada as different religious traditions, much like different nationalities. Together they would create something distinctively Canadian out of the beliefs that were shared in common. This became the storyline of The Way to Union, with its interminable subtitle “Being a Study of the Principles of the Foundation and of the Historic Development of the Christian Church as Bearing on the Proposed Union of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational Churches in Canada.” As Morton developed the plot, church union was the obvious next chapter to the story of Christianity in Canada. The customary account of the origins of a religious tradition usually emphasized what set it apart from others. Morton added a twist to his tale by highlighting what Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists had in common. As he followed their converging paths to Canada, his aim was to persuade readers that apparent differences “tend to disappear with the circumstances that created them, and their great fundamental unities will be brought into the clear

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light of day.”97 Overcoming such differences was central to the ­story of the United Church’s forbears as the first generation of church union supporters related it. Unionists followed Morton’s lead and airbrushed their confessional family pictures to enhance the resemblance. The Presbyterians, the oldest of the uniting parties, were a case in point. John Calvin had not only advanced a particular theological position but also devised a polity that expressly sought to put in place a representative approach to church government that included lay power and participation (well suited to Geneva’s republican spirit). Calvin’s representative style of church government had been modified as it moved from Geneva around the world. In North America, for instance, it had typically evolved into local congregational sessions, regional presbyteries and synods, and national ­assemblies.98 Before uniting with others, Presbyterians in Canada had already consolidated over a dozen Presbyterian-type churches brought to Canada, mostly from the United States or the British Isles.99 Once nagging differences over the relationship of church and state (the initial cause of friction in many cases) were recognized as inconsequential in the Canadian setting, Presbyterians found much upon which they could agree: the Westminster Confession of Faith, its Catechisms, and Directory of Public Worship, as well as a common form of church government.100 Most would have agreed with R.C. Chalmers’s identification of Presbyterian principles: an emphasis on the sovereignty of God, salvation by grace through faith, the priesthood of all believers that found expression in a church ruled by presbyters, an approach to the sacrament of the Eucharist that avoided both Catholic and Lutheran “magic” and Zwingli’s memorialism, and a recognition of the state as called to fulfill a divine purpose (and to be resisted only when it acted in violation of Christian conscience).101 The stereotypically dour Presbyterians had little reason to be gloomy about their future in Canada as they considered union. Buoyed by an influx of Scottish immigrants, they edged past the Methodist Church in the 1911 census and became the largest Protestant denomination in the country. Assessing the situation in Canada a few years after church union, former Congregationalist C.E. Silcox considered them to have been “perhaps the most influential Protestant denomination in the Dominion – influential in scholarship, in general culture, in numbers, in the wealth and economic

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success of its members.”102 They were particularly proud of the influence of their theological and liberal arts colleges, described by one historian as “nurseries both of religion and learning.”103 This was symbolically acknowledged at the inauguration service when the Presbyterians identified their inheritance and gift to the United Church as “the manifestation of the Spirit in vigilance for Christ’s Kirk and Covenant, in care for the spread of education and devotion to sacred learning.”104 Next, Morton introduced the Congregationalists, who traced their origins to the Puritan movement within the Church of England. Their theology, too, owed much to the influence of Calvin and the Reformed tradition, but as the name ‘Congregationalist’ implied, their polity gave each local congregation autonomy. Unlike the Presbyterians in Scotland who had created a national church governed by presbytery representatives, the Congregationalists formed local fellowships whose covenant with God and each other bound them together. They sought the right to be free of outside interference, in defiance of the direction of England’s established church.105 Their spiritual forebears, the Puritans (viewed by some as notable for their intolerance), held the right of conscience on religious matters as a cherished principle. At the time of the Puritan Revolution, Oliver Cromwell (an Independent whom Morton considered part of the Congregationalist family) had proposed that in order to protect freedom of consciences, it might be necessary to have liberty for all religions. Morton noted that this concept, so shocking to Presbyterians when first proposed, was now largely accepted in Canada. The major Protestant denominations had since grown closer and now stood where the Congregationalists had first begun: with the understanding that the church was a voluntary association.106 Congregationalists arrived in Canada in the early days of mideighteenth-century colonial settlement, but struggled to survive. Many of the Congregationalist churches organized by settlers from New England collapsed when their members returned to the United States after the American Revolution. Some congregations then exercised their autonomy and joined other denominations. In the aftermath of the New Light revivals in Nova Scotia, many became Baptist churches, while theological affinities with Presbyterianism made closer association with that denomination an attractive ­option for others.107 The invitation to consider union with the

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Presbyterians and Methodists came as a welcome development for the remaining Congregationalists. Despite their small size (about 1 per cent of the population), the Congregationalists shaped key positions taken by the new church. They are remembered for their insistence that candidates for the ministry not be required to subscribe to the doctrinal statement of the Basis of Union as a test of the correctness of their theology; it was enough to be “in essential agreement.” They proposed that ordinands instead undergo a rigorous examination of their religious experience and theological beliefs, for which a mere creed could not substitute. While critics saw this as proof of the United Church’s theology laxity, it was actually a way to honour an old and fundamental principle of Congregationalism: that a person must be free to express the truths of the Christian faith in his or her own words, not in the words of a fixed creed.108 At the inaugural service, the Congregationalists identified the gift of their inheritance to the United Church as “the manifestation of the Spirit in the liberty of prophesying, the love of spiritual freedom and the enforcement of civic justice.”109 The Methodists, too, owed their distinctive features to a different time and place. Their rise was the most significant institutional ­expression of the evangelical revivals that swept across the British Isles and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Industrial Revolution, with its large-scale social and economic changes, was accompanied by dramatic increases in population not only in London but also in Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, and other new centres of industry. Since existing parish boundaries could be changed only by legislation, new church development failed to keep pace with the mushrooming population. Convinced that the Church of England was not meeting the spiritual needs of the people, John Wesley was eager to explore alternatives to the parish system, and sent out preachers who organized bands of like-minded folk sharing a “desire to flee from the wrath to come.” Organized at first under the umbrella of the Church of England, these societies were the scene of a flurry of evangelistic efforts. Wesley’s lay preachers first used Anglican churches as their base, but found themselves unwelcome there. Following George Whitefield’s example of preaching in the open field to the miners at Kingswood, Wesley took to the fields in 1739.

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The early Methodists, including Wesley’s own family, thought of themselves as loyal members of the Church of England. Finding little in the Thirty-Nine Articles to quarrel with, Wesley abridged them to twenty-five in 1784 for the use of Methodist societies in America, and they came to be regarded as Methodism’s doctrinal statement.110 Its piety, nurtured in class meetings as well as in Sunday worship, found theological expression in hymns and sermons, with Wesley’s fifty-two “Standard Sermons” being regarded as an authoritative ­explication of Methodist theology.111 A distinctive piety grew principally out of Methodism’s emphasis on conversion coupled with efforts to discern Wesley’s understanding of holiness or Christian perfection (an attainment which he himself was reluctant to claim). Methodism presented a theological alternative to Calvinism, and its doctrine that God would forgive all who earnestly sought redemption softened the inscrutability and finality of predestination.112 In recognition of its distinctive approach to the religious life and practice, the inauguration service received as Methodism’s contribution “the manifestation of the Spirit in evangelical zeal and human redemption, and the ministry of sacred song.”113 Wesley had hoped to renew the Church of England with his efforts. Instead he provoked a crisis. Anglican clergy were reluctant to administer the sacraments in Methodist chapels, a disturbing turn of events for those who believed, as did Wesley, in the importance of Communion. Even more pressing were the needs of Methodist societies in North America after the American Revolution disrupted the work of churches with British ties. Faced with these practical difficulties, Wesley decided to ordain some lay preachers for the chapels and to consecrate Thomas Coke as superintendent for the mission in North America. Coke assumed the role of a bishop, a step that irrevocably set the movement on a course toward separation from the Church of England after Wesley’s death in 1791. Methodism splintered as its leaders quarrelled over differing interpretations of Wesley’s message and methods.114 Talk of merging these streams of Protestantism had long been in the air. Morton claimed that John Wesley himself had predicted that as soon as he was dead the Methodists would become “a regular Presbyterian Church.” Instead, his movement had survived and successfully competed with Presbyterians and Congregationalists in Canada. Still, the differences that remained were small when placed alongside the enormous challenge of shrinking resources and keen

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competition. Each of the three streams could trace a series of mergers that had brought dozens of denominations together along confessional lines.115 After nine unions and a less formal incorporation of a number of other Reformed groups, the Presbyterian Church in Canada was formed in 1875. The Methodist Church (Canada, Newfoundland, and Bermuda), a culmination of eight unions, was completed in 1884. In 1906 Congregationalists in Ontario and Quebec joined those from the Maritimes to form the Congregational Union of Canada. Meanwhile, the hopes of the unionists found concrete expression in a series of agreements that resulted in unions at the local congregational level. The challenge of meeting the religious needs of the Prairies was crucial to the case for church union. In his new position at the University of Saskatchewan, Walter Murray observed firsthand the variety of European religious traditions – Scandinavian Lutherans, Ruthenians, Uniate Catholics, Polish Catholics, Doukhobors – whose members rarely saw a minister from their own tradition. Most had come from countries where membership in a state church was assumed; arriving in Canada, argued Murray, they would be predisposed to being served by a church perceived as national. He noted that racial differences, far from being a barrier to co-operation, actually acted as a catalyst in promoting union: “Racial differences, the co-operative spirit, the community interest are driving together all who prize religion and patriotism.” Acknowledging the significance of the many union churches already being formed, he predicted that “unless Union comes soon they will develop into a new church and will sweep Western Canada.”116 At first, local union congregations tended to affiliate with one (or sometimes two) of the uniting traditions, but as church union drew closer, many remained independent. The result was what C.E. Silcox described as “an ecclesiastical omelette that could only be ‘unscrambled’ by organic union.” He cited a 1923 study that put the number of pastoral charges where some form of union was already in effect at 1,244; over 3,000 preaching points, most of them in western Canada, already thought of themselves as part of a united church.117 At the inauguration ceremony, the collection of these young local  union congregations was recognized alongside the three well-established traditions for “furtherance of community-life within the Kingdom of God, and of the principle, in things essential unity, and in things secondary liberty.”118

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Rather than the modern pacesetters they are often made out to be, those who first set out to unite Protestantism by creating a national church should perhaps more aptly be thought of as accidental innovators. Their talent was less for originality than for adapting ideas already at hand; they traded on familiar ideas that seemed new when fashioned to meet the challenges and opportunities of the twentieth century. The impulse of the previous century to unite a divided Christendom became a bridge to the ideals of a new generation of leaders who made the case for church union in Canada. Their strategic adaptation to modernity was selective: more apparent at the operational (administrative) than the ideational (theological) level. As they told the story of church union, it was simply the next stage of the worldwide expansion of Christendom, not a radical break from the past. There was, thus, a remarkable (and often overlooked) ‘conserving’ impulse in the efforts of the founding generation to restore the link between faith and community. The case for church union assumed that churches had an important role to play in shaping the nation of Canada and its people. “The new church will certainly be a unifying influence throughout the country,” claimed a confident spokesperson for the Joint Committee, offering as proof “the gathering of ministers and leading laymen from remote parts of the Dominion at Church and inter-Church assemblies and conferences” that had “resulted in a better understanding and the realization of a common interest between the people of the different Provinces.”119 Its proponents tended to see the state as neutral, still malleable, and welcoming of guidance in setting Canada’s moral direction. The United Church would become the nation’s conscience, distinct but not separate from the body politic. For its part, the state had found a group of Protestant churches willing to be enlisted in its nation-building project – and, to the taxpayers’ delight, at no cost. Thinking that there was a nation waiting to be built upon Christian principles, and convinced that history was on their side, the leaders of the church union movement were confident of success. Their mission was surely a friendly service to the young nation of Canada. If organizations have callings that shape their destinies, as some systems analysts suggest,120 the new church’s mission was auspicious, for it continued to shape the United Church’s agenda after its founding. It also drew immediate criticism. The determined idealism of those who supported church union and the equally determined

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r­ecalcitrance of those who opposed it was a combustible mix that exploded with most force in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Proponents of church union saw themselves as players in the story of a twentieth-century renewal movement. They would reverse the divisive tendencies of the past by blending inherited insights. They would be united by a common cause and a common faith. With “assimilation” used so positively to describe nation-building, they had little difficulty thinking in similar terms about what they expected to set in motion with church union. Little did they know that their notions of mutual assimilation would someday look as quixotic in hindsight as the seemingly arcane theological quarrels that had once divided them. But non-concurring Presbyterians vehemently dismissed the call for a united church. They argued that the idea of a national church was flawed and that church union would divide both the nation of Canada and its churches. And thus was the stage set for controversy.

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2 Controversy and the Construction of Identity The Vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision’s greatest enemy. Thine has a great hook nose like thine, Mine has a snub nose like to mine. William Blake, “The Everlasting Gospel”

When William M. Birks looked for a turning point to explain his support for the church union movement, it was an unexpected Saturday night stopover on a business trip to Schreiber that came to mind. On what he described as a typical November Sunday, he worshipped at the Presbyterian church in that northern Ontario town with two men, a few women, and some children. He later learned that attendance at the other places of worship in Schreiber was no better: two men at the nearby Anglican church, three men at the Methodist church across the road, and only one man at the Baptist church close by. Birks was shocked to hear that not one of the ministers was paid as much as his chauffeur. For twenty years he, his brother, and their father, jeweller Henry M. Birks, had each given an annual gift of $500 for home missions, a sum of $30,000 “gone to spread the shame, or if you prefer it, the curse of Schreiber.” Upon his return to Montreal, he related his experience to Ephraim Scott, a staunch opponent of the proposed union, along with a blunt message: he would give not a penny more to support home missions. Apparently Scott’s response was equally curt. He would never again speak to Birks or acknowledge him when they met on the street.1 The case for church union that was so persuasive in Schreiber and many communities across Canada was hotly contested in

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others. Fergus, Ontario, was the scene of a bitter fight over whether St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church would become part of the United Church of Canada on 10 June 1925. Those described by the local newspaper as the most active lay leaders had been staunch supporters of the union movement, but when the votes were counted, more members sided with their anti-unionist minister. And so a small group of pro-union Presbyterians gathered for worship without pulpit or organ in a Sunday school room provided by the neighbouring Methodists. Feeling that they had been driven from the church, they reportedly sought consolation by turning to their Presbyterian past with its stories of their forebears in Scotland who had resisted political and religious tyranny. The recent church union bills passed by the federal and provincial legislatures confirmed their conviction that they were the real Presbyterians and not dissenters, as the majority in their congregation claimed. Meanwhile, up the hill, the Presbyterians who disagreed with their General ­Assembly’s decision to join with Methodists and Congregationalists to form the United Church met as usual at St Andrew’s. They reportedly rejoiced that “they not only held the property, but had $40,000 in the Bank while their former co-workers had nothing.” Describing those who voted against church union as “filled with enthusiasm because they believe that they are the ‘real Presbyterians,’” the editor echoed Shakespeare in asking, “What’s in a name?”2 The Fergus Record’s portrayal of the two groups of Presbyterians who worshipped that Sunday morning was all too typical of divided congregations across Canada, although more often than not the fortunes of the two sides were reversed.3 Who had legitimate claim to represent the Presbyterian Church in Canada? Was it the unionists who, buttressed by a winning majority in every one of the several votes taken by its general assemblies, presbyteries, and congregations between 1910 and 1924, claimed to be carrying its name with them into union? Or was it those who refused to give up the right to be called the Presbyterian Church in Canada? There was a good deal at stake (not least, the question of who had the right to the property and funds held under the legal title of The Presbyterian Church in Canada). Church union was a long time in coming, and the battle over the name went on even after the inauguration ceremony in 1925.4 The skirmishes continued until the Act of Incorporation that had been passed by Parliament in 1925 was amended in 1939 to

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reflect a compromise reached a year earlier: the United Church continued to say that it had incorporated what had once been the Presbyterian Church in Canada (along with the other uniting traditions), but the continuing Presbyterians were given the legal use of the old name.5 The proposal to create a united church sparked a heated debate that divided families and turned old friends into antagonists. Alongside the legal wrangling over the use of the Presbyterian name was a battle waged in local communities as both sides struggled to gain public support. There, the “antis” were joined by other opponents of a national church. Out of the bitter exchanges, two myths about the making of the United Church materialized, disclosing theological differences over the essence of Christian unity and tactical differences over the role of the church in public life. Those who charged that union had been achieved by playing fast and loose with theological differences called it a “creedless” church. Its offer of friendly service to the nation was characterized as more befitting a political organization or a service club than a church. Those who joined the non-concurring Presbyterians in opposing church union chiselled into the public mind a negative picture of the United Church that proved difficult to erase. And as other denominations and the secular press joined the debate, relationships were forged and broken in ways that had repercussions lasting long after the procedural wrangling was over. Both sides saw 1902 as a turning point. However, the advocates of church union and those who resisted it were to remember what happened at their national gatherings that year differently, and each blamed the other for what went wrong thereafter. Discussions about church union had already been happening off and on for a quarter century. But in 1902 church leaders across the land were still absorbing the shock of the immigration challenge signalled in the census figures released a year earlier as they prepared for their judicatory meetings. Almost forgotten by both sides was the role of William Caven, principal of Knox College from 1875 until his death in 1904 just a few weeks before the first meeting of the Joint Committee (which he was to have convened). Caven’s support for Christian unity was well known in his day.6 He had been a leader in bringing the various branches of the Presbyterian family together in 1875, served from

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Table 2.1 Chronology of church union in Canada 1875

Presbyterian Church in Canada is formed from four branches of Presbyterianism. 1884 Methodist Church (Canada, Newfoundland, and Bermuda) is formed from four branches of Methodism. 1885 Synod of the Anglican Province of Canada invites Methodists and Presbyterians to discuss union. 1889 Conference on Church Unity meets in Toronto. 1899 Presbyterian General Assembly appoints a committee to confer with other evangelical churches to avoid overlapping of congregations; the Methodist General Council sets up a similar committee. 1902 Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians appoint representatives to meet as a joint committee in response to an invitation from the Methodist Church. 1904 British House of Lords awards the assets of the Free Church of Scotland to the Wee Frees, who had opposed creation of the United Free Church of Scotland in 1900 (Overtoun appeal). 1904 Joint Committee on Church Union meets for the first time. 1906 Congregational Union of Canada is formed from various Congregational churches. 1906 Anglicans and Baptists decline to join negotiations; Joint Committee on Church Union agrees on Basis of Union. 1908 Congregations in the west use the Basis of Union to organize local unions. 1910–12 National courts of the three uniting churches approve the Basis of Union and refer it to the lower courts and the membership. 1910 Presbyterian Association for the Federation of the Churches of the Protestant Denominations is organized to consider alternatives to ­“organic union.” 1912 Majority of Presbyterian presbyteries and congregations vote in favour of union, but the General Assembly agrees to allow time to build greater support. 1912 Several local union congregations form the General Council of Local Union Churches. 1914 “The United Church of Canada” is approved as the name during the ­process of minor revisions to the Basis of Union. 1915 Presbyterian General Assembly votes in favour of the revised Basis of Union and submits it for a second vote in the lower courts and membership, where the majority again supports it. 1916 Presbyterian General Assembly passes a resolution to unite, and sets up a committee to prepare for consummation after the end of the war. 1916 Presbyterian Church Association and Presbyterian Women’s League step up resistance to church union. 1917 Supporters and dissenters agree to a moratorium on debate and propaganda until after the war. 1921 Presbyterian General Assembly decision to proceed to a union in effect ends the “truce.”

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Table 2.1  (Continued) 1921

Representatives of the General Council of Local Union Churches meet with the Joint Committee on Church Union. 1923 Presbyterian General Assembly takes last vote on church union. 1924 The United Church of Canada Act is passed by the Dominion Parliament; congregations are given the right to decide by majority vote not to enter the union. 1924–26 Enabling legislation for church union is passed in all nine provinces. 1925 Inaugural service on 10 June creates a church of approximately 8,000 congregations and 600,000 members. 1925 Non-concurring Presbyterians continue as the Presbyterian Church in Canada with approximately 1,000 congregations and 150,000 members. 1930 Wesleyan Methodist Church of Bermuda affiliates with the United Church. 1938 Dispute over the name “The Presbyterian Church in Canada” is resolved, allowing both churches to claim continuity. 1939 The United Church of Canada Act is amended to allow the continuing Presbyterians legal use of the name “The Presbyterian Church in Canada.”

1888 until his death as chair of the Presbyterian General Assembly’s committee on church union, and was the third president of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity (succeeding George Monro Grant).7 At the General Assembly that met in Toronto in June 1902, Caven made a presentation on behalf of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity urging the Presbyterian Church to actively pursue church union. The General Assembly responded by passing a resolution to support “the action of the Home Mission Committee in ­conferring with any committee of the Church of England, of the Methodist Church or of either of them, as opportunity may offer.”8 That opportunity came a few months later. In September, Winnipeg was the scene of the quadrennial General Conference of the Methodist Church. Before the meeting adjourned, the Methodist Church issued a general invitation directed to denominations “already marked by a great degree of spiritual unity” and “closely assimilated in standards and ideals of church life, forms of worship and ecclesiastical polity” to consider union negotiations.9 The Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches soon took steps to  set up a Joint Committee on Church Union, and in 1904 its ­subcommittees began working on the areas that would eventually comprise the five major sections of a Basis of Union: Doctrine,

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Polity, Ministry, Administration, and Law. By 1908 the document was ready for the churches to consider. Just as memorable for the story of church union as the invitation to set up a church union committee were the fraternal greetings from the Presbyterian delegation to the Methodist gathering in 1902 that led to it. It was there that William Patrick delivered the fateful words that, according to some accounts, launched the negotiations and the controversy that ensued. Patrick was new to Canadian church gatherings, having arrived from Scotland only two years earlier to become principal of Manitoba College. Admitting that he might be “found guilty of sublime audacity,” he asked the Methodist delegates whether the time had come for the two churches to come closer together.10 His passionate appeal for Canada “to be the first to show the Christian nations of the world the way to reunion” proved irresistibly bewitching to his Methodist audience, suggests N.K. Clifford. The Methodists unwittingly accepted an invitation that Patrick should never have extended, he maintains, for it had not been properly authorized by the Presbyterian Church. Those who understood the folly of Patrick’s haste objected at the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1904, the date that marks, for Clifford, the beginning of the resistance to church union.11 The making of the United Church as told by its supporters has Patrick as a more minor player in a drama foreshadowed by Confederation and their own denominational trajectories.12 They were mindful that their churches had already considered models of union in the 1880s and 1890s that ranged from loose federation to organic union, and at a conference in Toronto in 1889 organized by the Anglicans, had even tackled the thorny issue of what to do with the historic episcopate if the Church of England were included.13 Patrick was only one of three Presbyterian fraternal delegates bringing the customary plea for greater co-operation. Preceding him was George Bryce, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church. He perhaps had in mind the passing of Caven’s resolution at his own church’s assembly a few months earlier when he reminded Methodists how close the two churches had grown in their forms of government and the causes they supported – even going so far as to endorse the temperance movement. Speaking after Patrick was C.W. Gordon, a local Presbyterian minister likely better known to Methodists for his novels, who spoke of materialism as their common foe.14 Fraternal

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delegates from the Congregational Church, when bringing their greetings the following week, also signalled support for union: if all the “near relatives” were to be included in the “wedding” of the churches, they too expected an invitation.15 Although Patrick died in 1911, before there was much evidence of effective resistance, many blamed him for triggering the animosity that attended the negotiations. It was he, they charged, who had “introduced the issue improperly, handled it illegally and justified his action in terms which verged on blasphemy” by claiming the church union movement was divinely inspired. His personality only made matters worse: once Patrick determined a course of action, he apparently brooked no interference, making it easy for his opponents to imagine that he had acted alone, rather than through proper channels. Described by his friends as a sad and lonely man, he apparently had few personal ties to Presbyterians in Canada, even in Winnipeg.16 His was a presence, says Clifford, that “continued to haunt the church until it accomplished the purpose he had set for it,” steering the course of events even after his death despite his being (and in part because he was) an outsider.17 But how much of an outlier was Patrick on the issue of church union? Clifford is likely right in reasoning that Patrick had brought the idea of union with him to Canada, rather than discovering it after his arrival. However, his claim that Patrick was unaware that others were advocating union is less convincing.18 It is difficult to imagine that Patrick had paid no attention to the press coverage of the death of George Monro Grant a few months earlier. After all, Grant’s dream of a united Protestantism was among the most publicized of his religious causes. It is impossible to know whether Patrick was at the session that voted on Caven’s resolution on Christian unity, but he is recorded as being present as a delegate to the General Assembly. Could Patrick really have believed he was the first to broach the idea of closer relations between Presbyterians and Methodists? Perhaps Patrick’s “audacity” was a bit tongue-in-cheek, feigning innocence in response to the opening provided when Methodist general superintendent Albert Carman introduced him as a “tenderfoot” in comparison with the “old-timer” Bryce.19 Still, supposing Patrick was unfamiliar with Canadian efforts to promote church union, those listening to his address that day would have heard nothing substantially new. Creation of “one great national Protestant Church” was not a fresh idea. It was a restatement

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(however eloquent) of a case that others had been making for years. Knowingly or not, Patrick was joining a conversation that was already abuzz among personal networks of family, friends, and religious leaders who had seized the cause of church union as a way of dealing with the challenges their churches faced. Why then – even allowing for misguided enthusiasm on the part of the Methodists – did Presbyterians and Congregationalists respond so swiftly to the invitation? Likely as decisive for all parties as the words of one person was the effect of the place where they were spoken: Winnipeg, a city where the impact of Canada’s new immigration policy was so evident. Whether or not they ought to race with each other to set up home missions for these new Canadians was a question weighing heavily on their minds. The two sides quickly found themselves mired in procedural debates that were not of one person’s making, though Patrick proved to be an easy scapegoat for the opposition. His defence of the Basis of Union and the plan to implement it was often brilliant, but even his allies cringed at his tendency to verbally batter his opponents. Particularly upsetting was his rough handling of John Mackay, a young Montreal minister who vigorously opposed the first draft of the Basis of Union when it was put before the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1906.20 The governance model that Mackay championed was federation: union by co-operation that would leave the  three denominations ­essentially intact. Mackay also dismissed the theological articles in the Basis of Union as showing “nothing more, nothing less than that a large number of the ablest men of the three churches can produce a document sufficiently ambiguous to be accepted as a Methodist document by some Methodists, a Presbyterian by some Presbyterians, and a Congregationalist by some Congregationalists.”21 One of Patrick’s withering attacks on Mackay took place when he raised the 1904 ruling of the British House of Lords in the Overtoun appeal.22 Studying in Scotland at the time, Mackay was familiar with the case that saw the court award the assets of the Free Church of Scotland to the Wee Frees, a small number of Presbyterians who had opposed Scottish church union. Although Patrick publicly dismissed Mackay’s concerns, others were uneasy about how common law might be interpreted if those resisting church union were to take their case to London on appeal. The legal situation in Canada was, if anything, more precarious than in Scotland, since the British North

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America Act assigned matters of property and civil rights (which included religion) to provincial rather than federal jurisdiction. Anticipating litigation, the uniting churches eventually sought enabling legislation for incorporation as The United Church of Canada not only from the Dominion Parliament but also the legislatures of Canada’s nine provinces (although it did not pass in Quebec until 1926).23 It was Mackay, by then the principal of Westminster Hall in Vancouver, whose hour-long plea for the federation model at the General Assembly in 1910 almost carried the day. Patrick delivered another stinging rebuttal, belittling Mackay in the process. While Patrick was credited with saving the vote for the unionists, his tactics dismayed even those who sided with him. George Pidgeon’s biographer suggests that a distaste for Patrick’s methods accounts for Pidgeon’s early reluctance to actively support church union – a cause to which he was predisposed both by temperament and positive experiences in co-operative ventures.24 E.D. McLaren, superintendent of Home Missions, watched what was happening with alarm. He later wrote that he had warned Patrick after the debate that “the danger to the union cause would come thenceforward from its friends.”25 Those who led the church union movement after Patrick’s death in 1911 were, unlike him, Canadian-born with a mesh of close relationships within the Presbyterian Church. With Patrick, they shared the credit for creating momentum for the vision of a united church; they were also among its “friends” whose own strategy drew criticism. The unionists had their own explanation for what went wrong: the fault was in deviating from Presbyterian polity by giving too much, rather than too little, say to the people after 1910. Clarence Mackinnon thought that the General Assembly had departed from Presbyterian principles by “sending the dispute down among the people” for a congregational vote. While many supporters of church union were progressive in their theology, they appealed to an older model of governance that relied on an educated ordained and lay clerisy to make major decisions. Presbyterianism was, Mackinnon insisted, “government by Presbyteries, by ministers and elders, by informed and ordained men.” He had come to appreciate the wisdom of past leaders who “would never have risked a vital matter to the judgment of the masses” – a fatal mistake, as he saw it, although one that was “probably unavoidable under the circumstances.”26 On the other hand, those who resisted church union took advantage of a trend toward more democratic practices that was in tension with

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the hierarchy of church courts. To historian John Moir, it appears that an “incipient congregationalism, which was infiltrating the Presbyterian Church in Canada before church union was even proposed, was now brought into the open in a basic internal division of opinion over Presbyterian polity.”27 Meanwhile Methodists and Congregationalists, whose national bodies had already voted in favour of church union in 1910 and were preparing to proceed with it by 1912, were left hanging. An apologetic Walter Murray tried to explain the dilemma in a letter to Nathanael Burwash after another Presbyterian vote in 1912. He optimistically (but wrongly) predicted that with time and patience the minority could be brought into union. “I hope your church will not become impatient with us,” he pleaded. “We can quite well understand how irritating our actions must be to you, but we are placed in a very awkward position.”28 That position became even more awkward with increased opposition to church union in eastern Canada and increased support for it in western Canada, as reflected in the growing number of new local union congregations. The second vote on church union at the Presbyterian General Assembly held in Winnipeg in 1916 proved to be another pivotal moment for both sides. While it was clear that a minority of Presbyterians still opposed organic union, Murray’s powerful plea that there be no further delay persuaded most of those present to vote for it.29 A newly appointed Joint Committee on Church Union, this time chaired by Robert Falconer, considered itself legally and morally charged with the responsibility of taking concrete steps to consummate the relationship; to keep faith with Methodists and Congregationalists, there could be no turning back. The impact in some places was immediate. The minister of the Presbyterian church in Kelowna, b c , was so “imbued with the union spirit” that he resigned as soon as he returned home from the General Assembly, and a union church was formed with the Methodist minister in charge. In Rosedale, east of Chilliwack, b c , three congregations whose resources had been depleted by the war, formed a union church in 1917 and affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, which was the strongest in their community. Not all differences disappeared instantly. Methodists in Prince George, bc, were disappointed to learn that the union church would be “in the hands of the Presbyterians” and their building would not be used. Some of them remained aloof from the venture until after the 1925 union.30

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The 1916 General Assembly was likewise a crossroads for the minority of Presbyterians who were against forming the United ­ Church.31 They left Winnipeg bitter, energized, and determined to organize a movement to preserve the Presbyterian Church in Canada. They formally registered a protest, charging that those who had voted in favour of supporting the Basis of Union had “ceased to be the Presbyterian Church in Canada.”32 A few weeks later, the Presbyterian Church Association was launched at a rally held at St Andrew’s Church (King Street) in Toronto, reviving the Church Federation Association that Mackay and his supporters had attempted to form in 1911. Opposition to church union sometimes made for strange bed­ fellows. Some of the most barbed anti-union commentary over the years was to come from what seems, at first glance, a surprising source: the editorials and articles in a secular magazine. Saturday Night’s sympathies were apparent in its story on the aftermath of the St Andrew’s rally. “It won’t go through now, of course,” predicted the writer, for while the unionists still talked about pressing their cause after the war, the chance of church union happening was becoming less likely. The reporter wagered that neither the Dominion Parliament nor any of the provincial legislatures before which bills would have to be presented “would have the nerve now to grant such charters in face of the opposition that has developed.” The movement was nothing more than a Methodist takeover bid, a scheme devised by the “business man” to dupe unsuspecting pastors into a cost-saving merger. The business man also had his hooks in the university, the writer divulged, and his ignorance had been rewarded by honorary degrees. Particular scorn was heaped on the University of Toronto’s president for borrowing the idea of union given him by the business man: what Falconer had cooked up “wasn’t just efficiency and business methods and crude raw materials like that. Not at all. It was the National Church – the National Church as against the Baptist Church and the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church and all the other Churches that couldn’t be as national because they wouldn’t have as many members.” However, the “cool Scotch mind” had discovered a flaw in the plan before it was too late: its “disregard of the spiritual equation.”33 The Saturday Night article detected misgivings about union that simmered near the surface of the debate: the suspicion that business efficiency had trumped spiritual considerations, and the threat that a

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national church posed to other denominations. It also noted the swift response to the 1916 decision. Even before the General Assembly voted, the dissidents had used a donation from textile manufacturer John Penman to hire someone to rebut press releases favourable to church union. Despite its complaint that the union movement was driven by “the businessman,” the Presbyterian Church Association was at first largely funded by the wealthy Penman and a  few other well-to-do Presbyterians.34 Having already lost two votes at the General Assembly, the Presbyterian Church Association launched a print campaign that cast doubt on the decision to move forward. It also attempted to shift the debate from the church courts by organizing the opposition in local congregations. Its efforts were bolstered by two invaluable allies: Ephraim Scott and the Presbyterian Women’s League. Like a number of his unionist rivals, Ephraim Scott was a Maritime ‘export.’ He made Montreal his new home, and from there, for the next thirty-five years, he edited the Presbyterian Record. Once union was a fait accompli and it came time to select a moderator to lead the continuing Presbyterian Church, Scott’s was the only name put forward – and for good reason. His strident voice set the tone for much of the propaganda produced by both sides. An early volley that circulated widely as a pamphlet before the 1917 General Assembly used the literary device of a wise old pastor writing to a young inquirer. The letters presented a negative image of the proposed church as united only in name and preoccupied with government, control, and the outward and formal dimensions of religion; its members left the thinking to others and did what they were told. The Presbyterian Church, by contrast, was united in spirit and emphasized the inward and spiritual dimensions of religion; it celebrated diversity and allowed its members the freedom to think for themselves.35 Although Scott dubbed the two types as “German” and “British,” his characterization of the former as working like a “great ecclesiastical machine, with its centralized control” left little doubt that he was taking aim at Methodism. Scott scorned the prized unity of the common faith expressed in the proposed theological statement, warning of the dangers of “A Church without a Creed.” He was no kinder in his assessment of the United Church’s expectation of a greater role in national affairs. Such power should only be exercised by Christians acting as citizens, he argued, not by a spiritually decayed church usurping the authority

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of the state.36 His acerbic attacks continued even after the 1925 inauguration of the United Church. The religious life of the proposed church, said Scott, centred around “the absolute power of the clergy and officials in the church courts” who had the authority to completely change the church if they wanted; the system was “despotism complete.” Those accustomed to hearing the United Church criticized for its modernism might have been startled to read that Scott identified it with the spirit of the seventeenth century (autocracy), whereas the Presbyterian Church displayed the spirit of the twentieth century in its democracy.37 Scott’s effective anti-union polemic was complemented by shrewd organization of the opposition at the local level, aided by the Presbyterian Women’s League. The League’s fundraising activities brought in nearly $5,000 in the first six months, enough to defray its own expenses and make a generous donation of $3,000 to the Presbyterian Church Association.38 More difficult to assess, but perhaps even more significant, was its influence on family, friends, and members of the congregation, particularly in congregations where the pastor had sided with the unionist cause. A gathering in Montreal heard that one minister had forbidden members of the Women’s League to oppose church union without the permission of the congregation’s Session. Even meetings in the home were prohibited. The Montreal Gazette reported that while the woman told her story calmly, “something of a concerted gasp followed her statements, accompanied by ejaculations of ‘Dear, dear,’ and such remarks as ‘Go right ahead,’ ‘We are dissenters, are we?’ and others equally emphatic.” One woman predicted that such tactics “will make us more wild than ever.” The League ought to feel flattered observed another: “We are only mere women ... We should not be in this thing at all, and it is very gratifying to us that we have been able to create such a stir.” The Gazette also detected the developing tensions between clergy and laity, noting that “ministers came in for frank criticism by the feminine members of their flocks,” who found them to be rather autocratic in some cases.39 Women who supported church union did not form a separate organization to counter the Presbyterian Women’s League. They were pictured as sharing the vision of a united church, particularly the promise it held for missions. A press report of prayer services for the union cause held at St James Square Presbyterian Church in Toronto noted that most of the women who gathered were leaders of the missionary

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society in their congregations.40 Asked by a reporter whether women in his church planned to oppose the antis, one pro-union minister replied that his congregation’s “leading women” had decided such activities would distract them from more important work. They were, he added, as well informed about union as the men in his congregation and, as loyal Presbyterians, would be “guided by denominational procedure.”41 Even in a congregation where the minister was a well-known supporter of union, being guided by procedure sometimes involved demanding more information. At Bloor Street Presbyterian Church in Toronto, Mrs J.W. Daniel called for a meeting to hear both sides of the issue, arguing that it did not “seem natural to me that Presbyterian women [would] allow themselves to be bundled out of one organization into another without a with your leave or by your leave until they have had an opportunity of thinking the matter well over.”42 There turned out to be more time to think the matter over than either side would have imagined in 1916. When the General Assembly met a year later, the delegates agreed to call for a truce in Presbyterian hostilities for as long as Canada was at war, and implementation of the decision to unite was suspended.43 A vote in 1921 to resume action toward union roused the opposition, and the Presbyterian Church Association was reactivated the following summer. Concerned unionists from Toronto smelled trouble and gathered a few months later to devise a strategy to neutralize renewed resistance. In the group was George Pidgeon, by then minister at Bloor Street Presbyterian Church. Writing to his brother Leslie in Winnipeg to fill him in on the details and enlist his help in garnering western support, he found some good news to report: an anti-union convention, which organizers had expected would fill St Andrew’s Church in Toronto to overflowing, had drawn a crowd of only 700. He assured his brother that there was nothing in the speeches to cause concern. More worrisome was a proposal to prepare what he called a monster petition of 100,000 names of those opposed to church union. The Presbyterian Church Association had hired E ­ ugene Le Fleur, described by Pidgeon as one of the greatest lawyers in the country, as counsel; they were well organized, well financed, and committed to blocking the proposed church union legislation.44 “There’s no fighting the Pidgeons,” it was often said in Presbyterian circles – “Leslie is too clever, and George is too good.”45 Those on

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the side of the Pidgeon brothers in the union controversy quickly realized to their dismay that, in this case, success in the courts of the church was no guarantee of victory in the public arena. Since politicians would be the ones to approve the legislation, both sides recognized the importance of the voting public and scrambled to make their case. George Pidgeon feared that the church union supporters in the west might be indifferent: “The thing seems so self evident there that they cannot see the necessity for action.” He urged brother Leslie to begin organizing pro-union support immediately, for the anti-unionists had “thrown down the gage of battle and unless we start to meet it now, the whole movement will be endangered.” He added that he did not want to give the impression that the east was panicking; but if the bill was to be passed in Parliament and provincial legislatures, “there must be such an expression of the country’s convictions on the subject that will be overwhelming and will show all in authority that the conscience of the country is behind it.”46 The pro-union strategy described by Pidgeon called for the organization of a press campaign backed by generous financial support from lay leaders. Although the plan presumed that volunteers would handle much of the work, a decision was made to hire someone to coordinate the publicity campaign. R.J. Wilson, minister of Chalmers Presbyterian Church, Kingston, was recruited to run the Joint Bureau of Literature. It was an offer that would have been hard to refuse. Meeting in George Pidgeon’s study in 1922, Wilson was urged by a group of notable Presbyterians that included William Birks and Robert Falconer to accept the challenge. Their assessment of the situation was grave: there would be no church union unless congregations were made aware of what was at stake. His new respon­ sibilities included preparing literature for distribution, organizing meetings to present the union position, arranging for speakers to visit congregations, supplying newspapers with information, and providing a key person in each presbytery with a supporting organization “to carry on the fight.”47 A fight it was indeed, and as it turned out, the unionists had picked someone who seemed to thrive on controversy as much as Ephraim Scott. In a letter to brother Leslie in Winnipeg, Pidgeon shared a bit of gossip he had picked up. “The other day someone in a committee mentioned ‘R.J.’s’ tendency to boast a bit and also his splendid qualities as a fighter,” Pidgeon confided. “One of the men quoted Josh Billings to this effect – There are two things that I admire about the

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rooster – his crow and the spurs to back it. I think you can see the point in this, only do not tell anyone else.”48 Wilson lived up to this billing. He quickly took stock of the situation, deemed it serious, and proposed a strategy in anticipation of an attack. Scouring the methods and literature of the anti-unionist camp, he found a “campaign of misrepresentations and deliberate falsehood” already underway. Of particular concern was its impact on union sympathizers who “still blind their eyes to the methods of Anti-Unionism, who are satisfied that the policy of benevolent neutrality will accomplish more than an aggressive campaign.”49 Contrary to rumours that Scott was withdrawing his opposition to union, Wilson believed that the Presbyterian Church Association was instead preparing to step up its attacks. His summary of the anti-union tactics proved to be close to the mark; he predicted, for instance, that opponents would attempt to sway public opinion with this ploy: “The Presbyterian Church is announced as a non-political organization. By implication the United Church of Canada is to be political.”50 Wilson believed it was time to take off the gloves in order to retain the support of a number of churches in danger of being swayed by the Association. “The Anti-Unionist is out to ‘save the Church’. Let us be out to save Canada for Christ. Our appeal is so much larger and so much worthier that if we get it squarely before the people we need not be afraid of their decision.”51 Outlines for sermons and addresses prepared by Wilson’s office for those invited to speak in favour of church union tapped into the movement’s ideals. Church union would unleash “new spiritual forces and treasures to place the crown upon the brow of the World’s Redeemer, who gave His life that we all might be one in life, love and service. It is the most significant movement since the Reformation.”52 But there were hard-hitting addresses as well, bluntly stating that the only issue remaining to be settled was whether particular congregations would remain in the Presbyterian Church in Canada by entering the United Church, or whether they would secede from their “Mother Church” by voting against church union. Dire consequences such as isolation in foreign mission work and strife at home were predicted for the secessionists. To choose to join the United Church was, on the other hand, to remain connected to Presbyterianism worldwide, retain the essential doctrines and polity of Presbyterianism, and demonstrate acceptance of “the challenge of Non Anglo-Saxon Canada.”53

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After church union legislation again passed easily at the Port Arthur General Assembly in 1923, the dissidents turned their energies to preparing for the final vote at the congregational level, h ­ oping to persuade as many as possible to cast a ballot to opt out of joining the United Church of Canada on 10 June 1925. As Presbyterians prepared to make this crucial decision, Wilson hired a clipping service to keep a “watchful eye” on the newspapers, for he saw the press as key to shaping public opinion. He claimed to have countered “dangerous influences” by providing accurate information to newspapers, preparing reports of meetings and interviews for columns, making personal contact with editors, and even doing editorial work on request. The coverage in Toronto continued to be a matter of concern; except for the Star, the secular press did not seem to favour union. But on the whole, Wilson concluded, “newspaper publicity has had an astounding effect on Union,” one that he assessed as generally favourable.54 The decisions made by Wilson and the Joint Committee drove the counter-resistance as inauguration day drew closer. They assumed that using prominent Presbyterians to present the union cause would most effectively blunt opposition. They relied on Methodists for some of the funding, and counted on them to pull back while Presbyterians worked out their differences. Even Chown’s suggestion on behalf of the Joint Committee on Church Union that some literature be prepared from the Methodist point of view was politely dismissed as “inopportune.”55 The need to defend the United Church as the continuing Presbyterian tradition meant that its Methodist features were muted before, and likely even after, union. Finding themselves on the receiving end of a barrage of negative publicity and innuendo portraying them as theologically and socially inferior, it was difficult for Methodists to hold their tongues and let their Presbyterian friends defend their theological reputations. The unfairness of such criticism was acknowledged in a leaflet outlining a sermon on the biblical text “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory.” The preacher was to urge his listeners to beware of empty boasting about past glory, reminding them that the Methodist Church had more members and even larger property holdings. As for Presbyterians who were glorying in their social ­status, the sermon outline suggested that the status be shared with Methodists to elevate them!56

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The opposition’s tactics further alienated Methodists when the Presbyterian Church Association added a new arrow to its quiver to shore up support for the final vote. At a time when the fundamentalist-modernist debate in the United States was dividing denominations, Methodist leaders in Canada were furious to hear their church described not only as creedless but also as modernist and even apostate. Chafing from disparaging comments made about them, and weary of waiting for pro-union Presbyterians to defend them, some Methodists began to respond in kind. T. Albert Moore, secretary of both the Methodist General Conference and the Joint Committee (and later the first general secretary of the United Church), fired off a personal letter of protest to a Presbyterian minister who had suggested federation as a compromise. The Methodists “did not take any part in your debate, we were not involved and we acted with high restraint,” Moore complained. “Your people [the Presbyterian Church Association] deliberately dragged us in and argued that we are of such character that association with us in Church fellowship would be betrayal of Christian honor.”57 While Moore fumed, Pidgeon protested the “absolute dishonesty” of those who claimed that “Church Union is the Canadian form of Modernism” while retaining principal Daniel J. Fraser of Presbyterian College in Montreal, well known for his liberal theology, as president of the Presbyterian Church Association.58 This ratcheting up of  the rhetoric as the controversy wore on made it difficult for Methodists to support a proposal to delay the consummation of union in the hope that, with time, more dissidents would be won over to the union cause. The energy of Wilson and the unionists in pamphleteering and feeding the press was more than matched by the efforts of Ephraim Scott, the Presbyterian Church Association, and the Women’s League. The strategy to stop church union was simple: raise doubts about the groundwork that had been laid for the proposed national church, and challenge the legitimacy of the public role it hoped to play. The most fundamental criticism lodged was that there was no basis for unity because the parties proposing to unite did not have enough in common: in theology, polity, and even social class, they were simply too different. While some used the traditional language of Calvinism vs. Arminianism to frame the differences in theological terms, others

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couched their opposition in scientific terms. Robert Campbell, the influential clerk of assembly during the early years of the controversy, insisted that the laws of nature barred “the mating of things that are unlike.”59 The blending of Presbyterianism’s stability with Methodism’s fervour, and Congregationalism’s love of liberty was thus doomed from the start, union critics argued, for nature showed that crossbreeds were always weaker than the parent stocks, amalgams of metal lost the unique qualities of their original states. In their view, the oft-cited problem of inefficiency resulting from duplication was exaggerated; denominational competition was healthy since it was rivalry, not cooperation, that sparked enthusiasm for the work of the church.60 Those who opposed church union thus repudiated the environmentalist assumptions that A.S. Morton had laid out in The Way to Union, rejecting his argument that church life in Canada was evolving irresistibly toward union. They also questioned the case for nation-building made by the unionists, dismissing their notion of mutual assimilation for either a new type of church or a new type of Canadian.61 The debate also revealed different understandings of Christian unity. One critic of union lamented the loss of the image of being Christ’s branches, with him as the Vine: “Instead of Branches we have latterly come to use the word Denominations, a mechanical, unorganic word, void of the idea of vital relation to a living Stem. We speak of sects as if they were rival business concerns. And, not unnaturally, we now think of organic unity as an incorporating union on the lines of a commercial merger. External, mechanical union is not essential to organic, spiritual unity.” An Act of Parliament might have the power to incorporate a commercial enterprise, but it could not create spiritual unity.62 Presbyterians were not alone in their concerns about the incompatibility of the uniting traditions. Some Methodist ministers feared the loss of their distinctive polity – not only the itinerant system of assigning pastoral charges so maligned by Presbyterian critics but also their pension fund! Those who were convinced that a united church would look much more Presbyterian than Methodist perhaps heard reason for concern as they listened in on the Presbyterian debate. Explaining his rejection of the proposed union, one Methodist minister listed among his reasons: “Because Dr Patrick, Presbyterian, says, ‘We have not changed our doctrine or discipline or polity, we have assimilated the other bodies.’”63

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Just as damaging as the questions about the organizational culture of the uniting churches was the escalating attack on its theological foundation. Ephraim Scott had at first found little to criticize in the Basis of Union (as its defenders enjoyed reminding him): he reported that he could see no substantial difference between the new doctrinal statement and the Presbyterian Shorter Catechism. Praising it as “a model to other churches contemplating union,” Scott had initially described it as a “standing testimony to the essential unity of the Protestant Evangelical Church, both in this and in other lands.” This first impression of the articles stood in marked contrast to his later characterization of the United Church as creedless and its Basis of Union as providing “an open door for every error, especially that error which takes from Christ His Crown of Deity and takes from sinners a Saviour, making Him only a man.”64 Presbyterian critics of the Basis of Union warned of the dire consequences of requiring ministers to be in “essential agreement” with the theological articles of the Basis of Union, a concession that had been made to convince the Congregationalists to join. Addressing an audience of concerned Presbyterians gathered at St Andrew’s Church, Toronto, Thomas McMillan asked whether they realized that a minister who claimed to accept the doctrinal statement at ordination could later become a Unitarian, a Universalist, a Christian Scientist, or even a Catholic without any disciplinary remedy available in the Basis of Union. Such a minister could “go on wrecking congregations without limit” by being transferred by the Settlement Committee from place to place.65 While Methodists who were wary about the Basis of Union offered little organized resistance,66 they occasionally expressed personal reservations about its theological foundations. W.S. Griffin challenged readers of the Christian Guardian: “Place Dr Burwash’s defence of the doctrines in the Basis of Union side by side with John Wesley’s Christian perfection, and we almost feel that the respected and Distinguished Chancellor of our university [Victoria] has sadly fallen from grace.” Convinced that it was professors and church executives, not those engaged in pastoral or evangelistic work, who were behind the union movement, Griffin questioned the wisdom of its leaders. How could men who “spend their days in offices and college classrooms” be trusted with the responsibilities of reorganizing church life? Griffin joined Presbyterian critics in challenging the argument that a unified church would be more effective. Far from a

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large organization doing more to save the world, history taught him that “revivals always involved the breaking away from these mighty church organizations.”67 Joining those within the uniting churches who questioned the ­formulation of common faith in the Basis of Union was an eclectic mix of allies, including conservative Protestants in Canada and the United States. Historians of religion in North America note with interest that the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was not waged with the same intensity in Canada as in the United States. However, the debate over church union that took place in Canada at the same time as the struggle over theological modernism elsewhere was anything but irenic. What is fascinating is the resemblance between the arguments against church union in Canada and the case against theological modernism in the United States, particularly ­after the reactivation of the Presbyterian Church Association in 1921. Few champions of conservative theology were more articulate than J. Gresham Machen, professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, whose battles with the school and the Presbyterian Church in the u sa spurred him to found Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1929. Machen’s writings provided the intellectual underpinnings for fundamentalist attempts to stall the spread of liberal ideas among evangelical Protestants. Christianity and Liberalism, published in 1923 just as Presbyterians in Canada prepared to take their arguments to congregations and legislatures for what proved to be the last time, had a blunt message: liberalism was un-Christian.68 Liberalism was even more pernicious than other heterodox expressions of Christianity, claimed Machen, since its understanding of God and humanity, its seat of authority, and its approach to salvation constituted a different religion. “We have,” he concluded, “the entrance of paganism into the Church in the name of Christianity,” and he predicted that such churches would soon be “given over altogether to naturalism.”69 Those wondering how Machen might appraise the common faith at the theological heart of the Basis of Union did not have far to look: the opening pages of Christianity and Liberalism belittled all such efforts. “In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about

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which men will fight.”70 His final chapter on “The Church” dismissed “the liberal program for unity” because it was based on the assumption that doctrinal differences were mere trifles, readily resolved by uniting around a program for Christian service.71 Machen condemned the dishonesty of ministers who no longer held to the theological standards of their church, insisting that “evangelical churches are creedal churches.” By implication a so-called creedless church (as critics were fond of calling the proposed united church) was no longer evangelical. He urged those who no longer accepted the Westminster Confession to which they had subscribed at the time of their ordination to join another denomination or start a new church. Commending the Unitarian Church for its honesty, he described it as exactly the home liberals were seeking: “a church without an authoritative Bible, without doctrinal requirements, and without a creed.”72 The General Assembly minority that refused to adjourn after the majority officially constituted the United Church of Canada later approved a resolution to formally thank Machen “for his substantial and continued interest in our cause.” Machen’s letter of support for the continuing Presbyterians, read to the gathering and written into the Acts of Proceedings, reflected his affinity with the anti-union cause. Machen compared the ordeal of the Presbyterians in Canada to events in the United States, and identified their common source: “a compromising interdenominationalism.” Assuring them of prayers of support from around the world, he commended them for their example: “In these days of defection and unbelief, your Church is like a city set on a hill.”73 In addition, Machen provided tangible support for the continuing Presbyterians by recruiting Americans for pastoral charges left vacant because of union, even paying some of their expenses out of his own pocket.74 A number of the ministers arriving from the United States to serve Presbyterian congregations had studied at Machen’s new seminary.75 Church union also came under fire from fundamentalists closer to home. T.T. Shields of Jarvis Street Baptist Church provided local newspapers with colourful descriptions of the union threat. Not even an astronomer skilled in measuring space could determine the distance between church union and the spirit of Christ, he reportedly said. Like Machen, Shields described the United Church as “not Christian, it is essentially pagan; and the movement is a part of the

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general apostasy of the age.”76 The Toronto Telegram reported that on one occasion Shields preached on the subject of church union for over an hour, linking the idea to “Rome” and warning that such a church would attempt to impose its will on a free people: “You will have to have the permission of the United Church to live after a while.”77 The affinity Shields saw between Rome and a united Protestant church was far from apparent to Catholics, who found little to like about union. The Catholic press dismissed the troubles within the Presbyterian Church as typical of the turmoil that had come to characterize Protestantism since the sixteenth-century Reformation. “There is a merry war on among the sects,” reported the Catholic Register, “and Catholics are vastly amused at the game of Presbyterian kettle calling Methodist pot black.” The coverage of the controversy in the daily papers confirmed “that no Presbyterian or Methodist clearly knows what or why he believes” and revealed a “mass of conflicting doctrine, confusing incoherency and bewildering inconsistency” in the squabbling. One thing was clear, observed the editor: “a great part of Protestantism is tainted with modernism and pagan unbelief in Christ’s Divinity and is therefore not Christian in any sense.” The controversy confirmed the Catholic contention “that Protestantism is a bedlam of contradiction, based on the arrogant say-so of cock-sure individualism, and infallible egoism” that doomed it to multiplicity, subdivision, and disintegration.78 The Catholic press joined Presbyterian and fundamentalist critics of the theological basis for union by emphasizing lingering religious differences between the uniting parties. The Antigonish Casket contrasted Presbyterian religion with its “intellectual appeal to reason but a reason carried to fantastic lengths, and soured with gloomy theories taken from the Old Testament” with Methodism’s “appeal to spiritual excitement ... which found expression in writhings on the floor and in despairing abandonment or else in unreasoning certainty of salvation.” The editor could think of no two religions more unalike and described union as “an abandonment by both Methodists and by Presbyterians of all that was ever distinctive in their respective creeds.”79 Theological conservatives and Catholics were not alone in raising doubts about the prospects for uniting under the umbrella of a  common faith. Charles Frederick Paul, the Unitarian editor of Saturday Night, presumably had little theological affinity with

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either fundamentalist or Catholic critics of union, but articles on  church union published in the magazine under his editorship from 1909 until his death in 1926 showed a similar antipathy.80 Pondering the question “Will the uniting parties live happily ever after?” the pseudonymous writer “Josephus the Second” had his doubts. Methodists were “born Cockney” and recruited from the middle and lower classes. Presbyterians were of Scottish heritage and (though Josephus left it unsaid) of a superior class. Theologically, Wesley and Calvin stood on opposite sides of “an unabridged and unbridgeable chasm.” Temperamentally, they differed as well: the Scot, being “undemonstrative, scowls at the Amen corner, and will wait a lifetime before daring to take the sacrament,” whereas the Methodist “was exhorted to testify for the Lord the night of his conversion, was trained to talk in class meeting of his spiritual ups and down, and in general wore his heart upon his sleeve.” Josephus contrasted the dignity of Presbyterian worship services with the informality of Methodist gatherings, where “emotionalism used to swing exuberant Methodists off their base” during revival meetings. He mischievously compared Methodists as the equal of Presbyterians in numbers, missionary zeal, preaching power, vitality of church life, work with youth, and application of Christian principles to social problems – they were a match for Presbyterians “in everything but prestige. They are handicapped by immaturity. They have not the culture.”81 The denigration of the public role that the new church was expected to adopt was just as severe and, given the need to garner legislative support for union, potentially more damaging. The church union bill before Parliament was ominously cast as a debate over whether Canada would have a state-controlled church. Instead of being the Church of Christ, the United Church would become “a civil corporation, a creation of Parliament, a creature of the State, having its existence and name by grace of Parliament, its teachings authorized by Parliament, its life dependent upon the will of Parliament.”82 Social progressives who opposed church union objected to the premise that a united church would be a more effective means of creating a Christian social order in Canada. D.J. Fraser had made no secret of his own liberal leanings over the years. As he prepared for the final General Assembly vote, he summed up the case for his side in the controversy: “What many of us feel to-day is the need of a change of emphasis from legislation to regeneration, from reform to

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redemption, from outward change to inward conversion. The pulpit is not a platform for discussing the questions of the hour, but is a medium for the message of the Eternal.”83 W.D. Tait, professor of psychology at McGill University, agreed, charging unionists with wrongly placing faith in “church organization” as the solution to social problems: “it should be plain to all that the curse of the modern world is organization.” “Organization” stifled effort since “it destroys personality, deadens refined, sensitive feelings and obliterates the genius of the individual.” He concluded that spiritual power “must come from the individual or not at all; and spiritual unity is not a necessary consequence of social or ecclesiastical legislation.”84 Suspicion of a hidden agenda in the guise of church union was pervasive among its critics. E. Lloyd Morrow, author of a book that catalogued their complaints (and himself a supporter of a federation model for ecumenical co-operation),85 was scathing in his analysis of what he called a “Big Merger Church.” A “Big United Protestant Church might cause racial and religious strife in Canada” if Frenchand English-speaking Catholics sensed that their civil and religious liberties were threatened. The past, as he read it, told a different story than the unionists had related: “All history is a protest against the argument of the moral,[sic] and spiritual efficiency of the one big Church idea,” he protested. Protestant national churches had proved to be as decadent as Catholic ones.86 He dismissed as absurd the argument that a Protestant national church was needed to “obliterate these precious religious differences, in order to mould the character of our citizenship.” Canada was already bound together by imperial, national, economic, family, and religious bonds that were unbreakable. “Beware of the religio-political motives for Union,” he warned, for it might actually divide Canada by creating a split with Quebec “if a United Protestant Church were strong enough and unchristian enough to start a quarrel with our fellow-Christians of the Roman Catholic faith.”87 Suspicion about the union movement’s political aims crossed denominational lines and international borders. Once again, those identified as fundamentalists took aim. Machen’s attacks on the “program” of the modern liberal church in the United States was strikingly similar to what was being said in Canada about the proposed united church. There was little emphasis on heaven in the liberal understanding of salvation, said Machen, and liberalism’s emphasis on “this world” had resulted in a religion that was a “mere

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function of the community or of the state.” The liberal Protestant response to new immigrants drew his scorn as an attempt to repress their mother languages in order to produce “a unified American people.” The state had turned to religion to implement its agenda, and immigrants were now greeted with “a Bible in one hand and a club in the other offering them the blessings of liberty. That is what is sometimes meant by ‘Christian Americanization.’”88 Machen’s Canadian readers would have had little difficulty in translating this as an indictment of the unionists’ hopes of Christianizing the social order and creating a new type of Canadian. While he conceded that such tactics might provide a good defence against Bolshevism, produce a united country or a healthy community, and even promote international peace, Christianity for Machen was more than a means to such ends; a religion could no longer be considered “Christian” if it was principally concerned with such objectives.89 He rightly predicted that his assessment of liberalism would be interpreted as an attack on the social gospel, which differed significantly from his own view of the social dimension of the Christian faith. He was particularly suspicious of social Christianity’s view of the state, cautioning that even the family, the most important social institution, was being “pushed into the background by undue encroachments of the community and the state.” He warned readers that soon children would no longer be “surrounded by the loving atmosphere of the Christian home, but by the utilitarianism of the state.”90 Fundamentalists closer to home were likewise worried about what they saw reflected in the founding vision for the new church. T.T. Shields attacked S.D. Chown for claiming that union would result in godly legislation: “The work of the church is not to interfere in politics; and no church body has the right to go to the legislators of the land and ask for legislation, godly or otherwise.” Himself a staunch supporter of temperance, he feared that while union supporters might “succeed in having other Acts such as the O.T.A. [Ontario Temperance Act] written upon the statute books of the land,” they were “forgetting the hearts of the people; and so they bring great joy to the devil.”91 Uneasiness in some quarters of the Anglican Church was reported in the Canadian Churchman, whose editor opined that religion “must be a thing of the heart and of the will, an impelling impulse of life. It would never do to exchange the Church of God for a great social service institution, a law enacting body or an organization to

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spike the guns of the Roman Church.”92 A number of bishops took issue with the paper’s position, stressing that it was not the official organ of the Anglican Church; still, the editorial was a reminder that union was far from popular in some Protestant circles. In the heat of the debate over church union in the Ontario legislature, m p p J.A. McCausland, an Anglican, pronounced the bill as “good as dead.” He explained to the reporter that “we have a legislature here that is not going to let that domineering bunch of Methodists have their own way – that bunch that for the last ten years or so has been telling us what we must eat and drink ... Do you think we Anglicans are going to let Dr Chown tell us what we are to do? I’d see him ...” – at which point words were uttered that the reporter was not allowed to quote!93 Catholics also had misgivings about the political repercussions of church union. An issue of St Peter’s Messenger that came out shortly after the inauguration ceremony expressed shock at how quickly and easily its leaders circumvented the “tests of Holy Scripture,” ­citing as evidence calls for the ordination of women. While United Church ministers were free to “preach the silliest and most absurd doctrines” and “follow the paths of error and darkness to their heart’s content” within their own ranks, the paper drew a line: “when they invoke the power of the law to enforce their petty ideas of reform upon us, when they want to tell us what kind of religious instruction our children are to receive in our schools, when they want to tell us what we should drink, and so on, then we are obliged to call a halt.”94 Secular press coverage of the controversy likewise often displayed the uniting churches and their cause in an unflattering light. Methodists found themselves pictured as power-hungry social climbers. Chown, in particular, drew harsh personal criticism. As one critic put it, “Dr Chown cracked the solidarity whip about his shins, and he changed his Highland fling to the Methodist solidarity goose step. Politico-religious control has arrived.”95 An editorial in the New York Sunday Times on the rise of the church union movement expressed the apprehension of its opponents that the new church would become a political force as “the State Church potentially, though of course not in name, of the English-speaking Provinces.” Union supporters no doubt were dismayed to find the Basis of Union itself quoted as evidence: “There is a clause in the ‘Basis of Union’ which proposes that the United Church of Canada shall

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‘enact such legislation and adopt such measures as may tend to promote true godliness and repress immorality, &c.’” The newspaper had failed to notice that it was quoting from a section of the Basis of Union (8.6.10) outlining the General Council’s responsibilities to regulate the church’s own actions. The American newspaper mistook this for a quite different kind of ‘legislation’ and remarked disapprovingly: “The Dominion has long suffered from church intervention in politics, and knows the tendency of the ecclesiastical temperament to dub as ‘ungodly’ or ‘immoral’ any action or opinion with which it fails to agree.”96 The Act of Parliament that legally formalized church union made it even more suspect in the eyes of those who opposed it. As one letter to the Toronto Telegram put it, “The Dominion Government by confirming the ambitious name it had assumed, and by ratifying its constitution, has to all intents and purposes conferred upon it the dignity of being the Established Church of our New Nation, and all who are not in organic union with it will rank as mere ­dissenters.”97 Saturday Night sounded its usual libertarian alarm: “The question arises whether this co-operation [between church and state] is to take the form of a vast sin-factory for the creation of new statutory offences; and to impose on the rest of the community the Unionist discipline with regard to alcoholic beverages, horse racing, card playing and possibly smoking (for the word ‘narcotics’ is of wide meaning).”98 The unflattering press coverage identified the social agenda of the new church with temperance, and played on the growing unpopularity of prohibition. George Pidgeon suspected that the legislative opposition to church union in Ontario was a way for those who opposed temperance legislation to hit back at the Methodist Church for promoting it.99 Led by R.J. Wilson, the Joint Committee on Church Union vigorously responded to the barrage of criticism. A pamphlet pointedly titled The Fundamentals answered questions raised about the “central truths of evangelical religion.” It upheld the doctrinal section of the Basis of Union, in particular the articles on grace, as being as “clear and strong as any authoritative statement issued by any Church in recent times.”100 Those who took time to read the Basis of Union would have indeed discovered that Article VI, “Of the Grace of God,” declared that “God, out of His great love for the world, has given His only begotten Son to be the Saviour of sinners, and in the

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Gospel freely offers His all-sufficient salvation to all men”; it was followed by articles on Christ’s atonement “for the sins of the whole world,” regeneration, repentance, justification, and sanctification. Supporters of church union also drew attention to the affinity of their cause to the Reformation. Affirming the authority of the Scripture and acknowledging the importance of the ancient creeds, the preamble to the Basis of Union added: “We further maintain our allegiance to the evangelical doctrines of the Reformation” adopted by the uniting traditions. However, the Joint Committee rejected the notion that the competition among post-Reformation denominations was preferable to a national church. Dismissing the characterization of a national church as “medieval” or “Roman,” T.B. Kilpatrick claimed that the United Church was akin to the Protestant model developed in the sixteenth century. Reformers then had envisaged a particular type of Protestant church in each nation. “There is no room, properly, in any one nation, for any other Church than the Church of that nation, which shall be the expression and organ of the national religious life.”101 As the final vote neared, unionists distributed leaflets in an attempt to assuage concerns about political interference. “The United Church has no political aspirations, its primal purpose is to lay the foundation for that unity of soul and conscience, which must come first in all our nation-building,” one pamphlet explained. “By breaking down the barriers of provincialism and sectionalism within itself, the United Church will stand as a symbol of national unity, and it will be the task of the United Church, so far as lies within its power, to create and maintain a United Canada. The United Church of Canada will be one from ocean to ocean; one in the East and in the West, and it will become a uniting influence in the national life.”102 The alternative to the adventure in faith that union promised was “separation from the Mother Church; separation from the great West; separation from foreign missionaries and their work; visionless isolation; unrest and distraction; perpetuation of strife.”103 Little matter, then, whether one were a member of a large con­ gregation such as Bloor Street Presbyterian or a small local-union church in “new Ontario” or the West: each was called to take part in the new venture. Preaching before a crowd described as having “taxed the capacity of Bloor St Presbyterian Church,” George Pidgeon urged the “churches of the east” to “win the whole land for Christ.” Well aware of the appeal that was being made to preserve

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the distinctive features of the Presbyterian tradition, he reminded them that just as a person could shut out the sun by holding a penny too close to the eye, so local differences might blind them to “the greatest opportunity of the age.” If the name “Presbyterian” had to go, it was “only the bursting of the acorn shell in order to let the oak develop,” for the tree could not otherwise grow.104 The printed matter distributed to his congregation included a pamphlet that succinctly presented what the unionists believed to be at stake for them in the upcoming vote: “Consideration of our place within the Nation forbids our remaining aloof, as an independent congregation, and, with almost equal emphasis, suggests that there is no place within a small dissenting group for such work as our people wish to undertake for the sake of Canada.”105 Entering the new United Church with churches like the large and prosperous Bloor Street Presbyterian were hundreds of small and struggling congregations in the West that were heartened by hearing the case for church union: the future of Canada depended on the kind of co-operation they had already demonstrated in their local unions. From his vantage point in Saskatoon, principal E.H. Oliver predicted that a united church would create a “great healing and unifying bond of kindliness and love” between East and West. He was convinced that there could be no turning back, for “the church of the future in Western Canada is a united church; do not make any mistake about that.”106 Demographics seemed to support Oliver’s case. Considering the question of the consequences of reversing the decision to unite, the Manitoba Free Press reported that “it would mean the abandonment of a constructive work of national pro­ portions that has extended over the past sixteen years ... It is not possible to go back without disrupting the life of three thousand congregations scattered over the whole Dominion.”107 Church union supporters may have exaggerated the strength and significance of the union movement in western Canada,108 but the thought of losing such a large block of congregations was sobering. Critics downplayed the spiritual aims of church union; supporters countered with a vision of Christian Canada and its mission in the world. Addressing a gathering at Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto, J.R.P. Sclater painted a vivid picture of what he saw at stake in the controversy. “We have just seen Christian civilization doing its very best, all but successfully, to commit suicide. You have seen the nations reeking with the fumes of war and reeling in

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the shock of it, and that in a professedly Christian world – in the very centre of the Christian domination of the world; and yet people think they are getting on very nicely!” Sclater was not so sanguine. “Stretches of Canada are untouched, stretches of the world unheralded by the Gospel of Jesus Christ; and you say the Church is getting on very nicely! I say it is getting on tragically; and if ever there was a time for men to consider the proper adjustment of the means at their disposal, it is today when we stand amid the ruins left by the greatest catastrophe that has ever befallen Christian civilization.” To him the implications for the church union question were clear: “If, in these days, we cannot learn that the Christian Church has much to unlearn, particularly in regard to its insensate divisions, then we are sunk too deep in self-complacency, even to be taught.”109 And yet going ahead with union held its own dangers once it became apparent that the Presbyterian Church could unite only by dividing. Even some of its earliest supporters began to harbour doubts. By 1916 D.M. Gordon had come to believe that the benefits of union would outweigh the losses. A quarter-century earlier, in the style of King Arthur, he had gathered young theological knights at his Round Table in Halifax. Together they had championed the cause of church union. Now, plagued by ill health that would lead to his retirement as principal of Queen’s University the following year and torn in his loyalties, Gordon’s public statements expressed concern and his private correspondence reflected growing sadness. The tangled personal and professional ties that were frayed by the controversy were evident within Gordon’s own network of family and friends. Daughter Minnie was considered the key organizer of the antis in Kingston, although she declined to hold office in the Presbyterian Women’s League because of her father’s position at the university.110 Son-in-law Will, married to his daughter Katherine, was W.F. Nickle, known in his public life as the anti-union attorney general of Ontario. Yet still supporting the cause of church union were old friends from his Halifax days who, despite his pleas to ­suspend negotiations, insisted on going ahead with union even with the knowledge that many congregations would vote against it. One of those old friends and fellow-knights, Clarence Mackinnon, was elected moderator in 1924 and charged with the responsibility of overseeing the last steps toward union. Gordon was caught on the horns of a dilemma. He had been a  member of the first union committee and long regarded as a

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s­ upporter of a united church. In the story of church union as he remembered it, his committee had assumed that union would only proceed if the whole church supported it.111 It was folly, he wrote in 1916, for the majority to form a united church while its opponents were left with the old name and some of the property.112 His letter of congratulations to Mackinnon on his “elevation to the Moderator’s chair” urged him to consider the costs of forcing a union which, far from fostering spiritual unity, would “open the floodgates to strife, resentment and other destructive forces.” As “the really wise course,” Gordon proposed suspending negotiations with the Methodists and Congregationalists in an effort to go back to the way things were before the 1916 vote. The immediate task for Presbyterians was to restore unity within their own ranks and wait for divine guidance on organic union with others.113 By then Gordon had lost confidence in those who were steering the process. To say he was disappointed in the actions of the Joint Committee was “a very mild expression of my feeling, and it might shrivel up this paper, as with fire, if I were to use anything like adequate language. Words fail me,” he confided in a letter to a friend. His disappointment was palpable as he reminisced about his own early involvement in the movement, concluding that it was premature: “The seed was unduly forced into bloom, and therefore failed to yield the fruit we had hoped for.”114 Yet, other Presbyterians who had opposed union eventually overcame their reservations and joined the United Church. John Mackay soon gave up his fight for federation.115 By the time the United Church was inaugurated in 1925, he was principal of Manitoba College, once headed by his past antagonist Patrick. Even the statistics told two stories of church union and, concludes Moir, could be “juggled to prove whatever one wanted to prove.” By simply counting the number of ballots cast, those against union claimed their support was growing. But many congregations (especially in the West) did not bother to cast ballots since support for union was a foregone conclusion. In the end, about the same number chose to continue as the Presbyterian Church in Canada after 1925 as had voted against union when it was put to a congregational vote in 1911: roughly a third. However, the distribution of dissent was not evenly spread across Canada. According to Moir’s calculations, 21 per cent of the non-concurring congregations were in the Maritimes, 25 per cent in Quebec, 38 per cent in Ontario

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319

4

4,797

–

334

266

550

4,512

115

–

387

572

876

437

1,280

211

203

358

73

Presbyterian

Source: C.E. Silcox, Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences, Table XIV.

171

–

Trinidad

Total

–

Newfoundland

4

24

Alberta

British Columbia

27

Saskatchewan

513

458 1,683

26 64

Quebec

Ontario

Manitoba

263

343

68

Methodist

7

New Brunswick

– 15

Nova Scotia

Congregational

Prince Edward Island

Province / Colony

Before 10 June 1925 (breakdown of 9,480 congregations by denomination)

8,688

115

334

629

1,103

1,394

746

2,530

643

444

633

117

United

8

–

–

–

3

–

–

5

–

–

–

–

Non-concurring Congregational

784

–

–

28

40

22

14

492

52

29

83

24

Non-concurring Presbyterian

After 10 June 1925 (breakdown of 9,480 congregations by denomination)

Table 2.2 Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations before 10 June 1925 and United and non-concurring congregations after 10 June 1925



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(particularly the wealthier ones), and less than 5 per cent in the West.116 The vast majority of ministers and overseas missionaries chose to join the United Church, leaving the United Church with a surplus (and the Presbyterians with a shortage) of personnel. Unfortunately for the United Church, the enabling legislation in Ontario and Quebec awarded Knox College in Toronto and Presbyterian College in ­Montreal to the continuing Presbyterians. The loss of Knox College was a particularly bitter pill to swallow, since the new building completed in 1915 had been linked in principal Alfred Gandier’s fundraising activities to preparing leaders for a united church. A decade later he had no choice but to raise money for a new college after he and his faculty, as well as three-quarters of the students, vacated Knox College.117 It is hard to gauge the impact of this bitter, protracted, and at times unseemly controversy. The continuing resistance to church union secured the survival of the Presbyterian Church in Canada by denying the claim of the founders of the United Church that its name had been carried into union. The dispute thereby became a defining moment in shaping the identity of the continuing Presbyterians. But it forged the identity of the United Church as well: first impressions of the new church and its leaders were formed while watching the two sides argue. The public was thus exposed to two sets of convictions about the mission of the church, particularly in the North and West, as well as tactical disagreements over how to carry it out.118 Tensions heightened when anti-union groups converged with anti-modernist theology to cast the Methodist and Congregationalist union partners in an unfavourable light. The effective use of such disparaging terms as “creedless” and “political club” created an impression that the United Church found hard to shake long after 1925. And by becoming modernists in the eyes of fundamentalists, their claim to be a stream of the evangelical tradition was suddenly suspect in some circles. What can be said with certainty is that out of the controversy came two stories about church union. As told by the continuing Presbyterians, it was a tale of the rise of a new sect misnamed “The United Church of Canada.” As lovers of liberty, the Presbyterian Church in Canada was willing to let them leave, as long as they left the trusts and property – and, of course, the name – behind. Ephraim Scott complained that the phrase “you’ll never know the difference”

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had been “a constant opiate to Presbyterians, to dull them during the attempted extinction of their Church.”119 Little wonder that many years later, the history of First United Church in Victoria, bc, observed that “congregations in the Presbyterian tradition,” like theirs, were “reputedly loath” to give up their old name. It was not until 1937 that the superscription “Former Presbyterian Church” was ­removed from its own notices and bulletin board.120 The story as told by the founders of the United Church emphasized that they had not given up their heritage, nor anything essential to their traditions – only their old names. Writing shortly after union, another minister in British Columbia was still defending the case for church union: “We fully and gladly concede then that The United Church must be something different from any Church to which we belonged before union came. It should be capable of larger views and larger undertakings, and it must be ready for new experiences. That does not mean, however, that we are to lose any vital thing which was in our history or experience.”121 The whole of the Methodist Church and nearly all of the Congregationalist churches were persuaded that it was so. A significant minority of Presbyterians were not so sure. Both sides of the controversy that ensued claimed to be preserving the past, and each constructed an identity that initially denied the right of the other to exist. One of the terms of the 1938 ceasefire was the acknowledgement that both could claim continuity with the pre1925 Presbyterian Church in Canada.122 The Presbyterian Church in Canada survived alongside the United Church, but the financial and emotional cost for both was high. Property was divided; so were families, friends, and co-workers. Was it worth it? There was little time to ponder that question once former Presbyterians joined former Methodists, former Congregationalists, and the recently created local union congregations to become “The United Church of Canada.”

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Principal George Monro Grant, early promoter of church union, n.d. The Presbyterian Church in Canada Archives, G-6424-FC.

Rev. Samuel Dwight Chown, Methodist general superintendent [1903?]. u cca, 76.001P / 1008. Official represen­ tative of the Methodist Church at the United Church of Canada inaugural ceremony in 1925.

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Rev. George Campbell Pidgeon, Presbyterian moderator and first moderator of the United Church of Canada, n.d. uc c a , 76.001P / 5163. Official represen­ tative of the Presbyterian Church in Canada at the United Church of Canada inaugural ceremony in 1925.

Rev. William Henry Warriner, Congregational Union chairman, 1925. uc c a 76.001P / 6998. Official represen­ tative of the Congregational Church at the United Church of Canada inaugural ceremony in 1925.

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Rev. Ephraim E. Scott, leader of the non-concurring Presbyterians [1925?]. The Presbyterian Church in Canada Archives, G-380-MC.

Winnifred Thomas, CGIT leader and member of the Dominion Board of the wms, receiving L.L.D. from Mount Allison University, Sackville, nb, 18 October 1945. u cca, 76.001P / 6608.

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Rev. Andrew Roddan (left), minister of First United Church in Vancouver, with an unidentified colleague and unemployed Chinese men in shantytown, Vancouver, [193-?]. u cca, 93.049P / 4592.

Rev. John Line, professor of theology at Emmanuel College [1950?]. Victoria University Archives.

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Deaconess interviewing a woman applying for help from Fred Victor Mission [1957?]. u cca, 90.115P / 509.

Margaret H. Brown (left) greeting Katharine Hockin (right) at the Chinese border as she leaves the mission field after the civil war, December 1951. u c c a , 76.001P / 2720.

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Dedication to Mission Ceremony (Church of the Master, Toronto; Rev. J. Arnold Foster). Representatives of Explorers, Junior and Senior c gi t, Tyro, Sigma-C, and Tuxis present mission funds to chairman of Missionary and Maintenance Committee. Berkeley Studio, [196-?]. uc c a , 2008.011P / 2245.

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Lois Freeman (centre), candidate for ministry (later Rev. Lois Wilson, first female moderator); with other candidates from Westminster United Church, Winnipeg; Rev. Allen R. Huband (left); and Rev. Reid Vipond (right), 1948. Courtesy of Lois M. Wilson.

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Rev. James Mutchmor (left) being installed as the moderator by retiring moderator Rev. Hugh McLeod, 1962. uc c a , 76.001P / 4139.

Rev. Donald Murray Mathers, ­professor of theology at Queen’s Theological College, holding a copy of The Word and the Way. E.L. Homewood, The United Church Observer, 1962. uc ca, 76.001P / 3940.

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3 The Mission and the “Machinery” First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do. Epictetus

S.D. Chown had reason to be well pleased as he prepared to introduce the newly formed United Church to the Christian Union Quarterly’s international readership. With the inaugural service behind him, the man often hailed as the architect of church union enthusiastically divulged what he saw in store: God was calling this young church to observe Christian principles and practices “more fully than they have been obeyed in any previous period in the history of the Church of Christ.” This would entail advancing in key areas: rescuing sinners from sin through individual conversion; solving social problems; banishing superstitions and half-truths from the faith; carrying the Gospel to “the uttermost parts of the earth”; and promoting Christian unity. He warned that a bleak future awaited a church that emphasized only a fraction of Christ’s message: “inward deformity and comparative spiritual impotence,” even if outward disaster were avoided. Of his own church’s destiny, however, he seemed confident: “We believe we have now constituted a church well built and strong in every part, all its machinery being adapted, or soon to be adapted, to the purposes we desire to fulfil.”1 The United Church was organized religion – and proud of it. “Religion, and especially the Christian religion, carries so much social significance that organization is an evident necessity,” explained a study book prepared for the Young People’s Society. There was work that individual Christians could undertake alone, and work that was better done together. Some tasks could be undertaken by local congregations, but others needed the support of the wider church.2 This principle underlay the organizational culture of the

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United Church from the outset. According to the Basis of Union, the Session’s duties for governing the congregation included organizing meetings “for Christian fellowship, instruction and work” (5.10.1). Through the United Church’s connectional design, the activities of these congregations were linked to the General Council’s national boards, whose many committees intersected with regional structures (eleven conferences divided into just over a hundred presbyteries) comprised of ministers and lay representatives. What the United Church stood for was thus conveyed not only by making theological pronouncements but also by determining ­institutional priorities in board reports and allocating resources ­accordingly through unified budget proposals and programming.3 In particular, the Board of Christian Education, the Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e&ss), the Board of Home Missions, the Board of Foreign (later Overseas) Missions, and the Woman’s Missionary Society (wms) were to act as repositories of the opportunities and challenges the United Church faced in its early years. Those who ran the “machinery” were expected to convert its vision of a national church into programs that would prepare its members for Christian citizenship. The distribution of duties within the United Church was in keeping with changes already underway in denominations across North America before 1925.4 Methodists were often fingered as the ringleaders in this shift toward centralization, but Presbyterians had ­developed a penchant for a similar bureaucratic style. The uniting traditions had already incorporated into their denominational structures some of the work that had been done earlier by such religious voluntary associations as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Lord’s Day Alliance, and various missionary societies.5 In harmonizing their organizational practices with this North American trend, they embraced what sociologist Gibson Winter describes as the Protestant pattern of organization – a burgeoning administrative staff, centralization of fund allocation and fundraising, and boards with specialized functions.6 The United Church’s national leaders and agencies, housed for many years in what had been the headquarters of the Methodist Church at 299 Queen Street West in Toronto, developed bold proposals in keeping with the church’s lofty aims. The hope was that the programs they designed and the practices they modelled would be

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Table 3.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1931 United Church Canada Prince Edward Island Nova Scotia New Brunswick

Total population

Membership

% of population

10,376,786

2,017,375

19.44

88,038

21,979

24.97

512,846

110,548

21.56

408,219

61,176

14.99

Quebec

2,874,255

88,253

3.07

Ontario

3,431,683

973,768

28.38

Manitoba

700,139

176,240

25.17

Saskatchewan

921,785

243,399

26.41

Alberta

731,605

176,816

24.17

British Columbia

694,263

164,750

23.73

Northwest Territories

9,723

94

.97

Yukon Territory

4,230

352

8.32

Source: Census of Canada (1931), vol. II, Table 38.

replicated at the regional and local levels. Standardized procedures lent a corporate cast to church life, but they also connected congregations, many of them rural or remote, and facilitated internal blending of regional differences. For example, religious education programs were designed for use across Canada, although there were regional variations in what caught on. A memory course developed in the 1930s that included Bible verses, hymns, prayers, and graces was “splendidly received” in most places, but used more widely in Maritime Conference than all others combined.7 The United Church followed the lead of other secular and denominational organizations by compartmentalizing its youth ­ programs by age and sometimes by gender. In addition to coeducational Sunday schools and the Young People’s Society, it sponsored Canadian Girls in Training (c gi t ) for girls in their teens, Trail Rangers for boys age twelve to fourteen, Tuxis Boys for those fi ­ fteen and older), and an Older Boys’ Parliament.8 The administration of religious education was largely handled by male church executives, leaving them with less time to work with the boys themselves. Meanwhile, the female religious education leaders focused on a

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more modest but manageable mandate: putting programs in place in local congregations.9 Winnifred Thomas illustrates the pivotal role of the national staff in promoting such programs. Instrumental in organizing cg i t in 1917, she later served in administrative positions that included secretary of the Committee on Women Workers (1925–31) and membership on the Dominion Board of the w m s (1932–53). Thomas decisively shaped the educational philosophy that was credited with c g it’s growth.10 Launched in Ontario, it soon expanded across the country by building on the resources of the yw ca and nesting its program in congregations. The United Church welcomed it as part of its religious education program, a relationship that seems to have been mutually beneficial: although cg i t was designed to be inter-denominational, its membership and ethos was predominantly United Church.11 The gendered pattern of participation in church programs continued beyond the teen years. Women had come to significantly outnumber men in their involvement in church life. The difficulty of inducing men to become involved was a concern that the United Church shared with other North American denominations. At the beginning of the century, some influential religious education leaders (notably American George Coe) had hoped that modernism’s focus on scientific methods would be an antidote to the ‘feminization’ of the church.12 In most congregations, men attended public worship and were on church committees but were only occasionally involved in Sunday school, choir, or Bible study. At the local level, women handled nearly all the community service, religious education, and missionary support.13 The Lay Advisory Council reported in 1944 that numbers from the previous year indicated that of the denomination’s 721,184 communicants, there were a “not inconsiderable” 10,930 involved in men’s organi­ zations. However, that number paled in comparison to the 131,859 women in the wms alone, prompting the comment that “much more ought to be done to enlist our layfolk in planned and active participation in the various efforts of the Church.”14 The United Church directed much of its energy in this regard ­toward encouraging membership in As One That Serves (ao t s ), a Methodist men’s club in Vancouver that began to spread across Canada just before church union. Advertised as “a men’s service club within the church” and “a non-party, non-racial society for Christian fellowship – in the church, in the community, in politics, in business

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and in our own homes,” aot s offered a broad range of programs for young men, such as leadership training for the Older Boys’ Parliament. “Faithful committee work” was the “hallmark of full membership” in ao t s, and men were assured that there was “room for every member on the various committees of a well-organized club.”15 Every United Church congregation was urged to form an aots group that would gather for study, prayer, conversation, and service. It was considered of “supreme importance” that members “prove their fellowship with Jesus Christ at their points of daily contact.”16 Although not all congregations complied, ao t s was to become the United Church’s most successful organized group for men.17 It was women’s groups, however, that proved to be more enduring symbols of organizing for service within and beyond the congregation. The largest was the wms. There was a mood of exhilaration, recalled Jean Forbes, as ninety women from across Canada gathered to merge three missionary societies at the inaugural service for the new wms held at Toronto’s Bloor Street United Church in October 1926. Its members considered themselves “missionary-minded world citizens, a part of the world-wide fellowship of Christians, with whom we were co-workers in Christ’s cause and in the extension of His Kingdom.” But supporting missions in Canada also “appealed strongly, as something near at hand, within their ken, and for the well-being of their own country.”18 The name “Woman’s Missionary Society” hardly does justice to its scope. Along with the evangelistic, educational, and medical work abroad, the wms ran hospitals, various types of school homes for indigenous and other (notably Ukrainian) children, a broad range of community programs in both urban and rural areas, and ministries to new immigrants in Canada.19 At its peak its activities included not only women’s auxiliaries but also baby bands, mission bands and circles, and affiliated c gi t groups from which it aimed to recruit the next generation of members.20 In addition to Missionary Monthly and study books for adults, the w m s published World Friends for youth. Its auxiliaries formed “a great company of women banded together in a fellowship which brings to each member a richer religious experience, a broader vision of the world and its needs, and an opportunity to share in the extension of God’s Kingdom in Canada and other lands.”21 wms activities went far beyond customary missionary support. One of its programs, Community Friendship, arranged for visits to

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immigrants and others new to the community, as well as to the sick and other shut-ins. Its objectives were broadly understood to include study and promotion of social issues, with causes such as temperance, racial awareness, and world peace promoted as part of “Christian Citizenship.”22 In effect, it functioned as the female arm of e& ss, as well as sharing responsibilities for home and foreign missions. In local missionary societies, women sowed the seeds of Canada’s commitment to internationalism and multiculturalism as they learned about Christian friendship abroad and Christian citizenship at home. Confident of the worth of their collective endeavours, they gathered (often in a member’s home) to pray, study, raise funds, and socialize. Criticism of projects such as the residential schools occasionally surfaced, but reassurance was readily at hand in annual reports that spoke glowingly of the good accomplished. “Great stress is laid on the physical care of the pupils,” noted one report that described the medical and dental care provided by the wms-sponsored missionaries. “The Indian women are not neglected and a goodly number have been given a new interest through baby clinics and weekly meetings and particularly through the formation of small Auxiliaries where they feel themselves a part of the great company of interested women.”23 Some women in the United Church elected to join the Woman’s Association (wa ) instead of (or in addition to) the missionary society.24 Organized after church union to continue the work of the Ladies’ Aid, the wa raised funds for local projects and contributed a significant portion of its resources to the church’s budget to cover such functions as turkey suppers, fairs and bazaars, and community relief work. When money was needed to install electric lights, improve the sanctuary, or purchase new hymn books, collection plates, or communion sets, “the ladies” were there. Congregational histories are replete with illustrations of these groups in action. For instance, a letter from a minister in Prince George, bc, told the story of the struggle with finances at Knox United Church. Its representatives met with someone from the Board of Home Missions to deal with its debt. “At last with a little give and take, we finally agreed that we could handle the situation if the debt was reduced to $3000.00 to be paid off at the rate of $300.00 a year. Hope revived! In those lean years $300.00 was no small sum to raise. But the ladies (Bless ’em) did it mostly.” The chronicler of another congregation’s history credited “the mysterious manner seemingly known only

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to  this organization” for straightening out the congregation’s fi­ nances. “Church work was made not only more successful but also more pleasant and personal by the social gatherings sponsored by the ladies.”25 The w ms and wa were committed to serving others, but these organizations also benefited the women involved. The empowerment they experienced was summed up well by Margaret McPherson: “Even the most paternalistic, chauvinist man could not deny his wife or his daughter the right to get together for mission work; and so they learned how to conduct meetings, how to write minutes, how to make reports, to handle money.”26 They exemplified the virtues of organized religion as they attended meetings, studied, engaged in fundraising, and offered hospitality. On the whole, women were conspicuous by their absence in the United Church’s executive leadership,27 leaving the men to talk as though they owned the administrative machinery. But at the local level, women knew how to work the system too, especially in these organizations run by women. It was assumed that those who operated the denominational machinery had the means to speak to United Church congregations; it was also assumed that they would speak for its members on moral and social issues at home and ecumenical affairs abroad. Administrative departments within the United Church bore names similar to those in other North American denominations, suggesting an ecumenical kinship and easing worldwide communication (at least at the executive level) with other Protestant churches.28 Representatives chosen to attend ecumenical gatherings tended to be among the United Church’s most able executives, ministers, and lay leaders; their names crop up over and over in lists of conference speakers, contributors to publications, and committees for major ecumenical events. Suggested initiatives were often adapted to the United Church’s context upon their return. The relationship with the Federal Council of Churches is a case in point. The United Church became an affiliate member in the biennium between 1932 and 1934 (the only non-U.S. church to do so). The congruence of the work of e&ss with the moral and social causes promoted by the Federal Council of Churches in the 1930s is striking. For instance, both ­organized (largely disappointing) national evangelistic campaigns, undertook research on economic issues, and prepared a report on marriage and the family around the same period.29

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The agenda of the United Church and its denominational partners owed much to a groundbreaking missionary conference held in Jerusalem in 1928 that reinforced links within international ecumenism. Time and place were loaded with symbolic significance: Easter in Jerusalem, the city where, on the Day of Pentecost, people from many lands witnessed the birth of the Christian church. Churches from around the world were presented with a frank assessment of the difficulties of communicating the Christian message. The world had dramatically changed since 1910, the year that thousands of delegates and observers had left the historic World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh committed to co-operation in evangelizing the world and extending the influence of Christian civilization.30 The interwar period was to prove an unusually challenging time in  which to honour that pledge. The new energy and enthusiasm for world missions unleashed at the Edinburgh gathering, and the ­assumptions about globalization upon which they were based, were soon imperilled.31 The First World War was to hamper the mis­ sionary enterprise. The principle of self-determination preached by Woodrow Wilson at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference flew in the face of old assumptions about homogeneity and assimilation that underlay attempts to obliterate or at least transcend racial and ethnic differences under the banner of Christian unity.32 The old watchword of “evangelization of the world in this generation” that had inspired those at Edinburgh in 1910 raised very different questions for those gathered nearly two decades later as they considered a new theme: “The World Message of Christianity.” Joining the Canadian contingent in Jerusalem as an observer was E.W. Wallace, who had recently returned to Canada after serving many years as a Methodist missionary to China. His perceptive reports about what he had witnessed at the gathering identified the key issues to which the United Church and its ecumenical partners would respond over the next decade. In addresses and essays, including ten articles for the New Outlook, Wallace prepared the United Church for tactical shifts in what he billed as a new approach to missions.33 As he saw it, the Jerusalem meeting marked the beginning of a “new day in the life of the whole Christian movement.” The change of direction was evident in the delegate selection, with over half representing “mission lands,” which were primarily in Africa and Asia.34 It was, he claimed, the first time in history that the whole

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world was “directly represented in a Christian gathering”35 (although Catholic delegates were conspicuously absent). The Jerusalem meeting approached evangelism from an unconventional perspective. Instead of a map of the world with unevangelized areas painted in black (a familiar visual aid at missionary gatherings), those gathered in Jerusalem were challenged to think rather of the “dark continents” of human existence, where the Spirit of Christ was absent – to racial conflict, industrial relations, and rural life for instance.36 So the mission field now included the West, quashing the idea of “sending” and “receiving” countries. Even references to “older” and “younger” churches were questioned as the focus shifted from the duration to the degree of Christianization manifest in the social order. The focus on Christianization was further sharpened by linking it to a more expansive approach to evangelism.37 The consensus at Jerusalem was that evangelism should involve the practical implications of the Christian message, as well as its proclamation. Any activity that delivered the message of Jesus Christ was viewed as evangelism, with preaching, teaching, and healing in particular representing the full range of Jesus’ own ministry.38 However, spreading that message and advancing the Kingdom of God by calling for both individual and social redemption once again drew the ire of fundamentalists, who disparaged it as a “soulless” social gospel.39 Conferences are rarely as momentous as those who plan and attend them expect, but Wallace could feel change in the air at the Jerusalem meeting. Its effect was perhaps amplified because ideas that its organizers billed as new and groundbreaking had already been given a test run and were gaining support in missionary circles. Notably, Jerusalem provided an international platform for Daniel Fleming of Union Theological Seminary in New York.40 Described by one historian as “the most prolific, influential, and creative liberal theorist of missions between the world wars,”41 Fleming was already known in Canadian mission circles. Nearly half the students at the Canadian School of Missions in Toronto had enrolled in a one-week course he offered in 1927–28. There they were no doubt introduced to ideas from Fleming’s recent book, provocative when first published in 1925 and soon to be disseminated in missionary circles ­after the Jerusalem meeting. Published reports communicated the meeting’s message to missionary boosters around the world. Its

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proceedings were studied in many educational settings, the Canadian School of Missions among them, and discussed at formal and informal gatherings.42 Coming so soon after union, the conference evidently made a deep impression on United Church leaders. They were heartened by its message, and proved adept at adapting its insights to their work. Its principles found a warm welcome at the executive level, and were popularized in many congregations by ministers and missionary societies. Wallace himself redesigned his course for Emmanuel College students preparing for ministry to introduce them to this new ­approach to missions.43 Four years after the auspicious meeting in Jerusalem, Wallace (by then president and chancellor of Victoria University) announced to the 1932 General Council that the old missionary maps of unevangelized lands were gone, replaced by a focus on “the unevangelized areas of life which are found in Canada as well as places like Africa or India.”44 Before its final benediction, the 1932 General Council would set an ambitious agenda that accented Christianizing all areas of life. Among the program initiatives was support for a joint committee of the four largest Protestant churches chaired by George Pidgeon, tellingly called a movement for the evangelization of Canadian life. It also called for related studies that were presented two years later as “Evangelism” and “Christianizing the Social Order.” These noteworthy reports placed the United Church squarely in the camp of international ecumenism in its assumptions about the mission of the church and the significance of its social role.45 Those who think of the social gospel as the wellspring of the United Church’s “social passion” often overlook the missionary movement as a driving force. Church union supporters were among those committed to the evangelization of the world in this generation after Edinburgh. Jesse Arnup, who along with James Endicott and A.E. Armstrong formed the triumvirate in charge of the Board of Foreign Missions after union, saw “abundant evidence that a world vision and a world purpose” was shared by the founders. Indeed the United Church’s “ultimate objective was always set down as the evangelization of the world,” he informed readers of his study book for missionary societies and the Young People’s Union (yp u ) in 1937.46 His description of the scope of the church’s outreach was likewise ambitious: “Of set purpose it aims to make Canada wholly Christian; but

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its ultimate objective is nothing less than the fulfillment of God’s purpose for the whole world.”47 The long-standing resolve to build the Kingdom of God and thereby create “His Dominion” in Canada lingered in the evangelistic language of home missions supporters,48 and translated easily to the new aim of Christianizing all areas of life.” It meshed well with the aspirations of moral and social reformers who advocated relating Christian principles to social realities, thereby enjoying the support of many at e&ss, whose coterie of paid staff and elected volunteers included a number of prominent activists and some of the church’s best minds. Among them was Ernest Thomas, the brilliant and at times acerbic associate secretary. Thomas praised the Jerusalem meeting (along with the first World Conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne in 1927 and the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference a year later) for proposing an approach to evangelism that differed “from all revivalist movements,” some of which were “far from sharing the aim or the outlook” of its message.49 What is sometimes referred to as the “social gospel ethos” made a lasting impact on the United Church, in large part because the enthusiasm for missions at home and abroad bolstered key aspects of e& ss’s progressive agenda.50 The work of proclaiming the gospel while providing practical assistance was shared by missionary societies and two mission boards, which had at their disposal much larger budgets for education, hospitals, etc. than e & s s alone. The missionary movement, with its many voices, deeper pockets, and undeniable link to the evangelical impulse of the past, joined the cause of moral and social crusaders in Christianizing all areas of life. With every land now considered a mission field, even small congregations (often the recipients of mission support) were acquainted with programs designed on the assumption that Christianizing the social order was a missionary task. Much was made of the United Church’s unique opportunity in this regard. Church union propagandist R.J. Wilson was characteristically assertive in presenting the opportunities ahead.51 With the “larger part” of Canada’s population living in rural areas, few, if any, Protestants would be out of reach: “the vast majority of them will find that The United Church is the only Church doing Christian work in the areas where they settle.” It was, he added, the United Church’s aim to “claim every community in Canada for Christ and to minister in His name to all, regardless of creed, language or color,

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who need her help, and who are dependent on her for comfort and instruction in the Gospel.”52 Likewise Jesse Arnup portrayed the United Church as a church committed to assisting others. Since more than half of its pastoral charges received support from mission funds, the United Church was, he claimed, a home mission church,53 operating in at least twenty-five languages as well as serving “isolated Indians and white communities in the far West and North.”54 He was particularly pleased about ministry to indigenous peoples that had been provided as the land in Canada came under the “control and occupancy of the white man.” It had become “apparent that the future welfare of the Indian would be contingent upon his ability to adapt himself to new and still changing conditions of life,” he explained. Both the churches and the government had stepped in – the churches accepting the “duty” of evangelization, the government meeting its economic and social obligations under the terms of various treaties by constructing buildings and, in the case of day schools, providing salaries for the teachers. It was, in Arnup’s estimation, a partnership that had “worked out to the advantage of all parties.”55 Arnup presented a glowing account of the educational program of the residential schools as an alternative to day schools: “Immoral customs among the pagan Indians, unsatisfactory home life, the ­absence of parental discipline, nomadic habits, the activities and influence of the medicine man, all served to neutralize the effect of Christian teaching, given for only a few hours each day.”56 Not only did residential schools help Indians to become better citizens of Canada; they were preserving aboriginal culture by sparking a “revival of Indian art and design,” including totem poles and Cowichan sweaters.57 Arnup boasted of the educational and professional success of graduates who scored well on high school entrance exams and went on to become teachers, nurses, and ministers.58 This was a theme repeated in other study materials and reports.59 In seeking to Christianize the social order, the United Church worked in partnership with various levels of government to ‘Canadianize’ immigrants and indigenous peoples. Efforts to create a common culture by providing pastoral care to those who were ‘different’ were accepted as necessary and constructive, a way of creating a better nation. To those who wondered whether such efforts were still necessary, given the restrictions on immigration after 1925, the Missionary Monthly responded with an unequivocal “yes.” Mrs J. Erle

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Jones estimated that 80 per cent of immigrants already in Canada were not connected to any Christian church, and described them as drifters who had lost faith even in what they had once been taught to believe. She warned, “If we Christian people let them adrift we are responsible for a great menace which may threaten Canada.” She urged readers to “show them that the Church is ready and eager to help them to become the citizens they ought to be.”60 Readers of missionary reports and study materials learned about United Church activities in small, remote, or linguistically diverse communities (many of them identified as “Non-Anglo-Saxon”). Such work was crucial in efforts to become “the Church of the rural areas and the Prairies,” noted R.B. Cochrane, secretary of the Board of Home Missions in 1938. “Paganism in one form or another is as real in the life of our Dominion as in the heart of Africa,” he claimed, predicting that “we shall not overtake our missionary task abroad until we get an awakening at home!”61 J.I. MacKay, superintendent of the Church of All Nations in Toronto, was also concerned about the future of Canada. He admitted in his preface to The World in Canada that his own choice of title for his missionary study book had been “Can the Church Save Canada?,” for he feared that the country might disintegrate. Canada’s people (or their parents) had come from “the ends of the earth,” he wrote, bringing with them “all the things that make for antagonism and discord, improperly related, but with the qualities also that will make for harmony and beauty and strength if wisely coordinated.” The church’s “unparalleled opportunity” in the midst of this complex situation was to save this “world in Canada” and thereby “point the way to the saving of the larger world.”62 One did not have to live in a remote community in Canada, or in another country, to encounter the United Church’s missionizing impulse. Most congregations had to look no further than their own wms meetings, where local missionary educators were well positioned to promote ideas that were current in ecumenical circles. At a time when most denominations (including the United Church) had separated the administration of home missions and foreign missions, the wms remained responsible for both, and was able to explore the interconnections between them. Historians have wondered how the social ideals of national denominational leaders were communicated to local congregations – what Richard Allen describes as the “underbrush” of church life.63 Perhaps a clue lies in the organizational

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structure of these missionary societies with their connections to women in local congregations. Those wanting to find the women who seem to be missing from standard accounts of the social gospel movement might do well to look more closely there.64 Many United Church leaders had come to believe, like their ecumenical counterparts, that the key to world harmony was a new international order based on Christian friendship.65 They considered the missionary cause an essential precursor of peace, and praised the missionaries themselves as “builders of that world-wide community of Christians which is at once the embodiment and the instrument of world brotherhood and the basis of world peace.”66 In a world threatened by the rise of aggressive nationalism in some countries, the missionary’s role became even more important to global unity, insisted Arnup.67 But others, including the predictably provocative Daniel Fleming, were beginning to ask difficult questions about the Anglo-Saxon form of nationalism unwittingly spread by the early missionary movement.68 Ironically, the antiWestern nationalism that was rising in many parts of the world was at odds with Christian internationalism, heralding complications for missions in years to come. “Doors are open everywhere,” mission reports claimed. Missionaries themselves reported that opportunities abounded if only staffing and money could be found to support them. The idea that their years of sacrifice might come to naught due to a lack of funds likely caused many to inflate opportunities and overstate the strategic importance of a Christian presence in their area.69 However, events soon belied their optimism. With money for existing programs in short supply and hostility to their presence as foreigners on the rise, missionaries’ reports sounded increasingly desperate. Evangelistic work was particularly vulnerable, and even educational and medical work was not as welcome as in the past. A special committee formed to advise the church on how to deal with its financial crisis frankly stated another problem: “We cannot win the world for Christ to-day on the strategy of a century ago or even twenty-five years ago.”70 The committee’s recommended objectives and methods drew explicitly on the current assumptions and strategies of the international missionary movement, emphasizing an expansive approach to evangelism that involved preaching, teaching, and healing.71 However, even the usually sanguine Arnup sounded apprehensive as he described the new world the church was

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facing. The missionary enterprise was in jeopardy – and so too was the future of the church. “You cannot think of God except as a missionary God,” he warned. “So it is with the Church. Rob it of its missionary purpose and passion and you remove both its right and its power to carry on.”72 Meanwhile, there were indications that Canada’s own national aspirations and the rise of what Doug Owram calls the “service state” (which defined itself by the help it offered to its citizens) were affecting the United Church’s mission by changing its role as a service provider. After the First World War, the government had extended its authority by taking on new social responsibilities.73 State-funded public agencies soon superseded voluntary associations and rivalled both churches and service clubs in providing social services they could not afford to match. Such increases in government spending would have been unthinkable only a short time earlier, remarked Frank Stapleford approvingly as he observed the scene in 1925. Stapleford was a United Church (formerly Methodist) minister and head of Toronto’s Neighbourhood Workers Association, which he had helped found in 1918. He reckoned that social work had been transformed by a more confident attitude about what human beings could accomplish and an assumption that change was the result of social research. Whereas churches continued to organize philanthropic enterprises such as orphanages, rescue homes, settlement houses, and inner-city missions, these establishments were increasingly run by welfare institutions under non-religious auspices.74 This shift in delivery of social services was to have important implications for the United Church in the coming decades. Was it time to hand over even more administrative responsibility to the state and secular agencies? Stapleford himself was unperturbed by that prospect, pointing out that since the boards of even so-called secular institutions were still comprised of men and women holding deep religious convictions, churches need not be discomfited by this trend. He guessed that over 90 per cent of those doing either professional or volunteer social work in Toronto were religiously inspired. According to Stapleford, the church had a critical role to play in energizing social initiatives and raising awareness of the connections between moral and economic issues – especially among business leaders (obviously considered in need of such education and enlightenment).75

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Others were less certain. By the 1930s, a more sombre mood pervaded discussions of the church’s relationship to the state, a marked contrast to the energetic and enterprising spirit of social reformers at  the turn of the century. Social welfare and prohibition were among  the issues that complicated the church’s working relationships with various levels of government. Like Stapleford, the United Church had initially assumed it would become an integral part of Canadian society and a shaper of its values, particularly in moral matters. With its offer of friendly service to the nation, the newly founded church had expected a supportive, or at least neutral, state partner that could be persuaded to advance a progressive social agenda. It saw itself as neither totally accommodating of nor completely separate from secular culture. For many United Church leaders, losing the fight for prohibition was an eye-opener. It revealed a different reality: a state with diverging interests on particular issues, unresponsive, and at times even hostile to the church’s agenda. Prohibition was the public policy issue with which the United Church, at the time of its founding, was most closely identified. Despite considerable church effort to sway the political debate, the tide turned against temperance as one province after another rejected prohibition and adopted government control of the sale of alcoholic beverages.76 Ironically, tax revenues from such purchases (and from the proceeds of gambling, which the United Church also opposed) were badly needed to fund the new social services the church favoured. Prohibition was a reminder of the complexity of the church’s relationships with federal and provincial governments, whose ­ ­decisions proved more resistant than expected to united Protestant influence. For temperance supporters it was sobering to see their concerns dismissed or ignored. The state had become not only an  unreliable consociate but also an obstacle to moral reform. Misgivings surfaced among some ardent social reformers, wary of relying too heavily on the state to implement the church’s social policies.77 Ernest Thomas found himself at odds with some of his colleagues for questioning their calls for legal prohibition of alcohol and reminding them that attempts to coerce people by legislation to become non-drinkers no longer enjoyed wide public support. His efforts to inject a dose of reality into discussions alienated many in the church.78 Thomas did not live to see the United Church accept his strategy in the 1950s: promoting of personal abstinence

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through education and building of consensus through persuasion rather than coercive prohibition legislation. If the task of the church was to Christianize all areas of life, where did politics fit in? How far should the church go in siding with particular political parties? Was the church limited to presenting general Christian principles when making pronouncements about moral and social issues? These were questions that threatened to substitute political quarrels for theological ones over where to draw the line between theology and partisan politics. D.L. Ritchie, dean of the newly formed United Theological College in Montreal, alluded to the customary distinction between religion and politics when he warned that the church’s efforts to build a new social order would not be advanced either by mingling organized politics with religion or by the church becoming an extension of a particular political party. Only by refusing to become political would pastors remain prophetic; they were to be spiritual teachers who presented ideals and principles rather than political contestants who translated them into policy. Their part was to redeem the role of the politician by honouring and supporting those who discharged their responsibilities faithfully, and to encourage the best persons in their midst to consider public service as a worthy calling. Ritchie put out a special plea for the church to use its considerable influence with women to encourage them to regard public office as a suitable position for their husbands (though apparently not for themselves).79 Fresh questions about the role of the church in politics were asked after the organization of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (c c f ) party in 1932, in which some United Church ministers were conspicuously involved. D.N. McLachlan, secretary of e & s s , repeated the standard position of the executive leadership: the United Church had no interest in promoting any particular party, whether left or right. On the other hand, being non-partisan did not mean remaining silent, he insisted, and the church reserved “the right at all times to cry out against injustice and wrong.” If this was not part of the church’s mission, he added, the church had no mission.80 Still, not everyone agreed on what that meant in the real world of politics. Anti-prohibitionists outside the United Church had long memories of what to them smacked of the church dabbling in politics to promote temperance legislation. Critics of the United Church’s statements on economic issues archly noted that “prohibition” was now extended from the use of alcohol to the making of profits. There

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were even rumours that the church was considering an affiliation with the cc f.81 Such allegations became more credible when Toronto Conference, in a close vote at its 1933 annual meeting, denounced the capitalist economic system “unchristian” and supported state control of a number of key industries. Those who objected to what they saw as an intrusion of the church into the political arena warned of the danger of such pronouncements: once a position was declared to be “Christian,” it was difficult to get rid of it if it proved impractical. An editorial in Saturday Night asserted that a church could hardly change its mind about what was or was not “Christian” every second or third year. “The last two occasions, in Canada, on which [God] was extensively enlisted in support of courses of action ... were the War and Prohibition, and the long-term results were not good in either case,” it warned.82 How could Christian responsibility be translated into public influence without becoming partisan in the process? This was the vexing problem assigned to the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order that reported to the General Council in 1934. Chaired by Sir Robert Falconer, recently retired from his position as president of the University of Toronto, it brought together those who were “expert in the fields of industry, finance, statecraft and church life,” and was billed as “the outcome of a great body of representative opinion throughout the Church.”83 Falconer was an interesting choice as chair. Not even the conservative wing of the social gospel movement claimed him as a supporter. For his part, he dismissed the social gospel as the response of “impatient members” of Protestant churches to “what seems to be a loss of moral authority.”84 Yet he and more radical Christian socialists evidently shared a number of concerns: political corruption, financial speculation, and the preoccupation with profits in farming and business alike. As his biographer puts it, Falconer “selectively weeded the socialist garden to suit his own taste.”85 The commission grappled with some of the most complex issues spawned by the Depression. Those who crafted the report urged “a more complete commitment of professing Christians to the principles and practice of Christian living both in personal and corporate life.” However, this “Christian” program was not to be identified with any political party or group. Ministers of the church were given explicit instructions: whatever they might say or do as citizens, the pulpit was not to be “used for purposes which lie outside its sphere.”

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And yet a minister was not to “consent to keep silence as to any part of the Christian Message because some particular group avowedly seeks the same end.” Persuasion, not coercion, was the church’s weapon in its warfare against social evils. On matters where the consensus of informed judgment pointed in a clear moral direction, the role of the church was to bring the issue to the attention of the public and political leaders, and rely on them to act.86 The report thus stopped just short of prescribing a specific course of action for Christianizing the social order. As it felicitously put it, the task of the church was “to be the light rather than the engineer of the City of God, to give direction and reveal goals rather than to devise programs.” In this spirit, it supported the idea of public utilities and applauded initiatives to provide more income security for the elderly, unemployed, and disabled.87 At several points the report explained that the church did not have the “technical ability to prescribe the process by which [unemployment] should be eliminated.” Its task was to shape public opinion on moral issues through the enlightened consciences of its members, but not to directly advise the government on the details of public policy.88 This approach was perhaps a reflection of the cautious political instincts of the commission’s chair. Falconer’s own frank assessment of the social role of the church, published in an autobiographical account a few years after the commission completed its work, ­appraised the church’s current political influence in blunt terms: ­national leaders did not consult church leaders in times of social difficulty – and with good reason in his opinion: “The advice given by churches and by good Christians is often of little value, because it is not determined on a sufficiently broad understanding of what is feasible.” To expect anything more was to misunderstand the task of the church, which was “not intended to be another earthly kingdom legislating for the social and political welfare of even its own members, to say nothing of the multitudes who would never acknowledge its authority.” Its more modest role was nonetheless crucial: rather than dictate or even prescribe solutions, it was to educate and enlighten its members in an effort to “release [their] moral energies.” Its task was to co-operate with the home in producing educated Christians whose “fundamental convictions and intelligence” would guide them in “active citizenship.”89 Still, the report of the commission was “pretty radical” for its day in the judgment of another of its influential members. Richard

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Roberts, the minister at Sherbourne Street United Church in Toronto who had been elected moderator by the same General Council that received the report, claimed that he and Falconer were mainly responsible for drafting it.90 He largely agreed with Falconer’s assessment of the church’s task in political and economic life, and like him distinguished between ethical and technical judgments (the latter ­being outside the church’s competence). Just as the church lacked the expertise to run a chemical laboratory or preside in a court of law, it lacked competence to pass judgment on capitalism and communism as economic systems. It could, however, assess the possible or actual consequences for the souls and bodies of those living under those systems. All social processes were to be governed by Christian principles that would promote the growth of personality and community.91 Despite its mediating stance, the report was not endorsed by all  who took the time to study its recommendations. A response from the congregation of St Marys United Church in southwestern Ontario objected to the findings, stating that righting economic wrongs would come only as “the result of individual experiences of  reconciliation with God through Christ Jesus our Lord.” While the St Marys’s Session agreed that “more Christian operation” of the economy was important, the church’s main task was preaching the message of salvation. Their response also took exception to the report’s critical a­ ssessment of Western civilization as “debased” by materialism. Admittedly there were problems, but capitalism was certainly preferable to Communism or Corporate Nationalism.92 While some criticized the United Church for going beyond its spiritual mandate, others were just as disappointed by what it left unsaid. The tasks assigned to the commission by the General Council had included a request “to define those particular measures which must form the first steps toward a social order in keeping with the mind of Christ.”93 The commission stopped short of detailing such measures in the final report, admitting it was unqualified to do so. However, a minority of commission members felt that the report should have more emphatic on a number of points. Several unresolved issues were identified in a paragraph that followed the report, all of them showing the influence of the Christian socialist critique of capitalism.94 The United Church, in large part through the work of e & s s , continued to vigorously press the case for moral and social reform based on Christian principles. Its leaders were perhaps naive in hoping

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other issues would meet a better fate than the temperance cause. Yet at times there was reason to think that the active citizenship upheld by the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order might indeed produce results. The federal government appeared to be open to listening to the church’s overtures for social initiatives that we now identify with the welfare state. On some issues, the United Church found its interests aligned with a state that was once again looking for friends. By the 1930s, federal and provincial governments were facing their own difficulties in implementing the ambitious social programs ­anticipated during the 1920s. Social assistance was still minimal a decade later, and organized locally and provincially rather than nationally. The British North America Act had given responsibility for welfare and unemployment to the provinces (some of which by the mid-1930s were assumed to be well-nigh bankrupt). In tandem with the very real problem of deficits and constitutional restrictions was the lingering suspicion that going beyond the most rudimentary welfare system would only encourage indigence.95 Voters and the politicians they elected seemed more concerned with reducing the national debt accumulated during the First World War than with launching new social programs. Hence the federal government was slow to open its coffers (which were nearly empty anyway). After a number of ad hoc programs failed to counteract the devastating impact of the Depression, Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett announced in his 1935 New Year’s address a New Deal modelled on the American plan for recovery. The legislation brought before Parliament shortly before Canadians went to the polls later that year included provision for a minimum wage and unemployment insurance, but still fell short of what Bennett had promised.96 His party’s crushing defeat to W.L.M. King’s Liberals likely had less to do with whether Canadians approved or disapproved of his policies than with their lack of confidence in his ability to follow through on them. The Liberals won by an electoral landslide of 173 of 245 seats, but with less than 45 per cent of the popular vote.97 Historians suspect that King may have been less enthusiastic about social security measures than Bennett; at any rate, his party could claim it had no choice but to keep the status quo when the Privy Council of the United Kingdom dealt the final blow to Bennett’s New Deal by ruling in 1937 that key elements of its munificence were ultra vires.98

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An important step in overcoming the constitutional obstacle to greater federal involvement in financing social security was taken when the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations (chaired first by Newton Wesley Rowell and later by Joseph Sirois) was called in 1937. The principles central to the United Church’s report on Christianizing the social order were evident in “A Brief on Social Security,” which the United Church prepared in response to an invitation from the Royal Commission. Although a letter accompanying the brief disclaimed it as “a report of The United Church of Canada,” the group that prepared the submission assured the commissioners that they had “worked in cooperation with consultative committees set up in various parts of our Church.”99 Their brief went beyond simply the principles in unequivocally supporting constitutional changes that would make it possible for the federal government to fund Old Age Pensions and assume a proportion of the debt incurred by provincial and municipal governments in providing unemployment relief.100 The Royal Commission report did not disappoint those who submitted the church’s brief: completed in 1940, it proposed a national standard of services, with additional powers to tax income in order to provide grants to supplement provincial coffers. More social programs followed when economic recovery and the outbreak of war created a more favourable political environment for formulating and funding social security measures.101 Social ethicist Roger Hutchinson credits the United Church with helping to lay the groundwork for these initiatives by changing the Canadian mindset that had once looked with suspicion on involvement of the state in providing social services.102 Reports such as Christianizing the Social Order, circulated widely for discussion in pamphlet form, prepared its members to accept a more expansive role for the state in social programs by linking proposals for social welfare in Canada to such familiar concepts as the Kingdom of God and a Christian social order. Whether its members were happy with the machinery that the United Church had put in place to advance the Kingdom of God and a Christian social order was another matter. Mobilizing for mission had figured prominently in the case for unification, and the machinery set in motion was designed to coordinate the church’s work across the nation and around the world. Not surprisingly, the resulting o ­ rganizational culture quickly became an issue. How

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could institutional demands for order and efficiency be balanced with a yearning for spiritual renewal that was resistant to being ‘organized’? Nostalgia for the old ways and disillusionment with the new were evident from the start. At issue was not only what was being said and done but also how and by whom. Joseph Flavelle of  Sherbourne Street United Church in Toronto was among those unhappy with the situation. A former Methodist and a wealthy businessman well versed in secular patterns of organization and fundraising, Flavelle soon grew wary of the concentration of power in the office of the general secretary, and with T. Albert Moore, the particular person charged with wielding it. Flavelle was blunt in his assessment of Moore, remarking that if he were in New York and not a Christian, he would “make an excellent lieutenant to a Tammany Chief.” He perhaps had Moore in mind when he complained of the type of church leader who found “great satisfaction in office,” and who was “restless for meetings, for Conventions, for conferences, and councils, for inspirational meetings, etc. etc.”103 Flavelle put his finger on a predicament that was to plague the emerging corporate style of church administration for years to come: the friction between older pastoral structures, where preaching and faith formation were of paramount concern, and modern attempts to promote denominational priorities.104 He noted that local leaders were becoming irritated “because they think there is an attempt at  domination from the central bureau.” Sensing that the practice of ministry was changing, he saw it overshadowed by “the tendency of the modern, highly-organized church ... to make the minister somewhat less important in initiative and constructive leadership.” Aware of what was happening in the church at both the national and congregational level, Flavelle identified the problem as planning gone awry, not dissatisfaction with particular policies. They needed to “wisely control the disposition to organize,” since he believed it was sapping the spiritual energy of the church. Perhaps, he mused, competition had not been so bad after all.105 Flavelle was not alone in sensing a clash between the institutional demands and the spiritual dimensions of religious life, a danger that other staunch supporters of union had spotted early on. D.L. Ritchie warned those gathered at the first General Council that if the new church were to become only an “ecclesiastical organization,” it might be “great and powerful for certain purposes,” but would eventually become “a burden if not a tyranny in the world” – unblessed

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by God and unable to bless others.106 Four years later, Ritchie reported that he was still hearing “not a little about the dread of the big machine” from outside critics and discontented insiders. While he celebrated the signs of life he saw evidenced in “liberty, flexibility and a certain measure of nonconformity,” he admitted that “one hears much about money and machinery and maintenance and schemes and buildings, and it is well, for these also may be fruits of the spirit.” But there was, he added, “a longing for something more”; well-oiled machinery was not enough.107 One did not have to be a conservative to have qualms about the means and methods the church was using to achieve its ends. As the United Church approached its fifth General Council in 1932, social gospel advocate Salem Bland lamented that the previous four had, of necessity, been concerned with “the perfecting and adjusting of the machinery of such a Church as up to its formation the world had not seen.” He believed the time had come to show whether the United Church still cared about the convictions that had given it birth, or whether it had become absorbed in maintenance like other churches.108 J.W.A. Nicholson, another Christian socialist, complained that the United Church had, like churches in the past, “gravitated back to the pagan notion that the important thing is to keep the machinery going.”109 Even those running the machinery were occasionally anxious about its organizational style. As his term as moderator began in the fall of 1934, Richard Roberts evidently shared some of his parishioner Flavelle’s concerns. The first decade’s preoccupation with method, order, organization, and “adequate temporal machinery” had been inevitable, he allowed, but it was time to attend to the church’s “spiritual offices.” In remedy, he offered to spend his two-year term organizing spiritual retreats and meeting with ministers, church executives, children, and young adults.110 But as his term came to an end, Roberts made no secret of his continuing disquietude. Religious communities that cared less about their purpose than their organization, machinery, importance, and prestige were “sick unto death,” he warned, and efficiency, clubs, and good balance sheets would not save them. His prognosis was bleak: if a church “forgets or becomes indifferent to its worship, to the preaching of the Word, to its Sacraments and its devotional life, to its missionary calling, the writing is on the wall.” For him, a church organized like a department store “was under sentence of death.” Preoccupation with statistics

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was a symptom of the organizational malady infecting the church: “as though it mattered very much how many of us there are, when the real matter is what kind of people we are.”111 However, the machinery of the new church needed more than a spiritual message to run it. The vastness of the land and the opportunities it offered for expansion had captured the imagination of the founding generation of the United Church, but the financial burden of realizing that vision hit congregations squarely in the pocketbook. Outreach at home – whether in urban, rural, or developing communities in the North and West – was the overarching practical problem that church union was designed to solve. The United Church had also inherited most of the overseas commitments of the founding traditions. At first, consolidation relieved the pressure on the Board of Home Missions budget in some communities, providing a rationale for closing struggling pastoral charges and making it possible for ministers to have “a man’s job” (presumably a reference to salary).112 But the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, which was essential to home mission operations, was hit hard by the decline in church income during the Depression. Shrinking budgets during the 1930s put plans on hold. There was not enough money to support existing programs let alone develop new ones. Between 1928 and 1935, the United Church closed 233 of its 3,117 pastoral charges, nearly three-quarters of them in the Prairie provinces.113 Home Missions accounted for the largest draw on the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, with Foreign Missions typically vying with Pensions as the second-largest disbursement. In 1936 came the distressing news that foreign missionary personnel had been reduced by 20 per cent, and their salaries by 25 per cent. The reserve fund was soon spent, and the Board of Foreign Missions was in debt and beholden to the w m s , which had come to its aid with a grant of $15,000, despite its own fundraising problems.114 The w m s spending on its work at home and overseas exceeded receipts, and the difference was underwritten by dipping into its reserve funds. The situation was no brighter for e & s s . It was responsible for a broad range of philanthropic endeavours such as hospitals, maternity homes for girls, reform schools for youth, and drought relief to the Prairies.115 However, ten years after union, its budget had been slashed to about $40,000, less than half its nearly $90,000 appropriation five years earlier.116

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3,566,051.99 1,300,792.02 36.48

3,057,340.90 1,058,410.47 34.62

2,613,003.90

2,613,465.69

2,479,674.05

2,398,322.07

2,354,575.04

2,376,379.51

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

489,817.03 20.61 767,952.07 32.32 116,041.52

484,532.93 20.58 747,363.56 31.74 124,154.22

502,901.59 20.97 721,954.40 30.10 125,469.36

562,674.95 22.69 713,481.49 28.77 133,184.80

601,922.65 23.03 712,272.02 27.25 144,853.73

574,319.07 21.98 744,807.31 28.50 150,494.37

646,370.05 21.14 825,285.83 26.99 210,508.05

850,858.33 23.86 841,953.96 23.61 246,689.48

859,683.40 23.65 828,521.22 22.79 265,073.07

4.88

5.27

5.23

5.37

5.54

5.76

6.89

6.92

7.29

7.98

8.17

37,708.07

40,577.15

37,802.81

39,672.44

41,249.79

41,243.93

60,998.58

72,920.86

78,202.57

89,498.05

101,658.67

Other2 ($)

1.59 207,935.18

1.72 189,350.41

1.58 217,712.27

1.60 210,747.48

1.58 238,016.94

1.58 224,859.76

2.00 255,767.92

2.04 252,837.34

2.15 300,623.44

2.41 266,479.25

2.52 305,808.10

Evangelism & Social % of Service % of total ($) total

1  A combination of disbursements to the Christian Education and Colleges and Secondary Schools boards, including special grants such as assistance to St Andrew’s College in the 1930s. 2  Includes other boards (e.g., Finance and Publication), General Council office administration, and funding for a variety of special initiatives. Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book (reports of the Finance Committee)

756,925.64 31.85

768,596.77 32.64

792,481.64 33.04

819,912.89 33.07

875,150.56 33.49

877,279.46 33.57

3,635,267.14 1,303,163.44 35.85

870,393.32 23.40 746,587.77 20.08 296,950.19

3,718,886.78 1,448,978.20 38.96

1930

% of Education1 ($) total

1929

Pensions ($)

4,033,043.53 1,500,590.87 37.21 1,016,340.44 25.20 779,176.22 19.32 329,469.23

% of total

1928

% of total

Foreign Missions ($)

Year

Home Missions ($)

Total disbursements ($)

Table 3.2 Disbursement of the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, 1928–38

8.75

8.04

9.08

8.50

9.11

8.61

8.37

7.09

8.27

7.17

7.58

% of total



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Recruitment of pastors and missionary personnel was a further concern. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Canada had been well represented among Anglo-American student volunteers for overseas missions. But enthusiasm waned in the interwar years, and an anxious Arnup admitted that younger members were losing interest in the missionary movement. Recruitment was a problem for the wms as well. It sponsored teachers and medical staff, many of them sent to schools and hospitals in indigenous communities. Its deaconesses provided religious services in areas where ordained ministers were already in short supply (a situation that worsened after the outbreak of the Second World War).117 Staffing was a constant challenge as rates of attrition through resignation (usually in order to marry) and retirement outstripped new recruits. There were still some brilliant young recruits like Katharine Hockin, the daughter of missionaries to China, who understood her own call to become a missionary in terms of being an ambassador for Christ. Many of those who joined her considered their decision to become missionaries “a living part of the concern for peace and, more profoundly, for personal and global reconciliation in Christ.”118 Other young idealists were drawn to the peace movement, racial reconciliation, and reconstruction of the social and economic order, Arnup noted.119 Given the prominence of these pursuits in the new thinking about Christian missions after the Jerusalem meeting, is it any wonder that they turned to public service instead of the ministry or the mission field? Stanley Knowles, a United Church minister and long-serving mp from Winnipeg, at first felt called to be a missionary after a conversion experience in 1924, but involvement in the Student Christian Movement (sc m) and the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order (f c so ) redirected his energies.120 Eugene Forsey’s autobiography tells of the significant role religion had played in his life. Although he had once considered becoming a missionary, his declared candidacy for the ministry “wilted” as he became more actively involved in the social gospel movement.121 However valuable their contributions elsewhere, the lack of young recruits to replace retiring ministers and missionaries was disquieting. New leaders were badly needed to succeed those who had straddled the stages of negotiating and implementing church union. Finding able personnel to make the vision a reality was a problem the United Church shared with other organizations. Speaking to a group of students at the University of Toronto, Richard Roberts remarked

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that a whole generation had perished in the First World War, leaving public affairs “in the hands of old or oldish men with pre-war minds.”122 He may well have had in mind the organizational culture of his own denomination. To outsiders the public face of the United Church may have seemed orderly in the extreme, but behind the scenes matters were more chaotic. Privately, Roberts expressed misgivings about the lack of coordination at head office. Life there was “not happy” in his view, despite an improving financial picture as the economy recovered. McLachlan’s long illness had left things at e& ss “in a pretty bad mess.” Roberts mused that “there is something in the view that the best proof of the doctrine of original sin is to be found in Ecclesiastical Offices.”123 The year 1936 was something of a watershed at the national executive level. Eight vacancies were filled by relatively young appointees, among them Gordon Sisco succeeding T. Albert Moore and G.R. Cragg succeeding W.B. Creighton in the key positions of general secretary and New Outlook editor respectively. These were not just new faces; they were a new generation.124 Even so, a few years later and by then retired, Roberts was still pessimistic about the organizational changes he had helped put in place as a member of the 1936 nominating committee. In a letter to his son-in-law, he  complained that the national church lacked staff with “both spiritual insight and business acumen.” He felt they were “pretty second-rate,” except for Jesse Arnup in Foreign Missions (“rising to  the critical missionary situation with some spirit”) and J.R. Mutchmor, who by then had succeeded McLachlan in e & s s (deemed “all right”).125 It is easy to criticize church leaders for their lofty ambitions and lack of foresight about the impact of national and world events on congregational life in local communities. Their failure to meet their own expectations should not obscure the real achievements even, and especially, during the difficult years of the Depression. There were many early successes, some directly attributable to the effectiveness of the church’s machinery, which gave it a public voice and allowed it to deliver spiritual and practical aid. The e & s s is a case in point. Ian Manson’s analysis of its activities before 1945 shows its leaders determined to “challenge others in the church to open their eyes to  the many changes occurring in society, take society’s problems

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seriously, and do their part to try to eliminate many serious forms of injustice.” A cautious attitude, rather than assumption of inevitable progress, characterized e & ss’s work in the interwar years.126 Its  leaders paved the way for its institutional advances after the Second World War – when the future for a time seemed to belong to organized religion. With time would come the realization that the machinery was not the only problem. The rise of the service state had the practical consequence of relegating religious social service to a dwindling role, inadvertently eroding an important corner of the foundation on which the United Church had been built. At times the mission of the United Church coincided with the interests of the state and its machinery was effective in promoting it – but, as in the case of temperance, not always. More often than not, the economic crisis of the 1930s confirmed what the prohibition issue had signalled: religiously motivated reformers could play an important role in launching social initiatives, but even the combined resources of the uniting churches were not enough to sustain them. Key aspects of the United Church’s mission – and with it, its identity – changed as functions were taken over by the state, even though the ‘transfer’ was made at the church’s entreaty. First, those early aspirations were tempered by the realization that shrinking resources meant a more limited offering of specialized social services. And second, an ambitious state with its own plans for remaking Canada – without the friendly service of the United Church – gradually edged the church to the margins of public life. International ecumenism’s notion of Christianizing all areas of life fared no better. As he watched the growing antagonism around the world to Western imperialism, Ernest Thomas saw the “more friendly contacts” that the church offered in its evangelistic, educational, and medical work as “all the more needed” to promote world friendship. Yet, with typical candor he pointed out the church’s limits: “Our own type of Christianity has made no wide appeal to any people except to those in the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic family, and even there mainly to the well-to-do middle class. How can such a Church provide unification?”127 Soon after he penned these words in 1937, the world changed in ways that dashed any hope for international peace based on Christian friendship, or even the United Church’s more modest mission of a Christian social order in Canada.

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4 The Search for a Faith for Sociable Souls Tension is a creative force. But polarization, which seems an abiding sin of our age, is worse than useless. It stifles creativity, whereas a healthy dose of negative capability, the ability to hold differences in tension while both affirming and denying them, enlivens both poetry and theology. Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

With only a few hours remaining in his term as first moderator of the United Church, George Pidgeon rose to preach at the opening service of the second General Council. Words from the prophet Zechariah had given him a title for his sermon and inspired an image of the church he hoped would be built in Canada: “The City without Walls.” What he had witnessed in communities across Canada over the past year had been heartening. But as he looked ahead, he saw a danger: the church could be “dwarfed into a sect.” A sectarian spirit characterized by sharply drawn lines, strong positions, closed minds, self-interest, and contention with other Christian believers was in  stark contrast to Pidgeon’s “New Testament church”: Gospelcentred, loyal to the truth, open-minded, tolerant, comprehensive, interested in other religious groups and the whole community, offering “a vital experience” of religion and a “clear-cut message of salvation.” Pidgeon’s sermon reiterated the United Church’s commitment to its evangelical past while distinguishing it from what he called “modern Fundamentalism.” Allegations that the United Church was apostate and creedless were perhaps still in his mind as he complained, “If you go beyond them [the fundamentalists], you will be disowned, and your place among the faithful forfeited.”1 The theological issues raised during the church union controversy continued to vex the United Church during the interwar years. It came as no surprise that its expectations of the coming Kingdom

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differed markedly from end-of-the-world scenarios preached by many fundamentalists.2 What was just as unsettling – and likely more perplexing in the long run – were new controversies on the horizon. Making its way to Canada from the United States and continental Europe was a revolt within the ranks of early twentieth-century liberalism that took various forms. Many younger critics identified themselves as neo-orthodox, Christian realists, or Barthians. Still others turned to natural theology or to a secular brand of humanism that not only competed with religion but also was viewed by some as a religion. At stake for the United Church in these debates was its conviction that Christianity was both personal and social in character, formed in fellowship, and practiced in the course of everyday life. Decades after the United Church was inaugurated, a new generation of leaders would still praise as wise the decision not to separate moral and social concerns from evangelism, as many of their denominational counterparts in the United States had done by 1925. The United Church aimed instead to focus on ‘souls’ as well as ‘the social order’; its people, so it was hoped, would become sociable souls.3 The United Church faced the challenge of communicating this message to people who had experienced the end of a world war, a burst of prosperity, and economic collapse in little more than a decade. Popular culture celebrated the passing of older mores and values. And yet some historians take issue with the Jazz-Age picture associated with the 1920s. Instead they find that traditional values and concern for preserving the past persisted alongside the prominence of novelty and social experimentation. “The post-war generation was less disillusioned than it was uncertain, less cynical than nervous,” suggests historian A.B. McKillop; it was “an ambivalent and tense generation living at a time when old and new forms co-existed uneasily.”4 That was certainly so in the United Church as it turned to its pastors, professors (mostly ordained ministers teaching at its theological colleges), and national church staff to deal with theological issues left over from church union while addressing fresh concerns. Pidgeon was among those convinced that there was a place in the United Church for both old and new points of view. Recalling the case of a minister who left his congregation even before union because he was a premillennialist, Pidgeon insisted that “there should be room in the

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United Church for men of strong evangelical spirit who take this view of our Lord’s return.” But, he added, the United Church needed social settlements, All People’s churches, and stately cathedrals such as Toronto’s Metropolitan Church as well. Each contributed to meeting contemporary spiritual needs, and “the one is as essential as the other to a full-rounded Christianity.”5 And yet becoming “full-rounded” was an elusive aim. To many outsiders (and, to be fair, more than a few insiders), the United Church was not viewed as sufficiently spiritual. Its approach to the religious life was what sociologist Talcott Parsons has described as inner-worldly, a category he proposed to counter the equation of “degree of religiousness” with “sense of other-worldliness.” There was a tendency, he noted, to consider one who engaged in acts of devotion or contemplation and minimized practical acts of social involvement as religious, while economic and political engagement suggested a lack of religious interest. Parsons traced inner-worldly religiosity back to what at first glance seems an unlikely source: Calvin’s understanding of secular callings and his notion that each person had “a positive assignment to work in the building of the Kingdom” in their “worldly lives.”6 An inner-worldly approach to piety that aimed at making sociable souls was also characteristic of the Methodist tradition. A capacious and comprehensive sense of individual salvation enlarged the importance of Christian service as an expression of the faithful Christian life, and was a widely shared conviction.7 While some historians have assumed that Methodist progressives were concerned only with changing the social order, William McGuire King argues that even for them the primary concern was “about the structure of concrete personal experience and about the emergence and preservation of meaning within the self.” Social service thus had a dual purpose: “to enable others to discover the personal fulfillment of authentic human relationships and to enable oneself to find a personal center of meaning.”8 The United Church sought to balance the care of souls with care of society. Its approach to lived religion tapped the root meaning of ­‘pietas’: personal duty to God and to others that included right relationships. Limiting the church’s role to “saving souls” smacked of “indifferentism” when it came to social questions, wrote E.H. Oliver. He characterized this approach as typical of Plymouthism (a reference to the Plymouth Brethren movement that had influenced modern

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fundamentalism). Nor did the United Church and other major Protestant churches attempt to “pervade all life, have hospitals, schools, everything of its own, all dominated by its religious view of life,” an attitude that Oliver claimed to have observed among Catholics in Saskatchewan, where he served as principal of St Andrew’s College. Its social engagement differed too from either social humanitarianism, which inadequately emphasized the worth of individuals by submerging them “in the interests of the whole,” or philosophical idealism, which similarly treated human nature “largely in relation to its ultimate significance.”9 For Oliver, the individual was still the key to social transformation, and the church’s greatest social service would always be “to create men, kindled with the passion for the good of their fellows, strengthened by Divine might in their inner man.” But while regenerating individuals was the most important task, the church’s work was not complete unless the persons it influenced engaged in “fighting against social evils, Christianizing all human relations, establishing social justice, outlawing War, and crusading for God’s Kingdom.”10 Whether branded as conservative, moderate, or radical, members of the United Church generally concurred: there was a moral dimension to community life that they and their newly organized church were uniquely positioned to shape. They were inclined to suppose that the world could be made more hospitable to the principles of the Kingdom of God. Many whose politics differed from J.S. Woodsworth’s still would have said “amen” to his assertion that to pray “thy kingdom come” did not refer to “some future state in some far off world, and not in some vague way all over the universe, but thy kingdom come right here in Canada, in Manitoba, in Winnipeg, in Brownsville, in my own township.”11 The United Church took as a given that its members belonged not only to congregations but also to families and communities. Its piety was thus civic-oriented, formed in the web of associations both in and beyond the congregation. In its ranks were such prominent public figures as novelist Nellie McClung, politician Newton Wesley Rowell, and newspaper publisher Joseph Atkinson. Countless other men and women in local congregations were active in their neighbourhoods, their understanding of ‘being United’ extending to homemaking, volunteering for community service, and supporting civic organizations, as well as gathering for public worship and other church-sponsored events. Their activities were intertwined with

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participation in the life of the wider community, and hence were more difficult to see as religiously motivated than were the devotional practices of those who drew a more distinct line between faith and civic engagement. Casting this social bent of the United Church’s piety as ‘evangelical’ – even if qualified as a liberal variant – proved easier said than done. No matter how often the word was used in its programs and policies, the United Church seemed unable to satisfy those who looked for emphasis on a definite experience of conversion or particular doctrinal formulations as the true marks of an evangelical church. Part of the confusion resulted from different usages of the term. As a report from e & ss on “Evangelism” explained it, the word had initially been used in the sixteenth century to refer to Protestants, then later to promoters of the “Evangelical quickening” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (which had profoundly influenced all of the uniting traditions). However, the term had been “revived near the close of the last century” to identify those opposed to the historical approach to the Bible and theology. Since then, claimed the report, this narrower use of the term “evangelical” had become a “party badge” by which to exclude Christians who were no less definite in their emphasis “on the character of sin, the atoning sacrifice of Christ, the redeeming power of God, the guidance of the Spirit and the authority of Scripture.”12 Fundamentalists considered the United Church’s theology as suspect on precisely those points. “Can nobody stop the use of these absurd terms, Fundamentalism and Modernism?” asked an exasperated J.R.P. Sclater, pastor of Old St Andrew’s United in Toronto. Fundamentalist beliefs were not fundamental to the faith, nor were the Modernists particularly modern, he maintained. Attempts to label Christians as one or the other were succeeding only in “chloroforming the mind.”13 R.J. Wilson, whose role had shifted from coordinating publicity for the pro-union side to handling requests for information about the United Church, complained that in the United States, “the fundamentalist press is sedulously circulating the idea that the Presbyterian Church (continuing) stands for evangelical religion and the United Church quite definitely for a surrender of the evangelical position.”14 He perhaps detected the meddling of J. Gresham Machen, who continued his ­attacks on the United Church after 1925. When invited to speak at Knox Presbyterian in Toronto and MacVicar Memorial Presbyterian in Montreal in 1926, Machen delivered a popular sermon that he had

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preached and published in the United States, which linked those he castigated as modernists to past Christian heresies.15 Unwilling to cede exclusive use of the word to either the Presbyterians or the fundamentalists, the United Church vigorously defended its own understanding of what it meant to be evangelical. It countered by insisting that to be evangelical did not oblige one to adopt the theological formulations of the gospel message propounded by fundamentalism. Indeed, the editors of the Canadian Journal of Religious Thought (most of them connected with the United Church) were convinced that the days of fundamentalism were numbered: “it can only live on in uninformed and unreflecting minds.”16 Another editorial characterized it as imported propaganda and a barren approach to the study of the Bible. Their confident conclusion was that “Jesus and His truth have nothing to fear from a grave scientific enquiry. They have everything to fear from credulity, scribal ingenuity, unbrotherly temper and gross slandering of the scholarly institutions of the land.”17 While insisting that the United Church was evangelical in its theology, there was still uncertainty about the effectiveness of old methods of evangelism, particularly revivalism, once thought to hold the key to both spiritual renewal and social transformation. The same results could no longer be counted on, warned e & s s secretary D.N. McLachlan. “‘Conversions’ as we formerly understood them” were declining in number, he noted in 1928, a trend he attributed to a toorestrictive understanding of what conversion entailed. Its connotation in the past had been “the saving of the individual soul,” and still involved “the relation of the soul to God.” But the United Church had come to the realization that Christianity had “a social as well as an individual application” that involved not only a mystical experience of conversion but also a visible manifestation on earth of ­fellowship where each served the other. The once-popular revival meeting was no longer effective; its message no longer resonated with the so-called lapsed masses.18 Rather than mass revival meetings, worship services and other church activities were the key to e & s s ’s emerging understanding of evangelism. In this respect the timing of church union was propitious. The church itself was a “transmitter of religion and the mother of saints,” and it was there that the “super-personal urge to sin” was met by a “super-personal organization of grace.”19 Gathering for

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public worship on Sunday mornings was the most visible expression of this collective experience of organized grace. The United Church immediately took steps after church union to encourage an ‘ordered liberty’ in liturgical practices that would make Sunday morning worship a demonstration of its common faith. Forms of Service (1926) compiled services that were already in use for Communion and other occasions: thirteen Presbyterian forms, four Methodist, and one Congregationalist.20 That same year, committees were struck to prepare a hymn book and service book. The result of their work was publication of the Hymnary in 1930 and the Book of Common Order in 1932. The new hymn book proved durable, more than meeting expec­ tations that it would form a bond among worshipping communities across the country. It was widely used, and shaped the United Church’s piety, worship, and outlook for over four decades, despite some early griping about the disproportionate Presbyterian influence, personified in Alexander MacMillan, the respected musician who served as secretary for the hymn book committee.21 To counter a tendency toward subjectivity, some of the more popular hymns were deemed unfit for public services. “Rock of Ages” was scrutinized but made the final cut because it expressed so well the “soul hunger” of Christian experience. The committee was searching for hymns that would cultivate “a right approach to the Deity” when sung by “all devout persons united in the act of worship,” rather than hymns chosen for their entertainment or even educational value.22 Reception of the Book of Common Order was another matter entirely.23 Attempts to promote its two proposed orders of service for Sunday worship were to no avail. Decades later those making the case for a new service book to meet the worship needs of expanding congregations following the Second World War rated it as “of its kind, excellent – but not very much use seems to be made of it, except for some of the special services.”24 One disappointed minister, G. Campbell Wadsworth, described it as “a root springing out of dry ground” because the denominations that formed the United Church shared “an extraordinary ignorance of the manner in which their fathers had worshipped and an almost pathological distaste for the ways of liturgical devotion.”25 The resurgence of interest in worship that many took to be an answer to prayer for spiritual revival was evidently not greeted with the same enthusiasm in all circles.

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The tepid reception of the Book of Common Order at the congregational level was evidence of anti-ritual tendencies that surfaced from time to time.26 Osbert Morley Sanford, president of British Columbia Conference, cautioned his assembly in 1931 about the growth of a “ritualistic spirit” that he feared was supplanting the “devotional spirit.” Familiar with both the hymn book and advance copies of the new service book, he gently chided the formality they displayed. The Lord’s Supper, which had begun as a simple meal, was becoming “an elaborate Eucharist, with very scrupulous doctrines about the minutest details.” There was room for spontaneity and freedom in the new church, he countered, and former Methodists owed it to the United Church to invite Brother Smith to lead in prayer or to suggest singing a verse of “O Happy Day that Fixed My Choice” (a popular hymn that managed to survive scrutiny by the committee). Doing so “might destroy a very solemn and formal communion service,” he allowed; “on the other hand, it might save it.”27 Sanford believed that the United Church would soon have to decide whether to be a prophetic church “preaching or teaching truth to the highest place,” or a priestly church seeking to guide people to God “by way of forms and acts of worship committed particularly to the care of ministers especially consecrated for such service.” While he recognized the importance of the priestly functions of ministry, his own predilection was clear: prophets were needed more than ever at a time when their preaching was scorned. “We appear in the movies as the most absurd and impossible of men. We are the butt of coarse jokes in cheap magazines and in newspaper columns ... If someone has a passion to do something heroic, let him preach the gospel to this age.” The Holy Spirit had often had to escape bondage to “so-called orthodoxy and regularity of order, and above all, from the repressing environments of worldly-minded and even corrupt [church] administrators,” he reminded his audience (made up mostly of theologians, ordained ministers, and church staff).28 Not all ministers agreed with this assessment. A.G. Reynolds made a compelling case for more emphasis on worship. With the United Church’s many rural churches in mind, he argued that it was false to regard the church as “an agency established merely for the good of the community, like the school or a department of public works,” since the church existed “primarily for God, and not for a community.” Reynolds was blunt: “We do need to strive for social righteousness; let us make no mistake about that; but we have been

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neglecting worship, and unless we learn to make way for God at the centre of our lives in the best tradition of Christian worship, our fussy concern about the social order will do little good.”29 He perhaps had in mind such Christian socialists as R. Edis Fairbairn. Alarmed by the preoccupation with liturgy among United Church youth, Fairbairn had argued that in the past, worship had often been a “real evil,” offering an escape from moral obligation. The substitution of interest in social worship for social righteousness verged “on religious treachery and moral cowardice,” he stated bluntly.30 Fairbairn’s fiery letter was one of several printed in the denominational paper in 1940, evidence of a continuing reluctance to exchange the freedom of the eclectic pre-union worship directories for the standard forms of the Book of Common Order. The debate over ritual, like the qualms about the old-time revival services, showed efforts to come to terms with an experience of God that was less direct than in the past. Public worship in the United Church offered a mediated experience of God through formal and liturgical actions. Its more ‘catholic’ approach was a striking shift from the immediacy of experience that evangelicals had generally expected, and reflected a growing uneasiness with the display of emotion as a mark of religious vitality. Walter Brown insisted that worship still involved what he described as deep emotional experiences. But he admitted that among the students he had observed as a professor at Victoria University, emotion was “no longer fashionable in religious circles”: an age “dominated by the scientific spirit which loved the objectivity of facts” had “no place for the so-called subjectivity of emotions.”31 In its public statements, the United Church tried to represent its theological moorings as having been shaped by both its evangelical past and its more recent brushes with liberalism. Even those ready to move beyond evangelicalism wrestled to retain both the personal and social dimensions of the Christian message. A 1932 report on the church and industry, for instance, described the United Church as formed by the traditions belonging to the evangelical type of Christianity, characterized by emphasis “not on Church orders and forms, nor even on creeds, but on personal salvation through right adjustment of the individual to God, and on personal religious experience.” The report pictured the United Church at a crossroads: “Christianity as we have known it” versus “Christianity as it might be.” Even so, attending to social ills was not meant to displace

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“ministry to personal religious life,” the report explained: the two were not in conflict, for “the causes of evil, of human maladjustment may lie in the economic structure as well as in personal character, and Christianity can only be made complete by the rectifying of both.”32 The Great Depression provided further evidence of the brittleness of the liberal evangelical accord, and forced the United Church to scrutinize the degree to which it could still be assumed that transformed individuals – in either evangelical or liberal terms – were the key to changing society. Could the economic collapse be the judgment of God, as some suggested? If so, why was its personal impact felt so inequitably? Why were those who worked in fishing, mining, the forest industry, construction, and transportation dealt a harsher blow than those in manufacturing, retailing, banking, service industries, or the public sector, such as teachers and civil servants? Even the weather turned against the Prairie economy, as drought ravaged the farms of Saskatchewan. In contrast, deflation was actually beneficial to people with continuing sources of income, who often found themselves better off than before 1929.33 The economic crisis seemed impervious to individual deeds, no matter how ‘Christian’ their motivation. To complicate matters, liberal evangelicals who were identified with what had been touted in the early twentieth century as the New Theology found themselves the target of a fresh theological ­challenge that drew its energy from liberalism’s disenchanted supporters.34 Heather Warren finds that between 1928 and 1932 “the theological tide in American Protestantism turned sharply from prewar liberalism” as younger theologians turned to neo-orthodoxy.35 That changing tide was evident in Canada at a conference held in Muskoka in 1931. United Church participants listened to W.A. Visser ’t Hooft, the Dutch secretary of the World Student Christian Federation, give a memorable address that was the highlight of the event. Those hearing him for the first time were likely startled to hear him recount how he had been inspired by the “Barthian revolt against loose thinking and the vagueness of liberalism.”36 Bidding farewell to the old social gospel was to become a regular theme in Visser ’t Hooft’s speeches and publications over the next few years, convinced as he was that American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s attack on utopian liberalism would prove fatal.37 The title of a 1933 Christian Century article by American theo­ logian John Bennett dared to ask, “After Liberalism – What?,” a

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question on the minds of many up-and-coming theologians. Bennett expressed the misgivings of his generation with an opening salvo that left no doubt about how he viewed the perilous state of liberalism: “The most important fact about contemporary American theology is the disintegration of liberalism.” It was, he explained, quite literally coming to pieces. It no longer enjoyed its earlier coherence and confidence, leaving many with a sense of “theological homelessness.” Like Visser ’t Hooft, Bennett praised Niebuhr for dispensing the European criticism of liberalism in North America in a dose “mild enough to be taken without too much risk of complications.”38 Among those who sent a congratulatory letter to Bennett was Gregory Vlastos, a young philosophy professor from Queen’s University. The piece was grand, he enthused, adding that he largely agreed with the way Bennett had “put the whole matter.”39 But for those still committed to the principles of the early social gospel movement, Niebuhr’s medicine left a bitter taste. His sermons and publications dismissed their handling of political issues as a “substitution of sentimental illusions for the enervating pessimism of orthodoxy.”40 He belittled liberal Christianity for its “pious hope that people might be good and loving, in which case all the nasty business of politics could be dispensed with.” Calling the liberal approach to social and economic problems politically unrealistic and religiously superficial, he claimed that their efforts would have been “less inept and fatuous” had they “less moral idealism and more r­eligious realism.”41 While attention has generally focused on the deleterious effects of fundamentalism and continental theology on early twentieth-century liberalism (including its evangelical variant), historian William McGuire King finds that a more serious theological challenge came from another source: religious naturalism.42 According to its proponents (which included the major process theologians), liberalism had not gone far enough in its rejection of older religious forms. For instance, process theologian Henry Nelson Wieman of the University of Chicago turned the traditional approach to worship on its head by emphasizing its private rather than public dimensions. The reader of his book on Methods of Private Religious Living was advised to “earnestly seek the best adjustment to whatever in all the universe he believes to be that which can help him most, even though it be nothing more, in his belief, than his own subconscious self, or his fellow associates in the group to which he belongs.” Wieman viewed public

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worship as a gathering “to help one another find God each for himself and in his own way.”43 Worship was “the time when a man deliberately undertakes to make the best possible adjustment to that which he believes in all sincerity to be the matter of greatest concern.”44 All were in need of ‘salvation’ by adjustment: “Every one of us, even the reformer who is so sure of himself and his plan,  must undergo personal reconstruction before he is fit to ­reconstruct society.”45 Empiricism was essential to theological naturalism, and science was its ultimate methodological key. The appeal of naturalism was further evidence of the complexity of undertaking theological reformulation in a cultural storm that was battering old landmarks. Those who were drawn to it saw science as a new ally as they considered the implications of the new physics and the theory of relativity for the Christian understanding of God and spiritual phenomena. In the 1930s John Line, then a professor of philosophy at Victoria College, was hopeful that a fresh approach to science, with room for a “transcending Cause,” would avoid the mechanistic dualism of the past. The writings of scientists A.S. Eddington and A.N. Whitehead had introduced him to process theology, which he saw as recognizing both the transcendent and immanent dimensions of God’s relationship to the created world.46 The president of the University of Toronto was less sanguine as he considered the challenges of a scientific world view for those teaching theology and other disciplines in the humanities. In his presidential address to the Religious Education Association in 1928, Robert Falconer observed that “when psychology in the name of science makes wide claims, philosophy, that ancient mistress, is almost put on her defense; as for the humanities they need apologists; theology appears to many as an antique.” Surrounded by material accomplishments, the average person asked no questions about the ultimate origins of life, and was too enmeshed in the world to allow the mind “leisure to ponder the imponderable.” Even worship practices were on trial, since there was skepticism about rituals that emphasized the mysterious or the miraculous.47 Like a canary in a coal mine, theological discourse was at risk of being an early casualty of the growing dominance of science. The challenge to Christianity was even greater when a secular form of humanism joined forces with naturalism. This new threat was the subject of a provocative paper presented at the gathering of world

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Christian leaders in Jerusalem in 1928. In it, Quaker philosopher Rufus Jones had added secularism to a list of non-Christian faiths as a new religion, singling it out as Christianity’s chief rival. Defined as an approach to life where God had no place (and often linked to the struggle for material well-being), Jones claimed that secularism had spread in the West and was sweeping the East and the southern hemisphere.48 His warning gave pause to those accustomed to considering the boundary between Christian faith and the secular world as permeable. Many progressives had thought of secular culture as the benign or even synergistic mate of the sacred. Now, not only science was promoting secularism; a new brand of humanism that was explicitly non-theistic in its orientation was circulating in academic circles and being popularized by leading intellectuals. One event that provoked theologians was John Dewey’s Gifford Lectures in 1929, published as The Quest for Certainty; another was the widely disseminated “Humanist Manifesto” (1933), which presented what its critics called a religion without God.49 The new humanism generated intense discussions about the threat that naturalism, even in its religious guise, posed to Christianity.50 Alarmed by its implications for Christian theology (and perhaps suspicious of Dewey’s influence on teachers), critics pointed to religious education as the fountainhead of what naturalism’s proponents were candidly presenting as the only approach to religious life adequate to the demands of the new day. Shelton Smith, an influential professor at Duke University, was dismayed at its impact on religious education, customarily the method by which liberal religious faith was transmitted. While some saw naturalism simply as a new educational method, Smith argued that it had given rise to a “reconstructed religion,” and predicted that it would either expand the meaning of religious experience to include any enriching human event, or lead to “spiritualizing” human value.51 Progressives in the United Church received the new humanism gingerly, recognizing its affinities with liberal theology. Their attacks left little doubt that the old alliances were strained. The Canadian Journal of Religious Thought carried a cautious review of Dewey’s Gifford lectures written by Line. The journal continued its coverage with a special issue that included assessments from some of the United Church’s leading scholars. While recognizing that the ­humanist shared much in common with the Christian in matters of faith and morals, Scottish theologian John Baillie (for a time a

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professor at Emmanuel College) pinpointed the issue that separated them: not whether we can find God or believe in God, but whether we any longer have need of God. He detected “something in the atmosphere of our popular philosophy which makes our age feel that they do not want Him.”52 Other contributors pressed for a new formulation of the faith that would prepare Christians to meet this ­alternative to theism.53 These theological trends were likely on the minds of those who prepared the statement on evangelism for the General Council in 1934.54 Their report urged the United Church to recognize that a crucial change in the contemporary context called for new methods of evangelism. Whereas, in the past, evangelism involved awakening faith that was already present, if only vaguely, such religious convictions had since faded. The certainties of the past were now only “spiritual intuitions” for some, and “alien if not impossible” to accept for ­others. The task of evangelism, while more complicated, was all the more imperative if the Christian message was to reach those who saw no need of God. Humanism was named specifically as an alternative to faith in God, appealing especially to “people of high morality and fine idealism.” In preparing to “conquer the intellectual habit that excludes the knowledge of God,” the modern evangelist was fighting against what the report called “poisoned air.”55 Some religious leaders seemed unaware of this new danger, optimistically interpreting the lively interest in personal transformation and self-improvement as spiritual hungering. What caught the attention of a number of United Church theologians was the absence of reference to God in that personal quest. Whether thought of as transcendent or immanent, God and not oneself had been for both evangelicals and progressives the key agent in transformation. A rival to Christianity was now on offer: self-transformation (or at least adjustment) that owed nothing to God. Seekers had before them a veritable feast of options, ranging from the highbrow to the popular, spiced with ideas from science, philosophy, psychology, and education. Self-help and self-improvement books were best-sellers. Secretary McLachlan was troubled by these trends as he prepared his annual e & ss report in 1930. He remembered the social idealism and optimism of the period just prior to the First World War and the calls for reconstruction that had followed. Appeals to service, loyalty, and sacrifice were now regarded by a younger generation as having

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drawn their older siblings to their deaths. Personal self-realization had become the goal of life, he mused, replacing the ethical focus of bygone days. Books on devotional life, applied psychology, and mental hygiene were read instead of social gospel writings; the aesthetic details of the worship service were considered more important than social service.56 Among those who shared McLachlan’s concerns was Richard Roberts, minister of Sherbourne Street United in Toronto. “Our great-grandfathers believed in God,” he observed, “our grandfathers believed in Reason; our fathers believed in things: and all these have, it seems, been found wanting. What then is there left for us to believe in? Only one thing – namely, ourselves.” As evidence, he cited the growing fascination with physical fitness, and a shift in interest from physics to psychology. There appeared to be, he wryly noted, no shortage of work, even during the Depression, for psychologists!57 Roberts was both fascinated by psychology and wary of its implications for religious practice. He was particularly critical of what he called the pseudo-psychology associated with power – whether willpower or mind-power, which he dismissed as little more than autosuggestion. To counter this “quackery,” he called for a restatement of the New Testament’s doctrine of spiritual growth: growth in grace by cultivating the qualities that St Paul had described as the fruits of the Spirit.58 Religious leaders competed with tutors of popular culture, with their different world view, much of it imported from the United States. The circulation of Maclean’s, the best-selling Canadian magazine, fell well behind the Saturday Evening Post (which advertised itself as “Canada’s leading magazine”), Ladies’ Home Journal, Pictorial Review, and McCall’s. By the time Chatelaine was launched in 1928 to compete with American magazines, the market in Canada was dominated by the United States.59 American-made movies were also popular. In the 1920s the middle classes flocked to the theatres, which had at first been frequented only by the poor and less literate. Attendance increased dramatically during the Depression years, peaking in the early 1950s with the advent of television. There were virtually no Canadian movies available during these years. Before the First World War, an estimated 60 per cent of films were produced in the United States; by the 1930s and ’40s, almost all the movies seen by Canadians were made there – even those about Canada! Canadian news segments were added to American newsreels.60

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Not surprisingly, United Church ministers were experiencing the  same challenges that Charles W. Gilkey, dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, found in the United States: many people were turning to books, magazines, and the radio for religious instruction. Detecting a trend in the 1930s that would become even more pronounced after the Second World War, he speculated that “many of those who prefer their religion so, likewise do not go to public lectures for their information or to mass meetings for their politics: they distrust or dislike uplift at wholesale, and want both their education and their religion to their individual and private order.”61 For those filled with the spirit of the times, religious practices were no longer considered an expression of either duty or gratitude to God; their value was assessed on whether they were deemed helpful to the person performing them. Attitudes toward worship reflected this drift.62 Another illustration of the quest for personal renewal was the interest in the Oxford Group movement, introduced to Canada by Frank Buchman soon after the economic collapse.63 To some observers, the movement was an answer to prayers for religious revival because it emphasized personal transformation. But critics noted that the social implications of Jesus’ teaching were not part of its message (and in fact, there was not much mention of Jesus at all).64 While some attributed the movement’s success to its ability to exploit nostalgia for the evangelical past, the movement likely owed at least as much of its popularity to the new therapeutic spirit of the era. The discord the gatherings created among those calling for a revival of religion hinted at the threat the movement was thought to pose to the United Church’s more expansive approach to evangelism. By the time the Oxford Group movement tore through Canada in  late 1932, even those who considered it benign worried that it would divert energy and attention from the Joint Committee on the Evangelization of Canadian Life that the major Protestant churches had recently formed. The latter connected personal religious experience to home, school, work, recreation, and national life in ways that were considered appropriate to the United Church’s ethos.65 But even this broader approach to evangelism did not escape crit­ icism. Writing it off as “the last kick of a decayed Moodyism,” Richard Roberts (whose term as moderator in 1934-36 coincided with the campaign) expected it would be a flop. Highly organized events “seem to estrange the Holy Spirit,” he mused, and were at

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odds with Christianity because of the anonymity of “monster gatherings.” He feared it might “provoke a reaction that would leave the church deeper in the doldrums than before.”66 Evidently he had good reason to worry, for despite an impressive roster of organizers at the national level and a few successful rallies in cities across Canada, the outcomes of the evangelization campaign repeatedly fell short of expectations.67 Harsher criticism of the evangelism campaign came from J.W.A. Nicholson, a pastor from North Bedeque, p e i , who sardonically accused the Joint Committee of simply going through the motions of “giving the prayer wheel another turn.” He argued that personal renewal – even broadly understood – could no longer bring about social change; the iniquities of the day were “not in the direct human relationships, but in the indirect, circuitous relationships that we have allowed to become impersonal.” The Big Four churches (Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, and United) ought to be sponsoring an educational campaign to bring together political, industrial, and financial leaders to rectify the ills of social injustice.68 Nicholson was a member of the f c s o, a small but vocal movement that attracted United Church support after its founding in 1934.69 The f c so contended that the economic woes facing Canada and other capitalist countries were systemic; the shortcomings of particular individuals were not the cause. As economist and f cs o member Eugene Forsey put it, since capitalism existed to make profits rather than to meet needs, “a flock of archangels administering capitalism would be under the same compulsion, and their action could not be appreciably different.”70 If that were so, then emphasizing personal piety as the remedy for social and economic ills was misconstrued. John Line was among those drawn to Christian socialism in the 1930s, and like Nicholson and Forsey, he joined the f cs o. He too was uneasy with the preoccupation with individual religiosity that he was witnessing. He cautioned that prayer and public worship by themselves, apart from social self-abandon, would produce religious introverts whose moods would “wobble between self-complacency and self-commiseration.”71 Line blamed the “vast collectivization of human living” for rendering conventional evangelical teaching on the relationship between personal and social transformation less effective than in the past.72 He poignantly pinpointed its inability to deal with the new economic realities: those who had trusted and

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followed it “as faithfully as men ever did are destitute and hopeless; having been for years upright and industrious, they are now on the street.”73 As he watched the church organize retreats and special meetings, Line worried that religion had lost its way. To him it seemed that religion was “unable to recapture the certainty, confidence and directness which belonged to it in other days.” He offered some advice to those praying for revival: rather than assuming that religion revolved around “subjective moods,” they should instead commit to working “by all right means to establish God’s righteousness in the world.” If they did so, Line predicted that religious renewal would soon follow.74 Nicholson, Forsey, and Line were contributors to Towards the Christian Revolution, a collection of essays that drew a stinging review from Reinhold Niebuhr. Though glowing in his praise of the contributors as persons (“as promising a group as could be found in any church”), he alleged that they still assumed the socialist commonwealth was identical with the Kingdom of God – the same illusion that, in his view, had characterized the earlier social gospel movement.75 Reviewing the book for the New Outlook, Gordon Sisco, the United Church’s recently elected general secretary, defended the contributors on that score. The book’s message was “radically different from the social gospel of twenty-five years ago,” its theology “deeper, sadder, more tragic” than the liberal optimism of the former. “If we cannot keep such men within the fellowship of the Church,” he warned, “if we stifle their freedom to prophesy merely on the ground that they are radicals, then our Protestant religion will gradually fade out as a saving force in modern life.” Sisco was not without his own reservations about their Christian socialist agenda (for instance, whether a transition from capitalism could be effected by a democratic process), but he highly recommended the book: “Brother ministers and laymen, read this book. You may not like it, but you need to face up to its challenging viewpoint.”76 These new theological currents found both a critic and a popularizer in Richard Roberts.77 He admitted to what he described as an “insuperable dualism” in his own thinking that lingered despite his efforts at synthesis. He claimed to be content to live with two theologies that would logically seem to be irreconcilable: the substance of the theology of the creeds with their doctrines of Inspiration, Revelation,

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Incarnation, Redemption, and Grace in concert with such modern elements as the Indwelling Christ, Jesus as the crown of biological evolution, and Immanence as Inner Light. “I mean to be a traditionalist and a modernist, as far as in me lies.”78 He conceded that the range of theological options made agreement difficult, thus contributing to what he described as chaos in Protestant thought. With ­humanism standing at one end and Karl Barth at the other end, “Protestant Christendom is sounding every sort of interval along the gamut of testimony; and the trumpet as a whole gives forth an uncertain and unintelligible ground.” Nothing would serve the church better, he ventured, than the production of “a summary statement” of its belief “respecting the great cardinal matters of faith: God, Man, the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit, the Church, the Atonement, and Eternal life.”79 Those who had formulated the doctrinal articles in the Basis of Union in the early years of the twentieth century would not have been surprised by a call for a contemporary proclamation of Christian faith. They had urged that the next generation restate the common faith as its own. The General Council took up that challenge in 1936, appointing a commission to prepare a new doctrinal statement that appeared four years later as the Statement of Faith. In his last address to the General Council as moderator, Roberts threw his support behind the commission’s decision, hopeful that presenting the Christian faith in contemporary terms would counter the “strange and perilous gospels” of conservative “sects,” whose promoters were influencing those “not tutored in their own faith.”80 Toward the end of his life, and awaiting publication of the Statement of Faith, Roberts sounded ready to pass the theological torch. He was candid about the social gospel movement: it had inspired Christians to redress the concerns of the poor and disadvantaged, but had placed too much blame for social anomalies on the economic system.81 Still, he rebuffed the idea that politics and economics were independent of religion as “a gross heresy.”82 He seemed unable to situate himself comfortably in any of the theological camps. “I have no apology to make for the liberalism I once professed,” he insisted, while admitting that liberalism had “run its course – has indeed here and there run to seed in a non-theistic humanism.” The evangelical revival that he had known in his early ministry had likewise reached a cul-de-sac, with its emphasis on personal salvation giving way to a vague personal loyalty to Jesus

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barren of the power for ethical behaviour or creative insight. Nor was Karl Barth’s “extreme theology” the answer.83 Attempts to resolve the theological tensions that Roberts identified likely tipped the Statement of Faith closer to Barth than Roberts would have wished. Behind the scenes, personality conflicts complicated theological differences as pastors, professors, and national church staff joined forces to tackle the task of preparing the document. Early drafts show them picking and choosing elements from two presentations (identified impartially as Statement A and Statement B).84 The influence of liberal theology was perhaps diminished due to Ernest Thomas’s poor health; he did not live to see the final draft.85 However, his misgivings were well known to other committee members. The minutes of one of the last meetings he attended record that he questioned “whether it would be wise to make ­Barthianism determinative.”86 The theological challenge to the old underpinnings of civic piety that Barth represented was clear to all. Nevertheless, the United Church did seem to be taking a Barthian turn, with the Statement of Faith placing more emphasis on God’s transcendence and human sin – and less emphasis on a coming Kingdom that might be brought nearer by ethical conduct. The fifth article described “man’s sin, God’s righteous judgment, and man’s helplessness and need,” while the sixth affirmed God’s “redemption of man” through Christ’s victory over death and evil as “at once an awful mystery and a glorious fact.” The authority of the church and its ministry nudged aside the Kingdom as the Christian community par excellence for life together before the end of time. Sisco conceded that Protestant liberalism had held a “too-easy view of the reality of sin” by assuming that progress was certain. Barthianism had replaced the immanent God of liberal theology with “a God who is transcendent, whose Kingdom does not come by anything man does, whose supreme realm is the believers’ soul, where grace alone can operate.” Hoping to reconcile Barth’s doctrine of revelation with the liberal understanding of community, he was convinced that “we can have a Church with a strong spirit of worlddenial at those points where the world is opposed to the Christian way, yet world-affirming at those very points where society gives indications of becoming reconciled with the creative will and love of God.”87 Randolph Carleton Chalmers, who would serve the United Church as pastor, associate secretary of e & s s , and professor of

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theology during his distinguished career, expressed the dilemma even more succinctly: “Humanism belittles God; Barthianism belittles man. Neither the one nor the other can be a gospel of hope for our bewildered civilization, and so we believe they must both be superseded.”88 Reconciling these different theological worldviews proved to be as difficult for theological radicals as for liberal evangelicals. While some, like Ernest Thomas, continued to hold firm to the principles of the social gospel, some prominent advocates for Christian socialism had second thoughts. Eugene Forsey moved toward the political centre during a career that saw him make important contributions to  Canadian public life as constitutional expert and senator. In ­retrospect he was to assess some of what was said in Towards the Christian Revolution “and especially of what I said” as “very foolish, or worse.”89 Gregory Vlastos accepted a teaching position at Cornell University in 1948 before moving to Princeton University in 1955, where he enjoyed a distinguished career in philosophy. His biography, posted on the department’s website, notes that while he continued to advocate for a “radical social order,” he soon came to consider such ideas “more a part of his private than of his professional life; he never revisited these topics and, indeed, never again included them in his curriculum vitae.”90 R.B.Y. Scott, Vlastos’s co-editor of Towards the Christian Revolution, also left Canada for a time, accepting an appointment in biblical studies at Princeton in 1955 before retiring in Toronto. Aware during the McCarthy era that his earlier political views might be considered suspect, he was careful to point out that he had always steered clear of Communism. “I no longer hold – if I ever did – that the social problem requires simply the replacement of capitalism by a kind of Christian socialism; as I have grown older I have realized better the complexities and ambiguities of the situation. In any case, you may be sure that I will not embarrass the University by ill-­ considered utterances or writings. As an alien resident I would keep strictly out of any political activities, for which in any case I would have little inclination.”91 Yet something of Scott’s earlier vision of a Christian social order was captured in lyrics that found an enduring place in hymnody.92 One of them, “O World of God,” set to the same tune as the hymn “Jerusalem,” a c c f favourite, poignantly pictured the human dilemma and the Christian hope:

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O world where human life is lived, So strangely mingling joy and pain, So full of evil and of good, So needful that the good shall reign! It is this world that God has loved, And goodness was its Maker’s plan, The promise of God’s triumph is A humble birth in Bethlehem.93 John Line’s theological journey more closely typified the tensions that the United Church was experiencing. During the Depression, Line drew public attention when he championed a controversial anti-capitalist resolution passed by Toronto Conference in 1933. A flattering article in Saturday Night about the incident reviewed his career: his crossing from Britain to Newfoundland at the age of eighteen as a shy young Methodist missionary; his studies at Victoria College; a teaching position at Mount Allison in philosophy and economics; and a return to Victoria College in 1929 after a brief stint at Pine Hill in Halifax. “Has the final stage in his development been reached?” asked the writer.94 As it turned out, no. Ten years later Line would move again, professionally and, it seems, theologically: he was still a professor at  Victoria University, but now teaching systematic theology and philosophy of religion at its theological college. He remained at Emmanuel College until his retirement in 1953. Line’s shifts in thinking while serving on the Commission on Christian Faith likely tipped the Statement of Faith in a more Barthian direction.95 The continuation in his spiritual trek toward a more liturgical expression of piety was reflected in his final publication in 1959, The Doctrine of the Christian Ministry, a study of the authority of the church and its sacraments.96 Much in demand as a committee member, Line was involved in  preparing the reports on “Evangelism” and “Christianizing the Social Order” that e & ss presented to the General Council in 1934. Line later expressed the sentiments of those who wanted to save both souls and the social order: “If I could go off to the woods and spend a year there with no telephone and write a book, or try to, I think the book I would write would be an attempt to combine the ideas of these two Reports and put them into one document. I think such a book is very badly needed, and I don’t know anything more

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important in connection with the work of the Board [e & s s ] than this question of how to co-ordinate these Reports.”97 A memorial statement presented to Toronto Conference to mark his death in 1970 described Line as “strongly evangelical,” one who “never lost sight of the necessary social implications of the Gospel.” No mention was made of the controversial anti-capitalist resolution of the 1930s. Instead, he was remembered for preaching on the street corners of Toronto during the Depression and working among the unemployed, often taking his students with him. Lauding him as one who epitomized the ideals of the United Church, the memorial summed up his life of witness and service: “He combined great gifts of mind with a compassionate heart.”98 Such an approach to lived religion was encapsulated in a phrase credited to American missionary Sherwood Eddy: a “whole Gospel” that did not pit personal evangelism against the social gospel.99 Yet this whole Gospel did not unite everyone. Writing under the pen name Candidus after the 1936 General Council, one observer expressed disappointment at the United Church’s timid response to economic problems. He contended that the reluctance to translate the gospel “into practical terms – ‘to serve the present age’ – came close to emptying the Social Gospel of all real content.”100 That assessment was perhaps too pessimistic. The report that had drawn the ire of Candidus actually claimed to be concerned with “man’s economic plight as well as his inward motives.” Its language was bold: “it must be our purpose to proclaim a whole Gospel for men and for the society of men ... Perish, we would say, the antithesis of individual Gospel versus social Gospel; perish even the distinction between them. We will evangelize with a whole Gospel or none, for none other is the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord.”101 That not all were able to rally around this call for the whole Gospel spelled trouble for Pidgeon’s “city without walls.” United Church people who were participating in church activities, raising children in Christian homes, organizing turkey suppers, or volunteering for community service were likely unaware of the theological debates over what it meant to pray “thy Kingdom come.” Being inner-worldly was a mark of ‘being United’ for the sociable souls who gathered for worship and other church-sponsored activities, volunteered for its many committees, studied together, and worked to extend the church’s influence in their community. The unresolved tensions that

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surfaced in the 1930s would return with a vengeance three decades later as the United Church considered how to deal with a resurgent fundamentalism, a declining neo-orthodoxy, and new forms of religious naturalism – discovering in the process that it was perhaps not nearly as modern as its critics in the 1920s and ’30s had claimed. In the meantime, theological friction combined with the growing appeal of the individual spiritual quest to weaken the sense of a fellowship united by a common faith. That there was a connection between faith and the conduct of everyday life remained a shared conviction. But a critical minority was more doubtful about the impact of ‘good persons’ on a social system that seemed resistant to change. And what if those good persons disagreed on how to bring about social change? Did the church have a responsibility to take a stand on particular issues, speaking and acting as the collective conscience of its members? Theological clashes were made even more complex by the troubling questions about Christianity and culture raised by the worsening international situation. The whole Gospel for sociable souls was soon sundered by  conflict that made it challenging to be united in either faith or fellowship.

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5 Christian Canada in a “New World Order” And one ought to consider that there is nothing more difficult to pull off, more chancy to succeed in, or more dangerous to manage, than the ­introduction of a new order of things. Machiavelli, The Prince

Many a Canadian would have smiled in agreement had they heard Lester Pearson’s reply when asked in 1941, “Are you American?” The diplomat who would later become prime minister answered tactfully, “Yes, I am Canadian.”1 Accustomed to thinking of themselves as ‘British’ in some sense, Canadians shared a continent with a country that claimed the name ‘American’ all for itself. A decade or so later, Canadians were less likely to think of themselves as either British or American; they were becoming simply Canadian. It was a small but telling detail of how quickly the Second World War erased old social identifiers. Although far from evident at the time, the 1940s were the beginning of the end not only of British Canada but also of Christian Canada. The political realities of the “new world order” that the victors hoped to create soon revealed the limits of Protestantism as a source of common values and a basis for national unity in postwar Canada. The war raised perplexing questions about the intersection of church, nation, and international affairs that lingered long after the conflict was over. The seemingly intractable differences between Protestants, Catholics, and non-Christians around the world – and even in Canada – disclosed the narrowness of the ecumenical movement’s vision of the Christian message as the basis for international harmony. The collapse of the British Empire, the rise of the United States as a superpower, and the growing diversity of Canada’s population as immigrants poured in during and after the war added new

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wrinkles to the old issue of Canadian identity and the churches’ role in constructing it. It was not just that Christian identity was found to be insufficiently universal to counter Communism; even in Canada a united church was evidently not conducive to sustaining a united country. The war was a destabilizing experience for the United Church. Its place in Christianity’s global mission shifted as it came to terms with the realization that its missionaries were no longer welcome in China and what was to become North Korea. Further, the movement of people during and after the war disrupted old patterns of interaction. Despite oft-repeated hopes for a new world order based on Christian principles, it was soon apparent that what had come into being after 1945 was anything but orderly. Even hopes that the United Church would evolve as the national repository of Protestant identity for Canadians outside Quebec were dashed by the demographic realities of the influx of ethnically and religiously diverse immigrants, many of them Catholic, during and after the war. The new Canada that emerged, so unlike the country that the church unionists had imagined, presented unforeseen challenges for the United Church’s work at home and overseas. A new world order based on Christian principles was a prominent theme at the World Conference of Christian Churches that met at Oxford University in 1937,2 and its theme still resonated with United Church leaders as they weighed their response to the grim international situation at their own General Council a year later. Delegates were presented with a report that reiterated the position the United Church had taken in the past: war was contrary to the mind of Christ and Christian principles. It acknowledged that some would read Jesus’ command to “love thy neighbour as thyself” as a ban on participation in any war, while others would interpret it to mean they could not participate in an unjust war. However, couched in language borrowed from the concluding pronouncement of the Oxford Conference was a broader and more assertive rationale for the use of force: “in the present unredeemed state of the world the state has the duty under God to use force when law and order are threatened or to vindicate an essential Christian principle, i.e., to defend victims of wanton aggression or secure freedom for the oppressed.” Rather than supporting only one position, in 1938 ­ the United Church recognized “the conscientious right and action”

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of all three, adding (under the rather pointed heading “The Way of the Cross”) that “Christians must be willing that for the world’s salvation their own blood be shed.”3 A year later, when the United Church rallied to support the cause of defending Christian civilization, it thus found itself in an uncomfortable position. Although many of its members supported the war, and saw it as an unavoidable response to Nazi aggression, pacifists within the church argued that war was not the solution to the international crisis. To make matters worse, both sides claimed (with good reason, if they had checked the Record of Proceedings from the previous year’s General Council) to have the church’s blessing. Pacifists kept this in mind as they called for the United Church to do more to press the federal government to provide legal services for interned aliens, care for child refugees from enemy countries, and ascertain non-military ways (such as reconstruction and rehabilitation projects) for conscientious objectors to serve their country.4 Despite the United Church’s recognition of conscientious objection as a defensible moral option, staunch supporters of Canada’s war effort were outraged when The United Church Observer published “A Witness against War,” a pacifist declaration signed by a number of prominent ministers.5 John Coburn, one of e & s s ’s field secretaries, tried to defend his church’s policy to critics by noting its similarity to the statement on war that had come from the Oxford Conference, “the nearest possible approach to an ecumenical deliverance so far as non-roman [sic] Christianity is concerned.” War was indeed sinful and violated the basic principles of the Christian religion, even if the cause was just. But the state was in a different position and had the right, and indeed the duty, to choose between two essentially evil courses of action. The resulting dilemma, as Coburn saw it, was that a church member was also a citizen and, as such, would have to make a decision about which course of action to follow. Both the Oxford Conference (expressing the mind of international ecumenism) and the United Church conceded that sincere Christian citizens could “come to opposite conclusions and take entirely different lines of actions.”6 As realism nudged idealism aside, the United Church offered ­practical aid to the war effort.7 It provided chaplaincy services to the enlisted men and women who identified themselves as members of the United Church in the Canadian Army (21.4 per cent), Royal Canadian Navy (25 per cent), and rcaf (31.87 per cent).8

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Representatives from its War Service Committee worked with the Department of National Defence to develop qualifications and classifications for chaplains, and nominated ministers for the positions. The women it employed were at the forefront of its ministry in communities where war industries and military training camps placed huge demands on social services and pastoral care.9 An estimated 60,000 women became active members of its War Service Committee’s units, which partnered with the Red Cross in supplying “comforts and necessities” to enlisted men and women.10 Deaconesses and wms missionaries often coordinated these efforts. Among them was Verda Ullman, who was sent by the Dominion Board of the wms to visit communities across Canada soon after her graduation from the United Church Training School in Toronto in 1942. One of her specific tasks was to support soldiers’ wives and women working in war industries by assessing their needs for housing, recreation, and pastoral care.11 Pleas from across the country for a “woman worker” came from places like Prince Rupert, bc, where a minister reported a doubling of the population in two years because of “soldiers, their relatives, Indians and other ship-building employees.”12 The wms’s Dominion Board also tackled what one newspaper referred to as the “delicate Japanese situation.” Its ­missionaries followed members of eight Japanese-Canadian congregations in British Columbia after their internment, hoping to  reestablish “the cultural and religious life to which they have been accustomed.”13 Even before the end of the war, the United Church looked ahead to demobilization and resettlement. War had uprooted an estimated one-sixth of the country’s population. Nearly 800,000 (including about 32,500 women) were in the armed forces; less conspicuous were the over 1.1 million (including 250,000 women) employed in war industries.14 Nearly all of them belonged to one church or another. The United Church was aware that once the war ended, adjusting to “the ways of peace and normalcy” would be difficult for many. As a pamphlet on the new tasks it would face bluntly put it, “young folks who came from farm life with its long hours, seasonal heavy work, absence of regular income and nearby attractions, will find it hard to go back to the quiet and drudgery involved in the noble vocation of agriculture.” Young veterans and war workers, especially female factory workers, were expected to be ‘different’ – at the very least, more mature – and this was of particular concern.

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There were fears that a woman’s place in society had changed. Young women engaged in the war industry “may have lost some of the feminine touch and ... taken on some masculine qualities.” Some veterans might return with deeper spiritual convictions, while others would be resentful, cynical, and emotionally traumatized. New opportunities for ministry were anticipated: psychiatric work with the emotional casualties of war, personal counselling on a range of issues, and a “new emphasis on the therapeutic value of worship.”15 While such efforts were considered by some to be minimal, critics of the church’s support for the war protested that too much was ­being done. They were especially shocked to learn that the United Church was urging its members to purchase war bonds in its name, putting the church in a position to gain a profit and retire its $1.7 million debt when the bonds matured. Unwanted international attention was drawn to this fundraising ploy when the Christian Century’s C.C. Morrison, ordinarily an admirer of the United Church, published a blistering attack in one of his editorials.16 The bonds controversy further alienated pacifists. Among those uneasy with the idea, which smacked to some of compromising ideals for financial gain, was R. Edis Fairbairn, the minister who had crafted the controversial “Witness against War” petition. According to Fairbairn, people were asking whether there was any issue upon which the United Church was willing to take a stand (and act on it) regardless of consequences. He suggested that the acid test was not “Will you die for your faith?” but “Will you cheerfully suffer financial loss for it?” For him, the real tragedy was that the average person did not believe in Christianity because the churches no longer seemed to believe in it.17 Others, however, still saw a constructive role for the churches. The social and theological plan for a new world order that had been bandied about in ecumenical circles before the war seemed all the more relevant once the war was underway. Invited as the speaker for the “Church of the Air” series in 1941, E.G.D. Freeman, professor and later dean of the Faculty of Theology at United College in Winnipeg, took as his theme “The Church and the New World Order.” More important than the conflict that had recently engulfed the world, he told his listeners, was the “conflict within the human soul.” The Christian church was called upon to take a side in this conflict and defend its values. He identified ten principles to which he claimed all Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, should be

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committed, among them equal rights and opportunities, freedom, justice, social security, protection of the family unit, and stewardship of resources. Like many United Church leaders, he searched for opportunities to move toward those worthy objectives, insisting that “unless we regard the present war as a stupid and meaningless dog fight, it is up against some such background that we must see it.”18 In his first address, Freeman set out a case for seeing Christian standards as a way to counter the materialistic and mechanistic “paganism” that had led to war.19 The second address elucidated what was becoming a common theme for those promoting the new world order: the ties between Christian faith and the democratic way of life. Freeman’s God spoke to men and women “through the voice and pleading of high ideals,” and he was struck by the similarity of democracy’s values to those of the historic Christian faith.20 A supporter of the policies that the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order had favoured in 1934, he conceded that during the Depression no one had the money to provide the social services it had recommended. But with the war came a different view of the state: “never again will people readily believe that a government that can finance a great war cannot in times of peace somehow provide work for people. The cry that there is no money in the country will never be believed again.”21 His final lecture presented the implications of the new world order for the church in cultivating a public conscience and sense of social responsibility.22 He made a special plea for co-­operation in higher education: “All the kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ – and the most important of all is the kingdom of the mind.”23 The United Church exuded this confident outlook as it prepared for postwar reconstruction. A Commission on Church, Nation and World Order that reported to the General Council in 1944 oversaw an ambitious research project that included collaboration with ecumenical partners in the United States and Great Britain.24 Canadian academics, business professionals, and civil servants served as volunteer consultants, working either directly with the commission or, more often, in regional study groups assigned to garner ideas and information on specific issues. It was assumed that this local wisdom would somehow find its way into the final report.25 Behind the scenes, some troubling issues were surfacing. The philanthropic demands of the Depression had depleted the church’s

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resources, forcing it to cut back on social research. It was evident that voluntary organizations could not compete with the taxation power of government, particularly at the federal level, to amass research funding. What then could church staff or volunteers say or do to address social issues that specialists working in secular organizations would not do better? And what did the principles promulgated by national executives and General Council delegates have to do with decisions made by churchgoers across the country? Commission members disagreed about the means, ends, and even their own competence to address the questions. The United Church’s delegates to the Round Table Conference at Princeton Theological Seminary found other church leaders facing a similar problem: it was easy to agree on moral principles, but difficult to find consensus on how to apply them.26 A decade after the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order finished its work, the relationship between broad theological principles and specific social policies was still contested, leaving some puzzled and others disillusioned and angry. Dalhousie University professor R.A. MacKay put the matter bluntly to J.R. Mutchmor, who was assigned to serve as secretary to the new commission: the issues assigned to subcommittees were worthy of discussion, but since most committee members were not experts, he expected little would come of their input. His advice was to focus on the “moral, humanitarian, and probably a religious basis” of policies, and “leave to governments or other agencies the main responsibility of finding ways and means.”27 A.R.M. Lower, a well-known historian and United Church layman who served as a consultant to the commission, worried that the report might be viewed as politically biased. He critiqued an early draft as “an orthodox statement of the Christian position, followed by a social manifesto that does not intimately relate to the statement of doctrine preceding it.” Concerned that with a few changes, the policy sections might just as easily have been issued by “an advanced left-wing party,” Lower wondered whether it was the church’s business “to take its stand on too specific a social programme.”28 Influential commission members apparently agreed with correspondents who expressed similar concerns,29 as did the new coordinator hired by the secretary of General Council to wrap things up. General secretary Gordon Sisco had discovered, to his chagrin, that after five drafts there was still little agreement on strategy, and not all members and regional groups were equally reliable in preparing

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their sections.30 With the deadline for the final report drawing closer, he turned to C.E. Silcox, a minister with extensive background in social research and administration.31 Silcox’s involvement in international ecumenism included work for the Rockefeller-funded Institute for Religious Research in New York, which published his book Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences in 1933. Although Sisco asked him to revise only one section of the report, Silcox ended up restructuring the entire document, taking a global rather than a Canadian outlook as his starting point.32 Silcox’s conviction that detailed policy proposals were futile drastically changed the tone of the final report. It also put him at odds with R.B.Y. Scott, at that time still professor of Old Testament at McGill (and no doubt still remembered for his involvement in the fc so and as co-editor of Towards the Christian Revolution). In his role as research director for the Church, Nation and World Order commission, Scott favoured incorporating the findings of policy studies into the report, such as those prepared by the left-leaning League for Social Reconstruction.33 Silcox disagreed, arguing that minimum detail would produce maximum agreement.34 At eightythree pages (including regional reports and appendices), the commission’s 1944 report could hardly be called “minimum” in length, but its moderate and erudite tone no doubt came as a relief to those who had been fretting that the church might do harm by stumbling into matters beyond its competence. A proposal for a “Christian Charter for Man and Society” epitomized the mediating mood of the final report. It understood human rights as “not absolute, but conditioned upon man’s acceptance of corresponding responsibilities as a child of God and as a brother to his fellow-man.”35 The state’s role was envisioned as providing for “the mutual sharing of burdens beyond the powers of individuals, voluntary associations or lesser governmental units,” though not to “relieve the individual citizen of responsibilities” or take on tasks better handled elsewhere. Gone was the optimism about human nature and the coming of the Kingdom of God associated with early social gospel liberalism. “The Gospel must be brought to bear both on personal lives and on the structure of human relationships as a whole,” it declared; however, “the Kingdom of God in its perfection is beyond any attempt to give it formulation.”36 The commission’s correspondence indicates that the United Church was perceived as wielding considerable political clout, hence

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the concern that it be exercised prudently.37 Its ambitious report weighed in on such issues as national unity, economic policy, social security, family life, racial relationships, the arts, and education, thus lending support for social programs the Liberal government was proposing.38 It also shaped opinion in the United Church for many years. The Committee on the Church and International Affairs (c c ia ) that was set up at the General Council in 1946 saw itself as a creation of the commission, and considered the 1944 report “the basic statement of our church in this field.”39 However, in the supposed influence of the church on its members, the report noted a disturbing trend: “an underlying hostility that has arisen within the church towards the pronouncements of Church Courts in the economic and social field.”40 Evidently, some still considered such matters none of the church’s business. Even before the war ended, there were indications that the road to the new world order was unlikely to be a smooth one. The United Church’s own experience of dealing with diversity highlighted the difficulties of promoting common Christian values even in Canada. The predominantly Catholic province of Quebec was the most obvious challenge. A young George Monro Grant had once dared to imagine a national church that would include both Catholics and Protestants, but near the end of his life, even he sounded pessimistic about that prospect as he described religious differences in Canada to an international audience: “Even in cities where there is the closest association of Protestant and Romanist in commercial, industrial and political life, the two currents of religious life flow side by side as distinct from each other as the St Lawrence and the Ottawa after their junction. But the rivers do eventually blend into one. The two currents of religious life do not.”41 Complicating matters further was the lingering effect of a bitter struggle over language that had erupted among Canadian Catholics around the turn of the century. It was fuelled, Robert Choquette ­argues, by different visions of Canada, with Catholic anglophones favouring “a homogeneous British English-speaking nation with ­allowance for a bilingual French-Quebec ‘reservation.’”42 The war would test a tenuous truce between francophone Catholics in Quebec and Protestants in the rest of Canada, with English-speaking Catholics typically torn between the two sides.

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Quebec and the rest of Canada were running on separate tracks that only cautiously intersected, with linguistic differences rein­ forcing centuries-old hostilities between Protestants and Catholics. Looking back on a life of service that took him across Canada and around the globe, Lester Pearson remembered how the world once looked to a boy raised in a Methodist parsonage: “to transpose John Wesley, the parish was my world, geographically and in other ways.” To someone born in 1897 and growing up in central Canada, ­Quebec was “virtually a foreign part which we read about in our school-books.” The rest of the world was defined in terms of the British Empire – a view he assessed as “normal for the times.” The man whose government was to set up the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the 1960s admitted that Canadian nationalism “hardly touched us in those days since our teaching was concentrated on Canada as part of an empire.”43 Meanwhile, another future prime minister of Canada was learning very different lessons about his country. It was not a Methodist ­parish but a Jesuit school that shaped Pierre Trudeau’s view of the world during the eight years he spent at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal in the 1930s.44 Asked during those formative years to prepare an essay predicting his future, he imagined himself arriving in Montreal in 1976 to “take command of the troops and lead the army to victory.” He would then declare Quebec’s independence and form a country that would include the Maritimes and Manitoba. “I now live in a country that is Catholic and canadien,” he prognosticated.45 In an oratorical contest a year later, Trudeau’s speech on the survival of the French-Canadian nation argued that Quebec would resist the “fatal tendency to continental assimilation” because of “the canadien miracle”: a high birth rate that was far outpacing that of Ontario and British Columbia.46 Later he would leave behind his youthful separatist leanings to become a strong Canadian nationalist and “citizen of the world.”47 Such different understandings of nationhood were unlikely to be  reconciled easily. In January 1938, on the eve of the war, an ­address by Cardinal Villeneuve, later printed in Le Devoir, alarmed Protestants in Quebec with its talk of limited toleration for those preaching “corrosive doctrines” and spreading “poisoned seeds.” Some quarters of the United Church worried that this would lead to a “bid for the supremacy of the Catholic Church in matters temporal

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and spiritual, making Canon Law superior to that of the state in matters affecting the doctrines and aims of Roman Catholicism.”48 The gloves came off later that same year at a conference on “Problems of Canadian Unity” at Lake Couchiching organized by the Canadian Institute on Economics and Politics. Speaking at a ­session on religion as a facet of political conflict, C.E. Silcox addressed the simmering tensions between Protestants and Catholics. Protestants objected to the Canon Law requirement that marriages to “heretical Christians” (such as they) were valid only if solemnized in the presence of a Catholic priest. Particularly troubling was the expectation that children would be educated in the Catholic faith, a practice looked upon by many Protestants as a means by which “Catholics can overcome their minority status through breeding and thus gain political power.”49 Other thorny issues included restrictions on public criticism of Catholicism due to the church’s control of Quebec’s censorship board, public funding for Catholic schools, Catholic labour unions, and the Catholic Church’s extensive taxexempt properties. The difference between Catholic Quebec and the rest of Canada was put on national display in 1942 with the call for a plebiscite on conscription for overseas service. Protestants and Catholics generally agreed that the conflict was in defence of Christian civilization; their disagreement lay in the role of democracy. While Protestants tended to see democracy as essential to a Christian civilization, many Catholics in Quebec disagreed: democracy was often anti-Christian in practice, replacing the rule of Christ by the rule of the people.50 There was no sense of solidarity with Protestant social reform, which was met instead with suspicion, suggests historian Tom Faulkner. In Quebec, Christian civilization was primarily canadien, secondarily Canadian, and “most emphatically ... never British.”51 Protestants contrasted their emphasis on individual freedom with the authoritarianism they associated with Catholicism. They would hardly have been calmed by the notion of “corporatism” discussed by Quebec’s religious leaders, which featured an active role for the state in creating a distinctively Catholic alternative to socialism, fascism, and even capitalism.52 Little wonder that Protestant leaders regarded Quebec Catholicism as an obstacle to their plans for postwar reconstruction and Canadian unity. Mutchmor stated as “a fact” – not as a criticism, much less an argument – that Roman Catholic influence in Quebec was “a threat to any constructive

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post-war planning.” French Canadians had created “a state within a state, in which the Roman Catholic Church is dominant,” and Mutchmor assumed that its influence in Canadian politics was consequently considerable.53 The animosity soon spilled over into other areas of domestic ­policy. Not surprisingly, Silcox was among those incensed when Parliament provided for family allowances by passing in 1944 what he described as “the most precipitate and indefensible piece of legislation which a civilized government has ever ventured to pass in wartime.”54 He viewed it as a crassly political concession to Quebec’s demands, not a step toward a comprehensive and fiscally sound policy.55 He was not against social welfare – quite the contrary – but rewarding families with high birth rates was not the way to go about it in his estimation.56 He suspected a conspiracy to “push even higher the fertility of French Canadian women” by subsidizing them with funds from Protestants and non-francophone Catholics (whose birth rates approximated Protestants). The Liberal government seemed prepared to pay the price “if only it can maintain its hold on its darling Quebec bloc!”57 With the country at war, Silcox predicted that the move would be resented elsewhere in Canada, especially since Quebec was under-represented in the armed forces. As someone had said to him, “They breed, while we bleed.”58 That Protestantism would remain a minority in Quebec had long been conceded, but its dominance elsewhere in Canada had been presumed. In 1944, alarmed by the prospect of a demographic time bomb, e & ss set up a special committee chaired by George Pidgeon (a native of Quebec). A “strictly confidential” report to the executive of General Council warned that population trends indicated that in the not-too-distant future the majority of Canadians might be Catholic. Already some areas outside Quebec formerly peopled by English Protestants were becoming French and Catholic. While ruling out a “bigoted or intolerant anti-Catholic campaign,” the committee recommended co-operation with other Protestants to remedy the “lamentable ignorance” about Catholic beliefs, including Canada’s “distinctive protestant [sic] doctrine as to the relation of church and state, the church in international affairs, and the ­duties of the individual citizen.”59 The United Church took the lead in organizing an interdenominational committee on Protestant– Roman Catholic relations in 1945, with Pidgeon serving as its first chair.60

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Not all were convinced that the cradle would triumph. Among the doubters was general secretary Sisco, another Quebecer who had risen to prominence in the United Church. As the only Canadian invited to address the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches (wc c ) in 1948, Sisco introduced those gathered to the religious situation in Canada. Canadian Catholicism was not as cohesive as it was in United States, he explained, because “the French Canadians keep pretty much to themselves and are somewhat obsessed by the idea that they can win Canada by means of the battle of the cradle.” He expected this plan to fail, however, since industrialization would likely lower the birthrate in Quebec as it had elsewhere. In his view, the cause of ecumenism had actually been advanced by Catholicism – by provoking Protestants to unite in ­order to counter it.61 Apprehension about the growing number of Catholics, especially outside Quebec, and the threat to religious freedom they were ­assumed to represent persisted into the 1950s. Requests for clear answers to the question “What’s the difference?” resulted in a controversial publication by that name. Its catechetical question-andanswer style allowed the pamphlet to tackle the most sensitive issues head-on. To the question asking whether one type of Christianity was as good as the other, the response was frank: “No. Two mutually contradictory beliefs cannot be equally true.”62 The last of the twenty-five questions were reserved for the most contentious issues: “What is the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church to religious liberty?” and “What is the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church to mixed marriages?” Readers were warned that the “Roman Church” was a religious dictatorship that expected to control civil government in Catholic states. In countries like Canada where it was not yet powerful enough to claim that authority, “it is working for ­advantage and privilege and power in other ways until the day of ‘liberty’ when it can rule by sheer force.”63 As for mixed marriage, the conditions for granting a dispensation threatened to hasten that day, since the “heretical” Protestant partner had to sign an agreement allowing children of both sexes to be baptized and brought up in the Catholic faith.64 Though “the revenge of the cradle” persisted as a popular image of religious rivalry, ironically it was the open refugee and immigration policies that many United Church leaders championed that more

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decisively altered the makeup of Canada’s population. Quebec was not the United Church’s only or most immediate challenge when it came to religious and cultural diversity. More pressing was the church’s failure to appeal to the non-Anglo-Saxons outside Quebec, the very problem that the church union movement had hoped to solve by creating a strong national church for them to join. Years later, despite energetic efforts to broaden its appeal to immigrants, the United Church still drew its membership primarily from those of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Immigration continued to complicate the issue of Canadian identity. The vision of Canadian society as a cultural mosaic that invited but did not demand homogeneity gradually nudged aside the image of Canada as a melting pot of diverse cultures.65 In the 1930s old questions still dogged those who pored over census figures and surveys to assess whether some immigrants were more easily ­ Canadianized than others. John Cormie, superintendent of home missions in Manitoba, wondered how well the “material” being “poured into the pot” was “melting and fusing.”66 His study of immigration and population for the Social Service Council of Canada confirmed a widely shared feeling: the “fusing process” was progressing well with “North Western Europeans,” but those from “South Eastern and Central Europe” were integrating more slowly. He concluded that “those who are not akin to us in their political and cultural traditions should, as far as possible, be discouraged from coming to Canada as immigrants.”67 A survey of three rural areas conducted by J.R. Watts, a professor at Queen’s Theological College, gave the United Church even more to worry about. He detected only a vague sense of purpose in the United Church’s home missions work, especially when working among Southern Europeans. Was the aim to make them AngloSaxon Protestants, or was it to provide them with religious ordinances more in line with their own traditions? Watts knew that Saskatchewan Conference pastors had been encouraged to work with immigrants (and especially with young people) if pastoral care from “their own church” was inadequate. That directive assumed that home missions work needed to be “enlarged and pressed with greater vigor and earnestness if we are going to make Canada the Christian country that The United Church of Canada holds as its  ideal.” Watts himself sounded dubious about the eventual outcome of such initiatives, rightly predicting the challenge awaiting a

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congregation that found itself “contiguous to a foreign block expanding into territory once wholly British-speaking.”68 “The replacement of the old Canadian stock by the New Canadians continues to weaken many rural United Churches,” observed a Manitoba Conference report on home missions that described growing numbers of Ukrainian and Mennonite settlements in the province.69 According to the 1941 census, such immigrants identified with the United Church in larger numbers than any other denomination;70 yet the results were still discouraging. G.B. King, dean of the Faculty of Theology at United College in Winnipeg, made the startling claim that in Manitoba, “leadership, so far as the numbers go, has already passed from the Anglo-Saxon group.” Between 1931 and 1936, what he described as “the British element” had actually decreased by 5,621 compared to an increase of 16,698 in other groups. As these new Canadians moved in, congregations that were once “solidly Anglo-Saxon” and resilient faced a more precarious future. King was not inclined to abandon work with recently arrived immigrants, especially since conservative evangelical groups (which he referred to as “the smaller sects”) seemed to be making headway in some communities, appealing to those he disparagingly characterized as “ill-adjusted and starved personalities.”71 The short supply of ministers willing to serve in mission-supported congregations was reduced even more by the demand for chaplains for the armed forces. Although amalgamating pastoral charges was a solution to personnel shortages, it created a different problem by opening the field to religious competition, usually from smaller conservative denominations. Home mission reports noted the arrival of the Salvation Army, the Gospel Hall, and Pentecostalism. “On many of our Home Mission Fields, we find such groups already in action, as well as in the process of organization,” a British Columbia report noted in 1940. Commenting that these new movements were drawing “recruits from our own United Church congregations,” the report urged “a more determined effort to find wherein our own work has lost its appeal.”72 Even after the war ended, vacant positions went unfilled. The Board of Home Missions report for 1948 warned that the United Church’s work was “being taken over by others, who, for one reason or another, seem to have more personnel available for these communities than we have.”73 Other depictions of the competition were less charitable. For example, Newfoundlanders who were drawn to the Salvation Army and Pentecostalism were described as “emotionally unstable, reactionary, and older church members.”74

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Canada’s population was not only growing more diverse but more mobile. The Board of Home Missions estimated that at least 750,000 Canadians had migrated from one area to another between 1939 and 1942, many of them from rural communities to the city.75 Farm labour was in short supply, with many young adults moving to jobs in urban areas or joining the armed services. A report on home missions work in central and northern Alberta gave a frank description of what was happening in many communities as the number of farms sold to new immigrants increased. Families had moved there forty or fifty years earlier, organizing a church when they arrived. The parents were now too old to do farm work by themselves, their children lived elsewhere, and hired help was hard to find. When a farm was put up for sale, “a young Non-Anglo-Saxon arrives with the money in his hand to purchase the farm implements and stock.” These newcomers generally were uninterested in joining the church; to make matters worse, the previous owners, usually older pillars of the church, often moved to the city once their farms were sold.76 In response to repeated expressions of concern about work with ethnic minorities, the United Church formed a commission that completed its report on “City Missions and Non-Anglo-Saxon Work” in 1944. The findings of congregational surveys in prairie communities and visits to institutions that worked with immigrants were discouraging. The investigation uncovered little inclination (especially among those of Catholic background) to affiliate with the United Church. There was some success among Ukrainians immigrants, especially children and young adults. Those born in Canada were “tired of the candles and incense,” according to the pastor from the Canora-Buchanan pastoral charge, and “secretly aspire to ‘equality’ & fellowship with Anglo-Saxons. They like our Sunday Schools and young people’s organizations: to my mind, this is the key.” Yet he found their involvement hampered by “bias and bigotry among A.S.’s [Anglo-Saxons]” in his six-point pastoral charge.77 Urging the church to be “jolted out of its complacency,” the report recommended that a new emphasis be placed on “comprehensive inclusiveness.” It sounded a warning: unless there was “a change of attitude on the part of many ministers and people,” the United Church would be “in danger of becoming an Anglo-Saxon sect.”78 Some United Church groups took up the challenge. Educational programs alerted wms members, most of whom lived in racially homogeneous communities, to the inequality that faced racial minorities in Canada. Issues were presented in terms of Christian

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citizenship and tied to the wms’s own objectives, lending them an  air of indisputability. A series in Missionary Monthly on “The Church Woman as Citizen” that concluded with a two-part article on “race prejudice” framed the issue in terms of a w m s objective: “to create bonds of Christian friendship between our members and peoples of other races and other lands.” Winnifred Thomas described race prejudice as a problem at the international, national, community, and personal level. Urging readers to root out prejudice in their own hearts and minds, and then aid others around them to do likewise, she reminded readers that “public opinion is personal opinion.”79 The first step toward “curing” race prejudice, she counselled, was to acknowledge that it was unchristian, learn about other races, and acquaint oneself with their members.80 Appeals on behalf of war refugees added to the urgency of overcoming prejudice toward new Canadians. United Church groups were among those who took up their cause, speaking, writing, and supporting petitions for those hoping to resettle in Canada.81 Among them were Jews from Germany and Czechoslovakia who caught the attention of well-placed advocates. Silcox was aware of the dire situation they faced in Europe even before the outbreak of war.82 Convinced that economic fears were partly to blame for immigration restrictions, he presented a financial case for easing regulations: European refugees were “assimilable people” who would become consumers and build new industries. He bluntly noted that opposition to immigration was cultural as well as economic, based on fear that unless Anglo-Saxons remained the majority, “our whole British outlook on life may be destroyed if we do not encourage fresh infusion of Anglo-Saxon blood.” What was more necessary, he countered, was “the Anglo-Saxon spirit,” and where, he asked, was it more likely to be found than among such refugees?83 Their “intellectual standards and their understanding of and passion for democracy” would uphold British ideals and institutions.84 Ernest Marshall Howse was another who joined those calling for Canada to open its doors to refugees. An up-and-coming minister from Newfoundland, Howse preached two compelling sermons on the European refugee problem to his parishioners at Westminster United Church in Winnipeg in the spring of 1939. He deplored the hypocrisy of North Americans who for years had been “dripping over with sympathy for the oppressed people in Europe,” but now refused to help Hitler’s victims.85 He favoured increasing Canada’s

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share of refugees, quoting with approval the Canadian National Committee on Refugees (headed at the time by Sir Robert Falconer): “A nation which has the potential resources of Canada and refuses to help in such an emergency does not deserve economic prosperity; it does not even deserve the right to be called a Christian country.”86 Obviously alluding to Jewish immigrants, he praised those seeking refuge as belonging to “the most highly trained and gifted families in  Europe,” and likened them to “refined gold from a very fierce crucible.” Their only offence was to belong to “the race that gave us Isaiah, Jesus, and St Paul.” Suffering beside them were Christians who had “protested the paganization of the German race.”87 Missionary societies also took up the cause of refugee resettlement. The wms co-sponsored e & ss ’s petition drives. Its literature confronted negative depictions of Jews, such as their predilection for living in cities, by presenting information aimed at dispelling stereotypes – in this instance pointing out that in the Middle Ages, restrictions placed on Jews prevented them from owning or tilling the land.88 Such articles often tackled the issue of anti-Semitism headon, disclosing that the refugee petition was “revealing a great deal of anti-Jewish feeling,” and reminding readers that for many Jews the alternative to living in Canada was starvation in Europe. There was a religious rationale as well: “If Christian people turn their backs on the homeless, how can we call ourselves followers of the Christ?”89 Yet even those who agreed with such principles found them difficult to put into practice, and outcomes were modest. Constance Hayward, executive secretary of the Canadian National Committee on Refugees, admitted that “enlightened opinions had only limited effect” in convincing policy-makers that it was in Canada’s interest to admit refugees fleeing Nazi tyranny.90 While more local studies are needed to confirm it, one is left with the impression that in the United Church, there was well-intentioned talk, but almost no action of consequence.91 For example, a study of the Ministerial Association (mainly Protestant with some Jewish involvement) in Kingston, Ontario, and the Catholic diocesan newspaper suggests that relationships with local rabbis were cordial, but local concerns took precedence over international ones.92 Similarly, the United Church opposed (though, again, with little to show for it) the punitive government policies that abrogated the civil rights of those of Japanese ancestry, even the Nisei who had been born and raised in Canada.93 Japanese-Canadians had joined the

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United Church in significant numbers. Many remained under its pastoral care, sometimes accompanied by missionaries, after they were forced to leave their homes. Elda Daniels escorted eighteen girls from the Oriental Home and School in Victoria, bc, to the Girls’ Residence in Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, where their anticipated arrival was nicknamed “The Invasion.” Her charges were reportedly well received in the community, a feat that she credited to “the groundwork done by church leaders and school teachers in preparing right attitudes before our arrival.” Her mission involved more than attending to the spiritual welfare of the girls. According to Daniels: “We hope to show the community how truly Canadian our family is, and how the church is doing its part in helping the state to train Christian citizens for tomorrow.”94 But such efforts were of little immediate help to the Japanese, described by one report as having the worst experience of any group of immigrants to Canada.95 Their treatment belied the belief that Anglo-Saxonism was a cultural identity that was acquired rather than innate, with conversion to Christianity a critical step in the process; it did not bode well for either British Canada or Christian culture. There was more unwelcome news awaiting international ecumenism and those associated with it as they confronted the geopolitical revolution that followed the war. Britain, says historian Peter Clarke, “survived the war only to find itself a ghost of the great power that  had held a dominant position in the world since the fall of Napoleon.”96 The United States emerged as the ascendant world power, a change in fortunes with effects that rippled around the globe. Weakened by the terms of the war loan negotiated with the United States, Britain lacked the economic resources and the political will to retain its mandate in Palestine, which reverted to the United Nations in 1947. Its empire in India was lost to Gandhi’s independence movement the same year.97 Chronicling the details of the “liquidation” of the empire, Clarke sees the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 as a key indicator of Britain’s fate: though few had expected the Zionists to succeed, the United States exerted its considerable influence at the un on their behalf, and sided against the Arabs in the conflict. “In the end,” he concludes, “the British generally chose the Arabs and the Americans chose the Jews.”98 Although its placid decolonization process did not make headlines around the world, Canada’s relationship with the mother country

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was changing too. After the Canadian Citizenship Act came into effect in 1947, Canadians were no longer British subjects. Being British and part of the empire – the core identity for anglophone Canadians since Confederation, and touted as the linchpin of cultural assimilation of new immigrants – faded in significance. Arthur Lower claimed in 1952 that while old sentiments for the British Empire still lived on and found expression at ceremonial occasions, people probably knew “in their bones” that the old world was gone. “The average English Canadian retains relatively unchanged his traditional attitudes to the Crown,” Lower claimed. “But while he listens respectfully to appeals to the idea of the Commonwealth, he has difficulty, as with a long prayer, in remembering what has been said.”99 Less perceptible was the religious impact of this loss of “Britishness,” where Protestantism had enjoyed what historian Linda Colley describes as a place of “absolute centrality,” with Europe viewed as the  Catholic “Other.”100 Canada’s Protestant identity soon proved to be as shallow as its British identity – and was to fade away almost as quickly. The new superpower status of its neighbour further complicated matters. English-speaking Canadians had grown accustomed to using their British identity as a buffer against the rising American empire after the Great War.101 By the 1920s the United States had already supplanted Great Britain as Canada’s largest foreign investor; by the 1950s it accounted for close to 80 per cent of foreign ­investment in Canada. Whereas the British had preferred to hold railway and government bonds, Americans favoured direct control of manufacturing and resource companies; hence, their investments were more visible.102 As the pace of investment quickened, uneasiness heightened. Had Canada shed its colonial status only to fall under the control of another imperial power? The first report from the Committee on the Church and International Affairs (cci a) in 1948 noted a marked shift in trade patterns and warned that “Canada may find herself in the unhappy position of having to elect whether to be a British or American nation.” Although Canada benefited economically from its proximity to the United States,103 at times the American way of life seemed a more immediate threat to the Canadian way of life than more distant Communist foes. The drift toward democracy, rather than Christian civilization, as the banner under which the Cold War was fought added another wrinkle. The linguistic turn was at first barely

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discernible. In 1946, Winston Churchill, in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech, rallied Christian civilization against its Communist enemy. Louis St Laurent, soon to succeed W.L.M. King as prime minister, described Christian civilization in similar terms a year later, as one of five principles upon which Canada’s foreign policy rested.104 But in the United States, the battle against Communism was becoming linked to defending the American way of life, a cause that drew its citizens together as Americans in a way that superseded their particular identities as Protestants, Catholics, or Jews. The democratic principles of individual freedom and human rights became associated with a secular ideology that had no need of Christianity as a source of shared values – perhaps an attractive alternative once it became obvious that there was no common understanding among Catholics and Protestants (to say nothing of Jews and other religions) of what Christian civilization signified.105 This lack of Christian unanimity dashed the hopes of United Church leaders who linked the church’s world mission to fighting the Communist foe. Howse, newly arrived from Winnipeg to ­Toronto as minister of Bloor Street United Church, boasted that in the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries had been alone in calling for “one common and universal allegiance.” Although he conceded that in many places in the world Christians were a despised and persecuted minority, there was still an organized church in every country except Tibet, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. Christianity was the only religion that could rationally claim to be universal since it was “unthinkable that all mankind will ever become Sikhs or ­Mohammedans or Buddhists.” Howse warned that, for the first time, Christianity was facing a dangerous world rival that aimed to be a substitute for all religions: “The authoritarian state, Fascist or Communist, is the expression of a competing world culture, utterly incompatible with the Christian view of life ... It is, so to speak, a black religion. It has not only in the most astonishing fashion taken the guise and regalia of religion, it aspires to take the place of religion.”106 What Howse failed to see was that the democratic state might also compete with Christian internationalism once Christianity’s universal appeal was found wanting. Many in the United Church considered the cause of democracy and the goals of Christian civilization as analogous. A pamphlet for aots men published in 1948 described the club’s intent to build a “Christian democracy.” It was imperative therefore “to create public

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opinion on all important issues, based on [Christ’s] life and teachings” as “t he c o nd i t i on o f su rvi val .”107 Women were also inspired by the democratic ideals of Christian citizenship. Margaret McWilliams, an active member of St Stephen’s-Broadway United Church in Winnipeg and married to the lieutenant governor of Manitoba, was a civic leader in her own right as founder and first president of the Canadian Federation of University Women and a four-term alderman.108 As she saw it, western civilization was facing a “deadly challenge.” A struggle was being waged between liberal democracy and the ideology of materialistic Communism. She believed that Communism would be defeated “only by proving to the world that our liberal democracy, which has flowed under the influence of Christianity, brings more happiness, more well-being to everyone within its sunlight.” However, the way in which this contest was being waged concerned her; she sensed that the “indubitable fact” of the Christian roots of liberal democracy was being forgotten. Instead religious beliefs were becoming merely “private possessions,” and there was a reluctance “even to bring the names of God and Jesus into our daily conversation.”109 Just as disturbing was the discovery that democratic values were sometimes at odds with the aims of Christian internationalism. By the time the wc c met for the first time in 1948, the language of ecumenism was changing in ways that hinted at uncertainty about its  assumptions of universality. At first the signs were subtle. The foremost ecumenical journal, launched in 1935 as churches prepared for the Oxford Conference, went by the name Christendom: An Ecumenical Review. With the founding of the w cc, it became simply The Ecumenical Review. The omission of the word “Christendom” clearly demonstrated Christianity’s more precarious international standing as a source of common values. More telling was the replacement of order by disorder to describe the new world that emerged out of the crucible of war. One of the four books published in preparation for the first wc c assembly was titled The Church and the International Disorder, edited by a group that included John Foster Dulles, a politically well-connected American Presbyterian. Dulles’s essay on “The Christian Citizen in a Changing World” drew the stinging conclusion that Christianity’s impact on the fight against Communism was at present “wholly inadequate.” If Christians were to play a role, it was imperative that their churches “have better organization, more unity of action and put more emphasis on

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Christianity as a world religion.”110 His hopes for the w cc soon foundered due to its reluctance to share his confidence in the American way of life as tantamount to God’s way of working in the world.111 The wc c ’s early assemblies steered away from granting the United States the redemptive role that Dulles had proposed, leaning too far to the left in his view, and leaving him wary of the political judgment of church leaders.112 Defending the individual liberties of the Free World, rather than Christian civilization, became the new rallying cry of those who agreed with him.113 The new dominance of the United States in world affairs was soon felt in Canada. For a time there was a continuation of the close collaboration that had developed during the war, and only minor dif­ ferences of opinion surfaced on issues of international security.114 However, the unequal partnership between the two North American nations was bound to cause resentment. As the Cold War escalated, Canada’s relationship with United States chilled. Tensions came to a head during discussions of the defence of North America. American politicians and military leaders seemed to be treating Canada as an extension of the United States. As Canada demanded to be consulted about the production and use of nuclear weapons, the United States became more secretive. Canada wanted to play a mediating role in international conflict as a middle power, but was treated as poor cousin and ignored unless it was willing to take the American side.115 A defining moment in the United Church’s assessment of Canada’s dealings with its powerful neighbour came in 1960 after news that the Soviets had shot down an American U-2 spy plane flying over the ussr. The ccia’s report to the General Council expressed shock at the way national interest had trumped the truth: the United States had been caught in a “flagrant, detailed, and circumstantial self-­ justifying lie” after proclaiming its “moral superiority so aboundingly.” The incident made it clear that “Canada has little voice in policy and no influence on decision; its counsel is heard but ignored; it is not kept informed.”116 The report raised a moral question: was the United States about to cross the line between defensive action and pre-emptive war, not only with the U-2 flights but also in its willingness to conduct chemical and bacteriological experiments? Canada had good reason to be concerned, since it had made testing grounds available for such experiments. “The affluent society drifts,” the report warned, and the committee clearly did not like the direction in which it was headed: “In a half-informed society, spoon-fed with the

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official half-truth, security is equated with secrecy, safety with more destructive weapons, survival with mass murder. What is there in this to attract the new African nations, the Latin Americans, the awakening Asians, to our side? They account for more than half the human race.”117 The Vietnam War would deepen these divisions. The changing world presented the United Church with a host of new questions about policies and programs it had once wholeheartedly supported. Those who championed principles of fairness and justice for refugees were torn, for instance, between supporting the establishment of a homeland for Jews and sympathizing with the  Palestinians who suddenly found themselves displaced because of it. Refugee advocates who had once worked on behalf of Jews escaping from Europe were accused of latent anti-Semitism when they took up the cause of the Palestinians who fled from their homes in 1948 after the war in the Middle East. The United Church found itself in the awkward position of supporting the cause of both Arabs and Israelis, but not fully siding with either, until the war in 1967 tipped a ­number of prominent church leaders more decisively toward the Palestinians.118 Among the early critics of the un ’s proposal to create a Jewish state was Silcox, described by one scholar as the “pre-eminent champion of the Jewish refugee cause in Christian Canada.”119 Well known in Jewish circles as director of the Canadian Conference of Christians and Jews from 1940 to 1946, his disapproval no doubt came as a disappointment to Israel’s supporters. Defending his position, he pointed out that Balfour’s famous declaration in support of a homeland for the Jewish people had also promised that nothing would be done to compromise the rights of the non-Jewish communities ­already living in Palestine. Nothing good would come of a clash of nationalism, imperialism, and ideology in this strategically important area of the world where three continents converged, he predicted.120 He identified another geopolitical concern: since Islamic countries formed a buffer between East and West, understanding their world was of the utmost importance for western countries.121 Though he remained sympathetic to the Jewish cause, his telling of the history of the contested land emphasized that the region was peopled before the arrival of Abraham’s descendants, and many who were not Jewish still lived there. A bi-national state was the solution he favoured.

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After 1948 the c c i a treated the creation of the state of Israel as a matter of fact; the refugees were the nagging problem. Its reports blamed the United States, the uk , and the u n as well as Israel for the  impasse. The Arab allies were complicit too; they had left the Palestinians in deplorable camps, noted one report, callous in the knowledge they had “immense reserves of men and territory, and of world Muslim sympathy” as well as the advantage of time. Arab states were urged to recognize the state of Israel, and Israel was advised to compensate the refugees who could not return to ­ their homes.122 The c ci a claimed to be avoiding a partisan position, hoping the United Church would remain friends with everyone in the Middle East.123 But concerns that the Palestinian plight was ignored in the mainstream media swayed them to remind the church that the Palestinians were bearing the brunt of the guilt of others for treatment of an earlier group of refugees: “The Western conscience was soothed by sending [Jews] somewhere else at bitter cost to less favoured peoples who have had to provide ‘living space’ for Israel’s immigrants with their own villages, gardens and homes.”124 Those who followed the c c i a reports and related study materials also learned of the bitter hatred of Israel among Arabs, a hostility that was nurtured even in the un – quite an admission, given the United Church’s largely uncritical support of that organization at the time.125 The c c i a was alarmed by the growing numbers of refugees worldwide, including 400,000 Jews forced to leave Iraq, Yemen, North Africa, and Egypt in the decade after the 1948 war and an additional 15 million refugees from Europe – equivalent to the population of Canada, as the report pointedly put it.126 Another unwelcome consequence of the “new world disorder” was the blow dealt to the United Church’s overseas missionary program. Enthusiastic promotion of Christian internationalism before the war seemed hopelessly misdirected as tangible missionary support withered for pragmatic more than theological reasons. As late as 1937, Jesse Arnup had claimed that the uniting churches were “providentially ... led to plant their foreign missions” in a way that brought the United Church “into helpful contact with the great races and nations of the non-Christian world.” Four-fifths of its mission sites were in Asia, and over two-thirds of its missionaries served in China, Korea, and Japan.127 Little more than a decade later, these same locations spelled disaster for its missionary enterprise as

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political authorities turned hostile to the presence of missionaries from North America and Europe. Bad news from the international missions scene continued as Communism swept away what was left of work in northern Korea and China, already destabilized by depression and war. The cessation of w m s -sponsored missions in North Honan was reported in 1948,128 and missionaries to China were evacuated over the next few years. With its Korean missions situated north of the 38th parallel, the United Church concentrated on meeting the needs of refugees who fled south; its Korean work became “a mission in exile.”129 The impact was devastating when measured in terms of missionary personnel abroad. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of overseas personnel plummeted as missionaries from Asia were recalled. The policy review presented to the 1948 General Council still claimed, “our missionaries contribute greatly to the Christian goodwill among nations, essential to ‘One World.’”130 Although the United Church’s role was obviously diminished, the demise of Christian internationalism was only slowly accepted. “The closing of doors in China and the disruption of our work in Korea are not to be interpreted as failures,” insisted a report on overseas mission policy in 1952.131 Phrases like “one world,” “partners in a common civilization,” “one mission,” and “one Church” were used over and over in making the familiar case for world evangelization, but less convincingly. By that time some missionaries were disillusioned Christian internationalists. Two young Canadian idealists, Mary Austin and James G. Endicott, met at a missionary conference in Washington, d c, in 1925. A whirlwind romance followed, and before the end of the year they were serving as missionaries in China. As hopes for Christianity as the basis for international harmony dimmed, they became convinced that support for the Communist party offered a better chance for world peace.132 Jim resigned from the ministry of the United Church in 1946 in order “to take an active part in the struggle for human betterment in the field of social and political movements,” activities he deemed difficult for ministers “unless possibly they happen to be on the ‘right’ side.”133 He continued to maintain that he was a “Christian Liberal Reformer” rather than a Communist (since he believed it impossible to be both). Mary was less reluctant to be called a Communist sympathizer.134 Together they weathered a barrage of criticism from inside and outside the United Church, including Jim’s vilification in the press as “public enemy number one” in

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1952 for accusing the United States military of using germ warfare against the North Koreans.135 The United Church maintained a missionary presence in Japan, India, Africa (expanding to the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia in 1953), and Trinidad, often in co-operation with other denominations. Shifting the focus to these locations brought new issues to its members’ attention. For example, articles and reports on international affairs often mentioned concern for Africa, and were critical of churches that supported apartheid in South Africa. The ccia’s report in 1958 presciently observed that Christianity was not the only alternative to ancient African tribal deities, and Muslims were witnessing to their faith in places like Malaysia, Indonesia, and the areas bordering the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean “with a zeal and passion reminiscent of the days when they conquered Spain and spread into France.” The Prophet’s followers in Africa did not have the burden of association with “the white man of Christian heritage.” The “missionaries of the Crescent” were champions of anti-colonial movements in Africa, a development that “missionaries of the Cross” were advised to note.136 International missionary conferences before the war had called for indigenization, but did not anticipate the conditions under which it actually happened: as the only recourse, given the hostility to anything that smacked of Western influence during postwar decoloni­ zation. A policy report on the wms’s overseas missions announced that what was left of its administrative authority would be gradually transferred to indigenous church associations as part of the changing relationship between home base and foreign fields.137 Ecumenical co-operation through involvement with the newly formed Canadian Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council, and links with the National Council of Churches in the u sa (successor to the Federal Council of Churches), became a matter of necessity as well as principle as United Church missionaries joined church workers from other countries in areas such as Angola and India.138 Before the Second World War, “doors are open” had been the missionary movement’s rallying call. After the war, the image tended to shift from doors to windows, from ‘entering’ to ‘looking in.’ It reflected a different attitude toward overseas work, one created by the political restrictions that missionaries faced. Wide Windows (1951) was the title of a widely circulated study of the history of the w m s , but even windows that were wide open must have seemed small to

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those whose expectations for Christian internationalism had once been so grand. The United Church’s missionaries and their families continued to play diplomatic roles during the Cold War Era.139 However, the hopes for one world bound together by Christian friendship were shattered. World events belied the confidence that Christianity could provide a basis for cohesion in Canada, let alone the rest of the world. The church union movement had been launched at a time when it was still widely assumed that religion enhanced shared values and encouraged social responsibility. Spiritual ideals were a source of social cohesion. The implicit assimilation in the United Church’s search for a common faith had been reinforced by prevailing cultural assumptions about nation-building. Although early twentieth-century Canada was in reality far from culturally monolithic, appeals to the Anglo-Saxon ideals of the British Empire and the Christian civilization associated with it held the promise of a common identity that could be acquired, absorbed, and passed on to the next generation. Christianizing the social order was in that sense an inclusive goal. The challenge of diversity – both religious and racial – sounded a knell for the aspirations that had energized those who founded the United Church. The decline of Canada’s British-American identity (and the Protestant values attached to it) was neither necessarily secular nor antithetical to Christianity. Yet it coincided with the end of the British Empire and the beginning of the end of Christendom in both Britain and Canada. After the Second World War, Canada stepped hesitantly toward a new world where liberal democracy was viewed as the source of universal values. No longer was Christianity as confidently assumed to be a foundation for either international harmony or national cohesion.

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6 Calling Postwar Canada to Christ Gl e nd ower I can call spirits from the vasty deep. H o t s p ur Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I

“The Hidden Failure of Our Churches” was how the Maclean’s cover story in the 25 February 1961 issue announced the startling findings uncovered in its survey of churchgoers. Canadians had been attending religious services in record numbers for over a decade, and the United Church was among the churches enjoying the statistical windfall. “Amazing” was a word that cropped up often as its growth met and even exceeded expectations. This long-awaited revival of  religious interest begged the question: how much influence did the churches really exert on people’s lives once the Sunday morning services were over? Maclean’s decided to ask. It hired a firm to conduct a survey (described as “the first of its kind”) of the residents of Guelph, Ontario.1 The results so astonished veteran journalist Ralph Allen that he retraced the trail to confirm the findings for himself. Most of those surveyed said they believed in God and thought of the church in much the same terms as had their forebears, but admitted they were not guided by its teaching in their everyday lives. While 70 per cent of Protestants (and over 90 per cent of Catholics) attended church at least once a month, only one in five claimed that their behaviour had been influenced as a result. More specific inquiries about the conduct of those surveyed supported that finding. Among Protestants, church attendance had limited impact on decisions about the use of alcohol (11.4 per cent); birth control (5 per cent); sexual behaviour (2.5 per cent); political decisions (6.6 per cent);

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public causes and organizations (12.5 per cent); and business conduct (20 per cent). Catholic teaching seemed to have even less influence on behaviour with two exceptions: birth control (21 per cent) and sexual behaviour (11 per cent). Only 6 per cent of Catholics said the church influenced their business conduct, and the impact on political decisions was an astonishingly low 3 per cent.2 At least in Guelph, Catholics appeared not to be priest-ridden – perhaps something of a consolation to Protestants as they read an article about the soon-to-be-released census figures alongside the main story: “The Swelling Stream of Catholicism: Will It Soon Be Our Majority Faith?”3 Religious leaders interviewed to discuss the survey seemed less surprised by the results than Allen, but there was a mood of apprehension among them. Former United Church moderator Angus MacQueen described the state of organized religion in Canada in stinging terms: churches in general were too preoccupied with denominational programs, congregational budgets, and buildings; they were “too comfortable and too well adjusted to the status quo, and too ready to equate it with the Kingdom of God on earth.” The church was “unfit for the tasks of the hour” and becoming irrelevant in the face of the “real stuff of life,” he warned, and was instead “the feeble guardian of personal decency and the fount of tranquility and optimism.” J.R. Mutchmor, secretary of the Board of e & s s and well known for his colourful quips, summed up the uneasiness of many in his denomination even as they watched it grow: “I believe the United Church stands in a slippery place because it is becoming a clubby, chubby Church.”4 Critics had once scorned the United Church as a “political club” that was more interested in moral and social reform than in personal faith. The survey suggested a different and more disturbing possibility: a church that was no different from the rest, and whose statistical health masked failure to influence its own members. Becoming a “clubby, chubby church” redefined the meaning of “social” in United Church parlance. Rather than too much social gospel, it seemed a case of not enough – or more to the point, a disturbingly narrow notion of “social” that ran the risk of simply reflecting rather than challenging the status quo. This was a diminished understanding of the United Church’s mission as understood by its founding generation. In its stead was a more insular and inward-looking gathering of the faithful, whose religious life was identified in terms of what

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happened inside the building but inconsequential beyond it. With the fraying of connections between the church and the broader community, the “larger fellowship” that the founders had hoped to build suddenly appeared much smaller. A different future for the United Church had been envisaged not only by the founders but also by those who laid the ambitious plans for a Forward Movement to create a new world order after the war. Programs and publications, including the 1940 Statement of Faith in pamphlet form and various devotional resources related to it, assumed that the personal faith of its members had public consequences for community-building both locally and nationally. The new catechism’s answer to the question “What is the task of the Church?” still identified social engagement as central to its mission: “The Church is called to worship God, to watch over and care for all within her fellowship, to preach the Gospel to all mankind, to minister to the needy, to wage war on evil, and to strive for right relations among men.”5 This conviction was shared across a broad theological spectrum, including those whose enthusiasm for the social gospel was tepid at best. Among the latter was Richard Davidson, principal of Emmanuel College and chair of the group that put together the catechism. Writing for Saturday Night in 1944, with the catechism hot off the press, he admitted that the priority after union had been “to get the machine to run smoothly and do the work it was devised to do.” Davidson sounded relieved that the founding generation had been otherwise engaged. “A blight had fallen on theology” during the nineteenth century, he contended, almost as if human success and prosperity had “lulled the Most High to sleep,” and “the Social Gospel flourished in place of the historic Gospel.” But in the last two decades things had changed: the Most High had “awaked and got on His feet again.” Yet even Davidson identified the social implications of the gospel as central to the mission of the United Church, naming as its “chief innovation” its affirmation of “man’s duty to man.” There was no sphere of life – political, social, or economic – to which Christianity was indifferent, although Davidson warned the church not to go beyond its competence in statesmanship and trade, matters that were best left to “individual churchmen.”6 All in all, the United Church appeared to have made remarkable progress, erasing the concerns of the 1930s about its survival. As he

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assessed social trends after the war, sociologist S.D. Clark described religion in robust terms. Canada “has been, and remains, a fundamentally religious nation,” he observed.7 Church union had strengthened Protestantism enormously in his estimation – to the degree that “the influence of organized religion in the country has perhaps never been stronger.” So strong were Canada’s churches that he doubted whether a political party could survive an open attack on them.8 Statistics showed the United Church to be a healthy institution, equal to or surpassing the growth of other Protestant churches in numerical terms.9 Outside observers concurred. The United Church was a success story, or so it seemed. It could put effective pressure on federal and provincial governments to provide services that churches and other philanthropic agencies could not afford.10 Its civic piety was respected, even if considered a tad self-righteous by some. It was keeping a close eye on Canada’s spiritual frontiers, enthused editor Harold E. Fey to readers of the Christian Century following his attendance at the General Council in 1956. In fact, the American added, no U.S. church assembly provided “a comparable sense of the church struggling for the soul of the nation.” He was particularly impressed by the calibre of the discussion surrounding the abolishment of capital punishment, and the fact that the United Church’s “consistent effort to link conversion and conscience, the saving of souls and the saving of society, is producing really responsible Christian leadership.”11 Yet a curious disquiet could be detected among those who knew the United Church best. Their experience suggested that although to many the church symbolized continuity and stability, the reality was otherwise. The old patterns of interaction among church, family, and community were being disrupted. The threat that modern culture posed to the church was a theme regularly sounded by seasoned ministers, professors, and church executives as counterpoint to the encouraging statistics. They fretted that the United Church (and indeed Western Christianity) was entering uncharted territory, cautioning that the challenges facing Christianity were social and cultural as well as moral and spiritual. Complicating the familiar tension between the personal and social dimensions of faith was what e& s s ’s associate secretary R.C. Chalmers called a “third front”: culture was subtly undermining the gospel.12 He warned that Christianity was in danger of being con­ sidered an interest or hobby irrelevant to everyday life, creating a

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situation that he claimed was unique in history in its complexity, breadth, comprehensiveness, and “anti-spiritual nature.”13 John Line likewise sought to disabuse theologians of the illusion that they were still living in a Christian world. He wondered whether Western civilization could any longer be called Christian. Writing for the international readership of Theology Today in 1951, he urged readers to prepare to make a “basic re-presentation of Christianity to a world near the edge of being void of it.” His prediction was that the general public would soon have no interest in Christian truth. To counter the coming cultural shift, he urged the church to emphasize “the primal truths by which Christianity is identifiable as Christian.”14 The venerable George Pidgeon agreed that a cultural crisis was looming, and the consequences of inaction dire. He warned that if the United Church failed to intervene in time, it would “be unable to enter at a later date.” It needed to follow people to the new suburbs and settlements if it expected to hold “a place in their lives and guide the use of their power.” To support his case, Pidgeon spoke of the de-Christianization of Europe, a phrase used by one of the presidents of the wc c who had reportedly said that Europe had “in great part become pagan again” – still comprised of many Christians but no longer consisting of Christian nations. It was a pessimistic assessment, Pidgeon admitted, that “must make us pause.”15 Perhaps this explains why a church so often accused of being liberal and even modernist in its theology was decidedly reserved in its embrace of contemporary culture. Many of its leaders lashed out against popular forms of entertainment, sometimes pejoratively described as pagan, that competed with art forms more closely associated with the church. The media were suspect as well, accused of being cultural purveyors of paganism. Jesse Arnup blamed the radio for dispensing “an overdose of syncopated disharmony known as jazz.”16 The Commission on Church, Nation and World Order report went further, anxiously noting “the emergence of the new paganism which divorces sex from true romance, and gets a foothold in the screen, the radio and in prurient literature” – a list to which television was soon to be added.17 The first t v set arrived in 1952, and cost 20 per cent of the average annual income.18 This signalled a new social ‘problem’ for the middle class: what to do with leisure time, much of it spent inside the home or participating in activities controlled by secular agencies and businesses. Movie theatres, bowling alleys, and dance halls were old amusements that

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threatened the vitality of the church by draining it of its best community leaders. New attractions in government-funded community halls, centres, and rinks were tempting politicians to turn to the “liquor people” and other questionable sources for operating funds. Watching television or attending sporting events was more appealing to many than the church’s attempts to create Christian fellowship. “Large areas of our people’s life are a wasteland, suffering erosion from pagan – if not pagan, certainly sub-Christian – influences,” warned one minister in calling for the United Church to “evangelize unchurched recreation.”19 An impressive report prepared in the late 1940s by the Commission on Culture expounded on similar themes. With R.C. Chalmers as secretary and some of its most respected academics and ministers (including a young professor at Victoria College by the name of Northrop Frye) as members, the group’s terms of reference assumed that the customs, habits, and thinking of modern culture were at some points in tension with the Christian faith. Their task was to  ponder how to transform culture (including the media) to “a Christian pattern,” and to advise the church on its role in “the redemption of culture.” Published in 1950 as The Church and the Secular World, their findings laid the groundwork for the brief that the United Church presented to the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (more commonly known as the Massey Commission) in 1949.20 Erudite and ambitious in scope, the report was the work of a group familiar with the latest developments in the arts and sciences but wary of their implications for Christian faith given the impending cultural crisis. The report claimed that the United Church was justified in “believing that the salvation of souls must be understood in such a way as to include the cultural enterprise of men.”21 Recognizing the escalating importance of communication media, literature, drama, music, and art, the report offered Christian resources for making them more wholesome.22 It bemoaned, for instance, what was happening to modern music under the influence of popular forms of enter­ tainment: “The gushing fountainhead of American jazz with its propensity towards self-expression imperils the development of pure melody, enervates the artistic sense, stimulates eroticism, and at the very best generates nothing more than mediocre products.” Clearly steps needed to be taken to “arrest this wild orgy”! The report admitted the church was not blameless in the corruption of music,

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which had been treated “brutally” by people whose apathy and carelessness had failed to distinguish between the sacred and the secular in art. As for hymns, the number of “atrocious” ones was “astonishing.”23 The urbanization of Canada was adding to the problems of modern culture, creating a situation that was entirely new, noted W.J. Gallagher in an address to the Christian Social Council of Canada. No longer was the country rural. The work of the church was changing, and not always for the better, due to a complex mix of factors: ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ wars, urbanization and industrialization, the welfare state, immigration, modern educational trends, new means of communication, and new ideologies.24 A resolve to enlist and equip ­clergy and laity to rescue Canadian society from the incursion of undesirable elements of modernity was fundamental to the strategic decisions made by the United Church in the 1950s. There were plenty of indications that church members were becoming captivated by cultural affluence and alienated from Christian influence. The middle class was especially at risk. A mid-decade survey of Observer readers found that 26 per cent were in professional and managerial groups compared to 14 per cent of the general population. Its readers were much more likely than the average Canadian to have telephone service and to own cars and electrical appliances. Drawing on the survey’s findings, a 1954 e & s s report concluded, “our Communion is, in large measure, a middle-class one.” As such it was becoming susceptible to a North American form of “culturereligion,” one that stressed comfort and mistook “chummy acquaintance for fellowship.” Church leaders were urged to make Christian fellowship “more inclusive”; to challenge culture-religion with “true Christian standards”; and to make “every possible attempt ... to reach, save and teach all for whom Christ died.”25 At the core of the United Church’s major postwar initiatives to ­reassert its social and cultural agenda was a broad approach to evangelization. Events that provided opportunities to make a personal commitment to Christ were organized and linked to plans for church expansion in developing residential neighbourhoods and a new approach to Christian education. The core message was clear and unequivocal: it was not enough to focus only on conversion, for faith had implications for the personal conduct of individuals, the social welfare of communities, and the cultural well-being of the nation.

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J.R. Mutchmor personified these objectives. As secretary of e & s s he was in a pivotal position to shape the United Church’s policies and programs. He became the voice of the United Church during the 1940s and ’50s, and was the most recognized religious leader in Canada by the time he retired in 1964. Indeed, to a remarkable degree, Mutchmor’s life mirrored the denomination’s own maturation. Born in 1892 in Providence Bay, a small community in northern Ontario, he grew up with the church union movement already underway. Raised a Presbyterian, he was proud that some still misidentified him, as had novelist Robertson Davies, as one of the “few remaining ranting old Methodists.”26 Mutchmor studied at the University of Toronto just before the First World War during what he described as a time of high idealism, when many believed that the world would be converted to Christianity in their generation. An interest in social work (and a rather low opinion of theological education at Knox College) took him to Union Theological Seminary in New York for graduate studies in theology, which he combined with a master’s program in economics at Columbia University across the street. In 1920 he returned to Canada, accepting a call to Robertson Memorial Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg, where his work included oversight of a mission in the north end of the city. A part-time position as a member of Manitoba’s Welfare Supervision Board (serving as its chair from 1926–36) gave Mutchmor access to surveys and studies on a broad assortment of social welfare issues. All in all, it was valuable experience that prepared him for his appointment as associate secretary of the Board of e & ss in 1936.27 Due to D.L. McLachlan’s illness, he was effectively in charge before he was formally appointed as secretary in 1938. Mutchmor was fully committed to both parts of his board’s mandate – evangelism and social service. He encouraged and coordinated countless initiatives that he described as “witness in deeds, not talk.”28 But he also used words to promote his causes, vocally opposing such vices as drinking and gambling. Not one to shy away from unpopular stands, he objected to women working outside the home – “mothers swept into gainful employment” as he put it. He was shocked to see them dropping off their children “in indiscriminate places” to be cared for while they worked. For him, this was a practice as dangerous as taking children from their mothers and forcing them to work in canneries or mines: both were threats to

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child welfare that called for child protection. And yet he defies facile pigeonholing as a social conservative. The Observer’s cover story following his election as moderator at the 1962 General Council claimed that “no churchman in Canada took big business to task as often as Mutchmor.” Visibility had its drawbacks, however, and Mutchmor received threatening telephone calls, often several dozen throughout the night. His very public stand on temperance predictably drew ridicule. But he attracted admiration too, some of it from surprising quarters. When Mutchmor became the butt of jokes at one cocktail party, c b c reporter Stanley Burke came to his defence by recalling an incident that happened after he “unwittingly blasphemed” while still on camera. Among the pile of disapproving letters was one expressing appreciation for his work, praising him for the high calibre of his un reportage, and closing with, “I just thought that at this particular time you might appreciate knowing. Sincerely yours, J.R. Mutchmor.”29 His notes and letters reveal a gracious man with a wry sense of humour. “I cannot understand you having the flu,” the teetotaller wrote to an ailing friend, “must be that you have not the right kind of rum.”30 Mutchmor fervently believed that the church was the conscience of the state, a conviction that he attributed to the Reformed tradition (while admitting that Calvin may have enforced it “to an extreme” in Geneva).31 He assumed that the United Church’s “political witness and warfare” extended from the global arena to fighting the devil in one’s own back yard – at the town-pump level, as he put it.32 His advice to ministers presumed that they would play an influential role in helping church members to connect faith and community: preaching sermons on social issues that were both biblically and factually sound, making effective use of denominational structures and pronouncements, encouraging their congregations to use church resources to study social issues, liaising with community organizations, and even becoming specialists on particular social issues.33 But Mutchmor was just as avid an advocate for evangelism, and claimed that he was a stronger defender of it than many former Methodists.34 His travels across Canada in 1943 convinced him that support for it was growing.35 With his enthusiastic endorsement, the United Church joined mainstream churches in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia in organizing mass evangelistic meetings that boosted church attendance during the 1940s and ’50s.36 Under his leadership the United Church promoted evangelistic

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campaigns whose themes advertised the hopes of the organizers: Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom, National Evangelistic Mission, Mission to the Nation, and Calling Canada to Christ. The Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom was the United Church’s first major postwar evangelistic initiative, a two-year program launched in 1945.37 Interest in evangelism was running high in North America at the time, and Youth for Christ rallies favoured by fundamentalists were attracting huge crowds. Charles Templeton, a charismatic Canadian preacher from a conservative evangelical denomination, was making headlines.38 When he began to question his faith, the young evangelist turned to Mutchmor for advice, hoping that theological studies would assuage his doubts. At the urging of Mutchmor and Pidgeon, president John A. Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary arranged for the high-school dropout to study there as a “special student.”39 Templeton began his studies in 1948, and three years later ­accepted a position as evangelist for the American mainstream denominations that comprised the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the u sa (nc c ), on condition that he could preach in Canada four months of the year.40 The Templeton Missions, organized in conjunction with the United Church, filled large churches like Chalmers United in Ottawa to capacity, with people occupying “every bit of space that was possible to place them without creating a fire hazard.”41 The Observer provided glowing accounts of Templeton’s cross-Canada itinerary as tens of thousands flocked to the churches and arenas where his meetings were held. Thousands went forward at the end of the service to make a commitment to Christ.42 These rallies featured Templeton as preacher and his talented wife as soloist. The music and the sermons reflected the United Church’s efforts to deal with the imminent cultural crisis. Refusing to pander to popular tastes with female octets, brass bands, and Negro spirituals (associated with rallies organized by conservative evangelicals), the United Church insisted on music accompanied by the piano or organ, with a church choir or Connie Templeton singing classical pieces by Handel and Bach.43 Those who hired Templeton may well have suspected that the audience preferred more lowbrow entertainment, but given their concerns about sacred music, they were determined to give those attending a taste of something more appropriate – nothing that might be confused with jazz! As for Templeton’s

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message, historian Kevin Kee’s summary of what listeners typically heard would have had a familiar ring to those raised in the United Church: a “total gospel” that related Christianity to all areas of life and emphasized the link between personal faith and service.44 The social implications of the gospel message became even more prominent when the United Church used the momentum from the Templeton Missions to launch its own four-year National Evangelistic Mission (ne m) in 1954. Directed by e& s s staff member William G. Berry, the strategy for this Mission to the Nation was set out in Calling Canada to Christ, a booklet that he edited. Central to the campaign was a focus on national life that connected the call for individual commitment to Christ to four areas of living: family, community, daily work and the economy, and civic and political engagement.45 “National salvation” was the prescription for “national sin,” a “deeper and more powerful form of evil than individual sin.”46 The literature distributed by the ne m committee offered concrete advice for everyday living and tools for measuring advancement ­toward the goals of the campaign. The pamphlet on the Christian family, for instance, featured an eleven-point checklist of practices for parents that included personal declaration of faith in God and loyalty to Jesus Christ, daily devotions that included all family members, and participation in the mid-week and Sunday programs of the church.47 Likewise, a pamphlet designed for women’s groups challenged them to use a “Group-Analysis Chart for Church Organizations” to calculate the “lost potential for evangelism.” Several questions probed whether the women’s group at the church was distinctly Christian and thus different from a secular club.48 The campaign concluded with a series of special events organized around its four themes, and congregations were encouraged to promote them. Billy Graham brought his crusade to Canada a year after the creation of the nem, raising a fresh round of questions about the United Church’s approach to evangelism. An editorial in the Observer before his arrival in Toronto noted that the national leadership of the United Church had not endorsed Graham’s campaign (as was the case with the Templeton Mission), leaving it up to presbyteries and conferences to decide on their own whether to become involved. One sticking point was Graham’s literal approach to interpreting the Bible, but Observer editor A.C. Forrest identified another: “In the United Church we have been taught that the Bible is relevant to ­every department of life – social, political, economic, and personal. And

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we will not sacrifice that truth for the sake of successful techniques in mass evangelism.”49 Graham was conspicuously absent from the list of evangelists invited to participate in the ne m. Although terse when questioned about Graham’s absence, its coordinator was more loquacious when asked about the place of periodic revivals. The “genius of the United Church,” Berry replied, did not lend itself “to the revivalist technique of evangelism.” Its best work was done “through the ordinary channels of pulpit evangelism, visitation evangelism, communicant classes and the occasional preaching mission.” He added that contemporary revivalism was in some cases based on a theological perspective that differed from what was taught at United Church theological schools. While not denying that some still came to religious faith through a “catastrophic conversion,” Berry thought this had become rare in the United Church: most of its people were converted through the “ordinary preaching of the gospel and the fellowship of the church.”50 The divided mind of the United Church over evangelism was evident in the Observer. Forrest reminded readers that the United Church had deliberately placed evangelism and social service together under one board at the time of its founding, convinced that one must “not go rushing off into revivalism unrelated to moral issues and social concerns,” nor to divorce social reforms from personal evangelism. To explain the distinctive features of the United Church’s approach to evangelism, he quoted at length from a statement about the n em prepared by Angus MacQueen, minister of St Andrew’s United Church in London, Ontario, and chair of e & s s . MacQueen believed Donald Soper, the famed British Methodist preacher from the West London Mission, was the person who came closer than Billy Graham to representing the mind of the United Church on evangelism. He reported that when Soper challenged his Canadian audience with the demands of Christian discipleship, some left angry and disappointed because they had come expecting the “cheap brand” of evangelism: “fanfare and ballyhoo, hot songs and catchy tunes, pretty soloists and well-groomed announcers, and a ‘come to Jesus and collect your advantages’ appeal.”51 MacQueen admitted that although the United Church stood in the evangelical tradition, many ministers had misgivings about modern evangelism. Should a type of evangelism be approved, he wondered, just because it seemed to get results? Or should they be asking,

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what kind of results? Will the results last? What about scruples in matters such as intellectual and theological integrity, ethics, or social relevance?52 These questions remained long after the nem ended.53 Joining the Board of e & ss in calling postwar Canada to Christ was the much larger Board of Home Missions, which Mutchmor credited with contributing even more to the church’s active witness than e&ss.54 Under its auspices, presbyteries made ambitious plans for new church development, especially in the expanding suburbs, and a  National Committee on Church Extension chaired by Malcolm Macdonald launched a campaign to fund it.55 Macdonald passionately believed that the program “to extend the Kingdom of God within this land” was as great a challenge as the United Church or its parent bodies had ever faced.56 While he insisted that the United Church did not proselytize those from other faith traditions, it was “ready to provide not only a spiritual home for them, but also to assist them in understanding and finding their true place in our Canadian way of life.”57 Macdonald admitted that in the past, meeting the religious needs of every community in Canada had been easier: a missionary who arrived with a plan to open a new church had been met with an ­enthusiastic welcome. At present, indifference or competition from other attractions made church development in frontier areas or new suburbs more challenging. Yet the consequences of failure were grave and “exceedingly detrimental to the well-being of the nation,” for much of the population would be “left to the often extreme and eccentric leadership of the sects or else succumb to the invading secularism, materialism and paganism of our age.”58 Church extension committees handled most of the details of starting a congregation, but the commitment of lay leaders was essential to success. It was a layman who alerted Winnipeg Presbytery to the religious situation in his suburban neighbourhood. He’d stopped a young boy to ask why he wasn’t in Sunday school. The boy’s answer – “What is that?” – startled him so much that he started talking to others about organizing a congregation. Twenty-five women from the area joined fifty other women from Winnipeg Presbytery to conduct house-to-house surveys to gauge interest in having a United Church Sunday school and worship service nearby. As a result, Westworth United was built and quickly flourished. Within five years, over 500 children were enrolled in Sunday school. The church

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Table 6.1 Membership of Woman’s Missionary Society auxiliaries, bands, and affiliated cgit groups Years

Auxiliaries1

Mission bands

Baby bands

Affiliated CGIT2

1950

88,693

49,874

58,574

16,786

1951

89,185

52,919

61,004

17,714

1952

90,415

54,654

61,632

17,609

1953

91,943

58,747

67,521

19,952

1954

92,931

49,953

70,605

20,507

1955

93,097

47,812

71,697

22,060

1956

92,971

47,378

69,669

24,427

1957

94,937

47,724

70,490

23,978

1958

95,901

48,054

69,102

26,842

1959

98,122

46,849

67,942

27,352

1960

98,821

48,234

66,032

32,377

1961

96,444

43,227

56,242

31,452

1  Includes members of the Evening Auxiliaries, which were considered a separate category from 1950–52. 2 Affiliated CGIT groups included in the total membership during this period; method of counting other affiliates (e.g., Explorers) varied. Source: Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Society and The United Church of Canada Year Book (reports of the Woman’s Missionary Society)

was abuzz with Mission Band, Explorers, cg i t, Cubs, Scouts, Tyros, Hi-C, and Young People’s groups. Women were invited to join the wa and the wms; men served on the Session as elders and stewards until 1968, when women too became eligible.59 Following the Second World War, similar growth was reported across Canada. An increase in membership was not the only good news. Between 1941 and 1946, subscriptions to the denominational paper, renamed The United Church Observer in 1939, increased from 15,000 to over 50,000. A capital campaign exceeded expectations, raising $4 million in pledges in 194660 and helping to replenish the mission funds depleted during the Depression. The w m s announced in 1950 that a new record had been set for fundraising, and that amount was bettered in subsequent years. There was fellowship aplenty. With a baby boom well underway, a notable increase in Baby Bands and study groups for mothers soon followed.61 Programs for children and youth challenged the church building’s

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Woman’s Missionary Society

Woman’s Association (all purposes)

1926+ 1927+ 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961

$5 750 000 $5 500 000 $5 250 000 $5 000 000 $4 750 000 $4 500 000 $4 250 000 $4 000 000 $3 750 000 $3 500 000 $3 250 000 $3 000 000 $2 750 000 $2 500 000 $2 250 000 $2 000 000 $1 750 000 $1 500 000 $1 250 000 $1 000 000 $750 000 $500 000 $250 000 $0

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Figure 6.1 Funds raised by the Woman’s Association (all purposes) and the Woman’s Missionary Society, 1926–61 Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book. + 1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

capacity in many congregations. The Young People’s Union flourished during the 1950s. By mid-decade it was among the largest youth organizations in the country with some 30,000 members between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. A new organization called Hi-C quickly attracted 20,000 teenagers.62 Couples clubs, service clubs, and even camps for men and women in their thirties and early forties were organized to tap the spiritual and social longings of young adults. The first of several schools for lay leaders was opened in Naramata, b c , in 1947, and the training school for deaconesses in Toronto celebrated its move to a new building in 1955. A conspicuous exception to the successful ventures of the 1950s was recruitment of personnel for overseas missions, a situation that editor A.C. Forrest considered “the greatest concern of our time.”63 However, the vibrancy of congregational life likely generated more

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interest in ministry as a profession and helped to ease the chronic shortage of personnel after the war. In 1954, the United Church reported that 159 young people (nine from one Moncton congregation alone) had entered the candidacy process for ordination, the most in its history.64 Despite record high numbers of candidates, there were still not enough ministers by decade’s end to match the projected demand.65 This cohort prepared for ministry at an auspicious time. There was much talk of a theological renaissance underway, and many dared to believe that a positive and redemptive engagement with modern culture would ensue. Convinced of the transformative possibilities of Christian education for all ages, the United Church laid plans to capitalize on the revival of interest in religious questions by linking learning to evangelism and church extension. It launched a number of initiatives to acquaint its members with its particular theological orientation (and sometimes to defend itself against detractors). Broad and moderate was how United Church leaders liked to picture themselves. Their church was “liberal without being radical or humanistic,” explained Preston MacLeod to Christian Century readers, with neo-orthodoxy enjoying a “strong following, especially among the younger ministers” who, though not inclined to repudiate liberal theology, wanted to go beyond it to make theology “more central and vital in the life of the church, and distinctively Christian in its interpretation of biblical revelation.”66 Writing for an American audience in 1947, C.E. Silcox claimed that even the United Church’s critics had to concede that it was a dynamic church. While it admittedly had a tendency to issue unwise pronouncements before fully thinking through the implications, it could not be accused of pussyfooting. In general he found that it repudiated “both the mushiness of liberalism and the crudities of fundamentalism and is essentially liberal-conservative.”67 R.C. Chalmers agreed. A key staff member on the committee that had prepared the Statement of Faith, he reported that “orthodox liberalism or progressive conservatism” was “very apparent in leading theological circles in our United Church.”68 The publications that he oversaw at e & ss championed what he portrayed as an “evangelical type” of Christianity,69 a stance that continued to be as contentious in the 1940s and ’50s as it had been in the 1920s and ’30s. Chalmers made the customary distinction between the United Church’s evangelical identity and other parties who were claiming to

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define what it entailed: “a legalistic and rigid Fundamentalism,” or “some special esoteric and emotional religious experience,” or as “synonymous with the sect type of Christianity.” He urged the United Church to become more evangelical in faith and practice by seeing “the whole of life religiously interpreted through Jesus Christ.”70 But becoming more evangelical was easier said than done. On the one hand, there were hopeful signs of a growing interest in learning more about the Christian way of life. The Observer seized the opportunity to educate its readers, publishing a series on “What the United Church Believes,” which dealt with topics related to revelation, sin, and salvation.71 Reacting to religious competition on two different fronts (fundamentalist and Catholic), over the next decade the Commission on Christian Faith would prepare materials stating the United Church’s position on doctrines emphasized by sectarian groups, as well as on the differences between Protestants and Catholics: Why the Sects? (A.C. Forrest); In Remembrance of Me: Being an Account of Man’s Part in the Lord’s Supper (Harvey Forster); Is Christ Coming Again? (C.C. Oke); Christianity and Healing (C.G. Park); British-Israelism: Is It Christian? and Jehovah’s Witnesses (both by Alfred E. Cooke); and What’s the Difference? Protestant and Roman Catholic Beliefs Compared and Life and Death (both by A.G. Reynolds).72 As Mutchmor reviewed the United Church’s accomplishments in anticipation of its fortieth anniversary in 1965, he proudly recalled that a pamphlet containing the Statement of Faith was a best seller from the beginning and the catechism based on it in steady demand. By its nature and of necessity, the United Church was “deeply theological,” he boasted: “it’s a plain fact that a far larger proportion of the ministers and members of the United Church of Canada strive to learn and comprehend the deeper things of God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit; of man and his sin, of salvation, and of the Christian witness on all the fronts of life than any other Christian Communion in Canada.”73 The pamphlets by Reynolds in particular sparked a lively debate both inside and outside the United Church.74 What’s the Difference?, boosted by complaints from cardinals James McGuigan of Toronto and Paul-Émile Léger of Montreal, showed unprecedented numbers in sales of a United Church publication. Sales for Life and Death also shot up after fundamentalists condemned it.75 The “New Curriculum” became the linchpin of the United Church’s plans to create a more theologically literate membership. Utilizing

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the tools of modern biblical scholarship to interpret the Bible, the materials aimed to relate its teachings to the contemporary context.76 The project drew much of its inspiration from the Christian Faith and Life curriculum that had been launched by the Presbyterian Church in the u sa in 1948. Not surprisingly the United Church’s New Curriculum was similar in assumptions and planning process to its American counterpart.77 A critical difference was timing: development of the curriculum materials in Canada lagged behind by at least five years. Although the decision to produce new materials was made at the 1952 General Council, a series of consultations at both the national and regional level followed; the critical response to the presuppositions announced in 1958 likely slowed the process as well.78 The impact of delay proved devastating. Like the Presbyterian materials, the United Church’s New Curriculum focused on the family as integral to Christian education, and produced hardcover illustrated books intended for reading at home during the week. The failings of a family-centred program in the United States were perceptible even before the New Curriculum was sent to press in Canada.79 Alas, for the United Church, its poorly timed launch coincided with the end of the baby boom, more-complicated family relationships, and a completely different theological climate from the one that had informed its design. Unveiled in the mid-1960s, it was infused with the theological and educational presuppositions of the 1940s and ’50s. Its critics in the 1960s failed to appreciate how deeply biblical and theological it was in both aim and actual content – it was exactly what respected leaders like Line and Pidgeon had called for to preserve Christian culture. However, it appealed to neither conservative evangelicals nor a younger generation of more radical liberals.80 The troubled development of the New Curriculum provides a glimpse of the uphill battle that the United Church faced even at a time when people seemed to be deeply interested in religious matters. For all the talk of a postwar theological renaissance associated with the names of Barth, Niebuhr, Tillich, and other so-called neoorthodox theologians, how extensive was their influence? Speaking at a dinner at Emmanuel College in 1957, Forrest conjectured that if Victoria University’s president and Emmanuel College’s principal were to announce that Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale had been appointed to the faculty, “there would be within The United

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Church great rejoicing.” But the response to the appointment of Reinhold Niebuhr or Paul Tillich would likely be, “Who are they?” What he described as a cultural lag was greatest among “some of our best people” from farms and small communities. Forrest n ­ oticed a spiritual disorientation that surfaced when those folk moved to the city: despite being raised in the United Church, some felt more at home in Gospel Halls, small Baptist churches, or a Pentecostal Tabernacle.81 Little wonder then that a few years later, the New Curriculum was greeted with suspicion even by some of the church’s most stalwart supporters. The controversy it sparked revived memories of Billy Graham’s visit to Canada in the 1950s and the gap that was evident even then between his theology and that of the United Church. It was also out of step with a cadre of younger ministers who found it not sufficiently progressive. Such theological misgivings added to the practical problems of the New Curriculum after its launch in the 1960s. The design – in retrospect, flawed – disclosed a church operating in denial about the degree of acceptance of theological liberalism shorn of its evangelical roots, and seemingly unaware of the damage already done to the crucial links between church, home, and community life it presupposed. It epitomized the ill-fated efforts to  negotiate with modernity in the 1950s – to correlate faith and ­culture, as neo-orthodox theologians liked to put it. The United Church’s miscalculations in its approach to Christian education matched its misplaced confidence in mass evangelism and church extension. Its leaders were astute in identifying signs of a ­culture shift underway but ineffectual in their efforts to influence its ­direction, despite impressive outlays of time and resources. Headlines in the 1950s tended to trumpet the church’s accomplishments, but assessments of its leaders were more guarded. After visiting United Church congregations across Canada during his two years as moderator, James S. Thomson sounded somewhat optimistic in 1958 as he described the “manifold signs of a quickened vitality” indicated by the upswing in church attendance. He sensed a turning of the tide of interest in religion that he candidly characterized as an “anxious, sometimes ill-informed, yet not the less genuine seeking for spiritual enlightenment and help rather than profound spiritual revival.” However, he found little or no inclination to apply the gospel to social questions or world problems. That there was “no passion for public

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righteousness or social reform” was in his view the consequence of the relativity in faith and morals of an age “devoid of moral enthusiasm.”82 Thomson’s disturbing observation was consistent with other indications that modern life was running counter to the dynamics that had propelled the church union movement. Everyday life seemed to sap the sense of collective purpose that was integral to the identity of a denomination designed to connect faith and community. City life further hindered this goal. Those who gathered for worship on Sunday might otherwise have little contact with each other or the community in which the church was situated. The first of several reports from the Commission on Urban Problems set up in 1936 assessed “the cutting-off from the old social and spiritual moorings” as the most significant obstacle. Rural life could be nasty, vicious, and coarse, said the report, but seldom was its outlook so secular as in the city. Though religious observances in a rural community might suffer from neglect, the tradition of churchgoing overshadowed daily life. Not so in the city, where “public scrutiny and popular appraisal” of conduct were impossible due to urban anonymity and secular distractions. Social and racial groupings tended to be more “socially disintegrative” than in smaller communities where people knew each other and mingled at community events. The report found the impact on children particularly disturbing. “They belong to nowhere in particular. They grow up in no church or school, in the soil of which their lives become rooted. Their lives are barren in respect of loyalties and friendship.”83 The shadow of the church was even less visible to those on the move after the Second World War. Mobility disrupted old social ­networks and group norms, complicating the rituals of family life. Family members who moved to find employment in another community were no longer able to worship together as a clan. Memories of baptisms and funerals were associated with several church buildings rather than one. The disruption of old community ties also ­increased the likelihood of mating with someone from a different religious background. Mixed marriages were identified as a problem in the United Church’s first statement on marriage issued in 1932, which noted in particular the difficulty of rearing children in a home “where united religious acts are impossible, in which silence or extreme reserve must be maintained.”84 Concern for protecting the next generation of Protestants heightened as the number of mixed marriages increased after the war.85

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Church attendance at first withstood these pressures. The habit of going to church on Sunday morning was associated with ‘normal’ behaviour and good citizenship. Sin became a common theme in the preaching of the day, stirring feelings of guilt that some apparently tried to ease by attending church services regularly.86 Perhaps heightened anxiety about an unsettled world and the threat of nuclear weapons brought out a tribal instinct to be with others. However, on many city street corners, the community church was becoming an artifact of a bygone era. The residential patterns of city life were proving to be problematic, admitted Malcolm Macdonald in 1961 as he compared current home mission strategies with those of the past. What to do about the “great apartment structures, sometimes ten or twelve or even more stories high,” that had sprung up after the war baffled church workers. In one area of Toronto, for instance, it was estimated that 75 per cent of the 4,000 or so people living in the six or seven apartment complexes had little or no connection with a church. Tenants were hard to contact in the first place and difficult to track once they moved. Many were still childless, and thus had no sense of urgency to affiliate with a congregation. They thought of their situation as temporary and were unwilling to make a commitment to a particular community by joining a church.87 Rural life, usually applauded for its moral values, was changing too.88 In his role as associate secretary of e & s s , W.G. Berry was pleased to find strong and well-organized congregations in the cities he visited in western Canada in 1949. It was in the rural districts that he spotted failing congregations, apparently unable to make the transition from the horse-and-buggy era to the automobile era. Moral issues were becoming more challenging, at least according to some parents, who told him that they thought moral awareness was easier to instill in a child in the city than in a small Prairie town. The growing “alcohol problem” was evidence of a serious moral laxity among country youth. The decline of rural communities was a dangerous trend, he cautioned, since the United Church had more congregations there than other Protestant denominations.89 Nowhere was the widening gap between the United Church’s ideals and cultural realities more evident than in the homes of its members, microcosms as it were of the church’s troubled efforts to translate its teaching into lived experience. The Christian home was considered the critical nexus between church and community. Hugh Dobson

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summed up what was at stake in the drawn-out title of a pamphlet issued in 1940 – The Christian Family Is Essential to Democracy, to Canadian National Life and to the Coming Kingdom of God for Which We Pray – and sternly warned: “If family life breaks down, national life will crack.”90 As the 1946 report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home put it (apparently missing the irony of the language), the home was “the symbol of the Kingdom of God” and built on the conviction that “all men are brothers” and that “God is the Creator-Father, and that the world of men is or should be a family, a household of faith, inspired by family loyalty.”91 The 1950 report of the Commission on Culture still recommended that parents be mindful of the importance of the family in spreading Christian culture “through such means as reading the Bible aloud, singing hymns together, prayer, church fellowship and above all, by the kindliness, good temper, good manners and behaviour of the father and mother.”92 And yet domestic Christianity was not as robust as the rhetoric about its redemptive potential made out. The report on marriage and the home admitted that parents had been content to let the church take over responsibility for religious education, wrongly assuming that an hour of Sunday school would suffice to teach the Christian faith.93 To make matters worse, the home itself seemed in danger of disintegration. Family dislocation, secularism, materialism, encroachment of “outside groups” (such as state services), a lower childbirth rate, and divorce were listed as threats that had left Christian family life in a precarious situation: “A generation is growing up that knows little or nothing of Christian knowledge or experience, and in the time of crisis has no invisible resources to draw upon for its salvation.”94 One solution to the failure of the Christian home to nurture Christian beliefs was to expand the role of the church among children and youth beyond the Sunday school hour. In a bold depiction of a church intent on being at the centre of personal lives and social relationships, principal Richard Davidson pictured its authority extending far into homes and communities, usurping even the importance of the family in nurturing piety. There would have been few if any women present in 1943 at the Winnipeg retreat for ministers where he likened the church to a mother, a metaphor more familiar to Catholics than to his Protestant listeners, assigning to “her” responsibilities more commonly associated with the familial piety of

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the Victorian home. The family of God was the “home” of the Christian child, and the church was responsible for raising the infant member. “The Church teaches him what the Father is like and what a child’s duties in the family are. The Church shields him from evil and cares for him at school and at play.” (How “she” did so was not elaborated.)95 Worship was essential to raising the child: “She [the Church] knows that some of the richest memories men have in later years are of looking on at the Sacraments. She arranges and adorns the church building so that the child will feel there that he is in his Father’s house.” He stressed the effective use of architectural lines, light and shade, colour, windows, hangings, pictures, texts of Scripture, the font, the pulpit, the Communion table to convey a sense of the Father’s presence. Once the child reached manhood, the church was there to meet him “with God’s strengthening grace” by teaching him about God and duty, praying for him, confirming him, and then admitting him “to the fellowship of the Holy Sacrament.” The men who gathered for the retreat were assured that the church “loves each one of her children with the particularizing love of a mother” – indeed, its task was “mothering the children of men from the cradle to the grave.”96 The emphasis on God as Father and the church as Mother was an expression of a liturgical theology that had practical consequences as those influenced by Davidson’s teaching at Emmanuel moved into congregations. For instance, a more liturgically proper service of baptism was less focused on the natural family. Forrest observed in 1961 that it was becoming difficult to persuade younger ministers to perform private baptisms. Instead, they expected to have the babies and the parents “present before the whole congregation, so that vows may be made publicly and members of the congregation will realize they have a responsibility too.”97 It was also more challenging to schedule a Sunday morning baptism at a convenient time, especially for relatives travelling some distance. The escalating number of mixed marriages further complicated the details of performing a baptism, especially in the days before Vatican II. For a variety of reasons, the number of baptisms was declining in the 1950s even though church membership was on the rise. For many migrants to the larger cities who were experiencing the loss of old ties to family and friends, the church provided artificial forms of kinship and a semblance of community – though perhaps

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less intensely liturgical than what Davidson had in mind. One belonged to a home congregation; other members became a church family; the design features of new buildings, such as carpeted floors, made churches seem ‘homey.’ Belonging was likely a welcome respite from the anonymity of urban life, especially for those from small towns or rural communities, replicating some of the values of community life that were lost in the move. Forrest guessed that the majority of churchgoers were “displaced persons seeking a spiritual home within the Christian family.” Having once “lived within the shadow of the church’s spire,” they now “sensed the rootlessness of life outside the church” and wanted to “belong to the fellowship which is good, and is the gift of God.”98 He defended the United Church against critics who dismissed it as “a big social centre.” It was that and more, and he considered “being a family within the community” that welcomed everyone who wanted to belong to the “family circle” to be the United Church’s greatest strength.99 And yet church leaders were nervous about what they saw happening in their busy congregations. Those who emphasized the importance of worship worried that it was taking a back seat to education, fellowship, humanitarian work, and other auxiliary activities. Children and youth whose experience of church before confirmation was based primarily on age-specific activities discovered, upon arriving at a worship service, that the language was strange, the music unfamiliar, and some of the sermons boring. There was more fun to be had elsewhere on Sundays, especially with the loosening of laws enforcing Sabbath observance. Moreover, the lessons that children learned outside the church did little to reinforce its message. The innocent pleasures of the so-called pagan culture were tempting, and the media’s celebration of materialism in programming and advertising was often more powerful and immediate than spiritual instruction offered by either parents or pastors. Even the usually optimistic Forrest became a little less sanguine as he followed the trends during the 1950s. Sunday school sessions were shorter, and Sunday services were over by noon. Gone were afternoon Sunday schools (except in some rural areas in eastern Canada) and evening services. In 1961 he summed up the pattern of typical adult activity in many United churches during the 1950s: “Bible classes are small, prayer meetings few, midweek meetings numerous.”100 He astutely noted a generational divide: older members criticized the young for not being concerned about alcoholism and

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heavy smoking, and for not observing Sunday as a day of rest; young people criticized the older generation for “being obtuse on matters of race discrimination, indifferent to the needs of undeveloped countries, and for supporting a medieval penal system.”101 It was a preview of the clash of values that was about to hit the church. There was almost as much uneasiness about crowded churches as empty ones. Berry discovered a disturbing explanation for the increase in church membership in an article by American sociologist Will Herberg that described three types of character development: tradition-directed, with a code of behaviour transmitted from one generation to the next (and tending to die out in industrial and urban societies); inner-directed, relentlessly and often individualistically moving toward a goal (whether for good or evil) as though driven by an “internal gyroscope”; and other-directed, a new type that had emerged in the last generation, which operated with a “built-in radar apparatus” that received signals from the social group to which the person wished to conform.102 Berry assessed the trend in Canada to be “almost all in the direction of the other-directed kind of characters.” The man who a few years later was charged with leading the Mission to the Nation campaign was struck in 1954 by what he characterized as the “tragedy of our time”: “People join our churches in droves in order to conform, but deny our gospel day by day for the very same reason that they joined, in order to conform!”103 But those who were inner-­ directed were problematic too, for they spurned the restraints of communal guidance offered by the church. These self-regulating individuals were bombarded by choices with a range of options for political positions, media channels, leisure activities, and religious views. A different way of looking at the world was as close as the nearest television, where a wider range of ‘normal’ behaviour was on display daily. Resistance to moral regulation by the church stiffened after the war, undermining its efforts to guide members through the moral maze in what it believed to be the right direction. A church concerned about Sunday observance, temperance, and sexual purity had always had hecklers, but increasingly its critics were sitting in its own pews. No longer was it possible to identify its members by particular practices associated with their spiritual forebears (temperance for Methodists, Sabbath observance for Presbyterians, and the permanence of

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marriage for all the uniting traditions). This was not for lack of ­trying. Its teaching on Sunday observance, for instance, was reaffirmed in the new catechism, which offered this response to Question 60 about how to observe it: “We should spend the Lord’s Day in public and private worship, in reading and meditation, in converse with family and friends, in deeds of kindness, and in grateful rest from all but necessary labour.” Yet its own reports show a church struggling to convince its members to comply. “On the Lord’s Day,” a report to the General Council prepared in 1948, reaffirmed the importance of a day of rest despite the cultural influences that were undermining it: godlessness, secularism, hedonism, improper use of leisure, commercial and sports interests, Sunday motoring, and even a variety of ‘good’ activities (meetings, concerts, entertaining friends) that were not considered to be the best use of the day. An ominous sign of what was to come was the “wideopen disavowal of the Lord’s Day” that was most evident in areas near the U.S. border, and exacerbated by the growing number of immigrants with a Continental European background.104 The commission made a bold claim for the importance of its cause, i­nsisting that the church “must teach that the Lord’s Day is the keystone institution in building and maintaining a Christian civilization.”105 It was, of course, easier to keep the Sabbath the Protestant way when nearly everything was closed in order to preserve a day free from commercial activities and professional sporting events. The United Church’s failure to influence popular opinion on Sunday observance was evident by 1950 when its support for the Lord’s Day Alliance was not enough to win a municipal plebiscite on banning Sunday sports in Toronto.106 Part of the framework for a Christian Canada was demolished as one community after another removed similar restrictions. Just as striking was the waning support for the temperance cause. By 1950 even the wms found that collecting signatures for the total abstinence “purpose cards” was a hard sell.107 Its committee on Temperance and Christian Citizenship was renamed “Christian Citizenship” that year, although temperance was still listed among its concerns alongside peace, racial brotherhood, and social welfare. Meanwhile the United Church debated whether total abstinence from the use of beverage alcohol ought to be a condition of membership, deciding instead to adopt voluntary total abstinence in 1948.108 In an effort to encourage compliance, a flurry of flyers and

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pamphlets targeted married couples and individuals.109 Even that policy proved too restrictive. Deliberating in 1960 on the report of a temperance commission set up four years earlier, the General Council conceded that while abstinence was still the wisest and safest course of action, one could drink responsibly and be a member in good standing.110 The United Church’s strategy for discouraging the use of beverage alcohol also included pressure on the federal government to restrict advertising and to nationalize pricing and profits.111 Mutchmor’s tactics included both public statements and behind-the-scenes lobbying. Writing to thank Mutchmor after enjoying dinner at his home, Stanley Knowles, a United Church minister and ccf Member of Parliament, laid out the steps he had since taken to raise the issue of liquor advertising. Knowles evidently appreciated the groundwork Mutchmor had laid, and encouraged him to continue his visits to Ottawa.112 Their exchange of letters on establishment of the Canada Council (which Knowles hoped would “relieve the Dominion Drama Festival from its dependence on liquor money”) show them collaborating to rally other mp s to support their cause, specifically Liberal Cabinet ministers Lester Pearson and Walter Harris. The political sensitivity of the issue was not lost on Knowles, who was alarmed by “Bronfman’s influence in the Liberal Party” (a reference to the owner of a large distillery in Quebec).113 The United Church was also forced to confront resistance to its efforts to regulate family life. The emphasis on the Christian home as an institution with a redemptive role in raising good citizens was gradually giving way to a focus on family relationships.114 Despite the growing number of women working outside the home, there was remarkably little change between 1932 and 1962 in the way the United Church portrayed Christian marriage. Its purpose remained three-fold: procreation, companionship, and the “divine vocation” of parenting.115 Marriage was assumed to be a lifelong commitment. Commissioned reports during this period were unequivocal. Having children, rather than the regulation of sexual satisfaction, was considered the end and purpose of marriage and not to be evaded “in the pursuit of selfish ease and pleasure at the cost of a childless home.”116 Procreation was promoted as both a delight and a duty, although the United Church defended “voluntary parenthood” and sided with the Federal Council of Churches and the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops against the Roman Catholic condemnation of contraception.117

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By mid-century, however, the “art of controlling birth” had led to what a 1950 report described as “the most sudden biological change the human race has known.”118 The United Church had reason to be concerned about the smaller family size that resulted. During the baby boom, the fertility rate among its female members was lower than the Canadian average.119 Reproductive control became even more reliable when ‘the Pill’ came on the market in 1961, although the sale of contraceptives was still illegal in Canada until 1969.120 The United Church was adamant that procreation was not the sole purpose of marriage, and set great store by the companionship of the couple joined in marriage. However, the notion of marriage as a mere contract between private individuals was repeatedly denounced.121 Sexuality was part of the work of God’s creation and, as such, was declared a good and natural aspect of companionship, albeit requiring disciplined expression.122 Family life disclosed God’s grace, and both marriage and sexuality were often described as sacred or sacramental (although not a Sacrament as theologically defined). Marital difficulties, on the other hand, seemed to mirror the brokenness of relationships after the Fall. The United Church was concerned about a sizable and increasing number of couples who had separated while still legally married, either because they had no legal grounds for divorce or could not afford to obtain one. An annulment of the marriage might settle the legal ambiguity of the couple, but the United Church worried that it left their children in an ambiguous position as illegitimate offspring.123 By 1946 the United Church admitted that old solutions for dealing with failed marriages were inadequate, and called for the matter to be studied.124 A decade later, still without a formal policy to guide ministers, a Commission on Christian Marriage and Divorce was formed, and its reports came before the General Council in 1960 and 1962. It was not the United Church’s position on marriage that changed in the process, but its decision (shocking at the time) to see redemptive possibilities in the remarriage of divorced persons. The second report admitted that for healing and wholeness, divorce was sometimes a better choice than remaining unhappily married. In Jesus’ teaching, commissioners found a message of compassion that dared them to conclude that it was “God’s will for his church to deal compassionately with those whose marriages are threatened or broken.”125 The provocative decision to permit United Church ministers to solemnize marriages of divorced persons set out conditions that

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included confession, repentance, acceptance of the responsibilities of the new marriage, and a desire for the grace of God to forgive and be forgiven.126 A Christian ceremony thus became an alternative to civil marriage or common-law cohabitation for those whose first marriages had failed. The United Church’s biblical and theological rationale for linking home, church, and community became more tenuous once the ‘moral mother’ became the ‘working mother,’ with less time to oversee her children’s spiritual formation. As the spiritual significance of parenting as a divine vocation faded – even for women – the Christian home was drained of some of its sanctity. The impact of more women working outside the home was noticeable in the church and the community. Even in the 1950s, women were finding it more difficult to find time to volunteer at church or community events. Lamenting what he had witnessed, especially in work with the disadvantaged, Mutchmor blamed it on the decline in volunteer service that “in turn is largely caused by the much greater proportion of gainfully employed married women.”127 Others in ministry shared this view of a woman’s primary vocation as that of a parent. Earl Lautenschlager, soon to move from a large Sudbury congregation to the principal’s office at Emmanuel College, offered guidance to brides and grooms in 1962 that would have sounded conventional to young people raised during the 1950s. A sidebar of quotations from the first of two articles was designed to catch the attention of readers leafing through the Observer: “People who don’t want children should remain single.” “The wife who works can unman her husband.” “Women who can’t cook should be ashamed of themselves.”128 Lautenschlager’s frank words were no doubt drawn from years of dealing with couples who came to see him about their problems. His own view of marriage breakdown differed from the new position of the United Church: there was “no good reason to break up any marriage for any reason,” given the spiritual resources for forgiveness that God offered.129 To women who showed him a bruise after their husbands hit them, his candid counsel was not to take it too seriously – “He’s likely as sorry about it as you are.”130 That such a remark passed the scrutiny of a seasoned editor reflects a tolerance of domestic violence that would shock a later generation. Surprisingly, it drew no letters to the editor (or at least none were published).

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After the war women had been bombarded by messages discouraging them from working in paid employment and advising them to put their energies into motherhood and homemaking.131 Those admonitions went unheeded. What both secular and religious critics of women who worked outside the home often overlooked were economic shifts that made homemaking less economically viable. The United Church’s own studies identified a trend toward a new economy where the basic necessities of life, once produced in the home or acquired by bartering services, were now purchased with cash. The report of the Commission on Culture presented to the General Council in 1950 pictured family life in pioneer times as a “closely knit cultural nursery,” with the home producing most of its own material goods. The situation of the modern family was drastically different; it was enmeshed in a money economy, and faced disaster unless it had cash to purchase almost everything it needed.132 The 1961 census reported a startling consequence of that trend: nearly half of the women in the labour force were married. This was a dramatic increase from 1941 (one in twenty) and 1951 (one in ten).133 The divided mind of the United Church over married women who worked outside the home was evident at the General Council in 1962. The Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women presented a report that Mutchmor characterized as “unduly slanted in favour of the demands of woman as woman.”134 It assumed that working women were here to stay, and the church’s task was to figure out how to deal with the problems that were expected to follow. Billed as the first study in Canada to consider the implications of married women in paid positions from a Christian perspective, the report challenged many stereotypes. It pointedly observed that a woman who taught school or worked as a hospital custodian might be using her time away from family concerns as profitably as one who filled her days with such idle amusements as bingo, bridge, shopping, or coffee-partying. Among its recommendations was a call for government and social service agencies to help working families and support for the principle of equal pay for equal work.135 In marked contrast to this affirmation of working women was another report involving the ordination of women, presented to the same General Council. Although the United Church had ordained Lydia Gruchy in 1936 (and several women thereafter), a married woman was still not eligible for consideration. Deaconesses who married were disjoined – formally released from the vows they had

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made when they joined the order – but there was no similar pro­ vision for ‘un-ordaining’ women. Women could thus sidestep the problem by delaying marriage until after they were ordained, but not everyone felt comfortable taking that route. When Elinor Leard, a married women, was ordained in 1957 (over the objections of the moderator), the General Council was asked to clarify “the relationship of an ordained woman minister to her work following her marriage.” The Commission on Ordination concluded that a married woman was not able to discharge her obligations to her husband and children and, at the same time, carry on the work for which she was ordained. Hesitant to adopt this course of action when it was put to a vote, the General Council referred the report to its executive for further deliberation.136 The executive rejected the report’s direction, in effect upholding the Basis of Union (as amended in 1936), which referred to ordaining “men and women” – with no reference to marital status. When the 1964 General Council approved the action of the executive, the path to ordination was cleared for women like Lois Freeman, who had declined to follow a friend’s advice to postpone her marriage to Roy Wilson until she was ordained. Lois Wilson was ordained in 1965, on her fifteenth wedding anniversary, with her husband Roy involved in the laying on of hands at the service.137 It was another sign of what was to come: resistance to male-led public worship, to g­ ender-segregation in much of the life of local congregations, and to women being underrepresented in church structures beyond the congregation. The United Church’s initiatives in the 1940s and ’50s were the work of a church still intent on saving souls and society, and hoping to redeem modern culture as well. It had not yet given up on Christian Canada. It poured time and money into evangelism, church extension, and Christian education. Those who found their way to Sunday services during those years heard the familiar call to Christian citizenship that connected the church with the community. When the United Church called the nation to Christ, people still took notice. The problem was that it seemed to make little difference. The disappointing practical results of the United Church’s postwar initiatives can perhaps account for some of the later skepticism toward what was dismissively dubbed as the Billy Graham–type of evangelism. A number of church leaders concluded that evangelism by itself would not lead to a Christian Canada as they defined it;

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while it might improve church attendance, there was little evidence of it affecting social views or even personal behaviour. Templeton’s own example was hardly reassuring. At the height of his success, still beset by doubts about his faith, he left the ministry in 1957, divorced his wife Connie, and pursued opportunities in secular media. He later wrote in his memoirs that although he did not realize it at the time, the itinerant mass evangelism in which he had been involved was about to die because of television and televangelists, with his old friend Billy Graham the lone survivor.138 The United Church’s identity as an “evangelical” church was doomed once support for Graham’s crusades became a theological litmus test of authenticity. The United Church’s collective purpose was further diminished by the growing separation between neighbours and within families in a more mobile society. Its own members were becoming more selective in their acceptance of its stance on moral issues such as Sabbath observance, temperance, and the permanence of marriage. In an ­individualistic society, they no longer had the same sense of being ­involved in one another’s lives; fellowship was more elusive. As the gap between the guiding principles espoused by denominational leaders and the views of people in the pews widened, more was at stake than just the church’s sense of what it meant to be United. If the church was not influencing the conscience of its own members, how could it be the conscience of the nation? Before the time when public opinion polls regularly took the pulse of the population, church leaders were assumed to speak for their members. One historian has remarked that on matters such as banning beverage alcohol, divorce, and abortion, “the flocks may or may not have heeded their pastors. But governments certainly did.” 139 Ministers were perhaps less surprised than politicians as evidence mounted that people were not always heeding their spiritual leaders, trusting themselves as moral authorities instead. As a result, politicians began to take less notice when someone like Mutchmor came to call. In a democratic society, the ‘church’ doesn’t vote; individual members do. The United Church had hoped that Christian identity could be  cultivated by seeding the culture with Christian values. That Christian culture – whether of the Protestant or Catholic variety – was more tenuous than traditionally assumed created apprehension across denominational lines. The consequences of failure were grave, and United Church leaders were not alone in their fear for

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the future of the church. As one of its ministers who pondered the findings of the Maclean’s survey in 1961, W.J. Gallagher, then secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches, sounded a chilling word of warning: “Christianity is never more than a generation away from extinction.”140

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Rev. William Berry, Rev. Ernest E. Long, Rt Rev. Angus J. MacQueen, and Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker (left to right behind the pulpit) leading the General Council in a hymn of praise. E.L. Homewood, The United Church Observer, September 1958. uc c a 92.185P / 378.

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Rev. Dr Alfred Clinton Forrest, editor of The United Church Observer (far right), with unidentified ministers and Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson (centre). Dominion-Wide Photographs, n.d. uc c a , 76.001P / 1950.

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Rev. J. Raymond Hord, secretary of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service. The United Church Observer, 1 September 1967.

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Student Glee Club at Portage la Prairie Indian residential school, [1967?]. uc c a , 86.158P / 33.

Dr J.P.C. Fraser, port chaplain in Halifax, introducing immigrants to his wife at United Church booth, Berkeley Studio, [196-?]. uc c a 2008.011P / 2679.

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Rev. Clarke MacDonald, secretary of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service, head of the new department of Church in Society in the Division of Mission in Canada after restructuring, and former minister of St Luke’s United Church, Toronto. The United Church Observer, February 1971.

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Tuxis boys entertain at a church coffee house event. Berkeley Studio, [196-?]. u cca, 2008.011P / 2276.

At the “Dugout,” a coffee house on skid row run by First United Church, Vancouver. Berkeley Studio, 1970. uc ca, 2008.011P / 4133.

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Meeting of members of the Committee on the Revision of the Hymnary, 1964. Anglican and United Church members pictured (left to right): Donald S. Henderson, R.D. Atkinson, Jay Macpherson, John Webster Grant, G.G.D. Kilpatrick, R.H.N. Davidson, Stanley Osborne, John W. Stinson, H.A.A. Rose, F.R.C. Clarke. uc c a , 92.185P / 527.

Harriet Christie, secretary of the Board of Women, and other senior church executives. The United Church Observer, October 1970.

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Rev. Bruce McLeod, newly elected United Church moderator. The United Church Observer, October 1972.

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7 Uncoupling Christianity and Culture in Canada Original sin of institutions: priests may pray for guidance with utter ­sincerity, but what they are unconsciously praying for is the continuance of the social ascendancy of their Church. Northrop Frye, “Notebook” 11e [56]

As the retiring United Church moderator stepped forward to give his final address, few of those assembled for the 1962 General Council were expecting a speech that would make headlines the next morning. The Rev. Hugh A. McLeod had been introduced to delegates two years earlier as the “quiet and highly respected minister” of Winnipeg’s Knox United Church – more of a “highland mystic” than an agitator. Yet reputedly where he stood was always clear if he thought it necessary to take a side.1 On this occasion, there would be no doubt about his views on immigration trends.2 The nation’s future would be in peril, he predicted, if immigration continued “overwhelmingly as in the past ten years to make Canada predominantly Roman Catholic.” McLeod tried to explain that his objections were not personal – the immigrants themselves were praiseworthy. Their church, however, was another matter entirely. Insisting that Catholicism favoured “the establishment of a monolithic infallible authority under Rome” (and rejecting the notion that Canadian Catholics believed otherwise), he feared that their growing numbers heralded “the end of liberty as we have known it.” Democracy was “very vulnerable to infiltration,” he cautioned, for political parties wanted to win votes and the press wanted to increase circulation. “By reason of our vaunted tolerance we are in danger of losing our freedom by default.”

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Although aware that the Second Vatican Council was to get underway in a few weeks, he dismissed the optimism of those who hoped for a different kind of Catholicism.3 Given the prevailing assumptions about the role of organized religion in society, McLeod had good reason to be uneasy about the rising number of Catholics: more members, it was supposed, would translate into more political influence for a church’s leaders. However, what McLeod and other leaders failed at first to appreciate was the extent to which the public role of both Protestant and Catholic churches was shifting. Faced with the prospect of conflicts generated by religious pluralism, Canada and other western countries ventured to promote solely secular values to provide cultural cohesion – among them the tolerance, liberty, and democracy that McLeod had proudly promoted as distinctively Protestant ideals. With the demise of Christendom that this move signalled, churches were to find their influence in key social and cultural areas more limited than in the past. An examination of issues of the semi-monthly Observer following McLeod’s speech illustrates some of the complexities of the United Church’s relationship with the Catholic Church at that pivotal ­moment. The magazine was quick to defend McLeod against the critical press coverage that his controversial remarks drew. The comments on immigration had been taken out of context, explained the Observer, insisting that the address had been well received by those who heard it.4 A.C. Forrest, editor of the Observer (and still dealing with the fallout as the next issue went to press), declared the superficiality of the secular media startling and claimed that little notice had been given to the steps the United Church was taking to deal constructively with Canada’s rapidly changing religious configuration. He drew attention to two commissions that the United Church’s recent General Council had set up to study the related issues of immigration and religion in the public schools.5 By happenstance a miniature photo of Pope John XXIII, inserted to publicize the cover story for an article in the next issue of the Observer, appeared just a few pages away from Forrest’s attempt to deal with criticism of the former moderator.6 The situation was ­further exacerbated by what readers saw when that issue arrived two weeks later: an attractive picture of the pope graced the cover and inside was a reprint of an article by a prominent American

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theologian, Robert McAfee Brown, who attended Vatican Council as a Protestant observer. Readers learned that the idea for convening a council had come to the pope during a period “devoted to prayers for the re-union of Christendom.” It is unlikely that those Protestants who feared Catholic domination were placated by the disclosure that the pope sought to show the world how the Catholic Church was facing its internal problems in hopes of welcoming back to the fold “other sheep” that had “strayed.”7 Forrest was shrewd enough to anticipate the furor the picture would create. He assured readers that the cover story had been planned for some time to mark the opening of the Vatican Council. “Just in case some think that we decided to put His Holiness on the cover as a public relations gesture after all the recent bad press, please be assured we don’t scare that easily.”8 His attempt at humour did little to soften reader response: almost all the correspondence published in “Letters to the Editor” was negative – and that was just a sampling. One angry, unsigned, and unprinted note was blunt: “Your Observer just came. I am returning it as I am a Protestant, and feel I shouldn’t have to be staring at the Pope’s picture from a church paper, that I understood was Protestant. I don’t want it in my home.”9 At the same time, to Forrest’s dismay, word came of a request for more government support for Catholic separate schools in Ontario, a proposal that he knew was bound to open old wounds and spark new controversy. “Not This!” shouted the editorial headline, with the body of the editorial denouncing the bishops’ request, calling it “political dynamite.”10 There was reason for Protestants to be apprehensive about the population patterns. Postwar immigration had made for a religiously plural mix, with Protestant numbers increasingly in the minority. After years of restrictions, the resumption of admissions brought refugees and other immigrants, and showed a definite trend: more continental European immigrants meant more Catholics outside Quebec, an unsettling demographic fact that ­further undermined the notion of “British Canada.” It did not help matters that Catholics were said to be smugly aware that the ­recent census showed them at 46 per cent of the population – and growing. “We Will Bury You with Babies” was the title of an ­article in a Catholic magazine that turned the old revenge of the cradle into an attack on the United Church’s position on artificial birth control.11

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The United Church was of two minds where immigration was concerned. Its International Affairs committee supported a “vig­ orous and well directed immigration policy” to attract people to Canada from all regions of the world. It recommended that Canada accept “at least a token number from the Orient, India, The [sic] British West Indies and Africa,”12 including a “fair share of the ‘Hard Core’ in refugee camps, at the rate that this country can successfully integrate them.”13 The committee was fully aware that a more open immigration policy would complicate social integration, especially at a time when Anglo-Saxon culture was disappearing as a source of common values. Making the case for admitting immigrants from places beyond the uk and Europe, one International Affairs report stated the problem candidly: “There is the dilemma between the need to open up empty lands by immigration and the desire to restrict immigration only to the assimilable – had the Indians been able to enforce such a policy of assimilable immigration they would have been around still!”14 The committee denounced Canada’s immigration laws as a “brand of apartheid” because they were based on racial discrimination.15 The tone of its reports was still pro-immigration in 1962 as the country awaited details of a new immigration policy that would benefit chiefly Asians, Africans, and those from countries in the Middle East.16 The response of the Board of Home Missions was more reserved, reflecting perhaps the mixed results of the United Church’s outreach programs to immigrants under its auspices, especially in urban areas.17 Statistics confirmed what many suspected: the United Church had kept pace with other Protestant churches, but lost ground to Catholicism even outside Quebec due to lower fertility rates and higher numbers of Catholic immigrants.18 Home Missions secretary Malcolm Macdonald reported in 1961 that of the 106,928 persons admitted into Canada during the previous two years, only 33,235 were Protestants. The most dramatic change was in Toronto, then Canada’s second-largest city and long considered its Protestant centre. Projections showed that the city would be predominantly Roman Catholic by 1980. It was already losing what he called its AngloSaxon Protestant stock to the suburbs (still mainly Protestant), “while Roman Catholic Non-Anglo-Saxons concentrate in the city proper and replace old church constituencies that were Protestant for decades.”19 Protestants and Catholics in Toronto were soon to be joined by significant numbers of new Canadians who were neither.

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The year 1962 was arguably a tipping point for both the United Church and Canada. A reckoning with religious and cultural pluralism was inescapable, for by then, it was apparent that Quebec’s Quiet Revolution was dramatically altering the role of the Catholic Church and its vision for a Christian society in that province.20 Outside Quebec another revolution, just as momentous, was underway. Among its casualties was the cultural role in nation-building ascribed to the major Protestant churches. With the search for a new collective identity for Canada would come the realization that religion was as much a hindrance as a help in that enterprise: no longer could Christianity be harnessed as a unifying force in a religiously diverse Canada. Evident at the General Council that year was what the Observer described as a liberalizing trend. Delegates had affirmed the controversial position on remarriage taken two years earlier by accepting broader grounds for divorce, recommended that birth control information be provided to married couples, rejected a call for a censorship board, and acknowledged “the increasing prestige of gainfully employed women” (more commonly known as working women). The call for laws against gambling; restrictions on production, advertising, and sale of beverage alcohol; and protection of the ­ Christian Sunday were more muted than in the past, replaced by calls for “self-discipline of the members in faith and practice.”21 A ten-year process of restructuring was set in motion with the first report of the Long Range Planning Committee, whose task was to answer the question: What is the purpose of the church and the ­nature of a congregation?22 A commission was formed to study how the United Church could “best share in the World Mission of the Church.”23 A new organization for women, United Church Women (u c w), was celebrated as a merger of the w m s and the wa. Publication of The Word and the Way for adult education marked the arrival of the New Curriculum. And it was at the 1962 General Council that the indomitable J.R. Mutchmor was elected on the first ballot as the next moderator. Mutchmor promised to make evangelism his priority during his two-year term as moderator by targeting the 1 million persons who had recently told census-takers that they belonged to the United Church but were never seen there. He implored the church to think of these no-shows as “a fringe to be cultivated, not cut off.”24 This was likely a reference to changes to the United Church’s membership

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policy being considered at the time. In 1956 a Committee on Membership, chaired by Donald Mathers of Queen’s Theological College, had been appointed to clear up some problems that had surfaced in recent years. Church records had not kept pace with postwar mobility and church growth in the 1950s. The committee’s interim report had already been presented to the previous General Council and then discussed at most presbyteries, where it generated “a considerable volume of comment and suggestion.”25 By 1962 the committee’s final report was ready. Compared with the many other contentious matters before the General Council that year, the membership issue was a sleeper. The recommendations seemed innocuous. The only item that drew any real attention simply encouraged congregations to enforce an already existing provision in the Manual that authorized the removal from its roll of the names of members who “without reasonable excuse” had been absent from public worship and Communion in their local church for three years (or some other period determined by the session).26 There was no need for a person to make a formal request to have their name removed from the membership roll.27 It was a solution to a practical problem of church discipline that perhaps had unintended consequences, as congregations followed this directive and purged their membership rolls over the next few years. One wonders how many commissioners took note of the bold new introduction to the final report, which set the practical recommen­ dations for church membership in a theological framework that ­divulged the precarious condition of Christendom in Canada and offered a frank theological assessment of what was in store. A year earlier Mathers had offered a group of United Church leaders a preview of what his committee members saw on the horizon. Speaking to representatives of two key boards (Christian Education and e&ss), he warned that the Constantinian Era, a period of more than a thousand years when “Christian standards were accepted by all as the normal and natural basis of public life,” was coming to an end. He mused that the United Church might overestimate its political and social influence in its attempts to adapt to the end of the era and be tempted to take stands on issues that would lead to humiliating defeat, weakening whatever influence it still held.28 He also cautioned that the end of Christian civilization meant that the public school system could no longer be counted on to provide effective religious instruction, making it all the more important for the church

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to develop its own educational resources.29 As author of The Word and the Way, the adult study book for the New Curriculum, Mathers himself was already deeply involved in one such initiative. The seriousness of the new situation was set out in response to an obvious question (given the rather mundane subject matter of the report and a booklet based on it that was being prepared for congregational discussion): Why study church membership? “We have become aware of a great change in relations between church and world,” was the reply. The report announced the end of Christendom in Canada with its blunt assertion that “the Middle Ages have finally come to an end.” Living in a religiously plural society, where one no longer needed to be a church member in order to be a good citizen, would soon mean making a clear distinction between church membership and citizenship. The report predicted that the United Church was about to enter a new and different age. It would continue to “seek to serve society” as in the past; however, church membership would no longer be considered “the religious aspect of citizenship,” and Christians would no longer be expected to accept the “standards of good citizenship uncritically from the state.” This new freedom was cause for celebration, according to the report, for Christianity was awakening from “the comfortable slumber of a thousand years of European domesticity” and could now embrace its “world mission” more fully.30 Although other United Church leaders were soon to take the notion of a new world mission much further, Mathers and his committee laid some of the early theological groundwork. The end of Christendom in Canada, as elsewhere, meant that religion was soon less visibly present in everyday life. The quest for secular alternatives to the guiding principles of Christian civilization raised a host of new questions. What did it mean to be a Christian citizen if the notion of Christian civilization no longer had currency? Were churches whose mission had been construed in those terms rendered useless? What was the role for the church in community life if Christian values were separate from civic values, rather than their source? If religion divided opinion when it entered the public arena, should it simply be kept out? Politicians and pundits were quietly asking those same questions as they pondered the new exigencies of postwar Canada. It had long been presumed in the West that religion had a part to play in civi­ lizing society. The close ties between Christianity and culture had

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survived the division of medieval Christendom after the reformations of the sixteenth century; in and beyond Europe, religion continued to shape the identity of nation-states. As he studied Canadian society in the 1940s, sociologist S.D. Clark identified the close relationship of church and community as an important feature of nationalism in the western world. One of “the fullest expressions” of that association, he claimed, was “found in one of our own churches, the United Church of Canada.”31 That connection still appeared to be intact as Canada faced the uncertainties of the nuclear age; in public, at least, political leaders applauded the church’s civic contributions.32 The International Affairs committee began its 1952 report to the General Council with testimonials from three United Church Members of Parliament. Leading off was Lester Pearson, who urged the United Church to take a greater interest in Canada’s foreign policy. He assured the church that its attentiveness to international issues was helping “to ensure that Christian principles and endeavour are directed to the task of promoting a just and peaceful world order.”33 His words would have had a familiar ring to those raised, as he was, in homes and churches imbued with the missionary spirit of Christian internationalism. The United Church exuded a sense of its own importance. Meetings with prominent politicians and civil servants such as Pearson and Paul Martin occurred frequently; likewise, collaboration with other church bodies (notably the w cc) and consultations with scientists and other academics in preparing of recommendations were common.34 When the Learned Societies met in Ottawa in 1957, the United Church moderator presided at a meeting of church leaders and scientists.35 And it was a service in Sydenham Street United Church in Kingston that Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip attended during their 1959 royal visit to Canada. Pearson’s addresses in the early 1950s reflected the customary ­assumption of Christianity’s influence. His installation address as chancellor of Victoria University challenged the school to give its students “a faith, a sense of mission, and understanding of social and moral values.” Education, “especially at a university such as ours” (perhaps a reference to its standing as a denominational college of the United Church) “must be based on a belief in something deeper and higher than oneself, whatever it may be called; on Christian morality, as a basis for the individual and for society.”36 His public roles sometimes called for him to speak from pulpits where his

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Methodist father or grandfather had preached. In what he later described as the nearest he came to giving a religious address, he ­offered his listeners counsel with Christian overtones: “Today, it is true, we live in fear and tension and under the awful shadow of a nuclear cloud. But if each of us remains true to those Christian ideals and Christian principles, which provide an answer to every question, a solution to every problem, we have no cause for despair.”37 Particularly vexing was that implementing some of the progressive social and cultural initiatives associated with those ideals and principles seemed to erode the customary relationship between church and community in Canada and elsewhere. In Victorian times governments had shown little interest in providing social services, leaving it up to individuals to help themselves or to seek help from a benevolent organization, often under the auspices of a church.38 In their attempts to meet the public demands of Victorian society, argues historian Jeffrey Cox, the Non-Conformist churches in Britain (the denominational counterparts of the United Church’s founding traditions) idealistically claimed responsibility for education, poverty relief, entertainment, character development, and social cohesion. In time, as their inability to meet expectations became evident, they were happy to turn these tasks over to specialized institutions. But in doing so their own world view, and their role as regenerators in it, disintegrated; the next generation was less convinced of the power of the church’s influence. Cox describes what followed in the interwar period as a “sort of retreat into the church,” with a shift of emphasis from serving to belonging.39 Cox pinpoints more specifically what some have referred to variously as the impact of secularization, secularism, urbanization, industrialization, and materialism: churches were “hit all at once by the emergence of new philanthropic, administrative, and educational bureaucracies which destroyed their claims to social utility, by a changing age structure, and by a generational revolt.” In order to gain an advantage in their bid to influence Victorian society, they had invested in philanthropic work. Now, with the dismantling of that philanthropic work, they became irrelevant: they were “left with little to do and even less to say, since ‘church work’ had been a central justification for their existence.”40 In Britain, the expansion of government into education and social services during the interwar years was, as historian Frank Prochaska

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sees it, “both the cause and effect of Christian decline.” Ceding ­responsibility for social well-being to the government “reflected a social and cultural transformation that had repercussions for Christianity that were arguably as great as any since the eighteenthcentury religious revival.” Although at least some of the impetus was connected to war and reconstruction (and thus, he concedes, beyond the churches’ control), he poignantly pictures church leaders participating in their own demise by calling for more government investment in social welfare: “The bishops blew out the candles to see better in the dark.”41 The situation of the United Church was strikingly similar, and the impact on its social services (and the volunteerism of the Christian citizens who supported them) was likewise profound.42 By the 1940s its boarding schools were closing because there were too few residents.43 The prospect that Canada would have thousands of new immigrants once the war was over, with their children filling the schools, delayed dealing with a situation already described in 1944 as a crisis.44 By the end of the 1950s, it was clear that boarding schools were headed for obsolescence, school buses and rural school consolidation making it possible for more children to attend school while living at home.45 Hospitals operated by the United Church were undergoing a similar transition. Church union had brought together the medical missions of the Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church, a number of them operated by the wms . The Board of Home Missions and the w ms shared oversight of hospitals that were set up to serve indigenous peoples and immigrants in sparsely populated districts where there was no other provision for medical care.46 Hundreds of doctors and nurses saw this as an expression of practical Christianity that paralleled overseas missionary service. Longest serving among them was Morley A.R. Young, whose career at the Lamont, Alberta, hospital between 1922 and 1977 included such distinctions as a term as president of the Canadian Medical Association.47 Rising health-care costs and shifting demographics made this form of Christian service less feasible. Better means of transportation meant that even those who lived in rural areas had access to a wider range of medical services than church hospitals could provide, especially with more generous government funding of municipal hospitals. The wms realized by 1954 that hospital work was in transition and asked the Commission on Church Hospitals that year if it was

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time to withdraw these services now that the government was taking responsibility for caring for the sick.48 The commission’s first report (1956) noted that in the past, hospital work had served an important social purpose. It reiterated the findings of an earlier survey that medical missions in “Non-Anglo-Saxon districts” was of “special value in breaking down natural barriers of prejudice and suspicion and in securing a better mutual understanding and in promoting good fellowship among the various racial groups.”49 But the vulnerability of medical missions was evident in its second report two years later. Of the twenty-four facilities in operation before the war, only eleven remained; six were operated by the Board of Home Missions and five by the wms. It noted an ironic consequence of the new government-funded hospital insurance plans: although the grants had reduced the church’s outlay in some areas, the rising costs of maintaining modern standards of hospital care meant that the church could expect larger capital expenditures in the future.50 As the United Church withdrew from medical ministries, its hospitals were sold to municipalities or, in some cases, Catholic charities. A benevolent state with the power to tax was covering more and more of the escalating costs of education, health care, and other s­ocial programs. Secular standards of social work made religious social service appear outdated and redundant, and its past contributions to the community were quickly forgotten.51 It was difficult to object to better-funded government initiatives – after all, the United Church had lobbied for them! Yet the church’s place in society was subtly transformed once it relinquished responsibilities that had made its presence visible in many communities. Friendly service to the nation had been central to the case for church union. Its congregations, once considered centres of community activity, suddenly had less to do – and in any case, with more women working outside the home, not as much volunteer time available. There were fewer and fewer church-related institutions to oversee. And for church members, there was not as much to lose by flouting the church’s moral authority; they now relied instead on the state for social services. Meanwhile, the state was emerging as a formidable rival in other vital areas of Canadian life. By 1949 the threat of American ascendancy in mass culture, competing claims about who was to control the broadcast media, and a crisis in university funding were serious enough issues to persuade the Liberal government to appoint a

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commission to address them.52 The findings of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (more often dubbed the Culture Commission or the Massey Commission, in recognition of Vincent Massey’s role as chair) went far beyond the mandate suggested by its name. It implicitly endorsed Massey’s own view of culture as a political rather than moral force, and presented a compelling case for state support of culture as a means of promoting national identity. As a young man, Massey had been an active member of the Methodist Church, a delegate at the Edinburgh Conference in 1910, and a participant in congregational and denominational ­affairs. But his church’s attitude to culture was fraught with contradiction, as historian Karen Finlay’s study of Massey notes: supportive of educational institutions on the one hand, but frowning on visual arts and the theatre, to which Massey found himself drawn.53 Shortly after his father’s death in 1926, Massey became an Anglican, and criticism of “Puritan” attitudes toward the arts and contempt for their use as moral propaganda cropped up in his writings around the same time. After diplomatic postings in the United States and Britain, Massey returned to Canada in 1946 convinced, says Finlay, of the peril that Canada faced from the escalation of American imperialism.54 The Massey Report offered a defensive strategy based on the interlocking connections it presumed between citizenship, national sovereignty, and culture (notably the arts, ­sciences, and education). The United Church was one of three churches invited to present a brief to the commission.55 All underscored the importance of religious broadcasting on c b c radio and television to communicate the Christian message.56 Some of the United Church’s theologians had at first frowned on religious broadcasting as a “menace,”57 but most had since come to see its opportunities, especially after witnessing the adroitness of conservative preachers who disseminated their teachings on radio programs originating in the United States. The United Church was among the early supporters of public broadcasting, and provided material for the c bc’s religious programming.58 It no doubt hoped that the Massey Commission’s work would elevate the tone of Canadian culture and defend it from American domination. For its part, the commission perhaps considered the United Church a useful ally, given its customary antipathy to popular entertainment as “pagan” (or at least American) in tone.

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Canada’s churches still wanted and expected a voice in the cultural affairs of the nation. However, the report’s bold call for government funding of cultural activities gradually relieved them of their responsibility to sponsor literary work, education, and the performing arts. Instead the Massey Commission created an expectation in the public mind that the government was responsible for developing and funding a cultural policy for Canada; this was its greatest achievement, concludes historian Paul Litt.59 And so the state joined technology and mass culture in competing with the churches for the time and attention of the Christian citizen.60 It was hardly a fair contest, for federal and provincial governments had more means (taxes) and greater access to contemporary methods (such as more direct use of media) for shaping the hearts and minds of Canadians. The impact of its recommendations was to silently chip away at Christianity’s contribution to national distinctiveness by creating the impression that Canadian culture was itself a sufficient source of national identity. This new departure was later cause for concern for at least one of the five commissioners.61 Hilda Neatby was a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan and a staunch Presbyterian. While she saw Canada as “formally a Christian country,” with the vast majority of its people affiliated with a church, she was uneasy about the tension between Christianity’s message of sin and salvation, on the one hand, and the belief that human striving alone was sufficient. There was a great deal at stake in her view: “It is impossible to say whether a culture can develop without being centred in a religious faith of some sort; it is a fact that such a thing never has happened.”62 One of a number of prominent Canadians asked in 1957 whether there was a religious revival underway, Neatby expressed her misgivings by critiquing a cbc religious program produced by the National Religious Advisory Council. Within this program the hymn “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven” had been followed by a reading that included the words “man on earth has no one to help him but man.” Her assessment was scathing: “When popular ‘Christian’ national programmes combine purely pagan teaching with profoundly Christian hymns, without, apparently, any sense of irreverence or even of logical inconsistency, it is impossible not to fear that the apparent signs of religious revival may dissolve into the purely sentimental and archaic, or develop into a religious movement, powerful, but not Christian.”63

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The publication of the Massey Report in 1951 was to become a landmark in Canadian history. It coincided with new cultural initiatives that included the National Ballet of Canada, Stratford Festival, and c b c ’s telecast of Hockey Night in Canada.64 After his appointment in 1952 as the first Canadian-born governor general, Massey used his influence, along with his close ties to the Liberal government, to promote the report’s recommendations. In combination with other initiatives – abolishing the right of Canadians to appeal to the British Privy Council in 1949, letting the term ‘Dominion’ fall out of usage, and defining what it meant to be Canadian in terms of certain social programs to which all citizens of the country were entitled – it recommended measures that had the effect of downplaying British identity. For anglophones, says political scientist Kenneth McRoberts, it thus fostered “a new conception of a Canadian nationality, directly attached to the Canadian state and unmediated by any previous identity.”65 However, tampering with national identity appears to have raised hackles in Quebec, where the Massey Report was considered an attack on its prerogatives. McRoberts argues that premier Maurice Duplessis saw it as a challenge to the notion of Canada’s dual nationality. In 1956, Duplessis called his own Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems. The Tremblay Report reaffirmed Quebec as a Catholic society, but told the story of Confederation the way the separatists were to tell it a few years later, as a compact between two peoples, rather than a political pact between the provinces. Quebec also resisted Ottawa’s efforts to knit the country together by declining to participate in a number of national social programs that involved cost-sharing with the federal government.66 Government policies after the death of Duplessis in 1959 and of his successor, Paul Sauvé, a year later triggered a series of events that saw Jean Lesage’s Liberal party successfully campaigning in 1960 to become “masters in our own house.” The Massey model of national unity was on a collision course not only with Christian culture but also with Quebec’s aspirations for autonomy.67 By 1962 the precariousness of the situation was evident to Pearson. That year, as leader of the opposition, he delivered what he con­ sidered one of his most important speeches before the House of Commons. Warning of a divided Canada, he mused that most English-speaking Canadians considered protecting French language

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and culture a commitment that pertained only to Parliament, federal courts, and the province of Quebec itself. They assumed that “for all practical purposes, there would be an English-speaking Canada with a bilingual Quebec: What is called the ‘French fact’ was to be provincial only.” However, francophones in Quebec saw Canada as an equal partnership between two founding races, and presumed protection of their language and culture across Canada. This fundamental difference over the meaning of Confederation had been obscured by what Pearson described as a bicultural coexistence, with English as the language of communication when the two came into occasional contact.68 It was clear to Pearson that the people of Quebec were determined to control their own economic and cultural affairs, a situation that he likened to shock treatment for the rest of Canada. Hinting at the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism that he would call once he became prime minister the following year, he predicted that an inquiry would “show the importance of the contribution of our new Canadians other than the founding races, a contribution which has been of special and indeed exciting value since World War II.”69 What was nicknamed the “B & B Commission” was to go even further in redefining how Canadians thought of themselves as a people. The old notion of two races – and their tacit association with two faiths – no longer fit the new social reality of Canadian life. What historian Ramsay Cook found most striking about the final report was that “in some 140 pages religion was barely mentioned,” an omission that he guessed would not have been possible even ten years earlier. He was prepared to “state categorically that at no time before 1945 would it have been possible for a survey of FrenchEnglish relations to have been written without devoting a very considerable amount of space to religious differences.”70 Although the United Church may have been disappointed at that outcome, its own experience of preparing for its hearing before the B &B Commission showed why the commissioners preferred to steer clear of the subject. Constitutional expert Eugene Forsey agreed to  serve as chair of the group that prepared the brief. Born in Newfoundland, he had spent most of his years in Quebec, and was an active member of one of the United Church’s French-language congregations. He was in a unique position to address the commission’s terms of reference (which his committee believed to be too narrow) and set out to convince the commission to “consider the

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suggestion that the situation in Canada is wider than biculturalism and extends to multi-culturalism.”71 “We are not happy with the term ‘founding races,’” the United Church brief stated, noting that it was not a good translation into English of the French word peuples. Moreover, the reference to founding races might give the unintended and offensive impression of British or French superiority (sec. 21). To underscore the point, the brief made a pointed reference to “the contribution of the Indians and Eskimos, who were here before any of us, and who might well dispute the claim of French and British to the title ‘founding peoples’” (sec. 47). The brief also reminded the commission of the United Church’s long-standing concern for the schooling of Protestant children in Quebec and other predominantly French areas of Canada, and pressed the point that “French” schools should not be assumed to be “Catholic” schools. It urged the provision of French public schools in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada (sec. 53–64). The United Church’s brief exuded the more open and tolerant spirit that had captured the imagination of many Canadians, especially new immigrants or those growing up after the war, who had never thought of themselves as British. However, there was more going on behind the scenes. Some of the United Church’s own members were reluctant to let go of the old animosities between English / Protestant and French / Catholic. Hostility toward francophones and dismay over the federal government’s failure to prevent Quebec from ‘controlling’ Canada filled their correspondence. Typical of such sentiments was a letter to Mutchmor from Alexander Smith of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. He derided the aim of Canadian unity as an excuse “to give the French whatever they want – turn us into half Frenchmen – a new mongrel sort of breed which will always acquiesce with the French, IE [i.e.], the Roman Church in any demands.” It seemed to him that Canada was being asked to join Quebec, rather than the other way around. Although Wolfe had won at the Plains of Abraham, “our Religionists are well on the way to hand the country back without a fight to the Roman Catholic Church personified in the French Minority in Canada.” The only solution was for Quebec to separate completely: “then we will have an English speaking non denominational [sic] country free from Roman Catholic influence. Whether now or later it must come in the interests of the whole of this country.”72

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B. Doerksen from Regina, Saskatchewan, uttered similar sentiments: “we can see no room for bilingualism of any type. Having failed miserably to keep Canada British, we now face the prospect of keeping it English-speaking at least.” He was certain that “Quebec punks are itching for a bloody revolution,” and supposed that Canadians would have to ask the uk “to help us defeat the French a second time.” If that proved unsuccessful, he speculated “Canadians may well ask Uncle Sam to come in and liberate us from the French Romans.” The writer held Pearson responsible. With a Cabinet “half full of Frenchmen or Roman Catholics or both,” Quebec had him “exactly where they want him – over a barrel.”73 A copy of a circular letter, signed by a man from Ottawa, claimed that a French minority was attempting to “pack our Civil Service with French nationalists, to monopolize the voice, ears, eyes and legal system of Government by controlling radio, television, printing bureau, film board, Dept. of State, the Mint, and also the foreign service and Public Works, the last being the great pot of gold useful for purposes of patronage.” The flag, the national anthem, and the public school would be next, the letter warned. The writer was angry at the inference that only the French were “Canadian” and concerned that others could claim “no roots,” for they had been destroyed by subversive methods “conceived and well planned in the Province of Quebec.” The letter ended with the ominous words: “It is later than you think.”74 Forsey no doubt considered such sentiments extreme, but a trip to Banff to attend a conference on Canadian unity opened his eyes to equally disturbing views circulating among francophones. Growing up in Quebec, he was familiar with the old revenge of the cradle version of Quebec nationalism that dreamed of New Brunswick becoming a predominantly French province, and of spreading across eastern and northern Ontario and encircling the English in southern Ontario.75 The new brand of nationalism was more alarming. Forsey admitted to United Church general secretary Ernest Long that the meeting had been a “searing experience” that left him “a good deal less enthusiastic about the whole business than I was.” The three prominent French-Canadian academics who had spoken – self-­ described moderates – were, as he put it bluntly, “insane.” If they spoke for Quebec, the future for Canada looked grim: the “jig is up,” he predicted. He fumed that “not one English Canadian in a thousand would tolerate for thirty seconds” what they were demanding: a new constitution, an “Austro-Hungarian” style of dual government,

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and the adoption of French “as a working language” across Canada (and if “extremists” took over, the terms would be even worse). Lest Long think he was exaggerating, he added, such views were available in print.76 Forsey repeated his concerns to J. Ralph Watson, secretary of Montreal Presbytery and a member of the group that had prepared the United Church’s brief, and described himself as “plunged in gloom” by the remarks of the three “quite crazy” professors from Quebec. “I did tell them plainly that if this is what French Canada really wanted, then I thought the reply of English Canada would be, ‘In God’s name, go!’” He confided, “Personally I would sooner have two completely separate states than the sort of associate state monstrosity these gentry intimated was the only alternative.”77 Forsey wondered at the time if his protest to what he had heard at Banff had been forceful enough, but some thought he had gone too far. Reminiscing about the conference in his memoirs years later, he recalled that he was considered an Anglo-Saxon bigot. Most of the English-speaking delegates “were so anxious to show themselves kind, conciliatory, broad-minded, and penitent that they were prepared to agree to almost anything, however impracticable, absurd, or destructive.”78 With a month to go before he was to present the church’s brief to the Royal Commission, Forsey summed up the dilemma facing Canada and its largest Protestant church as he saw it: “Once our brief has gone into the Royal Commission, the subject may become a pretty hot one in the United Church, for I am rather afraid that a large part of our membership will go into orbit at what they will regard as too many concessions to French Canada. At the same time, a great many French Canadians may dismiss the whole thing as mere crumbs; but this reaction is of less immediate importance to us.”79 The conciliatory tone of the United Church’s brief hinted that a change in its relationship to the Catholic Church was in the offing. Dominican priest Philip LeBlanc was likely right in conjecturing that the United Church’s presentation to the B& B Commission was “in striking contrast” to what would have been said a decade earlier.80 But that was in part because the situation of the Catholic Church was changing too – both in Canada and internationally. Facing ­similar challenges, the two were discovering commonalities that had been ignored when pamphlets like What’s the Difference? focused on dissimilarities. Vatican II was still in session as the B& B

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Commission wrapped up its hearings in 1965 and issued a preliminary report81 that signalled to Canada’s churches that the political calculations that had inspired the notion of the revenge of the cradle for Catholicism and the movement for a united Protestantism had suddenly changed. The B & B Commission showed even less interest than Massey’s in harnessing Christianity as a cultural force. A Protestant Canada outside Quebec was not the aim of those promoting a bicultural Canada, and a Christian Canada was a contradiction in terms for those who fully embraced multiculturalism. Instead, bilingual / bicultural (and later multicultural) became the Canadian mantra. Christianity – in both its Catholic and Protestant expressions – was left out of the new formula for creating national identity. The state looked to its own social and cultural programs rather than to the churches to provide the new glue to make the Canadian mosaic. By the time the commission’s work was completed, the Pearson government had ­already proposed a new Canadian flag to replace the Red Ensign, strengthened national social programs, and launched plans for the country’s Centennial celebrations in 1967. If the B & B Commission needed a reminder of the political complications of religious differences, they had only to follow the latest round of an old controversy that had erupted in Ontario over the place of religion in public schools. Growing up in a country that still thought of itself as Christian, one did not have to be raised by devout Christian parents or attend church to be exposed to at least a modicum of Christianity. Many public schools taught the rudiments of the Christian faith through daily prayers and Bible readings. Except in provinces where public funding of Catholic separate schools was constitutionally permitted, and in Newfoundland where public schools operated on a denominational basis, religious instruction in public schools was non-sectarian, that is, non-denominational.82 From its inception the United Church had considered the school a critical link in connecting faith and community life. Its ambitious postwar agenda included promoting religion instruction in the curriculum of Canadian schools wherever provincial regulations permitted it. Religion could not be separated from culture, argued C.E. Silcox, commending the work of R.C. Chalmers and the Commission on Culture that had prepared the brief for the Massey Commission: “to ignore or pretend to ignore the significance of the relationship is

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not only tragic, but, if persisted in, will prove suicidal.” Nor could religion be segregated from education by leaving it to the home and the church, “no matter what the secularists say.”83 The public schools of Ontario, the United Church’s demographic centre, were of particular concern. Troubled by evidence that “a growingly large proportion of children are receiving no religious training in the home, and that many do not have even that wholly inadequate modicum of religious influence – one hour a week at Sunday school,” Alfred Gandier and other church union supporters had advocated more religious education in public schools. Community well-being was at stake, for religion’s primary purpose was “not restricted to the individual soul. Character as well as knowledge is essential to good citizenship, and stable moral character has its roots in religion.” Hence, given the public consequences of failing to provide religious education, a “Christian state, the organized government of a Christian people,” could not ignore the problem. Gandier was undeterred by the argument that not everyone wanted religious education in the schools, retorting that “no self-respecting community can allow a small minority to turn it aside from what the majority believe vital to the well-being, not only of their children, but of the community and the country.” Canada was a Christian country, and as such, its people had the right to have their children “educated daily in the great facts and distinctive teachings of the Christian religion.”84 Gandier was part of a movement that historians R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar see as forming in the 1920s and culminating in legislation introduced by Premier George Drew in 1944, which gave instruction in a non-denominational Protestant form of Christianity an even larger place in the Ontario public school curriculum.85 The Royal Commission on Education in Ontario (Hope Commission) that reported in 1950 gave further encouragement to those who pictured the school co-operating with the home and church in a child’s religious training.86 The United Church was among the denominations that seized this new opportunity. An Observer article described a visit to a school in Lambeth, Ontario, in the mid-1950s, where Allen Duffield, a United Church minister with degrees in both theology and education, was in charge of religious instruction of students from kindergarten through grade eight. Since Duffield was the only minister residing in the small community, there was little opposition to his involvement: all the

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students participated, and all the teachers helped with the preparations.87 In other schools, classes were taught by United Church teachers who had taken courses in religion as part of their training. However, more needed to be done, according to George Pidgeon. In 1955 he urged the United Church to “lead in giving Divine Truth a new place in the mind of the nation.”Although the door to the public school was open, whether or not to step in had largely been left to personal or local initiatives, and in many communities the work was left undone or was undertaken by “sectarian groups who have their own axes to grind.”88 There was little coordination either denominationally or ecumenically. While the United Church prepared to coordinate religious in­ struction, the realities of dealing with postwar pluralism – and the anticipation of even greater diversity in the future with changes to Canada’s immigration policy – eroded support for its non-­ denominational approach. Opposition to religious instruction became more vocal. According to the Observer, the non-Christian reaction was “much harsher than ever expected.”89 Joining the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Unitarian Church was the Ethical Education Association (e e a ), a new organization founded by Doris Dodds. Dodds herself was Unitarian, but saw her organization as working on behalf of and alongside others who opposed the way religion was taught in Ontario schools. By all accounts her group was very successful in heating up the debate. Critics of religion in the public school curriculum had three main concerns. Firstly, they charged that current instructional practices were “sectarian,” which caused dismay in United Church circles. How could non-Christians see them as sectarian, the same term the United Church scornfully used for those it considered fanatical? Moreover, “non-sectarian” in the context of education had a long history and well-established meaning: instruction was presented within a general Christian framework, avoiding beliefs that were “peculiar” to any particular denomination and resonating well with the common faith on which the United Church was founded. Not surprisingly, it was taken aback by “the attempt to say that Christianity is itself a sect as over against Buddhism or other ethnic faiths.” This was “a warping of the original intent of the word,” protested E.R. McLean, the Board of Christian Education staff member responsible for religious education in the schools.90 But it was more than hairsplitting and potentially devastating, as McLean would

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well have known, for the legislation in many provinces called for education to be conducted on a non-sectarian basis. Secondly, critics claimed that religion in the public schools was a violation of the principle of separation of church and state. Even Winnipeg Presbytery had deferred to such criticism when (against the sentiment of the United Church in most other places) it sided with those opposed to religious instruction in Manitoba’s public schools.91 This perpetuated an erroneous reading of history, church leaders protested, patiently pointing out that no such principle existed in Canada. Canadians had rejected an American model of church-state separation in favour of a co-operation between them more akin to the British pattern.92 Defending the teaching of religion in the public schools rested on the conviction that Canada’s unique history had led to a distinctive pattern of church-state relations. Forrest appealed to the customary story of Canada’s past as it had been told after Confederation, at least outside Quebec: “Two peoples were deposited here with different languages, cultures and religions,” an Observer editorial reminded readers. Education had been the area of most controversy between church and state, resulting in arrangements that differed in each province. Forrest likely spoke for the majority of Protestants of the day when he said that they expected only some of the rights to religious instruction in public schools that had been granted to the Catholic minority through the funding of separate schools. However, he was seemingly unaware of the rapid and radical change that was about to take place; in 1960 he boldly (but wrongly) predicted, “Whether our system is ideal or not – and we prefer it to America’s – it isn’t likely to be basically altered.”93 Finally, critics of religion in the public schools claimed that their rights as non-Christian minorities were being violated. This was a more difficult concern to counter, admitted the Observer’s reporter Kenneth Bagnell, who interviewed e e a’s Dodds for a story about the dispute. In this case, the minorities most vocally opposed were “infinitesimal” – Jews comprised only 1.4 per cent of Canada’s population, and Unitarians, Buddhists, and Doukhobors even less. Turning to C.B. Sissons, an authority on church-state relations in education, for a perspective on minority rights, Bagnell was informed that in a democracy, a minority was given the right to free discussion in order to persuade the majority of the rightness of its cause. This, too, was about to change in a more pluralistic Canada more inclined to agree

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with Dodds than Sissons. Issues should be decided on principle, rather than majority-minority percentages, she contended – after all, today’s majority could be a minority tomorrow. Rights should never be ignored, even if represented by only 1 per cent of the population.94 Bagnell’s story cited a statement that was “evolving” in the United Church’s Board of Christian Education in 1963, which he expected to be approved at the upcoming meeting of the General Council Executive. The board’s support for emphasis on “the HebraicChristian heritage” in the curriculum acknowledged that the majority had no right to “trample a minority,” but added a qualification: “neither has a minority the right to frustrate a majority.”95 A detail that Bagnell mentioned in passing did not bode well for that standpoint. It was often said that there was no controversy over religion in the public schools outside metropolitan Toronto (and even there, mainly an issue in North York – home to many Jews). However, Dodds told him that she had found support for her views wherever she spoke, and she claimed that United Church people were almost always in agreement with her.96 It was another hint that the leadership of the church did not speak for all its members – and that there was divergence on the left as well as the right. Reaching consensus within the United Church proved surprisingly difficult. Even the Commission on Church and State in Education appointed at the 1962 General Council was unable to bring recommendations two years later. To explain the delay, an update in 1964 pointed out that the commission’s work was complicated by the time-consuming task of consulting separately with each province, and the proposed extension of funding for Catholic separate schools in Ontario had made the situation there even more complex. Its members were reportedly studying a statement on the topic of the church and education by James S. Thomson, retired from the faculty of theology at McGill and a former moderator.97 Thompson presented his findings to the General Council in 1966, but as his own, rather than the commission’s, position. Instead of presenting a report, the commission asked to be discharged, admitting that no substantial recommendations could be made until the church arrived at an “adequate philosophy of education.” And there was the rub: to do so would require prolonged research and study by a smaller working group because of the wide diversity of opinion within the denomination itself.98

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Thomson’s statement on “The Church and Education” was a thoughtful proposal that insisted that the church had an obligation to “express its mind on all the influences that affect the national life” – a long list that included education. To do otherwise would “be a complete abandonment of our responsibility and, certainly a departure from our historic role.”99 Catholic schools were not about to disappear any time soon, he added; numerically they enjoyed “an entrenched position” from which no government would be likely to dislodge them. However, Thomson’s conjecture that Protestants and Catholics might soon become allies in promoting religious education in the schools was an indication of how quickly the situation was changing on the ground.100 This did prove to be the case, as Protestants and Catholics in Ontario found common cause in fighting the quiet drift toward separation of church and state in education. But the battle was lost on the public school front in that province, where the most intentional program of religious education in the country became the most endangered. The Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario (1969) was set up by the provincial government to study the problem. Headed by the Honourable J. Keiller Mackay, the committee saw Ontario’s program of religious instruction as Christian, and reasoned that as such, other faiths might be offended by it. “In no uncertain terms,” historians Gidney and Millar contend, “the Mackay Report proceeded to recommend an end to this sorry state of affairs.” Instead of reading the Bible to open the school day, it suggested singing the National Anthem and saying the Lord’s Prayer or some other inclusive prayer for God’s help.101 While the Mackay Report still affirmed the importance of religious faith, it represented a shift from teaching religious values held in common to teaching about religious differences. An Ecumenical Study Commission brought together representatives from the Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Education and several Protestant churches to respond to the Mackay Report. Among them was Robin Smith, associate secretary of the United Church’s Board of Education, who no doubt would have endorsed the ecumenical coalition’s criticism of the Mackay Report for treating religion as a personal commitment that ought to be cultivated at home or in church but not in public schools.102 Such an assumption negated the United Church’s customary claims of connections between home, school, and church. Severing one of them placed even more

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responsibility on the church for religious education at a time when it was already dealing with criticism of its New Curriculum. The coalition also took issue with the separation of values from religion, stressing that it was “not only legitimate but necessary to look beyond culture to religion as a fundamental source of morality.”103 However, those who had the ear of Ontario’s Ministry of Education disagreed, preferring instead to teach moral education divorced from religious particularity. By the 1980s, even the vestiges of Christianity that remained after implementation of the Mackay Report’s recommendations were excised after the courts ruled that compulsory religious instruction and opening exercises that featured Christian Scriptures or the Lord’s Prayer violated the guarantee of religious freedom in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Teaching about religion was allowed, but only if all religions were given equal attention. Christian prayers and readings could only be used in opening exercises if secular and other religious material was given equal weight. Christian holidays were still acknowledged, but categorized as secular pause days rather than religious celebrations. Gidney and Millar conclude that Christianity was not only “disestablished but banished, at least as an animating force, in both the ceremonial and mundane activities” of Ontario’s public schools.104 Politicians and educators were among those whose work attuned them to the new religious and cultural realities of pluralism. Political scientist Paul Fox astutely assessed the difficulty sincere Christians faced when the “inner light” of conscience led them to hold different opinions on social, political, or economic issues. With some French Canadians conscientiously opting for an independent Quebec, and English Canadians supporting national unity, it would be foolhardy for a church “to try to declare one truth.” Writing in 1968, with church union negotiations between the United Church and Anglicans underway, Fox made a prediction: if a united church “attempted to give one answer to the question of nationalism, I doubt that it would stay united very long.” He suggested that churches be free to express the views of their own members, but not try to speak on God’s behalf for all Christians, a proposal that he admitted came close to advocating a separation of church and state.105 Arnold Edinborough, editor of Saturday Night, was harsher in his assessment, blaming the churches for their marginalization. An ­Anglican himself, he might have had the United Church in mind as  well when he complained that churches had tried to influence

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politicians “to legislate for everybody that which they believed requisite and necessary for the body and souls of the chosen few.” They had looked like “dinosaurs in the political pit” in the discussion of public and separate school education in Ontario and in debates over liberalization of divorce, contraception, and abortion laws. Edinborough observed another important indication of the churches’ changing public role: mass media and universities had replaced them as “teaching institutions” on such issues.106 Whether or not separation of church and state was the goal of the mass media, public school boards, or politicians, the practical outcome was the same. It became more difficult to claim that church and state were co-operating in areas of mutual concern. In a society that was becoming more and more diverse, no particular faith ­tradition could claim to be a national church, and no definition of non-sectarian pleased everyone. Pluralism thus led in practice to the neutralization of public expressions of religion. It was a solution that was attractive not only to secularists but also to those dealing with the realities of pluralism. Since religion was a source of conflicting definitions of the common good, the state relied instead on secular values (with no necessary reference to Christianity as their source) to define it. The gamble was that liberal democracy’s values could stand on their own once they were dislodged from their religious moorings. These struggles to define the place of Christianity in Canadian culture are illustrations of a broader global trend that philosopher Charles Taylor identified as a “switch in mind-set” that made earlier notions of cultural assimilation unsustainable: the beginning of the erosion (probably in the 1960s, he suggests) of the assumption that “one ought to suppress one’s difference for the sake of fitting in to a dominant mold.” Religious minorities were among those who demanded that the dominant culture be “modified to accommodate them, rather than the other way around.” While most migrants were prepared to assimilate, they no longer considered it imperative.107 One could add that it was not just newcomers who were unwilling to conform. Women no longer automatically assumed their traditional family role, and insisted on freedom to make choices about reproduction and paid employment outside the home. Young people resisted assimilating to prevailing mores as they moved toward adulthood, ignoring the received culture of either their family or

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their church. To be different and do your own thing captured the cultural mood of the times, and the size of the postwar cohort amplified the effect. Taylor predicted that if this emphasis on difference were to become an unstoppable reality, democratic societies would have to “engage in a constant process of self-reinvention” to accommodate the variety of identities they encompassed.108 So it was that both Quebec and the rest of Canada would undertake to reinvent themselves in the 1960s. A frustrated Forsey complained that Canadian history was being ­rewritten to make it appear that Quebec’s place in Canada was not as secure as English Canada had assumed. The pseudo-history (as he termed it) taught at one French school in Quebec claimed that the  Fathers of Confederation had intended to form only a loose Confederation, but were duped while under the influence of alcohol after John A. Macdonald had gotten them drunk!109 In English public schools, a less British version of Canadian history was ready in time for Centennial celebrations. It featured a new Canada that was built on differences – individual, religious, and cultural – rather than a common culture shaped by Christian ideals. A Just Society replaced Christian Canada as a unifying vision of nationhood; Canadian culture was the new “orthodoxy,” with a “common faith” in human rights and social programs as its chief tenets. There was a growing separation of Christian virtues and secular values – and Canadians increasingly opted for the latter. Canada had set itself on a path that led away from a collective Christian past, and toward a future where religious expression was an individual right guaranteed by the state, with no reference to organized religion. New icons of culture replaced the old, perhaps in the hope that Canadians would rally around the maple leaf flag more readily than the cross. The old connections between church and community that had long been taken for granted were dissolved in the hopes that a distinctively Canadian identity, with no reference to a particular religious identity, would coalesce. Likewise, religious institutions that were deeply influenced by democratic principles found themselves in a parallel process of reinvention, perhaps none more urgently so engaged than the United Church. It had prided itself on being the most Canadian of churches. Yet there was mounting evidence that the nation-building partnership it had taken for granted at the time of church union was no

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longer viable, thus dissolving the core of a founding vision that had energized and guided the church’s national mission for four decades. As Christianity and culture grew more distant, its notions of  a Christian Canada and a national church were becoming anachronisms. Even calls for Christianizing the social order were quietly dropped. The end of Christendom in Canada raised a troubling new question for the United Church: if it no longer served the community and provided a civilizing cultural influence, what was its mission? The uncoupling of Christianity and culture was a giant step toward a more complete (though still formally undeclared) separation of church and state in Canada – the practical result of the state going its own way. This distancing, if not formal separation, of church and state consigned a different public role to all Christian churches, whether Protestant or Catholic. It erased religious particularity from public life. Few religious institutions were as profoundly altered as the United Church by this de-Christianizing of Canadian society. Its leaders had taken for granted the effectiveness of religion in promoting social responsibility and national solidarity. But the convergence of religious and cultural identity turned out to be far less inevitable than they assumed. In fact, its friendly service to the nation was sought less often. Its reputation as custodian of the common good and purveyor of culture was slipping. Its side had lost the battle for religious education in the public schools. It was small comfort that the situation in which the church found itself was part of a wider trend in the United States, continental Europe, and England: all the major churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, faced the consequences of a truncated alliance with culture. An incident in 1969 epitomizes the turnabout for the United Church and its place in the new Canada. Shortly after becoming prime minister, Pierre Trudeau appointed an envoy to the Vatican. Before making this daring move (one that Pearson had viewed as too controversial), he first sought the public’s advice. According to the Observer, Trudeau admitted that the response from Protestants, liberal Catholics, and non-Roman religious groups was overwhelmingly negative – but he made the appointment anyway. Trudeau was quoted as saying it was “better to please ten million Roman Catholics than to be deterred by a few militant Protestants.”110 Forrest was miffed. He felt that the prime minister had used him as window

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dressing, attempting to give the impression of a “democrat seeking advice,” and so advised Trudeau to “fly his kites elsewhere” in the future if this were the case.111 Ironically, by then politicians were ­offering similar advice to leaders of the United Church who sought to influence them.

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8 Listening to the World Revolutionary moments attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them. George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion

J.R. Mutchmor’s retirement in 1964 was aptly billed by the Observer as “The End of an Era”1 – for the man and for the United Church. As Mutchmor prepared to give his final address as moderator, a position to which he had been elected two years earlier, there was much to celebrate. The United Church’s membership was still on the upswing, despite a downtrend in the Anglican, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches.2 And there was other good news to report. Fundraising had set a new record, ministers’ salaries were up, and properties were in good shape. However, other numbers were not so reassuring: funerals were up, while baptisms, confirmations, and adult professions of faith were down, particularly in the major cities. Stricter practices, such as refusing to baptize children of non-members and purging the membership rolls of the names of those who no longer attended, explained some of the loss. But other statistics came as more of a surprise. Membership in men’s clubs was down, as was Sunday school attendance – an inauspicious sign for the New Curriculum materials for children that were to be introduced that fall. The Observer did not mince words in its assessment: “The United Church is financially stronger than ever. Spiritually it faces a crisis.”3 Those who had characterized the United Church as too modern in 1925 might have been surprised to discover how conventional it looked four decades later. There were still complaints that its theology was too liberal and its social agenda too politically left wing. However, when Mutchmor ventured in 1961 to make a few predictions about its future, he had pictured a church “heavily influenced

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by those who would make her membership more exclusive,” either by emphasizing “narrower doctrinal teaching” or adopting social positions favoured by “elite members” and “posh congregations.”4 It was also drawing the ire of secular pundits who saw it as too complacent about social issues. “Just a social club” was a putdown of a church that to outsiders – and sometimes even to insiders – appeared rather smug about its solid position in society. Those staid congregations were about to be shaken up by men and women who had been born, baptized, converted, and educated after church union. Personal memory of union was fading, and assumptions that had once seemed obvious could no longer be taken for granted. Across the country major educational and executive positions were being filled by ministers ordained long after church union; by the mid-1960s only two of the national church officers had been ordained before 1925.5 This new cohort was handed responsibility for a church that was headed for trouble. Among them were some considered radical for their insistence that the church pay attention to signs that the times were changing. They pointed to mounting ­evidence that past initiatives, including the United Church’s recent evangelistic campaigns, had failed to Christianize the social order. They were inspired by talk of a new world mission that called into question aspects of the old. Joining the vanguard of international ecumenism, they rejected the traditional approach to evangelism. Instead of the church proclaiming the gospel to the world and calling Canada to Christ, they appealed to the church to “listen to the world.” J. Raymond Hord, Mutchmor’s successor, soon came to per­sonify the new era. Hord stepped into the media spotlight when he was nominated as secretary of e & ss at the 1962 General Council. There was little at this point in his career to indicate that he would soon become “the most controversial churchman in Canada today” and “minister to the come-alive generation.”6 Though one newspaper reported that the United Church had “picked a man it scarcely knew,”7 Mutchmor would have been acquainted with him and might well have applauded the choice. A few years earlier Hord and Mutchmor’s brother had co-signed a letter expressing consternation about plans to allow the Regina Braves baseball club to play three games on Sunday. The matter was “one for serious concern,” their letter stated, for the United Church was “disturbed by an action which might turn a holy day into a pagan holiday.”8 Hord’s preaching as pastor of suburban congregations in Regina (Lakeview

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United) and Toronto (Royal York United) was thoughtful and at times hard-hitting, but consistent with the United Church’s piety and practices. While he did not expect the Kingdom of God to be “established perfectly in this world of sin,” it was still the “sacred duty of Christians to improve life on earth as much as we possibly can.”9 Hord’s conduct during his congregational ministry was a clue to the resolve he was to show once he moved into his new leadership position in 1963. His sense of duty was uncompromising – almost to the point of compulsion. He conducted a funeral service for ­another child the day after his own son Jamie drowned at camp.10 He preached a sermon on “Why Does God Allow Accidents to Happen?” the following Sunday.11 He was in the pulpit the Sunday after being attacked and badly beaten in his home.12 Once in office, burdened by his hopes for the emergence of a new kind of church, he tackled his new responsibilities with that same intense commitment. Talk of his dismissal was in the air. When he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1968, his family and some of his colleagues held his critics responsible for hounding him to death.13 And yet one might wonder whether the pressure of his own ideals was at least in small part to blame. Hord claimed the only thing he had in common with Mutchmor was his initials (J.R.). An article in Star Weekly contrasted his efforts to tackle the “big issues” that would make the church “relevant” with Mutchmor’s preoccupation with moral issues such as drink, decadence, and divorce. Mutchmor was “virtually adulated by middle-of-the-road church leaders and lay people,” his manner “gracious, exuding personal charm as he travelled the country, dropping in on powerful men and lobbying quietly against either open bars or  open Sundays.” Hord was not always considered so charming. Whereas Mutchmor was associated with the moral battles of “fighting evil, standing for righteousness, criticizing the world, but rarely the church,” Hord made headlines for tackling controversial po­ litical issues with his criticism of big business and the U.S. war in Vietnam, Prime Minister Pearson (whom he described as a “puppy dog on l b j ’s leash”); his support for draft dodgers; and his calls for more rights for Canada’s indigenous peoples.14 In his lifetime he was considered “a prophet of the New Age”; his untimely death was to make him its martyr. Much of the responsibility for what happened in the United Church after the Mutchmor era was ascribed to Hord and the board he ­headed. However, the dramatic changes that the church experienced

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in a brief span of time were not the result of Hord’s drive alone: his call to listen to the world resonated with a new approach to world mission that had captivated international ecumenism. It was the wc c that general secretary Ernest Long credited for drawing attention to “the pressing questions of the meaning of evangelism and of conversion for our time.”15 By the time the w cc met in Evanston, Illinois, for its second assembly in 1954, how to proclaim the gospel to the world was becoming a matter of debate. “The church is mission” was shorthand for a new understanding of the task: God’s mission was to the world, and the church had no mission in and of itself.16 More signs that ecumenism was in flux were evident at the next assembly, held in New Delhi in 1961, which saw the w cc merge with the International Missionary Council. Five years later, the United Church’s Commission on World Mission would declare this to have been a turning point: it “underscored the place of mission in the whole life of the World Council of Churches and so gave that body a new direction and significance.”17 The merger accentuated the double meaning of world mission: it was global in outreach, and it focused on the world rather than on the institutional church. The study process that followed urged groups to think of God as “His own evangelist” by pondering the question, “What is God doing in the world?”18 The idea that God’s mission could not be separated from other aspects of the church’s life and teaching generated much controversy as its implications for evangelism and social ministries were explored at ecumenical and denominational gatherings around the world. The temperature of the debates shot up when what was thought of as traditional evangelism was castigated as a distortion of the church’s true mission. At the World Student Christian Federation in 1964, for instance, a case was made for redefining evangelism as Christian presence, rather than proclamation: the church’s witness at times needed to be silent.19 And evangelism was not the only thorny issue. Ecumenism’s left wing was challenging the middle axioms approach to dealing with social issues that had been a breakthrough at the Oxford Conference in 1937. Then the aim had been to agree on a range of options for translating Christian principles into policy, in order to broaden consensus. When the w cc’s first World Conference on Church and Society met in 1966, it discarded the flexibility of middle axioms; they “fell by the ecumenical wayside as clear-cut

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positions were taken on issue after issue, from patterns of economic growth to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.”20 The deepening divide within Protestantism was on display two years later as the wc c celebrated its twentieth anniversary at ­Uppsala. Long after that 1968 assembly was over, the new approach to mission, with its attendant implications for evangelism and social action, created rifts between ecumenicals and evangelicals (as the two sides were often called by then). Historian William Hutchison describes the preparatory materials, published under the title The Church for Others and the Church for the World, as “a high point of  antitraditional thinking among ecumenicals.” Evangelicals, disturbed by the takeover of ‘their’ terminology to promote a different approach to mission, considered it “unusual provocation.” “It seemed to conservatives that once again, as so often in the past, modernists with dubious Christian credentials had stolen the evangelicals’ ­rhetorical clothing and were trying desperately to wear it.”21 At ­Uppsala, Union Seminary professor Johannes Hoekendijk raised more hackles when he condemned the traditional approach to evangelism as heretical. Dismissing the “introverted” parish system as a medieval invention, he questioned whether converts should join existing congregations. Instead he proposed direct action in society, a model of church organization that he dubbed “go-structures.”22 This new thinking about the relationship of the church to the world raised fresh questions about the viability of one of the United Church’s most cherished convictions. During the fundamentalistmodernist controversy at the beginning of the twentieth century, many Protestant churches in the United States had adopted what historians have called a two-party system by separating oversight of evangelism from social concern.23 The founders of the United Church had deviated from the typical pattern, insisting that the two belonged together. Whether out of commitment, convenience, or connivance, evangelism and social service remained under the administration of the same board.24 By joining the work of evan­ gelism and social service the United Church had, as a special issue of the Observer in 1963 put it proudly, “laid down the conviction that a man’s faith cannot be held aloof from his work, that evan­ gelism cannot be carried on apart from deep concern for the world  in which men are redeemed and in which they earn their daily bread.”25

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The new staff at e & ss still spoke of these twin aims. Hord insisted that evangelism “must start with personal commitment or it will not start. But it must never end there if it is to have any impact on our world ... A basic law of evangelism is: we can never give to others what we don’t have ourselves. Its corollary is, we haven’t got the real thing if we do not share it.”26 He advocated keeping “private conversion and public responsibility in proper balance and tension.”27 Stewart Crysdale, who joined e & ss as assistant secretary at the same time as Hord became secretary, made a similar point in his first annual report: “The genius of our Board is that evangelism – the telling of the news of God’s love – is tied directly with social service. Either one without the other is a truncated Gospel.”28 Little wonder, then, that seeing the United Church torn apart along seams that had been so deliberately stitched together was painful. Data appeared to indicate that church attendance made ­little difference when it came to changing everyday attitudes or actions. If that were so, was evangelism partly to blame? Was Australian Methodist theologian Colin Williams right in claiming that ministry in a twentieth-century society that was no longer Christian required a different approach to making disciples than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?29 To complicate matters, evangelism was not the board’s only problem. Now that it was speaking more softly (if at all) on moral issues and turning over its social welfare work to government agencies, what was left to do in the field of social service? Did one objective have to be sacrificed in order to save the other, or did both evangelism and social service have to go? The new way of thinking about the church’s mission was soon reflected in e & ss’s programming. A “project on evangelism” had been included on the Centennial Committee’s list when it gave its first report at the General Council in 1962.30 Two years later “social action” was added to the committee’s name, and forming “truly worldly Christians” became the top priority of the National Project of Evangelism and Social Action.31 Hord and his colleagues were determined to use what was often simply called the National Project to move people out of the church building and into the commu­ nity.32 The word evangelism was still used (rather hard to avoid, given the name of the board) – but often qualified as “new” or “experimental,” or circumvented with “outreach.” The upshot was to distance evangelism from traditional evangelistic campaigns, even the United Church’s own recent initiatives.33

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The National Project gave a voice to a more radical bloc within the United Church. Among them was Rex Dolan, professor of homiletics and worship at United Theological College. In 1965 and 1966, Dolan delivered a series of lectures across Canada, urging his audience to tackle the pressing social concerns of the day, such as poverty, war, oppression, and technological change. Later published with Hord’s encouragement as The Big Change, Dolan’s talks took aim at traditional evangelism.34 Convinced that many spiritual seekers were confused or even repulsed by “God-talk,” he proposed that the United Church consider outreach, rather than evangelism, as its objective, no longer necessarily connecting it to church attendance. Unlike the careful planning usually associated with evangelistic campaigns, there was no need of a blueprint for outreach – nor was it necessary to put a Christian label on it: “If it is loving it is Christian and part of the evangelistic task.”35 Dolan’s “big change” did not stop there; what he and the National Project had in mind discounted a good deal of what the United Church had customarily thought of as service as well: teaching Sunday school, singing in the choir, assisting in the congregation’s administration as a member of the board, or raising funds for the men’s club or the uc w. He had a ready response to those who wondered what this would mean for men’s and women’s organizations: they were “introverted,” their drawing card was sociability, and their work was directed toward maintaining the church itself. As such they were among the United Church’s “deficiencies” that the new reformation was intent on correcting.36 Proponents of the new reformation had in mind a church that existed for the sake of the world. Worship was to prepare the congregation for outreach in the community. The focus was no longer on the minister as resident “holy man,” but on the ministry of the laity, whose vocation as the people of God, when rightly understood, would put them in contact with the world.37 Listening to the world involved removing walls that prevented the church from hearing society’s most pressing needs. “Breaking the Barriers” was the theme of e & ss’s 1964 annual meeting, which featured Eugene Carson Blake, a prominent American Presbyterian minister. The publication distributed for study after the meeting included an article by Blake on breaking racial barriers, illustrated by a photo of his arrest at a civil rights march.38 A selection of articles

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on racial issues portrayed Canada’s treatment of indigenous peoples as the most striking parallel to American segregation. It reprinted Peter Gzowski’s stinging indictment of Canadian racial attitudes written after the murder of a young Saulteaux man by a party of  white farmers and businessmen from Glaslyn, Saskatchewan. “This is Canada’s Alabama,” Gzowski had written, referring to recent events in Birmingham. In fact, the situation of the Indian in Saskatchewan might be worse than the plight of the Southern Negro, he mused, since the latter shared the same language, religion, and culture in most respects as their oppressors, whereas many Indians spoke a different language and had “moral and cultural values utterly different from ours.” To join the North American way of life would be far more wrenching for the Indian than the Negro, he predicted, “and our acceptance of him as an equal could well be an even more difficult decision than the Southerner’s acceptance of the black man.”39 After the 1960s it was hard to imagine that the United Church had once promised, as it did in the first issue of the New Outlook, that it would “preach the elements of the Gospel to these primitive minds still influenced by pagan superstition” so that “very slowly but also, surely, the truth will enlighten even these dark understandings, as long ago it enlightened the minds of our British ancestors.”40 Accounts of its work in indigenous communities became less glowing as evidence of the failure of assimilation (and the tragic consequences of the attempt) raised questions about its complicity in their plight in the past and cast doubts about ending segregation.41 Was integration just as misguided as assimilation? Observing the deplorable social conditions he witnessed at a school on a reserve, one teacher likened adaptation to the aggressive economic practices of white culture to “feeding them into a new kind of cultural gas chamber.”42 Listening to the world did not mean that e & s s ’s leaders intended to stay quiet. Much of the theological and sociological groundwork for the new strategy was laid by Crysdale, who saw clashes between what he called the prophetic-reformative and priestly-pietistic functions of religion as a positive sign of viability and creativity.43 His three-fold typology of the church’s relationship to society – accommodation, isolation, and conflict – reserved no place for the oncefavoured option of co-operation. The days of friendly service to the nation were over. There was a more combative tone to his claim that the third option, conflict, was the United Church’s role as e & s s now

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understood it: “critical, prophetic witness to the eternal demands of the Gospel in the changing conditions of the world.”44 To help them formulate their prophetic witness, Hord and his colleagues at e & ss made the controversial move of turning to critics of the institutional church for direction. Some of these outsiders turned out to be what historian Hugh McLeod describes as a novelty for most Western countries: “those who rejected Christianity and were increasingly ready to say so loudly and openly.”45 An unflattering image of organized religion was forming in the public mind. Instead of building a Christian Canada, the United Church found itself accused of constructing what one of its critics dubbed a “comfortable pew.” In 1965 Pierre Berton’s The Comfortable Pew made publishing history in Canada with record sales. Drawing on the New Theology popularized by British theologian John A.T. Robinson in Honest to God two years earlier, Berton’s captivating book called on Canada’s churches to reconsider their outdated theological and ethical positions. Berton’s own views had evidently evolved since the 1950s, when he had pronounced the Christian ethic as “timeless,” and complained that it was the “constant urge to modernize that, in the end, makes the church appear to be forever out of date.”46 A decade later (and by then a proponent of the so-called new morality), he accused churches of being out of touch with the issues that really mattered.47 His devastating critique of the typical Protestant congregation gave credence to predictions that organized religion would be irrelevant in the coming New Age. The Comfortable Pew had been commissioned by the Anglican Church, which Berton had left some years earlier.48 Asked whether the book would have been different had he been hired by the United Church, he reiterated that it was an indictment of Protestantism in general, not one church in particular. United Church sermons might perhaps be considered more relevant, he supposed, but its congre­ gational life was no different. It displayed the same “success moti­ vation, the conformist attitudes, the status-seeking of the clergy.” It was behind the times in its approach to such issues as drinking, Sunday observance, abortion, and premarital sex. And while the New Curriculum was commendable, as far as he could see it hadn’t yet done much to change what was taught in Sunday school in Kleinburg, where his wife Janet, a member of the local United Church, was a leader of the Explorer group and their children were active in Sunday school, c gi t, and Scouts.49

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While Hord and his staff may have taken exception to some of the particulars of Berton’s book, they agreed with its central thesis: a New Age was dawning and the United Church was woefully unprepared for it, especially in urban areas. Statistics to support their case were supplied in an ambitious National Survey of the United Church in Canadian Life conducted by Crysdale that confirmed that congregational life in the United Church was predominantly middle class, and primarily suburban or rural rather than urban.50 The findings showed steady membership losses even in city neighbourhoods that had once been strongholds of the church. Read as corroboration that traditional approaches to evangelism no longer worked, the results supported calls for a New Evangelism designed for the New Age.51 Berton was among the contributors to Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Symposium on the Church and the World, described in moderator E.M. Howse’s foreword as “a cogent and vivid picture of the Church as it appears to the critical but not hostile outsider.” It was not a flattering picture of either clergy or laity, or of the organized church itself. The candid sketches pictured the United Church as irrelevant and insular. Berton repeated his general criticism of organized religion. Journalist and social activist June Callwood bitingly depicted congregational life as displaying “a de-humanizing pride in bigness, a preoccupation with pettiness and a viewpoint no taller than the steeple – but not including the Cross.” The staff at e & s s , who had overseen the project, concluded: “There is no doubt that the sea is boiling hot. Now we must plunge into it.” The choice was to “take up the challenge or end with nothing.”52 e&ss wanted to provoke – and to be provoked. Its 1966 annual meeting featured an address by Saul Alinsky, a social activist from Chicago who, one reporter claimed, made Canada’s arch-critics of the church Pierre Berton and Gordon Sinclair “look like a couple of simpering Victorian spinsters by comparison.”53 Alinsky immediately served notice that he wasn’t afraid to step on the toes of his teetotalling hosts. His amusing anecdote about his unsuccessful attempt to order a double Scotch when he arrived at the meeting was perhaps calculated to put them on edge, as was his comment that, to an American, the one thing that Canada represented was whiskey. Alinsky’s hard-hitting speech took North American church leaders to task for their complacency, insisting that action, not dialogue, was the only solution to social problems. He urged them to frame issues

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in black and white, rather than grey, and to create, rather than avoid, controversy and conflict – to go out to streets of the “secular city” and make their souls a little cleaner by getting their hands dirty.54 Such calls for action involved changing the tactics that Mutchmor and others of his era had championed. As recently as 1960, the printed materials for the Calling Canada to Christ campaign had reiterated the recommendation of the 1934 Commission on Christianizing the Social Order: those speaking on behalf of the United Church should avoid identification with any particular political party. The church was to be the conscience of the state, bringing Christian principles to bear on the issues of the day by preparing timely resolutions. Ministers were to confront critical issues boldly, without displaying political partisanship.55 A new generation of leaders called instead for direct action, clear-cut policies on pressing social issues, and even political par­ tisanship.56 With a federal election approaching, University of Saskatchewan chaplain Ben Smillie contended that it was “time for Christians to take off their halos and put on their party buttons.” The old spirit of non-partisanship still lingered in his reminder that no party was the Christian party (admitting that the n d p that he supported found it hard to remember that it did not have a “corner on righteousness”). However, he belittled the effectiveness of the customary approach to social issues in the real world of politics: “resolutions pouring out of committees.”57 Some ministers were prepared to go even further. Claude de Mestral defended what he called political ministry. Political action was an essential but neglected form of evangelism, he argued, dismissing the notion of political neutrality as “a dangerous illusion.”58 Listening to the world made it harder for the New Age reformers to tune in to supporters of traditional evangelism as theological disagreements between them grew. The two sides differed, for instance, on whether or not to support Billy Graham’s evangelistic campaigns, which caused more discord in the 1960s than it had a decade earlier. Critics pointed out, as had Forrest and others in the 1950s, that a denomination that endorsed the biblical and theological scholarship behind the New Curriculum should perhaps think twice before inviting fundamentalists to be its evangelists. They saw Graham’s approach as regressive, simplistic, and out of touch with the younger generation. But finding fault with Graham had its pitfalls. It was “as

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if we opposed mother on Mother’s Day,” one Ottawa minister complained. Oddly, given the desire of proponents of the New Evangelism to appeal to the New Age, Graham’s use of modern technology to communicate was dismissed by them as “Madison Ave. sales techniques.”59 Congregations and their ministers were put on the spot when the Billy Graham Crusade announced a six-city Maritime campaign led by Leighton Ford, Graham’s Canadian-born colleague and brotherin-law, for the fall of 1963. e & ss had already decided to focus on its own plans for evangelism rather than join Graham’s team. Still new to his position at e & ss, Hord sounded conciliatory when interviewed for the Observer’s cover story: “We are greatly indebted to Billy Graham; he has a lot to teach us,” he was quoted as saying. Even so, Hord hinted at the direction that e & s s was headed by cautioning that mass evangelism might create a wall of suspicion and misunderstanding between the church and the world that only dedicated Christians, practising their faith in daily life, could pierce. He expected the crusade to have its greatest effect on those already connected to the church.60 Many United Church ministers in the Maritimes supported the Billy Graham Crusade, but it met a less-welcoming reception in ­other parts of the country. “Let’s Stop Backing Billy Graham,” Ben Smillie bluntly proposed in 1965. He explained that as chaplain, he often met students who were suffering from a “fundamentalist hangover.” Evangelists like Graham encouraged biblical ignorance, he argued, and invited people to join an “ecclesiastical ghetto” (the church) rather than to pay attention to the world outside its walls. Smillie had served on a committee that reviewed the findings of Crysdale’s national survey, and knew that presbyteries and con­ gregations were divided over whether to support Graham. He was, nonetheless, adamant: “in the name of honesty, the Anglican and United Churches should both get out of this game completely.”61 Smillie’s article provoked a flurry of letters to the Observer, most of them sympathetic to Graham. One was from R.C. Chalmers, a Pine Hill professor who had earlier served as Mutchmor’s associate secretary at e & ss. Publications whose production he had overseen had typically presented the United Church as evangelical in its theology, though of a liberal rather than a fundamentalist variety. His defence of Leighton Ford illustrated the fraught position of the United Church. At nearly all of the evangelistic meetings in the Maritimes

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the previous year, the largest group who signed cards to commit their lives to Christ identified themselves as members of the United Church. Working with the campaign in Halifax had been a positive ecumenical experience for Chalmers, and an opportunity to gain a deeper appreciation of other theological points of view. He was disturbed by the rigidity of the “stop backing Billy Graham” appeal. “To some of us, Mr Smillie’s liberal theology sounds very sectarian,” he cautioned. “As one who is indebted to liberalism (and other movements, too) let me say that I am just as much afraid of sectarian liberalism as I am of sectarian fundamentalism.”62 Where Billy Graham was concerned, those who tried to find middle ground met with little success. Forrest had perhaps hoped to dampen Smillie’s fiery article with an editorial that questioned the accuracy of his description of Graham’s approach to the Bible as “literalist.” A few weeks later, a chastened Forrest conceded that his attempts to get Graham to say more about biblical authority had failed: “we were wrong. He is a literalist; and he waffles, too. We don’t like to admit this, not so much because we dislike being wrong, but we are deeply disappointed in Billy Graham.” Just as damning was Forrest’s allegation that Graham’s preaching had changed since the 1950s. Graham, he surmised, had reverted to the literalism of his childhood because it produced more converts. He had also taken to scolding churches that challenged the status quo on social issues such as disarmament, federal aid to education, birth control, and the United Nations.63 As an alternative to the “Billy Graham type” of gatherings, proponents of the New Evangelism experimented with Planning Fellowships held across the country.64 Facilitators stressed the importance of “listening to what God is saying in unmet human needs,” and built in large blocks of time for small-group discussion instead of formal presentations. The design reflected the assumption of the organizers that ministers needed to hear what “ordinary people,” rather than theologians, were saying about the questions of the day.65 Few were more committed to putting this new approach to evangelism into practice than the minister of a Toronto congregation reputed to be “the swingingest church in town.”66 Clarke MacDonald was convinced that without drastic change, the church would soon be written off. Ultimate truths needed translation “into terms that will be both received and lived by people,” especially young people. “We cannot do that when we express the truth in wooden creeds

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and mealy-mouthed platitudes,” he insisted.67 MacDonald defended linking social action to evangelism with words from John Wesley’s preface to the first Methodist hymnal: “The Gospel of Christ knows no religion but social religion, no holiness but social holiness. This commandment we have from Christ that he who loves God loves his brother also.”68 Reservations about the New Evangelism were aired when Observer reporter Kenneth Bagnell interviewed MacDonald, Hord, and e & s s staffer Gordon Stewart. Asked about what was widely perceived as a lack of enthusiasm for the type of evangelism the church had supported until recently, Hord denied that he opposed mass evangelism. However, he admitted that he could no longer support Billy Graham. The church could not, as he put it, ride “two horses theologically,” referring to Graham’s approach to the Bible and the United Church’s own New Curriculum. He was also dismayed that Graham had “blessed the U.S. war effort” in Vietnam and had become the “arm of the status quo.” When Hord mentioned that it was often con­ servative business groups who sponsored Graham’s organization, Bagnell asked, “What’s wrong with that? Is it a sin to be conservative?” Hord countered by pointing out that St Paul’s preaching had not been well received by merchants in first-century Ephesus.69 Stewart then added that spreading the gospel message now involved connecting it to particular social causes, such as improving the welfare state, providing better housing, and expanding health care. “But surely,” prodded Bagnell, “it’s necessary to begin, not with welfare statism, but with the faith itself.” Stewart replied that the gospel couldn’t be summed up in a “nice little set of words.” It was, rather, “the experience of the Lord Jesus, in whose person we find summed up all the significant self-disclosure of God as it reveals itself through the historical experience of the Hebrew people consummated in discipleship, those who went with Christ.” (One suspects that readers agreed with Stewart’s own assessment of this “relevant gospel”: it was “more and more complex”!)70 Once the welfare state arrived, was the work of the church then finished? No, Hord and Stewart insisted, for even the affluent were searching for the meaning of life. But isn’t that the point, Bagnell asked as he pressed them to consider whether “this whole emphasis ... of ‘listening to the world’ may be taking us down the wrong a­ venue. Has the world – confused and bewildered – anything really penetrating and perceptive to tell us?” And was the

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board still committed to changing both the individual and society, or was it interested only in social change? MacDonald was a­ damant that there was only one gospel, with both individual and social “prongs,” but agreed that the pendulum was swinging away from the individual, where the board’s work in the past had been directed.71 Hord had the backing of the United Church’s left wing and even part of its centre, with support in Saskatchewan particularly strong.72 But he was definitely out of favour with conservatives, whose efforts to take over the church, he claimed, were “more evident every week.”73 Disappointed by their dealings with the executive staff of their denomination, conservatives sought support and solidarity elsewhere. In 1966, looking to build networks among ministers and laity of like mind, they launched the United Church Renewal Fellowship (u crf ). They also banded together with evangelicals in other denominations who shared their antipathy to the wc c’s new approach to world mission, disturbed by its implications for evangelism. The growing polarization of ecumenical and evangelical Protestants was evident at the first World Congress on Evangelism that met in Berlin in the fall of 1966. Co-sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Christianity Today, it brought together 700 invited delegates (all Protestant), observers, and reporters. ­Taking the theme “One Race, One Gospel, One Task,” it proclaimed itself the “spiritual successor” of the first ecumenical conference in Edinburgh in 1910, tacitly denying the w cc’s pedigree.74 Delegate James Somerville’s glowing portrayal of the event in the Observer identified the developing tactical differences between the two factions. He reported that rather than “listening to the world,” evangelicals were preparing to speak to it in a new way. It was “clear that evangelicals are ready to enter the New Age of history utilizing the tools it provides,” he enthused. For instance, World Vision, a relief organization supported by evangelicals, was urging churches to make use of computers and other technological advances in promoting evangelism.75 United Church minister J. Berkley Reynolds attended the congress as another of the church’s four delegates.76 Sometimes dubbed “the Billy Graham of Canada,” Reynolds quickly gained a reputation for his outspoken criticism of the New Evangelism.77 He blasted liberals for being “more political than biblical,” and dismissed as nonsense the notion that “social reform and a jumbo church” (a disapproving reference to the aims of ecumenism) would result in a “regenerated

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society.” Wondering how long it had been since anyone at the United Church’s national headquarters had given an altar call, he charged that Hord and his board had “all but forgotten their responsibility to seek individual conversion.” Reynolds also took exception to the board’s more direct approach to social issues, claiming that people wouldn’t notice the difference if the words “Evangelism and Social Service” were changed to “New Democratic Party.” The United Church could as easily be called “The Church Without Doctrine,” he complained.78 Critics of Billy Graham were just as uncompromising. In “Why the Fundamentalists Are Wrong,” Smillie took issue with the theology he had been taught as a boy in a Plymouth Brethren Sunday school. He rebuked those in the United Church who were “trying to work both sides of the theological street,” and objected to the social conservatism he associated with Graham’s revivalism.79 Further criticisms of Graham followed in the denominational magazine. One article featured an inside look at Graham’s crusade by two reporters who had gone undercover, one to usher and the other to sing in the choir, during a revival service at Toronto’s cn e stadium. They compared Graham’s preaching before a crowd of 45,000 to Nazi recruiting rallies. “Graham plays on the emotions, the insecurity, the fears and the yearnings in the hearts of listeners, then at the moment of decision punches home the sale with soft music. His sincerity and integrity enable him to carry it off. But these techniques are the same ones Hitler used.”80 Those taking the customary United Church position on evangelism – that it was both personal and connected to all areas of life – were caught on the defensive. In Small Voice, a magazine published by u c r f, Newfoundland Conference evangelist Norman Wesley Oake reminded readers that those who claimed evangelism was not concerned with social problems needed to re-read the history of revivalism. And yet he was troubled by what he saw as an attempt to reduce the evangelistic mission of the church to “purely social action,” thereby diverting resources from traditional evangelism – an indication perhaps of how conservative evangelicals viewed events sponsored by the National Project. Considering the United Church’s past insistence on linking evangelism and social concern, one can understand his dismay as they diverged: “Confusion reigns as to what the mission really is.”81

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Imagining the new possibilities for mission, however, was invigorating for some, among them Katharine Hockin, a renowned United Church missionary and ecumenical leader. Born to parents working as missionaries in China, she eventually served there herself after studying and working in Canada for a number of years.82 Among the last of the United Church’s missionaries to leave China, she returned to Canada and became involved in initiatives to redefine the mission of the church. She was well positioned to assess the challenges at home and overseas – as she put it, “the fluidity of so many things, the mobility of peoples and the growing irrelevance of much of what is customary and habitual.” She exuded enthusiasm for the new global outlook that was developing in ecumenical circles, characterizing it as “one of zest, confidence, adventure and anticipation as we stretch to work under God in his world, in ways that may be unfamiliar but which will keep us growing in understanding, capacity and obedience.”83 In 1962 Hockin was invited to join the Commission on World Mission chaired by Donald Fleming, recently retired from federal politics after serving in John Diefenbaker’s Cabinet as minister of finance and later as minister of justice and attorney general.84 The United Church’s missionary program was facing some serious practical problems. Its failure to find replacements for vacancies in its overseas staff was what Observer editor A.C. Forrest considered the number one crisis facing the church. The United Church would soon have more of its staff “talking and writing and promoting mission, than are working at it,” he warned. The consequences were monumental: “The Church’s commission is to make disciples of all nations. The Church is mission. If we are not missionary, we are not Christian.”85 The low number of missionary personnel was one of several issues that the commission was asked to tackle. The findings of the commission confirmed Forrest’s fears: the number of missionaries had indeed decreased dramatically in the postwar period.86 But Forrest was troubled for another reason as he observed the presentation of the lengthy report at the General Council in 1966. “We are not certain that the commissioners were fully aware of the radical change that has taken place in what we used to call ‘foreign missions,’” he wrote in his editorial for the next issue of the Observer. He was convinced that Fleming was either unaware of that shift, or unwilling to acknowledge it.87

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New Appointments Total Withdrawals*

Total Withdrawals*

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1928 1928 1929 1929 1930 1930 1931 1931 1932 1932 1933 1933 1934 1934 1935 1935 1936 1936 1937 1937 1938 1938 1939 1939 1940 1940 1941 1941 1942 1942 1943 1943 1944 1944 1945 1945 1946 1946 1947 1947 1948 1948 1949 1949 1950 1950 1951 1951 1952 1952 1953 1953 1954 1954 1955 1955 1956 1956 1957 1957 1958 1958 1959 1959 1960 1960 1961 1961 1962 1962 1963 1963 1964 1964 1965 1965

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Figure 8.1 Appointments and withdrawals of missionaries, 1928–65 Source: “World Mission,” Record of Proceedings of the 22nd General Council (1966), Appendix E * Includes retirements, deaths, and resignations for various reasons (such as unsettled conditions in China and, in the case of single women, marriage).

Forrest told readers that he had quizzed Fleming about this matter from the floor when the report was presented at the assembly. Fleming had assured the General Council that “if this were a departure from the traditional evangelical emphasis, my name would never have been attached to the report.” Forrest was not convinced. In his editorial rejoinder to their exchange, he pointed out that the report had emphasized “witness, sacrifice, and total mission,” but contained “little or no emphasis on proclamation, persuading, converting, making disciples of all nations, or ‘winning the world for Christ in this generation.’” Forrest himself had no quarrel with the theological shift; however, it bothered him that there had been “no clear-cut admission of the serious and radical departure from what many of our people still consider ‘missions.’”88 Fleming was riled by the editorial. His seven-page letter took Forrest to task for implying that the commission he had chaired was unaware of a radical change in the context of mission (which the report had in fact analyzed at length). He had understood Forrest’s question at the General Council as inquiring about the purpose of  mission. Insisting that the report proposed no change in what

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he characterized as “the traditional evangelical concept,” Fleming demanded a retraction.89 Forrest refused to back down. In his view a radical change in theological emphasis, not just method, had ­taken place. “If this report does not reflect that change then in my opinion it should, or we mislead our people,” he contended. As a compromise, Forrest invited Fleming to write a brief piece for the Observer to set the record straight.90 Fleming refused to settle for anything less than either publication of his lengthy initial letter in full or a retraction.91 In a last attempt at conciliation, and after what he described as “a long telephone conversation” with Fleming, Forrest drafted a piece for the Observer titled “Win Souls to Christ.” It confirmed that Fleming considered winning souls to Christ as the primary purpose of mission. However, Forrest went on to explain that while that had been the emphasis at the time of church union, the contemporary aim of mission was “to serve the world for Christ’s sake.” Conceding that Fleming spoke for “many, perhaps the vast majority,” of United Church members, Forrest argued that present mission policies (and at least the subtext of the report) took for granted a different theological point of view that ought to be named as such.92 Failing to gain Fleming’s endorsement despite several more letters, Forrest dropped the idea of publishing the piece. Although Fleming insisted that the World Mission report represented no change in the traditional evangelical emphasis, C. Douglas Jay, secretary of the commission and instrumental in drafting it, apparently thought otherwise. When Jay, also professor at Emmanuel College, gave the R.P. MacKay Memorial Lectures a year later, he described how the ecumenical task had recently shifted from focusing on missionary enterprises – “missions” – to making “an effective Christian presence in the world.” This was, he suggested, “a more acceptable theological and strategic approach” in an age when proselytism (which the report had defined in its glossary as the practice of making converts) had been called into question.93 Jay explained that highlighting the unity between home and foreign missions (as the wc c had recently done) had far-reaching implications for the conventional distinction between them. Whereas “revival, of recalling those with Christian memories, the lost sheep back to the fold of the church” was the focus of home missions, those working in foreign missions had been expected to “break new ground in a pagan world.” In current ecumenical thinking, however,

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the boundary was no longer between home and foreign missions, but between the church and the world. He saw the United Church’s Board of World Mission as “in general ahead of the church at large” in coming to terms with the end of Western missionary expansion.94 If that were so, little wonder that its advocacy of a new approach to mission met a chilly reception in conservative evangelical circles. They saw its emphasis on Christian presence and openness to other faiths as a repudiation of efforts to convert the world to Christ: what was evangelism to them had been defined by the United Church as proselytism, and disparaged as such. Confusion over the new direction the United Church had taken (knowingly or not) was further evidence of a shakeup that was transforming inter-church relations. Denominational loyalties were waning – but not for the reasons an older generation of ecumenists had assumed. Astute observers were spotting startlingly new trends. Principal George Johnston of United Theological College made a prediction in 1968 that would have seemed preposterous even a decade earlier: the future of ecumenism would be shaped by conservative Protestants and post–Vatican II Catholics.95 From his vantage point as a church executive, Ernest Long also detected signs of that repositioning: the United Church was growing more distant from “so-called evangelicals,” but enjoying more cordial relationships with Catholics than had often been the case in the past.96 While some in the ecumenical camp were growing impatient with making compromises to find common ground, their evangelical ­rivals were discovering the advantages of working together. The revival of interest in religion in the 1950s had swelled the numbers of fundamentalists and other conservative evangelicals, giving rise to what is sometimes described as a neo-evangelical movement.97 These evangelicals thought of themselves as non-denominational or transdenominational, rather than ecumenical, a word they deplored. Their ranks included many of the United Church’s “sectarian” competitors, who had generally adopted decentralized coordination of resources rather than the bureaucratic model of governance that larger and more liberal Protestant denominations preferred.98 The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, founded in 1964, offered these groups what they saw as a more suitable approach to co-operation, welcoming local congregations and ministry organizations, as well as denominations, as members.99 “A unity is being cultivated among

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Christian believers unlike the current ecumenism which seems to superimpose a pseudo-unity on organizational structure,” enthused Berkley Reynolds as he heralded the founding of the u crf as evidence of a new day dawning for Canadian evangelicals.100 Meanwhile the United Church was finding the company of old adversaries more enjoyable as an era of co-operation with Catholics commenced in the heady years following Vatican II.101 The InterChurch Committee on Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations, formed in 1944 by several Protestant groups to keep an eye on Catholic “encroachment” on the state, was discharged in 1973. By then neither ecumenical Protestants nor Roman Catholics seemed to have the energy for reciting old grievances. A committee report presented at the 1972 General Council recommended that the United Church “at every level” from congregation to the national divisions “no longer use any literature on Protestant-Roman Catholic relations which is pre-Vatican II,” and urged that new materials on mixed marriages be prepared to help couples accept their religious differences.102 The pervasive sense of being on the cusp of a New Age, in which there was no secure place for any of the institutional churches, generated different concerns than in the past. The United Church remained fiercely proud of its francophone members, many with longstanding connections to Protestantism. But some were former Catholics. The situation presented a new dilemma: should ecumenical Protestants encourage the latter to return to the Catholic Church in order to renew it from within?103 Others were more wary as they read the documents issued after the Vatican Council. George Johnston was troubled by what he feared was a “new type of Roman Catholic imperialism” that still regarded Protestants as belonging to mere ecclesial communities rather than true churches.104 What did these changes portend for ecumenism as once understood by the United Church? With the uncoupling of Christianity and culture underway in many countries, Canada among them, the old strategic intention of reuniting Christendom by first creating united national churches was no longer as viable. There was continuing interest in bringing confessional families together in the kind of organic union that the United Church had achieved in 1925. However, ecumenism was transformed by those who imagined alternatives to that model. Moreover, for those still committed to an organic model of Christian unity, Vatican II dramatically redefined what was at stake. It offered an intriguing new possibility: a church

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made more fully catholic by the return of the “separated brethren” of non-Roman ecclesial communities. At the same time, a glimmer of a different understanding of ecumenism, informed by the changing approach to world mission, was evident in the United Church’s avid support for inter-church coalitions organized around issues of common concern. This approach shifted the emphasis from beliefs held in common (still the basis for  much of the co-operation among conservative Protestants) to working together despite confessional fault lines. There would still be amalgamation in the future, Hord predicted, but with less money spent on buildings (temples to the idols of denominationalism, as he put it) and more on specialized staff, community service, and world mission. Inner-city work would be done ecumenically and coordinated with community developers and social workers in existing agencies.105 Such a venture in ecumenical outreach was launched in the Lakehead region of Ontario by Lois Wilson, serving in team ministry at First United Church, Fort William, with her husband, Roy Wilson. In the fall of 1967 they invited Protestant and Catholic churches to join in planning Town Talk, a month-long multimedia public forum to discuss such relevant community topics as family problems, poverty in an affluent society, pollution, science, and foreign aid.106 But the fissures that were remaking Christianity elsewhere were apparent in northern Ontario as well. While the success of Town Talk exceeded expectations, Wilson recalled that some conservative churches boycotted the project because there wasn’t enough emphasis on the Bible.107 It was a sign of the new ecclesial times: although the United Church’s interaction with Catholicism was growing less oppositional, it was drawing more criticism from conservative Protestants, including some within its own ranks. Town Talk was to reshape how Wilson viewed the United Church’s public role and the church’s place in an urban setting.108 The event showcased exciting possibilities for urban outreach, a crucial element of the United Church’s new mission strategy. The spiritual needs of the frontier had figured large in the case for church union. Its home missions strategy had been aimed at providing religious services for small communities as well as for non-Anglo-Saxons in cities. However, it was the urban frontier that caught the imagination of those preparing the United Church for its new mission to the

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world. “The cradle of our pluralistic society” was how the first report of the Commission on the Church on the Urban Frontier portrayed the city in 1964. People were flocking there to seek power, opportunity, and excitement in the economic, social, educational, and artistic exchanges it offered. But most congregations were unprepared to meet the demands of the new sort of community taking shape on this new frontier, and were in danger of providing answers in rural or outdated terms that expressed “nostalgia for bygone days.”109 Nothing was safe from scrutiny. The United Church’s praiseworthy studies on immigration, war and peace, capital punishment, national health insurance, and the use of alcohol and tobacco had sometimes shaped public policy in the past, noted a second report; however, “the large majority of church members have never heard of these reports, let alone taken action following their recommendations.” The New Curriculum – already under fire from conservatives – was hit with a different criticism: it might not be suitable for all communities, prepared as it was for “average, middle-class young people.” Nor should the church expect to make its influence felt in urban communities through social service work as in the past, now that the government or secular agencies were providing such services. Congregations were instead urged to take up “community issues of importance with a view to political action.”110 Shifting the focus to the urban frontier had serious consequences for the old frontier. Although rural churches still made up 65 per cent of United Church congregations, the encroachment of urbanism was having a negative affect. Changes in pastoral leadership were frequent. Some pastoral charges were in a precarious financial situation. Controversy over biblical interpretation or moral standards could be devastating in a rural church, Board of Home Missions associate secretary Harold Bailey reminded those who complained about the slow pace of change there. Losing some members over a hotly contested issue might make little difference in a large church, whereas such division in a small rural congregation could threaten its survival.111 Perhaps it is not surprising then that there was more resistance to adopting the New Curriculum in rural churches than in large urban ones. Moreover, the new ecumenical spirit created uncertainty about the purpose of home missions. When Forrest editorialized about the meaning of the term “national church” in 1957, he reiterated that the United Church had never intended to become a state church, but

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hoped to “provide fellowship for all who would come to Canada from whatever nation or culture.” Although at that time 80 per cent of its members still considered the British Isles their ancestral home, the United Church’s aspiration was that every Christian who came to Canada would “find fellowship in our church.” Forrest could boast that “in a real sense it is becoming the Church of Christ in Canada.”112 Home missions had helped to make it so. For instance, in contrast to the Anglican and Presbyterian churches, the United Church had expanded missions to Chinese immigrants in the 1950s, and the results were impressive. By 1961, over half the persons of Chinese extraction in Canada had joined a Protestant church, and the United Church’s share of Chinese Protestants was 38.7 per cent (up from 13.6 per cent two decades earlier.)113 Even though the 1961 census showed that Catholics were gaining ground on Protestants, the United Church could point to such successes. However, the theological and cultural rationale for sponsoring missionary work among immigrants was becoming less clear by the mid-1960s.114 Since most immigrants to Canada had no direct confessional link to the United Church in the country they had left, how was the United Church to extend fellowship without seeming to proselytize? Ecumenical sensitivity to the overtures of Vatican II combined with the new theology of world mission to scuttle the old home mission strategy, especially in urban centres where Catholic immigrants were arriving in large numbers. The shift to providing only technical services in health, education, agriculture, industry, etc. alienated some who believed, as George Johnston bluntly put it, that the Christian message was “proselytizing at its core.”115 Conservative evangelicals certainly thought so, and did not hesitate to encourage Catholics – and unhappy Protestants in liberal congregations – to join them. Caught between the old and new frontiers was suburbia, where the majority of the baby boomers were born.116 The merits of an ambitious church extension program in new housing developments had seemed obvious in the 1950s, and it was to new suburban congregations that the United Church owed most of its postwar success. Suburban churches were in a paradoxical situation: they were caught between the tug of nostalgia for old traditions associated with the  congregations (often rural) in which their members had grown up, and their willingness to experiment.117 A sympathetic

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Observer editorial published shortly after release of The Comfortable Pew noted that new suburban congregations were criticized for adjusting too much. Some had even gone so far as to change the time of worship from eleven o’clock on Sunday morning and cancel the Sunday evening service. Their ecumenism was expressed by dispensing with denominational programs that they deemed ineffective, and ignoring denominational labels, “partly because they [suburban parishioners] don’t know the difference or because they just don’t care.”118 To make matters worse, their sociability was suspect to those who urged the church to listen to the world. What critics denounced as a social club, suburban parishioners saw as putting down new roots: “They want to find or create a community and rear their children in the fear of God and the knowledge of Christ among believers – nice, decent believers.” With the inner city “left to the Roman Catholics, the ethnic churches and the Gospel halls,” Forrest protested, “jibing at the suburbs or depreciating their witness” offered “no assistance and no cure.”119 The Comfortable Pew no doubt reinforced negative images of the suburban congregation. But Forrest also attributed some of the snide remarks he heard when he was out and about to the impact of Americans Vance Packard and Gibson Winter, whose writings depicted superficial suburbanites switching churches casually in their quest for status.120 Months after the editorial about suburban congregations appeared in 1964, Forrest found that his positive assessment was making the Observer “the object of wearisome attack.” “You can’t mean it,” wrote someone he described as a good friend, who wondered if he was trying to be ironic!121 Forrest did mean it, and repeated his admiration for what was happening in the suburbs as “the most exciting and promising manifestation of our changing religious life.” Despite obvious experimentation, suburban churchgoers had “sought to preserve and nurture the best elements of community life they left behind on farm and in village and town.” They displayed “the best questioning, the freshest thinking, the most venturesome planning, and the most sacrificial giving.” Indeed, if there was to be a new reformation, it was likely to have the best chance in suburban churches, which had become “little ecumenical institutes.”122 Forrest decided to investigate what a wide cross-section of church leaders thought about suburban congregational life, and the result was a symposium published in the Observer in 1965.

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Many (including all the principals of theological colleges who ­commented) praised suburban churches for their innovation, enthusiasm, openness, and generosity. Disparagement was motivated by  jealousy, retorted principal E.S. Lautenschlager of Emmanuel College, and “initiated by the devil.” Bruce McLeod, who had spent six years as minister of a suburban congregation, reminded readers that behind the power mowers and morning cups of coffee were men, women, and children living in situations as hopeless as any other place. “What I miss in many well-phrased criticisms of the church’s involvement in suburbia is some alternative plan of caring for these people.” Mutchmor commended suburban churches for displaying “visible proof of a strong, intelligent faith” and providing more for the worship, work, and witness of the Christian church than his own generation.123 Hord, the former pastor of two flourishing suburban churches, took a more critical stance. He described the suburbanite as living a “schizophrenic existence” between the “impersonal structures of the business corporation and political machine” and the comforts of a middle-class, split-level home in the suburbs. Citing Winter’s Suburban Captivity of the Churches, he insisted that only by accepting responsibility for the inner city would the suburban church find its true life.124 Among the most scathing of the published responses were two ­letters from women, one a suburban minister’s wife who asked to remain anonymous. She characterized the suburban community as comprised of one socio-economic group (mainly families of young executives) who thought it was good for business to belong to a church. The main concern was for the building itself, rather than what was happening inside it. A compartmentalized attitude to religion that saw it as unrelated to social issues was being passed on to the youth of suburban churches, who, like their fathers, thought the church should “stick to its knitting” and not speak out on educational, economic, or political matters. She had found suburban ­congregations filled with status seekers and nominal Christians “rejoicing in broadloom wall to wall, full of pride, arrogance and selfrighteousness,” willing to “serve suppers and salve their consciences with a token money gift.”125 Katherine Burbidge concurred. Outsiders could not be blamed for “equating us with an ultra-respectable service club with religious overtones.” She claimed that the service club spirit of the United

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Church repelled many suburbanites. Consequently, “thinking Christians” were drifting to Unitarian churches. “We are not all born fund raisers, and it should be possible to sing in the choir, or teach Sunday school, lead a youth group or serve on the session without becoming involved as a huckster of anything from variety show tickets to 50-pound bags of potatoes,” she complained.126 Sociability had been a virtue associated with faith and fellowship, especially in rural communities and small towns. Now secular pundits and even some of the United Church’s own leaders, who frowned on the festivals of suburban church life, mocked it. Suburban churches had assumed that cultivating community within the congregation was laudable as an antidote to the anonymity of modern life. But this aspect of congregational life was coming under fire from those who insisted that rather than being preoccupied with drawing people in, the church should be sending them out into the world. Perhaps it is not surprising that some who had been only loosely connected to the United Church chose to stay at home rather than engage in activities that its own leaders considered a hindrance to God’s mission in the world.127 Some worried that old practices of pastoral care were no longer appreciated. Even if the welfare state were to take care of most ma­ terial needs in the future, Forrest reminded Observer readers, the government was not equipped to care for persons suffering from loneliness, frustration, neuroses, and ills that beset even the affluent. Sewing circles, knitting clubs, Bible classes, suppers, bazaars, prayer meetings, and choirs provided effective ministry to the lonely. “This, too, is evangelism,” he insisted.128 But those who associated evangelism with Billy Graham’s methods would not have agreed – and they appeared to be gaining exclusive recognition as the evangelical brand. Forrest was startled to hear conservative Protestants referred to simply as evangelicals. “Aren’t we all?” he asked plaintively, still convinced that Protestants who weren’t evangelical should be.129 By the end of the tumultuous decade of the sixties, those who would answer “yes” to that question were a shrinking minority. Was there a remedy for what was ailing the United Church? Could it be cured by listening to the world, as those who embraced the new concept of world mission hoped? The mixed results of the National Project and its Planning Fellowships at both the national and local levels were not encouraging. What emerged in 1967 in conjunction

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with Canada’s Centennial celebrations was barely recognizable as the National Project of Evangelism that had been announced in 1962. Many of the activities connected with the original focus on evangelism were sidelined to make way for the added emphasis on social action.130 The accomplishments described in the final report were modest: issues had been brought into the open, groups of like-minded persons (both conservative and radical) had come together, and the majority of those who attended the Planning Fellowships had experienced “catharsis.” There was a frank admission that Planning Fellowships had often left participants feeling “hung up” – aware of the church’s failings, but short on remedies.131 Meanwhile other groups, including the Jesus movement, offered Jesus as the answer to what was ailing society. Staffer Robert Christie sounded discouraged in 1970 as he approached retirement, timed to coincide with the closing of e & s s ’s Vancouver office where he had worked for nearly two decades. His stinging accusation was that the United Church’s misplaced priorities had “both minimized and jeopardized the ordinary Christian’s growth in faith and its practical expression in the workaday social setting.” Personal commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour had been replaced by “a less demanding brand of sub-Christian ­fraternizing and sharing of human experience and joint social action – proclaiming this to be ‘the New Evangelism.’”132 His visits to congregations and presbyteries had convinced him that the church’s once generally effective social ministry was also imperiled; it was “renamed, redirected, devitalized, devocalized – if not totally confounded.”133 He held his own board as partly responsible: the postMutchmor staff had replaced personal evangelism (such as preaching missions, teaching missions, visitation, schools for elders, Lenten studies, and evangelism conferences) with impersonal congregational self-analysis and Planning Fellowships.134 William Berry, another long-time staffer, saw things differently as he prepared to return to pastoral ministry that same year. His parting report was a reminder of why the United Church had been persuaded to listen to the world in the first place. The man who had steered the Calling Canada to Christ campaign in the 1950s insisted that “only a daring, enthusiastic continuing [sic] and vital policy of evangelism can save western culture from the decadence into which it has already fallen.” Yet thinking of evangelism in terms that were “too personal” obscured the “corporate power of society.” No one

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person was responsible for unemployment or war; such social sins were “more blatant, vicious and brutal than the sins of any one individual.” By focusing on personal evangelism during the Mutchmor era, the United Church had missed an opportunity: “We tried winning people one by one in the hope they would challenge society. But it never worked out.” Instead the revival had produced a “lack-lustre feeble Christianity.” Yet he agreed with Christie that the gospel was both social and personal: “We have only a lopsided arch, which cannot stand if we emphasize one side and not the other.”135 Even Hord admitted that the National Project had polarized the liberal and conservative wings of the United Church, dividing them over whether to emphasize evangelism or social service. But he still insisted that they “belong together and must not be separated if we are to be true to Christ.”136 “Finding Life’s Meaning,” a winsome poem penned a year before his death, spoke to how the personal and the social were enjoined in his own piety: Christ has broken the power of evil, And exposed it on the Cross; In response I want to serve Him Who has loved me at such cost. As Christ came to seek and win me And assure me I’m a child of God, So He sends me forth to win my brothers, And point them in the path He trod.137 The 1960s saw the rapid demise of the early twentieth-century approach to mission that had been celebrated with great fanfare at Edinburgh in 1910. Admittedly, balancing its twin goals of evangelization and Christianization had never been easy. But after the 1960s, there were fewer who thought the effort worthwhile. The so-called dual mandate of doing mission and doing justice was soon to replace the old two-pronged approach to evangelism and social service in the lexicon of the United Church.138 Evangelism still had liberal defenders. But by the end of the decade, as the emerging notion of world mission drew the line more sharply between ecumenical and evangelical Protestants, to be a liberal evangelical was almost a contradiction in terms. Evangelism was viewed with suspicion to be sure; however, just as significant was scrutiny of old assumptions about

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the social role of the church, which revealed a diminishing demand for the kind of social service the United Church had once delivered.139 The sometimes-querulous marriage of evangelism and social service was over, and the liberal evangelicalism they had once fostered was forsaken. A desire to move beyond the impasse between them perhaps explains the enthusiastic response to what was hailed as the “social action report” at the General Council that convened a few months after Hord’s death. Among the recommendations of the Commission on the Church in the Field of Social Welfare was that the areas of evangelism, social service, and home missions (and perhaps others) be collapsed into a new Church and Society division.140 In promoting partnerships with governmental and non-governmental agencies, it insisted that there was nothing about “religious” social programs, as such, that made them superior; rather, the quality of service and sensitivity to human need were the only proper criteria for judging a program’s merit.141 If in the coming years it was difficult to distinguish the United Church’s social ministries from secular social work, that was by design. The leaders of the 1960s are often blamed for the failure of the United Church to keep pace with the growth of the previous decade. Yet it is fallacious to pin numerical decline on particular persons or programs. The appeal to listen to the world was a genuine attempt to confront the challenges facing churches around the world, and to rethink mission accordingly. To be sure, there were flawed decisions. But as the so-called radicals listened to the world, they were convinced that a greater risk than failure was to do nothing. By forcing a hesitant church to imagine a New Age where the church was no longer assured of its customary place, they primed it for the difficult days ahead. As she pondered that future, Katharine Hockin even dared to ask: “Can it be that God is active in our world in ways that may not always be to our advantage?”142 As the 1960s drew to a close, the United Church was less certain of the answer to that question than the founding generation had been.

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9 Reconceiving the United Church A real tradition is not the relic of a past irretrievably gone; it is a living force that animates and informs the present ... It appears as an heirloom, a heritage that one receives on condition of making it bear fruit before passing it on to one’s descendants. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

Preaching at the annual pilgrimage service of the historic Old Hay Bay Church in 1965, general secretary Ernest Long warned an overflow crowd that unless his church changed its ways, it was headed for a “stunning defeat” over the next twenty years.1 Sounding even less optimistic two years later, “Mr United Church” (as Long was nicknamed) made headlines when he warned that his church had “five years to change radically – or else!”2 Defending his dire outlook for the future, he bluntly declared that the old idea of a worlddominating Christendom was dead.3 It was evident to Long that the very survival of the United Church was in question too. The signs were unmistakable; it was already in the throes of change. During the revivals of the 1950s, some church leaders had boasted that the United Church’s “amazing growth” would “continue, and perhaps even be stepped up in tempo.”4 A decade later the swagger was gone. “The revival is over; we may be in for a difficult time of retrenchment,” announced Observer editor A.C. Forrest as he delivered the bad news in 1967: church growth had halted in 1962, and total church membership declined in 1966 for the first time since church union.5 There were dire predictions that churches in Canada would follow the pattern of decline already evident in much of the  u k and continental Europe. Statistical projections indicated that ­before long Christianity would become a minority religion in Canada.6 One computer model predicted that attendance at Anglican

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Table 9.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1971 United Church

Total population

Membership

% of population

21,568,310

3,768,800

17.47

Newfoundland

522,105

101,805

19.50

Prince Edward Island

111,640

27,830

24.93

Nova Scotia

788,960

162,885

20.65

New Brunswick

634,555

85,185

13.42

Canada

Quebec

6,027,760

176,825

2.93

Ontario

7,703,105

1,682,820

21.85

Manitoba

988,250

256,560

25.96

Saskatchewan

926,245

274,285

29.61

Alberta

1,627,875

456,925

28.07

British Columbia

24.61

2,184,620

537,565

Northwest Territories

34,805

3,005

8.6

Yukon Territory

18,390

3,110

16.91

Source: Census of Canada (1971), vol. I, part 3, Table 10

churches in Toronto would cease by 12 February 1981. The United Church’s future was not much brighter; one of its own studies predicted that it would suffer a similar fate by the mid-1990s.7 With negotiations between the two churches underway, it appeared that any union between them would be short-lived. The United Church was to outlast these grim forecasts of its imminent end. And yet Long was in a sense proven right: in many ­respects the church that was born in 1925 did not survive the tumultuous 1960s. The hope of a Christian Canada that had inspired the bold experiment of the founders dimmed as the country grew religiously and culturally diverse. The customary insistence that faith was both personal and social in character, formed in Christian fellowship and practised in the course of everyday life, sounded quaint to a new generation that was demanding relevance and social action. There were complaints from across the theological spectrum that the organizational machinery – once hailed as a key to the success of the United Church’s mission – was broken. In response its leaders resolved to woo back the disenchanted, convinced that

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1926+ 1927+ 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

Persons under PastoralPastoral care Pastoral Members Persons under care Persons under Care

Figure 9.1 United Church of Canada membership, 1926–75

25729_AIRHART.indb 257 1972 1973 1974 1975

1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1955 1960 1956 1961 1957 1962 1958 1963 1959 1964 1960 1965 1961 1966 1962 1967 1963 1968 1964 1969 1965 1970 1966 1971 1967 1972 1968 1973 1969 1974 1970 1975 1971

1926+ 1926+ 1927+ 1927+ 1928 1927 1928 1929 1929 1930 1930 1931 1931 1932 1932 1933 1933 1934 1934 1935 1935 1936 1936 1937 1937 1938 1938 1939 1939 1940 1940 1941 1941 1942 1942 1943 1943 1944 1944 1945 1945 1946 1946 1947 1947 1948 1948 1949 1949 1950 1950 1951 1951 1952 1952 1953 1953 1954 1954 1955 1955 1956 1956 1957 1957 1958 1958 1959 1959 1960 1960 1961 1961 1962 1962 1963 1963 1964 1964 1965 1965 1966 1966 1967 1967 1968 1968 1969 1969 1970 1970 1971 1971 1972 1972 1973 1973 1974 1974 1975 1975

mbership, 1926–751926–75 mbership,

2,800,000 Members Members

2,600,000

2,400,000

2,200,000

2,000,000

1,800,000

1,600,000

1,400,000

1,200,000

1,000,000

800,000

600,000

400,000

200,000

Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book +  1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

$100 000 000

Total Funds Raised

$90 000 000

$80 000 000

$70 000 000

$60 000 000

$50 000 000

$40 000 000

$30 000 000

$20 000 000

$10 000 000

$0

Figure 9.2 Total funds raised for all purposes, 1926–75

Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book. + 1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

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those who were ambivalent about organized religion were not necessarily rejecting God or abandoning Christianity, but only the conformity, clubbiness, and bureaucratic authority that critics associated with it. Scholars agree that the 1960s decisively changed the religious landscape of North America and Western Europe; they disagree on explanations for the sudden downward spiral in religious partici­ pation in mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches. Historian Hugh McLeod cautions that it is a mistake to single out one “master factor” to account for it. The United Church’s experience confirms his claim that a number of initially disparate currents converged to create the crisis: affluence, the decline of ideologically based subcultures, theological radicalization, political radicalization (especially opposition to the Vietnam War), the sexual revolution, and women’s search for independence, to name a few of the most significant.8 He finds the most serious religious decline to have been associated with the “low-key style of piety which had flourished in previous decades, which emphasized Christian ethics and membership of the Christian community, rather than the dogmatic or the miraculous”9 – an apt description of the United Church. In The Upside of Down, political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that the greatest opportunity for transformative change happens when a number of adaptive cycles collide. He uses the term “panarchy,” a concept borrowed from ecology, to refer to the un­ predictable change that results from such “cycles within cycles.”10 In  social systems, as in nature, catastrophe can clear the ground for  something new as innovations are introduced and tested.11 Experiments that fail are abandoned, while those that succeed shape the next phase of development.12 Breakdown is disruptive to some parts of a system, but does not need to be catastrophic overall; in fact, limited breakdown in a social system is necessary to create space for new leadership and structures to emerge.13 On the other hand, “excessive exuberance” can threaten the survival of a system.14 The challenge to leadership during times of adaptive change is to allow systems to “fail gracefully”: to limit the damage and preserve what will aid in recovery.15 Panarchy aptly describes the situation of the United Church during the 1960s: its heightened vulnerability after a period of growth, the collision of cycles within cycles, and the tension between innovators and conservers who both played critical roles by preventing (or

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at least delaying) its collapse. Picturing change as an adaptive cycle recognizes the significance of links between the parts of a complex system – an intriguing way to think of conciliar governance in the United Church. Slow change at one level protects the system while faster-paced innovation at another level energizes it. The theory also emphasizes the importance of connections between “remembrance” (persistence) and “revolt” (evolvability) during a cycle of change and renewal. Healthy systems in society, as in nature – whether a forest after a fire or a coral reef after a storm – rely on “memories” during such times of reorganization and renewal.16 While innovators clear the ground for change, conservers look for ways to plant the seeds of memory for another generation to harvest. The adaptive challenges facing the United Church in the 1960s were unprecedented in its short history. Though often described as a modern church, it was not well suited to cope with some key cultural dynamics that ran counter to its founding vision. The United Church had aspired to situate itself at the centre of communities across Canada, communicating both spiritual and social messages from a Christian vantage point. It had proudly identified itself within Max Weber’s famous typology as a church, rather than a sect, and adopted an organizational style to match. What seemed to catch the United Church by surprise in the 1960s was the growing presence, even in its own midst, of Weber’s third type. “Mystic” was a rather misleading English translation of the term Weber had used for those who regarded the autonomy of individual and immediate experience as their authority in religious matters.17 In centuries past this third type had been predominantly otherworldly in its orientation. The 1960s demonstrated that this third type could be radically this-worldly in its spiritual focus. Such mystics were ambivalent and even antagonistic to organized religion, sentiments that were captured in phrases such as ‘secular religion,’ ‘no religion,’ and ‘spiritual but not religious.’ The subjectivity of their spiritual quest eroded the United Church’s faith in fellowship, and their suspicion of bureaucratic organizations undermined its conciliar structure. It was this new challenge that Ray Hord had confronted in one of his last addresses before his death in 1968. “It’s later than we think for the institutional church,” he warned. The church had helped to define modern Christendom, with its edifice standing in the centre of

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the community and the priest or minister relating its teachings to all of life through preaching and the sacraments. But now, he contended, “Christendom with its homogeneity and common standards has all but disappeared.” The church no longer held a central place in people’s lives, nor did it bring the community together as it had in the past. The church would only continue to influence the world if it discovered “forms of fellowship and service that are more congenial to current experience.” Comparing the situation of the United Churchto that of the Jews in exile during the sixth century bc, Hord insisted that its most urgent task was “to prepare and train her members to be a part of the church of the dispersion” that was “scattered in a pluralistic culture.” Once it faced this new reality, he predicted it would worry less about its administrative structures and old forms of worship.18 A radically different approach to faith and fellowship was shaking the theological foundations on which mainstream churches like the United Church rested. Making Christianity “ready for the world” was how principal Donald Mathers summed up a decade of dramatic theological change to a gathering of the Queen’s University Saturday Club in 1969. The quest for salvation had once involved taking one’s sins to a religious expert, he mused, as one would take an ulcer to a doctor. But now individuals were expected to work out their own solutions – in effect to bear their own sins. “We seem to have moved from confession and absolution to counselling, and from the external restraints of a community bound by an official orthodoxy to the internal loyalties of a fellowship of pilgrims.” Mathers explained how this fellowship of pilgrims was altering assumptions about the spiritual quest. Terms like ‘personal maturity,’ ‘integrity,’ and ‘social relevance’ had become the modern equivalents of ‘salvation.’ The time would come, he expected, when God would be praised in the language of science, or politics, or medicine, for every workplace would be considered a place of service to God. Every person would be a priest, and each home a temple, he predicted (noting that the Apocalypse of John made no mention of a temple in the New Jerusalem). “We are indeed being secularized,” he declared, explaining that this was “not an elimination of religion from the world but a religious transformation of the world.”19 A conspicuous number of these “pilgrims” were affiliated with the United Church. They were inclined to turn to their own conscience, rather than the guidance of the church or even the Bible, in matters

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of moral and spiritual discernment. They distanced themselves from the organized fellowship that had defined their church for four decades, relying instead on their own experience to guide their actions. They did not want any organization – certainly not the church – to speak for them on social issues. This fellowship of pilgrims thus repudiated much of what ‘being United’ had entailed. Yet the United Church’s hope was that these pilgrims who needed no priest for themselves might be drawn to the prophetic message of the gospel for the sake of others. Paradoxically, while the new spiritual quest was not necessarily solitary, it was subjective. The individual autonomy it prized entailed a different understanding of belonging to a moral community. Not only was a person expected to make his or her own moral decisions (not an uncommon Protestant notion): autonomy now extended to the selection of criteria for making such decisions. This eroded the church’s traditional authority as the primary moral guide.20 Those wishing to uphold the moral values of the past were left to negotiate them privately with no backing from secular culture – and increasingly less encouragement from the church. As fewer heeded its advice on personal conduct, the United Church scrambled to find more relevant language to defend old causes. After the 1964 General Council, Forrest complained that the commissioners had engaged in long discussions on smoking but “refused to call it a ‘moral issue’ not because it isn’t but because that sounds like sin.” Instead smoking was discouraged as “a health hazard and a deep concern to the Christian conscience.”21 Some fights it seemed – even good ones – could not be won. Coming to terms with the eclipse of moral community was particularly difficult in the matter of beverage alcohol. “You have before you just about the most discouraging task of any group in Canada,” Forrest told a young people’s temperance group in 1965. Prohibition didn’t have a chance, and government control as a way of countering abuse had become a joke. Drinking was actually encouraged by government agencies to increase tax revenues. Even “decent people” were embarrassed about refusing to drink because of the bad image of the old temperance movement. He hoped that one day a politician might be able to do something to restrict the sale of beverage alcohol if, as he expected, things continued to get out of hand. “In the meantime we can be temperate in all things,” he counselled. “We must

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insist on our right to be total abstainers. And insist on the rights of others to be temperate users of alcohol. And promote and support every good effort aimed at understanding, and assisting the addict to solve his problems. If we do this then we may be able to enlist others who have a common concern for the welfare, economy and sobriety of Canada.”22 Nearly all churches had trouble with the topic of sex during the 1960s, and the United Church was no exception. The gap between what the church taught and what people were doing was an old problem. However, the divergence between the churches’ approach to sexual ethics and the message of the media and psychologists was new.23 Secular critics complained that churches were skittish about talking to young adults about sex. The United Church responded by tackling a broader range of issues and experimenting with ways to promote discussion. For instance, it joined the Anglican Church in commissioning Coffee House, a drama created to encourage young adults to discuss premarital sex, abortion, and the new morality.24 And more change was on the way. During the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the collapse of what historian Doug Owram calls “the cult of virginity” blurred the relationship between sex and marriage. By the 1970s the three-fold purpose of marriage (procreation, companionship, and the vocation of parenting) portrayed in United Church materials of bygone years was reduced to one: intimacy.25 In many communities across Canada, a more secular Sunday was another sign that belonging to a moral community was waning in significance. The effects of living in a secular society were felt with increasing strength each passing year, according to a 1962 report on “The Lord’s Day.”26 Pluralism was being used as an excuse to change Sunday legislation, the report complained. Conceding that urban areas of Canada were no longer “chiefly Anglo-Saxon,” it maintained that immigrants should generally “be prepared to accept Canadian ways rather than expect Canadians to adapt themselves to the ways of newcomers.”27 A child living in a “Christian country” should not have to choose between a baseball game and Sunday school; thus laws “which ensure such choices do not have to be made, are not only good Christianity but good citizenship.”28 A report on the same issue a decade later proposed a choice between one of two days of rest (Saturday or Sunday), basing its case on promoting “human well-being.” By then the United Church was ready to concede that in a pluralistic culture, “the Christian segment can no longer expect the

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state to enforce, by the law, religious practices which are uniquely matters of individual conscience.”29 By the 1970s another moral cause had been abandoned. Not only were United Church people inclined to flout their church’s lead in moral matters, they were more likely than in the past to dispense with Christian fellowship, even on Sunday morning. As people weighed the benefits of belonging, convincing them to join one voluntary organization over another was a problem both inside and outside the church. Mutchmor reported in 1962 that “loss of fellowship is reflected in sparsely attended old time political meetings and in the current decline of trade union membership.”30 As other groups competed for volunteers, the United Church discovered that it was harder to find adults willing to serve as Sunday school teachers, youth leaders, and committee members. Even showing up for an hour on Sunday morning was onerous, especially to young people who complained of being ‘turned off’ by boring worship services. With supporters of experimental forms of ministry provocatively claiming that going to church on Sunday did not make a person good, what was the point of being there?31 A cultural revolution was underway, unleashing forces that affected the habits of churchgoers as well as the organizations and institutions to which they belonged, noted Forrest in 1969. Nowhere was that more evident, he suggested, than in the changed attitude to Sunday. After years of well-attended worship services, requiring a double-shift in some cases, there were forecasts that the morning service and Sunday school would follow the path to extinction that Sunday evening services and mid-week prayer meetings had already taken.32 There was nothing holy about scheduling, he granted, and structures needed to change. However, there was “something sacred about Christian fellowship, about disciplined worship and prayer, about study, about teaching, about meeting in the name of Christ,” he insisted. His quarrel was not with those who had rejected the church because they had lost their faith, but “the people who believe but are not working at it” – the ones who still sent a cheque to support the church, but would rather curl, golf, play bridge, or spend time at the cottage than show up on Sunday morning.33 In communities across Canada, attendance at church-sponsored events was plummeting. For a denomination that placed a premium on fellowship as a way of nurturing faith, the declining appeal of

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264 A Church with the Soul of a Nation mbership, 1926–75 mbership, 1926–75 Persons under Pastoral care Members Persons under Schools Pastoral care Membership of Sunday 800 000 800,000

Members Members

Through-Week Organizations Members Through-Week Organizations

Membership of Sunday Schools

700,000 700 000 600,000 600 000 500,000 500 000 400 000 400,000 300 000 300,000 200 000 200,000 100 000 100,000

1926+ 1927+ 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

-

Figure 9.3 Membership in Sunday schools and through-week organizations, 1926–75

1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1955 1962 1956 1963 1957 1964 1958 1965 1959 1966 1960 1967 1961 1968 1962 1969 1963 1970 1964 1971 1965 1972 1966 1973 1967 1974 1968 1975 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book +  1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

such activities did not bode well for the future. Particularly disturbing was the prospect of losing the generation of young adults born after the Second World War. With many of them pursuing post-­ secondary education in the 1960s, there was evidence that the baby boomers were entering university as Christians but leaving as agnostics or atheists.34 Student Christian Movement (s cm ) general secretary John Berry reported poor attendance at worship services and Bible study groups on university campuses. The majority of s cm ers leaned toward what he called churchless Christianity, and were “intensely dissatisfied with the state of the church” because of its divisions and its failure to connect its message with “life in the world.”35 The Sunday school was a leading indicator of the trouble that lay ahead. The United Church had invested heavily in the New Curriculum, expecting to tap the religious energies of children and youth. Despite the furor in the press after its children’s program was launched in 1964, the New Curriculum was in use in 90 per cent of United Church congregations a year later.36 But euphoria over classrooms filled to capacity and brisk sales of books was short-lived. Sunday school volunteers were dismayed to learn that three years after the New Curriculum was introduced, enrolment had dropped by 25 per cent. With the end of the baby boom, there were fewer children to replace those who left to work or attend university

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elsewhere. Sales of New Curriculum materials plunged after the first cycle, perhaps as much the result of recycling as a negative response to content: rather than being given to children to keep, the durable hardcover books were retrieved and re-used three years later. Children were not the New Curriculum’s only target: it was billed as a program that would “revolutionize the Sunday church school, and put the emphasis back on adults.”37 Some congregations found that introducing the New Curriculum to adults was a greater challenge than using it with children: it demanded more time than the adults were prepared to give. Women in particular were showing signs of volunteer fatigue. Sunday schools for adults had not been common in the past, and the theology underlying the curriculum was unfamiliar even to people who had grown up in the church. Sunday school teachers were no longer sure enough about their own faith to instruct others.38 Winnipeg’s Westworth United Church, for instance, reported that some members left because of the troubling theological issues that the New Curriculum raised, and even many who stayed struggled with it.39 Adults who volunteered to teach the New Curriculum were expected to be learners themselves. For instance, upon opening the manual to prepare for a Sunday school class of nine- to eleven-year-olds in the first year of the New Curriculum, a teacher would have found nearly a hundred pages of biblical background and pedagogical theory written by professionals before coming to the material on what to do at the first session.40 Although conservative evangelicals inside and outside the denomination were wary of the New Curriculum, some who took the time to examine it were surprisingly appreciative of its merits. The consensus of those who discussed it at a gathering of the Christian Research Seminar was “very favourable in many respects,” according to Wilber Sutherland, the general secretary of Canadian Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (and a Presbyterian). Writing to a friend connected to the uc r f, he reported that there had been “enthusiastic agreement” that it made sections of the Old Testament “readable and interesting.” Its handling of science and creation was “excellent,” and even its controversial handling of the first chapters of Genesis did a better job of conveying their theological significance than evangelical publications.41 However, Sutherland was worried by an implicit “philosophical naturalism” that left the impression that Christians had no resources for living that were any different from non-Christians. Once young people had “imbibed” it, he feared

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it “would not take very much to move them completely away from the Church and espousal of the Christian faith.”42 Though conservatives castigated it as too modern, others found the New Curriculum dated as soon as it came off the press. Its release coincided with the stir over John A.T. Robinson’s Honest to God, so it was widely but wrongly assumed to be an expression of the theological trends of the 1960s – as if the United Church had rushed publication to be ‘relevant’ to the debate. In fact, its writers were harvesting the theological renaissance of the 1940s and ’50s. Work on the 1940 Statement of Faith and the catechism based on it were, according to Mutchmor, the “seed-bed” out of which the New Curriculum had grown.43 Production had been delayed when the General Council rejected the design for a three-year cycle organized around the questions: “Who is God?”; “Who is my neighbour?”; and “Who am I?” Years later, editor Peter Gordon White recalled that commissioners had wanted “a curriculum built on the great affirmations of the Christian faith” rather than questions, which might give the impression of doubt. The discarded design was a decade ahead of its time, he speculated, and might have worn better.44 Like the New Evangelism promoted by e & s s , the New Curriculum was arguably as much the casualty as the cause of the crisis facing the United Church.45 With one in four families moving every year, ties to the community church were tenuous. As one teacher noted, there were plenty of other things to do on Sunday. The New Curriculum had not caused those changes, she insisted – nor had it been able to meet them as well as some had hoped, despite what most teachers considered a greatly improved course of study.46 Yet some blamed it for the decline in Sunday school attendance, despite the fact that almost every other North American denomination was showing a similar trend. A story in the Observer about a random sampling survey on Sunday schools taken in 1970, purportedly the first ever done at the national level, reported on the gravity of the situation. The Sunday school was on “a steep path to oblivion,” with the lowest enrolment since church union and a loss of nearly half of its teachers and students since 1962. Anglican numbers were, if anything, worse, while Presbyterian and Baptist Sunday schools were in trouble as well. Only “the most enthusiastically dedicated” (Pentecostals, unaffili­ ated congregations such as Toronto’s People’s Church, etc.) were flourishing – but by using “gimmicks” such as contests and prizes as

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attractions! The survey results also revealed a church divided – by region, age group, and community size – over how to respond to declining Sunday school attendance. Even the general reaction to the New Curriculum varied, with those from rural areas compared to those from communities over 50,000 opposing the New Curriculum by a margin of 2 to 1. Notes and letters attached to the questionnaires indicated that while some appreciated the new manuals for Sunday school teachers, others found them frustrating. An old hand at Sunday school teaching from Climax, Saskatchewan, wrote that he and his wife could no longer find time to prepare the lessons. More than a grade twelve education was needed to understand the material, he claimed, so where in a village of 400 would you find enough teachers?47 There was exasperation at the national headquarters too. Perhaps miffed by hearing constant criticism of the New Curriculum, the Board of Education was in no hurry to design another. According to one unnamed staff member, the New Curriculum had been the “last gasp of uniformity for a national church.” There was no plan to continue publishing it beyond 1973. Rather than rallying congregations to save the Sunday school, as traditionalists might have hoped, the staff at the Board of Education encouraged experimentation with new educational models and materials. “They insist that people must find their own answers – then they’ll help to find the resources to put the programs into action,” the Observer’s managing editor James Taylor reported. He added, “I’m afraid that congregations are likely to find coming to grips with their own needs a trying experience.”48 That was an understatement. The failure of the New Curriculum was only one of the challenges facing local congregations. They discovered, along with the Scouts and other organizations, that the formality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism associated with their activities had little appeal to baby boomers approaching young adulthood.49 The Young People’s Union (y pu ) had once attracted nearly 100,000 members who spent time together in Bible study, singsongs, and social activities such as weenie-roasts and sleigh rides. In 1964 the United Church approved a recommendation to create a new organization for young adults, and Kairos replaced the y p u a year later. According to those interviewed for a story in the Observer on the new organization, time seemed to have passed the y p u by, with secular organizations

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replacing church basements as places to gather. No longer was it possible to please everyone, explained field worker Wayne Barr, and those who showed up for y p u were too often those he characterized as rejects and misfits who “couldn’t make it anywhere else.”50 Kairos epitomized the new approach to mission that was rocking the United Church.51 Its aim was to challenge social and economic structures. For many (perhaps most) members of Kairos, its emphasis on ecumenical opportunities for social action was a drawing card. Programs such as Summer of Service (s o s ) attracted young volunteers to “become aware of and involved in the social problems facing Canada.”52 But it also reflected the subjectivity of the new spiritual quest. Based on what he had observed at a Kairos con­ ference, reporter Harvey Shepherd found an “intense interest in ­personal development, interpersonal relations and techniques for improving these.” The most popular session had been a sensitivity group, featuring a discussion of how participants felt about themselves, the meeting, and each other. Groups seemed to be comprised of friends whose relationship to a particular denomination was incidental. Some were already wondering whether Kairos could still be called Christian.53 Efforts to revamp activities for adults were also underway, and likewise met with mixed results. Creating a new organization for women did little to sustain participation, which peaked in the mid-1960s. Much of the impetus for merging the wms and wa to form the ucw in 1962 had come from women pressed for time. There seemed to be no good reason to support two women’s organizations that were often comprised of the same members. There were hopes that Bible studies, discussion groups, and practical projects rather than bazaars, bees, and suppers would better meet the personal and spiritual needs of working women.54 Sounding the new imperative of mission to the world, American theme speaker Peggy Way, a minister in the United Church of Christ, warned the Board of Women against seeking the “cheap grace” of irrelevant activities in a “sexual ghetto” rather than “attacking the social realities of our time.”55 But not all women wanted to leave church kitchens for community projects. Donating their time to help with suppers and bazaars was a way for women who had no money of their own to support the church. Reporter Patricia Clarke found many of them reluctant to give up the fellowship they enjoyed as they worked together. As one woman put it, “If you can bake a pie

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better than engage in theological debate, get on with it. I doubt if the pie is offered up to God, that he says, ‘I do wish she had made a political speech instead.’”56 As for men, a survey conducted in 1970 found a “sincere yearning for ‘fellowship’” and a desire “to know God better and serve Christ more.” The results did not support the conclusion that men were looking for bowling, bridge, or even community projects to undertake. Nor did the survey uncover much interest in tackling social ­issues of national concern, although respondents still regarded the church as the conscience of the nation. Instead, the men said they needed guidance for Christian living, help in finding opportunities for service, and ways to deepen their faith. A sympathetic editorial response described them as “aching for clarification” about basic ­issues of faith.57 Do people belong to the church because they believe or, as some scholars have wondered, do they believe because they belong to the church and have their faith formed by participating in its life and work?58 That conundrum would test the connection between faith and community – both within and beyond the congregation – that was the heart of ‘being United.’ What one generation prized as fellowship, another disparaged as clubby. Fellowship was the “secret weapon of the faith,” according to William Berry, a former church executive who had recently returned to the pastorate. Yet he had his doubts about how well the United Church coordinated Christian fellowship. “I protest against the graded Church of the twentieth century,” he wrote. He saw groups that appealed to newcomers according to interests, rather than age or gender, as a promising alternative to over-structured organizations.59 Others went further in their criticism of church fellowship, focusing instead on experimental forms of ministry with youth, university students, business professionals, and housing project residents. Bill Phipps, one of the United Church ministers who had formed Community Consultants Services in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park, ­described their work as “part of the silent church”: “No counselling in the name of the church. No visiting to get people out to church. That’s crap. We try to get agencies and people to work together for the sake of the people. But we don’t seek visibility in the name of the church. Just the opposite.”60 Some ministries financed by the United Church were deliberately not identified with it.61

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Thorncliffe Park was one of the projects highlighted in Churches Where the Action Is! Written to inspire Christians to move outside the walls of the church and into the community, the book featured stories of ministries set up by the United Church (sometimes in ­collaboration with other churches) among people in diverse settings – blacks in Halifax after their displacement from Africville; low-income families in housing projects in major cities across the ­country; newcomers to suburban communities; hippies, indigenous peoples moving from reserves, and apartment-dwellers in Toronto; even a congregation meeting in a seed and fertilizer store in an Alberta village.62 But congregations that tried to combine outreach with fellowship sometimes met with resistance, as Rowntree Memorial United Church in London, Ontario, discovered. Its attendance had started to drop around 1964. About the same time it saw changes in the surrounding neighbourhood, which was less affluent than it had been when the church was built a decade earlier. The congregation decided in 1967 to become “more secular” by welcoming a variety of non-denominational organizations to use its property. The strategy not only failed to attract new members but also created a split in the congregation. The two University of Western Ontario sociologists hired as consultants to help the congregation assess its needs found a clash between those they named the “Contented,” who saw themselves as part of mainstream Canadian society, and the “Discontented,” who were critical of mainstream society and wanted to change it.63 The consultants also discovered that the minister’s attempts at outreach to the Discontented were at odds with the priorities of the lay leadership. The minister had urged the congregation to accept “less reputable” groups, such as a drop-in centre for youth and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings; the lay leadership preferred groups like the Girl Guides and the Badminton Club. Survey results indicated that Rowntree’s “desired minister” was “not one who leads the church toward identification of social problems and community action, but one who concentrates his efforts on the personal needs of the members of the congregation themselves.” The study provided data that illustrated the tension between those looking for fellowship and those wanting social action. It also uncovered a sense of alienation that was developing among active women in the congregation, who did most of the work while men exercised most of the power.64

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The dilemma of the Rowntree congregation, as described by the consultants, was the same one facing more and more congregations after the 1960s: “many people today, particularly the young, are less satisfied with life than the core members of Rowntree Church, and notably uninterested in joining a warm, supportive Christian congregation.”65 But the alternatives offered by the United Church proved to be no more appealing to idealistic young people. Many who in the past might have been drawn by their social concern to serve as ministers, missionaries, or church volunteers were finding new and exciting secular opportunities to engage in community development. Groups like Canadian University Service Overseas ­ (c u so) and the Company of Young Canadians, organized in the 1960s and funded by the federal government, competed with faithbased initiatives such as overseas missions and the s cm , which had once been magnets for student idealism.66 Meanwhile the momentum was shifting to groups that were more adept than the United Church at emphasizing the personal dimensions of being religious. The church’s attempts to become more cosmopolitan clashed with the approach of conservative evangelicals who focused on a personal decision for Christ and a few other key beliefs as tests of valid faith. Neo-evangelicals were not schooled to consider the fellowship of a worshipping community as counting for much when it came to salvation.67 Nor were they saddled with structures that were as bureaucratic as the denominations identified with ecumenical Protestantism. Their conversion experience provided a narrative that oriented their spiritual pilgrimage. ‘Being United’ required no similar testimony to a life-changing or charismatic experience – a vagueness that was sometimes mistaken for coldness and lack of Christian conviction. The baby boomers, observes Owram, had elevated experience as a way to restore the emotion that was essential to individual and social transformation, often turning to music to find it.68 The United Church had come to regard emotion as suspect, and was at a competitive disadvantage in this new spiritual marketplace, where religion was viewed as a personal, or at most ‘tribal,’ choice. Neo-evangelicalism was not ecumenical Protestantism’s only rival. At e& ss ’s annual meeting in 1962, the Christian Century’s Kyle Haselden warned that syncretism was the most dangerous threat facing American religion. Arriving almost everywhere in the world at the same time, according to Haselden, its particular expression in

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North America involved the practice of picking and choosing ideas from a variety of religions and putting them in “a secular basket” in an effort to convert “the pagan mind of our age.”69 The United Church soon discovered that its liberal tendencies made its youth highly susceptible to this eclectic approach to spirituality.70 The university campus was a place where the variety of religious experience was on display. The growth of departments of religion on university campuses was an indication that interest in religious questions was not dead. “Campus lectures on religion are crowded,” the Observer reported, but “mass meetings and preaching services are out.”71 To complicate matters further, the United Church found itself struggling to identify its theological distinctiveness once the old markers that had defined its forebears were forgotten. It had not been created to uphold or advance a particular doctrine, nor were there ritual practices that its members were expected to adopt. Though founded as a church that was broadly inclusive, it was not self-consciously diverse – in fact theological and cultural differences had initially been suppressed. Author Lucy Maud Montgomery had once expressed the sentiments of disheartened Presbyterian dissenters when she dismissed the new church as “nameless.”72 It was a taunt that came back to haunt the United Church when immigrants to Canada did not connect its name to the Methodist or Reformed churches they had left behind. After Vatican II, even the Catholic Church no longer served as a foil against which to construct an alternative Protestant identity. The United Church was thus imperilled by a tradition of theological inclusion that gave it the appearance of sameness in an age where difference increasingly defined identity. Donald Mathers had sounded confident about the United Church’s theological future as he assessed the situation at a mid-decade consultation on the world mission of the church. “I think we all realize that in the United Church we have far more of a common mind than most churches do in spite of the fact that people often think we are  scattered, vague and uncertain.” Disputing that the desire for Christian unity had led to a lack of firm conviction, he used the phrase “extreme centre” to describe the United Church’s theological orientation: “a centre in the sense that we represent no unbalanced presentation of the Gospel, but extreme in the sense that we are no less convinced or enthusiastic about our convictions than anyone else.”73

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During the 1960s, both the left and the right tugged at this extreme centre. The left offered a so-called secular theology that critics claimed was indistinguishable from the thought of Unitarians or well-meaning secular humanists. The right bore a resemblance to fundamentalism in its emphasis on a narrow definition of ­biblical authority as a test of faith. Those caught in-between – including many United Church ministers – interpreted what it meant to be in essential agreement with the articles of faith in the Basis of  Union in different ways. Those inside and outside the United Church assumed that its members had a wide berth for theological exploration. The ideal of a common faith was moving toward a multi-creedal pragmatism. A pivotal decision in that transition was the inclusion of what came to be known as the New Creed in the Service Book issued in 1969. The project to revise the Book of Common Order, which had been in use since 1932, was launched in 1958. By the time the Committee on Church Worship and Ritual completed its work a decade later, the United Church was in an entirely different liturgical situation. The report presented to the General Council in 1968 reflected the committee’s struggle to steer a course between “a very vocal ‘left’ that demands radical change” and “a not-so-articulate ‘right’ that resists all but minor emendations.” Their aim was to produce a service book for public worship that was “the work of the whole Church.” The committee admitted that the language problem had bedevilled them; they were well aware that efforts to communicate with “technological man” had challenged the authority of the Bible in new ways by raising questions about the adequacy of biblical concepts. However, they were unequivocal about their own approach: the Service Book affirmed the use of scriptural language “as the most fitting vehicle for liturgy,” insisting that to do otherwise would be “to cast ourselves adrift in a sea of chaos.”74 The committee assumed that worship would continue to evolve by adapting the best of the past to the needs of the present, as they believed they had done in preparing the Service Book. However, what they had witnessed as they prepared it led them to expect a revolution in liturgy in the years ahead that might well involve a sharp break with familiar practices.75 Despite the committee’s own instincts to preserve tradition, a decision made in 1965 proved to be a historic (though perhaps unintentional) step to break with tradition: a request was sent to the Committee on Christian Faith for a short

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creed that could be used as an alternative to the Apostles’ Creed in the baptismal service. By offering the choice of either an ancient or a modern creed, suggests N.K. Clifford, the new Service Book gave the impression that the use of a creed was “solely a matter of personal taste,”76 thus inviting theological novelty. Unlike many contemporary liturgical resources designed during the 1960s, the New Creed was to find an enduring place both as a baptismal creed and a brief statement of faith.77 It resonated with and beyond the spirit of the times with its opening words that captured a longing for fellowship in defiance of existential loneliness: “Man is not alone.”78 Parts of the New Creed were controversial from the outset, and the General Council that received it in 1968 sent it back to the committee for redrafting.79 Even then, not everyone was entirely happy with the results. Reflecting the position of those who objected to the continued use of ancient creeds in the liturgy John Burbidge, a young United Church minister doing doctoral work in philosophy at the University of Toronto, found it ironic that a church that encouraged moral action expected “weekly perjury” by its members. The executive should have left the version presented to the General Council as it was, he complained, rather than watering it down until it had “the force of a wet dishrag.”80 He was especially disappointed to note that those he called “the orthodox” had succeeded in replacing “we proclaim his kingdom,” with “to proclaim Jesus crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.” However, he conceded that the redrafted version was better than no new creed at all.81 Berkley Reynolds agreed that half a loaf was better than none, and praised God that “the most socialistic of any Council” in the United Church’s history had “refused to scuttle the cross and resurrection as the centre of Christian faith.” He commended the General Council for sending “the skeleton” back to the executive “to have some meat put on its bones.”82 He suggested that those who preferred a “humanistic” creed that spoke only of “the true Man, Jesus,” rather than the power of the resurrection, should join the Unitarians.83 But other u c r f members were not appeased. Graham Scott charged that a  creed that was only half true was still “intolerably heretical.” A Unitarian would, in his opinion, have no theological difficulty with the New Creed. He urged uc r f backers to emulate those in the early church who had paid no heed to the authority of heretical Arian bishops by likewise ignoring the United Church’s “ecclesiastical

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­ ureaucrats.” Perhaps, he added, conservatives should write their b own “short, memorable and accurate summary of the Christian faith in the several contemporary idioms of thought and language.”84 One of the paradoxes of panarchy was that the evangelical wing had already developed what the uc rf was calling a “new creed,” which had reworded the article on Scripture in the Basis of Union.85 This new article described the Bible as “God’s objective revelation in word written, given by Divine inspiration (God breathed), is entirely trustworthy, [sic] and therefore ‘the only infallible rule of faith and life.’”86 Its interpretation of revelation and infallibility ran counter to a report that had been presented to the General Council in 1966. The Committee on Christian Faith had admitted that after six years of study, it was still unable to “produce a clearly defined statement” on revelation. On one issue, however, its report sounded unequivocal: infallibility belonged to God alone, not to the human words of Scripture that bore witness to God’s self-revelation.87 Prepared as the debate over biblical inerrancy was heating up in evangelical circles, the uc r f ’s “new creed” placed more emphasis on the Bible “as a revelation in itself, rather than as a record of revelation,” Berkley Reynolds explained, and thus took “a stronger position on its infallible authority” than the Basis of Union. He admitted that the requirement that uc r f members be willing to sign this new declaration was a problem for some sympathizers, who objected to adopting it in addition to the twenty articles of the Basis of Union.88 Reynolds reported that conservative evangelicals were encouraged by signs that some theological college professors were disenchanted with “the radical theology that has plagued the church.”89 But there was little evidence that they considered the u crf a viable alternative. The “incipient fundamentalism” of the u crf ’s position on verbal inerrancy was a feature of the movement that bothered Alan Davies, a United Church minister teaching in the religion department at the University of Toronto. He was “in favor of spiritual renewal” but “not at the price of a new orthodoxy that is really an old and potentially dangerous heresy.”90 Others no doubt agreed with a young minister who wrote that he was opposed to a “gutless liberalism that leans over backwards to join the chorus of the Church’s critics and ends up calling on us to surrender the gospel to the spirit of the age.” However, he was just as opposed to the approach of Reynolds and the uc r f, which he described as “a sheer conservatism that blindly defends the status quo.”91

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Liberal evangelicals were also uncomfortable with the demand to sign a statement of faith. Clarke MacDonald declared that when it came to proclaiming the fundamentals as summed up by the Saviour, he would “take a back seat to no one in or outside of ‘Renewal Fellowship.’” But signing a statement that would put him “in some creedal strait jacket” was another matter – and he wanted no part of it. He pleaded for toleration to keep the split that was developing from growing into a chasm that might take thirty or forty years to bridge.92 Failing to find common ground was a disturbing prospect that had far-reaching ramifications, since the United Church’s conciliar system of governance presumed the possibility that guidance might come from those holding a theological perspective different from one’s own. With its own people testing the boundaries of being a “united” church, the 1960s was hardly a propitious time to explore what it meant to be a “uniting” church. Yet offers to try were hard to turn down. Since its own founding, the United Church had been hoping to add a chapter to the story of church union in Canada.93 Not surprisingly it jumped at the opportunity to work toward a re-united Christendom, as an invitation from the Church of England’s General Synod put it in 1943.94 However, nearly two decades passed with almost nothing to show from that initiative except for occasional outbursts of frustration.95 Fed up with futile gestures, the Observer reported in 1964 that the General Council had listened with “restrained enthusiasm to the customary reports that progress toward union with the Anglicans was still being made.”96 Suddenly there was a breakthrough in 1965 with agreement between representatives of the two bodies on the Principles of Union.97 Hopes ran high that union would happen within the next ten years. Even the somewhat skeptical Forrest was convinced that if the Anglican General Synod approved the document (as quickly happened later that year), “nothing should stop it.”98 The United Church followed suit and accepted the Principles of Union as a working document at the General Council in 1966. A draft of the Plan of Union was prepared by working committees in advance of a joint meeting of the General Synod and General Council in 1971. After two more years of study and revision, it was approved by both parties in 1973. However, all was in vain: despite the high calibre of the work done to advance the cause, negotiations ended two years later.99 In 1975

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the implementation committee stopped its work after the General Synod of the Anglican Church reaffirmed a commitment to Christian unity, but declined to proceed toward organic union with the United Church and the Disciples of Christ.100 Those who had optimistically presented the Principles of Union for approval in 1965 were never able to work out some irrecon­ cilable differences that were detectable from the outset. Anglicans generally assumed that the United Church had lost its distinctive Methodist quirks, relieving some of their lesser concerns. An Anglican sympathetic to uniting observed that the “emotional extremism” that had sometimes accompanied the Methodist emphasis on a direct experience of salvation (which Anglicans found “horrifying”) was no longer noticeable in the United Church. A puritanical attitude about personal conduct (which he claimed Anglicans found irrelevant) was gone too: “field research” at a cocktail party would, he conjectured, confirm that the younger generation no longer shared the same views of alcohol as the older generation. Its old moral fervour had “changed form and sphere of interest.”101 Yet the United Church that was taking shape in the 1960s retained characteristics that Anglican sensibilities found just as hard to tolerate. To begin with, it was still unabashedly Protestant, and as such was not regarded by some Anglicans as a real church. At Forrest’s invitation, an Anglican priest identified with its Anglo-Catholic wing (and vehemently opposed to union) prepared a statement about Christian unity from the perspective of those who held that “the Church” was comprised of Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox. In his view the United Church was one of the Protestant sects torn from the true Church by what he provocatively called the “Deformation.” Only by returning to the Catholic fold would the tragic schism end: “a watered-down Christianity, which would result from anything less than the complete submission of Protestantism to Catholicism, would be damnable.”102 Forrest knew full well that this candid statement of differences would rile readers, suggesting in an accompanying editorial that they contain themselves until the next issue, which would feature a rejoinder.103 But as negotiations proceeded, issues that had been intractable in the past remained sticking points. Among the most contentious was ordination. Put simply, without ordination by a bishop in accordance with the doctrine of apostolic succession, was the ordination of United Church ministers really valid? And to

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complicate matters further, the United Church ordained women; the Anglican Church did not. Although the Observer’s editorial position favoured union, the magazine provided opportunities for well-known United Church leaders to express their reservations about the Principles of Union. Couched in J.R. Mutchmor’s predictable defence of traditional Protestant practices was a show of support for the ideals of the new reformers. He warned that the Principles of Union would put in place a hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons “at a time when this out-moded, status-ridden ladder should be reverently stored in  some ecclesiastical museum.” Don Gillies, minister of Bloor Street United Church in Toronto, agreed. He was dismayed that the Principles of Union attempted to revive archaic and meaningless jargon and reassert a “religious ‘caste’ system” by making “fine distinctions between priest and layman, church and world.” Instead he believed the church ought to be “streamlining its organization, so that it might be an effective community of concern in the midst of a troubled world.”104 Not all who had reservations about the Principles of Union were against union as such. Jean Hutchinson, former chair of the Board of Women, supported it, but was disturbed by the ambiguity about the role of women in the document. “One would not have thought it possible that the question of ordination of women could be reopened in this age!” she remarked. Mary Coburn, chair of the Board of Women’s finance committee, objected that women ministers would feel humiliated by being put in an anomalous position if the new church were to suspend the ordination of women. She poked fun at a scenario of “bishops assuming their full dignity, double layers of skirts to prove it, and our ordained women, not unfrocked but feeling slightly naked, meeting with their brother clergy to vote on the propriety of admitting others of their kind.”105 Those who prepared the Principles of Union seemed unaware of how quickly the ecumenical scene was changing. Inadvertently, the negotiators stepped into what the United Church’s Committee on Ecumenical Affairs described in 1968 as an ecumenical ferment that had been sweeping through “the Church everywhere” during the previous two years. The report credited two events in particular for the sudden transformation of ecumenical dialogue: the optimism unleashed by Vatican II that closed in December 1965, and the Church and Society conference convened by the World Council of Churches

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in 1966. Inspired by what the report called “Secularization Theology,” a radical ecumenism was spreading like wildfire. European church leaders, particularly those influenced by the w cc, were saying that ecumenism ought to involve more than bringing together institutions that were themselves irrelevant.106 Supporters of Anglican-United Church union discovered to their chagrin that what seemed to them a daring plan to create a new church looked unadventurous when placed alongside the new ecumenism. George Johnston, himself a member of the General Commission on Union, admitted that some of the criticism of the Principles of Union from the left, such as the lack of modern idiom and its theological verbiage, was justified. And if predictions of a “wholly secularized” future were to come to pass, he wondered if new forms of worship, music, and ministry needed to be considered as well.107 The proposed episcopal structure bore more resemblance to bureaucratic systems of the past than the religionless Christianity predicted for the future. On the other hand, for Anglicans who saw the historic episcopate and the ancient creeds as the basis for Christian unity, Vatican II held out the enticing possibility of union on a more ambitious scale. Already suspicious about whether United Church ministers were properly ordained, Anglo-Catholics were unlikely to be reassured by news that the United Church had adopted a New Creed and was thinking about ministry in even broader terms. Union met resistance from the Council for the Faith, an organization formed to preserve Anglican doctrine and forms of worship as well as the historic creeds as the minimal basis for union.108 The results of a 1970 survey conducted by the Observer and its Anglican counterpart, the Canadian Churchman, turned out to be closer to the mark than church union supporters would have wished. It detected a predilection for the status quo that five more years of study and discussion was unable to counteract.109 Described as the first straw vote on the “feeling from the pews,” the survey was admittedly unofficial and open to the bias of mail-in polls (where strong feelings tended to be overrepresented). However, it was evident that United support for union was more widespread and enthusiastic than Anglican. There was also a striking difference between the young United and Anglican respondents: the former were most strongly in favour of union, while the latter were most strongly opposed to it (and threatening to leave if it took place).110

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Another hint of the dissimilarity in religious outlooks was revealed when respondents were asked where they would worship if there were no church of their own denomination nearby. More Anglican respondents indicated that they would choose a Roman Catholic rather than a United service (and among the Anglican clergy, the United Church placed third behind the Orthodox Church). By an even wider margin, United Church respondents picked the Presbyterian Church over the Anglican Church. When asked what change after union would concern them most, Anglican respondents chose doctrine, followed by the use of creeds, and worship practices. Acceptance of their ministers’ ordination was the main concern for United Church respondents, who reported hearing Anglicans refer to them as “so-called ministers.” Older respondents worried about being served wine at Communion, while younger ones wondered about the role of bishops (unimportant) and the ordination of women (imperative).111 Church union with the Anglican Church that seemed tantalizingly close in 1965 ultimately came to naught, landing a serious blow to the United Church’s claim to be a “uniting” church. Union with the Evangelical United Brethren Church in 1968, which added sixty-two congregations, was small consolation.112 The dream of re-uniting Christendom in Canada died; instead, interfaith coalitions attempted to transcend divisions by finding a common cause rather than a common statement of faith or common organizational principles. While there was public discomfiture when negotiations ended, those who had caught a vision of a more radical ecumenism may have breathed a sigh of relief. They had little allegiance to the traditions of the past; hence, for them, the loss of Protestant principles was not an impediment. However, the new church that union would create was, in their view, not nearly modern enough to meet the challenges of a post-denominational and anti-institutional age. So was organized religion doomed to obsolescence as critics supposed? The United Church’s own surveys concluded otherwise, but showed that it was facing serious challenges.113 Stewart Crysdale, who had conducted a number of those studies, reckoned that its organizational machinery had been designed to meet the rural conditions of the past, and was “singularly unsuited for dealing with modern social and personal problems” associated with urban life.114 Its structures assumed lines of authority and relationships that either

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no longer existed or no longer functioned as they had in the past. It was unclear what presbyteries, conferences, or the ‘Vatican’ (as the national leadership was sometimes called in jest) did for the church at the local level. The machinery was a mystery to some and a menace to others. And for those seeking religionless Christianity in the secular city, it was irrelevant.115 Two decades after church union, moderator J.R.P. Sclater claimed that his postbag was filled with letters on two issues in particular: whether the church “should, or should not, be solely an evangelistic power, dealing with the souls of men”; and who spoke authoritatively for the United Church, especially in cases where the proceedings of the General Council seemed at odds with regional and local church courts.116 The Commission on Church, Nation and World Order had considered presbyteries pivotal in implementing the United Church’s ambitious postwar agenda. But its assessment of how presbyteries were actually operating in the mid-1940s was hardly encouraging – and without well-functioning presbyteries, it predicted that the ­national body of the United Church would eventually become an association of “fairly independent congregations.”117 With the passing of another two decades, an organizational upheaval that transcended particular persons, boards, denominations, or even national borders brought that prediction closer to reality. The world, it seemed, was being turned upside down as lines of authority became horizontal rather than hierarchical, decision-making participatory rather than delegated to leaders, and action from the bottom-up rather than top-down. Authority was moving away from the centre, rather than toward it, and in the process, shifting more power to local congregations.118 The resulting turmoil left the national staff particularly exposed. Politicians and the general public could no longer confidently assume that United Church officials spoke for its members. Once the General Council was over, the force of its pronouncements was weakened by the disclaimer of the disaffected: “they don’t speak for me.”119 Church executives like Mutchmor had shown a smooth hand when they operated the machinery. “When I thought I had a good case, enjoyed my executive’s or board’s approval, and was able to fit a special endeavour into my generally crowded programme, I went to work,” he wrote in his memoirs.120 Even when people vehemently disagreed with or criticized Mutchmor, claims John Webster Grant, they seldom accused him of misstating the church’s policy.121 The

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same could not be said of national staff who served after him. Those who expected the General Council and its executive to speak as one voice on behalf of the United Church were frustrated by officers who expressed differing opinions. Hord, for example, was often criticized by some for his impatience, while others admired his efforts to be a catalyst for social justice. Colleagues argued that all members of the United Church ought to be free to speak their minds on difficult issues – and this included its officers, who were more than its “official spokesmen” (or its “intellectual eunuchs” as someone had described them).122 “Damn fools,” a minister who studied at Emmanuel College recalled principal Earl Lautenschlager fuming as he lambasted na­ tional executives for joining secular critics in complaining about organized religion; they were going to “break their neck kicking their asses so hard.” But he was also worried as he observed the impact of the changing times on students preparing for church leadership. His advice to those who were unsure about whether God was dead or Jesus was living was to get out of the ministry and find a job elsewhere.123 Some apparently did just that. The United Church had enjoyed an upsurge in candidates for ministry during the boom years of the 1950s. However, during the 1965-66 academic year alone, nearly 15 per cent of its candidates dropped out.124 By 1970 there was welcome news that many ministers who had resigned from the ministry or left a church position for a secular placement were quietly returning to the pastorate. But there was no denying the devastating losses: there were 1,121 fewer congregations in 1968 than in 1960, and only 280 students studying for full-time ministry, compared with 668 eight years earlier.125 The numbers reflected the impact that criticism of organized religion had on professional ministry.126 A contributor to Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot provocatively contrasted the manly figure he saw as the ideal clergyman with the typical minister, who was “paid to be good” and thus not treated as other men. As a result the typical minister had become a “ladies’ man” – his language free of obscenities, his thinking about sex more like a woman’s than a man’s, and a teadrinker at social functions where no liquor was served.127 A man who had decided to leave the ministry after twenty years poignantly described his professional crisis: worship was irrelevant, the focus of church members was on preserving the building, and there was little respect for his professionalism despite long hours of work.128

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A Commission on the Church’s Ministry in the Twentieth Century was formed to respond to the “growing sense of frustration amongst congregations, presbyteries, and ministers as they seek to actualize the church’s ministry in our changing society.”129 Its meetings were described as tense, as members struggled with their conviction that the state of the church demanded radical change.130 The report’s call for a less hierarchical model of ministry was bound to cause difficulties as it vied with the very different understanding of the church and its ministry in the Principles of Union. G. Campbell Wadsworth, retired in Montreal after many years in the ministry, was dismayed as he compared the two, so different that only with difficulty could he see them as “springing from the mind of one and the same Church.” If it truly represented the thinking of the United Church, he regretfully concluded, “we might as well speedily surrender all hope of further Reunion in our time.”131 Surprisingly even the new paradigm for ministry proposed by the commission in its controversial set of recommendations failed to appreciate fully the revolution in church life that women were about to trigger. The new theological understanding of the church’s relationship to the world had seeped into the vocabulary of those who prepared the report, but inclusive language evidently had not. The church was a place where “men are invited to grow as sons of God rooted in a Christian community and sustained by the Christian hope”; it was “so ordered that it can fulfill its role in God’s intentions for man.” The report played down distinctions between ordained ministers and the laity by emphasizing the ministry of the whole people of God, but still presented a picture of the church’s personnel as male.132 Women had always been active in the United Church’s congregational life, but were under-represented and less visible elsewhere in its organizational structures. Although the United Church had decided to ordain women in 1936, three decades later there were relatively few female ministers. There were inklings of change after 1964, when the way was cleared for married women to be ordained. That year the eloquence of the female commissioners to General Council caught Forrest’s attention. Even so, he opined that although United Church women were “at least a hundred years ahead of where their sisters are in most of the great churches of Christendom,” the General Council was “still a man’s world.”133 That too was about to change, though slowly at first.

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A series of events coincided to change the face of the United Church’s administrative and pastoral leadership. The first major overhaul of its governing structures since 1925 was already underway when serious negotiations with the Anglican Church commenced. The process that led to restructuring was set in motion in 1960, at a time when the United Church still hoped to escape the general decline that churches in the uk and continental Europe had experienced. The task of the Long Range Planning Committee was to study the planning procedures of other North American churches and to assess the adequacy of its own structures and policies “to meet the needs of a growing Church in a changing world.”134 By the time the plan was implemented, over a decade had passed and the United Church was facing a drastically different situation: it was no longer growing and the world had changed in ways that those preparing the report had not imagined. To improve effectiveness, the plan called for reducing the number of boards at the national level from twelve to five (no more than could be counted on the fingers of one hand, as it was sometimes explained). An ambitious two-year experiment was proposed as the first step. A new Division of Congregational Life and Work was established to coordinate the work of four boards.135 The transition from boards to divisions coincided with changes in a number of high-profile executive positions.136 The confusion of connecting new positions with new personnel likely reinforced suspicion in some quarters that a nameless ‘someone’ in Toronto was changing their church. Sadly, ‘divisions’ seemed an apt term to describe the lack of communication among the new units. Congregations experienced them as insular and resistant to influence, further weakening connections between them. The gradual loss of familiar names for the functions of evangelism, social service, home missions, and Christian education was also alienating; like the names of the persons associated with them, they seemed to vanish with the creation of the Division of Mission in Canada that was responsible for them after restructuring.137 Changing the descriptions of the divisions and their assigned responsibilities was to prove far more than cosmetic. Harold Vaughan, who witnessed events as former secretary of the Board of Colleges and Secondary Schools, claimed that restructuring coincided with the “diminished role of the dominant figure and leaders.” Thereafter national church staffers were “increasingly treated as if they were civil servants rather than executive secretaries and leaders.”138

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Before the 1960s the “dominant figure” had nearly always been male. The shortage of men preparing for ministry had been a persistent problem for the United Church from the outset, with the healthy supply of candidates for ordination in the 1950s an anomaly. A decade later, with enrolment dropping in theological colleges and discouraged clergy leaving in significant numbers, women found a more welcome reception than in the past as they made their way to the classrooms of the United Church’s theological colleges and eventually to church pulpits.139 Women began to insist on not only visibility but also a voice. For instance, as part of the negotiations that saw the creation of the uc w, the wms transferred $6.5 million in a combination of funds and property holdings to the newly integrated Board of Missions in exchange for a promise of more representation on committees, especially at the national level. The first issue of the Observer for 1962 launched “The United Church Woman” as a regular section of the magazine, and the masthead soon listed names in the role of women’s editor, including regular contributors Grace Lane and Patricia Clarke. The editorial voice of women was amplified in 1966 when the women’s editor became the associate editor, with Clarke named to the new position. But many women were left wondering whether the losses from the merger were greater than the gains.140 Meanwhile the situation of women in the church was still far from equitable. In one of the Observer’s early pieces on the feminist movement, Barbara Bagnell reported that many feminists saw the Christian church as a bastion of male superiority, and had decided therefore to leave it.141 Feminist theology combined with the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, instituted in 1967, to galvanize women in the United Church. Their numbers at meetings of presbytery, conference, and General Council had increased substantially by 1970. In fact, Forrest surmised that presbytery might soon be comprised of women, ministers, and a few laymen. “In the headquarters establishment,” however, it was “still a man’s world,” he reported. Women served as associate secretaries only where the Manual mandated a female appointment. Although most female members of the United Church were married, it appeared to Forrest that only single women were considered for senior positions. Only one senior secretary was female, and restructuring had reduced her office in size and status.142 Those who later claimed that feminists had “destroyed the church” were partly right.143 As women assumed leadership roles,

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they generated further changes to the United Church’s organizational culture. Often preferring more fluid networks and coalitions, they joined other critics of the United Church’s complex hierarchical structure; they were among those who hoped to change the United Church by helping it to “fail gracefully.” In doing so they believed that they were simply fixing machinery that had been designed and broken by men. By strengthening the church’s capacity for change, women were quarrelling with the ‘fathers’ to be sure – not only with their understanding of mission but also with the male assumptions embedded in the church’s organizational structures. But women, and especially the feminists among them, were also quarrelling with the ‘mothers’ of the  church, whose sense of vocation had been rooted in Christian homes. Those most dismayed by the growing feminist influence were the men and women who remembered the United Church of 1925 and whose hearts still resided there. One of the major challenges facing those who operated the denominational machinery was how to deal with the sheer volume of business. “A Church Court Forced into Preoccupation with Its Own Housekeeping” summed up in a subheading the Observer’s withering assessment of the 1964 General Council. The meetings had been socially overwhelming and spiritually uninspiring. People tended to focus on and debate trivial matters; the assembly had “tinkered well”; the “machinery creaked”; and the average commissioner had been confused by the complexity and sheer volume of the business to be done. Just when it seemed as though the church was on the verge of moving forward, something negative nearly always happened: “The wrong direction was taken. The amendments were confused. Things got referred to three boards, five committees, and seven conferences.”144 Four years later there were signs of change. To encourage wider participation, some of the business at the 1968 General Council was conducted in table groups rather than by formal debate. John Webster Grant suggests that assumptions about decision-making were changing as well: gut feeling was valued more than intellect, and relying on precedents (deemed the unwelcome influence of past elites) was rejected. There was a dismantling of traditional authority as “experts, including clergy, lost caste.” It marked for Grant an abrupt and radical change in how the United Church conducted its

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business.145 The gathering was variously described at the time as both “reckless” and lacking in “thorough discussion” of its decisions.146 Yet the 1968 General Council that some found frustrating was exciting and exhilarating to others. (One woman admitted that she had found it both infuriating and satisfying.)147 It made significant decisions related to worship, ministry, and the role of the church in the field of social welfare. It recommended that the Canadian government reduce sales of war materials to the United States, provide a guaranteed annual income, and designate 2 per cent of g n p to foreign aid. It also called for the end of bombing in Vietnam, recognition of Israel by Arab countries, resettlement of Arab refugees, population control, and sale of the church’s shares in a bank that supported apartheid in South Africa.148 Even though there was ­silence on the old moral issues, the United Church was clearly not about to pull back from speaking out on major social concerns, even when it meant breaking with the diplomatic style of past ­policy reports.149 The focus on what was new tended to obscure the ways in which the United Church managed to provide continuity and stability in key areas. The restructured machinery had familiar features – too many for some. There were still seemingly innumerable committees at all levels of church life and too much information to absorb. But, paradoxically, the United Church’s expansive administrative structure, so often blamed for the ills that beset the denomination, may have helped to safeguard its survival during a time of rapid change. The church was still large enough and strong enough to absorb shocks. Its conciliar model of governance was in a sense like a bridge, designed to withstand pressure and even damage in one section without collapse of the entire edifice. Its leaders were positioned to detect problems at one level and solve them before the entire system crumbled. To an extent the United Church was thus able to mediate the impact and pace of social and theological changes. At least when working effectively, the conciliar system meant that different levels experienced adaptation at varying paces, often with outcomes that differed as well. It thus operated as what ecologist C.S. Holling calls a dynamic hierarchy:150 it provided support for innovation at some levels, while elsewhere offering stability from the impact of experiments that were shaking the system; and it mitigated the effects of “excessive exuberance.”151 The instinct to preserve was strong in the lay leadership of congregations, especially in rural

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areas. Ministers provided pastoral care as before. At the national level, officials in a few key positions supplied a measure of continuity as well. Long, for instance, had served as the United Church’s third general secretary for nearly two decades by the time he retired in 1972. Forrest was editor of the Observer for almost a quarter of a century when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1978. Forrest had an ear for hearing what was being whispered in the pews about controversial stands the United Church had taken, and offered space for both sides to air their views. His communications strategy not only boosted the magazine’s circulation figures during the 1960s but also helped its readers to anticipate and thus adapt to change.152 No one who took the time to read the Observer during those years could legitimately complain of not knowing that change was afoot. As those who founded the United Church could attest, major change does not come without risk. A process of change does not always end happily. While an adaptive cycle can renew a system, a maladaptive cycle can result in “cascading collapse,” says Holling. Adaptive change can be devastating to organizations, if the slow pace makes it seem as though nothing is happening, or when the process is so complex and highly contested that no agreement on action can be reached. Some systems are prone to what he calls a rigidity trap where novelty is smothered because the system’s high resilience makes it resistant to adaptation.153 Especially at risk are systems where past success has allowed stresses to accumulate, adds Homer-Dixon. “The longer people sustain a social, economic or ecological system in its growth phase, the sharper, harder, and more destructive its ultimate breakdown will be.”154 It gives one pause to consider the United Church’s adaptive cycle in these terms. Did its earlier successes, the postwar revival for instance, create the conditions for its later malaise? Did its response to the 1960s allow it to “fail gracefully,” or only to postpone the reckoning? Homer-Dixon tells of a conversation with Holling where they spoke of the threat of deep collapse: “a pan-caking implosion of the entire system as higher-level adaptive cycles collapse, which causes progressive collapse at lower levels.” A situation where many cycles “become synchronized and peak together” is particularly prone to this danger.155 If the higher levels of the United Church’s conciliar system were to collapse, would a pan-caking ­implosion follow? Was R.C. Chalmers right when he predicted in 1970, “if you close headquarters down, I can see the whole thing breaking up”?156

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Still, Ernest Long, whose gloomy warnings had made headlines a few years before, seemed heartened by what he had witnessed in 1968. He commended the delegates to the General Council that year for demonstrating “a real concept of the outward thrust of the church into the world” for the “first time.”157 His declaration perhaps startled those who assumed that the United Church had been concerned for social redemption from the outset. Had it not always called for building the Kingdom of God and Christianizing the social order? Yet Long had caught a glimpse of something new: the machinery was more and more being driven by those whose approach to mission focused on the world outside the building that housed the congregation rather than the faith and fellowship of the people gathered in it. It was a recognition that the United Church’s social impulse was changing as much (and perhaps with a greater impact on what it meant to be United) as its methods of evangelism. Insiders and outsiders alike sensed that the United Church was reforming. The contours of the emerging church were not to everyone’s liking – but then again, neither was the United Church that had been formed in 1925. Some were as disappointed with what they saw taking shape as the non-concurring Presbyterians had been with that earlier union. They felt as though they no longer belonged to the same church – and they hadn’t even voted to leave it. Among them were some its most committed members, who feared that the United Church was being destroyed by those trying to mend it. The underlying assumptions of the founding vision were giving way to new ways of thinking about faith and community. It was clear that adaptation would be easier said than done. Even the most optimistic conceded that, given the general decline of organized religion, a turnaround would take time.158 Conference presidents from across Canada interviewed in 1970 expected the situation in their region to get worse before it got better. “We ain’t seen nothing yet,” predicted the president of British Columbia Conference. He warned that there would be nothing left of the United Church unless it figured out how to do ministry in “a world without churches.” There was no such thing as “one congregation” anymore, since most were divided between groups wanting at least three different things: to be activists, to have a quiet place to remember the past, or to learn about their faith.159 So was there an “upside of down” to the panarchy of the 1960s? It was hard to find one at the time. But given the bleak forecasts for

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organized religion during that period, perhaps it should be said that simply surviving was an achievement in and of itself. The United Church discovered more resilience than many had given it credit for: its congregations were not willing to die quickly or quietly. More significantly, it emerged with a sharper sense of what it stood for and what was holding it together. No longer could the United Church be counted as evangelical, in the contemporary meaning of the term – but neither could it truthfully be called Unitarian. Though it was perhaps moving away from what Mathers had described as the ­ ­“extreme centre,” its formal theological framework was still rooted in a Christocentric liberalism. ‘Being United’ still allowed a freedom to explore that was discouraged in many other faith traditions. However, the appeal of eclectic theologies and the persistence of the  u crf were  indications that the United Church was becoming more self-­ consciously diverse. Moreover, at least for the time being, its machinery would not be run with episcopal parts borrowed from Anglicans. Few had done more than Donald Mathers to provide theological resources for the United Church as it began to come to grips with the demise of Christendom in Canada. His death from leukemia in 1972 at the age of fifty-one was a blow not only to Queen’s Theological College where he had served as professor and principal for nineteen years but also to a denomination that had turned to him for theological leadership.160 The order of service for his funeral at Chalmers Church reflected his appreciation for tradition: the organ music was by J.S. Bach; the readings were from Isaiah 40 and Romans 12; the congregation sang Psalm 23 (to the tune Crimond) and “Now Thank We All Our God.” But the words of assurance were from The Word and the Way, which Mathers had written for the controversial New Curriculum a decade earlier. Characterizing the book as “almost a devotional statement of the Christian faith” and “an intimate, deeply personal statement of Donald’s inner story,” the presiding minister drew from it to remind mourners of what Mathers had “written into our hearts and minds with his pen and his life.” Those gathered then heard him read what Mathers had written in the chapter on “The Resurrection and the Life to Come”: “Those who believe in Christ have already passed from spiritual death into spiritual life (John 5:24). Physical death still remains but it has now been robbed of its sting. To the Christian death becomes an occasion for the exercise of faith, and an opportunity for love to transform the painful necessity of dying into a willing act of giving up and of self-surrender to God.”161

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The United Church was by then dealing with its own painful necessities. During the 1960s it turned a corner and gingerly made its way into a world that no longer reserved a place of prominence for organized religion. It stepped toward that future with new models of worship and fellowship, a new creed, and a new organizational design. A new mission drove its agenda. It no longer considered itself a national church in the old sense. Instead it had a ministry in and to the world that came with a new emphasis on social action. The crisis kindled a difficult but unavoidable conversation about its identity that continues today. And in that exchange both conservers and innovators planted seeds of memory and hope, beneath the hard soil of an indifferent culture, for another generation to harvest.162

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Epilogue Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets

The result of a “lamentable misunderstanding” was how Walter Bryden of Knox College described the United Church as he defended his decision to remain a Presbyterian. “The Church is and shall remain the Church of God just in so far as she is not indigenous with the soil of any country, or determined by the habits, thoughts and customs of any people ... The true Church belongs to no age and no country.”1 Those who had founded the United Church disagreed. They saw adaptation to time and place as a sign of vitality, and ­believed that they had been called to work together to build the Kingdom of God in Canada. As the fortieth anniversary of church union approached, the United Church appeared to have made remarkable progress toward that end. Morale was so high that “outsiders often complain that we act as if we were the church in Canada,” wrote John Webster Grant in 1963.2 By then most of the old wounds left by the controversy over its founding had healed. Relations between the two churches were so friendly that a local newspaper reporter had the temerity to ask the minister of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Kitchener whether the United Church was “Presbyterian.” Answering “yes,” former moderator Findlay G. Stewart explained that those who had continued as the Presbyterian Church in Canada had resisted church union because they “were opposed to organizing the Kingdom of God.” But the United Church had since “evolved,” as he put it, and the “old Methodist traditions had not remained in the fabric.” Asked whether

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the time had come for Presbyterians to join the United Church, Stewart retorted that it was “just as fair to ask why the United Church doesn’t return to Presbyterianism in name since it already has in fact.” He predicted that union might happen within a generation, further evolving from present day co-operation to a “natural birth.”3 What followed was not an institutional evolution that would bring the Presbyterian and United churches together, but a cultural revolution that hit both with a speed and severity that stunned observers. Essayist Robert Fulford saw the decline of organized religion as a prime illustration of the impact of the new style of social criticism on Western societies: no consideration had been given to what would replace discarded ideas and institutions. “Under the pressure of criticism, great institutions vanish – not actually (they’re still there, in tangible form) but imaginatively.”4 Leaders of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution hadn’t burned churches or killed priests – they just ignored them. Meanwhile, Canadian Protestant churches, and the United Church in particular, “simply crumbled under the weight of the attacks against them from within and without.” In 1960 almost everyone took them seriously, but a decade later hardly anyone did. “Once, not long ago, it mattered what the United Church said about liquor laws or Sunday closing or birth control; now nobody cares, unless he’s professionally involved.” Fulford saw it as an example of how things change “without announcement, without decision, without any clear line of demarcation.”5 Smaller denominations and independent congregations have the luxury of declining or even disappearing free of public scrutiny. Not so the United Church. As Canada’s largest Protestant church, it drew much media attention when its influence began to wane. Its statistical decline is often interpreted as a consequence of a faulty approach to theology or flawed assumptions about the task of the church – the impending doom that critics had forecast at the time of union. For instance, when historian Mark Noll asks “what happened to Christian Canada?,” he links its passing to the victory of the “modernistic social gospel” at the time of church union, which “fatally compromised” the ability of the founding traditions “to make any kind of a sharp Christian impact on Canadian thought, society, politics, or spirituality.”6 Was the making of the United Church a “tragic failure,” as some have claimed?7 Judged by the standard of what it hoped to become, perhaps so. Yet measured by what it accomplished in the attempt,

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one might offer a more charitable assessment; one could say it has been both a failure and a success. The early twentieth century was one of the few times in Canadian history when the church union experiment could have been attempted at all. The movement was launched during the late stages of western Christendom, an era when a symbiotic relationship between religion, politics, and culture was still assumed. The United Church adapted to the ethos of the early twentieth century by presenting itself as the church best suited to meet the spiritual needs of a young nation. With religious identity tied to nationalism, ‘made in Canada’ was a feature that gave the United Church a boost in a country looking for partners in nation-building. Not so later: pluralism, the privatization of spirituality, and the church’s own failure to find consensus loosened the customary connections between faith and community. The United Church was not only sharing the public arena with other religious groups but also seeing its influence on its own members compromised by cultural competitors who vied for their attention. In the new global village, its national particularity was a liability that made it difficult to contend with ethnic or transnational denominational rivals that had better name recognition outside Canada. Immigrants who had belonged to Methodist or Reformed churches before their arrival did not always find their way to the church that had been formed to unite them in Canada. The United Church is less racially diverse ­today than it was before adopting a new approach to mission in the 1960s.8 Channelling divided religious traditions into a united force was an exciting prospect for the founders of the United Church. However, what they saw as the obvious path to the Kingdom of God appeared less certain to spiritual pilgrims a few decades later. As time passed, the church’s call to Christianize the social order seemed arrogant and paternalistic. The heady optimism that saw the 1925 union as the first in a series of unions that would end denominational divisions in Canada was chastened by the failure of union negotiations with the Anglican Church. Its organizational structure, once advantageous in coordinating scarce resources to help struggling congregations in small towns and rural communities, was less effective in a decentralized society. Even its community spirit seemed old-­fashioned, a vestige of village life that was unappealing to urban sophisticates accustomed to anonymity.

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The new world order that materialized after the Second World War was a precarious place for mainstream Protestantism in Canada. The religious neutrality espoused by the state gave an unintended advantage to religious groups that had not tried to weave their religious principles into public life or relied on the association of church attendance with good citizenship. A situation in which religion, politics, and culture were no longer mutually reinforcing was uncharted territory for the United Church as it grappled with the realization that creating a Christian Canada was unlikely – and perhaps even undesirable – in a pluralistic and segmented world. But would an ‘un-united’ Protestantism have done more to forestall the end of Christendom? After all, neither the Presbyterian name nor the more conservative theology of the Presbyterian Church was enough to ward off a statistical decline as steep as that experienced by the United Church.9 One can only speculate whether the Methodist and Congregational churches would have fared better if union had not happened; however, there is little cause for optimism if the situation of their denominational counterparts in the United States and Britain is any indication. Then was the making of the United Church a mistake? The answer to that question is not as obvious as the non-concurring Presbyterians believed. Its formation coincided with the late stages of what historian Jeffrey Cox describes as an institutional revival in Western Christianity. In his view, the attempt by churches to extend their influence was not a mistake, since they succeeded in shaping the politics, social welfare, and public values of their generation.10 It would be hard to find a more stellar illustration of that institutional revival than the United Church. Though Canada’s democratic ideals and social welfare policies have since become separated from their Christian roots, the United Church did help to lay the groundwork for them. It has also left its mark on Canadian life in more subtle ways. Surveying religious life in God’s Dominion, Ron Graham described the United Church as “the most Canadian of churches,” noting that “like Canada, its strengths may be the same as its weaknesses: diversity, tolerance, compromise, humility, practicality, and niceness. Truth gets written by committee, mystery gets lost in the negotiation, decency gets translated into dullness, and the spirit gets hamstrung by the bureaucracy.”11 Was the United Church helping to create a new national identity for Canada or uncritically reflecting it? It is fair to say it did both.

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By the end of the 1960s it was evident that Canada was “rescripting” the role of religion in public life.12 The importance of faith was still acknowledged, but there was little attention paid to the particular contributions of one church or another. The new Canada wanted no church – Catholic or Protestant – as its conscience; there was little state interest in the United Church’s offer of friendly service. It was one among many religious groups in the public arena – regarded as no more or less than they, but having no special status as an aspiring national church. It found itself written out of the story of Canada’s past, relieved not only of its illusions but also of many of its ambitions and cherished notions. A sightseer at Expo 67, the international exposition in Montreal that coincided with Canada’s Centennial celebrations, would have caught a glimpse of the new public place of religion in a pluralistic Canada. Gary Miedema describes in fascinating detail what went on behind the scenes as the organizers’ initial proposal for one pavilion that would display religion as a unifying force was turned into three – with two of them illustrating the growing divide within Christianity between ecumenical and evangelical Protestants. Roman Catholics and mainstream Protestants worked together on what was called the Christian pavilion. Visitors discovered to their surprise that there was no explicit reference to churches, Jesus Christ, or even God in an exhibit that was designed to raise questions about faith rather than provide answers.13 The growing confidence of evangelical Protestants was signalled by their refusal to support the Christian pavilion. Disappointed that Expo 67 organizers rejected their repeated attempts to set up a pavilion for Billy Graham,14 they found a back door into the exposition with a proposal for a “scientific” display. Their Sermons from Science pavilion was approved on the condition that there be no proselytizing (a ban that Miedema says was completely ignored).15 Then there was the Jewish pavilion, which “offered beauty and rest, not shock and provocation,” and “announced a positive, inclusive message that fit very well with the exposition’s larger theme.”16 It was this pavilion – representing a non-Christian minority – that might well have come closest to modelling how the state preferred faith to be put on public display in the new Canada. Meanwhile the Presbyterian and United churches were rescripting the stories of their past. In 1965, as Presbyterians celebrated the ­anniversary of their resistance to church union, theologian Joseph

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McLelland complained that his church had wandered in the wilderness for forty years, using the memory of the controversy in a futile attempt to create a confessional church mystique and an evangelical ethos17 – raising doubts thereby about the United Church’s pedigree. As for the United Church, it had insisted that the Reformed and Methodist confessional traditions had been duly blended in church union, and initially defended its own claim to have remained evangelical. Following the social revolution of the 1960s, however, not as  many seemed to care about preserving past identities. In 1968 Northrop Frye noted a change in the perception of time, which was eroding old assumptions of continuity between past and present, especially among radicals influenced by the New Left. There was, he maintained, a flight from the past as people anxiously tried to keep up to date, ridding themselves of unfashionable ideas and techniques in the process. To be released from the past was considered a necessary step toward a utopian future.18 The changing times forced (or freed, some would say) the United Church to reconsider how it told its own story. The drama of casting itself as Canada’s national church was over.19 A subtle revision of the past was soon detectable. The smallest of the three founding traditions enjoyed unaccustomed attention; both the right and left wings of the church appealed to Congregationalist ideals – radicals claiming freedom to dissent from creedal authority and conservatives taking heart in congregational autonomy. The evangelical roots of the progressive movement were grafted to the philanthropic work of home missions to show the United Church as the flowering of the Canadian social gospel movement. Missionaries became reformers providing education and health services in small communities. Gone too were the unfashionable moral battles that the public had associated previously with the United Church. Peace, human rights, and economic justice were the battles in the new “good fight.”20 The search for a prophetic past revealed new heroes – paradoxically, most of them from the Methodist tradition that had been downplayed after the controversy over church union to showcase the Presbyterian heritage. The radical wing of the social gospel, with its Christian socialist tinges and support for the labour movement, supplied critics of the dominant culture and the institutional church. Among them were Salem Bland, Nellie McClung, and J.S. Woodsworth, celebrated for their affinities to the utopian, feminist, and oppositional inclinations of the cultural revolution taking

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place.21 Making more room for the radical minority tended to ­diminish the role of the more moderate liberal evangelical majority who too had hoped to build the Kingdom of God – George Monro Grant, Nathanael Burwash, E.H. Oliver, even S.D. Chown and George Pidgeon.22 Those who grew up in the United Church in the 1940s and 1950s knew less about its prophetic past than one might suppose. Theologian Douglas John Hall attributed his “incipient notions of the political dimensions of Christian belief” to being the son of a socialist union man who was known to drink – behaviour frowned upon in the United Church congregation in southwestern Ontario where he grew up. He later learned of J.S. Woodsworth and Salem Bland, but thought of them as “exceptions.” The church that formed his early images of Christianity did not swim against the stream as they had. Instead it “gave every indication of supporting to  the  full the fundamental structures of society, namely, of the ­dominant culture.”23 Bill Phipps’s memories of growing up in the United Church in Toronto were similar. His parents observed the Lord’s Day and would not allow him to throw around a baseball or play street hockey on Sunday. The man who was to advance the idea of a moral economy during his term as moderator (1997–2000) divulged that he was unaware of the “social justice dimension of the Christian faith” until he worked in Brooklyn, New York, in 1964. “No one had told me about the Social Gospel tradition of the United Church of Canada, expressed in the ministry of such people as Salem Bland, J.S. Woodsworth, R.B.Y. Scott, and their fellow travellers.” He claims to have known “nothing of the church’s history of pursuing social justice for the poor, for immigrants, and for people of colour; nor of its requirement that we lobby governments and challenge oppressive corporate power.”24 By the 1960s the social gospel was apparently no better known in Winnipeg. Despite growing up in Transcona surrounded by ccf n dp supporters, Bill Blaikie admitted that he did not know “even loosely about the social gospel, about the connection between Christian activism and left-wing politics in Canada, about prophetic Winnipeg personalities in the United Church tradition,” such as J.S. Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles. “I didn’t know about the political dimension of the gospel because I was brought up in a Christian world view that saw itself as apolitical.” But that was changing by

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the time Blaikie arrived at the University of Winnipeg (the former United College) in 1970. When American minister and civil rights activist William Stringfellow spoke to students in one of his classes, he learned about a prophetic way of dealing with the world that “was neither religious liberalism nor evangelical authoritarianism.” Studying at Emmanuel College was another turning point both theologically and politically. When he graduated in 1977, he no longer considered his call to ministry as “something that contradicted my call to public life.”25 Having already won the n d p nomination in his riding by the time he was ordained a year later, he served as an m p for nearly three decades. The United Church’s response to the revolution of the 1960s did not reverse its statistical decline. Perhaps that was not its intention. Proponents of a more this-worldly Christianity saw preoccupation with membership and buildings as symptomatic of the malaise of religion. The radicals among them dared to loosen ties to the salvation establishment of the institutional church, and echoed Bonhoeffer in calling for a religionless Christianity. They were willing to risk theological anonymity and denominational invisibility when they took their faith into the wider community. Yet thousands of United Church congregations across Canada still believed themselves “called to be the Church,” as the New Creed put it, “to celebrate God’s presence.” Here too the changing times forced (or freed) the United Church to reconsider how faith was formed when its people gathered for fellowship as a Christian community. Variety in worship practices was more evident after the 1960s. Some congregations saw their release from the past as an opportunity to explore contemporary styles of worship,26 while others turned to earlier Christian traditions to broaden their Protestant roots. The liturgical renewal sparked by Vatican II was a reminder of the unity in worship in the Western church before the Reformation. Making the United Church in 1925 was possible because its founders refused to be tied to a fixed view of the church or the world. Its remaking grew out of a similar conviction: the church is not called to escape time and place, but to engage them more faithfully. If there are to be more chapters added to its story in the twenty-first century, the United Church will undoubtedly undergo another such metamorphosis.27 In a culture that has lost much of its Christian memory, re-Christianizing those affiliated with it may require as

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bold a venture as church union once seemed, with even more uncertainty about the outcome. Will its commitment to inclusion leave it with enough distinctiveness to thrive in a culture of diversity? Will the connections of its conciliar system be strong enough to hold its congregations together? Will there be enough people on a spiritual quest for meaning, guidance, and consolation who want to belong to an organized community of faith? Will sufficient memory of its past survive to sustain its renewal in either a post-Christian or postsecular future? Time will tell.

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Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to the memory of two scholars who were outstanding historians of religion in Canada and ordained ministers of the United Church of Canada. Both, in different ways, influenced the course of my professional life. All who teach Canadian religious history are indebted to John Webster Grant, but perhaps none more than I. When he retired, I followed him in the position he held at Emmanuel College. (For a time I was reminded of him each day when I opened my office door and sniffed a faint trace of his pipe tobacco!) Yet, in a way, everyone who explores the history of Christianity in Canada has ‘followed’ him. He continues to lead us in our study of the past with his wise words preserved in print. Writing a book about the United Church is not something I imagined myself doing when I started teaching at Emmanuel. That changed in the months following the death of N.K. Clifford. I had first heard of him at the University of Chicago, where he did postdoctoral research before accepting a position at the University of British Columbia. My teachers Jerald C. Brauer and Martin E. Marty were excited about the book on the United Church that he was planning, and occasionally remarked that I “must meet Keith.” When I finally did meet Keith, in the spring of 1984, he was putting the finishing touches on a different book, which was published the following year: The Resistance to Church Union in Canada. In the preface he tells of his decision to accept a collection of papers that Knox College principal Allan Farris had discovered in a vault. After suffering a series of heart attacks, Farris had feared he would be unable to complete the project and had persuaded Keith to work with

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the documents. The book that resulted took longer to finish than expected, but after more than a decade spent examining the opposition to church union, Keith resumed working on a history of the denomination that had supported it. Keith died of a heart attack as I was wrapping up work on Serving the Present Age. In the years since then, I am still grateful (most days!) to Brian Fraser, his friend and literary executor, for convincing me that Keith would have wished me to continue what he had started. My proximity to the United Church archives, at that time located in the adjacent building, made the decision seem less an opportunity than an obligation. With the blessing of Keith’s wife, Sabine, I became the beneficiary of several boxes of his papers – and thus ­indirectly, the  recipient of support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: most of the articles and archival documents had been photocopied for Keith by his researcher, Neil Semple, whose work was funded by a sshrc research grant. From casual conversations with Keith and familiarity with his published work, I know a bit about what he had in mind for his project. This is not the book he would have written — nor is it the one I expected to write when I started. The manuscript seemed to have a mind of its own, first pulling me back to the nineteenth century (the spirit of John Grant at work perhaps), and then plunging me further into the twentieth century than I initially wanted to go. In the end, it has come to reflect the issues that have been woven into my own teaching and research over the years: the practice of piety, faith and public life, and comparative themes in Canadian and American religious history. I have no idea what Keith might have called his book, but I’d like to think he would have appreciated the title of mine. We had in common the influence of Brauer and Marty. It was in their classes that I was introduced to the work of Sidney Mead, whose use of G.K. Chesterton’s description of the United States as “a nation with the soul of a church” made me wonder, as a graduate student, whether the same could be said of Canada. A Church with the Soul of a Nation is in part an answer to a question that I scribbled on a page many years ago. This book has been slow in the writing. Along the way, I have compiled a far longer list of persons and institutions to thank than I can name in a few paragraphs, but the following were involved at key points. Along with Brian Fraser and Sabine Clifford, the late

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Bob Smith, then bc Conference archivist, sifted through the mate­ rials that eventually came to me. I was well served by librarians (especially those who work in Emmanuel’s library) and the staff at  the archives of bc Conference, Queen’s University, Victoria University, the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and the United Church of Canada. I have been privileged to work with wonderful colleagues over the years. Co-teaching courses at the Toronto School of Theology with Brian Clarke, Alan Hayes, Brian Hogan, Stuart Macdonald, and Mark Toulouse has created occasions for a lively exchange of ideas about religion in Canada. Special thanks goes to Roger Hutchinson, who has been a constant source of support and encouragement, as well as a perceptive reader of the manuscript. His research on the social policies of the United Church was a happy match for my work on its history. Together we directed a project on the United Church, generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. that provided funding for several conferences, graduate student stipends, and research assistants. I received a grant from the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada, and occasional funding from Victoria University through Emmanuel College. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Among the students funded by the Lilly grant was Ian Manson, who has worked with me in various roles for more years than I care to calculate: as M.Div. and doctoral student, teaching assistant, research assistant, Lilly project coordinator, minister of my congregation for a number of years, and most recently reader of various drafts of the manuscript. Allison Barrett and Kate Crawford helped to organize the Clifford papers, retrieve and reproduce sources, and gather statistical data. Over the years, other student assistants, including Peg Allin, Chris Dowdeswell, Stephanie Klaassen, Ross Lockhart, Jonathan Seiling, and Jeralyn Towne, handled similar tasks. Teaching assistant Philip Gardner added the task of proofreading endnotes to his other responsibilities. In a class by herself as first reader of drafts is my friend Heather Gamester, whose candid suggestions immeasurably improved the narrative flow of the manuscript. The making of this book also

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involved many people whom I came to know only through email exchanges or telephone conversations. An example is Patricia Ingold, editorial administrator for The United Church Observer, who scanned images of magazine covers for some of the illustrations. One was a particular challenge because her only copy was in a bound volume, so she suggested that I try to find a loose copy. Eventually, that led me to phone Joanne Lucyk, Ray Hord’s sisterin-law, who took time to find the issue with a cover story about him in some family papers, at a time when she was grieving the recent death of her son. I am grateful for the practical support of managing editor Ryan Van Huijstee and the editorial staff of McGill-Queen’s University Press. They selected two superb readers, later identified in the prepublication material as Duncan McDowell and Mark Noll, who provided very different perspectives on the manuscript (including advice from one to shorten it and from the other to lengthen it). I took their suggestions seriously (even when it was difficult to please both!). The managing editor assigned my manuscript to Eleanor Gasparik, a copy editor who manages to be both exacting and delightful to work with, and recommended Lee Frew, an indexer who works with remarkable skill and speed. Finally, I want to thank Don Akenson, editor of the series in which this book appears, for assurances that, like George Rawlyk before him, he would be interested in considering my manuscript whenever I was ready to submit it. And as always, my gratitude to Matthew, who has been with me even longer than this book, and who continues to give me love, joy, and harmony.

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Notes

p rol og u e   1 John Wesley, Journals and Diaries II, vol. 19 of The Works of John Wesley, ed. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 67 (emphasis in the original).   2 E.H. Oliver, “The Place and Work of the United Church in the Life of Canada,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 19–20.   3 Sidney Mead, “The ‘Nation with the Soul of a Church,’” Church History 36, no. 3 (1967): 262.   4 John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 519.   5 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

c ha p t e r o n e   1 Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterson, eds., The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3:235; for her antipathy to church union (and Methodism), see 3:196–236.   2 John Webster Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union (London: Lutterworth Press, 1967), 21. C.T. McIntire, “Unity among Many: The Formation of the United Church of Canada, 1899–1930,” in Don Schweitzer, ed., The United Church of Canada: A History (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 13–4, counters the United Church’s claim to be the first union across confessional lines in the West with the formation of the Protestant Church in Prussia in 1817. The United Church’s founders no doubt agreed with church historian John T.

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306

  3

  4

  5

  6

Notes to page 4

McNeill (who had witnessed union as a Presbyterian) that the Prussian union had “produced a church without a general polity, a common worship, or a common statement of belief, and without any adequate sense of religious unity”; it could be called a union “only with reservations”; cited in Ruth Rouse and Stephen Neill, A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1517–1948, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 288. Claris Edwin Silcox, Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933), 127, and repeated, for example, in Randolph Carleton Chalmers, See the Christ Stand! A Study in Doctrine in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), 117. During the church union controversy, a few Presbyterian opponents insisted that the proposed doctrinal basis was not modern enough; see E. Lloyd Morrow, Church Union in Canada: Its History, Motives, Doctrine and Government (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1923), 215, who concluded that “there is scarcely anything in it of the truly modern point of view”; also see 155–6, 292. Kenneth McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5–24, describes the political dualism that allowed for Quebec and the rest of Canada to view nationality in different ways even after Confederation. Interestingly, Quebec in a sense was treated by the British as a distinct “confessional state,” to borrow the terminology that evolved after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended the devastating wars between Catholics and Protestants in Europe. Whereas in the seventeenth century the religion of the ruler determined the religion of the land, in democratic societies the religion of the majority of the population has since become the ­decisive factor. “‘I’m a Unionist Because I’m Canadian – Ralph Connor,’” St Thomas Times-Journal, 22 December 1924, United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series I (hereafter cited as Church Union Collection), United Church of Canada Archives (hereafter cited as uc a ) 83.063C, box 38 (scrapbook). S.D. Chown, “Church Union,” Christian Guardian, 28 June 1922, 13. This is from Chown’s infamous speech that was widely reported as referring to the new church as a “religio-political machine.” Chown did on occasion use the word “machine” to describe the church; for an example, see “That They All May Be One,” January 1912, 9, Samuel Dwight Chown Papers, uc a , box 3-67, a sermon preached prior to the Methodist vote in 1912 that referred to building “a machine of the highest efficiency for doing [Christ’s] work.”

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Notes to pages 4–6

307

  7 For example, in “That They All May Be One,” 7, Chown’s economic case for union was followed by a theological rationale that described the doctrinal statement as both “quite conservative in spirit” and “liberal.” For an analysis of the theological vs. the ‘non-theological’ factors, see George M. Morrison, “The United Church of Canada: Ecumenical or Economic Necessity?” (Bachelor of Divinity thesis, Emmanuel College of Victoria University, 1956); Edgar File, “A Sociological Analysis of Church Union in Canada” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1961); and W.E. Mann, “The Canadian Church Union,” in Religion in Canadian Society, ed. Stewart Crysdale and Les Wheatcroft (Toronto: Macmillan, 1976), 385–97.   8 “The Church and the Spirit,” [1924?], 4, Church Union Collection, box 29-653, one of many pamphlets issued by the Bureau of Literature and Information.   9 On revisions to the Basis of Union, amended in December 1914 and voted on the following year at the Presbyterian General Assembly, see Silcox, 170-2. 10 “Report of Home Missions and Social Service,” The United Church of Canada Year Book (1926), 330. 11 John Strachan, “Upper Canada: The National Church” in John Strachan: Documents and Opinion, ed. J.L.H. Henderson (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969), 91–2. 12 For a summary of the events leading up to disestablishment, see Terrance Murphy, “The English-Speaking Colonies to 1854,” in A Concise History of Christianity in Canada, ed. Terrence Murphy and Roberto Perin (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996), 134–7, 184–8. For an analysis of disestablishment, see John S. Moir, Church and State in Canada West: Three Studies in the Relation of Denominationalism and Nationalism, 1841–1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959), and John S. Moir, “‘Who Pays the Piper ... ’: Canadian Presbyterianism and ChurchState Relations,” in The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow: The Presbyterian Contribution to Canadian Life and Culture, ed. William Klempa (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 70–3. 13 John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in NineteenthCentury Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 153. 14 André Siegfried, The Race Question in Canada (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1906; ET 1907; 2nd ed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), 55. On ultramontane Catholicism in Quebec, see Susan Mann, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 115–31. Her opening sentence sums up well her assessment of its importance: “In the last third

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308

15 16

17 18

19

20

21

22 23

Notes to pages 6–8

of the nineteenth century the clergy was as much a means of national unity as the railroad.” When quotations are not indicated with an endnote number, it is because the same source will be quoted again shortly following the first quotation. The last quotation from the same source will be marked with a note number. Siegfried, 56. For a perceptive analysis of the social utility of religion before and after disestablishment, see William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1989), especially chapter 4. W. Stewart Wallace, The Growth of Canadian National Feeling (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1927), 2–3. On the ‘quasi-federalism’ in the constitutional settlement of 1867, with particular attention to the persistence of support for provincial autonomy in Ontario, see Robert C. Vipond, Liberty and Community: Canadian Federalism and the Failure of the Constitution (Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 1991). R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald B. Smith, Journeys: A History of Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Nelson, 2010), 303. The fragility of Confederation and the continuing tendency toward regionalism is ­discussed in chapter 14. Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 3–5, sees appeal of British imperialism as a way to dodge the threat of American expansion and thus an attempt to promote Canadian nationalism. John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (Toronto: Viking, 2008), 312–13. He highlights the role of Irish Protestants who “saw Canada through British blinkers”; he also notes that a “new school of historians emerged from 1867 determined to treat Confederation as a brand-new beginning” and thereby emphasizing its “Britishness.” Other cultures, including indigenous peoples and francophone, were marginal to this telling of the story (158–9). Ibid., 9, 107. J.R. Miller, “Anti-Catholicism in Canada: From the British Conquest to the Great War,” in Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930, ed. Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 40–1. Miller sees the competition between Protestant and Catholic missions to the West as a contributing factor to church union. On Irish

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24 25

26

27 28 29 30

31

32 33

Notes to pages 8–9

309

identity, see Mark G. McGowan, The Waning of the Green: Catholics, The Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 218–49. A.G. Bailey, Culture and Nationality (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), 182. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 156–7. Horsman describes the complex theories of monogenesis (that all humans shared the same parental origins) and polygenesis (that racial ­differences supported multiple origins of the species). The latter raised a serious problem for the biblical account of creation, 44–5. Ibid., 189–207, for a discussion of how theories of racial destiny were used to explain the declining numbers of American indigenous peoples. For Canada, see J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), esp. 83–115. On the advocacy of assimilation in support of humanitarian causes and imperialism, see Douglas A. Lorimer, “Race, Science and Culture: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities,” in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Brookfield, v t: Ashgate, 1996), 23–4. George W. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 48–9. Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart Inc., 1990), 53–5. Ibid., 48–50, 63–4. George Emery, The Methodist Church on the Prairies (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 3–19, argues that immigration changed the prairie region, and in doing so, changed the future of religion in Canada. Among the consequences for the Methodist Church was the relocation of leaders with strong links to Ontario (78–103). On the controversy in Manitoba, see Paul Crunican, Priests and Politicians: Manitoba Schools and the Election of 1896 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). Terence J. Fay, A History of Canadian Catholics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 136–45. See the statistical tables in David V.J. Bell, The Roots of Disunity: A Study of Canadian Political Culture, rev. ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 179, 182. On the challenges that the new type of immigrant posed for old assumptions about French-English duality, see Susan Mann, 171–3.

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310

Notes to pages 10–11

34 William T. Gunn, His Dominion (Toronto: Canadian Council of the Missionary Education Movement, 1917), 211. 35 John Webster Grant, “The Reaction of wasp Churches to Non-wasp Immigrants,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 1968, 3,5. 36 Brian Clarke, “English-Speaking Canada from 1854,” in A Concise History of Christianity in Canada, 293–96. For a discussion of the fears stoked by the Riel rebellions, the pope’s involvement in the dispute over the Jesuit Estates (1888), and Catholic schools in the west as expressions of French-Canadian ambitions in Quebec and beyond, see Susan Mann, 150–65. Fay, 155–75, analyzes the conflicts in terms of two competing forms of “messianism,” which created tensions between English- and French-speaking Catholics as well. 37 Quoted in Dominique Clift, The Secret Kingdom: Interpretations of the Canadian Character (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), 50–1, ­citing and translating Michel Brunet, La presence anglaise et les Canadiens (Montreal: Beauchemin, 1964), 177–8. 38 See W.G. Smith, Building the Nation: A Study of Some Problems Concerning the Churches’ Relation to the Immigrants (Toronto: Canadian Council of the Missionary Education Movement, 1922), published jointly by missionary agencies within the Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. The book includes an interesting chapter on immigrants from Asia (124–53) and a policy on immigrants developed by ­representatives of the uniting churches along with the Anglican and Baptist churches (195–7). Howard Palmer, “Mosaic versus Melting Pot? Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada and the United States,” International Journal 31, no. 1 (1975–76): 491–506, sees the “new type” as a variation of the old melting pot idea that was beginning to fall out of favour in the United States by the 1920s. He notes that while recent studies assume a “mosaic” approach to Canadian identity by the 1920s, the cultural pluralism that the metaphor implies found few proponents before the Second World War. Conspicuous among “new type” proponents that he mentions were some prominent supporters of church union, such as Nellie McClung, Walter Murray, E.H. Oliver, and J.S. Woodsworth. For McClung’s and Woodsworth’s views on assimilation, see Elizabeth Profit, “‘The Land of the Fair Deal’: Canadian Nationalism and the Social Gospel” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001), 27–41, 147–53. 39 Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 2. What he calls the rebirth of the United States after the wreckage of the Civil War was created out of

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Notes to pages 11–14

311

notions of regeneration, self-sacrifice, the superiority of the white race (purportedly based on science), and Anglo-Saxon civilization; see especially 1–11, 21–2, 92–110, 167–221, 276–355. 40 The influence of American social thought in Canada is illustrated by the books and magazine articles listed in J.S. Woodsworth, Strangers within Our Gates, or Coming Canadians, 2nd ed. (Toronto: The Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, 1909), 7: all were published in the United States. Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), discusses the influence of the eugenics movement. 41 N.W. Rowell, The Church and Immigration (Toronto: Canadian Council, [1908?]), 5. 42 Ibid., 6–8, 12. 43 William H. Magney, “The Methodist Church and the National Gospel, 1884–1914,” The Bulletin 20 (1968): 73–7, quoting Creighton’s editorial “Nationalizing the Foreigner,” Christian Guardian, 22 April 1908, 5. 44 J.W. Sparling, “Introduction” to Strangers within Our Gates, or Coming Canadians, 4. The emphasis is Sparling’s. 45 W.D. Reid, “The Non-Anglo-Saxon in Canada: Their Christianization and Nationalization,” Pre-Assembly Congress (Toronto: Board of Foreign Missions, 1913), 119–23. For similar fears expressed by a highly placed Methodist, see S.D. Chown, “How Shall the Foreigners Govern Us?” Christian Guardian, 23 February 1910, 8. The two men are interesting to compare: one was opposed to church union, the other a leading supporter. 46 J.R. Mutchmor, “Immigration 1914–15” (master’s thesis, 1917 [Columbia University]), 35; 61–2, 69. 47 Gunn, His Dominion, 217–23. 48 J. Lee Thompson and John H. Thompson, “Ralph Connor and the Canadian Identity,” Queen’s Quarterly 79, no. 2 (1972): 167–9. Barry Mack, “Modernity without Tears: The Mythic World of Ralph Connor,” in The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow, ed. Klempa, 150, makes the interesting observation that structurally, Ralph Connor’s novel The Man from Glengarry is the same as The Foreigner: the culturally backward Scottish Highlanders who change their old ways for liberal modernism and urban affluence were not unlike the Ukrainian immigrants who were expected to leave behind their old ways to become Canadian. 49 Ralph Connor, The Foreigner (Toronto: Westminster, 1909), 253. 50 Mary Vipond, “Canadian National Consciousness and the Formation of the United Church of Canada,” The Bulletin 24 (1975), 11, notes that a

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Notes to page 15

number of church union leaders gave at least lip service to the idea of a new Canadian identity after 1912. 51 Robert Falconer, “The Present Position of the Churches in Canada,” Constructive Quarterly 1 (1913): 278–80. 52 Paul T. Phillips, A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity, 1880–1940 (University Park, pa : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) is an exception. 53 See Rouse and Neill, 274–5, for the contribution of prominent Broad Churchmen to the concept of a comprehensive national church. 54 Phillips, Kingdom, 163. Arnold had a following among an eclectic and influential group of intellectuals who were interested in tapping the cultural potential of a “national church,” including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T.H. Green, John Robert Seeley, Arnold Toynbee, and B.F. Westcott. He also explores the influence of Fremantle’s “national church” on ecumenists, liberals, and social gospel proponents, such as William Reed Huntington, Richard Ely, Washington Gladden, W.T. Stead, and Hugh Price Hughes; cf. 164–70, 173–4, 179. 55 Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1970), 2: 280. 56 Fremantle, 282–4. It is such links between religion and empire that John Ralston Saul, 5, perhaps had in mind with his less charitable ­assessment of the outcome: “Throughout the Western world in the ­second half of the nineteenth century, middle-class, pew-chained and empire-obsessed civilizations gradually slipped toward the paranoid fears of the twentieth century.” 57 Paul T. Phillips, “The Concept of a National Church in Late NineteenthCentury England and America,” Journal of Religious History 14, no. 1 (1986): 31–2. 58 J.W. Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union, 29–30, observes that by simply substituting “Canada” for “United States” one could see William Reed Huntington’s proposal for a national church as “almost ideally suited to the Canadian problem and the Canadian tradition of Church and state.” However, Grant does not explore the connections between Fremantle and Huntington that Phillips describes in A Kingdom on Earth. His proposal drew some initial interest in Canada, particularly among members of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity; see Phillips, A Kingdom on Earth, 171n32, whose presidents included Presbyterian William Caven and Methodist S.D. Chown. 59 On Grant’s influence on religion and culture in Canada, see D.B. Mack, “George Monro Grant: Evangelical Prophet” (PhD diss., Queen’s University,

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60

61

62 63 64

65 66

67 68 69

70 71

Notes to pages 15–17

313

1992) and Barry Mack, “George Monro Grant and the Lost Centre,” Touchstone 12–1 (1994): 30–43. Barry Mack, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, s.v. “Grant, George Monro,” 13:404, notes that Grant was influenced by Arnold through Norman McLeod, as does Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1991), 156–7, 198; also see D.B. Mack, “George Monro Grant: Evangelical Prophet,” 94–106. Mack notes that Grant’s description of McLeod applied to himself as well: “He believed that a church should aim at including all the Christians in the land and thus be truly national ... and that the church should aim at being coextensive with the religious life of the nation” (95). Cited in William Grant and Frederick Hamilton, Principal Grant (Toronto: Morang and Company, 1904), 155–6, and F.A. Peake, “Movements toward Christian Unity in the Post-Confederation Period,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 9, no. 4 (1967): 97–9. G.M. Grant, “Organic Union of Churches: How Far Should It Go?” Canadian Methodist Magazine 10 (September 1884): 245. Ibid., 251–5. G.M. Grant, Sermon Preached before the Synod of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island (Halifax: James Bowes and Sons, 1866), 17–18, George Monro Grant Papers, Queen’s University Archives. Berger, 31–2. Ibid., 219–26. For Grant’s assumptions about assimilation and AngloSaxon culture, see Allan Smith, “The Thought of George Monro Grant,” Canadian Literature 83 (Winter 1979): 90–116. Grant and Hamilton, 500–2. Clarence Mackinnon, Reminiscences (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1938), 136. Richard Allen, The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 207–18; he speculates that Bland would have been dismayed by the conservative tone of some of “his idol’s” social and economic views (212). Also see A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979), 216–22. Grant and Hamilton, 439. John S. Moir, “From Sectarian Rivalry to National Vision: The ­Contribution of Maritime Presbyterianism to Canada,” in The Contri­ bution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada, ed. Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston:

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Notes to pages 17–18

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 162. Moir notes that by the 1870s a new generation of ministers committed to a national vision of the Presbyterian Church had appeared: a “clerisy” operating as a “family compact” in educational circles. 72 Douglas F. Campbell, “A Group, a Network and the Winning of Church Union in Canada: A Case Study in Leadership,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 25, no. 1 (1988): 41–66, provides bio­ graphical details about the members and how they combined their educational influences to effect a takeover of the organizational structure of the Presbyterian Church. In a surprising omission, Campbell does not include “King Arthur” among the members who lost faith in the unionist cause (54–5). On D.M. Gordon’s about-face on church union, see ­chapter 2 below. 73 Mackinnon, Reminiscences, 105. 74 The formation of the group is described in Mackinnon, Reminiscences, 105–8. It is not clear from Mackinnon’s account whether Gandier was an original member of the club (which at first was limited to ten): Mackinnon prefaced his account of Gandier’s involvement with the proviso, “A ­notable name must be added.” Moir’s discussion of the Round Table notes their important contributions to Canadian public life and emphasizes Grant’s influence on them, although he wrongly credits Grant, rather than Gordon, with the organization of the club; see “From Sectarian Rivalry,” 166. 75 John Dow, Alfred Gandier: Man of Vision and Achievement (Toronto: The United Church Publishing House, 1951), 98; also cited in Kenneth Cousland, “A Brief History of the Church Union Movement in Canada,” in Our Common Faith, Thomas Buchanan Kilpatrick (Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1928), 5. 76 Dow, 54. Privately, Grant’s opinion of Gandier appears to have been less enthusiastic. To his wife, Grant described Gandier as “a first-rate teacher of the second class. He will never rise to the first – neither from thinking power, nor from spiritual insight, nor from oratorial talent.” Still, he added, he wished that there were more like him. Mack says that Grant’s influence on Gandier was evident in the latter’s inaugural address at Knox College a few years later; see Mack, “Evangelical Prophet,” 358–9. 77 Alfred Gandier, “Church Union,” Theologue 10, no. 4 (1899): 114–15. 78 G.M. Grant, “The Outlook of the Twentieth Century in Theology,” American Journal of Theology 6, no. 1 (1902): 15. 79 Clarence Mackinnon, “The Compensations of Union,” Theologue 12, no. 1 (November 1900): 167–70.

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Notes to pages 19–20

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80 James G. Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 115. 81 Brian Fraser, Church, College, and Clergy: A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994 (Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 124–6. 82 David R. Murray and Robert A. Murray, The Prairie Builder (Edmonton: NeWest Publishers, 1984), 135–56, describe his leadership in the church and involvement in the union movement. 83 N.K. Clifford, “The Interpreters of the United Church of Canada,” Church History 46, no. 2 (1977): 203–7, notes Morton’s connections to key ­leaders in the church union controversy and the influence of his case for the inevitability of church union. 84 Mackinnon, Reminiscences, 174–5, describes the advice of Walter Murray, “the family mentor,” as instrumental in his decision to return to Halifax. 85 Clifford, “The Interpreters of the United Church of Canada,” 212–13. 86 Nathanael Burwash, “To the Members of the Methodist Ecumenical Conference,” [1911?], 3, Nathanael Burwash Papers, uc a , box 8-107. 87 Nathanael Burwash, “Our Federated Divinity Schools,” Christian Guardian, 17 October 1894, 661. 88 R.J. Wilson, Church Union after Three Years (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1929), 13–15, credits such voluntary associations as the y mc a , y wc a , etc., as contributing factors in “the breakdown of exclusiveness.” Silcox, 73–102, describes the growth of co-operation in these activities, noting the urge to present a united front against the influence of Catholicism as a motive in some cases. Siegfried, 57–8, also saw the church union movement as motivated by Protestant fear of “the Roman peril,” despite ­“outward courtesy”: to this observer from France it appeared that “Catholicism, the common enemy, reminds them periodically of the need for united action if not for unity.” 89 On the developing bureaucracy in the Presbyterian Church, see Brian Fraser, The Social Uplifters: Presbyterian Progressives and the Social Gospel in Canada, 1875–1915 (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988), 64–6; for Methodism, see John Thomas, “‘A Pure and Popular Church’: Case Studies in the Development of the Methodist ‘Organizational’ Church, 1884–1925” (PhD diss., York University, 1991). On the significance for church union of relationships between leaders involved in voluntary associations, see Douglas F. Campbell, “Ecumenists and Entrepreneurs: A Study of Coalition Leadership,” Journal of Canadian Studies 27, no. 3 (1992): 28–46.

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Notes to pages 21–4

  90 The Canadian Society of Christian Unity was formed in 1898. George Grant and William Caven preceded Chown as the second and third presidents of the organization.   91 Magney, 88–9.   92 See Phyllis D. Airhart, “Ordering a New Nation and Reordering Protestantism, 1967–1914,” in The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1790 to 1990, ed. George A. Rawlyk (Burlington, on: Welch, 1990), 98–138, for illustrations of the connections between them.   93 Marguerite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind: Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 158–9. For Burwash’s influential views on doctrine during the negotiations, see Van Die, 147–64. She concludes that what he “had been defending all along in church union was not so much the new as the old” (177).   94 Kilpatrick, 63–4. For his involvement in the formulation of the Basis of Union, see Brian J. Fraser, “Christianizing the Social Order: T.B. Kilpatrick’s Theological Vision of the United Church of Canada,” Toronto Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1996): 189–200.   95 Alfred Gandier, The Doctrinal Basis of Union and Its Relation to the Historic Creeds (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1926), 35.   96 Perhaps this accounts for the creation of a church that N.K. Clifford has described as “one of the most homogeneous denominations in Canada”; see “Interpreters,” 209.   97 A.S. Morton, The Way to Union (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912), 99–100.   98 Ibid., 100–8.   99 On the varieties and unions of Presbyterians, see Silcox, 56–70; John Thomas McNeill, The Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1875–1925 (Toronto: General Board, Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1925), 16–32; and Grant, Profusion of Spires, 26–8. 100 N.G. Smith, “The Presbyterian Tradition in Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, ed. John Webster Grant (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1963), 47. 101 Chalmers, 46–7. 102 Silcox, 69. 103 John T. McNeill, “The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the United Church,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 12. 104 “Inauguration Service of the United Church of Canada,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 6. 105 Morton, 123–46. 106 Ibid., 153.

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Notes to pages 24–7

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107 Earl B. Eddy, “The Congregational Tradition in Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, 31–2. Also see Silcox, 41–55, for a discussion of the development of Congregationalism in Canada. 108 On the United Church’s interpretation of Congregational theological principles, see Chalmers, 76–9, and Silcox, 143–6. 109 “Inauguration Service of the United Church of Canada,” 6. 110 The twenty-five articles are reprinted in Chalmers, Appendix 3, 296–9. For a comparison with the thirty-nine articles on which they were based, see Chalmers, 93–5. 111 For a Canadian interpretation of the importance of Wesley’s sermons, see Burwash’s preface and introduction to Wesley’s Doctrinal Standards, Part 1, The Sermons, ed. Nathanael Burwash (Toronto: William Briggs, 1881), iii–xviii. 112 On the United Church’s interpretation of Methodist theological principles, see Chalmers, 96–113. 113 “Inauguration Service of the United Church of Canada,” 6. 114 Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 71–126; Goldwin French, “The People Called Methodists in Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, ed. John Webster Grant (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1963), 71–7; and Silcox, 47–55. 115 See William T. Gunn, Uniting Three United Churches (Toronto: Bureau of Literature and Information of the Joint Church Union Committee, [1923?]) for details of these unions. His pamphlet includes a detailed ­diagram of the mergers that had created three traditions that would soon be one united church, 8–9. It is frequently reproduced as a graphic presentation of the case for church union, and currently appears on the United Church of Canada’s website as its “family tree”; accessed 7 August 2012, www.united-church.ca / history / overview / archival#familytree. 116 Walter Murray, “Why We Want Church Union in the Prairie Provinces,” clipping dated for release 17 February 1917, (newspaper not identified), Church Union Collection, box 35-769. 117 Silcox, 226–8. McIntire, 18–19, gives examples of the variety of local unions. 118 “Inauguration Service,” 6. Although the local union congregations were ceremonially recognized as a group at the inaugural service, they legally joined the United Church separately after 10 June 1925. See Silcox, 216– 30, for an analysis of the significance of the local church unions in the momentum for church union. E.H. Oliver, His Dominion in Canada: A Study in the Background, Development and Challenge of the Missions of

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Notes to pages 28–31

the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Board of Home Missions and Woman’s Missionary Society, 1932), 137–41, claimed that these churches in frontier communities led the way to union. 119 R.J. Wilson, “Church Union and National Unity,” (typescript, n.d.), 1, Robert J. Wilson Papers, u ca, box 2-27. 120 Bryan Smith, “The Destiny Factor,” in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, ed. Peter Senge (London: N. Brealey, 1994), 341–4, argues that organizations have “callings” that shape their destinies.

c h a p t e r t wo    1 Statement provided by W.M. Birks for the Bureau of Literature and Information, United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series I (hereafter Church Union Collection), u ca 83.063C, box 29-663. He dates his trip “around 1920.”   2 “Modern Covenanters,” Fergus Record, 16 April 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook).    3 For a similar account from the anti-union side, see “Many Knox Church Dissenters from Union Debarred from Their Own Building Gather as Welcome Guest of All Saints’ Church,” Peterborough Evening Examiner, 3 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 33–736. In this case it was the non-concurring rather than uniting Presbyterians who identified with the resistance of the Covenanters and claimed to be the true guardians of their traditions “for which they are prepared to go out on the street beggared as to the church property but rich in the possession of their grand old faith.” For an analysis of one city’s vote that illustrates the impact of ministerial leadership and congregational culture on the outcome of the vote, see William Haughton, “The Experience of Church Union Among the Presbyterians of Galt, Ontario” (master’s thesis, Emmanuel College of Victoria University, 2007).    4 The work of the Dominion Commission on Church Property set up to handle the division of the denominational funds and assets was largely completed by 1927; see C.E. Silcox, Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933), 347–55, and N.K. Clifford, The Resistance to Church Union in Canada, 1904–1939 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985), 194–9. Dividing local church property took longer since it was subject to different legislation in each province; see Silcox, 355–77, and Clifford, Resistance, 200–6.

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Notes to pages 32–5

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 5 Clifford, Resistance, 226–35. He notes that Gordon Sisco, who succeeded T. Albert Moore as general secretary in 1936, played a pivotal role in the negotiations. The legal challenges to the use of the name are discussed in Donald John McCrae Corbett, “The Canadian Church Union and the Law” (Bachelor of Divinity thesis, Knox College, 1957), especially 61–9. Corbett says it is with “considerable amazement” that he hears the United Church still claim that the Presbyterian Church went into the union since “the courts have made it impossible for the United Church to make this claim” (67). For the implications of the legislation for Canada’s approach to church-state relations, see Sara J. Knight, “Voices United? The House of Commons’ Role in the Creation of the United Church of Canada,” Papers of Canadian Society of Church History, 2003, 39–64. Despite their criticism of the United Church for seeking enabling legislation from the state, Clifford, Resistance, 234, notes that the Presbyterians sought legislative protection by presenting an Act to Incorporate the Board of Trustees of the Presbyterian Church in Canada to the Dominion Parliament and the provincial legislatures after the United Church Act was amended.   6 John Thomas McNeill, The Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1875–1925 (Toronto: General Board of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1925), 247–53. Caven’s principles for union were set out in “The Union of the Christian Churches,” Westminster [new series] 1, no. 1 (July 1902): 26–9.   7 Brian J. Fraser, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, s.v. “Caven, William,” 13:181–4. The similarities to Grant and other supporters of church union discussed in the previous chapter are striking; Fraser describes Caven as an evangelical who believed that “a United Protestantism would have a much more powerful influence on national righteousness than separate denominations.” In view of later fundamentalist opposition to church union (discussed below), it is ironic that Caven’s pamphlet on The Testimony of Christ to the Old Testament was included posthumously in The Fundamentals (one of the few Canadian contributors).  8 Acts and Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (1902), 59.   9 Quoted in A Brief Sketch of the Negotiations for Union of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational Churches in Canada (Toronto, 1905), 6, Church Union Collection, box 1-2. 10 “The General Conference,” Christian Guardian, 17 September 1902, 8. 11 N.K. Clifford, “The Origins of the Church Union Controversy,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 18 (June–September 1976): 42; Clifford, Resistance, 13–15.

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Notes to pages 35–8

12 For typical unionist account, see Kenneth Cousland, “A Brief History of the Church Union Movement in Canada,” in Our Common Faith, Thomas Buchanan Kilpatrick (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1928), 6–21, and William T. Gunn, Uniting Three United Churches (Toronto: Bureau of Literature and Information of the Joint Church Union Committee, 1923). McNeill, 251, also downplays Patrick’s role at the General Conference, noting that he had informed those gathered that he was not speaking for the Presbyterian Church and pointedly mentioning that the Methodist invitation made no reference to Patrick’s address. 13 Cousland, “A Brief History,” 16–19, and Silcox, 106–20. The Presbyterians had sponsored discussions of proposals for Christian unity in 1886, the Methodists in 1890 and 1894, and the Presbyterians again in 1899. 14 “The General Conference,” 8. 15 Silcox, 122. 16 Clifford, Resistance, 1–3, 23–4. 17 Clifford, “The Origins of the Church Union Controversy,” 51. 18 Clifford, Resistance, 21. He suggests that articles supporting union were published in obscure journals by men who had not yet risen to prominence. However, by the time Patrick arrived, D.M. Gordon, Alfred Gandier, Robert Falconer, and Clarence Mackinnon were well known in the Presbyterian Church (and even in 1902, their positions may have ­compared favourably in prestige to that of the new principal of a small western college). 19 “The General Conference,” 8. Carman’s introduction mentioned that Presbyterians and Methodists in Winnipeg had already formed a committee to work on the home missions problem. 20 For a discussion of the conflict between Patrick and Mackay see Clifford, Resistance, 43–8, and John Webster Grant, George Pidgeon: A Biography, (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1962) 62–3. 21 Clifford, Resistance, 46. The federation model was at first an attractive alternative to organic union. For a discussion of its merits, see E. Lloyd Morrow, Church Union in Canada: Its History, Motives, Doctrine, and Government (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1923), 70–1, 294–301, 435–44. 22 Silcox, 189. 23 Clifford, Resistance, 19–20. The complex legal arguments to the House of Lords in 1903 and the ruling in 1904 on the Overtoun appeal are compiled in Robert Orr, The Free Church of Scotland Appeals, 1903–4 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904). See D.J.M. Corbett, “The Legal Problems of the Canadian Church Union of 1925,” Canadian Society of

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Notes to pages 38–40

321

Presbyterian History Papers (1979), 53–67, for a discussion of how the Presbyterians in Canada appealed to the case. On the legislative process as viewed by the lawyer who prepared the bills for the various jurisdictions (including Newfoundland and Bermuda), see Gershom W. Mason, The Legislative Struggle for Church Union (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1956); cf. Silcox, 243–71, and Clifford, Resistance, 142–64. 24 Grant, George Pidgeon, 68–9, notes that by 1899 Pidgeon was preaching a sermon on “The Unity of Believers,” and by 1903 had delivered it five times. Pidgeon was not alone in taking exception to the personal attacks on Mackay. Clarence Mackinnon, Reminiscences (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1938), 167, recalled that Patrick had presented the case for church union in 1910 “fully, though perhaps a little too vigorously.” 25 Letter to D.M. Gordon from E.D. McLaren, April 1923, D.M. Gordon Papers, Queen’s University Archives, box 2. McLaren had by that time switched his support and was writing to express his relief that Gordon had done likewise. 26 Mackinnon, 167–8. His assessment of their actions differs from Clifford, “The Origins of the Church Union Controversy,” 41, who sees the supporters of union as young liberals who believed that church administration was a matter of expediency, and were thus less concerned with how things had been done in the past. 27 John S. Moir, Enduring Witness: A History of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 3rd ed. (Burlington, on : Eagle Press, [2004?]), 216. 28 Cited in David R. Murray and Robert A. Murray, The Prairie Builder: Robert Murray of Saskatchewan (Edmonton: NeWest Publishers, 1984), 145. 29 Clifford, Resistance, 84–5. 30 Guy Bagnall, ed., Trinity United Church, Vernon, B.C., 1892–1967 (n.p: n.d.), 20; Marion R. Archibald, Historical Sketch of Methodist, Presbyterian and United Churches of Canada in Rosedale (n.p.: [1948?]), 5; and F.E. Runnals, The History of the Knox United Church, Prince George, B.C. (1945), 58, a sampling of publications in the Congregational History Collection, British Columbia Conference (United Church of Canada) Archives (hereafter bc Archives). 31 After 1925 the continuing Presbyterians were averse to the label “antiunionist.” Allan L. Farris, “The Fathers of 1925,” in Enkindled by the Word: Essays on Presbyterianism in Canada, ed. Centennial Committee of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (Toronto: Presbyterian Publications, 1966), 59–82, observes that the opposition included

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Notes to pages 40–3

federalists, ethical critics, and theological objectors, as well as those who were against union in principle. 32 Clifford, Resistance, 86. 33 H.F. Gadsby, “Love’s Labor Lost,” Saturday Night, 4 November 1916 [clipping], Church Union Collection, box 34-742. 34 Clifford, Resistance, 75, 89. 35 Ephraim Scott, “Letter 2,” in Continuing the Presbyterian Church in Canada: Letters to an Inquirer (Montreal, 1917), 2, Church Union Collection, box 20-455. 36 Scott, “Letter 12,” 13, and “Letter 19,” 20. 37 Ephraim Scott, “Church Union” and the Presbyterian Church in Canada (Montreal: John Lovell and Son, 1928), 123, 125–6. Whereas he claimed that the lay leaders of the resistance to church union were fighting clerical tyranny, he presented the lay leaders of church union as manipulative businessmen: the Methodist clergy give the orders – but only after taking instructions from their wealthy paymasters. 38 Clifford, Resistance, 132–4. Also see Roberta Clare, “The Role of Women in the Preservation of the Presbyterian Church in Canada: 1921–28,” in The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow: The Presbyterian Contribution to Canadian Life and Culture, ed. William Klempa (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 259–77. 39 “Parlour Meeting on Union Condemned,” Montreal Gazette, 18 May 1923 [clipping], Church Union Collection, box 33-724. 40 “Feminine Unionists Ask Divine Blessing,” Toronto Star, 19 December 1924, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). 41 “Church Unionists Not Taking Counter-Action,” Toronto Mail and Empire, 21 March 1923, Church Union Collection, box 39 (scrapbook). The minister and congregation are not named. 42 “Mrs J.W. Daniel to the President of the W.M.S. and W.A. of Bloor Street Presbyterian Church,” [undated], Church Union Collection, box 31-693. 43 The Presbyterian Church supported the war effort and co-operated with other churches in providing chaplaincy services. However, once the war was over, both sides used different aspects of that experience to support their position on church union. See George G.D. Kilpatrick, “The War and Church Union,” in The Need of Church Union by a Group of Presbyterians [1924?], 10–12, Church Union Collection, box 18-420, who argued that his experience as a Protestant chaplain confirmed that there was no incompatibility between the traditions; cf. Cyrus MacMillan, “The War and Church Union,” in The Need of the Presbyterian Church by a Group of Presbyterians [1924?], 9–11, Church Union Collection, box 19-442,

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Notes to pages 43–7

323

who saw the “forced uniformity” of church union as a denial of the liberty he had fought to defend. For an assessment of the “truce” and its implications for the controversy, see George C. Pidgeon, The United Church of Canada: The Story of the Union (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1950), 51–9. 44 George Pidgeon to Leslie Pidgeon, 19 October 1922, Pidgeon Papers, box 3-57. 45 Grant, George Pidgeon, 103. 46 George Pidgeon to Leslie Pidgeon, 19 October 1922, Pidgeon Papers, box 3-57. 47 “Memorandum on Organization of the Joint Bureau of Literature and Information as Related by Dr R.J. Wilson,” Claris Edwin Silcox Papers, uc a , box 20-16. 48 George Pidgeon to Leslie Pidgeon, 26 January 1923, Pidgeon Papers, box 3-60. 49 Memo from R.J. Wilson to Pidgeon, “General Review,” [undated], 1, Church Union Collection, box 30-673. Accusations of dirty tricks came from both sides. A. Donald MacLeod, W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 37–40, reports that the clergy in W. Stanford Reid’s family were divided on the issue. As a boy, Reid heard accusations about the behaviour of church leaders that made a lasting impression on him. 50 “General Review,” 1. 51 Ibid., 5. 52 “Outline Sermons and Addresses on Church Union and the United Church of Canada,” Bureau of Literature and Information of the Joint Committee on Church Union, December 1924, 16, Church Union Collection, box 29-656. 53 “Outline Sermons and Addresses on Church Union and the United Church of Canada,” 3–4. 54 “Report of the Committee on Literature and Information,” 17 October 1924, Church Union Collection, box 23-508; “Report of the Committee on Literature and Information,” 14 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 23-508. 55 Letter from R.J. Wilson to S.D. Chown, 24 February 1925, Church Union Collection, box 23-530. 56 “Outline Sermons and Addresses on Church Union and the United Church of Canada,” 7–8. 57 T. Albert Moore to D.R. Drummond, 4 February 1925, Methodist Church (Canada) General Conference, Correspondence of the Secretary,

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324

58

59

60 61

Notes to pages 47–8

1906–1925, u ca 78.107C, box 10-200. Drummond, the minister of St Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, was promoting a federation proposal as a way around the impasse over church union. Although Moore’s letter is in the official Methodist Church records, he pointed out to Drummond that he was speaking for himself, and that no one knew he was writing. As if to underline that point, the letter was not written on institutional letterhead, and the return address was Moore’s residence rather than the church headquarters. Pidgeon to G.B. McLennan, 21 November 1924, Pidgeon Papers, box 4-91. The letter refers to a rumour that the “antis” were planning to turn the controversy into a debate about modernism, but perhaps had judged wrongly since it was “utterly baseless.” Other letters to Pidgeon around that time raised similar concerns, noting the unfairness of the charge given Fraser’s liberal theological positions. See the letter from J.W.S. Milne, 21 November 1924, Pidgeon Papers, box 4-91, which provided examples from Fraser’s sermons and noted that Fraser had been the only Presbyterian minister at the last General Assembly in Ottawa who was willing to preach in the Unitarian Church. The words “File carefully” are written in pencil at the top; whether it is Pidgeon’s handwriting is hard to say. Few if any of the pro-union leaders would have qualified as Protestant “modernists” according to the criterion described by Kathryn Lofton, “The Methodology of the Modernists: Process in American Protestantism,” Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 377–8, an aggressive methodology that involved a “demanding process of cross-examination and inquiry, a process that transformed the terming of biblical narrative and Christian faith.” Robert Campbell, The Relation of the Christian Churches to One Another, and the Problems Growing out of Them, Especially in Canada (Toronto: William Briggs, 1913), 233. Ibid., 256, 260–8. N.K. Clifford, “Robert Campbell: The Defender of Presbyterianism,” in Called to Witness: Profiles of Canadian Presbyterians, ed. W. Stanford Reid ([Don Mills, on ]: Presbyterian Publications, 1975), 60–2. Mary Vipond, “National Consciousness in English-speaking Canada in the 1920s: Seven Studies” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1974), 18, finds scant reference to social and national goals among the continuing Presbyterians. Robert Campbell was an early critic of church union as a solution to the immigration crisis; see Clifford, “Robert Campbell,” 57. For a critique of Campbell’s opposition to ecumenism, see Jay Newman, “The Case against Ecumenism: A Classic Canadian Argument,” in

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62 63 64

65 66

67

68

Notes to pages 48–50

325

Pluralism, Tolerance and Dialogue: Six Studies, ed. M. Darrol Bryant (Waterloo, on : University of Waterloo Press, 1989), 29–36. George Duncan, “The Unity of the Church,” in The Need of the Presbyterian Church, 3–4. G. Washington, Why, as a Methodist I Cannot Accept the Basis of Union, [1911?], Church Union Collection, box 5-86. R.E. Welsh, The Things that Matter in Church Union (Montreal: Church Union Committee, n.d.), 1–2, referring to an editorial that Scott had published in the Presbyterian Record soon after the theological statement was issued. T. McMillan, Our Church and the Proposed Substitute [Toronto, 1922], 3, Church Union Collection, box 19-444. The Methodists in Newfoundland, then a British colony and not yet a Canadian province, voted against union as a conference but followed the direction of the General Council. W.S. Griffin, “Why I Am Against the Basis of Union,” Christian Guardian, 13 March 1912, 24. This is one of the rare objections to church union published after an editorial announced that only items shedding “new light” on the subject would be published in the magazine; see Christian Guardian, 14 February 1912, 3. On the discussion of the Basis of Union in the Methodist Church, see Marguerite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind: Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 143–66, and Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 421–3. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, mi: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1923), 7. Machen explains in the preface that the core of the book was published a year earlier as an article in the Princeton Theological Review. D.G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 67, points out that Machen’s lectures were an attack on an American plan for organic union. Hart notes the similarity of his concerns to those of the non-concurring Presbyterians in Canada (69), but does not explore his influence on the Canadian debate. D.G. Hart, “When Is a Fundamentalist a Modernist? J. Gresham Machen, Cultural Modernism, and Conservative Protestantism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65–3 (1997): 606, mentions that Machen’s books were widely reviewed in Canada. Machen’s relationship with “liberals” in his own denomination, as Hart describes it

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Notes to pages 50–2

(including Machen’s claim that they were not entitled to trusts and property since they had strayed from the Westminster Confession and his ­critique of inter-denominational creeds), resembles the strategy of the Presbyterian Church Association; see “When Is a Fundamentalist a Modernist?” 611–12, 615–21. It suggests collaboration between Machen and the Presbyterian Church Association, although to what extent I have so far been unable to determine. 69 Machen, 172–3, 178–9. 70 Ibid., 1–2. 71 Ibid., 161–2. His animus may be related to theological controversy among the Presbyterians in the United States. Princeton Theological Seminary was caught up in bitter disputes, and support for church union there was linked to the liberal position on biblical criticism. See John Abernathy Smith, “Ecclesiastical Politics and the Founding of the Federal Council of Churches,” Church History 43, no. 3 (1974): 356–8. On the importance of confessional statements in that controversy, see James H. Moorland, “Presbyterian Confessional Identity and Its Dilemmas,” in Holding on to the Faith: Confessional Traditions in American Christianity, ed. Douglas A. Sweeney and Charles Hambrick-Stowe (Lanham, md: University Press of America, 2008), 47–70. 72 Ibid., 162, 165. 73 Acts and Proceedings of the Fifty-first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (1925), 128. N.K. Clifford, “The Interpreters of the United Church of Canada,” Church History 46, no. 2 (1977): 214, also comments on Machen’s influence. 74 Moir, Enduring Witness, 226. Moir notes Machen’s continuing identification of ecumenism with modernism when he was invited in 1926 to preach at Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto and at MacVicar Presbyterian Church in Montreal. His sermons described St Paul as a conservative and Judas as a modernist (234). 75 John Webster Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union (London: Lutterworth Press, 1967), 75. Among them was W.S. Reid, who continued to oppose movements of denominational co-operation because they anticipated an organic union; cf. Moir, 253. On Reid’s opposition to church union and his relationship to Machen and Westminster Theological Seminary, see A. Donald MacLeod, W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 36–40, 53–65. 76 “Finds Church Union Is Pagan Movement,” [unidentified clipping], Church Union Collection, box 36-773.

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Notes to pages 52–4

327

77 “Church Union ‘Pagan,’ Shields an Outspoken Critic,” Toronto Telegram, 19 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 39 (scrapbook). Given the fierce newspaper competition of the day, the Telegram was no doubt pleased to report that Shields had condemned the editorial position of the Star in his sermon, complaining that “whoever writes the editorials is as blind as a bat spiritually and does not know the alphabet of the Christian religion.” Shields singled out The Blessed Hope, T. Albert Moore’s pamphlet published by the Methodist Department of Evangelism and Social Reform, as an example of the “infidel literature” associated with the union movement, perhaps adding to Moore’s unhappiness about the portrayal of Methodists as apostate discussed above. 78 “Sectarian Discord,” Catholic Register, 22 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). See also “Union and Disunion,” Kingston Freeman, 9 August 1923, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). 79 “Church Union,” Antigonish Casket, 25 October 1923, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). 80 The obituary in the Globe (1 May 1926) noted his religious affiliation, as well as his involvement in organizations that included the Social Hygiene Council. 81 Josephus the Second [pseud.], “A Religious Horoscope of June 1925: Will the United Church of Canada Be a United Church?” Saturday Night, 10 January 1925. For analysis of religion and social class, see T.W. Acheson, “Changing Social Origins of the Canadian Industrial Elite, 1880–1910,” Business History Review 17, no. 2 (1973): 198–200, who finds that Presbyterians and Anglicans were indeed over-represented among the “industrial elite” (with Methodists gaining significant ground in the west); and Douglas F. Campbell, “Class, Status and Crisis: UpperClass Protestants and the Founding of the United Church of Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies 29, no. 3 (1994): 63–84. 82 Scott, “Church Union” and the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 106. 83 D.J. Fraser, “Keep to Spirit Not Letter of Worship of Their Fathers,” Toronto Star, 9 June 1925, Church Union Collection, box 36-773. 84 W.D. Tait, “Church Union and Social Service,” in The Need of the Presbyterian Church, 8. 85 Morrow, 284–301, presented a federation model in a chapter entitled “The Kind of Church Union Canada Needs.” 86 Ibid., 86–7, 89 (emphasis in the original). Perhaps because they had a weaker presence in the province of Quebec, Methodists seemed less perturbed by the prospect of problems there. William Magney finds their “almost total neglect of Quebec and the French-Canadians” curious,

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Notes to pages 54–9



evidence perhaps of a live-and-let-live attitude among English-Canadian nationalists. William H. Magney, “The Methodist Church and the National Gospel, 1884–1914,” The Bulletin 20 (1968): 88–9.   87 Ibid., 296.   88 Machen, 148–9.   89 Ibid., 149–52.   90 Ibid., 154.   91 Shields, “Finds Church Union Is Pagan Movement.”  92 The Canadian Churchman, 10 April 1924, box 38 (scrapbook).   93 “Sees Presbyterians Gobbled Up by Methodists If Union Passes,” Toronto Star, 4 April 1924, Church Union Collection, box 35-772.   94 “The Very Rev. Dr. George Pidgeon Speaks,” St Peter’s Messenger, 26 November 1925, Church Union Collection, box 34-757.   95 Jas. Craig, “At the Crack of the Whip,” Toronto Telegram, 22 April 1925, box 38 (scrapbook).   96 “Church Union in Canada,” New York Sunday Times, 15 July 1923, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook).   97 Outsider [pseud.], “National Church?” Toronto Telegram, 22 April 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook).   98 “The Church’s Part in Politics,” Saturday Night, 4 July 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). Saturday Night provided unflattering accounts of the parliamentary debates; as examples, see articles by The Mace [pseud.], “Church Union in the Commons,” 8 March 1924, 4, and “Storming the Hill,” 17 May, 1924, 4.  99 Clifford, Resistance, 156. On the importance of temperance for the social gospel movement, and the role of the uniting traditions in supporting it, see Richard Allen, The Social Passion, esp. 264–83. The Presbyterian Church had its share of moral reformers as well, but even they were not always well received. Clifford, Resistance, 184, remarks that for some Presbyterians “the legislation of righteousness was abhorrent, and they believed that there was no way in which they could be comfortable in a church dominated by uplifters and social gospellers.” 100 The Fundamentals, n.d., Church Union Collection, box 29-654. 101 T.B. Kilpatrick, “The Unity of the Church,” in The Need of Church Union, 2. 102 A Vision of Unity, n.d., Church Union Collection, box 29-658. 103 A Choice and a Challenge, n.d., Church Union Collection, box 29-653. 104 George Pidgeon, “The Church Union Situation in Canada,” sermon preached 9 February 1924 and privately printed by a member of the congregation because of “insistent demand.” 105 “Why Bloor Street Should Enter Union,” Church Union Collection, box 35-733.

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Notes to pages 59–61

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106 “Address by Rev. Edmund H. Oliver ... at Complimentary Banquet Given by Sir James Woods, K.C.M.G.” (Toronto: Presbyterian Church-Union Movement Committee, [1923?]), 13–14, Church Union Collection, box 18-417. 107 “Three Thousand Congregations Already Adopt Forms of Union,” Manitoba Free Press, 22 March 1922, box 34-752. The article summarized the regional distribution of the 1,245 such pastoral charges as follows: Maritime, 30; Montreal and Ottawa, 29; Toronto and Kingston, 170; Hamilton and London, 1; Manitoba, 148; Saskatchewan, 431; Alberta, 297; B.C., 139. For a discussion of the local union movement, see Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union, 45–7. 108 N.K. Clifford, “Church Union and Western Canada,” in Prairie Spirit: Perspectives on the Heritage of the United Church of Canada in the West, ed. Dennis L. Butcher, et al. (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985), 283–95, disputes Oliver’s case for promoting church union. Whether the western local union churches were determined to form a united church regardless of what the negotiating denominations decided to do is debatable. When J.R. Johns, an active member of the Local Union Council, responded to a request from the United Church Archives for information on his involvement in church union, he was particularly ­anxious to correct what appeared to him to be a misunderstanding: “The one thing I am concerned [with?] is that you include in your record that the original meeting we held in Regina had no intention to form anything approaching an Organized movement separated from the negotiating churches (Mother Churches)” [emphasis in original]. See letter from J.R. Johns to Richard Ruggle, 9 March 1968, Church Union Collection, box 22-504. 109 J.R.P. Sclater, An Address on Church Union Delivered before the Congregation of Old St Andrew’s, Toronto (n.p.: 1924), 6. Church Union Collection, box 29-657. “New” St Andrew’s (King Street) opposed union. 110 Clifford, Resistance, 134, quotes a letter from Frances McCaskill that described Minnie Gordon as “the power behind the throne” in the Kingston branch. 111 Gordon to McLaren, 23 November 1924, Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 2 (correspondence). He recalled that during the 1905 meetings, he had pressed the matter about having the support of the whole church before uniting. 112 Draft of “The Present Situation in Regard to Church Union,” [April 1916?], Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 5-58.

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Notes to pages 61–74

113 Gordon to Mackinnon, 5 June 1924, Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 2 (correspondence). 114 Gordon to McLaren, 6 March 1924, Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 2 (correspondence). 115 Clifford, Resistance, 59, notes that Mackay’s leadership of the resistance to church union was short-lived; by the time his wife died in 1912, leaving him with the care of a young son, he had already withdrawn from the fray. 116 Moir, 222. On the final congregational vote, see Clifford, Resistance, 165– 84; on the various denominational plebiscites, see Silcox, 173–77, 192–97, 479–81. 117 Kenneth H. Cousland, The Founding of Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto (Toronto: 1978), 45–55, discusses the impact of church union on both Knox College and Victoria University, a Methodist school with a faculty of theology. 118 For a study of missions, particularly as they related to indigenous peoples and non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, see Peter Bush, Western Challenge: The Presbyterian Church in Canada’s Mission on the Prairies and North, 1885–1925 ([Winnipeg]: Watson and Dwyer, 2000). Bush challenges what he calls the establishment view that church union was the most effective solution to meeting the needs of the new settlements. 119 Scott, “Church Union” and the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 122. 120 [First United Church, Victoria], “One Hundred Years: 1862–1962” [n.p.: 1962], 35, Congregational History Collection, b c Archives. 121 Osbert Morley Sanford, The Genius of the United Church (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1931), 6. 122 John Webster Grant, Divided Heritage: The Presbyterian Contribution to the United Church of Canada (Yorkton, s k : Gravelbooks, 2007), 201–2.

c h a p t e r t h re e    1 S.D. Chown, “Some Ideals and Responsibilities of the United Church of Canada,” Christian Union Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1926): 258–60.    2 Alfred J. Johnston, A Larger Fellowship (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1926), 111. The chapter on “The Church Organized for Its Task” includes a ­succinct description of the basic organizational structure of the United Church (114–23).    3 John Webster Grant, “Unauthoritative Reflections on the United Church’s Story,” Touchstone 12, no. 1 (1994): 6, claims that e&ss’s reports served “a function analogous to that of the Westminster Confession for Presbyterians and the Book of Common Prayer for Anglicans.”

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Notes to pages 74–6

331

  4 On the impact of bureaucratization on the ecumenical movement in the United States, see John Abernathy Smith, “Ecclesiastical Politics and the Founding of the Federal Council of Churches,” Church History 43, no. 3 (1974): 350–65. On its impact on denominational development, see Russell Richey, “Denominations and Denominationalism: An American Morphology,” in Reimagining Denominationalism: Interpretive Essays, ed. Robert Bruce Mullin and Russell Richey (New York: Oxford, 1994), 74–97; Mark Chaves and John R. Sutton, “Organizational Consolidation in American Protestant Denominations, 1890–1990,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43, no. 1 (2004): 51–66; William McGuire King, “Denominational Modernization and Religious Identity: The Case of the Methodist Episcopal Church,” Methodist History 20, no. 2 (1982): 75–89; and Milton J Coalter, et al., eds., The Organizational Revolution: Presbyterians and American Denominationalism (Louisville, ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), especially Louis B. Weeks, “The Incorporation of the Presbyterians” (37–54), Richard W. Reifsnyder, “Managing the Mission: Church Restructuring in the Twentieth Century” (55–95), and Craig Dykstra and James Hudnut-­ Beumler, “The National Organizational Structures of Protestant Denominations: An Invitation to a Conversation” (307–31).   5 For the Methodist experience with changes in the approach to temperance work, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “Condensation and Heart Religion: Canadian Methodists as Evangelicals, 1884–1925,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997) 93–6.   6 Gibson Winter, Religious Identity: A Study of Religious Organization (New York: MacMillan, 1968), 30–4.   7 Frank Langford’s submission to Reports and Agenda: First Annual Meeting of the Board of Christian Education (4–6 April 1933), 27, Board of Christian Education, Series I, u ca 89.079C, box 3-3.   8 Cynthia Comacchio, The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada, 1920 to 1950 (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 189–204, includes the United Church’s organizations in her discussion of the structured approach to recreation that flourished in this period. For a detailed description of personnel, programs for all ages, and their organizational structure, see Olive Sparling, “The United Church of Canada Board of Christian Education, 1925–71” (unpublished manuscript, 1979), u ca BX 9881 S75.   9 Lucille Marr, “Hierarchy, Gender and the Goals of the Religious Educators in the Canadian Presbyterian, Methodist and United Churches, 1919– 1939,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 20, no. 1 (1991): 68–70.

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Notes to pages 76–7

10 Margaret Prang, “‘The Girl God Would Have Me Be’: The Canadian Girls in Training, 1915–39,” Canadian Historical Review 66, no. 2 (1985): 157n12, describes Thomas as the most influential woman in the United Church at that time. Prang notes that her innovative approach to religious education included use of the Sharman method of Bible study, which proved effective in the yw ca as well as the Student Christian Movement (161–6). The Kingdom of God, a study booklet that she wrote, was used by many cg i t groups and church-run summer camps. 11 Ibid., 180–1. M. Lucille Marr, “Church Teen Clubs, Feminized Organizations? Tuxis Boys, Trail Rangers, and Canadian Girls in Training, 1919– 1939,” Historical Studies in Education 3–2 (1991): 259–60, finds that this approach was successful in attracting girls, but did not appeal as much to boys, who apparently still preferred the Scouts program (with no religious affiliation). 12 Ann Taves, “Feminization Revisited: Protestantism and Gender at the Turn of the Century,” in Women and Twentieth Century Protestantism, ed. Margaret Lambert Bendroth and Virginia Brereton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 307. For Coe’s influence on Canadian Methodism, see Phyllis D. Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1992), 98–102. 13 Marr, “Church Teen Clubs, Feminized Organizations?” 261. 14 “Report of the Lay Advisory Council,” r o p (1944), 148. If the Epworth League was established as a “Trojan horse” to re-masculinize the church, as suggested by Nancy Christie, “Young Men and the Creation of Civic Christianity in Urban Methodist Churches, 1880–1914,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2006, New Series, 17–1 (2006): 104–5, it apparently failed to retain the involvement of adolescents when they reached adulthood as had been hoped. 15 ao t s , A Guide for Programme Suggestions Handbook (Vancouver: National Association of aots Clubs, 1948), 1–3. 16 “Men’s Organizations,” r o p (1926), 110. 17 For details of the complex relationship between aots and other men’s groups in the United Church, see the introduction to the finding aid (F.A. 293) to the aots collection, u ca. 18 Jean Gordon Forbes, Wide Windows: The Story of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: The Woman’s Missionary Society, 1951), 114–15. 19 Forbes, Wide Windows, 116. As a case in point, Michael Owen, “‘Lighting the Pathways for New Canadians: Methodist and United Church wms

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20

21 22

23 24

25

26 27

28

Notes to pages 77–9

333

Missions in Eastern Alberta, 1904–1940,” in Standing on New Ground: Women in Alberta, ed. Catherine Anne Cavanaugh and R.R. Warne (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1993), 1–18, examines wms missions with Ukrainians. Donna Sinclair, Crossing Worlds: The Story of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1992), 67–70, describes the intergenerational networking. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1934), 380. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1938), 374, indicates that the Dominion Board reaffirmed the “Aim and Object of the Society” in 1937 in response to the challenge to “re-think missions.” The same list of objectives prefaced subsequent reports to General Council until the wms’s last report in 1960. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1936), 439. Marilyn Färdig Whiteley, “Drawing the Circles: Recruitment and Nurture in Women’s Church Organizations,” paper presented to the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, 8 June 1993, compares how the two groups and their successor (United Church Women) functioned in two Ontario churches between 1925 and 1965. It illustrates the dynamics of age-grouping, intergenerational connections, and “fellowship” for groups in different congregational settings (one rural, the other urban). F.E. Runnals, The History of the Knox United Church, Prince George, B.C. (n.p., 1945), 84, and W. O’Neill, ed., Knox Presbyterian, 1912–1925, Knox United, 1925–1972 (Parksville, bc: n.d.), 3, both in the Congregational History Collection, British Columbia Conference of the United Church of Canada Archives. Quoted in Sinclair, 3. On the w m s ’s fundraising success, see ibid., 97–110. Robert A. Wright, A World Mission: Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order (Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1991), 112, notes the dominance of male leadership at the national level in Canada, despite a high percentage of women missionaries, in comparison to Britain where women had positional leadership. For the first board structure and the officers appointed by the General Council in 1926, see Yearbook (1927), 5. The resemblance to the committees and executive members of the 1924 Inter-Church Advisory Council illustrates the importance of the ecumenical networks that operated before church union: at least twelve of the sixteen secretaries listed in the United Church yearbook for 1927 had prior experience with the Inter-Church

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29

30

31

32

33

Notes to pages 79–80

movement, generally chairing a committee in the same area of responsibility. On the work of the Inter-Church Forward Movement, see Airhart, “Condensation,” 97–105. Robert T. Handy, “Reflections on the Federal Council of Churches, the United Church of Canada, and the Social Gospel in the 1930s,” Toronto Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1996): 179–88, notes the similarities between their aims and purposes, as well as the involvement of a number of senior United Church leaders in its work. Historians and theologians are far from agreed on the significance of the Edinburgh Conference. For example, critic John Kent, The Unacceptable Face of the Church: The Modern Church in the Eyes of the Historian (London: s cm , 1987), 203, sees Edinburgh as the beginning of an organizational quest for Christian unity that had already run out of steam by the time the Faith and Order Commission of the recently formed World Council of Churches met at Lund in 1952. John Webster Grant, The Ship under the Cross: A Survey of the Ecumenical Movement (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1960), 36–7, assesses it more positively as “a critical point at which the ongoing life of the church was dramatically intersected by a new impulse of the Spirit.” Brian Stanley, World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids, m i : Eerdmans, 2009), 1–17, begins his comprehensive study of the event and its aftermath with an overview of interpretations. A number of church union supporters from Canada attended the conference, including Newton Wesley Rowell, who went as a Methodist delegate and served as a member of the Continuation Committee the following year. Dana Robert, “The First Globalization: The Internationalization of the Protestant Missionary Movement between the World Wars,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 26, no. 2 (2002): 50. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), explores the implications of self-­ determination for the treaty negotiations and the consequences of the ­lingering resentment over its terms. While the power shifts in AngloAmerican relations that were evident at Paris were important for Canada’s national aspirations, the hostility roused in China, Japan, and Korea is worth noting (306–44); the unresolved tensions later created a crisis for United Church missions. The ten articles were published between 4 April and 27 June 1928. Wallace also left detailed notes of the proceedings, as well as reports and minutes obtained at the conference, in his personal papers (uc a ).

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Notes to pages 80–3

335

34 Edward Wilson Wallace, “The Pattern on the Mount,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 5, no. 4 (1928): 313. 35 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Going to Jerusalem,” New Outlook, 4 April 1928, 26. 36 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Who Is Sufficient for These Things?” New Outlook, 16 May 1928, 5, 7. 37 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Workers Together with God: The Christian Message in Action,” New Outlook, 30 May 1928, 8, 16. 38 Wallace, “The Pattern on the Mount,” 315. 39 Jerald D. Gort, “Jerusalem 1928: Mission, Kingdom and Church,” International Review of Mission 67, no. 3 (1978): 287–90. Concerns were further heightened by the provocative recommendations of “the laymen’s report” that appeared as Re-Thinking Missions in 1932. See James Alan Patterson, “The Loss of a Protestant Missionary Consensus: Foreign Missions and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Conflict,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880– 1980, ed. Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 84–91. 40 Daniel Fleming, Whither Bound in Missions (New York: Association Press, 1925), 47, had urged readers to discard the missionary maps that showed “sending” and “receiving” countries. Instead he pictured the West as part of the “non-Christian world,” one that was “a deeper black because it has had access to Christ so long.” 41 Grant Wacker, “Second Thoughts on the Great Commission: Liberal Protestants and Foreign Missions,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980, 291. 42 Wright, 168–9. 43 Ibid., 168. 44 Wallace’s address to the General Council was published as “The World Situation as It Confronts the Church Today,” New Outlook, 19 October 1932, 968. 45 For a further discussion of the contested term “evangelical,” including its use in the “Evangelism” report, see chapter 4 below. “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 256, makes explicit reference to the influence of the Jerusalem meeting. 46 Jesse H. Arnup, A New Church Faces a New World (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1937), 96. 47 Ibid., 77. 48 N.K. Clifford, “His Dominion: A Vision in Crisis,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 2, no. 4 (1973): 315–36, argues that the p ­ ersistence of

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regional and ethnic loyalties among immigrants eroded the nationalist assumptions of Christian Canada in the decades after Confederation. While that may be so, “His Dominion” still resonated with the United Church’s founders before and after union. For example, William Gunn, secretary of the Congregational Missionary Society (1907–25) and moderator (1928–30), chose His Dominion as the title for his study of missions in 1917. The phrase also appears in the title of the overview of wms and home missions work by E.H. Oliver, His Dominion of Canada: A Study of the Background, Development and Challenge of the Missions of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1932). Neither work connects the mission theme to the theology of the social gospel, although the importance of social service is evident for both authors. 49 Ernest Thomas, “Shall We Recover a Lost God?” New Outlook, 8 February 1933, 129. He commended the Jerusalem meeting as going beyond the later and more liberal “Laymen’s Commission” (formally known a Re-Thinking Missions) “in its insistence of a God whose character is such as we see in Jesus Christ.” In “The Spirit of the Modern Church,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 7, no. 2 (1930): 86–7, Thomas credited the Jerusalem meeting with challenging “the whole educational programme of our Western Christendom on the ground that we have relied mainly on indoctrination and have departed from the programme of Jesus, so far as we have so done.” His article included extensive extracts from its reports. 50 See Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914–28 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 313–46, on connections between internationalism and social reform (especially pacifism). Allen observes that internationalism gained momentum in the years when some of the earlier expressions of the social gospel, notably prohibition, were dissipating (342). For analysis of similar links in the United States, see James Alan Patterson, “The Kingdom and the Great Commission: Social Gospel Impulses and American Protestant Missionary Leaders,” Fides et Historia 25, no. 1 (1993): 48–61. 51 R.J. Wilson, Church Union in Canada after Three Years (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1929), illustrates the convergence. A section on “The Task of the United Church” (32–40) highlighted the importance of home missions for dealing with the “problem” of the New Canadian. A discussion of “The Social Order” (40–4) followed, which presented the ­“individual” gospel as incomplete and made specific reference to the Jerusalem meeting (40).

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Notes to pages 84–6

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52 [R.J. Wilson], Two Years’ Progress in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church of Canada Bureau of Literature and Information, 1928), 13. 53 Arnup, 85. 54 Ibid., 93. 55 Ibid., 153–4. 56 Ibid., 151–2. 57 Ibid., 155, citing the report of a joint commission of the Home Mission Board and the w m s . 58 Ibid., 158–62. 59 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1932), 363, is typical in praising students who are training “for service among their own people as teachers or doctors and nurses.” 60 Mrs J. Erle Jones, “Canada, the Great Home Mission Field,” Missionary Monthly, August 1932, 352. 61 “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1938), 335–6 (emphasis in original). 62 J.I. MacKay, The World in Canada (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1938), 32–3, 203. The book provides a detailed description of the United Church’s work with indigenous peoples and immigrants just prior to the Second World War. 63 Allen, 123. 64 For suggestive work along these lines, see Eleanor J. Stebner, “More than Maternal Feminists and Good Samaritans: Women and the Social Gospel in Canada,” in Gender and the Social Gospel, ed. Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 53–67, which deals mainly with pre-union social reform. The connections between evangelical feminism, missionary enthusiasm, and social reform are explored in Gayle I. Thrift, “Proscribed Piety: Woman’s Missionary Societies in Alberta, 1918–1939” (master’s thesis, University of Calgary, 1998). 65 William McGuire King, “An Enthusiasm for Humanity: The Social Emphasis in Religion and Its Accommodation in Protestant Theology,” in Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life, ed. Michael J. Lacey (New York: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Cambridge University Press, 1989), 60–1, notes the internationalist perspective of liberal Protestantism and its disillusionment with nationalism. 66 “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” r o p (1936), 291, prepared by a joint committee appointed in 1935 by the Board of Foreign Missions and the w m s . 67 Arnup, 240–3.

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68 Daniel Fleming, “The World Task of the Church,” in The Church through Half a Century: Essays in Honor of William Adams Brown, ed. Samuel McCrea Cavert and Henry Pitney Van Duson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 322–3, observed that early missionaries were blind to their own Anglo-Saxon nationalism, and were now being forced by nationalistic trends “to inquire whether they have been too much presenting Jesus Christ as one whose significance has been thoroughly worked out in our Western creeds, theologies and social orders, rather than as one whose wondrous personality may break through in new directions not yet envisaged by the West.” 69 For a response to the drastic cuts proposed, see “The Voice of the Fields: What the Missionaries Think of the Proposed Cut” prepared by the Board of Foreign Missions [1935]; copy in George Campbell Pidgeon Papers, uc a , box 15-275. 70 “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” r o p (1936), 241–6. 71 The Jerusalem meeting is mentioned immediately after reference to “new lines of approach” in the “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” and its key assumptions are discussed throughout the report. It is striking that no reference is made to the more radical approach of “the laymen’s report.” This is not for lack of awareness of the study; see Ruth Brouwer, Modern Women Modernizing Men: The Changing Missions of Three Professional Women in Asia and Africa (Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2002), 26–30, for a discussion of the reception of Re-Thinking Missions in Canada. 72 Arnup, 229–31, 236. 73 Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900–1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 107–34. 74 F.N. Stapleford, “The Relation of the Church to Social Work,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 2, no. 1 (1925): 61–2. 75 Stapleford, 63, 68–70. 76 Time Marches On (e& s s Annual Report, 1935), 33. 77 For instance, D.N. McLachlan’s report for Thy Will Be Done (e&ss Annual Report, 1927), 18, urged vigilance in “invoking the coercive power” of the state to further the church’s objectives. 78 Allen, 280–3, describes Thomas’s strategy and the rifts it created with e & s s ’s associate secretary Hugh Dobson in particular. 79 D.L. Ritchie, “The Church in Public Life,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 2 (1926): 177–9. 80 D.L. McLachlan, “Must the Church Be Silent?” Western Recorder, August 1933, 5. For the Christian socialist position, see R.B.Y. Scott, “What Has

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Notes to pages 90–3

339

Christianity to Say on Social and Economic Questions?” New Outlook, 11 April 1934, 267, responding to the negative coverage of church pronouncements on social issues in the secular press. 81 “The Church and the Party,” Saturday Night, 17 June 1933, 1. 82 “Unchangeable Doctrine,” Saturday Night, 24 June 1933, 1. 83 “Report of the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order” (hereafter “Christianizing the Social Order”), r o p (1934), 235. For a different ­interpretation of the report, see David Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 240–8. 84 Robert A. Falconer, Religion on My Life’s Road (Houston: Rice Institute, 1938), 106. 85 James G. Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 85. 86 “Christianizing the Social Order,” 244–6. 87 Ibid., 247. 88 Ibid., 241. 89 Falconer, Religion, 106–7. 90 Gwen R.P. Norman, Grace Unfailing: The Radical Mind and the Beloved Community of Richard Roberts (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1998), 186. 91 Richard Roberts, The Contemporary Christ (New York: Macmillan Company, 1938), 135–6. 92 Session of St Marys United Church, A Critical Comment on a Pamphlet Issued by the General Council of The United Church and Entitled “Christianizing the Social Order” (n.p., n.d.), 2–5. 93 “Christianizing the Social Order,” 235. 94 Ibid., 247–8. The group had pressed the commission, without success, to make more explicit statements about the problems of capitalism and the “almost unlimited pursuit of private gain.” The similarities between their proposals for restructuring the economy on a Christian basis and the policies of the newly formed ccf party left Christian socialist sympathizers vulnerable to the charge that they had crossed the line between principles and partisanship. 95 Kenneth Norrie and Douglas Owram, A History of the Canadian Economy (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 491–4. 96 John Herd Thompson and Allan Seager, Canada 1922–39: Decades of Discord (Toronto: McClelland and Stuart, 1985), 262–6. 97 Thompson and Seager, 274.

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Notes to pages 94–6

98 Norrie and Owram, 498–502. On King’s ambivalence to expanding social programs, see Thompson and Seager, 273–81. Owram, Government Generation, 180, notes the irony in Bennett’s poor relationship with the reform-minded intellectual community since his New Deal attempted to expand the role of the state in systematic social planning along the lines it had proposed.   99 Walter T. Brown and J.R. Mutchmor to Newton Wesley Rowell, 12 April 1938, a letter that accompanied “A Brief on Social Security by a Commission on Economic and Social Research ... Presented to the Royal Com­ mission on Dominion-Provincial Relations,” April 1938, Commission on Economic and Social Research, u ca 82.032C, box 1-3. 100 “A Brief on Social Security by a Commission on Economic and Social Research,” 12, box 1-3. 101 Ted Reeve, Claiming the Social Passion: The Role of the United Church in Creating a Culture of Social Well-Being in Canadian Society (Toronto: Moderator’s Consultation on Faith and the Economy, 1999), discusses the United Church’s involvement in promoting social welfare policies, including the “Christianizing the Social Order” report (54–68) and the Rowell Commission brief (75–83). 102 Roger Hutchinson, “The Public Faith of a Democratic Socialist,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 21, no. 2 (1986): 34. 103 Michael Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire (Toronto: Macmillan Company, 1978), 454. 104 Winter, 40–1, describes the problems that surface when pastoral and agency orientations work at cross-purposes rather than complementarily, identifying the agency’s takeover of the religious enterprise as a danger confronting many Protestant churches. 105 Bliss, 454–5. Ironically, Flavelle’s assessment is remarkably similar to the complaint of Presbyterian opponents of church union in both Canada and the United States. James H. Moorhead, “Presbyterians and the Mystique of Organizational Efficiency, 1870–1936,” in Reimagining Denominationalism, 277–81, points out that centralization was resisted by Machen and other conservatives in the Presbyterian church in the United States, and notes the tensions between national and local concerns. 106 “New United Church Comes into Being,” Toronto Mail, 11 June 1925 [clipping], United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series I, uc a 83.063C, box 36-773, reporting on Ritchie’s address to the General Council. 107 D.L. Ritchie, “The Fourth 10th of June,” New Outlook, 6 June 1928, 8.

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Notes to pages 96–100

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108 Salem G. Bland, “The Most Momentous Issue of the Coming Council,” New Outlook, 21 September 1932, 872. 109 J.W.A. Nicholson, “The Church’s Role,” in Towards the Christian Revolution, ed. R.B.Y. Scott and Gregory Vlastos (Chicago: Willet, Clark and Company, 1936), 177. 110 Richard Roberts, “The Moderator’s Mission,” New Outlook, 31 October 1934, 954. 111 Roberts, The Contemporary Christ, 47–8, 119–20. 112 [R.J. Wilson], Two Years’ Progress, 9. 113 Marshall, 230–3, discusses the United Church’s dire financial situation, arguing that it stemmed from the economic crisis as well as its own spiritual depression. 114 “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” 238. 115 Ian McKay Manson, “‘Fighting the Good Fight’: Salvation, Social Reform, and Service in the United Church of Canada’s Board of Evangelism and Social Service” (ThD diss., Victoria University, 1999), 154–81, describes the social services supported by e& s s , including “redemptive” homes, maternity homes, and reform schools for boys and girls. 116 McLachlan, Time Marches On, 30. 117 “The Largest Class since Church Union,” Missionary Monthly, July 1946, 300. Mary Anne MacFarland, “Faithful and Courageous Handmaidens: Deaconesses in the United Church of Canada, 1925–1945,” in Changing Roles of Women within the Christian Church in Canada, ed. Elizabeth Gillan Muir and Marilyn Färdig Whiteley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 248–55, discusses their role as missionaries, noting that after the Second World War opportunities for paid employment for women shifted to Christian education in congregations. 118 Katharine B. Hockin, “My Pilgrimage in Mission,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 12, no. 1 (1988): 26. 119 Arnup, 253. 120 Eleanor J. Stebner, “Young Man Knowles: Christianity, Politics, and the ‘Making of a Better World,’” in Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 221–32. 121 Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 226. 122 Richard Roberts, For the Kingdom of God (London: sc m Press, 1933), 82–3. 123 Norman, 221.

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Notes to pages 100–3

124 The generational shift bears a striking resemblance to the cycles of change described in William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 69–96; in this case the “Missionary” generation (an Idealist type) was succeeded by the “Lost” generation (a Reactive type) during a ­“crisis era.” 125 Richard Roberts to Don MacVicar, 20 February 1941, Richard Roberts Papers, uc a, box 1-14. When Arnup retired in 1952 he had been in national executive positions since 1913. Mutchmor was to remain as ­secretary of e& s s until 1962, with his own retirement coming in 1964. 126 Manson, 8. 127 Ernest Thomas, Christian Life in a Changing World (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1937), 61–3.

c ha p t e r f o u r    1 George Campbell Pidgeon, “The City without Walls,” New Outlook, 16 June 1926, 7, 28. D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 180, remarks that the unity of evangelical Protestantism in Britain and the United States was shattered by the 1920s, with divisions between conservatives and liberals sometimes so sharp that one side did not consider the other side as Christian, let alone evangelical. The church union controversy seems to have fueled a similar response to the United Church, with Machen and others providing sparks.   2 e & s s published a number of pamphlets that challenged apocalyptic and premillennial interpretations of the Kingdom; see Andrew Stewart, The Millennial Reign of Christ (n.d.); Ernest Thomas, Why Christians Expect the Reign of Christ (1936); Ernest Thomas, Waiting for the Lord’s Return (1936); and R.B.Y. Scott, The Gospel of the Kingdom (Montreal: Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, 1936).    3 The United Church was more ‘settled’ than the liberal Protestants ­featured in Leigh Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005); its leaders were also attempting to straddle the developing divide described in Jean Miller Schmidt, Souls or the Social Order: The TwoParty System in American Protestantism (Brooklyn, ny: Carlson, 1991). See Bebbington, 210–19, for a nicely nuanced analysis of conservative and liberal approaches to social reform among evangelical Protestants in Britain.

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Notes to pages 103–7

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  4 A.B. McKillop, Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 406.   5 Pidgeon, “The Message and Mission of the United Church of Canada,” 23–4.   6 Talcott Parsons, “Christianity in a Modern Industrial Society,” in Sociological Theory, Values, and Sociocultural Change: Essays in Honor of Pitirim A. Sorokin, ed. Edward A. Tiryakian (Glencoe, il: Free Press, 1963), 36–7, 52–4. “Inner-worldly” piety bears a striking family resemblance to Nancy Ammerman’s “Golden Rule Christians”: lay liberals who hope to make the world a bit better through donations and volunteer activities, rather than overturning the political system; see “Golden Rule Christianity: Lived Religion in the American Mainstream,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton, n j: Princeton University Press, 1997), 203–6.   7 Phyllis D. Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Methodism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1992), especially chapter 4.   8 William McGuire King, “An Enthusiasm for Humanity: The Social Emphasis in Religion and Its Accommodation in Protestant Theology,” in Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life, ed. Michael J. Lacy (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Cambridge University Press, 1989), 55, 57–8.   9 Edmund Oliver, The Social Achievement of the Christian Church (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada, 1930), 178–9. On the developing split among evangelical Protestants over what conversion entailed, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “‘What Must I Do to Be Saved?’: Two Paths to Evangelical Conversion in Late Victorian Canada,” Church History 59, no. 3 (1990): 372–85. 10 Oliver, 172. 11 J.S. Woodsworth, “Thy Kingdom Come,” Grain Grower’s Guide 30 (June 1915), in Malcolm Ross, ed., Our Sense of Identity: A Book of Canadian Essays (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954), 293. 12 “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 252–5. 13 J.R.P. Sclater, Modernist Fundamentalism (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1926), 23. The foreword notes that the chapters were adapted from a series of sermons that were later published in the New Outlook, an indication that this was considered a timely topic. 14 R.J. Wilson [undated report], United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series 1, u ca 83.063C, box 23-509. 15 John S. Moir, Enduring Witness: A History of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 3rd ed. (Burlington, on : Eagle Press, [2004?]), 234. Moir says

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Notes to pages 107–8

that Machen compared modernists to Judas; the published text of the ­sermon associates them with “the Judaizers” (a heresy unrelated to Judas) along with Gnostics and Pelagians. See J. Gresham Machen, “The Mission of the Church,” accessed 7 August 2012, www.pcahistory. org / findingaids / machen / mission.html. 16 “The ‘Fundamentalists,’” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 3 (1926): 170. 17 “True Fundamentalism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 3 (1926): 170–1. 18 D.L. McLachlan’s annual report in He Must Reign (e&ss Annual Report, 1928), 19–20. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 224–43, find evidence of a revival of personal religion in the 1930s, yet even the Oxford Group was not simply a return to mass meetings on the scale of earlier decades. 19 “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 257. 20 William S. Kervin, “Worship on the Way: The Dialectic of United Church Worship,” in The United Church of Canada: A History, ed. Don Schweitzer (Waterloo, on : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 188– 94, discusses the importance of Forms of Service and other liturgical resources in shaping the ethos of worship. 21 N. Keith Clifford, “No Easy Process: Alexander MacMillan and the Birth of the Hymnary,” Touchstone 8, no. 1 (January 1990): 42–3. On the “Presbyterian preponderance” of influence, see Thomas Harding and Bruce Harding, Patterns of Worship in the United Church of Canada, 1925–1960 (Toronto: Evensong, 1995), 39–41. 22 S.P. Rose, “The Making of a Hymn-Book,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 7, no. 4 (1930): 309, 311. 23 For an account of the use of service books in the United Church, see Harding and Harding, especially chapter 3. On the early liturgical ­development of the United Church, see William S. Kervin, “Forms of Service (1926): The Liturgical Ethos of the United Church of Canada,” Toronto Journal of Theology 17, no. 2 (2001): 215–29. Kervin notes that Presbyterian forms outnumbered Methodist sources by a ratio of 3 to 1 (218). Combined with Macmillan’s influence on the hymn book committee, it is not surprising that United Church worship developed a decidedly Presbyterian tone that was to last until the revolution of the 1960s. 24 J.A. Davidson cited in Harding and Harding, 121.

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Notes to pages 108–11

345

25 G. Campbell Wadsworth, “The United Church Communion Rite of 1932: An Appreciation and Apologia,” Canadian Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1966): 110. On the use of the Book of Common Order, see David R. Newman, “Worship in the United Church of Canada,” Worship 53 (1979): 538–48 and W. Morrison Kelly, “Fifty Years of Worship in the United Church,” Gathering (Advent / Christmas / Epiphany Study Papers, 1985): 1–6. 26 Harding and Harding, 97–102. 27 Osbert Morley Sanford, The Genius of the United Church (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1931), 11. 28 Sanford, 12–19. 29 A.G. Reynolds, For the Land’s Sake (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, [1944?]), 61, 63. 30 R. Edis Fairbairn, “Worship As a Substitute,” u c o , 14 September 1940, 15. 31 W.T. Brown, “The Meaning of Worship,” Baccalaureate Sermon: Victoria University and Union Theological College, 14 April 1928, 6. For a discussion of emotion as essential yet dangerous, see “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 259–60. On changes in what was deemed appropriate emotional expression prior to union, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “Condensation and Heart Religion: Canadian Methodists as Evangelicals, 1884–1925,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 99. 32 “The Church and Industry,” r o p (1932), 288–9. 33 Michiel Horn, The Great Depression of the 1930s in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1984), 9–14. 34 For an analysis of liberal theology between the wars, including a discussion of its challengers, see Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, k y: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 435–521. For a succinct discussion of the “liberal era” of American Protestantism between 1875 and 1935, see William McGuire King, “Liberalism,” in The Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (New York: Scribner, 1988), 2:1129–45. Sydney Ahlstrom, “Continental Influence on American Christian Thought since World War I,” in Theological Themes in the American Protestant World, vol. 4 of Modern American Protestantism and Its World, ed. Martin E. Marty (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1992), 238–9, describes its central themes and notes that stagnancy was evident by 1920: “With the possible exception of the great religious depression of the Revolutionary epoch (1770–1800), there

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Notes to pages 111–13

was probably never a time in American history when less heed was paid to the message of the churches. At no time did it so deserve to be ignored.” 35 Heather A. Warren, Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 50–3. On Barth’s influence, see Gary Dorrien, Theology without Weapons: The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 14–80. Ahlstrom, “Continental Influence,” 244–5, sees 1934 as a critical year with the ­publication of Barth’s sermons in English; Edwin Lewis’s “Christian Manifesto”; Walter Marshall Horton’s Realistic Theology; and Niebuhr’s Reflections on the End of an Era as well as his lectures that came out a year later as An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. See also Dennis N. Voskuil, “America Encounters Karl Barth,” in Theological Themes in the American Protestant World, 253–66. He notes that, although Barth’s Commentary on Romans was published in 1919, the shockwaves of this “bombshell” took longer to reach North America. By then the continent was in the throes of the Depression and ready to take note of his message. 36 “A Significant Student Conference,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 4 (1931): 271–2. The editorial also expressed regret that the sv m had become a “separate fellowship,” and described them as “mere traditionists” [sic], while applauding the sc m event as manifesting a “vigorous and vital evangelical form without the graver defects which characterize the evangelical party.” For Visser ’t Hooft’s presentation of the theological shift see “An Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 1 (1931): 37–51. 37 W.A. Visser ’t Hooft, “A Farewell to the Social Gospel,” Student World 26, no. 3 (1933): 275–6. 38 John C. Bennett, “After Liberalism – What?” Christian Century, 8 November 1933, 1403–4. 39 Vlastos’s letter is cited in Warren, 61. 40 Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), 169. Chapter 5 of this work displays Niebuhr’s biting critique of liberalism. Daniel F. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey: An American Odyssey (Albany: State University of New York, 1993), 196ff., provides an excellent summary of Niebuhr’s critique of the liberal creed. 41 Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 177–9. 42 King, “An Enthusiasm for Humanity,” 75. 43 Henry Nelson Wieman, Methods of Private Religious Living (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 116.

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Notes to pages 113–15

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44 Ibid., 17–18. 45 Ibid., 63. 46 John Line, “The New Physics and the Religious View of the World,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 7, no. 1 (1930): 6–17, presents a positive assessment of new scientific developments, as do H.F. Leach, “The New Physics and the Idea of God,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 6, no. 5 (1929): 326–34, and Richard Roberts, The Christian God (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 82–6. All three mention the influence of Eddington and Whitehead. 47 Robert A. Falconer, “Difficulties for Religion in an Age of Science,” Religious Education 23, no. 4 (1928): 281–2. 48 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Going to Jerusalem,” New Outlook, 4 April 1928, 26. He left the conference convinced that “secular civilization” was “coming to be the great opponent in all lands” and a common challenge to all Christians. Samuel McCrae Cavert, The American Churches in the Ecumenical Movement, 1900–1968 (New York: Association Press, 1968), 134, confirms that assessment of the impact of Jones’s paper, crediting his presentation at the Jerusalem meeting in 1928 for an idea “little recognized in previous missionary gatherings”: that secularism, rather than other religions, had become Christianity’s main competitor. 49 Rice, 55. See John Dewey, “Humanist Manifesto,” in American Christianity, ed. H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 2:248–53. 50 On the conflict over naturalism (including humanism) and liberal theology, see Rice, esp. 93–215. 51 H. Shelton Smith, “Is Religious Naturalism Enough?” Religious Education 31, no. 2 (1936): 107. 52 John Baillie, “The Predicament of Humanism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 109, 112–15. 53 John Line, “How Humanism Came and What It Is,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 98–108, and Walter T. Brown, “Humanism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 125–34. 54 My survey of the issues of the Federal Council Bulletin (f c b ) in the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School library suggests that the United Church’s ecumenical partners in the Federal Council of Churches were contending with similar problems. As illustrations, see Francis J. McConnell, “The Social Task of the Church in America,” f c b , March– April 1925, 13–14; S. Parker Cadman, “The Returning Emphasis on the Inner Life,” f c b , September–October 1926, 11; Reinhold Niebuhr, “Can

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Notes to pages 115–17

Religion Solve Social Problems,” f c b , March 1927, 11–12; “When Mysticism and Social Service Meet,” f c b , November 1927, 3; “Evangelism – Individual and Social,” f c b , June 1928, 1–2; “A FullOrbed Evangelism,” f c b , June 1930, 1–2; “Beyond Humanism,” f c b , November 1930, 5; Luther Weigle, “The New Paganism and the Coming Revival,” f c b , April 1931, 6–7; Rufus M. Jones, “The First Requisite for a Better World,” f c b , October 1931, 6; Robert Speer, “The Meaning of the Gospel for the Individual Today” f c b , February 1932, 7; “Salvation: Individual and Social,” f c b , May 1935, 3; “The Recovery of Evangelism,” f c b , September 1936, 3. 55 “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 255–6, 262. 56 D.N. McLachlan’s report in Revive Thy Work (e&ss Annual Report, 1930), 17–18. 57 Richard Roberts, For the Kingdom of God (London: sc m Press, 1933), 15–17. 58 Richard Roberts, The Spirit of God and the Faith of Today (Chicago: Willett, Clark and Colby, 1930), 120–3. 59 John Herd Thompson and Allan Seager, Canada 1922–39: Decades of Discord (Toronto: McClelland and Stuart, 1985), 183–4. 60 Mary Vipond, The Mass Media in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1989), 21–33. 61 Charles W. Gilkey, “Protestant Preaching,” in The Church through Half a Century: Essays in Honor of William Adams Brown, ed. Samuel McCrea Cavert and Henry Pitney Van Dusen (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 320. 62 Richard Roberts, The Contemporary Christ (New York: Macmillan Company, 1938), 104, observed that people had “fallen into a way of accepting the good of life as a matter of course, even if not as a matter of right; and it hardly occurs to us to give thanks; and the giving of thanks is the key to worship.” 63 For an astute analysis of the Oxford Group movement’s blending of old and new and its shift to political concerns, see Kevin Kee, Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 96–142. For a sampling of the mixed reaction of United Church ministers to the “groupers,” see A.D. Miller, “The Movement through Friendly but Open Eyes,” (n.d.), Alfred Dennis Miller Papers, u ca, box 1-14; The Committee of Thirty, The Challenge of the Oxford Group Movement: An Attempt at Appraisal (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1933); Richard Roberts, “The Oxford Group,”

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64

65

66

67

Notes to pages 117–18

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Christian Century, 1 February 1933, 147–9; Ernest Thomas, “How to Make the Oxford Group Fruitful,” Western Recorder, January 1933, 4–5; Ernest Thomas, “The Oxford Group: Second Phase,” Western Recorder, March 1933, 4–5; and Claris Edwin Silcox, “The Oxford Groups in Canada,” Christian Century, 12 September 1934, 1137–40. David Plaxton, “A Whole Gospel for a Whole Nation” (PhD diss., Queen’s University, 1997), 108–13, notes that most observers viewed the movement as an attempt to recover evangelical piety because of its emphasis on experience. Christie and Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity, 224, suggest that the Oxford Group avoided references to basic evangelical doctrine because of the antipathy of those subscribing to social Christianity. On the other hand, Niebuhr, Interpretation, 177–8, described the Oxford Group as an expression of liberal Christianity. His assessment was scathing: “The Buchman movement, supposedly a revitalization of Christianity but in reality the final and most absurd expression of the romantic presuppositions of liberal Christianity, has undertaken to solve all the problems of modern economics and politics by persuading individuals to live in terms of ‘absolute honesty’ and ‘absolute love.’” David Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 226–7, sees the Oxford Group movement as further evidence of the spiritual depression that Canadian Protestantism was experiencing. For example, the Joint Committee suggested studies on the topic of “God in National and Personal Life,” (Easter 1934), Pidgeon Papers, box 9-178. For the relationship of the Oxford Group to the Joint Committee, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “Christian Socialism and the Legacy of Revivalism in the 1930s,” in A Long and Faithful March: ‘Towards the Christian Revolution,’ 1930s / 1980s, ed. Harold Wells and Roger Hutchinson (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1989), 35–7, and Plaxton, chapter 4. Pidgeon chaired the Joint Committee, but continued to support the Oxford Group even after its meetings became a bone of contention in his own denomination. Gwen R.P. Norman, Grace Unfailing: The Radical Mind and the Beloved Community of Richard Roberts (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1998), 222–4. Ian Manson, “Religious Revival and Social Transformation: George Pidgeon and the United Church of Canada in the 1930s,” Toronto Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1996): 216–20.

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Notes to pages 118–21

68 J.W.A. Nicholson, “Realism in Religion: Giving the Prayer-Wheel Another Turn,” u c o , 21 March 1934, 206–7. 69 For a discussion of the fcs o’s position in relation to the United Church’s social message, see Roger Hutchinson, “The Fellowship for a Christian Social Order: A Social Ethical Analysis of a Christian Socialist Movement” (ThD diss., Victoria University, 1975), 26–70. 70 Eugene Forsey, “A New Economic Order,” in Towards the Christian Revolution, ed. R.B.Y. Scott and Gregory Vlastos (Chicago: Willet, Clark and Company, 1936), 101–2. 71 John Line, “The Fundamental Unity of Spiritual and Religious Values,” Address to the Toronto Ministerial Association, 5 January 1931, 5, John Line Papers, u ca, box 1-2. 72 Line, “The Theological Principles,” in Towards the Christian Revolution, 33. 73 Ibid., 32. 74 John Line, “Conditions of Religious Renewal,” Christian Century, 3 June 1936, 800, 802. 75 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Towards a Christian Revolution,” Radical Religion 2, no. 1 (1937): 42–4. 76 Gordon A. Sisco, “[Review of] Towards the Christian Revolution,” New Outlook, 19 February 1937, 160–1. 77 For Roberts’s response to the crisis in liberalism, see Michael Bourgeois, “Hope, History and Redemption in the Theology of Richard Roberts (1874–1945),” Toronto Journal of Theology 19, no. 2 (2003): 157–72. 78 Richard Roberts, The New Man and the Divine Society: A Study in Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 16–17. 79 Richard Roberts, “In Praise of Humanism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 122–4. He found in process theology a tool for preserving his understanding of God as both transcendent and immanent, and Christ as both divine and human; see Roberts, The Christian God, 82–6, and The Spirit of God and the Faith of Today, 144–5. 80 Richard Roberts, [Moderator’s Final Address to General Council in 1936], Roberts Papers, box 3-84, 9–10. 81 Roberts, The Contemporary Christ, 44. 82 Ibid., 77. 83 Ibid., 124–5. 84 Clashes between the first chair and secretary of the commission (Queen’s professor J.M. Shaw and e& s s ’s Ernest Thomas) led to their replacement in 1938 by Richard Davidson, (principal of Emmanuel College) and J.R. Mutchmor (recently appointed as secretary of e&ss). For an analysis of

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85

86

87

88

89 90

Notes to pages 121–2

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the membership and work of the Commission, see Ian McKay Manson, “‘Fighting the Good Fight’: Salvation, Social Reform, and Service in the United Church of Canada’s Board of Evangelism and Social Service” (ThD diss., Victoria University, 1999), 194–201, which includes a comparison of the draft submitted by Ernest Thomas (“Statement A”) with one prepared by John Line and his Emmanuel colleague John Dow (“Statement B”). See Commission on Christian Faith, u ca 82.031C, box 2 for the statements and responses. Minutes, 20 November 1939, Commission on Christian Faith, box 1-1, recorded that Thomas was absent because of illness, and he died the following February. Line was absent from that meeting as well, perhaps accounting for the frank discussion of the merits of particular sections of the two statements suggested in the minutes. Minutes, 17 April 1939, Commission on Christian Faith, box 1-1. The minutes of the 26 May 1939 meeting (ibid.) indicate that Line complimented Thomas’s draft, but stated that in his view it was impossible to combine it with the (arguably more Barthian) one that he had helped to prepare. Gordon A. Sisco, “Shall We Return to Calvinism?” New Outlook, 17 September 1937, 837–8. Unlike Talcott Parsons (as noted above), who credited Calvin with a world-affirming theology, Sisco saw Barth’s worlddenying theology as an attempt to reclaim Calvin’s “stern views of God, man, and history.” Sisco referred to Scottish theologian John Macmurray as “a thinker who holds to the liberal tradition” and urged that his ideas be used to modify Barth. Macmurray’s name often crops up in the writings of John Line, and Richard Roberts as well. Randolph Carleton Chalmers, See the Christ Stand! A Study in Doctrine in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), 189. Chalmers succeeded Richard Roberts at Sherbourne Street United Church, became associate secretary of e& s s in 1945, and then left in 1950 to accept a position at St Andrew’s College. He returned to the Maritimes in 1957 to teach at Pine Hill Divinity Hall, retiring in 1974. For an assessment of his theology, see William Haughton, “Almost Forgotten: RC [sic] Chalmers and the Liberal-Evangelical Heritage of the United Church of Canada,” Touchstone 29, no. 2 (2011): 51–8. Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 59. “Gregory Vlastos,” accessed 3 May 2013, http: / / philosophy.princeton. edu / index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55&Itemid=145. For an assessment of his impact on students at Queen’s Theological

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Notes to pages 122–6



College as a Christian socialist, see George Rawlyk and Kevin Quinn, The Redeemed of the Lord Say So: A History of Queen’s Theological College (Kingston: Queen’s Theological College, 1980), 115–8.   91 Letter to Professor George F. Thomas, 12 March 1955, R.B.Y. Scott Papers, uc a, box 1-3. By that point in his mid-fifties, he accepted the ­position at Princeton with its “most generous” salary, and inquired about becoming an American citizen in order to receive Social Security upon retirement.   92 Ian Manson, “‘O Day of God Draw Nigh’: R.B.Y. Scott, the Church and the Call for Social Reconstruction,” in Doing Ethics in a Pluralistic World: Essays in Honour of Roger C. Hutchinson, ed. Phyllis D. Airhart, Marilyn J. Legge, and Gary L. Redcliffe (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002), 99–111.   93 Courtesy of Emmanuel College. Copyright © Emmanuel College 1965.   94 R.P. Stouffer, “Prof. Line and the Resolution,” Saturday Night, 24 June 1933: 3.   95 John Line, “Recent Trends in Theological Education,” u c o , 1 August 1941, 28, was written shortly after his move to Emmanuel, and reflects his theological transitions.   96 John Line, The Doctrine of the Christian Ministry (London: Lutterworth, 1959).   97 John Line, “The Significance of the Report of the Commission on the Christianization of the Social Order,” Time Marches On (e&ss Annual Report, 1935), 26.   98 “Rev. John Line,” Minutes of Toronto Conference (1971), 57–8.   99 Some initiatives were reframed to capture this new image of the “whole Gospel.” For example, e& s s still supported Pidgeon’s Evangelization of Canadian Life campaign, but insisted that its activities be interpreted in the light of the “whole Gospel” and conducted in consultation with the Social Service Council of Canada. See Pidgeon Papers, box 9-184, for a copy of the action taken by e& s s at its 1937 meeting. 100 Candidus [pseud.], “An Outsider Looks at General Council,” New Outlook, 14 October 1936, 956. 101 “Evangelism and Social Service,” r o p (1936), 80.

c ha p t e r f i ve    1 L.B. Pearson, “Canada and the United States,” in Words and Occasions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 25.

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Notes to pages 127–30

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  2 John Bennett, Georgia Harkness, and the brothers Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr are among those dubbed by one historian as “theologians of a new world order.” See Heather Warren, Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). She notes the congruence between themes in the Oxford Conference reports and concerns of various group members circulated in their own publications as well as preparatory materials for the meeting, for example, worldwide social disintegration, sin as the cause of the turmoil, and the institutional church as the antidote for social ills (79–80).   3 “The Church and International Relationships,” r o p (1938), 93–5.   4 Minutes, 31 October 1939, War Service Committee, uc a 82.041C, box 1-1.   5 “A Witness Against the War,” u c o , 15 October 1939, 21.   6 John Coburn to H.D. Ranns, 10 October 1939, Board of Evangelism and Social Service, Series I, subseries 2, u ca 83.052C, box 46-80.   7 Ian McKay Manson, “The United Church of Canada and the Second World War,” in The United Church of Canada: A History (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 62–6, describes the wide-ranging involvement of the United Church in the war effort at the national and local levels.   8 Gordon Sisco, “Specific Tasks of the Crusade,” n.d., Gordon A. Sisco Papers, u ca, box 1-6.   9 “A Resume of the Wartime Services Rendered by the United Church Committee on Camp and War Production Communities,” n.d., 14, uc a 82.044C, box 1-6. Over a third of the names on a roster of the committee compiled at the end of the war were female. 10 “Practical Christianity in Wartime,” unidentified clipping appended to “A Resume of the Wartime Services.” 11 “United Church W.M.S. to Assist Women War Workers,” St Thomas Times Journal, May 27 1942 [clipping], Verda Ullman biographical file, uc a . 12 Minutes, 28 September 1942, Committee on Camp and War Production Communities, u ca 82.044C, box 1-1. For the wms’s involvement, see Isabel McIntosh Loveys, “The United Church and War Production Communities,” The Missionary Monthly, November 1942, 500–1. 13 “United Church W.M.S. to Assist Women War Workers.” 14 Malcolm MacDonald, They Look to the Church (Toronto: Committee on Camp and War Production Communities, 1944), 3. 15 Ibid., 11–12, 17–18, 20–3.

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Notes to pages 130–2

16 “Canadian War Bonds for the Church,” Christian Century, 5 February 1941, 172–3. The problematic relationship of church and state that Morrison identified is discussed in N.K. Clifford, “Charles Clayton Morrison and the United Church of Canada,” Canadian Journal of Theology 15, no. 2 (1969): 80–92. 17 R. Edis Fairbairn, “Indictment,” u c o , 1 February 1941, 11. He applied his criticism more broadly in Apostate Christendom (Ken-Pax Pub. Co., [1948?]), a booklet based on newsletters he fired off from his small pastoral charge in Windermere, Ontario, where he considered himself “exiled” after his acerbic pronouncements against the war led to his ouster from a larger church. 18 E.G.D. Freeman, “The Church and Social Reconstruction,” Church of the Air series; lectures delivered in Winnipeg, November 1941; mimeographed and mailed from the Department [sic] of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada, Toronto, lecture 1, 1–2. 19 Ibid., lecture 1, 3–5. 20 Ibid., lecture 2, 2–4. He credited Henry Sloan Coffin, one of his teachers at Union Theological Seminary, for influencing his faith in democracy. 21 Ibid., lecture 3, 3. 22 Ibid., lecture 4, 2. 23 Ibid., lecture 4, 4. 24 “Church Nation and World Order Interim Report,” r o p (1942), 129, notes the commission of the Federal Council of Churches that produced A Just and Durable Peace, to which the United Church had sent three representatives. 25 The wide-ranging topics included racial minorities, agriculture, postwar employment, housing, social security (including unemployment and disability insurance, worker’s compensation, health services, family allowances, and old age pensions), and English-French relations. 26 Gordon A. Sisco, “Christian Leaders Face Post-war Problems,” u c o , 1 August 1943, 27. The nine Canadian delegates included several from the United Church, among them Gordon Sisco, R.B.Y. Scott (who led discussions and was involved in drafting statements), W.C. Lockhart, and Gerald Hutchinson. 27 R.A. MacKay to J.R. Mutchmor, 2 February 1943, Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (hereafter cited as c nwo), uc a 82.046, box 1-7. 28 A.R.M. Lower, “Re the Basic Memorandum: Commission on the Church, Nation and World Order, United Church of Canada,” 9 August 1943, c nwo, box 1-10.

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Notes to pages 132–3

355

29 Correspondence addressed to the commission expressed wide-ranging concerns that confirmed the point that Silcox was making. Letter William M. Birks to Gordon Sisco, 3 February 1943, box 1-7, for instance, expressed concerns about the group that was working on banking. Birks wrote, “If it is made up of ministers and not experts, I hope that it will, at least, take advice from outstanding bankers, and economists, including the governor of the Bank of Canada.” Sisco assured him that the commission did not intend to “pose as an expert in this field,” adding,“I imagine that whatever information is sent in on this subject would be used by way of illustration of some general principle”; see Sisco to Birks, 8 February 1943, box 1-7. The correspondence in cnwo, box 1-7, suggests the polarity that the commission was attempting to manage: for example, Harvey Forster to Gordon Sisco, 20 February 1943; Mel Staples to Gordon Sisco, 21 June 1943; and Sisco’s reply to Staples, 22 June 1943. 30 Gordon Sisco to H.W. Avison, 29 January 1944, c nwo, box 1-7. 31 For a summary of his career, see Alan Davies, “Claris Edwin Silcox (1888– 1961): Brave and Resolute Champion of the City of God,” Touchstone 27, no. 2 (2009): 50–7. 32 Silcox explained his rationale for the revised draft in “Memorandum to Members of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order,” 11 October 1943, cn wo, box 1-3. 33 Scott expressed frustration with the new direction taken in the fifth draft, finding it “hard to see why the practical suggestions for application of the Christian Charter are identified with socialism”; see letter from R.B.Y Scott to C.E. Silcox, 19 September 1943, c nwo, box 1-7. Scott also raised questions about importing middle axioms from the American “Six Pillars of Peace.” 34 Silcox, “Memorandum,” 11 October 1943, c nwo, box 1-3. In one of his first presentations to the commission, Silcox defended his approach as ­follows: “The problem of middle axioms is a vexed one, but while the Church should refuse to confine itself to pious generalities it should also refuse to issue dogmatic statements regarding a wide variety of detailed plans the implementation of which depends upon many factors varying with the time, the place and the specific situation.” He referred to a copy of the declaration on world peace which had been issued by major Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders as an illustration of how much agreement could be achieved by avoiding “maximum” statements, and promised to share the “secret history” of how this “remarkable agreement” was reached at the next meeting (18 October). Silcox’s view was likely shared by Gordon Sisco, and is strikingly similar to the views

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356

35

36 37

38

39

40 41 42

43

Notes to pages 133–5

expressed by John Foster Dulles, chair of the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace on which Mutchmor and Sisco served. On a copy of a Life magazine article that Dulles sent to Sisco (and which he in turn sent to cn wo commission members), Sisco highlighted the ­following words: “We need men who, as citizens, will think out the application of those principles to the daily life of our nation. That is something that every one must do for himself. The Church cannot and should not try to do that for him.” John Foster Dulles, “A Righteous Faith,” Life, [28 December 1942?], cn wo, box 1-17. Church, Nation and World Order: A Report of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, [1944?]), 6. Ibid., 13. For example, Hugh H. Wolfenden to Gordon Sisco, 25 February 1943, c nwo, box 1-7, warned those preparing the 1944 report: “This Commission on such a question could and should have great influence throughout the whole of Canada; and general thinking on the social security question at the present moment is so much in the stage of somewhat unreliable endorsation or opposition ... that it will be of paramount importance for influential groups like this Commission to state its conclusion only after the most careful exploration and deliberation.” On proposals for social programs during the war (including a discussion of the Marsh report and the impact of the Beveridge report), see Dennis Guest, “World War II and the Welfare State in Canada,” in The “Benevolent” State: The Growth of Welfare in Canada, ed. Allan Moscovitch and Jim Albert (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1987), 205–21. “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 133, referring to Sisco’s description of its work in 1946. The c c ia was under the auspices of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service, and replaced the Committee on International Relationships. Church, Nation and World Order, 34. George M. Grant, “Canada,” in Christendom Anno Domini MDCCCCI, ed. William D. Grant (Toronto: William Briggs, 1902), 1:81. Robert Choquette, “English-French Relations in the Canadian Catholic Community,” in Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930, ed. Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 19. Lester B. Pearson, Mike: The Memoirs of the Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1972), 1:15. For his

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44

45 46

47

48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

Notes to pages 135–7

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description of life in a Methodist parsonage, and his parents’ hopes that he would follow his father into the ministry, see 8–10, 14. Max and Monique Nemni, Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919–1944, trans. William Johnson (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006), is a fascinating account of how Trudeau’s student papers were infused with the values of his teachers. They conclude that almost all the students at Quebec’s Jesuit colleges “ended up with identical values with respect to Catholicism and French-Canadian nationalism. And they were convinced that they reached these values of their own free will” (48). See John English, et al., eds., The Hidden Pierre Elliott Trudeau: The Faith behind the Politics (Ottawa: Novalis, 2004), especially David Seljak, “Trudeau and the Privatization of Religion: The Quebec Context,” 47–56, for Trudeau’s approach to religion in political life in his later years. Nemni and Nemni, 58. Ibid., 63–4. They describe young Trudeau as a dutiful student presenting notions that were widely disseminated in Quebec schools: “the revenge of the cradle, the return to the land, the apostolic mission of the French Canadian ‘race,’ which is even a biological entity.” They note that at another Jesuit college, a teenager named René Lévesque was publishing similar ideas in the student newspaper (64–5). John English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 292–9, discusses Trudeau’s reversal in his views of the role of the Catholic Church in Quebec society. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1938), 342–3 (regional report submitted by J.U. Tanner). Claris Edwin Silcox, Protestant-Catholic Relations in Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1938), 10–11. Charles Thompson Sinclair Faulkner, “‘For Christian Civilization’: The Churches and Canada’s War Effort, 1939–1942” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1975), 112–15. Ibid., 123–4. Ibid., 117–32. J.R. Mutchmor, “Canadian Churches and Post-War Reconstruction,” Christendom 8 (1943): 374. C.E. Silox, The Revenge of the Cradles (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), iii. Ibid., iv–vi. Ibid., 25–7. The alternatives included a proposal to “dignify and render more livable and enjoyable the national vocation of the homemaker” by enabling women to “carry into married life the interests, acquired

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Notes to pages 137–9

aptitudes and activities” that would give them more security and economic independence. 57 Ibid., 21. 58 Ibid., 23. 59 The letter is undated, but the details suggest 1944 as the date of the meeting. George Campbell Pidgeon Papers, u c a , box 15–279. 60 “Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations,” r o p (1964), 458. The committee was discharged in 1973, replaced by a new committee that was to deal only with education issues. 61 “The Condition and Task of the Church in Canada,” n.d., Sisco Papers, box 1-11, 3. “Dr Sisco Says Quebec May Not Win Canada via ‘Battle of the Cradle,’” Toronto Star, 26 August 1948, indicates that he gave this speech in Amsterdam at the first General Assembly of the wc c . Sisco also served as the only Canadian on its first executive. 62 Arthur G. Reynolds, What’s the Difference? Protestant and Roman Catholic Beliefs Compared (Toronto: Commission on the Christian Faith, United Church of Canada, 1954), 6–8. Replies to other questions set out the history of the reformation and basic Protestant teaching about salvation, sin and grace, the authority of the Bible, sacraments, Mary and the saints, worship practices, and purgatory. “Daniel” [pseud.], Chats with a Prospective Convert to Roman Catholicism (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1954), a second booklet published the same year, used the literary device of a dialogue between a young man and a Protestant army chaplain as they talked about differences between the two religious faiths. Taking the pseudonym “Daniel,” the writer was identified in the preface as a man in the armed forces who had come to regret his decision to convert to Catholicism at the time of his marriage. 63 Reynolds, What’s the Difference?, 58–9. 64 Ibid., 60–1. 65 When and how the transition happened is difficult to pinpoint. John Webster Grant, “The Reaction of was p Churches to Non-wasp Immigrants,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 1968, 11, argues that the mosaic imagery was commonplace before church union. Other historians see the shift as happening in the 1920s and ’30s – and even then not really taking hold until after the Second World War with a new round of immigration underway and the tragic consequences of racism so apparent. See Allan Smith, “Metaphor and Nationality in North America,” Canadian Historical Review 51, no. 3 (1970): 257; and Howard Palmer, “Mosaic versus Melting Pot? Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada and the United States,” International Journal 31 (1975–76):

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66

67

68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

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Notes to pages 139–42

359

491–2, are among the historians who date the transition later. Richard J.F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 149–76, also discusses the popularity of the mosaic as an alternative to the American overtones of the melting pot image. John Cormie, Canada and the New Canadian (Toronto: Social Service Council of Canada, 1931), 3. Cormie remarked that the notion of “assimilation” had recently become provocative, explaining the use of the images of fusing and amalgamation as alternatives to “the process of the melting pot” (29). Ibid., 29–30. The pamphlet gives a detailed statistical picture of the sources and distribution of immigration. On the challenge that ‘Canadianizing’ settlers from Southern and Eastern European presented for schools as well as churches, see Michael Owen, “‘Building the Kingdom of God on the Prairies’: E.H. Oliver and Saskatchewan Education,” Saskatchewan History 40, no. 1 (1987): 22–34. J.R. Watts, Fifty Years of Rural Canada: Summary of Surveys ([Toronto?]: Board of Home Missions, 1933), 51–2. The areas surveyed were Dufferin County, o n , Cumberland County, n s , and District of Hamiota, mn. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1940), 330 (regional report submitted by J.A. Cormie). Gordon Sisco, s.v. “United Church of Canada,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1947, 397. G.B. King, “Training of Men for the Ministry,” u c o , 1 January 1941, 11. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1940), 341. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1948), 375. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1950), 356. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1942), 352. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1944), 339. “Questionnaire” [1944?], 1–2, Board of Home Missions, Series II, Section 1 (hereafter cited as bhm ), u ca 83.050C, box 26-422, “Report of the Commission on City Missions and Non-Anglo-Saxon Work,” 1–2, b h m, box 25-396. For questionnaire responses and reports of associate secretary George Dorey’s visits, see bhm , box 26, files 397 to 432; for Dorey’s memo summarizing the results from the questionnaire on nonAnglo-Saxon work, see bhm , box 26-422. The report was adopted in March 1944. The “Anglo-Saxon sect” reference found its way into the board’s report to the General Council; see “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1944), 309. Winnifred Thomas, “The Church Woman as Citizen,” Missionary Monthly, April 1945, 173–4.

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Notes to pages 142–3

80 Winnifred Thomas, “The Church Woman as Citizen,” Missionary Monthly, May 1945, 219–20. 81 See Missionary Monthly, June 1939, 249, for a copy of the petition. 82 C.E. Silcox, “The Church and Anti-Semitism: A Plea for a New Rapprochement of Christian and Jew,” Silcox Papers, box 9-14 (a draft of an article for Canadian Churchman dated 6 February 1941). 83 C.E. Silcox, “Should Canada Provide Sanctuary for European Refugees,” address delivered in Kingston, 1 November 1938, Silcox Papers, box 5-18, 3. 84 Ibid., 2. 85 E.M. Howse, Two Sermons (n.p., [1939?]), 12–13. The sermons were titled “Christian Canada and the Refugees” and “The Refugees – A Policy for Canada.” 86 Ibid., 15. Those exact words are found in Silcox’s Kingston address given the previous year. 87 Ibid., 13. 88 “Knowing the Facts about Refugees,” Missionary Monthly, November 1939, 482–3. 89 “Let Us Think about the Refugee Petition,” Missionary Monthly, January 1944, 14. 90 Constance Hayward, “Has the Christian Church Any Responsibility for the Refugees in Canada?” Missionary Monthly, June 1942, 245–6. 91 Alan T. Davies and Marilyn F. Nefsky, How Silent Were the Churches? Canadian Protestantism and the Jewish Plight during the Nazi Era (Waterloo, on : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998), 30–46. For a harsher assessment of the United Church’s response to the Holocaust, see Haim Genizi, The Holocaust, Israel, and the Canadian Protestant Churches (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 41–51. 92 Mary-Ann Shantz, “Kingston Christians and the Persecution of European Jews during the Nazi Era,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2003, 5–18. 93 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1944), 358–9. The Board of Home Missions and the w m s protested the sale of Japanese property to no avail. Eiji Yatabe, “From the Nisei (Japanese Canadian) Viewpoint,” Missionary Monthly, September 1943, 391–2, condemned the internment but praised the help of the w m s and United Church congregations as “one of the few comforting features” of the internment. The United Church also pressed for Japanese rights after the war; see “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1948), 458.

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Notes to pages 144–6

361

  94 Elda S. Daniels, “Evacuation from the Defence Area,” Western Recorder, June 1942, 11.   95 “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1944), 308.   96 Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire (London, Allen Lane, 2007), xxvii.   97 Ibid., 365–504, describes the cost of victory as Britain undertook to discharge its financial obligations, and the role of the United States in the resulting “liquidation” of the empire.   98 Ibid., 509. Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 51–74, discusses how the differences between the United States and Britain figured into the un vote to create the state of Israel.   99 Arthur R.M. Lower, Canada: Nation and Neighbour (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1952), 188. 100 Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (1992): 316–21. 101 For a history of Canada-U.S. relations before the Second World War, see Robert Bothwell, Canada and the United States: The Politics of Partnership (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 1–24. 102 Lawrence Aronsen, “An Open Door to the North: The Liberal Government and the Expansion of American Foreign Investment, 1945– 1953,” American Review of Canadian Studies (Summer 1992): 167. Both conservatives and those to the left of the Liberal Party saw this as a wrong turn at the fork in the road. He suggests that nationalist critics overlooked the debt load incurred during the war that left the federal government with few alternatives to foreign investment, and argues that the prosperity that resulted from American investment eventually “allowed for the expansion of the welfare state and cultural institutions that, in the years ahead, were to be the most important factors in maintaining the Canadian identity” (190–1). 103 Lawrence Aronsen, “From World War to Cold War: Cooperation and Competition in the North Atlantic Triangle, 1945–1949,” in The North Atlantic Triangle in a Changing World: Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1902–1956, ed. B.J.C. McKercher and Lawrence Aronsen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 212–13. 104 Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada since 1945: Power, Politic, and Provincialism, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 89. 105 Dianne Kirby, “Harry Truman’s Religious Legacy: The Holy Alliance, Containment, and the Cold War,” in Religion and the Cold War,

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Notes to pages 146–8

ed. Dianne Kirby (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), for a discussion of attempts to link democracy and Christianity (78–9), and the compli­ cations of uniting the Vatican and the w cc in the “holy war” against Communism (92–7). On the impact of liberal Protestant churches in ­shaping the approach to human rights that evolved as part of liberal democracy in Canada, see George Egerton, “Entering the Age of Human Rights: Religion, Politics, and Canadian Liberalism, 1945–50,” Canadian Historical Review 85, no. 3 (2004): 451–79. 106 E.M. Howse, The Field Is the World (Toronto: Board of Overseas Missions, United Church of Canada, [1949?]), 10–14, a reprint of a ­sermon preached at Bloor Street United, Toronto. 107 National Association of aots Clubs, Handbook, 1948 / 49 (Vancouver, [1948?]), 1–2. 108 Mary Kinnear, “Religion and the Shaping of ‘Public Woman’: A PostSuffrage Case Study,” in Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 196–8. 109 Margaret McWilliams, “A Constructive Philosophy for Our Time: ‘What Must I Do?’” Saturday Night, 28 June 1947, 24. 110 “The Christian Citizen in a Changing World,” in The Church and the International Disorder, ed. R.P. Barnes, et al. (London: sc m Press, 1948), 144. 111 Mark G. Toulouse, The Transformation of John Foster Dulles: From Prophet of Realism to Priest of Nationalism (Macon, ga : Mercer University Press, 1985), 196–8. 112 Ibid., 199–200. 113 See William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), for an analysis of the changing relationship of mainstream Protestantism to presidents Truman and Eisenhower and their key advisors (notably Dulles). 114 Edelgard Mahant and Graeme S. Mount, Invisible and Inaudible in Washington: American Policies toward Canada (Vancouver: ub c Press, 1999), 15–16. As minister of external affairs, Lester Pearson disagreed with the U.S. response to events in Korea, which may have had an impact on Canada’s relationship with U.S. leaders when he became prime minister a decade later; see 34–42 for a discussion of policy differences over Korea, China, and Vietnam. On the Korean War, see Martin Kitchen, “From the Korean War to Suez: Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1950–1956,” in The North Atlantic Triangle in a Changing World, 220–55.

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Notes to pages 148–50

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115 Mahant and Mount, 42–3, conclude that by the 1960s the United States considered Canada unreliable, unimportant, and meddlesome. 116 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1960), 407–8. 117 Ibid., 409–10. 118 Silcox and Howse drew criticism early on; later A.C. Forrest became the focus of attention. Typically, the United Church took a position similar to leaders who were prominent in ecumenical circles, among them the ­editors of the Christian Century, several influential theologians (including H. Richard Niebuhr and two presidents of Union Theological Seminary, Henry Sloane Coffin and Henry Van Dusen), as well as the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. An exception was Reinhold Niebuhr, who was instrumental in organizing a group of pro-Zionist Christian clergy; see Martin E. Marty, Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960, vol. 3 of Modern American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 184–7. 119 Davies, “Claris Edwin Silcox,” 54. Davies (rightly in my view) acknowledges Silcox’s anti-Zionism without accusing him of anti-Semitism as other interpreters tend to do. 120 C.E. Silcox, “Impasse in the Holy Land,” University of Toronto Quarterly 16 (January 1947): 123. There was plenty of blame to go around, in his view, including Britain’s treatment of Arabs in the peace settlement after the First World War that was causing them to resist a diplomatic resolution to the Middle East crisis (129–30). C.E. Silcox, “The Palestine Question,” an outline of an address to a Rotary Club in Brampton, 19 July 1948, is typical of his postwar perspective in his many public addresses; see Silcox Papers, box 6-67. 121 C.E. Silcox, “The Crisis in the Middle East,” u c o , 15 February 1956, 24–6. 122 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1954), 141–3. Settlement of Palestinians in host countries and compensation from Israel continued to be recommended; cf. “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 152. 123 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1954), 141. 124 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1956), 143. 125 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 149. For criticism of Howse and Forrest, see Genezi, 66–146. Genizi sees Howse’s addition to the cci a in 1956 as a critical turning point that nudged the United Church toward a pro-Palestinian position. 126 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 150. 127 Jesse H. Arnup, A New Church Faces a New World (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1937), 97–8.

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Notes to pages 151–4

128 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1948), 450. 129 “Board of Overseas Missions,” r o p (1954), 485. 130 “Board of Overseas Missions,” r o p (1948), 214 (a report optimistically referred to by its members as “Opportunity Now”). 131 “Overseas Mission Policy,” r o p (1952), 416. 132 Shirley Jane Endicott, China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott (Waterloo, on : Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2003), 24–34. Mary Endicott’s letters describe their harrowing experience during the revolution, as well as their personal struggles during the controversy. For a fascinating biography of his father’s work as missionary, his intelligence gathering for the United States during the Second World War, and his relationship with the Communist party in China during the civil war, see Stephen Endicott, James G. Endicott: Rebel Out of China (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 133 Letter from James Endicott (undated) in Wilfrid Arnold Burbidge Papers, uc a , box 2-36a. 134 Shirley Jane Endicott, 185–90. 135 Alvyn J. Austin, Saving China: Canadian Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1888–1959 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 314–22. 136 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 145–7. 137 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1956), 516. 138 Daniel C. Goodwin, “The Canadian Council of Churches: Its Founding Vision and Early Years, 1944–1964,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 41, no. 2 (2004): 147–73, notes that the assumption of “Christian nations” reflected in the reorganization of international ecumenism along national lines after the war was soon tested. 139 On the family connections between missions and Cold War diplomacy, see Alvyn Austin, “Missionaries, Scholars, and Diplomats: China Missions and Canadian Public Life,” in Van Die, ed., Religion and Public Life in Canada, 142–6, and Sachiyo Takashima, “Dreams for Missionaries, Realities for Diplomats: Why the United Church of Canada’s Chinese Missionaries Were Involved in Politics during the 1940s and 1950s,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2001, 65–80.

chapter six    1 Ralph Allen, “The Hidden Failure of Our Churches,” Maclean’s, 25 February 1961. Its extensive analysis of religion in Canada includes a discussion of the changing role of the Catholic Church in Quebec.

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Notes to pages 155–8

365

  2 Ibid., 15.   3 Ibid., 46.   4 Ibid., 12–13.  5 Catechism: The United Church of Canada (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1944), III.27, 7.   6 Richard Davidson, “Purposes of New United Church Catechism,” Saturday Night, 15 April 1944, 22–3.   7 S.D. Clark, The Developing Canadian Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962, 2nd ed. 1968), 182; first published in 1947 as “The Religious Factor in Canadian Economic Development.”   8 Ibid., 171, 182.   9 Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald, “How Are Canada’s Five Largest Protestant Denominations Faring? A Look at the 2001 Census,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 40, no. 4 (2001): 511–34, analyze the growth in the 1950s, as well as the more recent relative decline. 10 For an astute assessment of the postwar expansion of Canadian churches and the cultural dynamics that undermined their vitality, see John Webster Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), 160–83. 11 H.E.F. [Harold E. Fey], “A Church Grows in Canada,” Christian Century, 3 October 1956, 1125–6. 12 Randolph Carleton Chalmers, The Pure Celestial Fire: An Evangelical Interpretation of Christianity (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1948), 212. 13 Ibid., 215–16. He quotes Union Theological Seminary’s Henry Van Dusen as warning of the “deep, undersurface tides” that for more than a generation had been “setting dead against everything of our concern,” despite the advantageous “winds of doctrine” of recent times. 14 John Line, “Decisive Theological Issues Today,” Theology Today 8, no. 1 (1951): 20–1, 28. 15 George C. Pidgeon, “Is the Church in Danger?” u c o , 1 May 1951, 5, citing an article by Marc Boegner, Christian Century, 7 March 1951. The warning about “paganism” had been sounded at the major gatherings of international ecumenism in 1928 and 1937; see John Flett, “From Jerusalem to Oxford: Mission as the Foundation and Goal of Ecumenical Social Thought,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 27, no. 1 (2003): 18, 21. 16 Jesse H. Arnup, A New Church Faces a New World (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1937), 232. 17 Church, Nation and World Order: A Report of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, [1944?]), 9.

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Notes to pages 158–62

18 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 87–9. 19 Arthur Organ, “Recreational Evangelism,” The Responsible Society (e&ss Annual Report, 1949), 39, 43. Organ was chair of e&ss at the time. 20 The Church and the Secular World (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1950), a reproduction of the report of the Commission on Culture to General Council, r o p (1950), Appendix, i–vi, 100. See page v of the pamphlet for the terms of reference, as well as the list of members. 21 Ibid., vi–vii. 22 Ibid., 36–53. 23 Ibid., 48–9. 24 The address was reprinted as W.J. Gallagher, “A New Situation,” in Frontiers of Faith (e& s s Annual Report, 1954), 77. 25 “‘Culture-Religion’ versus Christianity,” r o p (1954), 231 (emphasis in original). A commission report “On a Functional Ministry,” r o p (1954), 163–6, noted the challenge of attracting workers in an industrialized society to the church. Henry Gordon MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada, 1946–1977: A Study in the Sociology of the Denomination” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1980), 48–55, confirms that the United Church drew its membership predominantly from those who had higher levels of education, income, and occupational status than the general population. 26 J.R. Mutchmor, Mutchmor: The Memoirs of James Ralph Mutchmor (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 6. 27 Ibid., 21–7, 65–6, 75–9. 28 Ibid., 105. 29 These are among the anecdotes related in Kenneth Bagnell, “That Man Mutchmor,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 12–4, 46. 30 J.R. Mutchmor to Rev. James Fraser, 22 January 1951, James Ralph Mutchmor Papers, u ca, box 1a-11. 31 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 140–2. 32 J.R. Mutchmor, “The Church and Politics,” address to Annual Meeting of London Conference, 3 June 1948, 11–12. Mutchmor Papers, box 12-183a. 33 J.R. Mutchmor, “The Church and Social Action,” in The Minister’s Handbook: A Guidebook for Ministers in the United Church of Canada, ed. Randolph Carleton Chalmers (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1952), 217–21. 34 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 97. 35 “Reports of Secretaries,” in Right Relations among Men (e&ss Annual Report, 1943), 22.

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Notes to pages 162–4

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36 David Plaxton, “‘We Will Evangelize with a Whole Gospel or None’: Evangelism and the United Church of Canada,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997), 117–20. Mutchmor, Memoirs, 107–19, recounts his support of evangelism and his strategic role. 37 For the message and methods of postwar evangelism, see “Forward Movement after the War,” r o p (1944), 114–20. For an early assessment of the campaign, see “The Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom,” r o p (1946), 163–6. 38 On Templeton’s work as evangelist, see Kevin Kee, Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 143–87, and David Vance, “Charles Templeton and the Performances of Unbelief” (master’s thesis, Carleton University, 2008), 19–41. 39 Charles Templeton, An Anecdotal Memoir (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983), 69–70. 40 Ibid., 80. 41 J.R.M. [Mutchmor], “Rev. C. Templeton Stirs Large Crowds, Holy Week, Ottawa,” u c o , 1 May 1951, 5. 42 The front page of the u c o for 15 October 1951 featured four stories: “The Templeton Missions Draw Great Crowds”; “Forty Thousand Attend Sydney [n s ] Mission”; “Templeton Mission Success in Smith’s Falls”; and “Ottawa Service of Witness Largely Attended.” For examples of u c o ’s coverage of the campaign, see “Charles B. Templeton in London,” u c o , 1 January 1952, 3; “The Templeton Missions Draw Great Crowds,” u c o , 15 November 1952, 3; “Templeton Mission in Winnipeg Was Resounding Success,” u c o , 15 December 1952, 1; “Calgary Will Long Remember the Templetons,” u c o , 1 January 1953, 1; and “The Templeton Missions in Fredericton and St John’s,” u c o , 1 January 1954. 43 Kee, Revivalists, 176; also see Kevin Kee, “Bobby-sox to Bach: Charles Templeton and the Commodification of Popular Protestantism in PostWorld War II Canada,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 15, no. 1 (2004): 231–53. 44 Ibid., 175. 45 See “The National Evangelistic Mission,” r o p (1956), 180–91, and “National Evangelistic Mission,” r o p (1958), 204–10, for summaries of the campaign’s approach. For illustrations of how the implications for “national life” were presented at conferences and in congregations, see W.G. Berry, ed., Calling Canada to Christ (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1957), especially the addresses by F.E. Vipond (91–5), Arthur

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Notes to pages 164–6

Organ (95–100), and W.B. Berry (106–11). Berry, for instance, stated that God “works through nations” and linked the “genius of the United Church” to its proclamation of a “national gospel.” 46 “What Has the N.E.M. Accomplished?” u c o , 1 March 1958, 23. 47 C.A. Myers, The Christian Family at Home, rev. ed. (Toronto: National Evangelistic Mission Committee, 1957). 48 Women and Evangelism (Toronto: National Evangelistic Mission Com­ mittee, 1959), 11–12. 49 “Billy Graham’s Canadian Crusade,” u c o , 15 September 1955, 4. Also see A.C. Forrest, “Billy Graham in Toronto,” u c o , 1 November 1955, 7, 14. Forrest’s descriptions of Graham’s personal qualities were uniformly positive over the years, despite his difficulties with Graham’s theology. 50 “What Has the N.E.M. Accomplished?” u c o , 1 March 1958, 23. 51 “Evangelism in Our Time,” u c o , 15 March 1958, 7. Forrest’s own view was that while some “fine things” had come out of the evangelical fervour of the past, the old-time revivalism had “little appeal for United Church people.” Its most effective evangelism was “members witnessing to the neighbours on the street, and bringing them to the church”; see “At the Concerns of the Church,” u c o , 15 September 1959, 7. 52 “Evangelism in Our Time,” u c o , 15 March 1958, 7. 53 Here I take issue with Kevin Neil Flatt, “The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church, 1930–1971” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2008), who argues that the leadership of the church supported evangelism in public, while rejecting it in private until the New Curriculum and other events in the 1960s forced them to end their duplicity. I am suggesting that honest differences over evangelism had surfaced well before the 1960s, and the United Church’s divergence from more theologically conservative groups would have been evident to anyone who paid attention to its publications. Whether the sentiments of Forrest and other church executives were typical of persons in the pews is a different matter. 54 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 235. This may have been modesty on his part, but see chapter 3 above for an assessment of the critical but often-overlooked role of home missions in creating the “social gospel ethos” that is often attributed (wrongly) to e& s s alone. 55 Malcolm Macdonald, “Planting the Church in New Areas of Canada,” u c o , 1 February 1951, 1, 28, is typical of the board’s reports. 56 Malcolm Macdonald, “The Church Says: ‘We Must Advance and Build,’” u c o 1 April 1953, 21. Macdonald’s article is followed by reports from Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, Sydney River, Saskatoon, The Lakeshore

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57

58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67

68

69

Notes to pages 166–9

369

(between Hamilton and Toronto), and Vancouver. For a study of church extension in the greater Toronto area, see Noelle Boughton, Meeting the Challenge of the Future: A History of the Toronto United Church Council (Toronto: Toronto United Church Council and the Emmanuel College Centre for the Study of Religion, 1988). Malcolm Macdonald, From Lakes to Northern Lights (Toronto: Commission on Missionary Education, 1951), 53–4. Macdonald appealed to what he called the United Church’s founding “charter” to urge that it become an institution that can “fully be described as national” (an interesting substitution for the word “fittingly” that was used in the Basis of Union). The Board of Home Missions reports continued to use the language of “Christian Canada” to present its task. Ibid., 190–1. Jean Doern, et al., All Things Are Possible: A History of Westworth United Church, 1950–1990 (n.p., 1993), 8, 30–1. Gordon Sisco, s.v. “United Church of Canada,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1947, 397. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1950), 416. A.C. Forrest, “What about Those Young People,” u c o , 1 November 1956, 15. The article noted that Intervarsity and Youth for Christ had attracted fewer United Church young people because of the vigour of its own programs (29). A.C. Forrest, “At the Concerns of the Church,” u c o , 15 September 1959, 7. W. Harold Young, “More Candidates than Ever Before,” and J.C. Johnson, “Nine Candidates from One Church,” u c o , 1 April 1954, 3. “A Desperate Shortage,” u c o , 15 October 1959, 6. G. Preston MacLeod, “What Is Disturbing the United Church of Canada?” Christian Century, 5 July 1944, 803. C.E. Silcox, “The United Church of Canada: An Appraisal,” typescript manuscript submitted to The Advance, June 1947, Claris Edward Silcox Papers, u ca, box 9-44. Randolph Carleton Chalmers, See the Christ Stand: A Study in Doctrine in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), 228–9. For a summary of these educational resources and an assessment of their impact, see Randolph Carleton Chalmers, “The Faith of the United Church of Canada,” Religion in Life 19 (1949): 110–11. For a discussion of Chalmers’s contrast of the “evangelical” or “experiential” form of Christianity with the “Catholic” or “institutional” type, see The Pure Celestial Fire, 1–5. On the difference between “orthodox” and “unorthodox” liberalism as he defined them, cf. See the Christ Stand, 146–7.

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Notes to pages 170–2

70 Chalmers, The Pure Celestial Fire, vii. 71 The series of articles was published between May 1946 and February 1947, most of them written by men serving in pastoral charges. 72 For a report on the process and the complete list of topics selected (not all of which saw publication), see “Commission on the Christian Faith,” r o p (1946), 103. 73 J.R. Mutchmor, “The United Church’s Purpose and Task,” address to Annual Meeting of Manitoba Conference, 2 June 1964, 3–4, Mutchmor Papers, box 13-181. 74 What’s the Difference? angered Canadian Catholics and drew international commentary; Life and Death was described in press clippings as revolutionary. For reaction to the latter see Commission on Christian Faith, uc a 82.031C, box 3-66. 75 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 202. 76 William Bean Kennedy, “The Church as Educator: Religious Education,” in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935–1985, ed. David Lotz (Grand Rapids, m i : Eerdmans, 1989), 280–95. 77 For an overview of the New Curriculum and Peter Gordon White’s critical role, see A.C. Forrest, “The Crisis and the New Curriculum,” u c o , 15 February 1965, 19–21 (the first of a two-part article). 78 The presuppositions that circulated in 1956 were approved by General Council in 1958. They were included in Prospectus (Toronto: Board of Christian Education and Board of Publication of the United Church of Canada, 1961), 17–28. For a discussion of the development of the presuppositions, see George Johnston, “What the Sunday Schools Are Going to Teach,” u c o , 15 June 1959, 21, 24, and 26. He hinted that lack of consensus about the presuppositions (with resistance more likely coming from the theological left at that point) was slowing preparation of materials. Interestingly, Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Growing Up Protestant: Parents, Children, and Mainline Churches (New Brunswick, nj : Rutgers University Press, 2002), 115, finds a shift away from neo-orthodox theology and the family focus in Presbyterian circles in the United States around the same time. Its curriculum was renamed “Christian Faith and Action.” The United Church eventually made a similar theological shift – but not until after the New Curriculum was launched. 79 Bendroth, 112–18. 80 For the controversy over the New Curriculum, see chapter 9 below. 81 A.C. Forrest, “Address at Emmanuel College Dinner,” 28 May 1957, 5, Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, u ca, box 4-5.

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Notes to pages 173–7

371

82 “The State of the Church – Now: A Moderatorial Report,” u c o , 15 October 1958, 5, 20. 83 “Urban Problems,” r o p (1938), 212–14. Subsequent reports make for interesting reading, disclosing the United Church’s assumptions about its social position, as well as how it distinguished itself from other denominations, notably competition from new evangelical groups. 84 “The Meaning and Responsibilities of Christian Marriage,” r o p (1932), 283. 85 The Presbyterian Church in Canada raised similar concerns and came to the same conclusions in Christian Marriage and the Church (Toronto: The Board of Evangelism and Social Action, n.d.). A draft was presented to its General Assembly in 1948 and published after conducting a survey of presbyteries in 1949. 86 Andrew S. Finstuen, Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety (Chapel Hill, n c: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), explores the significance of the doctrine of sin for three religious leaders with markedly different assumptions. 87 Malcolm Macdonald, “Our Heritage and Horizons in Home Missions,” James Robertson Memorial Lectures, 1961, lecture 1, 8–10. 88 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 123–5. 89 W.G. Berry’s report in The Responsible Society (e&ss Annual Report, 1949), 36–7. 90 Hugh Dobson, The Christian Family (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1940), 15. 91 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” 107. The report also circulated as a pamphlet. 92 “On Culture,” r o p (1950), 145. 93 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” 117. 94 Ibid., 106–7. 95 Richard Davidson, A Faith to Live By (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1943), 29. 96 Ibid., 29–30. 97 “On Trends in the Churches,” u c o , 15 January 1961, 9. 98 “Why Churches Are Crowded? An Editorial Answer,” u c o , 1 March 1958, 7.

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Notes to pages 177–80

  99 “An Editorial Look-See at the Concerns of the Church,” u c o , 15 September 1959, 7. 100 A.C. Forrest, “On Trends in the Churches” (Part 1), u c o , 15 January 1961, 7. 101 A.C. Forrest, “On Trends in the Churches” (Part 2), u c o , 1 February 1961, 9. 102 W.G. Berry, “The ‘Character’ of Our Time,” in Frontiers of Faith (e&ss Annual Report, 1954), 75–6, citing Will Herberg, “Faith and Character Structure,” Christianity and Crisis, 25 January 1954. Herberg’s article did credit sociologist David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) for the terminology he was using, although Berry omitted this detail in his précis. 103 Berry, “The ‘Character’ of Our Time,” 77. 104 “On the Lord’s Day,” r o p (1948), 157–60. That French Canadians had a different “system” – Mass followed by “healthy relaxation and innocent pleasure” – on Sunday was acknowledged, but used to explain why Protestants should avoid activities such as golf or skiing (160–3). 105 Ibid., 164. 106 Paul Laverdure, Sunday in Canada: The Rise and Fall of the Lord’s Day (Yorkton, sk: Gravelbooks, 2004), 163–83. 107 “Temperance and Christian Citizenship,” Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Society (1949–50), 230. 108 “Board of Evangelism and Social Service,” r o p (1948), 363. 109 The following are examples of publications printed by the Board of Evangelism and Social Service: Helen and J.G. Macdonald, Why We Gave Up Social Drinking [1959?]; Martin and Margaret Johns, Why We Don’t Drink [1961?]; Hugh Dobson, For God and Our Families for the Community and the Nation for a Better World Order [1944?]; William G. Berry, The Christian and Social Drinking: A New Testament Approach (1946); Peter Bryce, Let’s Face the Facts (a sermon preached at Metropolitan United Church, 23 January 1946, and reprinted from the Toronto Star, 28 January 1946); Ernest Marshall Howse, Temperance and Realism: An Address (1947); Homer R. Lane, The Bible Says (1952); Ernest T. Campbell, Six Reasons for Voluntary Abstinence (1952); John A. Linton, You Are Involved (1958); Glenn Everett, You Don’t Have to Drink [1959?]; Norman Rawson, To Drink or Not to Drink (1959). In a number of cases, no author was indicated: Looking at the Ontario Liquor Law [1946?]; Unmasked – At Last! (1946); We Are Not Amused [1947?]; A Call to Christian Citizens: Make Your Church’s Stand Your Stand: An Appeal for Voluntary Action by United Church People (1951); The United

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Notes to pages 180–1

373

Church of Canada Is Convinced that Whichever Way You Look At It Voluntary Total Abstinence Makes Sense (1952); Urgent: 500,000 Christian Citizens Needed as Witnesses for Temperance [1953?]. 110 “The Commission on Temperance Policy and Program,” r o p (1960), 265–300, and published as The Church and the Alcohol Problem: Report of the Commission on Temperance Policy and Program (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Services, 1960). Also see Literature Review of Beverage Alcohol Use, Commission on Temperance Policy and Program, January 1960, a confidential and unpublished report that included essays on the use, criminal behaviour associated with, and social factors related to beverage alcohol. 111 For a summary of the plan of action, see J.R. Mutchmor, “The Temperance Policy and Program of the United Church of Canada,” 11 September 1957, Mutchmor Papers, box 12-174, an address that he gave to Brantford Presbytery. In anticipation of public interest in the address, it was issued as a “News Release” for 3 p.m. that afternoon. 112 Stanley Knowles to J.R. Mutchmor, 2 February 1956, Mutchmor Papers, box 1a-16. 113 Stanley Knowles to J.R. Mutchmor, 19 May 1956, Mutchmor Papers, box 1a-16. For an example of Mutchmor’s careful attention to detail, see his objection to reducing taxes on alcohol (urging tax relief to low-income families rather than multi-millionaires), written to Walter Harris, 8 March 1957, Mutchmor Papers, box 1a-17. 114 Bendroth, 128–34; Daphne J. Anderson and Terence R. Anderson, “United Church of Canada: Kingdom Symbol or Lifestyle Choice,” in Faith Traditions and the Family, ed. Phyllis D. Airhart and Margaret J. Bendroth (Louisville, ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 129–33. This shift is explored further in chapter 9 below. 115 The terminology varied slightly, but the three purposes were constant; see r o p (1932), 277; r o p (1946), 109–10; r o p (1960), 183; r o p (1962), 152–3. 116 “The Meaning and Responsibilities of Christian Marriage,” r o p (1932), 277, 279. 117 Ibid., 280–1, and “Report of Commission on Voluntary Parenthood and Sterilization,” r o p (1936), 324–32. 118 The Church and the Secular World (Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1950), 30–1. 119 MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada,” 76. 120 Owram, 264–70, discusses the impact of the Pill, observing that the shift in assumptions about what was sexually appropriate was another

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Notes to pages 181–3

important dimension of the sexual revolution. He notes that “the baby boom was over, long before the Pill had any meaningful effect” (183). 121 As late as 1974, the response of those delegated with the task of considering what to do with marriage vows that pledged “until death do us part” was firm; see the statement on the permanence of Christian marriage in the committee report “Christian Faith,” r o p (1974), 284–9, which insisted that marrying without the intention of permanence was not marriage “as understood in the Christian tradition” (284). 122 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 132–7, contrasted pagan and Greek ideas of the body as inherently evil with the Christian view. For a discussion of the doctrinal principles underlying the United Church’s position on marriage (including consideration of divorce as recognition that the marriage has already ended) by an influential member of the Commission on Christian Faith, see John Line, “The Theological Basis of Christian Marriage,” n.d., Commission on Christian Faith, u c a 82.031C, box 3-57, especially 5–8. 123 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 124. This added to concerns about the threat of annulment of mixed marriages not performed by a Catholic priest. 124 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 146. 125 “Report Number Two of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Divorce,” r o p (1962), 155. 126 Ibid., 160–1. 127 Mutchmor, Mutchmor, 192. 128 Earl Lautenslager [sic], “The Marriage Partnership” (Part 1), u c o , 15 April 1962, 25. 129 Earl Lautenslager [sic], “The Marriage Partnership” (Part 2), u c o , 1 May 1962, 27. 130 Lautenslager [sic], “The Marriage Partnership” (Part 1), 26. 131 Veronica Strong-Boag, “Home Dreams: Women and the Suburban Experiment in Canada, 1945–69,” Canadian Historical Review 72, no. 4 (1991): 475–9; Ruth Roach Pierson, “They’re Still Women After All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 215–20. 132 The Church and the Secular World, 30–3. In a telling detail indicating the social location of the commission members, the report described the “city mother” who “may easily deal with 10 or 20 tradesmen in an ordinary day,” thus functioning as “both family treasurer and family manager” while the father was at the shop or office.

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Notes to pages 183–98

375

133 “Report of the Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women,” r o p (1962), 259. It was subsequently published as a pamphlet titled Married Women Working. 134 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 125. 135 “Report of the Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women,” 259–60, 276–7. 136 “Commission on Ordination,” 370, 393–5; cf. recommendation 3 and 4. On the executive’s decision, see r o p (1964), 81–2. 137 Lois Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down: A Memoir (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1989), 23, 42. 138 Templeton, 85–90. 139 Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada since 1945: Power, Politics, and Provincialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, rev. ed. 1989), 93. 140 Allen, 50. Gallagher was then serving as general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches.

c h a p t e r s e ve n    1 “Veteran Westerner Elected Moderator,” u c o , 1 October 1960, 8.   2 Ibid.    3 “The Address of the Moderator,” in “‘Thus in the Stilly Night’: Being the Recollections of the Very Rev. Hugh Alexander McLeod,” unpublished mss., Victoria, bc, 1972, Appendix D, 283–4, Hugh Alexander McLeod Papers, u ca.    4 “Dr McLeod Also Said,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 6, pointed out that a vote had been taken to make the much-appreciated address available “in permanent form.” The only copy I was able to find was the one that McLeod included in his unpublished memoirs.    5 “Catholics: Immigration and Education,” u c o , 15 October 1962, 8.   6 “What’s Coming,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 5.    7 Robert McAfee Brown, “Pope John’s Vatican Council,” u c o , 15 October 1962, 15–16, a reprint of Brown’s article in Presbyterian Life. The editorial comments in issues of the u c o that followed indicate disappointment with the narrow terms of ecumenism at Vatican II and failure to acknowledge Protestant churches as equals in the universal church.   8 “What’s New,” u c o , 15 October 1962, 5.    9 Anonymous letter to A.C. Forrest, [1962?], Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, uc a , box 8-2.

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Notes to pages 198–200

10 “Not This! Roman Catholic Bishops’ Demands Endanger Ontario Educational System,” u c o , 15 November 1962, 9, 46. 11 Ibid., 9, citing a recent article in the Canadian Register. Forrest quoted another Catholic publication that asked Protestants to understand that “error” did not have the same rights as the “truth” held by the “only true church,” which he saw as evidence that Catholics had not changed their position on religious freedom. 12 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1956), 140–1. 13 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1957), 161. 14 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1960), 405. 15 Ibid., 417. 16 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1962), 532. 17 Henry Gordon MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada, 1946–1977: A Study in the Sociology of the Denomination” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1980), 49, notes that census figures from 1951 show that 82.7 per cent of United Church members identified themselves as British; the next largest group was German at 3.6 per cent, followed by French at 1.9 per cent. By 1971 little had changed: 78.6 per cent, 5.5 per cent, and 3.0 per cent respectively. He notes that United Church remained overwhelmingly European: 97 per cent by 1971. The 1961 census figures show that some European immigrants (notably Dutch and Hungarian Protestants) joined the United Church in significant numbers during the 1950s. See “The Commission on Immigration,” r o p (1964), 218. The report includes an interesting section on the history of immigration from the United Church’s perspective (214–19). 18 MacLeod, 75–9, 86, maintains that fertility rates were a more significant demographic factor than immigration: “Natural increase has been the crucial factor in the demography of United Church membership growth in the post-war period. Its foreign-born membership and mortality have remained relatively constant.” 19 Malcolm Macdonald, “Our Heritage and Horizons in Home Missions,” James Robertson Memorial Lectures, 1961, lecture 1, 7–8. 20 For a discussion of Catholicism in Quebec during the critical decades before the Quiet Revolution, see Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). The secularization of Quebec nationalism bears striking parallels to the transitions taking place in English Canada viz. the role of the churches as nation builders; see David Seljak, “Why the Quiet Revolution Was ‘Quiet’: The Catholic Church’s Reaction to the Secularization of Nationalism in Quebec after 1960,”

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21 22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34

Notes to pages 200–3

377

c c h s Historical Studies 62 (1996): 109–24. He concludes that “centuries – not decades” separate Quebec Catholicism in the 1980s from what it had been in the 1950s (124). Cf. Susan Mann, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 298–315, on what she calls Quebec’s “noisy evolution.” “Interpretation: Some Editorial Comments on the Actions of the 20th General Council,” u c o , 15 September 1962, 11. “Long Range Planning Committee,” r o p (1962), 313. The Commission on World Mission that reported in 1966 was set up as a recommendation of the Commission on Financial Policy, which was dealing with how to distribute money for missions; see “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 301. “Cultivate the Fringe,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 6. “The Doctrine and Practice of Church Membership: Interim Report,” r o p (1960), 348–91. The consultation process is described in Church Membership: Doctrine and Practice in the United Church of Canada (n.p., n.d), 3, which included the report presented to General Council as “The Doctrine and Practice of Church Membership,” r o p (1962), 458–510. Church Membership, 5, 52. Ibid., 52–3; see 55–6 for the suggested procedure, which was intended as a last resort after private reproof. D.M. Mathers, “Church Membership in a Secular Age,” in Command the Morning (e& s s Annual Report, 1961), 40–1. Ibid., 43. Church Membership, 8–9. S.D. Clark, The Developing Canadian Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 128; reprint of “The Religious Sect in Canadian Politics,” in The Report of the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, 1944, 86–96. Gayle I. Thrift, “‘Concerning the Evil State of the World out of Which Strife Comes’: Church-State Relations in Early Cold War Canada, 1945– 1955,” paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association, 2001, explores the effort of United Church leaders to counter Communism by emphasizing Christian values. She notes the important role of the c c ia in the attempt to influence public opinion (7–11). “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1952), 127. Gordon Graydon and Stanley Knowles also provided testimonials (127–8). “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1956), 127, reported that by way of “correspondence and sometimes by personal interview, the

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35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47

48 49

Notes to pages 203–6

committee makes its work known to the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa and receives help from them.” Its connections to Diefenbaker’s External Affairs department continued through Howard Green (“The Church and International Affairs,” rop (1960), 423), although there was more ­qualified praise for him than Pearson and Martin and a different relationship signalled with the comment in “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1962), 525–6, that “the times demanded something different.” “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 135. L.B. Pearson, “On My Installation as Chancellor of Victoria College” (4 February 1952), in Words and Occasions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 113. Pearson, “Christian Foundations for World Order” (1954), in Words and Occasions, 128 (his preface to this address) and 132–3. Frank Prochaska, Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 13. Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870– 1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 182, 210–11, 218. Cox, 253, 273–4. Prochaska, 150–2. He finds that across much of Europe high levels of social welfare correspond to low levels of religious adherence. While this chapter focuses on Protestant social services (and the United Church in particular), there are interesting parallels to the social role of the Catholic Church in Quebec society. Mark Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?” Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 255–61, describes how religion was sidelined in both Quebec and the rest of Canada with the secularization of social services. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1940), 356. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1944), 356. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1958), 527. “Commission on Church Hospitals,” r o p (1956), 151–2, which includes a brief history of the church’s work in this area. For a description of the hospitals and some of their workers, see Bob Burrows, Healing in the Wilderness: A History of United Church Mission Hospitals (Madeira Park, b c : Harbour Publishing Co., 2004). Neil Young, “The Life and Work of Dr Morley A.R. Young” (Unpublished paper, Emmanuel College, 1985), discusses his grandfather’s work; Burrows, 65–6, 153–8. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1954), 541. “Commission on Church Hospitals,” r o p (1956), 152, citing the findings of an “emergency meeting” of the “Hospital Survey Committee” in 1928.

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Notes to pages 206–8

379

50 “Commission on Church Hospitals,” r o p (1958), 180. 51 An article by the Director of Child Welfare for the province of Ontario, B. Beaumont, “The Role of the Church in Social Work,” The Time of Healing (e& s s Annual Report, 1947), 106–7, alludes to tensions between secular and religious social work. 52 Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 11–17, explores the origins of the commission and the political plotting of its Liberal backers, in which Pearson played a pivotal role by promoting the selection of his friend Vincent Massey as chair. 53 Karen A. Finlay, The Force of Culture: Vincent Massey and Canadian Sovereignty (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 17–50, discusses the transition from “conversion” to “culture” within Canadian Methodist thought, and assesses the cultural role of Methodist denominational colleges and the Massey family’s support for Victoria University. 54 Ibid., 200. 55 The United Church prepared for the brief by calling its own commission on culture that issued a report published as The Church and the Secular World (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1950); see chapter 6 above for a discussion of its assumptions about Christian culture. 56 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–51, accessed 7 August 2012, www.collectionscanada. gc.ca / 2 / 5 / h5-400-e.html. 57 “The Menace of the Radio,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 2, no. 2 (1925): 93–4. 58 Russell Johnston, “The Early Trials of Protestant Radio, 1922–38,” Canadian Historical Review 75, no. 3 (1994): 400ff., notes the organizational complications for denominations like the United Church when faced with competition with charismatic leaders. Also see Dorothy Zolf and Paul W. Taylor, “Redressing the Balance in Canadian Broadcasting: A History of Religious Broadcasting in Canada,” Studies in Religion /  Sciences Religieuses 18, no. 2 (1989): 153–70, and Mark G. McGowan, “Air Wars: Radio Regulation, Sectarianism and Religious Broadcasting in Canada, 1922–1938,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2008, 5–25. 59 Litt, 247. 60 On the challenge of technology and mass culture to religion, see L.B. Kuffert, A Great Duty: Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture, 1939–1967 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 107–34.

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380

Notes to pages 208–11

61 Litt, 91–4, notes the seminal role of Christian values for western civilization in the thinking of commission members Hilda Neatby and Henri Lévesque, a Dominican priest. 62 Hilda Neatby, “Culture, Religion and Broadcasting,” Frontiers of Faith (e & s s Annual Report, 1954), 77–8; excerpted from an article Neatby had published in the Globe and Mail, n.d. 63 “Is There a Religious Revival in Canada,” Presbyterian Record, April 1957, 11. One can only imagine what she would make of the later popularity of New Age spirituality. 64 On the Massey Commission and “cultural flowering” of Canada that followed, see Jonathan F. Vance, A History of Canadian Culture (Don Mills, o n: Oxford University Press, 2009), 365–97. 65 Kenneth McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. 66 McRoberts, 24–30. 67 Litt, 6, notes that more recently the report has been called the work of the “Massey-Lévesque Commission,” giving its sole francophone member the position of co-chair, which he did not actually have at the time, as a gesture to counter Quebec’s resistance to its recommendations. 68 Pearson, “The Canadian Partnership” (17 December 1962), in Words and Occasions, 191, 193–4. E.L. Homewood, “The Face of French Protestantism,” u c o , 1 May 1959, 8–9, 21, 24–5, discusses the linguistic challenge of the United Church’s ministry to French Canadians. 69 Pearson, “The Canadian Partnership,” 197. Although Trudeau is usually credited with championing multiculturalism before it became official policy in 1971, it was implicit in Pearson’s speeches about language and ­culture a decade earlier. 70 Ramsay Cook, “Protestant Lion, Catholic Lamb,” in One Church, Two Nations?, ed. Philip LeBlanc and Arnold Edinborough (Don Mills, on: Longmans, 1968), 3–4. 71 Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (hereafter cited as Commission on B& B), u ca 82.117C, GC 20 C5B5, box 1-1. The terms of reference were reported to the General Council a year later in “Bilingualism and Biculturalism,” r o p (1964), 185–6. The term “multi-culturalism” was used in the United Church’s “Brief Presented to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism” (1964), Commission on B &B , box 1-1 (sec. 20), but “other cultures” (e.g., sections 46–51) was the phrase more commonly used. The section numbers that follow refer to the brief. 72 Alexander Smith (Dartmouth, n s ) to J.R. Mutchmor, 12 April 1964, Commission on B& B, box 1-5.

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Notes to pages 212–15

381

73 B. Doerksen (Regina) to J.R. Mutchmor, 12 April 1964, Commission on B & B , box 1-5. 74 Roland Garrett to Forsey, 29 May 1964, includes the text of the circular letter, Commission on B& B, box 1-5. 75 Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 203. 76 Forsey to Ernest Long, 2 July 1964, Commission on B &B , box 1-5. 77 Forsey to Rev. J. Ralph Watson, 20 July 1964, Commission on B &B , box 1-5. 78 Forsey, A Life on the Fringe, 118. 79 Eugene Forsey to Frank P. Fidler, 24 February 1965, Commission on B &B , box 1-6. Claude de Mestral, the bilingual minister of Noranda-Rouyn United Church in Quebec, was a prudent addition to the United Church delegation. As it turned out, United Church members were apparently not as outraged as the letters to Forsey and other church leaders had intimated. Instead there was nervousness about indifference to the seriousness of the situation. e& s s attempted to counter the complacency by organizing conferences and preparing study materials that drew attention to the looming national crisis. For example, the Lenten study book in 1965 was written by Claude de Mestral, A New Dawn in Canada? A Bilingual Minister Looks at Critical National Issues in the Light of the Cross (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service and Board of Christian Education, United Church of Canada, 1965). Some bilingual pamphlets were produced by the board, including Bilingualism and Biculturalism: Recent Statements of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church of Canada, [1967]). 80 Philip LeBlanc, “Preface,” in One Church, Two Nations?, xii. 81 The report was issued in instalments. The commission concluded its work in 1969, a year before the final instalment was published. 82 See C.B. Sissons, Church and State in Education (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1959), for an in-depth study of each province’s provisions for religious instruction. “Religious Education in the Schools of Canada,” Close the Chasm (e& s s Annual Report, 1962), 134, summarized in a chart the type of instruction as of 1962, with recitation of the Lord’s Prayer obligatory in six provinces and permitted in four; daily Bible readings obligatory in seven and permitted in three; and religious instruction obligatory in three, permitted in three, not permitted in three, and an extramural elective in one. 83 C.E. Silcox, “Religious Education and the Schools,” u c o , 1 August 1952, 11.

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Notes to pages 215–18

84 Alfred Gandier, “Religious Education in the Public School,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 2 (1926): 119–20. 85 R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, “The Christian Recessional in Ontario’s Public Schools,” in Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 275–80. They note that compared with other North American school systems, Ontario was unique in making provision for religious instruction in public schools. 86 Ibid., 281. 87 E.L. Homewood, “Three R’s Have Become Four,” u c o , 1 May 1954, 14–15. 88 George C. Pidgeon, “The Church Should Enter Open Doors,” u c o , 1 January 1955, 3. 89 “For a Conference on Religion in the Schools,” u c o , 15 February 1960, 7. Forrest was particularly concerned that Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, with whom Protestants had worked well in the past, referred to religious instruction in Ontario schools as “an unjust political means fashioned by sincere men for narrow sectarian purposes.” 90 E.R. MacLean, “Religion in the Schools,” u c o , 15 May 1961, 16. Ironically, McLean ended his protest against the arguments of Jews and Unitarians by drawing inspiration from the words of the late Catholic Bishop Fallon of London, Ontario, who had defended Protestant religious instruction in public schools. 91 Kenneth Bagnell, “The Big Fight about the Bible in the Schools,” u c o , 1 March 1963, 40. The article noted (11–12) that some Baptists were staunch supporters of separation, a historic position for them, but one that the United Church disputed as the Canadian tradition. 92 See, for example, E.R. MacLean, “Religious Education in the Schools of Canada,” u c o , 1 January 1955, 7. Immigrating from Switzerland to Canada, and serving in a pastoral charge in Quebec, de Mestral was struck by what he saw as an alternative to the more rigid separation between church and state in the United States. In the mid-1960s he still claimed that “our policy is co-operation between them”; see A New Dawn in Canada?, 48. 93 “For a Conference on Religion in the Schools,” 7. 94 Bagnell, “The Big Fight about the Bible in the Schools,” 12. Israel’s director of religious education confirmed that there was a compulsory program there, which the Christian minority was expected to attend, an embarrassing inconsistency to Jews in Canada, according to Bagnell. 95 Ibid., 40.

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Notes to pages 218–21

383

  96 Ibid., 12.   97 “Church and State in Education,” r o p (1964), 191.   98 “Church and State, [sic] in Education,” r o p (1966), 275. Why the commission declined to support his report is not clear. Perhaps his appeal to the national role of the church sounded quaint to its younger members. Although Thomson used some of the new catch phrases of the 1960s (“mission to the world” and “social action” rather than “social service”), for the most part his analysis reads more like a throwback to earlier decades. I could find no evidence of an initiative to develop a philosophy of Christian education after the Commission was discharged.   99 James S. Thomson, “The Church and Education,” r o p (1966), 276–7. 100 Ibid., 279–80. 101 Gidney and Millar, 281–2, citing the Mackay Report. They describe the steps to purge Christianity from the curriculum (and the objections to removing such instruction); it was replaced by either a “World Religions” course or values education (282–8). 102 Religion in Our Schools: An Ecumenical Reaction to the Keiller Mackay Report (Toronto: The Ecumenical Study Commission, 1972), 16, citing sections of the Mackay Report. As an indication of the position of the United Church, see Robin Smith, “Religion in Public Education,” in You Have a Right to Be Here (Toronto: Division of Mission in Canada, United Church of Canada, [1973?]). Smith agreed that the public school should not be an arena for proselytism, but worried that if parents turned to ­private schools to ensure religious instruction, it would result in “separate ghettos”; giving religion the place it deserved was one way to avoid a school system “fractured by religion” (321–3). 103 Ibid., 24. 104 Gidney and Millar, 288–9. 105 Paul W. Fox, “Mutuality with Differences,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 18–19. Fox claimed that Protestant churches were scorned by many because of their “obsessive devotion to the cause of prohibition,” and warned that if the Anglican and United churches used the augmented power that might come with union to influence secular issues, the result would be “increased resentment from a lay public, and probably eventually comparable retribution.” 106 Arnold Edinborough, “Introduction,” in One Church, Two Nations?, xvi–xix. 107 Charles Taylor, “Democracy, Inclusive and Exclusive,” in Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity and Self, ed. Richard Madsen, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 187.

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Notes to pages 222–6

108 Ibid., 188. 109 Forsey, A Life on the Fringe, 208–10. 110 “Report to the United Church Committee on Inter-Church Relations from the secretary of the Inter-Church Committee on Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations,” 21 October 1969, u c a 82.0001C, Series IX, box 165-3. The report pointedly noted that Trudeau had taken the time for an audience with the pope a year earlier. The appointment was a stunning blow to this committee, formed twenty-five years earlier to counter such signs of “Catholic aggression.” The appointment perhaps gave Catholics pause as well: Trudeau chose as Canada’s first ambassador to the Vatican a self-described humanist from Manitoba who leaned toward Unitarianism. See Frederick J. McEvoy, “The Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between Canada and the Vatican, 1969,” c c h s Historical Studies 68 (2002): 81. 111 “Mr Trudeau and the Vatican,” u c o , 15 November 1969, 10. Forrest was later given a rare glimpse into Trudeau’s personal faith for “An Observer Interview with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau,” u c o , September 1971, 16–20 (which ended with Forrest asking him if anything positive had yet come of the new relationship with the Vatican).

chapter eight    1 “End of an Era” was a cover story on J.R. Mutchmor in the 15 September 1964 issue of the Observer, occasioned by his retirement. The first part (“The Summing Up”) contained excerpts from Mutchmor’s report as the retiring moderator, followed by “The Controversial Years,” an article by editor A.C. Forrest.   2 J.R. Mutchmor, Mutchmor: The Memoirs of James Ralph Mutchmor (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 207–10.   3 “Crises,” u c o , 15 June 1964, 7.   4 J.R. Mutchmor, Command the Morning (e&ss Annual Report, 1961), 53.    5 Forrest, “The Controversial Years,” 13.    6 Ken Bagnell, “Ray Hord – The United Church’s Great Dissenter,” Star Weekly Magazine, 27 January 1968, 26.    7 “Ilderton Native Selected to Take Key Church Post” [clipping], London Free Press, 20 September 1962, u ca, J. Raymond Hord biographical file.    8 “Sunday Sport Issue May Go to Voters,” Regina Leader-Post, 8 July 1955, 3, accessed 7 August 2012, http: / / library2.usask.ca / sni / stories / spo3c.html

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Notes to pages 227–8

385

  9 J.R. Hord, “A Christian’s Attitude toward His Culture,” sermon delivered 21 September 1958, 3–4, for instance, was based on H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture. The original copies of Hord’s sermons are in my possession, given to me by his brother-in-law Stan Lucyk, who later served as a minister at Royal York Road United. 10 Sandra Beardsall, “Ray Hord: ‘Prophet Evangelist’ of the United Church,” Touchstone 24, no. 3 (2006): 50. 11 J.R. Hord, “Why Does God Allow Accidents to Happen?” sermon delivered 29 July 1962. Lucyk’s handwritten note on the sermon identifies it as “preached after Ray and June’s son, Jamie, drowned at Pinecrest camp.” Hord’s reaction to his son’s death was often noted in articles about him in the 1960s, and is still remembered by members of Royal York Road United Church who witnessed it. 12 The police concluded that Hord was likely mistaken for the man living in an identical house next door, who had recently testified at a court proceeding. June Hord wondered at the time if the attack was linked to his support for religious education in the public schools. See “Pastor’s Wife Tells of Vicious Attack” [unidentified clipping], Hord biographical file. 13 Beardsall, 55–6. 14 Bagnell, “Ray Hord – The United Church’s Great Dissenter,” 26. 15 E.E. Long, “The State of the Church,” 1, [1967?], Ernest Edgar Long Papers, u ca, box 9-128. 16 Robert W. Spike, “The Glorious Confusion about Missions,” Dead or Alive (e &s s Annual Report, 1966), 82. Spike, a prominent American theological and civil rights leader who was murdered in 1966, identified three competing perspectives on mission, each based on a different way of understanding the relationship between the church, the gospel, and the world (83–4). 17 “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 327. The International Council on Mission had been formed in 1921 by the Edinburgh Conference’s continuation committee. For a summary of the main conferences and committees of the modern ecumenical movement, see Paul A. Crow Jr, “The Ecumenical Movement,” in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, vol. 2, ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (New York: Scribner, 1988), 983–92. 18 Spike, 83. 19 William Hutchison, “Americans in World Mission: Revision and Realignment,” in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935– 1985, ed. David W. Lotz (Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 1989), 159.

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Notes to page 229

20 Theodore A. Gill Jr, “American Presbyterians in the Global Ecumenical Movement,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: The Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Christian Witness, eds. Milton J Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 140–3. J.H. Oldham, a Scottish missionary deeply involved in the ecumenical movement and the formation of the wc c , is credited with coining the term “middle axioms.” The new direction is evident in, for instance, “The Church in the Field of Social Welfare” report (1968) ­discussed below. 21 Hutchison, “Americans in World Mission: Revision and Realignment,” 161–2. For the impact of the animosity between liberals and conservatives in a denomination similar to the United Church, see Milton J Coalter, “Presbyterian Evangelism: A Case of Parallel Allegiances Diverging,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Christian Witness, 33–54, and Theodore A. Gill Jr, “American Presbyterians in the Global Ecumenical Movement,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: The Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Christian Witness, 144–5. 22 Hutchison, 160–1, who remarks that these provocative positions were presented with Hoekendijk’s “characteristic acerbity.” 23 Martin E. Marty popularized the phrase “two-party system” used by his doctoral student Jean Miller Schmidt to describe the split in U.S. churches often noted by historians. Marty used this terminology when he addressed e & s s ; see “The Controller, the Centaur and the Commissar,” It’s a Big Responsibility (e& s s Annual Report, 1970), 437. Schmidt’s dissertation was later published as Souls or the Social Order: The Two-Party System in American Protestantism (Brooklyn, n y: Carlson, 1991). 24 D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 226, finds a “broadening continuum” (rather than separate camps of conservatives and liberals), among the Nonconformist churches in Britain that I see as similar to the United Church. In both cases, moderates managed to hold the two parties together until after the Second World War. Kevin Neil Flatt, “The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church of Canada” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2008), tends to interpret these leaders as dissembling in their public statements so as not to alienate their more conservative supporters. My own assessment of their motives is more charitable. 25 “Evangelism and Social Service,” The United Church Observer Special Reference Handbook of Facts and Church Directory, January 1963 (Reference Issue), 21.

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Notes to pages 230–2

387

26 J.R. Hord, “Every Christian Is an Evangelist,” Breaking the Barriers (e & s s Annual Report, 1964), 11–12. 27 J.R. Hord, “The Price of Hope,” Listen to the World (e&ss Annual Report, 1965), 6–7. 28 “Report by Rev. Stuart Crysdale,” Breaking the Barriers, xii (insert). 29 Robert Christie, “New Focus for Commitment,” xi–xiii (insert), and “Experimental Evangelism and Social Action,” 125–35, both in Canada and Its Future (e& s s Annual Report, 1967), illustrate the implications of Colin Williams’s approach to evangelism for the work of the National Project. At the time, Williams was executive director of the Central Department of Evangelism for the n cc. 30 “The Centennial Committee,” r o p (1962), 253–4. 31 “Evangelism and Social Service,” r o p (1964), 115. The resolution noted that the latest statistics indicated a “crisis” in evangelism, in particular the failure of teenage membership to keep pace with their numbers in the ­general population. 32 J.R. Hord, “Some Goals for a National Project of Evangelism and Social Action,” Listen to the World, 106–7. 33 The section on evangelism in Dead or Alive illustrates well the new emphasis. “The Changing Church in a Changing World,” 11, provides a chart that identifies fourteen approaches. 34 Rex R. Dolan, The Big Change: The Challenge to Radical Change in the Church (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1967). Dolan did his doctoral studies at Union Theological Seminary, and the influence of Hoekendijk and other promoters of the new view of the mission of the church as service to the world is evident in his references; see, for example, his discussion of the role of the church, 22–8. Dolan identified architects of the “big change” as Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Rudolph Bultmann, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (97–100), and devoted a chapter (39–59) to the “death of God” theologians and the debate over John A.T. Robinson’s Honest to God. 35 Dolan, 61–70. Given his dismissal of the need for a blueprint, it is ­curious that the new approach was set out in a pamphlet titled A New Blueprint for Evangelism, prepared by an e&ss committee that Dolan chaired. 36 Ibid., 36–7. 37 Ibid., 17–18. 38 Eugene Carson Blake, “The Racial Barrier,” Breaking the Barriers, 63–7. 39 Peter Gzowski, “This Is Our Alabama,” Breaking the Barriers, 89–90, an excerpt from Maclean’s, 6 July 1963.

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Notes to pages 232–3

40 D.M. Ramsay, “Home Mission Enterprise of the United Church of Canada,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 41. 41 See the essays in George Dorey, et al., eds., No Vanishing Race: The Canadian Indian Today (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1955), for a positive assessment of home mission work with indigenous peoples, including one by A.E. Caldwell, later convicted of abuse. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1956), 526, reported that the book topped the wms ’s list of its “best-sellers” with 6,000 copies sold. For a more ­critical assessment of the United Church’s involvement, see the articles in Touchstone 16, no. 2 (1998). 42 James E. Milord, “Genocide in Canada: We Call It Integration,” u c o , August 1970, 24–6. On the United Church’s shift to a policy of integration, which involved phasing out its residential schools, see the records of the Commission to Study Indian Work, u ca 82.079C. The commission’s report was presented to General Council in two instalments: r o p (1956), 207–34, and r o p (1958), 185–94. 43 Stewart Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is! (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, United Church of Canada, 1966), 2. One of the congregations featured in the chapter “Real Cool at Yorkville” (7–20) was St Paul’s Avenue Road United Church in Toronto, where Crysdale had followed Berry as minister. Bruce Michael Douville, “The Uncomfortable Pew: Christianity, the New Left, and the Hip Counterculture in Toronto, 1965–1975” (PhD diss., York University, 2011), 142–3, discusses the congregation’s attempts at outreach to the youth who were drawn to the Yorkville scene. Although Douville does not track Berry and Crysdale’s work at e&ss, it is interesting to consider how their programming was influenced by their former congregation’s encounter with the culture of the 1960s. Douville provides a concise presentation of his research as it relates to the United Church in “A Puppy-Dog Tale: The United Church of Canada and the Youth Counter-Culture, 1965–73,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2008, 27–46. 44 Stewart Crysdale, “Prophecy in an Industrial Society,” Breaking the Barriers, 161. 45 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1. 46 “Is There a Religious Revival in Canada?” Presbyterian Record, April 1957, 10. Berton was the managing editor at Maclean’s magazine at that time, and one of several public figures invited to comment on the upswing in church attendance. His assessment that “there is a great deal of

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47

48

49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

57

Notes to pages 233–5

389

nonsense talked about the need for ‘modernizing’ the church” is ironic in view of his own critique a few years later. It is interesting to speculate whether Berton’s friendship (and occasional literary collaboration) with Charles Templeton influenced his later, more critical view of religion. A.B. McKillop, Pierre Berton: A Biography (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2008), makes several references to their relationship, as does David Vance, “Charles Templeton and the Performances of Unbelief” (master’s thesis, Carleton University, 2008), but neither considers that possibility. Berton’s dismissal from Maclean’s in 1963 after a public outcry against a column that condoned premarital sex (McKillop, 394–97) perhaps accounts for some of his antagonism toward the ‘old’ morality. Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965). On Berton’s publishing relationship with the Anglican Church, the promotion of his hugely successful book, and its impact on the churches, see A.B. McKillop, 403–4, 427–34. A.C. Forrest, “What Berton Would Say Differently If Writing for the United Church,” u c o , 1 February 1965, 31–3. For the published findings, see Stewart Crysdale, National Survey of the United Church in Canadian Life (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1964) and Stewart Crysdale, The Changing Church in Canada: Beliefs and Social Attitudes of United Church People (Toronto: Evangelism and Social Service, 1965). Stewart Crysdale, “The Hazards of Interpreting Signs,” Listen to the World, 25. Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Symposium on the Church and the World (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), iv, 22, 57. Charles Wilkinson, “Less Tact, More Action,” Dead or Alive, 69–70. Reprint of column in Hamilton Spectator, n.d. Saul Alinsky, “The Dynamics of Social Change,” Dead or Alive, 71–5. G.B. Mather, ed., Christianity and Politics (Toronto: National Evangelistic Mission Committee, 1960), 35. Roger Hutchinson, “Witnessing against War: Peacemaking in the Changing Canadian Context,” in Challenging the Conventional: Essays in Honour of Ed Newbery, ed. Wesley Cragg, et al., (Burlington, on: Trinity Press, 1989), 168–82, illustrates the distinctions between principles and concrete proposals in the United Church’s consideration of issues related to pacifism and nuclear weapons. Ben Smillie, “Off with the Halo,” u c o , 15 October 1965, 21, 40.

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390

Notes to pages 235–9

58 Claude de Mestral, “When Should the Church Speak?” in One Church, Two Nations?, ed. Philip LeBlanc and Arnold Edinborough (Don Mills, o n: Longmans, 1968), 168–71. 59 E.L. Homewood, “Billy Graham and Evangelism,” u c o , 15 October 1963, 13, captured the tone and range of criticism that was to follow. Hord claimed that “a sociologist” had made the Madison Ave. comparison. The article referred to reservations about Graham’s methods that had been expressed by leading theologians of the day, notably Paul Lehman and Reinhold Niebuhr. 60 Homewood, 13–14. 61 Ben Smillie, “Let’s Stop Backing Billy Graham,” u c o , August 1965, 17–18. 62 R.C. Chalmers, “It’s Commitment That Counts,” u c o , 15 September 1965, 26; the letter was included in a three-page section under the heading “Billy Graham: Should We Really Stop Supporting Him?” 63 “Waffling,” u c o , 15 November 1965, 11. Almost a year later, Graham provided answers to a list of twenty-six questions sent to him by the Observer; see “Billy Graham in Reply,” u c o , 1 July 1966, 10–13. The social issues that Forrest identified are interesting, suggesting a convergence of conservative evangelical theology with right-wing politics. The political shift in neo-evangelicalism that Graham’s critics detected is ­analyzed in William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), including a discussion of the deteriorating relationship with the nc c and the wc c . 64 Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is!, 149–56, 173–7, explained the theory behind the Planning Fellowships, which was influenced by the Chicago Urban Training Center’s action / reflection model with its links to community organization tactics. 65 Ibid., 168. 66 Ibid., 35–47, described MacDonald’s work at St Luke’s United Church, formerly Sherbourne Street United (whose previous ministers had included liberal evangelical sympathizers Richard Roberts and R.C. Chalmers), until its merger with Carleton Street United Church in 1959. 67 Clarke MacDonald, “The Shape of Things,” Life for the Choosing (e&ss Annual Report, 1969), 297. 68 Clarke MacDonald, “The King Has No Clothes,” The Cutting Edge (e&ss Annual Report, 1968), 6–7. 69 Kenneth Bagnell, “What’s All This So-Called New Evangelism?” u c o , 15 April 1966, 16–17. 70 Ibid., 17. 71 Ibid., 17–18.

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Notes to pages 239–40

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72 Kenneth Bagnell, “The View from the Firing Line,” u c o , 1 September 1967, 15, 40. He described St Andrew’s College in Saskatoon as “among the most avant-garde theological colleges” in Canada, noting that it had recently awarded an honorary degree to Hord. Saskatchewan Conference registered its support by passing a resolution that affirmed Hord’s leadership at e &s s . 73 Ken Bagnell, “Ray Hord – The United Church’s Great Dissenter,” 27. 74 Accessed 7 August 2012, www.wheaton.edu / bgc / archives / GUIDES / 014. htm#3. The timing suggests that the Congress was organized as a theological alternative to both the w cc and Vatican II, and to signal a geographical shift in emphasis: from Europe and North America to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 75 James Somerville, “The World’s Evangelicals Look at Themselves – and Their Future,” u c o , 1 January 1967, 14–15. For all the talk of appealing to the New Age, the United Church was slow to make the transition to the new technology; it continued to rely heavily on print materials. “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 349, suggests one explanation for this more cautious attitude toward the use of technology: the fear that it could weaken the church’s witness by leaving it vulnerable to “mass indoctrination.” 76 Somerville, 15. The article mentioned that at the time, Reynolds was the Canadian representative for Christianity Today, a magazine that Graham had helped to found in 1956 as an alternative to the Christian Century. 77 Reynolds, a native of Newfoundland, was to become a controversial figure in the United Church. Forty per cent of the members of West Ellesmere United in Scarborough, Ontario, voted against calling him in 1968 after he had served as the congregation’s interim minister. See the story on Reynolds by James Taylor, “Sharing the Faith: A Visitation Evangelism Program that Works,” u c o , July 1979, 10–13. “Gimme That Prime-time Religion,” Maclean’s, April 28, 1980, 48–9, is one of many accounts of his highly publicized battles with the United Church. He was placed on the discontinued list after a three-year dispute – not for his conservative theology per se, but for refusing to bow to pressure when he tried to move his congregation to a larger building against the wishes of the presbytery. His name is last listed in the Yearbook in 1980. 78 J. Berkley Reynolds, “Long Live the Old Evangelism,” u c o , 1 May 1967, 14–15. Reynolds singled out Crysdale and Dolan for reproof. 79 Ben Smillie, “Why the Fundamentalists Are Wrong,” u c o , 15 May 1967, 21. His reference to the Plymouth Brethren is interesting, since Smillie was born in India, where his parents served for a time as United Church missionaries.

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Notes to pages 240–1

80 John Burbidge and Patricia Clarke, “He Came; He Preached, and Here’s What Happened,” u c o , 15 October 1967, 17. They described the event in carnival, marketing, and Hollywood terms as well. 81 Norman Wesley Oake, “Evangelism Today,” Small Voice (Winter 1968): 8. Evidence of that confusion was supplied by a survey that Crysdale had conducted with participants at his Planning Fellowships, who were asked to identify the church’s “chief purpose.” A surprisingly small percentage of laity (3 per cent) and clergy (2 per cent) thought its purpose was “to guide and minister to believers.” A higher percentage of laity (16 per cent) than clergy (3 per cent) identified as its main purpose “to establish a more Christian social order.” The most favoured response by far was “to make Christ and his gospel known in the world” (67 per cent of laity and 73 per cent of clergy). Stewart Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is!, 162. At first glance it would seem to show support for the New Evangelism. However, when asked directly about evangelism (166), most respondents still preferred that there be an equal emphasis on proclamation and the witness of Christ-like action (laity 46 per cent, clergy 52 per cent). One wonders how representative the Planning Fellowships were, but their association with the New Evangelism makes the strong support for “proclamation” all the more striking. 82 See Katherine Hockin, “The Changing Face of Mission,” Mandate, October 1985, 17–20, and Katherine B. Hockin, “My Pilgrimage in Mission,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 12 (January 1988): 23–8, 30, for accounts of her life that place her experience alongside the major shifts in missionary thought and her own changing understanding of “world mission.” 83 Katharine Hockin, “Revolutionary Changes in the Twentieth Century Challenging Conventional Approaches to Missions,” n.d., 11, Commission on World Mission, u ca 82.124C, box 1-10. The paper was presented at a consultation, possibly at a special meeting held 12–13 February 1965. 84 The prestigious group of missionaries, church executives, and scholars included Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Canadian with connections to the United Church who was then teaching World Religions at Harvard, and whose approach to world religions featured the implicit pluralist position of the 1966 report. 85 “The Crisis in the United Church,” u c o , 1 March 1960, 7 (captioned “An Editorial Repetition”). 86 The entire report was printed as “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 299–493. For statistics on the number of missionaries, see Appendixes D and E, 462–3. It is interesting to note that the numbers of new appointments

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87 88 89

90

91

92

Notes to pages 241–3

393

between 1961 and 1964 indicated in the table in Appendix E were among the highest in forty years. “Radical Change in Mission,” u c o , 15 October 1966, 10. Ibid., 10. Letter from Donald Fleming to A.C. Forrest, 21 October 1966, 3–5, Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, u ca, box 8-7. I have wondered at the vehemence of Fleming’s response. Was the quarrel set off because of a misunderstanding between the two men over the word “commissioners” in the editorial? I assume Forrest had in mind the commissioners (delegates) to General Council; Fleming’s first letter obviously thought Forrest was referring to the members of the commission he had chaired (e.g., his reference to their two and a half years of work). Fleming was defending those who had worked with him on the report, whom Forrest seemingly had portrayed as daft – “unaware” of the shift. However, Fleming himself seems not to have appreciated fully the implications of the lengthy report his group had produced. Letter from A.C. Forrest to Donald Fleming, 3 November 1966, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. One of the difficulties was that the two men could not agree on the wording of the question that Forrest had asked on the floor. Forrest claimed that he had explicitly referred to the understanding of mission in 1925 as “making disciples of all nations,” and whether the report represented a shift in that emphasis. Fleming, he protested, had distorted his meaning by rephrasing his question. Letter from Donald Fleming to A.C. Forrest, 10 November 1966, 4, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. The exchange of letters gives a fascinating glimpse of the commission’s work and the response to it, as well as Forrest’s role as editor. Fleming mentioned more than once that he had the support of the new moderator (Wilfred Lockhart), but Forrest refused to give in to pressure once he was convinced that he was right. “Win Souls to Christ” [undated draft], 2–3, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. Forrest circulated this draft among some of the national staff. A memo from the associate secretary of the Board of World Mission suggested that Forrest emphasize “secularity and servanthood as the marks of Christ’s people” as “the theological emphasis today”; see Garth Legge to A.C. Forrest, 16 November 1966, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. Forrest’s reply to Legge (17 November 1966) and the draft statement indicate that he took his advice. Legge summed up what he saw as Forrest’s main point: a “rejection of a false evangelicalism which contends that the goal is ‘to win souls for Christ’ and society will take care of itself.” This, said Legge, “is for the birds – the vultures, that is – and the sooner it is disposed of, the better.”

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Notes to pages 243–5

  93 C. Douglas Jay, World Mission and World Civilization (Toronto: Board of World Mission, United Church of Canada, [1967?]), 2–4. For the definition of proselytism, see “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 303.  94 Jay, World Mission and World Civilization, 3–4, 11–12.   95 George Johnston, “The Future of Ecumenism in Canada,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 186. He noted in particular an active evangelical group within the Presbyterian Church.   96 Ernest E. Long, “The Truth about the Crisis in the Church,” u c o , 15 November 1967, 30.   97 Martin E. Marty, Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960, vol. 3 of Modern American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 434–55, analyzes the theological and cultural divisions within Protestantism in the 1950s. David Bebbington, “Evangelicalism in Its Settings: The British and American Movements since 1940,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 367, sees the time around 1940 as the nadir of the evangelical movement; it was “crushed between the upper and nether millstones of fundamentalism and modernism.” On the resurgence of conservative evangelicalism in the postwar period, see George M. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 1987); Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Garth M. Rosell, The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, m i : Baker Academic, 2008).   98 See Phyllis D. Airhart, “Condensation and Heart Religion: Canadian Methodists as Evangelicals, 1884–1925,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 90–105, for early indications of different organizational assumptions.   99 Whereas the Anglican, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches and the Canadian Council of Churches have since sought observer status in the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the United Church is represented only indirectly through the Canadian Council of Churches. 100 J. Berkley Reynolds, “Evangelical Renaissance,” Small Voice 1, no. 1 (1967): 2. He also drew attention to the Canadian Anglican Evangelical Fellowship and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (comparing the latter to the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals) as signs of the evangelical revival. He credited the Berlin Congress along with the

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Notes to pages 245–8

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Graham and Ford crusades for bringing evangelicals from different denominations together (10). 101 The sea change was evident in the Observer. Compare the skeptical tone of the Observer’s coverage of the Second Vatican Council in October 1962 to the hopeful tone of R.H.N. Davidson, “What Vatican II Can Mean for Protestants,” u c o , January 1966, 17–18, 30. Davidson described the closing service as “the end of the most important event in modern church history” and “the beginning of a new era.” For other indications of the shift, see A.C. Forrest, “A Protestant at Vatican II,” u c o , 15 November 1962, 14–15, 17; A.C. Forrest, “The New Mood in Catholicism,” 1 February 1964, u c o , 10–12, 40; and Patricia Clarke, “The RomanCatholic Protestant Thaw: How It Is Changing Your Church,” 1 May 1965, u c o , 13–15. For other illustrations of the impact, see John H. Young, “Reaction to Vatican II in the United Church of Canada,” in Vatican II: Canadian Experiences, ed. Michael Attridge, Catherine E. Clifford, and Gilles Routhier (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2011), 106–23. 102 “Inter-church and Inter-faith Relations,” r o p (1972), 267. I have been unable to find evidence that the recommendation for preparing new materials was followed. 103 Claude de Mestral, A New Dawn in Canada? A Bilingual Minister Looks at Critical National Issues in the Light of the Cross (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service and Board of Christian Education, 1965), 27. 104 George Johnston, “The Future of Ecumenism in Canada,” 186. 105 Brydon, 11. 106 Lois Wilson, “Town Talk,” The Cutting Edge, 230–3. 107 Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down: A Memoir (Toronto: Doubleday, 1989), 47–9. 108 Ibid., 50. 109 “The Church on the Urban Frontier,” r o p (1964), 275–7. 110 “The Church on the Urban Frontier” r o p (1966), 193–7. 111 Harold Bailey, “Rural,” u c o , 1 August 1966, 9. 112 “Is It a National Church?” u c o , August 1957, 6. 113 Jiwu Wang, “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril” (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 85. 114 Ibid., 85. He notes Protestant missions to Chinese immigrants were abandoned in the 1960s after the collapse of the vision of “His Dominion.” 115 George Johnston, “The Strategy of the Church in the Space Age,” Listen to the World, 76–80.

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Notes to pages 248–51

116 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 79. Chapter 3 discusses the impact of this new approach to housing, which made the upbringing of the baby boomers different from their grandparents or even their parents. 117 Wesley Morris, “The Suburban Church,” Telstar – Tell Peace! (e&ss Annual Report, 1963), 153. 118 “Suburbia,” u c o , 1 May 1964, 7. 119 Ibid., 7. 120 Forrest put his finger on an important dimension of the criticism. James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965 (New Brunswick, nj : Rutgers University Press, 1994), discusses the critique of suburban religion and links the “jeremiads” of secular and religious critics (notably Will Herberg, Gibson Winter, Peter Berger, and Harvey Cox among the latter) to the views of the youth culture of the 1960s. e&ss’s staff reports and articles indicate familiarity with this sociological research, and the names of Talbot Parsons, Peter Berger, and Gibson Winter crop up frequently. For instance, Crysdale’s essay on “The Church’s Functions in Contemporary Society,” Listen to the World, 48–50, listed several sociologists of religion, but no theologians. 121 “The Suburban Church: A Symposium,” u c o , 15 October 1965, 12. 122 Ibid., 12. Douglas John Hall, The Future of the Church (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1989), 5–19, gives a poignant description of growing up in a United Church congregation that I suspect was quite typical for someone born in 1928. He confirms Forrest’s hunch about suburban congregations: “The village church! it is the dream church of every suburbia I know!” (17). 123 “The Suburban Church: A Symposium,” 13–16. 124 Ibid., 13. 125 Ibid., 13–14. 126 Ibid., 17. 127 The section on “The Congregation in Mission” in “The Church on the Urban Frontier,” r o p (1966), 196–200 is a good summary of the application of the new approach to mission at the congregational level, e.g., study-action projects. The ambivalence about identifying the mission of the church with a building – often “a decaying monument to the ­prosperity of the institutional church of a previous generation” (199) – is evident.

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Notes to pages 251–4

397

128 “Evangelism,” u c o , 15 November 1967, 11. 129 “Evangelicals,” u c o , 15 May 1970, 8. 130 Cf. “Centenary Committee,” r o p (1964), 187–8; “Centenary Committee,” r o p (1966), 190. 131 “Final Report of the National Project of Evangelism and Social Action,” Life for the Choosing, 378–9. 132 Robert Christie, “Man of the Sixties – Scientific Genius and Social HalfWit,” It’s A Big Responsibility, 491–2. 133 Ibid., 495. 134 Robert Christie, “Where the End Is the Beginning,” Man Fully Alive (e&ss Annual Report, 1971), 3. 135 William Berry, “Evangelism – Retrospect and Prospect,” Man Fully Alive, 23–4, 27. 136 J.R. Hord, “Journey into the Future,” Canada and Its Future, iv (insert). 137 J.R. Hord, “Finding Life’s Meaning,” Man Fully Alive, 55, stanzas from a poem published posthumously in e& s s ’s last report. 138 Arch McCurdy, another e& s s staffer phased out by restructuring, saw the creation of a new Division of Mission in Canada as the end of the old two-pronged thrust of evangelism and social service. He makes the interesting observation that social action had “emerged” in the 1960s as a third facet of the old board’s work; see Arch McCurdy, “Transition,” Man Fully Alive, 19. 139 While some claimed that restructuring was a convenient way to rid the United Church of the term “evangelism,” there was also speculation that it was designed “to muffle the prophetic but sometimes embarrassing voice” of e& s s by replacing it with a church in society department within the new Division of Mission in Canada; see Patricia Clarke, “Clarke MacDonald: An Ear for Evangelism at the Top,” u c o , February 1971, 16. On Clarke MacDonald’s understanding of his responsibilities as head of the new department, see “The Department of Church in Society,” xix–xxi, which includes a reference to committing his life to Christ at the age of fourteen, and “Some Aspects of Our Task – At this Point in Time,” 272–5, an account of his impressions of the church’s work since the 1940s, both in You Have a Right to Be Here (Division of Mission in Canada Report, 1972–73). 140 “The Church in the Field of Social Welfare,” r o p (1968), 297. 141 Ibid., 295. 142 Hockin, “Revolutionary Changes in the Twentieth Century Challenging Conventional Approaches to Missions,” 1.

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398

Notes to pages 255–8

chapter nine   1 “Change Ways or Suffer Defeat Warns United Church Minister” [clipping], Napanee Beaver, 1 September 1965, Ernest Edgar Long Papers, uc a , box 11-173 (scrapbook).   2 “Mr United Church Warns of the Coming Crisis” [clipping], Toronto Daily Star, 18 November 1967, Long Papers, box 11-173 (scrapbook).   3 Ernest E. Long, “The Truth about the Crisis in the Church,” u c o , 15 November 1967, 12–15, 30, 40.   4 “An Editorial Measurement: Of the United Church’s Amazing Growth,” u c o , 1 May 1959, 7, 29.  5 “Disappointment,” u c o , 1 June 1967, 11.   6 J.R. Hord, “Where Is the Church in Canada Going?” Canada and Its Future (e & s s Annual Report, 1967), 11.   7 E.E. Long, “The State of the Church,” address delivered 26 January 1971, 1, Long Papers, box 9-file 128, which cited recently published surveys of church attendance.   8 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15. His book explores each of these contributory streams separately. Although much of his analysis focuses on Britain, Europe, and the United States, he includes Canada (with specific attention to Quebec), Australia, and New Zealand as examples of the geographical extent of the crisis. For a critique of theories of secularization, see Jeffrey Cox, “Master Narratives of Long-term Religious Change,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 201–17. Cox does not deny religious decline, but focuses on different categories, such as religious toleration and the impact of state and legal power.  9 McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 243. 10 Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 207– 34. He makes use of the work of ecologist C.S. Holling, “Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems,” Ecosystems 4 (2001): 396, who pictures panarchy as “a nested set of adaptive cycles” operating in a hierarchy. 11 Homer-Dixon, 228. 12 For a description of the phases see Holling, 396–404. 13 Homer-Dixon, 308. 14 Holling, 398–9. 15 Homer-Dixon, 289–90.

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Notes to pages 259–62

399

16 Holling, 397–8, 402. 17 See Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “Individualism Religious and Modern: Continuities and Discontinuities,” in Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada between Europe and America, ed. David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 52–7, for a discussion of the connections between mysticism and modern individualism. 18 J.R. Hord, “It’s Later than We Think,” The Cutting Edge (e&ss Annual Report, 1968), 11–12. Hord expressed similar thoughts in undated handwritten notes marked “Future Sermon” and titled “The Church of the Dispersion.” The original copies of Hord’s sermons are in my possession, given to me by his brother-in-law Stan Lucyk. Lucyk adds a comment: “I believe Ray was writing this just before his death.” 19 Donald Mathers, “The Concept of Secularization,” paper presented to the Saturday Club at Queen’s University, 12 April 1969, in Not by Sight (published privately by his friends, 1974), 36–8. An earlier sermon had described secularization as “a religious achievement,” though it warned of a “false secularism that slides back into pagan religiosity”; see “Secularization: A Sermon,” preached at Chalmers United Church in Kingston, 26 May 1968, in Not by Sight, 41–3. 20 Daphne J. Anderson and Terence R. Anderson, “United Church of Canada: Kingdom Symbol or Lifestyle Choice,” in Faith Traditions and the Family, ed. Phyllis D. Airhart and Margaret J. Bendroth (Louisville, k y: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 135. 21 “What the Council Did!” u c o , 15 October 1964, 39. 22 A.C. Forrest, “The Churches’ Role in the Alcohol Problem,” address to young people in Toc Alpha, Niagara Fall, 29 December 1965, 10, Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, u ca, box 4-45. 23 McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 29. 24 Hilda Benson Powicke, Coffee House: A One-Act Play (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada and the Department of Christian Social Service of the Anglican Church of Canada, [1965?]). 25 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 272. Anderson and Anderson, 129, identify Marriage Today: An Exploration of Man-Woman Relationship and Marriage (1978) as pivotal in separating sexuality and marriage, on the one hand, from procreation and family formation, on the other. They see this as a crucial step toward acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships, which had been thought of as “unnatural” because they did

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400

26

27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34

Notes to pages 262–4

not involve reproduction. In the 1960s, the United Church was not ready to accept homosexuals as ministers. For example, when asked what would happen if a candidate for the ministry was suspected of having a “homosexual problem,” Hord said he knew of no committee in the church that would recommend “a man with this aberration.” He was in favour of amending the Criminal Code to remove legal penalties for homosexual relationships between consenting adults, but felt that ministry was a ­different matter: a minister had an “unusual opportunity to mix” with boys and young men, and “confidence in him would be fatally undermined” if his homosexuality were known; see Toronto Daily Star ­[clipping], 20 January 1968, J. Raymond Hord biographical file, uc a . “The Lord’s Day,” r o p (1962), 338–40. The report noted the impact of television and other media, weekend travel, rootless communities, and competition from leisure activities. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 347. “The Lord’s Day Act,” r o p (1971), 161–2. J.R. Mutchmor’s report in Close the Chasm (e&ss Annual Report, 1962), 43. For two perspectives on the “why go to church” question, see W. Clarke MacDonald, “Sunday 11:00 a.m.: What’s It All About?” u c o , 1 September 1969, 24–5, and N. Bruce McLeod, “Why Won’t They Go to Church,” u c o , 1 November 1969, 20–2, 40. MacDonald warned that neglecting worship was “suicidal to the Christian life”; the “generation yet unborn” would be handed “cold ashes and not the flame of faith” (24). While not a direct response to MacDonald, McLeod’s article counters the assumption that people who neglect worship will eventually end up neglecting God. Kenneth Bagnell, “Are Prayer Meetings Passé?” u c o , 1 January 1966, 15, found that prayer meetings were a thing of the past but noted that Bible study was enjoying a renaissance, with groups taking “a more sophisticated approach to the scriptures.” “Guilty? Faith Crisis? Cultural Revolution? Golf? Me?” u c o , 15 October 1969, 11. Address by s cm general secretary Roy G. DeMarsh, “Campus Religion Slumps,” Command the Morning (e& s s Annual Report, 1961), 124–5. Owram, 179–83, describes the dramatic changes in higher education that corresponded to the surging number of students. For sc m’s postwar challenges and changes in this context, see Catherine Gidney, “Poisoning the Student Mind? The Christian Student Movement at the University of

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Notes to pages 264–6

401

Toronto, 1920–1965,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, New Series, 8 (1997): 157–63. 35 John W. Berry, “The Student Christian Movement – A Study in Creative Tension,” Breaking the Barriers (e& s s Annual Report, 1964), 53–4 (emphasis in the original). Bruce Michael Douville, “The Uncomfortable Pew: Christianity, the New Left, and the Hip Counterculture in Toronto, 1965–1975” (PhD diss., York University, 2011), 199–200, 203, indicates that the scm was having discussions about dropping “Christian” from its name; the loss of church funding that might result from the change was a consideration in retaining it. Douville sees connections between the youth counterculture (especially the s cm ) and the United Church’s shift to the left in the late-1960s (171–205), as well as its support for feminism and gl b t persons decades later (520–4). 36 Peter Gordon White, “Magnifying Voices, Sharing Visions,” in Voices and Visions: Sixty-five Years of the United Church of Canada, ed. John Webster Grant, et al. (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1990), 110. Even one of the New Curriculum’s harshest critics admitted that there had been “no loud protests” against it in the United Church; see J. Berkley Reynolds, “The Hot New Fight for the Good Old Faith,” u c o , 15 February 1968, 12, 14. 37 “Crises,” u c o , 15 June 1964, 7. 38 Joanne Strong, “Rx for the Sunday School,” u c o , 1 August 1968, 13. 39 Jean Doern, et al., All Things Are Possible: A History of Westworth United Church, 1950–1990 (n.p.: 1993), 31. 40 Robert Dobbie, et al., The Junior Teacher’s Guide (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1964). 41 “Comments on the New Curriculum,” Small Voice (Winter 1968): 4–5 (a letter from Wilber Sutherland to an unnamed friend). 42 Ibid., 7, 16–17. 43 J.R. Mutchmor, “Forty Years,” u c o , 1 June 1965, 11. 44 White, 107–9. 45 Judging from demographic patterns in other denominations, a decline may well have happened regardless of the controversy over curriculum. For a study that sees a more direct link between the New Curriculum and the decline in attendance, see Kevin Neil Flatt, “The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church, 1930–1971” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2008), especially chapter 3. 46 Strong, 10.

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402

Notes to pages 267–9

47 James Taylor, “What’s Happening to Our Sunday Schools?” u c o , September 1970, 13, 15. 48 Ibid., 13, 14–15. 49 Owram, 103. 50 Harvey L. Shepherd, “Is There Room in Kairos for You?” u c o , 1 March 1969, 26. This group should not be confused with the ecumenical organization k a iros that was formed later. 51 Ibid., 27. For instance, in contrast to the y pu’s nationally designed programs of the past, Kairos was based on locally defined goals and actions. The article conveys the author’s skepticism about Kairos’s organizational effectiveness. Although impressed by the intelligence of those he had met, he was uncertain about what it meant for the United Church: “Kairos looks like the vanguard of the church and Kairos looks a mess” (30). 52 “Ecumenical Affairs,” r o p (1968), 366–7. Some of the projects underway included setting up recreational facilities, working on Indian reservations, organizing multi-denominational and multiracial church services, providing folk music for worship, and developing activities for action in Latin America. 53 Shepherd, 27. 54 “Report of the Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women,” r o p (1962), 275. The decision to merge the two organizations came after nearly a decade of study. “The Work of Women in the Church,” r o p (1958), 214–18, relates the background and findings that led to the recommendations in “The Commission on the Work of Women in the Church,” r o p (1960), 301–17, which took two years to implement. 55 Patricia Clarke, “What’s Keeping Women in the Church Kitchen?” u c o , 1 September 1965, 12. 56 Ibid., 13, 14. 57 “Laymen: Okay. We Say It Again. Let’s Give Them What They Want,” u c o , 1 May 1970, 11. 58 S.J.D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organization and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 raises this question about the correlation between belonging and believing as he considers what happens when people stop attending church; cited in Cox, “Master Narratives of Longterm Religious Change,” 213. 59 William G. Berry, “Secrets of a Successful Evangelist,” u c o , 15 January 1968, 23. 60 See Kenneth Bagnell, “What’s Happening in the Church? A Stirring ... New Styles ... Search for Meaning, A New Reformation, Perhaps?”

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Notes to pages 269–72

403

Excerpt from Globe and Mail Magazine, 28 March 1970, It’s A Big Responsibility (e& s s Annual Report, 1970), 42–3. 61 A number of such projects were connected to the Canadian Urban Training project funded by e& s s and the Board of Home Missions; see Ted Reeve, “Walking the Talk,” in Action Training in Canada: Reflections on Church-Based Education for Social Transformation, ed. Ted Reeve and Roger Hutchinson (Toronto: Emmanuel College Centre for Research in Religion, 1997), 13–58. Other “experimental projects” were funded by the Stabilization Fund, including a seminar on “Secularization and Christian Education,” family counselling services, chaplaincies to industry, and social ministries in the downtown cores of Toronto, Hamilton, and Vancouver; see “Experimental Projects Financed from the Stabilization Fund Income,” r o p (1968), 260–5. Douville, 173–7, finds that the New Left radicals influenced by cu t’s approach were more confrontational and increasingly critical of organized religion. 62 Stewart Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is! (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, United Church of Canada, 1966). 63 E. Westhues and E. Burrill, “Summary Report Presented to Rowntree Memorial United Church,” November 1974, 2–3, Office of the Moderator, Series 2, u ca 83.069C, Wilbur Howard Papers, box 2 [unnumbered file]. 64 Ibid., 4–5, 8–10. 65 Ibid., 11. 66 For a study of the transition from missions to international development, see Ruth Compton Brouwer, “When Missions Became Development: Ironies of ‘NGOization’ in Mainstream Canadian Churches in the 1960s,” Canadian Historical Review 91 no. 4 (2010): 661–93. 67 Association with the institutional church is not included, for instance, in David Bebbington’s popular quadrilateral for defining evangelicalism: ­conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism. 68 Owram, 206–8. The appeal of the Jesus movement is perhaps not surprising, given its embrace of popular music. 69 Kyle Haselden, “Christianity’s Subtlest Foe,” Close the Chasm, 11–13. 70 McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 243–4, notes the popularity in the 1960s of charismatic forms of Christianity, mysticism, and other esoteric alternatives (e.g., neo-paganism, ecology, goddess, yoga). Leigh Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), sees the roots of New Age mysticism and seeker spirituality in nineteenth-century Transcendental liberalism. 71 “The 70s: Will They Be Sad, Soaring, Sordid, Sinful or Violent?” u c o , January 1970, 11.

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404

Notes to pages 272–4

72 Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterson, eds., The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3:133. 73 D.M. Mathers, “The Mission of the Church and the Rule of God over History,” [1965?], 1, Commission on World Mission 82.124C, box 2-13. 74 “Church Worship and Ritual,” r o p (1968), 357. 75 Ibid., r o p (1968), 357–8. One member of the committee who supported that “revolution” was Ronald Atkinson. For his views on liturgy as an expression of the “new worldliness and secularity,” see Ronald Atkinson, “Factors in the Preparation of a ‘Contemporary’ Liturgy,” in Ordered Liberty: Readings in the History of United Church Worship, ed. William S. Kervin (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 2011), 224–6, a reprint of an article published in 1965. 76 N.K. Clifford, “The United Church and Doctrinal Confession,” Touchstone 2, no. 2 (May 1984), 18. He contends that the Committee on Faith knowingly departed from the ancient creeds, the Reformed confessions, and its own traditions by beginning with a statement of the human condition rather than God. 77 Its reception differed from other materials prepared around the same time, including the Service Book (1969) for which the creed had been prepared and the Hymn Book published in co-operation with the Anglican Church of Canada (1971) that was long in use but much criticized. 78 Although the committee that worked on the new creed included two women (Katharine Hockin and Dorothy Wyman), feminist concern about sexist language was apparently not an issue. When the New Creed was revised in 1980, its striking opening affirmation was changed from “Man is not alone” to “We are not alone,” and “the true man Jesus” was replaced by “Jesus, the Word made flesh.” 79 For the presentation of the case for the New Creed, see “Christian Faith,” r o p (1968), 311–43, which includes the original version of the creed that was sent to the General Council. The creed was redrafted by the Committee on Faith and approved for congregational use and inclusion in the new service book by the General Council Executive on 5 November 1968; see Creeds: A Report of the Committee on Faith (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada, 1969), 3. 80 John Burbidge, “A Creed Is a Short, Memorable and Accurate Summary of the Important Parts of the Christian Faith,” u c o , 1 February 1969, 18. 81 Ibid., 30. 82 Berkley Reynolds, “A Creed Is a Short, Memorable and Accurate Summary of the Important Parts of the Christian Faith,” u c o , 1 February 1969, 40. 83 Ibid., 19.

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Notes to page 275

405

84 G.A.D. Scott, “The New Creed of ’68,” Small Voice [3?], no. 2 (1969): 24–5. The article was a response to a question that had been broached in an editorial in the previous issue of Small Voice: how much diversity “on the very truths which constitute its identity” could go unchecked without threatening the existence of the United Church? 85 Reynolds, “The Hot New Fight for the Good Old Faith,” 14, used the term “new creed” to describe the u crf’s statement of faith in an article published a few months before what eventually became known the New Creed was presented at the General Council. 86 “The Editorial,” Small Voice 1, no. 1 (1967): 1. The somewhat awkward wording and punctuation are in the original; the statement appears in later versions in a slightly modified form. 87 “Christian Faith,” r o p (1966), 509–11. Michael Bourgeois, “Awash in Theology: Issues in Theology in the United Church of Canada,” in The United Church of Canada: A History, ed. Don Schweitzer (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 266–70, astutely notes the shift in the understanding of revelation from the Statement of Faith, which had affirmed “God’s self-revelation only in Scripture and the events to which it witnesses, especially in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” 88 Reynolds, “The Hot New Fight for the Good Old Faith,” 13–14. The explanation is similar to the editorial in Small Voice that introduced the redrafted statement on biblical authority, suggesting that Reynolds wrote, or at least had a hand in writing, the editorial. The new language echoed the neo-evangelical defence of inerrancy described in Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids, m i : Zondervan, 1976), written by one of the most prominent champions of the inerrantist approach to biblical interpretation. Reynolds would have been familiar with the debate that was heating up through his connection to Christianity Today, where Lindsell was editor. 89 J. Berkley Reynolds, “Evangelical Renaissance,” Small Voice 1, no. 1 (1967): 2, 10. He was pleased that principal Lautenschlager supported the Emmanuel College students who were perturbed by former moderator Ernest Howse’s beliefs about the resurrection and deity of Christ. Kenneth Hamilton, a professor at the United Church’s theological college in Winnipeg, had criticized Paul Tillich and the “God is dead” theologians in his writings. While Hamilton described himself as a liberal evangelical, Reynolds claimed he was becoming more conservative. For an assessment of Hamilton’s theological evolution, see John McTavish, “Kenneth Hamilton: Canada’s Kierkegaard,” Touchstone 28, no. 3 (2010): 51–68. 90 Alan T. Davies, [letter to the editor], u c o , 1 April 1968, 2.

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406

Notes to pages 275–7

91 John McTavish, [letter to the editor], u c o , 15 March 1968, 2. 92 W. Clarke MacDonald, “The King Has No Clothes,” The Cutting Edge, 6–7. 93 For a summary of the tasks undertaken at the various stages of the negotiations, see Neil Semple, “Introduction,” Anglican Church, United Church, Christian Church (Disciples) Union Negotiations (Finding Aid 197), 1981, u ca. 94 For the response to the invitation and early negotiations, see the first report of the “Commission on Re-Union,” r o p (1946), 180–2. 95 See Forrest’s editorial “To Anglicans ‘Time Is Not Yet,’” u c o , 1 February 1959, 5, a reply to the lead editorial in the first issue of the new Canadian Churchman magazine that had suggested union would not be happening anytime soon. A letter from United Church moderator Angus MacQueen and a statement from Anglican acting primate Phillip Carrington followed in the u c o , 1 March 1959, 11, 24. MacQueen pointed out that the invitation in 1943 had come from the Anglican bishops, not “zealous and ambitious Unionists” from the United Church, and regarded the advice to continue discussing union in good faith as “tantamount to saying ‘Let’s Pretend’” (11). A later editorial, “Anglicans and Union,” u c o , 15 March 1959, 6, informed readers that little had been done to prepare for union by either side over the past thirteen years. 96 “What the Council Did!” u c o , 15 October 1964, 40. 97 The document was widely circulated, including publication in full in the u c o , 15 June 1965, 8–11, 26. 98 “Union,” u c o August 1965, 9. The editorial credited Vatican II and an Anglican Congress held in Toronto two years earlier for the “new reformation” that was underway. 99 For an astute analysis of the failure of negotiations from the perspective of one of the United Church’s representatives, see John Webster Grant, “Leading a Horse to Water: Reflections on Church Union Conversations in Canada,” in Studies of the Church in History, ed. Horton Davies (Allison Park, pa: Pickwick Publications, 1983), 165–81. 100 The United Church continued to discuss union with the Disciples of Christ, but they withdrew from negotiations in 1985. 101 John Gywnne-Timothy, “The Evolution of Protestant Nationalism,” in One Church, Two Nations?, ed. Philip LeBlanc and Arnold Edinborough (Don Mills, on : Longmans, 1968), 48. 102 William A. Collins, “The Catholic Nature of Anglicanism,” u c o , 1 September 1962, 10–11, 40. 103 “Blunt Talk,” u c o , 1 September 1962, 9. George Johnston took up the challenge of defending church union in the next issue.

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Notes to pages 278–81

407

104 “Union with the Anglicans? Here Come the Dissenters!” u c o , 1 April 1966, 19, 21. 105 “Union with the Anglicans?” 20–1, 22. 106 “Ecumenical Affairs,” r o p (1968), 362. The report rightly anticipated that the “new radicalism and activism” would drive a wedge between conservative evangelicals and churches within the ecumenical mainstream. 107 George Johnston, “The Future of Ecumenism in Canada,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 185–6. 108 Patricia Clarke, “Some Impolite Fears about Church Union,” u c o , 15 March 1969, 8. 109 “Let’s Get a Perspective on Union!” u c o , November 1970, 10. 110 Patricia Clarke and Jerry Hames, “Union: What Church Members Really Think about Church Union,” u c o , November 1970, 18. 111 Ibid., 19–20. 112 On the Evangelical United Brethren union, see “From the Church Union Front,” u c o , 1 June 1959, 7; “The Other Church Union,” u c o , 1 May 1966, 14–15; and John Burbidge, “Gentle Shepherd of 10,000 Brethren,” u c o , 1 January 1968, 10–12, 29 (a story on Emerson Hallman’s leadership in the negotiations as superintendent of the Canada Conference of the e ub ). 113 Stewart Crysdale, “Social Change and the Re-Formation of the Church,” Dead or Alive (e& s s Annual Report, 1966), 77–81. 114 Stewart Crysdale, “Upheaval and Integration,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 139. 115 Some theologians saw the de-institutionalization accompanying urbanization as a positive development. Among them was Harvey Cox, who popularized Bonhoeffer’s “religionless” Christianity in his best-selling book The Secular City. 116 See J.R.P. Sclater, “A Conciliar Church,” Right Relations among Men (e & s s Annual Report, 1943), 85. 117 Church, Nation and World Order: A Report of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, [1944?]), 35. 118 Martin E. Marty, “From the Centripetal to the Centrifugal in Culture and Religion,” Theology Today 51, no. 1 (1994): 7–8, claims that the world changed in 1968 in its organizational assumptions: from the centripetal, convergent, universalizing, and unitive inclinations of the postwar period to what he describes as the centrifugal, divergent, particularizing, mutually exclusive, and disruptive forces that reshaped the world after 1968. The restructuring process coincides with the declining significance of

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Notes to pages 281–2

denominations described by Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 1988), 71–99. For an analysis of this paradigm shift on the national structures of denominations (and the concomitant shift of energy to the congregational level), see David Roozen, “National Denominational Structures’ Engagement with Postmodernity: An Integrative Summary from an Organizational Perspective,” in Church, Identity, and Change: Theology and Denominational Structures in Unsettled Times, ed. David A. Roozen and James R. Nieman (Grand Rapids, mi: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 596–8. 119 John Webster Grant, “‘They Don’t Speak for Me’: The United Church’s Crisis of Confidence,” Touchstone 6, no. 3 (September 1988): 9–17, assesses this distrust of ecclesial authority in the United Church. 120 J.R. Mutchmor, Mutchmor: The Memoirs of James Ralph Mutchmor (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 141–2. 121 John Webster Grant, “What’s Past Is Prologue,” in Voices and Visions, 132. 122 G.B. Mather, “Debt of Love,” The Cutting Edge, 299–300, his final report as associate secretary. 123 John McTavish, “‘An Honest Bar of Soap’: Earl Lautenschlager Affectionately Remembered,” Touchstone 6, no. 3 (1988): 45. 124 Roy DeMarsh, “The Crisis in the Ministry Today,” The Cutting Edge, 204. 125 “Dropbacks,” u c o , 15 May 1970, 9. 126 E. Brooks Holifield, God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America (Grand Rapids, m i : Eerdmans, 2007), 235–74, describes the challenges to ministry as a profession in the United States from 1940–70, which are strikingly similar to what the United Church was facing. Bernard Ennals, Telling the Story: The Memoirs of Bernard Ennals (Sackville, n b: Hitcham Press, 1995), recounts how the rapidly changing context shaped his thinking about his own work as a minister in rural, small town, and suburban congregations in British Columbia and Ontario. The second section of his memoirs, titled “Changed Country! Changed Church!,” looks at the impact of urbanization, immigration, fundamentalism, and the sexual revolution. 127 Arnold Edinborough, “The Minister and the Twentieth Century,” in Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Symposium on the Church and the World (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 15. 128 R.S. Lederman, “Why I Am Leaving Parish Ministry,” The Cutting Edge, 208–13. Others seem to thrive on the challenges; see N. Bruce McLeod, “Why I Am Staying in Pastoral Ministry,” The Cutting Edge, 213–16.

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Notes to pages 283–4

409

129 “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century,” r o p (1968), 220, quoting the resolution that formed the commission in 1964. 130 Ibid., 221. 131 G. Campbell Wadsworth, “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century: A Critical Appraisal,” 1, 7, in “Report of the Commission on the Ministry in the Twentieth Century to the General Council: Three Appraisals,” Committee to Implement Decisions of the Twenty-third General Council relating to the Commission on Ministry in the Twentieth Century Recommendations, u ca 82.148C, box 1-2. Wadsworth had solicited assessments of the report from two well-known scholars in 1969, and ­submitted them to the implementation committee along with his own appraisal. George B. Caird of Mansfield College, Oxford, was disturbed that the report portrayed the church as “one of the social services.” T.F. Torrence of Edinburgh University linked the report’s questionable elements to what had been “learned from the World Council of Churches.” He warned that the shift of the centre of gravity from God and Christ toward “the human-technical realm” would imprison the United Church in sociological structures. By “trying to gear its message into the sociological patterns of contemporary living,” the United Church was “building obsolescence into itself.” 132 “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century,” 222–5. 133 “Council,” u c o , 15 October 1964, 36–7. An article after the previous General Council had hinted at the changes that were to come, with seventy-four women voting as commissioners (15 per cent), up from only four women commissioners in 1925. See Grace Lane, “As Women See the Church,” u c o , 1 November 1962, 25–6, for an assessment of the General Council from the point of view of several women who attended that year. 134 “Long Range Planning Committee, r o p (1962), 312. 135 Ibid., 323. The new division brought together the boards of Christian Education, Evangelism and Social Service, Men, and Women. (One wonders if most people noticed the change since the boards continued to operate and report under their old names.) 136 After serving as editor of the New Curriculum, Peter Gordon White became secretary of Christian Education in 1965. Floyd Honey’s short stint as secretary of the Board of World Missions ended in 1964 when he accepted a position with the w cc that took him to New York. Harold Bailey became the new secretary of Home Missions in 1968 after Malcolm Macdonald’s retirement. e& s s was rocked by the sudden loss of three leaders in a short period of time. Stuart Crysdale headed off to pursue a

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410

Notes to pages 284–6

doctoral degree in 1966; Bert Mathers’s decision to return to pastoral ministry was announced at e& s s ’s annual meeting in February 1968; a few weeks later, Ray Hord died. 137 Harold Bailey became the secretary of the Division of Mission in Canada, with former board secretaries Harriet Christie (Women) and Clarke MacDonald (e& s s ) as deputy secretaries responsible for Christian Development and Church in Society respectively. 138 H.W. Vaughan, “Memoirs,” Appendix, i–iv, Harold W. Vaughan Papers, uc a , box 3. Henry Gordon MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada, 1946–1977: A Study in the Sociology of the Denomination” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1980), 183–8, analyzes this shift from the more formal autocratic style of the 1950s and ’60s to the delegated power of national staff after restructuring. His conclusion corroborates Vaughan’s observation: “The work of the United Church is carried out by a group of executives, an oligarchy with rational authority, so that their control is not identified and not recognized as power. Their activities, policy-making decisions and published materials may appear to be anonymous” (190–1). 139 Phyllis D. Airhart, “Ecumenical Theological Education and Denominational Relationships: The Emmanuel College Case, 1960–85,” in Theological Education in Canada, ed. Graham Brown (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1998), 21, 26n31. 140 Donna Sinclair, Crossing Worlds: The Story of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 2001), 111–29. 141 Barbara Bagnell, “The Feminists,” u c o , 1 May 1970, 12–13. 142 “What’s Wrong with Church Women? u c o , August 1970, 10. 143 See Joan Wyatt, “‘We’ve Feminists Like You to Blame for this Mess,’” Touchstone 24, no. 2 (2006): 6–16, discusses the connections between the General Council’s decision on the ordination of gays and lesbians in 1988 and the feminists’ earlier fight for inclusion. 144 “Council,” u c o , 15 October 1964, 11. MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada,” 138ff., confirms that reports were increasing in number and taking longer to prepare. He supports his assessment with charts of General Council commissions (144–6) and major issues tackled by e& s s (155–6) during the period covered in his study. At a time when membership was declining, the ratio of executives per membership actually increased significantly from 3.4 per 100,000 members in 1946 to 9.5 in 1977 (196).

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Notes to page 287

411

145 John Webster Grant, “Unauthoritative Reflections on the United Church’s Story,” Touchstone 12, no. 1 (1994): 7. His article is a critical assessment of the departure from established practices and processes. 146 Taylor, “The Twenty-third General Council,” 12–13. A case in point was “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century” report, which church union supporters in particular thought should be sent back to the commission for reconsideration. Instead the General Council set up a committee to implement its more than seventy recommendations. Among them were recommendations to broaden the understanding of ministry by no longer identifying it exclusively with a pastoral charge, and expanding the order of ministry to include the work of non-ordained employees of the church, notably deaconesses. It also was an indication of a shift in theological education that emphasized a professional ministry, rather than a learned ministry. For the impact of that transition in the United Church, see Nathan H. Mair, Education for Ministry in the United Church of Canada: An Historical Probe (Toronto: Division of Ministry Personnel and Education of the United Church of Canada, 1983), 11–72. 147 Taylor, “The 23rd General Council,” 12. 148 “What General Council Did,” u c o , 15 October 1968, 14. 149 Its Middle East policy is an example of the United Church’s shift to clearcut positions on issues, in contrast to the more tactful approach of the 1950s. The plight of the Palestinian refugees had been a repeated concern in reports from the International Affairs committee and the Observer; cf. E.L. Homewood, “Palestine’s Refugees – Scar of the Near East,” u c o , 1 January 1959, 8–10, 24, 30, and E.L. Homewood, “The Divided Holy Land,” u c o , 15 February 1959, 12–14, 20. In “The Holy Land Today,” u c o , 15 December 1964, 14–15, Forrest reported that hatred was being nurtured among Palestinian children in the refugee camps, whose ambition was to go to Israel to “kill Jews.” However, after the Six-Day War in 1967, Forrest’s writing became more stridently pro-Palestinian; see A.C Forrest, “Back to the Tents,” u c o , 1 October 1967, 10–14, 26. In an effort to publicize the Arab side of the conflict, he took a ten-month leave of absence in 1968 to report on the Middle East; his editorials, articles, and The Unholy Land (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971) certainly accomplished that aim. The Observer continued to present perspectives that differed from its editor’s; see, for example, Alan T. Davies, “Was the Editorial Anti-Semitic?” u c o , March 1972, 11. For analysis of the fraught relationships, see Alan Davies, “Jews and Palestinians: An Unresolved Conflict in the United Church Mind,” in The United Church of Canada:

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412

Notes to pages 287–90

A History, ed. Don Schweitzer (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 239–57. 150 Holling, 393. 151 For instance, two days after Hord’s board approved his proposal to welcome U.S. draft dodgers with a gift of $1,000, the executive of General Council overturned the decision and set up a committee to investigate how e & s s made decisions. 152 Holling, 401, states that communication is essential to adaptation, by allowing ideas to be tested before they become part of “slower parts of the panarchy” (myths, constitutions, policies, etc.). I suspect that the Observer played a critical role in this regard. With a circulation of 281,623 in 1960, it outsold Time (223,073), Saturday Night (77,249), and the Presbyterian Record (86,214); see “Observations,” Observer, 15 December 1960, 5. The circulation, proudly published on the masthead of each issue, continued to increase during the 1960s, despite the decline in church membership. Subscriptions peaked at over 300,000 in February 1970, perhaps reflecting the impact on renewals of the change from a twice-monthly to monthly issue due to an increase in postal rates around that time. 153 Ibid., 399–401. 154 Homer-Dixon, 232. 155 Ibid., 231. 156 R.C. Chalmers, president of Maritime Conference, quoted in A.C. Forrest, “Your Church Today: Where It Is and Where It Is Going,” Observer, September 1970, 29. 157 Taylor, “The Twenty-third General Council,” 40. 158 Chalmers quoted in “Your Church Today,” 27. 159 Ivan Cumming, president of British Columbia Conference, quoted in “Your Church Today,” 26–7. 160 Mathers’s personal papers in the Queen’s University archives provide a glimpse of his service to the United Church. In addition to a demanding schedule at the theological school, he authored The Word and the Way, oversaw the preparation of a number of significant publications as chair of the Committee on Christian Faith (and provided background papers for other commissions), was involved in union negotiations with the Anglican Church, travelled across Canada to speak at workshops and retreats for the laity, and represented the United Church at international ecumenical gatherings (including the seminal meeting of the wc c at Uppsala in 1968). On his contributions as principal, see George Rawlyk and Kevin Quinn, The Redeemed of the Lord Say So: A History of Queen’s Theological College, 1912–1972 (Kingston: Queen’s Theological College, 1980), 223–41.

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Notes to pages 290–3

413

161 “The Service of Worship,” Chalmers Church, Kingston, on, 15 September 1972, Queen’s University Archives, Donald M. Mathers Papers, box 8-45. The selection comes from The Word and the Way, 168. 162 Some of the seeds of memory have grown in interesting places. It was amusing to read the June 2011 issue of the Observer as I was working on this chapter. It featured a cover story on the pastoral importance of funeral rituals by Kenneth Bagnell (who had written sympathetically about the prophetic role of the United Church in 1960s); see “Give Grief a Chance,” u c o , June 2011, 21–3. In the same issue, Connie denBok, the minister of one of the few United Church congregations affiliated with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, called for “fresh expressions of church for those not part of any Christian ministry,” new partnerships with other denominations, more flexible church structures, and less cumbersome procedures – not unlike what the “radicals” had called for in the 1960s. She quoted with approval missiologist David Bosch: “It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world”; see “At Issue,” u c o , June 2011, 32. Ray Hord would have agreed!

e p i l ogu e   1 W.W. Bryden, Why I Am a Presbyterian (Toronto: Presbyterian Publications, 1934), 74–5. His book makes it clear that he considered the nonconcurring Presbyterians as prone to the same faulty thinking.    2 John Webster Grant, “Blending Traditions: The United Church of Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, ed. John Webster Grant (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1963), 141. The pessimistic tone of the chapter added to the 1972 edition of The Church in the Canadian Era (Burlington, on : Welch, rev. ed. 1988) was a reflection on how his mind was to change.    3 “United Church Is Now Presbyterian: Dr Stewart,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, 4 May 1963. Ernest Edgar Long Papers, uc a , box 11–173 (scrapbook).    4 Robert Fulford, “So the Old Ways Die but Where Are the New?” Saturday Night, February 1972, 9–10.   5 Ibid., 9–10.    6 Mark Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?” Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 267. Noll carefully states that he begins “with an assumption that there was once a Christian Canada which is now gone” (245).

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414

Notes to pages 293–6

  7 For instance Noll, 267, says that Barry Mack has “very precisely labeled” church union as a “tragic failure.” For a typical illustration of Mack’s ­critical assessment of Presbyterian progressives, see “From Preaching to Propaganda to Marginalization: The Lost Centre of Twentieth-Century Presbyterianism,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. George Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 138–9, 143–8.   8 A table in Paul Bramadat and David Seljak, eds., Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 440, compares the percentage of Christian immigrants before and after 1971 (based on the 2001 census) in the major churches. At 5.38 per cent, the United Church has the smallest percentage of immigrants among the denominations listed; the Presbyterian Church, for instance, has 17.85 per cent. Greer Anne Wenh-In Ng, “The United Church of Canada: A Church Fittingly National,” in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 221–3, discusses the implications of “transnational identities” for the United Church.   9 Analyzing the dramatic drop in membership in the Presbyterian Church since the 1960s, historian Stuart Macdonald suggests that it demonstrates “the extent to which Presbyterian is no longer a brand that many in Canada identify with or possibly even recognize”; see Stuart Macdonald, “Presbyterian and Reformed Christians and Ethnicity,” in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 198n13. The dramatic decline in its membership occurred despite the arrival of large numbers of immigrants who brought with them a more conservative theology and a robust approach to evangelism. He notes that Korean immigrants do not identify with the “ethnically Canadian culture of the denomination”; not being in Canada to witness the boom years, they see a more accommodating approach as “a path to ruin” (186–7). 10 Jeffrey Cox, “Master Narratives of Long-term Religious Change,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 213. 11 Ron Graham, God’s Dominion: A Skeptic’s Quest (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990), 222. 12 The term “rescription” is used by Nick Nissley and Stedman Graham, “The Narrative Lens and Organizational Change,” l i a [Leadership in Action] 28 (January / February 2009): 14–17, to describe a process they use in working with executives who find themselves “stuck in dysfunctional story lines” when an organization fails to met its objectives (15).

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13

14 15

16

17

18

Notes to pages 296–7

415

They encourage leaders to consider “an alternative script” to find “a future narrative that will identify what’s needed to become unstuck.” Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 162–77, provides an excellent description of the layout of the pavilion, and discusses the mixed responses to it from members of the churches that had sponsored it. Even A.C. Forrest admitted that the message in one zone of the pavilion had to be explained to him before he understood it (176). Ibid., 146–50. Ibid., 156. Ironically, evangelicals committed to the old ideal of a Christian Canada turned to the United States for content when constructing their pavilion, which featured a scientist from the Moody Institute of Science. For a description of the pavilion, which showcased a film of Graham’s Canadian-born colleague Leighton Ford, see Miedema, 178–92. Ibid., 194. He notes that Canadian Jews had been quietly working for greater acceptance of diversity for over 200 years, and “had in recent years more actively campaigned for its [Christendom’s] fall” (195). Joseph McLelland, “Why Our Pond Is Lukewarm, or Forty Years in the Wilderness,” addresses to the Toronto and Kingston Synod, October 1965. His title linked his theme to similar concerns in the United Church by playing off the publicity generated by the latter’s Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot. His warnings in years to come about his church’s insularity from the world and its coming obsolescence echoed United Church ­concerns, and his call for a new blueprint for mission triggered similar disagreements; see J.C. McLelland, “Blueprint for a New Model,” Presbyterian Record, September 1967, 10–17. Stanford Reid, historian and leader of a renewal movement in the Presbyterian Church, agreed with McLelland’s bleak picture of the spiritual health of the Presbyterian Church, but offered a different diagnosis. “We must now face the issue of whether we wish to continue as Presbyterians,” Reid retorted, “or whether we are prepared to accept a revolutionary position which will largely eliminate our specifically reformed witness in favour of something much more general, in preparation for the next big church union movement”; see “McLelland’s Blueprint” [letters to the editor], Presbyterian Record, November 1967, 9. Northrop Frye, “The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract,” in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, ed. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French, vol. 7 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 366–7. The

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Notes to pages 297–8

“crisis of spirit” was a predicament that Frye saw as political, artistic, and intellectual, but above all religious. 19 After the early 1960s, the term national church is used infrequently and in a narrower sense – akin to its earlier usage as a reference to the United Church’s geographical expanse. 20 The essays in Fire and Grace: Stories of History and Vision, ed. Jim Taylor (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1999), published to commemorate the 75th anniversary, illustrate the rescripting of the United Church’s past. For example, the caption for the overview of the 1930s (12–13) reads “The Socialist Movement Flowers in the Thirties,” but only the first sentence refers to socialism, noting the involvement of J.S. Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles in the ccf party. (The second sentence describes support for the Missionary and Maintenance Fund during the Depression; the implication that giving was motivated by socialist sentiments is questionable.) Christopher Levan commends the United Church for its openness to difference that he claims was typical from its inception, and characterizes it as “the patron church of doubters” (61). Ted Reeve describes social activism as “the heart and soul” of the United Church, (105). It is interesting to compare this work to the commemorative volume prepared twenty-five years earlier, which highlights missions at home and overseas, but does not mention the social gospel movement or those associated with it. See Grace Lane, Brief Halt at Mile “50”: A Half Century of Church Union (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1974). The omission is striking since Lane was living in Saskatchewan, the province that has come to be most closely associated with the social gospel. For the way the telling of the past shapes the United Church’s ­current self-understanding, see “Dare to Be.” Accessed 7 August 2012, www.youtube.com / watch?v=66WctH5kE-M. 21 I suspect that the fine Canadian historian Richard Allen deserves considerable credit for drawing attention to the significance of the social gospel. In addition to his own study of the movement in The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914–28, published in 1973, he edited a reprint of J.S. Woodsworth’s My Neighbor in 1972. He also organized a conference in 1973 that brought together those who represented the social gospel’s “Living History” (including his father Harold T. Allen, a United Church minister) with “Contemporary Scholarship.” The proceedings were published as The Social Gospel in Canada: Papers of the Interdisciplinary Conference on the Social Gospel in Canada, ed. Richard Allen (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1975). More recently, the first volume of

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22

23 24 25

26

Notes to pages 298–9

417

his biography of Salem Bland was published in 2008 as The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity; it deals primarily with the period before Bland moved to Winnipeg in 1903 ­(pivotal to his identification with the ideals of the social gospel movement). Oscar L. Cole-Arnal, “The Prairie Labour Churches: The Methodist Input,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 34, no. 1 (2005), raises questions about Allen’s portrayal of the Methodist Church’s dealings with the radicals, arguing that there was less institutional support for them than Allen implies when it came to putting principles into practice. Bland and McClung remained involved in the United Church, although Bland (born in 1859) was retirement age by 1925. Woodsworth’s inclusion among the pantheon of heroes is fascinating since he had severed his formal ties to organized religion by 1925. He is erroneously given a position as the e & s s board secretary in one study; see Ng, 229. Douglas John Hall, The Future of the Church: Where Are We Headed? (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1989), 13. Bill Phipps, Cause for Hope: Humanity at the Crossroads (Kelowna, b c : CopperHouse, 2007), 138, 143–5. Bill Blaikie, The Blaikie Report: An Insider’s Look at Faith and Politics (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 2011), 39, 51–6. The professors and ecumenical leaders whom Blaikie credits with this reorientation are an indication of the discovery of the Canadian prophetic past that was underway during the 1970s. For instance, in Winnipeg he was deeply influenced by John Badertscher, who had been a Methodist minister and civil rights activist in the United States before moving to Canada to teach religious studies. Blaikie described himself as “inspired by the work of United Church theologian Douglas John Hall,” by then teaching at McGill after studies at Union Theological Seminary. When he attended Trinity United Church in Toronto, Bill Phipps was his minister. Blaikie considered regular lunches with Roman Catholic theologian Gregory Baum and United Church social ethicist Roger Hutchinson as his “most important theo-political education” while studying at Emmanuel and the Toronto School of Theology. Barbara Bagnell, “Would You Call This Worship?” in Ordered Liberty: Readings in the History of United Church Worship, ed. William S. Kervin (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 2011), 229–35, conveys something of the flavour of Celebration Project, a short-lived experiment in contemporary worship that was launched in 1968.

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418

Notes to page 299

27 David Roozen, “National Denominational Structures’ Engagement with Postmodernity: An Integrative Summary from an Organizational Perspective,” in Church, Identity, and Change: Theology and Denominational Structures in Unsettled Times, ed. David A. Roozen and James R. Nieman (Grand Rapids, m i : William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 617, wonders whether mainstream Protestant denominations are currently in the midst of a significant shift from “doing” to “experiencing.” He suggests this would entail “a related change from asking how we best structure ourselves for doing mission to how we best structure ourselves for providing experiences of God.”

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Index

Aboriginals. See indigenous peoples Alinsky, Saul, 234–5 Allen, Ralph, 154–5 Allen, Richard, 85, 336n50, 416n21 Anglican Church of Canada: union with United Church, 276–80, 294, 406n95. See also Church of England; church union movement Anglican-United Church union, 276–80, 294, 406n95. See also Principles of Union anti-unionists. See church union movement apartheid, 152 Arminianism, 21, 47 Armstrong, A.E., 82 Arnold, Thomas, 15 Arnup, Jesse: and foreign missions, 82, 86–8, 99, 100, 150; and home missions, 84; on popular entertainment, 158; on residential schools, 84. See also missions As One That Serves (aots ), 76–7, 146–7

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assimilation. See cultural assimilation Atkinson, Joseph, 105 Atkinson, R.D., photograph,193 Austin, Mary. See Endicott, Mary b&b Commission. See Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism Bagnell, Barbara, 285 Bagnell, Kenneth, 217–18, 238–9, 413n162 Bailey, A.G., 8 Bailey, Harold, 247 Baillie, John, 114–15 Barr, Wayne, 268 Barth, Karl. See Barthianism Barthianism: doctrine, 121–2, 351n87; influence, 103, 111, 120, 171, 346n35 Basis of Union: “common faith,” 50–1; congregational governance, 74; conservatism of, 4; critics, 40, 49–52, 273, 275; doctrinal statement, 25, 41, 49, 57–8, 120; formulation, 14–15,

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420 Index

21–2, 37, 50; misinterpretation of, 56–7; ordination, 184; preamble, 5, 22, 58; Presbyterian support, 40; sections, 34–5; theological articles, 37; theological foundations, 49. See also church union movement; Statement of Faith; United Church of Canada Bennett, John, 111–12 Bennett, R.B., 93 Berger, Carl, 16, 308n20 Bernier, Thomas-Alfred, 10–11 Berry, John, 264 Berry, William G., 164, 165, 174, 178, 252–3, 269; photograph, 187 Berton, Pierre, 233–4, 248–9, 388–9n46, 389n47 Bible and tract societies, 20 Billings, Josh, 44–5 Birks, William M., 30, 44 Blaikie, Bill, 298–9, 417n25 Blake, Eugene Carson, 231–2 Bland, Salem, 17, 96, 297–8, 313n69, 417n22 Bloor Street Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 43 Bloor Street United Church (Toronto), 77, 146, 278 Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e& s s ): agenda, 83; Depression, 97; evangelism, 106, 107, 123–4, 229–31, 236; influence of reports, 330n3; non-partisanship, 89; outreach, 230–5; postwar period, 160; and Quebec, 137; social reform, 83, 92, 100–1; “whole gospel” of, 352n99; and w m s , 78, 143; work of, 79, 101,

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230–1. See also missions; New Evangelism; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees; Woman’s Missionary Society Board of Women, 194, 268, 278 Brown, Margaret H., photograph, 69 Brown, Walter, 110 Bryce, George, 35, 36 Bryden, Walter, 292 Buchman, Frank, 117 Burbidge, John, 274 Burbidge, Katherine, 250–1 Burke, Stanley, 162 Burwash, Nathanael, 20, 21–2, 39, 298 Calling Canada to Christ, 163, 235, 252 Callwood, June, 234 Calvin, John, 23, 24, 53, 104, 162 Calvinism, 21, 26, 47, 351n87 Campbell, Robert, 47 Canada: assimilation, 11–14, 54–5, 77–8, 84–5, 143–4, 221–2; biculturalism, 209–10; Britishness, 7, 144–5, 198–9, 209, 248, 308n21, 313n69; British North America Act, 37–8, 93; and Christian social order, 4–5, 14, 53–4, 59–60, 94, 101; church/state relations, 4, 23, 84–5, 87–93, 129–34, 220–1, 222–4; Cold War, 145–8, 150–2; cultural pluralism of, 7–14, 199–200, 210–11, 216–18, 221–3, 262–3, 295; demise of Christianity in, 153, 197, 201–3, 222–3, 290; education, 214–21;

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Index 421

immigrants, 7–14, 32, 37, 16–27, 138–42, 210; indigenous peoples of, 8, 78, 84, 199, 211, 231–2; linguistic differences, 7–9, 134–5; national identity, 7–9, 11–14, 134–6, 144–6, 153, 206–10, 221–3; postwar religiosity, 154–5, 215; religious pluralism, 198–200, 202, 220–1, 248, 262–3, 294–5; religious tensions in, 10–11, 134–42, 198, 213–14; role of churches in, 11–14, 28–9, 83–93, 101, 126–31, 157, 204–8, 214–21; secularism, xix, xx, 114, 159, 197, 202, 204–6, 213–14, 221–3, 295–6; separatism, 209– 10, 211–13, 220; social services, 87–8, 93–4, 101, 204–6, 295; state funding of churches, 5–6, 28; urbanization, 141, 160, 204. See also Confederation; indigenous peoples; Maritimes; national church; Quebec; United Church of Canada; Western Canada Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 207, 208 Canadian Citizenship Act, 145 Canadian Conference of Christians and Jews, 149 Canadian Council of Churches, 152, 186 Canadian Girls in Training (cg i t), 75, 76, 77, 167 Canadian Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, 265 Canadian Jewish Congress, 216 Canadian National Committee on Refugees, 143. See also refugees Canadian School of Missions (Toronto), 81–2

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Canadian Society of Christian Unity, 21, 34 Carman, Albert, 36 Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Education, 219 Catholicism. See Roman Catholic Church Caven, William, 19, 32–4, 35, 36, 319n7 c b c . See Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Chalmers, Randolph Carleton: career, 351n88; Commission on Culture, 159, 183, 214–15; on culture, 157–8, 365n13; on Graham, 236–7; on liberalism, 121–3, 157–8, 169–70; on Presbyterianism, 23; on United Church administration, 288 Chalmers Presbyterian Church (Kingston), 44 Chalmers United Church (Kingston), 290 Chalmers United Church (Ottawa), 163 Chown, Samuel Dwight: as “architect” of church union, 21, 73, 306n6, 307n7; criticism of, 55, 56; Joint Committee on Church Union, 46; Methodist superintendent, 4; as moderate liberal evangelical, 298; photograph, 65 Christendom: demise of, 153, 197, 201–3, 223, 259–60, 290, 294–5; differences within, 17–18, 28, 147, 202–3; and Jews in Canada, 415n16; reuniting of, xviii–xix, 4, 28, 35, 36, 198, 245, 276–7, 279, 280, 283; Western, 197, 255, 259–60, 294–5. See also

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Christian civilization; Christian internationalism; ecumenism Christian citizenship, 74, 78, 128, 141–2. See also Canada; United Church of Canada Christian civilization: Christian re-union, 198, 276, 280; church union movement, 59–60; Cold War, 145–8; First World War, 59–60; nation-building, 153; Nazi Germany, 128, 136; Second World War, 128, 136; World Missionary Conference, 80. See also Christendom; Christian internationalism; ecumenism; missions Christian Endeavor, 20 Christian internationalism, 79–87, 101, 146–7, 150–3, 203, 336n50. See also Christendom, Christianization, missions Christian realists, 103 Christian Research Seminar, 265 Christian reunion, 198, 276, 280. See also Christendom; ecumenism Christian Social Council of Canada, 160 Christian socialism, 15, 90–2, 96, 118–20, 122–3. See also Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; Depression; United Church of Canada Christie, Harriet, 410n137; photograph, 194 Christie, Robert, 252 Church Federation Association, 40 Churchill, Winston, 146 Church of All Nations, 85 Church of England, 5–6, 24, 25–6; Anglican-United Church union,

25729_AIRHART.indb 422

220, 276–80, 294, 406n95; and church union movement, 15–16, 35, 55–6; membership, 10. See also Anglican Church of Canada church union movement: antecedents, 20, 36–7, 305–6n2, 320n13; British North America Act, 37–8; “common faith,” 18, 21–2, 29, 41, 50–3; as controversy, 30–2, 35–64, 297; creed revision, 22; critics, 21–2, 51–7, 59; Dominion Commission on Church Property, 318n4; federation proposal, 37–8, 47, 54, 61, 323–4n57; First World War, 43, 59–60, 322–3n43; historical context, 294; legality, 37–8, 318n4; legislation, 31, 34, 44, 37–8, 53, 57, 63, 319n5; local union congregations, 27, 39, 64; nationalism, 5, 15–16, 22, 40–2, 55–7, 294, 297; negotiations, 32–40, 46–7; nontheological considerations, 4–5, 11–12, 32, 37, 40–1, 307n7; opponents, 3, 30–2, 41–3, 60; pragmatism of, 15; progressive element, 3–4, 153; propaganda, 41, 44, 46–7, 57–9; religious identity, 14; as response to immigration, 11–12, 32, 37, 45, 54–5; and Roman Catholicism, 315n88; Round Table, 17–19; social reform, 16, 20; supporters, 4–5, 14–23, 28–39, 43–7, 57–61; theological colleges, 19–20, 63; in United Kingdom, 36, 37, 342n1; in United States, 50, 51, 54–5, 325n68, 326n71, 342n1; vote results,

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61–63. See also Anglican-United Church union; Canada; continuing Presbyterians; Joint Committee on Church Union; national church; non-concurring Presbyterians; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada Act; Western Canada Clark, S.D., 156–7, 203 Clarke, F.R.C., photograph, 193 Clarke, Patricia, 268, 285 Clarke, Peter, 144 Clifford, N.K., 19, 35, 36, 274 Coburn, John, 128 Coburn, Mary, 278 Cochrane, R.B., 85 Coe, George, 76 Coke, Thomas, 26 Cold War, 145–8, 150–2 Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf (Montreal), 135 Colley, Linda, 145 Columbia University (New York), 161 Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home, 175, 181, 374n122 Commission on Church, Nation and World Order, 131–4, 158–9, 281; report of, 354n25, 355n29, 355n33, 355–6n34, 356n37 “common faith.” See Basis of Union; church union movement; United Church of Canada Communism. See Cold War Community Friendship, 77–8. See also Woman’s Missionary Society Confederation: and Britishness, 7, 145, 308n21, 313n69; and church union movement, 15;

25729_AIRHART.indb 423

history, 7; and migration, 9; pragmatism of, 15; Quebec, 7, 209–10, 217, 222, 306n4. See also Canada Conference on Church Unity, 33 Conference on World Mission and Evangelism (Jerusalem), 80–3, 99, 113–14, 336n49, 336n51, 347n48 Congregationalists, 10, 20–21, 24–5, 38–9, 48–9, 61–4, 297 Congregational Union of Canada, 27, 39. See also Congregationalists Conner, Ralph. See C.W. Gordon conscription crisis, 136 continuing Presbyterians, 31–2, 34, 41, 61–3, 292–3, 321–2n31, 324–5n61. See also non-concurring Presbyterians; Presbyterian Church in Canada Cook, Ramsay, 210 Cooke, Alfred E., 170 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (c c f), 89–90, 339n94. See also Christian socialism, Depression, United Church of Canada Cormie, John, 139 Cornell University, 122 Council for the Faith, 279 Cox, Jeffrey, 204, 295 Cragg, G.R., 100 Creighton, W.B., 12, 100 Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom, 163 Crysdale, Stewart, 230, 232–3, 236, 280, 388n43, 409n136 cultural assimilation: in Canada, 11–14, 54–5, 77–8, 84–5, 143–4,

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221–2; consumerism as, 13–14; cultural mosaic model, 139, 358–9n65, 359n66; melting pot model, 7–8, 139; Paris Peace Conference (1919), 80; racism, 8, 11–14, 142; as threat, 54–5; and United Church, 138–43, 199–200, 231–2. See also church union movement; cultural pluralism; indigenous peoples; missions; United Church of Canada cultural pluralism: post-Confederation, 7–14, 294; postwar, 134–5, 138–40, 210–11, 216–18, 221–3, 262–3, 294–5; wartime, 134–7, 139–44. See also Canada; cultural assimilation; Quebec; religious pluralism; United Church of Canada Dalhousie University, 19, 132 Daniel, Mrs J.W., 43 Daniels, Elda, 144 Davidson, R.H.N., photograph, 193 Davidson, Richard, 156, 175–6, 350–1n84 Davies, Alan T., 275 decolonization, 144–5, 152 democracy, 42, 131, 136–7, 142, 145–7, 153, 196–7, 221 Department of Temperance and Moral Reform (Methodists), 21 Depression, 89–93, 97, 100, 116– 17, 123, 124 Dewey, John, 114 Diefenbaker, John G., 241, 378n34; photograph, 187 dissenters, 6, 31, 42, 57, 272, 318n3. See also church

25729_AIRHART.indb 424

union movement; continuing Presbyterians; non-concurring Presbyterians Dobson, Hugh, 174–5 Dodds, Doris, 216, 217–18 Dolan, Rex, 231, 387n34 Dominion Parliament. See United Church of Canada Act Duffield, Allen, 215–16 Duke University, 114 Dulles, John Foster, 147–8 Ecumenical Conference (Methodist), 20 Ecumenical Study Commission, 219 ecumenism: and church union movement, 16, 20–3, 26–9; and mission work, 79–82, 85–7, 101, 247–8; modern, 3–4; networks, 14, 19–20, 79–80, 239, 333–4n28; and New Evangelism, 226, 228–9, 241, 243–4; postwar, 127–31, 137–8, 144–8, 152–3; radical, 278–9, 280; rift with neo-evangelicals, 228–9, 239, 244, 251–3, 271, 296–7, 390n63, 405n88, 403n68; and Roman Catholic Church, 137–8, 244–2, 248; suburban congregations, 248–51. See also Christian internationalism; church union movement; cultural assimilation; missions; United Church of Canada Eddington, A.S., 113 Eddy, Sherwood, 124 Edinborough, Arnold, 220–1 Edinburgh conference. See World Missionary Conference

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Index 425

Emmanuel College (Toronto), 19, 82, 171–2, 176, 299; faculty, 68, 114–15, 123, 156, 182, 243, 250, 282 empiricism, 113–14, 119–20 Endicott, James, 82 Endicott, James G., 151–2, 364n132 Endicott, Mary, 151–2, 364n132 Ethical Education Association (e e a ), 216 Evangelical Alliance, 15, 20 Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, 244, 394n99 evangelical identity, xviii, xix, xx, 10, 21, 22, 25, 26, 50–1, 57, 58, 63, 83, 102–7, 110, 111, 115, 118, 121, 124, 169–70 evangelical Protestants, 10, 140, 163, 171, 229, 239–40, 248, 265, 271, 275, 296, 342n1, 390n63. See also New Evangelism; Presbyterianism; United Church of Canada Evangelical United Brethren Church, 280 evangelism, 14, 81–3, 86, 106–7, 115, 117–8, 123, 124, 162–6, 226, 228–30, 240, 244, 253–4. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service; ecumenism; fundamentalism; Graham; missions; National Project; New Evangelism; United Church of Canada evangelization. See missions Expo 67 (Montreal), 296, 415n13 Fairbairn, R. Edis, 110, 130, 354n17, 321n24, 334n32

25729_AIRHART.indb 425

Falconer, Robert: address to Religious Education Association, 113; Canadian National Committee on Refugees, 143; career, 19; on church union movement, 14–15, 39–40; Commission on Christianizing the Social Order, 90–2; criticism of 44; Joint Committee on Church Union, 39–40; Round Table, 17 Faulkner, Tom, 136 Federal Council of Churches, 79, 347–8n54 Fellowship for a Christian Social Order (fc so), 99, 118, 133 Fey, Harold E., 157 Finlay, Karen, 207 First Nations. See indigenous peoples First United Church (Fort William), 246 First United Church (Vancouver), 68, 192 First United Church (Victoria), 64 First World War, 43, 59–60, 80, 87, 93, 115–16 Flavelle, Joseph, 19, 95, 96 Fleming, Daniel, 81, 86 Fleming, Donald, 241–4, 393n89–91 Ford, Leighton, 236 foreign missions. See missions Forrest, Alfred Clinton: on Anglican-United Church union, 276–7; on biculturalism, 217; on cultural revolution, 263; death, 288; on evangelism, 164–5, 251, 368n51; and Fleming, 393n89– 92; on foreign missions, 241–3;

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on Graham, 164–5, 171–2, 235–6, 237, 251, 368n49, 390n63; on Middle East, 411n149; on national church, 347–8; photograph, 188; on postwar growth of United Church, 255; on postwar immigration, 198–8; on postwar worship practices, 177–8; on staff shortages, 168–9, 241; on suburban congregations, 249; on temperance, 261–2; and Trudeau, 223–4; on women’s role in United Church, 283, 285; work, 288. See also United Church Observer Forsey, Eugene, 99, 118, 119, 122, 210–11, 212–13 Forster, Harvey, 170 Fort Massey Presbyterian Church (Halifax), 18 Foster, J. Arnold, photograph, 70 Fox, Paul W., 220, 383n105 Fraser, Daniel J., 47, 53, 324n58 Fraser, J.P.C., photograph, 190 Fred Victor Mission, 69. See also missions Free Church of Scotland, 33, 37 Freeman, E.G.D., 130–1 Freeman, Lois. See Wilson, Lois M. Fremantle, William H., 15, 312n58 French Canada, 9, 10–11, 137–8, 209–13. See also Quebec Frye, Northrop, 159, 196, 297, 415–16n18 Fulford, Robert, 293 fundamentalism: and church union movement, 47, 50, 54–5, 63, 102–3; and evangelism, 81, 107, 163; interwar period, 102–3; popularity, 163; postwar

25729_AIRHART.indb 426

resurgence, 124–5, 235–7, 240, 244; and United Church, 102–7, 169–70, 299, 273; United Church Renewal Fellowship, 275. See also church union movement; United Church of Canada Gallagher, W.J., 160, 186 gambling, 57, 88, 200 Gandier, Alfred, 17–18, 19, 20, 22, 63, 215, 314n76 General Assembly (Presbyterian Church), 19, 31, 33–41, 43, 46, 51, 53–4. See also Presbyterian Church in Canada; Presbyterianism General Commission on Union, 279 General Conference (Methodist Church), 34, 47. See also Methodism; Methodist Church General Council (United Church): agenda, 82, 131–4; Depression, 124; housekeeping, 96–7, 285; liberalization of, 200; New Creed, 273–5, 404n77–8; New Curriculum, 171, 266; overseas missions, 151, 241–3; role, 56–7, 74, 157, 281–2, 286–7, 412n151; Second World War, 127–8; and Statement of Faith, 120–1; and women, 183–4, 283, 285. See also missions; Statement of Faith; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees General Council of Local Union Churches, 33–4 Gidney, R.D., 215, 219, 220

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Index 427

Gilkey, Charles W., 117 Gillies, Don, 278 Girls’ Residence (Assiniboia, s k), 144 Gordon, C.W., 4, 14, 35, 311n48 Gordon, Daniel Miner, 17, 19, 60–1, 329n111 Gordon, Minnie, 60, 329n110 Graham, Billy: critics, 235–7, 240, 368n49, 390n59; crusade of, 164–5, 172, 185, 236; and Expo 67, 296; and Forrest, 164–5, 171–2, 365–6, 237, 251, 368n49, 390n63; and Hord, 236, 238, 390n59; National Evangelistic Mission, 165; United Church leaders on, 184–5; United Church supporters, 236–8, 251; World Congress on Evangelism, 239–40, 394–5n100 Grant, George Monro, 15–19, 34, 36, 65, 134, 298, 313n60, 314n76; photograph, 65 Grant, John Webster, 10, 15, 281, 286, 292, 330n3, 312n58; photograph, 193 Griffin, W.S., 49–50 Gruchy, Lydia T., 183 Gunn, William, 13–14, 317n115 Gzowski, Peter, 232 Hall, Douglas John, 298 Harris, Walter, 180 Haseldan, Kyle, 271–2 Hayward, Constance, 143 Henderson, Donald S., photograph, 193 Herberg, Will, 178 Hockin, Katharine, 99, 241, 254; photograph, 69

25729_AIRHART.indb 427

Hoekendijk, Johannes, 229, 386n22 Holling, C.S., 287, 288 home missions. See missions Homer-Dixon, Thomas, 258, 288 Hope Commission. See Royal Commission on Education in Ontario Hord, J. Raymond: beating, 227, 385n12; Board of Evangelism and Social Service secretary, 226–7; as controversial, 226–7, 253, 412n151; criticism of, 239–40; death, 227; on demise of Christendom, 259–60, 399n18; on draft dodgers, 412n151; on evangelism, 238–9, 253; on Graham, 236, 238, 390n59; on homosexuals as ministers, 400n25; legacy, 227– 8; poem, 253; photograph, 189; on suburban congregations, 250; work, 226–7, 230, 233–4, 385n11. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service; New Evangelism Howse, Ernest Marshall, 142–4, 146, 234 Huband, Allen R., photograph, 71 humanism. See secular humanism Huntington, William Reed, 15, 312n58 Hutchinson, Jean, 278 Hutchinson, Roger, 94 Hutchison, William, 229 i mc . See International Missionary Council immigration. See Canada; cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism

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imperialism: British, 144–5, 153, 308n20; Canada, 7–11, 16, 101; of United States, 144–5, 206–7, 361n102; Western, 101 Indians. See indigenous peoples indigenous peoples, 8, 77, 84–5, 99, 199, 205, 211, 227, 231–2. See also Canada; cultural assimilation; missions; residential schools; United Church of Canada Institute for Religious Research (New York), 133 Inter-Church Committee on Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations, 137–8, 245 International Missionary Council, 152, 228 Israel, 144, 149–50, 363n120, 363n125, 411n149. See also Palestine; refugees Japanese-Canadian internment, 129, 143–4, 360n93 Jarvis Street Baptist Church (Toronto), 51–2 Jay, C. Douglas, 243–4 Jerusalem meeting. See Conference on World Mission and Evangelism Johnston, George, 244, 245, 279 Joint Bureau of Literature, 44 Joint Committee on Church Union: Basis of Union, 4, 22; “common faith,” 22; establishment of, 32–5; work, 39, 46–7, 57–8, 61. See also Basis of Union; church union movement; United Church of Canada Jones, Mrs J. Erle, 84–5 Jones, Rufus, 114

25729_AIRHART.indb 428

Kairos, 267–8 Kee, Kevin, 164 Kilpatrick, G.G.D., photograph, 193 Kilpatrick, T.B., 22, 58 King, G.B., 140 King, William McGuire, 104, 112 King, W.L.M., 93, 146 Knowles, Stanley, 99, 180, 298, 377n33, 416n20 Knox College (Toronto), 19–20, 32, 63, 161, 292 Knox Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 106 Knox United Church (Prince George), 78 Knox United Church (Winnipeg), 196 Ladies’ Aid, 78 Lambeth Conference, 83, 180 Lane, Grace, 285 Laurier, Wilfrid, 7 Lautenschlager, Earl, 182, 250, 282, 405n89 Lay Advisory Council, 76 Laymen’s Missionary Movement, 11 League for Social Reconstruction, 133 Leard, Elinor, 184 Lears, Jackson, 11, 310–11n39 LeBlanc, Philip, 213 Le Fleur, Eugene, 43 legislation. See church union movement liberal evangelicals, xix, xx, 111, 122, 169–70, 236, 253–4, 276, 405 n89. See also evangelical identity; liberalism

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Index 429

liberalism: and church union movement, 50–1, 54–5; during Depression, 110–22; and evangelicals, 237–40; postwar United Church, 169–72, 200–1, 225–8, 272–6, 237–40, 290; prewar United Church, 106, 110; and religious naturalism, 112–15. See also church union movement; ecumenism; New Evangelism; religious naturalism; theological modernism; United Church of Canada Line, John, 113–4, 118–19, 123–4, 158, 350–1n84, 351n87; photograph, 68 Litt, Paul, 208 local union congregations, 27, 39, 317n118, 329n107, 329n108 Long, Ernest E., 212–13, 228, 244, 255, 288, 289; photograph, 187 Long Range Planning Committee, 284 Lord’s Day Alliance, 20, 74, 179 Lower, A.R.M., 132, 145 McCausland, J.A., 56 McClung, Nellie, 105, 297–8, 417n22 MacDonald, Clarke, 237–9, 279; photograph, 191 Macdonald, J.A., 19 Macdonald, John A., 17 Macdonald, Malcolm, 166, 174, 199, 369n57 McGill University, 133, 218 Machen, J. Gresham, 50–1, 54–5, 106–7, 325n68, 326n71, 342n1, 343–4n15 MacKay, J.I., 85 Mackay, J. Keiller, 219

25729_AIRHART.indb 429

Mackay, John, 37–8, 40, 61, 330n115 Mackay, John A., 163 MacKay, R.A., 132 McKillop, A.B., 103 Mackinnon, Clarence, 17, 18, 19, 38, 60, 61, 330n115 McLachlan, D.N., 89, 100, 107, 115–16, 161, 338n77 McLaren, E.D., 38, 321n25 McLean, E.R., 216–17 McLelland, Joseph, 296–7 McLeod, Bruce, 195, 250; photograph, 195 McLeod, Hugh A., 196–8; photograph, 72 McLeod, Hugh, 233, 258 Macleod, Norman, 15 MacLeod, Preston, 169 MacMillan, Alexander, 108 McMillan, Thomas, 49 Macpherson, Jay, photograph, 193 McPherson, Margaret, 79 MacQueen, Angus, 155, 165–6; photograph, 187 McRoberts, Kenneth, 209 MacVicar Memorial Presbyterian Church (Montreal), 106 McWilliams, Margaret, 147 Manitoba College (Toronto), 35, 61 Manson, Ian, 100–1, 350–1n84, 353n7 Maritimes, 7, 61, 236–7 Massey, Vincent, 207, 209 Massey Report. See Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences Mathers, Donald Murray, 201–2, 260, 272, 290, 399n19, 412n160; photograph, 72

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430 Index

Maurice, F.D., 15 de Mestral, Claude, 235, 381n79, 382n92 Methodism, 10, 20, 21, 25–7, 53. See also Methodist Church Methodist Church, Canada, Newfoundland, and Bermuda, 23, 27, 33–4, 39, 46–7. See also Methodism Methodist Missionary Society, 12 Miedema, Gary, 296 Millar, W.P.J., 215, 219, 220 Ministerial Association (Kingston), 143 missions: agenda of, 82–5; Board of Foreign Missions, 74, 82, 97, 100; Board of Home Missions, 78, 97–8, 140–1, 166, 199; church union movement, 45, 53, 58, 63; Depression, 97–9; ecumenism, 20, 247–8; finances, 30, 78, 97–8, 166–7; focus of, 243–4; immigrants, 37, 139–42, 199–200, 248, 310n38; Japanese-Canadian internment, 143–4; Jerusalem meeting (1928), 80–2, 83, 99; medical, 205–6; and nationalism, 82–6, 338n68; New Evangelism, 241–4, 253–4, 294; and “NonAnglo-Saxons,” 85, 141–2, 199–200, 205–6; postwar, 127, 150–3, 241–4, 364n132; refugees, 143; reports of, 86–7; rural communities, 77–8, 81, 83–5, 139–42, 174, 247–8; and social gospel, 81–7; staffing, 140, 241–2; urban outreach, 246–7, 388n43; women, 42–3. See also Christian internationalism;

25729_AIRHART.indb 430

cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism; ecumenism; indigenous peoples; prohibition; residential schools, social gospel movement; United Church of Canada; Woman’s Missionary Society missionaries. See missions Missionary and Maintenance Fund, 97 Mission to the Nation, 162–3, 164, 178 Moir, John S., 17, 313n71, 343–4n15 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 3, 4, 272 Moore, T. Albert, 47, 95, 100 Morrison, C.C., 130 Morrow, E. Lloyd, 54 Morton, A.S., 17, 19, 22–4, 26, 48 Mowat, Oliver, 7 multiculturalism. See cultural pluralism Murray, Walter, 17, 19, 27, 39 Mutchmor, J.R.: Board of e&ss, 155, 161–2; career, 161–3; on fellowship, 263; on immigrants, 13; moderator of United Church, 200–1; photograph, 72; preoccupations of, 227, 252–3; on Principles of Union, 278; on Quebec, 136–7; retirement of, 225–6; on suburban congregations, 250; temperance, 180; on United Church, 155, 170, 225–6, 281; on working women, 161–2, 182, 183 national church, 5–6, 15–16, 27–9, 40–2, 56–7, 312n54, 312n58, 416n19. See also Canada; church

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Index 431

union movement; cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism; religious pluralism; United Church of Canada National Council of the Churches of Christ (n cc), 152, 163 National Evangelistic Mission (ne m), 163, 164–6 National Religious Advisory Council, 208 nationalism. See Canada; church union movement; United Church of Canada National Project of Evangelism and Social Action, 230–1, 240, 251–2, 253 National Survey of the United Church in Canadian Life, 234, 236 naturalism. See religious naturalism natural theology. See religious naturalism Nazi Germany, 128, 142–3, 240 Neatby, Hilda, 208 Neighbourhood Workers Association, 87 neo-orthodoxy, 103, 111, 124–5, 169, 171 New Creed, 273–5, 279, 299, 404n77–8. See also General Council (United Church); United Church of Canada New Curriculum, 170–2, 200–2, 220, 225, 233–5, 238, 264–7. See also United Church of Canada New Evangelism, 234–6, 237–44, 251–4, 266, 268–70, 289–91, 299. See also ecumenism; evangelism; United Church of Canada Nicholson, J.W.A., 96, 118, 119

25729_AIRHART.indb 431

Nickle, W.F., 60 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 111–12, 119, 171–2, 349n64, 353n2 Noll, Mark, 293 non-concurring Presbyterians, 29, 32, 61–2, 289, 295, 318n3, 321–2n31. See also continuing Presbyterians; Presbyterian Church Association Oake, Norman Wesley, 240 Oke, C.C., 170 Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 59. See also Old St Andrew’s United Church (Toronto); St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto) Old St Andrew’s United Church (Toronto), 106. See also Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto) Older Boys’ Parliament, 75, 77 Oliver, E.H., 59, 104–5, 298 Oriental Home and School (Victoria), 144 Osborne, Stanley, photograph, 193 Owram, Doug, 87, 262, 271, 373–4n120 Oxford Conference. See World Conference of Christian Churches Oxford Group, 117–18, 349n64 Packard, Vance, 249 Palestine, 144, 149–50, 363n120, 363n125, 411n149. See also Israel; refugees Parliament. See Canada; church union movement; United Church of Canada Act

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432 Index

Parsons, Talcott, 104 Patrick, William, 35–7, 48, 321n24 Paul, Charles Frederick, 52–3 Pearson, Lester B., 126, 135, 180, 203–4, 209–10, 227; photograph, 188 Penman, John, 41 philosophical naturalism. See religious naturalism Phipps, Bill, 269, 298 Pidgeon, George: church union movement, 38, 43–5, 47, 58–9; “city without walls,” 124, 342n1; on education, 216; evangelism, 82; moderator of United Church, 102, 103–4; photograph, 66; on postwar cultural crisis, 158, 365n15; ProtestantCatholic relations committee, 137–8; temperance, 57 Pidgeon, Leslie, 43–5 Pine Hill Divinity Hall, 123, 236. See also Presbyterian College (Halifax) Planning Fellowships, 251–2, 390n64, 392n81 Presbyterian Association for the Federation of the Churches of the Protestant Denominations, 33 Presbyterian Church Association, 40, 41–3, 45, 47, 50 Presbyterian Church in Canada, 27–40, 45, 60–1, 63–4, 292–3 296, 313n71. See also continuing Presbyterians; Presbyterianism Presbyterian Church in the u sa, 50 Presbyterian College (Halifax), 17–18, 19–20 Presbyterian College (Montreal), 19–20, 47, 63

25729_AIRHART.indb 432

Presbyterianism, 6, 10, 18, 21, 23– 4, 38–9, 53. See also continuing Presbyterians; non-concurring Presbyterians; Presbyterian Church in Canada Presbyterian Pre-Assembly Congress, 12 Presbyterian Women’s League, 41, 42–3, 47, 60 Princeton Theological Seminary, 50, 132, 163 Principles of Union, 276–7, 278–9, 283. See also Anglican-United Church union process theology, 112–13, 350n79, 350n79 prohibition, 57, 88–90, 101, 261–2, 336n50, 383n105. See also temperance Protestant Reformation, 45, 52, 58 Quebec: and b &b Commission, 210–11; and Canada, 7–11, 134–8, 209–13, 222, 306n4; and church union movement, 27, 38, 54, 61–3, 327–8n86; and Massey Report, 209–10; Quiet Revolution, 200, 293, 376–7n20; Roman Catholic Church in, 134–8, 211; separatism, 135, 209–13, 220; United Church in, 75, 210–11. See also Canada; cultural pluralism; religious pluralism; Roman Catholic Church Queen’s Theological Alumni Conferences (Kingston), 17 Queen’s Theological College (Kingston), 72, 139, 201, 290 Queen’s University (Kingston), 15, 17, 19, 60, 112, 260. See also

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Index 433

Queen’s Theological Alumni Conferences (Kingston); Queen’s Theological College (Kingston) Quiet Revolution. See Quebec racism, 8, 11–14, 84–5, 86, 139, 141–4. See also cultural assimilation refugees, 142–3, 149, 150, 363n118, 411n149. See also Israel; Palestinians Reid, W.D., 12–13 Reid, W. Stanford, 323n49, 326n75, 415n17 Religious Education Association, 113 religious naturalism, 103, 112–15, 124–5, 265–6 religious pluralism, 198–200, 202, 220–1, 248, 262–3, 294–5 residential schools, 78, 84–5, 190. See also cultural assimilation; indigenous peoples; missions; United Church of Canada; Woman’s Missionary Society Reynolds, A.G., 109–10, 170 Reynolds, J. Berkley, 239–40, 244–5, 274, 275, 391n76–7, 394–5n100, 405n88 Robinson, John A.T., 266 Roddan, Andrew, photograph, 68 Riel, Louis, 7 Ritchie, D.L., 89, 95–6 Robertson Memorial Presbyterian Church (Winnipeg), 161 Roberts, Richard, 91–2, 96–7, 99–100, 116, 117–18, 119–21, 350n79 Roman Catholic Church, 4–10, 40, 135–8, 196–200, 211–13, 244–6, 248. See also Roman Catholics

25729_AIRHART.indb 433

Roman Catholics: on church union movement, 52, 54, 56, 58; English-speaking, 8, 54, 134; French-Canadian, 10–11, 54, 134–8, 211–12; immigrant, 196–8; ultramontane Catholicism, 6, 10, 307–8n14. See also Roman Catholic Church; Quebec; United Church of Canada Rose, H.A.A., photograph, 193 Round Table, 17–19, 60, 314n74 Round Table Conference, 132 Rowell, Newton Wesley, 11–12, 94, 105, 334n30 Rowntree Memorial United Church (London), 270–1 Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems, 209 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 210–14 Royal Commission on DominionProvincial Relations, 94 Royal Commission on Education in Ontario, 215 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 159, 206–9, 214– 15, 380n67 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 285 Royal York United Church (Toronto), 226–7 St Andrew’s College (Saskatoon), 98, 105, 391n72 St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Fergus), 31 St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Kitchener), 292–3

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434 Index

St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 31, 40, 43, 49. See also Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto) St Andrew’s United Church (London), 165 St James Square Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 19, 42 St Laurent, Louis, 146 St Luke’s United Church. See Sherbourne Street United Church (Toronto) St Marys United Church (Ontario), 92 St Matthew’s Presbyterian Church (Halifax), 15, 19 St Stephen’s-Broadway United Church (Winnipeg), 147 Sanford, Osbert Morley, 109 Saul, John Ralston, 7–8 Sclater, J.R.P., 59–60, 106, 281 Scott, C.T., 12 Scott, Ephraim: criticisms of church union movement, 41, 49, 63–4, 322n37; as opponent of church union movement, 30, 44–5, 47; photograph, 67 Scott, Graham, 274–5 Scott, R.B.Y., 122–3, 133, 298, 352n91 Second Vatican Council, 137–98, 245–6, 248, 272, 278–9, 299, 375n7, 391n74, 395n101, 406n98. See also ecumenism Second World War, 101, 108, 129– 37, 140–1, 143–4 secular humanism, 103, 113–22 Shepherd, Harvey, 268 Sherbourne Street United Church (Toronto), 91–2, 95 Shields, T.T., 51–2, 55, 327n77

25729_AIRHART.indb 434

Siegfried, André, 6–7 Silcox, C.E.: and church union movement, 10, 23–4, 27, 62; on culture, 214–15; on Israel, 149; and refugees, 142; on religious tensions, 136–7; and report of Commission on Church, Nation and World Order, 133; on United Church of Canada, 169 Sirois, Joseph, 94 Sisco, Gordon, 100, 119, 121, 132– 3, 138, 351n87 Sissons, C.B., 217–18 Smillie, Ben, 235, 236–7, 240 Smith, Alexander, 211 Smith, Shelton, 114 social Christianity, 15 social gospel movement: and fundamentalist-modernist debate, 55, 81; interwar period, 99–101, 111–12, 116, 119–24, 133, 155– 6; and missionary movement, 81–7; nationalism, 21; and temperance, 328n99. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service; fundamentalism; liberalism; missions; United Church of Canada; Woman’s Missionary Society socialism. See Christian socialism social reform, 16, 20, 83, 88–92, 100–1, 328n99, 350–1n84. See also Christian socialism; ecumenism; social gospel movement; United Church of Canada Somerville, James, 239 Soper, Donald, 165 Sparling, J.W., 12 Stapleford, Frank, 87–8 Statement of Faith, 120, 121, 123, 156, 170, 266 Stewart, Findlay G., 292–3

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Index 435

Stewart, Gordon, 238–9 Stinson, John W., photograph, 193 Strachan, John, 5 Stringfellow, William, 299 Student Christian Movement (s c m), 99, 264, 271, 346n36 Student Volunteer Movement, 20, 346n36 Summer of Service (s os ), 268 Sutherland, Wilber, 265–6 Sydenham Street United Church (Kingston), 203 Synod of the Anglican Province of Canada, 33 Tait, W.D., 54 Taylor, Charles, 221–2 temperance: and church union movement, 10, 35, 55, 57; failure of, 88–9, 101, 261–2; opponents, 89– 90; and postwar moral regulation, 179–80; Woman’s Missionary Society, 78. See also missions; prohibition; social gospel movement; United Church of Canada Templeton, Charles, 163–4, 185 Templeton Missions, 163–4 theological modernism: church union movement, 3, 28, 47, 63; fundamentalist-modernist debate, 50–2, 54–5, 106–7, 324n58; and gender, 76; of United Church, 42, 102–3, 110–11, 158. See also church union movement; United Church of Canada Thomas, Ernest, 83, 88–9, 101, 121, 122, 336n49, 350–1n84 Thomas, Winnifred, 76, 142, 332n10; photograph, 67 Thompson, James S., 172–3, 218– 19, 383n98

25729_AIRHART.indb 435

Town Talk, 246 Trail Rangers, 75, 332n11 Tremblay Report. See Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems Trudeau, Pierre, 135, 223–4, 357n44, 357n46, 357n47, 384n110 Tuxis Boys, 70, 75, 332n11; photograph, 192 Ullman, Verda, 129 ultramontane Catholicism. See Roman Catholics union churches. See local union congregations unionists. See church union movement Union Theological Seminary (New York), 161 Unitarian Church, 51, 216 United Church Observer: on Anglican-United Church union, 276, 278, 279; on decline of United Church, 251, 255, 266–7, 272, 288; and ecumenicalevangelical rift, 239, 386n24; on education, 215, 217–8; and evangelicalism, 165; on evangelism and social service, 229; on General Council (United Church), 286; on Graham, 164– 5, 236, 390n63; on Middle East, 411n149; on missions, 241–3; on Mutchmor, 162, 225; and New Evangelism, 238; on pacifism, 128; pedagogy of, 170; on postwar growth of United Church, 225; readership, 160, 167, 412n152; on Roman CatholicUnited Church relations, 197–8;

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436 Index

on suburban congregations, 248–50; on Templeton, 163; on Trudeau, 223–4; and women, 285. See also A.C. Forrest United Church of Canada: administration, 28, 73–9, 85–6, 94–7, 99–101, 280–2, 340n105; administrative restructuring 258–9, 284–8; agenda of postwar, 130– 4, 160–1, 162–4, 184–6, 202–3, 214–16; agenda of prewar, 73–94, 103–7, 139–40; Anglican union with, 276–80; anti-ritual tendencies, 109, 113; attendance, 162–3, 172–3, 174, 225, 260–5, 270; and baby boomers, 248, 264, 267–8; and biculturalism commission, 210–14, 380n71; Britishness of, 376n17; as a “club,” 155, 226, 249–51; and Cold War, 145–8, 150–2, 203–4; “common faith” of, 108, 120, 153, 273; as conformist, 233–4, 249–51; as conservative, 4, 158–60, 225–6, 239–40, 265–6, 273–6; on contraception, 180–1; creed of, 25, 273–5, 279, 299; as “creedless,” 32, 41, 47, 49, 51, 63, 102; decline of, 255–72, 280–3, 289–91, 293–6, 299; Depression, 89–93, 110–12, 118–19, 123–4, 131–2, 339n94, 341n113; ecumenical-evangelical rift, 239, 228–9, 239, 244, 251– 3, 296–7; and education, 170–2, 184, 201–2, 205, 214–21; and empiricism, 113–15; evangelicalism, 106–7, 110–11, 115–24, 163–5, 169–70; evangelism, 184–5, 200–1, 228–31, 234–44,

25729_AIRHART.indb 436

253, 297, 368n53; as failure, 293–4; feminist influence within, 285–6, 410n143; forebears of, 4–5, 14–23, 28–9; forecasts on, 255–6, 280, 288–9; founding, 30–2, 35–64, 102–3; fundamentalist-modernist debate, 50–2, 54–5, 106–7, 324n58; funds raised, 257; gender roles in laity, 75–9, 85–6, 89, 129–30, 147, 161–2, 175–6, 180–4; gender roles in leadership, 268–70, 278, 282–7, 333n27, 404n78; and government, 4, 84–5, 87–93, 101, 129–34, 220–1, 222–4; hospitals, 205–6; and humanism, 115–22; Hymnary of, 108–9, 193; indigenous peoples, 84–5; influence on members, 154–5, 230–1; on marriage, 173, 176, 180–4, 374n121; and Massey Commission, 207–8; membership of, 200–2, 218, 225, 234, 255–7, 263–4, 268–70; as middle-class, 160, 233–4, 248–51; mission, 156, 228, 240–1, 282, 284–5, 292; modernity as threat, 157–63, 172–80, 182–4, 207–8, 221–2, 347n48; and moral regulation, 178–80, 184–5; and national church, 28–9, 32, 36–7, 40–1, 47–8, 53–4, 57–8, 297; as nation-building, 4–5, 22, 48, 58– 9, 222–3, 335–6n48; and New Age, 227, 233–6, 239, 245, 254, 391n75, 391n75; new catechism of, 179; New Creed of, 273–5, 279, 299, 404n77–8; New Curriculum of, 170–2, 200–2, 220, 225, 233–5, 238, 264–7;

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Index 437

non-partisanship of, 90–1, 235; organizations, 73–9, 167–8, 231, 263–9, 333n24; outreach of, 230–5, 246–7, 250, 269–71; as “pagan,” 50–1, 52; and “panarchy,” 258–9, 275, 289–90; political influence, 133–4, 157, 185, 203–4, 220–1, 223–4, 293; on popular culture, 158–60, 163; postwar growth, 154, 156–7, 166–7, 178, 225, 248, 254–5; on refugees, 142–3, 149–50; relationship with Anglican Church, 276–80, 406n95; relationship with Roman Catholic Church, 196–9, 213, 219, 244–6, 248; resilience, 289–91; revivalism, 107, 253; rural communities, 74–5, 77–8, 81, 83–5, 109, 139–42, 174, 234, 247–8, 267, 280–1, 287–8, 294; Second World War, 129–37, 140–1, 143–4, 353n7; service books, 108–10, 273–4, 344n23; on sexuality, 158, 178, 180–1, 233, 262, 373–4n120, 399–400n25; social services of, 87–8, 93–4, 101, 201–2, 204–6, 214–21, 254; staffing, 99–100, 140, 168–9, 241; suburban congregations of, 248–51; as success, 294, 295, 416n20; Sunday schools, 264–7; theological debates within, 102–25; “theological laxity,” 25, 40–1, 104, 106; and urbanization, 141, 160, 173–4, 176–7, 246–51, 280–1, 371n83; and working women, 76, 175–6, 182–4, 268; “world mission,” 226–34, 253; worship practices of, 102–10, 263–4,

25729_AIRHART.indb 437

273–4, 299; youth programs, 73, 75–6, 167–8, 190, 192, 331n8, 332n11. See also Basis of Union; Canada; church union movement; cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism; General Council (United Church); indigenous peoples; liberalism; missions; New Evangelism; social gospel movement; social reform; Statement of Faith; theological modernism; United Church Observer; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees: Board of Christian Education, 74, 218; Board of Colleges and Secondary Schools, 284; Board of Education, 219, 267; Board of Foreign Missions, see missions; Board of Home Missions, see missions; Board of Overseas Missions, see Board of Foreign Missions; Board of Missions, 285; Board of Women, 194, 268, 278; Board of World Mission, 244; Commission on Christian Faith, 123, 170; Commission on Christian Marriage and Divorce, 181; Commission on Christianizing the Social Order, 90–4, 131, 235; Commission on Church and State in Education, 218; Commission on Church Hospitals, 205–6; Commission on Culture, 159, 175, 183, 214–15, 374n132; Commission on Ordination,

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438 Index

184; Commission on the Church in the Field of Social Welfare, 254; Commission on the Church on the Urban Frontier, 247; Commission on the Church’s Ministry in the Twentieth Century, 283, 411n146; Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women, 183; Commission on Urban Problems, 173; Commission on World Mission, 228, 241–3, 392n84; Committee on Christian Faith, 273–4, 75; Committee on Church Worship and Ritual, 273; Committee on Ecumenical Affairs, 278; Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario, 219–20; Committee on the Church and International Affairs (ccia), 134, 145, 148–9, 150, 152; Committee on the Revision of the Hymnary, 193; Committee on Women Workers, 76; Division of Congregational Life and Work, 284; Division of Mission, 284; General Commission on Union, 279; International Affairs committee, 199, 203; Joint Committee on the Evangelization of Canadian Life, 117; Missionary and Maintenance Committee, 70; National Committee on Church Extension, 166; War Service Committee, 129. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e&ss); Christian civilization; Christian internationalism;

25729_AIRHART.indb 438

Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home; Commission on Church, Nation and World Order; ecumenism; General Council (United Church); prohibition; social reform; temperance; United Church Observer; United Church of Canada United Church of Canada Act, 34 United Church of Christ, 268 United Church Renewal Fellowship, 239, 240, 245, 274, 290; “new creed,” 275, 405n85 United Church Training School, 129 United Church Women (uc w), 200, 268–9, 285 United College (Winnipeg), 130, 140, 299 United Kingdom: Anglo-Saxonism, 144; demise of empire, 144–5; ecumenism, 131; Overtoun appeal, 37; Privy Council, 93; secularism 295. See also Canada; imperialism United Nations, 149–50 United States: Cold War, 146–9; emigration to, 7; fundamentalistmodernist debate, 50–1, 54–5, 106–7; immigrants, 9; imperialism of, 116–17, 126–7, 144–9; indigenous peoples of, 9; religious influence, 11, 23–4, 50–1, 103, 106–7, 116–17, 131; secularism, 116–17. See also Canada; church union movement; imperialism; United Church of Canada United Theological College (Montreal), 89, 231, 244

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Index 439

University of Toronto. See Emmanuel College (Toronto); Knox College (Toronto) Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Vaughan, Harold, 284 Victoria College (Toronto), 20, 113, 123, 159. See also Victoria University Victoria University (Toronto), 11, 49, 82, 110, 123, 171–2, 203 Vietnam War, 149, 227, 228–9, 238, 258 Villeneuve, Cardinal, 135–6 Vipond, Reid, photograph, 71 Visser ’t Hooft, W.A., 111, 112, 346n36 Vlastos, Gregory, 112, 122, 351n90 Wadsworth, G. Campbell, 108, 283 Wallace, E.W., 80–2 Warren, Heather, 111 Warriner, William Henry, photograph, 66 Watson, J. Ralph, 213 Watts, J.R., 139–40 Way, Peggy, 268 Weber, Max, 259 Wee Frees. See Free Church of Scotland Weiman, Henry Nelson, 112–13 Wesley, John, 25–6, 53, 135, 238 Wesley College (Winnipeg), 12 Wesleyan Methodist Church of Bermuda, 34 West London Mission, 165 Western Canada: church union role, 10, 27, 39, 59; home missions, 139–42;

25729_AIRHART.indb 439

Japanese-Canadian internment, 129, 143–4, 360n93; local union congregations, 27, 39, 317n118, 329n107, 329n108; moral issues, 174; non-concurring Presbyterians in, 61–3; settlement, 9, 139–42, 309n30. See also Canada; church union movement; cultural assimilation; missions Westminster Confession of Faith, Catechisms, and Directory of Public Worship, 23 Westminster Presbyterian Church (Winnipeg), 19 Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia), 50 Westminster United Church (Winnipeg), 71, 142 Westworth United Church (Winnipeg), 265 White, Peter Gordon, 266 Whitehead, A.N., 113 Wilson, Lois M., 184, 246; photograph, 71 Wilson, R.J., 44–7, 57, 83, 106, 336n51 Wilson, Roy, 246 Winter, Gibson, 74, 249–50 wms. See Woman’s Missionary Society Woman’s Association (wa ), 78–9 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 74 Woman’s Missionary Society (wms): Dominion Board of, 129; finances, 97–8, 167–8, 285; hospitals, 205–6; immigrant outreach, 141–2; membership, 76; merger with wa, 200, 268,

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440 Index

285; mission, 85–6, 333n22; and postwar growth, 167; postwar missions, 151–3; rural communities, 77–8, 141–2; scope, 77–8, 79; and Second World War, 129; staffing shortfalls, 99; temperance, 179. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e & s s ); indigenous peoples; missions; residential schools; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees; United Church Women; Woman’s Association Woodsworth, J.S., 12, 105, 297–8, 417n22 World Conference of Christian Churches (Oxford, 1937), 127– 8, 147, 228, 353n2 World Conference on Church and Society. See World Council of Churches World Conference on Faith and Order (Lausanne, 1927), 83 World Congress on Evangelism (Berlin, 1966), 239–40, 391n74, 394–5n100

25729_AIRHART.indb 440

World Council of Churches (wc c ), 138, 147, 158, 203, 228–9, 278–9 World Missionary Conference (Edinburgh, 1910), 4, 80, 207, 239, 253, 334n30 World Student Christian Federation, 111, 228 World Vision, 239 World War I. See First World War World War II. See Second World War ymc a . See Young Men’s Christian Association Young Men’s Christian Association (y mc a ), 20 Young, Morley A.R., 205 Young People’s Society, 73, 75. See also Young People’s Union Young People’s Union (y pu), 82, 168, 267–8. See also Young People’s Society Young Women’s Christian Association (y wc a ), 20, 76 ywc a . See Young Women’s Christian Association

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A C H U R C H W IT H T H E SOUL OF A NATI ON

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M cG i l l -Qu e e n ’s S t u di e s i n t h e H is to ry o f Religio n Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. s e ri e s o n e : g .a . r awly k , e di tor 1 Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson 2 Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario William Westfall 3 An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 Marguerite Van Die 4 The Dévotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France Elizabeth Rapley 5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau 6 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer 7 A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918–1939 Robert Wright

10  God’s Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson 11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 Edited by Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz 12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 Brian P. Clarke 13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States Edited by George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll 14 Children of Peace W. John McIntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution Joan Marshall 16 Padres in No Man’s Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War Duff Crerar

8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart

17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis P. Travis Kroeker

9 A Sensitive Independence Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 Rosemary R. Gagan

18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw

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19 Through Sunshine and Shadow The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 Sharon Cook 20 Church, College, and Clergy A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994 Brian J. Fraser 21 The Lord’s Dominion The History of Canadian Methodism Neil Semple 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau

23 Evangelism and Apostasy The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico Kurt Bowen 24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827– 1905 Eldon Hay 25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925 Johanne Selles 26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy William Lamont

s e ri e s t wo i n me mo ry of g e o r ge rawlyk d o n a l d ha r ma n a k e n so n , e di to r 1 Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640–1665 Patricia Simpson 2 Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience Edited by G.A. Rawlyk 3 Infinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature John Spencer Hill 4 The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada Edited by Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk 5 Labour, Love, and Prayer Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 Andrea Ebel Brozyna

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  6  The Waning of the Green Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 Mark G. McGowan   7  Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 John-Paul Himka  8 Good Citizens British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918 James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston   9  The Theology of the Oral Torah Revealing the Justice of God Jacob Neusner

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10  Gentle Eminence A Life of Cardinal Flahiff P. Wallace Platt 11 Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750–1870 Kevin McQuillan 12 Between Damnation and Starvation Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855 John P. Greene 13 Martin Luther, German Saviour German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 James M. Stayer 14 Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 William H. Katerberg 15 The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896–1914 George Emery 16 Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel Paul Charles Merkley 17 A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime Elizabeth Rapley 18 Households of Faith Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 Edited by Nancy Christie 19 Blood Ground Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 Elizabeth Elbourne 20 A History of Canadian Catholics Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism Terence J. Fay

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21 The View from Rome Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 Reports on the Ontario Bilingual Schools Question Edited and translated by John Zucchi 22 The Founding Moment Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College William Westfall 23 The Holocaust, Israel, and Canadian Protestant Churches Haim Genizi 24 Governing Charities Church and State in Toronto’s Catholic Archdiocese, 1850–1950 Paula Maurutto 25 Anglicans and the Atlantic World High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the Quebec Connection Richard W. Vaudry 26 Evangelicals and the Continental Divide The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States Sam Reimer 27 Christians in a Secular World The Canadian Experience Kurt Bowen 28 Anatomy of a Seance A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada Stan McMullin 29 With Skilful Hand The Story of King David David T. Barnard 30 Faithful Intellect Samuel S. Nelles and Victoria University Neil Semple 31 W. Stanford Reid An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy Donald MacLeod

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32 A Long Eclipse The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970 Catherine Gidney 33 Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics, 1787–1858 Kyla Madden 34 For Canada’s Sake Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s Gary R. Miedema 35 Revival in the City The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914 Eric R. Crouse 36 The Lord for the Body Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880–1930 James Opp 37 Six Hundred Years of Reform Bishops and the French Church, 1190–1789 J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields 38 The Missionary Oblate Sisters Vision and Mission Rosa Bruno-Jofré 39 Religion, Family, and Community in Victorian Canada The Colbys of Carrollcroft Marguerite Van Die 40 Michael Power The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier Mark G. McGowan 41 The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 Michael Gauvreau 42 Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665–1700 Patricia Simpson

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43 To Heal a Fractured World The Ethics of Responsibility Jonathan Sacks 44 Revivalists Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 Kevin Kee 45 The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Canada Edited by Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert 46 Political Ecumenism Catholics, Jews, and Protestants in De Gaulle’s Free France, 1940–1945 Geoffrey Adams 47 From Quaker to Upper Canadian Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends, 1801–1850 Robynne Rogers Healey 48 The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693–1796 Colleen Gray 49 Canadian Pentecostalism Transition and Transformation Edited by Michael Wilkinson 50 A War with a Silver Lining Canadian Protestant Churches and the South African War, 1899–1902 Gordon L. Heath 51 In the Aftermath of Catastrophe Founding Judaism, 70 to 640 Jacob Neusner 52 Imagining Holiness Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times Justin Jaron Lewis 53 Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774–1874 Calvin Hollett

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54 Into Deep Waters Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Calvinist Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855 Daniel C. Goodwin 55 Vanguard of the New Age The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891–1945 Gillian McCann 56 A Commerce of Taste Church Architecture in Canada, 1867–1914 Barry Magrill 57 The Big Picture The Antigonish Movement of Eastern Nova Scotia Santo Dodaro and Leonard Pluta 58 My Heart’s Best Wishes for You A Biography of Archbishop John Walsh John P. Comiskey 59 The Covenanters in Canada Reformed Presbyterianism from 1820 to 2012 Eldon Hay 60 The Guardianship of Best Interests Institutional Care for the Children of the Poor in Halifax, 1850–1960 Renée N. Lafferty

62 Contesting the Moral High Ground Popular Moralists in Mid-TwentiethCentury Britain Paul T. Phillips 63 The Catholicisms of Coutances Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France, 1350–1789 J. Michael Hayden 64 After Evangelicalism The Sixties and the United Church of Canada Kevin N. Flatt 65 The Return of Ancestral Gods Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation Mariya Lesiv 66 Transatlantic Methodists British Wesleyanism and the Formation of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec Todd Webb 67 A Church with the Soul of a Nation Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada Phyllis D. Airhart

61 In the Name of the Holy Office Joaquim Marques de Araújo, a Brazilian Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline James E. Wadsworth

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A Church with the Soul of a Nation Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada

p h y l l i s d . a ir ha rt

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 isb n isb n isb n isb n

978-0-7735-4248-8 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4249-5 (paper) 978-0-7735-8929-2 (ep df ) 978-0-7735-8930-8 (ep ub)

Legal deposit first quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Airhart, Phyllis D. (Phyllis Diane), 1953–, author A church with the soul of a nation: making and remaking the United Church of Canada / Phyllis D. Airhart. (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion. Series two; no. 67) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isb n 978-0-7735-4248-8 (bound). – is bn 978-0-7735-4249-5 (pbk.). – isb n 978-0-7735-8929-2 (ep df ). – is bn 978-0-7735-8930-8 (e p u b ) 1. United Church of Canada – History – 20th century.  2. Canada – Church history – 20th century.  I. Title.  II. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion. Series two; no. 67 BX 9881.A47 2014

287.9'20904

C 2013-905843-5 C 2013-905844-3

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Dedicated to John Webster Grant (1919–2006) and N.K. Clifford (1930–1990)

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Contents

Figures and Tables  xiii Abbreviations xv Prologue xvii Illustrations follow pages 64 and 186 1  “Friendly Service” to the Nation  3 2  Controversy and the Construction of Identity  30 3  The Mission and the “Machinery”  73 4  The Search for a Faith for Sociable Souls  102 5  Christian Canada in a “New World Order”  126 6  Calling Postwar Canada to Christ  154 7  Uncoupling Christianity and Culture in Canada  196 8  Listening to the World  225 9  Reconceiving the United Church  255 Epilogue 292 Acknowledgments 301 Notes 305 Index 419

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Figures and Tables

F ig u r e s 6.1 Funds raised by the Woman’s Association and the Woman’s Missionary Society, 1926–61  168 8.1 Appointments and withdrawals of missionaries, 1928–65  242 9.1 United Church of Canada membership, 1926–75  257 9.2 Total funds raised for all purposes, 1926–75  257 9.3 Membership in Sunday schools and through-week organizations, 1926–75 264

T a b l es 1.1 Denominational strength before and after church union (as a percentage of the total population of Canada)  10 2.1 Chronology of church union in Canada  33 2.2 Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations before 10 June 1925 and United and non-concurring congregations after 10 June 1925  62 3.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1931 75 3.2 Disbursement of the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, 1928–38 98 6.1 Membership of Woman’s Missionary Society auxiliaries, bands, and affiliated c gi t groups  167 9.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1971 256

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Abbreviations

aots As One That Serves c g it Canadian Girls in Training c c ia Committee on the Church and International Affairs e&ss Evangelism and Social Service fc so Fellowship for a Christian Social Order ncc

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the u sa

n em National Evangelistic Mission rop

Record of Proceedings of the United Church of Canada

sc m

Student Christian Movement

sos

Summer of Service

uca

United Church of Canada Archives

uco

United Church Observer

u c r f United Church Renewal Fellowship u c w United Church Women wa

Woman’s Association

wms Woman’s Missionary Society wc c World Council of Churches y mc a Young Men’s Christian Association y pu

Young People’s Union

y wc a Young Women’s Christian Association

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Prologue Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a ­preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events. History is a construct, she tells her students ... Still, there are definitive moments, moments we use as references, because they break our sense of continuity, they change the direction of time. We can look at these events and we can say that after them things were never the same again. They provide beginnings for us, and endings too. Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“I look upon all the world as my parish,” Methodist John Wesley famously wrote in his journal as he braced himself for clashes with critics of his itinerant preaching that would flout the parish boundaries of his day. “In whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty, to declare unto all that are willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation.”1 Two centuries later, those who joined with Wesley’s spiritual descendents to create the United Church of Canada had a more modest mission in mind. “Canada is our parish,” wrote Presbyterian E.H. Oliver in the first issue of the new denominational magazine. Excited by what its “vision of Dominion-wide service” would mean for the Prairies, the principal of St Andrew’s College in Saskatoon predicted that there would “be not a hamlet or a rural community in the whole land where the United Church will not serve.” It aimed to make a difference in those communities, for it had “a large faith that all of human kind are not only redeemable but, as well, usable for, and in, the Kingdom.”2 Mobilizing those redeemable and usable persons for the sake of God’s Kingdom in Canada was the mission that inspired the church union movement of the early 1900s. Its leaders believed that their

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xviii Prologue

venture in ecumenism would not only improve the operational efficiency of the uniting churches but also create better persons, better communities, and a better nation – a Christian social order, as they often put it. In making the United Church, they envisioned a national church that would relate in a special way to communities across Canada. Historian Sidney Mead once described America as “a nation with the soul of a church,” borrowing a remark that G.K. Chesterton made after visiting the United States in the early 1920s.3 Those advancing the cause of church union had something different in mind for Canada: they were hoping to build a church with the soul of a nation. The church founded in June 1925 was decades in the making. The idea of uniting Protestantism in Canada was conceived after Confederation by Victorian evangelicals who were eager to co-­ operate in meeting the spiritual needs of the young nation. What began as a quest for Protestant cohesion was complicated by competition from the Roman Catholic Church in and beyond Quebec, as well as theological and tactical divisions within its own ranks. Fissures in Anglo-American Protestantism were already appearing by the time formal church union negotiations commenced at the turn of the century. In Canada some of the animosity between ­conservative and progressive evangelicals was transposed into the bitter debate over church union that ensued. Whether the United Church could still claim to be a legitimate heir to the evangelical tradition was a theological issue contested long after other matters were resolved. While the United Church prided itself on being ‘made in Canada,’ its supporters traded ideas freely with church leaders in other countries before and after church union. The views of theologians who promoted a united Protestantism in England and Scotland sounded just as relevant in Canada, where churches were facing the massive challenges of expanding to new communities. The case for church union on a grand scale featured the practical advantages of overcoming the unfortunate divisions that had befallen Christendom after the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Canadian version made much of the fact that dozens of Old World denomi­ nations had already united within their confessional families (as Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists) after their ar­ rival. The next step was obvious: to set aside the doctrinal differences of the past by professing a “common faith” that emphasized

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Prologue xix

their theological harmony. Opponents charged that unionists were creating a creedless church that was little more than a political club, and accused them of theological modernism. The United Church was determined to prove its critics wrong, insisting that there could be adaptation without apostasy. Church union was an ambitious undertaking that tested the limits of inclusion by bringing together networks of missionary enthusiasts, social reformers, and Christian educators. Rather than the theological modernists or social radicals their detractors made them out to be, the most prominent among them were pragmatic progressives whose liberal evangelical theology held that personal faith had social implications. Their commitment to extending the influence of Christian civilization was widely shared among Protestants in and beyond Canada – even by many who opposed union. The United Church in this sense proclaimed a social gospel – not an endorsement of a partisan political or economic agenda, but an orientation to life that connected faith and community. Critics rightly observed that there was a civic dimension to ‘being United’ that was particularly evident during times of national crisis. It rallied its members to  provide assistance to those hardest hit by the Depression, and supported the Second World War and postwar reconstruction as a defence of Christian civilization. For a time it looked as if the United Church was meeting, and even exceeding, expectations. During the 1950s, insiders and onlookers saw it as vibrant, growing, and confident. To be sure, its leaders fretted about secularism and the decline of moral standards that they saw as evidence that western Christendom was becoming “pagan.” And yet its congregations were undoubtedly making a mark on communities across the nation. “In many respects it is as Canadian as the maple leaf and the beaver,” wrote sociologist John Porter in The Vertical Mosaic as he surveyed Canadian society in 19654 – just as the United Church’s situation was about to change. By then the United Church was showing signs of a crisis of institutional identity, complicated by the circumstances of its founding. A century after Confederation, Canada’s political leaders were less convinced than their predecessors that Christianity was a source of cultural cohesion. The notion of a national church, especially one that would represent a shrinking proportion of the population (if postwar demographic patterns were any indication), was problematic in a nation that was becoming noticeably less Protestant. Like

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xx Prologue

efforts to suppress cultural differences by assimilation, even the strategy of blending theological traditions began to sound less laudable; such conciliation smacked of compromise to a youth culture that celebrated diversity and authenticity. One historian has convincingly portrayed Canadian baby boomers as “born at the right time.”5 The United Church, however, seemed born at the wrong time to appeal to them. A pluralistic and segmented world foreshadowed trouble for the liberal evangelical assumptions of its founders. The ‘unmaking’ of their vision of becoming a church “which may fittingly be described national,” as the Basis of Union had put it, occasioned a crisis of mission in the wake of a revolution that brought an end to Christendom in Canada. Its remaking was led by leaders who called for new ways to connect faith and community by “listening to the world.” Taking the secular world as their “parish,” they were convinced that the founding mission needed to be reconceived to meet the spiritual challenges of a New Age in a new Canada. And so the church once born with the soul of a nation found itself waiting to be born again.

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1 “Friendly Service” to the Nation You can make the argument that there’s no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past ... They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don’t know how it’s going to come out ... You can’t understand them if you don’t understand how they perceived reality and you don’t understand that unless you understand the culture. David McCullough, “The Title Always Comes Last”

The day after the inauguration of the United Church of Canada, author Lucy Maud Montgomery mulled dejectedly over glowing newspaper accounts of its “birth.” In recent years she and her husband, Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, had made no secret of their opposition to the proposed union. Nevertheless, one of his two pastoral charges had voted to unite with the insufferable Methodists in Zephyr, Ontario. They now faced the unwelcome prospect of packing up the family belongings and moving from the Leaskdale manse. Cynical about the claims made for union and embittered by the outcome of the vote, Montgomery wrote in her journal entry later that day: “in Nature the births of living things do not take place in this fashion ... No, ’tis no ‘birth.’ It is rather the w ­ edding of two old churches, both of whom are too old to have offspring.”1 The church that was ceremonially born in Canada on 10 June 1925 is usually cast as a new and youthful player on the international religious stage. Critics often panned it as modernist and depicted its founders as innovators who had been captivated by the novelty of church union. There was within the uniting traditions a strong progressive element, to be sure. Canadian churches were not the first to propose “organic union” between rival confessional families, but such a proposition had never actually been consummated

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4

A Church with the Soul of a Nation

elsewhere on such a large scale.2 Negotiations between the uniting traditions were underway and a Basis of Union outlining its theology and polity was essentially completed even before the international missionary conference in Edinburgh in 1910, widely regarded as marking the beginning of the modern ecumenical movement. Canada was several steps ahead of the rest of Christendom, or so it seemed. Montgomery detected another dynamic: to her the United Church was defective because its thinking was not modern enough. She was not alone in this observation. The conservative tone of the theological statement in the Basis of Union was startling to many at the time, an aberration attributed to the age and outlook of the members of the Joint Committee on Church Union assigned the task of formulating it.3 But another feature, that was in a sense backward-looking, was as crucial for the destiny of the United Church. Union was an effort to invigorate an old idea: the partnership between church and state in building a Christian society. The effort to unite Protestantism was, at least in part, an attempt to create a strong connection ­between Protestantism and patriotism among English-speaking Canadians that paralleled the presumed political influence of the Catholic Church in Quebec.4 An adapted form of Christendom thus lived on after the legal disestablishment of the churches in the mid-­ nineteenth century, preserving the traditional link between piety and place and lending plausibility to the plan to unite evangelical Protestantism in Canada. C.W. Gordon, a Presbyterian minister from Winnipeg better known to most Canadians as novelist Ralph Connor, did not mince words when asked why he supported the creation of a united church: “I’m a church unionist not because I like the union so well but because I am a Canadian and love my country and I see in this union what is best for Canada.”5 No less enthusiastic about the new church as a solution for the challenges facing the nation was Methodist general superintendent S.D. Chown. “If the major Churches of Protestantism cannot unite,” he warned, “the battle which is going on now so definitely for the religious control of our country, will be lost within the next few years.”6 The case for union often detailed the advantages in pragmatic political and economic terms, casting the negotiations in a non-theological light.7 Unionists were stung by the charge that their motives were not “spiritual,” but their enthusiasm for linking the new church’s destiny with Canada’s made them easy targets.

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“Friendly Service” to the Nation

5

Without union, one pro-union pamphlet asserted, “the Church is not able adequately to accomplish her task, which is to make Canada a really Christian nation.” Economics could not be separated from theology, its advocates insisted, and a united church would be “a more efficient instrument for the building up of God’s Kingdom in this land and beyond.”8 The story of church union as told by its supporters highlighted this mission to create a Christian Canada, and a sense of responsibility for the nation created a bond between them. The name they proposed for the church conveyed what they believed to be its promise: a commitment to the wider unity of Christianity and a unique role in Canada. Its founding mission was encapsulated in the words of the general preamble to the Basis of Union, added in 1914 at a meeting to choose the name and make the final revisions: “It shall be the policy of The United Church to foster the spirit of unity in the hope that this settlement of unity may in due time, so far as Canada is concerned, take shape in a Church which may fittingly be described as national.”9 In one sense, the term ‘national church’ spoke to an as-yet-unrealized institution of the future, one that, to borrow the language of the Basis of Union, “may in due time” take shape. But alongside that anticipation was the impulse to be, from the outset, an institution that would relate in a very particular way to the nation of Canada. It would, as one report confidently announced, be “a national Church, National, not in any sense State-controlled, or Statecontrolling, but for the friendly service of the whole nation.”10 A century before church union, a quite different notion of national church had prevailed. As he prepared his sermon marking the  death in 1825 of Jacob Mountain, the first Anglican bishop of Quebec, John Strachan (himself soon to become the first bishop of Toronto) worked from a premise shared by most of the first Europeans to settle in Canada: religious authority would be mediated through a national church duly established and financially supported by the state. To speak of a Christian nation without a national church was a contradiction, Strachan insisted. A country that did not provide public support for religion could hardly be called a Christian nation.11 Strachan had arrived in Upper Canada at a time when the Church of England was still regarded as the established church of British North America. Other religious groups were free to hold their services without interference, and a few enjoyed other privileges. In

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6

A Church with the Soul of a Nation

Quebec, for instance, the Catholic Church had permission to support itself by collecting tithes. Even after Presbyterians and others successfully argued that the state support they received in their old homeland should be extended to their new setting as well, the Church of England still received the lion’s share of public funding. There were Christians who vehemently opposed this arrangement, since it meant that Methodists, Baptists, and others branded as dissenters received no public funding. Those excluded were not required to pay tithes or taxes to support the established churches, but they chafed under regulations that, for instance, excluded them from some institutions of higher education and prevented their clergy from conducting marriage or funeral services. Eventually, such restrictions were removed; yet there was no agreement on the thorny issue of how to extend state support to all groups. The result was gradual erosion of the benefits that had been dispensed to some churches as a solution to the problem of Protestant pluralism. One by one, privileges were contested and lost as churches in effect shifted from public to private sponsorship. With the sale of the clergy reserves in Canada West (Ontario) in 1854 and the founding of non-sectarian colleges there and in the Maritime provinces, the legal dismantling of established religion in British North America outside Quebec was largely complete.12 Under these new terms, Canada’s churches appeared to flourish and functioned culturally, if not legally, as what historians have variously termed a plural, shadow, or voluntary establishment. In Ontario, for instance, the percentage of the population that indicated no religious preference fell dramatically from 16.7 per cent in 1842 to less than 1 per cent in 1871.13 In 1906, an observer from France, André Siegfried, noted that, to all appearances, “the independence of these churches in regard to the state has been absolutely established in the New World.” But perhaps, he continued, “it would not be safe to say quite so positively that the state’s independence of the churches, even the Protestant ones, is established to the same degree.” While the Protestant clergy did not aim to control the government in the ultramontane Catholic fashion that Siegfried had observed in Quebec, their efforts were directed toward “informing it with their spirit.”14 He judged Protestants incapable of thinking outside of religious categories, and although he was convinced that unbelief among them was common, it was not publicly expressed: to do so would be “almost an act of infidelity to the Anglo-Saxon race.”15

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“Friendly Service” to the Nation

7

As Siegfried had discovered, there was more at stake in the complex relationship between church and state than distribution of tangible benefits. Little wonder then that politicians and civic leaders customarily courted churches as partners in promoting social wellbeing. For their part, churches were eager to demonstrate their social usefulness even without the state support once enjoyed by some.16 On the eve of church union negotiations, two entwined issues loomed large and made the United Church’s offer of “friendly service” appealing: uncertainty about Canada’s future as a nation and the arrival of huge numbers of immigrants. The creation of the ­Dominion of Canada in 1867 was a practical political agreement that had evoked little, if any, “national feeling” at the time. Critics dismissed talk of a Canadian identity as ridiculous since it was ­unimaginable to them that people would feel as attached to Ottawa as to London, Paris, Washington, Ireland, or even Quebec.17 Confederation brought together four provinces to form a British colony peopled by British subjects, but strong regional loyalties and cultural differences persisted.18 Quebec presented an obvious challenge, but anti-Confederation forces garnered support in the Maritimes as well. In Ontario Oliver Mowat promoted the cause of provincial rights, while the rebellions led by Louis Riel in 1869 and 1885 indicated resistance to the plan for a Dominion that reached from sea to sea. Political union was no guarantee of prosperity, and many people left to settle in the United States during the downturn of the 1880s. Even some who remained debated whether Canada should join the United States or, at the very least, negotiate a free trade agreement. As leader of the opposition, Wilfrid Laurier feared that “premature dissolution seems to be at hand” as he watched the events of the early 1890s unfold.19 Was it possible to ‘construct’ a nationality for Canada? Many who caught the nation-building fever that gripped the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western world thought so, even while conceding that the obstacles were formidable. Canadian nationalists wrestled to find an identity that embraced Britain’s imperial aspirations, while staking out a place of their own in North America.20 Canada pretended to be “a particularly British place” after Confederation, observes John Ralston Saul.21 New notions of racial  purity and the European inheritance displaced what he calls the “Métis civilization” of British North America, and the image of

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A Church with the Soul of a Nation

the melting pot supplanted the idea of a widening circle, which had characterized indigenous models of an interdependent society.22 Historians have suggested that even English-speaking Catholics became agents of Anglo-Saxon culture by siding with Protestants on language issues.23 Those who believed that Canada’s future depended on crafting a new Canadian identity found themselves grappling with the prac­ tical implications of scientific theories about racial and ethnic dif­ ferences. Misunderstandings arose, notes historian A.G. Bailey, as institutions and ideas “came to be looked upon as the mystical exfoliation of the genius of particular people.”24 One study of Victorian attitudes toward race concludes that by the mid-nineteenth century, the natural inequality of races was a widely published scientific ‘fact’: “One did not have to read obscure books to know that the Caucasians were innately superior, and that they were responsible for civilization in the world, or to know that so-called inferior races were destined to be overwhelmed or even disappear.”25 That the latter were doomed to extinction appeared to be borne out in North America by the rapidly diminishing numbers of indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada.26 Since scientific evidence also purported to show that mixing with inferior races might compromise racial superiority, the image of North America as a cultural melting pot came under scrutiny.27 The numerical growth of newly freed blacks and of immigrants raised difficult practical questions. How were those who were considered incapable of assimilation to be treated? Was it fair to admit ‘inferior’ races if doing so doomed them to extinction? Evolutionary theory further complicated questions about racial origins by popularizing the belief that certain characteristics were inherited. The eugenics movement, spouting its questionable scientific theories, warned that the present dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race was threatened, particularly when the higher fertility rates of the foreign-born were taken into account.28 Supporters of a more restrictive approach to immigration feared that Britain was dumping ‘unfit’ immigrants in Canada, and urged that they be turned away.29 Biological theories became competing metaphors of cultural assimilation, and attempts to persuade immigrants (at least outside Quebec) to adopt “AngloSaxon culture” vied with anticipation that a “new type” of Canadian was being constructed.

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“Friendly Service” to the Nation

9

Complicating matters was a mix of religion, language, and politics that boiled over from time to time. Protestants feared that migration from Quebec meant that the French language and the Catholic r­ eligion were seeping into northwestern Ontario and the Prairies. Catholics likewise worried about demographic trends. Manitoba had entered Confederation in 1870 with Catholics in the majority, but an influx of settlers from Ontario fortified Protestantism in ­western Canada, at least for a time.30 Public school systems became arenas for testing the strength of religious influence. In the 1890s, Manitoba’s decision to replace its dual system of Catholic and Protestant schools with nondenominational schools was controversial enough to become an issue in the federal election of 1896. The question of schools for religious minorities was still contentious when Saskatchewan and Alberta became provinces in 1905.31 As Protestant churches raced to provide pastoral care for new communities, the Catholic leaders complained about “proselytism.” Other disputes hit even closer to home. A papal declaration, Ne Tereme, that came into effect in 1908 stated that only marriages performed in the presence of a Catholic priest were valid, raising questions about the legitimacy of “mixed marriages” performed by Protestant clergy.32 Whether the Catholic or Protestant side would be able to claim the advantages that came from statistical dominance was far from clear at the turn of the century. Sweeping demographic changes added to the uncertainty about ­Canada’s future. Between 1881 and 1901 the percentage of the population born outside of Canada held steady at 13 to 14 per cent, almost identical to the number of foreign-born in the United States. Perhaps the most troubling demographic trend for many years after Confederation was the number of people leaving Canada for the United States, which had resulted in a net loss in the migration process. The 1911 census figures indicated a welcome change: for the first time since Confederation, Canada showed a net gain in migration. But some found cause for concern as they scrutinized the population profile. Continuing a trend in the census figures issued ten years earlier was a startling increase in the number of immigrants, many of them speaking neither French nor English. The percentage of foreign-born in Canada had jumped to 22 per cent, an even more shocking number when compared to U.S. statistics for the same period, which showed only a slight increase from previous levels of immigration.33

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A Church with the Soul of a Nation

Table 1.1 Denominational strength before and after church union (as a percentage of the total population of Canada) 1901 Congregational

1911

1921

5.27

4.73

3.50

Methodist

17.07

14.99

13.19

Presbyterian

15.69

15.49

16.04

United Church of Canada

1931

8.39 1 19.44

1  The strength of the Presbyterian numbers came as a surprise, since the final vote on church union would have projected a lower number relative to the size of the United Church. C.E. Silcox suspected that many members of United Church congregations, especially in areas of western Canada where the controversy had not reinforced the distinctions, continued for a time to think of themselves as ‘Presbyterian.’ For a comparison of the census of 1931 with church statistics on membership, Sunday school enrolments, funerals, etc., and an analysis of what he called the “lost battalion,” see Silcox, Church Union in Canada, 438–43. Source: Census of Canada (1931), Table 36.

For Protestants there was even more cause for anxiety. Between 1901 and 1911 the Catholic Church had increased its membership by 603,441, to nearly 2.3 million. The Church of England, too, could feel pleased that its membership had grown by 361,523 to just over a million. However, other Protestant groups had not fared as well: Congregationalists increased membership by 5,761 (to 34,054), Presbyterians by 272,882 (to 1,115,324), and Methodists by only 163,006 ­(dropping them, at 1,079,882, to second place among Protestant churches).34 Evangelical Protestants who were leading moral crusades to make Canada “God’s Dominion” were enjoying what John Webster Grant describes as the peak of their power and influence; but as he wryly puts it, just when they seemed to have succeeded in implanting the ideals of temperance and discipline, they saw Canada “inundated with people who had never heard of the virtues of total abstinence and threatened the rigid Canadian Sunday in the bargain.”35 These new immigrants landed at a time when a more militant Catholicism, linked to a nationalist movement in French Canada and energized by ultramontane values, had a different vision for the nation’s future.36 Assessing the situation in 1881, Thomas-Alfred Bernier, the mayor of Sainte-Agathe, Manitoba, was optimistic: “Happily for all, for immigrants as well as for children of the soil, there is in the Dominion of Canada a fruitful and vigorous race, with

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“Friendly Service” to the Nation

11

a common origin, identical interests, glorious traditions, a common language and a common faith, believing itself to have been called to a great mission and living under God’s protection.” His Protestant co-religionists would have taken exception to his prediction that “this race, which is to be found in all the provinces of Confederation, and which is its keystone, is the French-Canadian people. It is the one that will prove to be the dynamic element in this empire which will be neither English nor French, but solely and gloriously Canadian.”37 Protestant church leaders imagined that the new type of Canadian would bear far more resemblance to the values and virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race. However, even the progressives among them struggled to come to terms with the myriad issues raised by nonAnglo-Saxon immigration.38 Historian Jackson Lears finds that social Christianity in the United States was tinged with both idealism and imperialism: “Progress and Providence converged in the rhetoric of empire.”39 That was the presumption in Canada as well, with progressives hopeful that changing the social environment would ameliorate social problems; ethnic differences could and should be transcended, and moral and social uplift would result in racial uplift.40 As Methodist lawyer Newton Wesley Rowell told those who gathered in Toronto at Victoria University for a meeting of the Laymen’s Missionary Movement, settlement of new territories in the north and west provided “a home not in a southern clime which may breed a weak and effeminate race, but under skies and a c­ limate which must develop a strong, a progressive and a conquering people.”41 Like many of his day, Rowell believed that the greater part of the population of Canada might soon be found west of the Great Lakes, and the ideals of that region would determine the future of the nation. At first glance, this was a disturbing prospect. Rowell noted that the social, political, and religious institutions of non-English-s­peaking immigrants differed from those who had come from the British Isles or the United States. Men with little previous experience of representative government would soon be able to vote and, he warned, “their votes will be just as potent as yours and mine in ­determining the character of the men who shall represent us in Parliament and the nature of the laws under which we must live.” However, as a progressive, Rowell believed in the power of the new environment: “Many of these people have now, for the first time, a real chance for social

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and moral improvement. They provide the raw material out of which we may make good citizens if we but do our duty.” The public schools, the press, and government had a role to play, but only the church, with its Gospel of Christ, could make an appeal “to the deepest impulses or the most powerful motives.”42 For progressives like Rowell, confidence that old differences would be transcended in a new land was a widely shared egalitarian notion. By 1908, W.B. Creighton, the new editor of the Methodist denominational paper, was using the columns of the Christian Guardian to send the same message. The church had a responsibility to work with the state to provide educational and religious services for the immigrant today; otherwise, they were likely to become a burden tomorrow. Creighton praised city missions like the ones run by C.T. Scott in Montreal and J.S. Woodsworth in Winnipeg for “conforming to our type multitudes of alien races, and making of great motley groups a unified and coherent people worthy of the name ‘Canadian.’”43 Principal J.W. Sparling of Wesley College in Winnipeg wanted to leave no doubt in young readers’ minds about the enormity of the task facing the churches. Penning a foreword to J.S. Woodsworth’s Strangers within Our Gates, a study text for the youth department of the Methodist Missionary Society, he wrote in 1909: “I can with confidence commend this pioneering Canadian work on the subject to the careful consideration of those who are desirous of understanding and grappling with this great national danger. For there is a danger and it is national! Either we must educate and elevate the incoming multitudes or they will drag us and our children down to a lower level. We must see to it that the civilization and ideals of Southeastern Europe are not transplanted to and perpetuated on our virgin soil.”44 Sparling’s apprehension was broadly felt, even among Protestants who rejected church union as the most effective way of meeting the challenge of immigration. Speaking to the Presbyterian Pre-Assembly Congress in 1913, Rev. W.D. Reid of Montreal announced to those gathered that Canada was facing “the greatest immigration problem that has ever confronted any nation.” The problem, he explained, was that over 20 per cent of the newcomers were non-Anglo-Saxons, “who can not speak our language, have no sympathy with our ideals, and are foreigners in every sense of the term.” His address painted a bleak picture of the foreigner: illiterate, intemperate, ignorant,

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diseased, oppressed, draining charitable resources when unemployed and undercutting wages when employed, carrying unhelpful political baggage such as atheistic socialist ideas, and disproportionately tending toward crime, insanity, and pauperism. While he conceded that they were “often deeply religious,” he described their practices as “a mere caricature of religion.” Reid gave his audience something to ponder: “The question we have to ask ourselves seriously at this moment, is will the foreigner paganize us or shall we Christianize him?”45 Many worried that the churches were doing far too little to Christianize such foreigners. Presbyterian J.R. Mutchmor lambasted members of downtown churches for dealing with the ‘problem’ by moving away from it and faulted theological schools for failing to equip ministers to assimilate people from other cultures. In his master’s thesis, written while preparing for the ministry in New York City, the young Canadian wrestled with the “question of the nonassimilating Canadian,” specifically those from continental Europe and Asia. He wondered, “How can these people be Canadianized when the Canadian workingman hates a dago or a bohunk? How can the church help when so many so-called Christians thank God that they are not as other men are nor yet as this dago?” Still Mutchmor’s opinion was not atypical of early twentieth-century progressive opinion when he insisted, “Our King, our flag and our throne must remain uppermost in the hearts of the people of Canada at any cost, and the wages and standards of Canadians must increase and develop and the British ideals must be our ideals forever.”46 Few presented the new Canadian more sympathetically than Congregationalist William Gunn. He identified the obstacles that immigrants routinely faced: transition to a new way of life, low wages and slum conditions, exploitation, corrupting influences, alienation from their children who adapt more easily to their new home, competition with other immigrants for jobs, ridicule, and loss of faith. The question for Gunn was not whether the immigrant would be assimilated – that was assumed – but what values would be transmitted in that process. He recognized the power of materialism to bind together those who otherwise seemed to have little in common. To his list of what he called the five great assimilating forces (the church, the railway, the school, politics, and daily life), he added “one little one” that showed him to be a perceptive observer of new cultural trends: “the mail order catalogue which, from Vancouver to

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Cape Breton, with its illustrations and prices, speaks all languages and tends to reduce us all to one dead level of outward uniformity.” Against the negative assimilating power of consumerism stood the church, which had the potential within itself to become “the greatest assimilating agency of all” with its belief in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.47 The differences between evangelism, social service, and assimilation were sometimes small. Writing as Ralph Connor, C.W. Gordon often used his stories to convey the message that immigrants (even Scottish Highlanders) should abandon their old ways and be assimilated to a more ‘universal’ identity.48 The fictional Prairie missionary in Gordon’s The Foreigner expressed these values well. He couldn’t preach much, he admitted, but his “main line” was “the kiddies.” “I can teach them English, and then I am going to doctor them, and, if they’ll let me, teach them some of the elements of domestic science; in short, do anything to make them good Christians and good Canadians, which is the same thing.”49 Supporters of church union hoped that many would draw a further conclusion: constructing a new type of church was the best way to make them both good Christians and good Canadians.50 The formula for building a united church mirrored the blueprint for building a united country. Unionists considered religious identity, like national identity, malleable; assimilation was a tactic for managing differences, whether cultural or theological. Widely shared assumptions about cultural homogeneity made the idea of a united church plausible in the context of early twentieth-century Canada and shaped its founding narrative. Those who made the case for union were convinced that they would build a strong church by overcoming the limitations of difference; they sought unity in what they could believe and accomplish together. In this sense there was nothing mysterious or new about making a united church: it would be built from the stuff at hand. And at hand were networks of support for the mission of building a Christian nation – indeed, a Christian world. Robert Falconer, president of the University of Toronto, credited the surprisingly swift formulation of the Basis of Union (once negotiations got underway in 1904) to a movement that was already “subconscious in the minds of many.” Writing in 1913, he described the overextended churches as caught in a crunch that manifested a

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broader national problem. “Canada is calling herself a nation and is boldly claiming to be judged by the national standards of the most highly developed Western civilization,” he observed, yet needed to “provide at extremely short notice for all the organization of nationhood.” Church union was not unlike Confederation in its pragmatic nature, he argued: just as federal union was the result of provincial necessities, so church union would be “the result not of theory but of practical urgency.”51 But the ‘theory’ of union was not new either; it had been the topic of theological discussion for decades. Underpinning Christian nation-building (and often overlooked as a cradle for social Christianity) was an influential Victorian movement that saw Christian unity as pivotal to its vision of a better world.52 A plan for a national church in England that would include all but the Catholics and Unitarians was described in Principles of Church Reform (1833)53 and vigorously promoted in Anglican circles by Thomas Arnold, a prominent leader in the Broad Church movement.54 Later William H. Fremantle, another leading proponent of a national church, blended Arnold’s principles for Christian unity with theologian F.D. Maurice’s Christian socialist concerns.55 In Fremantle’s view, having “one great Church” in Western Europe was a step toward a universal church that would assimilate “by degrees the more backward nations.”56 His call for a national church caught the attention of American Episcopal priest William Reed Huntington, who put it in terms better suited to the disestablished North American context in A National Church, published in 1898.57 In Canada, the notion of a national church was, in John Webster Grant’s assessment, a “spectacular success” by the end of the nineteenth century.58 Topping any list of those deserving credit for its currency was George Monro Grant. For over a quarter of a century, first as minister of St Matthew’s Presbyterian Church in Halifax and later as principal of Queen’s University in Kingston, he sowed the idea of a united Protestant church.59 Whether he had read the writings of Arnold or Fremantle directly, or was introduced to the argument for a national church by his mentor Norman Macleod,60 the ideas of the British movement for Christian unity were familiar to Grant. His enthusiasm was evident in his widely reported and oftenquoted keynote address at the first meeting of the Canadian branch of the Evangelical Alliance in Montreal in 1874. Speaking on the theme “The Church of Canada – Can Such a Thing Be?,” he pictured

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a new church that would capture the best qualities of the major Protestant denominations: order and conservatism from the Anglicans; enthusiasm, zeal for missions, and adaptability from the Methodists; insistence on the rights of the individual from the Baptists; the love of liberty from the Congregationalists; and the  well-knit strength and high regard for the Word of God from the Presbyterians. He went so far as to hope that even Catholics might someday be drawn to such a church by their love of unity.61 After playing a leading role in uniting his own denomination in 1875, Grant saw union with the Methodists as an obvious next step. Writing in the Canadian Methodist Magazine after Methodism consolidated in 1884, he observed that in matters of Christian unity, the Canadian churches were, thanks to their environment, already in advance of their counterparts in “the mother land” and even “the go-ahead United States.”62 Prospects for such a union were promising since Methodist polity was, in his view, essentially Presbyterian, and “verbal differences” were insignificant when gauged against problems facing both. Union would, furthermore, be “a step towards the formation of that regenerated society for which we pray.”63 In Grant’s approach, creating a regenerated society through cooperation in missions and social reform was pivotal to overcoming debilitating theological and organizational differences. Preaching before his synod in 1866, he called for a “large liberty” and “cooperation in labour, and labouring together with God, rather than enforced agreement of opinion on subjects that may be relegated to the domain of philosophy, politics or science” as the “true and scriptural basis” for unity.64 Such co-operation, suggests historian Carl Berger, is the key to understanding both Grant’s imperialism and his ecumenism. The formation of a national church in Canada that would become a model for the reunification of churches worldwide was his most profound conviction, adds Berger: “Just as the union of the churches was the precondition for the Christianization of the social order, so too the unity of the Empire was necessary to maintain a political power making for righteousness on earth.”65 Grant’s imperialist ideals were couched in religious terms; his evolutionary view of history saw the imperialist advance as part of God’s design for bringing those it protected under its Christianizing and civilizing influence.66 An eager, energetic, and optimistic man, described by his first ­biographer as being gifted with “consummate cleverness,” Grant

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exerted, by all accounts, remarkable influence over others: “His ­fiery purpose inspired their ardour, his strong wisdom compelled their respect, his personal charm engaged their liking.”67 Remembered as one of the most influential Presbyterians of his day and one of the most significant leaders in the country,68 Grant inspired both his own generation and the next through a network that was interdenominational and intergenerational in character. His writings and the Queen’s Theological Alumni Conferences that he organized once he moved to Kingston influenced ministers from his own denomination and appealed to others, like Methodist Salem Bland.69 When he died in May 1902, it was reported that an even larger and more diverse group of persons came to Kingston to  mourn his passing than had gathered there years earlier for Sir John A. Macdonald’s funeral.70 Whether through coincidence or contrivance, many of Grant’s friends and associates found themselves in positions of public influence as the new nation of Canada and its Protestant churches were weighing their options for the future. A generation of leaders receptive to his influence became what John S. Moir dubbed “one of the most important exports of the Maritime provinces to the rest of Canada.”71 In the fall of 1894, a group of mostly young Presbyterian ministers resolved to meet several times as “The Round Table” to enjoy each other’s intellectual and social companionship.72 At the head of the table, in the place of “King Arthur,” was Daniel Miner Gordon, Grant’s friend and junior, who earlier that year had been appointed principal of Presbyterian College in Halifax. The other dozen or so theological “knights” were, as one of them later put it, men of “obscure beginnings” who went on to “positions of great prominence and responsibility in the wide Dominion.”73 Among those seated around the table were Alfred Gandier, Clarence Mackinnon, Robert Falconer, Walter Murray, and A.S. Morton, who first used their publications and later their positions to air their views on Christian unity, and promoted ideas that would become the core of the rationale for church union.74 Unlike most of the other knights, Alfred Gandier had not been raised in the Maritimes. His link to the ideals and traditions of the region was his relationship with Grant. His biographer speculated that Gandier, a graduate of Queen’s University, might well have heard one of principal Grant’s frequent challenges to those who

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studied theology there: “You and I are not responsible for the existing divisions of Christendom, but I beg you not to accept ordination until you are convinced that should you by word or deed perpetuate these divisions by one unnecessary day you will have been unworthy of your ordination.”75 Grant’s influence was decisive in landing Gandier the position as pastor of Fort Massey Presbyterian Church in Halifax in 1893. There had been a difficult two-year search to fill the position. Grant’s recommendation of Gandier as one of Queen’s most brilliant graduates was behind the congregation’s decision to issue the pastoral call to him.76 Gandier’s approach to resolving theological differences later became the basis for finding agreement among the uniting traditions: focus on a common faith. “The time has actually come,” he wrote in the Presbyterian magazine Theologue in 1899, “when Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists can sit around a table and deliberately agree to a common statement of faith in relation to every doctrine of fundamental importance.”77 His mentor Grant had made a similar point in an article published shortly before his death, predicting that “as preliminary to organic union,” churches would “rewrite their confessions, adapt them to our own time, and find out the extent of the common ground on which Christians now stand.”78 Clarence Mackinnon, who would one day become principal of Presbyterian College, presented Theologue readers with the skeleton of a proposal for how to find that common ground. He conceded that union between confessional families was more complex than the Presbyterian or Methodist unions had been. Churches were happy to unite, “provided the other denominations would only be so obliging as to lay aside their peculiar beliefs and practices, and to stoop to its yoke, if not actually to make a humble confession of their errors and do a flattering penance for the schisms of the past.” He enunciated an organizational principle that was assumed in later negotiations: “If there is to be union, it must take place along the only possible lines on which great bodies can unite, a readiness to abandon individual peculiarities and a willingness to appropriate whatever has proved itself effective in the work of other churches.” Mackinnon believed that without a willingness to sacrifice old identities, talk of union, however eloquent, would be futile. Presbyterians would have to modify their approach to church administration, he predicted, and even their confession of faith would have to be “thrown into the crucible and melted down.”79

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Grant’s death in 1902 set in motion a chain of events that scattered members of the Round Table across Canada as they moved into new positions of responsibility. The first to go was King Arthur: Daniel Gordon left Presbyterian College to succeed his mentor as principal of Queen’s University. Robert Falconer turned down an opportunity to teach New Testament at Knox College in Toronto, instead replacing Gordon as principal of Presbyterian College; when he moved in 1907, it was to become president of the University of Toronto. According to his biographer, Falconer was nominated for the university post by J.A. Macdonald, an acquaintance who was editor of the Toronto Globe. The summer before, the two had joined efforts to promote the cause of church union at the Presbyterian General Assembly.80 Connections with other influential networks were forged in Toronto. Living next door to Falconer was Joseph Flavelle, an enthusiastic Methodist supporter of church union. Falconer was also reunited with his old friend Alfred Gandier (whose sister he had married), who had accepted a call to St James Square Presbyterian Church in 1900. Members of Gandier’s new congregation included J.A. Macdonald and William Caven, then principal of Knox College (and a strong supporter of church union as well).81 Eight years later Gandier would succeed Caven as principal of Knox College and hold the position until church union saw the creation of a new faculty of theology; he was the first principal of what became Emmanuel College in 1928. Some members of the Round Table moved even further west. ­Walter Murray, a member of St Matthew’s Presbyterian Church in Halifax, left his teaching position in philosophy at Dalhousie University in 1908 to become the first president of the University of Saskatchewan.82 A.S. Morton accepted Murray’s invitation to join his faculty. Morton would decisively influence how the church union movement was remembered and interpreted with publication of The Way to Union in 1912.83 Clarence Mackinnon accepted a call to Westminster Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg in 1905, but returned to Halifax in 1909 to become principal of Presbyterian College.84 The power of the Round Table network in Presbyterian circles is suggested by N.K. Clifford’s observation that the Presbyterian minister who supported union was typically a graduate of Presbyterian College in Montreal, Queen’s, Presbyterian College in Halifax, or one of the colleges in the West. If a graduate of Knox supported

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union, he likely attended the school after 1908.85 (It is perhaps more than a coincidence that Gandier had arrived as principal that same year.) Similar networks of support for Christian unity were forming within Methodism and Congregationalism, often criss-crossing denominational lines. When Nathanael Burwash addressed Methodists from around the world who gathered in Toronto for the 1911 Ecumenical Conference, he suggested that God had used “union revivals” to ­prepare the churches in Canada for unity. Fifty years earlier, he recalled, “Methodists thought Presbyterians without much religion and Presbyterians thought Methodists ignorant and fanatical.” Uniting for revival meetings brought their religious world views together for at least a few weeks each year. “The old dividing dogmas were forgotten by us all as our hearts were quickened and filled with the central vital truths of the common gospel.”86 Burwash also witnessed the impact of collaborative theological education on inter-denominational ventures. With the organization of federated t­heological colleges in Toronto, Montreal, and later Winnipeg, the classroom experience was a concrete reminder of common ties that mitigated denominational particularities. Writing in 1894, a few years after Victoria College moved from Cobourg to federate with the University of Toronto, he described co-operation between denominational schools as the “divine leaven of unity” that was challenging “polemical theology.”87 Thousands of men and women who joined voluntary associations to promote missions and social reform formed similar bonds across denominational lines. Their hope of infusing public life with Christian ideals found concrete expression in evangelistic missions and reform movements at home and abroad. The Evangelical Alliance; Bible and tract societies; Sunday schools; home and foreign missionary societies for laymen and laywomen; temperance societies; the Lord’s Day Alliance; and youth organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (ym ca), the Young Women’s Christian Association (y wc a ) , Christian Endeavor, and the Student Volunteer Movement were among the organizations that offered opportunities to work together for a common cause.88 These coteries of future unionists, many of them lay leaders in local congregations, were linked to burgeoning denominational bureaucracies comprised of church executives who were charged with the responsibility of making Canada “His Dominion.”89

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Among their ranks was S.D. Chown, a Methodist minister later dubbed the architect of church union. By the time he was appointed first secretary of Methodism’s Department of Temperance and Moral Reform in 1902, he had already served as president of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity.90 Chown’s new position put him at the forefront of efforts to regenerate society, and he easily grafted church union to social concerns. What set the Canadian social gospel apart from British and American varieties, argues William Magney, was its passionate nationalism and eagerness to rise to the new social and economic challenges facing Canada. In fact, he suggests, Methodism’s approach to moral and social reform “might better be termed a ‘National’ than a ‘Social’ Gospel.”91 Either way, Chown’s variety of evangelicalism fit easily with the enhanced role in the life of the nation that unionists saw for a national church. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists across the country found themselves working together and thinking about their mission in similar terms. Before and during the time that the Basis of Union was being formulated, a web of inter-denominational connections linked leaders of evangelistic, missionary, and social reform movements; theological educators; and church executives.92 The extent of their rootedness in the religious world of late-Victorian Canada is important in the story of church union; however, it’s a point often left out in favour of an emphasis on the novelty of their position. Equally significant in launching church union (and thus provoking the controversy that ensued) was that these homegrown proponents effectively tied the mission of ‘Christianizing’ the West to an old and widely shared evangelical assumption: religion was essential to national and global well-being. Novelty was not the only charge brought against the church union movement; it was also dogged by criticism that efficiency was uppermost in the minds of its supporters and theology of comparatively little consequence. Detractors missed an important theological conviction that unionists shared: that the great truths of Christianity could be framed in terms of a common faith. Burwash’s advice to his colleagues on the Doctrine committee echoed Gandier’s earlier suggestion in the Theologue: that the statement be short, summarizing essential beliefs rather than formulating them dogmatically in either Arminian or Calvinist terms.93 Burwash and those who worked with him to craft the doctrinal section of the Basis of Union were not

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offended to hear their work described as a reflection of the theological idiom of their day; after all, they were not attempting to write a creed for all time but for their own time. Burwash would have had little quarrel with Presbyterian T.B. Kilpatrick’s interpretation of their task: “Creed revision is the inherent right, and the continual duty, of a living Church.” He described the standing of the newly minted articles in modest terms: “We have sought, humbly and earnestly, to serve our own generation; and now we hand on the result of our toil, with prayer and hope, to the generation following.”94 The importance of building on common principles, rather than preserving of peculiarities, was at the forefront of discussions from the outset. Gandier later recalled the Joint Committee’s attempts to find common ground. “Have we a common faith?” was always the key question. Early on, the founders had realized that “to be real and effective it [church union] must be based on common convictions and deep spiritual affinities.”95 This was a theme sounded three times in the short theological preamble to the Basis of Union: the articles were “the substance of the Christian faith as commonly held among us”; they affirmed the evangelical doctrines held in common by the uniting traditions; and the statement itself was “a brief summary of our common faith.” Reiteration of the virtues and values associated with this common faith punctuated the long process of negotiation, voting, and legislation.96 The uniting churches had come to Canada as different religious traditions, much like different nationalities. Together they would create something distinctively Canadian out of the beliefs that were shared in common. This became the storyline of The Way to Union, with its interminable subtitle “Being a Study of the Principles of the Foundation and of the Historic Development of the Christian Church as Bearing on the Proposed Union of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational Churches in Canada.” As Morton developed the plot, church union was the obvious next chapter to the story of Christianity in Canada. The customary account of the origins of a religious tradition usually emphasized what set it apart from others. Morton added a twist to his tale by highlighting what Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists had in common. As he followed their converging paths to Canada, his aim was to persuade readers that apparent differences “tend to disappear with the circumstances that created them, and their great fundamental unities will be brought into the clear

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light of day.”97 Overcoming such differences was central to the ­story of the United Church’s forbears as the first generation of church union supporters related it. Unionists followed Morton’s lead and airbrushed their confessional family pictures to enhance the resemblance. The Presbyterians, the oldest of the uniting parties, were a case in point. John Calvin had not only advanced a particular theological position but also devised a polity that expressly sought to put in place a representative approach to church government that included lay power and participation (well suited to Geneva’s republican spirit). Calvin’s representative style of church government had been modified as it moved from Geneva around the world. In North America, for instance, it had typically evolved into local congregational sessions, regional presbyteries and synods, and national ­assemblies.98 Before uniting with others, Presbyterians in Canada had already consolidated over a dozen Presbyterian-type churches brought to Canada, mostly from the United States or the British Isles.99 Once nagging differences over the relationship of church and state (the initial cause of friction in many cases) were recognized as inconsequential in the Canadian setting, Presbyterians found much upon which they could agree: the Westminster Confession of Faith, its Catechisms, and Directory of Public Worship, as well as a common form of church government.100 Most would have agreed with R.C. Chalmers’s identification of Presbyterian principles: an emphasis on the sovereignty of God, salvation by grace through faith, the priesthood of all believers that found expression in a church ruled by presbyters, an approach to the sacrament of the Eucharist that avoided both Catholic and Lutheran “magic” and Zwingli’s memorialism, and a recognition of the state as called to fulfill a divine purpose (and to be resisted only when it acted in violation of Christian conscience).101 The stereotypically dour Presbyterians had little reason to be gloomy about their future in Canada as they considered union. Buoyed by an influx of Scottish immigrants, they edged past the Methodist Church in the 1911 census and became the largest Protestant denomination in the country. Assessing the situation in Canada a few years after church union, former Congregationalist C.E. Silcox considered them to have been “perhaps the most influential Protestant denomination in the Dominion – influential in scholarship, in general culture, in numbers, in the wealth and economic

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success of its members.”102 They were particularly proud of the influence of their theological and liberal arts colleges, described by one historian as “nurseries both of religion and learning.”103 This was symbolically acknowledged at the inauguration service when the Presbyterians identified their inheritance and gift to the United Church as “the manifestation of the Spirit in vigilance for Christ’s Kirk and Covenant, in care for the spread of education and devotion to sacred learning.”104 Next, Morton introduced the Congregationalists, who traced their origins to the Puritan movement within the Church of England. Their theology, too, owed much to the influence of Calvin and the Reformed tradition, but as the name ‘Congregationalist’ implied, their polity gave each local congregation autonomy. Unlike the Presbyterians in Scotland who had created a national church governed by presbytery representatives, the Congregationalists formed local fellowships whose covenant with God and each other bound them together. They sought the right to be free of outside interference, in defiance of the direction of England’s established church.105 Their spiritual forebears, the Puritans (viewed by some as notable for their intolerance), held the right of conscience on religious matters as a cherished principle. At the time of the Puritan Revolution, Oliver Cromwell (an Independent whom Morton considered part of the Congregationalist family) had proposed that in order to protect freedom of consciences, it might be necessary to have liberty for all religions. Morton noted that this concept, so shocking to Presbyterians when first proposed, was now largely accepted in Canada. The major Protestant denominations had since grown closer and now stood where the Congregationalists had first begun: with the understanding that the church was a voluntary association.106 Congregationalists arrived in Canada in the early days of mideighteenth-century colonial settlement, but struggled to survive. Many of the Congregationalist churches organized by settlers from New England collapsed when their members returned to the United States after the American Revolution. Some congregations then exercised their autonomy and joined other denominations. In the aftermath of the New Light revivals in Nova Scotia, many became Baptist churches, while theological affinities with Presbyterianism made closer association with that denomination an attractive ­option for others.107 The invitation to consider union with the

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Presbyterians and Methodists came as a welcome development for the remaining Congregationalists. Despite their small size (about 1 per cent of the population), the Congregationalists shaped key positions taken by the new church. They are remembered for their insistence that candidates for the ministry not be required to subscribe to the doctrinal statement of the Basis of Union as a test of the correctness of their theology; it was enough to be “in essential agreement.” They proposed that ordinands instead undergo a rigorous examination of their religious experience and theological beliefs, for which a mere creed could not substitute. While critics saw this as proof of the United Church’s theology laxity, it was actually a way to honour an old and fundamental principle of Congregationalism: that a person must be free to express the truths of the Christian faith in his or her own words, not in the words of a fixed creed.108 At the inaugural service, the Congregationalists identified the gift of their inheritance to the United Church as “the manifestation of the Spirit in the liberty of prophesying, the love of spiritual freedom and the enforcement of civic justice.”109 The Methodists, too, owed their distinctive features to a different time and place. Their rise was the most significant institutional ­expression of the evangelical revivals that swept across the British Isles and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Industrial Revolution, with its large-scale social and economic changes, was accompanied by dramatic increases in population not only in London but also in Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, and other new centres of industry. Since existing parish boundaries could be changed only by legislation, new church development failed to keep pace with the mushrooming population. Convinced that the Church of England was not meeting the spiritual needs of the people, John Wesley was eager to explore alternatives to the parish system, and sent out preachers who organized bands of like-minded folk sharing a “desire to flee from the wrath to come.” Organized at first under the umbrella of the Church of England, these societies were the scene of a flurry of evangelistic efforts. Wesley’s lay preachers first used Anglican churches as their base, but found themselves unwelcome there. Following George Whitefield’s example of preaching in the open field to the miners at Kingswood, Wesley took to the fields in 1739.

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The early Methodists, including Wesley’s own family, thought of themselves as loyal members of the Church of England. Finding little in the Thirty-Nine Articles to quarrel with, Wesley abridged them to twenty-five in 1784 for the use of Methodist societies in America, and they came to be regarded as Methodism’s doctrinal statement.110 Its piety, nurtured in class meetings as well as in Sunday worship, found theological expression in hymns and sermons, with Wesley’s fifty-two “Standard Sermons” being regarded as an authoritative ­explication of Methodist theology.111 A distinctive piety grew principally out of Methodism’s emphasis on conversion coupled with efforts to discern Wesley’s understanding of holiness or Christian perfection (an attainment which he himself was reluctant to claim). Methodism presented a theological alternative to Calvinism, and its doctrine that God would forgive all who earnestly sought redemption softened the inscrutability and finality of predestination.112 In recognition of its distinctive approach to the religious life and practice, the inauguration service received as Methodism’s contribution “the manifestation of the Spirit in evangelical zeal and human redemption, and the ministry of sacred song.”113 Wesley had hoped to renew the Church of England with his efforts. Instead he provoked a crisis. Anglican clergy were reluctant to administer the sacraments in Methodist chapels, a disturbing turn of events for those who believed, as did Wesley, in the importance of Communion. Even more pressing were the needs of Methodist societies in North America after the American Revolution disrupted the work of churches with British ties. Faced with these practical difficulties, Wesley decided to ordain some lay preachers for the chapels and to consecrate Thomas Coke as superintendent for the mission in North America. Coke assumed the role of a bishop, a step that irrevocably set the movement on a course toward separation from the Church of England after Wesley’s death in 1791. Methodism splintered as its leaders quarrelled over differing interpretations of Wesley’s message and methods.114 Talk of merging these streams of Protestantism had long been in the air. Morton claimed that John Wesley himself had predicted that as soon as he was dead the Methodists would become “a regular Presbyterian Church.” Instead, his movement had survived and successfully competed with Presbyterians and Congregationalists in Canada. Still, the differences that remained were small when placed alongside the enormous challenge of shrinking resources and keen

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competition. Each of the three streams could trace a series of mergers that had brought dozens of denominations together along confessional lines.115 After nine unions and a less formal incorporation of a number of other Reformed groups, the Presbyterian Church in Canada was formed in 1875. The Methodist Church (Canada, Newfoundland, and Bermuda), a culmination of eight unions, was completed in 1884. In 1906 Congregationalists in Ontario and Quebec joined those from the Maritimes to form the Congregational Union of Canada. Meanwhile, the hopes of the unionists found concrete expression in a series of agreements that resulted in unions at the local congregational level. The challenge of meeting the religious needs of the Prairies was crucial to the case for church union. In his new position at the University of Saskatchewan, Walter Murray observed firsthand the variety of European religious traditions – Scandinavian Lutherans, Ruthenians, Uniate Catholics, Polish Catholics, Doukhobors – whose members rarely saw a minister from their own tradition. Most had come from countries where membership in a state church was assumed; arriving in Canada, argued Murray, they would be predisposed to being served by a church perceived as national. He noted that racial differences, far from being a barrier to co-operation, actually acted as a catalyst in promoting union: “Racial differences, the co-operative spirit, the community interest are driving together all who prize religion and patriotism.” Acknowledging the significance of the many union churches already being formed, he predicted that “unless Union comes soon they will develop into a new church and will sweep Western Canada.”116 At first, local union congregations tended to affiliate with one (or sometimes two) of the uniting traditions, but as church union drew closer, many remained independent. The result was what C.E. Silcox described as “an ecclesiastical omelette that could only be ‘unscrambled’ by organic union.” He cited a 1923 study that put the number of pastoral charges where some form of union was already in effect at 1,244; over 3,000 preaching points, most of them in western Canada, already thought of themselves as part of a united church.117 At the inauguration ceremony, the collection of these young local  union congregations was recognized alongside the three well-established traditions for “furtherance of community-life within the Kingdom of God, and of the principle, in things essential unity, and in things secondary liberty.”118

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Rather than the modern pacesetters they are often made out to be, those who first set out to unite Protestantism by creating a national church should perhaps more aptly be thought of as accidental innovators. Their talent was less for originality than for adapting ideas already at hand; they traded on familiar ideas that seemed new when fashioned to meet the challenges and opportunities of the twentieth century. The impulse of the previous century to unite a divided Christendom became a bridge to the ideals of a new generation of leaders who made the case for church union in Canada. Their strategic adaptation to modernity was selective: more apparent at the operational (administrative) than the ideational (theological) level. As they told the story of church union, it was simply the next stage of the worldwide expansion of Christendom, not a radical break from the past. There was, thus, a remarkable (and often overlooked) ‘conserving’ impulse in the efforts of the founding generation to restore the link between faith and community. The case for church union assumed that churches had an important role to play in shaping the nation of Canada and its people. “The new church will certainly be a unifying influence throughout the country,” claimed a confident spokesperson for the Joint Committee, offering as proof “the gathering of ministers and leading laymen from remote parts of the Dominion at Church and inter-Church assemblies and conferences” that had “resulted in a better understanding and the realization of a common interest between the people of the different Provinces.”119 Its proponents tended to see the state as neutral, still malleable, and welcoming of guidance in setting Canada’s moral direction. The United Church would become the nation’s conscience, distinct but not separate from the body politic. For its part, the state had found a group of Protestant churches willing to be enlisted in its nation-building project – and, to the taxpayers’ delight, at no cost. Thinking that there was a nation waiting to be built upon Christian principles, and convinced that history was on their side, the leaders of the church union movement were confident of success. Their mission was surely a friendly service to the young nation of Canada. If organizations have callings that shape their destinies, as some systems analysts suggest,120 the new church’s mission was auspicious, for it continued to shape the United Church’s agenda after its founding. It also drew immediate criticism. The determined idealism of those who supported church union and the equally determined

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r­ecalcitrance of those who opposed it was a combustible mix that exploded with most force in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Proponents of church union saw themselves as players in the story of a twentieth-century renewal movement. They would reverse the divisive tendencies of the past by blending inherited insights. They would be united by a common cause and a common faith. With “assimilation” used so positively to describe nation-building, they had little difficulty thinking in similar terms about what they expected to set in motion with church union. Little did they know that their notions of mutual assimilation would someday look as quixotic in hindsight as the seemingly arcane theological quarrels that had once divided them. But non-concurring Presbyterians vehemently dismissed the call for a united church. They argued that the idea of a national church was flawed and that church union would divide both the nation of Canada and its churches. And thus was the stage set for controversy.

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2 Controversy and the Construction of Identity The Vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision’s greatest enemy. Thine has a great hook nose like thine, Mine has a snub nose like to mine. William Blake, “The Everlasting Gospel”

When William M. Birks looked for a turning point to explain his support for the church union movement, it was an unexpected Saturday night stopover on a business trip to Schreiber that came to mind. On what he described as a typical November Sunday, he worshipped at the Presbyterian church in that northern Ontario town with two men, a few women, and some children. He later learned that attendance at the other places of worship in Schreiber was no better: two men at the nearby Anglican church, three men at the Methodist church across the road, and only one man at the Baptist church close by. Birks was shocked to hear that not one of the ministers was paid as much as his chauffeur. For twenty years he, his brother, and their father, jeweller Henry M. Birks, had each given an annual gift of $500 for home missions, a sum of $30,000 “gone to spread the shame, or if you prefer it, the curse of Schreiber.” Upon his return to Montreal, he related his experience to Ephraim Scott, a staunch opponent of the proposed union, along with a blunt message: he would give not a penny more to support home missions. Apparently Scott’s response was equally curt. He would never again speak to Birks or acknowledge him when they met on the street.1 The case for church union that was so persuasive in Schreiber and many communities across Canada was hotly contested in

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others. Fergus, Ontario, was the scene of a bitter fight over whether St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church would become part of the United Church of Canada on 10 June 1925. Those described by the local newspaper as the most active lay leaders had been staunch supporters of the union movement, but when the votes were counted, more members sided with their anti-unionist minister. And so a small group of pro-union Presbyterians gathered for worship without pulpit or organ in a Sunday school room provided by the neighbouring Methodists. Feeling that they had been driven from the church, they reportedly sought consolation by turning to their Presbyterian past with its stories of their forebears in Scotland who had resisted political and religious tyranny. The recent church union bills passed by the federal and provincial legislatures confirmed their conviction that they were the real Presbyterians and not dissenters, as the majority in their congregation claimed. Meanwhile, up the hill, the Presbyterians who disagreed with their General ­Assembly’s decision to join with Methodists and Congregationalists to form the United Church met as usual at St Andrew’s. They reportedly rejoiced that “they not only held the property, but had $40,000 in the Bank while their former co-workers had nothing.” Describing those who voted against church union as “filled with enthusiasm because they believe that they are the ‘real Presbyterians,’” the editor echoed Shakespeare in asking, “What’s in a name?”2 The Fergus Record’s portrayal of the two groups of Presbyterians who worshipped that Sunday morning was all too typical of divided congregations across Canada, although more often than not the fortunes of the two sides were reversed.3 Who had legitimate claim to represent the Presbyterian Church in Canada? Was it the unionists who, buttressed by a winning majority in every one of the several votes taken by its general assemblies, presbyteries, and congregations between 1910 and 1924, claimed to be carrying its name with them into union? Or was it those who refused to give up the right to be called the Presbyterian Church in Canada? There was a good deal at stake (not least, the question of who had the right to the property and funds held under the legal title of The Presbyterian Church in Canada). Church union was a long time in coming, and the battle over the name went on even after the inauguration ceremony in 1925.4 The skirmishes continued until the Act of Incorporation that had been passed by Parliament in 1925 was amended in 1939 to

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reflect a compromise reached a year earlier: the United Church continued to say that it had incorporated what had once been the Presbyterian Church in Canada (along with the other uniting traditions), but the continuing Presbyterians were given the legal use of the old name.5 The proposal to create a united church sparked a heated debate that divided families and turned old friends into antagonists. Alongside the legal wrangling over the use of the Presbyterian name was a battle waged in local communities as both sides struggled to gain public support. There, the “antis” were joined by other opponents of a national church. Out of the bitter exchanges, two myths about the making of the United Church materialized, disclosing theological differences over the essence of Christian unity and tactical differences over the role of the church in public life. Those who charged that union had been achieved by playing fast and loose with theological differences called it a “creedless” church. Its offer of friendly service to the nation was characterized as more befitting a political organization or a service club than a church. Those who joined the non-concurring Presbyterians in opposing church union chiselled into the public mind a negative picture of the United Church that proved difficult to erase. And as other denominations and the secular press joined the debate, relationships were forged and broken in ways that had repercussions lasting long after the procedural wrangling was over. Both sides saw 1902 as a turning point. However, the advocates of church union and those who resisted it were to remember what happened at their national gatherings that year differently, and each blamed the other for what went wrong thereafter. Discussions about church union had already been happening off and on for a quarter century. But in 1902 church leaders across the land were still absorbing the shock of the immigration challenge signalled in the census figures released a year earlier as they prepared for their judicatory meetings. Almost forgotten by both sides was the role of William Caven, principal of Knox College from 1875 until his death in 1904 just a few weeks before the first meeting of the Joint Committee (which he was to have convened). Caven’s support for Christian unity was well known in his day.6 He had been a leader in bringing the various branches of the Presbyterian family together in 1875, served from

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Table 2.1 Chronology of church union in Canada 1875

Presbyterian Church in Canada is formed from four branches of Presbyterianism. 1884 Methodist Church (Canada, Newfoundland, and Bermuda) is formed from four branches of Methodism. 1885 Synod of the Anglican Province of Canada invites Methodists and Presbyterians to discuss union. 1889 Conference on Church Unity meets in Toronto. 1899 Presbyterian General Assembly appoints a committee to confer with other evangelical churches to avoid overlapping of congregations; the Methodist General Council sets up a similar committee. 1902 Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians appoint representatives to meet as a joint committee in response to an invitation from the Methodist Church. 1904 British House of Lords awards the assets of the Free Church of Scotland to the Wee Frees, who had opposed creation of the United Free Church of Scotland in 1900 (Overtoun appeal). 1904 Joint Committee on Church Union meets for the first time. 1906 Congregational Union of Canada is formed from various Congregational churches. 1906 Anglicans and Baptists decline to join negotiations; Joint Committee on Church Union agrees on Basis of Union. 1908 Congregations in the west use the Basis of Union to organize local unions. 1910–12 National courts of the three uniting churches approve the Basis of Union and refer it to the lower courts and the membership. 1910 Presbyterian Association for the Federation of the Churches of the Protestant Denominations is organized to consider alternatives to ­“organic union.” 1912 Majority of Presbyterian presbyteries and congregations vote in favour of union, but the General Assembly agrees to allow time to build greater support. 1912 Several local union congregations form the General Council of Local Union Churches. 1914 “The United Church of Canada” is approved as the name during the ­process of minor revisions to the Basis of Union. 1915 Presbyterian General Assembly votes in favour of the revised Basis of Union and submits it for a second vote in the lower courts and membership, where the majority again supports it. 1916 Presbyterian General Assembly passes a resolution to unite, and sets up a committee to prepare for consummation after the end of the war. 1916 Presbyterian Church Association and Presbyterian Women’s League step up resistance to church union. 1917 Supporters and dissenters agree to a moratorium on debate and propaganda until after the war. 1921 Presbyterian General Assembly decision to proceed to a union in effect ends the “truce.”

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Table 2.1  (Continued) 1921

Representatives of the General Council of Local Union Churches meet with the Joint Committee on Church Union. 1923 Presbyterian General Assembly takes last vote on church union. 1924 The United Church of Canada Act is passed by the Dominion Parliament; congregations are given the right to decide by majority vote not to enter the union. 1924–26 Enabling legislation for church union is passed in all nine provinces. 1925 Inaugural service on 10 June creates a church of approximately 8,000 congregations and 600,000 members. 1925 Non-concurring Presbyterians continue as the Presbyterian Church in Canada with approximately 1,000 congregations and 150,000 members. 1930 Wesleyan Methodist Church of Bermuda affiliates with the United Church. 1938 Dispute over the name “The Presbyterian Church in Canada” is resolved, allowing both churches to claim continuity. 1939 The United Church of Canada Act is amended to allow the continuing Presbyterians legal use of the name “The Presbyterian Church in Canada.”

1888 until his death as chair of the Presbyterian General Assembly’s committee on church union, and was the third president of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity (succeeding George Monro Grant).7 At the General Assembly that met in Toronto in June 1902, Caven made a presentation on behalf of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity urging the Presbyterian Church to actively pursue church union. The General Assembly responded by passing a resolution to support “the action of the Home Mission Committee in ­conferring with any committee of the Church of England, of the Methodist Church or of either of them, as opportunity may offer.”8 That opportunity came a few months later. In September, Winnipeg was the scene of the quadrennial General Conference of the Methodist Church. Before the meeting adjourned, the Methodist Church issued a general invitation directed to denominations “already marked by a great degree of spiritual unity” and “closely assimilated in standards and ideals of church life, forms of worship and ecclesiastical polity” to consider union negotiations.9 The Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches soon took steps to  set up a Joint Committee on Church Union, and in 1904 its ­subcommittees began working on the areas that would eventually comprise the five major sections of a Basis of Union: Doctrine,

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Polity, Ministry, Administration, and Law. By 1908 the document was ready for the churches to consider. Just as memorable for the story of church union as the invitation to set up a church union committee were the fraternal greetings from the Presbyterian delegation to the Methodist gathering in 1902 that led to it. It was there that William Patrick delivered the fateful words that, according to some accounts, launched the negotiations and the controversy that ensued. Patrick was new to Canadian church gatherings, having arrived from Scotland only two years earlier to become principal of Manitoba College. Admitting that he might be “found guilty of sublime audacity,” he asked the Methodist delegates whether the time had come for the two churches to come closer together.10 His passionate appeal for Canada “to be the first to show the Christian nations of the world the way to reunion” proved irresistibly bewitching to his Methodist audience, suggests N.K. Clifford. The Methodists unwittingly accepted an invitation that Patrick should never have extended, he maintains, for it had not been properly authorized by the Presbyterian Church. Those who understood the folly of Patrick’s haste objected at the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1904, the date that marks, for Clifford, the beginning of the resistance to church union.11 The making of the United Church as told by its supporters has Patrick as a more minor player in a drama foreshadowed by Confederation and their own denominational trajectories.12 They were mindful that their churches had already considered models of union in the 1880s and 1890s that ranged from loose federation to organic union, and at a conference in Toronto in 1889 organized by the Anglicans, had even tackled the thorny issue of what to do with the historic episcopate if the Church of England were included.13 Patrick was only one of three Presbyterian fraternal delegates bringing the customary plea for greater co-operation. Preceding him was George Bryce, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church. He perhaps had in mind the passing of Caven’s resolution at his own church’s assembly a few months earlier when he reminded Methodists how close the two churches had grown in their forms of government and the causes they supported – even going so far as to endorse the temperance movement. Speaking after Patrick was C.W. Gordon, a local Presbyterian minister likely better known to Methodists for his novels, who spoke of materialism as their common foe.14 Fraternal

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delegates from the Congregational Church, when bringing their greetings the following week, also signalled support for union: if all the “near relatives” were to be included in the “wedding” of the churches, they too expected an invitation.15 Although Patrick died in 1911, before there was much evidence of effective resistance, many blamed him for triggering the animosity that attended the negotiations. It was he, they charged, who had “introduced the issue improperly, handled it illegally and justified his action in terms which verged on blasphemy” by claiming the church union movement was divinely inspired. His personality only made matters worse: once Patrick determined a course of action, he apparently brooked no interference, making it easy for his opponents to imagine that he had acted alone, rather than through proper channels. Described by his friends as a sad and lonely man, he apparently had few personal ties to Presbyterians in Canada, even in Winnipeg.16 His was a presence, says Clifford, that “continued to haunt the church until it accomplished the purpose he had set for it,” steering the course of events even after his death despite his being (and in part because he was) an outsider.17 But how much of an outlier was Patrick on the issue of church union? Clifford is likely right in reasoning that Patrick had brought the idea of union with him to Canada, rather than discovering it after his arrival. However, his claim that Patrick was unaware that others were advocating union is less convincing.18 It is difficult to imagine that Patrick had paid no attention to the press coverage of the death of George Monro Grant a few months earlier. After all, Grant’s dream of a united Protestantism was among the most publicized of his religious causes. It is impossible to know whether Patrick was at the session that voted on Caven’s resolution on Christian unity, but he is recorded as being present as a delegate to the General Assembly. Could Patrick really have believed he was the first to broach the idea of closer relations between Presbyterians and Methodists? Perhaps Patrick’s “audacity” was a bit tongue-in-cheek, feigning innocence in response to the opening provided when Methodist general superintendent Albert Carman introduced him as a “tenderfoot” in comparison with the “old-timer” Bryce.19 Still, supposing Patrick was unfamiliar with Canadian efforts to promote church union, those listening to his address that day would have heard nothing substantially new. Creation of “one great national Protestant Church” was not a fresh idea. It was a restatement

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(however eloquent) of a case that others had been making for years. Knowingly or not, Patrick was joining a conversation that was already abuzz among personal networks of family, friends, and religious leaders who had seized the cause of church union as a way of dealing with the challenges their churches faced. Why then – even allowing for misguided enthusiasm on the part of the Methodists – did Presbyterians and Congregationalists respond so swiftly to the invitation? Likely as decisive for all parties as the words of one person was the effect of the place where they were spoken: Winnipeg, a city where the impact of Canada’s new immigration policy was so evident. Whether or not they ought to race with each other to set up home missions for these new Canadians was a question weighing heavily on their minds. The two sides quickly found themselves mired in procedural debates that were not of one person’s making, though Patrick proved to be an easy scapegoat for the opposition. His defence of the Basis of Union and the plan to implement it was often brilliant, but even his allies cringed at his tendency to verbally batter his opponents. Particularly upsetting was his rough handling of John Mackay, a young Montreal minister who vigorously opposed the first draft of the Basis of Union when it was put before the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1906.20 The governance model that Mackay championed was federation: union by co-operation that would leave the  three denominations ­essentially intact. Mackay also dismissed the theological articles in the Basis of Union as showing “nothing more, nothing less than that a large number of the ablest men of the three churches can produce a document sufficiently ambiguous to be accepted as a Methodist document by some Methodists, a Presbyterian by some Presbyterians, and a Congregationalist by some Congregationalists.”21 One of Patrick’s withering attacks on Mackay took place when he raised the 1904 ruling of the British House of Lords in the Overtoun appeal.22 Studying in Scotland at the time, Mackay was familiar with the case that saw the court award the assets of the Free Church of Scotland to the Wee Frees, a small number of Presbyterians who had opposed Scottish church union. Although Patrick publicly dismissed Mackay’s concerns, others were uneasy about how common law might be interpreted if those resisting church union were to take their case to London on appeal. The legal situation in Canada was, if anything, more precarious than in Scotland, since the British North

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America Act assigned matters of property and civil rights (which included religion) to provincial rather than federal jurisdiction. Anticipating litigation, the uniting churches eventually sought enabling legislation for incorporation as The United Church of Canada not only from the Dominion Parliament but also the legislatures of Canada’s nine provinces (although it did not pass in Quebec until 1926).23 It was Mackay, by then the principal of Westminster Hall in Vancouver, whose hour-long plea for the federation model at the General Assembly in 1910 almost carried the day. Patrick delivered another stinging rebuttal, belittling Mackay in the process. While Patrick was credited with saving the vote for the unionists, his tactics dismayed even those who sided with him. George Pidgeon’s biographer suggests that a distaste for Patrick’s methods accounts for Pidgeon’s early reluctance to actively support church union – a cause to which he was predisposed both by temperament and positive experiences in co-operative ventures.24 E.D. McLaren, superintendent of Home Missions, watched what was happening with alarm. He later wrote that he had warned Patrick after the debate that “the danger to the union cause would come thenceforward from its friends.”25 Those who led the church union movement after Patrick’s death in 1911 were, unlike him, Canadian-born with a mesh of close relationships within the Presbyterian Church. With Patrick, they shared the credit for creating momentum for the vision of a united church; they were also among its “friends” whose own strategy drew criticism. The unionists had their own explanation for what went wrong: the fault was in deviating from Presbyterian polity by giving too much, rather than too little, say to the people after 1910. Clarence Mackinnon thought that the General Assembly had departed from Presbyterian principles by “sending the dispute down among the people” for a congregational vote. While many supporters of church union were progressive in their theology, they appealed to an older model of governance that relied on an educated ordained and lay clerisy to make major decisions. Presbyterianism was, Mackinnon insisted, “government by Presbyteries, by ministers and elders, by informed and ordained men.” He had come to appreciate the wisdom of past leaders who “would never have risked a vital matter to the judgment of the masses” – a fatal mistake, as he saw it, although one that was “probably unavoidable under the circumstances.”26 On the other hand, those who resisted church union took advantage of a trend toward more democratic practices that was in tension with

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the hierarchy of church courts. To historian John Moir, it appears that an “incipient congregationalism, which was infiltrating the Presbyterian Church in Canada before church union was even proposed, was now brought into the open in a basic internal division of opinion over Presbyterian polity.”27 Meanwhile Methodists and Congregationalists, whose national bodies had already voted in favour of church union in 1910 and were preparing to proceed with it by 1912, were left hanging. An apologetic Walter Murray tried to explain the dilemma in a letter to Nathanael Burwash after another Presbyterian vote in 1912. He optimistically (but wrongly) predicted that with time and patience the minority could be brought into union. “I hope your church will not become impatient with us,” he pleaded. “We can quite well understand how irritating our actions must be to you, but we are placed in a very awkward position.”28 That position became even more awkward with increased opposition to church union in eastern Canada and increased support for it in western Canada, as reflected in the growing number of new local union congregations. The second vote on church union at the Presbyterian General Assembly held in Winnipeg in 1916 proved to be another pivotal moment for both sides. While it was clear that a minority of Presbyterians still opposed organic union, Murray’s powerful plea that there be no further delay persuaded most of those present to vote for it.29 A newly appointed Joint Committee on Church Union, this time chaired by Robert Falconer, considered itself legally and morally charged with the responsibility of taking concrete steps to consummate the relationship; to keep faith with Methodists and Congregationalists, there could be no turning back. The impact in some places was immediate. The minister of the Presbyterian church in Kelowna, b c , was so “imbued with the union spirit” that he resigned as soon as he returned home from the General Assembly, and a union church was formed with the Methodist minister in charge. In Rosedale, east of Chilliwack, b c , three congregations whose resources had been depleted by the war, formed a union church in 1917 and affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, which was the strongest in their community. Not all differences disappeared instantly. Methodists in Prince George, bc, were disappointed to learn that the union church would be “in the hands of the Presbyterians” and their building would not be used. Some of them remained aloof from the venture until after the 1925 union.30

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The 1916 General Assembly was likewise a crossroads for the minority of Presbyterians who were against forming the United ­ Church.31 They left Winnipeg bitter, energized, and determined to organize a movement to preserve the Presbyterian Church in Canada. They formally registered a protest, charging that those who had voted in favour of supporting the Basis of Union had “ceased to be the Presbyterian Church in Canada.”32 A few weeks later, the Presbyterian Church Association was launched at a rally held at St Andrew’s Church (King Street) in Toronto, reviving the Church Federation Association that Mackay and his supporters had attempted to form in 1911. Opposition to church union sometimes made for strange bed­ fellows. Some of the most barbed anti-union commentary over the years was to come from what seems, at first glance, a surprising source: the editorials and articles in a secular magazine. Saturday Night’s sympathies were apparent in its story on the aftermath of the St Andrew’s rally. “It won’t go through now, of course,” predicted the writer, for while the unionists still talked about pressing their cause after the war, the chance of church union happening was becoming less likely. The reporter wagered that neither the Dominion Parliament nor any of the provincial legislatures before which bills would have to be presented “would have the nerve now to grant such charters in face of the opposition that has developed.” The movement was nothing more than a Methodist takeover bid, a scheme devised by the “business man” to dupe unsuspecting pastors into a cost-saving merger. The business man also had his hooks in the university, the writer divulged, and his ignorance had been rewarded by honorary degrees. Particular scorn was heaped on the University of Toronto’s president for borrowing the idea of union given him by the business man: what Falconer had cooked up “wasn’t just efficiency and business methods and crude raw materials like that. Not at all. It was the National Church – the National Church as against the Baptist Church and the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church and all the other Churches that couldn’t be as national because they wouldn’t have as many members.” However, the “cool Scotch mind” had discovered a flaw in the plan before it was too late: its “disregard of the spiritual equation.”33 The Saturday Night article detected misgivings about union that simmered near the surface of the debate: the suspicion that business efficiency had trumped spiritual considerations, and the threat that a

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national church posed to other denominations. It also noted the swift response to the 1916 decision. Even before the General Assembly voted, the dissidents had used a donation from textile manufacturer John Penman to hire someone to rebut press releases favourable to church union. Despite its complaint that the union movement was driven by “the businessman,” the Presbyterian Church Association was at first largely funded by the wealthy Penman and a  few other well-to-do Presbyterians.34 Having already lost two votes at the General Assembly, the Presbyterian Church Association launched a print campaign that cast doubt on the decision to move forward. It also attempted to shift the debate from the church courts by organizing the opposition in local congregations. Its efforts were bolstered by two invaluable allies: Ephraim Scott and the Presbyterian Women’s League. Like a number of his unionist rivals, Ephraim Scott was a Maritime ‘export.’ He made Montreal his new home, and from there, for the next thirty-five years, he edited the Presbyterian Record. Once union was a fait accompli and it came time to select a moderator to lead the continuing Presbyterian Church, Scott’s was the only name put forward – and for good reason. His strident voice set the tone for much of the propaganda produced by both sides. An early volley that circulated widely as a pamphlet before the 1917 General Assembly used the literary device of a wise old pastor writing to a young inquirer. The letters presented a negative image of the proposed church as united only in name and preoccupied with government, control, and the outward and formal dimensions of religion; its members left the thinking to others and did what they were told. The Presbyterian Church, by contrast, was united in spirit and emphasized the inward and spiritual dimensions of religion; it celebrated diversity and allowed its members the freedom to think for themselves.35 Although Scott dubbed the two types as “German” and “British,” his characterization of the former as working like a “great ecclesiastical machine, with its centralized control” left little doubt that he was taking aim at Methodism. Scott scorned the prized unity of the common faith expressed in the proposed theological statement, warning of the dangers of “A Church without a Creed.” He was no kinder in his assessment of the United Church’s expectation of a greater role in national affairs. Such power should only be exercised by Christians acting as citizens, he argued, not by a spiritually decayed church usurping the authority

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of the state.36 His acerbic attacks continued even after the 1925 inauguration of the United Church. The religious life of the proposed church, said Scott, centred around “the absolute power of the clergy and officials in the church courts” who had the authority to completely change the church if they wanted; the system was “despotism complete.” Those accustomed to hearing the United Church criticized for its modernism might have been startled to read that Scott identified it with the spirit of the seventeenth century (autocracy), whereas the Presbyterian Church displayed the spirit of the twentieth century in its democracy.37 Scott’s effective anti-union polemic was complemented by shrewd organization of the opposition at the local level, aided by the Presbyterian Women’s League. The League’s fundraising activities brought in nearly $5,000 in the first six months, enough to defray its own expenses and make a generous donation of $3,000 to the Presbyterian Church Association.38 More difficult to assess, but perhaps even more significant, was its influence on family, friends, and members of the congregation, particularly in congregations where the pastor had sided with the unionist cause. A gathering in Montreal heard that one minister had forbidden members of the Women’s League to oppose church union without the permission of the congregation’s Session. Even meetings in the home were prohibited. The Montreal Gazette reported that while the woman told her story calmly, “something of a concerted gasp followed her statements, accompanied by ejaculations of ‘Dear, dear,’ and such remarks as ‘Go right ahead,’ ‘We are dissenters, are we?’ and others equally emphatic.” One woman predicted that such tactics “will make us more wild than ever.” The League ought to feel flattered observed another: “We are only mere women ... We should not be in this thing at all, and it is very gratifying to us that we have been able to create such a stir.” The Gazette also detected the developing tensions between clergy and laity, noting that “ministers came in for frank criticism by the feminine members of their flocks,” who found them to be rather autocratic in some cases.39 Women who supported church union did not form a separate organization to counter the Presbyterian Women’s League. They were pictured as sharing the vision of a united church, particularly the promise it held for missions. A press report of prayer services for the union cause held at St James Square Presbyterian Church in Toronto noted that most of the women who gathered were leaders of the missionary

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society in their congregations.40 Asked by a reporter whether women in his church planned to oppose the antis, one pro-union minister replied that his congregation’s “leading women” had decided such activities would distract them from more important work. They were, he added, as well informed about union as the men in his congregation and, as loyal Presbyterians, would be “guided by denominational procedure.”41 Even in a congregation where the minister was a well-known supporter of union, being guided by procedure sometimes involved demanding more information. At Bloor Street Presbyterian Church in Toronto, Mrs J.W. Daniel called for a meeting to hear both sides of the issue, arguing that it did not “seem natural to me that Presbyterian women [would] allow themselves to be bundled out of one organization into another without a with your leave or by your leave until they have had an opportunity of thinking the matter well over.”42 There turned out to be more time to think the matter over than either side would have imagined in 1916. When the General Assembly met a year later, the delegates agreed to call for a truce in Presbyterian hostilities for as long as Canada was at war, and implementation of the decision to unite was suspended.43 A vote in 1921 to resume action toward union roused the opposition, and the Presbyterian Church Association was reactivated the following summer. Concerned unionists from Toronto smelled trouble and gathered a few months later to devise a strategy to neutralize renewed resistance. In the group was George Pidgeon, by then minister at Bloor Street Presbyterian Church. Writing to his brother Leslie in Winnipeg to fill him in on the details and enlist his help in garnering western support, he found some good news to report: an anti-union convention, which organizers had expected would fill St Andrew’s Church in Toronto to overflowing, had drawn a crowd of only 700. He assured his brother that there was nothing in the speeches to cause concern. More worrisome was a proposal to prepare what he called a monster petition of 100,000 names of those opposed to church union. The Presbyterian Church Association had hired E ­ ugene Le Fleur, described by Pidgeon as one of the greatest lawyers in the country, as counsel; they were well organized, well financed, and committed to blocking the proposed church union legislation.44 “There’s no fighting the Pidgeons,” it was often said in Presbyterian circles – “Leslie is too clever, and George is too good.”45 Those on

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the side of the Pidgeon brothers in the union controversy quickly realized to their dismay that, in this case, success in the courts of the church was no guarantee of victory in the public arena. Since politicians would be the ones to approve the legislation, both sides recognized the importance of the voting public and scrambled to make their case. George Pidgeon feared that the church union supporters in the west might be indifferent: “The thing seems so self evident there that they cannot see the necessity for action.” He urged brother Leslie to begin organizing pro-union support immediately, for the anti-unionists had “thrown down the gage of battle and unless we start to meet it now, the whole movement will be endangered.” He added that he did not want to give the impression that the east was panicking; but if the bill was to be passed in Parliament and provincial legislatures, “there must be such an expression of the country’s convictions on the subject that will be overwhelming and will show all in authority that the conscience of the country is behind it.”46 The pro-union strategy described by Pidgeon called for the organization of a press campaign backed by generous financial support from lay leaders. Although the plan presumed that volunteers would handle much of the work, a decision was made to hire someone to coordinate the publicity campaign. R.J. Wilson, minister of Chalmers Presbyterian Church, Kingston, was recruited to run the Joint Bureau of Literature. It was an offer that would have been hard to refuse. Meeting in George Pidgeon’s study in 1922, Wilson was urged by a group of notable Presbyterians that included William Birks and Robert Falconer to accept the challenge. Their assessment of the situation was grave: there would be no church union unless congregations were made aware of what was at stake. His new respon­ sibilities included preparing literature for distribution, organizing meetings to present the union position, arranging for speakers to visit congregations, supplying newspapers with information, and providing a key person in each presbytery with a supporting organization “to carry on the fight.”47 A fight it was indeed, and as it turned out, the unionists had picked someone who seemed to thrive on controversy as much as Ephraim Scott. In a letter to brother Leslie in Winnipeg, Pidgeon shared a bit of gossip he had picked up. “The other day someone in a committee mentioned ‘R.J.’s’ tendency to boast a bit and also his splendid qualities as a fighter,” Pidgeon confided. “One of the men quoted Josh Billings to this effect – There are two things that I admire about the

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rooster – his crow and the spurs to back it. I think you can see the point in this, only do not tell anyone else.”48 Wilson lived up to this billing. He quickly took stock of the situation, deemed it serious, and proposed a strategy in anticipation of an attack. Scouring the methods and literature of the anti-unionist camp, he found a “campaign of misrepresentations and deliberate falsehood” already underway. Of particular concern was its impact on union sympathizers who “still blind their eyes to the methods of Anti-Unionism, who are satisfied that the policy of benevolent neutrality will accomplish more than an aggressive campaign.”49 Contrary to rumours that Scott was withdrawing his opposition to union, Wilson believed that the Presbyterian Church Association was instead preparing to step up its attacks. His summary of the anti-union tactics proved to be close to the mark; he predicted, for instance, that opponents would attempt to sway public opinion with this ploy: “The Presbyterian Church is announced as a non-political organization. By implication the United Church of Canada is to be political.”50 Wilson believed it was time to take off the gloves in order to retain the support of a number of churches in danger of being swayed by the Association. “The Anti-Unionist is out to ‘save the Church’. Let us be out to save Canada for Christ. Our appeal is so much larger and so much worthier that if we get it squarely before the people we need not be afraid of their decision.”51 Outlines for sermons and addresses prepared by Wilson’s office for those invited to speak in favour of church union tapped into the movement’s ideals. Church union would unleash “new spiritual forces and treasures to place the crown upon the brow of the World’s Redeemer, who gave His life that we all might be one in life, love and service. It is the most significant movement since the Reformation.”52 But there were hard-hitting addresses as well, bluntly stating that the only issue remaining to be settled was whether particular congregations would remain in the Presbyterian Church in Canada by entering the United Church, or whether they would secede from their “Mother Church” by voting against church union. Dire consequences such as isolation in foreign mission work and strife at home were predicted for the secessionists. To choose to join the United Church was, on the other hand, to remain connected to Presbyterianism worldwide, retain the essential doctrines and polity of Presbyterianism, and demonstrate acceptance of “the challenge of Non Anglo-Saxon Canada.”53

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After church union legislation again passed easily at the Port Arthur General Assembly in 1923, the dissidents turned their energies to preparing for the final vote at the congregational level, h ­ oping to persuade as many as possible to cast a ballot to opt out of joining the United Church of Canada on 10 June 1925. As Presbyterians prepared to make this crucial decision, Wilson hired a clipping service to keep a “watchful eye” on the newspapers, for he saw the press as key to shaping public opinion. He claimed to have countered “dangerous influences” by providing accurate information to newspapers, preparing reports of meetings and interviews for columns, making personal contact with editors, and even doing editorial work on request. The coverage in Toronto continued to be a matter of concern; except for the Star, the secular press did not seem to favour union. But on the whole, Wilson concluded, “newspaper publicity has had an astounding effect on Union,” one that he assessed as generally favourable.54 The decisions made by Wilson and the Joint Committee drove the counter-resistance as inauguration day drew closer. They assumed that using prominent Presbyterians to present the union cause would most effectively blunt opposition. They relied on Methodists for some of the funding, and counted on them to pull back while Presbyterians worked out their differences. Even Chown’s suggestion on behalf of the Joint Committee on Church Union that some literature be prepared from the Methodist point of view was politely dismissed as “inopportune.”55 The need to defend the United Church as the continuing Presbyterian tradition meant that its Methodist features were muted before, and likely even after, union. Finding themselves on the receiving end of a barrage of negative publicity and innuendo portraying them as theologically and socially inferior, it was difficult for Methodists to hold their tongues and let their Presbyterian friends defend their theological reputations. The unfairness of such criticism was acknowledged in a leaflet outlining a sermon on the biblical text “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory.” The preacher was to urge his listeners to beware of empty boasting about past glory, reminding them that the Methodist Church had more members and even larger property holdings. As for Presbyterians who were glorying in their social ­status, the sermon outline suggested that the status be shared with Methodists to elevate them!56

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The opposition’s tactics further alienated Methodists when the Presbyterian Church Association added a new arrow to its quiver to shore up support for the final vote. At a time when the fundamentalist-modernist debate in the United States was dividing denominations, Methodist leaders in Canada were furious to hear their church described not only as creedless but also as modernist and even apostate. Chafing from disparaging comments made about them, and weary of waiting for pro-union Presbyterians to defend them, some Methodists began to respond in kind. T. Albert Moore, secretary of both the Methodist General Conference and the Joint Committee (and later the first general secretary of the United Church), fired off a personal letter of protest to a Presbyterian minister who had suggested federation as a compromise. The Methodists “did not take any part in your debate, we were not involved and we acted with high restraint,” Moore complained. “Your people [the Presbyterian Church Association] deliberately dragged us in and argued that we are of such character that association with us in Church fellowship would be betrayal of Christian honor.”57 While Moore fumed, Pidgeon protested the “absolute dishonesty” of those who claimed that “Church Union is the Canadian form of Modernism” while retaining principal Daniel J. Fraser of Presbyterian College in Montreal, well known for his liberal theology, as president of the Presbyterian Church Association.58 This ratcheting up of  the rhetoric as the controversy wore on made it difficult for Methodists to support a proposal to delay the consummation of union in the hope that, with time, more dissidents would be won over to the union cause. The energy of Wilson and the unionists in pamphleteering and feeding the press was more than matched by the efforts of Ephraim Scott, the Presbyterian Church Association, and the Women’s League. The strategy to stop church union was simple: raise doubts about the groundwork that had been laid for the proposed national church, and challenge the legitimacy of the public role it hoped to play. The most fundamental criticism lodged was that there was no basis for unity because the parties proposing to unite did not have enough in common: in theology, polity, and even social class, they were simply too different. While some used the traditional language of Calvinism vs. Arminianism to frame the differences in theological terms, others

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couched their opposition in scientific terms. Robert Campbell, the influential clerk of assembly during the early years of the controversy, insisted that the laws of nature barred “the mating of things that are unlike.”59 The blending of Presbyterianism’s stability with Methodism’s fervour, and Congregationalism’s love of liberty was thus doomed from the start, union critics argued, for nature showed that crossbreeds were always weaker than the parent stocks, amalgams of metal lost the unique qualities of their original states. In their view, the oft-cited problem of inefficiency resulting from duplication was exaggerated; denominational competition was healthy since it was rivalry, not cooperation, that sparked enthusiasm for the work of the church.60 Those who opposed church union thus repudiated the environmentalist assumptions that A.S. Morton had laid out in The Way to Union, rejecting his argument that church life in Canada was evolving irresistibly toward union. They also questioned the case for nation-building made by the unionists, dismissing their notion of mutual assimilation for either a new type of church or a new type of Canadian.61 The debate also revealed different understandings of Christian unity. One critic of union lamented the loss of the image of being Christ’s branches, with him as the Vine: “Instead of Branches we have latterly come to use the word Denominations, a mechanical, unorganic word, void of the idea of vital relation to a living Stem. We speak of sects as if they were rival business concerns. And, not unnaturally, we now think of organic unity as an incorporating union on the lines of a commercial merger. External, mechanical union is not essential to organic, spiritual unity.” An Act of Parliament might have the power to incorporate a commercial enterprise, but it could not create spiritual unity.62 Presbyterians were not alone in their concerns about the incompatibility of the uniting traditions. Some Methodist ministers feared the loss of their distinctive polity – not only the itinerant system of assigning pastoral charges so maligned by Presbyterian critics but also their pension fund! Those who were convinced that a united church would look much more Presbyterian than Methodist perhaps heard reason for concern as they listened in on the Presbyterian debate. Explaining his rejection of the proposed union, one Methodist minister listed among his reasons: “Because Dr Patrick, Presbyterian, says, ‘We have not changed our doctrine or discipline or polity, we have assimilated the other bodies.’”63

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Just as damaging as the questions about the organizational culture of the uniting churches was the escalating attack on its theological foundation. Ephraim Scott had at first found little to criticize in the Basis of Union (as its defenders enjoyed reminding him): he reported that he could see no substantial difference between the new doctrinal statement and the Presbyterian Shorter Catechism. Praising it as “a model to other churches contemplating union,” Scott had initially described it as a “standing testimony to the essential unity of the Protestant Evangelical Church, both in this and in other lands.” This first impression of the articles stood in marked contrast to his later characterization of the United Church as creedless and its Basis of Union as providing “an open door for every error, especially that error which takes from Christ His Crown of Deity and takes from sinners a Saviour, making Him only a man.”64 Presbyterian critics of the Basis of Union warned of the dire consequences of requiring ministers to be in “essential agreement” with the theological articles of the Basis of Union, a concession that had been made to convince the Congregationalists to join. Addressing an audience of concerned Presbyterians gathered at St Andrew’s Church, Toronto, Thomas McMillan asked whether they realized that a minister who claimed to accept the doctrinal statement at ordination could later become a Unitarian, a Universalist, a Christian Scientist, or even a Catholic without any disciplinary remedy available in the Basis of Union. Such a minister could “go on wrecking congregations without limit” by being transferred by the Settlement Committee from place to place.65 While Methodists who were wary about the Basis of Union offered little organized resistance,66 they occasionally expressed personal reservations about its theological foundations. W.S. Griffin challenged readers of the Christian Guardian: “Place Dr Burwash’s defence of the doctrines in the Basis of Union side by side with John Wesley’s Christian perfection, and we almost feel that the respected and Distinguished Chancellor of our university [Victoria] has sadly fallen from grace.” Convinced that it was professors and church executives, not those engaged in pastoral or evangelistic work, who were behind the union movement, Griffin questioned the wisdom of its leaders. How could men who “spend their days in offices and college classrooms” be trusted with the responsibilities of reorganizing church life? Griffin joined Presbyterian critics in challenging the argument that a unified church would be more effective. Far from a

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large organization doing more to save the world, history taught him that “revivals always involved the breaking away from these mighty church organizations.”67 Joining those within the uniting churches who questioned the ­formulation of common faith in the Basis of Union was an eclectic mix of allies, including conservative Protestants in Canada and the United States. Historians of religion in North America note with interest that the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was not waged with the same intensity in Canada as in the United States. However, the debate over church union that took place in Canada at the same time as the struggle over theological modernism elsewhere was anything but irenic. What is fascinating is the resemblance between the arguments against church union in Canada and the case against theological modernism in the United States, particularly ­after the reactivation of the Presbyterian Church Association in 1921. Few champions of conservative theology were more articulate than J. Gresham Machen, professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, whose battles with the school and the Presbyterian Church in the u sa spurred him to found Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1929. Machen’s writings provided the intellectual underpinnings for fundamentalist attempts to stall the spread of liberal ideas among evangelical Protestants. Christianity and Liberalism, published in 1923 just as Presbyterians in Canada prepared to take their arguments to congregations and legislatures for what proved to be the last time, had a blunt message: liberalism was un-Christian.68 Liberalism was even more pernicious than other heterodox expressions of Christianity, claimed Machen, since its understanding of God and humanity, its seat of authority, and its approach to salvation constituted a different religion. “We have,” he concluded, “the entrance of paganism into the Church in the name of Christianity,” and he predicted that such churches would soon be “given over altogether to naturalism.”69 Those wondering how Machen might appraise the common faith at the theological heart of the Basis of Union did not have far to look: the opening pages of Christianity and Liberalism belittled all such efforts. “In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about

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which men will fight.”70 His final chapter on “The Church” dismissed “the liberal program for unity” because it was based on the assumption that doctrinal differences were mere trifles, readily resolved by uniting around a program for Christian service.71 Machen condemned the dishonesty of ministers who no longer held to the theological standards of their church, insisting that “evangelical churches are creedal churches.” By implication a so-called creedless church (as critics were fond of calling the proposed united church) was no longer evangelical. He urged those who no longer accepted the Westminster Confession to which they had subscribed at the time of their ordination to join another denomination or start a new church. Commending the Unitarian Church for its honesty, he described it as exactly the home liberals were seeking: “a church without an authoritative Bible, without doctrinal requirements, and without a creed.”72 The General Assembly minority that refused to adjourn after the majority officially constituted the United Church of Canada later approved a resolution to formally thank Machen “for his substantial and continued interest in our cause.” Machen’s letter of support for the continuing Presbyterians, read to the gathering and written into the Acts of Proceedings, reflected his affinity with the anti-union cause. Machen compared the ordeal of the Presbyterians in Canada to events in the United States, and identified their common source: “a compromising interdenominationalism.” Assuring them of prayers of support from around the world, he commended them for their example: “In these days of defection and unbelief, your Church is like a city set on a hill.”73 In addition, Machen provided tangible support for the continuing Presbyterians by recruiting Americans for pastoral charges left vacant because of union, even paying some of their expenses out of his own pocket.74 A number of the ministers arriving from the United States to serve Presbyterian congregations had studied at Machen’s new seminary.75 Church union also came under fire from fundamentalists closer to home. T.T. Shields of Jarvis Street Baptist Church provided local newspapers with colourful descriptions of the union threat. Not even an astronomer skilled in measuring space could determine the distance between church union and the spirit of Christ, he reportedly said. Like Machen, Shields described the United Church as “not Christian, it is essentially pagan; and the movement is a part of the

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general apostasy of the age.”76 The Toronto Telegram reported that on one occasion Shields preached on the subject of church union for over an hour, linking the idea to “Rome” and warning that such a church would attempt to impose its will on a free people: “You will have to have the permission of the United Church to live after a while.”77 The affinity Shields saw between Rome and a united Protestant church was far from apparent to Catholics, who found little to like about union. The Catholic press dismissed the troubles within the Presbyterian Church as typical of the turmoil that had come to characterize Protestantism since the sixteenth-century Reformation. “There is a merry war on among the sects,” reported the Catholic Register, “and Catholics are vastly amused at the game of Presbyterian kettle calling Methodist pot black.” The coverage of the controversy in the daily papers confirmed “that no Presbyterian or Methodist clearly knows what or why he believes” and revealed a “mass of conflicting doctrine, confusing incoherency and bewildering inconsistency” in the squabbling. One thing was clear, observed the editor: “a great part of Protestantism is tainted with modernism and pagan unbelief in Christ’s Divinity and is therefore not Christian in any sense.” The controversy confirmed the Catholic contention “that Protestantism is a bedlam of contradiction, based on the arrogant say-so of cock-sure individualism, and infallible egoism” that doomed it to multiplicity, subdivision, and disintegration.78 The Catholic press joined Presbyterian and fundamentalist critics of the theological basis for union by emphasizing lingering religious differences between the uniting parties. The Antigonish Casket contrasted Presbyterian religion with its “intellectual appeal to reason but a reason carried to fantastic lengths, and soured with gloomy theories taken from the Old Testament” with Methodism’s “appeal to spiritual excitement ... which found expression in writhings on the floor and in despairing abandonment or else in unreasoning certainty of salvation.” The editor could think of no two religions more unalike and described union as “an abandonment by both Methodists and by Presbyterians of all that was ever distinctive in their respective creeds.”79 Theological conservatives and Catholics were not alone in raising doubts about the prospects for uniting under the umbrella of a  common faith. Charles Frederick Paul, the Unitarian editor of Saturday Night, presumably had little theological affinity with

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either fundamentalist or Catholic critics of union, but articles on  church union published in the magazine under his editorship from 1909 until his death in 1926 showed a similar antipathy.80 Pondering the question “Will the uniting parties live happily ever after?” the pseudonymous writer “Josephus the Second” had his doubts. Methodists were “born Cockney” and recruited from the middle and lower classes. Presbyterians were of Scottish heritage and (though Josephus left it unsaid) of a superior class. Theologically, Wesley and Calvin stood on opposite sides of “an unabridged and unbridgeable chasm.” Temperamentally, they differed as well: the Scot, being “undemonstrative, scowls at the Amen corner, and will wait a lifetime before daring to take the sacrament,” whereas the Methodist “was exhorted to testify for the Lord the night of his conversion, was trained to talk in class meeting of his spiritual ups and down, and in general wore his heart upon his sleeve.” Josephus contrasted the dignity of Presbyterian worship services with the informality of Methodist gatherings, where “emotionalism used to swing exuberant Methodists off their base” during revival meetings. He mischievously compared Methodists as the equal of Presbyterians in numbers, missionary zeal, preaching power, vitality of church life, work with youth, and application of Christian principles to social problems – they were a match for Presbyterians “in everything but prestige. They are handicapped by immaturity. They have not the culture.”81 The denigration of the public role that the new church was expected to adopt was just as severe and, given the need to garner legislative support for union, potentially more damaging. The church union bill before Parliament was ominously cast as a debate over whether Canada would have a state-controlled church. Instead of being the Church of Christ, the United Church would become “a civil corporation, a creation of Parliament, a creature of the State, having its existence and name by grace of Parliament, its teachings authorized by Parliament, its life dependent upon the will of Parliament.”82 Social progressives who opposed church union objected to the premise that a united church would be a more effective means of creating a Christian social order in Canada. D.J. Fraser had made no secret of his own liberal leanings over the years. As he prepared for the final General Assembly vote, he summed up the case for his side in the controversy: “What many of us feel to-day is the need of a change of emphasis from legislation to regeneration, from reform to

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redemption, from outward change to inward conversion. The pulpit is not a platform for discussing the questions of the hour, but is a medium for the message of the Eternal.”83 W.D. Tait, professor of psychology at McGill University, agreed, charging unionists with wrongly placing faith in “church organization” as the solution to social problems: “it should be plain to all that the curse of the modern world is organization.” “Organization” stifled effort since “it destroys personality, deadens refined, sensitive feelings and obliterates the genius of the individual.” He concluded that spiritual power “must come from the individual or not at all; and spiritual unity is not a necessary consequence of social or ecclesiastical legislation.”84 Suspicion of a hidden agenda in the guise of church union was pervasive among its critics. E. Lloyd Morrow, author of a book that catalogued their complaints (and himself a supporter of a federation model for ecumenical co-operation),85 was scathing in his analysis of what he called a “Big Merger Church.” A “Big United Protestant Church might cause racial and religious strife in Canada” if Frenchand English-speaking Catholics sensed that their civil and religious liberties were threatened. The past, as he read it, told a different story than the unionists had related: “All history is a protest against the argument of the moral,[sic] and spiritual efficiency of the one big Church idea,” he protested. Protestant national churches had proved to be as decadent as Catholic ones.86 He dismissed as absurd the argument that a Protestant national church was needed to “obliterate these precious religious differences, in order to mould the character of our citizenship.” Canada was already bound together by imperial, national, economic, family, and religious bonds that were unbreakable. “Beware of the religio-political motives for Union,” he warned, for it might actually divide Canada by creating a split with Quebec “if a United Protestant Church were strong enough and unchristian enough to start a quarrel with our fellow-Christians of the Roman Catholic faith.”87 Suspicion about the union movement’s political aims crossed denominational lines and international borders. Once again, those identified as fundamentalists took aim. Machen’s attacks on the “program” of the modern liberal church in the United States was strikingly similar to what was being said in Canada about the proposed united church. There was little emphasis on heaven in the liberal understanding of salvation, said Machen, and liberalism’s emphasis on “this world” had resulted in a religion that was a “mere

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function of the community or of the state.” The liberal Protestant response to new immigrants drew his scorn as an attempt to repress their mother languages in order to produce “a unified American people.” The state had turned to religion to implement its agenda, and immigrants were now greeted with “a Bible in one hand and a club in the other offering them the blessings of liberty. That is what is sometimes meant by ‘Christian Americanization.’”88 Machen’s Canadian readers would have had little difficulty in translating this as an indictment of the unionists’ hopes of Christianizing the social order and creating a new type of Canadian. While he conceded that such tactics might provide a good defence against Bolshevism, produce a united country or a healthy community, and even promote international peace, Christianity for Machen was more than a means to such ends; a religion could no longer be considered “Christian” if it was principally concerned with such objectives.89 He rightly predicted that his assessment of liberalism would be interpreted as an attack on the social gospel, which differed significantly from his own view of the social dimension of the Christian faith. He was particularly suspicious of social Christianity’s view of the state, cautioning that even the family, the most important social institution, was being “pushed into the background by undue encroachments of the community and the state.” He warned readers that soon children would no longer be “surrounded by the loving atmosphere of the Christian home, but by the utilitarianism of the state.”90 Fundamentalists closer to home were likewise worried about what they saw reflected in the founding vision for the new church. T.T. Shields attacked S.D. Chown for claiming that union would result in godly legislation: “The work of the church is not to interfere in politics; and no church body has the right to go to the legislators of the land and ask for legislation, godly or otherwise.” Himself a staunch supporter of temperance, he feared that while union supporters might “succeed in having other Acts such as the O.T.A. [Ontario Temperance Act] written upon the statute books of the land,” they were “forgetting the hearts of the people; and so they bring great joy to the devil.”91 Uneasiness in some quarters of the Anglican Church was reported in the Canadian Churchman, whose editor opined that religion “must be a thing of the heart and of the will, an impelling impulse of life. It would never do to exchange the Church of God for a great social service institution, a law enacting body or an organization to

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spike the guns of the Roman Church.”92 A number of bishops took issue with the paper’s position, stressing that it was not the official organ of the Anglican Church; still, the editorial was a reminder that union was far from popular in some Protestant circles. In the heat of the debate over church union in the Ontario legislature, m p p J.A. McCausland, an Anglican, pronounced the bill as “good as dead.” He explained to the reporter that “we have a legislature here that is not going to let that domineering bunch of Methodists have their own way – that bunch that for the last ten years or so has been telling us what we must eat and drink ... Do you think we Anglicans are going to let Dr Chown tell us what we are to do? I’d see him ...” – at which point words were uttered that the reporter was not allowed to quote!93 Catholics also had misgivings about the political repercussions of church union. An issue of St Peter’s Messenger that came out shortly after the inauguration ceremony expressed shock at how quickly and easily its leaders circumvented the “tests of Holy Scripture,” ­citing as evidence calls for the ordination of women. While United Church ministers were free to “preach the silliest and most absurd doctrines” and “follow the paths of error and darkness to their heart’s content” within their own ranks, the paper drew a line: “when they invoke the power of the law to enforce their petty ideas of reform upon us, when they want to tell us what kind of religious instruction our children are to receive in our schools, when they want to tell us what we should drink, and so on, then we are obliged to call a halt.”94 Secular press coverage of the controversy likewise often displayed the uniting churches and their cause in an unflattering light. Methodists found themselves pictured as power-hungry social climbers. Chown, in particular, drew harsh personal criticism. As one critic put it, “Dr Chown cracked the solidarity whip about his shins, and he changed his Highland fling to the Methodist solidarity goose step. Politico-religious control has arrived.”95 An editorial in the New York Sunday Times on the rise of the church union movement expressed the apprehension of its opponents that the new church would become a political force as “the State Church potentially, though of course not in name, of the English-speaking Provinces.” Union supporters no doubt were dismayed to find the Basis of Union itself quoted as evidence: “There is a clause in the ‘Basis of Union’ which proposes that the United Church of Canada shall

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‘enact such legislation and adopt such measures as may tend to promote true godliness and repress immorality, &c.’” The newspaper had failed to notice that it was quoting from a section of the Basis of Union (8.6.10) outlining the General Council’s responsibilities to regulate the church’s own actions. The American newspaper mistook this for a quite different kind of ‘legislation’ and remarked disapprovingly: “The Dominion has long suffered from church intervention in politics, and knows the tendency of the ecclesiastical temperament to dub as ‘ungodly’ or ‘immoral’ any action or opinion with which it fails to agree.”96 The Act of Parliament that legally formalized church union made it even more suspect in the eyes of those who opposed it. As one letter to the Toronto Telegram put it, “The Dominion Government by confirming the ambitious name it had assumed, and by ratifying its constitution, has to all intents and purposes conferred upon it the dignity of being the Established Church of our New Nation, and all who are not in organic union with it will rank as mere ­dissenters.”97 Saturday Night sounded its usual libertarian alarm: “The question arises whether this co-operation [between church and state] is to take the form of a vast sin-factory for the creation of new statutory offences; and to impose on the rest of the community the Unionist discipline with regard to alcoholic beverages, horse racing, card playing and possibly smoking (for the word ‘narcotics’ is of wide meaning).”98 The unflattering press coverage identified the social agenda of the new church with temperance, and played on the growing unpopularity of prohibition. George Pidgeon suspected that the legislative opposition to church union in Ontario was a way for those who opposed temperance legislation to hit back at the Methodist Church for promoting it.99 Led by R.J. Wilson, the Joint Committee on Church Union vigorously responded to the barrage of criticism. A pamphlet pointedly titled The Fundamentals answered questions raised about the “central truths of evangelical religion.” It upheld the doctrinal section of the Basis of Union, in particular the articles on grace, as being as “clear and strong as any authoritative statement issued by any Church in recent times.”100 Those who took time to read the Basis of Union would have indeed discovered that Article VI, “Of the Grace of God,” declared that “God, out of His great love for the world, has given His only begotten Son to be the Saviour of sinners, and in the

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Gospel freely offers His all-sufficient salvation to all men”; it was followed by articles on Christ’s atonement “for the sins of the whole world,” regeneration, repentance, justification, and sanctification. Supporters of church union also drew attention to the affinity of their cause to the Reformation. Affirming the authority of the Scripture and acknowledging the importance of the ancient creeds, the preamble to the Basis of Union added: “We further maintain our allegiance to the evangelical doctrines of the Reformation” adopted by the uniting traditions. However, the Joint Committee rejected the notion that the competition among post-Reformation denominations was preferable to a national church. Dismissing the characterization of a national church as “medieval” or “Roman,” T.B. Kilpatrick claimed that the United Church was akin to the Protestant model developed in the sixteenth century. Reformers then had envisaged a particular type of Protestant church in each nation. “There is no room, properly, in any one nation, for any other Church than the Church of that nation, which shall be the expression and organ of the national religious life.”101 As the final vote neared, unionists distributed leaflets in an attempt to assuage concerns about political interference. “The United Church has no political aspirations, its primal purpose is to lay the foundation for that unity of soul and conscience, which must come first in all our nation-building,” one pamphlet explained. “By breaking down the barriers of provincialism and sectionalism within itself, the United Church will stand as a symbol of national unity, and it will be the task of the United Church, so far as lies within its power, to create and maintain a United Canada. The United Church of Canada will be one from ocean to ocean; one in the East and in the West, and it will become a uniting influence in the national life.”102 The alternative to the adventure in faith that union promised was “separation from the Mother Church; separation from the great West; separation from foreign missionaries and their work; visionless isolation; unrest and distraction; perpetuation of strife.”103 Little matter, then, whether one were a member of a large con­ gregation such as Bloor Street Presbyterian or a small local-union church in “new Ontario” or the West: each was called to take part in the new venture. Preaching before a crowd described as having “taxed the capacity of Bloor St Presbyterian Church,” George Pidgeon urged the “churches of the east” to “win the whole land for Christ.” Well aware of the appeal that was being made to preserve

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the distinctive features of the Presbyterian tradition, he reminded them that just as a person could shut out the sun by holding a penny too close to the eye, so local differences might blind them to “the greatest opportunity of the age.” If the name “Presbyterian” had to go, it was “only the bursting of the acorn shell in order to let the oak develop,” for the tree could not otherwise grow.104 The printed matter distributed to his congregation included a pamphlet that succinctly presented what the unionists believed to be at stake for them in the upcoming vote: “Consideration of our place within the Nation forbids our remaining aloof, as an independent congregation, and, with almost equal emphasis, suggests that there is no place within a small dissenting group for such work as our people wish to undertake for the sake of Canada.”105 Entering the new United Church with churches like the large and prosperous Bloor Street Presbyterian were hundreds of small and struggling congregations in the West that were heartened by hearing the case for church union: the future of Canada depended on the kind of co-operation they had already demonstrated in their local unions. From his vantage point in Saskatoon, principal E.H. Oliver predicted that a united church would create a “great healing and unifying bond of kindliness and love” between East and West. He was convinced that there could be no turning back, for “the church of the future in Western Canada is a united church; do not make any mistake about that.”106 Demographics seemed to support Oliver’s case. Considering the question of the consequences of reversing the decision to unite, the Manitoba Free Press reported that “it would mean the abandonment of a constructive work of national pro­ portions that has extended over the past sixteen years ... It is not possible to go back without disrupting the life of three thousand congregations scattered over the whole Dominion.”107 Church union supporters may have exaggerated the strength and significance of the union movement in western Canada,108 but the thought of losing such a large block of congregations was sobering. Critics downplayed the spiritual aims of church union; supporters countered with a vision of Christian Canada and its mission in the world. Addressing a gathering at Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto, J.R.P. Sclater painted a vivid picture of what he saw at stake in the controversy. “We have just seen Christian civilization doing its very best, all but successfully, to commit suicide. You have seen the nations reeking with the fumes of war and reeling in

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the shock of it, and that in a professedly Christian world – in the very centre of the Christian domination of the world; and yet people think they are getting on very nicely!” Sclater was not so sanguine. “Stretches of Canada are untouched, stretches of the world unheralded by the Gospel of Jesus Christ; and you say the Church is getting on very nicely! I say it is getting on tragically; and if ever there was a time for men to consider the proper adjustment of the means at their disposal, it is today when we stand amid the ruins left by the greatest catastrophe that has ever befallen Christian civilization.” To him the implications for the church union question were clear: “If, in these days, we cannot learn that the Christian Church has much to unlearn, particularly in regard to its insensate divisions, then we are sunk too deep in self-complacency, even to be taught.”109 And yet going ahead with union held its own dangers once it became apparent that the Presbyterian Church could unite only by dividing. Even some of its earliest supporters began to harbour doubts. By 1916 D.M. Gordon had come to believe that the benefits of union would outweigh the losses. A quarter-century earlier, in the style of King Arthur, he had gathered young theological knights at his Round Table in Halifax. Together they had championed the cause of church union. Now, plagued by ill health that would lead to his retirement as principal of Queen’s University the following year and torn in his loyalties, Gordon’s public statements expressed concern and his private correspondence reflected growing sadness. The tangled personal and professional ties that were frayed by the controversy were evident within Gordon’s own network of family and friends. Daughter Minnie was considered the key organizer of the antis in Kingston, although she declined to hold office in the Presbyterian Women’s League because of her father’s position at the university.110 Son-in-law Will, married to his daughter Katherine, was W.F. Nickle, known in his public life as the anti-union attorney general of Ontario. Yet still supporting the cause of church union were old friends from his Halifax days who, despite his pleas to ­suspend negotiations, insisted on going ahead with union even with the knowledge that many congregations would vote against it. One of those old friends and fellow-knights, Clarence Mackinnon, was elected moderator in 1924 and charged with the responsibility of overseeing the last steps toward union. Gordon was caught on the horns of a dilemma. He had been a  member of the first union committee and long regarded as a

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s­ upporter of a united church. In the story of church union as he remembered it, his committee had assumed that union would only proceed if the whole church supported it.111 It was folly, he wrote in 1916, for the majority to form a united church while its opponents were left with the old name and some of the property.112 His letter of congratulations to Mackinnon on his “elevation to the Moderator’s chair” urged him to consider the costs of forcing a union which, far from fostering spiritual unity, would “open the floodgates to strife, resentment and other destructive forces.” As “the really wise course,” Gordon proposed suspending negotiations with the Methodists and Congregationalists in an effort to go back to the way things were before the 1916 vote. The immediate task for Presbyterians was to restore unity within their own ranks and wait for divine guidance on organic union with others.113 By then Gordon had lost confidence in those who were steering the process. To say he was disappointed in the actions of the Joint Committee was “a very mild expression of my feeling, and it might shrivel up this paper, as with fire, if I were to use anything like adequate language. Words fail me,” he confided in a letter to a friend. His disappointment was palpable as he reminisced about his own early involvement in the movement, concluding that it was premature: “The seed was unduly forced into bloom, and therefore failed to yield the fruit we had hoped for.”114 Yet, other Presbyterians who had opposed union eventually overcame their reservations and joined the United Church. John Mackay soon gave up his fight for federation.115 By the time the United Church was inaugurated in 1925, he was principal of Manitoba College, once headed by his past antagonist Patrick. Even the statistics told two stories of church union and, concludes Moir, could be “juggled to prove whatever one wanted to prove.” By simply counting the number of ballots cast, those against union claimed their support was growing. But many congregations (especially in the West) did not bother to cast ballots since support for union was a foregone conclusion. In the end, about the same number chose to continue as the Presbyterian Church in Canada after 1925 as had voted against union when it was put to a congregational vote in 1911: roughly a third. However, the distribution of dissent was not evenly spread across Canada. According to Moir’s calculations, 21 per cent of the non-concurring congregations were in the Maritimes, 25 per cent in Quebec, 38 per cent in Ontario

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319

4

4,797

–

334

266

550

4,512

115

–

387

572

876

437

1,280

211

203

358

73

Presbyterian

Source: C.E. Silcox, Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences, Table XIV.

171

–

Trinidad

Total

–

Newfoundland

4

24

Alberta

British Columbia

27

Saskatchewan

513

458 1,683

26 64

Quebec

Ontario

Manitoba

263

343

68

Methodist

7

New Brunswick

– 15

Nova Scotia

Congregational

Prince Edward Island

Province / Colony

Before 10 June 1925 (breakdown of 9,480 congregations by denomination)

8,688

115

334

629

1,103

1,394

746

2,530

643

444

633

117

United

8

–

–

–

3

–

–

5

–

–

–

–

Non-concurring Congregational

784

–

–

28

40

22

14

492

52

29

83

24

Non-concurring Presbyterian

After 10 June 1925 (breakdown of 9,480 congregations by denomination)

Table 2.2 Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations before 10 June 1925 and United and non-concurring congregations after 10 June 1925



Controversy and the Construction of Identity

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(particularly the wealthier ones), and less than 5 per cent in the West.116 The vast majority of ministers and overseas missionaries chose to join the United Church, leaving the United Church with a surplus (and the Presbyterians with a shortage) of personnel. Unfortunately for the United Church, the enabling legislation in Ontario and Quebec awarded Knox College in Toronto and Presbyterian College in ­Montreal to the continuing Presbyterians. The loss of Knox College was a particularly bitter pill to swallow, since the new building completed in 1915 had been linked in principal Alfred Gandier’s fundraising activities to preparing leaders for a united church. A decade later he had no choice but to raise money for a new college after he and his faculty, as well as three-quarters of the students, vacated Knox College.117 It is hard to gauge the impact of this bitter, protracted, and at times unseemly controversy. The continuing resistance to church union secured the survival of the Presbyterian Church in Canada by denying the claim of the founders of the United Church that its name had been carried into union. The dispute thereby became a defining moment in shaping the identity of the continuing Presbyterians. But it forged the identity of the United Church as well: first impressions of the new church and its leaders were formed while watching the two sides argue. The public was thus exposed to two sets of convictions about the mission of the church, particularly in the North and West, as well as tactical disagreements over how to carry it out.118 Tensions heightened when anti-union groups converged with anti-modernist theology to cast the Methodist and Congregationalist union partners in an unfavourable light. The effective use of such disparaging terms as “creedless” and “political club” created an impression that the United Church found hard to shake long after 1925. And by becoming modernists in the eyes of fundamentalists, their claim to be a stream of the evangelical tradition was suddenly suspect in some circles. What can be said with certainty is that out of the controversy came two stories about church union. As told by the continuing Presbyterians, it was a tale of the rise of a new sect misnamed “The United Church of Canada.” As lovers of liberty, the Presbyterian Church in Canada was willing to let them leave, as long as they left the trusts and property – and, of course, the name – behind. Ephraim Scott complained that the phrase “you’ll never know the difference”

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had been “a constant opiate to Presbyterians, to dull them during the attempted extinction of their Church.”119 Little wonder that many years later, the history of First United Church in Victoria, bc, observed that “congregations in the Presbyterian tradition,” like theirs, were “reputedly loath” to give up their old name. It was not until 1937 that the superscription “Former Presbyterian Church” was ­removed from its own notices and bulletin board.120 The story as told by the founders of the United Church emphasized that they had not given up their heritage, nor anything essential to their traditions – only their old names. Writing shortly after union, another minister in British Columbia was still defending the case for church union: “We fully and gladly concede then that The United Church must be something different from any Church to which we belonged before union came. It should be capable of larger views and larger undertakings, and it must be ready for new experiences. That does not mean, however, that we are to lose any vital thing which was in our history or experience.”121 The whole of the Methodist Church and nearly all of the Congregationalist churches were persuaded that it was so. A significant minority of Presbyterians were not so sure. Both sides of the controversy that ensued claimed to be preserving the past, and each constructed an identity that initially denied the right of the other to exist. One of the terms of the 1938 ceasefire was the acknowledgement that both could claim continuity with the pre1925 Presbyterian Church in Canada.122 The Presbyterian Church in Canada survived alongside the United Church, but the financial and emotional cost for both was high. Property was divided; so were families, friends, and co-workers. Was it worth it? There was little time to ponder that question once former Presbyterians joined former Methodists, former Congregationalists, and the recently created local union congregations to become “The United Church of Canada.”

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Principal George Monro Grant, early promoter of church union, n.d. The Presbyterian Church in Canada Archives, G-6424-FC.

Rev. Samuel Dwight Chown, Methodist general superintendent [1903?]. u cca, 76.001P / 1008. Official represen­ tative of the Methodist Church at the United Church of Canada inaugural ceremony in 1925.

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Rev. George Campbell Pidgeon, Presbyterian moderator and first moderator of the United Church of Canada, n.d. uc c a , 76.001P / 5163. Official represen­ tative of the Presbyterian Church in Canada at the United Church of Canada inaugural ceremony in 1925.

Rev. William Henry Warriner, Congregational Union chairman, 1925. uc c a 76.001P / 6998. Official represen­ tative of the Congregational Church at the United Church of Canada inaugural ceremony in 1925.

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Rev. Ephraim E. Scott, leader of the non-concurring Presbyterians [1925?]. The Presbyterian Church in Canada Archives, G-380-MC.

Winnifred Thomas, CGIT leader and member of the Dominion Board of the wms, receiving L.L.D. from Mount Allison University, Sackville, nb, 18 October 1945. u cca, 76.001P / 6608.

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Rev. Andrew Roddan (left), minister of First United Church in Vancouver, with an unidentified colleague and unemployed Chinese men in shantytown, Vancouver, [193-?]. u cca, 93.049P / 4592.

Rev. John Line, professor of theology at Emmanuel College [1950?]. Victoria University Archives.

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Deaconess interviewing a woman applying for help from Fred Victor Mission [1957?]. u cca, 90.115P / 509.

Margaret H. Brown (left) greeting Katharine Hockin (right) at the Chinese border as she leaves the mission field after the civil war, December 1951. u c c a , 76.001P / 2720.

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Dedication to Mission Ceremony (Church of the Master, Toronto; Rev. J. Arnold Foster). Representatives of Explorers, Junior and Senior c gi t, Tyro, Sigma-C, and Tuxis present mission funds to chairman of Missionary and Maintenance Committee. Berkeley Studio, [196-?]. uc c a , 2008.011P / 2245.

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Lois Freeman (centre), candidate for ministry (later Rev. Lois Wilson, first female moderator); with other candidates from Westminster United Church, Winnipeg; Rev. Allen R. Huband (left); and Rev. Reid Vipond (right), 1948. Courtesy of Lois M. Wilson.

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Rev. James Mutchmor (left) being installed as the moderator by retiring moderator Rev. Hugh McLeod, 1962. uc c a , 76.001P / 4139.

Rev. Donald Murray Mathers, ­professor of theology at Queen’s Theological College, holding a copy of The Word and the Way. E.L. Homewood, The United Church Observer, 1962. uc ca, 76.001P / 3940.

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3 The Mission and the “Machinery” First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do. Epictetus

S.D. Chown had reason to be well pleased as he prepared to introduce the newly formed United Church to the Christian Union Quarterly’s international readership. With the inaugural service behind him, the man often hailed as the architect of church union enthusiastically divulged what he saw in store: God was calling this young church to observe Christian principles and practices “more fully than they have been obeyed in any previous period in the history of the Church of Christ.” This would entail advancing in key areas: rescuing sinners from sin through individual conversion; solving social problems; banishing superstitions and half-truths from the faith; carrying the Gospel to “the uttermost parts of the earth”; and promoting Christian unity. He warned that a bleak future awaited a church that emphasized only a fraction of Christ’s message: “inward deformity and comparative spiritual impotence,” even if outward disaster were avoided. Of his own church’s destiny, however, he seemed confident: “We believe we have now constituted a church well built and strong in every part, all its machinery being adapted, or soon to be adapted, to the purposes we desire to fulfil.”1 The United Church was organized religion – and proud of it. “Religion, and especially the Christian religion, carries so much social significance that organization is an evident necessity,” explained a study book prepared for the Young People’s Society. There was work that individual Christians could undertake alone, and work that was better done together. Some tasks could be undertaken by local congregations, but others needed the support of the wider church.2 This principle underlay the organizational culture of the

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United Church from the outset. According to the Basis of Union, the Session’s duties for governing the congregation included organizing meetings “for Christian fellowship, instruction and work” (5.10.1). Through the United Church’s connectional design, the activities of these congregations were linked to the General Council’s national boards, whose many committees intersected with regional structures (eleven conferences divided into just over a hundred presbyteries) comprised of ministers and lay representatives. What the United Church stood for was thus conveyed not only by making theological pronouncements but also by determining ­institutional priorities in board reports and allocating resources ­accordingly through unified budget proposals and programming.3 In particular, the Board of Christian Education, the Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e&ss), the Board of Home Missions, the Board of Foreign (later Overseas) Missions, and the Woman’s Missionary Society (wms) were to act as repositories of the opportunities and challenges the United Church faced in its early years. Those who ran the “machinery” were expected to convert its vision of a national church into programs that would prepare its members for Christian citizenship. The distribution of duties within the United Church was in keeping with changes already underway in denominations across North America before 1925.4 Methodists were often fingered as the ringleaders in this shift toward centralization, but Presbyterians had ­developed a penchant for a similar bureaucratic style. The uniting traditions had already incorporated into their denominational structures some of the work that had been done earlier by such religious voluntary associations as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Lord’s Day Alliance, and various missionary societies.5 In harmonizing their organizational practices with this North American trend, they embraced what sociologist Gibson Winter describes as the Protestant pattern of organization – a burgeoning administrative staff, centralization of fund allocation and fundraising, and boards with specialized functions.6 The United Church’s national leaders and agencies, housed for many years in what had been the headquarters of the Methodist Church at 299 Queen Street West in Toronto, developed bold proposals in keeping with the church’s lofty aims. The hope was that the programs they designed and the practices they modelled would be

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Table 3.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1931 United Church Canada Prince Edward Island Nova Scotia New Brunswick

Total population

Membership

% of population

10,376,786

2,017,375

19.44

88,038

21,979

24.97

512,846

110,548

21.56

408,219

61,176

14.99

Quebec

2,874,255

88,253

3.07

Ontario

3,431,683

973,768

28.38

Manitoba

700,139

176,240

25.17

Saskatchewan

921,785

243,399

26.41

Alberta

731,605

176,816

24.17

British Columbia

694,263

164,750

23.73

Northwest Territories

9,723

94

.97

Yukon Territory

4,230

352

8.32

Source: Census of Canada (1931), vol. II, Table 38.

replicated at the regional and local levels. Standardized procedures lent a corporate cast to church life, but they also connected congregations, many of them rural or remote, and facilitated internal blending of regional differences. For example, religious education programs were designed for use across Canada, although there were regional variations in what caught on. A memory course developed in the 1930s that included Bible verses, hymns, prayers, and graces was “splendidly received” in most places, but used more widely in Maritime Conference than all others combined.7 The United Church followed the lead of other secular and denominational organizations by compartmentalizing its youth ­ programs by age and sometimes by gender. In addition to coeducational Sunday schools and the Young People’s Society, it sponsored Canadian Girls in Training (c gi t ) for girls in their teens, Trail Rangers for boys age twelve to fourteen, Tuxis Boys for those fi ­ fteen and older), and an Older Boys’ Parliament.8 The administration of religious education was largely handled by male church executives, leaving them with less time to work with the boys themselves. Meanwhile, the female religious education leaders focused on a

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more modest but manageable mandate: putting programs in place in local congregations.9 Winnifred Thomas illustrates the pivotal role of the national staff in promoting such programs. Instrumental in organizing cg i t in 1917, she later served in administrative positions that included secretary of the Committee on Women Workers (1925–31) and membership on the Dominion Board of the w m s (1932–53). Thomas decisively shaped the educational philosophy that was credited with c g it’s growth.10 Launched in Ontario, it soon expanded across the country by building on the resources of the yw ca and nesting its program in congregations. The United Church welcomed it as part of its religious education program, a relationship that seems to have been mutually beneficial: although cg i t was designed to be inter-denominational, its membership and ethos was predominantly United Church.11 The gendered pattern of participation in church programs continued beyond the teen years. Women had come to significantly outnumber men in their involvement in church life. The difficulty of inducing men to become involved was a concern that the United Church shared with other North American denominations. At the beginning of the century, some influential religious education leaders (notably American George Coe) had hoped that modernism’s focus on scientific methods would be an antidote to the ‘feminization’ of the church.12 In most congregations, men attended public worship and were on church committees but were only occasionally involved in Sunday school, choir, or Bible study. At the local level, women handled nearly all the community service, religious education, and missionary support.13 The Lay Advisory Council reported in 1944 that numbers from the previous year indicated that of the denomination’s 721,184 communicants, there were a “not inconsiderable” 10,930 involved in men’s organi­ zations. However, that number paled in comparison to the 131,859 women in the wms alone, prompting the comment that “much more ought to be done to enlist our layfolk in planned and active participation in the various efforts of the Church.”14 The United Church directed much of its energy in this regard ­toward encouraging membership in As One That Serves (ao t s ), a Methodist men’s club in Vancouver that began to spread across Canada just before church union. Advertised as “a men’s service club within the church” and “a non-party, non-racial society for Christian fellowship – in the church, in the community, in politics, in business

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and in our own homes,” aot s offered a broad range of programs for young men, such as leadership training for the Older Boys’ Parliament. “Faithful committee work” was the “hallmark of full membership” in ao t s, and men were assured that there was “room for every member on the various committees of a well-organized club.”15 Every United Church congregation was urged to form an aots group that would gather for study, prayer, conversation, and service. It was considered of “supreme importance” that members “prove their fellowship with Jesus Christ at their points of daily contact.”16 Although not all congregations complied, ao t s was to become the United Church’s most successful organized group for men.17 It was women’s groups, however, that proved to be more enduring symbols of organizing for service within and beyond the congregation. The largest was the wms. There was a mood of exhilaration, recalled Jean Forbes, as ninety women from across Canada gathered to merge three missionary societies at the inaugural service for the new wms held at Toronto’s Bloor Street United Church in October 1926. Its members considered themselves “missionary-minded world citizens, a part of the world-wide fellowship of Christians, with whom we were co-workers in Christ’s cause and in the extension of His Kingdom.” But supporting missions in Canada also “appealed strongly, as something near at hand, within their ken, and for the well-being of their own country.”18 The name “Woman’s Missionary Society” hardly does justice to its scope. Along with the evangelistic, educational, and medical work abroad, the wms ran hospitals, various types of school homes for indigenous and other (notably Ukrainian) children, a broad range of community programs in both urban and rural areas, and ministries to new immigrants in Canada.19 At its peak its activities included not only women’s auxiliaries but also baby bands, mission bands and circles, and affiliated c gi t groups from which it aimed to recruit the next generation of members.20 In addition to Missionary Monthly and study books for adults, the w m s published World Friends for youth. Its auxiliaries formed “a great company of women banded together in a fellowship which brings to each member a richer religious experience, a broader vision of the world and its needs, and an opportunity to share in the extension of God’s Kingdom in Canada and other lands.”21 wms activities went far beyond customary missionary support. One of its programs, Community Friendship, arranged for visits to

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immigrants and others new to the community, as well as to the sick and other shut-ins. Its objectives were broadly understood to include study and promotion of social issues, with causes such as temperance, racial awareness, and world peace promoted as part of “Christian Citizenship.”22 In effect, it functioned as the female arm of e& ss, as well as sharing responsibilities for home and foreign missions. In local missionary societies, women sowed the seeds of Canada’s commitment to internationalism and multiculturalism as they learned about Christian friendship abroad and Christian citizenship at home. Confident of the worth of their collective endeavours, they gathered (often in a member’s home) to pray, study, raise funds, and socialize. Criticism of projects such as the residential schools occasionally surfaced, but reassurance was readily at hand in annual reports that spoke glowingly of the good accomplished. “Great stress is laid on the physical care of the pupils,” noted one report that described the medical and dental care provided by the wms-sponsored missionaries. “The Indian women are not neglected and a goodly number have been given a new interest through baby clinics and weekly meetings and particularly through the formation of small Auxiliaries where they feel themselves a part of the great company of interested women.”23 Some women in the United Church elected to join the Woman’s Association (wa ) instead of (or in addition to) the missionary society.24 Organized after church union to continue the work of the Ladies’ Aid, the wa raised funds for local projects and contributed a significant portion of its resources to the church’s budget to cover such functions as turkey suppers, fairs and bazaars, and community relief work. When money was needed to install electric lights, improve the sanctuary, or purchase new hymn books, collection plates, or communion sets, “the ladies” were there. Congregational histories are replete with illustrations of these groups in action. For instance, a letter from a minister in Prince George, bc, told the story of the struggle with finances at Knox United Church. Its representatives met with someone from the Board of Home Missions to deal with its debt. “At last with a little give and take, we finally agreed that we could handle the situation if the debt was reduced to $3000.00 to be paid off at the rate of $300.00 a year. Hope revived! In those lean years $300.00 was no small sum to raise. But the ladies (Bless ’em) did it mostly.” The chronicler of another congregation’s history credited “the mysterious manner seemingly known only

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to  this organization” for straightening out the congregation’s fi­ nances. “Church work was made not only more successful but also more pleasant and personal by the social gatherings sponsored by the ladies.”25 The w ms and wa were committed to serving others, but these organizations also benefited the women involved. The empowerment they experienced was summed up well by Margaret McPherson: “Even the most paternalistic, chauvinist man could not deny his wife or his daughter the right to get together for mission work; and so they learned how to conduct meetings, how to write minutes, how to make reports, to handle money.”26 They exemplified the virtues of organized religion as they attended meetings, studied, engaged in fundraising, and offered hospitality. On the whole, women were conspicuous by their absence in the United Church’s executive leadership,27 leaving the men to talk as though they owned the administrative machinery. But at the local level, women knew how to work the system too, especially in these organizations run by women. It was assumed that those who operated the denominational machinery had the means to speak to United Church congregations; it was also assumed that they would speak for its members on moral and social issues at home and ecumenical affairs abroad. Administrative departments within the United Church bore names similar to those in other North American denominations, suggesting an ecumenical kinship and easing worldwide communication (at least at the executive level) with other Protestant churches.28 Representatives chosen to attend ecumenical gatherings tended to be among the United Church’s most able executives, ministers, and lay leaders; their names crop up over and over in lists of conference speakers, contributors to publications, and committees for major ecumenical events. Suggested initiatives were often adapted to the United Church’s context upon their return. The relationship with the Federal Council of Churches is a case in point. The United Church became an affiliate member in the biennium between 1932 and 1934 (the only non-U.S. church to do so). The congruence of the work of e&ss with the moral and social causes promoted by the Federal Council of Churches in the 1930s is striking. For instance, both ­organized (largely disappointing) national evangelistic campaigns, undertook research on economic issues, and prepared a report on marriage and the family around the same period.29

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The agenda of the United Church and its denominational partners owed much to a groundbreaking missionary conference held in Jerusalem in 1928 that reinforced links within international ecumenism. Time and place were loaded with symbolic significance: Easter in Jerusalem, the city where, on the Day of Pentecost, people from many lands witnessed the birth of the Christian church. Churches from around the world were presented with a frank assessment of the difficulties of communicating the Christian message. The world had dramatically changed since 1910, the year that thousands of delegates and observers had left the historic World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh committed to co-operation in evangelizing the world and extending the influence of Christian civilization.30 The interwar period was to prove an unusually challenging time in  which to honour that pledge. The new energy and enthusiasm for world missions unleashed at the Edinburgh gathering, and the ­assumptions about globalization upon which they were based, were soon imperilled.31 The First World War was to hamper the mis­ sionary enterprise. The principle of self-determination preached by Woodrow Wilson at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference flew in the face of old assumptions about homogeneity and assimilation that underlay attempts to obliterate or at least transcend racial and ethnic differences under the banner of Christian unity.32 The old watchword of “evangelization of the world in this generation” that had inspired those at Edinburgh in 1910 raised very different questions for those gathered nearly two decades later as they considered a new theme: “The World Message of Christianity.” Joining the Canadian contingent in Jerusalem as an observer was E.W. Wallace, who had recently returned to Canada after serving many years as a Methodist missionary to China. His perceptive reports about what he had witnessed at the gathering identified the key issues to which the United Church and its ecumenical partners would respond over the next decade. In addresses and essays, including ten articles for the New Outlook, Wallace prepared the United Church for tactical shifts in what he billed as a new approach to missions.33 As he saw it, the Jerusalem meeting marked the beginning of a “new day in the life of the whole Christian movement.” The change of direction was evident in the delegate selection, with over half representing “mission lands,” which were primarily in Africa and Asia.34 It was, he claimed, the first time in history that the whole

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world was “directly represented in a Christian gathering”35 (although Catholic delegates were conspicuously absent). The Jerusalem meeting approached evangelism from an unconventional perspective. Instead of a map of the world with unevangelized areas painted in black (a familiar visual aid at missionary gatherings), those gathered in Jerusalem were challenged to think rather of the “dark continents” of human existence, where the Spirit of Christ was absent – to racial conflict, industrial relations, and rural life for instance.36 So the mission field now included the West, quashing the idea of “sending” and “receiving” countries. Even references to “older” and “younger” churches were questioned as the focus shifted from the duration to the degree of Christianization manifest in the social order. The focus on Christianization was further sharpened by linking it to a more expansive approach to evangelism.37 The consensus at Jerusalem was that evangelism should involve the practical implications of the Christian message, as well as its proclamation. Any activity that delivered the message of Jesus Christ was viewed as evangelism, with preaching, teaching, and healing in particular representing the full range of Jesus’ own ministry.38 However, spreading that message and advancing the Kingdom of God by calling for both individual and social redemption once again drew the ire of fundamentalists, who disparaged it as a “soulless” social gospel.39 Conferences are rarely as momentous as those who plan and attend them expect, but Wallace could feel change in the air at the Jerusalem meeting. Its effect was perhaps amplified because ideas that its organizers billed as new and groundbreaking had already been given a test run and were gaining support in missionary circles. Notably, Jerusalem provided an international platform for Daniel Fleming of Union Theological Seminary in New York.40 Described by one historian as “the most prolific, influential, and creative liberal theorist of missions between the world wars,”41 Fleming was already known in Canadian mission circles. Nearly half the students at the Canadian School of Missions in Toronto had enrolled in a one-week course he offered in 1927–28. There they were no doubt introduced to ideas from Fleming’s recent book, provocative when first published in 1925 and soon to be disseminated in missionary circles ­after the Jerusalem meeting. Published reports communicated the meeting’s message to missionary boosters around the world. Its

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proceedings were studied in many educational settings, the Canadian School of Missions among them, and discussed at formal and informal gatherings.42 Coming so soon after union, the conference evidently made a deep impression on United Church leaders. They were heartened by its message, and proved adept at adapting its insights to their work. Its principles found a warm welcome at the executive level, and were popularized in many congregations by ministers and missionary societies. Wallace himself redesigned his course for Emmanuel College students preparing for ministry to introduce them to this new ­approach to missions.43 Four years after the auspicious meeting in Jerusalem, Wallace (by then president and chancellor of Victoria University) announced to the 1932 General Council that the old missionary maps of unevangelized lands were gone, replaced by a focus on “the unevangelized areas of life which are found in Canada as well as places like Africa or India.”44 Before its final benediction, the 1932 General Council would set an ambitious agenda that accented Christianizing all areas of life. Among the program initiatives was support for a joint committee of the four largest Protestant churches chaired by George Pidgeon, tellingly called a movement for the evangelization of Canadian life. It also called for related studies that were presented two years later as “Evangelism” and “Christianizing the Social Order.” These noteworthy reports placed the United Church squarely in the camp of international ecumenism in its assumptions about the mission of the church and the significance of its social role.45 Those who think of the social gospel as the wellspring of the United Church’s “social passion” often overlook the missionary movement as a driving force. Church union supporters were among those committed to the evangelization of the world in this generation after Edinburgh. Jesse Arnup, who along with James Endicott and A.E. Armstrong formed the triumvirate in charge of the Board of Foreign Missions after union, saw “abundant evidence that a world vision and a world purpose” was shared by the founders. Indeed the United Church’s “ultimate objective was always set down as the evangelization of the world,” he informed readers of his study book for missionary societies and the Young People’s Union (yp u ) in 1937.46 His description of the scope of the church’s outreach was likewise ambitious: “Of set purpose it aims to make Canada wholly Christian; but

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its ultimate objective is nothing less than the fulfillment of God’s purpose for the whole world.”47 The long-standing resolve to build the Kingdom of God and thereby create “His Dominion” in Canada lingered in the evangelistic language of home missions supporters,48 and translated easily to the new aim of Christianizing all areas of life.” It meshed well with the aspirations of moral and social reformers who advocated relating Christian principles to social realities, thereby enjoying the support of many at e&ss, whose coterie of paid staff and elected volunteers included a number of prominent activists and some of the church’s best minds. Among them was Ernest Thomas, the brilliant and at times acerbic associate secretary. Thomas praised the Jerusalem meeting (along with the first World Conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne in 1927 and the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference a year later) for proposing an approach to evangelism that differed “from all revivalist movements,” some of which were “far from sharing the aim or the outlook” of its message.49 What is sometimes referred to as the “social gospel ethos” made a lasting impact on the United Church, in large part because the enthusiasm for missions at home and abroad bolstered key aspects of e& ss’s progressive agenda.50 The work of proclaiming the gospel while providing practical assistance was shared by missionary societies and two mission boards, which had at their disposal much larger budgets for education, hospitals, etc. than e & s s alone. The missionary movement, with its many voices, deeper pockets, and undeniable link to the evangelical impulse of the past, joined the cause of moral and social crusaders in Christianizing all areas of life. With every land now considered a mission field, even small congregations (often the recipients of mission support) were acquainted with programs designed on the assumption that Christianizing the social order was a missionary task. Much was made of the United Church’s unique opportunity in this regard. Church union propagandist R.J. Wilson was characteristically assertive in presenting the opportunities ahead.51 With the “larger part” of Canada’s population living in rural areas, few, if any, Protestants would be out of reach: “the vast majority of them will find that The United Church is the only Church doing Christian work in the areas where they settle.” It was, he added, the United Church’s aim to “claim every community in Canada for Christ and to minister in His name to all, regardless of creed, language or color,

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who need her help, and who are dependent on her for comfort and instruction in the Gospel.”52 Likewise Jesse Arnup portrayed the United Church as a church committed to assisting others. Since more than half of its pastoral charges received support from mission funds, the United Church was, he claimed, a home mission church,53 operating in at least twenty-five languages as well as serving “isolated Indians and white communities in the far West and North.”54 He was particularly pleased about ministry to indigenous peoples that had been provided as the land in Canada came under the “control and occupancy of the white man.” It had become “apparent that the future welfare of the Indian would be contingent upon his ability to adapt himself to new and still changing conditions of life,” he explained. Both the churches and the government had stepped in – the churches accepting the “duty” of evangelization, the government meeting its economic and social obligations under the terms of various treaties by constructing buildings and, in the case of day schools, providing salaries for the teachers. It was, in Arnup’s estimation, a partnership that had “worked out to the advantage of all parties.”55 Arnup presented a glowing account of the educational program of the residential schools as an alternative to day schools: “Immoral customs among the pagan Indians, unsatisfactory home life, the ­absence of parental discipline, nomadic habits, the activities and influence of the medicine man, all served to neutralize the effect of Christian teaching, given for only a few hours each day.”56 Not only did residential schools help Indians to become better citizens of Canada; they were preserving aboriginal culture by sparking a “revival of Indian art and design,” including totem poles and Cowichan sweaters.57 Arnup boasted of the educational and professional success of graduates who scored well on high school entrance exams and went on to become teachers, nurses, and ministers.58 This was a theme repeated in other study materials and reports.59 In seeking to Christianize the social order, the United Church worked in partnership with various levels of government to ‘Canadianize’ immigrants and indigenous peoples. Efforts to create a common culture by providing pastoral care to those who were ‘different’ were accepted as necessary and constructive, a way of creating a better nation. To those who wondered whether such efforts were still necessary, given the restrictions on immigration after 1925, the Missionary Monthly responded with an unequivocal “yes.” Mrs J. Erle

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Jones estimated that 80 per cent of immigrants already in Canada were not connected to any Christian church, and described them as drifters who had lost faith even in what they had once been taught to believe. She warned, “If we Christian people let them adrift we are responsible for a great menace which may threaten Canada.” She urged readers to “show them that the Church is ready and eager to help them to become the citizens they ought to be.”60 Readers of missionary reports and study materials learned about United Church activities in small, remote, or linguistically diverse communities (many of them identified as “Non-Anglo-Saxon”). Such work was crucial in efforts to become “the Church of the rural areas and the Prairies,” noted R.B. Cochrane, secretary of the Board of Home Missions in 1938. “Paganism in one form or another is as real in the life of our Dominion as in the heart of Africa,” he claimed, predicting that “we shall not overtake our missionary task abroad until we get an awakening at home!”61 J.I. MacKay, superintendent of the Church of All Nations in Toronto, was also concerned about the future of Canada. He admitted in his preface to The World in Canada that his own choice of title for his missionary study book had been “Can the Church Save Canada?,” for he feared that the country might disintegrate. Canada’s people (or their parents) had come from “the ends of the earth,” he wrote, bringing with them “all the things that make for antagonism and discord, improperly related, but with the qualities also that will make for harmony and beauty and strength if wisely coordinated.” The church’s “unparalleled opportunity” in the midst of this complex situation was to save this “world in Canada” and thereby “point the way to the saving of the larger world.”62 One did not have to live in a remote community in Canada, or in another country, to encounter the United Church’s missionizing impulse. Most congregations had to look no further than their own wms meetings, where local missionary educators were well positioned to promote ideas that were current in ecumenical circles. At a time when most denominations (including the United Church) had separated the administration of home missions and foreign missions, the wms remained responsible for both, and was able to explore the interconnections between them. Historians have wondered how the social ideals of national denominational leaders were communicated to local congregations – what Richard Allen describes as the “underbrush” of church life.63 Perhaps a clue lies in the organizational

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structure of these missionary societies with their connections to women in local congregations. Those wanting to find the women who seem to be missing from standard accounts of the social gospel movement might do well to look more closely there.64 Many United Church leaders had come to believe, like their ecumenical counterparts, that the key to world harmony was a new international order based on Christian friendship.65 They considered the missionary cause an essential precursor of peace, and praised the missionaries themselves as “builders of that world-wide community of Christians which is at once the embodiment and the instrument of world brotherhood and the basis of world peace.”66 In a world threatened by the rise of aggressive nationalism in some countries, the missionary’s role became even more important to global unity, insisted Arnup.67 But others, including the predictably provocative Daniel Fleming, were beginning to ask difficult questions about the Anglo-Saxon form of nationalism unwittingly spread by the early missionary movement.68 Ironically, the antiWestern nationalism that was rising in many parts of the world was at odds with Christian internationalism, heralding complications for missions in years to come. “Doors are open everywhere,” mission reports claimed. Missionaries themselves reported that opportunities abounded if only staffing and money could be found to support them. The idea that their years of sacrifice might come to naught due to a lack of funds likely caused many to inflate opportunities and overstate the strategic importance of a Christian presence in their area.69 However, events soon belied their optimism. With money for existing programs in short supply and hostility to their presence as foreigners on the rise, missionaries’ reports sounded increasingly desperate. Evangelistic work was particularly vulnerable, and even educational and medical work was not as welcome as in the past. A special committee formed to advise the church on how to deal with its financial crisis frankly stated another problem: “We cannot win the world for Christ to-day on the strategy of a century ago or even twenty-five years ago.”70 The committee’s recommended objectives and methods drew explicitly on the current assumptions and strategies of the international missionary movement, emphasizing an expansive approach to evangelism that involved preaching, teaching, and healing.71 However, even the usually sanguine Arnup sounded apprehensive as he described the new world the church was

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facing. The missionary enterprise was in jeopardy – and so too was the future of the church. “You cannot think of God except as a missionary God,” he warned. “So it is with the Church. Rob it of its missionary purpose and passion and you remove both its right and its power to carry on.”72 Meanwhile, there were indications that Canada’s own national aspirations and the rise of what Doug Owram calls the “service state” (which defined itself by the help it offered to its citizens) were affecting the United Church’s mission by changing its role as a service provider. After the First World War, the government had extended its authority by taking on new social responsibilities.73 State-funded public agencies soon superseded voluntary associations and rivalled both churches and service clubs in providing social services they could not afford to match. Such increases in government spending would have been unthinkable only a short time earlier, remarked Frank Stapleford approvingly as he observed the scene in 1925. Stapleford was a United Church (formerly Methodist) minister and head of Toronto’s Neighbourhood Workers Association, which he had helped found in 1918. He reckoned that social work had been transformed by a more confident attitude about what human beings could accomplish and an assumption that change was the result of social research. Whereas churches continued to organize philanthropic enterprises such as orphanages, rescue homes, settlement houses, and inner-city missions, these establishments were increasingly run by welfare institutions under non-religious auspices.74 This shift in delivery of social services was to have important implications for the United Church in the coming decades. Was it time to hand over even more administrative responsibility to the state and secular agencies? Stapleford himself was unperturbed by that prospect, pointing out that since the boards of even so-called secular institutions were still comprised of men and women holding deep religious convictions, churches need not be discomfited by this trend. He guessed that over 90 per cent of those doing either professional or volunteer social work in Toronto were religiously inspired. According to Stapleford, the church had a critical role to play in energizing social initiatives and raising awareness of the connections between moral and economic issues – especially among business leaders (obviously considered in need of such education and enlightenment).75

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Others were less certain. By the 1930s, a more sombre mood pervaded discussions of the church’s relationship to the state, a marked contrast to the energetic and enterprising spirit of social reformers at  the turn of the century. Social welfare and prohibition were among  the issues that complicated the church’s working relationships with various levels of government. Like Stapleford, the United Church had initially assumed it would become an integral part of Canadian society and a shaper of its values, particularly in moral matters. With its offer of friendly service to the nation, the newly founded church had expected a supportive, or at least neutral, state partner that could be persuaded to advance a progressive social agenda. It saw itself as neither totally accommodating of nor completely separate from secular culture. For many United Church leaders, losing the fight for prohibition was an eye-opener. It revealed a different reality: a state with diverging interests on particular issues, unresponsive, and at times even hostile to the church’s agenda. Prohibition was the public policy issue with which the United Church, at the time of its founding, was most closely identified. Despite considerable church effort to sway the political debate, the tide turned against temperance as one province after another rejected prohibition and adopted government control of the sale of alcoholic beverages.76 Ironically, tax revenues from such purchases (and from the proceeds of gambling, which the United Church also opposed) were badly needed to fund the new social services the church favoured. Prohibition was a reminder of the complexity of the church’s relationships with federal and provincial governments, whose ­ ­decisions proved more resistant than expected to united Protestant influence. For temperance supporters it was sobering to see their concerns dismissed or ignored. The state had become not only an  unreliable consociate but also an obstacle to moral reform. Misgivings surfaced among some ardent social reformers, wary of relying too heavily on the state to implement the church’s social policies.77 Ernest Thomas found himself at odds with some of his colleagues for questioning their calls for legal prohibition of alcohol and reminding them that attempts to coerce people by legislation to become non-drinkers no longer enjoyed wide public support. His efforts to inject a dose of reality into discussions alienated many in the church.78 Thomas did not live to see the United Church accept his strategy in the 1950s: promoting of personal abstinence

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through education and building of consensus through persuasion rather than coercive prohibition legislation. If the task of the church was to Christianize all areas of life, where did politics fit in? How far should the church go in siding with particular political parties? Was the church limited to presenting general Christian principles when making pronouncements about moral and social issues? These were questions that threatened to substitute political quarrels for theological ones over where to draw the line between theology and partisan politics. D.L. Ritchie, dean of the newly formed United Theological College in Montreal, alluded to the customary distinction between religion and politics when he warned that the church’s efforts to build a new social order would not be advanced either by mingling organized politics with religion or by the church becoming an extension of a particular political party. Only by refusing to become political would pastors remain prophetic; they were to be spiritual teachers who presented ideals and principles rather than political contestants who translated them into policy. Their part was to redeem the role of the politician by honouring and supporting those who discharged their responsibilities faithfully, and to encourage the best persons in their midst to consider public service as a worthy calling. Ritchie put out a special plea for the church to use its considerable influence with women to encourage them to regard public office as a suitable position for their husbands (though apparently not for themselves).79 Fresh questions about the role of the church in politics were asked after the organization of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (c c f ) party in 1932, in which some United Church ministers were conspicuously involved. D.N. McLachlan, secretary of e & s s , repeated the standard position of the executive leadership: the United Church had no interest in promoting any particular party, whether left or right. On the other hand, being non-partisan did not mean remaining silent, he insisted, and the church reserved “the right at all times to cry out against injustice and wrong.” If this was not part of the church’s mission, he added, the church had no mission.80 Still, not everyone agreed on what that meant in the real world of politics. Anti-prohibitionists outside the United Church had long memories of what to them smacked of the church dabbling in politics to promote temperance legislation. Critics of the United Church’s statements on economic issues archly noted that “prohibition” was now extended from the use of alcohol to the making of profits. There

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were even rumours that the church was considering an affiliation with the cc f.81 Such allegations became more credible when Toronto Conference, in a close vote at its 1933 annual meeting, denounced the capitalist economic system “unchristian” and supported state control of a number of key industries. Those who objected to what they saw as an intrusion of the church into the political arena warned of the danger of such pronouncements: once a position was declared to be “Christian,” it was difficult to get rid of it if it proved impractical. An editorial in Saturday Night asserted that a church could hardly change its mind about what was or was not “Christian” every second or third year. “The last two occasions, in Canada, on which [God] was extensively enlisted in support of courses of action ... were the War and Prohibition, and the long-term results were not good in either case,” it warned.82 How could Christian responsibility be translated into public influence without becoming partisan in the process? This was the vexing problem assigned to the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order that reported to the General Council in 1934. Chaired by Sir Robert Falconer, recently retired from his position as president of the University of Toronto, it brought together those who were “expert in the fields of industry, finance, statecraft and church life,” and was billed as “the outcome of a great body of representative opinion throughout the Church.”83 Falconer was an interesting choice as chair. Not even the conservative wing of the social gospel movement claimed him as a supporter. For his part, he dismissed the social gospel as the response of “impatient members” of Protestant churches to “what seems to be a loss of moral authority.”84 Yet he and more radical Christian socialists evidently shared a number of concerns: political corruption, financial speculation, and the preoccupation with profits in farming and business alike. As his biographer puts it, Falconer “selectively weeded the socialist garden to suit his own taste.”85 The commission grappled with some of the most complex issues spawned by the Depression. Those who crafted the report urged “a more complete commitment of professing Christians to the principles and practice of Christian living both in personal and corporate life.” However, this “Christian” program was not to be identified with any political party or group. Ministers of the church were given explicit instructions: whatever they might say or do as citizens, the pulpit was not to be “used for purposes which lie outside its sphere.”

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And yet a minister was not to “consent to keep silence as to any part of the Christian Message because some particular group avowedly seeks the same end.” Persuasion, not coercion, was the church’s weapon in its warfare against social evils. On matters where the consensus of informed judgment pointed in a clear moral direction, the role of the church was to bring the issue to the attention of the public and political leaders, and rely on them to act.86 The report thus stopped just short of prescribing a specific course of action for Christianizing the social order. As it felicitously put it, the task of the church was “to be the light rather than the engineer of the City of God, to give direction and reveal goals rather than to devise programs.” In this spirit, it supported the idea of public utilities and applauded initiatives to provide more income security for the elderly, unemployed, and disabled.87 At several points the report explained that the church did not have the “technical ability to prescribe the process by which [unemployment] should be eliminated.” Its task was to shape public opinion on moral issues through the enlightened consciences of its members, but not to directly advise the government on the details of public policy.88 This approach was perhaps a reflection of the cautious political instincts of the commission’s chair. Falconer’s own frank assessment of the social role of the church, published in an autobiographical account a few years after the commission completed its work, ­appraised the church’s current political influence in blunt terms: ­national leaders did not consult church leaders in times of social difficulty – and with good reason in his opinion: “The advice given by churches and by good Christians is often of little value, because it is not determined on a sufficiently broad understanding of what is feasible.” To expect anything more was to misunderstand the task of the church, which was “not intended to be another earthly kingdom legislating for the social and political welfare of even its own members, to say nothing of the multitudes who would never acknowledge its authority.” Its more modest role was nonetheless crucial: rather than dictate or even prescribe solutions, it was to educate and enlighten its members in an effort to “release [their] moral energies.” Its task was to co-operate with the home in producing educated Christians whose “fundamental convictions and intelligence” would guide them in “active citizenship.”89 Still, the report of the commission was “pretty radical” for its day in the judgment of another of its influential members. Richard

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Roberts, the minister at Sherbourne Street United Church in Toronto who had been elected moderator by the same General Council that received the report, claimed that he and Falconer were mainly responsible for drafting it.90 He largely agreed with Falconer’s assessment of the church’s task in political and economic life, and like him distinguished between ethical and technical judgments (the latter ­being outside the church’s competence). Just as the church lacked the expertise to run a chemical laboratory or preside in a court of law, it lacked competence to pass judgment on capitalism and communism as economic systems. It could, however, assess the possible or actual consequences for the souls and bodies of those living under those systems. All social processes were to be governed by Christian principles that would promote the growth of personality and community.91 Despite its mediating stance, the report was not endorsed by all  who took the time to study its recommendations. A response from the congregation of St Marys United Church in southwestern Ontario objected to the findings, stating that righting economic wrongs would come only as “the result of individual experiences of  reconciliation with God through Christ Jesus our Lord.” While the St Marys’s Session agreed that “more Christian operation” of the economy was important, the church’s main task was preaching the message of salvation. Their response also took exception to the report’s critical a­ ssessment of Western civilization as “debased” by materialism. Admittedly there were problems, but capitalism was certainly preferable to Communism or Corporate Nationalism.92 While some criticized the United Church for going beyond its spiritual mandate, others were just as disappointed by what it left unsaid. The tasks assigned to the commission by the General Council had included a request “to define those particular measures which must form the first steps toward a social order in keeping with the mind of Christ.”93 The commission stopped short of detailing such measures in the final report, admitting it was unqualified to do so. However, a minority of commission members felt that the report should have more emphatic on a number of points. Several unresolved issues were identified in a paragraph that followed the report, all of them showing the influence of the Christian socialist critique of capitalism.94 The United Church, in large part through the work of e & s s , continued to vigorously press the case for moral and social reform based on Christian principles. Its leaders were perhaps naive in hoping

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other issues would meet a better fate than the temperance cause. Yet at times there was reason to think that the active citizenship upheld by the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order might indeed produce results. The federal government appeared to be open to listening to the church’s overtures for social initiatives that we now identify with the welfare state. On some issues, the United Church found its interests aligned with a state that was once again looking for friends. By the 1930s, federal and provincial governments were facing their own difficulties in implementing the ambitious social programs ­anticipated during the 1920s. Social assistance was still minimal a decade later, and organized locally and provincially rather than nationally. The British North America Act had given responsibility for welfare and unemployment to the provinces (some of which by the mid-1930s were assumed to be well-nigh bankrupt). In tandem with the very real problem of deficits and constitutional restrictions was the lingering suspicion that going beyond the most rudimentary welfare system would only encourage indigence.95 Voters and the politicians they elected seemed more concerned with reducing the national debt accumulated during the First World War than with launching new social programs. Hence the federal government was slow to open its coffers (which were nearly empty anyway). After a number of ad hoc programs failed to counteract the devastating impact of the Depression, Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett announced in his 1935 New Year’s address a New Deal modelled on the American plan for recovery. The legislation brought before Parliament shortly before Canadians went to the polls later that year included provision for a minimum wage and unemployment insurance, but still fell short of what Bennett had promised.96 His party’s crushing defeat to W.L.M. King’s Liberals likely had less to do with whether Canadians approved or disapproved of his policies than with their lack of confidence in his ability to follow through on them. The Liberals won by an electoral landslide of 173 of 245 seats, but with less than 45 per cent of the popular vote.97 Historians suspect that King may have been less enthusiastic about social security measures than Bennett; at any rate, his party could claim it had no choice but to keep the status quo when the Privy Council of the United Kingdom dealt the final blow to Bennett’s New Deal by ruling in 1937 that key elements of its munificence were ultra vires.98

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An important step in overcoming the constitutional obstacle to greater federal involvement in financing social security was taken when the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations (chaired first by Newton Wesley Rowell and later by Joseph Sirois) was called in 1937. The principles central to the United Church’s report on Christianizing the social order were evident in “A Brief on Social Security,” which the United Church prepared in response to an invitation from the Royal Commission. Although a letter accompanying the brief disclaimed it as “a report of The United Church of Canada,” the group that prepared the submission assured the commissioners that they had “worked in cooperation with consultative committees set up in various parts of our Church.”99 Their brief went beyond simply the principles in unequivocally supporting constitutional changes that would make it possible for the federal government to fund Old Age Pensions and assume a proportion of the debt incurred by provincial and municipal governments in providing unemployment relief.100 The Royal Commission report did not disappoint those who submitted the church’s brief: completed in 1940, it proposed a national standard of services, with additional powers to tax income in order to provide grants to supplement provincial coffers. More social programs followed when economic recovery and the outbreak of war created a more favourable political environment for formulating and funding social security measures.101 Social ethicist Roger Hutchinson credits the United Church with helping to lay the groundwork for these initiatives by changing the Canadian mindset that had once looked with suspicion on involvement of the state in providing social services.102 Reports such as Christianizing the Social Order, circulated widely for discussion in pamphlet form, prepared its members to accept a more expansive role for the state in social programs by linking proposals for social welfare in Canada to such familiar concepts as the Kingdom of God and a Christian social order. Whether its members were happy with the machinery that the United Church had put in place to advance the Kingdom of God and a Christian social order was another matter. Mobilizing for mission had figured prominently in the case for unification, and the machinery set in motion was designed to coordinate the church’s work across the nation and around the world. Not surprisingly, the resulting o ­ rganizational culture quickly became an issue. How

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could institutional demands for order and efficiency be balanced with a yearning for spiritual renewal that was resistant to being ‘organized’? Nostalgia for the old ways and disillusionment with the new were evident from the start. At issue was not only what was being said and done but also how and by whom. Joseph Flavelle of  Sherbourne Street United Church in Toronto was among those unhappy with the situation. A former Methodist and a wealthy businessman well versed in secular patterns of organization and fundraising, Flavelle soon grew wary of the concentration of power in the office of the general secretary, and with T. Albert Moore, the particular person charged with wielding it. Flavelle was blunt in his assessment of Moore, remarking that if he were in New York and not a Christian, he would “make an excellent lieutenant to a Tammany Chief.” He perhaps had Moore in mind when he complained of the type of church leader who found “great satisfaction in office,” and who was “restless for meetings, for Conventions, for conferences, and councils, for inspirational meetings, etc. etc.”103 Flavelle put his finger on a predicament that was to plague the emerging corporate style of church administration for years to come: the friction between older pastoral structures, where preaching and faith formation were of paramount concern, and modern attempts to promote denominational priorities.104 He noted that local leaders were becoming irritated “because they think there is an attempt at  domination from the central bureau.” Sensing that the practice of ministry was changing, he saw it overshadowed by “the tendency of the modern, highly-organized church ... to make the minister somewhat less important in initiative and constructive leadership.” Aware of what was happening in the church at both the national and congregational level, Flavelle identified the problem as planning gone awry, not dissatisfaction with particular policies. They needed to “wisely control the disposition to organize,” since he believed it was sapping the spiritual energy of the church. Perhaps, he mused, competition had not been so bad after all.105 Flavelle was not alone in sensing a clash between the institutional demands and the spiritual dimensions of religious life, a danger that other staunch supporters of union had spotted early on. D.L. Ritchie warned those gathered at the first General Council that if the new church were to become only an “ecclesiastical organization,” it might be “great and powerful for certain purposes,” but would eventually become “a burden if not a tyranny in the world” – unblessed

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by God and unable to bless others.106 Four years later, Ritchie reported that he was still hearing “not a little about the dread of the big machine” from outside critics and discontented insiders. While he celebrated the signs of life he saw evidenced in “liberty, flexibility and a certain measure of nonconformity,” he admitted that “one hears much about money and machinery and maintenance and schemes and buildings, and it is well, for these also may be fruits of the spirit.” But there was, he added, “a longing for something more”; well-oiled machinery was not enough.107 One did not have to be a conservative to have qualms about the means and methods the church was using to achieve its ends. As the United Church approached its fifth General Council in 1932, social gospel advocate Salem Bland lamented that the previous four had, of necessity, been concerned with “the perfecting and adjusting of the machinery of such a Church as up to its formation the world had not seen.” He believed the time had come to show whether the United Church still cared about the convictions that had given it birth, or whether it had become absorbed in maintenance like other churches.108 J.W.A. Nicholson, another Christian socialist, complained that the United Church had, like churches in the past, “gravitated back to the pagan notion that the important thing is to keep the machinery going.”109 Even those running the machinery were occasionally anxious about its organizational style. As his term as moderator began in the fall of 1934, Richard Roberts evidently shared some of his parishioner Flavelle’s concerns. The first decade’s preoccupation with method, order, organization, and “adequate temporal machinery” had been inevitable, he allowed, but it was time to attend to the church’s “spiritual offices.” In remedy, he offered to spend his two-year term organizing spiritual retreats and meeting with ministers, church executives, children, and young adults.110 But as his term came to an end, Roberts made no secret of his continuing disquietude. Religious communities that cared less about their purpose than their organization, machinery, importance, and prestige were “sick unto death,” he warned, and efficiency, clubs, and good balance sheets would not save them. His prognosis was bleak: if a church “forgets or becomes indifferent to its worship, to the preaching of the Word, to its Sacraments and its devotional life, to its missionary calling, the writing is on the wall.” For him, a church organized like a department store “was under sentence of death.” Preoccupation with statistics

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was a symptom of the organizational malady infecting the church: “as though it mattered very much how many of us there are, when the real matter is what kind of people we are.”111 However, the machinery of the new church needed more than a spiritual message to run it. The vastness of the land and the opportunities it offered for expansion had captured the imagination of the founding generation of the United Church, but the financial burden of realizing that vision hit congregations squarely in the pocketbook. Outreach at home – whether in urban, rural, or developing communities in the North and West – was the overarching practical problem that church union was designed to solve. The United Church had also inherited most of the overseas commitments of the founding traditions. At first, consolidation relieved the pressure on the Board of Home Missions budget in some communities, providing a rationale for closing struggling pastoral charges and making it possible for ministers to have “a man’s job” (presumably a reference to salary).112 But the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, which was essential to home mission operations, was hit hard by the decline in church income during the Depression. Shrinking budgets during the 1930s put plans on hold. There was not enough money to support existing programs let alone develop new ones. Between 1928 and 1935, the United Church closed 233 of its 3,117 pastoral charges, nearly three-quarters of them in the Prairie provinces.113 Home Missions accounted for the largest draw on the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, with Foreign Missions typically vying with Pensions as the second-largest disbursement. In 1936 came the distressing news that foreign missionary personnel had been reduced by 20 per cent, and their salaries by 25 per cent. The reserve fund was soon spent, and the Board of Foreign Missions was in debt and beholden to the w m s , which had come to its aid with a grant of $15,000, despite its own fundraising problems.114 The w m s spending on its work at home and overseas exceeded receipts, and the difference was underwritten by dipping into its reserve funds. The situation was no brighter for e & s s . It was responsible for a broad range of philanthropic endeavours such as hospitals, maternity homes for girls, reform schools for youth, and drought relief to the Prairies.115 However, ten years after union, its budget had been slashed to about $40,000, less than half its nearly $90,000 appropriation five years earlier.116

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3,566,051.99 1,300,792.02 36.48

3,057,340.90 1,058,410.47 34.62

2,613,003.90

2,613,465.69

2,479,674.05

2,398,322.07

2,354,575.04

2,376,379.51

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

489,817.03 20.61 767,952.07 32.32 116,041.52

484,532.93 20.58 747,363.56 31.74 124,154.22

502,901.59 20.97 721,954.40 30.10 125,469.36

562,674.95 22.69 713,481.49 28.77 133,184.80

601,922.65 23.03 712,272.02 27.25 144,853.73

574,319.07 21.98 744,807.31 28.50 150,494.37

646,370.05 21.14 825,285.83 26.99 210,508.05

850,858.33 23.86 841,953.96 23.61 246,689.48

859,683.40 23.65 828,521.22 22.79 265,073.07

4.88

5.27

5.23

5.37

5.54

5.76

6.89

6.92

7.29

7.98

8.17

37,708.07

40,577.15

37,802.81

39,672.44

41,249.79

41,243.93

60,998.58

72,920.86

78,202.57

89,498.05

101,658.67

Other2 ($)

1.59 207,935.18

1.72 189,350.41

1.58 217,712.27

1.60 210,747.48

1.58 238,016.94

1.58 224,859.76

2.00 255,767.92

2.04 252,837.34

2.15 300,623.44

2.41 266,479.25

2.52 305,808.10

Evangelism & Social % of Service % of total ($) total

1  A combination of disbursements to the Christian Education and Colleges and Secondary Schools boards, including special grants such as assistance to St Andrew’s College in the 1930s. 2  Includes other boards (e.g., Finance and Publication), General Council office administration, and funding for a variety of special initiatives. Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book (reports of the Finance Committee)

756,925.64 31.85

768,596.77 32.64

792,481.64 33.04

819,912.89 33.07

875,150.56 33.49

877,279.46 33.57

3,635,267.14 1,303,163.44 35.85

870,393.32 23.40 746,587.77 20.08 296,950.19

3,718,886.78 1,448,978.20 38.96

1930

% of Education1 ($) total

1929

Pensions ($)

4,033,043.53 1,500,590.87 37.21 1,016,340.44 25.20 779,176.22 19.32 329,469.23

% of total

1928

% of total

Foreign Missions ($)

Year

Home Missions ($)

Total disbursements ($)

Table 3.2 Disbursement of the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, 1928–38

8.75

8.04

9.08

8.50

9.11

8.61

8.37

7.09

8.27

7.17

7.58

% of total



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Recruitment of pastors and missionary personnel was a further concern. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Canada had been well represented among Anglo-American student volunteers for overseas missions. But enthusiasm waned in the interwar years, and an anxious Arnup admitted that younger members were losing interest in the missionary movement. Recruitment was a problem for the wms as well. It sponsored teachers and medical staff, many of them sent to schools and hospitals in indigenous communities. Its deaconesses provided religious services in areas where ordained ministers were already in short supply (a situation that worsened after the outbreak of the Second World War).117 Staffing was a constant challenge as rates of attrition through resignation (usually in order to marry) and retirement outstripped new recruits. There were still some brilliant young recruits like Katharine Hockin, the daughter of missionaries to China, who understood her own call to become a missionary in terms of being an ambassador for Christ. Many of those who joined her considered their decision to become missionaries “a living part of the concern for peace and, more profoundly, for personal and global reconciliation in Christ.”118 Other young idealists were drawn to the peace movement, racial reconciliation, and reconstruction of the social and economic order, Arnup noted.119 Given the prominence of these pursuits in the new thinking about Christian missions after the Jerusalem meeting, is it any wonder that they turned to public service instead of the ministry or the mission field? Stanley Knowles, a United Church minister and long-serving mp from Winnipeg, at first felt called to be a missionary after a conversion experience in 1924, but involvement in the Student Christian Movement (sc m) and the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order (f c so ) redirected his energies.120 Eugene Forsey’s autobiography tells of the significant role religion had played in his life. Although he had once considered becoming a missionary, his declared candidacy for the ministry “wilted” as he became more actively involved in the social gospel movement.121 However valuable their contributions elsewhere, the lack of young recruits to replace retiring ministers and missionaries was disquieting. New leaders were badly needed to succeed those who had straddled the stages of negotiating and implementing church union. Finding able personnel to make the vision a reality was a problem the United Church shared with other organizations. Speaking to a group of students at the University of Toronto, Richard Roberts remarked

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that a whole generation had perished in the First World War, leaving public affairs “in the hands of old or oldish men with pre-war minds.”122 He may well have had in mind the organizational culture of his own denomination. To outsiders the public face of the United Church may have seemed orderly in the extreme, but behind the scenes matters were more chaotic. Privately, Roberts expressed misgivings about the lack of coordination at head office. Life there was “not happy” in his view, despite an improving financial picture as the economy recovered. McLachlan’s long illness had left things at e& ss “in a pretty bad mess.” Roberts mused that “there is something in the view that the best proof of the doctrine of original sin is to be found in Ecclesiastical Offices.”123 The year 1936 was something of a watershed at the national executive level. Eight vacancies were filled by relatively young appointees, among them Gordon Sisco succeeding T. Albert Moore and G.R. Cragg succeeding W.B. Creighton in the key positions of general secretary and New Outlook editor respectively. These were not just new faces; they were a new generation.124 Even so, a few years later and by then retired, Roberts was still pessimistic about the organizational changes he had helped put in place as a member of the 1936 nominating committee. In a letter to his son-in-law, he  complained that the national church lacked staff with “both spiritual insight and business acumen.” He felt they were “pretty second-rate,” except for Jesse Arnup in Foreign Missions (“rising to  the critical missionary situation with some spirit”) and J.R. Mutchmor, who by then had succeeded McLachlan in e & s s (deemed “all right”).125 It is easy to criticize church leaders for their lofty ambitions and lack of foresight about the impact of national and world events on congregational life in local communities. Their failure to meet their own expectations should not obscure the real achievements even, and especially, during the difficult years of the Depression. There were many early successes, some directly attributable to the effectiveness of the church’s machinery, which gave it a public voice and allowed it to deliver spiritual and practical aid. The e & s s is a case in point. Ian Manson’s analysis of its activities before 1945 shows its leaders determined to “challenge others in the church to open their eyes to  the many changes occurring in society, take society’s problems

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seriously, and do their part to try to eliminate many serious forms of injustice.” A cautious attitude, rather than assumption of inevitable progress, characterized e & ss’s work in the interwar years.126 Its  leaders paved the way for its institutional advances after the Second World War – when the future for a time seemed to belong to organized religion. With time would come the realization that the machinery was not the only problem. The rise of the service state had the practical consequence of relegating religious social service to a dwindling role, inadvertently eroding an important corner of the foundation on which the United Church had been built. At times the mission of the United Church coincided with the interests of the state and its machinery was effective in promoting it – but, as in the case of temperance, not always. More often than not, the economic crisis of the 1930s confirmed what the prohibition issue had signalled: religiously motivated reformers could play an important role in launching social initiatives, but even the combined resources of the uniting churches were not enough to sustain them. Key aspects of the United Church’s mission – and with it, its identity – changed as functions were taken over by the state, even though the ‘transfer’ was made at the church’s entreaty. First, those early aspirations were tempered by the realization that shrinking resources meant a more limited offering of specialized social services. And second, an ambitious state with its own plans for remaking Canada – without the friendly service of the United Church – gradually edged the church to the margins of public life. International ecumenism’s notion of Christianizing all areas of life fared no better. As he watched the growing antagonism around the world to Western imperialism, Ernest Thomas saw the “more friendly contacts” that the church offered in its evangelistic, educational, and medical work as “all the more needed” to promote world friendship. Yet, with typical candor he pointed out the church’s limits: “Our own type of Christianity has made no wide appeal to any people except to those in the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic family, and even there mainly to the well-to-do middle class. How can such a Church provide unification?”127 Soon after he penned these words in 1937, the world changed in ways that dashed any hope for international peace based on Christian friendship, or even the United Church’s more modest mission of a Christian social order in Canada.

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4 The Search for a Faith for Sociable Souls Tension is a creative force. But polarization, which seems an abiding sin of our age, is worse than useless. It stifles creativity, whereas a healthy dose of negative capability, the ability to hold differences in tension while both affirming and denying them, enlivens both poetry and theology. Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

With only a few hours remaining in his term as first moderator of the United Church, George Pidgeon rose to preach at the opening service of the second General Council. Words from the prophet Zechariah had given him a title for his sermon and inspired an image of the church he hoped would be built in Canada: “The City without Walls.” What he had witnessed in communities across Canada over the past year had been heartening. But as he looked ahead, he saw a danger: the church could be “dwarfed into a sect.” A sectarian spirit characterized by sharply drawn lines, strong positions, closed minds, self-interest, and contention with other Christian believers was in  stark contrast to Pidgeon’s “New Testament church”: Gospelcentred, loyal to the truth, open-minded, tolerant, comprehensive, interested in other religious groups and the whole community, offering “a vital experience” of religion and a “clear-cut message of salvation.” Pidgeon’s sermon reiterated the United Church’s commitment to its evangelical past while distinguishing it from what he called “modern Fundamentalism.” Allegations that the United Church was apostate and creedless were perhaps still in his mind as he complained, “If you go beyond them [the fundamentalists], you will be disowned, and your place among the faithful forfeited.”1 The theological issues raised during the church union controversy continued to vex the United Church during the interwar years. It came as no surprise that its expectations of the coming Kingdom

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differed markedly from end-of-the-world scenarios preached by many fundamentalists.2 What was just as unsettling – and likely more perplexing in the long run – were new controversies on the horizon. Making its way to Canada from the United States and continental Europe was a revolt within the ranks of early twentieth-century liberalism that took various forms. Many younger critics identified themselves as neo-orthodox, Christian realists, or Barthians. Still others turned to natural theology or to a secular brand of humanism that not only competed with religion but also was viewed by some as a religion. At stake for the United Church in these debates was its conviction that Christianity was both personal and social in character, formed in fellowship, and practiced in the course of everyday life. Decades after the United Church was inaugurated, a new generation of leaders would still praise as wise the decision not to separate moral and social concerns from evangelism, as many of their denominational counterparts in the United States had done by 1925. The United Church aimed instead to focus on ‘souls’ as well as ‘the social order’; its people, so it was hoped, would become sociable souls.3 The United Church faced the challenge of communicating this message to people who had experienced the end of a world war, a burst of prosperity, and economic collapse in little more than a decade. Popular culture celebrated the passing of older mores and values. And yet some historians take issue with the Jazz-Age picture associated with the 1920s. Instead they find that traditional values and concern for preserving the past persisted alongside the prominence of novelty and social experimentation. “The post-war generation was less disillusioned than it was uncertain, less cynical than nervous,” suggests historian A.B. McKillop; it was “an ambivalent and tense generation living at a time when old and new forms co-existed uneasily.”4 That was certainly so in the United Church as it turned to its pastors, professors (mostly ordained ministers teaching at its theological colleges), and national church staff to deal with theological issues left over from church union while addressing fresh concerns. Pidgeon was among those convinced that there was a place in the United Church for both old and new points of view. Recalling the case of a minister who left his congregation even before union because he was a premillennialist, Pidgeon insisted that “there should be room in the

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United Church for men of strong evangelical spirit who take this view of our Lord’s return.” But, he added, the United Church needed social settlements, All People’s churches, and stately cathedrals such as Toronto’s Metropolitan Church as well. Each contributed to meeting contemporary spiritual needs, and “the one is as essential as the other to a full-rounded Christianity.”5 And yet becoming “full-rounded” was an elusive aim. To many outsiders (and, to be fair, more than a few insiders), the United Church was not viewed as sufficiently spiritual. Its approach to the religious life was what sociologist Talcott Parsons has described as inner-worldly, a category he proposed to counter the equation of “degree of religiousness” with “sense of other-worldliness.” There was a tendency, he noted, to consider one who engaged in acts of devotion or contemplation and minimized practical acts of social involvement as religious, while economic and political engagement suggested a lack of religious interest. Parsons traced inner-worldly religiosity back to what at first glance seems an unlikely source: Calvin’s understanding of secular callings and his notion that each person had “a positive assignment to work in the building of the Kingdom” in their “worldly lives.”6 An inner-worldly approach to piety that aimed at making sociable souls was also characteristic of the Methodist tradition. A capacious and comprehensive sense of individual salvation enlarged the importance of Christian service as an expression of the faithful Christian life, and was a widely shared conviction.7 While some historians have assumed that Methodist progressives were concerned only with changing the social order, William McGuire King argues that even for them the primary concern was “about the structure of concrete personal experience and about the emergence and preservation of meaning within the self.” Social service thus had a dual purpose: “to enable others to discover the personal fulfillment of authentic human relationships and to enable oneself to find a personal center of meaning.”8 The United Church sought to balance the care of souls with care of society. Its approach to lived religion tapped the root meaning of ­‘pietas’: personal duty to God and to others that included right relationships. Limiting the church’s role to “saving souls” smacked of “indifferentism” when it came to social questions, wrote E.H. Oliver. He characterized this approach as typical of Plymouthism (a reference to the Plymouth Brethren movement that had influenced modern

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fundamentalism). Nor did the United Church and other major Protestant churches attempt to “pervade all life, have hospitals, schools, everything of its own, all dominated by its religious view of life,” an attitude that Oliver claimed to have observed among Catholics in Saskatchewan, where he served as principal of St Andrew’s College. Its social engagement differed too from either social humanitarianism, which inadequately emphasized the worth of individuals by submerging them “in the interests of the whole,” or philosophical idealism, which similarly treated human nature “largely in relation to its ultimate significance.”9 For Oliver, the individual was still the key to social transformation, and the church’s greatest social service would always be “to create men, kindled with the passion for the good of their fellows, strengthened by Divine might in their inner man.” But while regenerating individuals was the most important task, the church’s work was not complete unless the persons it influenced engaged in “fighting against social evils, Christianizing all human relations, establishing social justice, outlawing War, and crusading for God’s Kingdom.”10 Whether branded as conservative, moderate, or radical, members of the United Church generally concurred: there was a moral dimension to community life that they and their newly organized church were uniquely positioned to shape. They were inclined to suppose that the world could be made more hospitable to the principles of the Kingdom of God. Many whose politics differed from J.S. Woodsworth’s still would have said “amen” to his assertion that to pray “thy kingdom come” did not refer to “some future state in some far off world, and not in some vague way all over the universe, but thy kingdom come right here in Canada, in Manitoba, in Winnipeg, in Brownsville, in my own township.”11 The United Church took as a given that its members belonged not only to congregations but also to families and communities. Its piety was thus civic-oriented, formed in the web of associations both in and beyond the congregation. In its ranks were such prominent public figures as novelist Nellie McClung, politician Newton Wesley Rowell, and newspaper publisher Joseph Atkinson. Countless other men and women in local congregations were active in their neighbourhoods, their understanding of ‘being United’ extending to homemaking, volunteering for community service, and supporting civic organizations, as well as gathering for public worship and other church-sponsored events. Their activities were intertwined with

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participation in the life of the wider community, and hence were more difficult to see as religiously motivated than were the devotional practices of those who drew a more distinct line between faith and civic engagement. Casting this social bent of the United Church’s piety as ‘evangelical’ – even if qualified as a liberal variant – proved easier said than done. No matter how often the word was used in its programs and policies, the United Church seemed unable to satisfy those who looked for emphasis on a definite experience of conversion or particular doctrinal formulations as the true marks of an evangelical church. Part of the confusion resulted from different usages of the term. As a report from e & ss on “Evangelism” explained it, the word had initially been used in the sixteenth century to refer to Protestants, then later to promoters of the “Evangelical quickening” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (which had profoundly influenced all of the uniting traditions). However, the term had been “revived near the close of the last century” to identify those opposed to the historical approach to the Bible and theology. Since then, claimed the report, this narrower use of the term “evangelical” had become a “party badge” by which to exclude Christians who were no less definite in their emphasis “on the character of sin, the atoning sacrifice of Christ, the redeeming power of God, the guidance of the Spirit and the authority of Scripture.”12 Fundamentalists considered the United Church’s theology as suspect on precisely those points. “Can nobody stop the use of these absurd terms, Fundamentalism and Modernism?” asked an exasperated J.R.P. Sclater, pastor of Old St Andrew’s United in Toronto. Fundamentalist beliefs were not fundamental to the faith, nor were the Modernists particularly modern, he maintained. Attempts to label Christians as one or the other were succeeding only in “chloroforming the mind.”13 R.J. Wilson, whose role had shifted from coordinating publicity for the pro-union side to handling requests for information about the United Church, complained that in the United States, “the fundamentalist press is sedulously circulating the idea that the Presbyterian Church (continuing) stands for evangelical religion and the United Church quite definitely for a surrender of the evangelical position.”14 He perhaps detected the meddling of J. Gresham Machen, who continued his ­attacks on the United Church after 1925. When invited to speak at Knox Presbyterian in Toronto and MacVicar Memorial Presbyterian in Montreal in 1926, Machen delivered a popular sermon that he had

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preached and published in the United States, which linked those he castigated as modernists to past Christian heresies.15 Unwilling to cede exclusive use of the word to either the Presbyterians or the fundamentalists, the United Church vigorously defended its own understanding of what it meant to be evangelical. It countered by insisting that to be evangelical did not oblige one to adopt the theological formulations of the gospel message propounded by fundamentalism. Indeed, the editors of the Canadian Journal of Religious Thought (most of them connected with the United Church) were convinced that the days of fundamentalism were numbered: “it can only live on in uninformed and unreflecting minds.”16 Another editorial characterized it as imported propaganda and a barren approach to the study of the Bible. Their confident conclusion was that “Jesus and His truth have nothing to fear from a grave scientific enquiry. They have everything to fear from credulity, scribal ingenuity, unbrotherly temper and gross slandering of the scholarly institutions of the land.”17 While insisting that the United Church was evangelical in its theology, there was still uncertainty about the effectiveness of old methods of evangelism, particularly revivalism, once thought to hold the key to both spiritual renewal and social transformation. The same results could no longer be counted on, warned e & s s secretary D.N. McLachlan. “‘Conversions’ as we formerly understood them” were declining in number, he noted in 1928, a trend he attributed to a toorestrictive understanding of what conversion entailed. Its connotation in the past had been “the saving of the individual soul,” and still involved “the relation of the soul to God.” But the United Church had come to the realization that Christianity had “a social as well as an individual application” that involved not only a mystical experience of conversion but also a visible manifestation on earth of ­fellowship where each served the other. The once-popular revival meeting was no longer effective; its message no longer resonated with the so-called lapsed masses.18 Rather than mass revival meetings, worship services and other church activities were the key to e & s s ’s emerging understanding of evangelism. In this respect the timing of church union was propitious. The church itself was a “transmitter of religion and the mother of saints,” and it was there that the “super-personal urge to sin” was met by a “super-personal organization of grace.”19 Gathering for

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public worship on Sunday mornings was the most visible expression of this collective experience of organized grace. The United Church immediately took steps after church union to encourage an ‘ordered liberty’ in liturgical practices that would make Sunday morning worship a demonstration of its common faith. Forms of Service (1926) compiled services that were already in use for Communion and other occasions: thirteen Presbyterian forms, four Methodist, and one Congregationalist.20 That same year, committees were struck to prepare a hymn book and service book. The result of their work was publication of the Hymnary in 1930 and the Book of Common Order in 1932. The new hymn book proved durable, more than meeting expec­ tations that it would form a bond among worshipping communities across the country. It was widely used, and shaped the United Church’s piety, worship, and outlook for over four decades, despite some early griping about the disproportionate Presbyterian influence, personified in Alexander MacMillan, the respected musician who served as secretary for the hymn book committee.21 To counter a tendency toward subjectivity, some of the more popular hymns were deemed unfit for public services. “Rock of Ages” was scrutinized but made the final cut because it expressed so well the “soul hunger” of Christian experience. The committee was searching for hymns that would cultivate “a right approach to the Deity” when sung by “all devout persons united in the act of worship,” rather than hymns chosen for their entertainment or even educational value.22 Reception of the Book of Common Order was another matter entirely.23 Attempts to promote its two proposed orders of service for Sunday worship were to no avail. Decades later those making the case for a new service book to meet the worship needs of expanding congregations following the Second World War rated it as “of its kind, excellent – but not very much use seems to be made of it, except for some of the special services.”24 One disappointed minister, G. Campbell Wadsworth, described it as “a root springing out of dry ground” because the denominations that formed the United Church shared “an extraordinary ignorance of the manner in which their fathers had worshipped and an almost pathological distaste for the ways of liturgical devotion.”25 The resurgence of interest in worship that many took to be an answer to prayer for spiritual revival was evidently not greeted with the same enthusiasm in all circles.

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The tepid reception of the Book of Common Order at the congregational level was evidence of anti-ritual tendencies that surfaced from time to time.26 Osbert Morley Sanford, president of British Columbia Conference, cautioned his assembly in 1931 about the growth of a “ritualistic spirit” that he feared was supplanting the “devotional spirit.” Familiar with both the hymn book and advance copies of the new service book, he gently chided the formality they displayed. The Lord’s Supper, which had begun as a simple meal, was becoming “an elaborate Eucharist, with very scrupulous doctrines about the minutest details.” There was room for spontaneity and freedom in the new church, he countered, and former Methodists owed it to the United Church to invite Brother Smith to lead in prayer or to suggest singing a verse of “O Happy Day that Fixed My Choice” (a popular hymn that managed to survive scrutiny by the committee). Doing so “might destroy a very solemn and formal communion service,” he allowed; “on the other hand, it might save it.”27 Sanford believed that the United Church would soon have to decide whether to be a prophetic church “preaching or teaching truth to the highest place,” or a priestly church seeking to guide people to God “by way of forms and acts of worship committed particularly to the care of ministers especially consecrated for such service.” While he recognized the importance of the priestly functions of ministry, his own predilection was clear: prophets were needed more than ever at a time when their preaching was scorned. “We appear in the movies as the most absurd and impossible of men. We are the butt of coarse jokes in cheap magazines and in newspaper columns ... If someone has a passion to do something heroic, let him preach the gospel to this age.” The Holy Spirit had often had to escape bondage to “so-called orthodoxy and regularity of order, and above all, from the repressing environments of worldly-minded and even corrupt [church] administrators,” he reminded his audience (made up mostly of theologians, ordained ministers, and church staff).28 Not all ministers agreed with this assessment. A.G. Reynolds made a compelling case for more emphasis on worship. With the United Church’s many rural churches in mind, he argued that it was false to regard the church as “an agency established merely for the good of the community, like the school or a department of public works,” since the church existed “primarily for God, and not for a community.” Reynolds was blunt: “We do need to strive for social righteousness; let us make no mistake about that; but we have been

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neglecting worship, and unless we learn to make way for God at the centre of our lives in the best tradition of Christian worship, our fussy concern about the social order will do little good.”29 He perhaps had in mind such Christian socialists as R. Edis Fairbairn. Alarmed by the preoccupation with liturgy among United Church youth, Fairbairn had argued that in the past, worship had often been a “real evil,” offering an escape from moral obligation. The substitution of interest in social worship for social righteousness verged “on religious treachery and moral cowardice,” he stated bluntly.30 Fairbairn’s fiery letter was one of several printed in the denominational paper in 1940, evidence of a continuing reluctance to exchange the freedom of the eclectic pre-union worship directories for the standard forms of the Book of Common Order. The debate over ritual, like the qualms about the old-time revival services, showed efforts to come to terms with an experience of God that was less direct than in the past. Public worship in the United Church offered a mediated experience of God through formal and liturgical actions. Its more ‘catholic’ approach was a striking shift from the immediacy of experience that evangelicals had generally expected, and reflected a growing uneasiness with the display of emotion as a mark of religious vitality. Walter Brown insisted that worship still involved what he described as deep emotional experiences. But he admitted that among the students he had observed as a professor at Victoria University, emotion was “no longer fashionable in religious circles”: an age “dominated by the scientific spirit which loved the objectivity of facts” had “no place for the so-called subjectivity of emotions.”31 In its public statements, the United Church tried to represent its theological moorings as having been shaped by both its evangelical past and its more recent brushes with liberalism. Even those ready to move beyond evangelicalism wrestled to retain both the personal and social dimensions of the Christian message. A 1932 report on the church and industry, for instance, described the United Church as formed by the traditions belonging to the evangelical type of Christianity, characterized by emphasis “not on Church orders and forms, nor even on creeds, but on personal salvation through right adjustment of the individual to God, and on personal religious experience.” The report pictured the United Church at a crossroads: “Christianity as we have known it” versus “Christianity as it might be.” Even so, attending to social ills was not meant to displace

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“ministry to personal religious life,” the report explained: the two were not in conflict, for “the causes of evil, of human maladjustment may lie in the economic structure as well as in personal character, and Christianity can only be made complete by the rectifying of both.”32 The Great Depression provided further evidence of the brittleness of the liberal evangelical accord, and forced the United Church to scrutinize the degree to which it could still be assumed that transformed individuals – in either evangelical or liberal terms – were the key to changing society. Could the economic collapse be the judgment of God, as some suggested? If so, why was its personal impact felt so inequitably? Why were those who worked in fishing, mining, the forest industry, construction, and transportation dealt a harsher blow than those in manufacturing, retailing, banking, service industries, or the public sector, such as teachers and civil servants? Even the weather turned against the Prairie economy, as drought ravaged the farms of Saskatchewan. In contrast, deflation was actually beneficial to people with continuing sources of income, who often found themselves better off than before 1929.33 The economic crisis seemed impervious to individual deeds, no matter how ‘Christian’ their motivation. To complicate matters, liberal evangelicals who were identified with what had been touted in the early twentieth century as the New Theology found themselves the target of a fresh theological ­challenge that drew its energy from liberalism’s disenchanted supporters.34 Heather Warren finds that between 1928 and 1932 “the theological tide in American Protestantism turned sharply from prewar liberalism” as younger theologians turned to neo-orthodoxy.35 That changing tide was evident in Canada at a conference held in Muskoka in 1931. United Church participants listened to W.A. Visser ’t Hooft, the Dutch secretary of the World Student Christian Federation, give a memorable address that was the highlight of the event. Those hearing him for the first time were likely startled to hear him recount how he had been inspired by the “Barthian revolt against loose thinking and the vagueness of liberalism.”36 Bidding farewell to the old social gospel was to become a regular theme in Visser ’t Hooft’s speeches and publications over the next few years, convinced as he was that American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s attack on utopian liberalism would prove fatal.37 The title of a 1933 Christian Century article by American theo­ logian John Bennett dared to ask, “After Liberalism – What?,” a

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question on the minds of many up-and-coming theologians. Bennett expressed the misgivings of his generation with an opening salvo that left no doubt about how he viewed the perilous state of liberalism: “The most important fact about contemporary American theology is the disintegration of liberalism.” It was, he explained, quite literally coming to pieces. It no longer enjoyed its earlier coherence and confidence, leaving many with a sense of “theological homelessness.” Like Visser ’t Hooft, Bennett praised Niebuhr for dispensing the European criticism of liberalism in North America in a dose “mild enough to be taken without too much risk of complications.”38 Among those who sent a congratulatory letter to Bennett was Gregory Vlastos, a young philosophy professor from Queen’s University. The piece was grand, he enthused, adding that he largely agreed with the way Bennett had “put the whole matter.”39 But for those still committed to the principles of the early social gospel movement, Niebuhr’s medicine left a bitter taste. His sermons and publications dismissed their handling of political issues as a “substitution of sentimental illusions for the enervating pessimism of orthodoxy.”40 He belittled liberal Christianity for its “pious hope that people might be good and loving, in which case all the nasty business of politics could be dispensed with.” Calling the liberal approach to social and economic problems politically unrealistic and religiously superficial, he claimed that their efforts would have been “less inept and fatuous” had they “less moral idealism and more r­eligious realism.”41 While attention has generally focused on the deleterious effects of fundamentalism and continental theology on early twentieth-century liberalism (including its evangelical variant), historian William McGuire King finds that a more serious theological challenge came from another source: religious naturalism.42 According to its proponents (which included the major process theologians), liberalism had not gone far enough in its rejection of older religious forms. For instance, process theologian Henry Nelson Wieman of the University of Chicago turned the traditional approach to worship on its head by emphasizing its private rather than public dimensions. The reader of his book on Methods of Private Religious Living was advised to “earnestly seek the best adjustment to whatever in all the universe he believes to be that which can help him most, even though it be nothing more, in his belief, than his own subconscious self, or his fellow associates in the group to which he belongs.” Wieman viewed public

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worship as a gathering “to help one another find God each for himself and in his own way.”43 Worship was “the time when a man deliberately undertakes to make the best possible adjustment to that which he believes in all sincerity to be the matter of greatest concern.”44 All were in need of ‘salvation’ by adjustment: “Every one of us, even the reformer who is so sure of himself and his plan,  must undergo personal reconstruction before he is fit to ­reconstruct society.”45 Empiricism was essential to theological naturalism, and science was its ultimate methodological key. The appeal of naturalism was further evidence of the complexity of undertaking theological reformulation in a cultural storm that was battering old landmarks. Those who were drawn to it saw science as a new ally as they considered the implications of the new physics and the theory of relativity for the Christian understanding of God and spiritual phenomena. In the 1930s John Line, then a professor of philosophy at Victoria College, was hopeful that a fresh approach to science, with room for a “transcending Cause,” would avoid the mechanistic dualism of the past. The writings of scientists A.S. Eddington and A.N. Whitehead had introduced him to process theology, which he saw as recognizing both the transcendent and immanent dimensions of God’s relationship to the created world.46 The president of the University of Toronto was less sanguine as he considered the challenges of a scientific world view for those teaching theology and other disciplines in the humanities. In his presidential address to the Religious Education Association in 1928, Robert Falconer observed that “when psychology in the name of science makes wide claims, philosophy, that ancient mistress, is almost put on her defense; as for the humanities they need apologists; theology appears to many as an antique.” Surrounded by material accomplishments, the average person asked no questions about the ultimate origins of life, and was too enmeshed in the world to allow the mind “leisure to ponder the imponderable.” Even worship practices were on trial, since there was skepticism about rituals that emphasized the mysterious or the miraculous.47 Like a canary in a coal mine, theological discourse was at risk of being an early casualty of the growing dominance of science. The challenge to Christianity was even greater when a secular form of humanism joined forces with naturalism. This new threat was the subject of a provocative paper presented at the gathering of world

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Christian leaders in Jerusalem in 1928. In it, Quaker philosopher Rufus Jones had added secularism to a list of non-Christian faiths as a new religion, singling it out as Christianity’s chief rival. Defined as an approach to life where God had no place (and often linked to the struggle for material well-being), Jones claimed that secularism had spread in the West and was sweeping the East and the southern hemisphere.48 His warning gave pause to those accustomed to considering the boundary between Christian faith and the secular world as permeable. Many progressives had thought of secular culture as the benign or even synergistic mate of the sacred. Now, not only science was promoting secularism; a new brand of humanism that was explicitly non-theistic in its orientation was circulating in academic circles and being popularized by leading intellectuals. One event that provoked theologians was John Dewey’s Gifford Lectures in 1929, published as The Quest for Certainty; another was the widely disseminated “Humanist Manifesto” (1933), which presented what its critics called a religion without God.49 The new humanism generated intense discussions about the threat that naturalism, even in its religious guise, posed to Christianity.50 Alarmed by its implications for Christian theology (and perhaps suspicious of Dewey’s influence on teachers), critics pointed to religious education as the fountainhead of what naturalism’s proponents were candidly presenting as the only approach to religious life adequate to the demands of the new day. Shelton Smith, an influential professor at Duke University, was dismayed at its impact on religious education, customarily the method by which liberal religious faith was transmitted. While some saw naturalism simply as a new educational method, Smith argued that it had given rise to a “reconstructed religion,” and predicted that it would either expand the meaning of religious experience to include any enriching human event, or lead to “spiritualizing” human value.51 Progressives in the United Church received the new humanism gingerly, recognizing its affinities with liberal theology. Their attacks left little doubt that the old alliances were strained. The Canadian Journal of Religious Thought carried a cautious review of Dewey’s Gifford lectures written by Line. The journal continued its coverage with a special issue that included assessments from some of the United Church’s leading scholars. While recognizing that the ­humanist shared much in common with the Christian in matters of faith and morals, Scottish theologian John Baillie (for a time a

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professor at Emmanuel College) pinpointed the issue that separated them: not whether we can find God or believe in God, but whether we any longer have need of God. He detected “something in the atmosphere of our popular philosophy which makes our age feel that they do not want Him.”52 Other contributors pressed for a new formulation of the faith that would prepare Christians to meet this ­alternative to theism.53 These theological trends were likely on the minds of those who prepared the statement on evangelism for the General Council in 1934.54 Their report urged the United Church to recognize that a crucial change in the contemporary context called for new methods of evangelism. Whereas, in the past, evangelism involved awakening faith that was already present, if only vaguely, such religious convictions had since faded. The certainties of the past were now only “spiritual intuitions” for some, and “alien if not impossible” to accept for ­others. The task of evangelism, while more complicated, was all the more imperative if the Christian message was to reach those who saw no need of God. Humanism was named specifically as an alternative to faith in God, appealing especially to “people of high morality and fine idealism.” In preparing to “conquer the intellectual habit that excludes the knowledge of God,” the modern evangelist was fighting against what the report called “poisoned air.”55 Some religious leaders seemed unaware of this new danger, optimistically interpreting the lively interest in personal transformation and self-improvement as spiritual hungering. What caught the attention of a number of United Church theologians was the absence of reference to God in that personal quest. Whether thought of as transcendent or immanent, God and not oneself had been for both evangelicals and progressives the key agent in transformation. A rival to Christianity was now on offer: self-transformation (or at least adjustment) that owed nothing to God. Seekers had before them a veritable feast of options, ranging from the highbrow to the popular, spiced with ideas from science, philosophy, psychology, and education. Self-help and self-improvement books were best-sellers. Secretary McLachlan was troubled by these trends as he prepared his annual e & ss report in 1930. He remembered the social idealism and optimism of the period just prior to the First World War and the calls for reconstruction that had followed. Appeals to service, loyalty, and sacrifice were now regarded by a younger generation as having

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drawn their older siblings to their deaths. Personal self-realization had become the goal of life, he mused, replacing the ethical focus of bygone days. Books on devotional life, applied psychology, and mental hygiene were read instead of social gospel writings; the aesthetic details of the worship service were considered more important than social service.56 Among those who shared McLachlan’s concerns was Richard Roberts, minister of Sherbourne Street United in Toronto. “Our great-grandfathers believed in God,” he observed, “our grandfathers believed in Reason; our fathers believed in things: and all these have, it seems, been found wanting. What then is there left for us to believe in? Only one thing – namely, ourselves.” As evidence, he cited the growing fascination with physical fitness, and a shift in interest from physics to psychology. There appeared to be, he wryly noted, no shortage of work, even during the Depression, for psychologists!57 Roberts was both fascinated by psychology and wary of its implications for religious practice. He was particularly critical of what he called the pseudo-psychology associated with power – whether willpower or mind-power, which he dismissed as little more than autosuggestion. To counter this “quackery,” he called for a restatement of the New Testament’s doctrine of spiritual growth: growth in grace by cultivating the qualities that St Paul had described as the fruits of the Spirit.58 Religious leaders competed with tutors of popular culture, with their different world view, much of it imported from the United States. The circulation of Maclean’s, the best-selling Canadian magazine, fell well behind the Saturday Evening Post (which advertised itself as “Canada’s leading magazine”), Ladies’ Home Journal, Pictorial Review, and McCall’s. By the time Chatelaine was launched in 1928 to compete with American magazines, the market in Canada was dominated by the United States.59 American-made movies were also popular. In the 1920s the middle classes flocked to the theatres, which had at first been frequented only by the poor and less literate. Attendance increased dramatically during the Depression years, peaking in the early 1950s with the advent of television. There were virtually no Canadian movies available during these years. Before the First World War, an estimated 60 per cent of films were produced in the United States; by the 1930s and ’40s, almost all the movies seen by Canadians were made there – even those about Canada! Canadian news segments were added to American newsreels.60

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Not surprisingly, United Church ministers were experiencing the  same challenges that Charles W. Gilkey, dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, found in the United States: many people were turning to books, magazines, and the radio for religious instruction. Detecting a trend in the 1930s that would become even more pronounced after the Second World War, he speculated that “many of those who prefer their religion so, likewise do not go to public lectures for their information or to mass meetings for their politics: they distrust or dislike uplift at wholesale, and want both their education and their religion to their individual and private order.”61 For those filled with the spirit of the times, religious practices were no longer considered an expression of either duty or gratitude to God; their value was assessed on whether they were deemed helpful to the person performing them. Attitudes toward worship reflected this drift.62 Another illustration of the quest for personal renewal was the interest in the Oxford Group movement, introduced to Canada by Frank Buchman soon after the economic collapse.63 To some observers, the movement was an answer to prayers for religious revival because it emphasized personal transformation. But critics noted that the social implications of Jesus’ teaching were not part of its message (and in fact, there was not much mention of Jesus at all).64 While some attributed the movement’s success to its ability to exploit nostalgia for the evangelical past, the movement likely owed at least as much of its popularity to the new therapeutic spirit of the era. The discord the gatherings created among those calling for a revival of religion hinted at the threat the movement was thought to pose to the United Church’s more expansive approach to evangelism. By the time the Oxford Group movement tore through Canada in  late 1932, even those who considered it benign worried that it would divert energy and attention from the Joint Committee on the Evangelization of Canadian Life that the major Protestant churches had recently formed. The latter connected personal religious experience to home, school, work, recreation, and national life in ways that were considered appropriate to the United Church’s ethos.65 But even this broader approach to evangelism did not escape crit­ icism. Writing it off as “the last kick of a decayed Moodyism,” Richard Roberts (whose term as moderator in 1934-36 coincided with the campaign) expected it would be a flop. Highly organized events “seem to estrange the Holy Spirit,” he mused, and were at

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odds with Christianity because of the anonymity of “monster gatherings.” He feared it might “provoke a reaction that would leave the church deeper in the doldrums than before.”66 Evidently he had good reason to worry, for despite an impressive roster of organizers at the national level and a few successful rallies in cities across Canada, the outcomes of the evangelization campaign repeatedly fell short of expectations.67 Harsher criticism of the evangelism campaign came from J.W.A. Nicholson, a pastor from North Bedeque, p e i , who sardonically accused the Joint Committee of simply going through the motions of “giving the prayer wheel another turn.” He argued that personal renewal – even broadly understood – could no longer bring about social change; the iniquities of the day were “not in the direct human relationships, but in the indirect, circuitous relationships that we have allowed to become impersonal.” The Big Four churches (Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, and United) ought to be sponsoring an educational campaign to bring together political, industrial, and financial leaders to rectify the ills of social injustice.68 Nicholson was a member of the f c s o, a small but vocal movement that attracted United Church support after its founding in 1934.69 The f c so contended that the economic woes facing Canada and other capitalist countries were systemic; the shortcomings of particular individuals were not the cause. As economist and f cs o member Eugene Forsey put it, since capitalism existed to make profits rather than to meet needs, “a flock of archangels administering capitalism would be under the same compulsion, and their action could not be appreciably different.”70 If that were so, then emphasizing personal piety as the remedy for social and economic ills was misconstrued. John Line was among those drawn to Christian socialism in the 1930s, and like Nicholson and Forsey, he joined the f cs o. He too was uneasy with the preoccupation with individual religiosity that he was witnessing. He cautioned that prayer and public worship by themselves, apart from social self-abandon, would produce religious introverts whose moods would “wobble between self-complacency and self-commiseration.”71 Line blamed the “vast collectivization of human living” for rendering conventional evangelical teaching on the relationship between personal and social transformation less effective than in the past.72 He poignantly pinpointed its inability to deal with the new economic realities: those who had trusted and

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followed it “as faithfully as men ever did are destitute and hopeless; having been for years upright and industrious, they are now on the street.”73 As he watched the church organize retreats and special meetings, Line worried that religion had lost its way. To him it seemed that religion was “unable to recapture the certainty, confidence and directness which belonged to it in other days.” He offered some advice to those praying for revival: rather than assuming that religion revolved around “subjective moods,” they should instead commit to working “by all right means to establish God’s righteousness in the world.” If they did so, Line predicted that religious renewal would soon follow.74 Nicholson, Forsey, and Line were contributors to Towards the Christian Revolution, a collection of essays that drew a stinging review from Reinhold Niebuhr. Though glowing in his praise of the contributors as persons (“as promising a group as could be found in any church”), he alleged that they still assumed the socialist commonwealth was identical with the Kingdom of God – the same illusion that, in his view, had characterized the earlier social gospel movement.75 Reviewing the book for the New Outlook, Gordon Sisco, the United Church’s recently elected general secretary, defended the contributors on that score. The book’s message was “radically different from the social gospel of twenty-five years ago,” its theology “deeper, sadder, more tragic” than the liberal optimism of the former. “If we cannot keep such men within the fellowship of the Church,” he warned, “if we stifle their freedom to prophesy merely on the ground that they are radicals, then our Protestant religion will gradually fade out as a saving force in modern life.” Sisco was not without his own reservations about their Christian socialist agenda (for instance, whether a transition from capitalism could be effected by a democratic process), but he highly recommended the book: “Brother ministers and laymen, read this book. You may not like it, but you need to face up to its challenging viewpoint.”76 These new theological currents found both a critic and a popularizer in Richard Roberts.77 He admitted to what he described as an “insuperable dualism” in his own thinking that lingered despite his efforts at synthesis. He claimed to be content to live with two theologies that would logically seem to be irreconcilable: the substance of the theology of the creeds with their doctrines of Inspiration, Revelation,

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Incarnation, Redemption, and Grace in concert with such modern elements as the Indwelling Christ, Jesus as the crown of biological evolution, and Immanence as Inner Light. “I mean to be a traditionalist and a modernist, as far as in me lies.”78 He conceded that the range of theological options made agreement difficult, thus contributing to what he described as chaos in Protestant thought. With ­humanism standing at one end and Karl Barth at the other end, “Protestant Christendom is sounding every sort of interval along the gamut of testimony; and the trumpet as a whole gives forth an uncertain and unintelligible ground.” Nothing would serve the church better, he ventured, than the production of “a summary statement” of its belief “respecting the great cardinal matters of faith: God, Man, the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit, the Church, the Atonement, and Eternal life.”79 Those who had formulated the doctrinal articles in the Basis of Union in the early years of the twentieth century would not have been surprised by a call for a contemporary proclamation of Christian faith. They had urged that the next generation restate the common faith as its own. The General Council took up that challenge in 1936, appointing a commission to prepare a new doctrinal statement that appeared four years later as the Statement of Faith. In his last address to the General Council as moderator, Roberts threw his support behind the commission’s decision, hopeful that presenting the Christian faith in contemporary terms would counter the “strange and perilous gospels” of conservative “sects,” whose promoters were influencing those “not tutored in their own faith.”80 Toward the end of his life, and awaiting publication of the Statement of Faith, Roberts sounded ready to pass the theological torch. He was candid about the social gospel movement: it had inspired Christians to redress the concerns of the poor and disadvantaged, but had placed too much blame for social anomalies on the economic system.81 Still, he rebuffed the idea that politics and economics were independent of religion as “a gross heresy.”82 He seemed unable to situate himself comfortably in any of the theological camps. “I have no apology to make for the liberalism I once professed,” he insisted, while admitting that liberalism had “run its course – has indeed here and there run to seed in a non-theistic humanism.” The evangelical revival that he had known in his early ministry had likewise reached a cul-de-sac, with its emphasis on personal salvation giving way to a vague personal loyalty to Jesus

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barren of the power for ethical behaviour or creative insight. Nor was Karl Barth’s “extreme theology” the answer.83 Attempts to resolve the theological tensions that Roberts identified likely tipped the Statement of Faith closer to Barth than Roberts would have wished. Behind the scenes, personality conflicts complicated theological differences as pastors, professors, and national church staff joined forces to tackle the task of preparing the document. Early drafts show them picking and choosing elements from two presentations (identified impartially as Statement A and Statement B).84 The influence of liberal theology was perhaps diminished due to Ernest Thomas’s poor health; he did not live to see the final draft.85 However, his misgivings were well known to other committee members. The minutes of one of the last meetings he attended record that he questioned “whether it would be wise to make ­Barthianism determinative.”86 The theological challenge to the old underpinnings of civic piety that Barth represented was clear to all. Nevertheless, the United Church did seem to be taking a Barthian turn, with the Statement of Faith placing more emphasis on God’s transcendence and human sin – and less emphasis on a coming Kingdom that might be brought nearer by ethical conduct. The fifth article described “man’s sin, God’s righteous judgment, and man’s helplessness and need,” while the sixth affirmed God’s “redemption of man” through Christ’s victory over death and evil as “at once an awful mystery and a glorious fact.” The authority of the church and its ministry nudged aside the Kingdom as the Christian community par excellence for life together before the end of time. Sisco conceded that Protestant liberalism had held a “too-easy view of the reality of sin” by assuming that progress was certain. Barthianism had replaced the immanent God of liberal theology with “a God who is transcendent, whose Kingdom does not come by anything man does, whose supreme realm is the believers’ soul, where grace alone can operate.” Hoping to reconcile Barth’s doctrine of revelation with the liberal understanding of community, he was convinced that “we can have a Church with a strong spirit of worlddenial at those points where the world is opposed to the Christian way, yet world-affirming at those very points where society gives indications of becoming reconciled with the creative will and love of God.”87 Randolph Carleton Chalmers, who would serve the United Church as pastor, associate secretary of e & s s , and professor of

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theology during his distinguished career, expressed the dilemma even more succinctly: “Humanism belittles God; Barthianism belittles man. Neither the one nor the other can be a gospel of hope for our bewildered civilization, and so we believe they must both be superseded.”88 Reconciling these different theological worldviews proved to be as difficult for theological radicals as for liberal evangelicals. While some, like Ernest Thomas, continued to hold firm to the principles of the social gospel, some prominent advocates for Christian socialism had second thoughts. Eugene Forsey moved toward the political centre during a career that saw him make important contributions to  Canadian public life as constitutional expert and senator. In ­retrospect he was to assess some of what was said in Towards the Christian Revolution “and especially of what I said” as “very foolish, or worse.”89 Gregory Vlastos accepted a teaching position at Cornell University in 1948 before moving to Princeton University in 1955, where he enjoyed a distinguished career in philosophy. His biography, posted on the department’s website, notes that while he continued to advocate for a “radical social order,” he soon came to consider such ideas “more a part of his private than of his professional life; he never revisited these topics and, indeed, never again included them in his curriculum vitae.”90 R.B.Y. Scott, Vlastos’s co-editor of Towards the Christian Revolution, also left Canada for a time, accepting an appointment in biblical studies at Princeton in 1955 before retiring in Toronto. Aware during the McCarthy era that his earlier political views might be considered suspect, he was careful to point out that he had always steered clear of Communism. “I no longer hold – if I ever did – that the social problem requires simply the replacement of capitalism by a kind of Christian socialism; as I have grown older I have realized better the complexities and ambiguities of the situation. In any case, you may be sure that I will not embarrass the University by ill-­ considered utterances or writings. As an alien resident I would keep strictly out of any political activities, for which in any case I would have little inclination.”91 Yet something of Scott’s earlier vision of a Christian social order was captured in lyrics that found an enduring place in hymnody.92 One of them, “O World of God,” set to the same tune as the hymn “Jerusalem,” a c c f favourite, poignantly pictured the human dilemma and the Christian hope:

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O world where human life is lived, So strangely mingling joy and pain, So full of evil and of good, So needful that the good shall reign! It is this world that God has loved, And goodness was its Maker’s plan, The promise of God’s triumph is A humble birth in Bethlehem.93 John Line’s theological journey more closely typified the tensions that the United Church was experiencing. During the Depression, Line drew public attention when he championed a controversial anti-capitalist resolution passed by Toronto Conference in 1933. A flattering article in Saturday Night about the incident reviewed his career: his crossing from Britain to Newfoundland at the age of eighteen as a shy young Methodist missionary; his studies at Victoria College; a teaching position at Mount Allison in philosophy and economics; and a return to Victoria College in 1929 after a brief stint at Pine Hill in Halifax. “Has the final stage in his development been reached?” asked the writer.94 As it turned out, no. Ten years later Line would move again, professionally and, it seems, theologically: he was still a professor at  Victoria University, but now teaching systematic theology and philosophy of religion at its theological college. He remained at Emmanuel College until his retirement in 1953. Line’s shifts in thinking while serving on the Commission on Christian Faith likely tipped the Statement of Faith in a more Barthian direction.95 The continuation in his spiritual trek toward a more liturgical expression of piety was reflected in his final publication in 1959, The Doctrine of the Christian Ministry, a study of the authority of the church and its sacraments.96 Much in demand as a committee member, Line was involved in  preparing the reports on “Evangelism” and “Christianizing the Social Order” that e & ss presented to the General Council in 1934. Line later expressed the sentiments of those who wanted to save both souls and the social order: “If I could go off to the woods and spend a year there with no telephone and write a book, or try to, I think the book I would write would be an attempt to combine the ideas of these two Reports and put them into one document. I think such a book is very badly needed, and I don’t know anything more

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important in connection with the work of the Board [e & s s ] than this question of how to co-ordinate these Reports.”97 A memorial statement presented to Toronto Conference to mark his death in 1970 described Line as “strongly evangelical,” one who “never lost sight of the necessary social implications of the Gospel.” No mention was made of the controversial anti-capitalist resolution of the 1930s. Instead, he was remembered for preaching on the street corners of Toronto during the Depression and working among the unemployed, often taking his students with him. Lauding him as one who epitomized the ideals of the United Church, the memorial summed up his life of witness and service: “He combined great gifts of mind with a compassionate heart.”98 Such an approach to lived religion was encapsulated in a phrase credited to American missionary Sherwood Eddy: a “whole Gospel” that did not pit personal evangelism against the social gospel.99 Yet this whole Gospel did not unite everyone. Writing under the pen name Candidus after the 1936 General Council, one observer expressed disappointment at the United Church’s timid response to economic problems. He contended that the reluctance to translate the gospel “into practical terms – ‘to serve the present age’ – came close to emptying the Social Gospel of all real content.”100 That assessment was perhaps too pessimistic. The report that had drawn the ire of Candidus actually claimed to be concerned with “man’s economic plight as well as his inward motives.” Its language was bold: “it must be our purpose to proclaim a whole Gospel for men and for the society of men ... Perish, we would say, the antithesis of individual Gospel versus social Gospel; perish even the distinction between them. We will evangelize with a whole Gospel or none, for none other is the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord.”101 That not all were able to rally around this call for the whole Gospel spelled trouble for Pidgeon’s “city without walls.” United Church people who were participating in church activities, raising children in Christian homes, organizing turkey suppers, or volunteering for community service were likely unaware of the theological debates over what it meant to pray “thy Kingdom come.” Being inner-worldly was a mark of ‘being United’ for the sociable souls who gathered for worship and other church-sponsored activities, volunteered for its many committees, studied together, and worked to extend the church’s influence in their community. The unresolved tensions that

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surfaced in the 1930s would return with a vengeance three decades later as the United Church considered how to deal with a resurgent fundamentalism, a declining neo-orthodoxy, and new forms of religious naturalism – discovering in the process that it was perhaps not nearly as modern as its critics in the 1920s and ’30s had claimed. In the meantime, theological friction combined with the growing appeal of the individual spiritual quest to weaken the sense of a fellowship united by a common faith. That there was a connection between faith and the conduct of everyday life remained a shared conviction. But a critical minority was more doubtful about the impact of ‘good persons’ on a social system that seemed resistant to change. And what if those good persons disagreed on how to bring about social change? Did the church have a responsibility to take a stand on particular issues, speaking and acting as the collective conscience of its members? Theological clashes were made even more complex by the troubling questions about Christianity and culture raised by the worsening international situation. The whole Gospel for sociable souls was soon sundered by  conflict that made it challenging to be united in either faith or fellowship.

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5 Christian Canada in a “New World Order” And one ought to consider that there is nothing more difficult to pull off, more chancy to succeed in, or more dangerous to manage, than the ­introduction of a new order of things. Machiavelli, The Prince

Many a Canadian would have smiled in agreement had they heard Lester Pearson’s reply when asked in 1941, “Are you American?” The diplomat who would later become prime minister answered tactfully, “Yes, I am Canadian.”1 Accustomed to thinking of themselves as ‘British’ in some sense, Canadians shared a continent with a country that claimed the name ‘American’ all for itself. A decade or so later, Canadians were less likely to think of themselves as either British or American; they were becoming simply Canadian. It was a small but telling detail of how quickly the Second World War erased old social identifiers. Although far from evident at the time, the 1940s were the beginning of the end not only of British Canada but also of Christian Canada. The political realities of the “new world order” that the victors hoped to create soon revealed the limits of Protestantism as a source of common values and a basis for national unity in postwar Canada. The war raised perplexing questions about the intersection of church, nation, and international affairs that lingered long after the conflict was over. The seemingly intractable differences between Protestants, Catholics, and non-Christians around the world – and even in Canada – disclosed the narrowness of the ecumenical movement’s vision of the Christian message as the basis for international harmony. The collapse of the British Empire, the rise of the United States as a superpower, and the growing diversity of Canada’s population as immigrants poured in during and after the war added new

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wrinkles to the old issue of Canadian identity and the churches’ role in constructing it. It was not just that Christian identity was found to be insufficiently universal to counter Communism; even in Canada a united church was evidently not conducive to sustaining a united country. The war was a destabilizing experience for the United Church. Its place in Christianity’s global mission shifted as it came to terms with the realization that its missionaries were no longer welcome in China and what was to become North Korea. Further, the movement of people during and after the war disrupted old patterns of interaction. Despite oft-repeated hopes for a new world order based on Christian principles, it was soon apparent that what had come into being after 1945 was anything but orderly. Even hopes that the United Church would evolve as the national repository of Protestant identity for Canadians outside Quebec were dashed by the demographic realities of the influx of ethnically and religiously diverse immigrants, many of them Catholic, during and after the war. The new Canada that emerged, so unlike the country that the church unionists had imagined, presented unforeseen challenges for the United Church’s work at home and overseas. A new world order based on Christian principles was a prominent theme at the World Conference of Christian Churches that met at Oxford University in 1937,2 and its theme still resonated with United Church leaders as they weighed their response to the grim international situation at their own General Council a year later. Delegates were presented with a report that reiterated the position the United Church had taken in the past: war was contrary to the mind of Christ and Christian principles. It acknowledged that some would read Jesus’ command to “love thy neighbour as thyself” as a ban on participation in any war, while others would interpret it to mean they could not participate in an unjust war. However, couched in language borrowed from the concluding pronouncement of the Oxford Conference was a broader and more assertive rationale for the use of force: “in the present unredeemed state of the world the state has the duty under God to use force when law and order are threatened or to vindicate an essential Christian principle, i.e., to defend victims of wanton aggression or secure freedom for the oppressed.” Rather than supporting only one position, in 1938 ­ the United Church recognized “the conscientious right and action”

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of all three, adding (under the rather pointed heading “The Way of the Cross”) that “Christians must be willing that for the world’s salvation their own blood be shed.”3 A year later, when the United Church rallied to support the cause of defending Christian civilization, it thus found itself in an uncomfortable position. Although many of its members supported the war, and saw it as an unavoidable response to Nazi aggression, pacifists within the church argued that war was not the solution to the international crisis. To make matters worse, both sides claimed (with good reason, if they had checked the Record of Proceedings from the previous year’s General Council) to have the church’s blessing. Pacifists kept this in mind as they called for the United Church to do more to press the federal government to provide legal services for interned aliens, care for child refugees from enemy countries, and ascertain non-military ways (such as reconstruction and rehabilitation projects) for conscientious objectors to serve their country.4 Despite the United Church’s recognition of conscientious objection as a defensible moral option, staunch supporters of Canada’s war effort were outraged when The United Church Observer published “A Witness against War,” a pacifist declaration signed by a number of prominent ministers.5 John Coburn, one of e & s s ’s field secretaries, tried to defend his church’s policy to critics by noting its similarity to the statement on war that had come from the Oxford Conference, “the nearest possible approach to an ecumenical deliverance so far as non-roman [sic] Christianity is concerned.” War was indeed sinful and violated the basic principles of the Christian religion, even if the cause was just. But the state was in a different position and had the right, and indeed the duty, to choose between two essentially evil courses of action. The resulting dilemma, as Coburn saw it, was that a church member was also a citizen and, as such, would have to make a decision about which course of action to follow. Both the Oxford Conference (expressing the mind of international ecumenism) and the United Church conceded that sincere Christian citizens could “come to opposite conclusions and take entirely different lines of actions.”6 As realism nudged idealism aside, the United Church offered ­practical aid to the war effort.7 It provided chaplaincy services to the enlisted men and women who identified themselves as members of the United Church in the Canadian Army (21.4 per cent), Royal Canadian Navy (25 per cent), and rcaf (31.87 per cent).8

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Representatives from its War Service Committee worked with the Department of National Defence to develop qualifications and classifications for chaplains, and nominated ministers for the positions. The women it employed were at the forefront of its ministry in communities where war industries and military training camps placed huge demands on social services and pastoral care.9 An estimated 60,000 women became active members of its War Service Committee’s units, which partnered with the Red Cross in supplying “comforts and necessities” to enlisted men and women.10 Deaconesses and wms missionaries often coordinated these efforts. Among them was Verda Ullman, who was sent by the Dominion Board of the wms to visit communities across Canada soon after her graduation from the United Church Training School in Toronto in 1942. One of her specific tasks was to support soldiers’ wives and women working in war industries by assessing their needs for housing, recreation, and pastoral care.11 Pleas from across the country for a “woman worker” came from places like Prince Rupert, bc, where a minister reported a doubling of the population in two years because of “soldiers, their relatives, Indians and other ship-building employees.”12 The wms’s Dominion Board also tackled what one newspaper referred to as the “delicate Japanese situation.” Its ­missionaries followed members of eight Japanese-Canadian congregations in British Columbia after their internment, hoping to  reestablish “the cultural and religious life to which they have been accustomed.”13 Even before the end of the war, the United Church looked ahead to demobilization and resettlement. War had uprooted an estimated one-sixth of the country’s population. Nearly 800,000 (including about 32,500 women) were in the armed forces; less conspicuous were the over 1.1 million (including 250,000 women) employed in war industries.14 Nearly all of them belonged to one church or another. The United Church was aware that once the war ended, adjusting to “the ways of peace and normalcy” would be difficult for many. As a pamphlet on the new tasks it would face bluntly put it, “young folks who came from farm life with its long hours, seasonal heavy work, absence of regular income and nearby attractions, will find it hard to go back to the quiet and drudgery involved in the noble vocation of agriculture.” Young veterans and war workers, especially female factory workers, were expected to be ‘different’ – at the very least, more mature – and this was of particular concern.

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There were fears that a woman’s place in society had changed. Young women engaged in the war industry “may have lost some of the feminine touch and ... taken on some masculine qualities.” Some veterans might return with deeper spiritual convictions, while others would be resentful, cynical, and emotionally traumatized. New opportunities for ministry were anticipated: psychiatric work with the emotional casualties of war, personal counselling on a range of issues, and a “new emphasis on the therapeutic value of worship.”15 While such efforts were considered by some to be minimal, critics of the church’s support for the war protested that too much was ­being done. They were especially shocked to learn that the United Church was urging its members to purchase war bonds in its name, putting the church in a position to gain a profit and retire its $1.7 million debt when the bonds matured. Unwanted international attention was drawn to this fundraising ploy when the Christian Century’s C.C. Morrison, ordinarily an admirer of the United Church, published a blistering attack in one of his editorials.16 The bonds controversy further alienated pacifists. Among those uneasy with the idea, which smacked to some of compromising ideals for financial gain, was R. Edis Fairbairn, the minister who had crafted the controversial “Witness against War” petition. According to Fairbairn, people were asking whether there was any issue upon which the United Church was willing to take a stand (and act on it) regardless of consequences. He suggested that the acid test was not “Will you die for your faith?” but “Will you cheerfully suffer financial loss for it?” For him, the real tragedy was that the average person did not believe in Christianity because the churches no longer seemed to believe in it.17 Others, however, still saw a constructive role for the churches. The social and theological plan for a new world order that had been bandied about in ecumenical circles before the war seemed all the more relevant once the war was underway. Invited as the speaker for the “Church of the Air” series in 1941, E.G.D. Freeman, professor and later dean of the Faculty of Theology at United College in Winnipeg, took as his theme “The Church and the New World Order.” More important than the conflict that had recently engulfed the world, he told his listeners, was the “conflict within the human soul.” The Christian church was called upon to take a side in this conflict and defend its values. He identified ten principles to which he claimed all Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, should be

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committed, among them equal rights and opportunities, freedom, justice, social security, protection of the family unit, and stewardship of resources. Like many United Church leaders, he searched for opportunities to move toward those worthy objectives, insisting that “unless we regard the present war as a stupid and meaningless dog fight, it is up against some such background that we must see it.”18 In his first address, Freeman set out a case for seeing Christian standards as a way to counter the materialistic and mechanistic “paganism” that had led to war.19 The second address elucidated what was becoming a common theme for those promoting the new world order: the ties between Christian faith and the democratic way of life. Freeman’s God spoke to men and women “through the voice and pleading of high ideals,” and he was struck by the similarity of democracy’s values to those of the historic Christian faith.20 A supporter of the policies that the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order had favoured in 1934, he conceded that during the Depression no one had the money to provide the social services it had recommended. But with the war came a different view of the state: “never again will people readily believe that a government that can finance a great war cannot in times of peace somehow provide work for people. The cry that there is no money in the country will never be believed again.”21 His final lecture presented the implications of the new world order for the church in cultivating a public conscience and sense of social responsibility.22 He made a special plea for co-­operation in higher education: “All the kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ – and the most important of all is the kingdom of the mind.”23 The United Church exuded this confident outlook as it prepared for postwar reconstruction. A Commission on Church, Nation and World Order that reported to the General Council in 1944 oversaw an ambitious research project that included collaboration with ecumenical partners in the United States and Great Britain.24 Canadian academics, business professionals, and civil servants served as volunteer consultants, working either directly with the commission or, more often, in regional study groups assigned to garner ideas and information on specific issues. It was assumed that this local wisdom would somehow find its way into the final report.25 Behind the scenes, some troubling issues were surfacing. The philanthropic demands of the Depression had depleted the church’s

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resources, forcing it to cut back on social research. It was evident that voluntary organizations could not compete with the taxation power of government, particularly at the federal level, to amass research funding. What then could church staff or volunteers say or do to address social issues that specialists working in secular organizations would not do better? And what did the principles promulgated by national executives and General Council delegates have to do with decisions made by churchgoers across the country? Commission members disagreed about the means, ends, and even their own competence to address the questions. The United Church’s delegates to the Round Table Conference at Princeton Theological Seminary found other church leaders facing a similar problem: it was easy to agree on moral principles, but difficult to find consensus on how to apply them.26 A decade after the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order finished its work, the relationship between broad theological principles and specific social policies was still contested, leaving some puzzled and others disillusioned and angry. Dalhousie University professor R.A. MacKay put the matter bluntly to J.R. Mutchmor, who was assigned to serve as secretary to the new commission: the issues assigned to subcommittees were worthy of discussion, but since most committee members were not experts, he expected little would come of their input. His advice was to focus on the “moral, humanitarian, and probably a religious basis” of policies, and “leave to governments or other agencies the main responsibility of finding ways and means.”27 A.R.M. Lower, a well-known historian and United Church layman who served as a consultant to the commission, worried that the report might be viewed as politically biased. He critiqued an early draft as “an orthodox statement of the Christian position, followed by a social manifesto that does not intimately relate to the statement of doctrine preceding it.” Concerned that with a few changes, the policy sections might just as easily have been issued by “an advanced left-wing party,” Lower wondered whether it was the church’s business “to take its stand on too specific a social programme.”28 Influential commission members apparently agreed with correspondents who expressed similar concerns,29 as did the new coordinator hired by the secretary of General Council to wrap things up. General secretary Gordon Sisco had discovered, to his chagrin, that after five drafts there was still little agreement on strategy, and not all members and regional groups were equally reliable in preparing

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their sections.30 With the deadline for the final report drawing closer, he turned to C.E. Silcox, a minister with extensive background in social research and administration.31 Silcox’s involvement in international ecumenism included work for the Rockefeller-funded Institute for Religious Research in New York, which published his book Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences in 1933. Although Sisco asked him to revise only one section of the report, Silcox ended up restructuring the entire document, taking a global rather than a Canadian outlook as his starting point.32 Silcox’s conviction that detailed policy proposals were futile drastically changed the tone of the final report. It also put him at odds with R.B.Y. Scott, at that time still professor of Old Testament at McGill (and no doubt still remembered for his involvement in the fc so and as co-editor of Towards the Christian Revolution). In his role as research director for the Church, Nation and World Order commission, Scott favoured incorporating the findings of policy studies into the report, such as those prepared by the left-leaning League for Social Reconstruction.33 Silcox disagreed, arguing that minimum detail would produce maximum agreement.34 At eightythree pages (including regional reports and appendices), the commission’s 1944 report could hardly be called “minimum” in length, but its moderate and erudite tone no doubt came as a relief to those who had been fretting that the church might do harm by stumbling into matters beyond its competence. A proposal for a “Christian Charter for Man and Society” epitomized the mediating mood of the final report. It understood human rights as “not absolute, but conditioned upon man’s acceptance of corresponding responsibilities as a child of God and as a brother to his fellow-man.”35 The state’s role was envisioned as providing for “the mutual sharing of burdens beyond the powers of individuals, voluntary associations or lesser governmental units,” though not to “relieve the individual citizen of responsibilities” or take on tasks better handled elsewhere. Gone was the optimism about human nature and the coming of the Kingdom of God associated with early social gospel liberalism. “The Gospel must be brought to bear both on personal lives and on the structure of human relationships as a whole,” it declared; however, “the Kingdom of God in its perfection is beyond any attempt to give it formulation.”36 The commission’s correspondence indicates that the United Church was perceived as wielding considerable political clout, hence

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the concern that it be exercised prudently.37 Its ambitious report weighed in on such issues as national unity, economic policy, social security, family life, racial relationships, the arts, and education, thus lending support for social programs the Liberal government was proposing.38 It also shaped opinion in the United Church for many years. The Committee on the Church and International Affairs (c c ia ) that was set up at the General Council in 1946 saw itself as a creation of the commission, and considered the 1944 report “the basic statement of our church in this field.”39 However, in the supposed influence of the church on its members, the report noted a disturbing trend: “an underlying hostility that has arisen within the church towards the pronouncements of Church Courts in the economic and social field.”40 Evidently, some still considered such matters none of the church’s business. Even before the war ended, there were indications that the road to the new world order was unlikely to be a smooth one. The United Church’s own experience of dealing with diversity highlighted the difficulties of promoting common Christian values even in Canada. The predominantly Catholic province of Quebec was the most obvious challenge. A young George Monro Grant had once dared to imagine a national church that would include both Catholics and Protestants, but near the end of his life, even he sounded pessimistic about that prospect as he described religious differences in Canada to an international audience: “Even in cities where there is the closest association of Protestant and Romanist in commercial, industrial and political life, the two currents of religious life flow side by side as distinct from each other as the St Lawrence and the Ottawa after their junction. But the rivers do eventually blend into one. The two currents of religious life do not.”41 Complicating matters further was the lingering effect of a bitter struggle over language that had erupted among Canadian Catholics around the turn of the century. It was fuelled, Robert Choquette ­argues, by different visions of Canada, with Catholic anglophones favouring “a homogeneous British English-speaking nation with ­allowance for a bilingual French-Quebec ‘reservation.’”42 The war would test a tenuous truce between francophone Catholics in Quebec and Protestants in the rest of Canada, with English-speaking Catholics typically torn between the two sides.

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Quebec and the rest of Canada were running on separate tracks that only cautiously intersected, with linguistic differences rein­ forcing centuries-old hostilities between Protestants and Catholics. Looking back on a life of service that took him across Canada and around the globe, Lester Pearson remembered how the world once looked to a boy raised in a Methodist parsonage: “to transpose John Wesley, the parish was my world, geographically and in other ways.” To someone born in 1897 and growing up in central Canada, ­Quebec was “virtually a foreign part which we read about in our school-books.” The rest of the world was defined in terms of the British Empire – a view he assessed as “normal for the times.” The man whose government was to set up the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the 1960s admitted that Canadian nationalism “hardly touched us in those days since our teaching was concentrated on Canada as part of an empire.”43 Meanwhile, another future prime minister of Canada was learning very different lessons about his country. It was not a Methodist ­parish but a Jesuit school that shaped Pierre Trudeau’s view of the world during the eight years he spent at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal in the 1930s.44 Asked during those formative years to prepare an essay predicting his future, he imagined himself arriving in Montreal in 1976 to “take command of the troops and lead the army to victory.” He would then declare Quebec’s independence and form a country that would include the Maritimes and Manitoba. “I now live in a country that is Catholic and canadien,” he prognosticated.45 In an oratorical contest a year later, Trudeau’s speech on the survival of the French-Canadian nation argued that Quebec would resist the “fatal tendency to continental assimilation” because of “the canadien miracle”: a high birth rate that was far outpacing that of Ontario and British Columbia.46 Later he would leave behind his youthful separatist leanings to become a strong Canadian nationalist and “citizen of the world.”47 Such different understandings of nationhood were unlikely to be  reconciled easily. In January 1938, on the eve of the war, an ­address by Cardinal Villeneuve, later printed in Le Devoir, alarmed Protestants in Quebec with its talk of limited toleration for those preaching “corrosive doctrines” and spreading “poisoned seeds.” Some quarters of the United Church worried that this would lead to a “bid for the supremacy of the Catholic Church in matters temporal

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and spiritual, making Canon Law superior to that of the state in matters affecting the doctrines and aims of Roman Catholicism.”48 The gloves came off later that same year at a conference on “Problems of Canadian Unity” at Lake Couchiching organized by the Canadian Institute on Economics and Politics. Speaking at a ­session on religion as a facet of political conflict, C.E. Silcox addressed the simmering tensions between Protestants and Catholics. Protestants objected to the Canon Law requirement that marriages to “heretical Christians” (such as they) were valid only if solemnized in the presence of a Catholic priest. Particularly troubling was the expectation that children would be educated in the Catholic faith, a practice looked upon by many Protestants as a means by which “Catholics can overcome their minority status through breeding and thus gain political power.”49 Other thorny issues included restrictions on public criticism of Catholicism due to the church’s control of Quebec’s censorship board, public funding for Catholic schools, Catholic labour unions, and the Catholic Church’s extensive taxexempt properties. The difference between Catholic Quebec and the rest of Canada was put on national display in 1942 with the call for a plebiscite on conscription for overseas service. Protestants and Catholics generally agreed that the conflict was in defence of Christian civilization; their disagreement lay in the role of democracy. While Protestants tended to see democracy as essential to a Christian civilization, many Catholics in Quebec disagreed: democracy was often anti-Christian in practice, replacing the rule of Christ by the rule of the people.50 There was no sense of solidarity with Protestant social reform, which was met instead with suspicion, suggests historian Tom Faulkner. In Quebec, Christian civilization was primarily canadien, secondarily Canadian, and “most emphatically ... never British.”51 Protestants contrasted their emphasis on individual freedom with the authoritarianism they associated with Catholicism. They would hardly have been calmed by the notion of “corporatism” discussed by Quebec’s religious leaders, which featured an active role for the state in creating a distinctively Catholic alternative to socialism, fascism, and even capitalism.52 Little wonder that Protestant leaders regarded Quebec Catholicism as an obstacle to their plans for postwar reconstruction and Canadian unity. Mutchmor stated as “a fact” – not as a criticism, much less an argument – that Roman Catholic influence in Quebec was “a threat to any constructive

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post-war planning.” French Canadians had created “a state within a state, in which the Roman Catholic Church is dominant,” and Mutchmor assumed that its influence in Canadian politics was consequently considerable.53 The animosity soon spilled over into other areas of domestic ­policy. Not surprisingly, Silcox was among those incensed when Parliament provided for family allowances by passing in 1944 what he described as “the most precipitate and indefensible piece of legislation which a civilized government has ever ventured to pass in wartime.”54 He viewed it as a crassly political concession to Quebec’s demands, not a step toward a comprehensive and fiscally sound policy.55 He was not against social welfare – quite the contrary – but rewarding families with high birth rates was not the way to go about it in his estimation.56 He suspected a conspiracy to “push even higher the fertility of French Canadian women” by subsidizing them with funds from Protestants and non-francophone Catholics (whose birth rates approximated Protestants). The Liberal government seemed prepared to pay the price “if only it can maintain its hold on its darling Quebec bloc!”57 With the country at war, Silcox predicted that the move would be resented elsewhere in Canada, especially since Quebec was under-represented in the armed forces. As someone had said to him, “They breed, while we bleed.”58 That Protestantism would remain a minority in Quebec had long been conceded, but its dominance elsewhere in Canada had been presumed. In 1944, alarmed by the prospect of a demographic time bomb, e & ss set up a special committee chaired by George Pidgeon (a native of Quebec). A “strictly confidential” report to the executive of General Council warned that population trends indicated that in the not-too-distant future the majority of Canadians might be Catholic. Already some areas outside Quebec formerly peopled by English Protestants were becoming French and Catholic. While ruling out a “bigoted or intolerant anti-Catholic campaign,” the committee recommended co-operation with other Protestants to remedy the “lamentable ignorance” about Catholic beliefs, including Canada’s “distinctive protestant [sic] doctrine as to the relation of church and state, the church in international affairs, and the ­duties of the individual citizen.”59 The United Church took the lead in organizing an interdenominational committee on Protestant– Roman Catholic relations in 1945, with Pidgeon serving as its first chair.60

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Not all were convinced that the cradle would triumph. Among the doubters was general secretary Sisco, another Quebecer who had risen to prominence in the United Church. As the only Canadian invited to address the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches (wc c ) in 1948, Sisco introduced those gathered to the religious situation in Canada. Canadian Catholicism was not as cohesive as it was in United States, he explained, because “the French Canadians keep pretty much to themselves and are somewhat obsessed by the idea that they can win Canada by means of the battle of the cradle.” He expected this plan to fail, however, since industrialization would likely lower the birthrate in Quebec as it had elsewhere. In his view, the cause of ecumenism had actually been advanced by Catholicism – by provoking Protestants to unite in ­order to counter it.61 Apprehension about the growing number of Catholics, especially outside Quebec, and the threat to religious freedom they were ­assumed to represent persisted into the 1950s. Requests for clear answers to the question “What’s the difference?” resulted in a controversial publication by that name. Its catechetical question-andanswer style allowed the pamphlet to tackle the most sensitive issues head-on. To the question asking whether one type of Christianity was as good as the other, the response was frank: “No. Two mutually contradictory beliefs cannot be equally true.”62 The last of the twenty-five questions were reserved for the most contentious issues: “What is the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church to religious liberty?” and “What is the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church to mixed marriages?” Readers were warned that the “Roman Church” was a religious dictatorship that expected to control civil government in Catholic states. In countries like Canada where it was not yet powerful enough to claim that authority, “it is working for ­advantage and privilege and power in other ways until the day of ‘liberty’ when it can rule by sheer force.”63 As for mixed marriage, the conditions for granting a dispensation threatened to hasten that day, since the “heretical” Protestant partner had to sign an agreement allowing children of both sexes to be baptized and brought up in the Catholic faith.64 Though “the revenge of the cradle” persisted as a popular image of religious rivalry, ironically it was the open refugee and immigration policies that many United Church leaders championed that more

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decisively altered the makeup of Canada’s population. Quebec was not the United Church’s only or most immediate challenge when it came to religious and cultural diversity. More pressing was the church’s failure to appeal to the non-Anglo-Saxons outside Quebec, the very problem that the church union movement had hoped to solve by creating a strong national church for them to join. Years later, despite energetic efforts to broaden its appeal to immigrants, the United Church still drew its membership primarily from those of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Immigration continued to complicate the issue of Canadian identity. The vision of Canadian society as a cultural mosaic that invited but did not demand homogeneity gradually nudged aside the image of Canada as a melting pot of diverse cultures.65 In the 1930s old questions still dogged those who pored over census figures and surveys to assess whether some immigrants were more easily ­ Canadianized than others. John Cormie, superintendent of home missions in Manitoba, wondered how well the “material” being “poured into the pot” was “melting and fusing.”66 His study of immigration and population for the Social Service Council of Canada confirmed a widely shared feeling: the “fusing process” was progressing well with “North Western Europeans,” but those from “South Eastern and Central Europe” were integrating more slowly. He concluded that “those who are not akin to us in their political and cultural traditions should, as far as possible, be discouraged from coming to Canada as immigrants.”67 A survey of three rural areas conducted by J.R. Watts, a professor at Queen’s Theological College, gave the United Church even more to worry about. He detected only a vague sense of purpose in the United Church’s home missions work, especially when working among Southern Europeans. Was the aim to make them AngloSaxon Protestants, or was it to provide them with religious ordinances more in line with their own traditions? Watts knew that Saskatchewan Conference pastors had been encouraged to work with immigrants (and especially with young people) if pastoral care from “their own church” was inadequate. That directive assumed that home missions work needed to be “enlarged and pressed with greater vigor and earnestness if we are going to make Canada the Christian country that The United Church of Canada holds as its  ideal.” Watts himself sounded dubious about the eventual outcome of such initiatives, rightly predicting the challenge awaiting a

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congregation that found itself “contiguous to a foreign block expanding into territory once wholly British-speaking.”68 “The replacement of the old Canadian stock by the New Canadians continues to weaken many rural United Churches,” observed a Manitoba Conference report on home missions that described growing numbers of Ukrainian and Mennonite settlements in the province.69 According to the 1941 census, such immigrants identified with the United Church in larger numbers than any other denomination;70 yet the results were still discouraging. G.B. King, dean of the Faculty of Theology at United College in Winnipeg, made the startling claim that in Manitoba, “leadership, so far as the numbers go, has already passed from the Anglo-Saxon group.” Between 1931 and 1936, what he described as “the British element” had actually decreased by 5,621 compared to an increase of 16,698 in other groups. As these new Canadians moved in, congregations that were once “solidly Anglo-Saxon” and resilient faced a more precarious future. King was not inclined to abandon work with recently arrived immigrants, especially since conservative evangelical groups (which he referred to as “the smaller sects”) seemed to be making headway in some communities, appealing to those he disparagingly characterized as “ill-adjusted and starved personalities.”71 The short supply of ministers willing to serve in mission-supported congregations was reduced even more by the demand for chaplains for the armed forces. Although amalgamating pastoral charges was a solution to personnel shortages, it created a different problem by opening the field to religious competition, usually from smaller conservative denominations. Home mission reports noted the arrival of the Salvation Army, the Gospel Hall, and Pentecostalism. “On many of our Home Mission Fields, we find such groups already in action, as well as in the process of organization,” a British Columbia report noted in 1940. Commenting that these new movements were drawing “recruits from our own United Church congregations,” the report urged “a more determined effort to find wherein our own work has lost its appeal.”72 Even after the war ended, vacant positions went unfilled. The Board of Home Missions report for 1948 warned that the United Church’s work was “being taken over by others, who, for one reason or another, seem to have more personnel available for these communities than we have.”73 Other depictions of the competition were less charitable. For example, Newfoundlanders who were drawn to the Salvation Army and Pentecostalism were described as “emotionally unstable, reactionary, and older church members.”74

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Canada’s population was not only growing more diverse but more mobile. The Board of Home Missions estimated that at least 750,000 Canadians had migrated from one area to another between 1939 and 1942, many of them from rural communities to the city.75 Farm labour was in short supply, with many young adults moving to jobs in urban areas or joining the armed services. A report on home missions work in central and northern Alberta gave a frank description of what was happening in many communities as the number of farms sold to new immigrants increased. Families had moved there forty or fifty years earlier, organizing a church when they arrived. The parents were now too old to do farm work by themselves, their children lived elsewhere, and hired help was hard to find. When a farm was put up for sale, “a young Non-Anglo-Saxon arrives with the money in his hand to purchase the farm implements and stock.” These newcomers generally were uninterested in joining the church; to make matters worse, the previous owners, usually older pillars of the church, often moved to the city once their farms were sold.76 In response to repeated expressions of concern about work with ethnic minorities, the United Church formed a commission that completed its report on “City Missions and Non-Anglo-Saxon Work” in 1944. The findings of congregational surveys in prairie communities and visits to institutions that worked with immigrants were discouraging. The investigation uncovered little inclination (especially among those of Catholic background) to affiliate with the United Church. There was some success among Ukrainians immigrants, especially children and young adults. Those born in Canada were “tired of the candles and incense,” according to the pastor from the Canora-Buchanan pastoral charge, and “secretly aspire to ‘equality’ & fellowship with Anglo-Saxons. They like our Sunday Schools and young people’s organizations: to my mind, this is the key.” Yet he found their involvement hampered by “bias and bigotry among A.S.’s [Anglo-Saxons]” in his six-point pastoral charge.77 Urging the church to be “jolted out of its complacency,” the report recommended that a new emphasis be placed on “comprehensive inclusiveness.” It sounded a warning: unless there was “a change of attitude on the part of many ministers and people,” the United Church would be “in danger of becoming an Anglo-Saxon sect.”78 Some United Church groups took up the challenge. Educational programs alerted wms members, most of whom lived in racially homogeneous communities, to the inequality that faced racial minorities in Canada. Issues were presented in terms of Christian

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citizenship and tied to the wms’s own objectives, lending them an  air of indisputability. A series in Missionary Monthly on “The Church Woman as Citizen” that concluded with a two-part article on “race prejudice” framed the issue in terms of a w m s objective: “to create bonds of Christian friendship between our members and peoples of other races and other lands.” Winnifred Thomas described race prejudice as a problem at the international, national, community, and personal level. Urging readers to root out prejudice in their own hearts and minds, and then aid others around them to do likewise, she reminded readers that “public opinion is personal opinion.”79 The first step toward “curing” race prejudice, she counselled, was to acknowledge that it was unchristian, learn about other races, and acquaint oneself with their members.80 Appeals on behalf of war refugees added to the urgency of overcoming prejudice toward new Canadians. United Church groups were among those who took up their cause, speaking, writing, and supporting petitions for those hoping to resettle in Canada.81 Among them were Jews from Germany and Czechoslovakia who caught the attention of well-placed advocates. Silcox was aware of the dire situation they faced in Europe even before the outbreak of war.82 Convinced that economic fears were partly to blame for immigration restrictions, he presented a financial case for easing regulations: European refugees were “assimilable people” who would become consumers and build new industries. He bluntly noted that opposition to immigration was cultural as well as economic, based on fear that unless Anglo-Saxons remained the majority, “our whole British outlook on life may be destroyed if we do not encourage fresh infusion of Anglo-Saxon blood.” What was more necessary, he countered, was “the Anglo-Saxon spirit,” and where, he asked, was it more likely to be found than among such refugees?83 Their “intellectual standards and their understanding of and passion for democracy” would uphold British ideals and institutions.84 Ernest Marshall Howse was another who joined those calling for Canada to open its doors to refugees. An up-and-coming minister from Newfoundland, Howse preached two compelling sermons on the European refugee problem to his parishioners at Westminster United Church in Winnipeg in the spring of 1939. He deplored the hypocrisy of North Americans who for years had been “dripping over with sympathy for the oppressed people in Europe,” but now refused to help Hitler’s victims.85 He favoured increasing Canada’s

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share of refugees, quoting with approval the Canadian National Committee on Refugees (headed at the time by Sir Robert Falconer): “A nation which has the potential resources of Canada and refuses to help in such an emergency does not deserve economic prosperity; it does not even deserve the right to be called a Christian country.”86 Obviously alluding to Jewish immigrants, he praised those seeking refuge as belonging to “the most highly trained and gifted families in  Europe,” and likened them to “refined gold from a very fierce crucible.” Their only offence was to belong to “the race that gave us Isaiah, Jesus, and St Paul.” Suffering beside them were Christians who had “protested the paganization of the German race.”87 Missionary societies also took up the cause of refugee resettlement. The wms co-sponsored e & ss ’s petition drives. Its literature confronted negative depictions of Jews, such as their predilection for living in cities, by presenting information aimed at dispelling stereotypes – in this instance pointing out that in the Middle Ages, restrictions placed on Jews prevented them from owning or tilling the land.88 Such articles often tackled the issue of anti-Semitism headon, disclosing that the refugee petition was “revealing a great deal of anti-Jewish feeling,” and reminding readers that for many Jews the alternative to living in Canada was starvation in Europe. There was a religious rationale as well: “If Christian people turn their backs on the homeless, how can we call ourselves followers of the Christ?”89 Yet even those who agreed with such principles found them difficult to put into practice, and outcomes were modest. Constance Hayward, executive secretary of the Canadian National Committee on Refugees, admitted that “enlightened opinions had only limited effect” in convincing policy-makers that it was in Canada’s interest to admit refugees fleeing Nazi tyranny.90 While more local studies are needed to confirm it, one is left with the impression that in the United Church, there was well-intentioned talk, but almost no action of consequence.91 For example, a study of the Ministerial Association (mainly Protestant with some Jewish involvement) in Kingston, Ontario, and the Catholic diocesan newspaper suggests that relationships with local rabbis were cordial, but local concerns took precedence over international ones.92 Similarly, the United Church opposed (though, again, with little to show for it) the punitive government policies that abrogated the civil rights of those of Japanese ancestry, even the Nisei who had been born and raised in Canada.93 Japanese-Canadians had joined the

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United Church in significant numbers. Many remained under its pastoral care, sometimes accompanied by missionaries, after they were forced to leave their homes. Elda Daniels escorted eighteen girls from the Oriental Home and School in Victoria, bc, to the Girls’ Residence in Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, where their anticipated arrival was nicknamed “The Invasion.” Her charges were reportedly well received in the community, a feat that she credited to “the groundwork done by church leaders and school teachers in preparing right attitudes before our arrival.” Her mission involved more than attending to the spiritual welfare of the girls. According to Daniels: “We hope to show the community how truly Canadian our family is, and how the church is doing its part in helping the state to train Christian citizens for tomorrow.”94 But such efforts were of little immediate help to the Japanese, described by one report as having the worst experience of any group of immigrants to Canada.95 Their treatment belied the belief that Anglo-Saxonism was a cultural identity that was acquired rather than innate, with conversion to Christianity a critical step in the process; it did not bode well for either British Canada or Christian culture. There was more unwelcome news awaiting international ecumenism and those associated with it as they confronted the geopolitical revolution that followed the war. Britain, says historian Peter Clarke, “survived the war only to find itself a ghost of the great power that  had held a dominant position in the world since the fall of Napoleon.”96 The United States emerged as the ascendant world power, a change in fortunes with effects that rippled around the globe. Weakened by the terms of the war loan negotiated with the United States, Britain lacked the economic resources and the political will to retain its mandate in Palestine, which reverted to the United Nations in 1947. Its empire in India was lost to Gandhi’s independence movement the same year.97 Chronicling the details of the “liquidation” of the empire, Clarke sees the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 as a key indicator of Britain’s fate: though few had expected the Zionists to succeed, the United States exerted its considerable influence at the un on their behalf, and sided against the Arabs in the conflict. “In the end,” he concludes, “the British generally chose the Arabs and the Americans chose the Jews.”98 Although its placid decolonization process did not make headlines around the world, Canada’s relationship with the mother country

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was changing too. After the Canadian Citizenship Act came into effect in 1947, Canadians were no longer British subjects. Being British and part of the empire – the core identity for anglophone Canadians since Confederation, and touted as the linchpin of cultural assimilation of new immigrants – faded in significance. Arthur Lower claimed in 1952 that while old sentiments for the British Empire still lived on and found expression at ceremonial occasions, people probably knew “in their bones” that the old world was gone. “The average English Canadian retains relatively unchanged his traditional attitudes to the Crown,” Lower claimed. “But while he listens respectfully to appeals to the idea of the Commonwealth, he has difficulty, as with a long prayer, in remembering what has been said.”99 Less perceptible was the religious impact of this loss of “Britishness,” where Protestantism had enjoyed what historian Linda Colley describes as a place of “absolute centrality,” with Europe viewed as the  Catholic “Other.”100 Canada’s Protestant identity soon proved to be as shallow as its British identity – and was to fade away almost as quickly. The new superpower status of its neighbour further complicated matters. English-speaking Canadians had grown accustomed to using their British identity as a buffer against the rising American empire after the Great War.101 By the 1920s the United States had already supplanted Great Britain as Canada’s largest foreign investor; by the 1950s it accounted for close to 80 per cent of foreign ­investment in Canada. Whereas the British had preferred to hold railway and government bonds, Americans favoured direct control of manufacturing and resource companies; hence, their investments were more visible.102 As the pace of investment quickened, uneasiness heightened. Had Canada shed its colonial status only to fall under the control of another imperial power? The first report from the Committee on the Church and International Affairs (cci a) in 1948 noted a marked shift in trade patterns and warned that “Canada may find herself in the unhappy position of having to elect whether to be a British or American nation.” Although Canada benefited economically from its proximity to the United States,103 at times the American way of life seemed a more immediate threat to the Canadian way of life than more distant Communist foes. The drift toward democracy, rather than Christian civilization, as the banner under which the Cold War was fought added another wrinkle. The linguistic turn was at first barely

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discernible. In 1946, Winston Churchill, in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech, rallied Christian civilization against its Communist enemy. Louis St Laurent, soon to succeed W.L.M. King as prime minister, described Christian civilization in similar terms a year later, as one of five principles upon which Canada’s foreign policy rested.104 But in the United States, the battle against Communism was becoming linked to defending the American way of life, a cause that drew its citizens together as Americans in a way that superseded their particular identities as Protestants, Catholics, or Jews. The democratic principles of individual freedom and human rights became associated with a secular ideology that had no need of Christianity as a source of shared values – perhaps an attractive alternative once it became obvious that there was no common understanding among Catholics and Protestants (to say nothing of Jews and other religions) of what Christian civilization signified.105 This lack of Christian unanimity dashed the hopes of United Church leaders who linked the church’s world mission to fighting the Communist foe. Howse, newly arrived from Winnipeg to ­Toronto as minister of Bloor Street United Church, boasted that in the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries had been alone in calling for “one common and universal allegiance.” Although he conceded that in many places in the world Christians were a despised and persecuted minority, there was still an organized church in every country except Tibet, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. Christianity was the only religion that could rationally claim to be universal since it was “unthinkable that all mankind will ever become Sikhs or ­Mohammedans or Buddhists.” Howse warned that, for the first time, Christianity was facing a dangerous world rival that aimed to be a substitute for all religions: “The authoritarian state, Fascist or Communist, is the expression of a competing world culture, utterly incompatible with the Christian view of life ... It is, so to speak, a black religion. It has not only in the most astonishing fashion taken the guise and regalia of religion, it aspires to take the place of religion.”106 What Howse failed to see was that the democratic state might also compete with Christian internationalism once Christianity’s universal appeal was found wanting. Many in the United Church considered the cause of democracy and the goals of Christian civilization as analogous. A pamphlet for aots men published in 1948 described the club’s intent to build a “Christian democracy.” It was imperative therefore “to create public

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opinion on all important issues, based on [Christ’s] life and teachings” as “t he c o nd i t i on o f su rvi val .”107 Women were also inspired by the democratic ideals of Christian citizenship. Margaret McWilliams, an active member of St Stephen’s-Broadway United Church in Winnipeg and married to the lieutenant governor of Manitoba, was a civic leader in her own right as founder and first president of the Canadian Federation of University Women and a four-term alderman.108 As she saw it, western civilization was facing a “deadly challenge.” A struggle was being waged between liberal democracy and the ideology of materialistic Communism. She believed that Communism would be defeated “only by proving to the world that our liberal democracy, which has flowed under the influence of Christianity, brings more happiness, more well-being to everyone within its sunlight.” However, the way in which this contest was being waged concerned her; she sensed that the “indubitable fact” of the Christian roots of liberal democracy was being forgotten. Instead religious beliefs were becoming merely “private possessions,” and there was a reluctance “even to bring the names of God and Jesus into our daily conversation.”109 Just as disturbing was the discovery that democratic values were sometimes at odds with the aims of Christian internationalism. By the time the wc c met for the first time in 1948, the language of ecumenism was changing in ways that hinted at uncertainty about its  assumptions of universality. At first the signs were subtle. The foremost ecumenical journal, launched in 1935 as churches prepared for the Oxford Conference, went by the name Christendom: An Ecumenical Review. With the founding of the w cc, it became simply The Ecumenical Review. The omission of the word “Christendom” clearly demonstrated Christianity’s more precarious international standing as a source of common values. More telling was the replacement of order by disorder to describe the new world that emerged out of the crucible of war. One of the four books published in preparation for the first wc c assembly was titled The Church and the International Disorder, edited by a group that included John Foster Dulles, a politically well-connected American Presbyterian. Dulles’s essay on “The Christian Citizen in a Changing World” drew the stinging conclusion that Christianity’s impact on the fight against Communism was at present “wholly inadequate.” If Christians were to play a role, it was imperative that their churches “have better organization, more unity of action and put more emphasis on

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Christianity as a world religion.”110 His hopes for the w cc soon foundered due to its reluctance to share his confidence in the American way of life as tantamount to God’s way of working in the world.111 The wc c ’s early assemblies steered away from granting the United States the redemptive role that Dulles had proposed, leaning too far to the left in his view, and leaving him wary of the political judgment of church leaders.112 Defending the individual liberties of the Free World, rather than Christian civilization, became the new rallying cry of those who agreed with him.113 The new dominance of the United States in world affairs was soon felt in Canada. For a time there was a continuation of the close collaboration that had developed during the war, and only minor dif­ ferences of opinion surfaced on issues of international security.114 However, the unequal partnership between the two North American nations was bound to cause resentment. As the Cold War escalated, Canada’s relationship with United States chilled. Tensions came to a head during discussions of the defence of North America. American politicians and military leaders seemed to be treating Canada as an extension of the United States. As Canada demanded to be consulted about the production and use of nuclear weapons, the United States became more secretive. Canada wanted to play a mediating role in international conflict as a middle power, but was treated as poor cousin and ignored unless it was willing to take the American side.115 A defining moment in the United Church’s assessment of Canada’s dealings with its powerful neighbour came in 1960 after news that the Soviets had shot down an American U-2 spy plane flying over the ussr. The ccia’s report to the General Council expressed shock at the way national interest had trumped the truth: the United States had been caught in a “flagrant, detailed, and circumstantial self-­ justifying lie” after proclaiming its “moral superiority so aboundingly.” The incident made it clear that “Canada has little voice in policy and no influence on decision; its counsel is heard but ignored; it is not kept informed.”116 The report raised a moral question: was the United States about to cross the line between defensive action and pre-emptive war, not only with the U-2 flights but also in its willingness to conduct chemical and bacteriological experiments? Canada had good reason to be concerned, since it had made testing grounds available for such experiments. “The affluent society drifts,” the report warned, and the committee clearly did not like the direction in which it was headed: “In a half-informed society, spoon-fed with the

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official half-truth, security is equated with secrecy, safety with more destructive weapons, survival with mass murder. What is there in this to attract the new African nations, the Latin Americans, the awakening Asians, to our side? They account for more than half the human race.”117 The Vietnam War would deepen these divisions. The changing world presented the United Church with a host of new questions about policies and programs it had once wholeheartedly supported. Those who championed principles of fairness and justice for refugees were torn, for instance, between supporting the establishment of a homeland for Jews and sympathizing with the  Palestinians who suddenly found themselves displaced because of it. Refugee advocates who had once worked on behalf of Jews escaping from Europe were accused of latent anti-Semitism when they took up the cause of the Palestinians who fled from their homes in 1948 after the war in the Middle East. The United Church found itself in the awkward position of supporting the cause of both Arabs and Israelis, but not fully siding with either, until the war in 1967 tipped a ­number of prominent church leaders more decisively toward the Palestinians.118 Among the early critics of the un ’s proposal to create a Jewish state was Silcox, described by one scholar as the “pre-eminent champion of the Jewish refugee cause in Christian Canada.”119 Well known in Jewish circles as director of the Canadian Conference of Christians and Jews from 1940 to 1946, his disapproval no doubt came as a disappointment to Israel’s supporters. Defending his position, he pointed out that Balfour’s famous declaration in support of a homeland for the Jewish people had also promised that nothing would be done to compromise the rights of the non-Jewish communities ­already living in Palestine. Nothing good would come of a clash of nationalism, imperialism, and ideology in this strategically important area of the world where three continents converged, he predicted.120 He identified another geopolitical concern: since Islamic countries formed a buffer between East and West, understanding their world was of the utmost importance for western countries.121 Though he remained sympathetic to the Jewish cause, his telling of the history of the contested land emphasized that the region was peopled before the arrival of Abraham’s descendants, and many who were not Jewish still lived there. A bi-national state was the solution he favoured.

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After 1948 the c c i a treated the creation of the state of Israel as a matter of fact; the refugees were the nagging problem. Its reports blamed the United States, the uk , and the u n as well as Israel for the  impasse. The Arab allies were complicit too; they had left the Palestinians in deplorable camps, noted one report, callous in the knowledge they had “immense reserves of men and territory, and of world Muslim sympathy” as well as the advantage of time. Arab states were urged to recognize the state of Israel, and Israel was advised to compensate the refugees who could not return to ­ their homes.122 The c ci a claimed to be avoiding a partisan position, hoping the United Church would remain friends with everyone in the Middle East.123 But concerns that the Palestinian plight was ignored in the mainstream media swayed them to remind the church that the Palestinians were bearing the brunt of the guilt of others for treatment of an earlier group of refugees: “The Western conscience was soothed by sending [Jews] somewhere else at bitter cost to less favoured peoples who have had to provide ‘living space’ for Israel’s immigrants with their own villages, gardens and homes.”124 Those who followed the c c i a reports and related study materials also learned of the bitter hatred of Israel among Arabs, a hostility that was nurtured even in the un – quite an admission, given the United Church’s largely uncritical support of that organization at the time.125 The c c i a was alarmed by the growing numbers of refugees worldwide, including 400,000 Jews forced to leave Iraq, Yemen, North Africa, and Egypt in the decade after the 1948 war and an additional 15 million refugees from Europe – equivalent to the population of Canada, as the report pointedly put it.126 Another unwelcome consequence of the “new world disorder” was the blow dealt to the United Church’s overseas missionary program. Enthusiastic promotion of Christian internationalism before the war seemed hopelessly misdirected as tangible missionary support withered for pragmatic more than theological reasons. As late as 1937, Jesse Arnup had claimed that the uniting churches were “providentially ... led to plant their foreign missions” in a way that brought the United Church “into helpful contact with the great races and nations of the non-Christian world.” Four-fifths of its mission sites were in Asia, and over two-thirds of its missionaries served in China, Korea, and Japan.127 Little more than a decade later, these same locations spelled disaster for its missionary enterprise as

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political authorities turned hostile to the presence of missionaries from North America and Europe. Bad news from the international missions scene continued as Communism swept away what was left of work in northern Korea and China, already destabilized by depression and war. The cessation of w m s -sponsored missions in North Honan was reported in 1948,128 and missionaries to China were evacuated over the next few years. With its Korean missions situated north of the 38th parallel, the United Church concentrated on meeting the needs of refugees who fled south; its Korean work became “a mission in exile.”129 The impact was devastating when measured in terms of missionary personnel abroad. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of overseas personnel plummeted as missionaries from Asia were recalled. The policy review presented to the 1948 General Council still claimed, “our missionaries contribute greatly to the Christian goodwill among nations, essential to ‘One World.’”130 Although the United Church’s role was obviously diminished, the demise of Christian internationalism was only slowly accepted. “The closing of doors in China and the disruption of our work in Korea are not to be interpreted as failures,” insisted a report on overseas mission policy in 1952.131 Phrases like “one world,” “partners in a common civilization,” “one mission,” and “one Church” were used over and over in making the familiar case for world evangelization, but less convincingly. By that time some missionaries were disillusioned Christian internationalists. Two young Canadian idealists, Mary Austin and James G. Endicott, met at a missionary conference in Washington, d c, in 1925. A whirlwind romance followed, and before the end of the year they were serving as missionaries in China. As hopes for Christianity as the basis for international harmony dimmed, they became convinced that support for the Communist party offered a better chance for world peace.132 Jim resigned from the ministry of the United Church in 1946 in order “to take an active part in the struggle for human betterment in the field of social and political movements,” activities he deemed difficult for ministers “unless possibly they happen to be on the ‘right’ side.”133 He continued to maintain that he was a “Christian Liberal Reformer” rather than a Communist (since he believed it impossible to be both). Mary was less reluctant to be called a Communist sympathizer.134 Together they weathered a barrage of criticism from inside and outside the United Church, including Jim’s vilification in the press as “public enemy number one” in

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1952 for accusing the United States military of using germ warfare against the North Koreans.135 The United Church maintained a missionary presence in Japan, India, Africa (expanding to the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia in 1953), and Trinidad, often in co-operation with other denominations. Shifting the focus to these locations brought new issues to its members’ attention. For example, articles and reports on international affairs often mentioned concern for Africa, and were critical of churches that supported apartheid in South Africa. The ccia’s report in 1958 presciently observed that Christianity was not the only alternative to ancient African tribal deities, and Muslims were witnessing to their faith in places like Malaysia, Indonesia, and the areas bordering the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean “with a zeal and passion reminiscent of the days when they conquered Spain and spread into France.” The Prophet’s followers in Africa did not have the burden of association with “the white man of Christian heritage.” The “missionaries of the Crescent” were champions of anti-colonial movements in Africa, a development that “missionaries of the Cross” were advised to note.136 International missionary conferences before the war had called for indigenization, but did not anticipate the conditions under which it actually happened: as the only recourse, given the hostility to anything that smacked of Western influence during postwar decoloni­ zation. A policy report on the wms’s overseas missions announced that what was left of its administrative authority would be gradually transferred to indigenous church associations as part of the changing relationship between home base and foreign fields.137 Ecumenical co-operation through involvement with the newly formed Canadian Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council, and links with the National Council of Churches in the u sa (successor to the Federal Council of Churches), became a matter of necessity as well as principle as United Church missionaries joined church workers from other countries in areas such as Angola and India.138 Before the Second World War, “doors are open” had been the missionary movement’s rallying call. After the war, the image tended to shift from doors to windows, from ‘entering’ to ‘looking in.’ It reflected a different attitude toward overseas work, one created by the political restrictions that missionaries faced. Wide Windows (1951) was the title of a widely circulated study of the history of the w m s , but even windows that were wide open must have seemed small to

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those whose expectations for Christian internationalism had once been so grand. The United Church’s missionaries and their families continued to play diplomatic roles during the Cold War Era.139 However, the hopes for one world bound together by Christian friendship were shattered. World events belied the confidence that Christianity could provide a basis for cohesion in Canada, let alone the rest of the world. The church union movement had been launched at a time when it was still widely assumed that religion enhanced shared values and encouraged social responsibility. Spiritual ideals were a source of social cohesion. The implicit assimilation in the United Church’s search for a common faith had been reinforced by prevailing cultural assumptions about nation-building. Although early twentieth-century Canada was in reality far from culturally monolithic, appeals to the Anglo-Saxon ideals of the British Empire and the Christian civilization associated with it held the promise of a common identity that could be acquired, absorbed, and passed on to the next generation. Christianizing the social order was in that sense an inclusive goal. The challenge of diversity – both religious and racial – sounded a knell for the aspirations that had energized those who founded the United Church. The decline of Canada’s British-American identity (and the Protestant values attached to it) was neither necessarily secular nor antithetical to Christianity. Yet it coincided with the end of the British Empire and the beginning of the end of Christendom in both Britain and Canada. After the Second World War, Canada stepped hesitantly toward a new world where liberal democracy was viewed as the source of universal values. No longer was Christianity as confidently assumed to be a foundation for either international harmony or national cohesion.

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6 Calling Postwar Canada to Christ Gl e nd ower I can call spirits from the vasty deep. H o t s p ur Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I

“The Hidden Failure of Our Churches” was how the Maclean’s cover story in the 25 February 1961 issue announced the startling findings uncovered in its survey of churchgoers. Canadians had been attending religious services in record numbers for over a decade, and the United Church was among the churches enjoying the statistical windfall. “Amazing” was a word that cropped up often as its growth met and even exceeded expectations. This long-awaited revival of  religious interest begged the question: how much influence did the churches really exert on people’s lives once the Sunday morning services were over? Maclean’s decided to ask. It hired a firm to conduct a survey (described as “the first of its kind”) of the residents of Guelph, Ontario.1 The results so astonished veteran journalist Ralph Allen that he retraced the trail to confirm the findings for himself. Most of those surveyed said they believed in God and thought of the church in much the same terms as had their forebears, but admitted they were not guided by its teaching in their everyday lives. While 70 per cent of Protestants (and over 90 per cent of Catholics) attended church at least once a month, only one in five claimed that their behaviour had been influenced as a result. More specific inquiries about the conduct of those surveyed supported that finding. Among Protestants, church attendance had limited impact on decisions about the use of alcohol (11.4 per cent); birth control (5 per cent); sexual behaviour (2.5 per cent); political decisions (6.6 per cent);

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public causes and organizations (12.5 per cent); and business conduct (20 per cent). Catholic teaching seemed to have even less influence on behaviour with two exceptions: birth control (21 per cent) and sexual behaviour (11 per cent). Only 6 per cent of Catholics said the church influenced their business conduct, and the impact on political decisions was an astonishingly low 3 per cent.2 At least in Guelph, Catholics appeared not to be priest-ridden – perhaps something of a consolation to Protestants as they read an article about the soon-to-be-released census figures alongside the main story: “The Swelling Stream of Catholicism: Will It Soon Be Our Majority Faith?”3 Religious leaders interviewed to discuss the survey seemed less surprised by the results than Allen, but there was a mood of apprehension among them. Former United Church moderator Angus MacQueen described the state of organized religion in Canada in stinging terms: churches in general were too preoccupied with denominational programs, congregational budgets, and buildings; they were “too comfortable and too well adjusted to the status quo, and too ready to equate it with the Kingdom of God on earth.” The church was “unfit for the tasks of the hour” and becoming irrelevant in the face of the “real stuff of life,” he warned, and was instead “the feeble guardian of personal decency and the fount of tranquility and optimism.” J.R. Mutchmor, secretary of the Board of e & s s and well known for his colourful quips, summed up the uneasiness of many in his denomination even as they watched it grow: “I believe the United Church stands in a slippery place because it is becoming a clubby, chubby Church.”4 Critics had once scorned the United Church as a “political club” that was more interested in moral and social reform than in personal faith. The survey suggested a different and more disturbing possibility: a church that was no different from the rest, and whose statistical health masked failure to influence its own members. Becoming a “clubby, chubby church” redefined the meaning of “social” in United Church parlance. Rather than too much social gospel, it seemed a case of not enough – or more to the point, a disturbingly narrow notion of “social” that ran the risk of simply reflecting rather than challenging the status quo. This was a diminished understanding of the United Church’s mission as understood by its founding generation. In its stead was a more insular and inward-looking gathering of the faithful, whose religious life was identified in terms of what

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happened inside the building but inconsequential beyond it. With the fraying of connections between the church and the broader community, the “larger fellowship” that the founders had hoped to build suddenly appeared much smaller. A different future for the United Church had been envisaged not only by the founders but also by those who laid the ambitious plans for a Forward Movement to create a new world order after the war. Programs and publications, including the 1940 Statement of Faith in pamphlet form and various devotional resources related to it, assumed that the personal faith of its members had public consequences for community-building both locally and nationally. The new catechism’s answer to the question “What is the task of the Church?” still identified social engagement as central to its mission: “The Church is called to worship God, to watch over and care for all within her fellowship, to preach the Gospel to all mankind, to minister to the needy, to wage war on evil, and to strive for right relations among men.”5 This conviction was shared across a broad theological spectrum, including those whose enthusiasm for the social gospel was tepid at best. Among the latter was Richard Davidson, principal of Emmanuel College and chair of the group that put together the catechism. Writing for Saturday Night in 1944, with the catechism hot off the press, he admitted that the priority after union had been “to get the machine to run smoothly and do the work it was devised to do.” Davidson sounded relieved that the founding generation had been otherwise engaged. “A blight had fallen on theology” during the nineteenth century, he contended, almost as if human success and prosperity had “lulled the Most High to sleep,” and “the Social Gospel flourished in place of the historic Gospel.” But in the last two decades things had changed: the Most High had “awaked and got on His feet again.” Yet even Davidson identified the social implications of the gospel as central to the mission of the United Church, naming as its “chief innovation” its affirmation of “man’s duty to man.” There was no sphere of life – political, social, or economic – to which Christianity was indifferent, although Davidson warned the church not to go beyond its competence in statesmanship and trade, matters that were best left to “individual churchmen.”6 All in all, the United Church appeared to have made remarkable progress, erasing the concerns of the 1930s about its survival. As he

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assessed social trends after the war, sociologist S.D. Clark described religion in robust terms. Canada “has been, and remains, a fundamentally religious nation,” he observed.7 Church union had strengthened Protestantism enormously in his estimation – to the degree that “the influence of organized religion in the country has perhaps never been stronger.” So strong were Canada’s churches that he doubted whether a political party could survive an open attack on them.8 Statistics showed the United Church to be a healthy institution, equal to or surpassing the growth of other Protestant churches in numerical terms.9 Outside observers concurred. The United Church was a success story, or so it seemed. It could put effective pressure on federal and provincial governments to provide services that churches and other philanthropic agencies could not afford.10 Its civic piety was respected, even if considered a tad self-righteous by some. It was keeping a close eye on Canada’s spiritual frontiers, enthused editor Harold E. Fey to readers of the Christian Century following his attendance at the General Council in 1956. In fact, the American added, no U.S. church assembly provided “a comparable sense of the church struggling for the soul of the nation.” He was particularly impressed by the calibre of the discussion surrounding the abolishment of capital punishment, and the fact that the United Church’s “consistent effort to link conversion and conscience, the saving of souls and the saving of society, is producing really responsible Christian leadership.”11 Yet a curious disquiet could be detected among those who knew the United Church best. Their experience suggested that although to many the church symbolized continuity and stability, the reality was otherwise. The old patterns of interaction among church, family, and community were being disrupted. The threat that modern culture posed to the church was a theme regularly sounded by seasoned ministers, professors, and church executives as counterpoint to the encouraging statistics. They fretted that the United Church (and indeed Western Christianity) was entering uncharted territory, cautioning that the challenges facing Christianity were social and cultural as well as moral and spiritual. Complicating the familiar tension between the personal and social dimensions of faith was what e& s s ’s associate secretary R.C. Chalmers called a “third front”: culture was subtly undermining the gospel.12 He warned that Christianity was in danger of being con­ sidered an interest or hobby irrelevant to everyday life, creating a

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situation that he claimed was unique in history in its complexity, breadth, comprehensiveness, and “anti-spiritual nature.”13 John Line likewise sought to disabuse theologians of the illusion that they were still living in a Christian world. He wondered whether Western civilization could any longer be called Christian. Writing for the international readership of Theology Today in 1951, he urged readers to prepare to make a “basic re-presentation of Christianity to a world near the edge of being void of it.” His prediction was that the general public would soon have no interest in Christian truth. To counter the coming cultural shift, he urged the church to emphasize “the primal truths by which Christianity is identifiable as Christian.”14 The venerable George Pidgeon agreed that a cultural crisis was looming, and the consequences of inaction dire. He warned that if the United Church failed to intervene in time, it would “be unable to enter at a later date.” It needed to follow people to the new suburbs and settlements if it expected to hold “a place in their lives and guide the use of their power.” To support his case, Pidgeon spoke of the de-Christianization of Europe, a phrase used by one of the presidents of the wc c who had reportedly said that Europe had “in great part become pagan again” – still comprised of many Christians but no longer consisting of Christian nations. It was a pessimistic assessment, Pidgeon admitted, that “must make us pause.”15 Perhaps this explains why a church so often accused of being liberal and even modernist in its theology was decidedly reserved in its embrace of contemporary culture. Many of its leaders lashed out against popular forms of entertainment, sometimes pejoratively described as pagan, that competed with art forms more closely associated with the church. The media were suspect as well, accused of being cultural purveyors of paganism. Jesse Arnup blamed the radio for dispensing “an overdose of syncopated disharmony known as jazz.”16 The Commission on Church, Nation and World Order report went further, anxiously noting “the emergence of the new paganism which divorces sex from true romance, and gets a foothold in the screen, the radio and in prurient literature” – a list to which television was soon to be added.17 The first t v set arrived in 1952, and cost 20 per cent of the average annual income.18 This signalled a new social ‘problem’ for the middle class: what to do with leisure time, much of it spent inside the home or participating in activities controlled by secular agencies and businesses. Movie theatres, bowling alleys, and dance halls were old amusements that

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threatened the vitality of the church by draining it of its best community leaders. New attractions in government-funded community halls, centres, and rinks were tempting politicians to turn to the “liquor people” and other questionable sources for operating funds. Watching television or attending sporting events was more appealing to many than the church’s attempts to create Christian fellowship. “Large areas of our people’s life are a wasteland, suffering erosion from pagan – if not pagan, certainly sub-Christian – influences,” warned one minister in calling for the United Church to “evangelize unchurched recreation.”19 An impressive report prepared in the late 1940s by the Commission on Culture expounded on similar themes. With R.C. Chalmers as secretary and some of its most respected academics and ministers (including a young professor at Victoria College by the name of Northrop Frye) as members, the group’s terms of reference assumed that the customs, habits, and thinking of modern culture were at some points in tension with the Christian faith. Their task was to  ponder how to transform culture (including the media) to “a Christian pattern,” and to advise the church on its role in “the redemption of culture.” Published in 1950 as The Church and the Secular World, their findings laid the groundwork for the brief that the United Church presented to the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (more commonly known as the Massey Commission) in 1949.20 Erudite and ambitious in scope, the report was the work of a group familiar with the latest developments in the arts and sciences but wary of their implications for Christian faith given the impending cultural crisis. The report claimed that the United Church was justified in “believing that the salvation of souls must be understood in such a way as to include the cultural enterprise of men.”21 Recognizing the escalating importance of communication media, literature, drama, music, and art, the report offered Christian resources for making them more wholesome.22 It bemoaned, for instance, what was happening to modern music under the influence of popular forms of enter­ tainment: “The gushing fountainhead of American jazz with its propensity towards self-expression imperils the development of pure melody, enervates the artistic sense, stimulates eroticism, and at the very best generates nothing more than mediocre products.” Clearly steps needed to be taken to “arrest this wild orgy”! The report admitted the church was not blameless in the corruption of music,

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which had been treated “brutally” by people whose apathy and carelessness had failed to distinguish between the sacred and the secular in art. As for hymns, the number of “atrocious” ones was “astonishing.”23 The urbanization of Canada was adding to the problems of modern culture, creating a situation that was entirely new, noted W.J. Gallagher in an address to the Christian Social Council of Canada. No longer was the country rural. The work of the church was changing, and not always for the better, due to a complex mix of factors: ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ wars, urbanization and industrialization, the welfare state, immigration, modern educational trends, new means of communication, and new ideologies.24 A resolve to enlist and equip ­clergy and laity to rescue Canadian society from the incursion of undesirable elements of modernity was fundamental to the strategic decisions made by the United Church in the 1950s. There were plenty of indications that church members were becoming captivated by cultural affluence and alienated from Christian influence. The middle class was especially at risk. A mid-decade survey of Observer readers found that 26 per cent were in professional and managerial groups compared to 14 per cent of the general population. Its readers were much more likely than the average Canadian to have telephone service and to own cars and electrical appliances. Drawing on the survey’s findings, a 1954 e & s s report concluded, “our Communion is, in large measure, a middle-class one.” As such it was becoming susceptible to a North American form of “culturereligion,” one that stressed comfort and mistook “chummy acquaintance for fellowship.” Church leaders were urged to make Christian fellowship “more inclusive”; to challenge culture-religion with “true Christian standards”; and to make “every possible attempt ... to reach, save and teach all for whom Christ died.”25 At the core of the United Church’s major postwar initiatives to ­reassert its social and cultural agenda was a broad approach to evangelization. Events that provided opportunities to make a personal commitment to Christ were organized and linked to plans for church expansion in developing residential neighbourhoods and a new approach to Christian education. The core message was clear and unequivocal: it was not enough to focus only on conversion, for faith had implications for the personal conduct of individuals, the social welfare of communities, and the cultural well-being of the nation.

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J.R. Mutchmor personified these objectives. As secretary of e & s s he was in a pivotal position to shape the United Church’s policies and programs. He became the voice of the United Church during the 1940s and ’50s, and was the most recognized religious leader in Canada by the time he retired in 1964. Indeed, to a remarkable degree, Mutchmor’s life mirrored the denomination’s own maturation. Born in 1892 in Providence Bay, a small community in northern Ontario, he grew up with the church union movement already underway. Raised a Presbyterian, he was proud that some still misidentified him, as had novelist Robertson Davies, as one of the “few remaining ranting old Methodists.”26 Mutchmor studied at the University of Toronto just before the First World War during what he described as a time of high idealism, when many believed that the world would be converted to Christianity in their generation. An interest in social work (and a rather low opinion of theological education at Knox College) took him to Union Theological Seminary in New York for graduate studies in theology, which he combined with a master’s program in economics at Columbia University across the street. In 1920 he returned to Canada, accepting a call to Robertson Memorial Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg, where his work included oversight of a mission in the north end of the city. A part-time position as a member of Manitoba’s Welfare Supervision Board (serving as its chair from 1926–36) gave Mutchmor access to surveys and studies on a broad assortment of social welfare issues. All in all, it was valuable experience that prepared him for his appointment as associate secretary of the Board of e & ss in 1936.27 Due to D.L. McLachlan’s illness, he was effectively in charge before he was formally appointed as secretary in 1938. Mutchmor was fully committed to both parts of his board’s mandate – evangelism and social service. He encouraged and coordinated countless initiatives that he described as “witness in deeds, not talk.”28 But he also used words to promote his causes, vocally opposing such vices as drinking and gambling. Not one to shy away from unpopular stands, he objected to women working outside the home – “mothers swept into gainful employment” as he put it. He was shocked to see them dropping off their children “in indiscriminate places” to be cared for while they worked. For him, this was a practice as dangerous as taking children from their mothers and forcing them to work in canneries or mines: both were threats to

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child welfare that called for child protection. And yet he defies facile pigeonholing as a social conservative. The Observer’s cover story following his election as moderator at the 1962 General Council claimed that “no churchman in Canada took big business to task as often as Mutchmor.” Visibility had its drawbacks, however, and Mutchmor received threatening telephone calls, often several dozen throughout the night. His very public stand on temperance predictably drew ridicule. But he attracted admiration too, some of it from surprising quarters. When Mutchmor became the butt of jokes at one cocktail party, c b c reporter Stanley Burke came to his defence by recalling an incident that happened after he “unwittingly blasphemed” while still on camera. Among the pile of disapproving letters was one expressing appreciation for his work, praising him for the high calibre of his un reportage, and closing with, “I just thought that at this particular time you might appreciate knowing. Sincerely yours, J.R. Mutchmor.”29 His notes and letters reveal a gracious man with a wry sense of humour. “I cannot understand you having the flu,” the teetotaller wrote to an ailing friend, “must be that you have not the right kind of rum.”30 Mutchmor fervently believed that the church was the conscience of the state, a conviction that he attributed to the Reformed tradition (while admitting that Calvin may have enforced it “to an extreme” in Geneva).31 He assumed that the United Church’s “political witness and warfare” extended from the global arena to fighting the devil in one’s own back yard – at the town-pump level, as he put it.32 His advice to ministers presumed that they would play an influential role in helping church members to connect faith and community: preaching sermons on social issues that were both biblically and factually sound, making effective use of denominational structures and pronouncements, encouraging their congregations to use church resources to study social issues, liaising with community organizations, and even becoming specialists on particular social issues.33 But Mutchmor was just as avid an advocate for evangelism, and claimed that he was a stronger defender of it than many former Methodists.34 His travels across Canada in 1943 convinced him that support for it was growing.35 With his enthusiastic endorsement, the United Church joined mainstream churches in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia in organizing mass evangelistic meetings that boosted church attendance during the 1940s and ’50s.36 Under his leadership the United Church promoted evangelistic

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campaigns whose themes advertised the hopes of the organizers: Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom, National Evangelistic Mission, Mission to the Nation, and Calling Canada to Christ. The Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom was the United Church’s first major postwar evangelistic initiative, a two-year program launched in 1945.37 Interest in evangelism was running high in North America at the time, and Youth for Christ rallies favoured by fundamentalists were attracting huge crowds. Charles Templeton, a charismatic Canadian preacher from a conservative evangelical denomination, was making headlines.38 When he began to question his faith, the young evangelist turned to Mutchmor for advice, hoping that theological studies would assuage his doubts. At the urging of Mutchmor and Pidgeon, president John A. Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary arranged for the high-school dropout to study there as a “special student.”39 Templeton began his studies in 1948, and three years later ­accepted a position as evangelist for the American mainstream denominations that comprised the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the u sa (nc c ), on condition that he could preach in Canada four months of the year.40 The Templeton Missions, organized in conjunction with the United Church, filled large churches like Chalmers United in Ottawa to capacity, with people occupying “every bit of space that was possible to place them without creating a fire hazard.”41 The Observer provided glowing accounts of Templeton’s cross-Canada itinerary as tens of thousands flocked to the churches and arenas where his meetings were held. Thousands went forward at the end of the service to make a commitment to Christ.42 These rallies featured Templeton as preacher and his talented wife as soloist. The music and the sermons reflected the United Church’s efforts to deal with the imminent cultural crisis. Refusing to pander to popular tastes with female octets, brass bands, and Negro spirituals (associated with rallies organized by conservative evangelicals), the United Church insisted on music accompanied by the piano or organ, with a church choir or Connie Templeton singing classical pieces by Handel and Bach.43 Those who hired Templeton may well have suspected that the audience preferred more lowbrow entertainment, but given their concerns about sacred music, they were determined to give those attending a taste of something more appropriate – nothing that might be confused with jazz! As for Templeton’s

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message, historian Kevin Kee’s summary of what listeners typically heard would have had a familiar ring to those raised in the United Church: a “total gospel” that related Christianity to all areas of life and emphasized the link between personal faith and service.44 The social implications of the gospel message became even more prominent when the United Church used the momentum from the Templeton Missions to launch its own four-year National Evangelistic Mission (ne m) in 1954. Directed by e& s s staff member William G. Berry, the strategy for this Mission to the Nation was set out in Calling Canada to Christ, a booklet that he edited. Central to the campaign was a focus on national life that connected the call for individual commitment to Christ to four areas of living: family, community, daily work and the economy, and civic and political engagement.45 “National salvation” was the prescription for “national sin,” a “deeper and more powerful form of evil than individual sin.”46 The literature distributed by the ne m committee offered concrete advice for everyday living and tools for measuring advancement ­toward the goals of the campaign. The pamphlet on the Christian family, for instance, featured an eleven-point checklist of practices for parents that included personal declaration of faith in God and loyalty to Jesus Christ, daily devotions that included all family members, and participation in the mid-week and Sunday programs of the church.47 Likewise, a pamphlet designed for women’s groups challenged them to use a “Group-Analysis Chart for Church Organizations” to calculate the “lost potential for evangelism.” Several questions probed whether the women’s group at the church was distinctly Christian and thus different from a secular club.48 The campaign concluded with a series of special events organized around its four themes, and congregations were encouraged to promote them. Billy Graham brought his crusade to Canada a year after the creation of the nem, raising a fresh round of questions about the United Church’s approach to evangelism. An editorial in the Observer before his arrival in Toronto noted that the national leadership of the United Church had not endorsed Graham’s campaign (as was the case with the Templeton Mission), leaving it up to presbyteries and conferences to decide on their own whether to become involved. One sticking point was Graham’s literal approach to interpreting the Bible, but Observer editor A.C. Forrest identified another: “In the United Church we have been taught that the Bible is relevant to ­every department of life – social, political, economic, and personal. And

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we will not sacrifice that truth for the sake of successful techniques in mass evangelism.”49 Graham was conspicuously absent from the list of evangelists invited to participate in the ne m. Although terse when questioned about Graham’s absence, its coordinator was more loquacious when asked about the place of periodic revivals. The “genius of the United Church,” Berry replied, did not lend itself “to the revivalist technique of evangelism.” Its best work was done “through the ordinary channels of pulpit evangelism, visitation evangelism, communicant classes and the occasional preaching mission.” He added that contemporary revivalism was in some cases based on a theological perspective that differed from what was taught at United Church theological schools. While not denying that some still came to religious faith through a “catastrophic conversion,” Berry thought this had become rare in the United Church: most of its people were converted through the “ordinary preaching of the gospel and the fellowship of the church.”50 The divided mind of the United Church over evangelism was evident in the Observer. Forrest reminded readers that the United Church had deliberately placed evangelism and social service together under one board at the time of its founding, convinced that one must “not go rushing off into revivalism unrelated to moral issues and social concerns,” nor to divorce social reforms from personal evangelism. To explain the distinctive features of the United Church’s approach to evangelism, he quoted at length from a statement about the n em prepared by Angus MacQueen, minister of St Andrew’s United Church in London, Ontario, and chair of e & s s . MacQueen believed Donald Soper, the famed British Methodist preacher from the West London Mission, was the person who came closer than Billy Graham to representing the mind of the United Church on evangelism. He reported that when Soper challenged his Canadian audience with the demands of Christian discipleship, some left angry and disappointed because they had come expecting the “cheap brand” of evangelism: “fanfare and ballyhoo, hot songs and catchy tunes, pretty soloists and well-groomed announcers, and a ‘come to Jesus and collect your advantages’ appeal.”51 MacQueen admitted that although the United Church stood in the evangelical tradition, many ministers had misgivings about modern evangelism. Should a type of evangelism be approved, he wondered, just because it seemed to get results? Or should they be asking,

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what kind of results? Will the results last? What about scruples in matters such as intellectual and theological integrity, ethics, or social relevance?52 These questions remained long after the nem ended.53 Joining the Board of e & ss in calling postwar Canada to Christ was the much larger Board of Home Missions, which Mutchmor credited with contributing even more to the church’s active witness than e&ss.54 Under its auspices, presbyteries made ambitious plans for new church development, especially in the expanding suburbs, and a  National Committee on Church Extension chaired by Malcolm Macdonald launched a campaign to fund it.55 Macdonald passionately believed that the program “to extend the Kingdom of God within this land” was as great a challenge as the United Church or its parent bodies had ever faced.56 While he insisted that the United Church did not proselytize those from other faith traditions, it was “ready to provide not only a spiritual home for them, but also to assist them in understanding and finding their true place in our Canadian way of life.”57 Macdonald admitted that in the past, meeting the religious needs of every community in Canada had been easier: a missionary who arrived with a plan to open a new church had been met with an ­enthusiastic welcome. At present, indifference or competition from other attractions made church development in frontier areas or new suburbs more challenging. Yet the consequences of failure were grave and “exceedingly detrimental to the well-being of the nation,” for much of the population would be “left to the often extreme and eccentric leadership of the sects or else succumb to the invading secularism, materialism and paganism of our age.”58 Church extension committees handled most of the details of starting a congregation, but the commitment of lay leaders was essential to success. It was a layman who alerted Winnipeg Presbytery to the religious situation in his suburban neighbourhood. He’d stopped a young boy to ask why he wasn’t in Sunday school. The boy’s answer – “What is that?” – startled him so much that he started talking to others about organizing a congregation. Twenty-five women from the area joined fifty other women from Winnipeg Presbytery to conduct house-to-house surveys to gauge interest in having a United Church Sunday school and worship service nearby. As a result, Westworth United was built and quickly flourished. Within five years, over 500 children were enrolled in Sunday school. The church

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Table 6.1 Membership of Woman’s Missionary Society auxiliaries, bands, and affiliated cgit groups Years

Auxiliaries1

Mission bands

Baby bands

Affiliated CGIT2

1950

88,693

49,874

58,574

16,786

1951

89,185

52,919

61,004

17,714

1952

90,415

54,654

61,632

17,609

1953

91,943

58,747

67,521

19,952

1954

92,931

49,953

70,605

20,507

1955

93,097

47,812

71,697

22,060

1956

92,971

47,378

69,669

24,427

1957

94,937

47,724

70,490

23,978

1958

95,901

48,054

69,102

26,842

1959

98,122

46,849

67,942

27,352

1960

98,821

48,234

66,032

32,377

1961

96,444

43,227

56,242

31,452

1  Includes members of the Evening Auxiliaries, which were considered a separate category from 1950–52. 2 Affiliated CGIT groups included in the total membership during this period; method of counting other affiliates (e.g., Explorers) varied. Source: Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Society and The United Church of Canada Year Book (reports of the Woman’s Missionary Society)

was abuzz with Mission Band, Explorers, cg i t, Cubs, Scouts, Tyros, Hi-C, and Young People’s groups. Women were invited to join the wa and the wms; men served on the Session as elders and stewards until 1968, when women too became eligible.59 Following the Second World War, similar growth was reported across Canada. An increase in membership was not the only good news. Between 1941 and 1946, subscriptions to the denominational paper, renamed The United Church Observer in 1939, increased from 15,000 to over 50,000. A capital campaign exceeded expectations, raising $4 million in pledges in 194660 and helping to replenish the mission funds depleted during the Depression. The w m s announced in 1950 that a new record had been set for fundraising, and that amount was bettered in subsequent years. There was fellowship aplenty. With a baby boom well underway, a notable increase in Baby Bands and study groups for mothers soon followed.61 Programs for children and youth challenged the church building’s

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Woman’s Missionary Society

Woman’s Association (all purposes)

1926+ 1927+ 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961

$5 750 000 $5 500 000 $5 250 000 $5 000 000 $4 750 000 $4 500 000 $4 250 000 $4 000 000 $3 750 000 $3 500 000 $3 250 000 $3 000 000 $2 750 000 $2 500 000 $2 250 000 $2 000 000 $1 750 000 $1 500 000 $1 250 000 $1 000 000 $750 000 $500 000 $250 000 $0

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Figure 6.1 Funds raised by the Woman’s Association (all purposes) and the Woman’s Missionary Society, 1926–61 Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book. + 1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

capacity in many congregations. The Young People’s Union flourished during the 1950s. By mid-decade it was among the largest youth organizations in the country with some 30,000 members between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. A new organization called Hi-C quickly attracted 20,000 teenagers.62 Couples clubs, service clubs, and even camps for men and women in their thirties and early forties were organized to tap the spiritual and social longings of young adults. The first of several schools for lay leaders was opened in Naramata, b c , in 1947, and the training school for deaconesses in Toronto celebrated its move to a new building in 1955. A conspicuous exception to the successful ventures of the 1950s was recruitment of personnel for overseas missions, a situation that editor A.C. Forrest considered “the greatest concern of our time.”63 However, the vibrancy of congregational life likely generated more

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interest in ministry as a profession and helped to ease the chronic shortage of personnel after the war. In 1954, the United Church reported that 159 young people (nine from one Moncton congregation alone) had entered the candidacy process for ordination, the most in its history.64 Despite record high numbers of candidates, there were still not enough ministers by decade’s end to match the projected demand.65 This cohort prepared for ministry at an auspicious time. There was much talk of a theological renaissance underway, and many dared to believe that a positive and redemptive engagement with modern culture would ensue. Convinced of the transformative possibilities of Christian education for all ages, the United Church laid plans to capitalize on the revival of interest in religious questions by linking learning to evangelism and church extension. It launched a number of initiatives to acquaint its members with its particular theological orientation (and sometimes to defend itself against detractors). Broad and moderate was how United Church leaders liked to picture themselves. Their church was “liberal without being radical or humanistic,” explained Preston MacLeod to Christian Century readers, with neo-orthodoxy enjoying a “strong following, especially among the younger ministers” who, though not inclined to repudiate liberal theology, wanted to go beyond it to make theology “more central and vital in the life of the church, and distinctively Christian in its interpretation of biblical revelation.”66 Writing for an American audience in 1947, C.E. Silcox claimed that even the United Church’s critics had to concede that it was a dynamic church. While it admittedly had a tendency to issue unwise pronouncements before fully thinking through the implications, it could not be accused of pussyfooting. In general he found that it repudiated “both the mushiness of liberalism and the crudities of fundamentalism and is essentially liberal-conservative.”67 R.C. Chalmers agreed. A key staff member on the committee that had prepared the Statement of Faith, he reported that “orthodox liberalism or progressive conservatism” was “very apparent in leading theological circles in our United Church.”68 The publications that he oversaw at e & ss championed what he portrayed as an “evangelical type” of Christianity,69 a stance that continued to be as contentious in the 1940s and ’50s as it had been in the 1920s and ’30s. Chalmers made the customary distinction between the United Church’s evangelical identity and other parties who were claiming to

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define what it entailed: “a legalistic and rigid Fundamentalism,” or “some special esoteric and emotional religious experience,” or as “synonymous with the sect type of Christianity.” He urged the United Church to become more evangelical in faith and practice by seeing “the whole of life religiously interpreted through Jesus Christ.”70 But becoming more evangelical was easier said than done. On the one hand, there were hopeful signs of a growing interest in learning more about the Christian way of life. The Observer seized the opportunity to educate its readers, publishing a series on “What the United Church Believes,” which dealt with topics related to revelation, sin, and salvation.71 Reacting to religious competition on two different fronts (fundamentalist and Catholic), over the next decade the Commission on Christian Faith would prepare materials stating the United Church’s position on doctrines emphasized by sectarian groups, as well as on the differences between Protestants and Catholics: Why the Sects? (A.C. Forrest); In Remembrance of Me: Being an Account of Man’s Part in the Lord’s Supper (Harvey Forster); Is Christ Coming Again? (C.C. Oke); Christianity and Healing (C.G. Park); British-Israelism: Is It Christian? and Jehovah’s Witnesses (both by Alfred E. Cooke); and What’s the Difference? Protestant and Roman Catholic Beliefs Compared and Life and Death (both by A.G. Reynolds).72 As Mutchmor reviewed the United Church’s accomplishments in anticipation of its fortieth anniversary in 1965, he proudly recalled that a pamphlet containing the Statement of Faith was a best seller from the beginning and the catechism based on it in steady demand. By its nature and of necessity, the United Church was “deeply theological,” he boasted: “it’s a plain fact that a far larger proportion of the ministers and members of the United Church of Canada strive to learn and comprehend the deeper things of God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit; of man and his sin, of salvation, and of the Christian witness on all the fronts of life than any other Christian Communion in Canada.”73 The pamphlets by Reynolds in particular sparked a lively debate both inside and outside the United Church.74 What’s the Difference?, boosted by complaints from cardinals James McGuigan of Toronto and Paul-Émile Léger of Montreal, showed unprecedented numbers in sales of a United Church publication. Sales for Life and Death also shot up after fundamentalists condemned it.75 The “New Curriculum” became the linchpin of the United Church’s plans to create a more theologically literate membership. Utilizing

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the tools of modern biblical scholarship to interpret the Bible, the materials aimed to relate its teachings to the contemporary context.76 The project drew much of its inspiration from the Christian Faith and Life curriculum that had been launched by the Presbyterian Church in the u sa in 1948. Not surprisingly the United Church’s New Curriculum was similar in assumptions and planning process to its American counterpart.77 A critical difference was timing: development of the curriculum materials in Canada lagged behind by at least five years. Although the decision to produce new materials was made at the 1952 General Council, a series of consultations at both the national and regional level followed; the critical response to the presuppositions announced in 1958 likely slowed the process as well.78 The impact of delay proved devastating. Like the Presbyterian materials, the United Church’s New Curriculum focused on the family as integral to Christian education, and produced hardcover illustrated books intended for reading at home during the week. The failings of a family-centred program in the United States were perceptible even before the New Curriculum was sent to press in Canada.79 Alas, for the United Church, its poorly timed launch coincided with the end of the baby boom, more-complicated family relationships, and a completely different theological climate from the one that had informed its design. Unveiled in the mid-1960s, it was infused with the theological and educational presuppositions of the 1940s and ’50s. Its critics in the 1960s failed to appreciate how deeply biblical and theological it was in both aim and actual content – it was exactly what respected leaders like Line and Pidgeon had called for to preserve Christian culture. However, it appealed to neither conservative evangelicals nor a younger generation of more radical liberals.80 The troubled development of the New Curriculum provides a glimpse of the uphill battle that the United Church faced even at a time when people seemed to be deeply interested in religious matters. For all the talk of a postwar theological renaissance associated with the names of Barth, Niebuhr, Tillich, and other so-called neoorthodox theologians, how extensive was their influence? Speaking at a dinner at Emmanuel College in 1957, Forrest conjectured that if Victoria University’s president and Emmanuel College’s principal were to announce that Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale had been appointed to the faculty, “there would be within The United

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Church great rejoicing.” But the response to the appointment of Reinhold Niebuhr or Paul Tillich would likely be, “Who are they?” What he described as a cultural lag was greatest among “some of our best people” from farms and small communities. Forrest n ­ oticed a spiritual disorientation that surfaced when those folk moved to the city: despite being raised in the United Church, some felt more at home in Gospel Halls, small Baptist churches, or a Pentecostal Tabernacle.81 Little wonder then that a few years later, the New Curriculum was greeted with suspicion even by some of the church’s most stalwart supporters. The controversy it sparked revived memories of Billy Graham’s visit to Canada in the 1950s and the gap that was evident even then between his theology and that of the United Church. It was also out of step with a cadre of younger ministers who found it not sufficiently progressive. Such theological misgivings added to the practical problems of the New Curriculum after its launch in the 1960s. The design – in retrospect, flawed – disclosed a church operating in denial about the degree of acceptance of theological liberalism shorn of its evangelical roots, and seemingly unaware of the damage already done to the crucial links between church, home, and community life it presupposed. It epitomized the ill-fated efforts to  negotiate with modernity in the 1950s – to correlate faith and ­culture, as neo-orthodox theologians liked to put it. The United Church’s miscalculations in its approach to Christian education matched its misplaced confidence in mass evangelism and church extension. Its leaders were astute in identifying signs of a ­culture shift underway but ineffectual in their efforts to influence its ­direction, despite impressive outlays of time and resources. Headlines in the 1950s tended to trumpet the church’s accomplishments, but assessments of its leaders were more guarded. After visiting United Church congregations across Canada during his two years as moderator, James S. Thomson sounded somewhat optimistic in 1958 as he described the “manifold signs of a quickened vitality” indicated by the upswing in church attendance. He sensed a turning of the tide of interest in religion that he candidly characterized as an “anxious, sometimes ill-informed, yet not the less genuine seeking for spiritual enlightenment and help rather than profound spiritual revival.” However, he found little or no inclination to apply the gospel to social questions or world problems. That there was “no passion for public

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righteousness or social reform” was in his view the consequence of the relativity in faith and morals of an age “devoid of moral enthusiasm.”82 Thomson’s disturbing observation was consistent with other indications that modern life was running counter to the dynamics that had propelled the church union movement. Everyday life seemed to sap the sense of collective purpose that was integral to the identity of a denomination designed to connect faith and community. City life further hindered this goal. Those who gathered for worship on Sunday might otherwise have little contact with each other or the community in which the church was situated. The first of several reports from the Commission on Urban Problems set up in 1936 assessed “the cutting-off from the old social and spiritual moorings” as the most significant obstacle. Rural life could be nasty, vicious, and coarse, said the report, but seldom was its outlook so secular as in the city. Though religious observances in a rural community might suffer from neglect, the tradition of churchgoing overshadowed daily life. Not so in the city, where “public scrutiny and popular appraisal” of conduct were impossible due to urban anonymity and secular distractions. Social and racial groupings tended to be more “socially disintegrative” than in smaller communities where people knew each other and mingled at community events. The report found the impact on children particularly disturbing. “They belong to nowhere in particular. They grow up in no church or school, in the soil of which their lives become rooted. Their lives are barren in respect of loyalties and friendship.”83 The shadow of the church was even less visible to those on the move after the Second World War. Mobility disrupted old social ­networks and group norms, complicating the rituals of family life. Family members who moved to find employment in another community were no longer able to worship together as a clan. Memories of baptisms and funerals were associated with several church buildings rather than one. The disruption of old community ties also ­increased the likelihood of mating with someone from a different religious background. Mixed marriages were identified as a problem in the United Church’s first statement on marriage issued in 1932, which noted in particular the difficulty of rearing children in a home “where united religious acts are impossible, in which silence or extreme reserve must be maintained.”84 Concern for protecting the next generation of Protestants heightened as the number of mixed marriages increased after the war.85

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Church attendance at first withstood these pressures. The habit of going to church on Sunday morning was associated with ‘normal’ behaviour and good citizenship. Sin became a common theme in the preaching of the day, stirring feelings of guilt that some apparently tried to ease by attending church services regularly.86 Perhaps heightened anxiety about an unsettled world and the threat of nuclear weapons brought out a tribal instinct to be with others. However, on many city street corners, the community church was becoming an artifact of a bygone era. The residential patterns of city life were proving to be problematic, admitted Malcolm Macdonald in 1961 as he compared current home mission strategies with those of the past. What to do about the “great apartment structures, sometimes ten or twelve or even more stories high,” that had sprung up after the war baffled church workers. In one area of Toronto, for instance, it was estimated that 75 per cent of the 4,000 or so people living in the six or seven apartment complexes had little or no connection with a church. Tenants were hard to contact in the first place and difficult to track once they moved. Many were still childless, and thus had no sense of urgency to affiliate with a congregation. They thought of their situation as temporary and were unwilling to make a commitment to a particular community by joining a church.87 Rural life, usually applauded for its moral values, was changing too.88 In his role as associate secretary of e & s s , W.G. Berry was pleased to find strong and well-organized congregations in the cities he visited in western Canada in 1949. It was in the rural districts that he spotted failing congregations, apparently unable to make the transition from the horse-and-buggy era to the automobile era. Moral issues were becoming more challenging, at least according to some parents, who told him that they thought moral awareness was easier to instill in a child in the city than in a small Prairie town. The growing “alcohol problem” was evidence of a serious moral laxity among country youth. The decline of rural communities was a dangerous trend, he cautioned, since the United Church had more congregations there than other Protestant denominations.89 Nowhere was the widening gap between the United Church’s ideals and cultural realities more evident than in the homes of its members, microcosms as it were of the church’s troubled efforts to translate its teaching into lived experience. The Christian home was considered the critical nexus between church and community. Hugh Dobson

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summed up what was at stake in the drawn-out title of a pamphlet issued in 1940 – The Christian Family Is Essential to Democracy, to Canadian National Life and to the Coming Kingdom of God for Which We Pray – and sternly warned: “If family life breaks down, national life will crack.”90 As the 1946 report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home put it (apparently missing the irony of the language), the home was “the symbol of the Kingdom of God” and built on the conviction that “all men are brothers” and that “God is the Creator-Father, and that the world of men is or should be a family, a household of faith, inspired by family loyalty.”91 The 1950 report of the Commission on Culture still recommended that parents be mindful of the importance of the family in spreading Christian culture “through such means as reading the Bible aloud, singing hymns together, prayer, church fellowship and above all, by the kindliness, good temper, good manners and behaviour of the father and mother.”92 And yet domestic Christianity was not as robust as the rhetoric about its redemptive potential made out. The report on marriage and the home admitted that parents had been content to let the church take over responsibility for religious education, wrongly assuming that an hour of Sunday school would suffice to teach the Christian faith.93 To make matters worse, the home itself seemed in danger of disintegration. Family dislocation, secularism, materialism, encroachment of “outside groups” (such as state services), a lower childbirth rate, and divorce were listed as threats that had left Christian family life in a precarious situation: “A generation is growing up that knows little or nothing of Christian knowledge or experience, and in the time of crisis has no invisible resources to draw upon for its salvation.”94 One solution to the failure of the Christian home to nurture Christian beliefs was to expand the role of the church among children and youth beyond the Sunday school hour. In a bold depiction of a church intent on being at the centre of personal lives and social relationships, principal Richard Davidson pictured its authority extending far into homes and communities, usurping even the importance of the family in nurturing piety. There would have been few if any women present in 1943 at the Winnipeg retreat for ministers where he likened the church to a mother, a metaphor more familiar to Catholics than to his Protestant listeners, assigning to “her” responsibilities more commonly associated with the familial piety of

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the Victorian home. The family of God was the “home” of the Christian child, and the church was responsible for raising the infant member. “The Church teaches him what the Father is like and what a child’s duties in the family are. The Church shields him from evil and cares for him at school and at play.” (How “she” did so was not elaborated.)95 Worship was essential to raising the child: “She [the Church] knows that some of the richest memories men have in later years are of looking on at the Sacraments. She arranges and adorns the church building so that the child will feel there that he is in his Father’s house.” He stressed the effective use of architectural lines, light and shade, colour, windows, hangings, pictures, texts of Scripture, the font, the pulpit, the Communion table to convey a sense of the Father’s presence. Once the child reached manhood, the church was there to meet him “with God’s strengthening grace” by teaching him about God and duty, praying for him, confirming him, and then admitting him “to the fellowship of the Holy Sacrament.” The men who gathered for the retreat were assured that the church “loves each one of her children with the particularizing love of a mother” – indeed, its task was “mothering the children of men from the cradle to the grave.”96 The emphasis on God as Father and the church as Mother was an expression of a liturgical theology that had practical consequences as those influenced by Davidson’s teaching at Emmanuel moved into congregations. For instance, a more liturgically proper service of baptism was less focused on the natural family. Forrest observed in 1961 that it was becoming difficult to persuade younger ministers to perform private baptisms. Instead, they expected to have the babies and the parents “present before the whole congregation, so that vows may be made publicly and members of the congregation will realize they have a responsibility too.”97 It was also more challenging to schedule a Sunday morning baptism at a convenient time, especially for relatives travelling some distance. The escalating number of mixed marriages further complicated the details of performing a baptism, especially in the days before Vatican II. For a variety of reasons, the number of baptisms was declining in the 1950s even though church membership was on the rise. For many migrants to the larger cities who were experiencing the loss of old ties to family and friends, the church provided artificial forms of kinship and a semblance of community – though perhaps

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less intensely liturgical than what Davidson had in mind. One belonged to a home congregation; other members became a church family; the design features of new buildings, such as carpeted floors, made churches seem ‘homey.’ Belonging was likely a welcome respite from the anonymity of urban life, especially for those from small towns or rural communities, replicating some of the values of community life that were lost in the move. Forrest guessed that the majority of churchgoers were “displaced persons seeking a spiritual home within the Christian family.” Having once “lived within the shadow of the church’s spire,” they now “sensed the rootlessness of life outside the church” and wanted to “belong to the fellowship which is good, and is the gift of God.”98 He defended the United Church against critics who dismissed it as “a big social centre.” It was that and more, and he considered “being a family within the community” that welcomed everyone who wanted to belong to the “family circle” to be the United Church’s greatest strength.99 And yet church leaders were nervous about what they saw happening in their busy congregations. Those who emphasized the importance of worship worried that it was taking a back seat to education, fellowship, humanitarian work, and other auxiliary activities. Children and youth whose experience of church before confirmation was based primarily on age-specific activities discovered, upon arriving at a worship service, that the language was strange, the music unfamiliar, and some of the sermons boring. There was more fun to be had elsewhere on Sundays, especially with the loosening of laws enforcing Sabbath observance. Moreover, the lessons that children learned outside the church did little to reinforce its message. The innocent pleasures of the so-called pagan culture were tempting, and the media’s celebration of materialism in programming and advertising was often more powerful and immediate than spiritual instruction offered by either parents or pastors. Even the usually optimistic Forrest became a little less sanguine as he followed the trends during the 1950s. Sunday school sessions were shorter, and Sunday services were over by noon. Gone were afternoon Sunday schools (except in some rural areas in eastern Canada) and evening services. In 1961 he summed up the pattern of typical adult activity in many United churches during the 1950s: “Bible classes are small, prayer meetings few, midweek meetings numerous.”100 He astutely noted a generational divide: older members criticized the young for not being concerned about alcoholism and

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heavy smoking, and for not observing Sunday as a day of rest; young people criticized the older generation for “being obtuse on matters of race discrimination, indifferent to the needs of undeveloped countries, and for supporting a medieval penal system.”101 It was a preview of the clash of values that was about to hit the church. There was almost as much uneasiness about crowded churches as empty ones. Berry discovered a disturbing explanation for the increase in church membership in an article by American sociologist Will Herberg that described three types of character development: tradition-directed, with a code of behaviour transmitted from one generation to the next (and tending to die out in industrial and urban societies); inner-directed, relentlessly and often individualistically moving toward a goal (whether for good or evil) as though driven by an “internal gyroscope”; and other-directed, a new type that had emerged in the last generation, which operated with a “built-in radar apparatus” that received signals from the social group to which the person wished to conform.102 Berry assessed the trend in Canada to be “almost all in the direction of the other-directed kind of characters.” The man who a few years later was charged with leading the Mission to the Nation campaign was struck in 1954 by what he characterized as the “tragedy of our time”: “People join our churches in droves in order to conform, but deny our gospel day by day for the very same reason that they joined, in order to conform!”103 But those who were inner-­ directed were problematic too, for they spurned the restraints of communal guidance offered by the church. These self-regulating individuals were bombarded by choices with a range of options for political positions, media channels, leisure activities, and religious views. A different way of looking at the world was as close as the nearest television, where a wider range of ‘normal’ behaviour was on display daily. Resistance to moral regulation by the church stiffened after the war, undermining its efforts to guide members through the moral maze in what it believed to be the right direction. A church concerned about Sunday observance, temperance, and sexual purity had always had hecklers, but increasingly its critics were sitting in its own pews. No longer was it possible to identify its members by particular practices associated with their spiritual forebears (temperance for Methodists, Sabbath observance for Presbyterians, and the permanence of

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marriage for all the uniting traditions). This was not for lack of ­trying. Its teaching on Sunday observance, for instance, was reaffirmed in the new catechism, which offered this response to Question 60 about how to observe it: “We should spend the Lord’s Day in public and private worship, in reading and meditation, in converse with family and friends, in deeds of kindness, and in grateful rest from all but necessary labour.” Yet its own reports show a church struggling to convince its members to comply. “On the Lord’s Day,” a report to the General Council prepared in 1948, reaffirmed the importance of a day of rest despite the cultural influences that were undermining it: godlessness, secularism, hedonism, improper use of leisure, commercial and sports interests, Sunday motoring, and even a variety of ‘good’ activities (meetings, concerts, entertaining friends) that were not considered to be the best use of the day. An ominous sign of what was to come was the “wideopen disavowal of the Lord’s Day” that was most evident in areas near the U.S. border, and exacerbated by the growing number of immigrants with a Continental European background.104 The commission made a bold claim for the importance of its cause, i­nsisting that the church “must teach that the Lord’s Day is the keystone institution in building and maintaining a Christian civilization.”105 It was, of course, easier to keep the Sabbath the Protestant way when nearly everything was closed in order to preserve a day free from commercial activities and professional sporting events. The United Church’s failure to influence popular opinion on Sunday observance was evident by 1950 when its support for the Lord’s Day Alliance was not enough to win a municipal plebiscite on banning Sunday sports in Toronto.106 Part of the framework for a Christian Canada was demolished as one community after another removed similar restrictions. Just as striking was the waning support for the temperance cause. By 1950 even the wms found that collecting signatures for the total abstinence “purpose cards” was a hard sell.107 Its committee on Temperance and Christian Citizenship was renamed “Christian Citizenship” that year, although temperance was still listed among its concerns alongside peace, racial brotherhood, and social welfare. Meanwhile the United Church debated whether total abstinence from the use of beverage alcohol ought to be a condition of membership, deciding instead to adopt voluntary total abstinence in 1948.108 In an effort to encourage compliance, a flurry of flyers and

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pamphlets targeted married couples and individuals.109 Even that policy proved too restrictive. Deliberating in 1960 on the report of a temperance commission set up four years earlier, the General Council conceded that while abstinence was still the wisest and safest course of action, one could drink responsibly and be a member in good standing.110 The United Church’s strategy for discouraging the use of beverage alcohol also included pressure on the federal government to restrict advertising and to nationalize pricing and profits.111 Mutchmor’s tactics included both public statements and behind-the-scenes lobbying. Writing to thank Mutchmor after enjoying dinner at his home, Stanley Knowles, a United Church minister and ccf Member of Parliament, laid out the steps he had since taken to raise the issue of liquor advertising. Knowles evidently appreciated the groundwork Mutchmor had laid, and encouraged him to continue his visits to Ottawa.112 Their exchange of letters on establishment of the Canada Council (which Knowles hoped would “relieve the Dominion Drama Festival from its dependence on liquor money”) show them collaborating to rally other mp s to support their cause, specifically Liberal Cabinet ministers Lester Pearson and Walter Harris. The political sensitivity of the issue was not lost on Knowles, who was alarmed by “Bronfman’s influence in the Liberal Party” (a reference to the owner of a large distillery in Quebec).113 The United Church was also forced to confront resistance to its efforts to regulate family life. The emphasis on the Christian home as an institution with a redemptive role in raising good citizens was gradually giving way to a focus on family relationships.114 Despite the growing number of women working outside the home, there was remarkably little change between 1932 and 1962 in the way the United Church portrayed Christian marriage. Its purpose remained three-fold: procreation, companionship, and the “divine vocation” of parenting.115 Marriage was assumed to be a lifelong commitment. Commissioned reports during this period were unequivocal. Having children, rather than the regulation of sexual satisfaction, was considered the end and purpose of marriage and not to be evaded “in the pursuit of selfish ease and pleasure at the cost of a childless home.”116 Procreation was promoted as both a delight and a duty, although the United Church defended “voluntary parenthood” and sided with the Federal Council of Churches and the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops against the Roman Catholic condemnation of contraception.117

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By mid-century, however, the “art of controlling birth” had led to what a 1950 report described as “the most sudden biological change the human race has known.”118 The United Church had reason to be concerned about the smaller family size that resulted. During the baby boom, the fertility rate among its female members was lower than the Canadian average.119 Reproductive control became even more reliable when ‘the Pill’ came on the market in 1961, although the sale of contraceptives was still illegal in Canada until 1969.120 The United Church was adamant that procreation was not the sole purpose of marriage, and set great store by the companionship of the couple joined in marriage. However, the notion of marriage as a mere contract between private individuals was repeatedly denounced.121 Sexuality was part of the work of God’s creation and, as such, was declared a good and natural aspect of companionship, albeit requiring disciplined expression.122 Family life disclosed God’s grace, and both marriage and sexuality were often described as sacred or sacramental (although not a Sacrament as theologically defined). Marital difficulties, on the other hand, seemed to mirror the brokenness of relationships after the Fall. The United Church was concerned about a sizable and increasing number of couples who had separated while still legally married, either because they had no legal grounds for divorce or could not afford to obtain one. An annulment of the marriage might settle the legal ambiguity of the couple, but the United Church worried that it left their children in an ambiguous position as illegitimate offspring.123 By 1946 the United Church admitted that old solutions for dealing with failed marriages were inadequate, and called for the matter to be studied.124 A decade later, still without a formal policy to guide ministers, a Commission on Christian Marriage and Divorce was formed, and its reports came before the General Council in 1960 and 1962. It was not the United Church’s position on marriage that changed in the process, but its decision (shocking at the time) to see redemptive possibilities in the remarriage of divorced persons. The second report admitted that for healing and wholeness, divorce was sometimes a better choice than remaining unhappily married. In Jesus’ teaching, commissioners found a message of compassion that dared them to conclude that it was “God’s will for his church to deal compassionately with those whose marriages are threatened or broken.”125 The provocative decision to permit United Church ministers to solemnize marriages of divorced persons set out conditions that

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included confession, repentance, acceptance of the responsibilities of the new marriage, and a desire for the grace of God to forgive and be forgiven.126 A Christian ceremony thus became an alternative to civil marriage or common-law cohabitation for those whose first marriages had failed. The United Church’s biblical and theological rationale for linking home, church, and community became more tenuous once the ‘moral mother’ became the ‘working mother,’ with less time to oversee her children’s spiritual formation. As the spiritual significance of parenting as a divine vocation faded – even for women – the Christian home was drained of some of its sanctity. The impact of more women working outside the home was noticeable in the church and the community. Even in the 1950s, women were finding it more difficult to find time to volunteer at church or community events. Lamenting what he had witnessed, especially in work with the disadvantaged, Mutchmor blamed it on the decline in volunteer service that “in turn is largely caused by the much greater proportion of gainfully employed married women.”127 Others in ministry shared this view of a woman’s primary vocation as that of a parent. Earl Lautenschlager, soon to move from a large Sudbury congregation to the principal’s office at Emmanuel College, offered guidance to brides and grooms in 1962 that would have sounded conventional to young people raised during the 1950s. A sidebar of quotations from the first of two articles was designed to catch the attention of readers leafing through the Observer: “People who don’t want children should remain single.” “The wife who works can unman her husband.” “Women who can’t cook should be ashamed of themselves.”128 Lautenschlager’s frank words were no doubt drawn from years of dealing with couples who came to see him about their problems. His own view of marriage breakdown differed from the new position of the United Church: there was “no good reason to break up any marriage for any reason,” given the spiritual resources for forgiveness that God offered.129 To women who showed him a bruise after their husbands hit them, his candid counsel was not to take it too seriously – “He’s likely as sorry about it as you are.”130 That such a remark passed the scrutiny of a seasoned editor reflects a tolerance of domestic violence that would shock a later generation. Surprisingly, it drew no letters to the editor (or at least none were published).

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After the war women had been bombarded by messages discouraging them from working in paid employment and advising them to put their energies into motherhood and homemaking.131 Those admonitions went unheeded. What both secular and religious critics of women who worked outside the home often overlooked were economic shifts that made homemaking less economically viable. The United Church’s own studies identified a trend toward a new economy where the basic necessities of life, once produced in the home or acquired by bartering services, were now purchased with cash. The report of the Commission on Culture presented to the General Council in 1950 pictured family life in pioneer times as a “closely knit cultural nursery,” with the home producing most of its own material goods. The situation of the modern family was drastically different; it was enmeshed in a money economy, and faced disaster unless it had cash to purchase almost everything it needed.132 The 1961 census reported a startling consequence of that trend: nearly half of the women in the labour force were married. This was a dramatic increase from 1941 (one in twenty) and 1951 (one in ten).133 The divided mind of the United Church over married women who worked outside the home was evident at the General Council in 1962. The Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women presented a report that Mutchmor characterized as “unduly slanted in favour of the demands of woman as woman.”134 It assumed that working women were here to stay, and the church’s task was to figure out how to deal with the problems that were expected to follow. Billed as the first study in Canada to consider the implications of married women in paid positions from a Christian perspective, the report challenged many stereotypes. It pointedly observed that a woman who taught school or worked as a hospital custodian might be using her time away from family concerns as profitably as one who filled her days with such idle amusements as bingo, bridge, shopping, or coffee-partying. Among its recommendations was a call for government and social service agencies to help working families and support for the principle of equal pay for equal work.135 In marked contrast to this affirmation of working women was another report involving the ordination of women, presented to the same General Council. Although the United Church had ordained Lydia Gruchy in 1936 (and several women thereafter), a married woman was still not eligible for consideration. Deaconesses who married were disjoined – formally released from the vows they had

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made when they joined the order – but there was no similar pro­ vision for ‘un-ordaining’ women. Women could thus sidestep the problem by delaying marriage until after they were ordained, but not everyone felt comfortable taking that route. When Elinor Leard, a married women, was ordained in 1957 (over the objections of the moderator), the General Council was asked to clarify “the relationship of an ordained woman minister to her work following her marriage.” The Commission on Ordination concluded that a married woman was not able to discharge her obligations to her husband and children and, at the same time, carry on the work for which she was ordained. Hesitant to adopt this course of action when it was put to a vote, the General Council referred the report to its executive for further deliberation.136 The executive rejected the report’s direction, in effect upholding the Basis of Union (as amended in 1936), which referred to ordaining “men and women” – with no reference to marital status. When the 1964 General Council approved the action of the executive, the path to ordination was cleared for women like Lois Freeman, who had declined to follow a friend’s advice to postpone her marriage to Roy Wilson until she was ordained. Lois Wilson was ordained in 1965, on her fifteenth wedding anniversary, with her husband Roy involved in the laying on of hands at the service.137 It was another sign of what was to come: resistance to male-led public worship, to g­ ender-segregation in much of the life of local congregations, and to women being underrepresented in church structures beyond the congregation. The United Church’s initiatives in the 1940s and ’50s were the work of a church still intent on saving souls and society, and hoping to redeem modern culture as well. It had not yet given up on Christian Canada. It poured time and money into evangelism, church extension, and Christian education. Those who found their way to Sunday services during those years heard the familiar call to Christian citizenship that connected the church with the community. When the United Church called the nation to Christ, people still took notice. The problem was that it seemed to make little difference. The disappointing practical results of the United Church’s postwar initiatives can perhaps account for some of the later skepticism toward what was dismissively dubbed as the Billy Graham–type of evangelism. A number of church leaders concluded that evangelism by itself would not lead to a Christian Canada as they defined it;

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while it might improve church attendance, there was little evidence of it affecting social views or even personal behaviour. Templeton’s own example was hardly reassuring. At the height of his success, still beset by doubts about his faith, he left the ministry in 1957, divorced his wife Connie, and pursued opportunities in secular media. He later wrote in his memoirs that although he did not realize it at the time, the itinerant mass evangelism in which he had been involved was about to die because of television and televangelists, with his old friend Billy Graham the lone survivor.138 The United Church’s identity as an “evangelical” church was doomed once support for Graham’s crusades became a theological litmus test of authenticity. The United Church’s collective purpose was further diminished by the growing separation between neighbours and within families in a more mobile society. Its own members were becoming more selective in their acceptance of its stance on moral issues such as Sabbath observance, temperance, and the permanence of marriage. In an ­individualistic society, they no longer had the same sense of being ­involved in one another’s lives; fellowship was more elusive. As the gap between the guiding principles espoused by denominational leaders and the views of people in the pews widened, more was at stake than just the church’s sense of what it meant to be United. If the church was not influencing the conscience of its own members, how could it be the conscience of the nation? Before the time when public opinion polls regularly took the pulse of the population, church leaders were assumed to speak for their members. One historian has remarked that on matters such as banning beverage alcohol, divorce, and abortion, “the flocks may or may not have heeded their pastors. But governments certainly did.” 139 Ministers were perhaps less surprised than politicians as evidence mounted that people were not always heeding their spiritual leaders, trusting themselves as moral authorities instead. As a result, politicians began to take less notice when someone like Mutchmor came to call. In a democratic society, the ‘church’ doesn’t vote; individual members do. The United Church had hoped that Christian identity could be  cultivated by seeding the culture with Christian values. That Christian culture – whether of the Protestant or Catholic variety – was more tenuous than traditionally assumed created apprehension across denominational lines. The consequences of failure were grave, and United Church leaders were not alone in their fear for

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the future of the church. As one of its ministers who pondered the findings of the Maclean’s survey in 1961, W.J. Gallagher, then secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches, sounded a chilling word of warning: “Christianity is never more than a generation away from extinction.”140

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Rev. William Berry, Rev. Ernest E. Long, Rt Rev. Angus J. MacQueen, and Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker (left to right behind the pulpit) leading the General Council in a hymn of praise. E.L. Homewood, The United Church Observer, September 1958. uc c a 92.185P / 378.

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Rev. Dr Alfred Clinton Forrest, editor of The United Church Observer (far right), with unidentified ministers and Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson (centre). Dominion-Wide Photographs, n.d. uc c a , 76.001P / 1950.

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Rev. J. Raymond Hord, secretary of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service. The United Church Observer, 1 September 1967.

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Student Glee Club at Portage la Prairie Indian residential school, [1967?]. uc c a , 86.158P / 33.

Dr J.P.C. Fraser, port chaplain in Halifax, introducing immigrants to his wife at United Church booth, Berkeley Studio, [196-?]. uc c a 2008.011P / 2679.

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Rev. Clarke MacDonald, secretary of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service, head of the new department of Church in Society in the Division of Mission in Canada after restructuring, and former minister of St Luke’s United Church, Toronto. The United Church Observer, February 1971.

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Tuxis boys entertain at a church coffee house event. Berkeley Studio, [196-?]. u cca, 2008.011P / 2276.

At the “Dugout,” a coffee house on skid row run by First United Church, Vancouver. Berkeley Studio, 1970. uc ca, 2008.011P / 4133.

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Meeting of members of the Committee on the Revision of the Hymnary, 1964. Anglican and United Church members pictured (left to right): Donald S. Henderson, R.D. Atkinson, Jay Macpherson, John Webster Grant, G.G.D. Kilpatrick, R.H.N. Davidson, Stanley Osborne, John W. Stinson, H.A.A. Rose, F.R.C. Clarke. uc c a , 92.185P / 527.

Harriet Christie, secretary of the Board of Women, and other senior church executives. The United Church Observer, October 1970.

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Rev. Bruce McLeod, newly elected United Church moderator. The United Church Observer, October 1972.

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7 Uncoupling Christianity and Culture in Canada Original sin of institutions: priests may pray for guidance with utter ­sincerity, but what they are unconsciously praying for is the continuance of the social ascendancy of their Church. Northrop Frye, “Notebook” 11e [56]

As the retiring United Church moderator stepped forward to give his final address, few of those assembled for the 1962 General Council were expecting a speech that would make headlines the next morning. The Rev. Hugh A. McLeod had been introduced to delegates two years earlier as the “quiet and highly respected minister” of Winnipeg’s Knox United Church – more of a “highland mystic” than an agitator. Yet reputedly where he stood was always clear if he thought it necessary to take a side.1 On this occasion, there would be no doubt about his views on immigration trends.2 The nation’s future would be in peril, he predicted, if immigration continued “overwhelmingly as in the past ten years to make Canada predominantly Roman Catholic.” McLeod tried to explain that his objections were not personal – the immigrants themselves were praiseworthy. Their church, however, was another matter entirely. Insisting that Catholicism favoured “the establishment of a monolithic infallible authority under Rome” (and rejecting the notion that Canadian Catholics believed otherwise), he feared that their growing numbers heralded “the end of liberty as we have known it.” Democracy was “very vulnerable to infiltration,” he cautioned, for political parties wanted to win votes and the press wanted to increase circulation. “By reason of our vaunted tolerance we are in danger of losing our freedom by default.”

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Although aware that the Second Vatican Council was to get underway in a few weeks, he dismissed the optimism of those who hoped for a different kind of Catholicism.3 Given the prevailing assumptions about the role of organized religion in society, McLeod had good reason to be uneasy about the rising number of Catholics: more members, it was supposed, would translate into more political influence for a church’s leaders. However, what McLeod and other leaders failed at first to appreciate was the extent to which the public role of both Protestant and Catholic churches was shifting. Faced with the prospect of conflicts generated by religious pluralism, Canada and other western countries ventured to promote solely secular values to provide cultural cohesion – among them the tolerance, liberty, and democracy that McLeod had proudly promoted as distinctively Protestant ideals. With the demise of Christendom that this move signalled, churches were to find their influence in key social and cultural areas more limited than in the past. An examination of issues of the semi-monthly Observer following McLeod’s speech illustrates some of the complexities of the United Church’s relationship with the Catholic Church at that pivotal ­moment. The magazine was quick to defend McLeod against the critical press coverage that his controversial remarks drew. The comments on immigration had been taken out of context, explained the Observer, insisting that the address had been well received by those who heard it.4 A.C. Forrest, editor of the Observer (and still dealing with the fallout as the next issue went to press), declared the superficiality of the secular media startling and claimed that little notice had been given to the steps the United Church was taking to deal constructively with Canada’s rapidly changing religious configuration. He drew attention to two commissions that the United Church’s recent General Council had set up to study the related issues of immigration and religion in the public schools.5 By happenstance a miniature photo of Pope John XXIII, inserted to publicize the cover story for an article in the next issue of the Observer, appeared just a few pages away from Forrest’s attempt to deal with criticism of the former moderator.6 The situation was ­further exacerbated by what readers saw when that issue arrived two weeks later: an attractive picture of the pope graced the cover and inside was a reprint of an article by a prominent American

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theologian, Robert McAfee Brown, who attended Vatican Council as a Protestant observer. Readers learned that the idea for convening a council had come to the pope during a period “devoted to prayers for the re-union of Christendom.” It is unlikely that those Protestants who feared Catholic domination were placated by the disclosure that the pope sought to show the world how the Catholic Church was facing its internal problems in hopes of welcoming back to the fold “other sheep” that had “strayed.”7 Forrest was shrewd enough to anticipate the furor the picture would create. He assured readers that the cover story had been planned for some time to mark the opening of the Vatican Council. “Just in case some think that we decided to put His Holiness on the cover as a public relations gesture after all the recent bad press, please be assured we don’t scare that easily.”8 His attempt at humour did little to soften reader response: almost all the correspondence published in “Letters to the Editor” was negative – and that was just a sampling. One angry, unsigned, and unprinted note was blunt: “Your Observer just came. I am returning it as I am a Protestant, and feel I shouldn’t have to be staring at the Pope’s picture from a church paper, that I understood was Protestant. I don’t want it in my home.”9 At the same time, to Forrest’s dismay, word came of a request for more government support for Catholic separate schools in Ontario, a proposal that he knew was bound to open old wounds and spark new controversy. “Not This!” shouted the editorial headline, with the body of the editorial denouncing the bishops’ request, calling it “political dynamite.”10 There was reason for Protestants to be apprehensive about the population patterns. Postwar immigration had made for a religiously plural mix, with Protestant numbers increasingly in the minority. After years of restrictions, the resumption of admissions brought refugees and other immigrants, and showed a definite trend: more continental European immigrants meant more Catholics outside Quebec, an unsettling demographic fact that ­further undermined the notion of “British Canada.” It did not help matters that Catholics were said to be smugly aware that the ­recent census showed them at 46 per cent of the population – and growing. “We Will Bury You with Babies” was the title of an ­article in a Catholic magazine that turned the old revenge of the cradle into an attack on the United Church’s position on artificial birth control.11

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The United Church was of two minds where immigration was concerned. Its International Affairs committee supported a “vig­ orous and well directed immigration policy” to attract people to Canada from all regions of the world. It recommended that Canada accept “at least a token number from the Orient, India, The [sic] British West Indies and Africa,”12 including a “fair share of the ‘Hard Core’ in refugee camps, at the rate that this country can successfully integrate them.”13 The committee was fully aware that a more open immigration policy would complicate social integration, especially at a time when Anglo-Saxon culture was disappearing as a source of common values. Making the case for admitting immigrants from places beyond the uk and Europe, one International Affairs report stated the problem candidly: “There is the dilemma between the need to open up empty lands by immigration and the desire to restrict immigration only to the assimilable – had the Indians been able to enforce such a policy of assimilable immigration they would have been around still!”14 The committee denounced Canada’s immigration laws as a “brand of apartheid” because they were based on racial discrimination.15 The tone of its reports was still pro-immigration in 1962 as the country awaited details of a new immigration policy that would benefit chiefly Asians, Africans, and those from countries in the Middle East.16 The response of the Board of Home Missions was more reserved, reflecting perhaps the mixed results of the United Church’s outreach programs to immigrants under its auspices, especially in urban areas.17 Statistics confirmed what many suspected: the United Church had kept pace with other Protestant churches, but lost ground to Catholicism even outside Quebec due to lower fertility rates and higher numbers of Catholic immigrants.18 Home Missions secretary Malcolm Macdonald reported in 1961 that of the 106,928 persons admitted into Canada during the previous two years, only 33,235 were Protestants. The most dramatic change was in Toronto, then Canada’s second-largest city and long considered its Protestant centre. Projections showed that the city would be predominantly Roman Catholic by 1980. It was already losing what he called its AngloSaxon Protestant stock to the suburbs (still mainly Protestant), “while Roman Catholic Non-Anglo-Saxons concentrate in the city proper and replace old church constituencies that were Protestant for decades.”19 Protestants and Catholics in Toronto were soon to be joined by significant numbers of new Canadians who were neither.

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The year 1962 was arguably a tipping point for both the United Church and Canada. A reckoning with religious and cultural pluralism was inescapable, for by then, it was apparent that Quebec’s Quiet Revolution was dramatically altering the role of the Catholic Church and its vision for a Christian society in that province.20 Outside Quebec another revolution, just as momentous, was underway. Among its casualties was the cultural role in nation-building ascribed to the major Protestant churches. With the search for a new collective identity for Canada would come the realization that religion was as much a hindrance as a help in that enterprise: no longer could Christianity be harnessed as a unifying force in a religiously diverse Canada. Evident at the General Council that year was what the Observer described as a liberalizing trend. Delegates had affirmed the controversial position on remarriage taken two years earlier by accepting broader grounds for divorce, recommended that birth control information be provided to married couples, rejected a call for a censorship board, and acknowledged “the increasing prestige of gainfully employed women” (more commonly known as working women). The call for laws against gambling; restrictions on production, advertising, and sale of beverage alcohol; and protection of the ­ Christian Sunday were more muted than in the past, replaced by calls for “self-discipline of the members in faith and practice.”21 A ten-year process of restructuring was set in motion with the first report of the Long Range Planning Committee, whose task was to answer the question: What is the purpose of the church and the ­nature of a congregation?22 A commission was formed to study how the United Church could “best share in the World Mission of the Church.”23 A new organization for women, United Church Women (u c w), was celebrated as a merger of the w m s and the wa. Publication of The Word and the Way for adult education marked the arrival of the New Curriculum. And it was at the 1962 General Council that the indomitable J.R. Mutchmor was elected on the first ballot as the next moderator. Mutchmor promised to make evangelism his priority during his two-year term as moderator by targeting the 1 million persons who had recently told census-takers that they belonged to the United Church but were never seen there. He implored the church to think of these no-shows as “a fringe to be cultivated, not cut off.”24 This was likely a reference to changes to the United Church’s membership

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policy being considered at the time. In 1956 a Committee on Membership, chaired by Donald Mathers of Queen’s Theological College, had been appointed to clear up some problems that had surfaced in recent years. Church records had not kept pace with postwar mobility and church growth in the 1950s. The committee’s interim report had already been presented to the previous General Council and then discussed at most presbyteries, where it generated “a considerable volume of comment and suggestion.”25 By 1962 the committee’s final report was ready. Compared with the many other contentious matters before the General Council that year, the membership issue was a sleeper. The recommendations seemed innocuous. The only item that drew any real attention simply encouraged congregations to enforce an already existing provision in the Manual that authorized the removal from its roll of the names of members who “without reasonable excuse” had been absent from public worship and Communion in their local church for three years (or some other period determined by the session).26 There was no need for a person to make a formal request to have their name removed from the membership roll.27 It was a solution to a practical problem of church discipline that perhaps had unintended consequences, as congregations followed this directive and purged their membership rolls over the next few years. One wonders how many commissioners took note of the bold new introduction to the final report, which set the practical recommen­ dations for church membership in a theological framework that ­divulged the precarious condition of Christendom in Canada and offered a frank theological assessment of what was in store. A year earlier Mathers had offered a group of United Church leaders a preview of what his committee members saw on the horizon. Speaking to representatives of two key boards (Christian Education and e&ss), he warned that the Constantinian Era, a period of more than a thousand years when “Christian standards were accepted by all as the normal and natural basis of public life,” was coming to an end. He mused that the United Church might overestimate its political and social influence in its attempts to adapt to the end of the era and be tempted to take stands on issues that would lead to humiliating defeat, weakening whatever influence it still held.28 He also cautioned that the end of Christian civilization meant that the public school system could no longer be counted on to provide effective religious instruction, making it all the more important for the church

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to develop its own educational resources.29 As author of The Word and the Way, the adult study book for the New Curriculum, Mathers himself was already deeply involved in one such initiative. The seriousness of the new situation was set out in response to an obvious question (given the rather mundane subject matter of the report and a booklet based on it that was being prepared for congregational discussion): Why study church membership? “We have become aware of a great change in relations between church and world,” was the reply. The report announced the end of Christendom in Canada with its blunt assertion that “the Middle Ages have finally come to an end.” Living in a religiously plural society, where one no longer needed to be a church member in order to be a good citizen, would soon mean making a clear distinction between church membership and citizenship. The report predicted that the United Church was about to enter a new and different age. It would continue to “seek to serve society” as in the past; however, church membership would no longer be considered “the religious aspect of citizenship,” and Christians would no longer be expected to accept the “standards of good citizenship uncritically from the state.” This new freedom was cause for celebration, according to the report, for Christianity was awakening from “the comfortable slumber of a thousand years of European domesticity” and could now embrace its “world mission” more fully.30 Although other United Church leaders were soon to take the notion of a new world mission much further, Mathers and his committee laid some of the early theological groundwork. The end of Christendom in Canada, as elsewhere, meant that religion was soon less visibly present in everyday life. The quest for secular alternatives to the guiding principles of Christian civilization raised a host of new questions. What did it mean to be a Christian citizen if the notion of Christian civilization no longer had currency? Were churches whose mission had been construed in those terms rendered useless? What was the role for the church in community life if Christian values were separate from civic values, rather than their source? If religion divided opinion when it entered the public arena, should it simply be kept out? Politicians and pundits were quietly asking those same questions as they pondered the new exigencies of postwar Canada. It had long been presumed in the West that religion had a part to play in civi­ lizing society. The close ties between Christianity and culture had

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survived the division of medieval Christendom after the reformations of the sixteenth century; in and beyond Europe, religion continued to shape the identity of nation-states. As he studied Canadian society in the 1940s, sociologist S.D. Clark identified the close relationship of church and community as an important feature of nationalism in the western world. One of “the fullest expressions” of that association, he claimed, was “found in one of our own churches, the United Church of Canada.”31 That connection still appeared to be intact as Canada faced the uncertainties of the nuclear age; in public, at least, political leaders applauded the church’s civic contributions.32 The International Affairs committee began its 1952 report to the General Council with testimonials from three United Church Members of Parliament. Leading off was Lester Pearson, who urged the United Church to take a greater interest in Canada’s foreign policy. He assured the church that its attentiveness to international issues was helping “to ensure that Christian principles and endeavour are directed to the task of promoting a just and peaceful world order.”33 His words would have had a familiar ring to those raised, as he was, in homes and churches imbued with the missionary spirit of Christian internationalism. The United Church exuded a sense of its own importance. Meetings with prominent politicians and civil servants such as Pearson and Paul Martin occurred frequently; likewise, collaboration with other church bodies (notably the w cc) and consultations with scientists and other academics in preparing of recommendations were common.34 When the Learned Societies met in Ottawa in 1957, the United Church moderator presided at a meeting of church leaders and scientists.35 And it was a service in Sydenham Street United Church in Kingston that Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip attended during their 1959 royal visit to Canada. Pearson’s addresses in the early 1950s reflected the customary ­assumption of Christianity’s influence. His installation address as chancellor of Victoria University challenged the school to give its students “a faith, a sense of mission, and understanding of social and moral values.” Education, “especially at a university such as ours” (perhaps a reference to its standing as a denominational college of the United Church) “must be based on a belief in something deeper and higher than oneself, whatever it may be called; on Christian morality, as a basis for the individual and for society.”36 His public roles sometimes called for him to speak from pulpits where his

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Methodist father or grandfather had preached. In what he later described as the nearest he came to giving a religious address, he ­offered his listeners counsel with Christian overtones: “Today, it is true, we live in fear and tension and under the awful shadow of a nuclear cloud. But if each of us remains true to those Christian ideals and Christian principles, which provide an answer to every question, a solution to every problem, we have no cause for despair.”37 Particularly vexing was that implementing some of the progressive social and cultural initiatives associated with those ideals and principles seemed to erode the customary relationship between church and community in Canada and elsewhere. In Victorian times governments had shown little interest in providing social services, leaving it up to individuals to help themselves or to seek help from a benevolent organization, often under the auspices of a church.38 In their attempts to meet the public demands of Victorian society, argues historian Jeffrey Cox, the Non-Conformist churches in Britain (the denominational counterparts of the United Church’s founding traditions) idealistically claimed responsibility for education, poverty relief, entertainment, character development, and social cohesion. In time, as their inability to meet expectations became evident, they were happy to turn these tasks over to specialized institutions. But in doing so their own world view, and their role as regenerators in it, disintegrated; the next generation was less convinced of the power of the church’s influence. Cox describes what followed in the interwar period as a “sort of retreat into the church,” with a shift of emphasis from serving to belonging.39 Cox pinpoints more specifically what some have referred to variously as the impact of secularization, secularism, urbanization, industrialization, and materialism: churches were “hit all at once by the emergence of new philanthropic, administrative, and educational bureaucracies which destroyed their claims to social utility, by a changing age structure, and by a generational revolt.” In order to gain an advantage in their bid to influence Victorian society, they had invested in philanthropic work. Now, with the dismantling of that philanthropic work, they became irrelevant: they were “left with little to do and even less to say, since ‘church work’ had been a central justification for their existence.”40 In Britain, the expansion of government into education and social services during the interwar years was, as historian Frank Prochaska

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sees it, “both the cause and effect of Christian decline.” Ceding ­responsibility for social well-being to the government “reflected a social and cultural transformation that had repercussions for Christianity that were arguably as great as any since the eighteenthcentury religious revival.” Although at least some of the impetus was connected to war and reconstruction (and thus, he concedes, beyond the churches’ control), he poignantly pictures church leaders participating in their own demise by calling for more government investment in social welfare: “The bishops blew out the candles to see better in the dark.”41 The situation of the United Church was strikingly similar, and the impact on its social services (and the volunteerism of the Christian citizens who supported them) was likewise profound.42 By the 1940s its boarding schools were closing because there were too few residents.43 The prospect that Canada would have thousands of new immigrants once the war was over, with their children filling the schools, delayed dealing with a situation already described in 1944 as a crisis.44 By the end of the 1950s, it was clear that boarding schools were headed for obsolescence, school buses and rural school consolidation making it possible for more children to attend school while living at home.45 Hospitals operated by the United Church were undergoing a similar transition. Church union had brought together the medical missions of the Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church, a number of them operated by the wms . The Board of Home Missions and the w ms shared oversight of hospitals that were set up to serve indigenous peoples and immigrants in sparsely populated districts where there was no other provision for medical care.46 Hundreds of doctors and nurses saw this as an expression of practical Christianity that paralleled overseas missionary service. Longest serving among them was Morley A.R. Young, whose career at the Lamont, Alberta, hospital between 1922 and 1977 included such distinctions as a term as president of the Canadian Medical Association.47 Rising health-care costs and shifting demographics made this form of Christian service less feasible. Better means of transportation meant that even those who lived in rural areas had access to a wider range of medical services than church hospitals could provide, especially with more generous government funding of municipal hospitals. The wms realized by 1954 that hospital work was in transition and asked the Commission on Church Hospitals that year if it was

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time to withdraw these services now that the government was taking responsibility for caring for the sick.48 The commission’s first report (1956) noted that in the past, hospital work had served an important social purpose. It reiterated the findings of an earlier survey that medical missions in “Non-Anglo-Saxon districts” was of “special value in breaking down natural barriers of prejudice and suspicion and in securing a better mutual understanding and in promoting good fellowship among the various racial groups.”49 But the vulnerability of medical missions was evident in its second report two years later. Of the twenty-four facilities in operation before the war, only eleven remained; six were operated by the Board of Home Missions and five by the wms. It noted an ironic consequence of the new government-funded hospital insurance plans: although the grants had reduced the church’s outlay in some areas, the rising costs of maintaining modern standards of hospital care meant that the church could expect larger capital expenditures in the future.50 As the United Church withdrew from medical ministries, its hospitals were sold to municipalities or, in some cases, Catholic charities. A benevolent state with the power to tax was covering more and more of the escalating costs of education, health care, and other s­ocial programs. Secular standards of social work made religious social service appear outdated and redundant, and its past contributions to the community were quickly forgotten.51 It was difficult to object to better-funded government initiatives – after all, the United Church had lobbied for them! Yet the church’s place in society was subtly transformed once it relinquished responsibilities that had made its presence visible in many communities. Friendly service to the nation had been central to the case for church union. Its congregations, once considered centres of community activity, suddenly had less to do – and in any case, with more women working outside the home, not as much volunteer time available. There were fewer and fewer church-related institutions to oversee. And for church members, there was not as much to lose by flouting the church’s moral authority; they now relied instead on the state for social services. Meanwhile, the state was emerging as a formidable rival in other vital areas of Canadian life. By 1949 the threat of American ascendancy in mass culture, competing claims about who was to control the broadcast media, and a crisis in university funding were serious enough issues to persuade the Liberal government to appoint a

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commission to address them.52 The findings of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (more often dubbed the Culture Commission or the Massey Commission, in recognition of Vincent Massey’s role as chair) went far beyond the mandate suggested by its name. It implicitly endorsed Massey’s own view of culture as a political rather than moral force, and presented a compelling case for state support of culture as a means of promoting national identity. As a young man, Massey had been an active member of the Methodist Church, a delegate at the Edinburgh Conference in 1910, and a participant in congregational and denominational ­affairs. But his church’s attitude to culture was fraught with contradiction, as historian Karen Finlay’s study of Massey notes: supportive of educational institutions on the one hand, but frowning on visual arts and the theatre, to which Massey found himself drawn.53 Shortly after his father’s death in 1926, Massey became an Anglican, and criticism of “Puritan” attitudes toward the arts and contempt for their use as moral propaganda cropped up in his writings around the same time. After diplomatic postings in the United States and Britain, Massey returned to Canada in 1946 convinced, says Finlay, of the peril that Canada faced from the escalation of American imperialism.54 The Massey Report offered a defensive strategy based on the interlocking connections it presumed between citizenship, national sovereignty, and culture (notably the arts, ­sciences, and education). The United Church was one of three churches invited to present a brief to the commission.55 All underscored the importance of religious broadcasting on c b c radio and television to communicate the Christian message.56 Some of the United Church’s theologians had at first frowned on religious broadcasting as a “menace,”57 but most had since come to see its opportunities, especially after witnessing the adroitness of conservative preachers who disseminated their teachings on radio programs originating in the United States. The United Church was among the early supporters of public broadcasting, and provided material for the c bc’s religious programming.58 It no doubt hoped that the Massey Commission’s work would elevate the tone of Canadian culture and defend it from American domination. For its part, the commission perhaps considered the United Church a useful ally, given its customary antipathy to popular entertainment as “pagan” (or at least American) in tone.

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Canada’s churches still wanted and expected a voice in the cultural affairs of the nation. However, the report’s bold call for government funding of cultural activities gradually relieved them of their responsibility to sponsor literary work, education, and the performing arts. Instead the Massey Commission created an expectation in the public mind that the government was responsible for developing and funding a cultural policy for Canada; this was its greatest achievement, concludes historian Paul Litt.59 And so the state joined technology and mass culture in competing with the churches for the time and attention of the Christian citizen.60 It was hardly a fair contest, for federal and provincial governments had more means (taxes) and greater access to contemporary methods (such as more direct use of media) for shaping the hearts and minds of Canadians. The impact of its recommendations was to silently chip away at Christianity’s contribution to national distinctiveness by creating the impression that Canadian culture was itself a sufficient source of national identity. This new departure was later cause for concern for at least one of the five commissioners.61 Hilda Neatby was a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan and a staunch Presbyterian. While she saw Canada as “formally a Christian country,” with the vast majority of its people affiliated with a church, she was uneasy about the tension between Christianity’s message of sin and salvation, on the one hand, and the belief that human striving alone was sufficient. There was a great deal at stake in her view: “It is impossible to say whether a culture can develop without being centred in a religious faith of some sort; it is a fact that such a thing never has happened.”62 One of a number of prominent Canadians asked in 1957 whether there was a religious revival underway, Neatby expressed her misgivings by critiquing a cbc religious program produced by the National Religious Advisory Council. Within this program the hymn “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven” had been followed by a reading that included the words “man on earth has no one to help him but man.” Her assessment was scathing: “When popular ‘Christian’ national programmes combine purely pagan teaching with profoundly Christian hymns, without, apparently, any sense of irreverence or even of logical inconsistency, it is impossible not to fear that the apparent signs of religious revival may dissolve into the purely sentimental and archaic, or develop into a religious movement, powerful, but not Christian.”63

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The publication of the Massey Report in 1951 was to become a landmark in Canadian history. It coincided with new cultural initiatives that included the National Ballet of Canada, Stratford Festival, and c b c ’s telecast of Hockey Night in Canada.64 After his appointment in 1952 as the first Canadian-born governor general, Massey used his influence, along with his close ties to the Liberal government, to promote the report’s recommendations. In combination with other initiatives – abolishing the right of Canadians to appeal to the British Privy Council in 1949, letting the term ‘Dominion’ fall out of usage, and defining what it meant to be Canadian in terms of certain social programs to which all citizens of the country were entitled – it recommended measures that had the effect of downplaying British identity. For anglophones, says political scientist Kenneth McRoberts, it thus fostered “a new conception of a Canadian nationality, directly attached to the Canadian state and unmediated by any previous identity.”65 However, tampering with national identity appears to have raised hackles in Quebec, where the Massey Report was considered an attack on its prerogatives. McRoberts argues that premier Maurice Duplessis saw it as a challenge to the notion of Canada’s dual nationality. In 1956, Duplessis called his own Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems. The Tremblay Report reaffirmed Quebec as a Catholic society, but told the story of Confederation the way the separatists were to tell it a few years later, as a compact between two peoples, rather than a political pact between the provinces. Quebec also resisted Ottawa’s efforts to knit the country together by declining to participate in a number of national social programs that involved cost-sharing with the federal government.66 Government policies after the death of Duplessis in 1959 and of his successor, Paul Sauvé, a year later triggered a series of events that saw Jean Lesage’s Liberal party successfully campaigning in 1960 to become “masters in our own house.” The Massey model of national unity was on a collision course not only with Christian culture but also with Quebec’s aspirations for autonomy.67 By 1962 the precariousness of the situation was evident to Pearson. That year, as leader of the opposition, he delivered what he con­ sidered one of his most important speeches before the House of Commons. Warning of a divided Canada, he mused that most English-speaking Canadians considered protecting French language

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and culture a commitment that pertained only to Parliament, federal courts, and the province of Quebec itself. They assumed that “for all practical purposes, there would be an English-speaking Canada with a bilingual Quebec: What is called the ‘French fact’ was to be provincial only.” However, francophones in Quebec saw Canada as an equal partnership between two founding races, and presumed protection of their language and culture across Canada. This fundamental difference over the meaning of Confederation had been obscured by what Pearson described as a bicultural coexistence, with English as the language of communication when the two came into occasional contact.68 It was clear to Pearson that the people of Quebec were determined to control their own economic and cultural affairs, a situation that he likened to shock treatment for the rest of Canada. Hinting at the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism that he would call once he became prime minister the following year, he predicted that an inquiry would “show the importance of the contribution of our new Canadians other than the founding races, a contribution which has been of special and indeed exciting value since World War II.”69 What was nicknamed the “B & B Commission” was to go even further in redefining how Canadians thought of themselves as a people. The old notion of two races – and their tacit association with two faiths – no longer fit the new social reality of Canadian life. What historian Ramsay Cook found most striking about the final report was that “in some 140 pages religion was barely mentioned,” an omission that he guessed would not have been possible even ten years earlier. He was prepared to “state categorically that at no time before 1945 would it have been possible for a survey of FrenchEnglish relations to have been written without devoting a very considerable amount of space to religious differences.”70 Although the United Church may have been disappointed at that outcome, its own experience of preparing for its hearing before the B &B Commission showed why the commissioners preferred to steer clear of the subject. Constitutional expert Eugene Forsey agreed to  serve as chair of the group that prepared the brief. Born in Newfoundland, he had spent most of his years in Quebec, and was an active member of one of the United Church’s French-language congregations. He was in a unique position to address the commission’s terms of reference (which his committee believed to be too narrow) and set out to convince the commission to “consider the

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suggestion that the situation in Canada is wider than biculturalism and extends to multi-culturalism.”71 “We are not happy with the term ‘founding races,’” the United Church brief stated, noting that it was not a good translation into English of the French word peuples. Moreover, the reference to founding races might give the unintended and offensive impression of British or French superiority (sec. 21). To underscore the point, the brief made a pointed reference to “the contribution of the Indians and Eskimos, who were here before any of us, and who might well dispute the claim of French and British to the title ‘founding peoples’” (sec. 47). The brief also reminded the commission of the United Church’s long-standing concern for the schooling of Protestant children in Quebec and other predominantly French areas of Canada, and pressed the point that “French” schools should not be assumed to be “Catholic” schools. It urged the provision of French public schools in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada (sec. 53–64). The United Church’s brief exuded the more open and tolerant spirit that had captured the imagination of many Canadians, especially new immigrants or those growing up after the war, who had never thought of themselves as British. However, there was more going on behind the scenes. Some of the United Church’s own members were reluctant to let go of the old animosities between English / Protestant and French / Catholic. Hostility toward francophones and dismay over the federal government’s failure to prevent Quebec from ‘controlling’ Canada filled their correspondence. Typical of such sentiments was a letter to Mutchmor from Alexander Smith of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. He derided the aim of Canadian unity as an excuse “to give the French whatever they want – turn us into half Frenchmen – a new mongrel sort of breed which will always acquiesce with the French, IE [i.e.], the Roman Church in any demands.” It seemed to him that Canada was being asked to join Quebec, rather than the other way around. Although Wolfe had won at the Plains of Abraham, “our Religionists are well on the way to hand the country back without a fight to the Roman Catholic Church personified in the French Minority in Canada.” The only solution was for Quebec to separate completely: “then we will have an English speaking non denominational [sic] country free from Roman Catholic influence. Whether now or later it must come in the interests of the whole of this country.”72

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B. Doerksen from Regina, Saskatchewan, uttered similar sentiments: “we can see no room for bilingualism of any type. Having failed miserably to keep Canada British, we now face the prospect of keeping it English-speaking at least.” He was certain that “Quebec punks are itching for a bloody revolution,” and supposed that Canadians would have to ask the uk “to help us defeat the French a second time.” If that proved unsuccessful, he speculated “Canadians may well ask Uncle Sam to come in and liberate us from the French Romans.” The writer held Pearson responsible. With a Cabinet “half full of Frenchmen or Roman Catholics or both,” Quebec had him “exactly where they want him – over a barrel.”73 A copy of a circular letter, signed by a man from Ottawa, claimed that a French minority was attempting to “pack our Civil Service with French nationalists, to monopolize the voice, ears, eyes and legal system of Government by controlling radio, television, printing bureau, film board, Dept. of State, the Mint, and also the foreign service and Public Works, the last being the great pot of gold useful for purposes of patronage.” The flag, the national anthem, and the public school would be next, the letter warned. The writer was angry at the inference that only the French were “Canadian” and concerned that others could claim “no roots,” for they had been destroyed by subversive methods “conceived and well planned in the Province of Quebec.” The letter ended with the ominous words: “It is later than you think.”74 Forsey no doubt considered such sentiments extreme, but a trip to Banff to attend a conference on Canadian unity opened his eyes to equally disturbing views circulating among francophones. Growing up in Quebec, he was familiar with the old revenge of the cradle version of Quebec nationalism that dreamed of New Brunswick becoming a predominantly French province, and of spreading across eastern and northern Ontario and encircling the English in southern Ontario.75 The new brand of nationalism was more alarming. Forsey admitted to United Church general secretary Ernest Long that the meeting had been a “searing experience” that left him “a good deal less enthusiastic about the whole business than I was.” The three prominent French-Canadian academics who had spoken – self-­ described moderates – were, as he put it bluntly, “insane.” If they spoke for Quebec, the future for Canada looked grim: the “jig is up,” he predicted. He fumed that “not one English Canadian in a thousand would tolerate for thirty seconds” what they were demanding: a new constitution, an “Austro-Hungarian” style of dual government,

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and the adoption of French “as a working language” across Canada (and if “extremists” took over, the terms would be even worse). Lest Long think he was exaggerating, he added, such views were available in print.76 Forsey repeated his concerns to J. Ralph Watson, secretary of Montreal Presbytery and a member of the group that had prepared the United Church’s brief, and described himself as “plunged in gloom” by the remarks of the three “quite crazy” professors from Quebec. “I did tell them plainly that if this is what French Canada really wanted, then I thought the reply of English Canada would be, ‘In God’s name, go!’” He confided, “Personally I would sooner have two completely separate states than the sort of associate state monstrosity these gentry intimated was the only alternative.”77 Forsey wondered at the time if his protest to what he had heard at Banff had been forceful enough, but some thought he had gone too far. Reminiscing about the conference in his memoirs years later, he recalled that he was considered an Anglo-Saxon bigot. Most of the English-speaking delegates “were so anxious to show themselves kind, conciliatory, broad-minded, and penitent that they were prepared to agree to almost anything, however impracticable, absurd, or destructive.”78 With a month to go before he was to present the church’s brief to the Royal Commission, Forsey summed up the dilemma facing Canada and its largest Protestant church as he saw it: “Once our brief has gone into the Royal Commission, the subject may become a pretty hot one in the United Church, for I am rather afraid that a large part of our membership will go into orbit at what they will regard as too many concessions to French Canada. At the same time, a great many French Canadians may dismiss the whole thing as mere crumbs; but this reaction is of less immediate importance to us.”79 The conciliatory tone of the United Church’s brief hinted that a change in its relationship to the Catholic Church was in the offing. Dominican priest Philip LeBlanc was likely right in conjecturing that the United Church’s presentation to the B& B Commission was “in striking contrast” to what would have been said a decade earlier.80 But that was in part because the situation of the Catholic Church was changing too – both in Canada and internationally. Facing ­similar challenges, the two were discovering commonalities that had been ignored when pamphlets like What’s the Difference? focused on dissimilarities. Vatican II was still in session as the B& B

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Commission wrapped up its hearings in 1965 and issued a preliminary report81 that signalled to Canada’s churches that the political calculations that had inspired the notion of the revenge of the cradle for Catholicism and the movement for a united Protestantism had suddenly changed. The B & B Commission showed even less interest than Massey’s in harnessing Christianity as a cultural force. A Protestant Canada outside Quebec was not the aim of those promoting a bicultural Canada, and a Christian Canada was a contradiction in terms for those who fully embraced multiculturalism. Instead, bilingual / bicultural (and later multicultural) became the Canadian mantra. Christianity – in both its Catholic and Protestant expressions – was left out of the new formula for creating national identity. The state looked to its own social and cultural programs rather than to the churches to provide the new glue to make the Canadian mosaic. By the time the commission’s work was completed, the Pearson government had ­already proposed a new Canadian flag to replace the Red Ensign, strengthened national social programs, and launched plans for the country’s Centennial celebrations in 1967. If the B & B Commission needed a reminder of the political complications of religious differences, they had only to follow the latest round of an old controversy that had erupted in Ontario over the place of religion in public schools. Growing up in a country that still thought of itself as Christian, one did not have to be raised by devout Christian parents or attend church to be exposed to at least a modicum of Christianity. Many public schools taught the rudiments of the Christian faith through daily prayers and Bible readings. Except in provinces where public funding of Catholic separate schools was constitutionally permitted, and in Newfoundland where public schools operated on a denominational basis, religious instruction in public schools was non-sectarian, that is, non-denominational.82 From its inception the United Church had considered the school a critical link in connecting faith and community life. Its ambitious postwar agenda included promoting religion instruction in the curriculum of Canadian schools wherever provincial regulations permitted it. Religion could not be separated from culture, argued C.E. Silcox, commending the work of R.C. Chalmers and the Commission on Culture that had prepared the brief for the Massey Commission: “to ignore or pretend to ignore the significance of the relationship is

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not only tragic, but, if persisted in, will prove suicidal.” Nor could religion be segregated from education by leaving it to the home and the church, “no matter what the secularists say.”83 The public schools of Ontario, the United Church’s demographic centre, were of particular concern. Troubled by evidence that “a growingly large proportion of children are receiving no religious training in the home, and that many do not have even that wholly inadequate modicum of religious influence – one hour a week at Sunday school,” Alfred Gandier and other church union supporters had advocated more religious education in public schools. Community well-being was at stake, for religion’s primary purpose was “not restricted to the individual soul. Character as well as knowledge is essential to good citizenship, and stable moral character has its roots in religion.” Hence, given the public consequences of failing to provide religious education, a “Christian state, the organized government of a Christian people,” could not ignore the problem. Gandier was undeterred by the argument that not everyone wanted religious education in the schools, retorting that “no self-respecting community can allow a small minority to turn it aside from what the majority believe vital to the well-being, not only of their children, but of the community and the country.” Canada was a Christian country, and as such, its people had the right to have their children “educated daily in the great facts and distinctive teachings of the Christian religion.”84 Gandier was part of a movement that historians R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar see as forming in the 1920s and culminating in legislation introduced by Premier George Drew in 1944, which gave instruction in a non-denominational Protestant form of Christianity an even larger place in the Ontario public school curriculum.85 The Royal Commission on Education in Ontario (Hope Commission) that reported in 1950 gave further encouragement to those who pictured the school co-operating with the home and church in a child’s religious training.86 The United Church was among the denominations that seized this new opportunity. An Observer article described a visit to a school in Lambeth, Ontario, in the mid-1950s, where Allen Duffield, a United Church minister with degrees in both theology and education, was in charge of religious instruction of students from kindergarten through grade eight. Since Duffield was the only minister residing in the small community, there was little opposition to his involvement: all the

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students participated, and all the teachers helped with the preparations.87 In other schools, classes were taught by United Church teachers who had taken courses in religion as part of their training. However, more needed to be done, according to George Pidgeon. In 1955 he urged the United Church to “lead in giving Divine Truth a new place in the mind of the nation.”Although the door to the public school was open, whether or not to step in had largely been left to personal or local initiatives, and in many communities the work was left undone or was undertaken by “sectarian groups who have their own axes to grind.”88 There was little coordination either denominationally or ecumenically. While the United Church prepared to coordinate religious in­ struction, the realities of dealing with postwar pluralism – and the anticipation of even greater diversity in the future with changes to Canada’s immigration policy – eroded support for its non-­ denominational approach. Opposition to religious instruction became more vocal. According to the Observer, the non-Christian reaction was “much harsher than ever expected.”89 Joining the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Unitarian Church was the Ethical Education Association (e e a ), a new organization founded by Doris Dodds. Dodds herself was Unitarian, but saw her organization as working on behalf of and alongside others who opposed the way religion was taught in Ontario schools. By all accounts her group was very successful in heating up the debate. Critics of religion in the public school curriculum had three main concerns. Firstly, they charged that current instructional practices were “sectarian,” which caused dismay in United Church circles. How could non-Christians see them as sectarian, the same term the United Church scornfully used for those it considered fanatical? Moreover, “non-sectarian” in the context of education had a long history and well-established meaning: instruction was presented within a general Christian framework, avoiding beliefs that were “peculiar” to any particular denomination and resonating well with the common faith on which the United Church was founded. Not surprisingly, it was taken aback by “the attempt to say that Christianity is itself a sect as over against Buddhism or other ethnic faiths.” This was “a warping of the original intent of the word,” protested E.R. McLean, the Board of Christian Education staff member responsible for religious education in the schools.90 But it was more than hairsplitting and potentially devastating, as McLean would

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well have known, for the legislation in many provinces called for education to be conducted on a non-sectarian basis. Secondly, critics claimed that religion in the public schools was a violation of the principle of separation of church and state. Even Winnipeg Presbytery had deferred to such criticism when (against the sentiment of the United Church in most other places) it sided with those opposed to religious instruction in Manitoba’s public schools.91 This perpetuated an erroneous reading of history, church leaders protested, patiently pointing out that no such principle existed in Canada. Canadians had rejected an American model of church-state separation in favour of a co-operation between them more akin to the British pattern.92 Defending the teaching of religion in the public schools rested on the conviction that Canada’s unique history had led to a distinctive pattern of church-state relations. Forrest appealed to the customary story of Canada’s past as it had been told after Confederation, at least outside Quebec: “Two peoples were deposited here with different languages, cultures and religions,” an Observer editorial reminded readers. Education had been the area of most controversy between church and state, resulting in arrangements that differed in each province. Forrest likely spoke for the majority of Protestants of the day when he said that they expected only some of the rights to religious instruction in public schools that had been granted to the Catholic minority through the funding of separate schools. However, he was seemingly unaware of the rapid and radical change that was about to take place; in 1960 he boldly (but wrongly) predicted, “Whether our system is ideal or not – and we prefer it to America’s – it isn’t likely to be basically altered.”93 Finally, critics of religion in the public schools claimed that their rights as non-Christian minorities were being violated. This was a more difficult concern to counter, admitted the Observer’s reporter Kenneth Bagnell, who interviewed e e a’s Dodds for a story about the dispute. In this case, the minorities most vocally opposed were “infinitesimal” – Jews comprised only 1.4 per cent of Canada’s population, and Unitarians, Buddhists, and Doukhobors even less. Turning to C.B. Sissons, an authority on church-state relations in education, for a perspective on minority rights, Bagnell was informed that in a democracy, a minority was given the right to free discussion in order to persuade the majority of the rightness of its cause. This, too, was about to change in a more pluralistic Canada more inclined to agree

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with Dodds than Sissons. Issues should be decided on principle, rather than majority-minority percentages, she contended – after all, today’s majority could be a minority tomorrow. Rights should never be ignored, even if represented by only 1 per cent of the population.94 Bagnell’s story cited a statement that was “evolving” in the United Church’s Board of Christian Education in 1963, which he expected to be approved at the upcoming meeting of the General Council Executive. The board’s support for emphasis on “the HebraicChristian heritage” in the curriculum acknowledged that the majority had no right to “trample a minority,” but added a qualification: “neither has a minority the right to frustrate a majority.”95 A detail that Bagnell mentioned in passing did not bode well for that standpoint. It was often said that there was no controversy over religion in the public schools outside metropolitan Toronto (and even there, mainly an issue in North York – home to many Jews). However, Dodds told him that she had found support for her views wherever she spoke, and she claimed that United Church people were almost always in agreement with her.96 It was another hint that the leadership of the church did not speak for all its members – and that there was divergence on the left as well as the right. Reaching consensus within the United Church proved surprisingly difficult. Even the Commission on Church and State in Education appointed at the 1962 General Council was unable to bring recommendations two years later. To explain the delay, an update in 1964 pointed out that the commission’s work was complicated by the time-consuming task of consulting separately with each province, and the proposed extension of funding for Catholic separate schools in Ontario had made the situation there even more complex. Its members were reportedly studying a statement on the topic of the church and education by James S. Thomson, retired from the faculty of theology at McGill and a former moderator.97 Thompson presented his findings to the General Council in 1966, but as his own, rather than the commission’s, position. Instead of presenting a report, the commission asked to be discharged, admitting that no substantial recommendations could be made until the church arrived at an “adequate philosophy of education.” And there was the rub: to do so would require prolonged research and study by a smaller working group because of the wide diversity of opinion within the denomination itself.98

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Thomson’s statement on “The Church and Education” was a thoughtful proposal that insisted that the church had an obligation to “express its mind on all the influences that affect the national life” – a long list that included education. To do otherwise would “be a complete abandonment of our responsibility and, certainly a departure from our historic role.”99 Catholic schools were not about to disappear any time soon, he added; numerically they enjoyed “an entrenched position” from which no government would be likely to dislodge them. However, Thomson’s conjecture that Protestants and Catholics might soon become allies in promoting religious education in the schools was an indication of how quickly the situation was changing on the ground.100 This did prove to be the case, as Protestants and Catholics in Ontario found common cause in fighting the quiet drift toward separation of church and state in education. But the battle was lost on the public school front in that province, where the most intentional program of religious education in the country became the most endangered. The Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario (1969) was set up by the provincial government to study the problem. Headed by the Honourable J. Keiller Mackay, the committee saw Ontario’s program of religious instruction as Christian, and reasoned that as such, other faiths might be offended by it. “In no uncertain terms,” historians Gidney and Millar contend, “the Mackay Report proceeded to recommend an end to this sorry state of affairs.” Instead of reading the Bible to open the school day, it suggested singing the National Anthem and saying the Lord’s Prayer or some other inclusive prayer for God’s help.101 While the Mackay Report still affirmed the importance of religious faith, it represented a shift from teaching religious values held in common to teaching about religious differences. An Ecumenical Study Commission brought together representatives from the Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Education and several Protestant churches to respond to the Mackay Report. Among them was Robin Smith, associate secretary of the United Church’s Board of Education, who no doubt would have endorsed the ecumenical coalition’s criticism of the Mackay Report for treating religion as a personal commitment that ought to be cultivated at home or in church but not in public schools.102 Such an assumption negated the United Church’s customary claims of connections between home, school, and church. Severing one of them placed even more

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responsibility on the church for religious education at a time when it was already dealing with criticism of its New Curriculum. The coalition also took issue with the separation of values from religion, stressing that it was “not only legitimate but necessary to look beyond culture to religion as a fundamental source of morality.”103 However, those who had the ear of Ontario’s Ministry of Education disagreed, preferring instead to teach moral education divorced from religious particularity. By the 1980s, even the vestiges of Christianity that remained after implementation of the Mackay Report’s recommendations were excised after the courts ruled that compulsory religious instruction and opening exercises that featured Christian Scriptures or the Lord’s Prayer violated the guarantee of religious freedom in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Teaching about religion was allowed, but only if all religions were given equal attention. Christian prayers and readings could only be used in opening exercises if secular and other religious material was given equal weight. Christian holidays were still acknowledged, but categorized as secular pause days rather than religious celebrations. Gidney and Millar conclude that Christianity was not only “disestablished but banished, at least as an animating force, in both the ceremonial and mundane activities” of Ontario’s public schools.104 Politicians and educators were among those whose work attuned them to the new religious and cultural realities of pluralism. Political scientist Paul Fox astutely assessed the difficulty sincere Christians faced when the “inner light” of conscience led them to hold different opinions on social, political, or economic issues. With some French Canadians conscientiously opting for an independent Quebec, and English Canadians supporting national unity, it would be foolhardy for a church “to try to declare one truth.” Writing in 1968, with church union negotiations between the United Church and Anglicans underway, Fox made a prediction: if a united church “attempted to give one answer to the question of nationalism, I doubt that it would stay united very long.” He suggested that churches be free to express the views of their own members, but not try to speak on God’s behalf for all Christians, a proposal that he admitted came close to advocating a separation of church and state.105 Arnold Edinborough, editor of Saturday Night, was harsher in his assessment, blaming the churches for their marginalization. An ­Anglican himself, he might have had the United Church in mind as  well when he complained that churches had tried to influence

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politicians “to legislate for everybody that which they believed requisite and necessary for the body and souls of the chosen few.” They had looked like “dinosaurs in the political pit” in the discussion of public and separate school education in Ontario and in debates over liberalization of divorce, contraception, and abortion laws. Edinborough observed another important indication of the churches’ changing public role: mass media and universities had replaced them as “teaching institutions” on such issues.106 Whether or not separation of church and state was the goal of the mass media, public school boards, or politicians, the practical outcome was the same. It became more difficult to claim that church and state were co-operating in areas of mutual concern. In a society that was becoming more and more diverse, no particular faith ­tradition could claim to be a national church, and no definition of non-sectarian pleased everyone. Pluralism thus led in practice to the neutralization of public expressions of religion. It was a solution that was attractive not only to secularists but also to those dealing with the realities of pluralism. Since religion was a source of conflicting definitions of the common good, the state relied instead on secular values (with no necessary reference to Christianity as their source) to define it. The gamble was that liberal democracy’s values could stand on their own once they were dislodged from their religious moorings. These struggles to define the place of Christianity in Canadian culture are illustrations of a broader global trend that philosopher Charles Taylor identified as a “switch in mind-set” that made earlier notions of cultural assimilation unsustainable: the beginning of the erosion (probably in the 1960s, he suggests) of the assumption that “one ought to suppress one’s difference for the sake of fitting in to a dominant mold.” Religious minorities were among those who demanded that the dominant culture be “modified to accommodate them, rather than the other way around.” While most migrants were prepared to assimilate, they no longer considered it imperative.107 One could add that it was not just newcomers who were unwilling to conform. Women no longer automatically assumed their traditional family role, and insisted on freedom to make choices about reproduction and paid employment outside the home. Young people resisted assimilating to prevailing mores as they moved toward adulthood, ignoring the received culture of either their family or

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their church. To be different and do your own thing captured the cultural mood of the times, and the size of the postwar cohort amplified the effect. Taylor predicted that if this emphasis on difference were to become an unstoppable reality, democratic societies would have to “engage in a constant process of self-reinvention” to accommodate the variety of identities they encompassed.108 So it was that both Quebec and the rest of Canada would undertake to reinvent themselves in the 1960s. A frustrated Forsey complained that Canadian history was being ­rewritten to make it appear that Quebec’s place in Canada was not as secure as English Canada had assumed. The pseudo-history (as he termed it) taught at one French school in Quebec claimed that the  Fathers of Confederation had intended to form only a loose Confederation, but were duped while under the influence of alcohol after John A. Macdonald had gotten them drunk!109 In English public schools, a less British version of Canadian history was ready in time for Centennial celebrations. It featured a new Canada that was built on differences – individual, religious, and cultural – rather than a common culture shaped by Christian ideals. A Just Society replaced Christian Canada as a unifying vision of nationhood; Canadian culture was the new “orthodoxy,” with a “common faith” in human rights and social programs as its chief tenets. There was a growing separation of Christian virtues and secular values – and Canadians increasingly opted for the latter. Canada had set itself on a path that led away from a collective Christian past, and toward a future where religious expression was an individual right guaranteed by the state, with no reference to organized religion. New icons of culture replaced the old, perhaps in the hope that Canadians would rally around the maple leaf flag more readily than the cross. The old connections between church and community that had long been taken for granted were dissolved in the hopes that a distinctively Canadian identity, with no reference to a particular religious identity, would coalesce. Likewise, religious institutions that were deeply influenced by democratic principles found themselves in a parallel process of reinvention, perhaps none more urgently so engaged than the United Church. It had prided itself on being the most Canadian of churches. Yet there was mounting evidence that the nation-building partnership it had taken for granted at the time of church union was no

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longer viable, thus dissolving the core of a founding vision that had energized and guided the church’s national mission for four decades. As Christianity and culture grew more distant, its notions of  a Christian Canada and a national church were becoming anachronisms. Even calls for Christianizing the social order were quietly dropped. The end of Christendom in Canada raised a troubling new question for the United Church: if it no longer served the community and provided a civilizing cultural influence, what was its mission? The uncoupling of Christianity and culture was a giant step toward a more complete (though still formally undeclared) separation of church and state in Canada – the practical result of the state going its own way. This distancing, if not formal separation, of church and state consigned a different public role to all Christian churches, whether Protestant or Catholic. It erased religious particularity from public life. Few religious institutions were as profoundly altered as the United Church by this de-Christianizing of Canadian society. Its leaders had taken for granted the effectiveness of religion in promoting social responsibility and national solidarity. But the convergence of religious and cultural identity turned out to be far less inevitable than they assumed. In fact, its friendly service to the nation was sought less often. Its reputation as custodian of the common good and purveyor of culture was slipping. Its side had lost the battle for religious education in the public schools. It was small comfort that the situation in which the church found itself was part of a wider trend in the United States, continental Europe, and England: all the major churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, faced the consequences of a truncated alliance with culture. An incident in 1969 epitomizes the turnabout for the United Church and its place in the new Canada. Shortly after becoming prime minister, Pierre Trudeau appointed an envoy to the Vatican. Before making this daring move (one that Pearson had viewed as too controversial), he first sought the public’s advice. According to the Observer, Trudeau admitted that the response from Protestants, liberal Catholics, and non-Roman religious groups was overwhelmingly negative – but he made the appointment anyway. Trudeau was quoted as saying it was “better to please ten million Roman Catholics than to be deterred by a few militant Protestants.”110 Forrest was miffed. He felt that the prime minister had used him as window

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dressing, attempting to give the impression of a “democrat seeking advice,” and so advised Trudeau to “fly his kites elsewhere” in the future if this were the case.111 Ironically, by then politicians were ­offering similar advice to leaders of the United Church who sought to influence them.

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8 Listening to the World Revolutionary moments attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them. George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion

J.R. Mutchmor’s retirement in 1964 was aptly billed by the Observer as “The End of an Era”1 – for the man and for the United Church. As Mutchmor prepared to give his final address as moderator, a position to which he had been elected two years earlier, there was much to celebrate. The United Church’s membership was still on the upswing, despite a downtrend in the Anglican, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches.2 And there was other good news to report. Fundraising had set a new record, ministers’ salaries were up, and properties were in good shape. However, other numbers were not so reassuring: funerals were up, while baptisms, confirmations, and adult professions of faith were down, particularly in the major cities. Stricter practices, such as refusing to baptize children of non-members and purging the membership rolls of the names of those who no longer attended, explained some of the loss. But other statistics came as more of a surprise. Membership in men’s clubs was down, as was Sunday school attendance – an inauspicious sign for the New Curriculum materials for children that were to be introduced that fall. The Observer did not mince words in its assessment: “The United Church is financially stronger than ever. Spiritually it faces a crisis.”3 Those who had characterized the United Church as too modern in 1925 might have been surprised to discover how conventional it looked four decades later. There were still complaints that its theology was too liberal and its social agenda too politically left wing. However, when Mutchmor ventured in 1961 to make a few predictions about its future, he had pictured a church “heavily influenced

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by those who would make her membership more exclusive,” either by emphasizing “narrower doctrinal teaching” or adopting social positions favoured by “elite members” and “posh congregations.”4 It was also drawing the ire of secular pundits who saw it as too complacent about social issues. “Just a social club” was a putdown of a church that to outsiders – and sometimes even to insiders – appeared rather smug about its solid position in society. Those staid congregations were about to be shaken up by men and women who had been born, baptized, converted, and educated after church union. Personal memory of union was fading, and assumptions that had once seemed obvious could no longer be taken for granted. Across the country major educational and executive positions were being filled by ministers ordained long after church union; by the mid-1960s only two of the national church officers had been ordained before 1925.5 This new cohort was handed responsibility for a church that was headed for trouble. Among them were some considered radical for their insistence that the church pay attention to signs that the times were changing. They pointed to mounting ­evidence that past initiatives, including the United Church’s recent evangelistic campaigns, had failed to Christianize the social order. They were inspired by talk of a new world mission that called into question aspects of the old. Joining the vanguard of international ecumenism, they rejected the traditional approach to evangelism. Instead of the church proclaiming the gospel to the world and calling Canada to Christ, they appealed to the church to “listen to the world.” J. Raymond Hord, Mutchmor’s successor, soon came to per­sonify the new era. Hord stepped into the media spotlight when he was nominated as secretary of e & ss at the 1962 General Council. There was little at this point in his career to indicate that he would soon become “the most controversial churchman in Canada today” and “minister to the come-alive generation.”6 Though one newspaper reported that the United Church had “picked a man it scarcely knew,”7 Mutchmor would have been acquainted with him and might well have applauded the choice. A few years earlier Hord and Mutchmor’s brother had co-signed a letter expressing consternation about plans to allow the Regina Braves baseball club to play three games on Sunday. The matter was “one for serious concern,” their letter stated, for the United Church was “disturbed by an action which might turn a holy day into a pagan holiday.”8 Hord’s preaching as pastor of suburban congregations in Regina (Lakeview

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United) and Toronto (Royal York United) was thoughtful and at times hard-hitting, but consistent with the United Church’s piety and practices. While he did not expect the Kingdom of God to be “established perfectly in this world of sin,” it was still the “sacred duty of Christians to improve life on earth as much as we possibly can.”9 Hord’s conduct during his congregational ministry was a clue to the resolve he was to show once he moved into his new leadership position in 1963. His sense of duty was uncompromising – almost to the point of compulsion. He conducted a funeral service for ­another child the day after his own son Jamie drowned at camp.10 He preached a sermon on “Why Does God Allow Accidents to Happen?” the following Sunday.11 He was in the pulpit the Sunday after being attacked and badly beaten in his home.12 Once in office, burdened by his hopes for the emergence of a new kind of church, he tackled his new responsibilities with that same intense commitment. Talk of his dismissal was in the air. When he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1968, his family and some of his colleagues held his critics responsible for hounding him to death.13 And yet one might wonder whether the pressure of his own ideals was at least in small part to blame. Hord claimed the only thing he had in common with Mutchmor was his initials (J.R.). An article in Star Weekly contrasted his efforts to tackle the “big issues” that would make the church “relevant” with Mutchmor’s preoccupation with moral issues such as drink, decadence, and divorce. Mutchmor was “virtually adulated by middle-of-the-road church leaders and lay people,” his manner “gracious, exuding personal charm as he travelled the country, dropping in on powerful men and lobbying quietly against either open bars or  open Sundays.” Hord was not always considered so charming. Whereas Mutchmor was associated with the moral battles of “fighting evil, standing for righteousness, criticizing the world, but rarely the church,” Hord made headlines for tackling controversial po­ litical issues with his criticism of big business and the U.S. war in Vietnam, Prime Minister Pearson (whom he described as a “puppy dog on l b j ’s leash”); his support for draft dodgers; and his calls for more rights for Canada’s indigenous peoples.14 In his lifetime he was considered “a prophet of the New Age”; his untimely death was to make him its martyr. Much of the responsibility for what happened in the United Church after the Mutchmor era was ascribed to Hord and the board he ­headed. However, the dramatic changes that the church experienced

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in a brief span of time were not the result of Hord’s drive alone: his call to listen to the world resonated with a new approach to world mission that had captivated international ecumenism. It was the wc c that general secretary Ernest Long credited for drawing attention to “the pressing questions of the meaning of evangelism and of conversion for our time.”15 By the time the w cc met in Evanston, Illinois, for its second assembly in 1954, how to proclaim the gospel to the world was becoming a matter of debate. “The church is mission” was shorthand for a new understanding of the task: God’s mission was to the world, and the church had no mission in and of itself.16 More signs that ecumenism was in flux were evident at the next assembly, held in New Delhi in 1961, which saw the w cc merge with the International Missionary Council. Five years later, the United Church’s Commission on World Mission would declare this to have been a turning point: it “underscored the place of mission in the whole life of the World Council of Churches and so gave that body a new direction and significance.”17 The merger accentuated the double meaning of world mission: it was global in outreach, and it focused on the world rather than on the institutional church. The study process that followed urged groups to think of God as “His own evangelist” by pondering the question, “What is God doing in the world?”18 The idea that God’s mission could not be separated from other aspects of the church’s life and teaching generated much controversy as its implications for evangelism and social ministries were explored at ecumenical and denominational gatherings around the world. The temperature of the debates shot up when what was thought of as traditional evangelism was castigated as a distortion of the church’s true mission. At the World Student Christian Federation in 1964, for instance, a case was made for redefining evangelism as Christian presence, rather than proclamation: the church’s witness at times needed to be silent.19 And evangelism was not the only thorny issue. Ecumenism’s left wing was challenging the middle axioms approach to dealing with social issues that had been a breakthrough at the Oxford Conference in 1937. Then the aim had been to agree on a range of options for translating Christian principles into policy, in order to broaden consensus. When the w cc’s first World Conference on Church and Society met in 1966, it discarded the flexibility of middle axioms; they “fell by the ecumenical wayside as clear-cut

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positions were taken on issue after issue, from patterns of economic growth to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.”20 The deepening divide within Protestantism was on display two years later as the wc c celebrated its twentieth anniversary at ­Uppsala. Long after that 1968 assembly was over, the new approach to mission, with its attendant implications for evangelism and social action, created rifts between ecumenicals and evangelicals (as the two sides were often called by then). Historian William Hutchison describes the preparatory materials, published under the title The Church for Others and the Church for the World, as “a high point of  antitraditional thinking among ecumenicals.” Evangelicals, disturbed by the takeover of ‘their’ terminology to promote a different approach to mission, considered it “unusual provocation.” “It seemed to conservatives that once again, as so often in the past, modernists with dubious Christian credentials had stolen the evangelicals’ ­rhetorical clothing and were trying desperately to wear it.”21 At ­Uppsala, Union Seminary professor Johannes Hoekendijk raised more hackles when he condemned the traditional approach to evangelism as heretical. Dismissing the “introverted” parish system as a medieval invention, he questioned whether converts should join existing congregations. Instead he proposed direct action in society, a model of church organization that he dubbed “go-structures.”22 This new thinking about the relationship of the church to the world raised fresh questions about the viability of one of the United Church’s most cherished convictions. During the fundamentalistmodernist controversy at the beginning of the twentieth century, many Protestant churches in the United States had adopted what historians have called a two-party system by separating oversight of evangelism from social concern.23 The founders of the United Church had deviated from the typical pattern, insisting that the two belonged together. Whether out of commitment, convenience, or connivance, evangelism and social service remained under the administration of the same board.24 By joining the work of evan­ gelism and social service the United Church had, as a special issue of the Observer in 1963 put it proudly, “laid down the conviction that a man’s faith cannot be held aloof from his work, that evan­ gelism cannot be carried on apart from deep concern for the world  in which men are redeemed and in which they earn their daily bread.”25

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The new staff at e & ss still spoke of these twin aims. Hord insisted that evangelism “must start with personal commitment or it will not start. But it must never end there if it is to have any impact on our world ... A basic law of evangelism is: we can never give to others what we don’t have ourselves. Its corollary is, we haven’t got the real thing if we do not share it.”26 He advocated keeping “private conversion and public responsibility in proper balance and tension.”27 Stewart Crysdale, who joined e & ss as assistant secretary at the same time as Hord became secretary, made a similar point in his first annual report: “The genius of our Board is that evangelism – the telling of the news of God’s love – is tied directly with social service. Either one without the other is a truncated Gospel.”28 Little wonder, then, that seeing the United Church torn apart along seams that had been so deliberately stitched together was painful. Data appeared to indicate that church attendance made ­little difference when it came to changing everyday attitudes or actions. If that were so, was evangelism partly to blame? Was Australian Methodist theologian Colin Williams right in claiming that ministry in a twentieth-century society that was no longer Christian required a different approach to making disciples than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?29 To complicate matters, evangelism was not the board’s only problem. Now that it was speaking more softly (if at all) on moral issues and turning over its social welfare work to government agencies, what was left to do in the field of social service? Did one objective have to be sacrificed in order to save the other, or did both evangelism and social service have to go? The new way of thinking about the church’s mission was soon reflected in e & ss’s programming. A “project on evangelism” had been included on the Centennial Committee’s list when it gave its first report at the General Council in 1962.30 Two years later “social action” was added to the committee’s name, and forming “truly worldly Christians” became the top priority of the National Project of Evangelism and Social Action.31 Hord and his colleagues were determined to use what was often simply called the National Project to move people out of the church building and into the commu­ nity.32 The word evangelism was still used (rather hard to avoid, given the name of the board) – but often qualified as “new” or “experimental,” or circumvented with “outreach.” The upshot was to distance evangelism from traditional evangelistic campaigns, even the United Church’s own recent initiatives.33

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The National Project gave a voice to a more radical bloc within the United Church. Among them was Rex Dolan, professor of homiletics and worship at United Theological College. In 1965 and 1966, Dolan delivered a series of lectures across Canada, urging his audience to tackle the pressing social concerns of the day, such as poverty, war, oppression, and technological change. Later published with Hord’s encouragement as The Big Change, Dolan’s talks took aim at traditional evangelism.34 Convinced that many spiritual seekers were confused or even repulsed by “God-talk,” he proposed that the United Church consider outreach, rather than evangelism, as its objective, no longer necessarily connecting it to church attendance. Unlike the careful planning usually associated with evangelistic campaigns, there was no need of a blueprint for outreach – nor was it necessary to put a Christian label on it: “If it is loving it is Christian and part of the evangelistic task.”35 Dolan’s “big change” did not stop there; what he and the National Project had in mind discounted a good deal of what the United Church had customarily thought of as service as well: teaching Sunday school, singing in the choir, assisting in the congregation’s administration as a member of the board, or raising funds for the men’s club or the uc w. He had a ready response to those who wondered what this would mean for men’s and women’s organizations: they were “introverted,” their drawing card was sociability, and their work was directed toward maintaining the church itself. As such they were among the United Church’s “deficiencies” that the new reformation was intent on correcting.36 Proponents of the new reformation had in mind a church that existed for the sake of the world. Worship was to prepare the congregation for outreach in the community. The focus was no longer on the minister as resident “holy man,” but on the ministry of the laity, whose vocation as the people of God, when rightly understood, would put them in contact with the world.37 Listening to the world involved removing walls that prevented the church from hearing society’s most pressing needs. “Breaking the Barriers” was the theme of e & ss’s 1964 annual meeting, which featured Eugene Carson Blake, a prominent American Presbyterian minister. The publication distributed for study after the meeting included an article by Blake on breaking racial barriers, illustrated by a photo of his arrest at a civil rights march.38 A selection of articles

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on racial issues portrayed Canada’s treatment of indigenous peoples as the most striking parallel to American segregation. It reprinted Peter Gzowski’s stinging indictment of Canadian racial attitudes written after the murder of a young Saulteaux man by a party of  white farmers and businessmen from Glaslyn, Saskatchewan. “This is Canada’s Alabama,” Gzowski had written, referring to recent events in Birmingham. In fact, the situation of the Indian in Saskatchewan might be worse than the plight of the Southern Negro, he mused, since the latter shared the same language, religion, and culture in most respects as their oppressors, whereas many Indians spoke a different language and had “moral and cultural values utterly different from ours.” To join the North American way of life would be far more wrenching for the Indian than the Negro, he predicted, “and our acceptance of him as an equal could well be an even more difficult decision than the Southerner’s acceptance of the black man.”39 After the 1960s it was hard to imagine that the United Church had once promised, as it did in the first issue of the New Outlook, that it would “preach the elements of the Gospel to these primitive minds still influenced by pagan superstition” so that “very slowly but also, surely, the truth will enlighten even these dark understandings, as long ago it enlightened the minds of our British ancestors.”40 Accounts of its work in indigenous communities became less glowing as evidence of the failure of assimilation (and the tragic consequences of the attempt) raised questions about its complicity in their plight in the past and cast doubts about ending segregation.41 Was integration just as misguided as assimilation? Observing the deplorable social conditions he witnessed at a school on a reserve, one teacher likened adaptation to the aggressive economic practices of white culture to “feeding them into a new kind of cultural gas chamber.”42 Listening to the world did not mean that e & s s ’s leaders intended to stay quiet. Much of the theological and sociological groundwork for the new strategy was laid by Crysdale, who saw clashes between what he called the prophetic-reformative and priestly-pietistic functions of religion as a positive sign of viability and creativity.43 His three-fold typology of the church’s relationship to society – accommodation, isolation, and conflict – reserved no place for the oncefavoured option of co-operation. The days of friendly service to the nation were over. There was a more combative tone to his claim that the third option, conflict, was the United Church’s role as e & s s now

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understood it: “critical, prophetic witness to the eternal demands of the Gospel in the changing conditions of the world.”44 To help them formulate their prophetic witness, Hord and his colleagues at e & ss made the controversial move of turning to critics of the institutional church for direction. Some of these outsiders turned out to be what historian Hugh McLeod describes as a novelty for most Western countries: “those who rejected Christianity and were increasingly ready to say so loudly and openly.”45 An unflattering image of organized religion was forming in the public mind. Instead of building a Christian Canada, the United Church found itself accused of constructing what one of its critics dubbed a “comfortable pew.” In 1965 Pierre Berton’s The Comfortable Pew made publishing history in Canada with record sales. Drawing on the New Theology popularized by British theologian John A.T. Robinson in Honest to God two years earlier, Berton’s captivating book called on Canada’s churches to reconsider their outdated theological and ethical positions. Berton’s own views had evidently evolved since the 1950s, when he had pronounced the Christian ethic as “timeless,” and complained that it was the “constant urge to modernize that, in the end, makes the church appear to be forever out of date.”46 A decade later (and by then a proponent of the so-called new morality), he accused churches of being out of touch with the issues that really mattered.47 His devastating critique of the typical Protestant congregation gave credence to predictions that organized religion would be irrelevant in the coming New Age. The Comfortable Pew had been commissioned by the Anglican Church, which Berton had left some years earlier.48 Asked whether the book would have been different had he been hired by the United Church, he reiterated that it was an indictment of Protestantism in general, not one church in particular. United Church sermons might perhaps be considered more relevant, he supposed, but its congre­ gational life was no different. It displayed the same “success moti­ vation, the conformist attitudes, the status-seeking of the clergy.” It was behind the times in its approach to such issues as drinking, Sunday observance, abortion, and premarital sex. And while the New Curriculum was commendable, as far as he could see it hadn’t yet done much to change what was taught in Sunday school in Kleinburg, where his wife Janet, a member of the local United Church, was a leader of the Explorer group and their children were active in Sunday school, c gi t, and Scouts.49

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While Hord and his staff may have taken exception to some of the particulars of Berton’s book, they agreed with its central thesis: a New Age was dawning and the United Church was woefully unprepared for it, especially in urban areas. Statistics to support their case were supplied in an ambitious National Survey of the United Church in Canadian Life conducted by Crysdale that confirmed that congregational life in the United Church was predominantly middle class, and primarily suburban or rural rather than urban.50 The findings showed steady membership losses even in city neighbourhoods that had once been strongholds of the church. Read as corroboration that traditional approaches to evangelism no longer worked, the results supported calls for a New Evangelism designed for the New Age.51 Berton was among the contributors to Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Symposium on the Church and the World, described in moderator E.M. Howse’s foreword as “a cogent and vivid picture of the Church as it appears to the critical but not hostile outsider.” It was not a flattering picture of either clergy or laity, or of the organized church itself. The candid sketches pictured the United Church as irrelevant and insular. Berton repeated his general criticism of organized religion. Journalist and social activist June Callwood bitingly depicted congregational life as displaying “a de-humanizing pride in bigness, a preoccupation with pettiness and a viewpoint no taller than the steeple – but not including the Cross.” The staff at e & s s , who had overseen the project, concluded: “There is no doubt that the sea is boiling hot. Now we must plunge into it.” The choice was to “take up the challenge or end with nothing.”52 e&ss wanted to provoke – and to be provoked. Its 1966 annual meeting featured an address by Saul Alinsky, a social activist from Chicago who, one reporter claimed, made Canada’s arch-critics of the church Pierre Berton and Gordon Sinclair “look like a couple of simpering Victorian spinsters by comparison.”53 Alinsky immediately served notice that he wasn’t afraid to step on the toes of his teetotalling hosts. His amusing anecdote about his unsuccessful attempt to order a double Scotch when he arrived at the meeting was perhaps calculated to put them on edge, as was his comment that, to an American, the one thing that Canada represented was whiskey. Alinsky’s hard-hitting speech took North American church leaders to task for their complacency, insisting that action, not dialogue, was the only solution to social problems. He urged them to frame issues

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in black and white, rather than grey, and to create, rather than avoid, controversy and conflict – to go out to streets of the “secular city” and make their souls a little cleaner by getting their hands dirty.54 Such calls for action involved changing the tactics that Mutchmor and others of his era had championed. As recently as 1960, the printed materials for the Calling Canada to Christ campaign had reiterated the recommendation of the 1934 Commission on Christianizing the Social Order: those speaking on behalf of the United Church should avoid identification with any particular political party. The church was to be the conscience of the state, bringing Christian principles to bear on the issues of the day by preparing timely resolutions. Ministers were to confront critical issues boldly, without displaying political partisanship.55 A new generation of leaders called instead for direct action, clear-cut policies on pressing social issues, and even political par­ tisanship.56 With a federal election approaching, University of Saskatchewan chaplain Ben Smillie contended that it was “time for Christians to take off their halos and put on their party buttons.” The old spirit of non-partisanship still lingered in his reminder that no party was the Christian party (admitting that the n d p that he supported found it hard to remember that it did not have a “corner on righteousness”). However, he belittled the effectiveness of the customary approach to social issues in the real world of politics: “resolutions pouring out of committees.”57 Some ministers were prepared to go even further. Claude de Mestral defended what he called political ministry. Political action was an essential but neglected form of evangelism, he argued, dismissing the notion of political neutrality as “a dangerous illusion.”58 Listening to the world made it harder for the New Age reformers to tune in to supporters of traditional evangelism as theological disagreements between them grew. The two sides differed, for instance, on whether or not to support Billy Graham’s evangelistic campaigns, which caused more discord in the 1960s than it had a decade earlier. Critics pointed out, as had Forrest and others in the 1950s, that a denomination that endorsed the biblical and theological scholarship behind the New Curriculum should perhaps think twice before inviting fundamentalists to be its evangelists. They saw Graham’s approach as regressive, simplistic, and out of touch with the younger generation. But finding fault with Graham had its pitfalls. It was “as

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if we opposed mother on Mother’s Day,” one Ottawa minister complained. Oddly, given the desire of proponents of the New Evangelism to appeal to the New Age, Graham’s use of modern technology to communicate was dismissed by them as “Madison Ave. sales techniques.”59 Congregations and their ministers were put on the spot when the Billy Graham Crusade announced a six-city Maritime campaign led by Leighton Ford, Graham’s Canadian-born colleague and brotherin-law, for the fall of 1963. e & ss had already decided to focus on its own plans for evangelism rather than join Graham’s team. Still new to his position at e & ss, Hord sounded conciliatory when interviewed for the Observer’s cover story: “We are greatly indebted to Billy Graham; he has a lot to teach us,” he was quoted as saying. Even so, Hord hinted at the direction that e & s s was headed by cautioning that mass evangelism might create a wall of suspicion and misunderstanding between the church and the world that only dedicated Christians, practising their faith in daily life, could pierce. He expected the crusade to have its greatest effect on those already connected to the church.60 Many United Church ministers in the Maritimes supported the Billy Graham Crusade, but it met a less-welcoming reception in ­other parts of the country. “Let’s Stop Backing Billy Graham,” Ben Smillie bluntly proposed in 1965. He explained that as chaplain, he often met students who were suffering from a “fundamentalist hangover.” Evangelists like Graham encouraged biblical ignorance, he argued, and invited people to join an “ecclesiastical ghetto” (the church) rather than to pay attention to the world outside its walls. Smillie had served on a committee that reviewed the findings of Crysdale’s national survey, and knew that presbyteries and con­ gregations were divided over whether to support Graham. He was, nonetheless, adamant: “in the name of honesty, the Anglican and United Churches should both get out of this game completely.”61 Smillie’s article provoked a flurry of letters to the Observer, most of them sympathetic to Graham. One was from R.C. Chalmers, a Pine Hill professor who had earlier served as Mutchmor’s associate secretary at e & ss. Publications whose production he had overseen had typically presented the United Church as evangelical in its theology, though of a liberal rather than a fundamentalist variety. His defence of Leighton Ford illustrated the fraught position of the United Church. At nearly all of the evangelistic meetings in the Maritimes

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the previous year, the largest group who signed cards to commit their lives to Christ identified themselves as members of the United Church. Working with the campaign in Halifax had been a positive ecumenical experience for Chalmers, and an opportunity to gain a deeper appreciation of other theological points of view. He was disturbed by the rigidity of the “stop backing Billy Graham” appeal. “To some of us, Mr Smillie’s liberal theology sounds very sectarian,” he cautioned. “As one who is indebted to liberalism (and other movements, too) let me say that I am just as much afraid of sectarian liberalism as I am of sectarian fundamentalism.”62 Where Billy Graham was concerned, those who tried to find middle ground met with little success. Forrest had perhaps hoped to dampen Smillie’s fiery article with an editorial that questioned the accuracy of his description of Graham’s approach to the Bible as “literalist.” A few weeks later, a chastened Forrest conceded that his attempts to get Graham to say more about biblical authority had failed: “we were wrong. He is a literalist; and he waffles, too. We don’t like to admit this, not so much because we dislike being wrong, but we are deeply disappointed in Billy Graham.” Just as damning was Forrest’s allegation that Graham’s preaching had changed since the 1950s. Graham, he surmised, had reverted to the literalism of his childhood because it produced more converts. He had also taken to scolding churches that challenged the status quo on social issues such as disarmament, federal aid to education, birth control, and the United Nations.63 As an alternative to the “Billy Graham type” of gatherings, proponents of the New Evangelism experimented with Planning Fellowships held across the country.64 Facilitators stressed the importance of “listening to what God is saying in unmet human needs,” and built in large blocks of time for small-group discussion instead of formal presentations. The design reflected the assumption of the organizers that ministers needed to hear what “ordinary people,” rather than theologians, were saying about the questions of the day.65 Few were more committed to putting this new approach to evangelism into practice than the minister of a Toronto congregation reputed to be “the swingingest church in town.”66 Clarke MacDonald was convinced that without drastic change, the church would soon be written off. Ultimate truths needed translation “into terms that will be both received and lived by people,” especially young people. “We cannot do that when we express the truth in wooden creeds

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and mealy-mouthed platitudes,” he insisted.67 MacDonald defended linking social action to evangelism with words from John Wesley’s preface to the first Methodist hymnal: “The Gospel of Christ knows no religion but social religion, no holiness but social holiness. This commandment we have from Christ that he who loves God loves his brother also.”68 Reservations about the New Evangelism were aired when Observer reporter Kenneth Bagnell interviewed MacDonald, Hord, and e & s s staffer Gordon Stewart. Asked about what was widely perceived as a lack of enthusiasm for the type of evangelism the church had supported until recently, Hord denied that he opposed mass evangelism. However, he admitted that he could no longer support Billy Graham. The church could not, as he put it, ride “two horses theologically,” referring to Graham’s approach to the Bible and the United Church’s own New Curriculum. He was also dismayed that Graham had “blessed the U.S. war effort” in Vietnam and had become the “arm of the status quo.” When Hord mentioned that it was often con­ servative business groups who sponsored Graham’s organization, Bagnell asked, “What’s wrong with that? Is it a sin to be conservative?” Hord countered by pointing out that St Paul’s preaching had not been well received by merchants in first-century Ephesus.69 Stewart then added that spreading the gospel message now involved connecting it to particular social causes, such as improving the welfare state, providing better housing, and expanding health care. “But surely,” prodded Bagnell, “it’s necessary to begin, not with welfare statism, but with the faith itself.” Stewart replied that the gospel couldn’t be summed up in a “nice little set of words.” It was, rather, “the experience of the Lord Jesus, in whose person we find summed up all the significant self-disclosure of God as it reveals itself through the historical experience of the Hebrew people consummated in discipleship, those who went with Christ.” (One suspects that readers agreed with Stewart’s own assessment of this “relevant gospel”: it was “more and more complex”!)70 Once the welfare state arrived, was the work of the church then finished? No, Hord and Stewart insisted, for even the affluent were searching for the meaning of life. But isn’t that the point, Bagnell asked as he pressed them to consider whether “this whole emphasis ... of ‘listening to the world’ may be taking us down the wrong a­ venue. Has the world – confused and bewildered – anything really penetrating and perceptive to tell us?” And was the

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board still committed to changing both the individual and society, or was it interested only in social change? MacDonald was a­ damant that there was only one gospel, with both individual and social “prongs,” but agreed that the pendulum was swinging away from the individual, where the board’s work in the past had been directed.71 Hord had the backing of the United Church’s left wing and even part of its centre, with support in Saskatchewan particularly strong.72 But he was definitely out of favour with conservatives, whose efforts to take over the church, he claimed, were “more evident every week.”73 Disappointed by their dealings with the executive staff of their denomination, conservatives sought support and solidarity elsewhere. In 1966, looking to build networks among ministers and laity of like mind, they launched the United Church Renewal Fellowship (u crf ). They also banded together with evangelicals in other denominations who shared their antipathy to the wc c’s new approach to world mission, disturbed by its implications for evangelism. The growing polarization of ecumenical and evangelical Protestants was evident at the first World Congress on Evangelism that met in Berlin in the fall of 1966. Co-sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Christianity Today, it brought together 700 invited delegates (all Protestant), observers, and reporters. ­Taking the theme “One Race, One Gospel, One Task,” it proclaimed itself the “spiritual successor” of the first ecumenical conference in Edinburgh in 1910, tacitly denying the w cc’s pedigree.74 Delegate James Somerville’s glowing portrayal of the event in the Observer identified the developing tactical differences between the two factions. He reported that rather than “listening to the world,” evangelicals were preparing to speak to it in a new way. It was “clear that evangelicals are ready to enter the New Age of history utilizing the tools it provides,” he enthused. For instance, World Vision, a relief organization supported by evangelicals, was urging churches to make use of computers and other technological advances in promoting evangelism.75 United Church minister J. Berkley Reynolds attended the congress as another of the church’s four delegates.76 Sometimes dubbed “the Billy Graham of Canada,” Reynolds quickly gained a reputation for his outspoken criticism of the New Evangelism.77 He blasted liberals for being “more political than biblical,” and dismissed as nonsense the notion that “social reform and a jumbo church” (a disapproving reference to the aims of ecumenism) would result in a “regenerated

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society.” Wondering how long it had been since anyone at the United Church’s national headquarters had given an altar call, he charged that Hord and his board had “all but forgotten their responsibility to seek individual conversion.” Reynolds also took exception to the board’s more direct approach to social issues, claiming that people wouldn’t notice the difference if the words “Evangelism and Social Service” were changed to “New Democratic Party.” The United Church could as easily be called “The Church Without Doctrine,” he complained.78 Critics of Billy Graham were just as uncompromising. In “Why the Fundamentalists Are Wrong,” Smillie took issue with the theology he had been taught as a boy in a Plymouth Brethren Sunday school. He rebuked those in the United Church who were “trying to work both sides of the theological street,” and objected to the social conservatism he associated with Graham’s revivalism.79 Further criticisms of Graham followed in the denominational magazine. One article featured an inside look at Graham’s crusade by two reporters who had gone undercover, one to usher and the other to sing in the choir, during a revival service at Toronto’s cn e stadium. They compared Graham’s preaching before a crowd of 45,000 to Nazi recruiting rallies. “Graham plays on the emotions, the insecurity, the fears and the yearnings in the hearts of listeners, then at the moment of decision punches home the sale with soft music. His sincerity and integrity enable him to carry it off. But these techniques are the same ones Hitler used.”80 Those taking the customary United Church position on evangelism – that it was both personal and connected to all areas of life – were caught on the defensive. In Small Voice, a magazine published by u c r f, Newfoundland Conference evangelist Norman Wesley Oake reminded readers that those who claimed evangelism was not concerned with social problems needed to re-read the history of revivalism. And yet he was troubled by what he saw as an attempt to reduce the evangelistic mission of the church to “purely social action,” thereby diverting resources from traditional evangelism – an indication perhaps of how conservative evangelicals viewed events sponsored by the National Project. Considering the United Church’s past insistence on linking evangelism and social concern, one can understand his dismay as they diverged: “Confusion reigns as to what the mission really is.”81

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Imagining the new possibilities for mission, however, was invigorating for some, among them Katharine Hockin, a renowned United Church missionary and ecumenical leader. Born to parents working as missionaries in China, she eventually served there herself after studying and working in Canada for a number of years.82 Among the last of the United Church’s missionaries to leave China, she returned to Canada and became involved in initiatives to redefine the mission of the church. She was well positioned to assess the challenges at home and overseas – as she put it, “the fluidity of so many things, the mobility of peoples and the growing irrelevance of much of what is customary and habitual.” She exuded enthusiasm for the new global outlook that was developing in ecumenical circles, characterizing it as “one of zest, confidence, adventure and anticipation as we stretch to work under God in his world, in ways that may be unfamiliar but which will keep us growing in understanding, capacity and obedience.”83 In 1962 Hockin was invited to join the Commission on World Mission chaired by Donald Fleming, recently retired from federal politics after serving in John Diefenbaker’s Cabinet as minister of finance and later as minister of justice and attorney general.84 The United Church’s missionary program was facing some serious practical problems. Its failure to find replacements for vacancies in its overseas staff was what Observer editor A.C. Forrest considered the number one crisis facing the church. The United Church would soon have more of its staff “talking and writing and promoting mission, than are working at it,” he warned. The consequences were monumental: “The Church’s commission is to make disciples of all nations. The Church is mission. If we are not missionary, we are not Christian.”85 The low number of missionary personnel was one of several issues that the commission was asked to tackle. The findings of the commission confirmed Forrest’s fears: the number of missionaries had indeed decreased dramatically in the postwar period.86 But Forrest was troubled for another reason as he observed the presentation of the lengthy report at the General Council in 1966. “We are not certain that the commissioners were fully aware of the radical change that has taken place in what we used to call ‘foreign missions,’” he wrote in his editorial for the next issue of the Observer. He was convinced that Fleming was either unaware of that shift, or unwilling to acknowledge it.87

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New Appointments Total Withdrawals*

Total Withdrawals*

70 70 60 60 50 50 40 40 30 30 20 20

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1928 1928 1929 1929 1930 1930 1931 1931 1932 1932 1933 1933 1934 1934 1935 1935 1936 1936 1937 1937 1938 1938 1939 1939 1940 1940 1941 1941 1942 1942 1943 1943 1944 1944 1945 1945 1946 1946 1947 1947 1948 1948 1949 1949 1950 1950 1951 1951 1952 1952 1953 1953 1954 1954 1955 1955 1956 1956 1957 1957 1958 1958 1959 1959 1960 1960 1961 1961 1962 1962 1963 1963 1964 1964 1965 1965

10 10

Figure 8.1 Appointments and withdrawals of missionaries, 1928–65 Source: “World Mission,” Record of Proceedings of the 22nd General Council (1966), Appendix E * Includes retirements, deaths, and resignations for various reasons (such as unsettled conditions in China and, in the case of single women, marriage).

Forrest told readers that he had quizzed Fleming about this matter from the floor when the report was presented at the assembly. Fleming had assured the General Council that “if this were a departure from the traditional evangelical emphasis, my name would never have been attached to the report.” Forrest was not convinced. In his editorial rejoinder to their exchange, he pointed out that the report had emphasized “witness, sacrifice, and total mission,” but contained “little or no emphasis on proclamation, persuading, converting, making disciples of all nations, or ‘winning the world for Christ in this generation.’” Forrest himself had no quarrel with the theological shift; however, it bothered him that there had been “no clear-cut admission of the serious and radical departure from what many of our people still consider ‘missions.’”88 Fleming was riled by the editorial. His seven-page letter took Forrest to task for implying that the commission he had chaired was unaware of a radical change in the context of mission (which the report had in fact analyzed at length). He had understood Forrest’s question at the General Council as inquiring about the purpose of  mission. Insisting that the report proposed no change in what

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he characterized as “the traditional evangelical concept,” Fleming demanded a retraction.89 Forrest refused to back down. In his view a radical change in theological emphasis, not just method, had ­taken place. “If this report does not reflect that change then in my opinion it should, or we mislead our people,” he contended. As a compromise, Forrest invited Fleming to write a brief piece for the Observer to set the record straight.90 Fleming refused to settle for anything less than either publication of his lengthy initial letter in full or a retraction.91 In a last attempt at conciliation, and after what he described as “a long telephone conversation” with Fleming, Forrest drafted a piece for the Observer titled “Win Souls to Christ.” It confirmed that Fleming considered winning souls to Christ as the primary purpose of mission. However, Forrest went on to explain that while that had been the emphasis at the time of church union, the contemporary aim of mission was “to serve the world for Christ’s sake.” Conceding that Fleming spoke for “many, perhaps the vast majority,” of United Church members, Forrest argued that present mission policies (and at least the subtext of the report) took for granted a different theological point of view that ought to be named as such.92 Failing to gain Fleming’s endorsement despite several more letters, Forrest dropped the idea of publishing the piece. Although Fleming insisted that the World Mission report represented no change in the traditional evangelical emphasis, C. Douglas Jay, secretary of the commission and instrumental in drafting it, apparently thought otherwise. When Jay, also professor at Emmanuel College, gave the R.P. MacKay Memorial Lectures a year later, he described how the ecumenical task had recently shifted from focusing on missionary enterprises – “missions” – to making “an effective Christian presence in the world.” This was, he suggested, “a more acceptable theological and strategic approach” in an age when proselytism (which the report had defined in its glossary as the practice of making converts) had been called into question.93 Jay explained that highlighting the unity between home and foreign missions (as the wc c had recently done) had far-reaching implications for the conventional distinction between them. Whereas “revival, of recalling those with Christian memories, the lost sheep back to the fold of the church” was the focus of home missions, those working in foreign missions had been expected to “break new ground in a pagan world.” In current ecumenical thinking, however,

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the boundary was no longer between home and foreign missions, but between the church and the world. He saw the United Church’s Board of World Mission as “in general ahead of the church at large” in coming to terms with the end of Western missionary expansion.94 If that were so, little wonder that its advocacy of a new approach to mission met a chilly reception in conservative evangelical circles. They saw its emphasis on Christian presence and openness to other faiths as a repudiation of efforts to convert the world to Christ: what was evangelism to them had been defined by the United Church as proselytism, and disparaged as such. Confusion over the new direction the United Church had taken (knowingly or not) was further evidence of a shakeup that was transforming inter-church relations. Denominational loyalties were waning – but not for the reasons an older generation of ecumenists had assumed. Astute observers were spotting startlingly new trends. Principal George Johnston of United Theological College made a prediction in 1968 that would have seemed preposterous even a decade earlier: the future of ecumenism would be shaped by conservative Protestants and post–Vatican II Catholics.95 From his vantage point as a church executive, Ernest Long also detected signs of that repositioning: the United Church was growing more distant from “so-called evangelicals,” but enjoying more cordial relationships with Catholics than had often been the case in the past.96 While some in the ecumenical camp were growing impatient with making compromises to find common ground, their evangelical ­rivals were discovering the advantages of working together. The revival of interest in religion in the 1950s had swelled the numbers of fundamentalists and other conservative evangelicals, giving rise to what is sometimes described as a neo-evangelical movement.97 These evangelicals thought of themselves as non-denominational or transdenominational, rather than ecumenical, a word they deplored. Their ranks included many of the United Church’s “sectarian” competitors, who had generally adopted decentralized coordination of resources rather than the bureaucratic model of governance that larger and more liberal Protestant denominations preferred.98 The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, founded in 1964, offered these groups what they saw as a more suitable approach to co-operation, welcoming local congregations and ministry organizations, as well as denominations, as members.99 “A unity is being cultivated among

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Christian believers unlike the current ecumenism which seems to superimpose a pseudo-unity on organizational structure,” enthused Berkley Reynolds as he heralded the founding of the u crf as evidence of a new day dawning for Canadian evangelicals.100 Meanwhile the United Church was finding the company of old adversaries more enjoyable as an era of co-operation with Catholics commenced in the heady years following Vatican II.101 The InterChurch Committee on Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations, formed in 1944 by several Protestant groups to keep an eye on Catholic “encroachment” on the state, was discharged in 1973. By then neither ecumenical Protestants nor Roman Catholics seemed to have the energy for reciting old grievances. A committee report presented at the 1972 General Council recommended that the United Church “at every level” from congregation to the national divisions “no longer use any literature on Protestant-Roman Catholic relations which is pre-Vatican II,” and urged that new materials on mixed marriages be prepared to help couples accept their religious differences.102 The pervasive sense of being on the cusp of a New Age, in which there was no secure place for any of the institutional churches, generated different concerns than in the past. The United Church remained fiercely proud of its francophone members, many with longstanding connections to Protestantism. But some were former Catholics. The situation presented a new dilemma: should ecumenical Protestants encourage the latter to return to the Catholic Church in order to renew it from within?103 Others were more wary as they read the documents issued after the Vatican Council. George Johnston was troubled by what he feared was a “new type of Roman Catholic imperialism” that still regarded Protestants as belonging to mere ecclesial communities rather than true churches.104 What did these changes portend for ecumenism as once understood by the United Church? With the uncoupling of Christianity and culture underway in many countries, Canada among them, the old strategic intention of reuniting Christendom by first creating united national churches was no longer as viable. There was continuing interest in bringing confessional families together in the kind of organic union that the United Church had achieved in 1925. However, ecumenism was transformed by those who imagined alternatives to that model. Moreover, for those still committed to an organic model of Christian unity, Vatican II dramatically redefined what was at stake. It offered an intriguing new possibility: a church

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made more fully catholic by the return of the “separated brethren” of non-Roman ecclesial communities. At the same time, a glimmer of a different understanding of ecumenism, informed by the changing approach to world mission, was evident in the United Church’s avid support for inter-church coalitions organized around issues of common concern. This approach shifted the emphasis from beliefs held in common (still the basis for  much of the co-operation among conservative Protestants) to working together despite confessional fault lines. There would still be amalgamation in the future, Hord predicted, but with less money spent on buildings (temples to the idols of denominationalism, as he put it) and more on specialized staff, community service, and world mission. Inner-city work would be done ecumenically and coordinated with community developers and social workers in existing agencies.105 Such a venture in ecumenical outreach was launched in the Lakehead region of Ontario by Lois Wilson, serving in team ministry at First United Church, Fort William, with her husband, Roy Wilson. In the fall of 1967 they invited Protestant and Catholic churches to join in planning Town Talk, a month-long multimedia public forum to discuss such relevant community topics as family problems, poverty in an affluent society, pollution, science, and foreign aid.106 But the fissures that were remaking Christianity elsewhere were apparent in northern Ontario as well. While the success of Town Talk exceeded expectations, Wilson recalled that some conservative churches boycotted the project because there wasn’t enough emphasis on the Bible.107 It was a sign of the new ecclesial times: although the United Church’s interaction with Catholicism was growing less oppositional, it was drawing more criticism from conservative Protestants, including some within its own ranks. Town Talk was to reshape how Wilson viewed the United Church’s public role and the church’s place in an urban setting.108 The event showcased exciting possibilities for urban outreach, a crucial element of the United Church’s new mission strategy. The spiritual needs of the frontier had figured large in the case for church union. Its home missions strategy had been aimed at providing religious services for small communities as well as for non-Anglo-Saxons in cities. However, it was the urban frontier that caught the imagination of those preparing the United Church for its new mission to the

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world. “The cradle of our pluralistic society” was how the first report of the Commission on the Church on the Urban Frontier portrayed the city in 1964. People were flocking there to seek power, opportunity, and excitement in the economic, social, educational, and artistic exchanges it offered. But most congregations were unprepared to meet the demands of the new sort of community taking shape on this new frontier, and were in danger of providing answers in rural or outdated terms that expressed “nostalgia for bygone days.”109 Nothing was safe from scrutiny. The United Church’s praiseworthy studies on immigration, war and peace, capital punishment, national health insurance, and the use of alcohol and tobacco had sometimes shaped public policy in the past, noted a second report; however, “the large majority of church members have never heard of these reports, let alone taken action following their recommendations.” The New Curriculum – already under fire from conservatives – was hit with a different criticism: it might not be suitable for all communities, prepared as it was for “average, middle-class young people.” Nor should the church expect to make its influence felt in urban communities through social service work as in the past, now that the government or secular agencies were providing such services. Congregations were instead urged to take up “community issues of importance with a view to political action.”110 Shifting the focus to the urban frontier had serious consequences for the old frontier. Although rural churches still made up 65 per cent of United Church congregations, the encroachment of urbanism was having a negative affect. Changes in pastoral leadership were frequent. Some pastoral charges were in a precarious financial situation. Controversy over biblical interpretation or moral standards could be devastating in a rural church, Board of Home Missions associate secretary Harold Bailey reminded those who complained about the slow pace of change there. Losing some members over a hotly contested issue might make little difference in a large church, whereas such division in a small rural congregation could threaten its survival.111 Perhaps it is not surprising then that there was more resistance to adopting the New Curriculum in rural churches than in large urban ones. Moreover, the new ecumenical spirit created uncertainty about the purpose of home missions. When Forrest editorialized about the meaning of the term “national church” in 1957, he reiterated that the United Church had never intended to become a state church, but

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hoped to “provide fellowship for all who would come to Canada from whatever nation or culture.” Although at that time 80 per cent of its members still considered the British Isles their ancestral home, the United Church’s aspiration was that every Christian who came to Canada would “find fellowship in our church.” Forrest could boast that “in a real sense it is becoming the Church of Christ in Canada.”112 Home missions had helped to make it so. For instance, in contrast to the Anglican and Presbyterian churches, the United Church had expanded missions to Chinese immigrants in the 1950s, and the results were impressive. By 1961, over half the persons of Chinese extraction in Canada had joined a Protestant church, and the United Church’s share of Chinese Protestants was 38.7 per cent (up from 13.6 per cent two decades earlier.)113 Even though the 1961 census showed that Catholics were gaining ground on Protestants, the United Church could point to such successes. However, the theological and cultural rationale for sponsoring missionary work among immigrants was becoming less clear by the mid-1960s.114 Since most immigrants to Canada had no direct confessional link to the United Church in the country they had left, how was the United Church to extend fellowship without seeming to proselytize? Ecumenical sensitivity to the overtures of Vatican II combined with the new theology of world mission to scuttle the old home mission strategy, especially in urban centres where Catholic immigrants were arriving in large numbers. The shift to providing only technical services in health, education, agriculture, industry, etc. alienated some who believed, as George Johnston bluntly put it, that the Christian message was “proselytizing at its core.”115 Conservative evangelicals certainly thought so, and did not hesitate to encourage Catholics – and unhappy Protestants in liberal congregations – to join them. Caught between the old and new frontiers was suburbia, where the majority of the baby boomers were born.116 The merits of an ambitious church extension program in new housing developments had seemed obvious in the 1950s, and it was to new suburban congregations that the United Church owed most of its postwar success. Suburban churches were in a paradoxical situation: they were caught between the tug of nostalgia for old traditions associated with the  congregations (often rural) in which their members had grown up, and their willingness to experiment.117 A sympathetic

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Observer editorial published shortly after release of The Comfortable Pew noted that new suburban congregations were criticized for adjusting too much. Some had even gone so far as to change the time of worship from eleven o’clock on Sunday morning and cancel the Sunday evening service. Their ecumenism was expressed by dispensing with denominational programs that they deemed ineffective, and ignoring denominational labels, “partly because they [suburban parishioners] don’t know the difference or because they just don’t care.”118 To make matters worse, their sociability was suspect to those who urged the church to listen to the world. What critics denounced as a social club, suburban parishioners saw as putting down new roots: “They want to find or create a community and rear their children in the fear of God and the knowledge of Christ among believers – nice, decent believers.” With the inner city “left to the Roman Catholics, the ethnic churches and the Gospel halls,” Forrest protested, “jibing at the suburbs or depreciating their witness” offered “no assistance and no cure.”119 The Comfortable Pew no doubt reinforced negative images of the suburban congregation. But Forrest also attributed some of the snide remarks he heard when he was out and about to the impact of Americans Vance Packard and Gibson Winter, whose writings depicted superficial suburbanites switching churches casually in their quest for status.120 Months after the editorial about suburban congregations appeared in 1964, Forrest found that his positive assessment was making the Observer “the object of wearisome attack.” “You can’t mean it,” wrote someone he described as a good friend, who wondered if he was trying to be ironic!121 Forrest did mean it, and repeated his admiration for what was happening in the suburbs as “the most exciting and promising manifestation of our changing religious life.” Despite obvious experimentation, suburban churchgoers had “sought to preserve and nurture the best elements of community life they left behind on farm and in village and town.” They displayed “the best questioning, the freshest thinking, the most venturesome planning, and the most sacrificial giving.” Indeed, if there was to be a new reformation, it was likely to have the best chance in suburban churches, which had become “little ecumenical institutes.”122 Forrest decided to investigate what a wide cross-section of church leaders thought about suburban congregational life, and the result was a symposium published in the Observer in 1965.

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Many (including all the principals of theological colleges who ­commented) praised suburban churches for their innovation, enthusiasm, openness, and generosity. Disparagement was motivated by  jealousy, retorted principal E.S. Lautenschlager of Emmanuel College, and “initiated by the devil.” Bruce McLeod, who had spent six years as minister of a suburban congregation, reminded readers that behind the power mowers and morning cups of coffee were men, women, and children living in situations as hopeless as any other place. “What I miss in many well-phrased criticisms of the church’s involvement in suburbia is some alternative plan of caring for these people.” Mutchmor commended suburban churches for displaying “visible proof of a strong, intelligent faith” and providing more for the worship, work, and witness of the Christian church than his own generation.123 Hord, the former pastor of two flourishing suburban churches, took a more critical stance. He described the suburbanite as living a “schizophrenic existence” between the “impersonal structures of the business corporation and political machine” and the comforts of a middle-class, split-level home in the suburbs. Citing Winter’s Suburban Captivity of the Churches, he insisted that only by accepting responsibility for the inner city would the suburban church find its true life.124 Among the most scathing of the published responses were two ­letters from women, one a suburban minister’s wife who asked to remain anonymous. She characterized the suburban community as comprised of one socio-economic group (mainly families of young executives) who thought it was good for business to belong to a church. The main concern was for the building itself, rather than what was happening inside it. A compartmentalized attitude to religion that saw it as unrelated to social issues was being passed on to the youth of suburban churches, who, like their fathers, thought the church should “stick to its knitting” and not speak out on educational, economic, or political matters. She had found suburban ­congregations filled with status seekers and nominal Christians “rejoicing in broadloom wall to wall, full of pride, arrogance and selfrighteousness,” willing to “serve suppers and salve their consciences with a token money gift.”125 Katherine Burbidge concurred. Outsiders could not be blamed for “equating us with an ultra-respectable service club with religious overtones.” She claimed that the service club spirit of the United

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Church repelled many suburbanites. Consequently, “thinking Christians” were drifting to Unitarian churches. “We are not all born fund raisers, and it should be possible to sing in the choir, or teach Sunday school, lead a youth group or serve on the session without becoming involved as a huckster of anything from variety show tickets to 50-pound bags of potatoes,” she complained.126 Sociability had been a virtue associated with faith and fellowship, especially in rural communities and small towns. Now secular pundits and even some of the United Church’s own leaders, who frowned on the festivals of suburban church life, mocked it. Suburban churches had assumed that cultivating community within the congregation was laudable as an antidote to the anonymity of modern life. But this aspect of congregational life was coming under fire from those who insisted that rather than being preoccupied with drawing people in, the church should be sending them out into the world. Perhaps it is not surprising that some who had been only loosely connected to the United Church chose to stay at home rather than engage in activities that its own leaders considered a hindrance to God’s mission in the world.127 Some worried that old practices of pastoral care were no longer appreciated. Even if the welfare state were to take care of most ma­ terial needs in the future, Forrest reminded Observer readers, the government was not equipped to care for persons suffering from loneliness, frustration, neuroses, and ills that beset even the affluent. Sewing circles, knitting clubs, Bible classes, suppers, bazaars, prayer meetings, and choirs provided effective ministry to the lonely. “This, too, is evangelism,” he insisted.128 But those who associated evangelism with Billy Graham’s methods would not have agreed – and they appeared to be gaining exclusive recognition as the evangelical brand. Forrest was startled to hear conservative Protestants referred to simply as evangelicals. “Aren’t we all?” he asked plaintively, still convinced that Protestants who weren’t evangelical should be.129 By the end of the tumultuous decade of the sixties, those who would answer “yes” to that question were a shrinking minority. Was there a remedy for what was ailing the United Church? Could it be cured by listening to the world, as those who embraced the new concept of world mission hoped? The mixed results of the National Project and its Planning Fellowships at both the national and local levels were not encouraging. What emerged in 1967 in conjunction

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with Canada’s Centennial celebrations was barely recognizable as the National Project of Evangelism that had been announced in 1962. Many of the activities connected with the original focus on evangelism were sidelined to make way for the added emphasis on social action.130 The accomplishments described in the final report were modest: issues had been brought into the open, groups of like-minded persons (both conservative and radical) had come together, and the majority of those who attended the Planning Fellowships had experienced “catharsis.” There was a frank admission that Planning Fellowships had often left participants feeling “hung up” – aware of the church’s failings, but short on remedies.131 Meanwhile other groups, including the Jesus movement, offered Jesus as the answer to what was ailing society. Staffer Robert Christie sounded discouraged in 1970 as he approached retirement, timed to coincide with the closing of e & s s ’s Vancouver office where he had worked for nearly two decades. His stinging accusation was that the United Church’s misplaced priorities had “both minimized and jeopardized the ordinary Christian’s growth in faith and its practical expression in the workaday social setting.” Personal commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour had been replaced by “a less demanding brand of sub-Christian ­fraternizing and sharing of human experience and joint social action – proclaiming this to be ‘the New Evangelism.’”132 His visits to congregations and presbyteries had convinced him that the church’s once generally effective social ministry was also imperiled; it was “renamed, redirected, devitalized, devocalized – if not totally confounded.”133 He held his own board as partly responsible: the postMutchmor staff had replaced personal evangelism (such as preaching missions, teaching missions, visitation, schools for elders, Lenten studies, and evangelism conferences) with impersonal congregational self-analysis and Planning Fellowships.134 William Berry, another long-time staffer, saw things differently as he prepared to return to pastoral ministry that same year. His parting report was a reminder of why the United Church had been persuaded to listen to the world in the first place. The man who had steered the Calling Canada to Christ campaign in the 1950s insisted that “only a daring, enthusiastic continuing [sic] and vital policy of evangelism can save western culture from the decadence into which it has already fallen.” Yet thinking of evangelism in terms that were “too personal” obscured the “corporate power of society.” No one

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person was responsible for unemployment or war; such social sins were “more blatant, vicious and brutal than the sins of any one individual.” By focusing on personal evangelism during the Mutchmor era, the United Church had missed an opportunity: “We tried winning people one by one in the hope they would challenge society. But it never worked out.” Instead the revival had produced a “lack-lustre feeble Christianity.” Yet he agreed with Christie that the gospel was both social and personal: “We have only a lopsided arch, which cannot stand if we emphasize one side and not the other.”135 Even Hord admitted that the National Project had polarized the liberal and conservative wings of the United Church, dividing them over whether to emphasize evangelism or social service. But he still insisted that they “belong together and must not be separated if we are to be true to Christ.”136 “Finding Life’s Meaning,” a winsome poem penned a year before his death, spoke to how the personal and the social were enjoined in his own piety: Christ has broken the power of evil, And exposed it on the Cross; In response I want to serve Him Who has loved me at such cost. As Christ came to seek and win me And assure me I’m a child of God, So He sends me forth to win my brothers, And point them in the path He trod.137 The 1960s saw the rapid demise of the early twentieth-century approach to mission that had been celebrated with great fanfare at Edinburgh in 1910. Admittedly, balancing its twin goals of evangelization and Christianization had never been easy. But after the 1960s, there were fewer who thought the effort worthwhile. The so-called dual mandate of doing mission and doing justice was soon to replace the old two-pronged approach to evangelism and social service in the lexicon of the United Church.138 Evangelism still had liberal defenders. But by the end of the decade, as the emerging notion of world mission drew the line more sharply between ecumenical and evangelical Protestants, to be a liberal evangelical was almost a contradiction in terms. Evangelism was viewed with suspicion to be sure; however, just as significant was scrutiny of old assumptions about

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the social role of the church, which revealed a diminishing demand for the kind of social service the United Church had once delivered.139 The sometimes-querulous marriage of evangelism and social service was over, and the liberal evangelicalism they had once fostered was forsaken. A desire to move beyond the impasse between them perhaps explains the enthusiastic response to what was hailed as the “social action report” at the General Council that convened a few months after Hord’s death. Among the recommendations of the Commission on the Church in the Field of Social Welfare was that the areas of evangelism, social service, and home missions (and perhaps others) be collapsed into a new Church and Society division.140 In promoting partnerships with governmental and non-governmental agencies, it insisted that there was nothing about “religious” social programs, as such, that made them superior; rather, the quality of service and sensitivity to human need were the only proper criteria for judging a program’s merit.141 If in the coming years it was difficult to distinguish the United Church’s social ministries from secular social work, that was by design. The leaders of the 1960s are often blamed for the failure of the United Church to keep pace with the growth of the previous decade. Yet it is fallacious to pin numerical decline on particular persons or programs. The appeal to listen to the world was a genuine attempt to confront the challenges facing churches around the world, and to rethink mission accordingly. To be sure, there were flawed decisions. But as the so-called radicals listened to the world, they were convinced that a greater risk than failure was to do nothing. By forcing a hesitant church to imagine a New Age where the church was no longer assured of its customary place, they primed it for the difficult days ahead. As she pondered that future, Katharine Hockin even dared to ask: “Can it be that God is active in our world in ways that may not always be to our advantage?”142 As the 1960s drew to a close, the United Church was less certain of the answer to that question than the founding generation had been.

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9 Reconceiving the United Church A real tradition is not the relic of a past irretrievably gone; it is a living force that animates and informs the present ... It appears as an heirloom, a heritage that one receives on condition of making it bear fruit before passing it on to one’s descendants. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

Preaching at the annual pilgrimage service of the historic Old Hay Bay Church in 1965, general secretary Ernest Long warned an overflow crowd that unless his church changed its ways, it was headed for a “stunning defeat” over the next twenty years.1 Sounding even less optimistic two years later, “Mr United Church” (as Long was nicknamed) made headlines when he warned that his church had “five years to change radically – or else!”2 Defending his dire outlook for the future, he bluntly declared that the old idea of a worlddominating Christendom was dead.3 It was evident to Long that the very survival of the United Church was in question too. The signs were unmistakable; it was already in the throes of change. During the revivals of the 1950s, some church leaders had boasted that the United Church’s “amazing growth” would “continue, and perhaps even be stepped up in tempo.”4 A decade later the swagger was gone. “The revival is over; we may be in for a difficult time of retrenchment,” announced Observer editor A.C. Forrest as he delivered the bad news in 1967: church growth had halted in 1962, and total church membership declined in 1966 for the first time since church union.5 There were dire predictions that churches in Canada would follow the pattern of decline already evident in much of the  u k and continental Europe. Statistical projections indicated that ­before long Christianity would become a minority religion in Canada.6 One computer model predicted that attendance at Anglican

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Table 9.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1971 United Church

Total population

Membership

% of population

21,568,310

3,768,800

17.47

Newfoundland

522,105

101,805

19.50

Prince Edward Island

111,640

27,830

24.93

Nova Scotia

788,960

162,885

20.65

New Brunswick

634,555

85,185

13.42

Canada

Quebec

6,027,760

176,825

2.93

Ontario

7,703,105

1,682,820

21.85

Manitoba

988,250

256,560

25.96

Saskatchewan

926,245

274,285

29.61

Alberta

1,627,875

456,925

28.07

British Columbia

24.61

2,184,620

537,565

Northwest Territories

34,805

3,005

8.6

Yukon Territory

18,390

3,110

16.91

Source: Census of Canada (1971), vol. I, part 3, Table 10

churches in Toronto would cease by 12 February 1981. The United Church’s future was not much brighter; one of its own studies predicted that it would suffer a similar fate by the mid-1990s.7 With negotiations between the two churches underway, it appeared that any union between them would be short-lived. The United Church was to outlast these grim forecasts of its imminent end. And yet Long was in a sense proven right: in many ­respects the church that was born in 1925 did not survive the tumultuous 1960s. The hope of a Christian Canada that had inspired the bold experiment of the founders dimmed as the country grew religiously and culturally diverse. The customary insistence that faith was both personal and social in character, formed in Christian fellowship and practised in the course of everyday life, sounded quaint to a new generation that was demanding relevance and social action. There were complaints from across the theological spectrum that the organizational machinery – once hailed as a key to the success of the United Church’s mission – was broken. In response its leaders resolved to woo back the disenchanted, convinced that

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1926+ 1927+ 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

Persons under PastoralPastoral care Pastoral Members Persons under care Persons under Care

Figure 9.1 United Church of Canada membership, 1926–75

25729_AIRHART.indb 257 1972 1973 1974 1975

1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1955 1960 1956 1961 1957 1962 1958 1963 1959 1964 1960 1965 1961 1966 1962 1967 1963 1968 1964 1969 1965 1970 1966 1971 1967 1972 1968 1973 1969 1974 1970 1975 1971

1926+ 1926+ 1927+ 1927+ 1928 1927 1928 1929 1929 1930 1930 1931 1931 1932 1932 1933 1933 1934 1934 1935 1935 1936 1936 1937 1937 1938 1938 1939 1939 1940 1940 1941 1941 1942 1942 1943 1943 1944 1944 1945 1945 1946 1946 1947 1947 1948 1948 1949 1949 1950 1950 1951 1951 1952 1952 1953 1953 1954 1954 1955 1955 1956 1956 1957 1957 1958 1958 1959 1959 1960 1960 1961 1961 1962 1962 1963 1963 1964 1964 1965 1965 1966 1966 1967 1967 1968 1968 1969 1969 1970 1970 1971 1971 1972 1972 1973 1973 1974 1974 1975 1975

mbership, 1926–751926–75 mbership,

2,800,000 Members Members

2,600,000

2,400,000

2,200,000

2,000,000

1,800,000

1,600,000

1,400,000

1,200,000

1,000,000

800,000

600,000

400,000

200,000

Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book +  1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

$100 000 000

Total Funds Raised

$90 000 000

$80 000 000

$70 000 000

$60 000 000

$50 000 000

$40 000 000

$30 000 000

$20 000 000

$10 000 000

$0

Figure 9.2 Total funds raised for all purposes, 1926–75

Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book. + 1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

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those who were ambivalent about organized religion were not necessarily rejecting God or abandoning Christianity, but only the conformity, clubbiness, and bureaucratic authority that critics associated with it. Scholars agree that the 1960s decisively changed the religious landscape of North America and Western Europe; they disagree on explanations for the sudden downward spiral in religious partici­ pation in mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches. Historian Hugh McLeod cautions that it is a mistake to single out one “master factor” to account for it. The United Church’s experience confirms his claim that a number of initially disparate currents converged to create the crisis: affluence, the decline of ideologically based subcultures, theological radicalization, political radicalization (especially opposition to the Vietnam War), the sexual revolution, and women’s search for independence, to name a few of the most significant.8 He finds the most serious religious decline to have been associated with the “low-key style of piety which had flourished in previous decades, which emphasized Christian ethics and membership of the Christian community, rather than the dogmatic or the miraculous”9 – an apt description of the United Church. In The Upside of Down, political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that the greatest opportunity for transformative change happens when a number of adaptive cycles collide. He uses the term “panarchy,” a concept borrowed from ecology, to refer to the un­ predictable change that results from such “cycles within cycles.”10 In  social systems, as in nature, catastrophe can clear the ground for  something new as innovations are introduced and tested.11 Experiments that fail are abandoned, while those that succeed shape the next phase of development.12 Breakdown is disruptive to some parts of a system, but does not need to be catastrophic overall; in fact, limited breakdown in a social system is necessary to create space for new leadership and structures to emerge.13 On the other hand, “excessive exuberance” can threaten the survival of a system.14 The challenge to leadership during times of adaptive change is to allow systems to “fail gracefully”: to limit the damage and preserve what will aid in recovery.15 Panarchy aptly describes the situation of the United Church during the 1960s: its heightened vulnerability after a period of growth, the collision of cycles within cycles, and the tension between innovators and conservers who both played critical roles by preventing (or

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at least delaying) its collapse. Picturing change as an adaptive cycle recognizes the significance of links between the parts of a complex system – an intriguing way to think of conciliar governance in the United Church. Slow change at one level protects the system while faster-paced innovation at another level energizes it. The theory also emphasizes the importance of connections between “remembrance” (persistence) and “revolt” (evolvability) during a cycle of change and renewal. Healthy systems in society, as in nature – whether a forest after a fire or a coral reef after a storm – rely on “memories” during such times of reorganization and renewal.16 While innovators clear the ground for change, conservers look for ways to plant the seeds of memory for another generation to harvest. The adaptive challenges facing the United Church in the 1960s were unprecedented in its short history. Though often described as a modern church, it was not well suited to cope with some key cultural dynamics that ran counter to its founding vision. The United Church had aspired to situate itself at the centre of communities across Canada, communicating both spiritual and social messages from a Christian vantage point. It had proudly identified itself within Max Weber’s famous typology as a church, rather than a sect, and adopted an organizational style to match. What seemed to catch the United Church by surprise in the 1960s was the growing presence, even in its own midst, of Weber’s third type. “Mystic” was a rather misleading English translation of the term Weber had used for those who regarded the autonomy of individual and immediate experience as their authority in religious matters.17 In centuries past this third type had been predominantly otherworldly in its orientation. The 1960s demonstrated that this third type could be radically this-worldly in its spiritual focus. Such mystics were ambivalent and even antagonistic to organized religion, sentiments that were captured in phrases such as ‘secular religion,’ ‘no religion,’ and ‘spiritual but not religious.’ The subjectivity of their spiritual quest eroded the United Church’s faith in fellowship, and their suspicion of bureaucratic organizations undermined its conciliar structure. It was this new challenge that Ray Hord had confronted in one of his last addresses before his death in 1968. “It’s later than we think for the institutional church,” he warned. The church had helped to define modern Christendom, with its edifice standing in the centre of

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the community and the priest or minister relating its teachings to all of life through preaching and the sacraments. But now, he contended, “Christendom with its homogeneity and common standards has all but disappeared.” The church no longer held a central place in people’s lives, nor did it bring the community together as it had in the past. The church would only continue to influence the world if it discovered “forms of fellowship and service that are more congenial to current experience.” Comparing the situation of the United Churchto that of the Jews in exile during the sixth century bc, Hord insisted that its most urgent task was “to prepare and train her members to be a part of the church of the dispersion” that was “scattered in a pluralistic culture.” Once it faced this new reality, he predicted it would worry less about its administrative structures and old forms of worship.18 A radically different approach to faith and fellowship was shaking the theological foundations on which mainstream churches like the United Church rested. Making Christianity “ready for the world” was how principal Donald Mathers summed up a decade of dramatic theological change to a gathering of the Queen’s University Saturday Club in 1969. The quest for salvation had once involved taking one’s sins to a religious expert, he mused, as one would take an ulcer to a doctor. But now individuals were expected to work out their own solutions – in effect to bear their own sins. “We seem to have moved from confession and absolution to counselling, and from the external restraints of a community bound by an official orthodoxy to the internal loyalties of a fellowship of pilgrims.” Mathers explained how this fellowship of pilgrims was altering assumptions about the spiritual quest. Terms like ‘personal maturity,’ ‘integrity,’ and ‘social relevance’ had become the modern equivalents of ‘salvation.’ The time would come, he expected, when God would be praised in the language of science, or politics, or medicine, for every workplace would be considered a place of service to God. Every person would be a priest, and each home a temple, he predicted (noting that the Apocalypse of John made no mention of a temple in the New Jerusalem). “We are indeed being secularized,” he declared, explaining that this was “not an elimination of religion from the world but a religious transformation of the world.”19 A conspicuous number of these “pilgrims” were affiliated with the United Church. They were inclined to turn to their own conscience, rather than the guidance of the church or even the Bible, in matters

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of moral and spiritual discernment. They distanced themselves from the organized fellowship that had defined their church for four decades, relying instead on their own experience to guide their actions. They did not want any organization – certainly not the church – to speak for them on social issues. This fellowship of pilgrims thus repudiated much of what ‘being United’ had entailed. Yet the United Church’s hope was that these pilgrims who needed no priest for themselves might be drawn to the prophetic message of the gospel for the sake of others. Paradoxically, while the new spiritual quest was not necessarily solitary, it was subjective. The individual autonomy it prized entailed a different understanding of belonging to a moral community. Not only was a person expected to make his or her own moral decisions (not an uncommon Protestant notion): autonomy now extended to the selection of criteria for making such decisions. This eroded the church’s traditional authority as the primary moral guide.20 Those wishing to uphold the moral values of the past were left to negotiate them privately with no backing from secular culture – and increasingly less encouragement from the church. As fewer heeded its advice on personal conduct, the United Church scrambled to find more relevant language to defend old causes. After the 1964 General Council, Forrest complained that the commissioners had engaged in long discussions on smoking but “refused to call it a ‘moral issue’ not because it isn’t but because that sounds like sin.” Instead smoking was discouraged as “a health hazard and a deep concern to the Christian conscience.”21 Some fights it seemed – even good ones – could not be won. Coming to terms with the eclipse of moral community was particularly difficult in the matter of beverage alcohol. “You have before you just about the most discouraging task of any group in Canada,” Forrest told a young people’s temperance group in 1965. Prohibition didn’t have a chance, and government control as a way of countering abuse had become a joke. Drinking was actually encouraged by government agencies to increase tax revenues. Even “decent people” were embarrassed about refusing to drink because of the bad image of the old temperance movement. He hoped that one day a politician might be able to do something to restrict the sale of beverage alcohol if, as he expected, things continued to get out of hand. “In the meantime we can be temperate in all things,” he counselled. “We must

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insist on our right to be total abstainers. And insist on the rights of others to be temperate users of alcohol. And promote and support every good effort aimed at understanding, and assisting the addict to solve his problems. If we do this then we may be able to enlist others who have a common concern for the welfare, economy and sobriety of Canada.”22 Nearly all churches had trouble with the topic of sex during the 1960s, and the United Church was no exception. The gap between what the church taught and what people were doing was an old problem. However, the divergence between the churches’ approach to sexual ethics and the message of the media and psychologists was new.23 Secular critics complained that churches were skittish about talking to young adults about sex. The United Church responded by tackling a broader range of issues and experimenting with ways to promote discussion. For instance, it joined the Anglican Church in commissioning Coffee House, a drama created to encourage young adults to discuss premarital sex, abortion, and the new morality.24 And more change was on the way. During the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the collapse of what historian Doug Owram calls “the cult of virginity” blurred the relationship between sex and marriage. By the 1970s the three-fold purpose of marriage (procreation, companionship, and the vocation of parenting) portrayed in United Church materials of bygone years was reduced to one: intimacy.25 In many communities across Canada, a more secular Sunday was another sign that belonging to a moral community was waning in significance. The effects of living in a secular society were felt with increasing strength each passing year, according to a 1962 report on “The Lord’s Day.”26 Pluralism was being used as an excuse to change Sunday legislation, the report complained. Conceding that urban areas of Canada were no longer “chiefly Anglo-Saxon,” it maintained that immigrants should generally “be prepared to accept Canadian ways rather than expect Canadians to adapt themselves to the ways of newcomers.”27 A child living in a “Christian country” should not have to choose between a baseball game and Sunday school; thus laws “which ensure such choices do not have to be made, are not only good Christianity but good citizenship.”28 A report on the same issue a decade later proposed a choice between one of two days of rest (Saturday or Sunday), basing its case on promoting “human well-being.” By then the United Church was ready to concede that in a pluralistic culture, “the Christian segment can no longer expect the

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state to enforce, by the law, religious practices which are uniquely matters of individual conscience.”29 By the 1970s another moral cause had been abandoned. Not only were United Church people inclined to flout their church’s lead in moral matters, they were more likely than in the past to dispense with Christian fellowship, even on Sunday morning. As people weighed the benefits of belonging, convincing them to join one voluntary organization over another was a problem both inside and outside the church. Mutchmor reported in 1962 that “loss of fellowship is reflected in sparsely attended old time political meetings and in the current decline of trade union membership.”30 As other groups competed for volunteers, the United Church discovered that it was harder to find adults willing to serve as Sunday school teachers, youth leaders, and committee members. Even showing up for an hour on Sunday morning was onerous, especially to young people who complained of being ‘turned off’ by boring worship services. With supporters of experimental forms of ministry provocatively claiming that going to church on Sunday did not make a person good, what was the point of being there?31 A cultural revolution was underway, unleashing forces that affected the habits of churchgoers as well as the organizations and institutions to which they belonged, noted Forrest in 1969. Nowhere was that more evident, he suggested, than in the changed attitude to Sunday. After years of well-attended worship services, requiring a double-shift in some cases, there were forecasts that the morning service and Sunday school would follow the path to extinction that Sunday evening services and mid-week prayer meetings had already taken.32 There was nothing holy about scheduling, he granted, and structures needed to change. However, there was “something sacred about Christian fellowship, about disciplined worship and prayer, about study, about teaching, about meeting in the name of Christ,” he insisted. His quarrel was not with those who had rejected the church because they had lost their faith, but “the people who believe but are not working at it” – the ones who still sent a cheque to support the church, but would rather curl, golf, play bridge, or spend time at the cottage than show up on Sunday morning.33 In communities across Canada, attendance at church-sponsored events was plummeting. For a denomination that placed a premium on fellowship as a way of nurturing faith, the declining appeal of

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264 A Church with the Soul of a Nation mbership, 1926–75 mbership, 1926–75 Persons under Pastoral care Members Persons under Schools Pastoral care Membership of Sunday 800 000 800,000

Members Members

Through-Week Organizations Members Through-Week Organizations

Membership of Sunday Schools

700,000 700 000 600,000 600 000 500,000 500 000 400 000 400,000 300 000 300,000 200 000 200,000 100 000 100,000

1926+ 1927+ 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

-

Figure 9.3 Membership in Sunday schools and through-week organizations, 1926–75

1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1955 1962 1956 1963 1957 1964 1958 1965 1959 1966 1960 1967 1961 1968 1962 1969 1963 1970 1964 1971 1965 1972 1966 1973 1967 1974 1968 1975 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book +  1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

such activities did not bode well for the future. Particularly disturbing was the prospect of losing the generation of young adults born after the Second World War. With many of them pursuing post-­ secondary education in the 1960s, there was evidence that the baby boomers were entering university as Christians but leaving as agnostics or atheists.34 Student Christian Movement (s cm ) general secretary John Berry reported poor attendance at worship services and Bible study groups on university campuses. The majority of s cm ers leaned toward what he called churchless Christianity, and were “intensely dissatisfied with the state of the church” because of its divisions and its failure to connect its message with “life in the world.”35 The Sunday school was a leading indicator of the trouble that lay ahead. The United Church had invested heavily in the New Curriculum, expecting to tap the religious energies of children and youth. Despite the furor in the press after its children’s program was launched in 1964, the New Curriculum was in use in 90 per cent of United Church congregations a year later.36 But euphoria over classrooms filled to capacity and brisk sales of books was short-lived. Sunday school volunteers were dismayed to learn that three years after the New Curriculum was introduced, enrolment had dropped by 25 per cent. With the end of the baby boom, there were fewer children to replace those who left to work or attend university

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elsewhere. Sales of New Curriculum materials plunged after the first cycle, perhaps as much the result of recycling as a negative response to content: rather than being given to children to keep, the durable hardcover books were retrieved and re-used three years later. Children were not the New Curriculum’s only target: it was billed as a program that would “revolutionize the Sunday church school, and put the emphasis back on adults.”37 Some congregations found that introducing the New Curriculum to adults was a greater challenge than using it with children: it demanded more time than the adults were prepared to give. Women in particular were showing signs of volunteer fatigue. Sunday schools for adults had not been common in the past, and the theology underlying the curriculum was unfamiliar even to people who had grown up in the church. Sunday school teachers were no longer sure enough about their own faith to instruct others.38 Winnipeg’s Westworth United Church, for instance, reported that some members left because of the troubling theological issues that the New Curriculum raised, and even many who stayed struggled with it.39 Adults who volunteered to teach the New Curriculum were expected to be learners themselves. For instance, upon opening the manual to prepare for a Sunday school class of nine- to eleven-year-olds in the first year of the New Curriculum, a teacher would have found nearly a hundred pages of biblical background and pedagogical theory written by professionals before coming to the material on what to do at the first session.40 Although conservative evangelicals inside and outside the denomination were wary of the New Curriculum, some who took the time to examine it were surprisingly appreciative of its merits. The consensus of those who discussed it at a gathering of the Christian Research Seminar was “very favourable in many respects,” according to Wilber Sutherland, the general secretary of Canadian Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (and a Presbyterian). Writing to a friend connected to the uc r f, he reported that there had been “enthusiastic agreement” that it made sections of the Old Testament “readable and interesting.” Its handling of science and creation was “excellent,” and even its controversial handling of the first chapters of Genesis did a better job of conveying their theological significance than evangelical publications.41 However, Sutherland was worried by an implicit “philosophical naturalism” that left the impression that Christians had no resources for living that were any different from non-Christians. Once young people had “imbibed” it, he feared

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it “would not take very much to move them completely away from the Church and espousal of the Christian faith.”42 Though conservatives castigated it as too modern, others found the New Curriculum dated as soon as it came off the press. Its release coincided with the stir over John A.T. Robinson’s Honest to God, so it was widely but wrongly assumed to be an expression of the theological trends of the 1960s – as if the United Church had rushed publication to be ‘relevant’ to the debate. In fact, its writers were harvesting the theological renaissance of the 1940s and ’50s. Work on the 1940 Statement of Faith and the catechism based on it were, according to Mutchmor, the “seed-bed” out of which the New Curriculum had grown.43 Production had been delayed when the General Council rejected the design for a three-year cycle organized around the questions: “Who is God?”; “Who is my neighbour?”; and “Who am I?” Years later, editor Peter Gordon White recalled that commissioners had wanted “a curriculum built on the great affirmations of the Christian faith” rather than questions, which might give the impression of doubt. The discarded design was a decade ahead of its time, he speculated, and might have worn better.44 Like the New Evangelism promoted by e & s s , the New Curriculum was arguably as much the casualty as the cause of the crisis facing the United Church.45 With one in four families moving every year, ties to the community church were tenuous. As one teacher noted, there were plenty of other things to do on Sunday. The New Curriculum had not caused those changes, she insisted – nor had it been able to meet them as well as some had hoped, despite what most teachers considered a greatly improved course of study.46 Yet some blamed it for the decline in Sunday school attendance, despite the fact that almost every other North American denomination was showing a similar trend. A story in the Observer about a random sampling survey on Sunday schools taken in 1970, purportedly the first ever done at the national level, reported on the gravity of the situation. The Sunday school was on “a steep path to oblivion,” with the lowest enrolment since church union and a loss of nearly half of its teachers and students since 1962. Anglican numbers were, if anything, worse, while Presbyterian and Baptist Sunday schools were in trouble as well. Only “the most enthusiastically dedicated” (Pentecostals, unaffili­ ated congregations such as Toronto’s People’s Church, etc.) were flourishing – but by using “gimmicks” such as contests and prizes as

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attractions! The survey results also revealed a church divided – by region, age group, and community size – over how to respond to declining Sunday school attendance. Even the general reaction to the New Curriculum varied, with those from rural areas compared to those from communities over 50,000 opposing the New Curriculum by a margin of 2 to 1. Notes and letters attached to the questionnaires indicated that while some appreciated the new manuals for Sunday school teachers, others found them frustrating. An old hand at Sunday school teaching from Climax, Saskatchewan, wrote that he and his wife could no longer find time to prepare the lessons. More than a grade twelve education was needed to understand the material, he claimed, so where in a village of 400 would you find enough teachers?47 There was exasperation at the national headquarters too. Perhaps miffed by hearing constant criticism of the New Curriculum, the Board of Education was in no hurry to design another. According to one unnamed staff member, the New Curriculum had been the “last gasp of uniformity for a national church.” There was no plan to continue publishing it beyond 1973. Rather than rallying congregations to save the Sunday school, as traditionalists might have hoped, the staff at the Board of Education encouraged experimentation with new educational models and materials. “They insist that people must find their own answers – then they’ll help to find the resources to put the programs into action,” the Observer’s managing editor James Taylor reported. He added, “I’m afraid that congregations are likely to find coming to grips with their own needs a trying experience.”48 That was an understatement. The failure of the New Curriculum was only one of the challenges facing local congregations. They discovered, along with the Scouts and other organizations, that the formality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism associated with their activities had little appeal to baby boomers approaching young adulthood.49 The Young People’s Union (y pu ) had once attracted nearly 100,000 members who spent time together in Bible study, singsongs, and social activities such as weenie-roasts and sleigh rides. In 1964 the United Church approved a recommendation to create a new organization for young adults, and Kairos replaced the y p u a year later. According to those interviewed for a story in the Observer on the new organization, time seemed to have passed the y p u by, with secular organizations

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replacing church basements as places to gather. No longer was it possible to please everyone, explained field worker Wayne Barr, and those who showed up for y p u were too often those he characterized as rejects and misfits who “couldn’t make it anywhere else.”50 Kairos epitomized the new approach to mission that was rocking the United Church.51 Its aim was to challenge social and economic structures. For many (perhaps most) members of Kairos, its emphasis on ecumenical opportunities for social action was a drawing card. Programs such as Summer of Service (s o s ) attracted young volunteers to “become aware of and involved in the social problems facing Canada.”52 But it also reflected the subjectivity of the new spiritual quest. Based on what he had observed at a Kairos con­ ference, reporter Harvey Shepherd found an “intense interest in ­personal development, interpersonal relations and techniques for improving these.” The most popular session had been a sensitivity group, featuring a discussion of how participants felt about themselves, the meeting, and each other. Groups seemed to be comprised of friends whose relationship to a particular denomination was incidental. Some were already wondering whether Kairos could still be called Christian.53 Efforts to revamp activities for adults were also underway, and likewise met with mixed results. Creating a new organization for women did little to sustain participation, which peaked in the mid-1960s. Much of the impetus for merging the wms and wa to form the ucw in 1962 had come from women pressed for time. There seemed to be no good reason to support two women’s organizations that were often comprised of the same members. There were hopes that Bible studies, discussion groups, and practical projects rather than bazaars, bees, and suppers would better meet the personal and spiritual needs of working women.54 Sounding the new imperative of mission to the world, American theme speaker Peggy Way, a minister in the United Church of Christ, warned the Board of Women against seeking the “cheap grace” of irrelevant activities in a “sexual ghetto” rather than “attacking the social realities of our time.”55 But not all women wanted to leave church kitchens for community projects. Donating their time to help with suppers and bazaars was a way for women who had no money of their own to support the church. Reporter Patricia Clarke found many of them reluctant to give up the fellowship they enjoyed as they worked together. As one woman put it, “If you can bake a pie

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better than engage in theological debate, get on with it. I doubt if the pie is offered up to God, that he says, ‘I do wish she had made a political speech instead.’”56 As for men, a survey conducted in 1970 found a “sincere yearning for ‘fellowship’” and a desire “to know God better and serve Christ more.” The results did not support the conclusion that men were looking for bowling, bridge, or even community projects to undertake. Nor did the survey uncover much interest in tackling social ­issues of national concern, although respondents still regarded the church as the conscience of the nation. Instead, the men said they needed guidance for Christian living, help in finding opportunities for service, and ways to deepen their faith. A sympathetic editorial response described them as “aching for clarification” about basic ­issues of faith.57 Do people belong to the church because they believe or, as some scholars have wondered, do they believe because they belong to the church and have their faith formed by participating in its life and work?58 That conundrum would test the connection between faith and community – both within and beyond the congregation – that was the heart of ‘being United.’ What one generation prized as fellowship, another disparaged as clubby. Fellowship was the “secret weapon of the faith,” according to William Berry, a former church executive who had recently returned to the pastorate. Yet he had his doubts about how well the United Church coordinated Christian fellowship. “I protest against the graded Church of the twentieth century,” he wrote. He saw groups that appealed to newcomers according to interests, rather than age or gender, as a promising alternative to over-structured organizations.59 Others went further in their criticism of church fellowship, focusing instead on experimental forms of ministry with youth, university students, business professionals, and housing project residents. Bill Phipps, one of the United Church ministers who had formed Community Consultants Services in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park, ­described their work as “part of the silent church”: “No counselling in the name of the church. No visiting to get people out to church. That’s crap. We try to get agencies and people to work together for the sake of the people. But we don’t seek visibility in the name of the church. Just the opposite.”60 Some ministries financed by the United Church were deliberately not identified with it.61

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Thorncliffe Park was one of the projects highlighted in Churches Where the Action Is! Written to inspire Christians to move outside the walls of the church and into the community, the book featured stories of ministries set up by the United Church (sometimes in ­collaboration with other churches) among people in diverse settings – blacks in Halifax after their displacement from Africville; low-income families in housing projects in major cities across the ­country; newcomers to suburban communities; hippies, indigenous peoples moving from reserves, and apartment-dwellers in Toronto; even a congregation meeting in a seed and fertilizer store in an Alberta village.62 But congregations that tried to combine outreach with fellowship sometimes met with resistance, as Rowntree Memorial United Church in London, Ontario, discovered. Its attendance had started to drop around 1964. About the same time it saw changes in the surrounding neighbourhood, which was less affluent than it had been when the church was built a decade earlier. The congregation decided in 1967 to become “more secular” by welcoming a variety of non-denominational organizations to use its property. The strategy not only failed to attract new members but also created a split in the congregation. The two University of Western Ontario sociologists hired as consultants to help the congregation assess its needs found a clash between those they named the “Contented,” who saw themselves as part of mainstream Canadian society, and the “Discontented,” who were critical of mainstream society and wanted to change it.63 The consultants also discovered that the minister’s attempts at outreach to the Discontented were at odds with the priorities of the lay leadership. The minister had urged the congregation to accept “less reputable” groups, such as a drop-in centre for youth and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings; the lay leadership preferred groups like the Girl Guides and the Badminton Club. Survey results indicated that Rowntree’s “desired minister” was “not one who leads the church toward identification of social problems and community action, but one who concentrates his efforts on the personal needs of the members of the congregation themselves.” The study provided data that illustrated the tension between those looking for fellowship and those wanting social action. It also uncovered a sense of alienation that was developing among active women in the congregation, who did most of the work while men exercised most of the power.64

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The dilemma of the Rowntree congregation, as described by the consultants, was the same one facing more and more congregations after the 1960s: “many people today, particularly the young, are less satisfied with life than the core members of Rowntree Church, and notably uninterested in joining a warm, supportive Christian congregation.”65 But the alternatives offered by the United Church proved to be no more appealing to idealistic young people. Many who in the past might have been drawn by their social concern to serve as ministers, missionaries, or church volunteers were finding new and exciting secular opportunities to engage in community development. Groups like Canadian University Service Overseas ­ (c u so) and the Company of Young Canadians, organized in the 1960s and funded by the federal government, competed with faithbased initiatives such as overseas missions and the s cm , which had once been magnets for student idealism.66 Meanwhile the momentum was shifting to groups that were more adept than the United Church at emphasizing the personal dimensions of being religious. The church’s attempts to become more cosmopolitan clashed with the approach of conservative evangelicals who focused on a personal decision for Christ and a few other key beliefs as tests of valid faith. Neo-evangelicals were not schooled to consider the fellowship of a worshipping community as counting for much when it came to salvation.67 Nor were they saddled with structures that were as bureaucratic as the denominations identified with ecumenical Protestantism. Their conversion experience provided a narrative that oriented their spiritual pilgrimage. ‘Being United’ required no similar testimony to a life-changing or charismatic experience – a vagueness that was sometimes mistaken for coldness and lack of Christian conviction. The baby boomers, observes Owram, had elevated experience as a way to restore the emotion that was essential to individual and social transformation, often turning to music to find it.68 The United Church had come to regard emotion as suspect, and was at a competitive disadvantage in this new spiritual marketplace, where religion was viewed as a personal, or at most ‘tribal,’ choice. Neo-evangelicalism was not ecumenical Protestantism’s only rival. At e& ss ’s annual meeting in 1962, the Christian Century’s Kyle Haselden warned that syncretism was the most dangerous threat facing American religion. Arriving almost everywhere in the world at the same time, according to Haselden, its particular expression in

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North America involved the practice of picking and choosing ideas from a variety of religions and putting them in “a secular basket” in an effort to convert “the pagan mind of our age.”69 The United Church soon discovered that its liberal tendencies made its youth highly susceptible to this eclectic approach to spirituality.70 The university campus was a place where the variety of religious experience was on display. The growth of departments of religion on university campuses was an indication that interest in religious questions was not dead. “Campus lectures on religion are crowded,” the Observer reported, but “mass meetings and preaching services are out.”71 To complicate matters further, the United Church found itself struggling to identify its theological distinctiveness once the old markers that had defined its forebears were forgotten. It had not been created to uphold or advance a particular doctrine, nor were there ritual practices that its members were expected to adopt. Though founded as a church that was broadly inclusive, it was not self-consciously diverse – in fact theological and cultural differences had initially been suppressed. Author Lucy Maud Montgomery had once expressed the sentiments of disheartened Presbyterian dissenters when she dismissed the new church as “nameless.”72 It was a taunt that came back to haunt the United Church when immigrants to Canada did not connect its name to the Methodist or Reformed churches they had left behind. After Vatican II, even the Catholic Church no longer served as a foil against which to construct an alternative Protestant identity. The United Church was thus imperilled by a tradition of theological inclusion that gave it the appearance of sameness in an age where difference increasingly defined identity. Donald Mathers had sounded confident about the United Church’s theological future as he assessed the situation at a mid-decade consultation on the world mission of the church. “I think we all realize that in the United Church we have far more of a common mind than most churches do in spite of the fact that people often think we are  scattered, vague and uncertain.” Disputing that the desire for Christian unity had led to a lack of firm conviction, he used the phrase “extreme centre” to describe the United Church’s theological orientation: “a centre in the sense that we represent no unbalanced presentation of the Gospel, but extreme in the sense that we are no less convinced or enthusiastic about our convictions than anyone else.”73

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During the 1960s, both the left and the right tugged at this extreme centre. The left offered a so-called secular theology that critics claimed was indistinguishable from the thought of Unitarians or well-meaning secular humanists. The right bore a resemblance to fundamentalism in its emphasis on a narrow definition of ­biblical authority as a test of faith. Those caught in-between – including many United Church ministers – interpreted what it meant to be in essential agreement with the articles of faith in the Basis of  Union in different ways. Those inside and outside the United Church assumed that its members had a wide berth for theological exploration. The ideal of a common faith was moving toward a multi-creedal pragmatism. A pivotal decision in that transition was the inclusion of what came to be known as the New Creed in the Service Book issued in 1969. The project to revise the Book of Common Order, which had been in use since 1932, was launched in 1958. By the time the Committee on Church Worship and Ritual completed its work a decade later, the United Church was in an entirely different liturgical situation. The report presented to the General Council in 1968 reflected the committee’s struggle to steer a course between “a very vocal ‘left’ that demands radical change” and “a not-so-articulate ‘right’ that resists all but minor emendations.” Their aim was to produce a service book for public worship that was “the work of the whole Church.” The committee admitted that the language problem had bedevilled them; they were well aware that efforts to communicate with “technological man” had challenged the authority of the Bible in new ways by raising questions about the adequacy of biblical concepts. However, they were unequivocal about their own approach: the Service Book affirmed the use of scriptural language “as the most fitting vehicle for liturgy,” insisting that to do otherwise would be “to cast ourselves adrift in a sea of chaos.”74 The committee assumed that worship would continue to evolve by adapting the best of the past to the needs of the present, as they believed they had done in preparing the Service Book. However, what they had witnessed as they prepared it led them to expect a revolution in liturgy in the years ahead that might well involve a sharp break with familiar practices.75 Despite the committee’s own instincts to preserve tradition, a decision made in 1965 proved to be a historic (though perhaps unintentional) step to break with tradition: a request was sent to the Committee on Christian Faith for a short

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creed that could be used as an alternative to the Apostles’ Creed in the baptismal service. By offering the choice of either an ancient or a modern creed, suggests N.K. Clifford, the new Service Book gave the impression that the use of a creed was “solely a matter of personal taste,”76 thus inviting theological novelty. Unlike many contemporary liturgical resources designed during the 1960s, the New Creed was to find an enduring place both as a baptismal creed and a brief statement of faith.77 It resonated with and beyond the spirit of the times with its opening words that captured a longing for fellowship in defiance of existential loneliness: “Man is not alone.”78 Parts of the New Creed were controversial from the outset, and the General Council that received it in 1968 sent it back to the committee for redrafting.79 Even then, not everyone was entirely happy with the results. Reflecting the position of those who objected to the continued use of ancient creeds in the liturgy John Burbidge, a young United Church minister doing doctoral work in philosophy at the University of Toronto, found it ironic that a church that encouraged moral action expected “weekly perjury” by its members. The executive should have left the version presented to the General Council as it was, he complained, rather than watering it down until it had “the force of a wet dishrag.”80 He was especially disappointed to note that those he called “the orthodox” had succeeded in replacing “we proclaim his kingdom,” with “to proclaim Jesus crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.” However, he conceded that the redrafted version was better than no new creed at all.81 Berkley Reynolds agreed that half a loaf was better than none, and praised God that “the most socialistic of any Council” in the United Church’s history had “refused to scuttle the cross and resurrection as the centre of Christian faith.” He commended the General Council for sending “the skeleton” back to the executive “to have some meat put on its bones.”82 He suggested that those who preferred a “humanistic” creed that spoke only of “the true Man, Jesus,” rather than the power of the resurrection, should join the Unitarians.83 But other u c r f members were not appeased. Graham Scott charged that a  creed that was only half true was still “intolerably heretical.” A Unitarian would, in his opinion, have no theological difficulty with the New Creed. He urged uc r f backers to emulate those in the early church who had paid no heed to the authority of heretical Arian bishops by likewise ignoring the United Church’s “ecclesiastical

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­ ureaucrats.” Perhaps, he added, conservatives should write their b own “short, memorable and accurate summary of the Christian faith in the several contemporary idioms of thought and language.”84 One of the paradoxes of panarchy was that the evangelical wing had already developed what the uc rf was calling a “new creed,” which had reworded the article on Scripture in the Basis of Union.85 This new article described the Bible as “God’s objective revelation in word written, given by Divine inspiration (God breathed), is entirely trustworthy, [sic] and therefore ‘the only infallible rule of faith and life.’”86 Its interpretation of revelation and infallibility ran counter to a report that had been presented to the General Council in 1966. The Committee on Christian Faith had admitted that after six years of study, it was still unable to “produce a clearly defined statement” on revelation. On one issue, however, its report sounded unequivocal: infallibility belonged to God alone, not to the human words of Scripture that bore witness to God’s self-revelation.87 Prepared as the debate over biblical inerrancy was heating up in evangelical circles, the uc r f ’s “new creed” placed more emphasis on the Bible “as a revelation in itself, rather than as a record of revelation,” Berkley Reynolds explained, and thus took “a stronger position on its infallible authority” than the Basis of Union. He admitted that the requirement that uc r f members be willing to sign this new declaration was a problem for some sympathizers, who objected to adopting it in addition to the twenty articles of the Basis of Union.88 Reynolds reported that conservative evangelicals were encouraged by signs that some theological college professors were disenchanted with “the radical theology that has plagued the church.”89 But there was little evidence that they considered the u crf a viable alternative. The “incipient fundamentalism” of the u crf ’s position on verbal inerrancy was a feature of the movement that bothered Alan Davies, a United Church minister teaching in the religion department at the University of Toronto. He was “in favor of spiritual renewal” but “not at the price of a new orthodoxy that is really an old and potentially dangerous heresy.”90 Others no doubt agreed with a young minister who wrote that he was opposed to a “gutless liberalism that leans over backwards to join the chorus of the Church’s critics and ends up calling on us to surrender the gospel to the spirit of the age.” However, he was just as opposed to the approach of Reynolds and the uc r f, which he described as “a sheer conservatism that blindly defends the status quo.”91

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Liberal evangelicals were also uncomfortable with the demand to sign a statement of faith. Clarke MacDonald declared that when it came to proclaiming the fundamentals as summed up by the Saviour, he would “take a back seat to no one in or outside of ‘Renewal Fellowship.’” But signing a statement that would put him “in some creedal strait jacket” was another matter – and he wanted no part of it. He pleaded for toleration to keep the split that was developing from growing into a chasm that might take thirty or forty years to bridge.92 Failing to find common ground was a disturbing prospect that had far-reaching ramifications, since the United Church’s conciliar system of governance presumed the possibility that guidance might come from those holding a theological perspective different from one’s own. With its own people testing the boundaries of being a “united” church, the 1960s was hardly a propitious time to explore what it meant to be a “uniting” church. Yet offers to try were hard to turn down. Since its own founding, the United Church had been hoping to add a chapter to the story of church union in Canada.93 Not surprisingly it jumped at the opportunity to work toward a re-united Christendom, as an invitation from the Church of England’s General Synod put it in 1943.94 However, nearly two decades passed with almost nothing to show from that initiative except for occasional outbursts of frustration.95 Fed up with futile gestures, the Observer reported in 1964 that the General Council had listened with “restrained enthusiasm to the customary reports that progress toward union with the Anglicans was still being made.”96 Suddenly there was a breakthrough in 1965 with agreement between representatives of the two bodies on the Principles of Union.97 Hopes ran high that union would happen within the next ten years. Even the somewhat skeptical Forrest was convinced that if the Anglican General Synod approved the document (as quickly happened later that year), “nothing should stop it.”98 The United Church followed suit and accepted the Principles of Union as a working document at the General Council in 1966. A draft of the Plan of Union was prepared by working committees in advance of a joint meeting of the General Synod and General Council in 1971. After two more years of study and revision, it was approved by both parties in 1973. However, all was in vain: despite the high calibre of the work done to advance the cause, negotiations ended two years later.99 In 1975

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the implementation committee stopped its work after the General Synod of the Anglican Church reaffirmed a commitment to Christian unity, but declined to proceed toward organic union with the United Church and the Disciples of Christ.100 Those who had optimistically presented the Principles of Union for approval in 1965 were never able to work out some irrecon­ cilable differences that were detectable from the outset. Anglicans generally assumed that the United Church had lost its distinctive Methodist quirks, relieving some of their lesser concerns. An Anglican sympathetic to uniting observed that the “emotional extremism” that had sometimes accompanied the Methodist emphasis on a direct experience of salvation (which Anglicans found “horrifying”) was no longer noticeable in the United Church. A puritanical attitude about personal conduct (which he claimed Anglicans found irrelevant) was gone too: “field research” at a cocktail party would, he conjectured, confirm that the younger generation no longer shared the same views of alcohol as the older generation. Its old moral fervour had “changed form and sphere of interest.”101 Yet the United Church that was taking shape in the 1960s retained characteristics that Anglican sensibilities found just as hard to tolerate. To begin with, it was still unabashedly Protestant, and as such was not regarded by some Anglicans as a real church. At Forrest’s invitation, an Anglican priest identified with its Anglo-Catholic wing (and vehemently opposed to union) prepared a statement about Christian unity from the perspective of those who held that “the Church” was comprised of Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox. In his view the United Church was one of the Protestant sects torn from the true Church by what he provocatively called the “Deformation.” Only by returning to the Catholic fold would the tragic schism end: “a watered-down Christianity, which would result from anything less than the complete submission of Protestantism to Catholicism, would be damnable.”102 Forrest knew full well that this candid statement of differences would rile readers, suggesting in an accompanying editorial that they contain themselves until the next issue, which would feature a rejoinder.103 But as negotiations proceeded, issues that had been intractable in the past remained sticking points. Among the most contentious was ordination. Put simply, without ordination by a bishop in accordance with the doctrine of apostolic succession, was the ordination of United Church ministers really valid? And to

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complicate matters further, the United Church ordained women; the Anglican Church did not. Although the Observer’s editorial position favoured union, the magazine provided opportunities for well-known United Church leaders to express their reservations about the Principles of Union. Couched in J.R. Mutchmor’s predictable defence of traditional Protestant practices was a show of support for the ideals of the new reformers. He warned that the Principles of Union would put in place a hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons “at a time when this out-moded, status-ridden ladder should be reverently stored in  some ecclesiastical museum.” Don Gillies, minister of Bloor Street United Church in Toronto, agreed. He was dismayed that the Principles of Union attempted to revive archaic and meaningless jargon and reassert a “religious ‘caste’ system” by making “fine distinctions between priest and layman, church and world.” Instead he believed the church ought to be “streamlining its organization, so that it might be an effective community of concern in the midst of a troubled world.”104 Not all who had reservations about the Principles of Union were against union as such. Jean Hutchinson, former chair of the Board of Women, supported it, but was disturbed by the ambiguity about the role of women in the document. “One would not have thought it possible that the question of ordination of women could be reopened in this age!” she remarked. Mary Coburn, chair of the Board of Women’s finance committee, objected that women ministers would feel humiliated by being put in an anomalous position if the new church were to suspend the ordination of women. She poked fun at a scenario of “bishops assuming their full dignity, double layers of skirts to prove it, and our ordained women, not unfrocked but feeling slightly naked, meeting with their brother clergy to vote on the propriety of admitting others of their kind.”105 Those who prepared the Principles of Union seemed unaware of how quickly the ecumenical scene was changing. Inadvertently, the negotiators stepped into what the United Church’s Committee on Ecumenical Affairs described in 1968 as an ecumenical ferment that had been sweeping through “the Church everywhere” during the previous two years. The report credited two events in particular for the sudden transformation of ecumenical dialogue: the optimism unleashed by Vatican II that closed in December 1965, and the Church and Society conference convened by the World Council of Churches

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in 1966. Inspired by what the report called “Secularization Theology,” a radical ecumenism was spreading like wildfire. European church leaders, particularly those influenced by the w cc, were saying that ecumenism ought to involve more than bringing together institutions that were themselves irrelevant.106 Supporters of Anglican-United Church union discovered to their chagrin that what seemed to them a daring plan to create a new church looked unadventurous when placed alongside the new ecumenism. George Johnston, himself a member of the General Commission on Union, admitted that some of the criticism of the Principles of Union from the left, such as the lack of modern idiom and its theological verbiage, was justified. And if predictions of a “wholly secularized” future were to come to pass, he wondered if new forms of worship, music, and ministry needed to be considered as well.107 The proposed episcopal structure bore more resemblance to bureaucratic systems of the past than the religionless Christianity predicted for the future. On the other hand, for Anglicans who saw the historic episcopate and the ancient creeds as the basis for Christian unity, Vatican II held out the enticing possibility of union on a more ambitious scale. Already suspicious about whether United Church ministers were properly ordained, Anglo-Catholics were unlikely to be reassured by news that the United Church had adopted a New Creed and was thinking about ministry in even broader terms. Union met resistance from the Council for the Faith, an organization formed to preserve Anglican doctrine and forms of worship as well as the historic creeds as the minimal basis for union.108 The results of a 1970 survey conducted by the Observer and its Anglican counterpart, the Canadian Churchman, turned out to be closer to the mark than church union supporters would have wished. It detected a predilection for the status quo that five more years of study and discussion was unable to counteract.109 Described as the first straw vote on the “feeling from the pews,” the survey was admittedly unofficial and open to the bias of mail-in polls (where strong feelings tended to be overrepresented). However, it was evident that United support for union was more widespread and enthusiastic than Anglican. There was also a striking difference between the young United and Anglican respondents: the former were most strongly in favour of union, while the latter were most strongly opposed to it (and threatening to leave if it took place).110

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Another hint of the dissimilarity in religious outlooks was revealed when respondents were asked where they would worship if there were no church of their own denomination nearby. More Anglican respondents indicated that they would choose a Roman Catholic rather than a United service (and among the Anglican clergy, the United Church placed third behind the Orthodox Church). By an even wider margin, United Church respondents picked the Presbyterian Church over the Anglican Church. When asked what change after union would concern them most, Anglican respondents chose doctrine, followed by the use of creeds, and worship practices. Acceptance of their ministers’ ordination was the main concern for United Church respondents, who reported hearing Anglicans refer to them as “so-called ministers.” Older respondents worried about being served wine at Communion, while younger ones wondered about the role of bishops (unimportant) and the ordination of women (imperative).111 Church union with the Anglican Church that seemed tantalizingly close in 1965 ultimately came to naught, landing a serious blow to the United Church’s claim to be a “uniting” church. Union with the Evangelical United Brethren Church in 1968, which added sixty-two congregations, was small consolation.112 The dream of re-uniting Christendom in Canada died; instead, interfaith coalitions attempted to transcend divisions by finding a common cause rather than a common statement of faith or common organizational principles. While there was public discomfiture when negotiations ended, those who had caught a vision of a more radical ecumenism may have breathed a sigh of relief. They had little allegiance to the traditions of the past; hence, for them, the loss of Protestant principles was not an impediment. However, the new church that union would create was, in their view, not nearly modern enough to meet the challenges of a post-denominational and anti-institutional age. So was organized religion doomed to obsolescence as critics supposed? The United Church’s own surveys concluded otherwise, but showed that it was facing serious challenges.113 Stewart Crysdale, who had conducted a number of those studies, reckoned that its organizational machinery had been designed to meet the rural conditions of the past, and was “singularly unsuited for dealing with modern social and personal problems” associated with urban life.114 Its structures assumed lines of authority and relationships that either

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no longer existed or no longer functioned as they had in the past. It was unclear what presbyteries, conferences, or the ‘Vatican’ (as the national leadership was sometimes called in jest) did for the church at the local level. The machinery was a mystery to some and a menace to others. And for those seeking religionless Christianity in the secular city, it was irrelevant.115 Two decades after church union, moderator J.R.P. Sclater claimed that his postbag was filled with letters on two issues in particular: whether the church “should, or should not, be solely an evangelistic power, dealing with the souls of men”; and who spoke authoritatively for the United Church, especially in cases where the proceedings of the General Council seemed at odds with regional and local church courts.116 The Commission on Church, Nation and World Order had considered presbyteries pivotal in implementing the United Church’s ambitious postwar agenda. But its assessment of how presbyteries were actually operating in the mid-1940s was hardly encouraging – and without well-functioning presbyteries, it predicted that the ­national body of the United Church would eventually become an association of “fairly independent congregations.”117 With the passing of another two decades, an organizational upheaval that transcended particular persons, boards, denominations, or even national borders brought that prediction closer to reality. The world, it seemed, was being turned upside down as lines of authority became horizontal rather than hierarchical, decision-making participatory rather than delegated to leaders, and action from the bottom-up rather than top-down. Authority was moving away from the centre, rather than toward it, and in the process, shifting more power to local congregations.118 The resulting turmoil left the national staff particularly exposed. Politicians and the general public could no longer confidently assume that United Church officials spoke for its members. Once the General Council was over, the force of its pronouncements was weakened by the disclaimer of the disaffected: “they don’t speak for me.”119 Church executives like Mutchmor had shown a smooth hand when they operated the machinery. “When I thought I had a good case, enjoyed my executive’s or board’s approval, and was able to fit a special endeavour into my generally crowded programme, I went to work,” he wrote in his memoirs.120 Even when people vehemently disagreed with or criticized Mutchmor, claims John Webster Grant, they seldom accused him of misstating the church’s policy.121 The

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same could not be said of national staff who served after him. Those who expected the General Council and its executive to speak as one voice on behalf of the United Church were frustrated by officers who expressed differing opinions. Hord, for example, was often criticized by some for his impatience, while others admired his efforts to be a catalyst for social justice. Colleagues argued that all members of the United Church ought to be free to speak their minds on difficult issues – and this included its officers, who were more than its “official spokesmen” (or its “intellectual eunuchs” as someone had described them).122 “Damn fools,” a minister who studied at Emmanuel College recalled principal Earl Lautenschlager fuming as he lambasted na­ tional executives for joining secular critics in complaining about organized religion; they were going to “break their neck kicking their asses so hard.” But he was also worried as he observed the impact of the changing times on students preparing for church leadership. His advice to those who were unsure about whether God was dead or Jesus was living was to get out of the ministry and find a job elsewhere.123 Some apparently did just that. The United Church had enjoyed an upsurge in candidates for ministry during the boom years of the 1950s. However, during the 1965-66 academic year alone, nearly 15 per cent of its candidates dropped out.124 By 1970 there was welcome news that many ministers who had resigned from the ministry or left a church position for a secular placement were quietly returning to the pastorate. But there was no denying the devastating losses: there were 1,121 fewer congregations in 1968 than in 1960, and only 280 students studying for full-time ministry, compared with 668 eight years earlier.125 The numbers reflected the impact that criticism of organized religion had on professional ministry.126 A contributor to Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot provocatively contrasted the manly figure he saw as the ideal clergyman with the typical minister, who was “paid to be good” and thus not treated as other men. As a result the typical minister had become a “ladies’ man” – his language free of obscenities, his thinking about sex more like a woman’s than a man’s, and a teadrinker at social functions where no liquor was served.127 A man who had decided to leave the ministry after twenty years poignantly described his professional crisis: worship was irrelevant, the focus of church members was on preserving the building, and there was little respect for his professionalism despite long hours of work.128

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A Commission on the Church’s Ministry in the Twentieth Century was formed to respond to the “growing sense of frustration amongst congregations, presbyteries, and ministers as they seek to actualize the church’s ministry in our changing society.”129 Its meetings were described as tense, as members struggled with their conviction that the state of the church demanded radical change.130 The report’s call for a less hierarchical model of ministry was bound to cause difficulties as it vied with the very different understanding of the church and its ministry in the Principles of Union. G. Campbell Wadsworth, retired in Montreal after many years in the ministry, was dismayed as he compared the two, so different that only with difficulty could he see them as “springing from the mind of one and the same Church.” If it truly represented the thinking of the United Church, he regretfully concluded, “we might as well speedily surrender all hope of further Reunion in our time.”131 Surprisingly even the new paradigm for ministry proposed by the commission in its controversial set of recommendations failed to appreciate fully the revolution in church life that women were about to trigger. The new theological understanding of the church’s relationship to the world had seeped into the vocabulary of those who prepared the report, but inclusive language evidently had not. The church was a place where “men are invited to grow as sons of God rooted in a Christian community and sustained by the Christian hope”; it was “so ordered that it can fulfill its role in God’s intentions for man.” The report played down distinctions between ordained ministers and the laity by emphasizing the ministry of the whole people of God, but still presented a picture of the church’s personnel as male.132 Women had always been active in the United Church’s congregational life, but were under-represented and less visible elsewhere in its organizational structures. Although the United Church had decided to ordain women in 1936, three decades later there were relatively few female ministers. There were inklings of change after 1964, when the way was cleared for married women to be ordained. That year the eloquence of the female commissioners to General Council caught Forrest’s attention. Even so, he opined that although United Church women were “at least a hundred years ahead of where their sisters are in most of the great churches of Christendom,” the General Council was “still a man’s world.”133 That too was about to change, though slowly at first.

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A series of events coincided to change the face of the United Church’s administrative and pastoral leadership. The first major overhaul of its governing structures since 1925 was already underway when serious negotiations with the Anglican Church commenced. The process that led to restructuring was set in motion in 1960, at a time when the United Church still hoped to escape the general decline that churches in the uk and continental Europe had experienced. The task of the Long Range Planning Committee was to study the planning procedures of other North American churches and to assess the adequacy of its own structures and policies “to meet the needs of a growing Church in a changing world.”134 By the time the plan was implemented, over a decade had passed and the United Church was facing a drastically different situation: it was no longer growing and the world had changed in ways that those preparing the report had not imagined. To improve effectiveness, the plan called for reducing the number of boards at the national level from twelve to five (no more than could be counted on the fingers of one hand, as it was sometimes explained). An ambitious two-year experiment was proposed as the first step. A new Division of Congregational Life and Work was established to coordinate the work of four boards.135 The transition from boards to divisions coincided with changes in a number of high-profile executive positions.136 The confusion of connecting new positions with new personnel likely reinforced suspicion in some quarters that a nameless ‘someone’ in Toronto was changing their church. Sadly, ‘divisions’ seemed an apt term to describe the lack of communication among the new units. Congregations experienced them as insular and resistant to influence, further weakening connections between them. The gradual loss of familiar names for the functions of evangelism, social service, home missions, and Christian education was also alienating; like the names of the persons associated with them, they seemed to vanish with the creation of the Division of Mission in Canada that was responsible for them after restructuring.137 Changing the descriptions of the divisions and their assigned responsibilities was to prove far more than cosmetic. Harold Vaughan, who witnessed events as former secretary of the Board of Colleges and Secondary Schools, claimed that restructuring coincided with the “diminished role of the dominant figure and leaders.” Thereafter national church staffers were “increasingly treated as if they were civil servants rather than executive secretaries and leaders.”138

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Before the 1960s the “dominant figure” had nearly always been male. The shortage of men preparing for ministry had been a persistent problem for the United Church from the outset, with the healthy supply of candidates for ordination in the 1950s an anomaly. A decade later, with enrolment dropping in theological colleges and discouraged clergy leaving in significant numbers, women found a more welcome reception than in the past as they made their way to the classrooms of the United Church’s theological colleges and eventually to church pulpits.139 Women began to insist on not only visibility but also a voice. For instance, as part of the negotiations that saw the creation of the uc w, the wms transferred $6.5 million in a combination of funds and property holdings to the newly integrated Board of Missions in exchange for a promise of more representation on committees, especially at the national level. The first issue of the Observer for 1962 launched “The United Church Woman” as a regular section of the magazine, and the masthead soon listed names in the role of women’s editor, including regular contributors Grace Lane and Patricia Clarke. The editorial voice of women was amplified in 1966 when the women’s editor became the associate editor, with Clarke named to the new position. But many women were left wondering whether the losses from the merger were greater than the gains.140 Meanwhile the situation of women in the church was still far from equitable. In one of the Observer’s early pieces on the feminist movement, Barbara Bagnell reported that many feminists saw the Christian church as a bastion of male superiority, and had decided therefore to leave it.141 Feminist theology combined with the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, instituted in 1967, to galvanize women in the United Church. Their numbers at meetings of presbytery, conference, and General Council had increased substantially by 1970. In fact, Forrest surmised that presbytery might soon be comprised of women, ministers, and a few laymen. “In the headquarters establishment,” however, it was “still a man’s world,” he reported. Women served as associate secretaries only where the Manual mandated a female appointment. Although most female members of the United Church were married, it appeared to Forrest that only single women were considered for senior positions. Only one senior secretary was female, and restructuring had reduced her office in size and status.142 Those who later claimed that feminists had “destroyed the church” were partly right.143 As women assumed leadership roles,

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they generated further changes to the United Church’s organizational culture. Often preferring more fluid networks and coalitions, they joined other critics of the United Church’s complex hierarchical structure; they were among those who hoped to change the United Church by helping it to “fail gracefully.” In doing so they believed that they were simply fixing machinery that had been designed and broken by men. By strengthening the church’s capacity for change, women were quarrelling with the ‘fathers’ to be sure – not only with their understanding of mission but also with the male assumptions embedded in the church’s organizational structures. But women, and especially the feminists among them, were also quarrelling with the ‘mothers’ of the  church, whose sense of vocation had been rooted in Christian homes. Those most dismayed by the growing feminist influence were the men and women who remembered the United Church of 1925 and whose hearts still resided there. One of the major challenges facing those who operated the denominational machinery was how to deal with the sheer volume of business. “A Church Court Forced into Preoccupation with Its Own Housekeeping” summed up in a subheading the Observer’s withering assessment of the 1964 General Council. The meetings had been socially overwhelming and spiritually uninspiring. People tended to focus on and debate trivial matters; the assembly had “tinkered well”; the “machinery creaked”; and the average commissioner had been confused by the complexity and sheer volume of the business to be done. Just when it seemed as though the church was on the verge of moving forward, something negative nearly always happened: “The wrong direction was taken. The amendments were confused. Things got referred to three boards, five committees, and seven conferences.”144 Four years later there were signs of change. To encourage wider participation, some of the business at the 1968 General Council was conducted in table groups rather than by formal debate. John Webster Grant suggests that assumptions about decision-making were changing as well: gut feeling was valued more than intellect, and relying on precedents (deemed the unwelcome influence of past elites) was rejected. There was a dismantling of traditional authority as “experts, including clergy, lost caste.” It marked for Grant an abrupt and radical change in how the United Church conducted its

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business.145 The gathering was variously described at the time as both “reckless” and lacking in “thorough discussion” of its decisions.146 Yet the 1968 General Council that some found frustrating was exciting and exhilarating to others. (One woman admitted that she had found it both infuriating and satisfying.)147 It made significant decisions related to worship, ministry, and the role of the church in the field of social welfare. It recommended that the Canadian government reduce sales of war materials to the United States, provide a guaranteed annual income, and designate 2 per cent of g n p to foreign aid. It also called for the end of bombing in Vietnam, recognition of Israel by Arab countries, resettlement of Arab refugees, population control, and sale of the church’s shares in a bank that supported apartheid in South Africa.148 Even though there was ­silence on the old moral issues, the United Church was clearly not about to pull back from speaking out on major social concerns, even when it meant breaking with the diplomatic style of past ­policy reports.149 The focus on what was new tended to obscure the ways in which the United Church managed to provide continuity and stability in key areas. The restructured machinery had familiar features – too many for some. There were still seemingly innumerable committees at all levels of church life and too much information to absorb. But, paradoxically, the United Church’s expansive administrative structure, so often blamed for the ills that beset the denomination, may have helped to safeguard its survival during a time of rapid change. The church was still large enough and strong enough to absorb shocks. Its conciliar model of governance was in a sense like a bridge, designed to withstand pressure and even damage in one section without collapse of the entire edifice. Its leaders were positioned to detect problems at one level and solve them before the entire system crumbled. To an extent the United Church was thus able to mediate the impact and pace of social and theological changes. At least when working effectively, the conciliar system meant that different levels experienced adaptation at varying paces, often with outcomes that differed as well. It thus operated as what ecologist C.S. Holling calls a dynamic hierarchy:150 it provided support for innovation at some levels, while elsewhere offering stability from the impact of experiments that were shaking the system; and it mitigated the effects of “excessive exuberance.”151 The instinct to preserve was strong in the lay leadership of congregations, especially in rural

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areas. Ministers provided pastoral care as before. At the national level, officials in a few key positions supplied a measure of continuity as well. Long, for instance, had served as the United Church’s third general secretary for nearly two decades by the time he retired in 1972. Forrest was editor of the Observer for almost a quarter of a century when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1978. Forrest had an ear for hearing what was being whispered in the pews about controversial stands the United Church had taken, and offered space for both sides to air their views. His communications strategy not only boosted the magazine’s circulation figures during the 1960s but also helped its readers to anticipate and thus adapt to change.152 No one who took the time to read the Observer during those years could legitimately complain of not knowing that change was afoot. As those who founded the United Church could attest, major change does not come without risk. A process of change does not always end happily. While an adaptive cycle can renew a system, a maladaptive cycle can result in “cascading collapse,” says Holling. Adaptive change can be devastating to organizations, if the slow pace makes it seem as though nothing is happening, or when the process is so complex and highly contested that no agreement on action can be reached. Some systems are prone to what he calls a rigidity trap where novelty is smothered because the system’s high resilience makes it resistant to adaptation.153 Especially at risk are systems where past success has allowed stresses to accumulate, adds Homer-Dixon. “The longer people sustain a social, economic or ecological system in its growth phase, the sharper, harder, and more destructive its ultimate breakdown will be.”154 It gives one pause to consider the United Church’s adaptive cycle in these terms. Did its earlier successes, the postwar revival for instance, create the conditions for its later malaise? Did its response to the 1960s allow it to “fail gracefully,” or only to postpone the reckoning? Homer-Dixon tells of a conversation with Holling where they spoke of the threat of deep collapse: “a pan-caking implosion of the entire system as higher-level adaptive cycles collapse, which causes progressive collapse at lower levels.” A situation where many cycles “become synchronized and peak together” is particularly prone to this danger.155 If the higher levels of the United Church’s conciliar system were to collapse, would a pan-caking ­implosion follow? Was R.C. Chalmers right when he predicted in 1970, “if you close headquarters down, I can see the whole thing breaking up”?156

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Still, Ernest Long, whose gloomy warnings had made headlines a few years before, seemed heartened by what he had witnessed in 1968. He commended the delegates to the General Council that year for demonstrating “a real concept of the outward thrust of the church into the world” for the “first time.”157 His declaration perhaps startled those who assumed that the United Church had been concerned for social redemption from the outset. Had it not always called for building the Kingdom of God and Christianizing the social order? Yet Long had caught a glimpse of something new: the machinery was more and more being driven by those whose approach to mission focused on the world outside the building that housed the congregation rather than the faith and fellowship of the people gathered in it. It was a recognition that the United Church’s social impulse was changing as much (and perhaps with a greater impact on what it meant to be United) as its methods of evangelism. Insiders and outsiders alike sensed that the United Church was reforming. The contours of the emerging church were not to everyone’s liking – but then again, neither was the United Church that had been formed in 1925. Some were as disappointed with what they saw taking shape as the non-concurring Presbyterians had been with that earlier union. They felt as though they no longer belonged to the same church – and they hadn’t even voted to leave it. Among them were some its most committed members, who feared that the United Church was being destroyed by those trying to mend it. The underlying assumptions of the founding vision were giving way to new ways of thinking about faith and community. It was clear that adaptation would be easier said than done. Even the most optimistic conceded that, given the general decline of organized religion, a turnaround would take time.158 Conference presidents from across Canada interviewed in 1970 expected the situation in their region to get worse before it got better. “We ain’t seen nothing yet,” predicted the president of British Columbia Conference. He warned that there would be nothing left of the United Church unless it figured out how to do ministry in “a world without churches.” There was no such thing as “one congregation” anymore, since most were divided between groups wanting at least three different things: to be activists, to have a quiet place to remember the past, or to learn about their faith.159 So was there an “upside of down” to the panarchy of the 1960s? It was hard to find one at the time. But given the bleak forecasts for

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organized religion during that period, perhaps it should be said that simply surviving was an achievement in and of itself. The United Church discovered more resilience than many had given it credit for: its congregations were not willing to die quickly or quietly. More significantly, it emerged with a sharper sense of what it stood for and what was holding it together. No longer could the United Church be counted as evangelical, in the contemporary meaning of the term – but neither could it truthfully be called Unitarian. Though it was perhaps moving away from what Mathers had described as the ­ ­“extreme centre,” its formal theological framework was still rooted in a Christocentric liberalism. ‘Being United’ still allowed a freedom to explore that was discouraged in many other faith traditions. However, the appeal of eclectic theologies and the persistence of the  u crf were  indications that the United Church was becoming more self-­ consciously diverse. Moreover, at least for the time being, its machinery would not be run with episcopal parts borrowed from Anglicans. Few had done more than Donald Mathers to provide theological resources for the United Church as it began to come to grips with the demise of Christendom in Canada. His death from leukemia in 1972 at the age of fifty-one was a blow not only to Queen’s Theological College where he had served as professor and principal for nineteen years but also to a denomination that had turned to him for theological leadership.160 The order of service for his funeral at Chalmers Church reflected his appreciation for tradition: the organ music was by J.S. Bach; the readings were from Isaiah 40 and Romans 12; the congregation sang Psalm 23 (to the tune Crimond) and “Now Thank We All Our God.” But the words of assurance were from The Word and the Way, which Mathers had written for the controversial New Curriculum a decade earlier. Characterizing the book as “almost a devotional statement of the Christian faith” and “an intimate, deeply personal statement of Donald’s inner story,” the presiding minister drew from it to remind mourners of what Mathers had “written into our hearts and minds with his pen and his life.” Those gathered then heard him read what Mathers had written in the chapter on “The Resurrection and the Life to Come”: “Those who believe in Christ have already passed from spiritual death into spiritual life (John 5:24). Physical death still remains but it has now been robbed of its sting. To the Christian death becomes an occasion for the exercise of faith, and an opportunity for love to transform the painful necessity of dying into a willing act of giving up and of self-surrender to God.”161

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The United Church was by then dealing with its own painful necessities. During the 1960s it turned a corner and gingerly made its way into a world that no longer reserved a place of prominence for organized religion. It stepped toward that future with new models of worship and fellowship, a new creed, and a new organizational design. A new mission drove its agenda. It no longer considered itself a national church in the old sense. Instead it had a ministry in and to the world that came with a new emphasis on social action. The crisis kindled a difficult but unavoidable conversation about its identity that continues today. And in that exchange both conservers and innovators planted seeds of memory and hope, beneath the hard soil of an indifferent culture, for another generation to harvest.162

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Epilogue Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets

The result of a “lamentable misunderstanding” was how Walter Bryden of Knox College described the United Church as he defended his decision to remain a Presbyterian. “The Church is and shall remain the Church of God just in so far as she is not indigenous with the soil of any country, or determined by the habits, thoughts and customs of any people ... The true Church belongs to no age and no country.”1 Those who had founded the United Church disagreed. They saw adaptation to time and place as a sign of vitality, and ­believed that they had been called to work together to build the Kingdom of God in Canada. As the fortieth anniversary of church union approached, the United Church appeared to have made remarkable progress toward that end. Morale was so high that “outsiders often complain that we act as if we were the church in Canada,” wrote John Webster Grant in 1963.2 By then most of the old wounds left by the controversy over its founding had healed. Relations between the two churches were so friendly that a local newspaper reporter had the temerity to ask the minister of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Kitchener whether the United Church was “Presbyterian.” Answering “yes,” former moderator Findlay G. Stewart explained that those who had continued as the Presbyterian Church in Canada had resisted church union because they “were opposed to organizing the Kingdom of God.” But the United Church had since “evolved,” as he put it, and the “old Methodist traditions had not remained in the fabric.” Asked whether

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the time had come for Presbyterians to join the United Church, Stewart retorted that it was “just as fair to ask why the United Church doesn’t return to Presbyterianism in name since it already has in fact.” He predicted that union might happen within a generation, further evolving from present day co-operation to a “natural birth.”3 What followed was not an institutional evolution that would bring the Presbyterian and United churches together, but a cultural revolution that hit both with a speed and severity that stunned observers. Essayist Robert Fulford saw the decline of organized religion as a prime illustration of the impact of the new style of social criticism on Western societies: no consideration had been given to what would replace discarded ideas and institutions. “Under the pressure of criticism, great institutions vanish – not actually (they’re still there, in tangible form) but imaginatively.”4 Leaders of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution hadn’t burned churches or killed priests – they just ignored them. Meanwhile, Canadian Protestant churches, and the United Church in particular, “simply crumbled under the weight of the attacks against them from within and without.” In 1960 almost everyone took them seriously, but a decade later hardly anyone did. “Once, not long ago, it mattered what the United Church said about liquor laws or Sunday closing or birth control; now nobody cares, unless he’s professionally involved.” Fulford saw it as an example of how things change “without announcement, without decision, without any clear line of demarcation.”5 Smaller denominations and independent congregations have the luxury of declining or even disappearing free of public scrutiny. Not so the United Church. As Canada’s largest Protestant church, it drew much media attention when its influence began to wane. Its statistical decline is often interpreted as a consequence of a faulty approach to theology or flawed assumptions about the task of the church – the impending doom that critics had forecast at the time of union. For instance, when historian Mark Noll asks “what happened to Christian Canada?,” he links its passing to the victory of the “modernistic social gospel” at the time of church union, which “fatally compromised” the ability of the founding traditions “to make any kind of a sharp Christian impact on Canadian thought, society, politics, or spirituality.”6 Was the making of the United Church a “tragic failure,” as some have claimed?7 Judged by the standard of what it hoped to become, perhaps so. Yet measured by what it accomplished in the attempt,

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one might offer a more charitable assessment; one could say it has been both a failure and a success. The early twentieth century was one of the few times in Canadian history when the church union experiment could have been attempted at all. The movement was launched during the late stages of western Christendom, an era when a symbiotic relationship between religion, politics, and culture was still assumed. The United Church adapted to the ethos of the early twentieth century by presenting itself as the church best suited to meet the spiritual needs of a young nation. With religious identity tied to nationalism, ‘made in Canada’ was a feature that gave the United Church a boost in a country looking for partners in nation-building. Not so later: pluralism, the privatization of spirituality, and the church’s own failure to find consensus loosened the customary connections between faith and community. The United Church was not only sharing the public arena with other religious groups but also seeing its influence on its own members compromised by cultural competitors who vied for their attention. In the new global village, its national particularity was a liability that made it difficult to contend with ethnic or transnational denominational rivals that had better name recognition outside Canada. Immigrants who had belonged to Methodist or Reformed churches before their arrival did not always find their way to the church that had been formed to unite them in Canada. The United Church is less racially diverse ­today than it was before adopting a new approach to mission in the 1960s.8 Channelling divided religious traditions into a united force was an exciting prospect for the founders of the United Church. However, what they saw as the obvious path to the Kingdom of God appeared less certain to spiritual pilgrims a few decades later. As time passed, the church’s call to Christianize the social order seemed arrogant and paternalistic. The heady optimism that saw the 1925 union as the first in a series of unions that would end denominational divisions in Canada was chastened by the failure of union negotiations with the Anglican Church. Its organizational structure, once advantageous in coordinating scarce resources to help struggling congregations in small towns and rural communities, was less effective in a decentralized society. Even its community spirit seemed old-­fashioned, a vestige of village life that was unappealing to urban sophisticates accustomed to anonymity.

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The new world order that materialized after the Second World War was a precarious place for mainstream Protestantism in Canada. The religious neutrality espoused by the state gave an unintended advantage to religious groups that had not tried to weave their religious principles into public life or relied on the association of church attendance with good citizenship. A situation in which religion, politics, and culture were no longer mutually reinforcing was uncharted territory for the United Church as it grappled with the realization that creating a Christian Canada was unlikely – and perhaps even undesirable – in a pluralistic and segmented world. But would an ‘un-united’ Protestantism have done more to forestall the end of Christendom? After all, neither the Presbyterian name nor the more conservative theology of the Presbyterian Church was enough to ward off a statistical decline as steep as that experienced by the United Church.9 One can only speculate whether the Methodist and Congregational churches would have fared better if union had not happened; however, there is little cause for optimism if the situation of their denominational counterparts in the United States and Britain is any indication. Then was the making of the United Church a mistake? The answer to that question is not as obvious as the non-concurring Presbyterians believed. Its formation coincided with the late stages of what historian Jeffrey Cox describes as an institutional revival in Western Christianity. In his view, the attempt by churches to extend their influence was not a mistake, since they succeeded in shaping the politics, social welfare, and public values of their generation.10 It would be hard to find a more stellar illustration of that institutional revival than the United Church. Though Canada’s democratic ideals and social welfare policies have since become separated from their Christian roots, the United Church did help to lay the groundwork for them. It has also left its mark on Canadian life in more subtle ways. Surveying religious life in God’s Dominion, Ron Graham described the United Church as “the most Canadian of churches,” noting that “like Canada, its strengths may be the same as its weaknesses: diversity, tolerance, compromise, humility, practicality, and niceness. Truth gets written by committee, mystery gets lost in the negotiation, decency gets translated into dullness, and the spirit gets hamstrung by the bureaucracy.”11 Was the United Church helping to create a new national identity for Canada or uncritically reflecting it? It is fair to say it did both.

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By the end of the 1960s it was evident that Canada was “rescripting” the role of religion in public life.12 The importance of faith was still acknowledged, but there was little attention paid to the particular contributions of one church or another. The new Canada wanted no church – Catholic or Protestant – as its conscience; there was little state interest in the United Church’s offer of friendly service. It was one among many religious groups in the public arena – regarded as no more or less than they, but having no special status as an aspiring national church. It found itself written out of the story of Canada’s past, relieved not only of its illusions but also of many of its ambitions and cherished notions. A sightseer at Expo 67, the international exposition in Montreal that coincided with Canada’s Centennial celebrations, would have caught a glimpse of the new public place of religion in a pluralistic Canada. Gary Miedema describes in fascinating detail what went on behind the scenes as the organizers’ initial proposal for one pavilion that would display religion as a unifying force was turned into three – with two of them illustrating the growing divide within Christianity between ecumenical and evangelical Protestants. Roman Catholics and mainstream Protestants worked together on what was called the Christian pavilion. Visitors discovered to their surprise that there was no explicit reference to churches, Jesus Christ, or even God in an exhibit that was designed to raise questions about faith rather than provide answers.13 The growing confidence of evangelical Protestants was signalled by their refusal to support the Christian pavilion. Disappointed that Expo 67 organizers rejected their repeated attempts to set up a pavilion for Billy Graham,14 they found a back door into the exposition with a proposal for a “scientific” display. Their Sermons from Science pavilion was approved on the condition that there be no proselytizing (a ban that Miedema says was completely ignored).15 Then there was the Jewish pavilion, which “offered beauty and rest, not shock and provocation,” and “announced a positive, inclusive message that fit very well with the exposition’s larger theme.”16 It was this pavilion – representing a non-Christian minority – that might well have come closest to modelling how the state preferred faith to be put on public display in the new Canada. Meanwhile the Presbyterian and United churches were rescripting the stories of their past. In 1965, as Presbyterians celebrated the ­anniversary of their resistance to church union, theologian Joseph

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McLelland complained that his church had wandered in the wilderness for forty years, using the memory of the controversy in a futile attempt to create a confessional church mystique and an evangelical ethos17 – raising doubts thereby about the United Church’s pedigree. As for the United Church, it had insisted that the Reformed and Methodist confessional traditions had been duly blended in church union, and initially defended its own claim to have remained evangelical. Following the social revolution of the 1960s, however, not as  many seemed to care about preserving past identities. In 1968 Northrop Frye noted a change in the perception of time, which was eroding old assumptions of continuity between past and present, especially among radicals influenced by the New Left. There was, he maintained, a flight from the past as people anxiously tried to keep up to date, ridding themselves of unfashionable ideas and techniques in the process. To be released from the past was considered a necessary step toward a utopian future.18 The changing times forced (or freed, some would say) the United Church to reconsider how it told its own story. The drama of casting itself as Canada’s national church was over.19 A subtle revision of the past was soon detectable. The smallest of the three founding traditions enjoyed unaccustomed attention; both the right and left wings of the church appealed to Congregationalist ideals – radicals claiming freedom to dissent from creedal authority and conservatives taking heart in congregational autonomy. The evangelical roots of the progressive movement were grafted to the philanthropic work of home missions to show the United Church as the flowering of the Canadian social gospel movement. Missionaries became reformers providing education and health services in small communities. Gone too were the unfashionable moral battles that the public had associated previously with the United Church. Peace, human rights, and economic justice were the battles in the new “good fight.”20 The search for a prophetic past revealed new heroes – paradoxically, most of them from the Methodist tradition that had been downplayed after the controversy over church union to showcase the Presbyterian heritage. The radical wing of the social gospel, with its Christian socialist tinges and support for the labour movement, supplied critics of the dominant culture and the institutional church. Among them were Salem Bland, Nellie McClung, and J.S. Woodsworth, celebrated for their affinities to the utopian, feminist, and oppositional inclinations of the cultural revolution taking

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place.21 Making more room for the radical minority tended to ­diminish the role of the more moderate liberal evangelical majority who too had hoped to build the Kingdom of God – George Monro Grant, Nathanael Burwash, E.H. Oliver, even S.D. Chown and George Pidgeon.22 Those who grew up in the United Church in the 1940s and 1950s knew less about its prophetic past than one might suppose. Theologian Douglas John Hall attributed his “incipient notions of the political dimensions of Christian belief” to being the son of a socialist union man who was known to drink – behaviour frowned upon in the United Church congregation in southwestern Ontario where he grew up. He later learned of J.S. Woodsworth and Salem Bland, but thought of them as “exceptions.” The church that formed his early images of Christianity did not swim against the stream as they had. Instead it “gave every indication of supporting to  the  full the fundamental structures of society, namely, of the ­dominant culture.”23 Bill Phipps’s memories of growing up in the United Church in Toronto were similar. His parents observed the Lord’s Day and would not allow him to throw around a baseball or play street hockey on Sunday. The man who was to advance the idea of a moral economy during his term as moderator (1997–2000) divulged that he was unaware of the “social justice dimension of the Christian faith” until he worked in Brooklyn, New York, in 1964. “No one had told me about the Social Gospel tradition of the United Church of Canada, expressed in the ministry of such people as Salem Bland, J.S. Woodsworth, R.B.Y. Scott, and their fellow travellers.” He claims to have known “nothing of the church’s history of pursuing social justice for the poor, for immigrants, and for people of colour; nor of its requirement that we lobby governments and challenge oppressive corporate power.”24 By the 1960s the social gospel was apparently no better known in Winnipeg. Despite growing up in Transcona surrounded by ccf n dp supporters, Bill Blaikie admitted that he did not know “even loosely about the social gospel, about the connection between Christian activism and left-wing politics in Canada, about prophetic Winnipeg personalities in the United Church tradition,” such as J.S. Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles. “I didn’t know about the political dimension of the gospel because I was brought up in a Christian world view that saw itself as apolitical.” But that was changing by

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the time Blaikie arrived at the University of Winnipeg (the former United College) in 1970. When American minister and civil rights activist William Stringfellow spoke to students in one of his classes, he learned about a prophetic way of dealing with the world that “was neither religious liberalism nor evangelical authoritarianism.” Studying at Emmanuel College was another turning point both theologically and politically. When he graduated in 1977, he no longer considered his call to ministry as “something that contradicted my call to public life.”25 Having already won the n d p nomination in his riding by the time he was ordained a year later, he served as an m p for nearly three decades. The United Church’s response to the revolution of the 1960s did not reverse its statistical decline. Perhaps that was not its intention. Proponents of a more this-worldly Christianity saw preoccupation with membership and buildings as symptomatic of the malaise of religion. The radicals among them dared to loosen ties to the salvation establishment of the institutional church, and echoed Bonhoeffer in calling for a religionless Christianity. They were willing to risk theological anonymity and denominational invisibility when they took their faith into the wider community. Yet thousands of United Church congregations across Canada still believed themselves “called to be the Church,” as the New Creed put it, “to celebrate God’s presence.” Here too the changing times forced (or freed) the United Church to reconsider how faith was formed when its people gathered for fellowship as a Christian community. Variety in worship practices was more evident after the 1960s. Some congregations saw their release from the past as an opportunity to explore contemporary styles of worship,26 while others turned to earlier Christian traditions to broaden their Protestant roots. The liturgical renewal sparked by Vatican II was a reminder of the unity in worship in the Western church before the Reformation. Making the United Church in 1925 was possible because its founders refused to be tied to a fixed view of the church or the world. Its remaking grew out of a similar conviction: the church is not called to escape time and place, but to engage them more faithfully. If there are to be more chapters added to its story in the twenty-first century, the United Church will undoubtedly undergo another such metamorphosis.27 In a culture that has lost much of its Christian memory, re-Christianizing those affiliated with it may require as

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bold a venture as church union once seemed, with even more uncertainty about the outcome. Will its commitment to inclusion leave it with enough distinctiveness to thrive in a culture of diversity? Will the connections of its conciliar system be strong enough to hold its congregations together? Will there be enough people on a spiritual quest for meaning, guidance, and consolation who want to belong to an organized community of faith? Will sufficient memory of its past survive to sustain its renewal in either a post-Christian or postsecular future? Time will tell.

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Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to the memory of two scholars who were outstanding historians of religion in Canada and ordained ministers of the United Church of Canada. Both, in different ways, influenced the course of my professional life. All who teach Canadian religious history are indebted to John Webster Grant, but perhaps none more than I. When he retired, I followed him in the position he held at Emmanuel College. (For a time I was reminded of him each day when I opened my office door and sniffed a faint trace of his pipe tobacco!) Yet, in a way, everyone who explores the history of Christianity in Canada has ‘followed’ him. He continues to lead us in our study of the past with his wise words preserved in print. Writing a book about the United Church is not something I imagined myself doing when I started teaching at Emmanuel. That changed in the months following the death of N.K. Clifford. I had first heard of him at the University of Chicago, where he did postdoctoral research before accepting a position at the University of British Columbia. My teachers Jerald C. Brauer and Martin E. Marty were excited about the book on the United Church that he was planning, and occasionally remarked that I “must meet Keith.” When I finally did meet Keith, in the spring of 1984, he was putting the finishing touches on a different book, which was published the following year: The Resistance to Church Union in Canada. In the preface he tells of his decision to accept a collection of papers that Knox College principal Allan Farris had discovered in a vault. After suffering a series of heart attacks, Farris had feared he would be unable to complete the project and had persuaded Keith to work with

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the documents. The book that resulted took longer to finish than expected, but after more than a decade spent examining the opposition to church union, Keith resumed working on a history of the denomination that had supported it. Keith died of a heart attack as I was wrapping up work on Serving the Present Age. In the years since then, I am still grateful (most days!) to Brian Fraser, his friend and literary executor, for convincing me that Keith would have wished me to continue what he had started. My proximity to the United Church archives, at that time located in the adjacent building, made the decision seem less an opportunity than an obligation. With the blessing of Keith’s wife, Sabine, I became the beneficiary of several boxes of his papers – and thus ­indirectly, the  recipient of support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: most of the articles and archival documents had been photocopied for Keith by his researcher, Neil Semple, whose work was funded by a sshrc research grant. From casual conversations with Keith and familiarity with his published work, I know a bit about what he had in mind for his project. This is not the book he would have written — nor is it the one I expected to write when I started. The manuscript seemed to have a mind of its own, first pulling me back to the nineteenth century (the spirit of John Grant at work perhaps), and then plunging me further into the twentieth century than I initially wanted to go. In the end, it has come to reflect the issues that have been woven into my own teaching and research over the years: the practice of piety, faith and public life, and comparative themes in Canadian and American religious history. I have no idea what Keith might have called his book, but I’d like to think he would have appreciated the title of mine. We had in common the influence of Brauer and Marty. It was in their classes that I was introduced to the work of Sidney Mead, whose use of G.K. Chesterton’s description of the United States as “a nation with the soul of a church” made me wonder, as a graduate student, whether the same could be said of Canada. A Church with the Soul of a Nation is in part an answer to a question that I scribbled on a page many years ago. This book has been slow in the writing. Along the way, I have compiled a far longer list of persons and institutions to thank than I can name in a few paragraphs, but the following were involved at key points. Along with Brian Fraser and Sabine Clifford, the late

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Bob Smith, then bc Conference archivist, sifted through the mate­ rials that eventually came to me. I was well served by librarians (especially those who work in Emmanuel’s library) and the staff at  the archives of bc Conference, Queen’s University, Victoria University, the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and the United Church of Canada. I have been privileged to work with wonderful colleagues over the years. Co-teaching courses at the Toronto School of Theology with Brian Clarke, Alan Hayes, Brian Hogan, Stuart Macdonald, and Mark Toulouse has created occasions for a lively exchange of ideas about religion in Canada. Special thanks goes to Roger Hutchinson, who has been a constant source of support and encouragement, as well as a perceptive reader of the manuscript. His research on the social policies of the United Church was a happy match for my work on its history. Together we directed a project on the United Church, generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. that provided funding for several conferences, graduate student stipends, and research assistants. I received a grant from the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada, and occasional funding from Victoria University through Emmanuel College. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Among the students funded by the Lilly grant was Ian Manson, who has worked with me in various roles for more years than I care to calculate: as M.Div. and doctoral student, teaching assistant, research assistant, Lilly project coordinator, minister of my congregation for a number of years, and most recently reader of various drafts of the manuscript. Allison Barrett and Kate Crawford helped to organize the Clifford papers, retrieve and reproduce sources, and gather statistical data. Over the years, other student assistants, including Peg Allin, Chris Dowdeswell, Stephanie Klaassen, Ross Lockhart, Jonathan Seiling, and Jeralyn Towne, handled similar tasks. Teaching assistant Philip Gardner added the task of proofreading endnotes to his other responsibilities. In a class by herself as first reader of drafts is my friend Heather Gamester, whose candid suggestions immeasurably improved the narrative flow of the manuscript. The making of this book also

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304 Acknowledgments

involved many people whom I came to know only through email exchanges or telephone conversations. An example is Patricia Ingold, editorial administrator for The United Church Observer, who scanned images of magazine covers for some of the illustrations. One was a particular challenge because her only copy was in a bound volume, so she suggested that I try to find a loose copy. Eventually, that led me to phone Joanne Lucyk, Ray Hord’s sisterin-law, who took time to find the issue with a cover story about him in some family papers, at a time when she was grieving the recent death of her son. I am grateful for the practical support of managing editor Ryan Van Huijstee and the editorial staff of McGill-Queen’s University Press. They selected two superb readers, later identified in the prepublication material as Duncan McDowell and Mark Noll, who provided very different perspectives on the manuscript (including advice from one to shorten it and from the other to lengthen it). I took their suggestions seriously (even when it was difficult to please both!). The managing editor assigned my manuscript to Eleanor Gasparik, a copy editor who manages to be both exacting and delightful to work with, and recommended Lee Frew, an indexer who works with remarkable skill and speed. Finally, I want to thank Don Akenson, editor of the series in which this book appears, for assurances that, like George Rawlyk before him, he would be interested in considering my manuscript whenever I was ready to submit it. And as always, my gratitude to Matthew, who has been with me even longer than this book, and who continues to give me love, joy, and harmony.

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Notes

p rol og u e   1 John Wesley, Journals and Diaries II, vol. 19 of The Works of John Wesley, ed. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 67 (emphasis in the original).   2 E.H. Oliver, “The Place and Work of the United Church in the Life of Canada,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 19–20.   3 Sidney Mead, “The ‘Nation with the Soul of a Church,’” Church History 36, no. 3 (1967): 262.   4 John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 519.   5 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

c ha p t e r o n e   1 Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterson, eds., The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3:235; for her antipathy to church union (and Methodism), see 3:196–236.   2 John Webster Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union (London: Lutterworth Press, 1967), 21. C.T. McIntire, “Unity among Many: The Formation of the United Church of Canada, 1899–1930,” in Don Schweitzer, ed., The United Church of Canada: A History (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 13–4, counters the United Church’s claim to be the first union across confessional lines in the West with the formation of the Protestant Church in Prussia in 1817. The United Church’s founders no doubt agreed with church historian John T.

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306

  3

  4

  5

  6

Notes to page 4

McNeill (who had witnessed union as a Presbyterian) that the Prussian union had “produced a church without a general polity, a common worship, or a common statement of belief, and without any adequate sense of religious unity”; it could be called a union “only with reservations”; cited in Ruth Rouse and Stephen Neill, A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1517–1948, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 288. Claris Edwin Silcox, Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933), 127, and repeated, for example, in Randolph Carleton Chalmers, See the Christ Stand! A Study in Doctrine in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), 117. During the church union controversy, a few Presbyterian opponents insisted that the proposed doctrinal basis was not modern enough; see E. Lloyd Morrow, Church Union in Canada: Its History, Motives, Doctrine and Government (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1923), 215, who concluded that “there is scarcely anything in it of the truly modern point of view”; also see 155–6, 292. Kenneth McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5–24, describes the political dualism that allowed for Quebec and the rest of Canada to view nationality in different ways even after Confederation. Interestingly, Quebec in a sense was treated by the British as a distinct “confessional state,” to borrow the terminology that evolved after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended the devastating wars between Catholics and Protestants in Europe. Whereas in the seventeenth century the religion of the ruler determined the religion of the land, in democratic societies the religion of the majority of the population has since become the ­decisive factor. “‘I’m a Unionist Because I’m Canadian – Ralph Connor,’” St Thomas Times-Journal, 22 December 1924, United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series I (hereafter cited as Church Union Collection), United Church of Canada Archives (hereafter cited as uc a ) 83.063C, box 38 (scrapbook). S.D. Chown, “Church Union,” Christian Guardian, 28 June 1922, 13. This is from Chown’s infamous speech that was widely reported as referring to the new church as a “religio-political machine.” Chown did on occasion use the word “machine” to describe the church; for an example, see “That They All May Be One,” January 1912, 9, Samuel Dwight Chown Papers, uc a , box 3-67, a sermon preached prior to the Methodist vote in 1912 that referred to building “a machine of the highest efficiency for doing [Christ’s] work.”

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Notes to pages 4–6

307

  7 For example, in “That They All May Be One,” 7, Chown’s economic case for union was followed by a theological rationale that described the doctrinal statement as both “quite conservative in spirit” and “liberal.” For an analysis of the theological vs. the ‘non-theological’ factors, see George M. Morrison, “The United Church of Canada: Ecumenical or Economic Necessity?” (Bachelor of Divinity thesis, Emmanuel College of Victoria University, 1956); Edgar File, “A Sociological Analysis of Church Union in Canada” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1961); and W.E. Mann, “The Canadian Church Union,” in Religion in Canadian Society, ed. Stewart Crysdale and Les Wheatcroft (Toronto: Macmillan, 1976), 385–97.   8 “The Church and the Spirit,” [1924?], 4, Church Union Collection, box 29-653, one of many pamphlets issued by the Bureau of Literature and Information.   9 On revisions to the Basis of Union, amended in December 1914 and voted on the following year at the Presbyterian General Assembly, see Silcox, 170-2. 10 “Report of Home Missions and Social Service,” The United Church of Canada Year Book (1926), 330. 11 John Strachan, “Upper Canada: The National Church” in John Strachan: Documents and Opinion, ed. J.L.H. Henderson (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969), 91–2. 12 For a summary of the events leading up to disestablishment, see Terrance Murphy, “The English-Speaking Colonies to 1854,” in A Concise History of Christianity in Canada, ed. Terrence Murphy and Roberto Perin (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996), 134–7, 184–8. For an analysis of disestablishment, see John S. Moir, Church and State in Canada West: Three Studies in the Relation of Denominationalism and Nationalism, 1841–1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959), and John S. Moir, “‘Who Pays the Piper ... ’: Canadian Presbyterianism and ChurchState Relations,” in The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow: The Presbyterian Contribution to Canadian Life and Culture, ed. William Klempa (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 70–3. 13 John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in NineteenthCentury Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 153. 14 André Siegfried, The Race Question in Canada (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1906; ET 1907; 2nd ed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), 55. On ultramontane Catholicism in Quebec, see Susan Mann, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 115–31. Her opening sentence sums up well her assessment of its importance: “In the last third

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15 16

17 18

19

20

21

22 23

Notes to pages 6–8

of the nineteenth century the clergy was as much a means of national unity as the railroad.” When quotations are not indicated with an endnote number, it is because the same source will be quoted again shortly following the first quotation. The last quotation from the same source will be marked with a note number. Siegfried, 56. For a perceptive analysis of the social utility of religion before and after disestablishment, see William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1989), especially chapter 4. W. Stewart Wallace, The Growth of Canadian National Feeling (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1927), 2–3. On the ‘quasi-federalism’ in the constitutional settlement of 1867, with particular attention to the persistence of support for provincial autonomy in Ontario, see Robert C. Vipond, Liberty and Community: Canadian Federalism and the Failure of the Constitution (Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 1991). R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald B. Smith, Journeys: A History of Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Nelson, 2010), 303. The fragility of Confederation and the continuing tendency toward regionalism is ­discussed in chapter 14. Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 3–5, sees appeal of British imperialism as a way to dodge the threat of American expansion and thus an attempt to promote Canadian nationalism. John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (Toronto: Viking, 2008), 312–13. He highlights the role of Irish Protestants who “saw Canada through British blinkers”; he also notes that a “new school of historians emerged from 1867 determined to treat Confederation as a brand-new beginning” and thereby emphasizing its “Britishness.” Other cultures, including indigenous peoples and francophone, were marginal to this telling of the story (158–9). Ibid., 9, 107. J.R. Miller, “Anti-Catholicism in Canada: From the British Conquest to the Great War,” in Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930, ed. Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 40–1. Miller sees the competition between Protestant and Catholic missions to the West as a contributing factor to church union. On Irish

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24 25

26

27 28 29 30

31

32 33

Notes to pages 8–9

309

identity, see Mark G. McGowan, The Waning of the Green: Catholics, The Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 218–49. A.G. Bailey, Culture and Nationality (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), 182. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 156–7. Horsman describes the complex theories of monogenesis (that all humans shared the same parental origins) and polygenesis (that racial ­differences supported multiple origins of the species). The latter raised a serious problem for the biblical account of creation, 44–5. Ibid., 189–207, for a discussion of how theories of racial destiny were used to explain the declining numbers of American indigenous peoples. For Canada, see J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), esp. 83–115. On the advocacy of assimilation in support of humanitarian causes and imperialism, see Douglas A. Lorimer, “Race, Science and Culture: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities,” in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Brookfield, v t: Ashgate, 1996), 23–4. George W. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 48–9. Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart Inc., 1990), 53–5. Ibid., 48–50, 63–4. George Emery, The Methodist Church on the Prairies (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 3–19, argues that immigration changed the prairie region, and in doing so, changed the future of religion in Canada. Among the consequences for the Methodist Church was the relocation of leaders with strong links to Ontario (78–103). On the controversy in Manitoba, see Paul Crunican, Priests and Politicians: Manitoba Schools and the Election of 1896 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). Terence J. Fay, A History of Canadian Catholics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 136–45. See the statistical tables in David V.J. Bell, The Roots of Disunity: A Study of Canadian Political Culture, rev. ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 179, 182. On the challenges that the new type of immigrant posed for old assumptions about French-English duality, see Susan Mann, 171–3.

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Notes to pages 10–11

34 William T. Gunn, His Dominion (Toronto: Canadian Council of the Missionary Education Movement, 1917), 211. 35 John Webster Grant, “The Reaction of wasp Churches to Non-wasp Immigrants,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 1968, 3,5. 36 Brian Clarke, “English-Speaking Canada from 1854,” in A Concise History of Christianity in Canada, 293–96. For a discussion of the fears stoked by the Riel rebellions, the pope’s involvement in the dispute over the Jesuit Estates (1888), and Catholic schools in the west as expressions of French-Canadian ambitions in Quebec and beyond, see Susan Mann, 150–65. Fay, 155–75, analyzes the conflicts in terms of two competing forms of “messianism,” which created tensions between English- and French-speaking Catholics as well. 37 Quoted in Dominique Clift, The Secret Kingdom: Interpretations of the Canadian Character (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), 50–1, ­citing and translating Michel Brunet, La presence anglaise et les Canadiens (Montreal: Beauchemin, 1964), 177–8. 38 See W.G. Smith, Building the Nation: A Study of Some Problems Concerning the Churches’ Relation to the Immigrants (Toronto: Canadian Council of the Missionary Education Movement, 1922), published jointly by missionary agencies within the Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. The book includes an interesting chapter on immigrants from Asia (124–53) and a policy on immigrants developed by ­representatives of the uniting churches along with the Anglican and Baptist churches (195–7). Howard Palmer, “Mosaic versus Melting Pot? Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada and the United States,” International Journal 31, no. 1 (1975–76): 491–506, sees the “new type” as a variation of the old melting pot idea that was beginning to fall out of favour in the United States by the 1920s. He notes that while recent studies assume a “mosaic” approach to Canadian identity by the 1920s, the cultural pluralism that the metaphor implies found few proponents before the Second World War. Conspicuous among “new type” proponents that he mentions were some prominent supporters of church union, such as Nellie McClung, Walter Murray, E.H. Oliver, and J.S. Woodsworth. For McClung’s and Woodsworth’s views on assimilation, see Elizabeth Profit, “‘The Land of the Fair Deal’: Canadian Nationalism and the Social Gospel” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001), 27–41, 147–53. 39 Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 2. What he calls the rebirth of the United States after the wreckage of the Civil War was created out of

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Notes to pages 11–14

311

notions of regeneration, self-sacrifice, the superiority of the white race (purportedly based on science), and Anglo-Saxon civilization; see especially 1–11, 21–2, 92–110, 167–221, 276–355. 40 The influence of American social thought in Canada is illustrated by the books and magazine articles listed in J.S. Woodsworth, Strangers within Our Gates, or Coming Canadians, 2nd ed. (Toronto: The Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, 1909), 7: all were published in the United States. Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), discusses the influence of the eugenics movement. 41 N.W. Rowell, The Church and Immigration (Toronto: Canadian Council, [1908?]), 5. 42 Ibid., 6–8, 12. 43 William H. Magney, “The Methodist Church and the National Gospel, 1884–1914,” The Bulletin 20 (1968): 73–7, quoting Creighton’s editorial “Nationalizing the Foreigner,” Christian Guardian, 22 April 1908, 5. 44 J.W. Sparling, “Introduction” to Strangers within Our Gates, or Coming Canadians, 4. The emphasis is Sparling’s. 45 W.D. Reid, “The Non-Anglo-Saxon in Canada: Their Christianization and Nationalization,” Pre-Assembly Congress (Toronto: Board of Foreign Missions, 1913), 119–23. For similar fears expressed by a highly placed Methodist, see S.D. Chown, “How Shall the Foreigners Govern Us?” Christian Guardian, 23 February 1910, 8. The two men are interesting to compare: one was opposed to church union, the other a leading supporter. 46 J.R. Mutchmor, “Immigration 1914–15” (master’s thesis, 1917 [Columbia University]), 35; 61–2, 69. 47 Gunn, His Dominion, 217–23. 48 J. Lee Thompson and John H. Thompson, “Ralph Connor and the Canadian Identity,” Queen’s Quarterly 79, no. 2 (1972): 167–9. Barry Mack, “Modernity without Tears: The Mythic World of Ralph Connor,” in The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow, ed. Klempa, 150, makes the interesting observation that structurally, Ralph Connor’s novel The Man from Glengarry is the same as The Foreigner: the culturally backward Scottish Highlanders who change their old ways for liberal modernism and urban affluence were not unlike the Ukrainian immigrants who were expected to leave behind their old ways to become Canadian. 49 Ralph Connor, The Foreigner (Toronto: Westminster, 1909), 253. 50 Mary Vipond, “Canadian National Consciousness and the Formation of the United Church of Canada,” The Bulletin 24 (1975), 11, notes that a

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Notes to page 15

number of church union leaders gave at least lip service to the idea of a new Canadian identity after 1912. 51 Robert Falconer, “The Present Position of the Churches in Canada,” Constructive Quarterly 1 (1913): 278–80. 52 Paul T. Phillips, A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity, 1880–1940 (University Park, pa : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) is an exception. 53 See Rouse and Neill, 274–5, for the contribution of prominent Broad Churchmen to the concept of a comprehensive national church. 54 Phillips, Kingdom, 163. Arnold had a following among an eclectic and influential group of intellectuals who were interested in tapping the cultural potential of a “national church,” including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T.H. Green, John Robert Seeley, Arnold Toynbee, and B.F. Westcott. He also explores the influence of Fremantle’s “national church” on ecumenists, liberals, and social gospel proponents, such as William Reed Huntington, Richard Ely, Washington Gladden, W.T. Stead, and Hugh Price Hughes; cf. 164–70, 173–4, 179. 55 Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1970), 2: 280. 56 Fremantle, 282–4. It is such links between religion and empire that John Ralston Saul, 5, perhaps had in mind with his less charitable ­assessment of the outcome: “Throughout the Western world in the ­second half of the nineteenth century, middle-class, pew-chained and empire-obsessed civilizations gradually slipped toward the paranoid fears of the twentieth century.” 57 Paul T. Phillips, “The Concept of a National Church in Late NineteenthCentury England and America,” Journal of Religious History 14, no. 1 (1986): 31–2. 58 J.W. Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union, 29–30, observes that by simply substituting “Canada” for “United States” one could see William Reed Huntington’s proposal for a national church as “almost ideally suited to the Canadian problem and the Canadian tradition of Church and state.” However, Grant does not explore the connections between Fremantle and Huntington that Phillips describes in A Kingdom on Earth. His proposal drew some initial interest in Canada, particularly among members of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity; see Phillips, A Kingdom on Earth, 171n32, whose presidents included Presbyterian William Caven and Methodist S.D. Chown. 59 On Grant’s influence on religion and culture in Canada, see D.B. Mack, “George Monro Grant: Evangelical Prophet” (PhD diss., Queen’s University,

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60

61

62 63 64

65 66

67 68 69

70 71

Notes to pages 15–17

313

1992) and Barry Mack, “George Monro Grant and the Lost Centre,” Touchstone 12–1 (1994): 30–43. Barry Mack, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, s.v. “Grant, George Monro,” 13:404, notes that Grant was influenced by Arnold through Norman McLeod, as does Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1991), 156–7, 198; also see D.B. Mack, “George Monro Grant: Evangelical Prophet,” 94–106. Mack notes that Grant’s description of McLeod applied to himself as well: “He believed that a church should aim at including all the Christians in the land and thus be truly national ... and that the church should aim at being coextensive with the religious life of the nation” (95). Cited in William Grant and Frederick Hamilton, Principal Grant (Toronto: Morang and Company, 1904), 155–6, and F.A. Peake, “Movements toward Christian Unity in the Post-Confederation Period,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 9, no. 4 (1967): 97–9. G.M. Grant, “Organic Union of Churches: How Far Should It Go?” Canadian Methodist Magazine 10 (September 1884): 245. Ibid., 251–5. G.M. Grant, Sermon Preached before the Synod of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island (Halifax: James Bowes and Sons, 1866), 17–18, George Monro Grant Papers, Queen’s University Archives. Berger, 31–2. Ibid., 219–26. For Grant’s assumptions about assimilation and AngloSaxon culture, see Allan Smith, “The Thought of George Monro Grant,” Canadian Literature 83 (Winter 1979): 90–116. Grant and Hamilton, 500–2. Clarence Mackinnon, Reminiscences (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1938), 136. Richard Allen, The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 207–18; he speculates that Bland would have been dismayed by the conservative tone of some of “his idol’s” social and economic views (212). Also see A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979), 216–22. Grant and Hamilton, 439. John S. Moir, “From Sectarian Rivalry to National Vision: The ­Contribution of Maritime Presbyterianism to Canada,” in The Contri­ bution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada, ed. Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston:

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314

Notes to pages 17–18

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 162. Moir notes that by the 1870s a new generation of ministers committed to a national vision of the Presbyterian Church had appeared: a “clerisy” operating as a “family compact” in educational circles. 72 Douglas F. Campbell, “A Group, a Network and the Winning of Church Union in Canada: A Case Study in Leadership,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 25, no. 1 (1988): 41–66, provides bio­ graphical details about the members and how they combined their educational influences to effect a takeover of the organizational structure of the Presbyterian Church. In a surprising omission, Campbell does not include “King Arthur” among the members who lost faith in the unionist cause (54–5). On D.M. Gordon’s about-face on church union, see ­chapter 2 below. 73 Mackinnon, Reminiscences, 105. 74 The formation of the group is described in Mackinnon, Reminiscences, 105–8. It is not clear from Mackinnon’s account whether Gandier was an original member of the club (which at first was limited to ten): Mackinnon prefaced his account of Gandier’s involvement with the proviso, “A ­notable name must be added.” Moir’s discussion of the Round Table notes their important contributions to Canadian public life and emphasizes Grant’s influence on them, although he wrongly credits Grant, rather than Gordon, with the organization of the club; see “From Sectarian Rivalry,” 166. 75 John Dow, Alfred Gandier: Man of Vision and Achievement (Toronto: The United Church Publishing House, 1951), 98; also cited in Kenneth Cousland, “A Brief History of the Church Union Movement in Canada,” in Our Common Faith, Thomas Buchanan Kilpatrick (Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1928), 5. 76 Dow, 54. Privately, Grant’s opinion of Gandier appears to have been less enthusiastic. To his wife, Grant described Gandier as “a first-rate teacher of the second class. He will never rise to the first – neither from thinking power, nor from spiritual insight, nor from oratorial talent.” Still, he added, he wished that there were more like him. Mack says that Grant’s influence on Gandier was evident in the latter’s inaugural address at Knox College a few years later; see Mack, “Evangelical Prophet,” 358–9. 77 Alfred Gandier, “Church Union,” Theologue 10, no. 4 (1899): 114–15. 78 G.M. Grant, “The Outlook of the Twentieth Century in Theology,” American Journal of Theology 6, no. 1 (1902): 15. 79 Clarence Mackinnon, “The Compensations of Union,” Theologue 12, no. 1 (November 1900): 167–70.

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Notes to pages 19–20

315

80 James G. Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 115. 81 Brian Fraser, Church, College, and Clergy: A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994 (Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 124–6. 82 David R. Murray and Robert A. Murray, The Prairie Builder (Edmonton: NeWest Publishers, 1984), 135–56, describe his leadership in the church and involvement in the union movement. 83 N.K. Clifford, “The Interpreters of the United Church of Canada,” Church History 46, no. 2 (1977): 203–7, notes Morton’s connections to key ­leaders in the church union controversy and the influence of his case for the inevitability of church union. 84 Mackinnon, Reminiscences, 174–5, describes the advice of Walter Murray, “the family mentor,” as instrumental in his decision to return to Halifax. 85 Clifford, “The Interpreters of the United Church of Canada,” 212–13. 86 Nathanael Burwash, “To the Members of the Methodist Ecumenical Conference,” [1911?], 3, Nathanael Burwash Papers, uc a , box 8-107. 87 Nathanael Burwash, “Our Federated Divinity Schools,” Christian Guardian, 17 October 1894, 661. 88 R.J. Wilson, Church Union after Three Years (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1929), 13–15, credits such voluntary associations as the y mc a , y wc a , etc., as contributing factors in “the breakdown of exclusiveness.” Silcox, 73–102, describes the growth of co-operation in these activities, noting the urge to present a united front against the influence of Catholicism as a motive in some cases. Siegfried, 57–8, also saw the church union movement as motivated by Protestant fear of “the Roman peril,” despite ­“outward courtesy”: to this observer from France it appeared that “Catholicism, the common enemy, reminds them periodically of the need for united action if not for unity.” 89 On the developing bureaucracy in the Presbyterian Church, see Brian Fraser, The Social Uplifters: Presbyterian Progressives and the Social Gospel in Canada, 1875–1915 (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988), 64–6; for Methodism, see John Thomas, “‘A Pure and Popular Church’: Case Studies in the Development of the Methodist ‘Organizational’ Church, 1884–1925” (PhD diss., York University, 1991). On the significance for church union of relationships between leaders involved in voluntary associations, see Douglas F. Campbell, “Ecumenists and Entrepreneurs: A Study of Coalition Leadership,” Journal of Canadian Studies 27, no. 3 (1992): 28–46.

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Notes to pages 21–4

  90 The Canadian Society of Christian Unity was formed in 1898. George Grant and William Caven preceded Chown as the second and third presidents of the organization.   91 Magney, 88–9.   92 See Phyllis D. Airhart, “Ordering a New Nation and Reordering Protestantism, 1967–1914,” in The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1790 to 1990, ed. George A. Rawlyk (Burlington, on: Welch, 1990), 98–138, for illustrations of the connections between them.   93 Marguerite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind: Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 158–9. For Burwash’s influential views on doctrine during the negotiations, see Van Die, 147–64. She concludes that what he “had been defending all along in church union was not so much the new as the old” (177).   94 Kilpatrick, 63–4. For his involvement in the formulation of the Basis of Union, see Brian J. Fraser, “Christianizing the Social Order: T.B. Kilpatrick’s Theological Vision of the United Church of Canada,” Toronto Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1996): 189–200.   95 Alfred Gandier, The Doctrinal Basis of Union and Its Relation to the Historic Creeds (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1926), 35.   96 Perhaps this accounts for the creation of a church that N.K. Clifford has described as “one of the most homogeneous denominations in Canada”; see “Interpreters,” 209.   97 A.S. Morton, The Way to Union (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912), 99–100.   98 Ibid., 100–8.   99 On the varieties and unions of Presbyterians, see Silcox, 56–70; John Thomas McNeill, The Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1875–1925 (Toronto: General Board, Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1925), 16–32; and Grant, Profusion of Spires, 26–8. 100 N.G. Smith, “The Presbyterian Tradition in Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, ed. John Webster Grant (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1963), 47. 101 Chalmers, 46–7. 102 Silcox, 69. 103 John T. McNeill, “The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the United Church,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 12. 104 “Inauguration Service of the United Church of Canada,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 6. 105 Morton, 123–46. 106 Ibid., 153.

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Notes to pages 24–7

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107 Earl B. Eddy, “The Congregational Tradition in Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, 31–2. Also see Silcox, 41–55, for a discussion of the development of Congregationalism in Canada. 108 On the United Church’s interpretation of Congregational theological principles, see Chalmers, 76–9, and Silcox, 143–6. 109 “Inauguration Service of the United Church of Canada,” 6. 110 The twenty-five articles are reprinted in Chalmers, Appendix 3, 296–9. For a comparison with the thirty-nine articles on which they were based, see Chalmers, 93–5. 111 For a Canadian interpretation of the importance of Wesley’s sermons, see Burwash’s preface and introduction to Wesley’s Doctrinal Standards, Part 1, The Sermons, ed. Nathanael Burwash (Toronto: William Briggs, 1881), iii–xviii. 112 On the United Church’s interpretation of Methodist theological principles, see Chalmers, 96–113. 113 “Inauguration Service of the United Church of Canada,” 6. 114 Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 71–126; Goldwin French, “The People Called Methodists in Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, ed. John Webster Grant (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1963), 71–7; and Silcox, 47–55. 115 See William T. Gunn, Uniting Three United Churches (Toronto: Bureau of Literature and Information of the Joint Church Union Committee, [1923?]) for details of these unions. His pamphlet includes a detailed ­diagram of the mergers that had created three traditions that would soon be one united church, 8–9. It is frequently reproduced as a graphic presentation of the case for church union, and currently appears on the United Church of Canada’s website as its “family tree”; accessed 7 August 2012, www.united-church.ca / history / overview / archival#familytree. 116 Walter Murray, “Why We Want Church Union in the Prairie Provinces,” clipping dated for release 17 February 1917, (newspaper not identified), Church Union Collection, box 35-769. 117 Silcox, 226–8. McIntire, 18–19, gives examples of the variety of local unions. 118 “Inauguration Service,” 6. Although the local union congregations were ceremonially recognized as a group at the inaugural service, they legally joined the United Church separately after 10 June 1925. See Silcox, 216– 30, for an analysis of the significance of the local church unions in the momentum for church union. E.H. Oliver, His Dominion in Canada: A Study in the Background, Development and Challenge of the Missions of

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Notes to pages 28–31

the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Board of Home Missions and Woman’s Missionary Society, 1932), 137–41, claimed that these churches in frontier communities led the way to union. 119 R.J. Wilson, “Church Union and National Unity,” (typescript, n.d.), 1, Robert J. Wilson Papers, u ca, box 2-27. 120 Bryan Smith, “The Destiny Factor,” in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, ed. Peter Senge (London: N. Brealey, 1994), 341–4, argues that organizations have “callings” that shape their destinies.

c h a p t e r t wo    1 Statement provided by W.M. Birks for the Bureau of Literature and Information, United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series I (hereafter Church Union Collection), u ca 83.063C, box 29-663. He dates his trip “around 1920.”   2 “Modern Covenanters,” Fergus Record, 16 April 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook).    3 For a similar account from the anti-union side, see “Many Knox Church Dissenters from Union Debarred from Their Own Building Gather as Welcome Guest of All Saints’ Church,” Peterborough Evening Examiner, 3 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 33–736. In this case it was the non-concurring rather than uniting Presbyterians who identified with the resistance of the Covenanters and claimed to be the true guardians of their traditions “for which they are prepared to go out on the street beggared as to the church property but rich in the possession of their grand old faith.” For an analysis of one city’s vote that illustrates the impact of ministerial leadership and congregational culture on the outcome of the vote, see William Haughton, “The Experience of Church Union Among the Presbyterians of Galt, Ontario” (master’s thesis, Emmanuel College of Victoria University, 2007).    4 The work of the Dominion Commission on Church Property set up to handle the division of the denominational funds and assets was largely completed by 1927; see C.E. Silcox, Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933), 347–55, and N.K. Clifford, The Resistance to Church Union in Canada, 1904–1939 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985), 194–9. Dividing local church property took longer since it was subject to different legislation in each province; see Silcox, 355–77, and Clifford, Resistance, 200–6.

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Notes to pages 32–5

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 5 Clifford, Resistance, 226–35. He notes that Gordon Sisco, who succeeded T. Albert Moore as general secretary in 1936, played a pivotal role in the negotiations. The legal challenges to the use of the name are discussed in Donald John McCrae Corbett, “The Canadian Church Union and the Law” (Bachelor of Divinity thesis, Knox College, 1957), especially 61–9. Corbett says it is with “considerable amazement” that he hears the United Church still claim that the Presbyterian Church went into the union since “the courts have made it impossible for the United Church to make this claim” (67). For the implications of the legislation for Canada’s approach to church-state relations, see Sara J. Knight, “Voices United? The House of Commons’ Role in the Creation of the United Church of Canada,” Papers of Canadian Society of Church History, 2003, 39–64. Despite their criticism of the United Church for seeking enabling legislation from the state, Clifford, Resistance, 234, notes that the Presbyterians sought legislative protection by presenting an Act to Incorporate the Board of Trustees of the Presbyterian Church in Canada to the Dominion Parliament and the provincial legislatures after the United Church Act was amended.   6 John Thomas McNeill, The Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1875–1925 (Toronto: General Board of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1925), 247–53. Caven’s principles for union were set out in “The Union of the Christian Churches,” Westminster [new series] 1, no. 1 (July 1902): 26–9.   7 Brian J. Fraser, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, s.v. “Caven, William,” 13:181–4. The similarities to Grant and other supporters of church union discussed in the previous chapter are striking; Fraser describes Caven as an evangelical who believed that “a United Protestantism would have a much more powerful influence on national righteousness than separate denominations.” In view of later fundamentalist opposition to church union (discussed below), it is ironic that Caven’s pamphlet on The Testimony of Christ to the Old Testament was included posthumously in The Fundamentals (one of the few Canadian contributors).  8 Acts and Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (1902), 59.   9 Quoted in A Brief Sketch of the Negotiations for Union of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational Churches in Canada (Toronto, 1905), 6, Church Union Collection, box 1-2. 10 “The General Conference,” Christian Guardian, 17 September 1902, 8. 11 N.K. Clifford, “The Origins of the Church Union Controversy,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 18 (June–September 1976): 42; Clifford, Resistance, 13–15.

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Notes to pages 35–8

12 For typical unionist account, see Kenneth Cousland, “A Brief History of the Church Union Movement in Canada,” in Our Common Faith, Thomas Buchanan Kilpatrick (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1928), 6–21, and William T. Gunn, Uniting Three United Churches (Toronto: Bureau of Literature and Information of the Joint Church Union Committee, 1923). McNeill, 251, also downplays Patrick’s role at the General Conference, noting that he had informed those gathered that he was not speaking for the Presbyterian Church and pointedly mentioning that the Methodist invitation made no reference to Patrick’s address. 13 Cousland, “A Brief History,” 16–19, and Silcox, 106–20. The Presbyterians had sponsored discussions of proposals for Christian unity in 1886, the Methodists in 1890 and 1894, and the Presbyterians again in 1899. 14 “The General Conference,” 8. 15 Silcox, 122. 16 Clifford, Resistance, 1–3, 23–4. 17 Clifford, “The Origins of the Church Union Controversy,” 51. 18 Clifford, Resistance, 21. He suggests that articles supporting union were published in obscure journals by men who had not yet risen to prominence. However, by the time Patrick arrived, D.M. Gordon, Alfred Gandier, Robert Falconer, and Clarence Mackinnon were well known in the Presbyterian Church (and even in 1902, their positions may have ­compared favourably in prestige to that of the new principal of a small western college). 19 “The General Conference,” 8. Carman’s introduction mentioned that Presbyterians and Methodists in Winnipeg had already formed a committee to work on the home missions problem. 20 For a discussion of the conflict between Patrick and Mackay see Clifford, Resistance, 43–8, and John Webster Grant, George Pidgeon: A Biography, (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1962) 62–3. 21 Clifford, Resistance, 46. The federation model was at first an attractive alternative to organic union. For a discussion of its merits, see E. Lloyd Morrow, Church Union in Canada: Its History, Motives, Doctrine, and Government (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1923), 70–1, 294–301, 435–44. 22 Silcox, 189. 23 Clifford, Resistance, 19–20. The complex legal arguments to the House of Lords in 1903 and the ruling in 1904 on the Overtoun appeal are compiled in Robert Orr, The Free Church of Scotland Appeals, 1903–4 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904). See D.J.M. Corbett, “The Legal Problems of the Canadian Church Union of 1925,” Canadian Society of

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Notes to pages 38–40

321

Presbyterian History Papers (1979), 53–67, for a discussion of how the Presbyterians in Canada appealed to the case. On the legislative process as viewed by the lawyer who prepared the bills for the various jurisdictions (including Newfoundland and Bermuda), see Gershom W. Mason, The Legislative Struggle for Church Union (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1956); cf. Silcox, 243–71, and Clifford, Resistance, 142–64. 24 Grant, George Pidgeon, 68–9, notes that by 1899 Pidgeon was preaching a sermon on “The Unity of Believers,” and by 1903 had delivered it five times. Pidgeon was not alone in taking exception to the personal attacks on Mackay. Clarence Mackinnon, Reminiscences (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1938), 167, recalled that Patrick had presented the case for church union in 1910 “fully, though perhaps a little too vigorously.” 25 Letter to D.M. Gordon from E.D. McLaren, April 1923, D.M. Gordon Papers, Queen’s University Archives, box 2. McLaren had by that time switched his support and was writing to express his relief that Gordon had done likewise. 26 Mackinnon, 167–8. His assessment of their actions differs from Clifford, “The Origins of the Church Union Controversy,” 41, who sees the supporters of union as young liberals who believed that church administration was a matter of expediency, and were thus less concerned with how things had been done in the past. 27 John S. Moir, Enduring Witness: A History of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 3rd ed. (Burlington, on : Eagle Press, [2004?]), 216. 28 Cited in David R. Murray and Robert A. Murray, The Prairie Builder: Robert Murray of Saskatchewan (Edmonton: NeWest Publishers, 1984), 145. 29 Clifford, Resistance, 84–5. 30 Guy Bagnall, ed., Trinity United Church, Vernon, B.C., 1892–1967 (n.p: n.d.), 20; Marion R. Archibald, Historical Sketch of Methodist, Presbyterian and United Churches of Canada in Rosedale (n.p.: [1948?]), 5; and F.E. Runnals, The History of the Knox United Church, Prince George, B.C. (1945), 58, a sampling of publications in the Congregational History Collection, British Columbia Conference (United Church of Canada) Archives (hereafter bc Archives). 31 After 1925 the continuing Presbyterians were averse to the label “antiunionist.” Allan L. Farris, “The Fathers of 1925,” in Enkindled by the Word: Essays on Presbyterianism in Canada, ed. Centennial Committee of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (Toronto: Presbyterian Publications, 1966), 59–82, observes that the opposition included

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Notes to pages 40–3

federalists, ethical critics, and theological objectors, as well as those who were against union in principle. 32 Clifford, Resistance, 86. 33 H.F. Gadsby, “Love’s Labor Lost,” Saturday Night, 4 November 1916 [clipping], Church Union Collection, box 34-742. 34 Clifford, Resistance, 75, 89. 35 Ephraim Scott, “Letter 2,” in Continuing the Presbyterian Church in Canada: Letters to an Inquirer (Montreal, 1917), 2, Church Union Collection, box 20-455. 36 Scott, “Letter 12,” 13, and “Letter 19,” 20. 37 Ephraim Scott, “Church Union” and the Presbyterian Church in Canada (Montreal: John Lovell and Son, 1928), 123, 125–6. Whereas he claimed that the lay leaders of the resistance to church union were fighting clerical tyranny, he presented the lay leaders of church union as manipulative businessmen: the Methodist clergy give the orders – but only after taking instructions from their wealthy paymasters. 38 Clifford, Resistance, 132–4. Also see Roberta Clare, “The Role of Women in the Preservation of the Presbyterian Church in Canada: 1921–28,” in The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow: The Presbyterian Contribution to Canadian Life and Culture, ed. William Klempa (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 259–77. 39 “Parlour Meeting on Union Condemned,” Montreal Gazette, 18 May 1923 [clipping], Church Union Collection, box 33-724. 40 “Feminine Unionists Ask Divine Blessing,” Toronto Star, 19 December 1924, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). 41 “Church Unionists Not Taking Counter-Action,” Toronto Mail and Empire, 21 March 1923, Church Union Collection, box 39 (scrapbook). The minister and congregation are not named. 42 “Mrs J.W. Daniel to the President of the W.M.S. and W.A. of Bloor Street Presbyterian Church,” [undated], Church Union Collection, box 31-693. 43 The Presbyterian Church supported the war effort and co-operated with other churches in providing chaplaincy services. However, once the war was over, both sides used different aspects of that experience to support their position on church union. See George G.D. Kilpatrick, “The War and Church Union,” in The Need of Church Union by a Group of Presbyterians [1924?], 10–12, Church Union Collection, box 18-420, who argued that his experience as a Protestant chaplain confirmed that there was no incompatibility between the traditions; cf. Cyrus MacMillan, “The War and Church Union,” in The Need of the Presbyterian Church by a Group of Presbyterians [1924?], 9–11, Church Union Collection, box 19-442,

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Notes to pages 43–7

323

who saw the “forced uniformity” of church union as a denial of the liberty he had fought to defend. For an assessment of the “truce” and its implications for the controversy, see George C. Pidgeon, The United Church of Canada: The Story of the Union (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1950), 51–9. 44 George Pidgeon to Leslie Pidgeon, 19 October 1922, Pidgeon Papers, box 3-57. 45 Grant, George Pidgeon, 103. 46 George Pidgeon to Leslie Pidgeon, 19 October 1922, Pidgeon Papers, box 3-57. 47 “Memorandum on Organization of the Joint Bureau of Literature and Information as Related by Dr R.J. Wilson,” Claris Edwin Silcox Papers, uc a , box 20-16. 48 George Pidgeon to Leslie Pidgeon, 26 January 1923, Pidgeon Papers, box 3-60. 49 Memo from R.J. Wilson to Pidgeon, “General Review,” [undated], 1, Church Union Collection, box 30-673. Accusations of dirty tricks came from both sides. A. Donald MacLeod, W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 37–40, reports that the clergy in W. Stanford Reid’s family were divided on the issue. As a boy, Reid heard accusations about the behaviour of church leaders that made a lasting impression on him. 50 “General Review,” 1. 51 Ibid., 5. 52 “Outline Sermons and Addresses on Church Union and the United Church of Canada,” Bureau of Literature and Information of the Joint Committee on Church Union, December 1924, 16, Church Union Collection, box 29-656. 53 “Outline Sermons and Addresses on Church Union and the United Church of Canada,” 3–4. 54 “Report of the Committee on Literature and Information,” 17 October 1924, Church Union Collection, box 23-508; “Report of the Committee on Literature and Information,” 14 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 23-508. 55 Letter from R.J. Wilson to S.D. Chown, 24 February 1925, Church Union Collection, box 23-530. 56 “Outline Sermons and Addresses on Church Union and the United Church of Canada,” 7–8. 57 T. Albert Moore to D.R. Drummond, 4 February 1925, Methodist Church (Canada) General Conference, Correspondence of the Secretary,

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324

58

59

60 61

Notes to pages 47–8

1906–1925, u ca 78.107C, box 10-200. Drummond, the minister of St Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, was promoting a federation proposal as a way around the impasse over church union. Although Moore’s letter is in the official Methodist Church records, he pointed out to Drummond that he was speaking for himself, and that no one knew he was writing. As if to underline that point, the letter was not written on institutional letterhead, and the return address was Moore’s residence rather than the church headquarters. Pidgeon to G.B. McLennan, 21 November 1924, Pidgeon Papers, box 4-91. The letter refers to a rumour that the “antis” were planning to turn the controversy into a debate about modernism, but perhaps had judged wrongly since it was “utterly baseless.” Other letters to Pidgeon around that time raised similar concerns, noting the unfairness of the charge given Fraser’s liberal theological positions. See the letter from J.W.S. Milne, 21 November 1924, Pidgeon Papers, box 4-91, which provided examples from Fraser’s sermons and noted that Fraser had been the only Presbyterian minister at the last General Assembly in Ottawa who was willing to preach in the Unitarian Church. The words “File carefully” are written in pencil at the top; whether it is Pidgeon’s handwriting is hard to say. Few if any of the pro-union leaders would have qualified as Protestant “modernists” according to the criterion described by Kathryn Lofton, “The Methodology of the Modernists: Process in American Protestantism,” Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 377–8, an aggressive methodology that involved a “demanding process of cross-examination and inquiry, a process that transformed the terming of biblical narrative and Christian faith.” Robert Campbell, The Relation of the Christian Churches to One Another, and the Problems Growing out of Them, Especially in Canada (Toronto: William Briggs, 1913), 233. Ibid., 256, 260–8. N.K. Clifford, “Robert Campbell: The Defender of Presbyterianism,” in Called to Witness: Profiles of Canadian Presbyterians, ed. W. Stanford Reid ([Don Mills, on ]: Presbyterian Publications, 1975), 60–2. Mary Vipond, “National Consciousness in English-speaking Canada in the 1920s: Seven Studies” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1974), 18, finds scant reference to social and national goals among the continuing Presbyterians. Robert Campbell was an early critic of church union as a solution to the immigration crisis; see Clifford, “Robert Campbell,” 57. For a critique of Campbell’s opposition to ecumenism, see Jay Newman, “The Case against Ecumenism: A Classic Canadian Argument,” in

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62 63 64

65 66

67

68

Notes to pages 48–50

325

Pluralism, Tolerance and Dialogue: Six Studies, ed. M. Darrol Bryant (Waterloo, on : University of Waterloo Press, 1989), 29–36. George Duncan, “The Unity of the Church,” in The Need of the Presbyterian Church, 3–4. G. Washington, Why, as a Methodist I Cannot Accept the Basis of Union, [1911?], Church Union Collection, box 5-86. R.E. Welsh, The Things that Matter in Church Union (Montreal: Church Union Committee, n.d.), 1–2, referring to an editorial that Scott had published in the Presbyterian Record soon after the theological statement was issued. T. McMillan, Our Church and the Proposed Substitute [Toronto, 1922], 3, Church Union Collection, box 19-444. The Methodists in Newfoundland, then a British colony and not yet a Canadian province, voted against union as a conference but followed the direction of the General Council. W.S. Griffin, “Why I Am Against the Basis of Union,” Christian Guardian, 13 March 1912, 24. This is one of the rare objections to church union published after an editorial announced that only items shedding “new light” on the subject would be published in the magazine; see Christian Guardian, 14 February 1912, 3. On the discussion of the Basis of Union in the Methodist Church, see Marguerite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind: Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 143–66, and Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 421–3. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, mi: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1923), 7. Machen explains in the preface that the core of the book was published a year earlier as an article in the Princeton Theological Review. D.G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 67, points out that Machen’s lectures were an attack on an American plan for organic union. Hart notes the similarity of his concerns to those of the non-concurring Presbyterians in Canada (69), but does not explore his influence on the Canadian debate. D.G. Hart, “When Is a Fundamentalist a Modernist? J. Gresham Machen, Cultural Modernism, and Conservative Protestantism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65–3 (1997): 606, mentions that Machen’s books were widely reviewed in Canada. Machen’s relationship with “liberals” in his own denomination, as Hart describes it

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Notes to pages 50–2

(including Machen’s claim that they were not entitled to trusts and property since they had strayed from the Westminster Confession and his ­critique of inter-denominational creeds), resembles the strategy of the Presbyterian Church Association; see “When Is a Fundamentalist a Modernist?” 611–12, 615–21. It suggests collaboration between Machen and the Presbyterian Church Association, although to what extent I have so far been unable to determine. 69 Machen, 172–3, 178–9. 70 Ibid., 1–2. 71 Ibid., 161–2. His animus may be related to theological controversy among the Presbyterians in the United States. Princeton Theological Seminary was caught up in bitter disputes, and support for church union there was linked to the liberal position on biblical criticism. See John Abernathy Smith, “Ecclesiastical Politics and the Founding of the Federal Council of Churches,” Church History 43, no. 3 (1974): 356–8. On the importance of confessional statements in that controversy, see James H. Moorland, “Presbyterian Confessional Identity and Its Dilemmas,” in Holding on to the Faith: Confessional Traditions in American Christianity, ed. Douglas A. Sweeney and Charles Hambrick-Stowe (Lanham, md: University Press of America, 2008), 47–70. 72 Ibid., 162, 165. 73 Acts and Proceedings of the Fifty-first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (1925), 128. N.K. Clifford, “The Interpreters of the United Church of Canada,” Church History 46, no. 2 (1977): 214, also comments on Machen’s influence. 74 Moir, Enduring Witness, 226. Moir notes Machen’s continuing identification of ecumenism with modernism when he was invited in 1926 to preach at Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto and at MacVicar Presbyterian Church in Montreal. His sermons described St Paul as a conservative and Judas as a modernist (234). 75 John Webster Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union (London: Lutterworth Press, 1967), 75. Among them was W.S. Reid, who continued to oppose movements of denominational co-operation because they anticipated an organic union; cf. Moir, 253. On Reid’s opposition to church union and his relationship to Machen and Westminster Theological Seminary, see A. Donald MacLeod, W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 36–40, 53–65. 76 “Finds Church Union Is Pagan Movement,” [unidentified clipping], Church Union Collection, box 36-773.

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Notes to pages 52–4

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77 “Church Union ‘Pagan,’ Shields an Outspoken Critic,” Toronto Telegram, 19 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 39 (scrapbook). Given the fierce newspaper competition of the day, the Telegram was no doubt pleased to report that Shields had condemned the editorial position of the Star in his sermon, complaining that “whoever writes the editorials is as blind as a bat spiritually and does not know the alphabet of the Christian religion.” Shields singled out The Blessed Hope, T. Albert Moore’s pamphlet published by the Methodist Department of Evangelism and Social Reform, as an example of the “infidel literature” associated with the union movement, perhaps adding to Moore’s unhappiness about the portrayal of Methodists as apostate discussed above. 78 “Sectarian Discord,” Catholic Register, 22 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). See also “Union and Disunion,” Kingston Freeman, 9 August 1923, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). 79 “Church Union,” Antigonish Casket, 25 October 1923, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). 80 The obituary in the Globe (1 May 1926) noted his religious affiliation, as well as his involvement in organizations that included the Social Hygiene Council. 81 Josephus the Second [pseud.], “A Religious Horoscope of June 1925: Will the United Church of Canada Be a United Church?” Saturday Night, 10 January 1925. For analysis of religion and social class, see T.W. Acheson, “Changing Social Origins of the Canadian Industrial Elite, 1880–1910,” Business History Review 17, no. 2 (1973): 198–200, who finds that Presbyterians and Anglicans were indeed over-represented among the “industrial elite” (with Methodists gaining significant ground in the west); and Douglas F. Campbell, “Class, Status and Crisis: UpperClass Protestants and the Founding of the United Church of Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies 29, no. 3 (1994): 63–84. 82 Scott, “Church Union” and the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 106. 83 D.J. Fraser, “Keep to Spirit Not Letter of Worship of Their Fathers,” Toronto Star, 9 June 1925, Church Union Collection, box 36-773. 84 W.D. Tait, “Church Union and Social Service,” in The Need of the Presbyterian Church, 8. 85 Morrow, 284–301, presented a federation model in a chapter entitled “The Kind of Church Union Canada Needs.” 86 Ibid., 86–7, 89 (emphasis in the original). Perhaps because they had a weaker presence in the province of Quebec, Methodists seemed less perturbed by the prospect of problems there. William Magney finds their “almost total neglect of Quebec and the French-Canadians” curious,

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Notes to pages 54–9



evidence perhaps of a live-and-let-live attitude among English-Canadian nationalists. William H. Magney, “The Methodist Church and the National Gospel, 1884–1914,” The Bulletin 20 (1968): 88–9.   87 Ibid., 296.   88 Machen, 148–9.   89 Ibid., 149–52.   90 Ibid., 154.   91 Shields, “Finds Church Union Is Pagan Movement.”  92 The Canadian Churchman, 10 April 1924, box 38 (scrapbook).   93 “Sees Presbyterians Gobbled Up by Methodists If Union Passes,” Toronto Star, 4 April 1924, Church Union Collection, box 35-772.   94 “The Very Rev. Dr. George Pidgeon Speaks,” St Peter’s Messenger, 26 November 1925, Church Union Collection, box 34-757.   95 Jas. Craig, “At the Crack of the Whip,” Toronto Telegram, 22 April 1925, box 38 (scrapbook).   96 “Church Union in Canada,” New York Sunday Times, 15 July 1923, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook).   97 Outsider [pseud.], “National Church?” Toronto Telegram, 22 April 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook).   98 “The Church’s Part in Politics,” Saturday Night, 4 July 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). Saturday Night provided unflattering accounts of the parliamentary debates; as examples, see articles by The Mace [pseud.], “Church Union in the Commons,” 8 March 1924, 4, and “Storming the Hill,” 17 May, 1924, 4.  99 Clifford, Resistance, 156. On the importance of temperance for the social gospel movement, and the role of the uniting traditions in supporting it, see Richard Allen, The Social Passion, esp. 264–83. The Presbyterian Church had its share of moral reformers as well, but even they were not always well received. Clifford, Resistance, 184, remarks that for some Presbyterians “the legislation of righteousness was abhorrent, and they believed that there was no way in which they could be comfortable in a church dominated by uplifters and social gospellers.” 100 The Fundamentals, n.d., Church Union Collection, box 29-654. 101 T.B. Kilpatrick, “The Unity of the Church,” in The Need of Church Union, 2. 102 A Vision of Unity, n.d., Church Union Collection, box 29-658. 103 A Choice and a Challenge, n.d., Church Union Collection, box 29-653. 104 George Pidgeon, “The Church Union Situation in Canada,” sermon preached 9 February 1924 and privately printed by a member of the congregation because of “insistent demand.” 105 “Why Bloor Street Should Enter Union,” Church Union Collection, box 35-733.

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106 “Address by Rev. Edmund H. Oliver ... at Complimentary Banquet Given by Sir James Woods, K.C.M.G.” (Toronto: Presbyterian Church-Union Movement Committee, [1923?]), 13–14, Church Union Collection, box 18-417. 107 “Three Thousand Congregations Already Adopt Forms of Union,” Manitoba Free Press, 22 March 1922, box 34-752. The article summarized the regional distribution of the 1,245 such pastoral charges as follows: Maritime, 30; Montreal and Ottawa, 29; Toronto and Kingston, 170; Hamilton and London, 1; Manitoba, 148; Saskatchewan, 431; Alberta, 297; B.C., 139. For a discussion of the local union movement, see Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union, 45–7. 108 N.K. Clifford, “Church Union and Western Canada,” in Prairie Spirit: Perspectives on the Heritage of the United Church of Canada in the West, ed. Dennis L. Butcher, et al. (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985), 283–95, disputes Oliver’s case for promoting church union. Whether the western local union churches were determined to form a united church regardless of what the negotiating denominations decided to do is debatable. When J.R. Johns, an active member of the Local Union Council, responded to a request from the United Church Archives for information on his involvement in church union, he was particularly ­anxious to correct what appeared to him to be a misunderstanding: “The one thing I am concerned [with?] is that you include in your record that the original meeting we held in Regina had no intention to form anything approaching an Organized movement separated from the negotiating churches (Mother Churches)” [emphasis in original]. See letter from J.R. Johns to Richard Ruggle, 9 March 1968, Church Union Collection, box 22-504. 109 J.R.P. Sclater, An Address on Church Union Delivered before the Congregation of Old St Andrew’s, Toronto (n.p.: 1924), 6. Church Union Collection, box 29-657. “New” St Andrew’s (King Street) opposed union. 110 Clifford, Resistance, 134, quotes a letter from Frances McCaskill that described Minnie Gordon as “the power behind the throne” in the Kingston branch. 111 Gordon to McLaren, 23 November 1924, Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 2 (correspondence). He recalled that during the 1905 meetings, he had pressed the matter about having the support of the whole church before uniting. 112 Draft of “The Present Situation in Regard to Church Union,” [April 1916?], Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 5-58.

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Notes to pages 61–74

113 Gordon to Mackinnon, 5 June 1924, Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 2 (correspondence). 114 Gordon to McLaren, 6 March 1924, Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 2 (correspondence). 115 Clifford, Resistance, 59, notes that Mackay’s leadership of the resistance to church union was short-lived; by the time his wife died in 1912, leaving him with the care of a young son, he had already withdrawn from the fray. 116 Moir, 222. On the final congregational vote, see Clifford, Resistance, 165– 84; on the various denominational plebiscites, see Silcox, 173–77, 192–97, 479–81. 117 Kenneth H. Cousland, The Founding of Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto (Toronto: 1978), 45–55, discusses the impact of church union on both Knox College and Victoria University, a Methodist school with a faculty of theology. 118 For a study of missions, particularly as they related to indigenous peoples and non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, see Peter Bush, Western Challenge: The Presbyterian Church in Canada’s Mission on the Prairies and North, 1885–1925 ([Winnipeg]: Watson and Dwyer, 2000). Bush challenges what he calls the establishment view that church union was the most effective solution to meeting the needs of the new settlements. 119 Scott, “Church Union” and the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 122. 120 [First United Church, Victoria], “One Hundred Years: 1862–1962” [n.p.: 1962], 35, Congregational History Collection, b c Archives. 121 Osbert Morley Sanford, The Genius of the United Church (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1931), 6. 122 John Webster Grant, Divided Heritage: The Presbyterian Contribution to the United Church of Canada (Yorkton, s k : Gravelbooks, 2007), 201–2.

c h a p t e r t h re e    1 S.D. Chown, “Some Ideals and Responsibilities of the United Church of Canada,” Christian Union Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1926): 258–60.    2 Alfred J. Johnston, A Larger Fellowship (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1926), 111. The chapter on “The Church Organized for Its Task” includes a ­succinct description of the basic organizational structure of the United Church (114–23).    3 John Webster Grant, “Unauthoritative Reflections on the United Church’s Story,” Touchstone 12, no. 1 (1994): 6, claims that e&ss’s reports served “a function analogous to that of the Westminster Confession for Presbyterians and the Book of Common Prayer for Anglicans.”

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Notes to pages 74–6

331

  4 On the impact of bureaucratization on the ecumenical movement in the United States, see John Abernathy Smith, “Ecclesiastical Politics and the Founding of the Federal Council of Churches,” Church History 43, no. 3 (1974): 350–65. On its impact on denominational development, see Russell Richey, “Denominations and Denominationalism: An American Morphology,” in Reimagining Denominationalism: Interpretive Essays, ed. Robert Bruce Mullin and Russell Richey (New York: Oxford, 1994), 74–97; Mark Chaves and John R. Sutton, “Organizational Consolidation in American Protestant Denominations, 1890–1990,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43, no. 1 (2004): 51–66; William McGuire King, “Denominational Modernization and Religious Identity: The Case of the Methodist Episcopal Church,” Methodist History 20, no. 2 (1982): 75–89; and Milton J Coalter, et al., eds., The Organizational Revolution: Presbyterians and American Denominationalism (Louisville, ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), especially Louis B. Weeks, “The Incorporation of the Presbyterians” (37–54), Richard W. Reifsnyder, “Managing the Mission: Church Restructuring in the Twentieth Century” (55–95), and Craig Dykstra and James Hudnut-­ Beumler, “The National Organizational Structures of Protestant Denominations: An Invitation to a Conversation” (307–31).   5 For the Methodist experience with changes in the approach to temperance work, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “Condensation and Heart Religion: Canadian Methodists as Evangelicals, 1884–1925,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997) 93–6.   6 Gibson Winter, Religious Identity: A Study of Religious Organization (New York: MacMillan, 1968), 30–4.   7 Frank Langford’s submission to Reports and Agenda: First Annual Meeting of the Board of Christian Education (4–6 April 1933), 27, Board of Christian Education, Series I, u ca 89.079C, box 3-3.   8 Cynthia Comacchio, The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada, 1920 to 1950 (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 189–204, includes the United Church’s organizations in her discussion of the structured approach to recreation that flourished in this period. For a detailed description of personnel, programs for all ages, and their organizational structure, see Olive Sparling, “The United Church of Canada Board of Christian Education, 1925–71” (unpublished manuscript, 1979), u ca BX 9881 S75.   9 Lucille Marr, “Hierarchy, Gender and the Goals of the Religious Educators in the Canadian Presbyterian, Methodist and United Churches, 1919– 1939,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 20, no. 1 (1991): 68–70.

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Notes to pages 76–7

10 Margaret Prang, “‘The Girl God Would Have Me Be’: The Canadian Girls in Training, 1915–39,” Canadian Historical Review 66, no. 2 (1985): 157n12, describes Thomas as the most influential woman in the United Church at that time. Prang notes that her innovative approach to religious education included use of the Sharman method of Bible study, which proved effective in the yw ca as well as the Student Christian Movement (161–6). The Kingdom of God, a study booklet that she wrote, was used by many cg i t groups and church-run summer camps. 11 Ibid., 180–1. M. Lucille Marr, “Church Teen Clubs, Feminized Organizations? Tuxis Boys, Trail Rangers, and Canadian Girls in Training, 1919– 1939,” Historical Studies in Education 3–2 (1991): 259–60, finds that this approach was successful in attracting girls, but did not appeal as much to boys, who apparently still preferred the Scouts program (with no religious affiliation). 12 Ann Taves, “Feminization Revisited: Protestantism and Gender at the Turn of the Century,” in Women and Twentieth Century Protestantism, ed. Margaret Lambert Bendroth and Virginia Brereton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 307. For Coe’s influence on Canadian Methodism, see Phyllis D. Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1992), 98–102. 13 Marr, “Church Teen Clubs, Feminized Organizations?” 261. 14 “Report of the Lay Advisory Council,” r o p (1944), 148. If the Epworth League was established as a “Trojan horse” to re-masculinize the church, as suggested by Nancy Christie, “Young Men and the Creation of Civic Christianity in Urban Methodist Churches, 1880–1914,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2006, New Series, 17–1 (2006): 104–5, it apparently failed to retain the involvement of adolescents when they reached adulthood as had been hoped. 15 ao t s , A Guide for Programme Suggestions Handbook (Vancouver: National Association of aots Clubs, 1948), 1–3. 16 “Men’s Organizations,” r o p (1926), 110. 17 For details of the complex relationship between aots and other men’s groups in the United Church, see the introduction to the finding aid (F.A. 293) to the aots collection, u ca. 18 Jean Gordon Forbes, Wide Windows: The Story of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: The Woman’s Missionary Society, 1951), 114–15. 19 Forbes, Wide Windows, 116. As a case in point, Michael Owen, “‘Lighting the Pathways for New Canadians: Methodist and United Church wms

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20

21 22

23 24

25

26 27

28

Notes to pages 77–9

333

Missions in Eastern Alberta, 1904–1940,” in Standing on New Ground: Women in Alberta, ed. Catherine Anne Cavanaugh and R.R. Warne (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1993), 1–18, examines wms missions with Ukrainians. Donna Sinclair, Crossing Worlds: The Story of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1992), 67–70, describes the intergenerational networking. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1934), 380. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1938), 374, indicates that the Dominion Board reaffirmed the “Aim and Object of the Society” in 1937 in response to the challenge to “re-think missions.” The same list of objectives prefaced subsequent reports to General Council until the wms’s last report in 1960. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1936), 439. Marilyn Färdig Whiteley, “Drawing the Circles: Recruitment and Nurture in Women’s Church Organizations,” paper presented to the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, 8 June 1993, compares how the two groups and their successor (United Church Women) functioned in two Ontario churches between 1925 and 1965. It illustrates the dynamics of age-grouping, intergenerational connections, and “fellowship” for groups in different congregational settings (one rural, the other urban). F.E. Runnals, The History of the Knox United Church, Prince George, B.C. (n.p., 1945), 84, and W. O’Neill, ed., Knox Presbyterian, 1912–1925, Knox United, 1925–1972 (Parksville, bc: n.d.), 3, both in the Congregational History Collection, British Columbia Conference of the United Church of Canada Archives. Quoted in Sinclair, 3. On the w m s ’s fundraising success, see ibid., 97–110. Robert A. Wright, A World Mission: Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order (Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1991), 112, notes the dominance of male leadership at the national level in Canada, despite a high percentage of women missionaries, in comparison to Britain where women had positional leadership. For the first board structure and the officers appointed by the General Council in 1926, see Yearbook (1927), 5. The resemblance to the committees and executive members of the 1924 Inter-Church Advisory Council illustrates the importance of the ecumenical networks that operated before church union: at least twelve of the sixteen secretaries listed in the United Church yearbook for 1927 had prior experience with the Inter-Church

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29

30

31

32

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Notes to pages 79–80

movement, generally chairing a committee in the same area of responsibility. On the work of the Inter-Church Forward Movement, see Airhart, “Condensation,” 97–105. Robert T. Handy, “Reflections on the Federal Council of Churches, the United Church of Canada, and the Social Gospel in the 1930s,” Toronto Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1996): 179–88, notes the similarities between their aims and purposes, as well as the involvement of a number of senior United Church leaders in its work. Historians and theologians are far from agreed on the significance of the Edinburgh Conference. For example, critic John Kent, The Unacceptable Face of the Church: The Modern Church in the Eyes of the Historian (London: s cm , 1987), 203, sees Edinburgh as the beginning of an organizational quest for Christian unity that had already run out of steam by the time the Faith and Order Commission of the recently formed World Council of Churches met at Lund in 1952. John Webster Grant, The Ship under the Cross: A Survey of the Ecumenical Movement (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1960), 36–7, assesses it more positively as “a critical point at which the ongoing life of the church was dramatically intersected by a new impulse of the Spirit.” Brian Stanley, World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids, m i : Eerdmans, 2009), 1–17, begins his comprehensive study of the event and its aftermath with an overview of interpretations. A number of church union supporters from Canada attended the conference, including Newton Wesley Rowell, who went as a Methodist delegate and served as a member of the Continuation Committee the following year. Dana Robert, “The First Globalization: The Internationalization of the Protestant Missionary Movement between the World Wars,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 26, no. 2 (2002): 50. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), explores the implications of self-­ determination for the treaty negotiations and the consequences of the ­lingering resentment over its terms. While the power shifts in AngloAmerican relations that were evident at Paris were important for Canada’s national aspirations, the hostility roused in China, Japan, and Korea is worth noting (306–44); the unresolved tensions later created a crisis for United Church missions. The ten articles were published between 4 April and 27 June 1928. Wallace also left detailed notes of the proceedings, as well as reports and minutes obtained at the conference, in his personal papers (uc a ).

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Notes to pages 80–3

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34 Edward Wilson Wallace, “The Pattern on the Mount,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 5, no. 4 (1928): 313. 35 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Going to Jerusalem,” New Outlook, 4 April 1928, 26. 36 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Who Is Sufficient for These Things?” New Outlook, 16 May 1928, 5, 7. 37 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Workers Together with God: The Christian Message in Action,” New Outlook, 30 May 1928, 8, 16. 38 Wallace, “The Pattern on the Mount,” 315. 39 Jerald D. Gort, “Jerusalem 1928: Mission, Kingdom and Church,” International Review of Mission 67, no. 3 (1978): 287–90. Concerns were further heightened by the provocative recommendations of “the laymen’s report” that appeared as Re-Thinking Missions in 1932. See James Alan Patterson, “The Loss of a Protestant Missionary Consensus: Foreign Missions and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Conflict,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880– 1980, ed. Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 84–91. 40 Daniel Fleming, Whither Bound in Missions (New York: Association Press, 1925), 47, had urged readers to discard the missionary maps that showed “sending” and “receiving” countries. Instead he pictured the West as part of the “non-Christian world,” one that was “a deeper black because it has had access to Christ so long.” 41 Grant Wacker, “Second Thoughts on the Great Commission: Liberal Protestants and Foreign Missions,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980, 291. 42 Wright, 168–9. 43 Ibid., 168. 44 Wallace’s address to the General Council was published as “The World Situation as It Confronts the Church Today,” New Outlook, 19 October 1932, 968. 45 For a further discussion of the contested term “evangelical,” including its use in the “Evangelism” report, see chapter 4 below. “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 256, makes explicit reference to the influence of the Jerusalem meeting. 46 Jesse H. Arnup, A New Church Faces a New World (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1937), 96. 47 Ibid., 77. 48 N.K. Clifford, “His Dominion: A Vision in Crisis,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 2, no. 4 (1973): 315–36, argues that the p ­ ersistence of

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Notes to page 83

regional and ethnic loyalties among immigrants eroded the nationalist assumptions of Christian Canada in the decades after Confederation. While that may be so, “His Dominion” still resonated with the United Church’s founders before and after union. For example, William Gunn, secretary of the Congregational Missionary Society (1907–25) and moderator (1928–30), chose His Dominion as the title for his study of missions in 1917. The phrase also appears in the title of the overview of wms and home missions work by E.H. Oliver, His Dominion of Canada: A Study of the Background, Development and Challenge of the Missions of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1932). Neither work connects the mission theme to the theology of the social gospel, although the importance of social service is evident for both authors. 49 Ernest Thomas, “Shall We Recover a Lost God?” New Outlook, 8 February 1933, 129. He commended the Jerusalem meeting as going beyond the later and more liberal “Laymen’s Commission” (formally known a Re-Thinking Missions) “in its insistence of a God whose character is such as we see in Jesus Christ.” In “The Spirit of the Modern Church,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 7, no. 2 (1930): 86–7, Thomas credited the Jerusalem meeting with challenging “the whole educational programme of our Western Christendom on the ground that we have relied mainly on indoctrination and have departed from the programme of Jesus, so far as we have so done.” His article included extensive extracts from its reports. 50 See Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914–28 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 313–46, on connections between internationalism and social reform (especially pacifism). Allen observes that internationalism gained momentum in the years when some of the earlier expressions of the social gospel, notably prohibition, were dissipating (342). For analysis of similar links in the United States, see James Alan Patterson, “The Kingdom and the Great Commission: Social Gospel Impulses and American Protestant Missionary Leaders,” Fides et Historia 25, no. 1 (1993): 48–61. 51 R.J. Wilson, Church Union in Canada after Three Years (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1929), illustrates the convergence. A section on “The Task of the United Church” (32–40) highlighted the importance of home missions for dealing with the “problem” of the New Canadian. A discussion of “The Social Order” (40–4) followed, which presented the ­“individual” gospel as incomplete and made specific reference to the Jerusalem meeting (40).

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Notes to pages 84–6

337

52 [R.J. Wilson], Two Years’ Progress in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church of Canada Bureau of Literature and Information, 1928), 13. 53 Arnup, 85. 54 Ibid., 93. 55 Ibid., 153–4. 56 Ibid., 151–2. 57 Ibid., 155, citing the report of a joint commission of the Home Mission Board and the w m s . 58 Ibid., 158–62. 59 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1932), 363, is typical in praising students who are training “for service among their own people as teachers or doctors and nurses.” 60 Mrs J. Erle Jones, “Canada, the Great Home Mission Field,” Missionary Monthly, August 1932, 352. 61 “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1938), 335–6 (emphasis in original). 62 J.I. MacKay, The World in Canada (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1938), 32–3, 203. The book provides a detailed description of the United Church’s work with indigenous peoples and immigrants just prior to the Second World War. 63 Allen, 123. 64 For suggestive work along these lines, see Eleanor J. Stebner, “More than Maternal Feminists and Good Samaritans: Women and the Social Gospel in Canada,” in Gender and the Social Gospel, ed. Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 53–67, which deals mainly with pre-union social reform. The connections between evangelical feminism, missionary enthusiasm, and social reform are explored in Gayle I. Thrift, “Proscribed Piety: Woman’s Missionary Societies in Alberta, 1918–1939” (master’s thesis, University of Calgary, 1998). 65 William McGuire King, “An Enthusiasm for Humanity: The Social Emphasis in Religion and Its Accommodation in Protestant Theology,” in Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life, ed. Michael J. Lacey (New York: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Cambridge University Press, 1989), 60–1, notes the internationalist perspective of liberal Protestantism and its disillusionment with nationalism. 66 “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” r o p (1936), 291, prepared by a joint committee appointed in 1935 by the Board of Foreign Missions and the w m s . 67 Arnup, 240–3.

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Notes to pages 86–9

68 Daniel Fleming, “The World Task of the Church,” in The Church through Half a Century: Essays in Honor of William Adams Brown, ed. Samuel McCrea Cavert and Henry Pitney Van Duson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 322–3, observed that early missionaries were blind to their own Anglo-Saxon nationalism, and were now being forced by nationalistic trends “to inquire whether they have been too much presenting Jesus Christ as one whose significance has been thoroughly worked out in our Western creeds, theologies and social orders, rather than as one whose wondrous personality may break through in new directions not yet envisaged by the West.” 69 For a response to the drastic cuts proposed, see “The Voice of the Fields: What the Missionaries Think of the Proposed Cut” prepared by the Board of Foreign Missions [1935]; copy in George Campbell Pidgeon Papers, uc a , box 15-275. 70 “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” r o p (1936), 241–6. 71 The Jerusalem meeting is mentioned immediately after reference to “new lines of approach” in the “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” and its key assumptions are discussed throughout the report. It is striking that no reference is made to the more radical approach of “the laymen’s report.” This is not for lack of awareness of the study; see Ruth Brouwer, Modern Women Modernizing Men: The Changing Missions of Three Professional Women in Asia and Africa (Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2002), 26–30, for a discussion of the reception of Re-Thinking Missions in Canada. 72 Arnup, 229–31, 236. 73 Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900–1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 107–34. 74 F.N. Stapleford, “The Relation of the Church to Social Work,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 2, no. 1 (1925): 61–2. 75 Stapleford, 63, 68–70. 76 Time Marches On (e& s s Annual Report, 1935), 33. 77 For instance, D.N. McLachlan’s report for Thy Will Be Done (e&ss Annual Report, 1927), 18, urged vigilance in “invoking the coercive power” of the state to further the church’s objectives. 78 Allen, 280–3, describes Thomas’s strategy and the rifts it created with e & s s ’s associate secretary Hugh Dobson in particular. 79 D.L. Ritchie, “The Church in Public Life,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 2 (1926): 177–9. 80 D.L. McLachlan, “Must the Church Be Silent?” Western Recorder, August 1933, 5. For the Christian socialist position, see R.B.Y. Scott, “What Has

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Notes to pages 90–3

339

Christianity to Say on Social and Economic Questions?” New Outlook, 11 April 1934, 267, responding to the negative coverage of church pronouncements on social issues in the secular press. 81 “The Church and the Party,” Saturday Night, 17 June 1933, 1. 82 “Unchangeable Doctrine,” Saturday Night, 24 June 1933, 1. 83 “Report of the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order” (hereafter “Christianizing the Social Order”), r o p (1934), 235. For a different ­interpretation of the report, see David Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 240–8. 84 Robert A. Falconer, Religion on My Life’s Road (Houston: Rice Institute, 1938), 106. 85 James G. Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 85. 86 “Christianizing the Social Order,” 244–6. 87 Ibid., 247. 88 Ibid., 241. 89 Falconer, Religion, 106–7. 90 Gwen R.P. Norman, Grace Unfailing: The Radical Mind and the Beloved Community of Richard Roberts (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1998), 186. 91 Richard Roberts, The Contemporary Christ (New York: Macmillan Company, 1938), 135–6. 92 Session of St Marys United Church, A Critical Comment on a Pamphlet Issued by the General Council of The United Church and Entitled “Christianizing the Social Order” (n.p., n.d.), 2–5. 93 “Christianizing the Social Order,” 235. 94 Ibid., 247–8. The group had pressed the commission, without success, to make more explicit statements about the problems of capitalism and the “almost unlimited pursuit of private gain.” The similarities between their proposals for restructuring the economy on a Christian basis and the policies of the newly formed ccf party left Christian socialist sympathizers vulnerable to the charge that they had crossed the line between principles and partisanship. 95 Kenneth Norrie and Douglas Owram, A History of the Canadian Economy (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 491–4. 96 John Herd Thompson and Allan Seager, Canada 1922–39: Decades of Discord (Toronto: McClelland and Stuart, 1985), 262–6. 97 Thompson and Seager, 274.

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Notes to pages 94–6

98 Norrie and Owram, 498–502. On King’s ambivalence to expanding social programs, see Thompson and Seager, 273–81. Owram, Government Generation, 180, notes the irony in Bennett’s poor relationship with the reform-minded intellectual community since his New Deal attempted to expand the role of the state in systematic social planning along the lines it had proposed.   99 Walter T. Brown and J.R. Mutchmor to Newton Wesley Rowell, 12 April 1938, a letter that accompanied “A Brief on Social Security by a Commission on Economic and Social Research ... Presented to the Royal Com­ mission on Dominion-Provincial Relations,” April 1938, Commission on Economic and Social Research, u ca 82.032C, box 1-3. 100 “A Brief on Social Security by a Commission on Economic and Social Research,” 12, box 1-3. 101 Ted Reeve, Claiming the Social Passion: The Role of the United Church in Creating a Culture of Social Well-Being in Canadian Society (Toronto: Moderator’s Consultation on Faith and the Economy, 1999), discusses the United Church’s involvement in promoting social welfare policies, including the “Christianizing the Social Order” report (54–68) and the Rowell Commission brief (75–83). 102 Roger Hutchinson, “The Public Faith of a Democratic Socialist,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 21, no. 2 (1986): 34. 103 Michael Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire (Toronto: Macmillan Company, 1978), 454. 104 Winter, 40–1, describes the problems that surface when pastoral and agency orientations work at cross-purposes rather than complementarily, identifying the agency’s takeover of the religious enterprise as a danger confronting many Protestant churches. 105 Bliss, 454–5. Ironically, Flavelle’s assessment is remarkably similar to the complaint of Presbyterian opponents of church union in both Canada and the United States. James H. Moorhead, “Presbyterians and the Mystique of Organizational Efficiency, 1870–1936,” in Reimagining Denominationalism, 277–81, points out that centralization was resisted by Machen and other conservatives in the Presbyterian church in the United States, and notes the tensions between national and local concerns. 106 “New United Church Comes into Being,” Toronto Mail, 11 June 1925 [clipping], United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series I, uc a 83.063C, box 36-773, reporting on Ritchie’s address to the General Council. 107 D.L. Ritchie, “The Fourth 10th of June,” New Outlook, 6 June 1928, 8.

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Notes to pages 96–100

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108 Salem G. Bland, “The Most Momentous Issue of the Coming Council,” New Outlook, 21 September 1932, 872. 109 J.W.A. Nicholson, “The Church’s Role,” in Towards the Christian Revolution, ed. R.B.Y. Scott and Gregory Vlastos (Chicago: Willet, Clark and Company, 1936), 177. 110 Richard Roberts, “The Moderator’s Mission,” New Outlook, 31 October 1934, 954. 111 Roberts, The Contemporary Christ, 47–8, 119–20. 112 [R.J. Wilson], Two Years’ Progress, 9. 113 Marshall, 230–3, discusses the United Church’s dire financial situation, arguing that it stemmed from the economic crisis as well as its own spiritual depression. 114 “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” 238. 115 Ian McKay Manson, “‘Fighting the Good Fight’: Salvation, Social Reform, and Service in the United Church of Canada’s Board of Evangelism and Social Service” (ThD diss., Victoria University, 1999), 154–81, describes the social services supported by e& s s , including “redemptive” homes, maternity homes, and reform schools for boys and girls. 116 McLachlan, Time Marches On, 30. 117 “The Largest Class since Church Union,” Missionary Monthly, July 1946, 300. Mary Anne MacFarland, “Faithful and Courageous Handmaidens: Deaconesses in the United Church of Canada, 1925–1945,” in Changing Roles of Women within the Christian Church in Canada, ed. Elizabeth Gillan Muir and Marilyn Färdig Whiteley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 248–55, discusses their role as missionaries, noting that after the Second World War opportunities for paid employment for women shifted to Christian education in congregations. 118 Katharine B. Hockin, “My Pilgrimage in Mission,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 12, no. 1 (1988): 26. 119 Arnup, 253. 120 Eleanor J. Stebner, “Young Man Knowles: Christianity, Politics, and the ‘Making of a Better World,’” in Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 221–32. 121 Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 226. 122 Richard Roberts, For the Kingdom of God (London: sc m Press, 1933), 82–3. 123 Norman, 221.

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124 The generational shift bears a striking resemblance to the cycles of change described in William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 69–96; in this case the “Missionary” generation (an Idealist type) was succeeded by the “Lost” generation (a Reactive type) during a ­“crisis era.” 125 Richard Roberts to Don MacVicar, 20 February 1941, Richard Roberts Papers, uc a, box 1-14. When Arnup retired in 1952 he had been in national executive positions since 1913. Mutchmor was to remain as ­secretary of e& s s until 1962, with his own retirement coming in 1964. 126 Manson, 8. 127 Ernest Thomas, Christian Life in a Changing World (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1937), 61–3.

c ha p t e r f o u r    1 George Campbell Pidgeon, “The City without Walls,” New Outlook, 16 June 1926, 7, 28. D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 180, remarks that the unity of evangelical Protestantism in Britain and the United States was shattered by the 1920s, with divisions between conservatives and liberals sometimes so sharp that one side did not consider the other side as Christian, let alone evangelical. The church union controversy seems to have fueled a similar response to the United Church, with Machen and others providing sparks.   2 e & s s published a number of pamphlets that challenged apocalyptic and premillennial interpretations of the Kingdom; see Andrew Stewart, The Millennial Reign of Christ (n.d.); Ernest Thomas, Why Christians Expect the Reign of Christ (1936); Ernest Thomas, Waiting for the Lord’s Return (1936); and R.B.Y. Scott, The Gospel of the Kingdom (Montreal: Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, 1936).    3 The United Church was more ‘settled’ than the liberal Protestants ­featured in Leigh Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005); its leaders were also attempting to straddle the developing divide described in Jean Miller Schmidt, Souls or the Social Order: The TwoParty System in American Protestantism (Brooklyn, ny: Carlson, 1991). See Bebbington, 210–19, for a nicely nuanced analysis of conservative and liberal approaches to social reform among evangelical Protestants in Britain.

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Notes to pages 103–7

343

  4 A.B. McKillop, Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 406.   5 Pidgeon, “The Message and Mission of the United Church of Canada,” 23–4.   6 Talcott Parsons, “Christianity in a Modern Industrial Society,” in Sociological Theory, Values, and Sociocultural Change: Essays in Honor of Pitirim A. Sorokin, ed. Edward A. Tiryakian (Glencoe, il: Free Press, 1963), 36–7, 52–4. “Inner-worldly” piety bears a striking family resemblance to Nancy Ammerman’s “Golden Rule Christians”: lay liberals who hope to make the world a bit better through donations and volunteer activities, rather than overturning the political system; see “Golden Rule Christianity: Lived Religion in the American Mainstream,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton, n j: Princeton University Press, 1997), 203–6.   7 Phyllis D. Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Methodism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1992), especially chapter 4.   8 William McGuire King, “An Enthusiasm for Humanity: The Social Emphasis in Religion and Its Accommodation in Protestant Theology,” in Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life, ed. Michael J. Lacy (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Cambridge University Press, 1989), 55, 57–8.   9 Edmund Oliver, The Social Achievement of the Christian Church (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada, 1930), 178–9. On the developing split among evangelical Protestants over what conversion entailed, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “‘What Must I Do to Be Saved?’: Two Paths to Evangelical Conversion in Late Victorian Canada,” Church History 59, no. 3 (1990): 372–85. 10 Oliver, 172. 11 J.S. Woodsworth, “Thy Kingdom Come,” Grain Grower’s Guide 30 (June 1915), in Malcolm Ross, ed., Our Sense of Identity: A Book of Canadian Essays (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954), 293. 12 “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 252–5. 13 J.R.P. Sclater, Modernist Fundamentalism (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1926), 23. The foreword notes that the chapters were adapted from a series of sermons that were later published in the New Outlook, an indication that this was considered a timely topic. 14 R.J. Wilson [undated report], United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series 1, u ca 83.063C, box 23-509. 15 John S. Moir, Enduring Witness: A History of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 3rd ed. (Burlington, on : Eagle Press, [2004?]), 234. Moir says

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Notes to pages 107–8

that Machen compared modernists to Judas; the published text of the ­sermon associates them with “the Judaizers” (a heresy unrelated to Judas) along with Gnostics and Pelagians. See J. Gresham Machen, “The Mission of the Church,” accessed 7 August 2012, www.pcahistory. org / findingaids / machen / mission.html. 16 “The ‘Fundamentalists,’” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 3 (1926): 170. 17 “True Fundamentalism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 3 (1926): 170–1. 18 D.L. McLachlan’s annual report in He Must Reign (e&ss Annual Report, 1928), 19–20. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 224–43, find evidence of a revival of personal religion in the 1930s, yet even the Oxford Group was not simply a return to mass meetings on the scale of earlier decades. 19 “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 257. 20 William S. Kervin, “Worship on the Way: The Dialectic of United Church Worship,” in The United Church of Canada: A History, ed. Don Schweitzer (Waterloo, on : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 188– 94, discusses the importance of Forms of Service and other liturgical resources in shaping the ethos of worship. 21 N. Keith Clifford, “No Easy Process: Alexander MacMillan and the Birth of the Hymnary,” Touchstone 8, no. 1 (January 1990): 42–3. On the “Presbyterian preponderance” of influence, see Thomas Harding and Bruce Harding, Patterns of Worship in the United Church of Canada, 1925–1960 (Toronto: Evensong, 1995), 39–41. 22 S.P. Rose, “The Making of a Hymn-Book,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 7, no. 4 (1930): 309, 311. 23 For an account of the use of service books in the United Church, see Harding and Harding, especially chapter 3. On the early liturgical ­development of the United Church, see William S. Kervin, “Forms of Service (1926): The Liturgical Ethos of the United Church of Canada,” Toronto Journal of Theology 17, no. 2 (2001): 215–29. Kervin notes that Presbyterian forms outnumbered Methodist sources by a ratio of 3 to 1 (218). Combined with Macmillan’s influence on the hymn book committee, it is not surprising that United Church worship developed a decidedly Presbyterian tone that was to last until the revolution of the 1960s. 24 J.A. Davidson cited in Harding and Harding, 121.

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Notes to pages 108–11

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25 G. Campbell Wadsworth, “The United Church Communion Rite of 1932: An Appreciation and Apologia,” Canadian Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1966): 110. On the use of the Book of Common Order, see David R. Newman, “Worship in the United Church of Canada,” Worship 53 (1979): 538–48 and W. Morrison Kelly, “Fifty Years of Worship in the United Church,” Gathering (Advent / Christmas / Epiphany Study Papers, 1985): 1–6. 26 Harding and Harding, 97–102. 27 Osbert Morley Sanford, The Genius of the United Church (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1931), 11. 28 Sanford, 12–19. 29 A.G. Reynolds, For the Land’s Sake (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, [1944?]), 61, 63. 30 R. Edis Fairbairn, “Worship As a Substitute,” u c o , 14 September 1940, 15. 31 W.T. Brown, “The Meaning of Worship,” Baccalaureate Sermon: Victoria University and Union Theological College, 14 April 1928, 6. For a discussion of emotion as essential yet dangerous, see “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 259–60. On changes in what was deemed appropriate emotional expression prior to union, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “Condensation and Heart Religion: Canadian Methodists as Evangelicals, 1884–1925,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 99. 32 “The Church and Industry,” r o p (1932), 288–9. 33 Michiel Horn, The Great Depression of the 1930s in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1984), 9–14. 34 For an analysis of liberal theology between the wars, including a discussion of its challengers, see Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, k y: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 435–521. For a succinct discussion of the “liberal era” of American Protestantism between 1875 and 1935, see William McGuire King, “Liberalism,” in The Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (New York: Scribner, 1988), 2:1129–45. Sydney Ahlstrom, “Continental Influence on American Christian Thought since World War I,” in Theological Themes in the American Protestant World, vol. 4 of Modern American Protestantism and Its World, ed. Martin E. Marty (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1992), 238–9, describes its central themes and notes that stagnancy was evident by 1920: “With the possible exception of the great religious depression of the Revolutionary epoch (1770–1800), there

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Notes to pages 111–13

was probably never a time in American history when less heed was paid to the message of the churches. At no time did it so deserve to be ignored.” 35 Heather A. Warren, Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 50–3. On Barth’s influence, see Gary Dorrien, Theology without Weapons: The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 14–80. Ahlstrom, “Continental Influence,” 244–5, sees 1934 as a critical year with the ­publication of Barth’s sermons in English; Edwin Lewis’s “Christian Manifesto”; Walter Marshall Horton’s Realistic Theology; and Niebuhr’s Reflections on the End of an Era as well as his lectures that came out a year later as An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. See also Dennis N. Voskuil, “America Encounters Karl Barth,” in Theological Themes in the American Protestant World, 253–66. He notes that, although Barth’s Commentary on Romans was published in 1919, the shockwaves of this “bombshell” took longer to reach North America. By then the continent was in the throes of the Depression and ready to take note of his message. 36 “A Significant Student Conference,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 4 (1931): 271–2. The editorial also expressed regret that the sv m had become a “separate fellowship,” and described them as “mere traditionists” [sic], while applauding the sc m event as manifesting a “vigorous and vital evangelical form without the graver defects which characterize the evangelical party.” For Visser ’t Hooft’s presentation of the theological shift see “An Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 1 (1931): 37–51. 37 W.A. Visser ’t Hooft, “A Farewell to the Social Gospel,” Student World 26, no. 3 (1933): 275–6. 38 John C. Bennett, “After Liberalism – What?” Christian Century, 8 November 1933, 1403–4. 39 Vlastos’s letter is cited in Warren, 61. 40 Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), 169. Chapter 5 of this work displays Niebuhr’s biting critique of liberalism. Daniel F. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey: An American Odyssey (Albany: State University of New York, 1993), 196ff., provides an excellent summary of Niebuhr’s critique of the liberal creed. 41 Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 177–9. 42 King, “An Enthusiasm for Humanity,” 75. 43 Henry Nelson Wieman, Methods of Private Religious Living (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 116.

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Notes to pages 113–15

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44 Ibid., 17–18. 45 Ibid., 63. 46 John Line, “The New Physics and the Religious View of the World,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 7, no. 1 (1930): 6–17, presents a positive assessment of new scientific developments, as do H.F. Leach, “The New Physics and the Idea of God,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 6, no. 5 (1929): 326–34, and Richard Roberts, The Christian God (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 82–6. All three mention the influence of Eddington and Whitehead. 47 Robert A. Falconer, “Difficulties for Religion in an Age of Science,” Religious Education 23, no. 4 (1928): 281–2. 48 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Going to Jerusalem,” New Outlook, 4 April 1928, 26. He left the conference convinced that “secular civilization” was “coming to be the great opponent in all lands” and a common challenge to all Christians. Samuel McCrae Cavert, The American Churches in the Ecumenical Movement, 1900–1968 (New York: Association Press, 1968), 134, confirms that assessment of the impact of Jones’s paper, crediting his presentation at the Jerusalem meeting in 1928 for an idea “little recognized in previous missionary gatherings”: that secularism, rather than other religions, had become Christianity’s main competitor. 49 Rice, 55. See John Dewey, “Humanist Manifesto,” in American Christianity, ed. H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 2:248–53. 50 On the conflict over naturalism (including humanism) and liberal theology, see Rice, esp. 93–215. 51 H. Shelton Smith, “Is Religious Naturalism Enough?” Religious Education 31, no. 2 (1936): 107. 52 John Baillie, “The Predicament of Humanism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 109, 112–15. 53 John Line, “How Humanism Came and What It Is,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 98–108, and Walter T. Brown, “Humanism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 125–34. 54 My survey of the issues of the Federal Council Bulletin (f c b ) in the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School library suggests that the United Church’s ecumenical partners in the Federal Council of Churches were contending with similar problems. As illustrations, see Francis J. McConnell, “The Social Task of the Church in America,” f c b , March– April 1925, 13–14; S. Parker Cadman, “The Returning Emphasis on the Inner Life,” f c b , September–October 1926, 11; Reinhold Niebuhr, “Can

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Notes to pages 115–17

Religion Solve Social Problems,” f c b , March 1927, 11–12; “When Mysticism and Social Service Meet,” f c b , November 1927, 3; “Evangelism – Individual and Social,” f c b , June 1928, 1–2; “A FullOrbed Evangelism,” f c b , June 1930, 1–2; “Beyond Humanism,” f c b , November 1930, 5; Luther Weigle, “The New Paganism and the Coming Revival,” f c b , April 1931, 6–7; Rufus M. Jones, “The First Requisite for a Better World,” f c b , October 1931, 6; Robert Speer, “The Meaning of the Gospel for the Individual Today” f c b , February 1932, 7; “Salvation: Individual and Social,” f c b , May 1935, 3; “The Recovery of Evangelism,” f c b , September 1936, 3. 55 “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 255–6, 262. 56 D.N. McLachlan’s report in Revive Thy Work (e&ss Annual Report, 1930), 17–18. 57 Richard Roberts, For the Kingdom of God (London: sc m Press, 1933), 15–17. 58 Richard Roberts, The Spirit of God and the Faith of Today (Chicago: Willett, Clark and Colby, 1930), 120–3. 59 John Herd Thompson and Allan Seager, Canada 1922–39: Decades of Discord (Toronto: McClelland and Stuart, 1985), 183–4. 60 Mary Vipond, The Mass Media in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1989), 21–33. 61 Charles W. Gilkey, “Protestant Preaching,” in The Church through Half a Century: Essays in Honor of William Adams Brown, ed. Samuel McCrea Cavert and Henry Pitney Van Dusen (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 320. 62 Richard Roberts, The Contemporary Christ (New York: Macmillan Company, 1938), 104, observed that people had “fallen into a way of accepting the good of life as a matter of course, even if not as a matter of right; and it hardly occurs to us to give thanks; and the giving of thanks is the key to worship.” 63 For an astute analysis of the Oxford Group movement’s blending of old and new and its shift to political concerns, see Kevin Kee, Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 96–142. For a sampling of the mixed reaction of United Church ministers to the “groupers,” see A.D. Miller, “The Movement through Friendly but Open Eyes,” (n.d.), Alfred Dennis Miller Papers, u ca, box 1-14; The Committee of Thirty, The Challenge of the Oxford Group Movement: An Attempt at Appraisal (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1933); Richard Roberts, “The Oxford Group,”

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64

65

66

67

Notes to pages 117–18

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Christian Century, 1 February 1933, 147–9; Ernest Thomas, “How to Make the Oxford Group Fruitful,” Western Recorder, January 1933, 4–5; Ernest Thomas, “The Oxford Group: Second Phase,” Western Recorder, March 1933, 4–5; and Claris Edwin Silcox, “The Oxford Groups in Canada,” Christian Century, 12 September 1934, 1137–40. David Plaxton, “A Whole Gospel for a Whole Nation” (PhD diss., Queen’s University, 1997), 108–13, notes that most observers viewed the movement as an attempt to recover evangelical piety because of its emphasis on experience. Christie and Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity, 224, suggest that the Oxford Group avoided references to basic evangelical doctrine because of the antipathy of those subscribing to social Christianity. On the other hand, Niebuhr, Interpretation, 177–8, described the Oxford Group as an expression of liberal Christianity. His assessment was scathing: “The Buchman movement, supposedly a revitalization of Christianity but in reality the final and most absurd expression of the romantic presuppositions of liberal Christianity, has undertaken to solve all the problems of modern economics and politics by persuading individuals to live in terms of ‘absolute honesty’ and ‘absolute love.’” David Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 226–7, sees the Oxford Group movement as further evidence of the spiritual depression that Canadian Protestantism was experiencing. For example, the Joint Committee suggested studies on the topic of “God in National and Personal Life,” (Easter 1934), Pidgeon Papers, box 9-178. For the relationship of the Oxford Group to the Joint Committee, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “Christian Socialism and the Legacy of Revivalism in the 1930s,” in A Long and Faithful March: ‘Towards the Christian Revolution,’ 1930s / 1980s, ed. Harold Wells and Roger Hutchinson (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1989), 35–7, and Plaxton, chapter 4. Pidgeon chaired the Joint Committee, but continued to support the Oxford Group even after its meetings became a bone of contention in his own denomination. Gwen R.P. Norman, Grace Unfailing: The Radical Mind and the Beloved Community of Richard Roberts (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1998), 222–4. Ian Manson, “Religious Revival and Social Transformation: George Pidgeon and the United Church of Canada in the 1930s,” Toronto Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1996): 216–20.

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Notes to pages 118–21

68 J.W.A. Nicholson, “Realism in Religion: Giving the Prayer-Wheel Another Turn,” u c o , 21 March 1934, 206–7. 69 For a discussion of the fcs o’s position in relation to the United Church’s social message, see Roger Hutchinson, “The Fellowship for a Christian Social Order: A Social Ethical Analysis of a Christian Socialist Movement” (ThD diss., Victoria University, 1975), 26–70. 70 Eugene Forsey, “A New Economic Order,” in Towards the Christian Revolution, ed. R.B.Y. Scott and Gregory Vlastos (Chicago: Willet, Clark and Company, 1936), 101–2. 71 John Line, “The Fundamental Unity of Spiritual and Religious Values,” Address to the Toronto Ministerial Association, 5 January 1931, 5, John Line Papers, u ca, box 1-2. 72 Line, “The Theological Principles,” in Towards the Christian Revolution, 33. 73 Ibid., 32. 74 John Line, “Conditions of Religious Renewal,” Christian Century, 3 June 1936, 800, 802. 75 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Towards a Christian Revolution,” Radical Religion 2, no. 1 (1937): 42–4. 76 Gordon A. Sisco, “[Review of] Towards the Christian Revolution,” New Outlook, 19 February 1937, 160–1. 77 For Roberts’s response to the crisis in liberalism, see Michael Bourgeois, “Hope, History and Redemption in the Theology of Richard Roberts (1874–1945),” Toronto Journal of Theology 19, no. 2 (2003): 157–72. 78 Richard Roberts, The New Man and the Divine Society: A Study in Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 16–17. 79 Richard Roberts, “In Praise of Humanism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 122–4. He found in process theology a tool for preserving his understanding of God as both transcendent and immanent, and Christ as both divine and human; see Roberts, The Christian God, 82–6, and The Spirit of God and the Faith of Today, 144–5. 80 Richard Roberts, [Moderator’s Final Address to General Council in 1936], Roberts Papers, box 3-84, 9–10. 81 Roberts, The Contemporary Christ, 44. 82 Ibid., 77. 83 Ibid., 124–5. 84 Clashes between the first chair and secretary of the commission (Queen’s professor J.M. Shaw and e& s s ’s Ernest Thomas) led to their replacement in 1938 by Richard Davidson, (principal of Emmanuel College) and J.R. Mutchmor (recently appointed as secretary of e&ss). For an analysis of

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85

86

87

88

89 90

Notes to pages 121–2

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the membership and work of the Commission, see Ian McKay Manson, “‘Fighting the Good Fight’: Salvation, Social Reform, and Service in the United Church of Canada’s Board of Evangelism and Social Service” (ThD diss., Victoria University, 1999), 194–201, which includes a comparison of the draft submitted by Ernest Thomas (“Statement A”) with one prepared by John Line and his Emmanuel colleague John Dow (“Statement B”). See Commission on Christian Faith, u ca 82.031C, box 2 for the statements and responses. Minutes, 20 November 1939, Commission on Christian Faith, box 1-1, recorded that Thomas was absent because of illness, and he died the following February. Line was absent from that meeting as well, perhaps accounting for the frank discussion of the merits of particular sections of the two statements suggested in the minutes. Minutes, 17 April 1939, Commission on Christian Faith, box 1-1. The minutes of the 26 May 1939 meeting (ibid.) indicate that Line complimented Thomas’s draft, but stated that in his view it was impossible to combine it with the (arguably more Barthian) one that he had helped to prepare. Gordon A. Sisco, “Shall We Return to Calvinism?” New Outlook, 17 September 1937, 837–8. Unlike Talcott Parsons (as noted above), who credited Calvin with a world-affirming theology, Sisco saw Barth’s worlddenying theology as an attempt to reclaim Calvin’s “stern views of God, man, and history.” Sisco referred to Scottish theologian John Macmurray as “a thinker who holds to the liberal tradition” and urged that his ideas be used to modify Barth. Macmurray’s name often crops up in the writings of John Line, and Richard Roberts as well. Randolph Carleton Chalmers, See the Christ Stand! A Study in Doctrine in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), 189. Chalmers succeeded Richard Roberts at Sherbourne Street United Church, became associate secretary of e& s s in 1945, and then left in 1950 to accept a position at St Andrew’s College. He returned to the Maritimes in 1957 to teach at Pine Hill Divinity Hall, retiring in 1974. For an assessment of his theology, see William Haughton, “Almost Forgotten: RC [sic] Chalmers and the Liberal-Evangelical Heritage of the United Church of Canada,” Touchstone 29, no. 2 (2011): 51–8. Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 59. “Gregory Vlastos,” accessed 3 May 2013, http: / / philosophy.princeton. edu / index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55&Itemid=145. For an assessment of his impact on students at Queen’s Theological

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Notes to pages 122–6



College as a Christian socialist, see George Rawlyk and Kevin Quinn, The Redeemed of the Lord Say So: A History of Queen’s Theological College (Kingston: Queen’s Theological College, 1980), 115–8.   91 Letter to Professor George F. Thomas, 12 March 1955, R.B.Y. Scott Papers, uc a, box 1-3. By that point in his mid-fifties, he accepted the ­position at Princeton with its “most generous” salary, and inquired about becoming an American citizen in order to receive Social Security upon retirement.   92 Ian Manson, “‘O Day of God Draw Nigh’: R.B.Y. Scott, the Church and the Call for Social Reconstruction,” in Doing Ethics in a Pluralistic World: Essays in Honour of Roger C. Hutchinson, ed. Phyllis D. Airhart, Marilyn J. Legge, and Gary L. Redcliffe (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002), 99–111.   93 Courtesy of Emmanuel College. Copyright © Emmanuel College 1965.   94 R.P. Stouffer, “Prof. Line and the Resolution,” Saturday Night, 24 June 1933: 3.   95 John Line, “Recent Trends in Theological Education,” u c o , 1 August 1941, 28, was written shortly after his move to Emmanuel, and reflects his theological transitions.   96 John Line, The Doctrine of the Christian Ministry (London: Lutterworth, 1959).   97 John Line, “The Significance of the Report of the Commission on the Christianization of the Social Order,” Time Marches On (e&ss Annual Report, 1935), 26.   98 “Rev. John Line,” Minutes of Toronto Conference (1971), 57–8.   99 Some initiatives were reframed to capture this new image of the “whole Gospel.” For example, e& s s still supported Pidgeon’s Evangelization of Canadian Life campaign, but insisted that its activities be interpreted in the light of the “whole Gospel” and conducted in consultation with the Social Service Council of Canada. See Pidgeon Papers, box 9-184, for a copy of the action taken by e& s s at its 1937 meeting. 100 Candidus [pseud.], “An Outsider Looks at General Council,” New Outlook, 14 October 1936, 956. 101 “Evangelism and Social Service,” r o p (1936), 80.

c ha p t e r f i ve    1 L.B. Pearson, “Canada and the United States,” in Words and Occasions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 25.

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Notes to pages 127–30

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  2 John Bennett, Georgia Harkness, and the brothers Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr are among those dubbed by one historian as “theologians of a new world order.” See Heather Warren, Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). She notes the congruence between themes in the Oxford Conference reports and concerns of various group members circulated in their own publications as well as preparatory materials for the meeting, for example, worldwide social disintegration, sin as the cause of the turmoil, and the institutional church as the antidote for social ills (79–80).   3 “The Church and International Relationships,” r o p (1938), 93–5.   4 Minutes, 31 October 1939, War Service Committee, uc a 82.041C, box 1-1.   5 “A Witness Against the War,” u c o , 15 October 1939, 21.   6 John Coburn to H.D. Ranns, 10 October 1939, Board of Evangelism and Social Service, Series I, subseries 2, u ca 83.052C, box 46-80.   7 Ian McKay Manson, “The United Church of Canada and the Second World War,” in The United Church of Canada: A History (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 62–6, describes the wide-ranging involvement of the United Church in the war effort at the national and local levels.   8 Gordon Sisco, “Specific Tasks of the Crusade,” n.d., Gordon A. Sisco Papers, u ca, box 1-6.   9 “A Resume of the Wartime Services Rendered by the United Church Committee on Camp and War Production Communities,” n.d., 14, uc a 82.044C, box 1-6. Over a third of the names on a roster of the committee compiled at the end of the war were female. 10 “Practical Christianity in Wartime,” unidentified clipping appended to “A Resume of the Wartime Services.” 11 “United Church W.M.S. to Assist Women War Workers,” St Thomas Times Journal, May 27 1942 [clipping], Verda Ullman biographical file, uc a . 12 Minutes, 28 September 1942, Committee on Camp and War Production Communities, u ca 82.044C, box 1-1. For the wms’s involvement, see Isabel McIntosh Loveys, “The United Church and War Production Communities,” The Missionary Monthly, November 1942, 500–1. 13 “United Church W.M.S. to Assist Women War Workers.” 14 Malcolm MacDonald, They Look to the Church (Toronto: Committee on Camp and War Production Communities, 1944), 3. 15 Ibid., 11–12, 17–18, 20–3.

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Notes to pages 130–2

16 “Canadian War Bonds for the Church,” Christian Century, 5 February 1941, 172–3. The problematic relationship of church and state that Morrison identified is discussed in N.K. Clifford, “Charles Clayton Morrison and the United Church of Canada,” Canadian Journal of Theology 15, no. 2 (1969): 80–92. 17 R. Edis Fairbairn, “Indictment,” u c o , 1 February 1941, 11. He applied his criticism more broadly in Apostate Christendom (Ken-Pax Pub. Co., [1948?]), a booklet based on newsletters he fired off from his small pastoral charge in Windermere, Ontario, where he considered himself “exiled” after his acerbic pronouncements against the war led to his ouster from a larger church. 18 E.G.D. Freeman, “The Church and Social Reconstruction,” Church of the Air series; lectures delivered in Winnipeg, November 1941; mimeographed and mailed from the Department [sic] of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada, Toronto, lecture 1, 1–2. 19 Ibid., lecture 1, 3–5. 20 Ibid., lecture 2, 2–4. He credited Henry Sloan Coffin, one of his teachers at Union Theological Seminary, for influencing his faith in democracy. 21 Ibid., lecture 3, 3. 22 Ibid., lecture 4, 2. 23 Ibid., lecture 4, 4. 24 “Church Nation and World Order Interim Report,” r o p (1942), 129, notes the commission of the Federal Council of Churches that produced A Just and Durable Peace, to which the United Church had sent three representatives. 25 The wide-ranging topics included racial minorities, agriculture, postwar employment, housing, social security (including unemployment and disability insurance, worker’s compensation, health services, family allowances, and old age pensions), and English-French relations. 26 Gordon A. Sisco, “Christian Leaders Face Post-war Problems,” u c o , 1 August 1943, 27. The nine Canadian delegates included several from the United Church, among them Gordon Sisco, R.B.Y. Scott (who led discussions and was involved in drafting statements), W.C. Lockhart, and Gerald Hutchinson. 27 R.A. MacKay to J.R. Mutchmor, 2 February 1943, Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (hereafter cited as c nwo), uc a 82.046, box 1-7. 28 A.R.M. Lower, “Re the Basic Memorandum: Commission on the Church, Nation and World Order, United Church of Canada,” 9 August 1943, c nwo, box 1-10.

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Notes to pages 132–3

355

29 Correspondence addressed to the commission expressed wide-ranging concerns that confirmed the point that Silcox was making. Letter William M. Birks to Gordon Sisco, 3 February 1943, box 1-7, for instance, expressed concerns about the group that was working on banking. Birks wrote, “If it is made up of ministers and not experts, I hope that it will, at least, take advice from outstanding bankers, and economists, including the governor of the Bank of Canada.” Sisco assured him that the commission did not intend to “pose as an expert in this field,” adding,“I imagine that whatever information is sent in on this subject would be used by way of illustration of some general principle”; see Sisco to Birks, 8 February 1943, box 1-7. The correspondence in cnwo, box 1-7, suggests the polarity that the commission was attempting to manage: for example, Harvey Forster to Gordon Sisco, 20 February 1943; Mel Staples to Gordon Sisco, 21 June 1943; and Sisco’s reply to Staples, 22 June 1943. 30 Gordon Sisco to H.W. Avison, 29 January 1944, c nwo, box 1-7. 31 For a summary of his career, see Alan Davies, “Claris Edwin Silcox (1888– 1961): Brave and Resolute Champion of the City of God,” Touchstone 27, no. 2 (2009): 50–7. 32 Silcox explained his rationale for the revised draft in “Memorandum to Members of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order,” 11 October 1943, cn wo, box 1-3. 33 Scott expressed frustration with the new direction taken in the fifth draft, finding it “hard to see why the practical suggestions for application of the Christian Charter are identified with socialism”; see letter from R.B.Y Scott to C.E. Silcox, 19 September 1943, c nwo, box 1-7. Scott also raised questions about importing middle axioms from the American “Six Pillars of Peace.” 34 Silcox, “Memorandum,” 11 October 1943, c nwo, box 1-3. In one of his first presentations to the commission, Silcox defended his approach as ­follows: “The problem of middle axioms is a vexed one, but while the Church should refuse to confine itself to pious generalities it should also refuse to issue dogmatic statements regarding a wide variety of detailed plans the implementation of which depends upon many factors varying with the time, the place and the specific situation.” He referred to a copy of the declaration on world peace which had been issued by major Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders as an illustration of how much agreement could be achieved by avoiding “maximum” statements, and promised to share the “secret history” of how this “remarkable agreement” was reached at the next meeting (18 October). Silcox’s view was likely shared by Gordon Sisco, and is strikingly similar to the views

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356

35

36 37

38

39

40 41 42

43

Notes to pages 133–5

expressed by John Foster Dulles, chair of the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace on which Mutchmor and Sisco served. On a copy of a Life magazine article that Dulles sent to Sisco (and which he in turn sent to cn wo commission members), Sisco highlighted the ­following words: “We need men who, as citizens, will think out the application of those principles to the daily life of our nation. That is something that every one must do for himself. The Church cannot and should not try to do that for him.” John Foster Dulles, “A Righteous Faith,” Life, [28 December 1942?], cn wo, box 1-17. Church, Nation and World Order: A Report of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, [1944?]), 6. Ibid., 13. For example, Hugh H. Wolfenden to Gordon Sisco, 25 February 1943, c nwo, box 1-7, warned those preparing the 1944 report: “This Commission on such a question could and should have great influence throughout the whole of Canada; and general thinking on the social security question at the present moment is so much in the stage of somewhat unreliable endorsation or opposition ... that it will be of paramount importance for influential groups like this Commission to state its conclusion only after the most careful exploration and deliberation.” On proposals for social programs during the war (including a discussion of the Marsh report and the impact of the Beveridge report), see Dennis Guest, “World War II and the Welfare State in Canada,” in The “Benevolent” State: The Growth of Welfare in Canada, ed. Allan Moscovitch and Jim Albert (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1987), 205–21. “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 133, referring to Sisco’s description of its work in 1946. The c c ia was under the auspices of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service, and replaced the Committee on International Relationships. Church, Nation and World Order, 34. George M. Grant, “Canada,” in Christendom Anno Domini MDCCCCI, ed. William D. Grant (Toronto: William Briggs, 1902), 1:81. Robert Choquette, “English-French Relations in the Canadian Catholic Community,” in Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930, ed. Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 19. Lester B. Pearson, Mike: The Memoirs of the Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1972), 1:15. For his

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44

45 46

47

48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

Notes to pages 135–7

357

description of life in a Methodist parsonage, and his parents’ hopes that he would follow his father into the ministry, see 8–10, 14. Max and Monique Nemni, Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919–1944, trans. William Johnson (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006), is a fascinating account of how Trudeau’s student papers were infused with the values of his teachers. They conclude that almost all the students at Quebec’s Jesuit colleges “ended up with identical values with respect to Catholicism and French-Canadian nationalism. And they were convinced that they reached these values of their own free will” (48). See John English, et al., eds., The Hidden Pierre Elliott Trudeau: The Faith behind the Politics (Ottawa: Novalis, 2004), especially David Seljak, “Trudeau and the Privatization of Religion: The Quebec Context,” 47–56, for Trudeau’s approach to religion in political life in his later years. Nemni and Nemni, 58. Ibid., 63–4. They describe young Trudeau as a dutiful student presenting notions that were widely disseminated in Quebec schools: “the revenge of the cradle, the return to the land, the apostolic mission of the French Canadian ‘race,’ which is even a biological entity.” They note that at another Jesuit college, a teenager named René Lévesque was publishing similar ideas in the student newspaper (64–5). John English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 292–9, discusses Trudeau’s reversal in his views of the role of the Catholic Church in Quebec society. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1938), 342–3 (regional report submitted by J.U. Tanner). Claris Edwin Silcox, Protestant-Catholic Relations in Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1938), 10–11. Charles Thompson Sinclair Faulkner, “‘For Christian Civilization’: The Churches and Canada’s War Effort, 1939–1942” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1975), 112–15. Ibid., 123–4. Ibid., 117–32. J.R. Mutchmor, “Canadian Churches and Post-War Reconstruction,” Christendom 8 (1943): 374. C.E. Silox, The Revenge of the Cradles (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), iii. Ibid., iv–vi. Ibid., 25–7. The alternatives included a proposal to “dignify and render more livable and enjoyable the national vocation of the homemaker” by enabling women to “carry into married life the interests, acquired

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Notes to pages 137–9

aptitudes and activities” that would give them more security and economic independence. 57 Ibid., 21. 58 Ibid., 23. 59 The letter is undated, but the details suggest 1944 as the date of the meeting. George Campbell Pidgeon Papers, u c a , box 15–279. 60 “Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations,” r o p (1964), 458. The committee was discharged in 1973, replaced by a new committee that was to deal only with education issues. 61 “The Condition and Task of the Church in Canada,” n.d., Sisco Papers, box 1-11, 3. “Dr Sisco Says Quebec May Not Win Canada via ‘Battle of the Cradle,’” Toronto Star, 26 August 1948, indicates that he gave this speech in Amsterdam at the first General Assembly of the wc c . Sisco also served as the only Canadian on its first executive. 62 Arthur G. Reynolds, What’s the Difference? Protestant and Roman Catholic Beliefs Compared (Toronto: Commission on the Christian Faith, United Church of Canada, 1954), 6–8. Replies to other questions set out the history of the reformation and basic Protestant teaching about salvation, sin and grace, the authority of the Bible, sacraments, Mary and the saints, worship practices, and purgatory. “Daniel” [pseud.], Chats with a Prospective Convert to Roman Catholicism (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1954), a second booklet published the same year, used the literary device of a dialogue between a young man and a Protestant army chaplain as they talked about differences between the two religious faiths. Taking the pseudonym “Daniel,” the writer was identified in the preface as a man in the armed forces who had come to regret his decision to convert to Catholicism at the time of his marriage. 63 Reynolds, What’s the Difference?, 58–9. 64 Ibid., 60–1. 65 When and how the transition happened is difficult to pinpoint. John Webster Grant, “The Reaction of was p Churches to Non-wasp Immigrants,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 1968, 11, argues that the mosaic imagery was commonplace before church union. Other historians see the shift as happening in the 1920s and ’30s – and even then not really taking hold until after the Second World War with a new round of immigration underway and the tragic consequences of racism so apparent. See Allan Smith, “Metaphor and Nationality in North America,” Canadian Historical Review 51, no. 3 (1970): 257; and Howard Palmer, “Mosaic versus Melting Pot? Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada and the United States,” International Journal 31 (1975–76):

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66

67

68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79

Notes to pages 139–42

359

491–2, are among the historians who date the transition later. Richard J.F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 149–76, also discusses the popularity of the mosaic as an alternative to the American overtones of the melting pot image. John Cormie, Canada and the New Canadian (Toronto: Social Service Council of Canada, 1931), 3. Cormie remarked that the notion of “assimilation” had recently become provocative, explaining the use of the images of fusing and amalgamation as alternatives to “the process of the melting pot” (29). Ibid., 29–30. The pamphlet gives a detailed statistical picture of the sources and distribution of immigration. On the challenge that ‘Canadianizing’ settlers from Southern and Eastern European presented for schools as well as churches, see Michael Owen, “‘Building the Kingdom of God on the Prairies’: E.H. Oliver and Saskatchewan Education,” Saskatchewan History 40, no. 1 (1987): 22–34. J.R. Watts, Fifty Years of Rural Canada: Summary of Surveys ([Toronto?]: Board of Home Missions, 1933), 51–2. The areas surveyed were Dufferin County, o n , Cumberland County, n s , and District of Hamiota, mn. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1940), 330 (regional report submitted by J.A. Cormie). Gordon Sisco, s.v. “United Church of Canada,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1947, 397. G.B. King, “Training of Men for the Ministry,” u c o , 1 January 1941, 11. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1940), 341. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1948), 375. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1950), 356. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1942), 352. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1944), 339. “Questionnaire” [1944?], 1–2, Board of Home Missions, Series II, Section 1 (hereafter cited as bhm ), u ca 83.050C, box 26-422, “Report of the Commission on City Missions and Non-Anglo-Saxon Work,” 1–2, b h m, box 25-396. For questionnaire responses and reports of associate secretary George Dorey’s visits, see bhm , box 26, files 397 to 432; for Dorey’s memo summarizing the results from the questionnaire on nonAnglo-Saxon work, see bhm , box 26-422. The report was adopted in March 1944. The “Anglo-Saxon sect” reference found its way into the board’s report to the General Council; see “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1944), 309. Winnifred Thomas, “The Church Woman as Citizen,” Missionary Monthly, April 1945, 173–4.

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Notes to pages 142–3

80 Winnifred Thomas, “The Church Woman as Citizen,” Missionary Monthly, May 1945, 219–20. 81 See Missionary Monthly, June 1939, 249, for a copy of the petition. 82 C.E. Silcox, “The Church and Anti-Semitism: A Plea for a New Rapprochement of Christian and Jew,” Silcox Papers, box 9-14 (a draft of an article for Canadian Churchman dated 6 February 1941). 83 C.E. Silcox, “Should Canada Provide Sanctuary for European Refugees,” address delivered in Kingston, 1 November 1938, Silcox Papers, box 5-18, 3. 84 Ibid., 2. 85 E.M. Howse, Two Sermons (n.p., [1939?]), 12–13. The sermons were titled “Christian Canada and the Refugees” and “The Refugees – A Policy for Canada.” 86 Ibid., 15. Those exact words are found in Silcox’s Kingston address given the previous year. 87 Ibid., 13. 88 “Knowing the Facts about Refugees,” Missionary Monthly, November 1939, 482–3. 89 “Let Us Think about the Refugee Petition,” Missionary Monthly, January 1944, 14. 90 Constance Hayward, “Has the Christian Church Any Responsibility for the Refugees in Canada?” Missionary Monthly, June 1942, 245–6. 91 Alan T. Davies and Marilyn F. Nefsky, How Silent Were the Churches? Canadian Protestantism and the Jewish Plight during the Nazi Era (Waterloo, on : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998), 30–46. For a harsher assessment of the United Church’s response to the Holocaust, see Haim Genizi, The Holocaust, Israel, and the Canadian Protestant Churches (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 41–51. 92 Mary-Ann Shantz, “Kingston Christians and the Persecution of European Jews during the Nazi Era,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2003, 5–18. 93 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1944), 358–9. The Board of Home Missions and the w m s protested the sale of Japanese property to no avail. Eiji Yatabe, “From the Nisei (Japanese Canadian) Viewpoint,” Missionary Monthly, September 1943, 391–2, condemned the internment but praised the help of the w m s and United Church congregations as “one of the few comforting features” of the internment. The United Church also pressed for Japanese rights after the war; see “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1948), 458.

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Notes to pages 144–6

361

  94 Elda S. Daniels, “Evacuation from the Defence Area,” Western Recorder, June 1942, 11.   95 “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1944), 308.   96 Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire (London, Allen Lane, 2007), xxvii.   97 Ibid., 365–504, describes the cost of victory as Britain undertook to discharge its financial obligations, and the role of the United States in the resulting “liquidation” of the empire.   98 Ibid., 509. Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 51–74, discusses how the differences between the United States and Britain figured into the un vote to create the state of Israel.   99 Arthur R.M. Lower, Canada: Nation and Neighbour (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1952), 188. 100 Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (1992): 316–21. 101 For a history of Canada-U.S. relations before the Second World War, see Robert Bothwell, Canada and the United States: The Politics of Partnership (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 1–24. 102 Lawrence Aronsen, “An Open Door to the North: The Liberal Government and the Expansion of American Foreign Investment, 1945– 1953,” American Review of Canadian Studies (Summer 1992): 167. Both conservatives and those to the left of the Liberal Party saw this as a wrong turn at the fork in the road. He suggests that nationalist critics overlooked the debt load incurred during the war that left the federal government with few alternatives to foreign investment, and argues that the prosperity that resulted from American investment eventually “allowed for the expansion of the welfare state and cultural institutions that, in the years ahead, were to be the most important factors in maintaining the Canadian identity” (190–1). 103 Lawrence Aronsen, “From World War to Cold War: Cooperation and Competition in the North Atlantic Triangle, 1945–1949,” in The North Atlantic Triangle in a Changing World: Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1902–1956, ed. B.J.C. McKercher and Lawrence Aronsen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 212–13. 104 Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada since 1945: Power, Politic, and Provincialism, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 89. 105 Dianne Kirby, “Harry Truman’s Religious Legacy: The Holy Alliance, Containment, and the Cold War,” in Religion and the Cold War,

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362

Notes to pages 146–8

ed. Dianne Kirby (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), for a discussion of attempts to link democracy and Christianity (78–9), and the compli­ cations of uniting the Vatican and the w cc in the “holy war” against Communism (92–7). On the impact of liberal Protestant churches in ­shaping the approach to human rights that evolved as part of liberal democracy in Canada, see George Egerton, “Entering the Age of Human Rights: Religion, Politics, and Canadian Liberalism, 1945–50,” Canadian Historical Review 85, no. 3 (2004): 451–79. 106 E.M. Howse, The Field Is the World (Toronto: Board of Overseas Missions, United Church of Canada, [1949?]), 10–14, a reprint of a ­sermon preached at Bloor Street United, Toronto. 107 National Association of aots Clubs, Handbook, 1948 / 49 (Vancouver, [1948?]), 1–2. 108 Mary Kinnear, “Religion and the Shaping of ‘Public Woman’: A PostSuffrage Case Study,” in Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 196–8. 109 Margaret McWilliams, “A Constructive Philosophy for Our Time: ‘What Must I Do?’” Saturday Night, 28 June 1947, 24. 110 “The Christian Citizen in a Changing World,” in The Church and the International Disorder, ed. R.P. Barnes, et al. (London: sc m Press, 1948), 144. 111 Mark G. Toulouse, The Transformation of John Foster Dulles: From Prophet of Realism to Priest of Nationalism (Macon, ga : Mercer University Press, 1985), 196–8. 112 Ibid., 199–200. 113 See William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), for an analysis of the changing relationship of mainstream Protestantism to presidents Truman and Eisenhower and their key advisors (notably Dulles). 114 Edelgard Mahant and Graeme S. Mount, Invisible and Inaudible in Washington: American Policies toward Canada (Vancouver: ub c Press, 1999), 15–16. As minister of external affairs, Lester Pearson disagreed with the U.S. response to events in Korea, which may have had an impact on Canada’s relationship with U.S. leaders when he became prime minister a decade later; see 34–42 for a discussion of policy differences over Korea, China, and Vietnam. On the Korean War, see Martin Kitchen, “From the Korean War to Suez: Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1950–1956,” in The North Atlantic Triangle in a Changing World, 220–55.

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Notes to pages 148–50

363

115 Mahant and Mount, 42–3, conclude that by the 1960s the United States considered Canada unreliable, unimportant, and meddlesome. 116 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1960), 407–8. 117 Ibid., 409–10. 118 Silcox and Howse drew criticism early on; later A.C. Forrest became the focus of attention. Typically, the United Church took a position similar to leaders who were prominent in ecumenical circles, among them the ­editors of the Christian Century, several influential theologians (including H. Richard Niebuhr and two presidents of Union Theological Seminary, Henry Sloane Coffin and Henry Van Dusen), as well as the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. An exception was Reinhold Niebuhr, who was instrumental in organizing a group of pro-Zionist Christian clergy; see Martin E. Marty, Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960, vol. 3 of Modern American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 184–7. 119 Davies, “Claris Edwin Silcox,” 54. Davies (rightly in my view) acknowledges Silcox’s anti-Zionism without accusing him of anti-Semitism as other interpreters tend to do. 120 C.E. Silcox, “Impasse in the Holy Land,” University of Toronto Quarterly 16 (January 1947): 123. There was plenty of blame to go around, in his view, including Britain’s treatment of Arabs in the peace settlement after the First World War that was causing them to resist a diplomatic resolution to the Middle East crisis (129–30). C.E. Silcox, “The Palestine Question,” an outline of an address to a Rotary Club in Brampton, 19 July 1948, is typical of his postwar perspective in his many public addresses; see Silcox Papers, box 6-67. 121 C.E. Silcox, “The Crisis in the Middle East,” u c o , 15 February 1956, 24–6. 122 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1954), 141–3. Settlement of Palestinians in host countries and compensation from Israel continued to be recommended; cf. “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 152. 123 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1954), 141. 124 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1956), 143. 125 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 149. For criticism of Howse and Forrest, see Genezi, 66–146. Genizi sees Howse’s addition to the cci a in 1956 as a critical turning point that nudged the United Church toward a pro-Palestinian position. 126 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 150. 127 Jesse H. Arnup, A New Church Faces a New World (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1937), 97–8.

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Notes to pages 151–4

128 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1948), 450. 129 “Board of Overseas Missions,” r o p (1954), 485. 130 “Board of Overseas Missions,” r o p (1948), 214 (a report optimistically referred to by its members as “Opportunity Now”). 131 “Overseas Mission Policy,” r o p (1952), 416. 132 Shirley Jane Endicott, China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott (Waterloo, on : Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2003), 24–34. Mary Endicott’s letters describe their harrowing experience during the revolution, as well as their personal struggles during the controversy. For a fascinating biography of his father’s work as missionary, his intelligence gathering for the United States during the Second World War, and his relationship with the Communist party in China during the civil war, see Stephen Endicott, James G. Endicott: Rebel Out of China (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 133 Letter from James Endicott (undated) in Wilfrid Arnold Burbidge Papers, uc a , box 2-36a. 134 Shirley Jane Endicott, 185–90. 135 Alvyn J. Austin, Saving China: Canadian Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1888–1959 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 314–22. 136 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 145–7. 137 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1956), 516. 138 Daniel C. Goodwin, “The Canadian Council of Churches: Its Founding Vision and Early Years, 1944–1964,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 41, no. 2 (2004): 147–73, notes that the assumption of “Christian nations” reflected in the reorganization of international ecumenism along national lines after the war was soon tested. 139 On the family connections between missions and Cold War diplomacy, see Alvyn Austin, “Missionaries, Scholars, and Diplomats: China Missions and Canadian Public Life,” in Van Die, ed., Religion and Public Life in Canada, 142–6, and Sachiyo Takashima, “Dreams for Missionaries, Realities for Diplomats: Why the United Church of Canada’s Chinese Missionaries Were Involved in Politics during the 1940s and 1950s,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2001, 65–80.

chapter six    1 Ralph Allen, “The Hidden Failure of Our Churches,” Maclean’s, 25 February 1961. Its extensive analysis of religion in Canada includes a discussion of the changing role of the Catholic Church in Quebec.

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Notes to pages 155–8

365

  2 Ibid., 15.   3 Ibid., 46.   4 Ibid., 12–13.  5 Catechism: The United Church of Canada (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1944), III.27, 7.   6 Richard Davidson, “Purposes of New United Church Catechism,” Saturday Night, 15 April 1944, 22–3.   7 S.D. Clark, The Developing Canadian Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962, 2nd ed. 1968), 182; first published in 1947 as “The Religious Factor in Canadian Economic Development.”   8 Ibid., 171, 182.   9 Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald, “How Are Canada’s Five Largest Protestant Denominations Faring? A Look at the 2001 Census,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 40, no. 4 (2001): 511–34, analyze the growth in the 1950s, as well as the more recent relative decline. 10 For an astute assessment of the postwar expansion of Canadian churches and the cultural dynamics that undermined their vitality, see John Webster Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), 160–83. 11 H.E.F. [Harold E. Fey], “A Church Grows in Canada,” Christian Century, 3 October 1956, 1125–6. 12 Randolph Carleton Chalmers, The Pure Celestial Fire: An Evangelical Interpretation of Christianity (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1948), 212. 13 Ibid., 215–16. He quotes Union Theological Seminary’s Henry Van Dusen as warning of the “deep, undersurface tides” that for more than a generation had been “setting dead against everything of our concern,” despite the advantageous “winds of doctrine” of recent times. 14 John Line, “Decisive Theological Issues Today,” Theology Today 8, no. 1 (1951): 20–1, 28. 15 George C. Pidgeon, “Is the Church in Danger?” u c o , 1 May 1951, 5, citing an article by Marc Boegner, Christian Century, 7 March 1951. The warning about “paganism” had been sounded at the major gatherings of international ecumenism in 1928 and 1937; see John Flett, “From Jerusalem to Oxford: Mission as the Foundation and Goal of Ecumenical Social Thought,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 27, no. 1 (2003): 18, 21. 16 Jesse H. Arnup, A New Church Faces a New World (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1937), 232. 17 Church, Nation and World Order: A Report of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, [1944?]), 9.

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Notes to pages 158–62

18 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 87–9. 19 Arthur Organ, “Recreational Evangelism,” The Responsible Society (e&ss Annual Report, 1949), 39, 43. Organ was chair of e&ss at the time. 20 The Church and the Secular World (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1950), a reproduction of the report of the Commission on Culture to General Council, r o p (1950), Appendix, i–vi, 100. See page v of the pamphlet for the terms of reference, as well as the list of members. 21 Ibid., vi–vii. 22 Ibid., 36–53. 23 Ibid., 48–9. 24 The address was reprinted as W.J. Gallagher, “A New Situation,” in Frontiers of Faith (e& s s Annual Report, 1954), 77. 25 “‘Culture-Religion’ versus Christianity,” r o p (1954), 231 (emphasis in original). A commission report “On a Functional Ministry,” r o p (1954), 163–6, noted the challenge of attracting workers in an industrialized society to the church. Henry Gordon MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada, 1946–1977: A Study in the Sociology of the Denomination” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1980), 48–55, confirms that the United Church drew its membership predominantly from those who had higher levels of education, income, and occupational status than the general population. 26 J.R. Mutchmor, Mutchmor: The Memoirs of James Ralph Mutchmor (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 6. 27 Ibid., 21–7, 65–6, 75–9. 28 Ibid., 105. 29 These are among the anecdotes related in Kenneth Bagnell, “That Man Mutchmor,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 12–4, 46. 30 J.R. Mutchmor to Rev. James Fraser, 22 January 1951, James Ralph Mutchmor Papers, u ca, box 1a-11. 31 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 140–2. 32 J.R. Mutchmor, “The Church and Politics,” address to Annual Meeting of London Conference, 3 June 1948, 11–12. Mutchmor Papers, box 12-183a. 33 J.R. Mutchmor, “The Church and Social Action,” in The Minister’s Handbook: A Guidebook for Ministers in the United Church of Canada, ed. Randolph Carleton Chalmers (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1952), 217–21. 34 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 97. 35 “Reports of Secretaries,” in Right Relations among Men (e&ss Annual Report, 1943), 22.

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Notes to pages 162–4

367

36 David Plaxton, “‘We Will Evangelize with a Whole Gospel or None’: Evangelism and the United Church of Canada,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997), 117–20. Mutchmor, Memoirs, 107–19, recounts his support of evangelism and his strategic role. 37 For the message and methods of postwar evangelism, see “Forward Movement after the War,” r o p (1944), 114–20. For an early assessment of the campaign, see “The Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom,” r o p (1946), 163–6. 38 On Templeton’s work as evangelist, see Kevin Kee, Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 143–87, and David Vance, “Charles Templeton and the Performances of Unbelief” (master’s thesis, Carleton University, 2008), 19–41. 39 Charles Templeton, An Anecdotal Memoir (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983), 69–70. 40 Ibid., 80. 41 J.R.M. [Mutchmor], “Rev. C. Templeton Stirs Large Crowds, Holy Week, Ottawa,” u c o , 1 May 1951, 5. 42 The front page of the u c o for 15 October 1951 featured four stories: “The Templeton Missions Draw Great Crowds”; “Forty Thousand Attend Sydney [n s ] Mission”; “Templeton Mission Success in Smith’s Falls”; and “Ottawa Service of Witness Largely Attended.” For examples of u c o ’s coverage of the campaign, see “Charles B. Templeton in London,” u c o , 1 January 1952, 3; “The Templeton Missions Draw Great Crowds,” u c o , 15 November 1952, 3; “Templeton Mission in Winnipeg Was Resounding Success,” u c o , 15 December 1952, 1; “Calgary Will Long Remember the Templetons,” u c o , 1 January 1953, 1; and “The Templeton Missions in Fredericton and St John’s,” u c o , 1 January 1954. 43 Kee, Revivalists, 176; also see Kevin Kee, “Bobby-sox to Bach: Charles Templeton and the Commodification of Popular Protestantism in PostWorld War II Canada,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 15, no. 1 (2004): 231–53. 44 Ibid., 175. 45 See “The National Evangelistic Mission,” r o p (1956), 180–91, and “National Evangelistic Mission,” r o p (1958), 204–10, for summaries of the campaign’s approach. For illustrations of how the implications for “national life” were presented at conferences and in congregations, see W.G. Berry, ed., Calling Canada to Christ (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1957), especially the addresses by F.E. Vipond (91–5), Arthur

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Notes to pages 164–6

Organ (95–100), and W.B. Berry (106–11). Berry, for instance, stated that God “works through nations” and linked the “genius of the United Church” to its proclamation of a “national gospel.” 46 “What Has the N.E.M. Accomplished?” u c o , 1 March 1958, 23. 47 C.A. Myers, The Christian Family at Home, rev. ed. (Toronto: National Evangelistic Mission Committee, 1957). 48 Women and Evangelism (Toronto: National Evangelistic Mission Com­ mittee, 1959), 11–12. 49 “Billy Graham’s Canadian Crusade,” u c o , 15 September 1955, 4. Also see A.C. Forrest, “Billy Graham in Toronto,” u c o , 1 November 1955, 7, 14. Forrest’s descriptions of Graham’s personal qualities were uniformly positive over the years, despite his difficulties with Graham’s theology. 50 “What Has the N.E.M. Accomplished?” u c o , 1 March 1958, 23. 51 “Evangelism in Our Time,” u c o , 15 March 1958, 7. Forrest’s own view was that while some “fine things” had come out of the evangelical fervour of the past, the old-time revivalism had “little appeal for United Church people.” Its most effective evangelism was “members witnessing to the neighbours on the street, and bringing them to the church”; see “At the Concerns of the Church,” u c o , 15 September 1959, 7. 52 “Evangelism in Our Time,” u c o , 15 March 1958, 7. 53 Here I take issue with Kevin Neil Flatt, “The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church, 1930–1971” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2008), who argues that the leadership of the church supported evangelism in public, while rejecting it in private until the New Curriculum and other events in the 1960s forced them to end their duplicity. I am suggesting that honest differences over evangelism had surfaced well before the 1960s, and the United Church’s divergence from more theologically conservative groups would have been evident to anyone who paid attention to its publications. Whether the sentiments of Forrest and other church executives were typical of persons in the pews is a different matter. 54 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 235. This may have been modesty on his part, but see chapter 3 above for an assessment of the critical but often-overlooked role of home missions in creating the “social gospel ethos” that is often attributed (wrongly) to e& s s alone. 55 Malcolm Macdonald, “Planting the Church in New Areas of Canada,” u c o , 1 February 1951, 1, 28, is typical of the board’s reports. 56 Malcolm Macdonald, “The Church Says: ‘We Must Advance and Build,’” u c o 1 April 1953, 21. Macdonald’s article is followed by reports from Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, Sydney River, Saskatoon, The Lakeshore

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57

58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67

68

69

Notes to pages 166–9

369

(between Hamilton and Toronto), and Vancouver. For a study of church extension in the greater Toronto area, see Noelle Boughton, Meeting the Challenge of the Future: A History of the Toronto United Church Council (Toronto: Toronto United Church Council and the Emmanuel College Centre for the Study of Religion, 1988). Malcolm Macdonald, From Lakes to Northern Lights (Toronto: Commission on Missionary Education, 1951), 53–4. Macdonald appealed to what he called the United Church’s founding “charter” to urge that it become an institution that can “fully be described as national” (an interesting substitution for the word “fittingly” that was used in the Basis of Union). The Board of Home Missions reports continued to use the language of “Christian Canada” to present its task. Ibid., 190–1. Jean Doern, et al., All Things Are Possible: A History of Westworth United Church, 1950–1990 (n.p., 1993), 8, 30–1. Gordon Sisco, s.v. “United Church of Canada,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1947, 397. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1950), 416. A.C. Forrest, “What about Those Young People,” u c o , 1 November 1956, 15. The article noted that Intervarsity and Youth for Christ had attracted fewer United Church young people because of the vigour of its own programs (29). A.C. Forrest, “At the Concerns of the Church,” u c o , 15 September 1959, 7. W. Harold Young, “More Candidates than Ever Before,” and J.C. Johnson, “Nine Candidates from One Church,” u c o , 1 April 1954, 3. “A Desperate Shortage,” u c o , 15 October 1959, 6. G. Preston MacLeod, “What Is Disturbing the United Church of Canada?” Christian Century, 5 July 1944, 803. C.E. Silcox, “The United Church of Canada: An Appraisal,” typescript manuscript submitted to The Advance, June 1947, Claris Edward Silcox Papers, u ca, box 9-44. Randolph Carleton Chalmers, See the Christ Stand: A Study in Doctrine in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), 228–9. For a summary of these educational resources and an assessment of their impact, see Randolph Carleton Chalmers, “The Faith of the United Church of Canada,” Religion in Life 19 (1949): 110–11. For a discussion of Chalmers’s contrast of the “evangelical” or “experiential” form of Christianity with the “Catholic” or “institutional” type, see The Pure Celestial Fire, 1–5. On the difference between “orthodox” and “unorthodox” liberalism as he defined them, cf. See the Christ Stand, 146–7.

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Notes to pages 170–2

70 Chalmers, The Pure Celestial Fire, vii. 71 The series of articles was published between May 1946 and February 1947, most of them written by men serving in pastoral charges. 72 For a report on the process and the complete list of topics selected (not all of which saw publication), see “Commission on the Christian Faith,” r o p (1946), 103. 73 J.R. Mutchmor, “The United Church’s Purpose and Task,” address to Annual Meeting of Manitoba Conference, 2 June 1964, 3–4, Mutchmor Papers, box 13-181. 74 What’s the Difference? angered Canadian Catholics and drew international commentary; Life and Death was described in press clippings as revolutionary. For reaction to the latter see Commission on Christian Faith, uc a 82.031C, box 3-66. 75 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 202. 76 William Bean Kennedy, “The Church as Educator: Religious Education,” in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935–1985, ed. David Lotz (Grand Rapids, m i : Eerdmans, 1989), 280–95. 77 For an overview of the New Curriculum and Peter Gordon White’s critical role, see A.C. Forrest, “The Crisis and the New Curriculum,” u c o , 15 February 1965, 19–21 (the first of a two-part article). 78 The presuppositions that circulated in 1956 were approved by General Council in 1958. They were included in Prospectus (Toronto: Board of Christian Education and Board of Publication of the United Church of Canada, 1961), 17–28. For a discussion of the development of the presuppositions, see George Johnston, “What the Sunday Schools Are Going to Teach,” u c o , 15 June 1959, 21, 24, and 26. He hinted that lack of consensus about the presuppositions (with resistance more likely coming from the theological left at that point) was slowing preparation of materials. Interestingly, Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Growing Up Protestant: Parents, Children, and Mainline Churches (New Brunswick, nj : Rutgers University Press, 2002), 115, finds a shift away from neo-orthodox theology and the family focus in Presbyterian circles in the United States around the same time. Its curriculum was renamed “Christian Faith and Action.” The United Church eventually made a similar theological shift – but not until after the New Curriculum was launched. 79 Bendroth, 112–18. 80 For the controversy over the New Curriculum, see chapter 9 below. 81 A.C. Forrest, “Address at Emmanuel College Dinner,” 28 May 1957, 5, Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, u ca, box 4-5.

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Notes to pages 173–7

371

82 “The State of the Church – Now: A Moderatorial Report,” u c o , 15 October 1958, 5, 20. 83 “Urban Problems,” r o p (1938), 212–14. Subsequent reports make for interesting reading, disclosing the United Church’s assumptions about its social position, as well as how it distinguished itself from other denominations, notably competition from new evangelical groups. 84 “The Meaning and Responsibilities of Christian Marriage,” r o p (1932), 283. 85 The Presbyterian Church in Canada raised similar concerns and came to the same conclusions in Christian Marriage and the Church (Toronto: The Board of Evangelism and Social Action, n.d.). A draft was presented to its General Assembly in 1948 and published after conducting a survey of presbyteries in 1949. 86 Andrew S. Finstuen, Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety (Chapel Hill, n c: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), explores the significance of the doctrine of sin for three religious leaders with markedly different assumptions. 87 Malcolm Macdonald, “Our Heritage and Horizons in Home Missions,” James Robertson Memorial Lectures, 1961, lecture 1, 8–10. 88 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 123–5. 89 W.G. Berry’s report in The Responsible Society (e&ss Annual Report, 1949), 36–7. 90 Hugh Dobson, The Christian Family (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1940), 15. 91 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” 107. The report also circulated as a pamphlet. 92 “On Culture,” r o p (1950), 145. 93 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” 117. 94 Ibid., 106–7. 95 Richard Davidson, A Faith to Live By (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1943), 29. 96 Ibid., 29–30. 97 “On Trends in the Churches,” u c o , 15 January 1961, 9. 98 “Why Churches Are Crowded? An Editorial Answer,” u c o , 1 March 1958, 7.

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Notes to pages 177–80

  99 “An Editorial Look-See at the Concerns of the Church,” u c o , 15 September 1959, 7. 100 A.C. Forrest, “On Trends in the Churches” (Part 1), u c o , 15 January 1961, 7. 101 A.C. Forrest, “On Trends in the Churches” (Part 2), u c o , 1 February 1961, 9. 102 W.G. Berry, “The ‘Character’ of Our Time,” in Frontiers of Faith (e&ss Annual Report, 1954), 75–6, citing Will Herberg, “Faith and Character Structure,” Christianity and Crisis, 25 January 1954. Herberg’s article did credit sociologist David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) for the terminology he was using, although Berry omitted this detail in his précis. 103 Berry, “The ‘Character’ of Our Time,” 77. 104 “On the Lord’s Day,” r o p (1948), 157–60. That French Canadians had a different “system” – Mass followed by “healthy relaxation and innocent pleasure” – on Sunday was acknowledged, but used to explain why Protestants should avoid activities such as golf or skiing (160–3). 105 Ibid., 164. 106 Paul Laverdure, Sunday in Canada: The Rise and Fall of the Lord’s Day (Yorkton, sk: Gravelbooks, 2004), 163–83. 107 “Temperance and Christian Citizenship,” Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Society (1949–50), 230. 108 “Board of Evangelism and Social Service,” r o p (1948), 363. 109 The following are examples of publications printed by the Board of Evangelism and Social Service: Helen and J.G. Macdonald, Why We Gave Up Social Drinking [1959?]; Martin and Margaret Johns, Why We Don’t Drink [1961?]; Hugh Dobson, For God and Our Families for the Community and the Nation for a Better World Order [1944?]; William G. Berry, The Christian and Social Drinking: A New Testament Approach (1946); Peter Bryce, Let’s Face the Facts (a sermon preached at Metropolitan United Church, 23 January 1946, and reprinted from the Toronto Star, 28 January 1946); Ernest Marshall Howse, Temperance and Realism: An Address (1947); Homer R. Lane, The Bible Says (1952); Ernest T. Campbell, Six Reasons for Voluntary Abstinence (1952); John A. Linton, You Are Involved (1958); Glenn Everett, You Don’t Have to Drink [1959?]; Norman Rawson, To Drink or Not to Drink (1959). In a number of cases, no author was indicated: Looking at the Ontario Liquor Law [1946?]; Unmasked – At Last! (1946); We Are Not Amused [1947?]; A Call to Christian Citizens: Make Your Church’s Stand Your Stand: An Appeal for Voluntary Action by United Church People (1951); The United

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Notes to pages 180–1

373

Church of Canada Is Convinced that Whichever Way You Look At It Voluntary Total Abstinence Makes Sense (1952); Urgent: 500,000 Christian Citizens Needed as Witnesses for Temperance [1953?]. 110 “The Commission on Temperance Policy and Program,” r o p (1960), 265–300, and published as The Church and the Alcohol Problem: Report of the Commission on Temperance Policy and Program (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Services, 1960). Also see Literature Review of Beverage Alcohol Use, Commission on Temperance Policy and Program, January 1960, a confidential and unpublished report that included essays on the use, criminal behaviour associated with, and social factors related to beverage alcohol. 111 For a summary of the plan of action, see J.R. Mutchmor, “The Temperance Policy and Program of the United Church of Canada,” 11 September 1957, Mutchmor Papers, box 12-174, an address that he gave to Brantford Presbytery. In anticipation of public interest in the address, it was issued as a “News Release” for 3 p.m. that afternoon. 112 Stanley Knowles to J.R. Mutchmor, 2 February 1956, Mutchmor Papers, box 1a-16. 113 Stanley Knowles to J.R. Mutchmor, 19 May 1956, Mutchmor Papers, box 1a-16. For an example of Mutchmor’s careful attention to detail, see his objection to reducing taxes on alcohol (urging tax relief to low-income families rather than multi-millionaires), written to Walter Harris, 8 March 1957, Mutchmor Papers, box 1a-17. 114 Bendroth, 128–34; Daphne J. Anderson and Terence R. Anderson, “United Church of Canada: Kingdom Symbol or Lifestyle Choice,” in Faith Traditions and the Family, ed. Phyllis D. Airhart and Margaret J. Bendroth (Louisville, ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 129–33. This shift is explored further in chapter 9 below. 115 The terminology varied slightly, but the three purposes were constant; see r o p (1932), 277; r o p (1946), 109–10; r o p (1960), 183; r o p (1962), 152–3. 116 “The Meaning and Responsibilities of Christian Marriage,” r o p (1932), 277, 279. 117 Ibid., 280–1, and “Report of Commission on Voluntary Parenthood and Sterilization,” r o p (1936), 324–32. 118 The Church and the Secular World (Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1950), 30–1. 119 MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada,” 76. 120 Owram, 264–70, discusses the impact of the Pill, observing that the shift in assumptions about what was sexually appropriate was another

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Notes to pages 181–3

important dimension of the sexual revolution. He notes that “the baby boom was over, long before the Pill had any meaningful effect” (183). 121 As late as 1974, the response of those delegated with the task of considering what to do with marriage vows that pledged “until death do us part” was firm; see the statement on the permanence of Christian marriage in the committee report “Christian Faith,” r o p (1974), 284–9, which insisted that marrying without the intention of permanence was not marriage “as understood in the Christian tradition” (284). 122 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 132–7, contrasted pagan and Greek ideas of the body as inherently evil with the Christian view. For a discussion of the doctrinal principles underlying the United Church’s position on marriage (including consideration of divorce as recognition that the marriage has already ended) by an influential member of the Commission on Christian Faith, see John Line, “The Theological Basis of Christian Marriage,” n.d., Commission on Christian Faith, u c a 82.031C, box 3-57, especially 5–8. 123 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 124. This added to concerns about the threat of annulment of mixed marriages not performed by a Catholic priest. 124 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 146. 125 “Report Number Two of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Divorce,” r o p (1962), 155. 126 Ibid., 160–1. 127 Mutchmor, Mutchmor, 192. 128 Earl Lautenslager [sic], “The Marriage Partnership” (Part 1), u c o , 15 April 1962, 25. 129 Earl Lautenslager [sic], “The Marriage Partnership” (Part 2), u c o , 1 May 1962, 27. 130 Lautenslager [sic], “The Marriage Partnership” (Part 1), 26. 131 Veronica Strong-Boag, “Home Dreams: Women and the Suburban Experiment in Canada, 1945–69,” Canadian Historical Review 72, no. 4 (1991): 475–9; Ruth Roach Pierson, “They’re Still Women After All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 215–20. 132 The Church and the Secular World, 30–3. In a telling detail indicating the social location of the commission members, the report described the “city mother” who “may easily deal with 10 or 20 tradesmen in an ordinary day,” thus functioning as “both family treasurer and family manager” while the father was at the shop or office.

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Notes to pages 183–98

375

133 “Report of the Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women,” r o p (1962), 259. It was subsequently published as a pamphlet titled Married Women Working. 134 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 125. 135 “Report of the Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women,” 259–60, 276–7. 136 “Commission on Ordination,” 370, 393–5; cf. recommendation 3 and 4. On the executive’s decision, see r o p (1964), 81–2. 137 Lois Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down: A Memoir (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1989), 23, 42. 138 Templeton, 85–90. 139 Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada since 1945: Power, Politics, and Provincialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, rev. ed. 1989), 93. 140 Allen, 50. Gallagher was then serving as general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches.

c h a p t e r s e ve n    1 “Veteran Westerner Elected Moderator,” u c o , 1 October 1960, 8.   2 Ibid.    3 “The Address of the Moderator,” in “‘Thus in the Stilly Night’: Being the Recollections of the Very Rev. Hugh Alexander McLeod,” unpublished mss., Victoria, bc, 1972, Appendix D, 283–4, Hugh Alexander McLeod Papers, u ca.    4 “Dr McLeod Also Said,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 6, pointed out that a vote had been taken to make the much-appreciated address available “in permanent form.” The only copy I was able to find was the one that McLeod included in his unpublished memoirs.    5 “Catholics: Immigration and Education,” u c o , 15 October 1962, 8.   6 “What’s Coming,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 5.    7 Robert McAfee Brown, “Pope John’s Vatican Council,” u c o , 15 October 1962, 15–16, a reprint of Brown’s article in Presbyterian Life. The editorial comments in issues of the u c o that followed indicate disappointment with the narrow terms of ecumenism at Vatican II and failure to acknowledge Protestant churches as equals in the universal church.   8 “What’s New,” u c o , 15 October 1962, 5.    9 Anonymous letter to A.C. Forrest, [1962?], Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, uc a , box 8-2.

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Notes to pages 198–200

10 “Not This! Roman Catholic Bishops’ Demands Endanger Ontario Educational System,” u c o , 15 November 1962, 9, 46. 11 Ibid., 9, citing a recent article in the Canadian Register. Forrest quoted another Catholic publication that asked Protestants to understand that “error” did not have the same rights as the “truth” held by the “only true church,” which he saw as evidence that Catholics had not changed their position on religious freedom. 12 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1956), 140–1. 13 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1957), 161. 14 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1960), 405. 15 Ibid., 417. 16 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1962), 532. 17 Henry Gordon MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada, 1946–1977: A Study in the Sociology of the Denomination” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1980), 49, notes that census figures from 1951 show that 82.7 per cent of United Church members identified themselves as British; the next largest group was German at 3.6 per cent, followed by French at 1.9 per cent. By 1971 little had changed: 78.6 per cent, 5.5 per cent, and 3.0 per cent respectively. He notes that United Church remained overwhelmingly European: 97 per cent by 1971. The 1961 census figures show that some European immigrants (notably Dutch and Hungarian Protestants) joined the United Church in significant numbers during the 1950s. See “The Commission on Immigration,” r o p (1964), 218. The report includes an interesting section on the history of immigration from the United Church’s perspective (214–19). 18 MacLeod, 75–9, 86, maintains that fertility rates were a more significant demographic factor than immigration: “Natural increase has been the crucial factor in the demography of United Church membership growth in the post-war period. Its foreign-born membership and mortality have remained relatively constant.” 19 Malcolm Macdonald, “Our Heritage and Horizons in Home Missions,” James Robertson Memorial Lectures, 1961, lecture 1, 7–8. 20 For a discussion of Catholicism in Quebec during the critical decades before the Quiet Revolution, see Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). The secularization of Quebec nationalism bears striking parallels to the transitions taking place in English Canada viz. the role of the churches as nation builders; see David Seljak, “Why the Quiet Revolution Was ‘Quiet’: The Catholic Church’s Reaction to the Secularization of Nationalism in Quebec after 1960,”

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21 22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34

Notes to pages 200–3

377

c c h s Historical Studies 62 (1996): 109–24. He concludes that “centuries – not decades” separate Quebec Catholicism in the 1980s from what it had been in the 1950s (124). Cf. Susan Mann, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 298–315, on what she calls Quebec’s “noisy evolution.” “Interpretation: Some Editorial Comments on the Actions of the 20th General Council,” u c o , 15 September 1962, 11. “Long Range Planning Committee,” r o p (1962), 313. The Commission on World Mission that reported in 1966 was set up as a recommendation of the Commission on Financial Policy, which was dealing with how to distribute money for missions; see “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 301. “Cultivate the Fringe,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 6. “The Doctrine and Practice of Church Membership: Interim Report,” r o p (1960), 348–91. The consultation process is described in Church Membership: Doctrine and Practice in the United Church of Canada (n.p., n.d), 3, which included the report presented to General Council as “The Doctrine and Practice of Church Membership,” r o p (1962), 458–510. Church Membership, 5, 52. Ibid., 52–3; see 55–6 for the suggested procedure, which was intended as a last resort after private reproof. D.M. Mathers, “Church Membership in a Secular Age,” in Command the Morning (e& s s Annual Report, 1961), 40–1. Ibid., 43. Church Membership, 8–9. S.D. Clark, The Developing Canadian Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 128; reprint of “The Religious Sect in Canadian Politics,” in The Report of the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, 1944, 86–96. Gayle I. Thrift, “‘Concerning the Evil State of the World out of Which Strife Comes’: Church-State Relations in Early Cold War Canada, 1945– 1955,” paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association, 2001, explores the effort of United Church leaders to counter Communism by emphasizing Christian values. She notes the important role of the c c ia in the attempt to influence public opinion (7–11). “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1952), 127. Gordon Graydon and Stanley Knowles also provided testimonials (127–8). “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1956), 127, reported that by way of “correspondence and sometimes by personal interview, the

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35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47

48 49

Notes to pages 203–6

committee makes its work known to the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa and receives help from them.” Its connections to Diefenbaker’s External Affairs department continued through Howard Green (“The Church and International Affairs,” rop (1960), 423), although there was more ­qualified praise for him than Pearson and Martin and a different relationship signalled with the comment in “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1962), 525–6, that “the times demanded something different.” “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 135. L.B. Pearson, “On My Installation as Chancellor of Victoria College” (4 February 1952), in Words and Occasions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 113. Pearson, “Christian Foundations for World Order” (1954), in Words and Occasions, 128 (his preface to this address) and 132–3. Frank Prochaska, Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 13. Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870– 1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 182, 210–11, 218. Cox, 253, 273–4. Prochaska, 150–2. He finds that across much of Europe high levels of social welfare correspond to low levels of religious adherence. While this chapter focuses on Protestant social services (and the United Church in particular), there are interesting parallels to the social role of the Catholic Church in Quebec society. Mark Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?” Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 255–61, describes how religion was sidelined in both Quebec and the rest of Canada with the secularization of social services. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1940), 356. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1944), 356. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1958), 527. “Commission on Church Hospitals,” r o p (1956), 151–2, which includes a brief history of the church’s work in this area. For a description of the hospitals and some of their workers, see Bob Burrows, Healing in the Wilderness: A History of United Church Mission Hospitals (Madeira Park, b c : Harbour Publishing Co., 2004). Neil Young, “The Life and Work of Dr Morley A.R. Young” (Unpublished paper, Emmanuel College, 1985), discusses his grandfather’s work; Burrows, 65–6, 153–8. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1954), 541. “Commission on Church Hospitals,” r o p (1956), 152, citing the findings of an “emergency meeting” of the “Hospital Survey Committee” in 1928.

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Notes to pages 206–8

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50 “Commission on Church Hospitals,” r o p (1958), 180. 51 An article by the Director of Child Welfare for the province of Ontario, B. Beaumont, “The Role of the Church in Social Work,” The Time of Healing (e& s s Annual Report, 1947), 106–7, alludes to tensions between secular and religious social work. 52 Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 11–17, explores the origins of the commission and the political plotting of its Liberal backers, in which Pearson played a pivotal role by promoting the selection of his friend Vincent Massey as chair. 53 Karen A. Finlay, The Force of Culture: Vincent Massey and Canadian Sovereignty (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 17–50, discusses the transition from “conversion” to “culture” within Canadian Methodist thought, and assesses the cultural role of Methodist denominational colleges and the Massey family’s support for Victoria University. 54 Ibid., 200. 55 The United Church prepared for the brief by calling its own commission on culture that issued a report published as The Church and the Secular World (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1950); see chapter 6 above for a discussion of its assumptions about Christian culture. 56 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–51, accessed 7 August 2012, www.collectionscanada. gc.ca / 2 / 5 / h5-400-e.html. 57 “The Menace of the Radio,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 2, no. 2 (1925): 93–4. 58 Russell Johnston, “The Early Trials of Protestant Radio, 1922–38,” Canadian Historical Review 75, no. 3 (1994): 400ff., notes the organizational complications for denominations like the United Church when faced with competition with charismatic leaders. Also see Dorothy Zolf and Paul W. Taylor, “Redressing the Balance in Canadian Broadcasting: A History of Religious Broadcasting in Canada,” Studies in Religion /  Sciences Religieuses 18, no. 2 (1989): 153–70, and Mark G. McGowan, “Air Wars: Radio Regulation, Sectarianism and Religious Broadcasting in Canada, 1922–1938,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2008, 5–25. 59 Litt, 247. 60 On the challenge of technology and mass culture to religion, see L.B. Kuffert, A Great Duty: Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture, 1939–1967 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 107–34.

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Notes to pages 208–11

61 Litt, 91–4, notes the seminal role of Christian values for western civilization in the thinking of commission members Hilda Neatby and Henri Lévesque, a Dominican priest. 62 Hilda Neatby, “Culture, Religion and Broadcasting,” Frontiers of Faith (e & s s Annual Report, 1954), 77–8; excerpted from an article Neatby had published in the Globe and Mail, n.d. 63 “Is There a Religious Revival in Canada,” Presbyterian Record, April 1957, 11. One can only imagine what she would make of the later popularity of New Age spirituality. 64 On the Massey Commission and “cultural flowering” of Canada that followed, see Jonathan F. Vance, A History of Canadian Culture (Don Mills, o n: Oxford University Press, 2009), 365–97. 65 Kenneth McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. 66 McRoberts, 24–30. 67 Litt, 6, notes that more recently the report has been called the work of the “Massey-Lévesque Commission,” giving its sole francophone member the position of co-chair, which he did not actually have at the time, as a gesture to counter Quebec’s resistance to its recommendations. 68 Pearson, “The Canadian Partnership” (17 December 1962), in Words and Occasions, 191, 193–4. E.L. Homewood, “The Face of French Protestantism,” u c o , 1 May 1959, 8–9, 21, 24–5, discusses the linguistic challenge of the United Church’s ministry to French Canadians. 69 Pearson, “The Canadian Partnership,” 197. Although Trudeau is usually credited with championing multiculturalism before it became official policy in 1971, it was implicit in Pearson’s speeches about language and ­culture a decade earlier. 70 Ramsay Cook, “Protestant Lion, Catholic Lamb,” in One Church, Two Nations?, ed. Philip LeBlanc and Arnold Edinborough (Don Mills, on: Longmans, 1968), 3–4. 71 Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (hereafter cited as Commission on B& B), u ca 82.117C, GC 20 C5B5, box 1-1. The terms of reference were reported to the General Council a year later in “Bilingualism and Biculturalism,” r o p (1964), 185–6. The term “multi-culturalism” was used in the United Church’s “Brief Presented to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism” (1964), Commission on B &B , box 1-1 (sec. 20), but “other cultures” (e.g., sections 46–51) was the phrase more commonly used. The section numbers that follow refer to the brief. 72 Alexander Smith (Dartmouth, n s ) to J.R. Mutchmor, 12 April 1964, Commission on B& B, box 1-5.

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Notes to pages 212–15

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73 B. Doerksen (Regina) to J.R. Mutchmor, 12 April 1964, Commission on B & B , box 1-5. 74 Roland Garrett to Forsey, 29 May 1964, includes the text of the circular letter, Commission on B& B, box 1-5. 75 Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 203. 76 Forsey to Ernest Long, 2 July 1964, Commission on B &B , box 1-5. 77 Forsey to Rev. J. Ralph Watson, 20 July 1964, Commission on B &B , box 1-5. 78 Forsey, A Life on the Fringe, 118. 79 Eugene Forsey to Frank P. Fidler, 24 February 1965, Commission on B &B , box 1-6. Claude de Mestral, the bilingual minister of Noranda-Rouyn United Church in Quebec, was a prudent addition to the United Church delegation. As it turned out, United Church members were apparently not as outraged as the letters to Forsey and other church leaders had intimated. Instead there was nervousness about indifference to the seriousness of the situation. e& s s attempted to counter the complacency by organizing conferences and preparing study materials that drew attention to the looming national crisis. For example, the Lenten study book in 1965 was written by Claude de Mestral, A New Dawn in Canada? A Bilingual Minister Looks at Critical National Issues in the Light of the Cross (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service and Board of Christian Education, United Church of Canada, 1965). Some bilingual pamphlets were produced by the board, including Bilingualism and Biculturalism: Recent Statements of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church of Canada, [1967]). 80 Philip LeBlanc, “Preface,” in One Church, Two Nations?, xii. 81 The report was issued in instalments. The commission concluded its work in 1969, a year before the final instalment was published. 82 See C.B. Sissons, Church and State in Education (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1959), for an in-depth study of each province’s provisions for religious instruction. “Religious Education in the Schools of Canada,” Close the Chasm (e& s s Annual Report, 1962), 134, summarized in a chart the type of instruction as of 1962, with recitation of the Lord’s Prayer obligatory in six provinces and permitted in four; daily Bible readings obligatory in seven and permitted in three; and religious instruction obligatory in three, permitted in three, not permitted in three, and an extramural elective in one. 83 C.E. Silcox, “Religious Education and the Schools,” u c o , 1 August 1952, 11.

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Notes to pages 215–18

84 Alfred Gandier, “Religious Education in the Public School,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 2 (1926): 119–20. 85 R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, “The Christian Recessional in Ontario’s Public Schools,” in Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 275–80. They note that compared with other North American school systems, Ontario was unique in making provision for religious instruction in public schools. 86 Ibid., 281. 87 E.L. Homewood, “Three R’s Have Become Four,” u c o , 1 May 1954, 14–15. 88 George C. Pidgeon, “The Church Should Enter Open Doors,” u c o , 1 January 1955, 3. 89 “For a Conference on Religion in the Schools,” u c o , 15 February 1960, 7. Forrest was particularly concerned that Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, with whom Protestants had worked well in the past, referred to religious instruction in Ontario schools as “an unjust political means fashioned by sincere men for narrow sectarian purposes.” 90 E.R. MacLean, “Religion in the Schools,” u c o , 15 May 1961, 16. Ironically, McLean ended his protest against the arguments of Jews and Unitarians by drawing inspiration from the words of the late Catholic Bishop Fallon of London, Ontario, who had defended Protestant religious instruction in public schools. 91 Kenneth Bagnell, “The Big Fight about the Bible in the Schools,” u c o , 1 March 1963, 40. The article noted (11–12) that some Baptists were staunch supporters of separation, a historic position for them, but one that the United Church disputed as the Canadian tradition. 92 See, for example, E.R. MacLean, “Religious Education in the Schools of Canada,” u c o , 1 January 1955, 7. Immigrating from Switzerland to Canada, and serving in a pastoral charge in Quebec, de Mestral was struck by what he saw as an alternative to the more rigid separation between church and state in the United States. In the mid-1960s he still claimed that “our policy is co-operation between them”; see A New Dawn in Canada?, 48. 93 “For a Conference on Religion in the Schools,” 7. 94 Bagnell, “The Big Fight about the Bible in the Schools,” 12. Israel’s director of religious education confirmed that there was a compulsory program there, which the Christian minority was expected to attend, an embarrassing inconsistency to Jews in Canada, according to Bagnell. 95 Ibid., 40.

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Notes to pages 218–21

383

  96 Ibid., 12.   97 “Church and State in Education,” r o p (1964), 191.   98 “Church and State, [sic] in Education,” r o p (1966), 275. Why the commission declined to support his report is not clear. Perhaps his appeal to the national role of the church sounded quaint to its younger members. Although Thomson used some of the new catch phrases of the 1960s (“mission to the world” and “social action” rather than “social service”), for the most part his analysis reads more like a throwback to earlier decades. I could find no evidence of an initiative to develop a philosophy of Christian education after the Commission was discharged.   99 James S. Thomson, “The Church and Education,” r o p (1966), 276–7. 100 Ibid., 279–80. 101 Gidney and Millar, 281–2, citing the Mackay Report. They describe the steps to purge Christianity from the curriculum (and the objections to removing such instruction); it was replaced by either a “World Religions” course or values education (282–8). 102 Religion in Our Schools: An Ecumenical Reaction to the Keiller Mackay Report (Toronto: The Ecumenical Study Commission, 1972), 16, citing sections of the Mackay Report. As an indication of the position of the United Church, see Robin Smith, “Religion in Public Education,” in You Have a Right to Be Here (Toronto: Division of Mission in Canada, United Church of Canada, [1973?]). Smith agreed that the public school should not be an arena for proselytism, but worried that if parents turned to ­private schools to ensure religious instruction, it would result in “separate ghettos”; giving religion the place it deserved was one way to avoid a school system “fractured by religion” (321–3). 103 Ibid., 24. 104 Gidney and Millar, 288–9. 105 Paul W. Fox, “Mutuality with Differences,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 18–19. Fox claimed that Protestant churches were scorned by many because of their “obsessive devotion to the cause of prohibition,” and warned that if the Anglican and United churches used the augmented power that might come with union to influence secular issues, the result would be “increased resentment from a lay public, and probably eventually comparable retribution.” 106 Arnold Edinborough, “Introduction,” in One Church, Two Nations?, xvi–xix. 107 Charles Taylor, “Democracy, Inclusive and Exclusive,” in Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity and Self, ed. Richard Madsen, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 187.

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Notes to pages 222–6

108 Ibid., 188. 109 Forsey, A Life on the Fringe, 208–10. 110 “Report to the United Church Committee on Inter-Church Relations from the secretary of the Inter-Church Committee on Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations,” 21 October 1969, u c a 82.0001C, Series IX, box 165-3. The report pointedly noted that Trudeau had taken the time for an audience with the pope a year earlier. The appointment was a stunning blow to this committee, formed twenty-five years earlier to counter such signs of “Catholic aggression.” The appointment perhaps gave Catholics pause as well: Trudeau chose as Canada’s first ambassador to the Vatican a self-described humanist from Manitoba who leaned toward Unitarianism. See Frederick J. McEvoy, “The Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between Canada and the Vatican, 1969,” c c h s Historical Studies 68 (2002): 81. 111 “Mr Trudeau and the Vatican,” u c o , 15 November 1969, 10. Forrest was later given a rare glimpse into Trudeau’s personal faith for “An Observer Interview with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau,” u c o , September 1971, 16–20 (which ended with Forrest asking him if anything positive had yet come of the new relationship with the Vatican).

chapter eight    1 “End of an Era” was a cover story on J.R. Mutchmor in the 15 September 1964 issue of the Observer, occasioned by his retirement. The first part (“The Summing Up”) contained excerpts from Mutchmor’s report as the retiring moderator, followed by “The Controversial Years,” an article by editor A.C. Forrest.   2 J.R. Mutchmor, Mutchmor: The Memoirs of James Ralph Mutchmor (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 207–10.   3 “Crises,” u c o , 15 June 1964, 7.   4 J.R. Mutchmor, Command the Morning (e&ss Annual Report, 1961), 53.    5 Forrest, “The Controversial Years,” 13.    6 Ken Bagnell, “Ray Hord – The United Church’s Great Dissenter,” Star Weekly Magazine, 27 January 1968, 26.    7 “Ilderton Native Selected to Take Key Church Post” [clipping], London Free Press, 20 September 1962, u ca, J. Raymond Hord biographical file.    8 “Sunday Sport Issue May Go to Voters,” Regina Leader-Post, 8 July 1955, 3, accessed 7 August 2012, http: / / library2.usask.ca / sni / stories / spo3c.html

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Notes to pages 227–8

385

  9 J.R. Hord, “A Christian’s Attitude toward His Culture,” sermon delivered 21 September 1958, 3–4, for instance, was based on H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture. The original copies of Hord’s sermons are in my possession, given to me by his brother-in-law Stan Lucyk, who later served as a minister at Royal York Road United. 10 Sandra Beardsall, “Ray Hord: ‘Prophet Evangelist’ of the United Church,” Touchstone 24, no. 3 (2006): 50. 11 J.R. Hord, “Why Does God Allow Accidents to Happen?” sermon delivered 29 July 1962. Lucyk’s handwritten note on the sermon identifies it as “preached after Ray and June’s son, Jamie, drowned at Pinecrest camp.” Hord’s reaction to his son’s death was often noted in articles about him in the 1960s, and is still remembered by members of Royal York Road United Church who witnessed it. 12 The police concluded that Hord was likely mistaken for the man living in an identical house next door, who had recently testified at a court proceeding. June Hord wondered at the time if the attack was linked to his support for religious education in the public schools. See “Pastor’s Wife Tells of Vicious Attack” [unidentified clipping], Hord biographical file. 13 Beardsall, 55–6. 14 Bagnell, “Ray Hord – The United Church’s Great Dissenter,” 26. 15 E.E. Long, “The State of the Church,” 1, [1967?], Ernest Edgar Long Papers, u ca, box 9-128. 16 Robert W. Spike, “The Glorious Confusion about Missions,” Dead or Alive (e &s s Annual Report, 1966), 82. Spike, a prominent American theological and civil rights leader who was murdered in 1966, identified three competing perspectives on mission, each based on a different way of understanding the relationship between the church, the gospel, and the world (83–4). 17 “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 327. The International Council on Mission had been formed in 1921 by the Edinburgh Conference’s continuation committee. For a summary of the main conferences and committees of the modern ecumenical movement, see Paul A. Crow Jr, “The Ecumenical Movement,” in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, vol. 2, ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (New York: Scribner, 1988), 983–92. 18 Spike, 83. 19 William Hutchison, “Americans in World Mission: Revision and Realignment,” in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935– 1985, ed. David W. Lotz (Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 1989), 159.

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Notes to page 229

20 Theodore A. Gill Jr, “American Presbyterians in the Global Ecumenical Movement,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: The Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Christian Witness, eds. Milton J Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 140–3. J.H. Oldham, a Scottish missionary deeply involved in the ecumenical movement and the formation of the wc c , is credited with coining the term “middle axioms.” The new direction is evident in, for instance, “The Church in the Field of Social Welfare” report (1968) ­discussed below. 21 Hutchison, “Americans in World Mission: Revision and Realignment,” 161–2. For the impact of the animosity between liberals and conservatives in a denomination similar to the United Church, see Milton J Coalter, “Presbyterian Evangelism: A Case of Parallel Allegiances Diverging,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Christian Witness, 33–54, and Theodore A. Gill Jr, “American Presbyterians in the Global Ecumenical Movement,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: The Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Christian Witness, 144–5. 22 Hutchison, 160–1, who remarks that these provocative positions were presented with Hoekendijk’s “characteristic acerbity.” 23 Martin E. Marty popularized the phrase “two-party system” used by his doctoral student Jean Miller Schmidt to describe the split in U.S. churches often noted by historians. Marty used this terminology when he addressed e & s s ; see “The Controller, the Centaur and the Commissar,” It’s a Big Responsibility (e& s s Annual Report, 1970), 437. Schmidt’s dissertation was later published as Souls or the Social Order: The Two-Party System in American Protestantism (Brooklyn, n y: Carlson, 1991). 24 D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 226, finds a “broadening continuum” (rather than separate camps of conservatives and liberals), among the Nonconformist churches in Britain that I see as similar to the United Church. In both cases, moderates managed to hold the two parties together until after the Second World War. Kevin Neil Flatt, “The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church of Canada” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2008), tends to interpret these leaders as dissembling in their public statements so as not to alienate their more conservative supporters. My own assessment of their motives is more charitable. 25 “Evangelism and Social Service,” The United Church Observer Special Reference Handbook of Facts and Church Directory, January 1963 (Reference Issue), 21.

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Notes to pages 230–2

387

26 J.R. Hord, “Every Christian Is an Evangelist,” Breaking the Barriers (e & s s Annual Report, 1964), 11–12. 27 J.R. Hord, “The Price of Hope,” Listen to the World (e&ss Annual Report, 1965), 6–7. 28 “Report by Rev. Stuart Crysdale,” Breaking the Barriers, xii (insert). 29 Robert Christie, “New Focus for Commitment,” xi–xiii (insert), and “Experimental Evangelism and Social Action,” 125–35, both in Canada and Its Future (e& s s Annual Report, 1967), illustrate the implications of Colin Williams’s approach to evangelism for the work of the National Project. At the time, Williams was executive director of the Central Department of Evangelism for the n cc. 30 “The Centennial Committee,” r o p (1962), 253–4. 31 “Evangelism and Social Service,” r o p (1964), 115. The resolution noted that the latest statistics indicated a “crisis” in evangelism, in particular the failure of teenage membership to keep pace with their numbers in the ­general population. 32 J.R. Hord, “Some Goals for a National Project of Evangelism and Social Action,” Listen to the World, 106–7. 33 The section on evangelism in Dead or Alive illustrates well the new emphasis. “The Changing Church in a Changing World,” 11, provides a chart that identifies fourteen approaches. 34 Rex R. Dolan, The Big Change: The Challenge to Radical Change in the Church (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1967). Dolan did his doctoral studies at Union Theological Seminary, and the influence of Hoekendijk and other promoters of the new view of the mission of the church as service to the world is evident in his references; see, for example, his discussion of the role of the church, 22–8. Dolan identified architects of the “big change” as Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Rudolph Bultmann, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (97–100), and devoted a chapter (39–59) to the “death of God” theologians and the debate over John A.T. Robinson’s Honest to God. 35 Dolan, 61–70. Given his dismissal of the need for a blueprint, it is ­curious that the new approach was set out in a pamphlet titled A New Blueprint for Evangelism, prepared by an e&ss committee that Dolan chaired. 36 Ibid., 36–7. 37 Ibid., 17–18. 38 Eugene Carson Blake, “The Racial Barrier,” Breaking the Barriers, 63–7. 39 Peter Gzowski, “This Is Our Alabama,” Breaking the Barriers, 89–90, an excerpt from Maclean’s, 6 July 1963.

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Notes to pages 232–3

40 D.M. Ramsay, “Home Mission Enterprise of the United Church of Canada,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 41. 41 See the essays in George Dorey, et al., eds., No Vanishing Race: The Canadian Indian Today (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1955), for a positive assessment of home mission work with indigenous peoples, including one by A.E. Caldwell, later convicted of abuse. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1956), 526, reported that the book topped the wms ’s list of its “best-sellers” with 6,000 copies sold. For a more ­critical assessment of the United Church’s involvement, see the articles in Touchstone 16, no. 2 (1998). 42 James E. Milord, “Genocide in Canada: We Call It Integration,” u c o , August 1970, 24–6. On the United Church’s shift to a policy of integration, which involved phasing out its residential schools, see the records of the Commission to Study Indian Work, u ca 82.079C. The commission’s report was presented to General Council in two instalments: r o p (1956), 207–34, and r o p (1958), 185–94. 43 Stewart Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is! (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, United Church of Canada, 1966), 2. One of the congregations featured in the chapter “Real Cool at Yorkville” (7–20) was St Paul’s Avenue Road United Church in Toronto, where Crysdale had followed Berry as minister. Bruce Michael Douville, “The Uncomfortable Pew: Christianity, the New Left, and the Hip Counterculture in Toronto, 1965–1975” (PhD diss., York University, 2011), 142–3, discusses the congregation’s attempts at outreach to the youth who were drawn to the Yorkville scene. Although Douville does not track Berry and Crysdale’s work at e&ss, it is interesting to consider how their programming was influenced by their former congregation’s encounter with the culture of the 1960s. Douville provides a concise presentation of his research as it relates to the United Church in “A Puppy-Dog Tale: The United Church of Canada and the Youth Counter-Culture, 1965–73,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2008, 27–46. 44 Stewart Crysdale, “Prophecy in an Industrial Society,” Breaking the Barriers, 161. 45 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1. 46 “Is There a Religious Revival in Canada?” Presbyterian Record, April 1957, 10. Berton was the managing editor at Maclean’s magazine at that time, and one of several public figures invited to comment on the upswing in church attendance. His assessment that “there is a great deal of

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47

48

49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

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Notes to pages 233–5

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nonsense talked about the need for ‘modernizing’ the church” is ironic in view of his own critique a few years later. It is interesting to speculate whether Berton’s friendship (and occasional literary collaboration) with Charles Templeton influenced his later, more critical view of religion. A.B. McKillop, Pierre Berton: A Biography (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2008), makes several references to their relationship, as does David Vance, “Charles Templeton and the Performances of Unbelief” (master’s thesis, Carleton University, 2008), but neither considers that possibility. Berton’s dismissal from Maclean’s in 1963 after a public outcry against a column that condoned premarital sex (McKillop, 394–97) perhaps accounts for some of his antagonism toward the ‘old’ morality. Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965). On Berton’s publishing relationship with the Anglican Church, the promotion of his hugely successful book, and its impact on the churches, see A.B. McKillop, 403–4, 427–34. A.C. Forrest, “What Berton Would Say Differently If Writing for the United Church,” u c o , 1 February 1965, 31–3. For the published findings, see Stewart Crysdale, National Survey of the United Church in Canadian Life (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1964) and Stewart Crysdale, The Changing Church in Canada: Beliefs and Social Attitudes of United Church People (Toronto: Evangelism and Social Service, 1965). Stewart Crysdale, “The Hazards of Interpreting Signs,” Listen to the World, 25. Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Symposium on the Church and the World (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), iv, 22, 57. Charles Wilkinson, “Less Tact, More Action,” Dead or Alive, 69–70. Reprint of column in Hamilton Spectator, n.d. Saul Alinsky, “The Dynamics of Social Change,” Dead or Alive, 71–5. G.B. Mather, ed., Christianity and Politics (Toronto: National Evangelistic Mission Committee, 1960), 35. Roger Hutchinson, “Witnessing against War: Peacemaking in the Changing Canadian Context,” in Challenging the Conventional: Essays in Honour of Ed Newbery, ed. Wesley Cragg, et al., (Burlington, on: Trinity Press, 1989), 168–82, illustrates the distinctions between principles and concrete proposals in the United Church’s consideration of issues related to pacifism and nuclear weapons. Ben Smillie, “Off with the Halo,” u c o , 15 October 1965, 21, 40.

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Notes to pages 235–9

58 Claude de Mestral, “When Should the Church Speak?” in One Church, Two Nations?, ed. Philip LeBlanc and Arnold Edinborough (Don Mills, o n: Longmans, 1968), 168–71. 59 E.L. Homewood, “Billy Graham and Evangelism,” u c o , 15 October 1963, 13, captured the tone and range of criticism that was to follow. Hord claimed that “a sociologist” had made the Madison Ave. comparison. The article referred to reservations about Graham’s methods that had been expressed by leading theologians of the day, notably Paul Lehman and Reinhold Niebuhr. 60 Homewood, 13–14. 61 Ben Smillie, “Let’s Stop Backing Billy Graham,” u c o , August 1965, 17–18. 62 R.C. Chalmers, “It’s Commitment That Counts,” u c o , 15 September 1965, 26; the letter was included in a three-page section under the heading “Billy Graham: Should We Really Stop Supporting Him?” 63 “Waffling,” u c o , 15 November 1965, 11. Almost a year later, Graham provided answers to a list of twenty-six questions sent to him by the Observer; see “Billy Graham in Reply,” u c o , 1 July 1966, 10–13. The social issues that Forrest identified are interesting, suggesting a convergence of conservative evangelical theology with right-wing politics. The political shift in neo-evangelicalism that Graham’s critics detected is ­analyzed in William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), including a discussion of the deteriorating relationship with the nc c and the wc c . 64 Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is!, 149–56, 173–7, explained the theory behind the Planning Fellowships, which was influenced by the Chicago Urban Training Center’s action / reflection model with its links to community organization tactics. 65 Ibid., 168. 66 Ibid., 35–47, described MacDonald’s work at St Luke’s United Church, formerly Sherbourne Street United (whose previous ministers had included liberal evangelical sympathizers Richard Roberts and R.C. Chalmers), until its merger with Carleton Street United Church in 1959. 67 Clarke MacDonald, “The Shape of Things,” Life for the Choosing (e&ss Annual Report, 1969), 297. 68 Clarke MacDonald, “The King Has No Clothes,” The Cutting Edge (e&ss Annual Report, 1968), 6–7. 69 Kenneth Bagnell, “What’s All This So-Called New Evangelism?” u c o , 15 April 1966, 16–17. 70 Ibid., 17. 71 Ibid., 17–18.

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Notes to pages 239–40

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72 Kenneth Bagnell, “The View from the Firing Line,” u c o , 1 September 1967, 15, 40. He described St Andrew’s College in Saskatoon as “among the most avant-garde theological colleges” in Canada, noting that it had recently awarded an honorary degree to Hord. Saskatchewan Conference registered its support by passing a resolution that affirmed Hord’s leadership at e &s s . 73 Ken Bagnell, “Ray Hord – The United Church’s Great Dissenter,” 27. 74 Accessed 7 August 2012, www.wheaton.edu / bgc / archives / GUIDES / 014. htm#3. The timing suggests that the Congress was organized as a theological alternative to both the w cc and Vatican II, and to signal a geographical shift in emphasis: from Europe and North America to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 75 James Somerville, “The World’s Evangelicals Look at Themselves – and Their Future,” u c o , 1 January 1967, 14–15. For all the talk of appealing to the New Age, the United Church was slow to make the transition to the new technology; it continued to rely heavily on print materials. “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 349, suggests one explanation for this more cautious attitude toward the use of technology: the fear that it could weaken the church’s witness by leaving it vulnerable to “mass indoctrination.” 76 Somerville, 15. The article mentioned that at the time, Reynolds was the Canadian representative for Christianity Today, a magazine that Graham had helped to found in 1956 as an alternative to the Christian Century. 77 Reynolds, a native of Newfoundland, was to become a controversial figure in the United Church. Forty per cent of the members of West Ellesmere United in Scarborough, Ontario, voted against calling him in 1968 after he had served as the congregation’s interim minister. See the story on Reynolds by James Taylor, “Sharing the Faith: A Visitation Evangelism Program that Works,” u c o , July 1979, 10–13. “Gimme That Prime-time Religion,” Maclean’s, April 28, 1980, 48–9, is one of many accounts of his highly publicized battles with the United Church. He was placed on the discontinued list after a three-year dispute – not for his conservative theology per se, but for refusing to bow to pressure when he tried to move his congregation to a larger building against the wishes of the presbytery. His name is last listed in the Yearbook in 1980. 78 J. Berkley Reynolds, “Long Live the Old Evangelism,” u c o , 1 May 1967, 14–15. Reynolds singled out Crysdale and Dolan for reproof. 79 Ben Smillie, “Why the Fundamentalists Are Wrong,” u c o , 15 May 1967, 21. His reference to the Plymouth Brethren is interesting, since Smillie was born in India, where his parents served for a time as United Church missionaries.

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Notes to pages 240–1

80 John Burbidge and Patricia Clarke, “He Came; He Preached, and Here’s What Happened,” u c o , 15 October 1967, 17. They described the event in carnival, marketing, and Hollywood terms as well. 81 Norman Wesley Oake, “Evangelism Today,” Small Voice (Winter 1968): 8. Evidence of that confusion was supplied by a survey that Crysdale had conducted with participants at his Planning Fellowships, who were asked to identify the church’s “chief purpose.” A surprisingly small percentage of laity (3 per cent) and clergy (2 per cent) thought its purpose was “to guide and minister to believers.” A higher percentage of laity (16 per cent) than clergy (3 per cent) identified as its main purpose “to establish a more Christian social order.” The most favoured response by far was “to make Christ and his gospel known in the world” (67 per cent of laity and 73 per cent of clergy). Stewart Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is!, 162. At first glance it would seem to show support for the New Evangelism. However, when asked directly about evangelism (166), most respondents still preferred that there be an equal emphasis on proclamation and the witness of Christ-like action (laity 46 per cent, clergy 52 per cent). One wonders how representative the Planning Fellowships were, but their association with the New Evangelism makes the strong support for “proclamation” all the more striking. 82 See Katherine Hockin, “The Changing Face of Mission,” Mandate, October 1985, 17–20, and Katherine B. Hockin, “My Pilgrimage in Mission,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 12 (January 1988): 23–8, 30, for accounts of her life that place her experience alongside the major shifts in missionary thought and her own changing understanding of “world mission.” 83 Katharine Hockin, “Revolutionary Changes in the Twentieth Century Challenging Conventional Approaches to Missions,” n.d., 11, Commission on World Mission, u ca 82.124C, box 1-10. The paper was presented at a consultation, possibly at a special meeting held 12–13 February 1965. 84 The prestigious group of missionaries, church executives, and scholars included Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Canadian with connections to the United Church who was then teaching World Religions at Harvard, and whose approach to world religions featured the implicit pluralist position of the 1966 report. 85 “The Crisis in the United Church,” u c o , 1 March 1960, 7 (captioned “An Editorial Repetition”). 86 The entire report was printed as “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 299–493. For statistics on the number of missionaries, see Appendixes D and E, 462–3. It is interesting to note that the numbers of new appointments

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87 88 89

90

91

92

Notes to pages 241–3

393

between 1961 and 1964 indicated in the table in Appendix E were among the highest in forty years. “Radical Change in Mission,” u c o , 15 October 1966, 10. Ibid., 10. Letter from Donald Fleming to A.C. Forrest, 21 October 1966, 3–5, Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, u ca, box 8-7. I have wondered at the vehemence of Fleming’s response. Was the quarrel set off because of a misunderstanding between the two men over the word “commissioners” in the editorial? I assume Forrest had in mind the commissioners (delegates) to General Council; Fleming’s first letter obviously thought Forrest was referring to the members of the commission he had chaired (e.g., his reference to their two and a half years of work). Fleming was defending those who had worked with him on the report, whom Forrest seemingly had portrayed as daft – “unaware” of the shift. However, Fleming himself seems not to have appreciated fully the implications of the lengthy report his group had produced. Letter from A.C. Forrest to Donald Fleming, 3 November 1966, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. One of the difficulties was that the two men could not agree on the wording of the question that Forrest had asked on the floor. Forrest claimed that he had explicitly referred to the understanding of mission in 1925 as “making disciples of all nations,” and whether the report represented a shift in that emphasis. Fleming, he protested, had distorted his meaning by rephrasing his question. Letter from Donald Fleming to A.C. Forrest, 10 November 1966, 4, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. The exchange of letters gives a fascinating glimpse of the commission’s work and the response to it, as well as Forrest’s role as editor. Fleming mentioned more than once that he had the support of the new moderator (Wilfred Lockhart), but Forrest refused to give in to pressure once he was convinced that he was right. “Win Souls to Christ” [undated draft], 2–3, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. Forrest circulated this draft among some of the national staff. A memo from the associate secretary of the Board of World Mission suggested that Forrest emphasize “secularity and servanthood as the marks of Christ’s people” as “the theological emphasis today”; see Garth Legge to A.C. Forrest, 16 November 1966, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. Forrest’s reply to Legge (17 November 1966) and the draft statement indicate that he took his advice. Legge summed up what he saw as Forrest’s main point: a “rejection of a false evangelicalism which contends that the goal is ‘to win souls for Christ’ and society will take care of itself.” This, said Legge, “is for the birds – the vultures, that is – and the sooner it is disposed of, the better.”

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394

Notes to pages 243–5

  93 C. Douglas Jay, World Mission and World Civilization (Toronto: Board of World Mission, United Church of Canada, [1967?]), 2–4. For the definition of proselytism, see “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 303.  94 Jay, World Mission and World Civilization, 3–4, 11–12.   95 George Johnston, “The Future of Ecumenism in Canada,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 186. He noted in particular an active evangelical group within the Presbyterian Church.   96 Ernest E. Long, “The Truth about the Crisis in the Church,” u c o , 15 November 1967, 30.   97 Martin E. Marty, Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960, vol. 3 of Modern American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 434–55, analyzes the theological and cultural divisions within Protestantism in the 1950s. David Bebbington, “Evangelicalism in Its Settings: The British and American Movements since 1940,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 367, sees the time around 1940 as the nadir of the evangelical movement; it was “crushed between the upper and nether millstones of fundamentalism and modernism.” On the resurgence of conservative evangelicalism in the postwar period, see George M. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 1987); Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Garth M. Rosell, The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, m i : Baker Academic, 2008).   98 See Phyllis D. Airhart, “Condensation and Heart Religion: Canadian Methodists as Evangelicals, 1884–1925,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 90–105, for early indications of different organizational assumptions.   99 Whereas the Anglican, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches and the Canadian Council of Churches have since sought observer status in the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the United Church is represented only indirectly through the Canadian Council of Churches. 100 J. Berkley Reynolds, “Evangelical Renaissance,” Small Voice 1, no. 1 (1967): 2. He also drew attention to the Canadian Anglican Evangelical Fellowship and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (comparing the latter to the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals) as signs of the evangelical revival. He credited the Berlin Congress along with the

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Notes to pages 245–8

395

Graham and Ford crusades for bringing evangelicals from different denominations together (10). 101 The sea change was evident in the Observer. Compare the skeptical tone of the Observer’s coverage of the Second Vatican Council in October 1962 to the hopeful tone of R.H.N. Davidson, “What Vatican II Can Mean for Protestants,” u c o , January 1966, 17–18, 30. Davidson described the closing service as “the end of the most important event in modern church history” and “the beginning of a new era.” For other indications of the shift, see A.C. Forrest, “A Protestant at Vatican II,” u c o , 15 November 1962, 14–15, 17; A.C. Forrest, “The New Mood in Catholicism,” 1 February 1964, u c o , 10–12, 40; and Patricia Clarke, “The RomanCatholic Protestant Thaw: How It Is Changing Your Church,” 1 May 1965, u c o , 13–15. For other illustrations of the impact, see John H. Young, “Reaction to Vatican II in the United Church of Canada,” in Vatican II: Canadian Experiences, ed. Michael Attridge, Catherine E. Clifford, and Gilles Routhier (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2011), 106–23. 102 “Inter-church and Inter-faith Relations,” r o p (1972), 267. I have been unable to find evidence that the recommendation for preparing new materials was followed. 103 Claude de Mestral, A New Dawn in Canada? A Bilingual Minister Looks at Critical National Issues in the Light of the Cross (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service and Board of Christian Education, 1965), 27. 104 George Johnston, “The Future of Ecumenism in Canada,” 186. 105 Brydon, 11. 106 Lois Wilson, “Town Talk,” The Cutting Edge, 230–3. 107 Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down: A Memoir (Toronto: Doubleday, 1989), 47–9. 108 Ibid., 50. 109 “The Church on the Urban Frontier,” r o p (1964), 275–7. 110 “The Church on the Urban Frontier” r o p (1966), 193–7. 111 Harold Bailey, “Rural,” u c o , 1 August 1966, 9. 112 “Is It a National Church?” u c o , August 1957, 6. 113 Jiwu Wang, “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril” (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 85. 114 Ibid., 85. He notes Protestant missions to Chinese immigrants were abandoned in the 1960s after the collapse of the vision of “His Dominion.” 115 George Johnston, “The Strategy of the Church in the Space Age,” Listen to the World, 76–80.

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Notes to pages 248–51

116 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 79. Chapter 3 discusses the impact of this new approach to housing, which made the upbringing of the baby boomers different from their grandparents or even their parents. 117 Wesley Morris, “The Suburban Church,” Telstar – Tell Peace! (e&ss Annual Report, 1963), 153. 118 “Suburbia,” u c o , 1 May 1964, 7. 119 Ibid., 7. 120 Forrest put his finger on an important dimension of the criticism. James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965 (New Brunswick, nj : Rutgers University Press, 1994), discusses the critique of suburban religion and links the “jeremiads” of secular and religious critics (notably Will Herberg, Gibson Winter, Peter Berger, and Harvey Cox among the latter) to the views of the youth culture of the 1960s. e&ss’s staff reports and articles indicate familiarity with this sociological research, and the names of Talbot Parsons, Peter Berger, and Gibson Winter crop up frequently. For instance, Crysdale’s essay on “The Church’s Functions in Contemporary Society,” Listen to the World, 48–50, listed several sociologists of religion, but no theologians. 121 “The Suburban Church: A Symposium,” u c o , 15 October 1965, 12. 122 Ibid., 12. Douglas John Hall, The Future of the Church (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1989), 5–19, gives a poignant description of growing up in a United Church congregation that I suspect was quite typical for someone born in 1928. He confirms Forrest’s hunch about suburban congregations: “The village church! it is the dream church of every suburbia I know!” (17). 123 “The Suburban Church: A Symposium,” 13–16. 124 Ibid., 13. 125 Ibid., 13–14. 126 Ibid., 17. 127 The section on “The Congregation in Mission” in “The Church on the Urban Frontier,” r o p (1966), 196–200 is a good summary of the application of the new approach to mission at the congregational level, e.g., study-action projects. The ambivalence about identifying the mission of the church with a building – often “a decaying monument to the ­prosperity of the institutional church of a previous generation” (199) – is evident.

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Notes to pages 251–4

397

128 “Evangelism,” u c o , 15 November 1967, 11. 129 “Evangelicals,” u c o , 15 May 1970, 8. 130 Cf. “Centenary Committee,” r o p (1964), 187–8; “Centenary Committee,” r o p (1966), 190. 131 “Final Report of the National Project of Evangelism and Social Action,” Life for the Choosing, 378–9. 132 Robert Christie, “Man of the Sixties – Scientific Genius and Social HalfWit,” It’s A Big Responsibility, 491–2. 133 Ibid., 495. 134 Robert Christie, “Where the End Is the Beginning,” Man Fully Alive (e&ss Annual Report, 1971), 3. 135 William Berry, “Evangelism – Retrospect and Prospect,” Man Fully Alive, 23–4, 27. 136 J.R. Hord, “Journey into the Future,” Canada and Its Future, iv (insert). 137 J.R. Hord, “Finding Life’s Meaning,” Man Fully Alive, 55, stanzas from a poem published posthumously in e& s s ’s last report. 138 Arch McCurdy, another e& s s staffer phased out by restructuring, saw the creation of a new Division of Mission in Canada as the end of the old two-pronged thrust of evangelism and social service. He makes the interesting observation that social action had “emerged” in the 1960s as a third facet of the old board’s work; see Arch McCurdy, “Transition,” Man Fully Alive, 19. 139 While some claimed that restructuring was a convenient way to rid the United Church of the term “evangelism,” there was also speculation that it was designed “to muffle the prophetic but sometimes embarrassing voice” of e& s s by replacing it with a church in society department within the new Division of Mission in Canada; see Patricia Clarke, “Clarke MacDonald: An Ear for Evangelism at the Top,” u c o , February 1971, 16. On Clarke MacDonald’s understanding of his responsibilities as head of the new department, see “The Department of Church in Society,” xix–xxi, which includes a reference to committing his life to Christ at the age of fourteen, and “Some Aspects of Our Task – At this Point in Time,” 272–5, an account of his impressions of the church’s work since the 1940s, both in You Have a Right to Be Here (Division of Mission in Canada Report, 1972–73). 140 “The Church in the Field of Social Welfare,” r o p (1968), 297. 141 Ibid., 295. 142 Hockin, “Revolutionary Changes in the Twentieth Century Challenging Conventional Approaches to Missions,” 1.

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Notes to pages 255–8

chapter nine   1 “Change Ways or Suffer Defeat Warns United Church Minister” [clipping], Napanee Beaver, 1 September 1965, Ernest Edgar Long Papers, uc a , box 11-173 (scrapbook).   2 “Mr United Church Warns of the Coming Crisis” [clipping], Toronto Daily Star, 18 November 1967, Long Papers, box 11-173 (scrapbook).   3 Ernest E. Long, “The Truth about the Crisis in the Church,” u c o , 15 November 1967, 12–15, 30, 40.   4 “An Editorial Measurement: Of the United Church’s Amazing Growth,” u c o , 1 May 1959, 7, 29.  5 “Disappointment,” u c o , 1 June 1967, 11.   6 J.R. Hord, “Where Is the Church in Canada Going?” Canada and Its Future (e & s s Annual Report, 1967), 11.   7 E.E. Long, “The State of the Church,” address delivered 26 January 1971, 1, Long Papers, box 9-file 128, which cited recently published surveys of church attendance.   8 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15. His book explores each of these contributory streams separately. Although much of his analysis focuses on Britain, Europe, and the United States, he includes Canada (with specific attention to Quebec), Australia, and New Zealand as examples of the geographical extent of the crisis. For a critique of theories of secularization, see Jeffrey Cox, “Master Narratives of Long-term Religious Change,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 201–17. Cox does not deny religious decline, but focuses on different categories, such as religious toleration and the impact of state and legal power.  9 McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 243. 10 Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 207– 34. He makes use of the work of ecologist C.S. Holling, “Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems,” Ecosystems 4 (2001): 396, who pictures panarchy as “a nested set of adaptive cycles” operating in a hierarchy. 11 Homer-Dixon, 228. 12 For a description of the phases see Holling, 396–404. 13 Homer-Dixon, 308. 14 Holling, 398–9. 15 Homer-Dixon, 289–90.

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Notes to pages 259–62

399

16 Holling, 397–8, 402. 17 See Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “Individualism Religious and Modern: Continuities and Discontinuities,” in Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada between Europe and America, ed. David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 52–7, for a discussion of the connections between mysticism and modern individualism. 18 J.R. Hord, “It’s Later than We Think,” The Cutting Edge (e&ss Annual Report, 1968), 11–12. Hord expressed similar thoughts in undated handwritten notes marked “Future Sermon” and titled “The Church of the Dispersion.” The original copies of Hord’s sermons are in my possession, given to me by his brother-in-law Stan Lucyk. Lucyk adds a comment: “I believe Ray was writing this just before his death.” 19 Donald Mathers, “The Concept of Secularization,” paper presented to the Saturday Club at Queen’s University, 12 April 1969, in Not by Sight (published privately by his friends, 1974), 36–8. An earlier sermon had described secularization as “a religious achievement,” though it warned of a “false secularism that slides back into pagan religiosity”; see “Secularization: A Sermon,” preached at Chalmers United Church in Kingston, 26 May 1968, in Not by Sight, 41–3. 20 Daphne J. Anderson and Terence R. Anderson, “United Church of Canada: Kingdom Symbol or Lifestyle Choice,” in Faith Traditions and the Family, ed. Phyllis D. Airhart and Margaret J. Bendroth (Louisville, k y: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 135. 21 “What the Council Did!” u c o , 15 October 1964, 39. 22 A.C. Forrest, “The Churches’ Role in the Alcohol Problem,” address to young people in Toc Alpha, Niagara Fall, 29 December 1965, 10, Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, u ca, box 4-45. 23 McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 29. 24 Hilda Benson Powicke, Coffee House: A One-Act Play (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada and the Department of Christian Social Service of the Anglican Church of Canada, [1965?]). 25 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 272. Anderson and Anderson, 129, identify Marriage Today: An Exploration of Man-Woman Relationship and Marriage (1978) as pivotal in separating sexuality and marriage, on the one hand, from procreation and family formation, on the other. They see this as a crucial step toward acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships, which had been thought of as “unnatural” because they did

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400

26

27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34

Notes to pages 262–4

not involve reproduction. In the 1960s, the United Church was not ready to accept homosexuals as ministers. For example, when asked what would happen if a candidate for the ministry was suspected of having a “homosexual problem,” Hord said he knew of no committee in the church that would recommend “a man with this aberration.” He was in favour of amending the Criminal Code to remove legal penalties for homosexual relationships between consenting adults, but felt that ministry was a ­different matter: a minister had an “unusual opportunity to mix” with boys and young men, and “confidence in him would be fatally undermined” if his homosexuality were known; see Toronto Daily Star ­[clipping], 20 January 1968, J. Raymond Hord biographical file, uc a . “The Lord’s Day,” r o p (1962), 338–40. The report noted the impact of television and other media, weekend travel, rootless communities, and competition from leisure activities. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 347. “The Lord’s Day Act,” r o p (1971), 161–2. J.R. Mutchmor’s report in Close the Chasm (e&ss Annual Report, 1962), 43. For two perspectives on the “why go to church” question, see W. Clarke MacDonald, “Sunday 11:00 a.m.: What’s It All About?” u c o , 1 September 1969, 24–5, and N. Bruce McLeod, “Why Won’t They Go to Church,” u c o , 1 November 1969, 20–2, 40. MacDonald warned that neglecting worship was “suicidal to the Christian life”; the “generation yet unborn” would be handed “cold ashes and not the flame of faith” (24). While not a direct response to MacDonald, McLeod’s article counters the assumption that people who neglect worship will eventually end up neglecting God. Kenneth Bagnell, “Are Prayer Meetings Passé?” u c o , 1 January 1966, 15, found that prayer meetings were a thing of the past but noted that Bible study was enjoying a renaissance, with groups taking “a more sophisticated approach to the scriptures.” “Guilty? Faith Crisis? Cultural Revolution? Golf? Me?” u c o , 15 October 1969, 11. Address by s cm general secretary Roy G. DeMarsh, “Campus Religion Slumps,” Command the Morning (e& s s Annual Report, 1961), 124–5. Owram, 179–83, describes the dramatic changes in higher education that corresponded to the surging number of students. For sc m’s postwar challenges and changes in this context, see Catherine Gidney, “Poisoning the Student Mind? The Christian Student Movement at the University of

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Notes to pages 264–6

401

Toronto, 1920–1965,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, New Series, 8 (1997): 157–63. 35 John W. Berry, “The Student Christian Movement – A Study in Creative Tension,” Breaking the Barriers (e& s s Annual Report, 1964), 53–4 (emphasis in the original). Bruce Michael Douville, “The Uncomfortable Pew: Christianity, the New Left, and the Hip Counterculture in Toronto, 1965–1975” (PhD diss., York University, 2011), 199–200, 203, indicates that the scm was having discussions about dropping “Christian” from its name; the loss of church funding that might result from the change was a consideration in retaining it. Douville sees connections between the youth counterculture (especially the s cm ) and the United Church’s shift to the left in the late-1960s (171–205), as well as its support for feminism and gl b t persons decades later (520–4). 36 Peter Gordon White, “Magnifying Voices, Sharing Visions,” in Voices and Visions: Sixty-five Years of the United Church of Canada, ed. John Webster Grant, et al. (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1990), 110. Even one of the New Curriculum’s harshest critics admitted that there had been “no loud protests” against it in the United Church; see J. Berkley Reynolds, “The Hot New Fight for the Good Old Faith,” u c o , 15 February 1968, 12, 14. 37 “Crises,” u c o , 15 June 1964, 7. 38 Joanne Strong, “Rx for the Sunday School,” u c o , 1 August 1968, 13. 39 Jean Doern, et al., All Things Are Possible: A History of Westworth United Church, 1950–1990 (n.p.: 1993), 31. 40 Robert Dobbie, et al., The Junior Teacher’s Guide (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1964). 41 “Comments on the New Curriculum,” Small Voice (Winter 1968): 4–5 (a letter from Wilber Sutherland to an unnamed friend). 42 Ibid., 7, 16–17. 43 J.R. Mutchmor, “Forty Years,” u c o , 1 June 1965, 11. 44 White, 107–9. 45 Judging from demographic patterns in other denominations, a decline may well have happened regardless of the controversy over curriculum. For a study that sees a more direct link between the New Curriculum and the decline in attendance, see Kevin Neil Flatt, “The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church, 1930–1971” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2008), especially chapter 3. 46 Strong, 10.

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Notes to pages 267–9

47 James Taylor, “What’s Happening to Our Sunday Schools?” u c o , September 1970, 13, 15. 48 Ibid., 13, 14–15. 49 Owram, 103. 50 Harvey L. Shepherd, “Is There Room in Kairos for You?” u c o , 1 March 1969, 26. This group should not be confused with the ecumenical organization k a iros that was formed later. 51 Ibid., 27. For instance, in contrast to the y pu’s nationally designed programs of the past, Kairos was based on locally defined goals and actions. The article conveys the author’s skepticism about Kairos’s organizational effectiveness. Although impressed by the intelligence of those he had met, he was uncertain about what it meant for the United Church: “Kairos looks like the vanguard of the church and Kairos looks a mess” (30). 52 “Ecumenical Affairs,” r o p (1968), 366–7. Some of the projects underway included setting up recreational facilities, working on Indian reservations, organizing multi-denominational and multiracial church services, providing folk music for worship, and developing activities for action in Latin America. 53 Shepherd, 27. 54 “Report of the Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women,” r o p (1962), 275. The decision to merge the two organizations came after nearly a decade of study. “The Work of Women in the Church,” r o p (1958), 214–18, relates the background and findings that led to the recommendations in “The Commission on the Work of Women in the Church,” r o p (1960), 301–17, which took two years to implement. 55 Patricia Clarke, “What’s Keeping Women in the Church Kitchen?” u c o , 1 September 1965, 12. 56 Ibid., 13, 14. 57 “Laymen: Okay. We Say It Again. Let’s Give Them What They Want,” u c o , 1 May 1970, 11. 58 S.J.D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organization and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 raises this question about the correlation between belonging and believing as he considers what happens when people stop attending church; cited in Cox, “Master Narratives of Longterm Religious Change,” 213. 59 William G. Berry, “Secrets of a Successful Evangelist,” u c o , 15 January 1968, 23. 60 See Kenneth Bagnell, “What’s Happening in the Church? A Stirring ... New Styles ... Search for Meaning, A New Reformation, Perhaps?”

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Notes to pages 269–72

403

Excerpt from Globe and Mail Magazine, 28 March 1970, It’s A Big Responsibility (e& s s Annual Report, 1970), 42–3. 61 A number of such projects were connected to the Canadian Urban Training project funded by e& s s and the Board of Home Missions; see Ted Reeve, “Walking the Talk,” in Action Training in Canada: Reflections on Church-Based Education for Social Transformation, ed. Ted Reeve and Roger Hutchinson (Toronto: Emmanuel College Centre for Research in Religion, 1997), 13–58. Other “experimental projects” were funded by the Stabilization Fund, including a seminar on “Secularization and Christian Education,” family counselling services, chaplaincies to industry, and social ministries in the downtown cores of Toronto, Hamilton, and Vancouver; see “Experimental Projects Financed from the Stabilization Fund Income,” r o p (1968), 260–5. Douville, 173–7, finds that the New Left radicals influenced by cu t’s approach were more confrontational and increasingly critical of organized religion. 62 Stewart Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is! (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, United Church of Canada, 1966). 63 E. Westhues and E. Burrill, “Summary Report Presented to Rowntree Memorial United Church,” November 1974, 2–3, Office of the Moderator, Series 2, u ca 83.069C, Wilbur Howard Papers, box 2 [unnumbered file]. 64 Ibid., 4–5, 8–10. 65 Ibid., 11. 66 For a study of the transition from missions to international development, see Ruth Compton Brouwer, “When Missions Became Development: Ironies of ‘NGOization’ in Mainstream Canadian Churches in the 1960s,” Canadian Historical Review 91 no. 4 (2010): 661–93. 67 Association with the institutional church is not included, for instance, in David Bebbington’s popular quadrilateral for defining evangelicalism: ­conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism. 68 Owram, 206–8. The appeal of the Jesus movement is perhaps not surprising, given its embrace of popular music. 69 Kyle Haselden, “Christianity’s Subtlest Foe,” Close the Chasm, 11–13. 70 McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 243–4, notes the popularity in the 1960s of charismatic forms of Christianity, mysticism, and other esoteric alternatives (e.g., neo-paganism, ecology, goddess, yoga). Leigh Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), sees the roots of New Age mysticism and seeker spirituality in nineteenth-century Transcendental liberalism. 71 “The 70s: Will They Be Sad, Soaring, Sordid, Sinful or Violent?” u c o , January 1970, 11.

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Notes to pages 272–4

72 Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterson, eds., The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3:133. 73 D.M. Mathers, “The Mission of the Church and the Rule of God over History,” [1965?], 1, Commission on World Mission 82.124C, box 2-13. 74 “Church Worship and Ritual,” r o p (1968), 357. 75 Ibid., r o p (1968), 357–8. One member of the committee who supported that “revolution” was Ronald Atkinson. For his views on liturgy as an expression of the “new worldliness and secularity,” see Ronald Atkinson, “Factors in the Preparation of a ‘Contemporary’ Liturgy,” in Ordered Liberty: Readings in the History of United Church Worship, ed. William S. Kervin (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 2011), 224–6, a reprint of an article published in 1965. 76 N.K. Clifford, “The United Church and Doctrinal Confession,” Touchstone 2, no. 2 (May 1984), 18. He contends that the Committee on Faith knowingly departed from the ancient creeds, the Reformed confessions, and its own traditions by beginning with a statement of the human condition rather than God. 77 Its reception differed from other materials prepared around the same time, including the Service Book (1969) for which the creed had been prepared and the Hymn Book published in co-operation with the Anglican Church of Canada (1971) that was long in use but much criticized. 78 Although the committee that worked on the new creed included two women (Katharine Hockin and Dorothy Wyman), feminist concern about sexist language was apparently not an issue. When the New Creed was revised in 1980, its striking opening affirmation was changed from “Man is not alone” to “We are not alone,” and “the true man Jesus” was replaced by “Jesus, the Word made flesh.” 79 For the presentation of the case for the New Creed, see “Christian Faith,” r o p (1968), 311–43, which includes the original version of the creed that was sent to the General Council. The creed was redrafted by the Committee on Faith and approved for congregational use and inclusion in the new service book by the General Council Executive on 5 November 1968; see Creeds: A Report of the Committee on Faith (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada, 1969), 3. 80 John Burbidge, “A Creed Is a Short, Memorable and Accurate Summary of the Important Parts of the Christian Faith,” u c o , 1 February 1969, 18. 81 Ibid., 30. 82 Berkley Reynolds, “A Creed Is a Short, Memorable and Accurate Summary of the Important Parts of the Christian Faith,” u c o , 1 February 1969, 40. 83 Ibid., 19.

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Notes to page 275

405

84 G.A.D. Scott, “The New Creed of ’68,” Small Voice [3?], no. 2 (1969): 24–5. The article was a response to a question that had been broached in an editorial in the previous issue of Small Voice: how much diversity “on the very truths which constitute its identity” could go unchecked without threatening the existence of the United Church? 85 Reynolds, “The Hot New Fight for the Good Old Faith,” 14, used the term “new creed” to describe the u crf’s statement of faith in an article published a few months before what eventually became known the New Creed was presented at the General Council. 86 “The Editorial,” Small Voice 1, no. 1 (1967): 1. The somewhat awkward wording and punctuation are in the original; the statement appears in later versions in a slightly modified form. 87 “Christian Faith,” r o p (1966), 509–11. Michael Bourgeois, “Awash in Theology: Issues in Theology in the United Church of Canada,” in The United Church of Canada: A History, ed. Don Schweitzer (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 266–70, astutely notes the shift in the understanding of revelation from the Statement of Faith, which had affirmed “God’s self-revelation only in Scripture and the events to which it witnesses, especially in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” 88 Reynolds, “The Hot New Fight for the Good Old Faith,” 13–14. The explanation is similar to the editorial in Small Voice that introduced the redrafted statement on biblical authority, suggesting that Reynolds wrote, or at least had a hand in writing, the editorial. The new language echoed the neo-evangelical defence of inerrancy described in Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids, m i : Zondervan, 1976), written by one of the most prominent champions of the inerrantist approach to biblical interpretation. Reynolds would have been familiar with the debate that was heating up through his connection to Christianity Today, where Lindsell was editor. 89 J. Berkley Reynolds, “Evangelical Renaissance,” Small Voice 1, no. 1 (1967): 2, 10. He was pleased that principal Lautenschlager supported the Emmanuel College students who were perturbed by former moderator Ernest Howse’s beliefs about the resurrection and deity of Christ. Kenneth Hamilton, a professor at the United Church’s theological college in Winnipeg, had criticized Paul Tillich and the “God is dead” theologians in his writings. While Hamilton described himself as a liberal evangelical, Reynolds claimed he was becoming more conservative. For an assessment of Hamilton’s theological evolution, see John McTavish, “Kenneth Hamilton: Canada’s Kierkegaard,” Touchstone 28, no. 3 (2010): 51–68. 90 Alan T. Davies, [letter to the editor], u c o , 1 April 1968, 2.

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406

Notes to pages 275–7

91 John McTavish, [letter to the editor], u c o , 15 March 1968, 2. 92 W. Clarke MacDonald, “The King Has No Clothes,” The Cutting Edge, 6–7. 93 For a summary of the tasks undertaken at the various stages of the negotiations, see Neil Semple, “Introduction,” Anglican Church, United Church, Christian Church (Disciples) Union Negotiations (Finding Aid 197), 1981, u ca. 94 For the response to the invitation and early negotiations, see the first report of the “Commission on Re-Union,” r o p (1946), 180–2. 95 See Forrest’s editorial “To Anglicans ‘Time Is Not Yet,’” u c o , 1 February 1959, 5, a reply to the lead editorial in the first issue of the new Canadian Churchman magazine that had suggested union would not be happening anytime soon. A letter from United Church moderator Angus MacQueen and a statement from Anglican acting primate Phillip Carrington followed in the u c o , 1 March 1959, 11, 24. MacQueen pointed out that the invitation in 1943 had come from the Anglican bishops, not “zealous and ambitious Unionists” from the United Church, and regarded the advice to continue discussing union in good faith as “tantamount to saying ‘Let’s Pretend’” (11). A later editorial, “Anglicans and Union,” u c o , 15 March 1959, 6, informed readers that little had been done to prepare for union by either side over the past thirteen years. 96 “What the Council Did!” u c o , 15 October 1964, 40. 97 The document was widely circulated, including publication in full in the u c o , 15 June 1965, 8–11, 26. 98 “Union,” u c o August 1965, 9. The editorial credited Vatican II and an Anglican Congress held in Toronto two years earlier for the “new reformation” that was underway. 99 For an astute analysis of the failure of negotiations from the perspective of one of the United Church’s representatives, see John Webster Grant, “Leading a Horse to Water: Reflections on Church Union Conversations in Canada,” in Studies of the Church in History, ed. Horton Davies (Allison Park, pa: Pickwick Publications, 1983), 165–81. 100 The United Church continued to discuss union with the Disciples of Christ, but they withdrew from negotiations in 1985. 101 John Gywnne-Timothy, “The Evolution of Protestant Nationalism,” in One Church, Two Nations?, ed. Philip LeBlanc and Arnold Edinborough (Don Mills, on : Longmans, 1968), 48. 102 William A. Collins, “The Catholic Nature of Anglicanism,” u c o , 1 September 1962, 10–11, 40. 103 “Blunt Talk,” u c o , 1 September 1962, 9. George Johnston took up the challenge of defending church union in the next issue.

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Notes to pages 278–81

407

104 “Union with the Anglicans? Here Come the Dissenters!” u c o , 1 April 1966, 19, 21. 105 “Union with the Anglicans?” 20–1, 22. 106 “Ecumenical Affairs,” r o p (1968), 362. The report rightly anticipated that the “new radicalism and activism” would drive a wedge between conservative evangelicals and churches within the ecumenical mainstream. 107 George Johnston, “The Future of Ecumenism in Canada,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 185–6. 108 Patricia Clarke, “Some Impolite Fears about Church Union,” u c o , 15 March 1969, 8. 109 “Let’s Get a Perspective on Union!” u c o , November 1970, 10. 110 Patricia Clarke and Jerry Hames, “Union: What Church Members Really Think about Church Union,” u c o , November 1970, 18. 111 Ibid., 19–20. 112 On the Evangelical United Brethren union, see “From the Church Union Front,” u c o , 1 June 1959, 7; “The Other Church Union,” u c o , 1 May 1966, 14–15; and John Burbidge, “Gentle Shepherd of 10,000 Brethren,” u c o , 1 January 1968, 10–12, 29 (a story on Emerson Hallman’s leadership in the negotiations as superintendent of the Canada Conference of the e ub ). 113 Stewart Crysdale, “Social Change and the Re-Formation of the Church,” Dead or Alive (e& s s Annual Report, 1966), 77–81. 114 Stewart Crysdale, “Upheaval and Integration,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 139. 115 Some theologians saw the de-institutionalization accompanying urbanization as a positive development. Among them was Harvey Cox, who popularized Bonhoeffer’s “religionless” Christianity in his best-selling book The Secular City. 116 See J.R.P. Sclater, “A Conciliar Church,” Right Relations among Men (e & s s Annual Report, 1943), 85. 117 Church, Nation and World Order: A Report of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, [1944?]), 35. 118 Martin E. Marty, “From the Centripetal to the Centrifugal in Culture and Religion,” Theology Today 51, no. 1 (1994): 7–8, claims that the world changed in 1968 in its organizational assumptions: from the centripetal, convergent, universalizing, and unitive inclinations of the postwar period to what he describes as the centrifugal, divergent, particularizing, mutually exclusive, and disruptive forces that reshaped the world after 1968. The restructuring process coincides with the declining significance of

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408

Notes to pages 281–2

denominations described by Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 1988), 71–99. For an analysis of this paradigm shift on the national structures of denominations (and the concomitant shift of energy to the congregational level), see David Roozen, “National Denominational Structures’ Engagement with Postmodernity: An Integrative Summary from an Organizational Perspective,” in Church, Identity, and Change: Theology and Denominational Structures in Unsettled Times, ed. David A. Roozen and James R. Nieman (Grand Rapids, mi: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 596–8. 119 John Webster Grant, “‘They Don’t Speak for Me’: The United Church’s Crisis of Confidence,” Touchstone 6, no. 3 (September 1988): 9–17, assesses this distrust of ecclesial authority in the United Church. 120 J.R. Mutchmor, Mutchmor: The Memoirs of James Ralph Mutchmor (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 141–2. 121 John Webster Grant, “What’s Past Is Prologue,” in Voices and Visions, 132. 122 G.B. Mather, “Debt of Love,” The Cutting Edge, 299–300, his final report as associate secretary. 123 John McTavish, “‘An Honest Bar of Soap’: Earl Lautenschlager Affectionately Remembered,” Touchstone 6, no. 3 (1988): 45. 124 Roy DeMarsh, “The Crisis in the Ministry Today,” The Cutting Edge, 204. 125 “Dropbacks,” u c o , 15 May 1970, 9. 126 E. Brooks Holifield, God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America (Grand Rapids, m i : Eerdmans, 2007), 235–74, describes the challenges to ministry as a profession in the United States from 1940–70, which are strikingly similar to what the United Church was facing. Bernard Ennals, Telling the Story: The Memoirs of Bernard Ennals (Sackville, n b: Hitcham Press, 1995), recounts how the rapidly changing context shaped his thinking about his own work as a minister in rural, small town, and suburban congregations in British Columbia and Ontario. The second section of his memoirs, titled “Changed Country! Changed Church!,” looks at the impact of urbanization, immigration, fundamentalism, and the sexual revolution. 127 Arnold Edinborough, “The Minister and the Twentieth Century,” in Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Symposium on the Church and the World (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 15. 128 R.S. Lederman, “Why I Am Leaving Parish Ministry,” The Cutting Edge, 208–13. Others seem to thrive on the challenges; see N. Bruce McLeod, “Why I Am Staying in Pastoral Ministry,” The Cutting Edge, 213–16.

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Notes to pages 283–4

409

129 “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century,” r o p (1968), 220, quoting the resolution that formed the commission in 1964. 130 Ibid., 221. 131 G. Campbell Wadsworth, “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century: A Critical Appraisal,” 1, 7, in “Report of the Commission on the Ministry in the Twentieth Century to the General Council: Three Appraisals,” Committee to Implement Decisions of the Twenty-third General Council relating to the Commission on Ministry in the Twentieth Century Recommendations, u ca 82.148C, box 1-2. Wadsworth had solicited assessments of the report from two well-known scholars in 1969, and ­submitted them to the implementation committee along with his own appraisal. George B. Caird of Mansfield College, Oxford, was disturbed that the report portrayed the church as “one of the social services.” T.F. Torrence of Edinburgh University linked the report’s questionable elements to what had been “learned from the World Council of Churches.” He warned that the shift of the centre of gravity from God and Christ toward “the human-technical realm” would imprison the United Church in sociological structures. By “trying to gear its message into the sociological patterns of contemporary living,” the United Church was “building obsolescence into itself.” 132 “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century,” 222–5. 133 “Council,” u c o , 15 October 1964, 36–7. An article after the previous General Council had hinted at the changes that were to come, with seventy-four women voting as commissioners (15 per cent), up from only four women commissioners in 1925. See Grace Lane, “As Women See the Church,” u c o , 1 November 1962, 25–6, for an assessment of the General Council from the point of view of several women who attended that year. 134 “Long Range Planning Committee, r o p (1962), 312. 135 Ibid., 323. The new division brought together the boards of Christian Education, Evangelism and Social Service, Men, and Women. (One wonders if most people noticed the change since the boards continued to operate and report under their old names.) 136 After serving as editor of the New Curriculum, Peter Gordon White became secretary of Christian Education in 1965. Floyd Honey’s short stint as secretary of the Board of World Missions ended in 1964 when he accepted a position with the w cc that took him to New York. Harold Bailey became the new secretary of Home Missions in 1968 after Malcolm Macdonald’s retirement. e& s s was rocked by the sudden loss of three leaders in a short period of time. Stuart Crysdale headed off to pursue a

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Notes to pages 284–6

doctoral degree in 1966; Bert Mathers’s decision to return to pastoral ministry was announced at e& s s ’s annual meeting in February 1968; a few weeks later, Ray Hord died. 137 Harold Bailey became the secretary of the Division of Mission in Canada, with former board secretaries Harriet Christie (Women) and Clarke MacDonald (e& s s ) as deputy secretaries responsible for Christian Development and Church in Society respectively. 138 H.W. Vaughan, “Memoirs,” Appendix, i–iv, Harold W. Vaughan Papers, uc a , box 3. Henry Gordon MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada, 1946–1977: A Study in the Sociology of the Denomination” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1980), 183–8, analyzes this shift from the more formal autocratic style of the 1950s and ’60s to the delegated power of national staff after restructuring. His conclusion corroborates Vaughan’s observation: “The work of the United Church is carried out by a group of executives, an oligarchy with rational authority, so that their control is not identified and not recognized as power. Their activities, policy-making decisions and published materials may appear to be anonymous” (190–1). 139 Phyllis D. Airhart, “Ecumenical Theological Education and Denominational Relationships: The Emmanuel College Case, 1960–85,” in Theological Education in Canada, ed. Graham Brown (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1998), 21, 26n31. 140 Donna Sinclair, Crossing Worlds: The Story of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 2001), 111–29. 141 Barbara Bagnell, “The Feminists,” u c o , 1 May 1970, 12–13. 142 “What’s Wrong with Church Women? u c o , August 1970, 10. 143 See Joan Wyatt, “‘We’ve Feminists Like You to Blame for this Mess,’” Touchstone 24, no. 2 (2006): 6–16, discusses the connections between the General Council’s decision on the ordination of gays and lesbians in 1988 and the feminists’ earlier fight for inclusion. 144 “Council,” u c o , 15 October 1964, 11. MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada,” 138ff., confirms that reports were increasing in number and taking longer to prepare. He supports his assessment with charts of General Council commissions (144–6) and major issues tackled by e& s s (155–6) during the period covered in his study. At a time when membership was declining, the ratio of executives per membership actually increased significantly from 3.4 per 100,000 members in 1946 to 9.5 in 1977 (196).

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Notes to page 287

411

145 John Webster Grant, “Unauthoritative Reflections on the United Church’s Story,” Touchstone 12, no. 1 (1994): 7. His article is a critical assessment of the departure from established practices and processes. 146 Taylor, “The Twenty-third General Council,” 12–13. A case in point was “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century” report, which church union supporters in particular thought should be sent back to the commission for reconsideration. Instead the General Council set up a committee to implement its more than seventy recommendations. Among them were recommendations to broaden the understanding of ministry by no longer identifying it exclusively with a pastoral charge, and expanding the order of ministry to include the work of non-ordained employees of the church, notably deaconesses. It also was an indication of a shift in theological education that emphasized a professional ministry, rather than a learned ministry. For the impact of that transition in the United Church, see Nathan H. Mair, Education for Ministry in the United Church of Canada: An Historical Probe (Toronto: Division of Ministry Personnel and Education of the United Church of Canada, 1983), 11–72. 147 Taylor, “The 23rd General Council,” 12. 148 “What General Council Did,” u c o , 15 October 1968, 14. 149 Its Middle East policy is an example of the United Church’s shift to clearcut positions on issues, in contrast to the more tactful approach of the 1950s. The plight of the Palestinian refugees had been a repeated concern in reports from the International Affairs committee and the Observer; cf. E.L. Homewood, “Palestine’s Refugees – Scar of the Near East,” u c o , 1 January 1959, 8–10, 24, 30, and E.L. Homewood, “The Divided Holy Land,” u c o , 15 February 1959, 12–14, 20. In “The Holy Land Today,” u c o , 15 December 1964, 14–15, Forrest reported that hatred was being nurtured among Palestinian children in the refugee camps, whose ambition was to go to Israel to “kill Jews.” However, after the Six-Day War in 1967, Forrest’s writing became more stridently pro-Palestinian; see A.C Forrest, “Back to the Tents,” u c o , 1 October 1967, 10–14, 26. In an effort to publicize the Arab side of the conflict, he took a ten-month leave of absence in 1968 to report on the Middle East; his editorials, articles, and The Unholy Land (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971) certainly accomplished that aim. The Observer continued to present perspectives that differed from its editor’s; see, for example, Alan T. Davies, “Was the Editorial Anti-Semitic?” u c o , March 1972, 11. For analysis of the fraught relationships, see Alan Davies, “Jews and Palestinians: An Unresolved Conflict in the United Church Mind,” in The United Church of Canada:

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Notes to pages 287–90

A History, ed. Don Schweitzer (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 239–57. 150 Holling, 393. 151 For instance, two days after Hord’s board approved his proposal to welcome U.S. draft dodgers with a gift of $1,000, the executive of General Council overturned the decision and set up a committee to investigate how e & s s made decisions. 152 Holling, 401, states that communication is essential to adaptation, by allowing ideas to be tested before they become part of “slower parts of the panarchy” (myths, constitutions, policies, etc.). I suspect that the Observer played a critical role in this regard. With a circulation of 281,623 in 1960, it outsold Time (223,073), Saturday Night (77,249), and the Presbyterian Record (86,214); see “Observations,” Observer, 15 December 1960, 5. The circulation, proudly published on the masthead of each issue, continued to increase during the 1960s, despite the decline in church membership. Subscriptions peaked at over 300,000 in February 1970, perhaps reflecting the impact on renewals of the change from a twice-monthly to monthly issue due to an increase in postal rates around that time. 153 Ibid., 399–401. 154 Homer-Dixon, 232. 155 Ibid., 231. 156 R.C. Chalmers, president of Maritime Conference, quoted in A.C. Forrest, “Your Church Today: Where It Is and Where It Is Going,” Observer, September 1970, 29. 157 Taylor, “The Twenty-third General Council,” 40. 158 Chalmers quoted in “Your Church Today,” 27. 159 Ivan Cumming, president of British Columbia Conference, quoted in “Your Church Today,” 26–7. 160 Mathers’s personal papers in the Queen’s University archives provide a glimpse of his service to the United Church. In addition to a demanding schedule at the theological school, he authored The Word and the Way, oversaw the preparation of a number of significant publications as chair of the Committee on Christian Faith (and provided background papers for other commissions), was involved in union negotiations with the Anglican Church, travelled across Canada to speak at workshops and retreats for the laity, and represented the United Church at international ecumenical gatherings (including the seminal meeting of the wc c at Uppsala in 1968). On his contributions as principal, see George Rawlyk and Kevin Quinn, The Redeemed of the Lord Say So: A History of Queen’s Theological College, 1912–1972 (Kingston: Queen’s Theological College, 1980), 223–41.

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Notes to pages 290–3

413

161 “The Service of Worship,” Chalmers Church, Kingston, on, 15 September 1972, Queen’s University Archives, Donald M. Mathers Papers, box 8-45. The selection comes from The Word and the Way, 168. 162 Some of the seeds of memory have grown in interesting places. It was amusing to read the June 2011 issue of the Observer as I was working on this chapter. It featured a cover story on the pastoral importance of funeral rituals by Kenneth Bagnell (who had written sympathetically about the prophetic role of the United Church in 1960s); see “Give Grief a Chance,” u c o , June 2011, 21–3. In the same issue, Connie denBok, the minister of one of the few United Church congregations affiliated with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, called for “fresh expressions of church for those not part of any Christian ministry,” new partnerships with other denominations, more flexible church structures, and less cumbersome procedures – not unlike what the “radicals” had called for in the 1960s. She quoted with approval missiologist David Bosch: “It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world”; see “At Issue,” u c o , June 2011, 32. Ray Hord would have agreed!

e p i l ogu e   1 W.W. Bryden, Why I Am a Presbyterian (Toronto: Presbyterian Publications, 1934), 74–5. His book makes it clear that he considered the nonconcurring Presbyterians as prone to the same faulty thinking.    2 John Webster Grant, “Blending Traditions: The United Church of Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, ed. John Webster Grant (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1963), 141. The pessimistic tone of the chapter added to the 1972 edition of The Church in the Canadian Era (Burlington, on : Welch, rev. ed. 1988) was a reflection on how his mind was to change.    3 “United Church Is Now Presbyterian: Dr Stewart,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, 4 May 1963. Ernest Edgar Long Papers, uc a , box 11–173 (scrapbook).    4 Robert Fulford, “So the Old Ways Die but Where Are the New?” Saturday Night, February 1972, 9–10.   5 Ibid., 9–10.    6 Mark Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?” Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 267. Noll carefully states that he begins “with an assumption that there was once a Christian Canada which is now gone” (245).

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Notes to pages 293–6

  7 For instance Noll, 267, says that Barry Mack has “very precisely labeled” church union as a “tragic failure.” For a typical illustration of Mack’s ­critical assessment of Presbyterian progressives, see “From Preaching to Propaganda to Marginalization: The Lost Centre of Twentieth-Century Presbyterianism,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. George Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 138–9, 143–8.   8 A table in Paul Bramadat and David Seljak, eds., Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 440, compares the percentage of Christian immigrants before and after 1971 (based on the 2001 census) in the major churches. At 5.38 per cent, the United Church has the smallest percentage of immigrants among the denominations listed; the Presbyterian Church, for instance, has 17.85 per cent. Greer Anne Wenh-In Ng, “The United Church of Canada: A Church Fittingly National,” in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 221–3, discusses the implications of “transnational identities” for the United Church.   9 Analyzing the dramatic drop in membership in the Presbyterian Church since the 1960s, historian Stuart Macdonald suggests that it demonstrates “the extent to which Presbyterian is no longer a brand that many in Canada identify with or possibly even recognize”; see Stuart Macdonald, “Presbyterian and Reformed Christians and Ethnicity,” in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 198n13. The dramatic decline in its membership occurred despite the arrival of large numbers of immigrants who brought with them a more conservative theology and a robust approach to evangelism. He notes that Korean immigrants do not identify with the “ethnically Canadian culture of the denomination”; not being in Canada to witness the boom years, they see a more accommodating approach as “a path to ruin” (186–7). 10 Jeffrey Cox, “Master Narratives of Long-term Religious Change,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 213. 11 Ron Graham, God’s Dominion: A Skeptic’s Quest (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990), 222. 12 The term “rescription” is used by Nick Nissley and Stedman Graham, “The Narrative Lens and Organizational Change,” l i a [Leadership in Action] 28 (January / February 2009): 14–17, to describe a process they use in working with executives who find themselves “stuck in dysfunctional story lines” when an organization fails to met its objectives (15).

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13

14 15

16

17

18

Notes to pages 296–7

415

They encourage leaders to consider “an alternative script” to find “a future narrative that will identify what’s needed to become unstuck.” Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 162–77, provides an excellent description of the layout of the pavilion, and discusses the mixed responses to it from members of the churches that had sponsored it. Even A.C. Forrest admitted that the message in one zone of the pavilion had to be explained to him before he understood it (176). Ibid., 146–50. Ibid., 156. Ironically, evangelicals committed to the old ideal of a Christian Canada turned to the United States for content when constructing their pavilion, which featured a scientist from the Moody Institute of Science. For a description of the pavilion, which showcased a film of Graham’s Canadian-born colleague Leighton Ford, see Miedema, 178–92. Ibid., 194. He notes that Canadian Jews had been quietly working for greater acceptance of diversity for over 200 years, and “had in recent years more actively campaigned for its [Christendom’s] fall” (195). Joseph McLelland, “Why Our Pond Is Lukewarm, or Forty Years in the Wilderness,” addresses to the Toronto and Kingston Synod, October 1965. His title linked his theme to similar concerns in the United Church by playing off the publicity generated by the latter’s Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot. His warnings in years to come about his church’s insularity from the world and its coming obsolescence echoed United Church ­concerns, and his call for a new blueprint for mission triggered similar disagreements; see J.C. McLelland, “Blueprint for a New Model,” Presbyterian Record, September 1967, 10–17. Stanford Reid, historian and leader of a renewal movement in the Presbyterian Church, agreed with McLelland’s bleak picture of the spiritual health of the Presbyterian Church, but offered a different diagnosis. “We must now face the issue of whether we wish to continue as Presbyterians,” Reid retorted, “or whether we are prepared to accept a revolutionary position which will largely eliminate our specifically reformed witness in favour of something much more general, in preparation for the next big church union movement”; see “McLelland’s Blueprint” [letters to the editor], Presbyterian Record, November 1967, 9. Northrop Frye, “The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract,” in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, ed. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French, vol. 7 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 366–7. The

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416

Notes to pages 297–8

“crisis of spirit” was a predicament that Frye saw as political, artistic, and intellectual, but above all religious. 19 After the early 1960s, the term national church is used infrequently and in a narrower sense – akin to its earlier usage as a reference to the United Church’s geographical expanse. 20 The essays in Fire and Grace: Stories of History and Vision, ed. Jim Taylor (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1999), published to commemorate the 75th anniversary, illustrate the rescripting of the United Church’s past. For example, the caption for the overview of the 1930s (12–13) reads “The Socialist Movement Flowers in the Thirties,” but only the first sentence refers to socialism, noting the involvement of J.S. Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles in the ccf party. (The second sentence describes support for the Missionary and Maintenance Fund during the Depression; the implication that giving was motivated by socialist sentiments is questionable.) Christopher Levan commends the United Church for its openness to difference that he claims was typical from its inception, and characterizes it as “the patron church of doubters” (61). Ted Reeve describes social activism as “the heart and soul” of the United Church, (105). It is interesting to compare this work to the commemorative volume prepared twenty-five years earlier, which highlights missions at home and overseas, but does not mention the social gospel movement or those associated with it. See Grace Lane, Brief Halt at Mile “50”: A Half Century of Church Union (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1974). The omission is striking since Lane was living in Saskatchewan, the province that has come to be most closely associated with the social gospel. For the way the telling of the past shapes the United Church’s ­current self-understanding, see “Dare to Be.” Accessed 7 August 2012, www.youtube.com / watch?v=66WctH5kE-M. 21 I suspect that the fine Canadian historian Richard Allen deserves considerable credit for drawing attention to the significance of the social gospel. In addition to his own study of the movement in The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914–28, published in 1973, he edited a reprint of J.S. Woodsworth’s My Neighbor in 1972. He also organized a conference in 1973 that brought together those who represented the social gospel’s “Living History” (including his father Harold T. Allen, a United Church minister) with “Contemporary Scholarship.” The proceedings were published as The Social Gospel in Canada: Papers of the Interdisciplinary Conference on the Social Gospel in Canada, ed. Richard Allen (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1975). More recently, the first volume of

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22

23 24 25

26

Notes to pages 298–9

417

his biography of Salem Bland was published in 2008 as The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity; it deals primarily with the period before Bland moved to Winnipeg in 1903 ­(pivotal to his identification with the ideals of the social gospel movement). Oscar L. Cole-Arnal, “The Prairie Labour Churches: The Methodist Input,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 34, no. 1 (2005), raises questions about Allen’s portrayal of the Methodist Church’s dealings with the radicals, arguing that there was less institutional support for them than Allen implies when it came to putting principles into practice. Bland and McClung remained involved in the United Church, although Bland (born in 1859) was retirement age by 1925. Woodsworth’s inclusion among the pantheon of heroes is fascinating since he had severed his formal ties to organized religion by 1925. He is erroneously given a position as the e & s s board secretary in one study; see Ng, 229. Douglas John Hall, The Future of the Church: Where Are We Headed? (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1989), 13. Bill Phipps, Cause for Hope: Humanity at the Crossroads (Kelowna, b c : CopperHouse, 2007), 138, 143–5. Bill Blaikie, The Blaikie Report: An Insider’s Look at Faith and Politics (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 2011), 39, 51–6. The professors and ecumenical leaders whom Blaikie credits with this reorientation are an indication of the discovery of the Canadian prophetic past that was underway during the 1970s. For instance, in Winnipeg he was deeply influenced by John Badertscher, who had been a Methodist minister and civil rights activist in the United States before moving to Canada to teach religious studies. Blaikie described himself as “inspired by the work of United Church theologian Douglas John Hall,” by then teaching at McGill after studies at Union Theological Seminary. When he attended Trinity United Church in Toronto, Bill Phipps was his minister. Blaikie considered regular lunches with Roman Catholic theologian Gregory Baum and United Church social ethicist Roger Hutchinson as his “most important theo-political education” while studying at Emmanuel and the Toronto School of Theology. Barbara Bagnell, “Would You Call This Worship?” in Ordered Liberty: Readings in the History of United Church Worship, ed. William S. Kervin (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 2011), 229–35, conveys something of the flavour of Celebration Project, a short-lived experiment in contemporary worship that was launched in 1968.

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418

Notes to page 299

27 David Roozen, “National Denominational Structures’ Engagement with Postmodernity: An Integrative Summary from an Organizational Perspective,” in Church, Identity, and Change: Theology and Denominational Structures in Unsettled Times, ed. David A. Roozen and James R. Nieman (Grand Rapids, m i : William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 617, wonders whether mainstream Protestant denominations are currently in the midst of a significant shift from “doing” to “experiencing.” He suggests this would entail “a related change from asking how we best structure ourselves for doing mission to how we best structure ourselves for providing experiences of God.”

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Index

Aboriginals. See indigenous peoples Alinsky, Saul, 234–5 Allen, Ralph, 154–5 Allen, Richard, 85, 336n50, 416n21 Anglican Church of Canada: union with United Church, 276–80, 294, 406n95. See also Church of England; church union movement Anglican-United Church union, 276–80, 294, 406n95. See also Principles of Union anti-unionists. See church union movement apartheid, 152 Arminianism, 21, 47 Armstrong, A.E., 82 Arnold, Thomas, 15 Arnup, Jesse: and foreign missions, 82, 86–8, 99, 100, 150; and home missions, 84; on popular entertainment, 158; on residential schools, 84. See also missions As One That Serves (aots ), 76–7, 146–7

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assimilation. See cultural assimilation Atkinson, Joseph, 105 Atkinson, R.D., photograph,193 Austin, Mary. See Endicott, Mary b&b Commission. See Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism Bagnell, Barbara, 285 Bagnell, Kenneth, 217–18, 238–9, 413n162 Bailey, A.G., 8 Bailey, Harold, 247 Baillie, John, 114–15 Barr, Wayne, 268 Barth, Karl. See Barthianism Barthianism: doctrine, 121–2, 351n87; influence, 103, 111, 120, 171, 346n35 Basis of Union: “common faith,” 50–1; congregational governance, 74; conservatism of, 4; critics, 40, 49–52, 273, 275; doctrinal statement, 25, 41, 49, 57–8, 120; formulation, 14–15,

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420 Index

21–2, 37, 50; misinterpretation of, 56–7; ordination, 184; preamble, 5, 22, 58; Presbyterian support, 40; sections, 34–5; theological articles, 37; theological foundations, 49. See also church union movement; Statement of Faith; United Church of Canada Bennett, John, 111–12 Bennett, R.B., 93 Berger, Carl, 16, 308n20 Bernier, Thomas-Alfred, 10–11 Berry, John, 264 Berry, William G., 164, 165, 174, 178, 252–3, 269; photograph, 187 Berton, Pierre, 233–4, 248–9, 388–9n46, 389n47 Bible and tract societies, 20 Billings, Josh, 44–5 Birks, William M., 30, 44 Blaikie, Bill, 298–9, 417n25 Blake, Eugene Carson, 231–2 Bland, Salem, 17, 96, 297–8, 313n69, 417n22 Bloor Street Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 43 Bloor Street United Church (Toronto), 77, 146, 278 Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e& s s ): agenda, 83; Depression, 97; evangelism, 106, 107, 123–4, 229–31, 236; influence of reports, 330n3; non-partisanship, 89; outreach, 230–5; postwar period, 160; and Quebec, 137; social reform, 83, 92, 100–1; “whole gospel” of, 352n99; and w m s , 78, 143; work of, 79, 101,

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230–1. See also missions; New Evangelism; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees; Woman’s Missionary Society Board of Women, 194, 268, 278 Brown, Margaret H., photograph, 69 Brown, Walter, 110 Bryce, George, 35, 36 Bryden, Walter, 292 Buchman, Frank, 117 Burbidge, John, 274 Burbidge, Katherine, 250–1 Burke, Stanley, 162 Burwash, Nathanael, 20, 21–2, 39, 298 Calling Canada to Christ, 163, 235, 252 Callwood, June, 234 Calvin, John, 23, 24, 53, 104, 162 Calvinism, 21, 26, 47, 351n87 Campbell, Robert, 47 Canada: assimilation, 11–14, 54–5, 77–8, 84–5, 143–4, 221–2; biculturalism, 209–10; Britishness, 7, 144–5, 198–9, 209, 248, 308n21, 313n69; British North America Act, 37–8, 93; and Christian social order, 4–5, 14, 53–4, 59–60, 94, 101; church/state relations, 4, 23, 84–5, 87–93, 129–34, 220–1, 222–4; Cold War, 145–8, 150–2; cultural pluralism of, 7–14, 199–200, 210–11, 216–18, 221–3, 262–3, 295; demise of Christianity in, 153, 197, 201–3, 222–3, 290; education, 214–21;

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Index 421

immigrants, 7–14, 32, 37, 16–27, 138–42, 210; indigenous peoples of, 8, 78, 84, 199, 211, 231–2; linguistic differences, 7–9, 134–5; national identity, 7–9, 11–14, 134–6, 144–6, 153, 206–10, 221–3; postwar religiosity, 154–5, 215; religious pluralism, 198–200, 202, 220–1, 248, 262–3, 294–5; religious tensions in, 10–11, 134–42, 198, 213–14; role of churches in, 11–14, 28–9, 83–93, 101, 126–31, 157, 204–8, 214–21; secularism, xix, xx, 114, 159, 197, 202, 204–6, 213–14, 221–3, 295–6; separatism, 209– 10, 211–13, 220; social services, 87–8, 93–4, 101, 204–6, 295; state funding of churches, 5–6, 28; urbanization, 141, 160, 204. See also Confederation; indigenous peoples; Maritimes; national church; Quebec; United Church of Canada; Western Canada Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 207, 208 Canadian Citizenship Act, 145 Canadian Conference of Christians and Jews, 149 Canadian Council of Churches, 152, 186 Canadian Girls in Training (cg i t), 75, 76, 77, 167 Canadian Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, 265 Canadian Jewish Congress, 216 Canadian National Committee on Refugees, 143. See also refugees Canadian School of Missions (Toronto), 81–2

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Canadian Society of Christian Unity, 21, 34 Carman, Albert, 36 Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Education, 219 Catholicism. See Roman Catholic Church Caven, William, 19, 32–4, 35, 36, 319n7 c b c . See Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Chalmers, Randolph Carleton: career, 351n88; Commission on Culture, 159, 183, 214–15; on culture, 157–8, 365n13; on Graham, 236–7; on liberalism, 121–3, 157–8, 169–70; on Presbyterianism, 23; on United Church administration, 288 Chalmers Presbyterian Church (Kingston), 44 Chalmers United Church (Kingston), 290 Chalmers United Church (Ottawa), 163 Chown, Samuel Dwight: as “architect” of church union, 21, 73, 306n6, 307n7; criticism of, 55, 56; Joint Committee on Church Union, 46; Methodist superintendent, 4; as moderate liberal evangelical, 298; photograph, 65 Christendom: demise of, 153, 197, 201–3, 223, 259–60, 290, 294–5; differences within, 17–18, 28, 147, 202–3; and Jews in Canada, 415n16; reuniting of, xviii–xix, 4, 28, 35, 36, 198, 245, 276–7, 279, 280, 283; Western, 197, 255, 259–60, 294–5. See also

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Christian civilization; Christian internationalism; ecumenism Christian citizenship, 74, 78, 128, 141–2. See also Canada; United Church of Canada Christian civilization: Christian re-union, 198, 276, 280; church union movement, 59–60; Cold War, 145–8; First World War, 59–60; nation-building, 153; Nazi Germany, 128, 136; Second World War, 128, 136; World Missionary Conference, 80. See also Christendom; Christian internationalism; ecumenism; missions Christian Endeavor, 20 Christian internationalism, 79–87, 101, 146–7, 150–3, 203, 336n50. See also Christendom, Christianization, missions Christian realists, 103 Christian Research Seminar, 265 Christian reunion, 198, 276, 280. See also Christendom; ecumenism Christian Social Council of Canada, 160 Christian socialism, 15, 90–2, 96, 118–20, 122–3. See also Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; Depression; United Church of Canada Christie, Harriet, 410n137; photograph, 194 Christie, Robert, 252 Church Federation Association, 40 Churchill, Winston, 146 Church of All Nations, 85 Church of England, 5–6, 24, 25–6; Anglican-United Church union,

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220, 276–80, 294, 406n95; and church union movement, 15–16, 35, 55–6; membership, 10. See also Anglican Church of Canada church union movement: antecedents, 20, 36–7, 305–6n2, 320n13; British North America Act, 37–8; “common faith,” 18, 21–2, 29, 41, 50–3; as controversy, 30–2, 35–64, 297; creed revision, 22; critics, 21–2, 51–7, 59; Dominion Commission on Church Property, 318n4; federation proposal, 37–8, 47, 54, 61, 323–4n57; First World War, 43, 59–60, 322–3n43; historical context, 294; legality, 37–8, 318n4; legislation, 31, 34, 44, 37–8, 53, 57, 63, 319n5; local union congregations, 27, 39, 64; nationalism, 5, 15–16, 22, 40–2, 55–7, 294, 297; negotiations, 32–40, 46–7; nontheological considerations, 4–5, 11–12, 32, 37, 40–1, 307n7; opponents, 3, 30–2, 41–3, 60; pragmatism of, 15; progressive element, 3–4, 153; propaganda, 41, 44, 46–7, 57–9; religious identity, 14; as response to immigration, 11–12, 32, 37, 45, 54–5; and Roman Catholicism, 315n88; Round Table, 17–19; social reform, 16, 20; supporters, 4–5, 14–23, 28–39, 43–7, 57–61; theological colleges, 19–20, 63; in United Kingdom, 36, 37, 342n1; in United States, 50, 51, 54–5, 325n68, 326n71, 342n1; vote results,

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61–63. See also Anglican-United Church union; Canada; continuing Presbyterians; Joint Committee on Church Union; national church; non-concurring Presbyterians; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada Act; Western Canada Clark, S.D., 156–7, 203 Clarke, F.R.C., photograph, 193 Clarke, Patricia, 268, 285 Clarke, Peter, 144 Clifford, N.K., 19, 35, 36, 274 Coburn, John, 128 Coburn, Mary, 278 Cochrane, R.B., 85 Coe, George, 76 Coke, Thomas, 26 Cold War, 145–8, 150–2 Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf (Montreal), 135 Colley, Linda, 145 Columbia University (New York), 161 Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home, 175, 181, 374n122 Commission on Church, Nation and World Order, 131–4, 158–9, 281; report of, 354n25, 355n29, 355n33, 355–6n34, 356n37 “common faith.” See Basis of Union; church union movement; United Church of Canada Communism. See Cold War Community Friendship, 77–8. See also Woman’s Missionary Society Confederation: and Britishness, 7, 145, 308n21, 313n69; and church union movement, 15;

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history, 7; and migration, 9; pragmatism of, 15; Quebec, 7, 209–10, 217, 222, 306n4. See also Canada Conference on Church Unity, 33 Conference on World Mission and Evangelism (Jerusalem), 80–3, 99, 113–14, 336n49, 336n51, 347n48 Congregationalists, 10, 20–21, 24–5, 38–9, 48–9, 61–4, 297 Congregational Union of Canada, 27, 39. See also Congregationalists Conner, Ralph. See C.W. Gordon conscription crisis, 136 continuing Presbyterians, 31–2, 34, 41, 61–3, 292–3, 321–2n31, 324–5n61. See also non-concurring Presbyterians; Presbyterian Church in Canada Cook, Ramsay, 210 Cooke, Alfred E., 170 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (c c f), 89–90, 339n94. See also Christian socialism, Depression, United Church of Canada Cormie, John, 139 Cornell University, 122 Council for the Faith, 279 Cox, Jeffrey, 204, 295 Cragg, G.R., 100 Creighton, W.B., 12, 100 Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom, 163 Crysdale, Stewart, 230, 232–3, 236, 280, 388n43, 409n136 cultural assimilation: in Canada, 11–14, 54–5, 77–8, 84–5, 143–4,

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221–2; consumerism as, 13–14; cultural mosaic model, 139, 358–9n65, 359n66; melting pot model, 7–8, 139; Paris Peace Conference (1919), 80; racism, 8, 11–14, 142; as threat, 54–5; and United Church, 138–43, 199–200, 231–2. See also church union movement; cultural pluralism; indigenous peoples; missions; United Church of Canada cultural pluralism: post-Confederation, 7–14, 294; postwar, 134–5, 138–40, 210–11, 216–18, 221–3, 262–3, 294–5; wartime, 134–7, 139–44. See also Canada; cultural assimilation; Quebec; religious pluralism; United Church of Canada Dalhousie University, 19, 132 Daniel, Mrs J.W., 43 Daniels, Elda, 144 Davidson, R.H.N., photograph, 193 Davidson, Richard, 156, 175–6, 350–1n84 Davies, Alan T., 275 decolonization, 144–5, 152 democracy, 42, 131, 136–7, 142, 145–7, 153, 196–7, 221 Department of Temperance and Moral Reform (Methodists), 21 Depression, 89–93, 97, 100, 116– 17, 123, 124 Dewey, John, 114 Diefenbaker, John G., 241, 378n34; photograph, 187 dissenters, 6, 31, 42, 57, 272, 318n3. See also church

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union movement; continuing Presbyterians; non-concurring Presbyterians Dobson, Hugh, 174–5 Dodds, Doris, 216, 217–18 Dolan, Rex, 231, 387n34 Dominion Parliament. See United Church of Canada Act Duffield, Allen, 215–16 Duke University, 114 Dulles, John Foster, 147–8 Ecumenical Conference (Methodist), 20 Ecumenical Study Commission, 219 ecumenism: and church union movement, 16, 20–3, 26–9; and mission work, 79–82, 85–7, 101, 247–8; modern, 3–4; networks, 14, 19–20, 79–80, 239, 333–4n28; and New Evangelism, 226, 228–9, 241, 243–4; postwar, 127–31, 137–8, 144–8, 152–3; radical, 278–9, 280; rift with neo-evangelicals, 228–9, 239, 244, 251–3, 271, 296–7, 390n63, 405n88, 403n68; and Roman Catholic Church, 137–8, 244–2, 248; suburban congregations, 248–51. See also Christian internationalism; church union movement; cultural assimilation; missions; United Church of Canada Eddington, A.S., 113 Eddy, Sherwood, 124 Edinborough, Arnold, 220–1 Edinburgh conference. See World Missionary Conference

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Emmanuel College (Toronto), 19, 82, 171–2, 176, 299; faculty, 68, 114–15, 123, 156, 182, 243, 250, 282 empiricism, 113–14, 119–20 Endicott, James, 82 Endicott, James G., 151–2, 364n132 Endicott, Mary, 151–2, 364n132 Ethical Education Association (e e a ), 216 Evangelical Alliance, 15, 20 Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, 244, 394n99 evangelical identity, xviii, xix, xx, 10, 21, 22, 25, 26, 50–1, 57, 58, 63, 83, 102–7, 110, 111, 115, 118, 121, 124, 169–70 evangelical Protestants, 10, 140, 163, 171, 229, 239–40, 248, 265, 271, 275, 296, 342n1, 390n63. See also New Evangelism; Presbyterianism; United Church of Canada Evangelical United Brethren Church, 280 evangelism, 14, 81–3, 86, 106–7, 115, 117–8, 123, 124, 162–6, 226, 228–30, 240, 244, 253–4. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service; ecumenism; fundamentalism; Graham; missions; National Project; New Evangelism; United Church of Canada evangelization. See missions Expo 67 (Montreal), 296, 415n13 Fairbairn, R. Edis, 110, 130, 354n17, 321n24, 334n32

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Falconer, Robert: address to Religious Education Association, 113; Canadian National Committee on Refugees, 143; career, 19; on church union movement, 14–15, 39–40; Commission on Christianizing the Social Order, 90–2; criticism of 44; Joint Committee on Church Union, 39–40; Round Table, 17 Faulkner, Tom, 136 Federal Council of Churches, 79, 347–8n54 Fellowship for a Christian Social Order (fc so), 99, 118, 133 Fey, Harold E., 157 Finlay, Karen, 207 First Nations. See indigenous peoples First United Church (Fort William), 246 First United Church (Vancouver), 68, 192 First United Church (Victoria), 64 First World War, 43, 59–60, 80, 87, 93, 115–16 Flavelle, Joseph, 19, 95, 96 Fleming, Daniel, 81, 86 Fleming, Donald, 241–4, 393n89–91 Ford, Leighton, 236 foreign missions. See missions Forrest, Alfred Clinton: on Anglican-United Church union, 276–7; on biculturalism, 217; on cultural revolution, 263; death, 288; on evangelism, 164–5, 251, 368n51; and Fleming, 393n89– 92; on foreign missions, 241–3;

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on Graham, 164–5, 171–2, 235–6, 237, 251, 368n49, 390n63; on Middle East, 411n149; on national church, 347–8; photograph, 188; on postwar growth of United Church, 255; on postwar immigration, 198–8; on postwar worship practices, 177–8; on staff shortages, 168–9, 241; on suburban congregations, 249; on temperance, 261–2; and Trudeau, 223–4; on women’s role in United Church, 283, 285; work, 288. See also United Church Observer Forsey, Eugene, 99, 118, 119, 122, 210–11, 212–13 Forster, Harvey, 170 Fort Massey Presbyterian Church (Halifax), 18 Foster, J. Arnold, photograph, 70 Fox, Paul W., 220, 383n105 Fraser, Daniel J., 47, 53, 324n58 Fraser, J.P.C., photograph, 190 Fred Victor Mission, 69. See also missions Free Church of Scotland, 33, 37 Freeman, E.G.D., 130–1 Freeman, Lois. See Wilson, Lois M. Fremantle, William H., 15, 312n58 French Canada, 9, 10–11, 137–8, 209–13. See also Quebec Frye, Northrop, 159, 196, 297, 415–16n18 Fulford, Robert, 293 fundamentalism: and church union movement, 47, 50, 54–5, 63, 102–3; and evangelism, 81, 107, 163; interwar period, 102–3; popularity, 163; postwar

25729_AIRHART.indb 426

resurgence, 124–5, 235–7, 240, 244; and United Church, 102–7, 169–70, 299, 273; United Church Renewal Fellowship, 275. See also church union movement; United Church of Canada Gallagher, W.J., 160, 186 gambling, 57, 88, 200 Gandier, Alfred, 17–18, 19, 20, 22, 63, 215, 314n76 General Assembly (Presbyterian Church), 19, 31, 33–41, 43, 46, 51, 53–4. See also Presbyterian Church in Canada; Presbyterianism General Commission on Union, 279 General Conference (Methodist Church), 34, 47. See also Methodism; Methodist Church General Council (United Church): agenda, 82, 131–4; Depression, 124; housekeeping, 96–7, 285; liberalization of, 200; New Creed, 273–5, 404n77–8; New Curriculum, 171, 266; overseas missions, 151, 241–3; role, 56–7, 74, 157, 281–2, 286–7, 412n151; Second World War, 127–8; and Statement of Faith, 120–1; and women, 183–4, 283, 285. See also missions; Statement of Faith; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees General Council of Local Union Churches, 33–4 Gidney, R.D., 215, 219, 220

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Gilkey, Charles W., 117 Gillies, Don, 278 Girls’ Residence (Assiniboia, s k), 144 Gordon, C.W., 4, 14, 35, 311n48 Gordon, Daniel Miner, 17, 19, 60–1, 329n111 Gordon, Minnie, 60, 329n110 Graham, Billy: critics, 235–7, 240, 368n49, 390n59; crusade of, 164–5, 172, 185, 236; and Expo 67, 296; and Forrest, 164–5, 171–2, 365–6, 237, 251, 368n49, 390n63; and Hord, 236, 238, 390n59; National Evangelistic Mission, 165; United Church leaders on, 184–5; United Church supporters, 236–8, 251; World Congress on Evangelism, 239–40, 394–5n100 Grant, George Monro, 15–19, 34, 36, 65, 134, 298, 313n60, 314n76; photograph, 65 Grant, John Webster, 10, 15, 281, 286, 292, 330n3, 312n58; photograph, 193 Griffin, W.S., 49–50 Gruchy, Lydia T., 183 Gunn, William, 13–14, 317n115 Gzowski, Peter, 232 Hall, Douglas John, 298 Harris, Walter, 180 Haseldan, Kyle, 271–2 Hayward, Constance, 143 Henderson, Donald S., photograph, 193 Herberg, Will, 178 Hockin, Katharine, 99, 241, 254; photograph, 69

25729_AIRHART.indb 427

Hoekendijk, Johannes, 229, 386n22 Holling, C.S., 287, 288 home missions. See missions Homer-Dixon, Thomas, 258, 288 Hope Commission. See Royal Commission on Education in Ontario Hord, J. Raymond: beating, 227, 385n12; Board of Evangelism and Social Service secretary, 226–7; as controversial, 226–7, 253, 412n151; criticism of, 239–40; death, 227; on demise of Christendom, 259–60, 399n18; on draft dodgers, 412n151; on evangelism, 238–9, 253; on Graham, 236, 238, 390n59; on homosexuals as ministers, 400n25; legacy, 227– 8; poem, 253; photograph, 189; on suburban congregations, 250; work, 226–7, 230, 233–4, 385n11. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service; New Evangelism Howse, Ernest Marshall, 142–4, 146, 234 Huband, Allen R., photograph, 71 humanism. See secular humanism Huntington, William Reed, 15, 312n58 Hutchinson, Jean, 278 Hutchinson, Roger, 94 Hutchison, William, 229 i mc . See International Missionary Council immigration. See Canada; cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism

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428 Index

imperialism: British, 144–5, 153, 308n20; Canada, 7–11, 16, 101; of United States, 144–5, 206–7, 361n102; Western, 101 Indians. See indigenous peoples indigenous peoples, 8, 77, 84–5, 99, 199, 205, 211, 227, 231–2. See also Canada; cultural assimilation; missions; residential schools; United Church of Canada Institute for Religious Research (New York), 133 Inter-Church Committee on Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations, 137–8, 245 International Missionary Council, 152, 228 Israel, 144, 149–50, 363n120, 363n125, 411n149. See also Palestine; refugees Japanese-Canadian internment, 129, 143–4, 360n93 Jarvis Street Baptist Church (Toronto), 51–2 Jay, C. Douglas, 243–4 Jerusalem meeting. See Conference on World Mission and Evangelism Johnston, George, 244, 245, 279 Joint Bureau of Literature, 44 Joint Committee on Church Union: Basis of Union, 4, 22; “common faith,” 22; establishment of, 32–5; work, 39, 46–7, 57–8, 61. See also Basis of Union; church union movement; United Church of Canada Jones, Mrs J. Erle, 84–5 Jones, Rufus, 114

25729_AIRHART.indb 428

Kairos, 267–8 Kee, Kevin, 164 Kilpatrick, G.G.D., photograph, 193 Kilpatrick, T.B., 22, 58 King, G.B., 140 King, William McGuire, 104, 112 King, W.L.M., 93, 146 Knowles, Stanley, 99, 180, 298, 377n33, 416n20 Knox College (Toronto), 19–20, 32, 63, 161, 292 Knox Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 106 Knox United Church (Prince George), 78 Knox United Church (Winnipeg), 196 Ladies’ Aid, 78 Lambeth Conference, 83, 180 Lane, Grace, 285 Laurier, Wilfrid, 7 Lautenschlager, Earl, 182, 250, 282, 405n89 Lay Advisory Council, 76 Laymen’s Missionary Movement, 11 League for Social Reconstruction, 133 Leard, Elinor, 184 Lears, Jackson, 11, 310–11n39 LeBlanc, Philip, 213 Le Fleur, Eugene, 43 legislation. See church union movement liberal evangelicals, xix, xx, 111, 122, 169–70, 236, 253–4, 276, 405 n89. See also evangelical identity; liberalism

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Index 429

liberalism: and church union movement, 50–1, 54–5; during Depression, 110–22; and evangelicals, 237–40; postwar United Church, 169–72, 200–1, 225–8, 272–6, 237–40, 290; prewar United Church, 106, 110; and religious naturalism, 112–15. See also church union movement; ecumenism; New Evangelism; religious naturalism; theological modernism; United Church of Canada Line, John, 113–4, 118–19, 123–4, 158, 350–1n84, 351n87; photograph, 68 Litt, Paul, 208 local union congregations, 27, 39, 317n118, 329n107, 329n108 Long, Ernest E., 212–13, 228, 244, 255, 288, 289; photograph, 187 Long Range Planning Committee, 284 Lord’s Day Alliance, 20, 74, 179 Lower, A.R.M., 132, 145 McCausland, J.A., 56 McClung, Nellie, 105, 297–8, 417n22 MacDonald, Clarke, 237–9, 279; photograph, 191 Macdonald, J.A., 19 Macdonald, John A., 17 Macdonald, Malcolm, 166, 174, 199, 369n57 McGill University, 133, 218 Machen, J. Gresham, 50–1, 54–5, 106–7, 325n68, 326n71, 342n1, 343–4n15 MacKay, J.I., 85 Mackay, J. Keiller, 219

25729_AIRHART.indb 429

Mackay, John, 37–8, 40, 61, 330n115 Mackay, John A., 163 MacKay, R.A., 132 McKillop, A.B., 103 Mackinnon, Clarence, 17, 18, 19, 38, 60, 61, 330n115 McLachlan, D.N., 89, 100, 107, 115–16, 161, 338n77 McLaren, E.D., 38, 321n25 McLean, E.R., 216–17 McLelland, Joseph, 296–7 McLeod, Bruce, 195, 250; photograph, 195 McLeod, Hugh A., 196–8; photograph, 72 McLeod, Hugh, 233, 258 Macleod, Norman, 15 MacLeod, Preston, 169 MacMillan, Alexander, 108 McMillan, Thomas, 49 Macpherson, Jay, photograph, 193 McPherson, Margaret, 79 MacQueen, Angus, 155, 165–6; photograph, 187 McRoberts, Kenneth, 209 MacVicar Memorial Presbyterian Church (Montreal), 106 McWilliams, Margaret, 147 Manitoba College (Toronto), 35, 61 Manson, Ian, 100–1, 350–1n84, 353n7 Maritimes, 7, 61, 236–7 Massey, Vincent, 207, 209 Massey Report. See Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences Mathers, Donald Murray, 201–2, 260, 272, 290, 399n19, 412n160; photograph, 72

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430 Index

Maurice, F.D., 15 de Mestral, Claude, 235, 381n79, 382n92 Methodism, 10, 20, 21, 25–7, 53. See also Methodist Church Methodist Church, Canada, Newfoundland, and Bermuda, 23, 27, 33–4, 39, 46–7. See also Methodism Methodist Missionary Society, 12 Miedema, Gary, 296 Millar, W.P.J., 215, 219, 220 Ministerial Association (Kingston), 143 missions: agenda of, 82–5; Board of Foreign Missions, 74, 82, 97, 100; Board of Home Missions, 78, 97–8, 140–1, 166, 199; church union movement, 45, 53, 58, 63; Depression, 97–9; ecumenism, 20, 247–8; finances, 30, 78, 97–8, 166–7; focus of, 243–4; immigrants, 37, 139–42, 199–200, 248, 310n38; Japanese-Canadian internment, 143–4; Jerusalem meeting (1928), 80–2, 83, 99; medical, 205–6; and nationalism, 82–6, 338n68; New Evangelism, 241–4, 253–4, 294; and “NonAnglo-Saxons,” 85, 141–2, 199–200, 205–6; postwar, 127, 150–3, 241–4, 364n132; refugees, 143; reports of, 86–7; rural communities, 77–8, 81, 83–5, 139–42, 174, 247–8; and social gospel, 81–7; staffing, 140, 241–2; urban outreach, 246–7, 388n43; women, 42–3. See also Christian internationalism;

25729_AIRHART.indb 430

cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism; ecumenism; indigenous peoples; prohibition; residential schools, social gospel movement; United Church of Canada; Woman’s Missionary Society missionaries. See missions Missionary and Maintenance Fund, 97 Mission to the Nation, 162–3, 164, 178 Moir, John S., 17, 313n71, 343–4n15 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 3, 4, 272 Moore, T. Albert, 47, 95, 100 Morrison, C.C., 130 Morrow, E. Lloyd, 54 Morton, A.S., 17, 19, 22–4, 26, 48 Mowat, Oliver, 7 multiculturalism. See cultural pluralism Murray, Walter, 17, 19, 27, 39 Mutchmor, J.R.: Board of e&ss, 155, 161–2; career, 161–3; on fellowship, 263; on immigrants, 13; moderator of United Church, 200–1; photograph, 72; preoccupations of, 227, 252–3; on Principles of Union, 278; on Quebec, 136–7; retirement of, 225–6; on suburban congregations, 250; temperance, 180; on United Church, 155, 170, 225–6, 281; on working women, 161–2, 182, 183 national church, 5–6, 15–16, 27–9, 40–2, 56–7, 312n54, 312n58, 416n19. See also Canada; church

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Index 431

union movement; cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism; religious pluralism; United Church of Canada National Council of the Churches of Christ (n cc), 152, 163 National Evangelistic Mission (ne m), 163, 164–6 National Religious Advisory Council, 208 nationalism. See Canada; church union movement; United Church of Canada National Project of Evangelism and Social Action, 230–1, 240, 251–2, 253 National Survey of the United Church in Canadian Life, 234, 236 naturalism. See religious naturalism natural theology. See religious naturalism Nazi Germany, 128, 142–3, 240 Neatby, Hilda, 208 Neighbourhood Workers Association, 87 neo-orthodoxy, 103, 111, 124–5, 169, 171 New Creed, 273–5, 279, 299, 404n77–8. See also General Council (United Church); United Church of Canada New Curriculum, 170–2, 200–2, 220, 225, 233–5, 238, 264–7. See also United Church of Canada New Evangelism, 234–6, 237–44, 251–4, 266, 268–70, 289–91, 299. See also ecumenism; evangelism; United Church of Canada Nicholson, J.W.A., 96, 118, 119

25729_AIRHART.indb 431

Nickle, W.F., 60 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 111–12, 119, 171–2, 349n64, 353n2 Noll, Mark, 293 non-concurring Presbyterians, 29, 32, 61–2, 289, 295, 318n3, 321–2n31. See also continuing Presbyterians; Presbyterian Church Association Oake, Norman Wesley, 240 Oke, C.C., 170 Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 59. See also Old St Andrew’s United Church (Toronto); St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto) Old St Andrew’s United Church (Toronto), 106. See also Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto) Older Boys’ Parliament, 75, 77 Oliver, E.H., 59, 104–5, 298 Oriental Home and School (Victoria), 144 Osborne, Stanley, photograph, 193 Owram, Doug, 87, 262, 271, 373–4n120 Oxford Conference. See World Conference of Christian Churches Oxford Group, 117–18, 349n64 Packard, Vance, 249 Palestine, 144, 149–50, 363n120, 363n125, 411n149. See also Israel; refugees Parliament. See Canada; church union movement; United Church of Canada Act

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Parsons, Talcott, 104 Patrick, William, 35–7, 48, 321n24 Paul, Charles Frederick, 52–3 Pearson, Lester B., 126, 135, 180, 203–4, 209–10, 227; photograph, 188 Penman, John, 41 philosophical naturalism. See religious naturalism Phipps, Bill, 269, 298 Pidgeon, George: church union movement, 38, 43–5, 47, 58–9; “city without walls,” 124, 342n1; on education, 216; evangelism, 82; moderator of United Church, 102, 103–4; photograph, 66; on postwar cultural crisis, 158, 365n15; ProtestantCatholic relations committee, 137–8; temperance, 57 Pidgeon, Leslie, 43–5 Pine Hill Divinity Hall, 123, 236. See also Presbyterian College (Halifax) Planning Fellowships, 251–2, 390n64, 392n81 Presbyterian Association for the Federation of the Churches of the Protestant Denominations, 33 Presbyterian Church Association, 40, 41–3, 45, 47, 50 Presbyterian Church in Canada, 27–40, 45, 60–1, 63–4, 292–3 296, 313n71. See also continuing Presbyterians; Presbyterianism Presbyterian Church in the u sa, 50 Presbyterian College (Halifax), 17–18, 19–20 Presbyterian College (Montreal), 19–20, 47, 63

25729_AIRHART.indb 432

Presbyterianism, 6, 10, 18, 21, 23– 4, 38–9, 53. See also continuing Presbyterians; non-concurring Presbyterians; Presbyterian Church in Canada Presbyterian Pre-Assembly Congress, 12 Presbyterian Women’s League, 41, 42–3, 47, 60 Princeton Theological Seminary, 50, 132, 163 Principles of Union, 276–7, 278–9, 283. See also Anglican-United Church union process theology, 112–13, 350n79, 350n79 prohibition, 57, 88–90, 101, 261–2, 336n50, 383n105. See also temperance Protestant Reformation, 45, 52, 58 Quebec: and b &b Commission, 210–11; and Canada, 7–11, 134–8, 209–13, 222, 306n4; and church union movement, 27, 38, 54, 61–3, 327–8n86; and Massey Report, 209–10; Quiet Revolution, 200, 293, 376–7n20; Roman Catholic Church in, 134–8, 211; separatism, 135, 209–13, 220; United Church in, 75, 210–11. See also Canada; cultural pluralism; religious pluralism; Roman Catholic Church Queen’s Theological Alumni Conferences (Kingston), 17 Queen’s Theological College (Kingston), 72, 139, 201, 290 Queen’s University (Kingston), 15, 17, 19, 60, 112, 260. See also

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Index 433

Queen’s Theological Alumni Conferences (Kingston); Queen’s Theological College (Kingston) Quiet Revolution. See Quebec racism, 8, 11–14, 84–5, 86, 139, 141–4. See also cultural assimilation refugees, 142–3, 149, 150, 363n118, 411n149. See also Israel; Palestinians Reid, W.D., 12–13 Reid, W. Stanford, 323n49, 326n75, 415n17 Religious Education Association, 113 religious naturalism, 103, 112–15, 124–5, 265–6 religious pluralism, 198–200, 202, 220–1, 248, 262–3, 294–5 residential schools, 78, 84–5, 190. See also cultural assimilation; indigenous peoples; missions; United Church of Canada; Woman’s Missionary Society Reynolds, A.G., 109–10, 170 Reynolds, J. Berkley, 239–40, 244–5, 274, 275, 391n76–7, 394–5n100, 405n88 Robinson, John A.T., 266 Roddan, Andrew, photograph, 68 Riel, Louis, 7 Ritchie, D.L., 89, 95–6 Robertson Memorial Presbyterian Church (Winnipeg), 161 Roberts, Richard, 91–2, 96–7, 99–100, 116, 117–18, 119–21, 350n79 Roman Catholic Church, 4–10, 40, 135–8, 196–200, 211–13, 244–6, 248. See also Roman Catholics

25729_AIRHART.indb 433

Roman Catholics: on church union movement, 52, 54, 56, 58; English-speaking, 8, 54, 134; French-Canadian, 10–11, 54, 134–8, 211–12; immigrant, 196–8; ultramontane Catholicism, 6, 10, 307–8n14. See also Roman Catholic Church; Quebec; United Church of Canada Rose, H.A.A., photograph, 193 Round Table, 17–19, 60, 314n74 Round Table Conference, 132 Rowell, Newton Wesley, 11–12, 94, 105, 334n30 Rowntree Memorial United Church (London), 270–1 Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems, 209 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 210–14 Royal Commission on DominionProvincial Relations, 94 Royal Commission on Education in Ontario, 215 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 159, 206–9, 214– 15, 380n67 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 285 Royal York United Church (Toronto), 226–7 St Andrew’s College (Saskatoon), 98, 105, 391n72 St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Fergus), 31 St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Kitchener), 292–3

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St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 31, 40, 43, 49. See also Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto) St Andrew’s United Church (London), 165 St James Square Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 19, 42 St Laurent, Louis, 146 St Luke’s United Church. See Sherbourne Street United Church (Toronto) St Marys United Church (Ontario), 92 St Matthew’s Presbyterian Church (Halifax), 15, 19 St Stephen’s-Broadway United Church (Winnipeg), 147 Sanford, Osbert Morley, 109 Saul, John Ralston, 7–8 Sclater, J.R.P., 59–60, 106, 281 Scott, C.T., 12 Scott, Ephraim: criticisms of church union movement, 41, 49, 63–4, 322n37; as opponent of church union movement, 30, 44–5, 47; photograph, 67 Scott, Graham, 274–5 Scott, R.B.Y., 122–3, 133, 298, 352n91 Second Vatican Council, 137–98, 245–6, 248, 272, 278–9, 299, 375n7, 391n74, 395n101, 406n98. See also ecumenism Second World War, 101, 108, 129– 37, 140–1, 143–4 secular humanism, 103, 113–22 Shepherd, Harvey, 268 Sherbourne Street United Church (Toronto), 91–2, 95 Shields, T.T., 51–2, 55, 327n77

25729_AIRHART.indb 434

Siegfried, André, 6–7 Silcox, C.E.: and church union movement, 10, 23–4, 27, 62; on culture, 214–15; on Israel, 149; and refugees, 142; on religious tensions, 136–7; and report of Commission on Church, Nation and World Order, 133; on United Church of Canada, 169 Sirois, Joseph, 94 Sisco, Gordon, 100, 119, 121, 132– 3, 138, 351n87 Sissons, C.B., 217–18 Smillie, Ben, 235, 236–7, 240 Smith, Alexander, 211 Smith, Shelton, 114 social Christianity, 15 social gospel movement: and fundamentalist-modernist debate, 55, 81; interwar period, 99–101, 111–12, 116, 119–24, 133, 155– 6; and missionary movement, 81–7; nationalism, 21; and temperance, 328n99. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service; fundamentalism; liberalism; missions; United Church of Canada; Woman’s Missionary Society socialism. See Christian socialism social reform, 16, 20, 83, 88–92, 100–1, 328n99, 350–1n84. See also Christian socialism; ecumenism; social gospel movement; United Church of Canada Somerville, James, 239 Soper, Donald, 165 Sparling, J.W., 12 Stapleford, Frank, 87–8 Statement of Faith, 120, 121, 123, 156, 170, 266 Stewart, Findlay G., 292–3

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Stewart, Gordon, 238–9 Stinson, John W., photograph, 193 Strachan, John, 5 Stringfellow, William, 299 Student Christian Movement (s c m), 99, 264, 271, 346n36 Student Volunteer Movement, 20, 346n36 Summer of Service (s os ), 268 Sutherland, Wilber, 265–6 Sydenham Street United Church (Kingston), 203 Synod of the Anglican Province of Canada, 33 Tait, W.D., 54 Taylor, Charles, 221–2 temperance: and church union movement, 10, 35, 55, 57; failure of, 88–9, 101, 261–2; opponents, 89– 90; and postwar moral regulation, 179–80; Woman’s Missionary Society, 78. See also missions; prohibition; social gospel movement; United Church of Canada Templeton, Charles, 163–4, 185 Templeton Missions, 163–4 theological modernism: church union movement, 3, 28, 47, 63; fundamentalist-modernist debate, 50–2, 54–5, 106–7, 324n58; and gender, 76; of United Church, 42, 102–3, 110–11, 158. See also church union movement; United Church of Canada Thomas, Ernest, 83, 88–9, 101, 121, 122, 336n49, 350–1n84 Thomas, Winnifred, 76, 142, 332n10; photograph, 67 Thompson, James S., 172–3, 218– 19, 383n98

25729_AIRHART.indb 435

Town Talk, 246 Trail Rangers, 75, 332n11 Tremblay Report. See Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems Trudeau, Pierre, 135, 223–4, 357n44, 357n46, 357n47, 384n110 Tuxis Boys, 70, 75, 332n11; photograph, 192 Ullman, Verda, 129 ultramontane Catholicism. See Roman Catholics union churches. See local union congregations unionists. See church union movement Union Theological Seminary (New York), 161 Unitarian Church, 51, 216 United Church Observer: on Anglican-United Church union, 276, 278, 279; on decline of United Church, 251, 255, 266–7, 272, 288; and ecumenicalevangelical rift, 239, 386n24; on education, 215, 217–8; and evangelicalism, 165; on evangelism and social service, 229; on General Council (United Church), 286; on Graham, 164– 5, 236, 390n63; on Middle East, 411n149; on missions, 241–3; on Mutchmor, 162, 225; and New Evangelism, 238; on pacifism, 128; pedagogy of, 170; on postwar growth of United Church, 225; readership, 160, 167, 412n152; on Roman CatholicUnited Church relations, 197–8;

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436 Index

on suburban congregations, 248–50; on Templeton, 163; on Trudeau, 223–4; and women, 285. See also A.C. Forrest United Church of Canada: administration, 28, 73–9, 85–6, 94–7, 99–101, 280–2, 340n105; administrative restructuring 258–9, 284–8; agenda of postwar, 130– 4, 160–1, 162–4, 184–6, 202–3, 214–16; agenda of prewar, 73–94, 103–7, 139–40; Anglican union with, 276–80; anti-ritual tendencies, 109, 113; attendance, 162–3, 172–3, 174, 225, 260–5, 270; and baby boomers, 248, 264, 267–8; and biculturalism commission, 210–14, 380n71; Britishness of, 376n17; as a “club,” 155, 226, 249–51; and Cold War, 145–8, 150–2, 203–4; “common faith” of, 108, 120, 153, 273; as conformist, 233–4, 249–51; as conservative, 4, 158–60, 225–6, 239–40, 265–6, 273–6; on contraception, 180–1; creed of, 25, 273–5, 279, 299; as “creedless,” 32, 41, 47, 49, 51, 63, 102; decline of, 255–72, 280–3, 289–91, 293–6, 299; Depression, 89–93, 110–12, 118–19, 123–4, 131–2, 339n94, 341n113; ecumenical-evangelical rift, 239, 228–9, 239, 244, 251– 3, 296–7; and education, 170–2, 184, 201–2, 205, 214–21; and empiricism, 113–15; evangelicalism, 106–7, 110–11, 115–24, 163–5, 169–70; evangelism, 184–5, 200–1, 228–31, 234–44,

25729_AIRHART.indb 436

253, 297, 368n53; as failure, 293–4; feminist influence within, 285–6, 410n143; forebears of, 4–5, 14–23, 28–9; forecasts on, 255–6, 280, 288–9; founding, 30–2, 35–64, 102–3; fundamentalist-modernist debate, 50–2, 54–5, 106–7, 324n58; funds raised, 257; gender roles in laity, 75–9, 85–6, 89, 129–30, 147, 161–2, 175–6, 180–4; gender roles in leadership, 268–70, 278, 282–7, 333n27, 404n78; and government, 4, 84–5, 87–93, 101, 129–34, 220–1, 222–4; hospitals, 205–6; and humanism, 115–22; Hymnary of, 108–9, 193; indigenous peoples, 84–5; influence on members, 154–5, 230–1; on marriage, 173, 176, 180–4, 374n121; and Massey Commission, 207–8; membership of, 200–2, 218, 225, 234, 255–7, 263–4, 268–70; as middle-class, 160, 233–4, 248–51; mission, 156, 228, 240–1, 282, 284–5, 292; modernity as threat, 157–63, 172–80, 182–4, 207–8, 221–2, 347n48; and moral regulation, 178–80, 184–5; and national church, 28–9, 32, 36–7, 40–1, 47–8, 53–4, 57–8, 297; as nation-building, 4–5, 22, 48, 58– 9, 222–3, 335–6n48; and New Age, 227, 233–6, 239, 245, 254, 391n75, 391n75; new catechism of, 179; New Creed of, 273–5, 279, 299, 404n77–8; New Curriculum of, 170–2, 200–2, 220, 225, 233–5, 238, 264–7;

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non-partisanship of, 90–1, 235; organizations, 73–9, 167–8, 231, 263–9, 333n24; outreach of, 230–5, 246–7, 250, 269–71; as “pagan,” 50–1, 52; and “panarchy,” 258–9, 275, 289–90; political influence, 133–4, 157, 185, 203–4, 220–1, 223–4, 293; on popular culture, 158–60, 163; postwar growth, 154, 156–7, 166–7, 178, 225, 248, 254–5; on refugees, 142–3, 149–50; relationship with Anglican Church, 276–80, 406n95; relationship with Roman Catholic Church, 196–9, 213, 219, 244–6, 248; resilience, 289–91; revivalism, 107, 253; rural communities, 74–5, 77–8, 81, 83–5, 109, 139–42, 174, 234, 247–8, 267, 280–1, 287–8, 294; Second World War, 129–37, 140–1, 143–4, 353n7; service books, 108–10, 273–4, 344n23; on sexuality, 158, 178, 180–1, 233, 262, 373–4n120, 399–400n25; social services of, 87–8, 93–4, 101, 201–2, 204–6, 214–21, 254; staffing, 99–100, 140, 168–9, 241; suburban congregations of, 248–51; as success, 294, 295, 416n20; Sunday schools, 264–7; theological debates within, 102–25; “theological laxity,” 25, 40–1, 104, 106; and urbanization, 141, 160, 173–4, 176–7, 246–51, 280–1, 371n83; and working women, 76, 175–6, 182–4, 268; “world mission,” 226–34, 253; worship practices of, 102–10, 263–4,

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273–4, 299; youth programs, 73, 75–6, 167–8, 190, 192, 331n8, 332n11. See also Basis of Union; Canada; church union movement; cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism; General Council (United Church); indigenous peoples; liberalism; missions; New Evangelism; social gospel movement; social reform; Statement of Faith; theological modernism; United Church Observer; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees: Board of Christian Education, 74, 218; Board of Colleges and Secondary Schools, 284; Board of Education, 219, 267; Board of Foreign Missions, see missions; Board of Home Missions, see missions; Board of Overseas Missions, see Board of Foreign Missions; Board of Missions, 285; Board of Women, 194, 268, 278; Board of World Mission, 244; Commission on Christian Faith, 123, 170; Commission on Christian Marriage and Divorce, 181; Commission on Christianizing the Social Order, 90–4, 131, 235; Commission on Church and State in Education, 218; Commission on Church Hospitals, 205–6; Commission on Culture, 159, 175, 183, 214–15, 374n132; Commission on Ordination,

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438 Index

184; Commission on the Church in the Field of Social Welfare, 254; Commission on the Church on the Urban Frontier, 247; Commission on the Church’s Ministry in the Twentieth Century, 283, 411n146; Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women, 183; Commission on Urban Problems, 173; Commission on World Mission, 228, 241–3, 392n84; Committee on Christian Faith, 273–4, 75; Committee on Church Worship and Ritual, 273; Committee on Ecumenical Affairs, 278; Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario, 219–20; Committee on the Church and International Affairs (ccia), 134, 145, 148–9, 150, 152; Committee on the Revision of the Hymnary, 193; Committee on Women Workers, 76; Division of Congregational Life and Work, 284; Division of Mission, 284; General Commission on Union, 279; International Affairs committee, 199, 203; Joint Committee on the Evangelization of Canadian Life, 117; Missionary and Maintenance Committee, 70; National Committee on Church Extension, 166; War Service Committee, 129. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e&ss); Christian civilization; Christian internationalism;

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Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home; Commission on Church, Nation and World Order; ecumenism; General Council (United Church); prohibition; social reform; temperance; United Church Observer; United Church of Canada United Church of Canada Act, 34 United Church of Christ, 268 United Church Renewal Fellowship, 239, 240, 245, 274, 290; “new creed,” 275, 405n85 United Church Training School, 129 United Church Women (uc w), 200, 268–9, 285 United College (Winnipeg), 130, 140, 299 United Kingdom: Anglo-Saxonism, 144; demise of empire, 144–5; ecumenism, 131; Overtoun appeal, 37; Privy Council, 93; secularism 295. See also Canada; imperialism United Nations, 149–50 United States: Cold War, 146–9; emigration to, 7; fundamentalistmodernist debate, 50–1, 54–5, 106–7; immigrants, 9; imperialism of, 116–17, 126–7, 144–9; indigenous peoples of, 9; religious influence, 11, 23–4, 50–1, 103, 106–7, 116–17, 131; secularism, 116–17. See also Canada; church union movement; imperialism; United Church of Canada United Theological College (Montreal), 89, 231, 244

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Index 439

University of Toronto. See Emmanuel College (Toronto); Knox College (Toronto) Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Vaughan, Harold, 284 Victoria College (Toronto), 20, 113, 123, 159. See also Victoria University Victoria University (Toronto), 11, 49, 82, 110, 123, 171–2, 203 Vietnam War, 149, 227, 228–9, 238, 258 Villeneuve, Cardinal, 135–6 Vipond, Reid, photograph, 71 Visser ’t Hooft, W.A., 111, 112, 346n36 Vlastos, Gregory, 112, 122, 351n90 Wadsworth, G. Campbell, 108, 283 Wallace, E.W., 80–2 Warren, Heather, 111 Warriner, William Henry, photograph, 66 Watson, J. Ralph, 213 Watts, J.R., 139–40 Way, Peggy, 268 Weber, Max, 259 Wee Frees. See Free Church of Scotland Weiman, Henry Nelson, 112–13 Wesley, John, 25–6, 53, 135, 238 Wesley College (Winnipeg), 12 Wesleyan Methodist Church of Bermuda, 34 West London Mission, 165 Western Canada: church union role, 10, 27, 39, 59; home missions, 139–42;

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Japanese-Canadian internment, 129, 143–4, 360n93; local union congregations, 27, 39, 317n118, 329n107, 329n108; moral issues, 174; non-concurring Presbyterians in, 61–3; settlement, 9, 139–42, 309n30. See also Canada; church union movement; cultural assimilation; missions Westminster Confession of Faith, Catechisms, and Directory of Public Worship, 23 Westminster Presbyterian Church (Winnipeg), 19 Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia), 50 Westminster United Church (Winnipeg), 71, 142 Westworth United Church (Winnipeg), 265 White, Peter Gordon, 266 Whitehead, A.N., 113 Wilson, Lois M., 184, 246; photograph, 71 Wilson, R.J., 44–7, 57, 83, 106, 336n51 Wilson, Roy, 246 Winter, Gibson, 74, 249–50 wms. See Woman’s Missionary Society Woman’s Association (wa ), 78–9 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 74 Woman’s Missionary Society (wms): Dominion Board of, 129; finances, 97–8, 167–8, 285; hospitals, 205–6; immigrant outreach, 141–2; membership, 76; merger with wa, 200, 268,

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440 Index

285; mission, 85–6, 333n22; and postwar growth, 167; postwar missions, 151–3; rural communities, 77–8, 141–2; scope, 77–8, 79; and Second World War, 129; staffing shortfalls, 99; temperance, 179. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e & s s ); indigenous peoples; missions; residential schools; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees; United Church Women; Woman’s Association Woodsworth, J.S., 12, 105, 297–8, 417n22 World Conference of Christian Churches (Oxford, 1937), 127– 8, 147, 228, 353n2 World Conference on Church and Society. See World Council of Churches World Conference on Faith and Order (Lausanne, 1927), 83 World Congress on Evangelism (Berlin, 1966), 239–40, 391n74, 394–5n100

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World Council of Churches (wc c ), 138, 147, 158, 203, 228–9, 278–9 World Missionary Conference (Edinburgh, 1910), 4, 80, 207, 239, 253, 334n30 World Student Christian Federation, 111, 228 World Vision, 239 World War I. See First World War World War II. See Second World War ymc a . See Young Men’s Christian Association Young Men’s Christian Association (y mc a ), 20 Young, Morley A.R., 205 Young People’s Society, 73, 75. See also Young People’s Union Young People’s Union (y pu), 82, 168, 267–8. See also Young People’s Society Young Women’s Christian Association (y wc a ), 20, 76 ywc a . See Young Women’s Christian Association

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A C H U R C H W IT H T H E SOUL OF A NATI ON

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M cG i l l -Qu e e n ’s S t u di e s i n t h e H is to ry o f Religio n Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. s e ri e s o n e : g .a . r awly k , e di tor 1 Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson 2 Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario William Westfall 3 An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 Marguerite Van Die 4 The Dévotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France Elizabeth Rapley 5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau 6 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer 7 A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918–1939 Robert Wright

10  God’s Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson 11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 Edited by Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz 12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 Brian P. Clarke 13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States Edited by George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll 14 Children of Peace W. John McIntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution Joan Marshall 16 Padres in No Man’s Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War Duff Crerar

8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart

17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis P. Travis Kroeker

9 A Sensitive Independence Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 Rosemary R. Gagan

18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw

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19 Through Sunshine and Shadow The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 Sharon Cook 20 Church, College, and Clergy A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994 Brian J. Fraser 21 The Lord’s Dominion The History of Canadian Methodism Neil Semple 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau

23 Evangelism and Apostasy The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico Kurt Bowen 24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827– 1905 Eldon Hay 25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925 Johanne Selles 26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy William Lamont

s e ri e s t wo i n me mo ry of g e o r ge rawlyk d o n a l d ha r ma n a k e n so n , e di to r 1 Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640–1665 Patricia Simpson 2 Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience Edited by G.A. Rawlyk 3 Infinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature John Spencer Hill 4 The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada Edited by Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk 5 Labour, Love, and Prayer Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 Andrea Ebel Brozyna

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  6  The Waning of the Green Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 Mark G. McGowan   7  Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 John-Paul Himka  8 Good Citizens British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918 James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston   9  The Theology of the Oral Torah Revealing the Justice of God Jacob Neusner

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10  Gentle Eminence A Life of Cardinal Flahiff P. Wallace Platt 11 Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750–1870 Kevin McQuillan 12 Between Damnation and Starvation Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855 John P. Greene 13 Martin Luther, German Saviour German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 James M. Stayer 14 Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 William H. Katerberg 15 The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896–1914 George Emery 16 Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel Paul Charles Merkley 17 A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime Elizabeth Rapley 18 Households of Faith Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 Edited by Nancy Christie 19 Blood Ground Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 Elizabeth Elbourne 20 A History of Canadian Catholics Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism Terence J. Fay

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21 The View from Rome Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 Reports on the Ontario Bilingual Schools Question Edited and translated by John Zucchi 22 The Founding Moment Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College William Westfall 23 The Holocaust, Israel, and Canadian Protestant Churches Haim Genizi 24 Governing Charities Church and State in Toronto’s Catholic Archdiocese, 1850–1950 Paula Maurutto 25 Anglicans and the Atlantic World High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the Quebec Connection Richard W. Vaudry 26 Evangelicals and the Continental Divide The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States Sam Reimer 27 Christians in a Secular World The Canadian Experience Kurt Bowen 28 Anatomy of a Seance A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada Stan McMullin 29 With Skilful Hand The Story of King David David T. Barnard 30 Faithful Intellect Samuel S. Nelles and Victoria University Neil Semple 31 W. Stanford Reid An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy Donald MacLeod

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32 A Long Eclipse The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970 Catherine Gidney 33 Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics, 1787–1858 Kyla Madden 34 For Canada’s Sake Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s Gary R. Miedema 35 Revival in the City The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914 Eric R. Crouse 36 The Lord for the Body Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880–1930 James Opp 37 Six Hundred Years of Reform Bishops and the French Church, 1190–1789 J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields 38 The Missionary Oblate Sisters Vision and Mission Rosa Bruno-Jofré 39 Religion, Family, and Community in Victorian Canada The Colbys of Carrollcroft Marguerite Van Die 40 Michael Power The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier Mark G. McGowan 41 The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 Michael Gauvreau 42 Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665–1700 Patricia Simpson

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43 To Heal a Fractured World The Ethics of Responsibility Jonathan Sacks 44 Revivalists Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 Kevin Kee 45 The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Canada Edited by Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert 46 Political Ecumenism Catholics, Jews, and Protestants in De Gaulle’s Free France, 1940–1945 Geoffrey Adams 47 From Quaker to Upper Canadian Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends, 1801–1850 Robynne Rogers Healey 48 The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693–1796 Colleen Gray 49 Canadian Pentecostalism Transition and Transformation Edited by Michael Wilkinson 50 A War with a Silver Lining Canadian Protestant Churches and the South African War, 1899–1902 Gordon L. Heath 51 In the Aftermath of Catastrophe Founding Judaism, 70 to 640 Jacob Neusner 52 Imagining Holiness Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times Justin Jaron Lewis 53 Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774–1874 Calvin Hollett

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54 Into Deep Waters Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Calvinist Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855 Daniel C. Goodwin 55 Vanguard of the New Age The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891–1945 Gillian McCann 56 A Commerce of Taste Church Architecture in Canada, 1867–1914 Barry Magrill 57 The Big Picture The Antigonish Movement of Eastern Nova Scotia Santo Dodaro and Leonard Pluta 58 My Heart’s Best Wishes for You A Biography of Archbishop John Walsh John P. Comiskey 59 The Covenanters in Canada Reformed Presbyterianism from 1820 to 2012 Eldon Hay 60 The Guardianship of Best Interests Institutional Care for the Children of the Poor in Halifax, 1850–1960 Renée N. Lafferty

62 Contesting the Moral High Ground Popular Moralists in Mid-TwentiethCentury Britain Paul T. Phillips 63 The Catholicisms of Coutances Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France, 1350–1789 J. Michael Hayden 64 After Evangelicalism The Sixties and the United Church of Canada Kevin N. Flatt 65 The Return of Ancestral Gods Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation Mariya Lesiv 66 Transatlantic Methodists British Wesleyanism and the Formation of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec Todd Webb 67 A Church with the Soul of a Nation Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada Phyllis D. Airhart

61 In the Name of the Holy Office Joaquim Marques de Araújo, a Brazilian Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline James E. Wadsworth

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A Church with the Soul of a Nation Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada

p h y l l i s d . a ir ha rt

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 isb n isb n isb n isb n

978-0-7735-4248-8 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4249-5 (paper) 978-0-7735-8929-2 (ep df ) 978-0-7735-8930-8 (ep ub)

Legal deposit first quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Airhart, Phyllis D. (Phyllis Diane), 1953–, author A church with the soul of a nation: making and remaking the United Church of Canada / Phyllis D. Airhart. (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion. Series two; no. 67) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isb n 978-0-7735-4248-8 (bound). – is bn 978-0-7735-4249-5 (pbk.). – isb n 978-0-7735-8929-2 (ep df ). – is bn 978-0-7735-8930-8 (e p u b ) 1. United Church of Canada – History – 20th century.  2. Canada – Church history – 20th century.  I. Title.  II. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion. Series two; no. 67 BX 9881.A47 2014

287.9'20904

C 2013-905843-5 C 2013-905844-3

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Dedicated to John Webster Grant (1919–2006) and N.K. Clifford (1930–1990)

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Contents

Figures and Tables  xiii Abbreviations xv Prologue xvii Illustrations follow pages 64 and 186 1  “Friendly Service” to the Nation  3 2  Controversy and the Construction of Identity  30 3  The Mission and the “Machinery”  73 4  The Search for a Faith for Sociable Souls  102 5  Christian Canada in a “New World Order”  126 6  Calling Postwar Canada to Christ  154 7  Uncoupling Christianity and Culture in Canada  196 8  Listening to the World  225 9  Reconceiving the United Church  255 Epilogue 292 Acknowledgments 301 Notes 305 Index 419

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Figures and Tables

F ig u r e s 6.1 Funds raised by the Woman’s Association and the Woman’s Missionary Society, 1926–61  168 8.1 Appointments and withdrawals of missionaries, 1928–65  242 9.1 United Church of Canada membership, 1926–75  257 9.2 Total funds raised for all purposes, 1926–75  257 9.3 Membership in Sunday schools and through-week organizations, 1926–75 264

T a b l es 1.1 Denominational strength before and after church union (as a percentage of the total population of Canada)  10 2.1 Chronology of church union in Canada  33 2.2 Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations before 10 June 1925 and United and non-concurring congregations after 10 June 1925  62 3.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1931 75 3.2 Disbursement of the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, 1928–38 98 6.1 Membership of Woman’s Missionary Society auxiliaries, bands, and affiliated c gi t groups  167 9.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1971 256

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Abbreviations

aots As One That Serves c g it Canadian Girls in Training c c ia Committee on the Church and International Affairs e&ss Evangelism and Social Service fc so Fellowship for a Christian Social Order ncc

National Council of the Churches of Christ in the u sa

n em National Evangelistic Mission rop

Record of Proceedings of the United Church of Canada

sc m

Student Christian Movement

sos

Summer of Service

uca

United Church of Canada Archives

uco

United Church Observer

u c r f United Church Renewal Fellowship u c w United Church Women wa

Woman’s Association

wms Woman’s Missionary Society wc c World Council of Churches y mc a Young Men’s Christian Association y pu

Young People’s Union

y wc a Young Women’s Christian Association

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Prologue Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a ­preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events. History is a construct, she tells her students ... Still, there are definitive moments, moments we use as references, because they break our sense of continuity, they change the direction of time. We can look at these events and we can say that after them things were never the same again. They provide beginnings for us, and endings too. Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“I look upon all the world as my parish,” Methodist John Wesley famously wrote in his journal as he braced himself for clashes with critics of his itinerant preaching that would flout the parish boundaries of his day. “In whatever part of it I am, I judge it meet, right, and my bounden duty, to declare unto all that are willing to hear the glad tidings of salvation.”1 Two centuries later, those who joined with Wesley’s spiritual descendents to create the United Church of Canada had a more modest mission in mind. “Canada is our parish,” wrote Presbyterian E.H. Oliver in the first issue of the new denominational magazine. Excited by what its “vision of Dominion-wide service” would mean for the Prairies, the principal of St Andrew’s College in Saskatoon predicted that there would “be not a hamlet or a rural community in the whole land where the United Church will not serve.” It aimed to make a difference in those communities, for it had “a large faith that all of human kind are not only redeemable but, as well, usable for, and in, the Kingdom.”2 Mobilizing those redeemable and usable persons for the sake of God’s Kingdom in Canada was the mission that inspired the church union movement of the early 1900s. Its leaders believed that their

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xviii Prologue

venture in ecumenism would not only improve the operational efficiency of the uniting churches but also create better persons, better communities, and a better nation – a Christian social order, as they often put it. In making the United Church, they envisioned a national church that would relate in a special way to communities across Canada. Historian Sidney Mead once described America as “a nation with the soul of a church,” borrowing a remark that G.K. Chesterton made after visiting the United States in the early 1920s.3 Those advancing the cause of church union had something different in mind for Canada: they were hoping to build a church with the soul of a nation. The church founded in June 1925 was decades in the making. The idea of uniting Protestantism in Canada was conceived after Confederation by Victorian evangelicals who were eager to co-­ operate in meeting the spiritual needs of the young nation. What began as a quest for Protestant cohesion was complicated by competition from the Roman Catholic Church in and beyond Quebec, as well as theological and tactical divisions within its own ranks. Fissures in Anglo-American Protestantism were already appearing by the time formal church union negotiations commenced at the turn of the century. In Canada some of the animosity between ­conservative and progressive evangelicals was transposed into the bitter debate over church union that ensued. Whether the United Church could still claim to be a legitimate heir to the evangelical tradition was a theological issue contested long after other matters were resolved. While the United Church prided itself on being ‘made in Canada,’ its supporters traded ideas freely with church leaders in other countries before and after church union. The views of theologians who promoted a united Protestantism in England and Scotland sounded just as relevant in Canada, where churches were facing the massive challenges of expanding to new communities. The case for church union on a grand scale featured the practical advantages of overcoming the unfortunate divisions that had befallen Christendom after the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Canadian version made much of the fact that dozens of Old World denomi­ nations had already united within their confessional families (as Presbyterians, Methodists, and Congregationalists) after their ar­ rival. The next step was obvious: to set aside the doctrinal differences of the past by professing a “common faith” that emphasized

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Prologue xix

their theological harmony. Opponents charged that unionists were creating a creedless church that was little more than a political club, and accused them of theological modernism. The United Church was determined to prove its critics wrong, insisting that there could be adaptation without apostasy. Church union was an ambitious undertaking that tested the limits of inclusion by bringing together networks of missionary enthusiasts, social reformers, and Christian educators. Rather than the theological modernists or social radicals their detractors made them out to be, the most prominent among them were pragmatic progressives whose liberal evangelical theology held that personal faith had social implications. Their commitment to extending the influence of Christian civilization was widely shared among Protestants in and beyond Canada – even by many who opposed union. The United Church in this sense proclaimed a social gospel – not an endorsement of a partisan political or economic agenda, but an orientation to life that connected faith and community. Critics rightly observed that there was a civic dimension to ‘being United’ that was particularly evident during times of national crisis. It rallied its members to  provide assistance to those hardest hit by the Depression, and supported the Second World War and postwar reconstruction as a defence of Christian civilization. For a time it looked as if the United Church was meeting, and even exceeding, expectations. During the 1950s, insiders and onlookers saw it as vibrant, growing, and confident. To be sure, its leaders fretted about secularism and the decline of moral standards that they saw as evidence that western Christendom was becoming “pagan.” And yet its congregations were undoubtedly making a mark on communities across the nation. “In many respects it is as Canadian as the maple leaf and the beaver,” wrote sociologist John Porter in The Vertical Mosaic as he surveyed Canadian society in 19654 – just as the United Church’s situation was about to change. By then the United Church was showing signs of a crisis of institutional identity, complicated by the circumstances of its founding. A century after Confederation, Canada’s political leaders were less convinced than their predecessors that Christianity was a source of cultural cohesion. The notion of a national church, especially one that would represent a shrinking proportion of the population (if postwar demographic patterns were any indication), was problematic in a nation that was becoming noticeably less Protestant. Like

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xx Prologue

efforts to suppress cultural differences by assimilation, even the strategy of blending theological traditions began to sound less laudable; such conciliation smacked of compromise to a youth culture that celebrated diversity and authenticity. One historian has convincingly portrayed Canadian baby boomers as “born at the right time.”5 The United Church, however, seemed born at the wrong time to appeal to them. A pluralistic and segmented world foreshadowed trouble for the liberal evangelical assumptions of its founders. The ‘unmaking’ of their vision of becoming a church “which may fittingly be described national,” as the Basis of Union had put it, occasioned a crisis of mission in the wake of a revolution that brought an end to Christendom in Canada. Its remaking was led by leaders who called for new ways to connect faith and community by “listening to the world.” Taking the secular world as their “parish,” they were convinced that the founding mission needed to be reconceived to meet the spiritual challenges of a New Age in a new Canada. And so the church once born with the soul of a nation found itself waiting to be born again.

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A C H U R C H W IT H T H E SOUL OF A NATI ON

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1 “Friendly Service” to the Nation You can make the argument that there’s no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past ... They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don’t know how it’s going to come out ... You can’t understand them if you don’t understand how they perceived reality and you don’t understand that unless you understand the culture. David McCullough, “The Title Always Comes Last”

The day after the inauguration of the United Church of Canada, author Lucy Maud Montgomery mulled dejectedly over glowing newspaper accounts of its “birth.” In recent years she and her husband, Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, had made no secret of their opposition to the proposed union. Nevertheless, one of his two pastoral charges had voted to unite with the insufferable Methodists in Zephyr, Ontario. They now faced the unwelcome prospect of packing up the family belongings and moving from the Leaskdale manse. Cynical about the claims made for union and embittered by the outcome of the vote, Montgomery wrote in her journal entry later that day: “in Nature the births of living things do not take place in this fashion ... No, ’tis no ‘birth.’ It is rather the w ­ edding of two old churches, both of whom are too old to have offspring.”1 The church that was ceremonially born in Canada on 10 June 1925 is usually cast as a new and youthful player on the international religious stage. Critics often panned it as modernist and depicted its founders as innovators who had been captivated by the novelty of church union. There was within the uniting traditions a strong progressive element, to be sure. Canadian churches were not the first to propose “organic union” between rival confessional families, but such a proposition had never actually been consummated

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elsewhere on such a large scale.2 Negotiations between the uniting traditions were underway and a Basis of Union outlining its theology and polity was essentially completed even before the international missionary conference in Edinburgh in 1910, widely regarded as marking the beginning of the modern ecumenical movement. Canada was several steps ahead of the rest of Christendom, or so it seemed. Montgomery detected another dynamic: to her the United Church was defective because its thinking was not modern enough. She was not alone in this observation. The conservative tone of the theological statement in the Basis of Union was startling to many at the time, an aberration attributed to the age and outlook of the members of the Joint Committee on Church Union assigned the task of formulating it.3 But another feature, that was in a sense backward-looking, was as crucial for the destiny of the United Church. Union was an effort to invigorate an old idea: the partnership between church and state in building a Christian society. The effort to unite Protestantism was, at least in part, an attempt to create a strong connection ­between Protestantism and patriotism among English-speaking Canadians that paralleled the presumed political influence of the Catholic Church in Quebec.4 An adapted form of Christendom thus lived on after the legal disestablishment of the churches in the mid-­ nineteenth century, preserving the traditional link between piety and place and lending plausibility to the plan to unite evangelical Protestantism in Canada. C.W. Gordon, a Presbyterian minister from Winnipeg better known to most Canadians as novelist Ralph Connor, did not mince words when asked why he supported the creation of a united church: “I’m a church unionist not because I like the union so well but because I am a Canadian and love my country and I see in this union what is best for Canada.”5 No less enthusiastic about the new church as a solution for the challenges facing the nation was Methodist general superintendent S.D. Chown. “If the major Churches of Protestantism cannot unite,” he warned, “the battle which is going on now so definitely for the religious control of our country, will be lost within the next few years.”6 The case for union often detailed the advantages in pragmatic political and economic terms, casting the negotiations in a non-theological light.7 Unionists were stung by the charge that their motives were not “spiritual,” but their enthusiasm for linking the new church’s destiny with Canada’s made them easy targets.

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Without union, one pro-union pamphlet asserted, “the Church is not able adequately to accomplish her task, which is to make Canada a really Christian nation.” Economics could not be separated from theology, its advocates insisted, and a united church would be “a more efficient instrument for the building up of God’s Kingdom in this land and beyond.”8 The story of church union as told by its supporters highlighted this mission to create a Christian Canada, and a sense of responsibility for the nation created a bond between them. The name they proposed for the church conveyed what they believed to be its promise: a commitment to the wider unity of Christianity and a unique role in Canada. Its founding mission was encapsulated in the words of the general preamble to the Basis of Union, added in 1914 at a meeting to choose the name and make the final revisions: “It shall be the policy of The United Church to foster the spirit of unity in the hope that this settlement of unity may in due time, so far as Canada is concerned, take shape in a Church which may fittingly be described as national.”9 In one sense, the term ‘national church’ spoke to an as-yet-unrealized institution of the future, one that, to borrow the language of the Basis of Union, “may in due time” take shape. But alongside that anticipation was the impulse to be, from the outset, an institution that would relate in a very particular way to the nation of Canada. It would, as one report confidently announced, be “a national Church, National, not in any sense State-controlled, or Statecontrolling, but for the friendly service of the whole nation.”10 A century before church union, a quite different notion of national church had prevailed. As he prepared his sermon marking the  death in 1825 of Jacob Mountain, the first Anglican bishop of Quebec, John Strachan (himself soon to become the first bishop of Toronto) worked from a premise shared by most of the first Europeans to settle in Canada: religious authority would be mediated through a national church duly established and financially supported by the state. To speak of a Christian nation without a national church was a contradiction, Strachan insisted. A country that did not provide public support for religion could hardly be called a Christian nation.11 Strachan had arrived in Upper Canada at a time when the Church of England was still regarded as the established church of British North America. Other religious groups were free to hold their services without interference, and a few enjoyed other privileges. In

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Quebec, for instance, the Catholic Church had permission to support itself by collecting tithes. Even after Presbyterians and others successfully argued that the state support they received in their old homeland should be extended to their new setting as well, the Church of England still received the lion’s share of public funding. There were Christians who vehemently opposed this arrangement, since it meant that Methodists, Baptists, and others branded as dissenters received no public funding. Those excluded were not required to pay tithes or taxes to support the established churches, but they chafed under regulations that, for instance, excluded them from some institutions of higher education and prevented their clergy from conducting marriage or funeral services. Eventually, such restrictions were removed; yet there was no agreement on the thorny issue of how to extend state support to all groups. The result was gradual erosion of the benefits that had been dispensed to some churches as a solution to the problem of Protestant pluralism. One by one, privileges were contested and lost as churches in effect shifted from public to private sponsorship. With the sale of the clergy reserves in Canada West (Ontario) in 1854 and the founding of non-sectarian colleges there and in the Maritime provinces, the legal dismantling of established religion in British North America outside Quebec was largely complete.12 Under these new terms, Canada’s churches appeared to flourish and functioned culturally, if not legally, as what historians have variously termed a plural, shadow, or voluntary establishment. In Ontario, for instance, the percentage of the population that indicated no religious preference fell dramatically from 16.7 per cent in 1842 to less than 1 per cent in 1871.13 In 1906, an observer from France, André Siegfried, noted that, to all appearances, “the independence of these churches in regard to the state has been absolutely established in the New World.” But perhaps, he continued, “it would not be safe to say quite so positively that the state’s independence of the churches, even the Protestant ones, is established to the same degree.” While the Protestant clergy did not aim to control the government in the ultramontane Catholic fashion that Siegfried had observed in Quebec, their efforts were directed toward “informing it with their spirit.”14 He judged Protestants incapable of thinking outside of religious categories, and although he was convinced that unbelief among them was common, it was not publicly expressed: to do so would be “almost an act of infidelity to the Anglo-Saxon race.”15

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As Siegfried had discovered, there was more at stake in the complex relationship between church and state than distribution of tangible benefits. Little wonder then that politicians and civic leaders customarily courted churches as partners in promoting social wellbeing. For their part, churches were eager to demonstrate their social usefulness even without the state support once enjoyed by some.16 On the eve of church union negotiations, two entwined issues loomed large and made the United Church’s offer of “friendly service” appealing: uncertainty about Canada’s future as a nation and the arrival of huge numbers of immigrants. The creation of the ­Dominion of Canada in 1867 was a practical political agreement that had evoked little, if any, “national feeling” at the time. Critics dismissed talk of a Canadian identity as ridiculous since it was ­unimaginable to them that people would feel as attached to Ottawa as to London, Paris, Washington, Ireland, or even Quebec.17 Confederation brought together four provinces to form a British colony peopled by British subjects, but strong regional loyalties and cultural differences persisted.18 Quebec presented an obvious challenge, but anti-Confederation forces garnered support in the Maritimes as well. In Ontario Oliver Mowat promoted the cause of provincial rights, while the rebellions led by Louis Riel in 1869 and 1885 indicated resistance to the plan for a Dominion that reached from sea to sea. Political union was no guarantee of prosperity, and many people left to settle in the United States during the downturn of the 1880s. Even some who remained debated whether Canada should join the United States or, at the very least, negotiate a free trade agreement. As leader of the opposition, Wilfrid Laurier feared that “premature dissolution seems to be at hand” as he watched the events of the early 1890s unfold.19 Was it possible to ‘construct’ a nationality for Canada? Many who caught the nation-building fever that gripped the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western world thought so, even while conceding that the obstacles were formidable. Canadian nationalists wrestled to find an identity that embraced Britain’s imperial aspirations, while staking out a place of their own in North America.20 Canada pretended to be “a particularly British place” after Confederation, observes John Ralston Saul.21 New notions of racial  purity and the European inheritance displaced what he calls the “Métis civilization” of British North America, and the image of

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the melting pot supplanted the idea of a widening circle, which had characterized indigenous models of an interdependent society.22 Historians have suggested that even English-speaking Catholics became agents of Anglo-Saxon culture by siding with Protestants on language issues.23 Those who believed that Canada’s future depended on crafting a new Canadian identity found themselves grappling with the prac­ tical implications of scientific theories about racial and ethnic dif­ ferences. Misunderstandings arose, notes historian A.G. Bailey, as institutions and ideas “came to be looked upon as the mystical exfoliation of the genius of particular people.”24 One study of Victorian attitudes toward race concludes that by the mid-nineteenth century, the natural inequality of races was a widely published scientific ‘fact’: “One did not have to read obscure books to know that the Caucasians were innately superior, and that they were responsible for civilization in the world, or to know that so-called inferior races were destined to be overwhelmed or even disappear.”25 That the latter were doomed to extinction appeared to be borne out in North America by the rapidly diminishing numbers of indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada.26 Since scientific evidence also purported to show that mixing with inferior races might compromise racial superiority, the image of North America as a cultural melting pot came under scrutiny.27 The numerical growth of newly freed blacks and of immigrants raised difficult practical questions. How were those who were considered incapable of assimilation to be treated? Was it fair to admit ‘inferior’ races if doing so doomed them to extinction? Evolutionary theory further complicated questions about racial origins by popularizing the belief that certain characteristics were inherited. The eugenics movement, spouting its questionable scientific theories, warned that the present dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race was threatened, particularly when the higher fertility rates of the foreign-born were taken into account.28 Supporters of a more restrictive approach to immigration feared that Britain was dumping ‘unfit’ immigrants in Canada, and urged that they be turned away.29 Biological theories became competing metaphors of cultural assimilation, and attempts to persuade immigrants (at least outside Quebec) to adopt “AngloSaxon culture” vied with anticipation that a “new type” of Canadian was being constructed.

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Complicating matters was a mix of religion, language, and politics that boiled over from time to time. Protestants feared that migration from Quebec meant that the French language and the Catholic r­ eligion were seeping into northwestern Ontario and the Prairies. Catholics likewise worried about demographic trends. Manitoba had entered Confederation in 1870 with Catholics in the majority, but an influx of settlers from Ontario fortified Protestantism in ­western Canada, at least for a time.30 Public school systems became arenas for testing the strength of religious influence. In the 1890s, Manitoba’s decision to replace its dual system of Catholic and Protestant schools with nondenominational schools was controversial enough to become an issue in the federal election of 1896. The question of schools for religious minorities was still contentious when Saskatchewan and Alberta became provinces in 1905.31 As Protestant churches raced to provide pastoral care for new communities, the Catholic leaders complained about “proselytism.” Other disputes hit even closer to home. A papal declaration, Ne Tereme, that came into effect in 1908 stated that only marriages performed in the presence of a Catholic priest were valid, raising questions about the legitimacy of “mixed marriages” performed by Protestant clergy.32 Whether the Catholic or Protestant side would be able to claim the advantages that came from statistical dominance was far from clear at the turn of the century. Sweeping demographic changes added to the uncertainty about ­Canada’s future. Between 1881 and 1901 the percentage of the population born outside of Canada held steady at 13 to 14 per cent, almost identical to the number of foreign-born in the United States. Perhaps the most troubling demographic trend for many years after Confederation was the number of people leaving Canada for the United States, which had resulted in a net loss in the migration process. The 1911 census figures indicated a welcome change: for the first time since Confederation, Canada showed a net gain in migration. But some found cause for concern as they scrutinized the population profile. Continuing a trend in the census figures issued ten years earlier was a startling increase in the number of immigrants, many of them speaking neither French nor English. The percentage of foreign-born in Canada had jumped to 22 per cent, an even more shocking number when compared to U.S. statistics for the same period, which showed only a slight increase from previous levels of immigration.33

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Table 1.1 Denominational strength before and after church union (as a percentage of the total population of Canada) 1901 Congregational

1911

1921

5.27

4.73

3.50

Methodist

17.07

14.99

13.19

Presbyterian

15.69

15.49

16.04

United Church of Canada

1931

8.39 1 19.44

1  The strength of the Presbyterian numbers came as a surprise, since the final vote on church union would have projected a lower number relative to the size of the United Church. C.E. Silcox suspected that many members of United Church congregations, especially in areas of western Canada where the controversy had not reinforced the distinctions, continued for a time to think of themselves as ‘Presbyterian.’ For a comparison of the census of 1931 with church statistics on membership, Sunday school enrolments, funerals, etc., and an analysis of what he called the “lost battalion,” see Silcox, Church Union in Canada, 438–43. Source: Census of Canada (1931), Table 36.

For Protestants there was even more cause for anxiety. Between 1901 and 1911 the Catholic Church had increased its membership by 603,441, to nearly 2.3 million. The Church of England, too, could feel pleased that its membership had grown by 361,523 to just over a million. However, other Protestant groups had not fared as well: Congregationalists increased membership by 5,761 (to 34,054), Presbyterians by 272,882 (to 1,115,324), and Methodists by only 163,006 ­(dropping them, at 1,079,882, to second place among Protestant churches).34 Evangelical Protestants who were leading moral crusades to make Canada “God’s Dominion” were enjoying what John Webster Grant describes as the peak of their power and influence; but as he wryly puts it, just when they seemed to have succeeded in implanting the ideals of temperance and discipline, they saw Canada “inundated with people who had never heard of the virtues of total abstinence and threatened the rigid Canadian Sunday in the bargain.”35 These new immigrants landed at a time when a more militant Catholicism, linked to a nationalist movement in French Canada and energized by ultramontane values, had a different vision for the nation’s future.36 Assessing the situation in 1881, Thomas-Alfred Bernier, the mayor of Sainte-Agathe, Manitoba, was optimistic: “Happily for all, for immigrants as well as for children of the soil, there is in the Dominion of Canada a fruitful and vigorous race, with

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a common origin, identical interests, glorious traditions, a common language and a common faith, believing itself to have been called to a great mission and living under God’s protection.” His Protestant co-religionists would have taken exception to his prediction that “this race, which is to be found in all the provinces of Confederation, and which is its keystone, is the French-Canadian people. It is the one that will prove to be the dynamic element in this empire which will be neither English nor French, but solely and gloriously Canadian.”37 Protestant church leaders imagined that the new type of Canadian would bear far more resemblance to the values and virtues of the Anglo-Saxon race. However, even the progressives among them struggled to come to terms with the myriad issues raised by nonAnglo-Saxon immigration.38 Historian Jackson Lears finds that social Christianity in the United States was tinged with both idealism and imperialism: “Progress and Providence converged in the rhetoric of empire.”39 That was the presumption in Canada as well, with progressives hopeful that changing the social environment would ameliorate social problems; ethnic differences could and should be transcended, and moral and social uplift would result in racial uplift.40 As Methodist lawyer Newton Wesley Rowell told those who gathered in Toronto at Victoria University for a meeting of the Laymen’s Missionary Movement, settlement of new territories in the north and west provided “a home not in a southern clime which may breed a weak and effeminate race, but under skies and a c­ limate which must develop a strong, a progressive and a conquering people.”41 Like many of his day, Rowell believed that the greater part of the population of Canada might soon be found west of the Great Lakes, and the ideals of that region would determine the future of the nation. At first glance, this was a disturbing prospect. Rowell noted that the social, political, and religious institutions of non-English-s­peaking immigrants differed from those who had come from the British Isles or the United States. Men with little previous experience of representative government would soon be able to vote and, he warned, “their votes will be just as potent as yours and mine in ­determining the character of the men who shall represent us in Parliament and the nature of the laws under which we must live.” However, as a progressive, Rowell believed in the power of the new environment: “Many of these people have now, for the first time, a real chance for social

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and moral improvement. They provide the raw material out of which we may make good citizens if we but do our duty.” The public schools, the press, and government had a role to play, but only the church, with its Gospel of Christ, could make an appeal “to the deepest impulses or the most powerful motives.”42 For progressives like Rowell, confidence that old differences would be transcended in a new land was a widely shared egalitarian notion. By 1908, W.B. Creighton, the new editor of the Methodist denominational paper, was using the columns of the Christian Guardian to send the same message. The church had a responsibility to work with the state to provide educational and religious services for the immigrant today; otherwise, they were likely to become a burden tomorrow. Creighton praised city missions like the ones run by C.T. Scott in Montreal and J.S. Woodsworth in Winnipeg for “conforming to our type multitudes of alien races, and making of great motley groups a unified and coherent people worthy of the name ‘Canadian.’”43 Principal J.W. Sparling of Wesley College in Winnipeg wanted to leave no doubt in young readers’ minds about the enormity of the task facing the churches. Penning a foreword to J.S. Woodsworth’s Strangers within Our Gates, a study text for the youth department of the Methodist Missionary Society, he wrote in 1909: “I can with confidence commend this pioneering Canadian work on the subject to the careful consideration of those who are desirous of understanding and grappling with this great national danger. For there is a danger and it is national! Either we must educate and elevate the incoming multitudes or they will drag us and our children down to a lower level. We must see to it that the civilization and ideals of Southeastern Europe are not transplanted to and perpetuated on our virgin soil.”44 Sparling’s apprehension was broadly felt, even among Protestants who rejected church union as the most effective way of meeting the challenge of immigration. Speaking to the Presbyterian Pre-Assembly Congress in 1913, Rev. W.D. Reid of Montreal announced to those gathered that Canada was facing “the greatest immigration problem that has ever confronted any nation.” The problem, he explained, was that over 20 per cent of the newcomers were non-Anglo-Saxons, “who can not speak our language, have no sympathy with our ideals, and are foreigners in every sense of the term.” His address painted a bleak picture of the foreigner: illiterate, intemperate, ignorant,

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diseased, oppressed, draining charitable resources when unemployed and undercutting wages when employed, carrying unhelpful political baggage such as atheistic socialist ideas, and disproportionately tending toward crime, insanity, and pauperism. While he conceded that they were “often deeply religious,” he described their practices as “a mere caricature of religion.” Reid gave his audience something to ponder: “The question we have to ask ourselves seriously at this moment, is will the foreigner paganize us or shall we Christianize him?”45 Many worried that the churches were doing far too little to Christianize such foreigners. Presbyterian J.R. Mutchmor lambasted members of downtown churches for dealing with the ‘problem’ by moving away from it and faulted theological schools for failing to equip ministers to assimilate people from other cultures. In his master’s thesis, written while preparing for the ministry in New York City, the young Canadian wrestled with the “question of the nonassimilating Canadian,” specifically those from continental Europe and Asia. He wondered, “How can these people be Canadianized when the Canadian workingman hates a dago or a bohunk? How can the church help when so many so-called Christians thank God that they are not as other men are nor yet as this dago?” Still Mutchmor’s opinion was not atypical of early twentieth-century progressive opinion when he insisted, “Our King, our flag and our throne must remain uppermost in the hearts of the people of Canada at any cost, and the wages and standards of Canadians must increase and develop and the British ideals must be our ideals forever.”46 Few presented the new Canadian more sympathetically than Congregationalist William Gunn. He identified the obstacles that immigrants routinely faced: transition to a new way of life, low wages and slum conditions, exploitation, corrupting influences, alienation from their children who adapt more easily to their new home, competition with other immigrants for jobs, ridicule, and loss of faith. The question for Gunn was not whether the immigrant would be assimilated – that was assumed – but what values would be transmitted in that process. He recognized the power of materialism to bind together those who otherwise seemed to have little in common. To his list of what he called the five great assimilating forces (the church, the railway, the school, politics, and daily life), he added “one little one” that showed him to be a perceptive observer of new cultural trends: “the mail order catalogue which, from Vancouver to

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Cape Breton, with its illustrations and prices, speaks all languages and tends to reduce us all to one dead level of outward uniformity.” Against the negative assimilating power of consumerism stood the church, which had the potential within itself to become “the greatest assimilating agency of all” with its belief in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.47 The differences between evangelism, social service, and assimilation were sometimes small. Writing as Ralph Connor, C.W. Gordon often used his stories to convey the message that immigrants (even Scottish Highlanders) should abandon their old ways and be assimilated to a more ‘universal’ identity.48 The fictional Prairie missionary in Gordon’s The Foreigner expressed these values well. He couldn’t preach much, he admitted, but his “main line” was “the kiddies.” “I can teach them English, and then I am going to doctor them, and, if they’ll let me, teach them some of the elements of domestic science; in short, do anything to make them good Christians and good Canadians, which is the same thing.”49 Supporters of church union hoped that many would draw a further conclusion: constructing a new type of church was the best way to make them both good Christians and good Canadians.50 The formula for building a united church mirrored the blueprint for building a united country. Unionists considered religious identity, like national identity, malleable; assimilation was a tactic for managing differences, whether cultural or theological. Widely shared assumptions about cultural homogeneity made the idea of a united church plausible in the context of early twentieth-century Canada and shaped its founding narrative. Those who made the case for union were convinced that they would build a strong church by overcoming the limitations of difference; they sought unity in what they could believe and accomplish together. In this sense there was nothing mysterious or new about making a united church: it would be built from the stuff at hand. And at hand were networks of support for the mission of building a Christian nation – indeed, a Christian world. Robert Falconer, president of the University of Toronto, credited the surprisingly swift formulation of the Basis of Union (once negotiations got underway in 1904) to a movement that was already “subconscious in the minds of many.” Writing in 1913, he described the overextended churches as caught in a crunch that manifested a

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broader national problem. “Canada is calling herself a nation and is boldly claiming to be judged by the national standards of the most highly developed Western civilization,” he observed, yet needed to “provide at extremely short notice for all the organization of nationhood.” Church union was not unlike Confederation in its pragmatic nature, he argued: just as federal union was the result of provincial necessities, so church union would be “the result not of theory but of practical urgency.”51 But the ‘theory’ of union was not new either; it had been the topic of theological discussion for decades. Underpinning Christian nation-building (and often overlooked as a cradle for social Christianity) was an influential Victorian movement that saw Christian unity as pivotal to its vision of a better world.52 A plan for a national church in England that would include all but the Catholics and Unitarians was described in Principles of Church Reform (1833)53 and vigorously promoted in Anglican circles by Thomas Arnold, a prominent leader in the Broad Church movement.54 Later William H. Fremantle, another leading proponent of a national church, blended Arnold’s principles for Christian unity with theologian F.D. Maurice’s Christian socialist concerns.55 In Fremantle’s view, having “one great Church” in Western Europe was a step toward a universal church that would assimilate “by degrees the more backward nations.”56 His call for a national church caught the attention of American Episcopal priest William Reed Huntington, who put it in terms better suited to the disestablished North American context in A National Church, published in 1898.57 In Canada, the notion of a national church was, in John Webster Grant’s assessment, a “spectacular success” by the end of the nineteenth century.58 Topping any list of those deserving credit for its currency was George Monro Grant. For over a quarter of a century, first as minister of St Matthew’s Presbyterian Church in Halifax and later as principal of Queen’s University in Kingston, he sowed the idea of a united Protestant church.59 Whether he had read the writings of Arnold or Fremantle directly, or was introduced to the argument for a national church by his mentor Norman Macleod,60 the ideas of the British movement for Christian unity were familiar to Grant. His enthusiasm was evident in his widely reported and oftenquoted keynote address at the first meeting of the Canadian branch of the Evangelical Alliance in Montreal in 1874. Speaking on the theme “The Church of Canada – Can Such a Thing Be?,” he pictured

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a new church that would capture the best qualities of the major Protestant denominations: order and conservatism from the Anglicans; enthusiasm, zeal for missions, and adaptability from the Methodists; insistence on the rights of the individual from the Baptists; the love of liberty from the Congregationalists; and the  well-knit strength and high regard for the Word of God from the Presbyterians. He went so far as to hope that even Catholics might someday be drawn to such a church by their love of unity.61 After playing a leading role in uniting his own denomination in 1875, Grant saw union with the Methodists as an obvious next step. Writing in the Canadian Methodist Magazine after Methodism consolidated in 1884, he observed that in matters of Christian unity, the Canadian churches were, thanks to their environment, already in advance of their counterparts in “the mother land” and even “the go-ahead United States.”62 Prospects for such a union were promising since Methodist polity was, in his view, essentially Presbyterian, and “verbal differences” were insignificant when gauged against problems facing both. Union would, furthermore, be “a step towards the formation of that regenerated society for which we pray.”63 In Grant’s approach, creating a regenerated society through cooperation in missions and social reform was pivotal to overcoming debilitating theological and organizational differences. Preaching before his synod in 1866, he called for a “large liberty” and “cooperation in labour, and labouring together with God, rather than enforced agreement of opinion on subjects that may be relegated to the domain of philosophy, politics or science” as the “true and scriptural basis” for unity.64 Such co-operation, suggests historian Carl Berger, is the key to understanding both Grant’s imperialism and his ecumenism. The formation of a national church in Canada that would become a model for the reunification of churches worldwide was his most profound conviction, adds Berger: “Just as the union of the churches was the precondition for the Christianization of the social order, so too the unity of the Empire was necessary to maintain a political power making for righteousness on earth.”65 Grant’s imperialist ideals were couched in religious terms; his evolutionary view of history saw the imperialist advance as part of God’s design for bringing those it protected under its Christianizing and civilizing influence.66 An eager, energetic, and optimistic man, described by his first ­biographer as being gifted with “consummate cleverness,” Grant

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exerted, by all accounts, remarkable influence over others: “His ­fiery purpose inspired their ardour, his strong wisdom compelled their respect, his personal charm engaged their liking.”67 Remembered as one of the most influential Presbyterians of his day and one of the most significant leaders in the country,68 Grant inspired both his own generation and the next through a network that was interdenominational and intergenerational in character. His writings and the Queen’s Theological Alumni Conferences that he organized once he moved to Kingston influenced ministers from his own denomination and appealed to others, like Methodist Salem Bland.69 When he died in May 1902, it was reported that an even larger and more diverse group of persons came to Kingston to  mourn his passing than had gathered there years earlier for Sir John A. Macdonald’s funeral.70 Whether through coincidence or contrivance, many of Grant’s friends and associates found themselves in positions of public influence as the new nation of Canada and its Protestant churches were weighing their options for the future. A generation of leaders receptive to his influence became what John S. Moir dubbed “one of the most important exports of the Maritime provinces to the rest of Canada.”71 In the fall of 1894, a group of mostly young Presbyterian ministers resolved to meet several times as “The Round Table” to enjoy each other’s intellectual and social companionship.72 At the head of the table, in the place of “King Arthur,” was Daniel Miner Gordon, Grant’s friend and junior, who earlier that year had been appointed principal of Presbyterian College in Halifax. The other dozen or so theological “knights” were, as one of them later put it, men of “obscure beginnings” who went on to “positions of great prominence and responsibility in the wide Dominion.”73 Among those seated around the table were Alfred Gandier, Clarence Mackinnon, Robert Falconer, Walter Murray, and A.S. Morton, who first used their publications and later their positions to air their views on Christian unity, and promoted ideas that would become the core of the rationale for church union.74 Unlike most of the other knights, Alfred Gandier had not been raised in the Maritimes. His link to the ideals and traditions of the region was his relationship with Grant. His biographer speculated that Gandier, a graduate of Queen’s University, might well have heard one of principal Grant’s frequent challenges to those who

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studied theology there: “You and I are not responsible for the existing divisions of Christendom, but I beg you not to accept ordination until you are convinced that should you by word or deed perpetuate these divisions by one unnecessary day you will have been unworthy of your ordination.”75 Grant’s influence was decisive in landing Gandier the position as pastor of Fort Massey Presbyterian Church in Halifax in 1893. There had been a difficult two-year search to fill the position. Grant’s recommendation of Gandier as one of Queen’s most brilliant graduates was behind the congregation’s decision to issue the pastoral call to him.76 Gandier’s approach to resolving theological differences later became the basis for finding agreement among the uniting traditions: focus on a common faith. “The time has actually come,” he wrote in the Presbyterian magazine Theologue in 1899, “when Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists can sit around a table and deliberately agree to a common statement of faith in relation to every doctrine of fundamental importance.”77 His mentor Grant had made a similar point in an article published shortly before his death, predicting that “as preliminary to organic union,” churches would “rewrite their confessions, adapt them to our own time, and find out the extent of the common ground on which Christians now stand.”78 Clarence Mackinnon, who would one day become principal of Presbyterian College, presented Theologue readers with the skeleton of a proposal for how to find that common ground. He conceded that union between confessional families was more complex than the Presbyterian or Methodist unions had been. Churches were happy to unite, “provided the other denominations would only be so obliging as to lay aside their peculiar beliefs and practices, and to stoop to its yoke, if not actually to make a humble confession of their errors and do a flattering penance for the schisms of the past.” He enunciated an organizational principle that was assumed in later negotiations: “If there is to be union, it must take place along the only possible lines on which great bodies can unite, a readiness to abandon individual peculiarities and a willingness to appropriate whatever has proved itself effective in the work of other churches.” Mackinnon believed that without a willingness to sacrifice old identities, talk of union, however eloquent, would be futile. Presbyterians would have to modify their approach to church administration, he predicted, and even their confession of faith would have to be “thrown into the crucible and melted down.”79

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Grant’s death in 1902 set in motion a chain of events that scattered members of the Round Table across Canada as they moved into new positions of responsibility. The first to go was King Arthur: Daniel Gordon left Presbyterian College to succeed his mentor as principal of Queen’s University. Robert Falconer turned down an opportunity to teach New Testament at Knox College in Toronto, instead replacing Gordon as principal of Presbyterian College; when he moved in 1907, it was to become president of the University of Toronto. According to his biographer, Falconer was nominated for the university post by J.A. Macdonald, an acquaintance who was editor of the Toronto Globe. The summer before, the two had joined efforts to promote the cause of church union at the Presbyterian General Assembly.80 Connections with other influential networks were forged in Toronto. Living next door to Falconer was Joseph Flavelle, an enthusiastic Methodist supporter of church union. Falconer was also reunited with his old friend Alfred Gandier (whose sister he had married), who had accepted a call to St James Square Presbyterian Church in 1900. Members of Gandier’s new congregation included J.A. Macdonald and William Caven, then principal of Knox College (and a strong supporter of church union as well).81 Eight years later Gandier would succeed Caven as principal of Knox College and hold the position until church union saw the creation of a new faculty of theology; he was the first principal of what became Emmanuel College in 1928. Some members of the Round Table moved even further west. ­Walter Murray, a member of St Matthew’s Presbyterian Church in Halifax, left his teaching position in philosophy at Dalhousie University in 1908 to become the first president of the University of Saskatchewan.82 A.S. Morton accepted Murray’s invitation to join his faculty. Morton would decisively influence how the church union movement was remembered and interpreted with publication of The Way to Union in 1912.83 Clarence Mackinnon accepted a call to Westminster Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg in 1905, but returned to Halifax in 1909 to become principal of Presbyterian College.84 The power of the Round Table network in Presbyterian circles is suggested by N.K. Clifford’s observation that the Presbyterian minister who supported union was typically a graduate of Presbyterian College in Montreal, Queen’s, Presbyterian College in Halifax, or one of the colleges in the West. If a graduate of Knox supported

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union, he likely attended the school after 1908.85 (It is perhaps more than a coincidence that Gandier had arrived as principal that same year.) Similar networks of support for Christian unity were forming within Methodism and Congregationalism, often criss-crossing denominational lines. When Nathanael Burwash addressed Methodists from around the world who gathered in Toronto for the 1911 Ecumenical Conference, he suggested that God had used “union revivals” to ­prepare the churches in Canada for unity. Fifty years earlier, he recalled, “Methodists thought Presbyterians without much religion and Presbyterians thought Methodists ignorant and fanatical.” Uniting for revival meetings brought their religious world views together for at least a few weeks each year. “The old dividing dogmas were forgotten by us all as our hearts were quickened and filled with the central vital truths of the common gospel.”86 Burwash also witnessed the impact of collaborative theological education on inter-denominational ventures. With the organization of federated t­heological colleges in Toronto, Montreal, and later Winnipeg, the classroom experience was a concrete reminder of common ties that mitigated denominational particularities. Writing in 1894, a few years after Victoria College moved from Cobourg to federate with the University of Toronto, he described co-operation between denominational schools as the “divine leaven of unity” that was challenging “polemical theology.”87 Thousands of men and women who joined voluntary associations to promote missions and social reform formed similar bonds across denominational lines. Their hope of infusing public life with Christian ideals found concrete expression in evangelistic missions and reform movements at home and abroad. The Evangelical Alliance; Bible and tract societies; Sunday schools; home and foreign missionary societies for laymen and laywomen; temperance societies; the Lord’s Day Alliance; and youth organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (ym ca), the Young Women’s Christian Association (y wc a ) , Christian Endeavor, and the Student Volunteer Movement were among the organizations that offered opportunities to work together for a common cause.88 These coteries of future unionists, many of them lay leaders in local congregations, were linked to burgeoning denominational bureaucracies comprised of church executives who were charged with the responsibility of making Canada “His Dominion.”89

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Among their ranks was S.D. Chown, a Methodist minister later dubbed the architect of church union. By the time he was appointed first secretary of Methodism’s Department of Temperance and Moral Reform in 1902, he had already served as president of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity.90 Chown’s new position put him at the forefront of efforts to regenerate society, and he easily grafted church union to social concerns. What set the Canadian social gospel apart from British and American varieties, argues William Magney, was its passionate nationalism and eagerness to rise to the new social and economic challenges facing Canada. In fact, he suggests, Methodism’s approach to moral and social reform “might better be termed a ‘National’ than a ‘Social’ Gospel.”91 Either way, Chown’s variety of evangelicalism fit easily with the enhanced role in the life of the nation that unionists saw for a national church. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists across the country found themselves working together and thinking about their mission in similar terms. Before and during the time that the Basis of Union was being formulated, a web of inter-denominational connections linked leaders of evangelistic, missionary, and social reform movements; theological educators; and church executives.92 The extent of their rootedness in the religious world of late-Victorian Canada is important in the story of church union; however, it’s a point often left out in favour of an emphasis on the novelty of their position. Equally significant in launching church union (and thus provoking the controversy that ensued) was that these homegrown proponents effectively tied the mission of ‘Christianizing’ the West to an old and widely shared evangelical assumption: religion was essential to national and global well-being. Novelty was not the only charge brought against the church union movement; it was also dogged by criticism that efficiency was uppermost in the minds of its supporters and theology of comparatively little consequence. Detractors missed an important theological conviction that unionists shared: that the great truths of Christianity could be framed in terms of a common faith. Burwash’s advice to his colleagues on the Doctrine committee echoed Gandier’s earlier suggestion in the Theologue: that the statement be short, summarizing essential beliefs rather than formulating them dogmatically in either Arminian or Calvinist terms.93 Burwash and those who worked with him to craft the doctrinal section of the Basis of Union were not

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offended to hear their work described as a reflection of the theological idiom of their day; after all, they were not attempting to write a creed for all time but for their own time. Burwash would have had little quarrel with Presbyterian T.B. Kilpatrick’s interpretation of their task: “Creed revision is the inherent right, and the continual duty, of a living Church.” He described the standing of the newly minted articles in modest terms: “We have sought, humbly and earnestly, to serve our own generation; and now we hand on the result of our toil, with prayer and hope, to the generation following.”94 The importance of building on common principles, rather than preserving of peculiarities, was at the forefront of discussions from the outset. Gandier later recalled the Joint Committee’s attempts to find common ground. “Have we a common faith?” was always the key question. Early on, the founders had realized that “to be real and effective it [church union] must be based on common convictions and deep spiritual affinities.”95 This was a theme sounded three times in the short theological preamble to the Basis of Union: the articles were “the substance of the Christian faith as commonly held among us”; they affirmed the evangelical doctrines held in common by the uniting traditions; and the statement itself was “a brief summary of our common faith.” Reiteration of the virtues and values associated with this common faith punctuated the long process of negotiation, voting, and legislation.96 The uniting churches had come to Canada as different religious traditions, much like different nationalities. Together they would create something distinctively Canadian out of the beliefs that were shared in common. This became the storyline of The Way to Union, with its interminable subtitle “Being a Study of the Principles of the Foundation and of the Historic Development of the Christian Church as Bearing on the Proposed Union of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational Churches in Canada.” As Morton developed the plot, church union was the obvious next chapter to the story of Christianity in Canada. The customary account of the origins of a religious tradition usually emphasized what set it apart from others. Morton added a twist to his tale by highlighting what Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists had in common. As he followed their converging paths to Canada, his aim was to persuade readers that apparent differences “tend to disappear with the circumstances that created them, and their great fundamental unities will be brought into the clear

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light of day.”97 Overcoming such differences was central to the ­story of the United Church’s forbears as the first generation of church union supporters related it. Unionists followed Morton’s lead and airbrushed their confessional family pictures to enhance the resemblance. The Presbyterians, the oldest of the uniting parties, were a case in point. John Calvin had not only advanced a particular theological position but also devised a polity that expressly sought to put in place a representative approach to church government that included lay power and participation (well suited to Geneva’s republican spirit). Calvin’s representative style of church government had been modified as it moved from Geneva around the world. In North America, for instance, it had typically evolved into local congregational sessions, regional presbyteries and synods, and national ­assemblies.98 Before uniting with others, Presbyterians in Canada had already consolidated over a dozen Presbyterian-type churches brought to Canada, mostly from the United States or the British Isles.99 Once nagging differences over the relationship of church and state (the initial cause of friction in many cases) were recognized as inconsequential in the Canadian setting, Presbyterians found much upon which they could agree: the Westminster Confession of Faith, its Catechisms, and Directory of Public Worship, as well as a common form of church government.100 Most would have agreed with R.C. Chalmers’s identification of Presbyterian principles: an emphasis on the sovereignty of God, salvation by grace through faith, the priesthood of all believers that found expression in a church ruled by presbyters, an approach to the sacrament of the Eucharist that avoided both Catholic and Lutheran “magic” and Zwingli’s memorialism, and a recognition of the state as called to fulfill a divine purpose (and to be resisted only when it acted in violation of Christian conscience).101 The stereotypically dour Presbyterians had little reason to be gloomy about their future in Canada as they considered union. Buoyed by an influx of Scottish immigrants, they edged past the Methodist Church in the 1911 census and became the largest Protestant denomination in the country. Assessing the situation in Canada a few years after church union, former Congregationalist C.E. Silcox considered them to have been “perhaps the most influential Protestant denomination in the Dominion – influential in scholarship, in general culture, in numbers, in the wealth and economic

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success of its members.”102 They were particularly proud of the influence of their theological and liberal arts colleges, described by one historian as “nurseries both of religion and learning.”103 This was symbolically acknowledged at the inauguration service when the Presbyterians identified their inheritance and gift to the United Church as “the manifestation of the Spirit in vigilance for Christ’s Kirk and Covenant, in care for the spread of education and devotion to sacred learning.”104 Next, Morton introduced the Congregationalists, who traced their origins to the Puritan movement within the Church of England. Their theology, too, owed much to the influence of Calvin and the Reformed tradition, but as the name ‘Congregationalist’ implied, their polity gave each local congregation autonomy. Unlike the Presbyterians in Scotland who had created a national church governed by presbytery representatives, the Congregationalists formed local fellowships whose covenant with God and each other bound them together. They sought the right to be free of outside interference, in defiance of the direction of England’s established church.105 Their spiritual forebears, the Puritans (viewed by some as notable for their intolerance), held the right of conscience on religious matters as a cherished principle. At the time of the Puritan Revolution, Oliver Cromwell (an Independent whom Morton considered part of the Congregationalist family) had proposed that in order to protect freedom of consciences, it might be necessary to have liberty for all religions. Morton noted that this concept, so shocking to Presbyterians when first proposed, was now largely accepted in Canada. The major Protestant denominations had since grown closer and now stood where the Congregationalists had first begun: with the understanding that the church was a voluntary association.106 Congregationalists arrived in Canada in the early days of mideighteenth-century colonial settlement, but struggled to survive. Many of the Congregationalist churches organized by settlers from New England collapsed when their members returned to the United States after the American Revolution. Some congregations then exercised their autonomy and joined other denominations. In the aftermath of the New Light revivals in Nova Scotia, many became Baptist churches, while theological affinities with Presbyterianism made closer association with that denomination an attractive ­option for others.107 The invitation to consider union with the

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Presbyterians and Methodists came as a welcome development for the remaining Congregationalists. Despite their small size (about 1 per cent of the population), the Congregationalists shaped key positions taken by the new church. They are remembered for their insistence that candidates for the ministry not be required to subscribe to the doctrinal statement of the Basis of Union as a test of the correctness of their theology; it was enough to be “in essential agreement.” They proposed that ordinands instead undergo a rigorous examination of their religious experience and theological beliefs, for which a mere creed could not substitute. While critics saw this as proof of the United Church’s theology laxity, it was actually a way to honour an old and fundamental principle of Congregationalism: that a person must be free to express the truths of the Christian faith in his or her own words, not in the words of a fixed creed.108 At the inaugural service, the Congregationalists identified the gift of their inheritance to the United Church as “the manifestation of the Spirit in the liberty of prophesying, the love of spiritual freedom and the enforcement of civic justice.”109 The Methodists, too, owed their distinctive features to a different time and place. Their rise was the most significant institutional ­expression of the evangelical revivals that swept across the British Isles and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Industrial Revolution, with its large-scale social and economic changes, was accompanied by dramatic increases in population not only in London but also in Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, and other new centres of industry. Since existing parish boundaries could be changed only by legislation, new church development failed to keep pace with the mushrooming population. Convinced that the Church of England was not meeting the spiritual needs of the people, John Wesley was eager to explore alternatives to the parish system, and sent out preachers who organized bands of like-minded folk sharing a “desire to flee from the wrath to come.” Organized at first under the umbrella of the Church of England, these societies were the scene of a flurry of evangelistic efforts. Wesley’s lay preachers first used Anglican churches as their base, but found themselves unwelcome there. Following George Whitefield’s example of preaching in the open field to the miners at Kingswood, Wesley took to the fields in 1739.

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The early Methodists, including Wesley’s own family, thought of themselves as loyal members of the Church of England. Finding little in the Thirty-Nine Articles to quarrel with, Wesley abridged them to twenty-five in 1784 for the use of Methodist societies in America, and they came to be regarded as Methodism’s doctrinal statement.110 Its piety, nurtured in class meetings as well as in Sunday worship, found theological expression in hymns and sermons, with Wesley’s fifty-two “Standard Sermons” being regarded as an authoritative ­explication of Methodist theology.111 A distinctive piety grew principally out of Methodism’s emphasis on conversion coupled with efforts to discern Wesley’s understanding of holiness or Christian perfection (an attainment which he himself was reluctant to claim). Methodism presented a theological alternative to Calvinism, and its doctrine that God would forgive all who earnestly sought redemption softened the inscrutability and finality of predestination.112 In recognition of its distinctive approach to the religious life and practice, the inauguration service received as Methodism’s contribution “the manifestation of the Spirit in evangelical zeal and human redemption, and the ministry of sacred song.”113 Wesley had hoped to renew the Church of England with his efforts. Instead he provoked a crisis. Anglican clergy were reluctant to administer the sacraments in Methodist chapels, a disturbing turn of events for those who believed, as did Wesley, in the importance of Communion. Even more pressing were the needs of Methodist societies in North America after the American Revolution disrupted the work of churches with British ties. Faced with these practical difficulties, Wesley decided to ordain some lay preachers for the chapels and to consecrate Thomas Coke as superintendent for the mission in North America. Coke assumed the role of a bishop, a step that irrevocably set the movement on a course toward separation from the Church of England after Wesley’s death in 1791. Methodism splintered as its leaders quarrelled over differing interpretations of Wesley’s message and methods.114 Talk of merging these streams of Protestantism had long been in the air. Morton claimed that John Wesley himself had predicted that as soon as he was dead the Methodists would become “a regular Presbyterian Church.” Instead, his movement had survived and successfully competed with Presbyterians and Congregationalists in Canada. Still, the differences that remained were small when placed alongside the enormous challenge of shrinking resources and keen

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competition. Each of the three streams could trace a series of mergers that had brought dozens of denominations together along confessional lines.115 After nine unions and a less formal incorporation of a number of other Reformed groups, the Presbyterian Church in Canada was formed in 1875. The Methodist Church (Canada, Newfoundland, and Bermuda), a culmination of eight unions, was completed in 1884. In 1906 Congregationalists in Ontario and Quebec joined those from the Maritimes to form the Congregational Union of Canada. Meanwhile, the hopes of the unionists found concrete expression in a series of agreements that resulted in unions at the local congregational level. The challenge of meeting the religious needs of the Prairies was crucial to the case for church union. In his new position at the University of Saskatchewan, Walter Murray observed firsthand the variety of European religious traditions – Scandinavian Lutherans, Ruthenians, Uniate Catholics, Polish Catholics, Doukhobors – whose members rarely saw a minister from their own tradition. Most had come from countries where membership in a state church was assumed; arriving in Canada, argued Murray, they would be predisposed to being served by a church perceived as national. He noted that racial differences, far from being a barrier to co-operation, actually acted as a catalyst in promoting union: “Racial differences, the co-operative spirit, the community interest are driving together all who prize religion and patriotism.” Acknowledging the significance of the many union churches already being formed, he predicted that “unless Union comes soon they will develop into a new church and will sweep Western Canada.”116 At first, local union congregations tended to affiliate with one (or sometimes two) of the uniting traditions, but as church union drew closer, many remained independent. The result was what C.E. Silcox described as “an ecclesiastical omelette that could only be ‘unscrambled’ by organic union.” He cited a 1923 study that put the number of pastoral charges where some form of union was already in effect at 1,244; over 3,000 preaching points, most of them in western Canada, already thought of themselves as part of a united church.117 At the inauguration ceremony, the collection of these young local  union congregations was recognized alongside the three well-established traditions for “furtherance of community-life within the Kingdom of God, and of the principle, in things essential unity, and in things secondary liberty.”118

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Rather than the modern pacesetters they are often made out to be, those who first set out to unite Protestantism by creating a national church should perhaps more aptly be thought of as accidental innovators. Their talent was less for originality than for adapting ideas already at hand; they traded on familiar ideas that seemed new when fashioned to meet the challenges and opportunities of the twentieth century. The impulse of the previous century to unite a divided Christendom became a bridge to the ideals of a new generation of leaders who made the case for church union in Canada. Their strategic adaptation to modernity was selective: more apparent at the operational (administrative) than the ideational (theological) level. As they told the story of church union, it was simply the next stage of the worldwide expansion of Christendom, not a radical break from the past. There was, thus, a remarkable (and often overlooked) ‘conserving’ impulse in the efforts of the founding generation to restore the link between faith and community. The case for church union assumed that churches had an important role to play in shaping the nation of Canada and its people. “The new church will certainly be a unifying influence throughout the country,” claimed a confident spokesperson for the Joint Committee, offering as proof “the gathering of ministers and leading laymen from remote parts of the Dominion at Church and inter-Church assemblies and conferences” that had “resulted in a better understanding and the realization of a common interest between the people of the different Provinces.”119 Its proponents tended to see the state as neutral, still malleable, and welcoming of guidance in setting Canada’s moral direction. The United Church would become the nation’s conscience, distinct but not separate from the body politic. For its part, the state had found a group of Protestant churches willing to be enlisted in its nation-building project – and, to the taxpayers’ delight, at no cost. Thinking that there was a nation waiting to be built upon Christian principles, and convinced that history was on their side, the leaders of the church union movement were confident of success. Their mission was surely a friendly service to the young nation of Canada. If organizations have callings that shape their destinies, as some systems analysts suggest,120 the new church’s mission was auspicious, for it continued to shape the United Church’s agenda after its founding. It also drew immediate criticism. The determined idealism of those who supported church union and the equally determined

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r­ecalcitrance of those who opposed it was a combustible mix that exploded with most force in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Proponents of church union saw themselves as players in the story of a twentieth-century renewal movement. They would reverse the divisive tendencies of the past by blending inherited insights. They would be united by a common cause and a common faith. With “assimilation” used so positively to describe nation-building, they had little difficulty thinking in similar terms about what they expected to set in motion with church union. Little did they know that their notions of mutual assimilation would someday look as quixotic in hindsight as the seemingly arcane theological quarrels that had once divided them. But non-concurring Presbyterians vehemently dismissed the call for a united church. They argued that the idea of a national church was flawed and that church union would divide both the nation of Canada and its churches. And thus was the stage set for controversy.

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2 Controversy and the Construction of Identity The Vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision’s greatest enemy. Thine has a great hook nose like thine, Mine has a snub nose like to mine. William Blake, “The Everlasting Gospel”

When William M. Birks looked for a turning point to explain his support for the church union movement, it was an unexpected Saturday night stopover on a business trip to Schreiber that came to mind. On what he described as a typical November Sunday, he worshipped at the Presbyterian church in that northern Ontario town with two men, a few women, and some children. He later learned that attendance at the other places of worship in Schreiber was no better: two men at the nearby Anglican church, three men at the Methodist church across the road, and only one man at the Baptist church close by. Birks was shocked to hear that not one of the ministers was paid as much as his chauffeur. For twenty years he, his brother, and their father, jeweller Henry M. Birks, had each given an annual gift of $500 for home missions, a sum of $30,000 “gone to spread the shame, or if you prefer it, the curse of Schreiber.” Upon his return to Montreal, he related his experience to Ephraim Scott, a staunch opponent of the proposed union, along with a blunt message: he would give not a penny more to support home missions. Apparently Scott’s response was equally curt. He would never again speak to Birks or acknowledge him when they met on the street.1 The case for church union that was so persuasive in Schreiber and many communities across Canada was hotly contested in

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others. Fergus, Ontario, was the scene of a bitter fight over whether St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church would become part of the United Church of Canada on 10 June 1925. Those described by the local newspaper as the most active lay leaders had been staunch supporters of the union movement, but when the votes were counted, more members sided with their anti-unionist minister. And so a small group of pro-union Presbyterians gathered for worship without pulpit or organ in a Sunday school room provided by the neighbouring Methodists. Feeling that they had been driven from the church, they reportedly sought consolation by turning to their Presbyterian past with its stories of their forebears in Scotland who had resisted political and religious tyranny. The recent church union bills passed by the federal and provincial legislatures confirmed their conviction that they were the real Presbyterians and not dissenters, as the majority in their congregation claimed. Meanwhile, up the hill, the Presbyterians who disagreed with their General ­Assembly’s decision to join with Methodists and Congregationalists to form the United Church met as usual at St Andrew’s. They reportedly rejoiced that “they not only held the property, but had $40,000 in the Bank while their former co-workers had nothing.” Describing those who voted against church union as “filled with enthusiasm because they believe that they are the ‘real Presbyterians,’” the editor echoed Shakespeare in asking, “What’s in a name?”2 The Fergus Record’s portrayal of the two groups of Presbyterians who worshipped that Sunday morning was all too typical of divided congregations across Canada, although more often than not the fortunes of the two sides were reversed.3 Who had legitimate claim to represent the Presbyterian Church in Canada? Was it the unionists who, buttressed by a winning majority in every one of the several votes taken by its general assemblies, presbyteries, and congregations between 1910 and 1924, claimed to be carrying its name with them into union? Or was it those who refused to give up the right to be called the Presbyterian Church in Canada? There was a good deal at stake (not least, the question of who had the right to the property and funds held under the legal title of The Presbyterian Church in Canada). Church union was a long time in coming, and the battle over the name went on even after the inauguration ceremony in 1925.4 The skirmishes continued until the Act of Incorporation that had been passed by Parliament in 1925 was amended in 1939 to

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reflect a compromise reached a year earlier: the United Church continued to say that it had incorporated what had once been the Presbyterian Church in Canada (along with the other uniting traditions), but the continuing Presbyterians were given the legal use of the old name.5 The proposal to create a united church sparked a heated debate that divided families and turned old friends into antagonists. Alongside the legal wrangling over the use of the Presbyterian name was a battle waged in local communities as both sides struggled to gain public support. There, the “antis” were joined by other opponents of a national church. Out of the bitter exchanges, two myths about the making of the United Church materialized, disclosing theological differences over the essence of Christian unity and tactical differences over the role of the church in public life. Those who charged that union had been achieved by playing fast and loose with theological differences called it a “creedless” church. Its offer of friendly service to the nation was characterized as more befitting a political organization or a service club than a church. Those who joined the non-concurring Presbyterians in opposing church union chiselled into the public mind a negative picture of the United Church that proved difficult to erase. And as other denominations and the secular press joined the debate, relationships were forged and broken in ways that had repercussions lasting long after the procedural wrangling was over. Both sides saw 1902 as a turning point. However, the advocates of church union and those who resisted it were to remember what happened at their national gatherings that year differently, and each blamed the other for what went wrong thereafter. Discussions about church union had already been happening off and on for a quarter century. But in 1902 church leaders across the land were still absorbing the shock of the immigration challenge signalled in the census figures released a year earlier as they prepared for their judicatory meetings. Almost forgotten by both sides was the role of William Caven, principal of Knox College from 1875 until his death in 1904 just a few weeks before the first meeting of the Joint Committee (which he was to have convened). Caven’s support for Christian unity was well known in his day.6 He had been a leader in bringing the various branches of the Presbyterian family together in 1875, served from

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Table 2.1 Chronology of church union in Canada 1875

Presbyterian Church in Canada is formed from four branches of Presbyterianism. 1884 Methodist Church (Canada, Newfoundland, and Bermuda) is formed from four branches of Methodism. 1885 Synod of the Anglican Province of Canada invites Methodists and Presbyterians to discuss union. 1889 Conference on Church Unity meets in Toronto. 1899 Presbyterian General Assembly appoints a committee to confer with other evangelical churches to avoid overlapping of congregations; the Methodist General Council sets up a similar committee. 1902 Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians appoint representatives to meet as a joint committee in response to an invitation from the Methodist Church. 1904 British House of Lords awards the assets of the Free Church of Scotland to the Wee Frees, who had opposed creation of the United Free Church of Scotland in 1900 (Overtoun appeal). 1904 Joint Committee on Church Union meets for the first time. 1906 Congregational Union of Canada is formed from various Congregational churches. 1906 Anglicans and Baptists decline to join negotiations; Joint Committee on Church Union agrees on Basis of Union. 1908 Congregations in the west use the Basis of Union to organize local unions. 1910–12 National courts of the three uniting churches approve the Basis of Union and refer it to the lower courts and the membership. 1910 Presbyterian Association for the Federation of the Churches of the Protestant Denominations is organized to consider alternatives to ­“organic union.” 1912 Majority of Presbyterian presbyteries and congregations vote in favour of union, but the General Assembly agrees to allow time to build greater support. 1912 Several local union congregations form the General Council of Local Union Churches. 1914 “The United Church of Canada” is approved as the name during the ­process of minor revisions to the Basis of Union. 1915 Presbyterian General Assembly votes in favour of the revised Basis of Union and submits it for a second vote in the lower courts and membership, where the majority again supports it. 1916 Presbyterian General Assembly passes a resolution to unite, and sets up a committee to prepare for consummation after the end of the war. 1916 Presbyterian Church Association and Presbyterian Women’s League step up resistance to church union. 1917 Supporters and dissenters agree to a moratorium on debate and propaganda until after the war. 1921 Presbyterian General Assembly decision to proceed to a union in effect ends the “truce.”

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Table 2.1  (Continued) 1921

Representatives of the General Council of Local Union Churches meet with the Joint Committee on Church Union. 1923 Presbyterian General Assembly takes last vote on church union. 1924 The United Church of Canada Act is passed by the Dominion Parliament; congregations are given the right to decide by majority vote not to enter the union. 1924–26 Enabling legislation for church union is passed in all nine provinces. 1925 Inaugural service on 10 June creates a church of approximately 8,000 congregations and 600,000 members. 1925 Non-concurring Presbyterians continue as the Presbyterian Church in Canada with approximately 1,000 congregations and 150,000 members. 1930 Wesleyan Methodist Church of Bermuda affiliates with the United Church. 1938 Dispute over the name “The Presbyterian Church in Canada” is resolved, allowing both churches to claim continuity. 1939 The United Church of Canada Act is amended to allow the continuing Presbyterians legal use of the name “The Presbyterian Church in Canada.”

1888 until his death as chair of the Presbyterian General Assembly’s committee on church union, and was the third president of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity (succeeding George Monro Grant).7 At the General Assembly that met in Toronto in June 1902, Caven made a presentation on behalf of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity urging the Presbyterian Church to actively pursue church union. The General Assembly responded by passing a resolution to support “the action of the Home Mission Committee in ­conferring with any committee of the Church of England, of the Methodist Church or of either of them, as opportunity may offer.”8 That opportunity came a few months later. In September, Winnipeg was the scene of the quadrennial General Conference of the Methodist Church. Before the meeting adjourned, the Methodist Church issued a general invitation directed to denominations “already marked by a great degree of spiritual unity” and “closely assimilated in standards and ideals of church life, forms of worship and ecclesiastical polity” to consider union negotiations.9 The Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches soon took steps to  set up a Joint Committee on Church Union, and in 1904 its ­subcommittees began working on the areas that would eventually comprise the five major sections of a Basis of Union: Doctrine,

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Polity, Ministry, Administration, and Law. By 1908 the document was ready for the churches to consider. Just as memorable for the story of church union as the invitation to set up a church union committee were the fraternal greetings from the Presbyterian delegation to the Methodist gathering in 1902 that led to it. It was there that William Patrick delivered the fateful words that, according to some accounts, launched the negotiations and the controversy that ensued. Patrick was new to Canadian church gatherings, having arrived from Scotland only two years earlier to become principal of Manitoba College. Admitting that he might be “found guilty of sublime audacity,” he asked the Methodist delegates whether the time had come for the two churches to come closer together.10 His passionate appeal for Canada “to be the first to show the Christian nations of the world the way to reunion” proved irresistibly bewitching to his Methodist audience, suggests N.K. Clifford. The Methodists unwittingly accepted an invitation that Patrick should never have extended, he maintains, for it had not been properly authorized by the Presbyterian Church. Those who understood the folly of Patrick’s haste objected at the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1904, the date that marks, for Clifford, the beginning of the resistance to church union.11 The making of the United Church as told by its supporters has Patrick as a more minor player in a drama foreshadowed by Confederation and their own denominational trajectories.12 They were mindful that their churches had already considered models of union in the 1880s and 1890s that ranged from loose federation to organic union, and at a conference in Toronto in 1889 organized by the Anglicans, had even tackled the thorny issue of what to do with the historic episcopate if the Church of England were included.13 Patrick was only one of three Presbyterian fraternal delegates bringing the customary plea for greater co-operation. Preceding him was George Bryce, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church. He perhaps had in mind the passing of Caven’s resolution at his own church’s assembly a few months earlier when he reminded Methodists how close the two churches had grown in their forms of government and the causes they supported – even going so far as to endorse the temperance movement. Speaking after Patrick was C.W. Gordon, a local Presbyterian minister likely better known to Methodists for his novels, who spoke of materialism as their common foe.14 Fraternal

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delegates from the Congregational Church, when bringing their greetings the following week, also signalled support for union: if all the “near relatives” were to be included in the “wedding” of the churches, they too expected an invitation.15 Although Patrick died in 1911, before there was much evidence of effective resistance, many blamed him for triggering the animosity that attended the negotiations. It was he, they charged, who had “introduced the issue improperly, handled it illegally and justified his action in terms which verged on blasphemy” by claiming the church union movement was divinely inspired. His personality only made matters worse: once Patrick determined a course of action, he apparently brooked no interference, making it easy for his opponents to imagine that he had acted alone, rather than through proper channels. Described by his friends as a sad and lonely man, he apparently had few personal ties to Presbyterians in Canada, even in Winnipeg.16 His was a presence, says Clifford, that “continued to haunt the church until it accomplished the purpose he had set for it,” steering the course of events even after his death despite his being (and in part because he was) an outsider.17 But how much of an outlier was Patrick on the issue of church union? Clifford is likely right in reasoning that Patrick had brought the idea of union with him to Canada, rather than discovering it after his arrival. However, his claim that Patrick was unaware that others were advocating union is less convincing.18 It is difficult to imagine that Patrick had paid no attention to the press coverage of the death of George Monro Grant a few months earlier. After all, Grant’s dream of a united Protestantism was among the most publicized of his religious causes. It is impossible to know whether Patrick was at the session that voted on Caven’s resolution on Christian unity, but he is recorded as being present as a delegate to the General Assembly. Could Patrick really have believed he was the first to broach the idea of closer relations between Presbyterians and Methodists? Perhaps Patrick’s “audacity” was a bit tongue-in-cheek, feigning innocence in response to the opening provided when Methodist general superintendent Albert Carman introduced him as a “tenderfoot” in comparison with the “old-timer” Bryce.19 Still, supposing Patrick was unfamiliar with Canadian efforts to promote church union, those listening to his address that day would have heard nothing substantially new. Creation of “one great national Protestant Church” was not a fresh idea. It was a restatement

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(however eloquent) of a case that others had been making for years. Knowingly or not, Patrick was joining a conversation that was already abuzz among personal networks of family, friends, and religious leaders who had seized the cause of church union as a way of dealing with the challenges their churches faced. Why then – even allowing for misguided enthusiasm on the part of the Methodists – did Presbyterians and Congregationalists respond so swiftly to the invitation? Likely as decisive for all parties as the words of one person was the effect of the place where they were spoken: Winnipeg, a city where the impact of Canada’s new immigration policy was so evident. Whether or not they ought to race with each other to set up home missions for these new Canadians was a question weighing heavily on their minds. The two sides quickly found themselves mired in procedural debates that were not of one person’s making, though Patrick proved to be an easy scapegoat for the opposition. His defence of the Basis of Union and the plan to implement it was often brilliant, but even his allies cringed at his tendency to verbally batter his opponents. Particularly upsetting was his rough handling of John Mackay, a young Montreal minister who vigorously opposed the first draft of the Basis of Union when it was put before the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1906.20 The governance model that Mackay championed was federation: union by co-operation that would leave the  three denominations ­essentially intact. Mackay also dismissed the theological articles in the Basis of Union as showing “nothing more, nothing less than that a large number of the ablest men of the three churches can produce a document sufficiently ambiguous to be accepted as a Methodist document by some Methodists, a Presbyterian by some Presbyterians, and a Congregationalist by some Congregationalists.”21 One of Patrick’s withering attacks on Mackay took place when he raised the 1904 ruling of the British House of Lords in the Overtoun appeal.22 Studying in Scotland at the time, Mackay was familiar with the case that saw the court award the assets of the Free Church of Scotland to the Wee Frees, a small number of Presbyterians who had opposed Scottish church union. Although Patrick publicly dismissed Mackay’s concerns, others were uneasy about how common law might be interpreted if those resisting church union were to take their case to London on appeal. The legal situation in Canada was, if anything, more precarious than in Scotland, since the British North

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America Act assigned matters of property and civil rights (which included religion) to provincial rather than federal jurisdiction. Anticipating litigation, the uniting churches eventually sought enabling legislation for incorporation as The United Church of Canada not only from the Dominion Parliament but also the legislatures of Canada’s nine provinces (although it did not pass in Quebec until 1926).23 It was Mackay, by then the principal of Westminster Hall in Vancouver, whose hour-long plea for the federation model at the General Assembly in 1910 almost carried the day. Patrick delivered another stinging rebuttal, belittling Mackay in the process. While Patrick was credited with saving the vote for the unionists, his tactics dismayed even those who sided with him. George Pidgeon’s biographer suggests that a distaste for Patrick’s methods accounts for Pidgeon’s early reluctance to actively support church union – a cause to which he was predisposed both by temperament and positive experiences in co-operative ventures.24 E.D. McLaren, superintendent of Home Missions, watched what was happening with alarm. He later wrote that he had warned Patrick after the debate that “the danger to the union cause would come thenceforward from its friends.”25 Those who led the church union movement after Patrick’s death in 1911 were, unlike him, Canadian-born with a mesh of close relationships within the Presbyterian Church. With Patrick, they shared the credit for creating momentum for the vision of a united church; they were also among its “friends” whose own strategy drew criticism. The unionists had their own explanation for what went wrong: the fault was in deviating from Presbyterian polity by giving too much, rather than too little, say to the people after 1910. Clarence Mackinnon thought that the General Assembly had departed from Presbyterian principles by “sending the dispute down among the people” for a congregational vote. While many supporters of church union were progressive in their theology, they appealed to an older model of governance that relied on an educated ordained and lay clerisy to make major decisions. Presbyterianism was, Mackinnon insisted, “government by Presbyteries, by ministers and elders, by informed and ordained men.” He had come to appreciate the wisdom of past leaders who “would never have risked a vital matter to the judgment of the masses” – a fatal mistake, as he saw it, although one that was “probably unavoidable under the circumstances.”26 On the other hand, those who resisted church union took advantage of a trend toward more democratic practices that was in tension with

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the hierarchy of church courts. To historian John Moir, it appears that an “incipient congregationalism, which was infiltrating the Presbyterian Church in Canada before church union was even proposed, was now brought into the open in a basic internal division of opinion over Presbyterian polity.”27 Meanwhile Methodists and Congregationalists, whose national bodies had already voted in favour of church union in 1910 and were preparing to proceed with it by 1912, were left hanging. An apologetic Walter Murray tried to explain the dilemma in a letter to Nathanael Burwash after another Presbyterian vote in 1912. He optimistically (but wrongly) predicted that with time and patience the minority could be brought into union. “I hope your church will not become impatient with us,” he pleaded. “We can quite well understand how irritating our actions must be to you, but we are placed in a very awkward position.”28 That position became even more awkward with increased opposition to church union in eastern Canada and increased support for it in western Canada, as reflected in the growing number of new local union congregations. The second vote on church union at the Presbyterian General Assembly held in Winnipeg in 1916 proved to be another pivotal moment for both sides. While it was clear that a minority of Presbyterians still opposed organic union, Murray’s powerful plea that there be no further delay persuaded most of those present to vote for it.29 A newly appointed Joint Committee on Church Union, this time chaired by Robert Falconer, considered itself legally and morally charged with the responsibility of taking concrete steps to consummate the relationship; to keep faith with Methodists and Congregationalists, there could be no turning back. The impact in some places was immediate. The minister of the Presbyterian church in Kelowna, b c , was so “imbued with the union spirit” that he resigned as soon as he returned home from the General Assembly, and a union church was formed with the Methodist minister in charge. In Rosedale, east of Chilliwack, b c , three congregations whose resources had been depleted by the war, formed a union church in 1917 and affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, which was the strongest in their community. Not all differences disappeared instantly. Methodists in Prince George, bc, were disappointed to learn that the union church would be “in the hands of the Presbyterians” and their building would not be used. Some of them remained aloof from the venture until after the 1925 union.30

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The 1916 General Assembly was likewise a crossroads for the minority of Presbyterians who were against forming the United ­ Church.31 They left Winnipeg bitter, energized, and determined to organize a movement to preserve the Presbyterian Church in Canada. They formally registered a protest, charging that those who had voted in favour of supporting the Basis of Union had “ceased to be the Presbyterian Church in Canada.”32 A few weeks later, the Presbyterian Church Association was launched at a rally held at St Andrew’s Church (King Street) in Toronto, reviving the Church Federation Association that Mackay and his supporters had attempted to form in 1911. Opposition to church union sometimes made for strange bed­ fellows. Some of the most barbed anti-union commentary over the years was to come from what seems, at first glance, a surprising source: the editorials and articles in a secular magazine. Saturday Night’s sympathies were apparent in its story on the aftermath of the St Andrew’s rally. “It won’t go through now, of course,” predicted the writer, for while the unionists still talked about pressing their cause after the war, the chance of church union happening was becoming less likely. The reporter wagered that neither the Dominion Parliament nor any of the provincial legislatures before which bills would have to be presented “would have the nerve now to grant such charters in face of the opposition that has developed.” The movement was nothing more than a Methodist takeover bid, a scheme devised by the “business man” to dupe unsuspecting pastors into a cost-saving merger. The business man also had his hooks in the university, the writer divulged, and his ignorance had been rewarded by honorary degrees. Particular scorn was heaped on the University of Toronto’s president for borrowing the idea of union given him by the business man: what Falconer had cooked up “wasn’t just efficiency and business methods and crude raw materials like that. Not at all. It was the National Church – the National Church as against the Baptist Church and the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church and all the other Churches that couldn’t be as national because they wouldn’t have as many members.” However, the “cool Scotch mind” had discovered a flaw in the plan before it was too late: its “disregard of the spiritual equation.”33 The Saturday Night article detected misgivings about union that simmered near the surface of the debate: the suspicion that business efficiency had trumped spiritual considerations, and the threat that a

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national church posed to other denominations. It also noted the swift response to the 1916 decision. Even before the General Assembly voted, the dissidents had used a donation from textile manufacturer John Penman to hire someone to rebut press releases favourable to church union. Despite its complaint that the union movement was driven by “the businessman,” the Presbyterian Church Association was at first largely funded by the wealthy Penman and a  few other well-to-do Presbyterians.34 Having already lost two votes at the General Assembly, the Presbyterian Church Association launched a print campaign that cast doubt on the decision to move forward. It also attempted to shift the debate from the church courts by organizing the opposition in local congregations. Its efforts were bolstered by two invaluable allies: Ephraim Scott and the Presbyterian Women’s League. Like a number of his unionist rivals, Ephraim Scott was a Maritime ‘export.’ He made Montreal his new home, and from there, for the next thirty-five years, he edited the Presbyterian Record. Once union was a fait accompli and it came time to select a moderator to lead the continuing Presbyterian Church, Scott’s was the only name put forward – and for good reason. His strident voice set the tone for much of the propaganda produced by both sides. An early volley that circulated widely as a pamphlet before the 1917 General Assembly used the literary device of a wise old pastor writing to a young inquirer. The letters presented a negative image of the proposed church as united only in name and preoccupied with government, control, and the outward and formal dimensions of religion; its members left the thinking to others and did what they were told. The Presbyterian Church, by contrast, was united in spirit and emphasized the inward and spiritual dimensions of religion; it celebrated diversity and allowed its members the freedom to think for themselves.35 Although Scott dubbed the two types as “German” and “British,” his characterization of the former as working like a “great ecclesiastical machine, with its centralized control” left little doubt that he was taking aim at Methodism. Scott scorned the prized unity of the common faith expressed in the proposed theological statement, warning of the dangers of “A Church without a Creed.” He was no kinder in his assessment of the United Church’s expectation of a greater role in national affairs. Such power should only be exercised by Christians acting as citizens, he argued, not by a spiritually decayed church usurping the authority

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of the state.36 His acerbic attacks continued even after the 1925 inauguration of the United Church. The religious life of the proposed church, said Scott, centred around “the absolute power of the clergy and officials in the church courts” who had the authority to completely change the church if they wanted; the system was “despotism complete.” Those accustomed to hearing the United Church criticized for its modernism might have been startled to read that Scott identified it with the spirit of the seventeenth century (autocracy), whereas the Presbyterian Church displayed the spirit of the twentieth century in its democracy.37 Scott’s effective anti-union polemic was complemented by shrewd organization of the opposition at the local level, aided by the Presbyterian Women’s League. The League’s fundraising activities brought in nearly $5,000 in the first six months, enough to defray its own expenses and make a generous donation of $3,000 to the Presbyterian Church Association.38 More difficult to assess, but perhaps even more significant, was its influence on family, friends, and members of the congregation, particularly in congregations where the pastor had sided with the unionist cause. A gathering in Montreal heard that one minister had forbidden members of the Women’s League to oppose church union without the permission of the congregation’s Session. Even meetings in the home were prohibited. The Montreal Gazette reported that while the woman told her story calmly, “something of a concerted gasp followed her statements, accompanied by ejaculations of ‘Dear, dear,’ and such remarks as ‘Go right ahead,’ ‘We are dissenters, are we?’ and others equally emphatic.” One woman predicted that such tactics “will make us more wild than ever.” The League ought to feel flattered observed another: “We are only mere women ... We should not be in this thing at all, and it is very gratifying to us that we have been able to create such a stir.” The Gazette also detected the developing tensions between clergy and laity, noting that “ministers came in for frank criticism by the feminine members of their flocks,” who found them to be rather autocratic in some cases.39 Women who supported church union did not form a separate organization to counter the Presbyterian Women’s League. They were pictured as sharing the vision of a united church, particularly the promise it held for missions. A press report of prayer services for the union cause held at St James Square Presbyterian Church in Toronto noted that most of the women who gathered were leaders of the missionary

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society in their congregations.40 Asked by a reporter whether women in his church planned to oppose the antis, one pro-union minister replied that his congregation’s “leading women” had decided such activities would distract them from more important work. They were, he added, as well informed about union as the men in his congregation and, as loyal Presbyterians, would be “guided by denominational procedure.”41 Even in a congregation where the minister was a well-known supporter of union, being guided by procedure sometimes involved demanding more information. At Bloor Street Presbyterian Church in Toronto, Mrs J.W. Daniel called for a meeting to hear both sides of the issue, arguing that it did not “seem natural to me that Presbyterian women [would] allow themselves to be bundled out of one organization into another without a with your leave or by your leave until they have had an opportunity of thinking the matter well over.”42 There turned out to be more time to think the matter over than either side would have imagined in 1916. When the General Assembly met a year later, the delegates agreed to call for a truce in Presbyterian hostilities for as long as Canada was at war, and implementation of the decision to unite was suspended.43 A vote in 1921 to resume action toward union roused the opposition, and the Presbyterian Church Association was reactivated the following summer. Concerned unionists from Toronto smelled trouble and gathered a few months later to devise a strategy to neutralize renewed resistance. In the group was George Pidgeon, by then minister at Bloor Street Presbyterian Church. Writing to his brother Leslie in Winnipeg to fill him in on the details and enlist his help in garnering western support, he found some good news to report: an anti-union convention, which organizers had expected would fill St Andrew’s Church in Toronto to overflowing, had drawn a crowd of only 700. He assured his brother that there was nothing in the speeches to cause concern. More worrisome was a proposal to prepare what he called a monster petition of 100,000 names of those opposed to church union. The Presbyterian Church Association had hired E ­ ugene Le Fleur, described by Pidgeon as one of the greatest lawyers in the country, as counsel; they were well organized, well financed, and committed to blocking the proposed church union legislation.44 “There’s no fighting the Pidgeons,” it was often said in Presbyterian circles – “Leslie is too clever, and George is too good.”45 Those on

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the side of the Pidgeon brothers in the union controversy quickly realized to their dismay that, in this case, success in the courts of the church was no guarantee of victory in the public arena. Since politicians would be the ones to approve the legislation, both sides recognized the importance of the voting public and scrambled to make their case. George Pidgeon feared that the church union supporters in the west might be indifferent: “The thing seems so self evident there that they cannot see the necessity for action.” He urged brother Leslie to begin organizing pro-union support immediately, for the anti-unionists had “thrown down the gage of battle and unless we start to meet it now, the whole movement will be endangered.” He added that he did not want to give the impression that the east was panicking; but if the bill was to be passed in Parliament and provincial legislatures, “there must be such an expression of the country’s convictions on the subject that will be overwhelming and will show all in authority that the conscience of the country is behind it.”46 The pro-union strategy described by Pidgeon called for the organization of a press campaign backed by generous financial support from lay leaders. Although the plan presumed that volunteers would handle much of the work, a decision was made to hire someone to coordinate the publicity campaign. R.J. Wilson, minister of Chalmers Presbyterian Church, Kingston, was recruited to run the Joint Bureau of Literature. It was an offer that would have been hard to refuse. Meeting in George Pidgeon’s study in 1922, Wilson was urged by a group of notable Presbyterians that included William Birks and Robert Falconer to accept the challenge. Their assessment of the situation was grave: there would be no church union unless congregations were made aware of what was at stake. His new respon­ sibilities included preparing literature for distribution, organizing meetings to present the union position, arranging for speakers to visit congregations, supplying newspapers with information, and providing a key person in each presbytery with a supporting organization “to carry on the fight.”47 A fight it was indeed, and as it turned out, the unionists had picked someone who seemed to thrive on controversy as much as Ephraim Scott. In a letter to brother Leslie in Winnipeg, Pidgeon shared a bit of gossip he had picked up. “The other day someone in a committee mentioned ‘R.J.’s’ tendency to boast a bit and also his splendid qualities as a fighter,” Pidgeon confided. “One of the men quoted Josh Billings to this effect – There are two things that I admire about the

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rooster – his crow and the spurs to back it. I think you can see the point in this, only do not tell anyone else.”48 Wilson lived up to this billing. He quickly took stock of the situation, deemed it serious, and proposed a strategy in anticipation of an attack. Scouring the methods and literature of the anti-unionist camp, he found a “campaign of misrepresentations and deliberate falsehood” already underway. Of particular concern was its impact on union sympathizers who “still blind their eyes to the methods of Anti-Unionism, who are satisfied that the policy of benevolent neutrality will accomplish more than an aggressive campaign.”49 Contrary to rumours that Scott was withdrawing his opposition to union, Wilson believed that the Presbyterian Church Association was instead preparing to step up its attacks. His summary of the anti-union tactics proved to be close to the mark; he predicted, for instance, that opponents would attempt to sway public opinion with this ploy: “The Presbyterian Church is announced as a non-political organization. By implication the United Church of Canada is to be political.”50 Wilson believed it was time to take off the gloves in order to retain the support of a number of churches in danger of being swayed by the Association. “The Anti-Unionist is out to ‘save the Church’. Let us be out to save Canada for Christ. Our appeal is so much larger and so much worthier that if we get it squarely before the people we need not be afraid of their decision.”51 Outlines for sermons and addresses prepared by Wilson’s office for those invited to speak in favour of church union tapped into the movement’s ideals. Church union would unleash “new spiritual forces and treasures to place the crown upon the brow of the World’s Redeemer, who gave His life that we all might be one in life, love and service. It is the most significant movement since the Reformation.”52 But there were hard-hitting addresses as well, bluntly stating that the only issue remaining to be settled was whether particular congregations would remain in the Presbyterian Church in Canada by entering the United Church, or whether they would secede from their “Mother Church” by voting against church union. Dire consequences such as isolation in foreign mission work and strife at home were predicted for the secessionists. To choose to join the United Church was, on the other hand, to remain connected to Presbyterianism worldwide, retain the essential doctrines and polity of Presbyterianism, and demonstrate acceptance of “the challenge of Non Anglo-Saxon Canada.”53

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After church union legislation again passed easily at the Port Arthur General Assembly in 1923, the dissidents turned their energies to preparing for the final vote at the congregational level, h ­ oping to persuade as many as possible to cast a ballot to opt out of joining the United Church of Canada on 10 June 1925. As Presbyterians prepared to make this crucial decision, Wilson hired a clipping service to keep a “watchful eye” on the newspapers, for he saw the press as key to shaping public opinion. He claimed to have countered “dangerous influences” by providing accurate information to newspapers, preparing reports of meetings and interviews for columns, making personal contact with editors, and even doing editorial work on request. The coverage in Toronto continued to be a matter of concern; except for the Star, the secular press did not seem to favour union. But on the whole, Wilson concluded, “newspaper publicity has had an astounding effect on Union,” one that he assessed as generally favourable.54 The decisions made by Wilson and the Joint Committee drove the counter-resistance as inauguration day drew closer. They assumed that using prominent Presbyterians to present the union cause would most effectively blunt opposition. They relied on Methodists for some of the funding, and counted on them to pull back while Presbyterians worked out their differences. Even Chown’s suggestion on behalf of the Joint Committee on Church Union that some literature be prepared from the Methodist point of view was politely dismissed as “inopportune.”55 The need to defend the United Church as the continuing Presbyterian tradition meant that its Methodist features were muted before, and likely even after, union. Finding themselves on the receiving end of a barrage of negative publicity and innuendo portraying them as theologically and socially inferior, it was difficult for Methodists to hold their tongues and let their Presbyterian friends defend their theological reputations. The unfairness of such criticism was acknowledged in a leaflet outlining a sermon on the biblical text “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory.” The preacher was to urge his listeners to beware of empty boasting about past glory, reminding them that the Methodist Church had more members and even larger property holdings. As for Presbyterians who were glorying in their social ­status, the sermon outline suggested that the status be shared with Methodists to elevate them!56

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The opposition’s tactics further alienated Methodists when the Presbyterian Church Association added a new arrow to its quiver to shore up support for the final vote. At a time when the fundamentalist-modernist debate in the United States was dividing denominations, Methodist leaders in Canada were furious to hear their church described not only as creedless but also as modernist and even apostate. Chafing from disparaging comments made about them, and weary of waiting for pro-union Presbyterians to defend them, some Methodists began to respond in kind. T. Albert Moore, secretary of both the Methodist General Conference and the Joint Committee (and later the first general secretary of the United Church), fired off a personal letter of protest to a Presbyterian minister who had suggested federation as a compromise. The Methodists “did not take any part in your debate, we were not involved and we acted with high restraint,” Moore complained. “Your people [the Presbyterian Church Association] deliberately dragged us in and argued that we are of such character that association with us in Church fellowship would be betrayal of Christian honor.”57 While Moore fumed, Pidgeon protested the “absolute dishonesty” of those who claimed that “Church Union is the Canadian form of Modernism” while retaining principal Daniel J. Fraser of Presbyterian College in Montreal, well known for his liberal theology, as president of the Presbyterian Church Association.58 This ratcheting up of  the rhetoric as the controversy wore on made it difficult for Methodists to support a proposal to delay the consummation of union in the hope that, with time, more dissidents would be won over to the union cause. The energy of Wilson and the unionists in pamphleteering and feeding the press was more than matched by the efforts of Ephraim Scott, the Presbyterian Church Association, and the Women’s League. The strategy to stop church union was simple: raise doubts about the groundwork that had been laid for the proposed national church, and challenge the legitimacy of the public role it hoped to play. The most fundamental criticism lodged was that there was no basis for unity because the parties proposing to unite did not have enough in common: in theology, polity, and even social class, they were simply too different. While some used the traditional language of Calvinism vs. Arminianism to frame the differences in theological terms, others

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couched their opposition in scientific terms. Robert Campbell, the influential clerk of assembly during the early years of the controversy, insisted that the laws of nature barred “the mating of things that are unlike.”59 The blending of Presbyterianism’s stability with Methodism’s fervour, and Congregationalism’s love of liberty was thus doomed from the start, union critics argued, for nature showed that crossbreeds were always weaker than the parent stocks, amalgams of metal lost the unique qualities of their original states. In their view, the oft-cited problem of inefficiency resulting from duplication was exaggerated; denominational competition was healthy since it was rivalry, not cooperation, that sparked enthusiasm for the work of the church.60 Those who opposed church union thus repudiated the environmentalist assumptions that A.S. Morton had laid out in The Way to Union, rejecting his argument that church life in Canada was evolving irresistibly toward union. They also questioned the case for nation-building made by the unionists, dismissing their notion of mutual assimilation for either a new type of church or a new type of Canadian.61 The debate also revealed different understandings of Christian unity. One critic of union lamented the loss of the image of being Christ’s branches, with him as the Vine: “Instead of Branches we have latterly come to use the word Denominations, a mechanical, unorganic word, void of the idea of vital relation to a living Stem. We speak of sects as if they were rival business concerns. And, not unnaturally, we now think of organic unity as an incorporating union on the lines of a commercial merger. External, mechanical union is not essential to organic, spiritual unity.” An Act of Parliament might have the power to incorporate a commercial enterprise, but it could not create spiritual unity.62 Presbyterians were not alone in their concerns about the incompatibility of the uniting traditions. Some Methodist ministers feared the loss of their distinctive polity – not only the itinerant system of assigning pastoral charges so maligned by Presbyterian critics but also their pension fund! Those who were convinced that a united church would look much more Presbyterian than Methodist perhaps heard reason for concern as they listened in on the Presbyterian debate. Explaining his rejection of the proposed union, one Methodist minister listed among his reasons: “Because Dr Patrick, Presbyterian, says, ‘We have not changed our doctrine or discipline or polity, we have assimilated the other bodies.’”63

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Just as damaging as the questions about the organizational culture of the uniting churches was the escalating attack on its theological foundation. Ephraim Scott had at first found little to criticize in the Basis of Union (as its defenders enjoyed reminding him): he reported that he could see no substantial difference between the new doctrinal statement and the Presbyterian Shorter Catechism. Praising it as “a model to other churches contemplating union,” Scott had initially described it as a “standing testimony to the essential unity of the Protestant Evangelical Church, both in this and in other lands.” This first impression of the articles stood in marked contrast to his later characterization of the United Church as creedless and its Basis of Union as providing “an open door for every error, especially that error which takes from Christ His Crown of Deity and takes from sinners a Saviour, making Him only a man.”64 Presbyterian critics of the Basis of Union warned of the dire consequences of requiring ministers to be in “essential agreement” with the theological articles of the Basis of Union, a concession that had been made to convince the Congregationalists to join. Addressing an audience of concerned Presbyterians gathered at St Andrew’s Church, Toronto, Thomas McMillan asked whether they realized that a minister who claimed to accept the doctrinal statement at ordination could later become a Unitarian, a Universalist, a Christian Scientist, or even a Catholic without any disciplinary remedy available in the Basis of Union. Such a minister could “go on wrecking congregations without limit” by being transferred by the Settlement Committee from place to place.65 While Methodists who were wary about the Basis of Union offered little organized resistance,66 they occasionally expressed personal reservations about its theological foundations. W.S. Griffin challenged readers of the Christian Guardian: “Place Dr Burwash’s defence of the doctrines in the Basis of Union side by side with John Wesley’s Christian perfection, and we almost feel that the respected and Distinguished Chancellor of our university [Victoria] has sadly fallen from grace.” Convinced that it was professors and church executives, not those engaged in pastoral or evangelistic work, who were behind the union movement, Griffin questioned the wisdom of its leaders. How could men who “spend their days in offices and college classrooms” be trusted with the responsibilities of reorganizing church life? Griffin joined Presbyterian critics in challenging the argument that a unified church would be more effective. Far from a

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large organization doing more to save the world, history taught him that “revivals always involved the breaking away from these mighty church organizations.”67 Joining those within the uniting churches who questioned the ­formulation of common faith in the Basis of Union was an eclectic mix of allies, including conservative Protestants in Canada and the United States. Historians of religion in North America note with interest that the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was not waged with the same intensity in Canada as in the United States. However, the debate over church union that took place in Canada at the same time as the struggle over theological modernism elsewhere was anything but irenic. What is fascinating is the resemblance between the arguments against church union in Canada and the case against theological modernism in the United States, particularly ­after the reactivation of the Presbyterian Church Association in 1921. Few champions of conservative theology were more articulate than J. Gresham Machen, professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, whose battles with the school and the Presbyterian Church in the u sa spurred him to found Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1929. Machen’s writings provided the intellectual underpinnings for fundamentalist attempts to stall the spread of liberal ideas among evangelical Protestants. Christianity and Liberalism, published in 1923 just as Presbyterians in Canada prepared to take their arguments to congregations and legislatures for what proved to be the last time, had a blunt message: liberalism was un-Christian.68 Liberalism was even more pernicious than other heterodox expressions of Christianity, claimed Machen, since its understanding of God and humanity, its seat of authority, and its approach to salvation constituted a different religion. “We have,” he concluded, “the entrance of paganism into the Church in the name of Christianity,” and he predicted that such churches would soon be “given over altogether to naturalism.”69 Those wondering how Machen might appraise the common faith at the theological heart of the Basis of Union did not have far to look: the opening pages of Christianity and Liberalism belittled all such efforts. “In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about

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which men will fight.”70 His final chapter on “The Church” dismissed “the liberal program for unity” because it was based on the assumption that doctrinal differences were mere trifles, readily resolved by uniting around a program for Christian service.71 Machen condemned the dishonesty of ministers who no longer held to the theological standards of their church, insisting that “evangelical churches are creedal churches.” By implication a so-called creedless church (as critics were fond of calling the proposed united church) was no longer evangelical. He urged those who no longer accepted the Westminster Confession to which they had subscribed at the time of their ordination to join another denomination or start a new church. Commending the Unitarian Church for its honesty, he described it as exactly the home liberals were seeking: “a church without an authoritative Bible, without doctrinal requirements, and without a creed.”72 The General Assembly minority that refused to adjourn after the majority officially constituted the United Church of Canada later approved a resolution to formally thank Machen “for his substantial and continued interest in our cause.” Machen’s letter of support for the continuing Presbyterians, read to the gathering and written into the Acts of Proceedings, reflected his affinity with the anti-union cause. Machen compared the ordeal of the Presbyterians in Canada to events in the United States, and identified their common source: “a compromising interdenominationalism.” Assuring them of prayers of support from around the world, he commended them for their example: “In these days of defection and unbelief, your Church is like a city set on a hill.”73 In addition, Machen provided tangible support for the continuing Presbyterians by recruiting Americans for pastoral charges left vacant because of union, even paying some of their expenses out of his own pocket.74 A number of the ministers arriving from the United States to serve Presbyterian congregations had studied at Machen’s new seminary.75 Church union also came under fire from fundamentalists closer to home. T.T. Shields of Jarvis Street Baptist Church provided local newspapers with colourful descriptions of the union threat. Not even an astronomer skilled in measuring space could determine the distance between church union and the spirit of Christ, he reportedly said. Like Machen, Shields described the United Church as “not Christian, it is essentially pagan; and the movement is a part of the

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general apostasy of the age.”76 The Toronto Telegram reported that on one occasion Shields preached on the subject of church union for over an hour, linking the idea to “Rome” and warning that such a church would attempt to impose its will on a free people: “You will have to have the permission of the United Church to live after a while.”77 The affinity Shields saw between Rome and a united Protestant church was far from apparent to Catholics, who found little to like about union. The Catholic press dismissed the troubles within the Presbyterian Church as typical of the turmoil that had come to characterize Protestantism since the sixteenth-century Reformation. “There is a merry war on among the sects,” reported the Catholic Register, “and Catholics are vastly amused at the game of Presbyterian kettle calling Methodist pot black.” The coverage of the controversy in the daily papers confirmed “that no Presbyterian or Methodist clearly knows what or why he believes” and revealed a “mass of conflicting doctrine, confusing incoherency and bewildering inconsistency” in the squabbling. One thing was clear, observed the editor: “a great part of Protestantism is tainted with modernism and pagan unbelief in Christ’s Divinity and is therefore not Christian in any sense.” The controversy confirmed the Catholic contention “that Protestantism is a bedlam of contradiction, based on the arrogant say-so of cock-sure individualism, and infallible egoism” that doomed it to multiplicity, subdivision, and disintegration.78 The Catholic press joined Presbyterian and fundamentalist critics of the theological basis for union by emphasizing lingering religious differences between the uniting parties. The Antigonish Casket contrasted Presbyterian religion with its “intellectual appeal to reason but a reason carried to fantastic lengths, and soured with gloomy theories taken from the Old Testament” with Methodism’s “appeal to spiritual excitement ... which found expression in writhings on the floor and in despairing abandonment or else in unreasoning certainty of salvation.” The editor could think of no two religions more unalike and described union as “an abandonment by both Methodists and by Presbyterians of all that was ever distinctive in their respective creeds.”79 Theological conservatives and Catholics were not alone in raising doubts about the prospects for uniting under the umbrella of a  common faith. Charles Frederick Paul, the Unitarian editor of Saturday Night, presumably had little theological affinity with

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either fundamentalist or Catholic critics of union, but articles on  church union published in the magazine under his editorship from 1909 until his death in 1926 showed a similar antipathy.80 Pondering the question “Will the uniting parties live happily ever after?” the pseudonymous writer “Josephus the Second” had his doubts. Methodists were “born Cockney” and recruited from the middle and lower classes. Presbyterians were of Scottish heritage and (though Josephus left it unsaid) of a superior class. Theologically, Wesley and Calvin stood on opposite sides of “an unabridged and unbridgeable chasm.” Temperamentally, they differed as well: the Scot, being “undemonstrative, scowls at the Amen corner, and will wait a lifetime before daring to take the sacrament,” whereas the Methodist “was exhorted to testify for the Lord the night of his conversion, was trained to talk in class meeting of his spiritual ups and down, and in general wore his heart upon his sleeve.” Josephus contrasted the dignity of Presbyterian worship services with the informality of Methodist gatherings, where “emotionalism used to swing exuberant Methodists off their base” during revival meetings. He mischievously compared Methodists as the equal of Presbyterians in numbers, missionary zeal, preaching power, vitality of church life, work with youth, and application of Christian principles to social problems – they were a match for Presbyterians “in everything but prestige. They are handicapped by immaturity. They have not the culture.”81 The denigration of the public role that the new church was expected to adopt was just as severe and, given the need to garner legislative support for union, potentially more damaging. The church union bill before Parliament was ominously cast as a debate over whether Canada would have a state-controlled church. Instead of being the Church of Christ, the United Church would become “a civil corporation, a creation of Parliament, a creature of the State, having its existence and name by grace of Parliament, its teachings authorized by Parliament, its life dependent upon the will of Parliament.”82 Social progressives who opposed church union objected to the premise that a united church would be a more effective means of creating a Christian social order in Canada. D.J. Fraser had made no secret of his own liberal leanings over the years. As he prepared for the final General Assembly vote, he summed up the case for his side in the controversy: “What many of us feel to-day is the need of a change of emphasis from legislation to regeneration, from reform to

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redemption, from outward change to inward conversion. The pulpit is not a platform for discussing the questions of the hour, but is a medium for the message of the Eternal.”83 W.D. Tait, professor of psychology at McGill University, agreed, charging unionists with wrongly placing faith in “church organization” as the solution to social problems: “it should be plain to all that the curse of the modern world is organization.” “Organization” stifled effort since “it destroys personality, deadens refined, sensitive feelings and obliterates the genius of the individual.” He concluded that spiritual power “must come from the individual or not at all; and spiritual unity is not a necessary consequence of social or ecclesiastical legislation.”84 Suspicion of a hidden agenda in the guise of church union was pervasive among its critics. E. Lloyd Morrow, author of a book that catalogued their complaints (and himself a supporter of a federation model for ecumenical co-operation),85 was scathing in his analysis of what he called a “Big Merger Church.” A “Big United Protestant Church might cause racial and religious strife in Canada” if Frenchand English-speaking Catholics sensed that their civil and religious liberties were threatened. The past, as he read it, told a different story than the unionists had related: “All history is a protest against the argument of the moral,[sic] and spiritual efficiency of the one big Church idea,” he protested. Protestant national churches had proved to be as decadent as Catholic ones.86 He dismissed as absurd the argument that a Protestant national church was needed to “obliterate these precious religious differences, in order to mould the character of our citizenship.” Canada was already bound together by imperial, national, economic, family, and religious bonds that were unbreakable. “Beware of the religio-political motives for Union,” he warned, for it might actually divide Canada by creating a split with Quebec “if a United Protestant Church were strong enough and unchristian enough to start a quarrel with our fellow-Christians of the Roman Catholic faith.”87 Suspicion about the union movement’s political aims crossed denominational lines and international borders. Once again, those identified as fundamentalists took aim. Machen’s attacks on the “program” of the modern liberal church in the United States was strikingly similar to what was being said in Canada about the proposed united church. There was little emphasis on heaven in the liberal understanding of salvation, said Machen, and liberalism’s emphasis on “this world” had resulted in a religion that was a “mere

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function of the community or of the state.” The liberal Protestant response to new immigrants drew his scorn as an attempt to repress their mother languages in order to produce “a unified American people.” The state had turned to religion to implement its agenda, and immigrants were now greeted with “a Bible in one hand and a club in the other offering them the blessings of liberty. That is what is sometimes meant by ‘Christian Americanization.’”88 Machen’s Canadian readers would have had little difficulty in translating this as an indictment of the unionists’ hopes of Christianizing the social order and creating a new type of Canadian. While he conceded that such tactics might provide a good defence against Bolshevism, produce a united country or a healthy community, and even promote international peace, Christianity for Machen was more than a means to such ends; a religion could no longer be considered “Christian” if it was principally concerned with such objectives.89 He rightly predicted that his assessment of liberalism would be interpreted as an attack on the social gospel, which differed significantly from his own view of the social dimension of the Christian faith. He was particularly suspicious of social Christianity’s view of the state, cautioning that even the family, the most important social institution, was being “pushed into the background by undue encroachments of the community and the state.” He warned readers that soon children would no longer be “surrounded by the loving atmosphere of the Christian home, but by the utilitarianism of the state.”90 Fundamentalists closer to home were likewise worried about what they saw reflected in the founding vision for the new church. T.T. Shields attacked S.D. Chown for claiming that union would result in godly legislation: “The work of the church is not to interfere in politics; and no church body has the right to go to the legislators of the land and ask for legislation, godly or otherwise.” Himself a staunch supporter of temperance, he feared that while union supporters might “succeed in having other Acts such as the O.T.A. [Ontario Temperance Act] written upon the statute books of the land,” they were “forgetting the hearts of the people; and so they bring great joy to the devil.”91 Uneasiness in some quarters of the Anglican Church was reported in the Canadian Churchman, whose editor opined that religion “must be a thing of the heart and of the will, an impelling impulse of life. It would never do to exchange the Church of God for a great social service institution, a law enacting body or an organization to

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spike the guns of the Roman Church.”92 A number of bishops took issue with the paper’s position, stressing that it was not the official organ of the Anglican Church; still, the editorial was a reminder that union was far from popular in some Protestant circles. In the heat of the debate over church union in the Ontario legislature, m p p J.A. McCausland, an Anglican, pronounced the bill as “good as dead.” He explained to the reporter that “we have a legislature here that is not going to let that domineering bunch of Methodists have their own way – that bunch that for the last ten years or so has been telling us what we must eat and drink ... Do you think we Anglicans are going to let Dr Chown tell us what we are to do? I’d see him ...” – at which point words were uttered that the reporter was not allowed to quote!93 Catholics also had misgivings about the political repercussions of church union. An issue of St Peter’s Messenger that came out shortly after the inauguration ceremony expressed shock at how quickly and easily its leaders circumvented the “tests of Holy Scripture,” ­citing as evidence calls for the ordination of women. While United Church ministers were free to “preach the silliest and most absurd doctrines” and “follow the paths of error and darkness to their heart’s content” within their own ranks, the paper drew a line: “when they invoke the power of the law to enforce their petty ideas of reform upon us, when they want to tell us what kind of religious instruction our children are to receive in our schools, when they want to tell us what we should drink, and so on, then we are obliged to call a halt.”94 Secular press coverage of the controversy likewise often displayed the uniting churches and their cause in an unflattering light. Methodists found themselves pictured as power-hungry social climbers. Chown, in particular, drew harsh personal criticism. As one critic put it, “Dr Chown cracked the solidarity whip about his shins, and he changed his Highland fling to the Methodist solidarity goose step. Politico-religious control has arrived.”95 An editorial in the New York Sunday Times on the rise of the church union movement expressed the apprehension of its opponents that the new church would become a political force as “the State Church potentially, though of course not in name, of the English-speaking Provinces.” Union supporters no doubt were dismayed to find the Basis of Union itself quoted as evidence: “There is a clause in the ‘Basis of Union’ which proposes that the United Church of Canada shall

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‘enact such legislation and adopt such measures as may tend to promote true godliness and repress immorality, &c.’” The newspaper had failed to notice that it was quoting from a section of the Basis of Union (8.6.10) outlining the General Council’s responsibilities to regulate the church’s own actions. The American newspaper mistook this for a quite different kind of ‘legislation’ and remarked disapprovingly: “The Dominion has long suffered from church intervention in politics, and knows the tendency of the ecclesiastical temperament to dub as ‘ungodly’ or ‘immoral’ any action or opinion with which it fails to agree.”96 The Act of Parliament that legally formalized church union made it even more suspect in the eyes of those who opposed it. As one letter to the Toronto Telegram put it, “The Dominion Government by confirming the ambitious name it had assumed, and by ratifying its constitution, has to all intents and purposes conferred upon it the dignity of being the Established Church of our New Nation, and all who are not in organic union with it will rank as mere ­dissenters.”97 Saturday Night sounded its usual libertarian alarm: “The question arises whether this co-operation [between church and state] is to take the form of a vast sin-factory for the creation of new statutory offences; and to impose on the rest of the community the Unionist discipline with regard to alcoholic beverages, horse racing, card playing and possibly smoking (for the word ‘narcotics’ is of wide meaning).”98 The unflattering press coverage identified the social agenda of the new church with temperance, and played on the growing unpopularity of prohibition. George Pidgeon suspected that the legislative opposition to church union in Ontario was a way for those who opposed temperance legislation to hit back at the Methodist Church for promoting it.99 Led by R.J. Wilson, the Joint Committee on Church Union vigorously responded to the barrage of criticism. A pamphlet pointedly titled The Fundamentals answered questions raised about the “central truths of evangelical religion.” It upheld the doctrinal section of the Basis of Union, in particular the articles on grace, as being as “clear and strong as any authoritative statement issued by any Church in recent times.”100 Those who took time to read the Basis of Union would have indeed discovered that Article VI, “Of the Grace of God,” declared that “God, out of His great love for the world, has given His only begotten Son to be the Saviour of sinners, and in the

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Gospel freely offers His all-sufficient salvation to all men”; it was followed by articles on Christ’s atonement “for the sins of the whole world,” regeneration, repentance, justification, and sanctification. Supporters of church union also drew attention to the affinity of their cause to the Reformation. Affirming the authority of the Scripture and acknowledging the importance of the ancient creeds, the preamble to the Basis of Union added: “We further maintain our allegiance to the evangelical doctrines of the Reformation” adopted by the uniting traditions. However, the Joint Committee rejected the notion that the competition among post-Reformation denominations was preferable to a national church. Dismissing the characterization of a national church as “medieval” or “Roman,” T.B. Kilpatrick claimed that the United Church was akin to the Protestant model developed in the sixteenth century. Reformers then had envisaged a particular type of Protestant church in each nation. “There is no room, properly, in any one nation, for any other Church than the Church of that nation, which shall be the expression and organ of the national religious life.”101 As the final vote neared, unionists distributed leaflets in an attempt to assuage concerns about political interference. “The United Church has no political aspirations, its primal purpose is to lay the foundation for that unity of soul and conscience, which must come first in all our nation-building,” one pamphlet explained. “By breaking down the barriers of provincialism and sectionalism within itself, the United Church will stand as a symbol of national unity, and it will be the task of the United Church, so far as lies within its power, to create and maintain a United Canada. The United Church of Canada will be one from ocean to ocean; one in the East and in the West, and it will become a uniting influence in the national life.”102 The alternative to the adventure in faith that union promised was “separation from the Mother Church; separation from the great West; separation from foreign missionaries and their work; visionless isolation; unrest and distraction; perpetuation of strife.”103 Little matter, then, whether one were a member of a large con­ gregation such as Bloor Street Presbyterian or a small local-union church in “new Ontario” or the West: each was called to take part in the new venture. Preaching before a crowd described as having “taxed the capacity of Bloor St Presbyterian Church,” George Pidgeon urged the “churches of the east” to “win the whole land for Christ.” Well aware of the appeal that was being made to preserve

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the distinctive features of the Presbyterian tradition, he reminded them that just as a person could shut out the sun by holding a penny too close to the eye, so local differences might blind them to “the greatest opportunity of the age.” If the name “Presbyterian” had to go, it was “only the bursting of the acorn shell in order to let the oak develop,” for the tree could not otherwise grow.104 The printed matter distributed to his congregation included a pamphlet that succinctly presented what the unionists believed to be at stake for them in the upcoming vote: “Consideration of our place within the Nation forbids our remaining aloof, as an independent congregation, and, with almost equal emphasis, suggests that there is no place within a small dissenting group for such work as our people wish to undertake for the sake of Canada.”105 Entering the new United Church with churches like the large and prosperous Bloor Street Presbyterian were hundreds of small and struggling congregations in the West that were heartened by hearing the case for church union: the future of Canada depended on the kind of co-operation they had already demonstrated in their local unions. From his vantage point in Saskatoon, principal E.H. Oliver predicted that a united church would create a “great healing and unifying bond of kindliness and love” between East and West. He was convinced that there could be no turning back, for “the church of the future in Western Canada is a united church; do not make any mistake about that.”106 Demographics seemed to support Oliver’s case. Considering the question of the consequences of reversing the decision to unite, the Manitoba Free Press reported that “it would mean the abandonment of a constructive work of national pro­ portions that has extended over the past sixteen years ... It is not possible to go back without disrupting the life of three thousand congregations scattered over the whole Dominion.”107 Church union supporters may have exaggerated the strength and significance of the union movement in western Canada,108 but the thought of losing such a large block of congregations was sobering. Critics downplayed the spiritual aims of church union; supporters countered with a vision of Christian Canada and its mission in the world. Addressing a gathering at Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Toronto, J.R.P. Sclater painted a vivid picture of what he saw at stake in the controversy. “We have just seen Christian civilization doing its very best, all but successfully, to commit suicide. You have seen the nations reeking with the fumes of war and reeling in

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the shock of it, and that in a professedly Christian world – in the very centre of the Christian domination of the world; and yet people think they are getting on very nicely!” Sclater was not so sanguine. “Stretches of Canada are untouched, stretches of the world unheralded by the Gospel of Jesus Christ; and you say the Church is getting on very nicely! I say it is getting on tragically; and if ever there was a time for men to consider the proper adjustment of the means at their disposal, it is today when we stand amid the ruins left by the greatest catastrophe that has ever befallen Christian civilization.” To him the implications for the church union question were clear: “If, in these days, we cannot learn that the Christian Church has much to unlearn, particularly in regard to its insensate divisions, then we are sunk too deep in self-complacency, even to be taught.”109 And yet going ahead with union held its own dangers once it became apparent that the Presbyterian Church could unite only by dividing. Even some of its earliest supporters began to harbour doubts. By 1916 D.M. Gordon had come to believe that the benefits of union would outweigh the losses. A quarter-century earlier, in the style of King Arthur, he had gathered young theological knights at his Round Table in Halifax. Together they had championed the cause of church union. Now, plagued by ill health that would lead to his retirement as principal of Queen’s University the following year and torn in his loyalties, Gordon’s public statements expressed concern and his private correspondence reflected growing sadness. The tangled personal and professional ties that were frayed by the controversy were evident within Gordon’s own network of family and friends. Daughter Minnie was considered the key organizer of the antis in Kingston, although she declined to hold office in the Presbyterian Women’s League because of her father’s position at the university.110 Son-in-law Will, married to his daughter Katherine, was W.F. Nickle, known in his public life as the anti-union attorney general of Ontario. Yet still supporting the cause of church union were old friends from his Halifax days who, despite his pleas to ­suspend negotiations, insisted on going ahead with union even with the knowledge that many congregations would vote against it. One of those old friends and fellow-knights, Clarence Mackinnon, was elected moderator in 1924 and charged with the responsibility of overseeing the last steps toward union. Gordon was caught on the horns of a dilemma. He had been a  member of the first union committee and long regarded as a

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s­ upporter of a united church. In the story of church union as he remembered it, his committee had assumed that union would only proceed if the whole church supported it.111 It was folly, he wrote in 1916, for the majority to form a united church while its opponents were left with the old name and some of the property.112 His letter of congratulations to Mackinnon on his “elevation to the Moderator’s chair” urged him to consider the costs of forcing a union which, far from fostering spiritual unity, would “open the floodgates to strife, resentment and other destructive forces.” As “the really wise course,” Gordon proposed suspending negotiations with the Methodists and Congregationalists in an effort to go back to the way things were before the 1916 vote. The immediate task for Presbyterians was to restore unity within their own ranks and wait for divine guidance on organic union with others.113 By then Gordon had lost confidence in those who were steering the process. To say he was disappointed in the actions of the Joint Committee was “a very mild expression of my feeling, and it might shrivel up this paper, as with fire, if I were to use anything like adequate language. Words fail me,” he confided in a letter to a friend. His disappointment was palpable as he reminisced about his own early involvement in the movement, concluding that it was premature: “The seed was unduly forced into bloom, and therefore failed to yield the fruit we had hoped for.”114 Yet, other Presbyterians who had opposed union eventually overcame their reservations and joined the United Church. John Mackay soon gave up his fight for federation.115 By the time the United Church was inaugurated in 1925, he was principal of Manitoba College, once headed by his past antagonist Patrick. Even the statistics told two stories of church union and, concludes Moir, could be “juggled to prove whatever one wanted to prove.” By simply counting the number of ballots cast, those against union claimed their support was growing. But many congregations (especially in the West) did not bother to cast ballots since support for union was a foregone conclusion. In the end, about the same number chose to continue as the Presbyterian Church in Canada after 1925 as had voted against union when it was put to a congregational vote in 1911: roughly a third. However, the distribution of dissent was not evenly spread across Canada. According to Moir’s calculations, 21 per cent of the non-concurring congregations were in the Maritimes, 25 per cent in Quebec, 38 per cent in Ontario

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319

4

4,797

–

334

266

550

4,512

115

–

387

572

876

437

1,280

211

203

358

73

Presbyterian

Source: C.E. Silcox, Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences, Table XIV.

171

–

Trinidad

Total

–

Newfoundland

4

24

Alberta

British Columbia

27

Saskatchewan

513

458 1,683

26 64

Quebec

Ontario

Manitoba

263

343

68

Methodist

7

New Brunswick

– 15

Nova Scotia

Congregational

Prince Edward Island

Province / Colony

Before 10 June 1925 (breakdown of 9,480 congregations by denomination)

8,688

115

334

629

1,103

1,394

746

2,530

643

444

633

117

United

8

–

–

–

3

–

–

5

–

–

–

–

Non-concurring Congregational

784

–

–

28

40

22

14

492

52

29

83

24

Non-concurring Presbyterian

After 10 June 1925 (breakdown of 9,480 congregations by denomination)

Table 2.2 Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian congregations before 10 June 1925 and United and non-concurring congregations after 10 June 1925



Controversy and the Construction of Identity

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(particularly the wealthier ones), and less than 5 per cent in the West.116 The vast majority of ministers and overseas missionaries chose to join the United Church, leaving the United Church with a surplus (and the Presbyterians with a shortage) of personnel. Unfortunately for the United Church, the enabling legislation in Ontario and Quebec awarded Knox College in Toronto and Presbyterian College in ­Montreal to the continuing Presbyterians. The loss of Knox College was a particularly bitter pill to swallow, since the new building completed in 1915 had been linked in principal Alfred Gandier’s fundraising activities to preparing leaders for a united church. A decade later he had no choice but to raise money for a new college after he and his faculty, as well as three-quarters of the students, vacated Knox College.117 It is hard to gauge the impact of this bitter, protracted, and at times unseemly controversy. The continuing resistance to church union secured the survival of the Presbyterian Church in Canada by denying the claim of the founders of the United Church that its name had been carried into union. The dispute thereby became a defining moment in shaping the identity of the continuing Presbyterians. But it forged the identity of the United Church as well: first impressions of the new church and its leaders were formed while watching the two sides argue. The public was thus exposed to two sets of convictions about the mission of the church, particularly in the North and West, as well as tactical disagreements over how to carry it out.118 Tensions heightened when anti-union groups converged with anti-modernist theology to cast the Methodist and Congregationalist union partners in an unfavourable light. The effective use of such disparaging terms as “creedless” and “political club” created an impression that the United Church found hard to shake long after 1925. And by becoming modernists in the eyes of fundamentalists, their claim to be a stream of the evangelical tradition was suddenly suspect in some circles. What can be said with certainty is that out of the controversy came two stories about church union. As told by the continuing Presbyterians, it was a tale of the rise of a new sect misnamed “The United Church of Canada.” As lovers of liberty, the Presbyterian Church in Canada was willing to let them leave, as long as they left the trusts and property – and, of course, the name – behind. Ephraim Scott complained that the phrase “you’ll never know the difference”

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had been “a constant opiate to Presbyterians, to dull them during the attempted extinction of their Church.”119 Little wonder that many years later, the history of First United Church in Victoria, bc, observed that “congregations in the Presbyterian tradition,” like theirs, were “reputedly loath” to give up their old name. It was not until 1937 that the superscription “Former Presbyterian Church” was ­removed from its own notices and bulletin board.120 The story as told by the founders of the United Church emphasized that they had not given up their heritage, nor anything essential to their traditions – only their old names. Writing shortly after union, another minister in British Columbia was still defending the case for church union: “We fully and gladly concede then that The United Church must be something different from any Church to which we belonged before union came. It should be capable of larger views and larger undertakings, and it must be ready for new experiences. That does not mean, however, that we are to lose any vital thing which was in our history or experience.”121 The whole of the Methodist Church and nearly all of the Congregationalist churches were persuaded that it was so. A significant minority of Presbyterians were not so sure. Both sides of the controversy that ensued claimed to be preserving the past, and each constructed an identity that initially denied the right of the other to exist. One of the terms of the 1938 ceasefire was the acknowledgement that both could claim continuity with the pre1925 Presbyterian Church in Canada.122 The Presbyterian Church in Canada survived alongside the United Church, but the financial and emotional cost for both was high. Property was divided; so were families, friends, and co-workers. Was it worth it? There was little time to ponder that question once former Presbyterians joined former Methodists, former Congregationalists, and the recently created local union congregations to become “The United Church of Canada.”

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Principal George Monro Grant, early promoter of church union, n.d. The Presbyterian Church in Canada Archives, G-6424-FC.

Rev. Samuel Dwight Chown, Methodist general superintendent [1903?]. u cca, 76.001P / 1008. Official represen­ tative of the Methodist Church at the United Church of Canada inaugural ceremony in 1925.

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Rev. George Campbell Pidgeon, Presbyterian moderator and first moderator of the United Church of Canada, n.d. uc c a , 76.001P / 5163. Official represen­ tative of the Presbyterian Church in Canada at the United Church of Canada inaugural ceremony in 1925.

Rev. William Henry Warriner, Congregational Union chairman, 1925. uc c a 76.001P / 6998. Official represen­ tative of the Congregational Church at the United Church of Canada inaugural ceremony in 1925.

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Rev. Ephraim E. Scott, leader of the non-concurring Presbyterians [1925?]. The Presbyterian Church in Canada Archives, G-380-MC.

Winnifred Thomas, CGIT leader and member of the Dominion Board of the wms, receiving L.L.D. from Mount Allison University, Sackville, nb, 18 October 1945. u cca, 76.001P / 6608.

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Rev. Andrew Roddan (left), minister of First United Church in Vancouver, with an unidentified colleague and unemployed Chinese men in shantytown, Vancouver, [193-?]. u cca, 93.049P / 4592.

Rev. John Line, professor of theology at Emmanuel College [1950?]. Victoria University Archives.

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Deaconess interviewing a woman applying for help from Fred Victor Mission [1957?]. u cca, 90.115P / 509.

Margaret H. Brown (left) greeting Katharine Hockin (right) at the Chinese border as she leaves the mission field after the civil war, December 1951. u c c a , 76.001P / 2720.

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Dedication to Mission Ceremony (Church of the Master, Toronto; Rev. J. Arnold Foster). Representatives of Explorers, Junior and Senior c gi t, Tyro, Sigma-C, and Tuxis present mission funds to chairman of Missionary and Maintenance Committee. Berkeley Studio, [196-?]. uc c a , 2008.011P / 2245.

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Lois Freeman (centre), candidate for ministry (later Rev. Lois Wilson, first female moderator); with other candidates from Westminster United Church, Winnipeg; Rev. Allen R. Huband (left); and Rev. Reid Vipond (right), 1948. Courtesy of Lois M. Wilson.

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Rev. James Mutchmor (left) being installed as the moderator by retiring moderator Rev. Hugh McLeod, 1962. uc c a , 76.001P / 4139.

Rev. Donald Murray Mathers, ­professor of theology at Queen’s Theological College, holding a copy of The Word and the Way. E.L. Homewood, The United Church Observer, 1962. uc ca, 76.001P / 3940.

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3 The Mission and the “Machinery” First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do. Epictetus

S.D. Chown had reason to be well pleased as he prepared to introduce the newly formed United Church to the Christian Union Quarterly’s international readership. With the inaugural service behind him, the man often hailed as the architect of church union enthusiastically divulged what he saw in store: God was calling this young church to observe Christian principles and practices “more fully than they have been obeyed in any previous period in the history of the Church of Christ.” This would entail advancing in key areas: rescuing sinners from sin through individual conversion; solving social problems; banishing superstitions and half-truths from the faith; carrying the Gospel to “the uttermost parts of the earth”; and promoting Christian unity. He warned that a bleak future awaited a church that emphasized only a fraction of Christ’s message: “inward deformity and comparative spiritual impotence,” even if outward disaster were avoided. Of his own church’s destiny, however, he seemed confident: “We believe we have now constituted a church well built and strong in every part, all its machinery being adapted, or soon to be adapted, to the purposes we desire to fulfil.”1 The United Church was organized religion – and proud of it. “Religion, and especially the Christian religion, carries so much social significance that organization is an evident necessity,” explained a study book prepared for the Young People’s Society. There was work that individual Christians could undertake alone, and work that was better done together. Some tasks could be undertaken by local congregations, but others needed the support of the wider church.2 This principle underlay the organizational culture of the

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United Church from the outset. According to the Basis of Union, the Session’s duties for governing the congregation included organizing meetings “for Christian fellowship, instruction and work” (5.10.1). Through the United Church’s connectional design, the activities of these congregations were linked to the General Council’s national boards, whose many committees intersected with regional structures (eleven conferences divided into just over a hundred presbyteries) comprised of ministers and lay representatives. What the United Church stood for was thus conveyed not only by making theological pronouncements but also by determining ­institutional priorities in board reports and allocating resources ­accordingly through unified budget proposals and programming.3 In particular, the Board of Christian Education, the Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e&ss), the Board of Home Missions, the Board of Foreign (later Overseas) Missions, and the Woman’s Missionary Society (wms) were to act as repositories of the opportunities and challenges the United Church faced in its early years. Those who ran the “machinery” were expected to convert its vision of a national church into programs that would prepare its members for Christian citizenship. The distribution of duties within the United Church was in keeping with changes already underway in denominations across North America before 1925.4 Methodists were often fingered as the ringleaders in this shift toward centralization, but Presbyterians had ­developed a penchant for a similar bureaucratic style. The uniting traditions had already incorporated into their denominational structures some of the work that had been done earlier by such religious voluntary associations as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Lord’s Day Alliance, and various missionary societies.5 In harmonizing their organizational practices with this North American trend, they embraced what sociologist Gibson Winter describes as the Protestant pattern of organization – a burgeoning administrative staff, centralization of fund allocation and fundraising, and boards with specialized functions.6 The United Church’s national leaders and agencies, housed for many years in what had been the headquarters of the Methodist Church at 299 Queen Street West in Toronto, developed bold proposals in keeping with the church’s lofty aims. The hope was that the programs they designed and the practices they modelled would be

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Table 3.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1931 United Church Canada Prince Edward Island Nova Scotia New Brunswick

Total population

Membership

% of population

10,376,786

2,017,375

19.44

88,038

21,979

24.97

512,846

110,548

21.56

408,219

61,176

14.99

Quebec

2,874,255

88,253

3.07

Ontario

3,431,683

973,768

28.38

Manitoba

700,139

176,240

25.17

Saskatchewan

921,785

243,399

26.41

Alberta

731,605

176,816

24.17

British Columbia

694,263

164,750

23.73

Northwest Territories

9,723

94

.97

Yukon Territory

4,230

352

8.32

Source: Census of Canada (1931), vol. II, Table 38.

replicated at the regional and local levels. Standardized procedures lent a corporate cast to church life, but they also connected congregations, many of them rural or remote, and facilitated internal blending of regional differences. For example, religious education programs were designed for use across Canada, although there were regional variations in what caught on. A memory course developed in the 1930s that included Bible verses, hymns, prayers, and graces was “splendidly received” in most places, but used more widely in Maritime Conference than all others combined.7 The United Church followed the lead of other secular and denominational organizations by compartmentalizing its youth ­ programs by age and sometimes by gender. In addition to coeducational Sunday schools and the Young People’s Society, it sponsored Canadian Girls in Training (c gi t ) for girls in their teens, Trail Rangers for boys age twelve to fourteen, Tuxis Boys for those fi ­ fteen and older), and an Older Boys’ Parliament.8 The administration of religious education was largely handled by male church executives, leaving them with less time to work with the boys themselves. Meanwhile, the female religious education leaders focused on a

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more modest but manageable mandate: putting programs in place in local congregations.9 Winnifred Thomas illustrates the pivotal role of the national staff in promoting such programs. Instrumental in organizing cg i t in 1917, she later served in administrative positions that included secretary of the Committee on Women Workers (1925–31) and membership on the Dominion Board of the w m s (1932–53). Thomas decisively shaped the educational philosophy that was credited with c g it’s growth.10 Launched in Ontario, it soon expanded across the country by building on the resources of the yw ca and nesting its program in congregations. The United Church welcomed it as part of its religious education program, a relationship that seems to have been mutually beneficial: although cg i t was designed to be inter-denominational, its membership and ethos was predominantly United Church.11 The gendered pattern of participation in church programs continued beyond the teen years. Women had come to significantly outnumber men in their involvement in church life. The difficulty of inducing men to become involved was a concern that the United Church shared with other North American denominations. At the beginning of the century, some influential religious education leaders (notably American George Coe) had hoped that modernism’s focus on scientific methods would be an antidote to the ‘feminization’ of the church.12 In most congregations, men attended public worship and were on church committees but were only occasionally involved in Sunday school, choir, or Bible study. At the local level, women handled nearly all the community service, religious education, and missionary support.13 The Lay Advisory Council reported in 1944 that numbers from the previous year indicated that of the denomination’s 721,184 communicants, there were a “not inconsiderable” 10,930 involved in men’s organi­ zations. However, that number paled in comparison to the 131,859 women in the wms alone, prompting the comment that “much more ought to be done to enlist our layfolk in planned and active participation in the various efforts of the Church.”14 The United Church directed much of its energy in this regard ­toward encouraging membership in As One That Serves (ao t s ), a Methodist men’s club in Vancouver that began to spread across Canada just before church union. Advertised as “a men’s service club within the church” and “a non-party, non-racial society for Christian fellowship – in the church, in the community, in politics, in business

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and in our own homes,” aot s offered a broad range of programs for young men, such as leadership training for the Older Boys’ Parliament. “Faithful committee work” was the “hallmark of full membership” in ao t s, and men were assured that there was “room for every member on the various committees of a well-organized club.”15 Every United Church congregation was urged to form an aots group that would gather for study, prayer, conversation, and service. It was considered of “supreme importance” that members “prove their fellowship with Jesus Christ at their points of daily contact.”16 Although not all congregations complied, ao t s was to become the United Church’s most successful organized group for men.17 It was women’s groups, however, that proved to be more enduring symbols of organizing for service within and beyond the congregation. The largest was the wms. There was a mood of exhilaration, recalled Jean Forbes, as ninety women from across Canada gathered to merge three missionary societies at the inaugural service for the new wms held at Toronto’s Bloor Street United Church in October 1926. Its members considered themselves “missionary-minded world citizens, a part of the world-wide fellowship of Christians, with whom we were co-workers in Christ’s cause and in the extension of His Kingdom.” But supporting missions in Canada also “appealed strongly, as something near at hand, within their ken, and for the well-being of their own country.”18 The name “Woman’s Missionary Society” hardly does justice to its scope. Along with the evangelistic, educational, and medical work abroad, the wms ran hospitals, various types of school homes for indigenous and other (notably Ukrainian) children, a broad range of community programs in both urban and rural areas, and ministries to new immigrants in Canada.19 At its peak its activities included not only women’s auxiliaries but also baby bands, mission bands and circles, and affiliated c gi t groups from which it aimed to recruit the next generation of members.20 In addition to Missionary Monthly and study books for adults, the w m s published World Friends for youth. Its auxiliaries formed “a great company of women banded together in a fellowship which brings to each member a richer religious experience, a broader vision of the world and its needs, and an opportunity to share in the extension of God’s Kingdom in Canada and other lands.”21 wms activities went far beyond customary missionary support. One of its programs, Community Friendship, arranged for visits to

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immigrants and others new to the community, as well as to the sick and other shut-ins. Its objectives were broadly understood to include study and promotion of social issues, with causes such as temperance, racial awareness, and world peace promoted as part of “Christian Citizenship.”22 In effect, it functioned as the female arm of e& ss, as well as sharing responsibilities for home and foreign missions. In local missionary societies, women sowed the seeds of Canada’s commitment to internationalism and multiculturalism as they learned about Christian friendship abroad and Christian citizenship at home. Confident of the worth of their collective endeavours, they gathered (often in a member’s home) to pray, study, raise funds, and socialize. Criticism of projects such as the residential schools occasionally surfaced, but reassurance was readily at hand in annual reports that spoke glowingly of the good accomplished. “Great stress is laid on the physical care of the pupils,” noted one report that described the medical and dental care provided by the wms-sponsored missionaries. “The Indian women are not neglected and a goodly number have been given a new interest through baby clinics and weekly meetings and particularly through the formation of small Auxiliaries where they feel themselves a part of the great company of interested women.”23 Some women in the United Church elected to join the Woman’s Association (wa ) instead of (or in addition to) the missionary society.24 Organized after church union to continue the work of the Ladies’ Aid, the wa raised funds for local projects and contributed a significant portion of its resources to the church’s budget to cover such functions as turkey suppers, fairs and bazaars, and community relief work. When money was needed to install electric lights, improve the sanctuary, or purchase new hymn books, collection plates, or communion sets, “the ladies” were there. Congregational histories are replete with illustrations of these groups in action. For instance, a letter from a minister in Prince George, bc, told the story of the struggle with finances at Knox United Church. Its representatives met with someone from the Board of Home Missions to deal with its debt. “At last with a little give and take, we finally agreed that we could handle the situation if the debt was reduced to $3000.00 to be paid off at the rate of $300.00 a year. Hope revived! In those lean years $300.00 was no small sum to raise. But the ladies (Bless ’em) did it mostly.” The chronicler of another congregation’s history credited “the mysterious manner seemingly known only

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to  this organization” for straightening out the congregation’s fi­ nances. “Church work was made not only more successful but also more pleasant and personal by the social gatherings sponsored by the ladies.”25 The w ms and wa were committed to serving others, but these organizations also benefited the women involved. The empowerment they experienced was summed up well by Margaret McPherson: “Even the most paternalistic, chauvinist man could not deny his wife or his daughter the right to get together for mission work; and so they learned how to conduct meetings, how to write minutes, how to make reports, to handle money.”26 They exemplified the virtues of organized religion as they attended meetings, studied, engaged in fundraising, and offered hospitality. On the whole, women were conspicuous by their absence in the United Church’s executive leadership,27 leaving the men to talk as though they owned the administrative machinery. But at the local level, women knew how to work the system too, especially in these organizations run by women. It was assumed that those who operated the denominational machinery had the means to speak to United Church congregations; it was also assumed that they would speak for its members on moral and social issues at home and ecumenical affairs abroad. Administrative departments within the United Church bore names similar to those in other North American denominations, suggesting an ecumenical kinship and easing worldwide communication (at least at the executive level) with other Protestant churches.28 Representatives chosen to attend ecumenical gatherings tended to be among the United Church’s most able executives, ministers, and lay leaders; their names crop up over and over in lists of conference speakers, contributors to publications, and committees for major ecumenical events. Suggested initiatives were often adapted to the United Church’s context upon their return. The relationship with the Federal Council of Churches is a case in point. The United Church became an affiliate member in the biennium between 1932 and 1934 (the only non-U.S. church to do so). The congruence of the work of e&ss with the moral and social causes promoted by the Federal Council of Churches in the 1930s is striking. For instance, both ­organized (largely disappointing) national evangelistic campaigns, undertook research on economic issues, and prepared a report on marriage and the family around the same period.29

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The agenda of the United Church and its denominational partners owed much to a groundbreaking missionary conference held in Jerusalem in 1928 that reinforced links within international ecumenism. Time and place were loaded with symbolic significance: Easter in Jerusalem, the city where, on the Day of Pentecost, people from many lands witnessed the birth of the Christian church. Churches from around the world were presented with a frank assessment of the difficulties of communicating the Christian message. The world had dramatically changed since 1910, the year that thousands of delegates and observers had left the historic World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh committed to co-operation in evangelizing the world and extending the influence of Christian civilization.30 The interwar period was to prove an unusually challenging time in  which to honour that pledge. The new energy and enthusiasm for world missions unleashed at the Edinburgh gathering, and the ­assumptions about globalization upon which they were based, were soon imperilled.31 The First World War was to hamper the mis­ sionary enterprise. The principle of self-determination preached by Woodrow Wilson at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference flew in the face of old assumptions about homogeneity and assimilation that underlay attempts to obliterate or at least transcend racial and ethnic differences under the banner of Christian unity.32 The old watchword of “evangelization of the world in this generation” that had inspired those at Edinburgh in 1910 raised very different questions for those gathered nearly two decades later as they considered a new theme: “The World Message of Christianity.” Joining the Canadian contingent in Jerusalem as an observer was E.W. Wallace, who had recently returned to Canada after serving many years as a Methodist missionary to China. His perceptive reports about what he had witnessed at the gathering identified the key issues to which the United Church and its ecumenical partners would respond over the next decade. In addresses and essays, including ten articles for the New Outlook, Wallace prepared the United Church for tactical shifts in what he billed as a new approach to missions.33 As he saw it, the Jerusalem meeting marked the beginning of a “new day in the life of the whole Christian movement.” The change of direction was evident in the delegate selection, with over half representing “mission lands,” which were primarily in Africa and Asia.34 It was, he claimed, the first time in history that the whole

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world was “directly represented in a Christian gathering”35 (although Catholic delegates were conspicuously absent). The Jerusalem meeting approached evangelism from an unconventional perspective. Instead of a map of the world with unevangelized areas painted in black (a familiar visual aid at missionary gatherings), those gathered in Jerusalem were challenged to think rather of the “dark continents” of human existence, where the Spirit of Christ was absent – to racial conflict, industrial relations, and rural life for instance.36 So the mission field now included the West, quashing the idea of “sending” and “receiving” countries. Even references to “older” and “younger” churches were questioned as the focus shifted from the duration to the degree of Christianization manifest in the social order. The focus on Christianization was further sharpened by linking it to a more expansive approach to evangelism.37 The consensus at Jerusalem was that evangelism should involve the practical implications of the Christian message, as well as its proclamation. Any activity that delivered the message of Jesus Christ was viewed as evangelism, with preaching, teaching, and healing in particular representing the full range of Jesus’ own ministry.38 However, spreading that message and advancing the Kingdom of God by calling for both individual and social redemption once again drew the ire of fundamentalists, who disparaged it as a “soulless” social gospel.39 Conferences are rarely as momentous as those who plan and attend them expect, but Wallace could feel change in the air at the Jerusalem meeting. Its effect was perhaps amplified because ideas that its organizers billed as new and groundbreaking had already been given a test run and were gaining support in missionary circles. Notably, Jerusalem provided an international platform for Daniel Fleming of Union Theological Seminary in New York.40 Described by one historian as “the most prolific, influential, and creative liberal theorist of missions between the world wars,”41 Fleming was already known in Canadian mission circles. Nearly half the students at the Canadian School of Missions in Toronto had enrolled in a one-week course he offered in 1927–28. There they were no doubt introduced to ideas from Fleming’s recent book, provocative when first published in 1925 and soon to be disseminated in missionary circles ­after the Jerusalem meeting. Published reports communicated the meeting’s message to missionary boosters around the world. Its

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proceedings were studied in many educational settings, the Canadian School of Missions among them, and discussed at formal and informal gatherings.42 Coming so soon after union, the conference evidently made a deep impression on United Church leaders. They were heartened by its message, and proved adept at adapting its insights to their work. Its principles found a warm welcome at the executive level, and were popularized in many congregations by ministers and missionary societies. Wallace himself redesigned his course for Emmanuel College students preparing for ministry to introduce them to this new ­approach to missions.43 Four years after the auspicious meeting in Jerusalem, Wallace (by then president and chancellor of Victoria University) announced to the 1932 General Council that the old missionary maps of unevangelized lands were gone, replaced by a focus on “the unevangelized areas of life which are found in Canada as well as places like Africa or India.”44 Before its final benediction, the 1932 General Council would set an ambitious agenda that accented Christianizing all areas of life. Among the program initiatives was support for a joint committee of the four largest Protestant churches chaired by George Pidgeon, tellingly called a movement for the evangelization of Canadian life. It also called for related studies that were presented two years later as “Evangelism” and “Christianizing the Social Order.” These noteworthy reports placed the United Church squarely in the camp of international ecumenism in its assumptions about the mission of the church and the significance of its social role.45 Those who think of the social gospel as the wellspring of the United Church’s “social passion” often overlook the missionary movement as a driving force. Church union supporters were among those committed to the evangelization of the world in this generation after Edinburgh. Jesse Arnup, who along with James Endicott and A.E. Armstrong formed the triumvirate in charge of the Board of Foreign Missions after union, saw “abundant evidence that a world vision and a world purpose” was shared by the founders. Indeed the United Church’s “ultimate objective was always set down as the evangelization of the world,” he informed readers of his study book for missionary societies and the Young People’s Union (yp u ) in 1937.46 His description of the scope of the church’s outreach was likewise ambitious: “Of set purpose it aims to make Canada wholly Christian; but

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its ultimate objective is nothing less than the fulfillment of God’s purpose for the whole world.”47 The long-standing resolve to build the Kingdom of God and thereby create “His Dominion” in Canada lingered in the evangelistic language of home missions supporters,48 and translated easily to the new aim of Christianizing all areas of life.” It meshed well with the aspirations of moral and social reformers who advocated relating Christian principles to social realities, thereby enjoying the support of many at e&ss, whose coterie of paid staff and elected volunteers included a number of prominent activists and some of the church’s best minds. Among them was Ernest Thomas, the brilliant and at times acerbic associate secretary. Thomas praised the Jerusalem meeting (along with the first World Conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne in 1927 and the Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference a year later) for proposing an approach to evangelism that differed “from all revivalist movements,” some of which were “far from sharing the aim or the outlook” of its message.49 What is sometimes referred to as the “social gospel ethos” made a lasting impact on the United Church, in large part because the enthusiasm for missions at home and abroad bolstered key aspects of e& ss’s progressive agenda.50 The work of proclaiming the gospel while providing practical assistance was shared by missionary societies and two mission boards, which had at their disposal much larger budgets for education, hospitals, etc. than e & s s alone. The missionary movement, with its many voices, deeper pockets, and undeniable link to the evangelical impulse of the past, joined the cause of moral and social crusaders in Christianizing all areas of life. With every land now considered a mission field, even small congregations (often the recipients of mission support) were acquainted with programs designed on the assumption that Christianizing the social order was a missionary task. Much was made of the United Church’s unique opportunity in this regard. Church union propagandist R.J. Wilson was characteristically assertive in presenting the opportunities ahead.51 With the “larger part” of Canada’s population living in rural areas, few, if any, Protestants would be out of reach: “the vast majority of them will find that The United Church is the only Church doing Christian work in the areas where they settle.” It was, he added, the United Church’s aim to “claim every community in Canada for Christ and to minister in His name to all, regardless of creed, language or color,

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who need her help, and who are dependent on her for comfort and instruction in the Gospel.”52 Likewise Jesse Arnup portrayed the United Church as a church committed to assisting others. Since more than half of its pastoral charges received support from mission funds, the United Church was, he claimed, a home mission church,53 operating in at least twenty-five languages as well as serving “isolated Indians and white communities in the far West and North.”54 He was particularly pleased about ministry to indigenous peoples that had been provided as the land in Canada came under the “control and occupancy of the white man.” It had become “apparent that the future welfare of the Indian would be contingent upon his ability to adapt himself to new and still changing conditions of life,” he explained. Both the churches and the government had stepped in – the churches accepting the “duty” of evangelization, the government meeting its economic and social obligations under the terms of various treaties by constructing buildings and, in the case of day schools, providing salaries for the teachers. It was, in Arnup’s estimation, a partnership that had “worked out to the advantage of all parties.”55 Arnup presented a glowing account of the educational program of the residential schools as an alternative to day schools: “Immoral customs among the pagan Indians, unsatisfactory home life, the ­absence of parental discipline, nomadic habits, the activities and influence of the medicine man, all served to neutralize the effect of Christian teaching, given for only a few hours each day.”56 Not only did residential schools help Indians to become better citizens of Canada; they were preserving aboriginal culture by sparking a “revival of Indian art and design,” including totem poles and Cowichan sweaters.57 Arnup boasted of the educational and professional success of graduates who scored well on high school entrance exams and went on to become teachers, nurses, and ministers.58 This was a theme repeated in other study materials and reports.59 In seeking to Christianize the social order, the United Church worked in partnership with various levels of government to ‘Canadianize’ immigrants and indigenous peoples. Efforts to create a common culture by providing pastoral care to those who were ‘different’ were accepted as necessary and constructive, a way of creating a better nation. To those who wondered whether such efforts were still necessary, given the restrictions on immigration after 1925, the Missionary Monthly responded with an unequivocal “yes.” Mrs J. Erle

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Jones estimated that 80 per cent of immigrants already in Canada were not connected to any Christian church, and described them as drifters who had lost faith even in what they had once been taught to believe. She warned, “If we Christian people let them adrift we are responsible for a great menace which may threaten Canada.” She urged readers to “show them that the Church is ready and eager to help them to become the citizens they ought to be.”60 Readers of missionary reports and study materials learned about United Church activities in small, remote, or linguistically diverse communities (many of them identified as “Non-Anglo-Saxon”). Such work was crucial in efforts to become “the Church of the rural areas and the Prairies,” noted R.B. Cochrane, secretary of the Board of Home Missions in 1938. “Paganism in one form or another is as real in the life of our Dominion as in the heart of Africa,” he claimed, predicting that “we shall not overtake our missionary task abroad until we get an awakening at home!”61 J.I. MacKay, superintendent of the Church of All Nations in Toronto, was also concerned about the future of Canada. He admitted in his preface to The World in Canada that his own choice of title for his missionary study book had been “Can the Church Save Canada?,” for he feared that the country might disintegrate. Canada’s people (or their parents) had come from “the ends of the earth,” he wrote, bringing with them “all the things that make for antagonism and discord, improperly related, but with the qualities also that will make for harmony and beauty and strength if wisely coordinated.” The church’s “unparalleled opportunity” in the midst of this complex situation was to save this “world in Canada” and thereby “point the way to the saving of the larger world.”62 One did not have to live in a remote community in Canada, or in another country, to encounter the United Church’s missionizing impulse. Most congregations had to look no further than their own wms meetings, where local missionary educators were well positioned to promote ideas that were current in ecumenical circles. At a time when most denominations (including the United Church) had separated the administration of home missions and foreign missions, the wms remained responsible for both, and was able to explore the interconnections between them. Historians have wondered how the social ideals of national denominational leaders were communicated to local congregations – what Richard Allen describes as the “underbrush” of church life.63 Perhaps a clue lies in the organizational

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structure of these missionary societies with their connections to women in local congregations. Those wanting to find the women who seem to be missing from standard accounts of the social gospel movement might do well to look more closely there.64 Many United Church leaders had come to believe, like their ecumenical counterparts, that the key to world harmony was a new international order based on Christian friendship.65 They considered the missionary cause an essential precursor of peace, and praised the missionaries themselves as “builders of that world-wide community of Christians which is at once the embodiment and the instrument of world brotherhood and the basis of world peace.”66 In a world threatened by the rise of aggressive nationalism in some countries, the missionary’s role became even more important to global unity, insisted Arnup.67 But others, including the predictably provocative Daniel Fleming, were beginning to ask difficult questions about the Anglo-Saxon form of nationalism unwittingly spread by the early missionary movement.68 Ironically, the antiWestern nationalism that was rising in many parts of the world was at odds with Christian internationalism, heralding complications for missions in years to come. “Doors are open everywhere,” mission reports claimed. Missionaries themselves reported that opportunities abounded if only staffing and money could be found to support them. The idea that their years of sacrifice might come to naught due to a lack of funds likely caused many to inflate opportunities and overstate the strategic importance of a Christian presence in their area.69 However, events soon belied their optimism. With money for existing programs in short supply and hostility to their presence as foreigners on the rise, missionaries’ reports sounded increasingly desperate. Evangelistic work was particularly vulnerable, and even educational and medical work was not as welcome as in the past. A special committee formed to advise the church on how to deal with its financial crisis frankly stated another problem: “We cannot win the world for Christ to-day on the strategy of a century ago or even twenty-five years ago.”70 The committee’s recommended objectives and methods drew explicitly on the current assumptions and strategies of the international missionary movement, emphasizing an expansive approach to evangelism that involved preaching, teaching, and healing.71 However, even the usually sanguine Arnup sounded apprehensive as he described the new world the church was

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facing. The missionary enterprise was in jeopardy – and so too was the future of the church. “You cannot think of God except as a missionary God,” he warned. “So it is with the Church. Rob it of its missionary purpose and passion and you remove both its right and its power to carry on.”72 Meanwhile, there were indications that Canada’s own national aspirations and the rise of what Doug Owram calls the “service state” (which defined itself by the help it offered to its citizens) were affecting the United Church’s mission by changing its role as a service provider. After the First World War, the government had extended its authority by taking on new social responsibilities.73 State-funded public agencies soon superseded voluntary associations and rivalled both churches and service clubs in providing social services they could not afford to match. Such increases in government spending would have been unthinkable only a short time earlier, remarked Frank Stapleford approvingly as he observed the scene in 1925. Stapleford was a United Church (formerly Methodist) minister and head of Toronto’s Neighbourhood Workers Association, which he had helped found in 1918. He reckoned that social work had been transformed by a more confident attitude about what human beings could accomplish and an assumption that change was the result of social research. Whereas churches continued to organize philanthropic enterprises such as orphanages, rescue homes, settlement houses, and inner-city missions, these establishments were increasingly run by welfare institutions under non-religious auspices.74 This shift in delivery of social services was to have important implications for the United Church in the coming decades. Was it time to hand over even more administrative responsibility to the state and secular agencies? Stapleford himself was unperturbed by that prospect, pointing out that since the boards of even so-called secular institutions were still comprised of men and women holding deep religious convictions, churches need not be discomfited by this trend. He guessed that over 90 per cent of those doing either professional or volunteer social work in Toronto were religiously inspired. According to Stapleford, the church had a critical role to play in energizing social initiatives and raising awareness of the connections between moral and economic issues – especially among business leaders (obviously considered in need of such education and enlightenment).75

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Others were less certain. By the 1930s, a more sombre mood pervaded discussions of the church’s relationship to the state, a marked contrast to the energetic and enterprising spirit of social reformers at  the turn of the century. Social welfare and prohibition were among  the issues that complicated the church’s working relationships with various levels of government. Like Stapleford, the United Church had initially assumed it would become an integral part of Canadian society and a shaper of its values, particularly in moral matters. With its offer of friendly service to the nation, the newly founded church had expected a supportive, or at least neutral, state partner that could be persuaded to advance a progressive social agenda. It saw itself as neither totally accommodating of nor completely separate from secular culture. For many United Church leaders, losing the fight for prohibition was an eye-opener. It revealed a different reality: a state with diverging interests on particular issues, unresponsive, and at times even hostile to the church’s agenda. Prohibition was the public policy issue with which the United Church, at the time of its founding, was most closely identified. Despite considerable church effort to sway the political debate, the tide turned against temperance as one province after another rejected prohibition and adopted government control of the sale of alcoholic beverages.76 Ironically, tax revenues from such purchases (and from the proceeds of gambling, which the United Church also opposed) were badly needed to fund the new social services the church favoured. Prohibition was a reminder of the complexity of the church’s relationships with federal and provincial governments, whose ­ ­decisions proved more resistant than expected to united Protestant influence. For temperance supporters it was sobering to see their concerns dismissed or ignored. The state had become not only an  unreliable consociate but also an obstacle to moral reform. Misgivings surfaced among some ardent social reformers, wary of relying too heavily on the state to implement the church’s social policies.77 Ernest Thomas found himself at odds with some of his colleagues for questioning their calls for legal prohibition of alcohol and reminding them that attempts to coerce people by legislation to become non-drinkers no longer enjoyed wide public support. His efforts to inject a dose of reality into discussions alienated many in the church.78 Thomas did not live to see the United Church accept his strategy in the 1950s: promoting of personal abstinence

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through education and building of consensus through persuasion rather than coercive prohibition legislation. If the task of the church was to Christianize all areas of life, where did politics fit in? How far should the church go in siding with particular political parties? Was the church limited to presenting general Christian principles when making pronouncements about moral and social issues? These were questions that threatened to substitute political quarrels for theological ones over where to draw the line between theology and partisan politics. D.L. Ritchie, dean of the newly formed United Theological College in Montreal, alluded to the customary distinction between religion and politics when he warned that the church’s efforts to build a new social order would not be advanced either by mingling organized politics with religion or by the church becoming an extension of a particular political party. Only by refusing to become political would pastors remain prophetic; they were to be spiritual teachers who presented ideals and principles rather than political contestants who translated them into policy. Their part was to redeem the role of the politician by honouring and supporting those who discharged their responsibilities faithfully, and to encourage the best persons in their midst to consider public service as a worthy calling. Ritchie put out a special plea for the church to use its considerable influence with women to encourage them to regard public office as a suitable position for their husbands (though apparently not for themselves).79 Fresh questions about the role of the church in politics were asked after the organization of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (c c f ) party in 1932, in which some United Church ministers were conspicuously involved. D.N. McLachlan, secretary of e & s s , repeated the standard position of the executive leadership: the United Church had no interest in promoting any particular party, whether left or right. On the other hand, being non-partisan did not mean remaining silent, he insisted, and the church reserved “the right at all times to cry out against injustice and wrong.” If this was not part of the church’s mission, he added, the church had no mission.80 Still, not everyone agreed on what that meant in the real world of politics. Anti-prohibitionists outside the United Church had long memories of what to them smacked of the church dabbling in politics to promote temperance legislation. Critics of the United Church’s statements on economic issues archly noted that “prohibition” was now extended from the use of alcohol to the making of profits. There

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were even rumours that the church was considering an affiliation with the cc f.81 Such allegations became more credible when Toronto Conference, in a close vote at its 1933 annual meeting, denounced the capitalist economic system “unchristian” and supported state control of a number of key industries. Those who objected to what they saw as an intrusion of the church into the political arena warned of the danger of such pronouncements: once a position was declared to be “Christian,” it was difficult to get rid of it if it proved impractical. An editorial in Saturday Night asserted that a church could hardly change its mind about what was or was not “Christian” every second or third year. “The last two occasions, in Canada, on which [God] was extensively enlisted in support of courses of action ... were the War and Prohibition, and the long-term results were not good in either case,” it warned.82 How could Christian responsibility be translated into public influence without becoming partisan in the process? This was the vexing problem assigned to the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order that reported to the General Council in 1934. Chaired by Sir Robert Falconer, recently retired from his position as president of the University of Toronto, it brought together those who were “expert in the fields of industry, finance, statecraft and church life,” and was billed as “the outcome of a great body of representative opinion throughout the Church.”83 Falconer was an interesting choice as chair. Not even the conservative wing of the social gospel movement claimed him as a supporter. For his part, he dismissed the social gospel as the response of “impatient members” of Protestant churches to “what seems to be a loss of moral authority.”84 Yet he and more radical Christian socialists evidently shared a number of concerns: political corruption, financial speculation, and the preoccupation with profits in farming and business alike. As his biographer puts it, Falconer “selectively weeded the socialist garden to suit his own taste.”85 The commission grappled with some of the most complex issues spawned by the Depression. Those who crafted the report urged “a more complete commitment of professing Christians to the principles and practice of Christian living both in personal and corporate life.” However, this “Christian” program was not to be identified with any political party or group. Ministers of the church were given explicit instructions: whatever they might say or do as citizens, the pulpit was not to be “used for purposes which lie outside its sphere.”

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And yet a minister was not to “consent to keep silence as to any part of the Christian Message because some particular group avowedly seeks the same end.” Persuasion, not coercion, was the church’s weapon in its warfare against social evils. On matters where the consensus of informed judgment pointed in a clear moral direction, the role of the church was to bring the issue to the attention of the public and political leaders, and rely on them to act.86 The report thus stopped just short of prescribing a specific course of action for Christianizing the social order. As it felicitously put it, the task of the church was “to be the light rather than the engineer of the City of God, to give direction and reveal goals rather than to devise programs.” In this spirit, it supported the idea of public utilities and applauded initiatives to provide more income security for the elderly, unemployed, and disabled.87 At several points the report explained that the church did not have the “technical ability to prescribe the process by which [unemployment] should be eliminated.” Its task was to shape public opinion on moral issues through the enlightened consciences of its members, but not to directly advise the government on the details of public policy.88 This approach was perhaps a reflection of the cautious political instincts of the commission’s chair. Falconer’s own frank assessment of the social role of the church, published in an autobiographical account a few years after the commission completed its work, ­appraised the church’s current political influence in blunt terms: ­national leaders did not consult church leaders in times of social difficulty – and with good reason in his opinion: “The advice given by churches and by good Christians is often of little value, because it is not determined on a sufficiently broad understanding of what is feasible.” To expect anything more was to misunderstand the task of the church, which was “not intended to be another earthly kingdom legislating for the social and political welfare of even its own members, to say nothing of the multitudes who would never acknowledge its authority.” Its more modest role was nonetheless crucial: rather than dictate or even prescribe solutions, it was to educate and enlighten its members in an effort to “release [their] moral energies.” Its task was to co-operate with the home in producing educated Christians whose “fundamental convictions and intelligence” would guide them in “active citizenship.”89 Still, the report of the commission was “pretty radical” for its day in the judgment of another of its influential members. Richard

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Roberts, the minister at Sherbourne Street United Church in Toronto who had been elected moderator by the same General Council that received the report, claimed that he and Falconer were mainly responsible for drafting it.90 He largely agreed with Falconer’s assessment of the church’s task in political and economic life, and like him distinguished between ethical and technical judgments (the latter ­being outside the church’s competence). Just as the church lacked the expertise to run a chemical laboratory or preside in a court of law, it lacked competence to pass judgment on capitalism and communism as economic systems. It could, however, assess the possible or actual consequences for the souls and bodies of those living under those systems. All social processes were to be governed by Christian principles that would promote the growth of personality and community.91 Despite its mediating stance, the report was not endorsed by all  who took the time to study its recommendations. A response from the congregation of St Marys United Church in southwestern Ontario objected to the findings, stating that righting economic wrongs would come only as “the result of individual experiences of  reconciliation with God through Christ Jesus our Lord.” While the St Marys’s Session agreed that “more Christian operation” of the economy was important, the church’s main task was preaching the message of salvation. Their response also took exception to the report’s critical a­ ssessment of Western civilization as “debased” by materialism. Admittedly there were problems, but capitalism was certainly preferable to Communism or Corporate Nationalism.92 While some criticized the United Church for going beyond its spiritual mandate, others were just as disappointed by what it left unsaid. The tasks assigned to the commission by the General Council had included a request “to define those particular measures which must form the first steps toward a social order in keeping with the mind of Christ.”93 The commission stopped short of detailing such measures in the final report, admitting it was unqualified to do so. However, a minority of commission members felt that the report should have more emphatic on a number of points. Several unresolved issues were identified in a paragraph that followed the report, all of them showing the influence of the Christian socialist critique of capitalism.94 The United Church, in large part through the work of e & s s , continued to vigorously press the case for moral and social reform based on Christian principles. Its leaders were perhaps naive in hoping

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other issues would meet a better fate than the temperance cause. Yet at times there was reason to think that the active citizenship upheld by the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order might indeed produce results. The federal government appeared to be open to listening to the church’s overtures for social initiatives that we now identify with the welfare state. On some issues, the United Church found its interests aligned with a state that was once again looking for friends. By the 1930s, federal and provincial governments were facing their own difficulties in implementing the ambitious social programs ­anticipated during the 1920s. Social assistance was still minimal a decade later, and organized locally and provincially rather than nationally. The British North America Act had given responsibility for welfare and unemployment to the provinces (some of which by the mid-1930s were assumed to be well-nigh bankrupt). In tandem with the very real problem of deficits and constitutional restrictions was the lingering suspicion that going beyond the most rudimentary welfare system would only encourage indigence.95 Voters and the politicians they elected seemed more concerned with reducing the national debt accumulated during the First World War than with launching new social programs. Hence the federal government was slow to open its coffers (which were nearly empty anyway). After a number of ad hoc programs failed to counteract the devastating impact of the Depression, Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett announced in his 1935 New Year’s address a New Deal modelled on the American plan for recovery. The legislation brought before Parliament shortly before Canadians went to the polls later that year included provision for a minimum wage and unemployment insurance, but still fell short of what Bennett had promised.96 His party’s crushing defeat to W.L.M. King’s Liberals likely had less to do with whether Canadians approved or disapproved of his policies than with their lack of confidence in his ability to follow through on them. The Liberals won by an electoral landslide of 173 of 245 seats, but with less than 45 per cent of the popular vote.97 Historians suspect that King may have been less enthusiastic about social security measures than Bennett; at any rate, his party could claim it had no choice but to keep the status quo when the Privy Council of the United Kingdom dealt the final blow to Bennett’s New Deal by ruling in 1937 that key elements of its munificence were ultra vires.98

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An important step in overcoming the constitutional obstacle to greater federal involvement in financing social security was taken when the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations (chaired first by Newton Wesley Rowell and later by Joseph Sirois) was called in 1937. The principles central to the United Church’s report on Christianizing the social order were evident in “A Brief on Social Security,” which the United Church prepared in response to an invitation from the Royal Commission. Although a letter accompanying the brief disclaimed it as “a report of The United Church of Canada,” the group that prepared the submission assured the commissioners that they had “worked in cooperation with consultative committees set up in various parts of our Church.”99 Their brief went beyond simply the principles in unequivocally supporting constitutional changes that would make it possible for the federal government to fund Old Age Pensions and assume a proportion of the debt incurred by provincial and municipal governments in providing unemployment relief.100 The Royal Commission report did not disappoint those who submitted the church’s brief: completed in 1940, it proposed a national standard of services, with additional powers to tax income in order to provide grants to supplement provincial coffers. More social programs followed when economic recovery and the outbreak of war created a more favourable political environment for formulating and funding social security measures.101 Social ethicist Roger Hutchinson credits the United Church with helping to lay the groundwork for these initiatives by changing the Canadian mindset that had once looked with suspicion on involvement of the state in providing social services.102 Reports such as Christianizing the Social Order, circulated widely for discussion in pamphlet form, prepared its members to accept a more expansive role for the state in social programs by linking proposals for social welfare in Canada to such familiar concepts as the Kingdom of God and a Christian social order. Whether its members were happy with the machinery that the United Church had put in place to advance the Kingdom of God and a Christian social order was another matter. Mobilizing for mission had figured prominently in the case for unification, and the machinery set in motion was designed to coordinate the church’s work across the nation and around the world. Not surprisingly, the resulting o ­ rganizational culture quickly became an issue. How

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could institutional demands for order and efficiency be balanced with a yearning for spiritual renewal that was resistant to being ‘organized’? Nostalgia for the old ways and disillusionment with the new were evident from the start. At issue was not only what was being said and done but also how and by whom. Joseph Flavelle of  Sherbourne Street United Church in Toronto was among those unhappy with the situation. A former Methodist and a wealthy businessman well versed in secular patterns of organization and fundraising, Flavelle soon grew wary of the concentration of power in the office of the general secretary, and with T. Albert Moore, the particular person charged with wielding it. Flavelle was blunt in his assessment of Moore, remarking that if he were in New York and not a Christian, he would “make an excellent lieutenant to a Tammany Chief.” He perhaps had Moore in mind when he complained of the type of church leader who found “great satisfaction in office,” and who was “restless for meetings, for Conventions, for conferences, and councils, for inspirational meetings, etc. etc.”103 Flavelle put his finger on a predicament that was to plague the emerging corporate style of church administration for years to come: the friction between older pastoral structures, where preaching and faith formation were of paramount concern, and modern attempts to promote denominational priorities.104 He noted that local leaders were becoming irritated “because they think there is an attempt at  domination from the central bureau.” Sensing that the practice of ministry was changing, he saw it overshadowed by “the tendency of the modern, highly-organized church ... to make the minister somewhat less important in initiative and constructive leadership.” Aware of what was happening in the church at both the national and congregational level, Flavelle identified the problem as planning gone awry, not dissatisfaction with particular policies. They needed to “wisely control the disposition to organize,” since he believed it was sapping the spiritual energy of the church. Perhaps, he mused, competition had not been so bad after all.105 Flavelle was not alone in sensing a clash between the institutional demands and the spiritual dimensions of religious life, a danger that other staunch supporters of union had spotted early on. D.L. Ritchie warned those gathered at the first General Council that if the new church were to become only an “ecclesiastical organization,” it might be “great and powerful for certain purposes,” but would eventually become “a burden if not a tyranny in the world” – unblessed

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by God and unable to bless others.106 Four years later, Ritchie reported that he was still hearing “not a little about the dread of the big machine” from outside critics and discontented insiders. While he celebrated the signs of life he saw evidenced in “liberty, flexibility and a certain measure of nonconformity,” he admitted that “one hears much about money and machinery and maintenance and schemes and buildings, and it is well, for these also may be fruits of the spirit.” But there was, he added, “a longing for something more”; well-oiled machinery was not enough.107 One did not have to be a conservative to have qualms about the means and methods the church was using to achieve its ends. As the United Church approached its fifth General Council in 1932, social gospel advocate Salem Bland lamented that the previous four had, of necessity, been concerned with “the perfecting and adjusting of the machinery of such a Church as up to its formation the world had not seen.” He believed the time had come to show whether the United Church still cared about the convictions that had given it birth, or whether it had become absorbed in maintenance like other churches.108 J.W.A. Nicholson, another Christian socialist, complained that the United Church had, like churches in the past, “gravitated back to the pagan notion that the important thing is to keep the machinery going.”109 Even those running the machinery were occasionally anxious about its organizational style. As his term as moderator began in the fall of 1934, Richard Roberts evidently shared some of his parishioner Flavelle’s concerns. The first decade’s preoccupation with method, order, organization, and “adequate temporal machinery” had been inevitable, he allowed, but it was time to attend to the church’s “spiritual offices.” In remedy, he offered to spend his two-year term organizing spiritual retreats and meeting with ministers, church executives, children, and young adults.110 But as his term came to an end, Roberts made no secret of his continuing disquietude. Religious communities that cared less about their purpose than their organization, machinery, importance, and prestige were “sick unto death,” he warned, and efficiency, clubs, and good balance sheets would not save them. His prognosis was bleak: if a church “forgets or becomes indifferent to its worship, to the preaching of the Word, to its Sacraments and its devotional life, to its missionary calling, the writing is on the wall.” For him, a church organized like a department store “was under sentence of death.” Preoccupation with statistics

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was a symptom of the organizational malady infecting the church: “as though it mattered very much how many of us there are, when the real matter is what kind of people we are.”111 However, the machinery of the new church needed more than a spiritual message to run it. The vastness of the land and the opportunities it offered for expansion had captured the imagination of the founding generation of the United Church, but the financial burden of realizing that vision hit congregations squarely in the pocketbook. Outreach at home – whether in urban, rural, or developing communities in the North and West – was the overarching practical problem that church union was designed to solve. The United Church had also inherited most of the overseas commitments of the founding traditions. At first, consolidation relieved the pressure on the Board of Home Missions budget in some communities, providing a rationale for closing struggling pastoral charges and making it possible for ministers to have “a man’s job” (presumably a reference to salary).112 But the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, which was essential to home mission operations, was hit hard by the decline in church income during the Depression. Shrinking budgets during the 1930s put plans on hold. There was not enough money to support existing programs let alone develop new ones. Between 1928 and 1935, the United Church closed 233 of its 3,117 pastoral charges, nearly three-quarters of them in the Prairie provinces.113 Home Missions accounted for the largest draw on the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, with Foreign Missions typically vying with Pensions as the second-largest disbursement. In 1936 came the distressing news that foreign missionary personnel had been reduced by 20 per cent, and their salaries by 25 per cent. The reserve fund was soon spent, and the Board of Foreign Missions was in debt and beholden to the w m s , which had come to its aid with a grant of $15,000, despite its own fundraising problems.114 The w m s spending on its work at home and overseas exceeded receipts, and the difference was underwritten by dipping into its reserve funds. The situation was no brighter for e & s s . It was responsible for a broad range of philanthropic endeavours such as hospitals, maternity homes for girls, reform schools for youth, and drought relief to the Prairies.115 However, ten years after union, its budget had been slashed to about $40,000, less than half its nearly $90,000 appropriation five years earlier.116

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3,566,051.99 1,300,792.02 36.48

3,057,340.90 1,058,410.47 34.62

2,613,003.90

2,613,465.69

2,479,674.05

2,398,322.07

2,354,575.04

2,376,379.51

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

489,817.03 20.61 767,952.07 32.32 116,041.52

484,532.93 20.58 747,363.56 31.74 124,154.22

502,901.59 20.97 721,954.40 30.10 125,469.36

562,674.95 22.69 713,481.49 28.77 133,184.80

601,922.65 23.03 712,272.02 27.25 144,853.73

574,319.07 21.98 744,807.31 28.50 150,494.37

646,370.05 21.14 825,285.83 26.99 210,508.05

850,858.33 23.86 841,953.96 23.61 246,689.48

859,683.40 23.65 828,521.22 22.79 265,073.07

4.88

5.27

5.23

5.37

5.54

5.76

6.89

6.92

7.29

7.98

8.17

37,708.07

40,577.15

37,802.81

39,672.44

41,249.79

41,243.93

60,998.58

72,920.86

78,202.57

89,498.05

101,658.67

Other2 ($)

1.59 207,935.18

1.72 189,350.41

1.58 217,712.27

1.60 210,747.48

1.58 238,016.94

1.58 224,859.76

2.00 255,767.92

2.04 252,837.34

2.15 300,623.44

2.41 266,479.25

2.52 305,808.10

Evangelism & Social % of Service % of total ($) total

1  A combination of disbursements to the Christian Education and Colleges and Secondary Schools boards, including special grants such as assistance to St Andrew’s College in the 1930s. 2  Includes other boards (e.g., Finance and Publication), General Council office administration, and funding for a variety of special initiatives. Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book (reports of the Finance Committee)

756,925.64 31.85

768,596.77 32.64

792,481.64 33.04

819,912.89 33.07

875,150.56 33.49

877,279.46 33.57

3,635,267.14 1,303,163.44 35.85

870,393.32 23.40 746,587.77 20.08 296,950.19

3,718,886.78 1,448,978.20 38.96

1930

% of Education1 ($) total

1929

Pensions ($)

4,033,043.53 1,500,590.87 37.21 1,016,340.44 25.20 779,176.22 19.32 329,469.23

% of total

1928

% of total

Foreign Missions ($)

Year

Home Missions ($)

Total disbursements ($)

Table 3.2 Disbursement of the Missionary and Maintenance Fund, 1928–38

8.75

8.04

9.08

8.50

9.11

8.61

8.37

7.09

8.27

7.17

7.58

% of total



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Recruitment of pastors and missionary personnel was a further concern. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Canada had been well represented among Anglo-American student volunteers for overseas missions. But enthusiasm waned in the interwar years, and an anxious Arnup admitted that younger members were losing interest in the missionary movement. Recruitment was a problem for the wms as well. It sponsored teachers and medical staff, many of them sent to schools and hospitals in indigenous communities. Its deaconesses provided religious services in areas where ordained ministers were already in short supply (a situation that worsened after the outbreak of the Second World War).117 Staffing was a constant challenge as rates of attrition through resignation (usually in order to marry) and retirement outstripped new recruits. There were still some brilliant young recruits like Katharine Hockin, the daughter of missionaries to China, who understood her own call to become a missionary in terms of being an ambassador for Christ. Many of those who joined her considered their decision to become missionaries “a living part of the concern for peace and, more profoundly, for personal and global reconciliation in Christ.”118 Other young idealists were drawn to the peace movement, racial reconciliation, and reconstruction of the social and economic order, Arnup noted.119 Given the prominence of these pursuits in the new thinking about Christian missions after the Jerusalem meeting, is it any wonder that they turned to public service instead of the ministry or the mission field? Stanley Knowles, a United Church minister and long-serving mp from Winnipeg, at first felt called to be a missionary after a conversion experience in 1924, but involvement in the Student Christian Movement (sc m) and the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order (f c so ) redirected his energies.120 Eugene Forsey’s autobiography tells of the significant role religion had played in his life. Although he had once considered becoming a missionary, his declared candidacy for the ministry “wilted” as he became more actively involved in the social gospel movement.121 However valuable their contributions elsewhere, the lack of young recruits to replace retiring ministers and missionaries was disquieting. New leaders were badly needed to succeed those who had straddled the stages of negotiating and implementing church union. Finding able personnel to make the vision a reality was a problem the United Church shared with other organizations. Speaking to a group of students at the University of Toronto, Richard Roberts remarked

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that a whole generation had perished in the First World War, leaving public affairs “in the hands of old or oldish men with pre-war minds.”122 He may well have had in mind the organizational culture of his own denomination. To outsiders the public face of the United Church may have seemed orderly in the extreme, but behind the scenes matters were more chaotic. Privately, Roberts expressed misgivings about the lack of coordination at head office. Life there was “not happy” in his view, despite an improving financial picture as the economy recovered. McLachlan’s long illness had left things at e& ss “in a pretty bad mess.” Roberts mused that “there is something in the view that the best proof of the doctrine of original sin is to be found in Ecclesiastical Offices.”123 The year 1936 was something of a watershed at the national executive level. Eight vacancies were filled by relatively young appointees, among them Gordon Sisco succeeding T. Albert Moore and G.R. Cragg succeeding W.B. Creighton in the key positions of general secretary and New Outlook editor respectively. These were not just new faces; they were a new generation.124 Even so, a few years later and by then retired, Roberts was still pessimistic about the organizational changes he had helped put in place as a member of the 1936 nominating committee. In a letter to his son-in-law, he  complained that the national church lacked staff with “both spiritual insight and business acumen.” He felt they were “pretty second-rate,” except for Jesse Arnup in Foreign Missions (“rising to  the critical missionary situation with some spirit”) and J.R. Mutchmor, who by then had succeeded McLachlan in e & s s (deemed “all right”).125 It is easy to criticize church leaders for their lofty ambitions and lack of foresight about the impact of national and world events on congregational life in local communities. Their failure to meet their own expectations should not obscure the real achievements even, and especially, during the difficult years of the Depression. There were many early successes, some directly attributable to the effectiveness of the church’s machinery, which gave it a public voice and allowed it to deliver spiritual and practical aid. The e & s s is a case in point. Ian Manson’s analysis of its activities before 1945 shows its leaders determined to “challenge others in the church to open their eyes to  the many changes occurring in society, take society’s problems

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seriously, and do their part to try to eliminate many serious forms of injustice.” A cautious attitude, rather than assumption of inevitable progress, characterized e & ss’s work in the interwar years.126 Its  leaders paved the way for its institutional advances after the Second World War – when the future for a time seemed to belong to organized religion. With time would come the realization that the machinery was not the only problem. The rise of the service state had the practical consequence of relegating religious social service to a dwindling role, inadvertently eroding an important corner of the foundation on which the United Church had been built. At times the mission of the United Church coincided with the interests of the state and its machinery was effective in promoting it – but, as in the case of temperance, not always. More often than not, the economic crisis of the 1930s confirmed what the prohibition issue had signalled: religiously motivated reformers could play an important role in launching social initiatives, but even the combined resources of the uniting churches were not enough to sustain them. Key aspects of the United Church’s mission – and with it, its identity – changed as functions were taken over by the state, even though the ‘transfer’ was made at the church’s entreaty. First, those early aspirations were tempered by the realization that shrinking resources meant a more limited offering of specialized social services. And second, an ambitious state with its own plans for remaking Canada – without the friendly service of the United Church – gradually edged the church to the margins of public life. International ecumenism’s notion of Christianizing all areas of life fared no better. As he watched the growing antagonism around the world to Western imperialism, Ernest Thomas saw the “more friendly contacts” that the church offered in its evangelistic, educational, and medical work as “all the more needed” to promote world friendship. Yet, with typical candor he pointed out the church’s limits: “Our own type of Christianity has made no wide appeal to any people except to those in the Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic family, and even there mainly to the well-to-do middle class. How can such a Church provide unification?”127 Soon after he penned these words in 1937, the world changed in ways that dashed any hope for international peace based on Christian friendship, or even the United Church’s more modest mission of a Christian social order in Canada.

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4 The Search for a Faith for Sociable Souls Tension is a creative force. But polarization, which seems an abiding sin of our age, is worse than useless. It stifles creativity, whereas a healthy dose of negative capability, the ability to hold differences in tension while both affirming and denying them, enlivens both poetry and theology. Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

With only a few hours remaining in his term as first moderator of the United Church, George Pidgeon rose to preach at the opening service of the second General Council. Words from the prophet Zechariah had given him a title for his sermon and inspired an image of the church he hoped would be built in Canada: “The City without Walls.” What he had witnessed in communities across Canada over the past year had been heartening. But as he looked ahead, he saw a danger: the church could be “dwarfed into a sect.” A sectarian spirit characterized by sharply drawn lines, strong positions, closed minds, self-interest, and contention with other Christian believers was in  stark contrast to Pidgeon’s “New Testament church”: Gospelcentred, loyal to the truth, open-minded, tolerant, comprehensive, interested in other religious groups and the whole community, offering “a vital experience” of religion and a “clear-cut message of salvation.” Pidgeon’s sermon reiterated the United Church’s commitment to its evangelical past while distinguishing it from what he called “modern Fundamentalism.” Allegations that the United Church was apostate and creedless were perhaps still in his mind as he complained, “If you go beyond them [the fundamentalists], you will be disowned, and your place among the faithful forfeited.”1 The theological issues raised during the church union controversy continued to vex the United Church during the interwar years. It came as no surprise that its expectations of the coming Kingdom

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differed markedly from end-of-the-world scenarios preached by many fundamentalists.2 What was just as unsettling – and likely more perplexing in the long run – were new controversies on the horizon. Making its way to Canada from the United States and continental Europe was a revolt within the ranks of early twentieth-century liberalism that took various forms. Many younger critics identified themselves as neo-orthodox, Christian realists, or Barthians. Still others turned to natural theology or to a secular brand of humanism that not only competed with religion but also was viewed by some as a religion. At stake for the United Church in these debates was its conviction that Christianity was both personal and social in character, formed in fellowship, and practiced in the course of everyday life. Decades after the United Church was inaugurated, a new generation of leaders would still praise as wise the decision not to separate moral and social concerns from evangelism, as many of their denominational counterparts in the United States had done by 1925. The United Church aimed instead to focus on ‘souls’ as well as ‘the social order’; its people, so it was hoped, would become sociable souls.3 The United Church faced the challenge of communicating this message to people who had experienced the end of a world war, a burst of prosperity, and economic collapse in little more than a decade. Popular culture celebrated the passing of older mores and values. And yet some historians take issue with the Jazz-Age picture associated with the 1920s. Instead they find that traditional values and concern for preserving the past persisted alongside the prominence of novelty and social experimentation. “The post-war generation was less disillusioned than it was uncertain, less cynical than nervous,” suggests historian A.B. McKillop; it was “an ambivalent and tense generation living at a time when old and new forms co-existed uneasily.”4 That was certainly so in the United Church as it turned to its pastors, professors (mostly ordained ministers teaching at its theological colleges), and national church staff to deal with theological issues left over from church union while addressing fresh concerns. Pidgeon was among those convinced that there was a place in the United Church for both old and new points of view. Recalling the case of a minister who left his congregation even before union because he was a premillennialist, Pidgeon insisted that “there should be room in the

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United Church for men of strong evangelical spirit who take this view of our Lord’s return.” But, he added, the United Church needed social settlements, All People’s churches, and stately cathedrals such as Toronto’s Metropolitan Church as well. Each contributed to meeting contemporary spiritual needs, and “the one is as essential as the other to a full-rounded Christianity.”5 And yet becoming “full-rounded” was an elusive aim. To many outsiders (and, to be fair, more than a few insiders), the United Church was not viewed as sufficiently spiritual. Its approach to the religious life was what sociologist Talcott Parsons has described as inner-worldly, a category he proposed to counter the equation of “degree of religiousness” with “sense of other-worldliness.” There was a tendency, he noted, to consider one who engaged in acts of devotion or contemplation and minimized practical acts of social involvement as religious, while economic and political engagement suggested a lack of religious interest. Parsons traced inner-worldly religiosity back to what at first glance seems an unlikely source: Calvin’s understanding of secular callings and his notion that each person had “a positive assignment to work in the building of the Kingdom” in their “worldly lives.”6 An inner-worldly approach to piety that aimed at making sociable souls was also characteristic of the Methodist tradition. A capacious and comprehensive sense of individual salvation enlarged the importance of Christian service as an expression of the faithful Christian life, and was a widely shared conviction.7 While some historians have assumed that Methodist progressives were concerned only with changing the social order, William McGuire King argues that even for them the primary concern was “about the structure of concrete personal experience and about the emergence and preservation of meaning within the self.” Social service thus had a dual purpose: “to enable others to discover the personal fulfillment of authentic human relationships and to enable oneself to find a personal center of meaning.”8 The United Church sought to balance the care of souls with care of society. Its approach to lived religion tapped the root meaning of ­‘pietas’: personal duty to God and to others that included right relationships. Limiting the church’s role to “saving souls” smacked of “indifferentism” when it came to social questions, wrote E.H. Oliver. He characterized this approach as typical of Plymouthism (a reference to the Plymouth Brethren movement that had influenced modern

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fundamentalism). Nor did the United Church and other major Protestant churches attempt to “pervade all life, have hospitals, schools, everything of its own, all dominated by its religious view of life,” an attitude that Oliver claimed to have observed among Catholics in Saskatchewan, where he served as principal of St Andrew’s College. Its social engagement differed too from either social humanitarianism, which inadequately emphasized the worth of individuals by submerging them “in the interests of the whole,” or philosophical idealism, which similarly treated human nature “largely in relation to its ultimate significance.”9 For Oliver, the individual was still the key to social transformation, and the church’s greatest social service would always be “to create men, kindled with the passion for the good of their fellows, strengthened by Divine might in their inner man.” But while regenerating individuals was the most important task, the church’s work was not complete unless the persons it influenced engaged in “fighting against social evils, Christianizing all human relations, establishing social justice, outlawing War, and crusading for God’s Kingdom.”10 Whether branded as conservative, moderate, or radical, members of the United Church generally concurred: there was a moral dimension to community life that they and their newly organized church were uniquely positioned to shape. They were inclined to suppose that the world could be made more hospitable to the principles of the Kingdom of God. Many whose politics differed from J.S. Woodsworth’s still would have said “amen” to his assertion that to pray “thy kingdom come” did not refer to “some future state in some far off world, and not in some vague way all over the universe, but thy kingdom come right here in Canada, in Manitoba, in Winnipeg, in Brownsville, in my own township.”11 The United Church took as a given that its members belonged not only to congregations but also to families and communities. Its piety was thus civic-oriented, formed in the web of associations both in and beyond the congregation. In its ranks were such prominent public figures as novelist Nellie McClung, politician Newton Wesley Rowell, and newspaper publisher Joseph Atkinson. Countless other men and women in local congregations were active in their neighbourhoods, their understanding of ‘being United’ extending to homemaking, volunteering for community service, and supporting civic organizations, as well as gathering for public worship and other church-sponsored events. Their activities were intertwined with

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participation in the life of the wider community, and hence were more difficult to see as religiously motivated than were the devotional practices of those who drew a more distinct line between faith and civic engagement. Casting this social bent of the United Church’s piety as ‘evangelical’ – even if qualified as a liberal variant – proved easier said than done. No matter how often the word was used in its programs and policies, the United Church seemed unable to satisfy those who looked for emphasis on a definite experience of conversion or particular doctrinal formulations as the true marks of an evangelical church. Part of the confusion resulted from different usages of the term. As a report from e & ss on “Evangelism” explained it, the word had initially been used in the sixteenth century to refer to Protestants, then later to promoters of the “Evangelical quickening” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (which had profoundly influenced all of the uniting traditions). However, the term had been “revived near the close of the last century” to identify those opposed to the historical approach to the Bible and theology. Since then, claimed the report, this narrower use of the term “evangelical” had become a “party badge” by which to exclude Christians who were no less definite in their emphasis “on the character of sin, the atoning sacrifice of Christ, the redeeming power of God, the guidance of the Spirit and the authority of Scripture.”12 Fundamentalists considered the United Church’s theology as suspect on precisely those points. “Can nobody stop the use of these absurd terms, Fundamentalism and Modernism?” asked an exasperated J.R.P. Sclater, pastor of Old St Andrew’s United in Toronto. Fundamentalist beliefs were not fundamental to the faith, nor were the Modernists particularly modern, he maintained. Attempts to label Christians as one or the other were succeeding only in “chloroforming the mind.”13 R.J. Wilson, whose role had shifted from coordinating publicity for the pro-union side to handling requests for information about the United Church, complained that in the United States, “the fundamentalist press is sedulously circulating the idea that the Presbyterian Church (continuing) stands for evangelical religion and the United Church quite definitely for a surrender of the evangelical position.”14 He perhaps detected the meddling of J. Gresham Machen, who continued his ­attacks on the United Church after 1925. When invited to speak at Knox Presbyterian in Toronto and MacVicar Memorial Presbyterian in Montreal in 1926, Machen delivered a popular sermon that he had

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preached and published in the United States, which linked those he castigated as modernists to past Christian heresies.15 Unwilling to cede exclusive use of the word to either the Presbyterians or the fundamentalists, the United Church vigorously defended its own understanding of what it meant to be evangelical. It countered by insisting that to be evangelical did not oblige one to adopt the theological formulations of the gospel message propounded by fundamentalism. Indeed, the editors of the Canadian Journal of Religious Thought (most of them connected with the United Church) were convinced that the days of fundamentalism were numbered: “it can only live on in uninformed and unreflecting minds.”16 Another editorial characterized it as imported propaganda and a barren approach to the study of the Bible. Their confident conclusion was that “Jesus and His truth have nothing to fear from a grave scientific enquiry. They have everything to fear from credulity, scribal ingenuity, unbrotherly temper and gross slandering of the scholarly institutions of the land.”17 While insisting that the United Church was evangelical in its theology, there was still uncertainty about the effectiveness of old methods of evangelism, particularly revivalism, once thought to hold the key to both spiritual renewal and social transformation. The same results could no longer be counted on, warned e & s s secretary D.N. McLachlan. “‘Conversions’ as we formerly understood them” were declining in number, he noted in 1928, a trend he attributed to a toorestrictive understanding of what conversion entailed. Its connotation in the past had been “the saving of the individual soul,” and still involved “the relation of the soul to God.” But the United Church had come to the realization that Christianity had “a social as well as an individual application” that involved not only a mystical experience of conversion but also a visible manifestation on earth of ­fellowship where each served the other. The once-popular revival meeting was no longer effective; its message no longer resonated with the so-called lapsed masses.18 Rather than mass revival meetings, worship services and other church activities were the key to e & s s ’s emerging understanding of evangelism. In this respect the timing of church union was propitious. The church itself was a “transmitter of religion and the mother of saints,” and it was there that the “super-personal urge to sin” was met by a “super-personal organization of grace.”19 Gathering for

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public worship on Sunday mornings was the most visible expression of this collective experience of organized grace. The United Church immediately took steps after church union to encourage an ‘ordered liberty’ in liturgical practices that would make Sunday morning worship a demonstration of its common faith. Forms of Service (1926) compiled services that were already in use for Communion and other occasions: thirteen Presbyterian forms, four Methodist, and one Congregationalist.20 That same year, committees were struck to prepare a hymn book and service book. The result of their work was publication of the Hymnary in 1930 and the Book of Common Order in 1932. The new hymn book proved durable, more than meeting expec­ tations that it would form a bond among worshipping communities across the country. It was widely used, and shaped the United Church’s piety, worship, and outlook for over four decades, despite some early griping about the disproportionate Presbyterian influence, personified in Alexander MacMillan, the respected musician who served as secretary for the hymn book committee.21 To counter a tendency toward subjectivity, some of the more popular hymns were deemed unfit for public services. “Rock of Ages” was scrutinized but made the final cut because it expressed so well the “soul hunger” of Christian experience. The committee was searching for hymns that would cultivate “a right approach to the Deity” when sung by “all devout persons united in the act of worship,” rather than hymns chosen for their entertainment or even educational value.22 Reception of the Book of Common Order was another matter entirely.23 Attempts to promote its two proposed orders of service for Sunday worship were to no avail. Decades later those making the case for a new service book to meet the worship needs of expanding congregations following the Second World War rated it as “of its kind, excellent – but not very much use seems to be made of it, except for some of the special services.”24 One disappointed minister, G. Campbell Wadsworth, described it as “a root springing out of dry ground” because the denominations that formed the United Church shared “an extraordinary ignorance of the manner in which their fathers had worshipped and an almost pathological distaste for the ways of liturgical devotion.”25 The resurgence of interest in worship that many took to be an answer to prayer for spiritual revival was evidently not greeted with the same enthusiasm in all circles.

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The tepid reception of the Book of Common Order at the congregational level was evidence of anti-ritual tendencies that surfaced from time to time.26 Osbert Morley Sanford, president of British Columbia Conference, cautioned his assembly in 1931 about the growth of a “ritualistic spirit” that he feared was supplanting the “devotional spirit.” Familiar with both the hymn book and advance copies of the new service book, he gently chided the formality they displayed. The Lord’s Supper, which had begun as a simple meal, was becoming “an elaborate Eucharist, with very scrupulous doctrines about the minutest details.” There was room for spontaneity and freedom in the new church, he countered, and former Methodists owed it to the United Church to invite Brother Smith to lead in prayer or to suggest singing a verse of “O Happy Day that Fixed My Choice” (a popular hymn that managed to survive scrutiny by the committee). Doing so “might destroy a very solemn and formal communion service,” he allowed; “on the other hand, it might save it.”27 Sanford believed that the United Church would soon have to decide whether to be a prophetic church “preaching or teaching truth to the highest place,” or a priestly church seeking to guide people to God “by way of forms and acts of worship committed particularly to the care of ministers especially consecrated for such service.” While he recognized the importance of the priestly functions of ministry, his own predilection was clear: prophets were needed more than ever at a time when their preaching was scorned. “We appear in the movies as the most absurd and impossible of men. We are the butt of coarse jokes in cheap magazines and in newspaper columns ... If someone has a passion to do something heroic, let him preach the gospel to this age.” The Holy Spirit had often had to escape bondage to “so-called orthodoxy and regularity of order, and above all, from the repressing environments of worldly-minded and even corrupt [church] administrators,” he reminded his audience (made up mostly of theologians, ordained ministers, and church staff).28 Not all ministers agreed with this assessment. A.G. Reynolds made a compelling case for more emphasis on worship. With the United Church’s many rural churches in mind, he argued that it was false to regard the church as “an agency established merely for the good of the community, like the school or a department of public works,” since the church existed “primarily for God, and not for a community.” Reynolds was blunt: “We do need to strive for social righteousness; let us make no mistake about that; but we have been

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neglecting worship, and unless we learn to make way for God at the centre of our lives in the best tradition of Christian worship, our fussy concern about the social order will do little good.”29 He perhaps had in mind such Christian socialists as R. Edis Fairbairn. Alarmed by the preoccupation with liturgy among United Church youth, Fairbairn had argued that in the past, worship had often been a “real evil,” offering an escape from moral obligation. The substitution of interest in social worship for social righteousness verged “on religious treachery and moral cowardice,” he stated bluntly.30 Fairbairn’s fiery letter was one of several printed in the denominational paper in 1940, evidence of a continuing reluctance to exchange the freedom of the eclectic pre-union worship directories for the standard forms of the Book of Common Order. The debate over ritual, like the qualms about the old-time revival services, showed efforts to come to terms with an experience of God that was less direct than in the past. Public worship in the United Church offered a mediated experience of God through formal and liturgical actions. Its more ‘catholic’ approach was a striking shift from the immediacy of experience that evangelicals had generally expected, and reflected a growing uneasiness with the display of emotion as a mark of religious vitality. Walter Brown insisted that worship still involved what he described as deep emotional experiences. But he admitted that among the students he had observed as a professor at Victoria University, emotion was “no longer fashionable in religious circles”: an age “dominated by the scientific spirit which loved the objectivity of facts” had “no place for the so-called subjectivity of emotions.”31 In its public statements, the United Church tried to represent its theological moorings as having been shaped by both its evangelical past and its more recent brushes with liberalism. Even those ready to move beyond evangelicalism wrestled to retain both the personal and social dimensions of the Christian message. A 1932 report on the church and industry, for instance, described the United Church as formed by the traditions belonging to the evangelical type of Christianity, characterized by emphasis “not on Church orders and forms, nor even on creeds, but on personal salvation through right adjustment of the individual to God, and on personal religious experience.” The report pictured the United Church at a crossroads: “Christianity as we have known it” versus “Christianity as it might be.” Even so, attending to social ills was not meant to displace

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“ministry to personal religious life,” the report explained: the two were not in conflict, for “the causes of evil, of human maladjustment may lie in the economic structure as well as in personal character, and Christianity can only be made complete by the rectifying of both.”32 The Great Depression provided further evidence of the brittleness of the liberal evangelical accord, and forced the United Church to scrutinize the degree to which it could still be assumed that transformed individuals – in either evangelical or liberal terms – were the key to changing society. Could the economic collapse be the judgment of God, as some suggested? If so, why was its personal impact felt so inequitably? Why were those who worked in fishing, mining, the forest industry, construction, and transportation dealt a harsher blow than those in manufacturing, retailing, banking, service industries, or the public sector, such as teachers and civil servants? Even the weather turned against the Prairie economy, as drought ravaged the farms of Saskatchewan. In contrast, deflation was actually beneficial to people with continuing sources of income, who often found themselves better off than before 1929.33 The economic crisis seemed impervious to individual deeds, no matter how ‘Christian’ their motivation. To complicate matters, liberal evangelicals who were identified with what had been touted in the early twentieth century as the New Theology found themselves the target of a fresh theological ­challenge that drew its energy from liberalism’s disenchanted supporters.34 Heather Warren finds that between 1928 and 1932 “the theological tide in American Protestantism turned sharply from prewar liberalism” as younger theologians turned to neo-orthodoxy.35 That changing tide was evident in Canada at a conference held in Muskoka in 1931. United Church participants listened to W.A. Visser ’t Hooft, the Dutch secretary of the World Student Christian Federation, give a memorable address that was the highlight of the event. Those hearing him for the first time were likely startled to hear him recount how he had been inspired by the “Barthian revolt against loose thinking and the vagueness of liberalism.”36 Bidding farewell to the old social gospel was to become a regular theme in Visser ’t Hooft’s speeches and publications over the next few years, convinced as he was that American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s attack on utopian liberalism would prove fatal.37 The title of a 1933 Christian Century article by American theo­ logian John Bennett dared to ask, “After Liberalism – What?,” a

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question on the minds of many up-and-coming theologians. Bennett expressed the misgivings of his generation with an opening salvo that left no doubt about how he viewed the perilous state of liberalism: “The most important fact about contemporary American theology is the disintegration of liberalism.” It was, he explained, quite literally coming to pieces. It no longer enjoyed its earlier coherence and confidence, leaving many with a sense of “theological homelessness.” Like Visser ’t Hooft, Bennett praised Niebuhr for dispensing the European criticism of liberalism in North America in a dose “mild enough to be taken without too much risk of complications.”38 Among those who sent a congratulatory letter to Bennett was Gregory Vlastos, a young philosophy professor from Queen’s University. The piece was grand, he enthused, adding that he largely agreed with the way Bennett had “put the whole matter.”39 But for those still committed to the principles of the early social gospel movement, Niebuhr’s medicine left a bitter taste. His sermons and publications dismissed their handling of political issues as a “substitution of sentimental illusions for the enervating pessimism of orthodoxy.”40 He belittled liberal Christianity for its “pious hope that people might be good and loving, in which case all the nasty business of politics could be dispensed with.” Calling the liberal approach to social and economic problems politically unrealistic and religiously superficial, he claimed that their efforts would have been “less inept and fatuous” had they “less moral idealism and more r­eligious realism.”41 While attention has generally focused on the deleterious effects of fundamentalism and continental theology on early twentieth-century liberalism (including its evangelical variant), historian William McGuire King finds that a more serious theological challenge came from another source: religious naturalism.42 According to its proponents (which included the major process theologians), liberalism had not gone far enough in its rejection of older religious forms. For instance, process theologian Henry Nelson Wieman of the University of Chicago turned the traditional approach to worship on its head by emphasizing its private rather than public dimensions. The reader of his book on Methods of Private Religious Living was advised to “earnestly seek the best adjustment to whatever in all the universe he believes to be that which can help him most, even though it be nothing more, in his belief, than his own subconscious self, or his fellow associates in the group to which he belongs.” Wieman viewed public

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worship as a gathering “to help one another find God each for himself and in his own way.”43 Worship was “the time when a man deliberately undertakes to make the best possible adjustment to that which he believes in all sincerity to be the matter of greatest concern.”44 All were in need of ‘salvation’ by adjustment: “Every one of us, even the reformer who is so sure of himself and his plan,  must undergo personal reconstruction before he is fit to ­reconstruct society.”45 Empiricism was essential to theological naturalism, and science was its ultimate methodological key. The appeal of naturalism was further evidence of the complexity of undertaking theological reformulation in a cultural storm that was battering old landmarks. Those who were drawn to it saw science as a new ally as they considered the implications of the new physics and the theory of relativity for the Christian understanding of God and spiritual phenomena. In the 1930s John Line, then a professor of philosophy at Victoria College, was hopeful that a fresh approach to science, with room for a “transcending Cause,” would avoid the mechanistic dualism of the past. The writings of scientists A.S. Eddington and A.N. Whitehead had introduced him to process theology, which he saw as recognizing both the transcendent and immanent dimensions of God’s relationship to the created world.46 The president of the University of Toronto was less sanguine as he considered the challenges of a scientific world view for those teaching theology and other disciplines in the humanities. In his presidential address to the Religious Education Association in 1928, Robert Falconer observed that “when psychology in the name of science makes wide claims, philosophy, that ancient mistress, is almost put on her defense; as for the humanities they need apologists; theology appears to many as an antique.” Surrounded by material accomplishments, the average person asked no questions about the ultimate origins of life, and was too enmeshed in the world to allow the mind “leisure to ponder the imponderable.” Even worship practices were on trial, since there was skepticism about rituals that emphasized the mysterious or the miraculous.47 Like a canary in a coal mine, theological discourse was at risk of being an early casualty of the growing dominance of science. The challenge to Christianity was even greater when a secular form of humanism joined forces with naturalism. This new threat was the subject of a provocative paper presented at the gathering of world

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Christian leaders in Jerusalem in 1928. In it, Quaker philosopher Rufus Jones had added secularism to a list of non-Christian faiths as a new religion, singling it out as Christianity’s chief rival. Defined as an approach to life where God had no place (and often linked to the struggle for material well-being), Jones claimed that secularism had spread in the West and was sweeping the East and the southern hemisphere.48 His warning gave pause to those accustomed to considering the boundary between Christian faith and the secular world as permeable. Many progressives had thought of secular culture as the benign or even synergistic mate of the sacred. Now, not only science was promoting secularism; a new brand of humanism that was explicitly non-theistic in its orientation was circulating in academic circles and being popularized by leading intellectuals. One event that provoked theologians was John Dewey’s Gifford Lectures in 1929, published as The Quest for Certainty; another was the widely disseminated “Humanist Manifesto” (1933), which presented what its critics called a religion without God.49 The new humanism generated intense discussions about the threat that naturalism, even in its religious guise, posed to Christianity.50 Alarmed by its implications for Christian theology (and perhaps suspicious of Dewey’s influence on teachers), critics pointed to religious education as the fountainhead of what naturalism’s proponents were candidly presenting as the only approach to religious life adequate to the demands of the new day. Shelton Smith, an influential professor at Duke University, was dismayed at its impact on religious education, customarily the method by which liberal religious faith was transmitted. While some saw naturalism simply as a new educational method, Smith argued that it had given rise to a “reconstructed religion,” and predicted that it would either expand the meaning of religious experience to include any enriching human event, or lead to “spiritualizing” human value.51 Progressives in the United Church received the new humanism gingerly, recognizing its affinities with liberal theology. Their attacks left little doubt that the old alliances were strained. The Canadian Journal of Religious Thought carried a cautious review of Dewey’s Gifford lectures written by Line. The journal continued its coverage with a special issue that included assessments from some of the United Church’s leading scholars. While recognizing that the ­humanist shared much in common with the Christian in matters of faith and morals, Scottish theologian John Baillie (for a time a

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professor at Emmanuel College) pinpointed the issue that separated them: not whether we can find God or believe in God, but whether we any longer have need of God. He detected “something in the atmosphere of our popular philosophy which makes our age feel that they do not want Him.”52 Other contributors pressed for a new formulation of the faith that would prepare Christians to meet this ­alternative to theism.53 These theological trends were likely on the minds of those who prepared the statement on evangelism for the General Council in 1934.54 Their report urged the United Church to recognize that a crucial change in the contemporary context called for new methods of evangelism. Whereas, in the past, evangelism involved awakening faith that was already present, if only vaguely, such religious convictions had since faded. The certainties of the past were now only “spiritual intuitions” for some, and “alien if not impossible” to accept for ­others. The task of evangelism, while more complicated, was all the more imperative if the Christian message was to reach those who saw no need of God. Humanism was named specifically as an alternative to faith in God, appealing especially to “people of high morality and fine idealism.” In preparing to “conquer the intellectual habit that excludes the knowledge of God,” the modern evangelist was fighting against what the report called “poisoned air.”55 Some religious leaders seemed unaware of this new danger, optimistically interpreting the lively interest in personal transformation and self-improvement as spiritual hungering. What caught the attention of a number of United Church theologians was the absence of reference to God in that personal quest. Whether thought of as transcendent or immanent, God and not oneself had been for both evangelicals and progressives the key agent in transformation. A rival to Christianity was now on offer: self-transformation (or at least adjustment) that owed nothing to God. Seekers had before them a veritable feast of options, ranging from the highbrow to the popular, spiced with ideas from science, philosophy, psychology, and education. Self-help and self-improvement books were best-sellers. Secretary McLachlan was troubled by these trends as he prepared his annual e & ss report in 1930. He remembered the social idealism and optimism of the period just prior to the First World War and the calls for reconstruction that had followed. Appeals to service, loyalty, and sacrifice were now regarded by a younger generation as having

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drawn their older siblings to their deaths. Personal self-realization had become the goal of life, he mused, replacing the ethical focus of bygone days. Books on devotional life, applied psychology, and mental hygiene were read instead of social gospel writings; the aesthetic details of the worship service were considered more important than social service.56 Among those who shared McLachlan’s concerns was Richard Roberts, minister of Sherbourne Street United in Toronto. “Our great-grandfathers believed in God,” he observed, “our grandfathers believed in Reason; our fathers believed in things: and all these have, it seems, been found wanting. What then is there left for us to believe in? Only one thing – namely, ourselves.” As evidence, he cited the growing fascination with physical fitness, and a shift in interest from physics to psychology. There appeared to be, he wryly noted, no shortage of work, even during the Depression, for psychologists!57 Roberts was both fascinated by psychology and wary of its implications for religious practice. He was particularly critical of what he called the pseudo-psychology associated with power – whether willpower or mind-power, which he dismissed as little more than autosuggestion. To counter this “quackery,” he called for a restatement of the New Testament’s doctrine of spiritual growth: growth in grace by cultivating the qualities that St Paul had described as the fruits of the Spirit.58 Religious leaders competed with tutors of popular culture, with their different world view, much of it imported from the United States. The circulation of Maclean’s, the best-selling Canadian magazine, fell well behind the Saturday Evening Post (which advertised itself as “Canada’s leading magazine”), Ladies’ Home Journal, Pictorial Review, and McCall’s. By the time Chatelaine was launched in 1928 to compete with American magazines, the market in Canada was dominated by the United States.59 American-made movies were also popular. In the 1920s the middle classes flocked to the theatres, which had at first been frequented only by the poor and less literate. Attendance increased dramatically during the Depression years, peaking in the early 1950s with the advent of television. There were virtually no Canadian movies available during these years. Before the First World War, an estimated 60 per cent of films were produced in the United States; by the 1930s and ’40s, almost all the movies seen by Canadians were made there – even those about Canada! Canadian news segments were added to American newsreels.60

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Not surprisingly, United Church ministers were experiencing the  same challenges that Charles W. Gilkey, dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago, found in the United States: many people were turning to books, magazines, and the radio for religious instruction. Detecting a trend in the 1930s that would become even more pronounced after the Second World War, he speculated that “many of those who prefer their religion so, likewise do not go to public lectures for their information or to mass meetings for their politics: they distrust or dislike uplift at wholesale, and want both their education and their religion to their individual and private order.”61 For those filled with the spirit of the times, religious practices were no longer considered an expression of either duty or gratitude to God; their value was assessed on whether they were deemed helpful to the person performing them. Attitudes toward worship reflected this drift.62 Another illustration of the quest for personal renewal was the interest in the Oxford Group movement, introduced to Canada by Frank Buchman soon after the economic collapse.63 To some observers, the movement was an answer to prayers for religious revival because it emphasized personal transformation. But critics noted that the social implications of Jesus’ teaching were not part of its message (and in fact, there was not much mention of Jesus at all).64 While some attributed the movement’s success to its ability to exploit nostalgia for the evangelical past, the movement likely owed at least as much of its popularity to the new therapeutic spirit of the era. The discord the gatherings created among those calling for a revival of religion hinted at the threat the movement was thought to pose to the United Church’s more expansive approach to evangelism. By the time the Oxford Group movement tore through Canada in  late 1932, even those who considered it benign worried that it would divert energy and attention from the Joint Committee on the Evangelization of Canadian Life that the major Protestant churches had recently formed. The latter connected personal religious experience to home, school, work, recreation, and national life in ways that were considered appropriate to the United Church’s ethos.65 But even this broader approach to evangelism did not escape crit­ icism. Writing it off as “the last kick of a decayed Moodyism,” Richard Roberts (whose term as moderator in 1934-36 coincided with the campaign) expected it would be a flop. Highly organized events “seem to estrange the Holy Spirit,” he mused, and were at

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odds with Christianity because of the anonymity of “monster gatherings.” He feared it might “provoke a reaction that would leave the church deeper in the doldrums than before.”66 Evidently he had good reason to worry, for despite an impressive roster of organizers at the national level and a few successful rallies in cities across Canada, the outcomes of the evangelization campaign repeatedly fell short of expectations.67 Harsher criticism of the evangelism campaign came from J.W.A. Nicholson, a pastor from North Bedeque, p e i , who sardonically accused the Joint Committee of simply going through the motions of “giving the prayer wheel another turn.” He argued that personal renewal – even broadly understood – could no longer bring about social change; the iniquities of the day were “not in the direct human relationships, but in the indirect, circuitous relationships that we have allowed to become impersonal.” The Big Four churches (Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, and United) ought to be sponsoring an educational campaign to bring together political, industrial, and financial leaders to rectify the ills of social injustice.68 Nicholson was a member of the f c s o, a small but vocal movement that attracted United Church support after its founding in 1934.69 The f c so contended that the economic woes facing Canada and other capitalist countries were systemic; the shortcomings of particular individuals were not the cause. As economist and f cs o member Eugene Forsey put it, since capitalism existed to make profits rather than to meet needs, “a flock of archangels administering capitalism would be under the same compulsion, and their action could not be appreciably different.”70 If that were so, then emphasizing personal piety as the remedy for social and economic ills was misconstrued. John Line was among those drawn to Christian socialism in the 1930s, and like Nicholson and Forsey, he joined the f cs o. He too was uneasy with the preoccupation with individual religiosity that he was witnessing. He cautioned that prayer and public worship by themselves, apart from social self-abandon, would produce religious introverts whose moods would “wobble between self-complacency and self-commiseration.”71 Line blamed the “vast collectivization of human living” for rendering conventional evangelical teaching on the relationship between personal and social transformation less effective than in the past.72 He poignantly pinpointed its inability to deal with the new economic realities: those who had trusted and

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followed it “as faithfully as men ever did are destitute and hopeless; having been for years upright and industrious, they are now on the street.”73 As he watched the church organize retreats and special meetings, Line worried that religion had lost its way. To him it seemed that religion was “unable to recapture the certainty, confidence and directness which belonged to it in other days.” He offered some advice to those praying for revival: rather than assuming that religion revolved around “subjective moods,” they should instead commit to working “by all right means to establish God’s righteousness in the world.” If they did so, Line predicted that religious renewal would soon follow.74 Nicholson, Forsey, and Line were contributors to Towards the Christian Revolution, a collection of essays that drew a stinging review from Reinhold Niebuhr. Though glowing in his praise of the contributors as persons (“as promising a group as could be found in any church”), he alleged that they still assumed the socialist commonwealth was identical with the Kingdom of God – the same illusion that, in his view, had characterized the earlier social gospel movement.75 Reviewing the book for the New Outlook, Gordon Sisco, the United Church’s recently elected general secretary, defended the contributors on that score. The book’s message was “radically different from the social gospel of twenty-five years ago,” its theology “deeper, sadder, more tragic” than the liberal optimism of the former. “If we cannot keep such men within the fellowship of the Church,” he warned, “if we stifle their freedom to prophesy merely on the ground that they are radicals, then our Protestant religion will gradually fade out as a saving force in modern life.” Sisco was not without his own reservations about their Christian socialist agenda (for instance, whether a transition from capitalism could be effected by a democratic process), but he highly recommended the book: “Brother ministers and laymen, read this book. You may not like it, but you need to face up to its challenging viewpoint.”76 These new theological currents found both a critic and a popularizer in Richard Roberts.77 He admitted to what he described as an “insuperable dualism” in his own thinking that lingered despite his efforts at synthesis. He claimed to be content to live with two theologies that would logically seem to be irreconcilable: the substance of the theology of the creeds with their doctrines of Inspiration, Revelation,

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Incarnation, Redemption, and Grace in concert with such modern elements as the Indwelling Christ, Jesus as the crown of biological evolution, and Immanence as Inner Light. “I mean to be a traditionalist and a modernist, as far as in me lies.”78 He conceded that the range of theological options made agreement difficult, thus contributing to what he described as chaos in Protestant thought. With ­humanism standing at one end and Karl Barth at the other end, “Protestant Christendom is sounding every sort of interval along the gamut of testimony; and the trumpet as a whole gives forth an uncertain and unintelligible ground.” Nothing would serve the church better, he ventured, than the production of “a summary statement” of its belief “respecting the great cardinal matters of faith: God, Man, the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit, the Church, the Atonement, and Eternal life.”79 Those who had formulated the doctrinal articles in the Basis of Union in the early years of the twentieth century would not have been surprised by a call for a contemporary proclamation of Christian faith. They had urged that the next generation restate the common faith as its own. The General Council took up that challenge in 1936, appointing a commission to prepare a new doctrinal statement that appeared four years later as the Statement of Faith. In his last address to the General Council as moderator, Roberts threw his support behind the commission’s decision, hopeful that presenting the Christian faith in contemporary terms would counter the “strange and perilous gospels” of conservative “sects,” whose promoters were influencing those “not tutored in their own faith.”80 Toward the end of his life, and awaiting publication of the Statement of Faith, Roberts sounded ready to pass the theological torch. He was candid about the social gospel movement: it had inspired Christians to redress the concerns of the poor and disadvantaged, but had placed too much blame for social anomalies on the economic system.81 Still, he rebuffed the idea that politics and economics were independent of religion as “a gross heresy.”82 He seemed unable to situate himself comfortably in any of the theological camps. “I have no apology to make for the liberalism I once professed,” he insisted, while admitting that liberalism had “run its course – has indeed here and there run to seed in a non-theistic humanism.” The evangelical revival that he had known in his early ministry had likewise reached a cul-de-sac, with its emphasis on personal salvation giving way to a vague personal loyalty to Jesus

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barren of the power for ethical behaviour or creative insight. Nor was Karl Barth’s “extreme theology” the answer.83 Attempts to resolve the theological tensions that Roberts identified likely tipped the Statement of Faith closer to Barth than Roberts would have wished. Behind the scenes, personality conflicts complicated theological differences as pastors, professors, and national church staff joined forces to tackle the task of preparing the document. Early drafts show them picking and choosing elements from two presentations (identified impartially as Statement A and Statement B).84 The influence of liberal theology was perhaps diminished due to Ernest Thomas’s poor health; he did not live to see the final draft.85 However, his misgivings were well known to other committee members. The minutes of one of the last meetings he attended record that he questioned “whether it would be wise to make ­Barthianism determinative.”86 The theological challenge to the old underpinnings of civic piety that Barth represented was clear to all. Nevertheless, the United Church did seem to be taking a Barthian turn, with the Statement of Faith placing more emphasis on God’s transcendence and human sin – and less emphasis on a coming Kingdom that might be brought nearer by ethical conduct. The fifth article described “man’s sin, God’s righteous judgment, and man’s helplessness and need,” while the sixth affirmed God’s “redemption of man” through Christ’s victory over death and evil as “at once an awful mystery and a glorious fact.” The authority of the church and its ministry nudged aside the Kingdom as the Christian community par excellence for life together before the end of time. Sisco conceded that Protestant liberalism had held a “too-easy view of the reality of sin” by assuming that progress was certain. Barthianism had replaced the immanent God of liberal theology with “a God who is transcendent, whose Kingdom does not come by anything man does, whose supreme realm is the believers’ soul, where grace alone can operate.” Hoping to reconcile Barth’s doctrine of revelation with the liberal understanding of community, he was convinced that “we can have a Church with a strong spirit of worlddenial at those points where the world is opposed to the Christian way, yet world-affirming at those very points where society gives indications of becoming reconciled with the creative will and love of God.”87 Randolph Carleton Chalmers, who would serve the United Church as pastor, associate secretary of e & s s , and professor of

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theology during his distinguished career, expressed the dilemma even more succinctly: “Humanism belittles God; Barthianism belittles man. Neither the one nor the other can be a gospel of hope for our bewildered civilization, and so we believe they must both be superseded.”88 Reconciling these different theological worldviews proved to be as difficult for theological radicals as for liberal evangelicals. While some, like Ernest Thomas, continued to hold firm to the principles of the social gospel, some prominent advocates for Christian socialism had second thoughts. Eugene Forsey moved toward the political centre during a career that saw him make important contributions to  Canadian public life as constitutional expert and senator. In ­retrospect he was to assess some of what was said in Towards the Christian Revolution “and especially of what I said” as “very foolish, or worse.”89 Gregory Vlastos accepted a teaching position at Cornell University in 1948 before moving to Princeton University in 1955, where he enjoyed a distinguished career in philosophy. His biography, posted on the department’s website, notes that while he continued to advocate for a “radical social order,” he soon came to consider such ideas “more a part of his private than of his professional life; he never revisited these topics and, indeed, never again included them in his curriculum vitae.”90 R.B.Y. Scott, Vlastos’s co-editor of Towards the Christian Revolution, also left Canada for a time, accepting an appointment in biblical studies at Princeton in 1955 before retiring in Toronto. Aware during the McCarthy era that his earlier political views might be considered suspect, he was careful to point out that he had always steered clear of Communism. “I no longer hold – if I ever did – that the social problem requires simply the replacement of capitalism by a kind of Christian socialism; as I have grown older I have realized better the complexities and ambiguities of the situation. In any case, you may be sure that I will not embarrass the University by ill-­ considered utterances or writings. As an alien resident I would keep strictly out of any political activities, for which in any case I would have little inclination.”91 Yet something of Scott’s earlier vision of a Christian social order was captured in lyrics that found an enduring place in hymnody.92 One of them, “O World of God,” set to the same tune as the hymn “Jerusalem,” a c c f favourite, poignantly pictured the human dilemma and the Christian hope:

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O world where human life is lived, So strangely mingling joy and pain, So full of evil and of good, So needful that the good shall reign! It is this world that God has loved, And goodness was its Maker’s plan, The promise of God’s triumph is A humble birth in Bethlehem.93 John Line’s theological journey more closely typified the tensions that the United Church was experiencing. During the Depression, Line drew public attention when he championed a controversial anti-capitalist resolution passed by Toronto Conference in 1933. A flattering article in Saturday Night about the incident reviewed his career: his crossing from Britain to Newfoundland at the age of eighteen as a shy young Methodist missionary; his studies at Victoria College; a teaching position at Mount Allison in philosophy and economics; and a return to Victoria College in 1929 after a brief stint at Pine Hill in Halifax. “Has the final stage in his development been reached?” asked the writer.94 As it turned out, no. Ten years later Line would move again, professionally and, it seems, theologically: he was still a professor at  Victoria University, but now teaching systematic theology and philosophy of religion at its theological college. He remained at Emmanuel College until his retirement in 1953. Line’s shifts in thinking while serving on the Commission on Christian Faith likely tipped the Statement of Faith in a more Barthian direction.95 The continuation in his spiritual trek toward a more liturgical expression of piety was reflected in his final publication in 1959, The Doctrine of the Christian Ministry, a study of the authority of the church and its sacraments.96 Much in demand as a committee member, Line was involved in  preparing the reports on “Evangelism” and “Christianizing the Social Order” that e & ss presented to the General Council in 1934. Line later expressed the sentiments of those who wanted to save both souls and the social order: “If I could go off to the woods and spend a year there with no telephone and write a book, or try to, I think the book I would write would be an attempt to combine the ideas of these two Reports and put them into one document. I think such a book is very badly needed, and I don’t know anything more

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important in connection with the work of the Board [e & s s ] than this question of how to co-ordinate these Reports.”97 A memorial statement presented to Toronto Conference to mark his death in 1970 described Line as “strongly evangelical,” one who “never lost sight of the necessary social implications of the Gospel.” No mention was made of the controversial anti-capitalist resolution of the 1930s. Instead, he was remembered for preaching on the street corners of Toronto during the Depression and working among the unemployed, often taking his students with him. Lauding him as one who epitomized the ideals of the United Church, the memorial summed up his life of witness and service: “He combined great gifts of mind with a compassionate heart.”98 Such an approach to lived religion was encapsulated in a phrase credited to American missionary Sherwood Eddy: a “whole Gospel” that did not pit personal evangelism against the social gospel.99 Yet this whole Gospel did not unite everyone. Writing under the pen name Candidus after the 1936 General Council, one observer expressed disappointment at the United Church’s timid response to economic problems. He contended that the reluctance to translate the gospel “into practical terms – ‘to serve the present age’ – came close to emptying the Social Gospel of all real content.”100 That assessment was perhaps too pessimistic. The report that had drawn the ire of Candidus actually claimed to be concerned with “man’s economic plight as well as his inward motives.” Its language was bold: “it must be our purpose to proclaim a whole Gospel for men and for the society of men ... Perish, we would say, the antithesis of individual Gospel versus social Gospel; perish even the distinction between them. We will evangelize with a whole Gospel or none, for none other is the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord.”101 That not all were able to rally around this call for the whole Gospel spelled trouble for Pidgeon’s “city without walls.” United Church people who were participating in church activities, raising children in Christian homes, organizing turkey suppers, or volunteering for community service were likely unaware of the theological debates over what it meant to pray “thy Kingdom come.” Being inner-worldly was a mark of ‘being United’ for the sociable souls who gathered for worship and other church-sponsored activities, volunteered for its many committees, studied together, and worked to extend the church’s influence in their community. The unresolved tensions that

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surfaced in the 1930s would return with a vengeance three decades later as the United Church considered how to deal with a resurgent fundamentalism, a declining neo-orthodoxy, and new forms of religious naturalism – discovering in the process that it was perhaps not nearly as modern as its critics in the 1920s and ’30s had claimed. In the meantime, theological friction combined with the growing appeal of the individual spiritual quest to weaken the sense of a fellowship united by a common faith. That there was a connection between faith and the conduct of everyday life remained a shared conviction. But a critical minority was more doubtful about the impact of ‘good persons’ on a social system that seemed resistant to change. And what if those good persons disagreed on how to bring about social change? Did the church have a responsibility to take a stand on particular issues, speaking and acting as the collective conscience of its members? Theological clashes were made even more complex by the troubling questions about Christianity and culture raised by the worsening international situation. The whole Gospel for sociable souls was soon sundered by  conflict that made it challenging to be united in either faith or fellowship.

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5 Christian Canada in a “New World Order” And one ought to consider that there is nothing more difficult to pull off, more chancy to succeed in, or more dangerous to manage, than the ­introduction of a new order of things. Machiavelli, The Prince

Many a Canadian would have smiled in agreement had they heard Lester Pearson’s reply when asked in 1941, “Are you American?” The diplomat who would later become prime minister answered tactfully, “Yes, I am Canadian.”1 Accustomed to thinking of themselves as ‘British’ in some sense, Canadians shared a continent with a country that claimed the name ‘American’ all for itself. A decade or so later, Canadians were less likely to think of themselves as either British or American; they were becoming simply Canadian. It was a small but telling detail of how quickly the Second World War erased old social identifiers. Although far from evident at the time, the 1940s were the beginning of the end not only of British Canada but also of Christian Canada. The political realities of the “new world order” that the victors hoped to create soon revealed the limits of Protestantism as a source of common values and a basis for national unity in postwar Canada. The war raised perplexing questions about the intersection of church, nation, and international affairs that lingered long after the conflict was over. The seemingly intractable differences between Protestants, Catholics, and non-Christians around the world – and even in Canada – disclosed the narrowness of the ecumenical movement’s vision of the Christian message as the basis for international harmony. The collapse of the British Empire, the rise of the United States as a superpower, and the growing diversity of Canada’s population as immigrants poured in during and after the war added new

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wrinkles to the old issue of Canadian identity and the churches’ role in constructing it. It was not just that Christian identity was found to be insufficiently universal to counter Communism; even in Canada a united church was evidently not conducive to sustaining a united country. The war was a destabilizing experience for the United Church. Its place in Christianity’s global mission shifted as it came to terms with the realization that its missionaries were no longer welcome in China and what was to become North Korea. Further, the movement of people during and after the war disrupted old patterns of interaction. Despite oft-repeated hopes for a new world order based on Christian principles, it was soon apparent that what had come into being after 1945 was anything but orderly. Even hopes that the United Church would evolve as the national repository of Protestant identity for Canadians outside Quebec were dashed by the demographic realities of the influx of ethnically and religiously diverse immigrants, many of them Catholic, during and after the war. The new Canada that emerged, so unlike the country that the church unionists had imagined, presented unforeseen challenges for the United Church’s work at home and overseas. A new world order based on Christian principles was a prominent theme at the World Conference of Christian Churches that met at Oxford University in 1937,2 and its theme still resonated with United Church leaders as they weighed their response to the grim international situation at their own General Council a year later. Delegates were presented with a report that reiterated the position the United Church had taken in the past: war was contrary to the mind of Christ and Christian principles. It acknowledged that some would read Jesus’ command to “love thy neighbour as thyself” as a ban on participation in any war, while others would interpret it to mean they could not participate in an unjust war. However, couched in language borrowed from the concluding pronouncement of the Oxford Conference was a broader and more assertive rationale for the use of force: “in the present unredeemed state of the world the state has the duty under God to use force when law and order are threatened or to vindicate an essential Christian principle, i.e., to defend victims of wanton aggression or secure freedom for the oppressed.” Rather than supporting only one position, in 1938 ­ the United Church recognized “the conscientious right and action”

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of all three, adding (under the rather pointed heading “The Way of the Cross”) that “Christians must be willing that for the world’s salvation their own blood be shed.”3 A year later, when the United Church rallied to support the cause of defending Christian civilization, it thus found itself in an uncomfortable position. Although many of its members supported the war, and saw it as an unavoidable response to Nazi aggression, pacifists within the church argued that war was not the solution to the international crisis. To make matters worse, both sides claimed (with good reason, if they had checked the Record of Proceedings from the previous year’s General Council) to have the church’s blessing. Pacifists kept this in mind as they called for the United Church to do more to press the federal government to provide legal services for interned aliens, care for child refugees from enemy countries, and ascertain non-military ways (such as reconstruction and rehabilitation projects) for conscientious objectors to serve their country.4 Despite the United Church’s recognition of conscientious objection as a defensible moral option, staunch supporters of Canada’s war effort were outraged when The United Church Observer published “A Witness against War,” a pacifist declaration signed by a number of prominent ministers.5 John Coburn, one of e & s s ’s field secretaries, tried to defend his church’s policy to critics by noting its similarity to the statement on war that had come from the Oxford Conference, “the nearest possible approach to an ecumenical deliverance so far as non-roman [sic] Christianity is concerned.” War was indeed sinful and violated the basic principles of the Christian religion, even if the cause was just. But the state was in a different position and had the right, and indeed the duty, to choose between two essentially evil courses of action. The resulting dilemma, as Coburn saw it, was that a church member was also a citizen and, as such, would have to make a decision about which course of action to follow. Both the Oxford Conference (expressing the mind of international ecumenism) and the United Church conceded that sincere Christian citizens could “come to opposite conclusions and take entirely different lines of actions.”6 As realism nudged idealism aside, the United Church offered ­practical aid to the war effort.7 It provided chaplaincy services to the enlisted men and women who identified themselves as members of the United Church in the Canadian Army (21.4 per cent), Royal Canadian Navy (25 per cent), and rcaf (31.87 per cent).8

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Representatives from its War Service Committee worked with the Department of National Defence to develop qualifications and classifications for chaplains, and nominated ministers for the positions. The women it employed were at the forefront of its ministry in communities where war industries and military training camps placed huge demands on social services and pastoral care.9 An estimated 60,000 women became active members of its War Service Committee’s units, which partnered with the Red Cross in supplying “comforts and necessities” to enlisted men and women.10 Deaconesses and wms missionaries often coordinated these efforts. Among them was Verda Ullman, who was sent by the Dominion Board of the wms to visit communities across Canada soon after her graduation from the United Church Training School in Toronto in 1942. One of her specific tasks was to support soldiers’ wives and women working in war industries by assessing their needs for housing, recreation, and pastoral care.11 Pleas from across the country for a “woman worker” came from places like Prince Rupert, bc, where a minister reported a doubling of the population in two years because of “soldiers, their relatives, Indians and other ship-building employees.”12 The wms’s Dominion Board also tackled what one newspaper referred to as the “delicate Japanese situation.” Its ­missionaries followed members of eight Japanese-Canadian congregations in British Columbia after their internment, hoping to  reestablish “the cultural and religious life to which they have been accustomed.”13 Even before the end of the war, the United Church looked ahead to demobilization and resettlement. War had uprooted an estimated one-sixth of the country’s population. Nearly 800,000 (including about 32,500 women) were in the armed forces; less conspicuous were the over 1.1 million (including 250,000 women) employed in war industries.14 Nearly all of them belonged to one church or another. The United Church was aware that once the war ended, adjusting to “the ways of peace and normalcy” would be difficult for many. As a pamphlet on the new tasks it would face bluntly put it, “young folks who came from farm life with its long hours, seasonal heavy work, absence of regular income and nearby attractions, will find it hard to go back to the quiet and drudgery involved in the noble vocation of agriculture.” Young veterans and war workers, especially female factory workers, were expected to be ‘different’ – at the very least, more mature – and this was of particular concern.

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There were fears that a woman’s place in society had changed. Young women engaged in the war industry “may have lost some of the feminine touch and ... taken on some masculine qualities.” Some veterans might return with deeper spiritual convictions, while others would be resentful, cynical, and emotionally traumatized. New opportunities for ministry were anticipated: psychiatric work with the emotional casualties of war, personal counselling on a range of issues, and a “new emphasis on the therapeutic value of worship.”15 While such efforts were considered by some to be minimal, critics of the church’s support for the war protested that too much was ­being done. They were especially shocked to learn that the United Church was urging its members to purchase war bonds in its name, putting the church in a position to gain a profit and retire its $1.7 million debt when the bonds matured. Unwanted international attention was drawn to this fundraising ploy when the Christian Century’s C.C. Morrison, ordinarily an admirer of the United Church, published a blistering attack in one of his editorials.16 The bonds controversy further alienated pacifists. Among those uneasy with the idea, which smacked to some of compromising ideals for financial gain, was R. Edis Fairbairn, the minister who had crafted the controversial “Witness against War” petition. According to Fairbairn, people were asking whether there was any issue upon which the United Church was willing to take a stand (and act on it) regardless of consequences. He suggested that the acid test was not “Will you die for your faith?” but “Will you cheerfully suffer financial loss for it?” For him, the real tragedy was that the average person did not believe in Christianity because the churches no longer seemed to believe in it.17 Others, however, still saw a constructive role for the churches. The social and theological plan for a new world order that had been bandied about in ecumenical circles before the war seemed all the more relevant once the war was underway. Invited as the speaker for the “Church of the Air” series in 1941, E.G.D. Freeman, professor and later dean of the Faculty of Theology at United College in Winnipeg, took as his theme “The Church and the New World Order.” More important than the conflict that had recently engulfed the world, he told his listeners, was the “conflict within the human soul.” The Christian church was called upon to take a side in this conflict and defend its values. He identified ten principles to which he claimed all Christians, whether Catholic or Protestant, should be

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committed, among them equal rights and opportunities, freedom, justice, social security, protection of the family unit, and stewardship of resources. Like many United Church leaders, he searched for opportunities to move toward those worthy objectives, insisting that “unless we regard the present war as a stupid and meaningless dog fight, it is up against some such background that we must see it.”18 In his first address, Freeman set out a case for seeing Christian standards as a way to counter the materialistic and mechanistic “paganism” that had led to war.19 The second address elucidated what was becoming a common theme for those promoting the new world order: the ties between Christian faith and the democratic way of life. Freeman’s God spoke to men and women “through the voice and pleading of high ideals,” and he was struck by the similarity of democracy’s values to those of the historic Christian faith.20 A supporter of the policies that the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order had favoured in 1934, he conceded that during the Depression no one had the money to provide the social services it had recommended. But with the war came a different view of the state: “never again will people readily believe that a government that can finance a great war cannot in times of peace somehow provide work for people. The cry that there is no money in the country will never be believed again.”21 His final lecture presented the implications of the new world order for the church in cultivating a public conscience and sense of social responsibility.22 He made a special plea for co-­operation in higher education: “All the kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ – and the most important of all is the kingdom of the mind.”23 The United Church exuded this confident outlook as it prepared for postwar reconstruction. A Commission on Church, Nation and World Order that reported to the General Council in 1944 oversaw an ambitious research project that included collaboration with ecumenical partners in the United States and Great Britain.24 Canadian academics, business professionals, and civil servants served as volunteer consultants, working either directly with the commission or, more often, in regional study groups assigned to garner ideas and information on specific issues. It was assumed that this local wisdom would somehow find its way into the final report.25 Behind the scenes, some troubling issues were surfacing. The philanthropic demands of the Depression had depleted the church’s

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resources, forcing it to cut back on social research. It was evident that voluntary organizations could not compete with the taxation power of government, particularly at the federal level, to amass research funding. What then could church staff or volunteers say or do to address social issues that specialists working in secular organizations would not do better? And what did the principles promulgated by national executives and General Council delegates have to do with decisions made by churchgoers across the country? Commission members disagreed about the means, ends, and even their own competence to address the questions. The United Church’s delegates to the Round Table Conference at Princeton Theological Seminary found other church leaders facing a similar problem: it was easy to agree on moral principles, but difficult to find consensus on how to apply them.26 A decade after the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order finished its work, the relationship between broad theological principles and specific social policies was still contested, leaving some puzzled and others disillusioned and angry. Dalhousie University professor R.A. MacKay put the matter bluntly to J.R. Mutchmor, who was assigned to serve as secretary to the new commission: the issues assigned to subcommittees were worthy of discussion, but since most committee members were not experts, he expected little would come of their input. His advice was to focus on the “moral, humanitarian, and probably a religious basis” of policies, and “leave to governments or other agencies the main responsibility of finding ways and means.”27 A.R.M. Lower, a well-known historian and United Church layman who served as a consultant to the commission, worried that the report might be viewed as politically biased. He critiqued an early draft as “an orthodox statement of the Christian position, followed by a social manifesto that does not intimately relate to the statement of doctrine preceding it.” Concerned that with a few changes, the policy sections might just as easily have been issued by “an advanced left-wing party,” Lower wondered whether it was the church’s business “to take its stand on too specific a social programme.”28 Influential commission members apparently agreed with correspondents who expressed similar concerns,29 as did the new coordinator hired by the secretary of General Council to wrap things up. General secretary Gordon Sisco had discovered, to his chagrin, that after five drafts there was still little agreement on strategy, and not all members and regional groups were equally reliable in preparing

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their sections.30 With the deadline for the final report drawing closer, he turned to C.E. Silcox, a minister with extensive background in social research and administration.31 Silcox’s involvement in international ecumenism included work for the Rockefeller-funded Institute for Religious Research in New York, which published his book Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences in 1933. Although Sisco asked him to revise only one section of the report, Silcox ended up restructuring the entire document, taking a global rather than a Canadian outlook as his starting point.32 Silcox’s conviction that detailed policy proposals were futile drastically changed the tone of the final report. It also put him at odds with R.B.Y. Scott, at that time still professor of Old Testament at McGill (and no doubt still remembered for his involvement in the fc so and as co-editor of Towards the Christian Revolution). In his role as research director for the Church, Nation and World Order commission, Scott favoured incorporating the findings of policy studies into the report, such as those prepared by the left-leaning League for Social Reconstruction.33 Silcox disagreed, arguing that minimum detail would produce maximum agreement.34 At eightythree pages (including regional reports and appendices), the commission’s 1944 report could hardly be called “minimum” in length, but its moderate and erudite tone no doubt came as a relief to those who had been fretting that the church might do harm by stumbling into matters beyond its competence. A proposal for a “Christian Charter for Man and Society” epitomized the mediating mood of the final report. It understood human rights as “not absolute, but conditioned upon man’s acceptance of corresponding responsibilities as a child of God and as a brother to his fellow-man.”35 The state’s role was envisioned as providing for “the mutual sharing of burdens beyond the powers of individuals, voluntary associations or lesser governmental units,” though not to “relieve the individual citizen of responsibilities” or take on tasks better handled elsewhere. Gone was the optimism about human nature and the coming of the Kingdom of God associated with early social gospel liberalism. “The Gospel must be brought to bear both on personal lives and on the structure of human relationships as a whole,” it declared; however, “the Kingdom of God in its perfection is beyond any attempt to give it formulation.”36 The commission’s correspondence indicates that the United Church was perceived as wielding considerable political clout, hence

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the concern that it be exercised prudently.37 Its ambitious report weighed in on such issues as national unity, economic policy, social security, family life, racial relationships, the arts, and education, thus lending support for social programs the Liberal government was proposing.38 It also shaped opinion in the United Church for many years. The Committee on the Church and International Affairs (c c ia ) that was set up at the General Council in 1946 saw itself as a creation of the commission, and considered the 1944 report “the basic statement of our church in this field.”39 However, in the supposed influence of the church on its members, the report noted a disturbing trend: “an underlying hostility that has arisen within the church towards the pronouncements of Church Courts in the economic and social field.”40 Evidently, some still considered such matters none of the church’s business. Even before the war ended, there were indications that the road to the new world order was unlikely to be a smooth one. The United Church’s own experience of dealing with diversity highlighted the difficulties of promoting common Christian values even in Canada. The predominantly Catholic province of Quebec was the most obvious challenge. A young George Monro Grant had once dared to imagine a national church that would include both Catholics and Protestants, but near the end of his life, even he sounded pessimistic about that prospect as he described religious differences in Canada to an international audience: “Even in cities where there is the closest association of Protestant and Romanist in commercial, industrial and political life, the two currents of religious life flow side by side as distinct from each other as the St Lawrence and the Ottawa after their junction. But the rivers do eventually blend into one. The two currents of religious life do not.”41 Complicating matters further was the lingering effect of a bitter struggle over language that had erupted among Canadian Catholics around the turn of the century. It was fuelled, Robert Choquette ­argues, by different visions of Canada, with Catholic anglophones favouring “a homogeneous British English-speaking nation with ­allowance for a bilingual French-Quebec ‘reservation.’”42 The war would test a tenuous truce between francophone Catholics in Quebec and Protestants in the rest of Canada, with English-speaking Catholics typically torn between the two sides.

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Quebec and the rest of Canada were running on separate tracks that only cautiously intersected, with linguistic differences rein­ forcing centuries-old hostilities between Protestants and Catholics. Looking back on a life of service that took him across Canada and around the globe, Lester Pearson remembered how the world once looked to a boy raised in a Methodist parsonage: “to transpose John Wesley, the parish was my world, geographically and in other ways.” To someone born in 1897 and growing up in central Canada, ­Quebec was “virtually a foreign part which we read about in our school-books.” The rest of the world was defined in terms of the British Empire – a view he assessed as “normal for the times.” The man whose government was to set up the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the 1960s admitted that Canadian nationalism “hardly touched us in those days since our teaching was concentrated on Canada as part of an empire.”43 Meanwhile, another future prime minister of Canada was learning very different lessons about his country. It was not a Methodist ­parish but a Jesuit school that shaped Pierre Trudeau’s view of the world during the eight years he spent at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal in the 1930s.44 Asked during those formative years to prepare an essay predicting his future, he imagined himself arriving in Montreal in 1976 to “take command of the troops and lead the army to victory.” He would then declare Quebec’s independence and form a country that would include the Maritimes and Manitoba. “I now live in a country that is Catholic and canadien,” he prognosticated.45 In an oratorical contest a year later, Trudeau’s speech on the survival of the French-Canadian nation argued that Quebec would resist the “fatal tendency to continental assimilation” because of “the canadien miracle”: a high birth rate that was far outpacing that of Ontario and British Columbia.46 Later he would leave behind his youthful separatist leanings to become a strong Canadian nationalist and “citizen of the world.”47 Such different understandings of nationhood were unlikely to be  reconciled easily. In January 1938, on the eve of the war, an ­address by Cardinal Villeneuve, later printed in Le Devoir, alarmed Protestants in Quebec with its talk of limited toleration for those preaching “corrosive doctrines” and spreading “poisoned seeds.” Some quarters of the United Church worried that this would lead to a “bid for the supremacy of the Catholic Church in matters temporal

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and spiritual, making Canon Law superior to that of the state in matters affecting the doctrines and aims of Roman Catholicism.”48 The gloves came off later that same year at a conference on “Problems of Canadian Unity” at Lake Couchiching organized by the Canadian Institute on Economics and Politics. Speaking at a ­session on religion as a facet of political conflict, C.E. Silcox addressed the simmering tensions between Protestants and Catholics. Protestants objected to the Canon Law requirement that marriages to “heretical Christians” (such as they) were valid only if solemnized in the presence of a Catholic priest. Particularly troubling was the expectation that children would be educated in the Catholic faith, a practice looked upon by many Protestants as a means by which “Catholics can overcome their minority status through breeding and thus gain political power.”49 Other thorny issues included restrictions on public criticism of Catholicism due to the church’s control of Quebec’s censorship board, public funding for Catholic schools, Catholic labour unions, and the Catholic Church’s extensive taxexempt properties. The difference between Catholic Quebec and the rest of Canada was put on national display in 1942 with the call for a plebiscite on conscription for overseas service. Protestants and Catholics generally agreed that the conflict was in defence of Christian civilization; their disagreement lay in the role of democracy. While Protestants tended to see democracy as essential to a Christian civilization, many Catholics in Quebec disagreed: democracy was often anti-Christian in practice, replacing the rule of Christ by the rule of the people.50 There was no sense of solidarity with Protestant social reform, which was met instead with suspicion, suggests historian Tom Faulkner. In Quebec, Christian civilization was primarily canadien, secondarily Canadian, and “most emphatically ... never British.”51 Protestants contrasted their emphasis on individual freedom with the authoritarianism they associated with Catholicism. They would hardly have been calmed by the notion of “corporatism” discussed by Quebec’s religious leaders, which featured an active role for the state in creating a distinctively Catholic alternative to socialism, fascism, and even capitalism.52 Little wonder that Protestant leaders regarded Quebec Catholicism as an obstacle to their plans for postwar reconstruction and Canadian unity. Mutchmor stated as “a fact” – not as a criticism, much less an argument – that Roman Catholic influence in Quebec was “a threat to any constructive

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post-war planning.” French Canadians had created “a state within a state, in which the Roman Catholic Church is dominant,” and Mutchmor assumed that its influence in Canadian politics was consequently considerable.53 The animosity soon spilled over into other areas of domestic ­policy. Not surprisingly, Silcox was among those incensed when Parliament provided for family allowances by passing in 1944 what he described as “the most precipitate and indefensible piece of legislation which a civilized government has ever ventured to pass in wartime.”54 He viewed it as a crassly political concession to Quebec’s demands, not a step toward a comprehensive and fiscally sound policy.55 He was not against social welfare – quite the contrary – but rewarding families with high birth rates was not the way to go about it in his estimation.56 He suspected a conspiracy to “push even higher the fertility of French Canadian women” by subsidizing them with funds from Protestants and non-francophone Catholics (whose birth rates approximated Protestants). The Liberal government seemed prepared to pay the price “if only it can maintain its hold on its darling Quebec bloc!”57 With the country at war, Silcox predicted that the move would be resented elsewhere in Canada, especially since Quebec was under-represented in the armed forces. As someone had said to him, “They breed, while we bleed.”58 That Protestantism would remain a minority in Quebec had long been conceded, but its dominance elsewhere in Canada had been presumed. In 1944, alarmed by the prospect of a demographic time bomb, e & ss set up a special committee chaired by George Pidgeon (a native of Quebec). A “strictly confidential” report to the executive of General Council warned that population trends indicated that in the not-too-distant future the majority of Canadians might be Catholic. Already some areas outside Quebec formerly peopled by English Protestants were becoming French and Catholic. While ruling out a “bigoted or intolerant anti-Catholic campaign,” the committee recommended co-operation with other Protestants to remedy the “lamentable ignorance” about Catholic beliefs, including Canada’s “distinctive protestant [sic] doctrine as to the relation of church and state, the church in international affairs, and the ­duties of the individual citizen.”59 The United Church took the lead in organizing an interdenominational committee on Protestant– Roman Catholic relations in 1945, with Pidgeon serving as its first chair.60

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Not all were convinced that the cradle would triumph. Among the doubters was general secretary Sisco, another Quebecer who had risen to prominence in the United Church. As the only Canadian invited to address the founding assembly of the World Council of Churches (wc c ) in 1948, Sisco introduced those gathered to the religious situation in Canada. Canadian Catholicism was not as cohesive as it was in United States, he explained, because “the French Canadians keep pretty much to themselves and are somewhat obsessed by the idea that they can win Canada by means of the battle of the cradle.” He expected this plan to fail, however, since industrialization would likely lower the birthrate in Quebec as it had elsewhere. In his view, the cause of ecumenism had actually been advanced by Catholicism – by provoking Protestants to unite in ­order to counter it.61 Apprehension about the growing number of Catholics, especially outside Quebec, and the threat to religious freedom they were ­assumed to represent persisted into the 1950s. Requests for clear answers to the question “What’s the difference?” resulted in a controversial publication by that name. Its catechetical question-andanswer style allowed the pamphlet to tackle the most sensitive issues head-on. To the question asking whether one type of Christianity was as good as the other, the response was frank: “No. Two mutually contradictory beliefs cannot be equally true.”62 The last of the twenty-five questions were reserved for the most contentious issues: “What is the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church to religious liberty?” and “What is the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church to mixed marriages?” Readers were warned that the “Roman Church” was a religious dictatorship that expected to control civil government in Catholic states. In countries like Canada where it was not yet powerful enough to claim that authority, “it is working for ­advantage and privilege and power in other ways until the day of ‘liberty’ when it can rule by sheer force.”63 As for mixed marriage, the conditions for granting a dispensation threatened to hasten that day, since the “heretical” Protestant partner had to sign an agreement allowing children of both sexes to be baptized and brought up in the Catholic faith.64 Though “the revenge of the cradle” persisted as a popular image of religious rivalry, ironically it was the open refugee and immigration policies that many United Church leaders championed that more

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decisively altered the makeup of Canada’s population. Quebec was not the United Church’s only or most immediate challenge when it came to religious and cultural diversity. More pressing was the church’s failure to appeal to the non-Anglo-Saxons outside Quebec, the very problem that the church union movement had hoped to solve by creating a strong national church for them to join. Years later, despite energetic efforts to broaden its appeal to immigrants, the United Church still drew its membership primarily from those of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Immigration continued to complicate the issue of Canadian identity. The vision of Canadian society as a cultural mosaic that invited but did not demand homogeneity gradually nudged aside the image of Canada as a melting pot of diverse cultures.65 In the 1930s old questions still dogged those who pored over census figures and surveys to assess whether some immigrants were more easily ­ Canadianized than others. John Cormie, superintendent of home missions in Manitoba, wondered how well the “material” being “poured into the pot” was “melting and fusing.”66 His study of immigration and population for the Social Service Council of Canada confirmed a widely shared feeling: the “fusing process” was progressing well with “North Western Europeans,” but those from “South Eastern and Central Europe” were integrating more slowly. He concluded that “those who are not akin to us in their political and cultural traditions should, as far as possible, be discouraged from coming to Canada as immigrants.”67 A survey of three rural areas conducted by J.R. Watts, a professor at Queen’s Theological College, gave the United Church even more to worry about. He detected only a vague sense of purpose in the United Church’s home missions work, especially when working among Southern Europeans. Was the aim to make them AngloSaxon Protestants, or was it to provide them with religious ordinances more in line with their own traditions? Watts knew that Saskatchewan Conference pastors had been encouraged to work with immigrants (and especially with young people) if pastoral care from “their own church” was inadequate. That directive assumed that home missions work needed to be “enlarged and pressed with greater vigor and earnestness if we are going to make Canada the Christian country that The United Church of Canada holds as its  ideal.” Watts himself sounded dubious about the eventual outcome of such initiatives, rightly predicting the challenge awaiting a

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congregation that found itself “contiguous to a foreign block expanding into territory once wholly British-speaking.”68 “The replacement of the old Canadian stock by the New Canadians continues to weaken many rural United Churches,” observed a Manitoba Conference report on home missions that described growing numbers of Ukrainian and Mennonite settlements in the province.69 According to the 1941 census, such immigrants identified with the United Church in larger numbers than any other denomination;70 yet the results were still discouraging. G.B. King, dean of the Faculty of Theology at United College in Winnipeg, made the startling claim that in Manitoba, “leadership, so far as the numbers go, has already passed from the Anglo-Saxon group.” Between 1931 and 1936, what he described as “the British element” had actually decreased by 5,621 compared to an increase of 16,698 in other groups. As these new Canadians moved in, congregations that were once “solidly Anglo-Saxon” and resilient faced a more precarious future. King was not inclined to abandon work with recently arrived immigrants, especially since conservative evangelical groups (which he referred to as “the smaller sects”) seemed to be making headway in some communities, appealing to those he disparagingly characterized as “ill-adjusted and starved personalities.”71 The short supply of ministers willing to serve in mission-supported congregations was reduced even more by the demand for chaplains for the armed forces. Although amalgamating pastoral charges was a solution to personnel shortages, it created a different problem by opening the field to religious competition, usually from smaller conservative denominations. Home mission reports noted the arrival of the Salvation Army, the Gospel Hall, and Pentecostalism. “On many of our Home Mission Fields, we find such groups already in action, as well as in the process of organization,” a British Columbia report noted in 1940. Commenting that these new movements were drawing “recruits from our own United Church congregations,” the report urged “a more determined effort to find wherein our own work has lost its appeal.”72 Even after the war ended, vacant positions went unfilled. The Board of Home Missions report for 1948 warned that the United Church’s work was “being taken over by others, who, for one reason or another, seem to have more personnel available for these communities than we have.”73 Other depictions of the competition were less charitable. For example, Newfoundlanders who were drawn to the Salvation Army and Pentecostalism were described as “emotionally unstable, reactionary, and older church members.”74

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Canada’s population was not only growing more diverse but more mobile. The Board of Home Missions estimated that at least 750,000 Canadians had migrated from one area to another between 1939 and 1942, many of them from rural communities to the city.75 Farm labour was in short supply, with many young adults moving to jobs in urban areas or joining the armed services. A report on home missions work in central and northern Alberta gave a frank description of what was happening in many communities as the number of farms sold to new immigrants increased. Families had moved there forty or fifty years earlier, organizing a church when they arrived. The parents were now too old to do farm work by themselves, their children lived elsewhere, and hired help was hard to find. When a farm was put up for sale, “a young Non-Anglo-Saxon arrives with the money in his hand to purchase the farm implements and stock.” These newcomers generally were uninterested in joining the church; to make matters worse, the previous owners, usually older pillars of the church, often moved to the city once their farms were sold.76 In response to repeated expressions of concern about work with ethnic minorities, the United Church formed a commission that completed its report on “City Missions and Non-Anglo-Saxon Work” in 1944. The findings of congregational surveys in prairie communities and visits to institutions that worked with immigrants were discouraging. The investigation uncovered little inclination (especially among those of Catholic background) to affiliate with the United Church. There was some success among Ukrainians immigrants, especially children and young adults. Those born in Canada were “tired of the candles and incense,” according to the pastor from the Canora-Buchanan pastoral charge, and “secretly aspire to ‘equality’ & fellowship with Anglo-Saxons. They like our Sunday Schools and young people’s organizations: to my mind, this is the key.” Yet he found their involvement hampered by “bias and bigotry among A.S.’s [Anglo-Saxons]” in his six-point pastoral charge.77 Urging the church to be “jolted out of its complacency,” the report recommended that a new emphasis be placed on “comprehensive inclusiveness.” It sounded a warning: unless there was “a change of attitude on the part of many ministers and people,” the United Church would be “in danger of becoming an Anglo-Saxon sect.”78 Some United Church groups took up the challenge. Educational programs alerted wms members, most of whom lived in racially homogeneous communities, to the inequality that faced racial minorities in Canada. Issues were presented in terms of Christian

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citizenship and tied to the wms’s own objectives, lending them an  air of indisputability. A series in Missionary Monthly on “The Church Woman as Citizen” that concluded with a two-part article on “race prejudice” framed the issue in terms of a w m s objective: “to create bonds of Christian friendship between our members and peoples of other races and other lands.” Winnifred Thomas described race prejudice as a problem at the international, national, community, and personal level. Urging readers to root out prejudice in their own hearts and minds, and then aid others around them to do likewise, she reminded readers that “public opinion is personal opinion.”79 The first step toward “curing” race prejudice, she counselled, was to acknowledge that it was unchristian, learn about other races, and acquaint oneself with their members.80 Appeals on behalf of war refugees added to the urgency of overcoming prejudice toward new Canadians. United Church groups were among those who took up their cause, speaking, writing, and supporting petitions for those hoping to resettle in Canada.81 Among them were Jews from Germany and Czechoslovakia who caught the attention of well-placed advocates. Silcox was aware of the dire situation they faced in Europe even before the outbreak of war.82 Convinced that economic fears were partly to blame for immigration restrictions, he presented a financial case for easing regulations: European refugees were “assimilable people” who would become consumers and build new industries. He bluntly noted that opposition to immigration was cultural as well as economic, based on fear that unless Anglo-Saxons remained the majority, “our whole British outlook on life may be destroyed if we do not encourage fresh infusion of Anglo-Saxon blood.” What was more necessary, he countered, was “the Anglo-Saxon spirit,” and where, he asked, was it more likely to be found than among such refugees?83 Their “intellectual standards and their understanding of and passion for democracy” would uphold British ideals and institutions.84 Ernest Marshall Howse was another who joined those calling for Canada to open its doors to refugees. An up-and-coming minister from Newfoundland, Howse preached two compelling sermons on the European refugee problem to his parishioners at Westminster United Church in Winnipeg in the spring of 1939. He deplored the hypocrisy of North Americans who for years had been “dripping over with sympathy for the oppressed people in Europe,” but now refused to help Hitler’s victims.85 He favoured increasing Canada’s

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share of refugees, quoting with approval the Canadian National Committee on Refugees (headed at the time by Sir Robert Falconer): “A nation which has the potential resources of Canada and refuses to help in such an emergency does not deserve economic prosperity; it does not even deserve the right to be called a Christian country.”86 Obviously alluding to Jewish immigrants, he praised those seeking refuge as belonging to “the most highly trained and gifted families in  Europe,” and likened them to “refined gold from a very fierce crucible.” Their only offence was to belong to “the race that gave us Isaiah, Jesus, and St Paul.” Suffering beside them were Christians who had “protested the paganization of the German race.”87 Missionary societies also took up the cause of refugee resettlement. The wms co-sponsored e & ss ’s petition drives. Its literature confronted negative depictions of Jews, such as their predilection for living in cities, by presenting information aimed at dispelling stereotypes – in this instance pointing out that in the Middle Ages, restrictions placed on Jews prevented them from owning or tilling the land.88 Such articles often tackled the issue of anti-Semitism headon, disclosing that the refugee petition was “revealing a great deal of anti-Jewish feeling,” and reminding readers that for many Jews the alternative to living in Canada was starvation in Europe. There was a religious rationale as well: “If Christian people turn their backs on the homeless, how can we call ourselves followers of the Christ?”89 Yet even those who agreed with such principles found them difficult to put into practice, and outcomes were modest. Constance Hayward, executive secretary of the Canadian National Committee on Refugees, admitted that “enlightened opinions had only limited effect” in convincing policy-makers that it was in Canada’s interest to admit refugees fleeing Nazi tyranny.90 While more local studies are needed to confirm it, one is left with the impression that in the United Church, there was well-intentioned talk, but almost no action of consequence.91 For example, a study of the Ministerial Association (mainly Protestant with some Jewish involvement) in Kingston, Ontario, and the Catholic diocesan newspaper suggests that relationships with local rabbis were cordial, but local concerns took precedence over international ones.92 Similarly, the United Church opposed (though, again, with little to show for it) the punitive government policies that abrogated the civil rights of those of Japanese ancestry, even the Nisei who had been born and raised in Canada.93 Japanese-Canadians had joined the

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United Church in significant numbers. Many remained under its pastoral care, sometimes accompanied by missionaries, after they were forced to leave their homes. Elda Daniels escorted eighteen girls from the Oriental Home and School in Victoria, bc, to the Girls’ Residence in Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, where their anticipated arrival was nicknamed “The Invasion.” Her charges were reportedly well received in the community, a feat that she credited to “the groundwork done by church leaders and school teachers in preparing right attitudes before our arrival.” Her mission involved more than attending to the spiritual welfare of the girls. According to Daniels: “We hope to show the community how truly Canadian our family is, and how the church is doing its part in helping the state to train Christian citizens for tomorrow.”94 But such efforts were of little immediate help to the Japanese, described by one report as having the worst experience of any group of immigrants to Canada.95 Their treatment belied the belief that Anglo-Saxonism was a cultural identity that was acquired rather than innate, with conversion to Christianity a critical step in the process; it did not bode well for either British Canada or Christian culture. There was more unwelcome news awaiting international ecumenism and those associated with it as they confronted the geopolitical revolution that followed the war. Britain, says historian Peter Clarke, “survived the war only to find itself a ghost of the great power that  had held a dominant position in the world since the fall of Napoleon.”96 The United States emerged as the ascendant world power, a change in fortunes with effects that rippled around the globe. Weakened by the terms of the war loan negotiated with the United States, Britain lacked the economic resources and the political will to retain its mandate in Palestine, which reverted to the United Nations in 1947. Its empire in India was lost to Gandhi’s independence movement the same year.97 Chronicling the details of the “liquidation” of the empire, Clarke sees the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 as a key indicator of Britain’s fate: though few had expected the Zionists to succeed, the United States exerted its considerable influence at the un on their behalf, and sided against the Arabs in the conflict. “In the end,” he concludes, “the British generally chose the Arabs and the Americans chose the Jews.”98 Although its placid decolonization process did not make headlines around the world, Canada’s relationship with the mother country

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was changing too. After the Canadian Citizenship Act came into effect in 1947, Canadians were no longer British subjects. Being British and part of the empire – the core identity for anglophone Canadians since Confederation, and touted as the linchpin of cultural assimilation of new immigrants – faded in significance. Arthur Lower claimed in 1952 that while old sentiments for the British Empire still lived on and found expression at ceremonial occasions, people probably knew “in their bones” that the old world was gone. “The average English Canadian retains relatively unchanged his traditional attitudes to the Crown,” Lower claimed. “But while he listens respectfully to appeals to the idea of the Commonwealth, he has difficulty, as with a long prayer, in remembering what has been said.”99 Less perceptible was the religious impact of this loss of “Britishness,” where Protestantism had enjoyed what historian Linda Colley describes as a place of “absolute centrality,” with Europe viewed as the  Catholic “Other.”100 Canada’s Protestant identity soon proved to be as shallow as its British identity – and was to fade away almost as quickly. The new superpower status of its neighbour further complicated matters. English-speaking Canadians had grown accustomed to using their British identity as a buffer against the rising American empire after the Great War.101 By the 1920s the United States had already supplanted Great Britain as Canada’s largest foreign investor; by the 1950s it accounted for close to 80 per cent of foreign ­investment in Canada. Whereas the British had preferred to hold railway and government bonds, Americans favoured direct control of manufacturing and resource companies; hence, their investments were more visible.102 As the pace of investment quickened, uneasiness heightened. Had Canada shed its colonial status only to fall under the control of another imperial power? The first report from the Committee on the Church and International Affairs (cci a) in 1948 noted a marked shift in trade patterns and warned that “Canada may find herself in the unhappy position of having to elect whether to be a British or American nation.” Although Canada benefited economically from its proximity to the United States,103 at times the American way of life seemed a more immediate threat to the Canadian way of life than more distant Communist foes. The drift toward democracy, rather than Christian civilization, as the banner under which the Cold War was fought added another wrinkle. The linguistic turn was at first barely

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discernible. In 1946, Winston Churchill, in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech, rallied Christian civilization against its Communist enemy. Louis St Laurent, soon to succeed W.L.M. King as prime minister, described Christian civilization in similar terms a year later, as one of five principles upon which Canada’s foreign policy rested.104 But in the United States, the battle against Communism was becoming linked to defending the American way of life, a cause that drew its citizens together as Americans in a way that superseded their particular identities as Protestants, Catholics, or Jews. The democratic principles of individual freedom and human rights became associated with a secular ideology that had no need of Christianity as a source of shared values – perhaps an attractive alternative once it became obvious that there was no common understanding among Catholics and Protestants (to say nothing of Jews and other religions) of what Christian civilization signified.105 This lack of Christian unanimity dashed the hopes of United Church leaders who linked the church’s world mission to fighting the Communist foe. Howse, newly arrived from Winnipeg to ­Toronto as minister of Bloor Street United Church, boasted that in the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries had been alone in calling for “one common and universal allegiance.” Although he conceded that in many places in the world Christians were a despised and persecuted minority, there was still an organized church in every country except Tibet, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia. Christianity was the only religion that could rationally claim to be universal since it was “unthinkable that all mankind will ever become Sikhs or ­Mohammedans or Buddhists.” Howse warned that, for the first time, Christianity was facing a dangerous world rival that aimed to be a substitute for all religions: “The authoritarian state, Fascist or Communist, is the expression of a competing world culture, utterly incompatible with the Christian view of life ... It is, so to speak, a black religion. It has not only in the most astonishing fashion taken the guise and regalia of religion, it aspires to take the place of religion.”106 What Howse failed to see was that the democratic state might also compete with Christian internationalism once Christianity’s universal appeal was found wanting. Many in the United Church considered the cause of democracy and the goals of Christian civilization as analogous. A pamphlet for aots men published in 1948 described the club’s intent to build a “Christian democracy.” It was imperative therefore “to create public

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opinion on all important issues, based on [Christ’s] life and teachings” as “t he c o nd i t i on o f su rvi val .”107 Women were also inspired by the democratic ideals of Christian citizenship. Margaret McWilliams, an active member of St Stephen’s-Broadway United Church in Winnipeg and married to the lieutenant governor of Manitoba, was a civic leader in her own right as founder and first president of the Canadian Federation of University Women and a four-term alderman.108 As she saw it, western civilization was facing a “deadly challenge.” A struggle was being waged between liberal democracy and the ideology of materialistic Communism. She believed that Communism would be defeated “only by proving to the world that our liberal democracy, which has flowed under the influence of Christianity, brings more happiness, more well-being to everyone within its sunlight.” However, the way in which this contest was being waged concerned her; she sensed that the “indubitable fact” of the Christian roots of liberal democracy was being forgotten. Instead religious beliefs were becoming merely “private possessions,” and there was a reluctance “even to bring the names of God and Jesus into our daily conversation.”109 Just as disturbing was the discovery that democratic values were sometimes at odds with the aims of Christian internationalism. By the time the wc c met for the first time in 1948, the language of ecumenism was changing in ways that hinted at uncertainty about its  assumptions of universality. At first the signs were subtle. The foremost ecumenical journal, launched in 1935 as churches prepared for the Oxford Conference, went by the name Christendom: An Ecumenical Review. With the founding of the w cc, it became simply The Ecumenical Review. The omission of the word “Christendom” clearly demonstrated Christianity’s more precarious international standing as a source of common values. More telling was the replacement of order by disorder to describe the new world that emerged out of the crucible of war. One of the four books published in preparation for the first wc c assembly was titled The Church and the International Disorder, edited by a group that included John Foster Dulles, a politically well-connected American Presbyterian. Dulles’s essay on “The Christian Citizen in a Changing World” drew the stinging conclusion that Christianity’s impact on the fight against Communism was at present “wholly inadequate.” If Christians were to play a role, it was imperative that their churches “have better organization, more unity of action and put more emphasis on

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Christianity as a world religion.”110 His hopes for the w cc soon foundered due to its reluctance to share his confidence in the American way of life as tantamount to God’s way of working in the world.111 The wc c ’s early assemblies steered away from granting the United States the redemptive role that Dulles had proposed, leaning too far to the left in his view, and leaving him wary of the political judgment of church leaders.112 Defending the individual liberties of the Free World, rather than Christian civilization, became the new rallying cry of those who agreed with him.113 The new dominance of the United States in world affairs was soon felt in Canada. For a time there was a continuation of the close collaboration that had developed during the war, and only minor dif­ ferences of opinion surfaced on issues of international security.114 However, the unequal partnership between the two North American nations was bound to cause resentment. As the Cold War escalated, Canada’s relationship with United States chilled. Tensions came to a head during discussions of the defence of North America. American politicians and military leaders seemed to be treating Canada as an extension of the United States. As Canada demanded to be consulted about the production and use of nuclear weapons, the United States became more secretive. Canada wanted to play a mediating role in international conflict as a middle power, but was treated as poor cousin and ignored unless it was willing to take the American side.115 A defining moment in the United Church’s assessment of Canada’s dealings with its powerful neighbour came in 1960 after news that the Soviets had shot down an American U-2 spy plane flying over the ussr. The ccia’s report to the General Council expressed shock at the way national interest had trumped the truth: the United States had been caught in a “flagrant, detailed, and circumstantial self-­ justifying lie” after proclaiming its “moral superiority so aboundingly.” The incident made it clear that “Canada has little voice in policy and no influence on decision; its counsel is heard but ignored; it is not kept informed.”116 The report raised a moral question: was the United States about to cross the line between defensive action and pre-emptive war, not only with the U-2 flights but also in its willingness to conduct chemical and bacteriological experiments? Canada had good reason to be concerned, since it had made testing grounds available for such experiments. “The affluent society drifts,” the report warned, and the committee clearly did not like the direction in which it was headed: “In a half-informed society, spoon-fed with the

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official half-truth, security is equated with secrecy, safety with more destructive weapons, survival with mass murder. What is there in this to attract the new African nations, the Latin Americans, the awakening Asians, to our side? They account for more than half the human race.”117 The Vietnam War would deepen these divisions. The changing world presented the United Church with a host of new questions about policies and programs it had once wholeheartedly supported. Those who championed principles of fairness and justice for refugees were torn, for instance, between supporting the establishment of a homeland for Jews and sympathizing with the  Palestinians who suddenly found themselves displaced because of it. Refugee advocates who had once worked on behalf of Jews escaping from Europe were accused of latent anti-Semitism when they took up the cause of the Palestinians who fled from their homes in 1948 after the war in the Middle East. The United Church found itself in the awkward position of supporting the cause of both Arabs and Israelis, but not fully siding with either, until the war in 1967 tipped a ­number of prominent church leaders more decisively toward the Palestinians.118 Among the early critics of the un ’s proposal to create a Jewish state was Silcox, described by one scholar as the “pre-eminent champion of the Jewish refugee cause in Christian Canada.”119 Well known in Jewish circles as director of the Canadian Conference of Christians and Jews from 1940 to 1946, his disapproval no doubt came as a disappointment to Israel’s supporters. Defending his position, he pointed out that Balfour’s famous declaration in support of a homeland for the Jewish people had also promised that nothing would be done to compromise the rights of the non-Jewish communities ­already living in Palestine. Nothing good would come of a clash of nationalism, imperialism, and ideology in this strategically important area of the world where three continents converged, he predicted.120 He identified another geopolitical concern: since Islamic countries formed a buffer between East and West, understanding their world was of the utmost importance for western countries.121 Though he remained sympathetic to the Jewish cause, his telling of the history of the contested land emphasized that the region was peopled before the arrival of Abraham’s descendants, and many who were not Jewish still lived there. A bi-national state was the solution he favoured.

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After 1948 the c c i a treated the creation of the state of Israel as a matter of fact; the refugees were the nagging problem. Its reports blamed the United States, the uk , and the u n as well as Israel for the  impasse. The Arab allies were complicit too; they had left the Palestinians in deplorable camps, noted one report, callous in the knowledge they had “immense reserves of men and territory, and of world Muslim sympathy” as well as the advantage of time. Arab states were urged to recognize the state of Israel, and Israel was advised to compensate the refugees who could not return to ­ their homes.122 The c ci a claimed to be avoiding a partisan position, hoping the United Church would remain friends with everyone in the Middle East.123 But concerns that the Palestinian plight was ignored in the mainstream media swayed them to remind the church that the Palestinians were bearing the brunt of the guilt of others for treatment of an earlier group of refugees: “The Western conscience was soothed by sending [Jews] somewhere else at bitter cost to less favoured peoples who have had to provide ‘living space’ for Israel’s immigrants with their own villages, gardens and homes.”124 Those who followed the c c i a reports and related study materials also learned of the bitter hatred of Israel among Arabs, a hostility that was nurtured even in the un – quite an admission, given the United Church’s largely uncritical support of that organization at the time.125 The c c i a was alarmed by the growing numbers of refugees worldwide, including 400,000 Jews forced to leave Iraq, Yemen, North Africa, and Egypt in the decade after the 1948 war and an additional 15 million refugees from Europe – equivalent to the population of Canada, as the report pointedly put it.126 Another unwelcome consequence of the “new world disorder” was the blow dealt to the United Church’s overseas missionary program. Enthusiastic promotion of Christian internationalism before the war seemed hopelessly misdirected as tangible missionary support withered for pragmatic more than theological reasons. As late as 1937, Jesse Arnup had claimed that the uniting churches were “providentially ... led to plant their foreign missions” in a way that brought the United Church “into helpful contact with the great races and nations of the non-Christian world.” Four-fifths of its mission sites were in Asia, and over two-thirds of its missionaries served in China, Korea, and Japan.127 Little more than a decade later, these same locations spelled disaster for its missionary enterprise as

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political authorities turned hostile to the presence of missionaries from North America and Europe. Bad news from the international missions scene continued as Communism swept away what was left of work in northern Korea and China, already destabilized by depression and war. The cessation of w m s -sponsored missions in North Honan was reported in 1948,128 and missionaries to China were evacuated over the next few years. With its Korean missions situated north of the 38th parallel, the United Church concentrated on meeting the needs of refugees who fled south; its Korean work became “a mission in exile.”129 The impact was devastating when measured in terms of missionary personnel abroad. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of overseas personnel plummeted as missionaries from Asia were recalled. The policy review presented to the 1948 General Council still claimed, “our missionaries contribute greatly to the Christian goodwill among nations, essential to ‘One World.’”130 Although the United Church’s role was obviously diminished, the demise of Christian internationalism was only slowly accepted. “The closing of doors in China and the disruption of our work in Korea are not to be interpreted as failures,” insisted a report on overseas mission policy in 1952.131 Phrases like “one world,” “partners in a common civilization,” “one mission,” and “one Church” were used over and over in making the familiar case for world evangelization, but less convincingly. By that time some missionaries were disillusioned Christian internationalists. Two young Canadian idealists, Mary Austin and James G. Endicott, met at a missionary conference in Washington, d c, in 1925. A whirlwind romance followed, and before the end of the year they were serving as missionaries in China. As hopes for Christianity as the basis for international harmony dimmed, they became convinced that support for the Communist party offered a better chance for world peace.132 Jim resigned from the ministry of the United Church in 1946 in order “to take an active part in the struggle for human betterment in the field of social and political movements,” activities he deemed difficult for ministers “unless possibly they happen to be on the ‘right’ side.”133 He continued to maintain that he was a “Christian Liberal Reformer” rather than a Communist (since he believed it impossible to be both). Mary was less reluctant to be called a Communist sympathizer.134 Together they weathered a barrage of criticism from inside and outside the United Church, including Jim’s vilification in the press as “public enemy number one” in

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1952 for accusing the United States military of using germ warfare against the North Koreans.135 The United Church maintained a missionary presence in Japan, India, Africa (expanding to the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia in 1953), and Trinidad, often in co-operation with other denominations. Shifting the focus to these locations brought new issues to its members’ attention. For example, articles and reports on international affairs often mentioned concern for Africa, and were critical of churches that supported apartheid in South Africa. The ccia’s report in 1958 presciently observed that Christianity was not the only alternative to ancient African tribal deities, and Muslims were witnessing to their faith in places like Malaysia, Indonesia, and the areas bordering the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean “with a zeal and passion reminiscent of the days when they conquered Spain and spread into France.” The Prophet’s followers in Africa did not have the burden of association with “the white man of Christian heritage.” The “missionaries of the Crescent” were champions of anti-colonial movements in Africa, a development that “missionaries of the Cross” were advised to note.136 International missionary conferences before the war had called for indigenization, but did not anticipate the conditions under which it actually happened: as the only recourse, given the hostility to anything that smacked of Western influence during postwar decoloni­ zation. A policy report on the wms’s overseas missions announced that what was left of its administrative authority would be gradually transferred to indigenous church associations as part of the changing relationship between home base and foreign fields.137 Ecumenical co-operation through involvement with the newly formed Canadian Council of Churches and the International Missionary Council, and links with the National Council of Churches in the u sa (successor to the Federal Council of Churches), became a matter of necessity as well as principle as United Church missionaries joined church workers from other countries in areas such as Angola and India.138 Before the Second World War, “doors are open” had been the missionary movement’s rallying call. After the war, the image tended to shift from doors to windows, from ‘entering’ to ‘looking in.’ It reflected a different attitude toward overseas work, one created by the political restrictions that missionaries faced. Wide Windows (1951) was the title of a widely circulated study of the history of the w m s , but even windows that were wide open must have seemed small to

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those whose expectations for Christian internationalism had once been so grand. The United Church’s missionaries and their families continued to play diplomatic roles during the Cold War Era.139 However, the hopes for one world bound together by Christian friendship were shattered. World events belied the confidence that Christianity could provide a basis for cohesion in Canada, let alone the rest of the world. The church union movement had been launched at a time when it was still widely assumed that religion enhanced shared values and encouraged social responsibility. Spiritual ideals were a source of social cohesion. The implicit assimilation in the United Church’s search for a common faith had been reinforced by prevailing cultural assumptions about nation-building. Although early twentieth-century Canada was in reality far from culturally monolithic, appeals to the Anglo-Saxon ideals of the British Empire and the Christian civilization associated with it held the promise of a common identity that could be acquired, absorbed, and passed on to the next generation. Christianizing the social order was in that sense an inclusive goal. The challenge of diversity – both religious and racial – sounded a knell for the aspirations that had energized those who founded the United Church. The decline of Canada’s British-American identity (and the Protestant values attached to it) was neither necessarily secular nor antithetical to Christianity. Yet it coincided with the end of the British Empire and the beginning of the end of Christendom in both Britain and Canada. After the Second World War, Canada stepped hesitantly toward a new world where liberal democracy was viewed as the source of universal values. No longer was Christianity as confidently assumed to be a foundation for either international harmony or national cohesion.

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6 Calling Postwar Canada to Christ Gl e nd ower I can call spirits from the vasty deep. H o t s p ur Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I

“The Hidden Failure of Our Churches” was how the Maclean’s cover story in the 25 February 1961 issue announced the startling findings uncovered in its survey of churchgoers. Canadians had been attending religious services in record numbers for over a decade, and the United Church was among the churches enjoying the statistical windfall. “Amazing” was a word that cropped up often as its growth met and even exceeded expectations. This long-awaited revival of  religious interest begged the question: how much influence did the churches really exert on people’s lives once the Sunday morning services were over? Maclean’s decided to ask. It hired a firm to conduct a survey (described as “the first of its kind”) of the residents of Guelph, Ontario.1 The results so astonished veteran journalist Ralph Allen that he retraced the trail to confirm the findings for himself. Most of those surveyed said they believed in God and thought of the church in much the same terms as had their forebears, but admitted they were not guided by its teaching in their everyday lives. While 70 per cent of Protestants (and over 90 per cent of Catholics) attended church at least once a month, only one in five claimed that their behaviour had been influenced as a result. More specific inquiries about the conduct of those surveyed supported that finding. Among Protestants, church attendance had limited impact on decisions about the use of alcohol (11.4 per cent); birth control (5 per cent); sexual behaviour (2.5 per cent); political decisions (6.6 per cent);

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public causes and organizations (12.5 per cent); and business conduct (20 per cent). Catholic teaching seemed to have even less influence on behaviour with two exceptions: birth control (21 per cent) and sexual behaviour (11 per cent). Only 6 per cent of Catholics said the church influenced their business conduct, and the impact on political decisions was an astonishingly low 3 per cent.2 At least in Guelph, Catholics appeared not to be priest-ridden – perhaps something of a consolation to Protestants as they read an article about the soon-to-be-released census figures alongside the main story: “The Swelling Stream of Catholicism: Will It Soon Be Our Majority Faith?”3 Religious leaders interviewed to discuss the survey seemed less surprised by the results than Allen, but there was a mood of apprehension among them. Former United Church moderator Angus MacQueen described the state of organized religion in Canada in stinging terms: churches in general were too preoccupied with denominational programs, congregational budgets, and buildings; they were “too comfortable and too well adjusted to the status quo, and too ready to equate it with the Kingdom of God on earth.” The church was “unfit for the tasks of the hour” and becoming irrelevant in the face of the “real stuff of life,” he warned, and was instead “the feeble guardian of personal decency and the fount of tranquility and optimism.” J.R. Mutchmor, secretary of the Board of e & s s and well known for his colourful quips, summed up the uneasiness of many in his denomination even as they watched it grow: “I believe the United Church stands in a slippery place because it is becoming a clubby, chubby Church.”4 Critics had once scorned the United Church as a “political club” that was more interested in moral and social reform than in personal faith. The survey suggested a different and more disturbing possibility: a church that was no different from the rest, and whose statistical health masked failure to influence its own members. Becoming a “clubby, chubby church” redefined the meaning of “social” in United Church parlance. Rather than too much social gospel, it seemed a case of not enough – or more to the point, a disturbingly narrow notion of “social” that ran the risk of simply reflecting rather than challenging the status quo. This was a diminished understanding of the United Church’s mission as understood by its founding generation. In its stead was a more insular and inward-looking gathering of the faithful, whose religious life was identified in terms of what

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happened inside the building but inconsequential beyond it. With the fraying of connections between the church and the broader community, the “larger fellowship” that the founders had hoped to build suddenly appeared much smaller. A different future for the United Church had been envisaged not only by the founders but also by those who laid the ambitious plans for a Forward Movement to create a new world order after the war. Programs and publications, including the 1940 Statement of Faith in pamphlet form and various devotional resources related to it, assumed that the personal faith of its members had public consequences for community-building both locally and nationally. The new catechism’s answer to the question “What is the task of the Church?” still identified social engagement as central to its mission: “The Church is called to worship God, to watch over and care for all within her fellowship, to preach the Gospel to all mankind, to minister to the needy, to wage war on evil, and to strive for right relations among men.”5 This conviction was shared across a broad theological spectrum, including those whose enthusiasm for the social gospel was tepid at best. Among the latter was Richard Davidson, principal of Emmanuel College and chair of the group that put together the catechism. Writing for Saturday Night in 1944, with the catechism hot off the press, he admitted that the priority after union had been “to get the machine to run smoothly and do the work it was devised to do.” Davidson sounded relieved that the founding generation had been otherwise engaged. “A blight had fallen on theology” during the nineteenth century, he contended, almost as if human success and prosperity had “lulled the Most High to sleep,” and “the Social Gospel flourished in place of the historic Gospel.” But in the last two decades things had changed: the Most High had “awaked and got on His feet again.” Yet even Davidson identified the social implications of the gospel as central to the mission of the United Church, naming as its “chief innovation” its affirmation of “man’s duty to man.” There was no sphere of life – political, social, or economic – to which Christianity was indifferent, although Davidson warned the church not to go beyond its competence in statesmanship and trade, matters that were best left to “individual churchmen.”6 All in all, the United Church appeared to have made remarkable progress, erasing the concerns of the 1930s about its survival. As he

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assessed social trends after the war, sociologist S.D. Clark described religion in robust terms. Canada “has been, and remains, a fundamentally religious nation,” he observed.7 Church union had strengthened Protestantism enormously in his estimation – to the degree that “the influence of organized religion in the country has perhaps never been stronger.” So strong were Canada’s churches that he doubted whether a political party could survive an open attack on them.8 Statistics showed the United Church to be a healthy institution, equal to or surpassing the growth of other Protestant churches in numerical terms.9 Outside observers concurred. The United Church was a success story, or so it seemed. It could put effective pressure on federal and provincial governments to provide services that churches and other philanthropic agencies could not afford.10 Its civic piety was respected, even if considered a tad self-righteous by some. It was keeping a close eye on Canada’s spiritual frontiers, enthused editor Harold E. Fey to readers of the Christian Century following his attendance at the General Council in 1956. In fact, the American added, no U.S. church assembly provided “a comparable sense of the church struggling for the soul of the nation.” He was particularly impressed by the calibre of the discussion surrounding the abolishment of capital punishment, and the fact that the United Church’s “consistent effort to link conversion and conscience, the saving of souls and the saving of society, is producing really responsible Christian leadership.”11 Yet a curious disquiet could be detected among those who knew the United Church best. Their experience suggested that although to many the church symbolized continuity and stability, the reality was otherwise. The old patterns of interaction among church, family, and community were being disrupted. The threat that modern culture posed to the church was a theme regularly sounded by seasoned ministers, professors, and church executives as counterpoint to the encouraging statistics. They fretted that the United Church (and indeed Western Christianity) was entering uncharted territory, cautioning that the challenges facing Christianity were social and cultural as well as moral and spiritual. Complicating the familiar tension between the personal and social dimensions of faith was what e& s s ’s associate secretary R.C. Chalmers called a “third front”: culture was subtly undermining the gospel.12 He warned that Christianity was in danger of being con­ sidered an interest or hobby irrelevant to everyday life, creating a

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situation that he claimed was unique in history in its complexity, breadth, comprehensiveness, and “anti-spiritual nature.”13 John Line likewise sought to disabuse theologians of the illusion that they were still living in a Christian world. He wondered whether Western civilization could any longer be called Christian. Writing for the international readership of Theology Today in 1951, he urged readers to prepare to make a “basic re-presentation of Christianity to a world near the edge of being void of it.” His prediction was that the general public would soon have no interest in Christian truth. To counter the coming cultural shift, he urged the church to emphasize “the primal truths by which Christianity is identifiable as Christian.”14 The venerable George Pidgeon agreed that a cultural crisis was looming, and the consequences of inaction dire. He warned that if the United Church failed to intervene in time, it would “be unable to enter at a later date.” It needed to follow people to the new suburbs and settlements if it expected to hold “a place in their lives and guide the use of their power.” To support his case, Pidgeon spoke of the de-Christianization of Europe, a phrase used by one of the presidents of the wc c who had reportedly said that Europe had “in great part become pagan again” – still comprised of many Christians but no longer consisting of Christian nations. It was a pessimistic assessment, Pidgeon admitted, that “must make us pause.”15 Perhaps this explains why a church so often accused of being liberal and even modernist in its theology was decidedly reserved in its embrace of contemporary culture. Many of its leaders lashed out against popular forms of entertainment, sometimes pejoratively described as pagan, that competed with art forms more closely associated with the church. The media were suspect as well, accused of being cultural purveyors of paganism. Jesse Arnup blamed the radio for dispensing “an overdose of syncopated disharmony known as jazz.”16 The Commission on Church, Nation and World Order report went further, anxiously noting “the emergence of the new paganism which divorces sex from true romance, and gets a foothold in the screen, the radio and in prurient literature” – a list to which television was soon to be added.17 The first t v set arrived in 1952, and cost 20 per cent of the average annual income.18 This signalled a new social ‘problem’ for the middle class: what to do with leisure time, much of it spent inside the home or participating in activities controlled by secular agencies and businesses. Movie theatres, bowling alleys, and dance halls were old amusements that

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threatened the vitality of the church by draining it of its best community leaders. New attractions in government-funded community halls, centres, and rinks were tempting politicians to turn to the “liquor people” and other questionable sources for operating funds. Watching television or attending sporting events was more appealing to many than the church’s attempts to create Christian fellowship. “Large areas of our people’s life are a wasteland, suffering erosion from pagan – if not pagan, certainly sub-Christian – influences,” warned one minister in calling for the United Church to “evangelize unchurched recreation.”19 An impressive report prepared in the late 1940s by the Commission on Culture expounded on similar themes. With R.C. Chalmers as secretary and some of its most respected academics and ministers (including a young professor at Victoria College by the name of Northrop Frye) as members, the group’s terms of reference assumed that the customs, habits, and thinking of modern culture were at some points in tension with the Christian faith. Their task was to  ponder how to transform culture (including the media) to “a Christian pattern,” and to advise the church on its role in “the redemption of culture.” Published in 1950 as The Church and the Secular World, their findings laid the groundwork for the brief that the United Church presented to the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (more commonly known as the Massey Commission) in 1949.20 Erudite and ambitious in scope, the report was the work of a group familiar with the latest developments in the arts and sciences but wary of their implications for Christian faith given the impending cultural crisis. The report claimed that the United Church was justified in “believing that the salvation of souls must be understood in such a way as to include the cultural enterprise of men.”21 Recognizing the escalating importance of communication media, literature, drama, music, and art, the report offered Christian resources for making them more wholesome.22 It bemoaned, for instance, what was happening to modern music under the influence of popular forms of enter­ tainment: “The gushing fountainhead of American jazz with its propensity towards self-expression imperils the development of pure melody, enervates the artistic sense, stimulates eroticism, and at the very best generates nothing more than mediocre products.” Clearly steps needed to be taken to “arrest this wild orgy”! The report admitted the church was not blameless in the corruption of music,

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which had been treated “brutally” by people whose apathy and carelessness had failed to distinguish between the sacred and the secular in art. As for hymns, the number of “atrocious” ones was “astonishing.”23 The urbanization of Canada was adding to the problems of modern culture, creating a situation that was entirely new, noted W.J. Gallagher in an address to the Christian Social Council of Canada. No longer was the country rural. The work of the church was changing, and not always for the better, due to a complex mix of factors: ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ wars, urbanization and industrialization, the welfare state, immigration, modern educational trends, new means of communication, and new ideologies.24 A resolve to enlist and equip ­clergy and laity to rescue Canadian society from the incursion of undesirable elements of modernity was fundamental to the strategic decisions made by the United Church in the 1950s. There were plenty of indications that church members were becoming captivated by cultural affluence and alienated from Christian influence. The middle class was especially at risk. A mid-decade survey of Observer readers found that 26 per cent were in professional and managerial groups compared to 14 per cent of the general population. Its readers were much more likely than the average Canadian to have telephone service and to own cars and electrical appliances. Drawing on the survey’s findings, a 1954 e & s s report concluded, “our Communion is, in large measure, a middle-class one.” As such it was becoming susceptible to a North American form of “culturereligion,” one that stressed comfort and mistook “chummy acquaintance for fellowship.” Church leaders were urged to make Christian fellowship “more inclusive”; to challenge culture-religion with “true Christian standards”; and to make “every possible attempt ... to reach, save and teach all for whom Christ died.”25 At the core of the United Church’s major postwar initiatives to ­reassert its social and cultural agenda was a broad approach to evangelization. Events that provided opportunities to make a personal commitment to Christ were organized and linked to plans for church expansion in developing residential neighbourhoods and a new approach to Christian education. The core message was clear and unequivocal: it was not enough to focus only on conversion, for faith had implications for the personal conduct of individuals, the social welfare of communities, and the cultural well-being of the nation.

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J.R. Mutchmor personified these objectives. As secretary of e & s s he was in a pivotal position to shape the United Church’s policies and programs. He became the voice of the United Church during the 1940s and ’50s, and was the most recognized religious leader in Canada by the time he retired in 1964. Indeed, to a remarkable degree, Mutchmor’s life mirrored the denomination’s own maturation. Born in 1892 in Providence Bay, a small community in northern Ontario, he grew up with the church union movement already underway. Raised a Presbyterian, he was proud that some still misidentified him, as had novelist Robertson Davies, as one of the “few remaining ranting old Methodists.”26 Mutchmor studied at the University of Toronto just before the First World War during what he described as a time of high idealism, when many believed that the world would be converted to Christianity in their generation. An interest in social work (and a rather low opinion of theological education at Knox College) took him to Union Theological Seminary in New York for graduate studies in theology, which he combined with a master’s program in economics at Columbia University across the street. In 1920 he returned to Canada, accepting a call to Robertson Memorial Presbyterian Church in Winnipeg, where his work included oversight of a mission in the north end of the city. A part-time position as a member of Manitoba’s Welfare Supervision Board (serving as its chair from 1926–36) gave Mutchmor access to surveys and studies on a broad assortment of social welfare issues. All in all, it was valuable experience that prepared him for his appointment as associate secretary of the Board of e & ss in 1936.27 Due to D.L. McLachlan’s illness, he was effectively in charge before he was formally appointed as secretary in 1938. Mutchmor was fully committed to both parts of his board’s mandate – evangelism and social service. He encouraged and coordinated countless initiatives that he described as “witness in deeds, not talk.”28 But he also used words to promote his causes, vocally opposing such vices as drinking and gambling. Not one to shy away from unpopular stands, he objected to women working outside the home – “mothers swept into gainful employment” as he put it. He was shocked to see them dropping off their children “in indiscriminate places” to be cared for while they worked. For him, this was a practice as dangerous as taking children from their mothers and forcing them to work in canneries or mines: both were threats to

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child welfare that called for child protection. And yet he defies facile pigeonholing as a social conservative. The Observer’s cover story following his election as moderator at the 1962 General Council claimed that “no churchman in Canada took big business to task as often as Mutchmor.” Visibility had its drawbacks, however, and Mutchmor received threatening telephone calls, often several dozen throughout the night. His very public stand on temperance predictably drew ridicule. But he attracted admiration too, some of it from surprising quarters. When Mutchmor became the butt of jokes at one cocktail party, c b c reporter Stanley Burke came to his defence by recalling an incident that happened after he “unwittingly blasphemed” while still on camera. Among the pile of disapproving letters was one expressing appreciation for his work, praising him for the high calibre of his un reportage, and closing with, “I just thought that at this particular time you might appreciate knowing. Sincerely yours, J.R. Mutchmor.”29 His notes and letters reveal a gracious man with a wry sense of humour. “I cannot understand you having the flu,” the teetotaller wrote to an ailing friend, “must be that you have not the right kind of rum.”30 Mutchmor fervently believed that the church was the conscience of the state, a conviction that he attributed to the Reformed tradition (while admitting that Calvin may have enforced it “to an extreme” in Geneva).31 He assumed that the United Church’s “political witness and warfare” extended from the global arena to fighting the devil in one’s own back yard – at the town-pump level, as he put it.32 His advice to ministers presumed that they would play an influential role in helping church members to connect faith and community: preaching sermons on social issues that were both biblically and factually sound, making effective use of denominational structures and pronouncements, encouraging their congregations to use church resources to study social issues, liaising with community organizations, and even becoming specialists on particular social issues.33 But Mutchmor was just as avid an advocate for evangelism, and claimed that he was a stronger defender of it than many former Methodists.34 His travels across Canada in 1943 convinced him that support for it was growing.35 With his enthusiastic endorsement, the United Church joined mainstream churches in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia in organizing mass evangelistic meetings that boosted church attendance during the 1940s and ’50s.36 Under his leadership the United Church promoted evangelistic

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campaigns whose themes advertised the hopes of the organizers: Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom, National Evangelistic Mission, Mission to the Nation, and Calling Canada to Christ. The Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom was the United Church’s first major postwar evangelistic initiative, a two-year program launched in 1945.37 Interest in evangelism was running high in North America at the time, and Youth for Christ rallies favoured by fundamentalists were attracting huge crowds. Charles Templeton, a charismatic Canadian preacher from a conservative evangelical denomination, was making headlines.38 When he began to question his faith, the young evangelist turned to Mutchmor for advice, hoping that theological studies would assuage his doubts. At the urging of Mutchmor and Pidgeon, president John A. Mackay of Princeton Theological Seminary arranged for the high-school dropout to study there as a “special student.”39 Templeton began his studies in 1948, and three years later ­accepted a position as evangelist for the American mainstream denominations that comprised the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the u sa (nc c ), on condition that he could preach in Canada four months of the year.40 The Templeton Missions, organized in conjunction with the United Church, filled large churches like Chalmers United in Ottawa to capacity, with people occupying “every bit of space that was possible to place them without creating a fire hazard.”41 The Observer provided glowing accounts of Templeton’s cross-Canada itinerary as tens of thousands flocked to the churches and arenas where his meetings were held. Thousands went forward at the end of the service to make a commitment to Christ.42 These rallies featured Templeton as preacher and his talented wife as soloist. The music and the sermons reflected the United Church’s efforts to deal with the imminent cultural crisis. Refusing to pander to popular tastes with female octets, brass bands, and Negro spirituals (associated with rallies organized by conservative evangelicals), the United Church insisted on music accompanied by the piano or organ, with a church choir or Connie Templeton singing classical pieces by Handel and Bach.43 Those who hired Templeton may well have suspected that the audience preferred more lowbrow entertainment, but given their concerns about sacred music, they were determined to give those attending a taste of something more appropriate – nothing that might be confused with jazz! As for Templeton’s

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message, historian Kevin Kee’s summary of what listeners typically heard would have had a familiar ring to those raised in the United Church: a “total gospel” that related Christianity to all areas of life and emphasized the link between personal faith and service.44 The social implications of the gospel message became even more prominent when the United Church used the momentum from the Templeton Missions to launch its own four-year National Evangelistic Mission (ne m) in 1954. Directed by e& s s staff member William G. Berry, the strategy for this Mission to the Nation was set out in Calling Canada to Christ, a booklet that he edited. Central to the campaign was a focus on national life that connected the call for individual commitment to Christ to four areas of living: family, community, daily work and the economy, and civic and political engagement.45 “National salvation” was the prescription for “national sin,” a “deeper and more powerful form of evil than individual sin.”46 The literature distributed by the ne m committee offered concrete advice for everyday living and tools for measuring advancement ­toward the goals of the campaign. The pamphlet on the Christian family, for instance, featured an eleven-point checklist of practices for parents that included personal declaration of faith in God and loyalty to Jesus Christ, daily devotions that included all family members, and participation in the mid-week and Sunday programs of the church.47 Likewise, a pamphlet designed for women’s groups challenged them to use a “Group-Analysis Chart for Church Organizations” to calculate the “lost potential for evangelism.” Several questions probed whether the women’s group at the church was distinctly Christian and thus different from a secular club.48 The campaign concluded with a series of special events organized around its four themes, and congregations were encouraged to promote them. Billy Graham brought his crusade to Canada a year after the creation of the nem, raising a fresh round of questions about the United Church’s approach to evangelism. An editorial in the Observer before his arrival in Toronto noted that the national leadership of the United Church had not endorsed Graham’s campaign (as was the case with the Templeton Mission), leaving it up to presbyteries and conferences to decide on their own whether to become involved. One sticking point was Graham’s literal approach to interpreting the Bible, but Observer editor A.C. Forrest identified another: “In the United Church we have been taught that the Bible is relevant to ­every department of life – social, political, economic, and personal. And

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we will not sacrifice that truth for the sake of successful techniques in mass evangelism.”49 Graham was conspicuously absent from the list of evangelists invited to participate in the ne m. Although terse when questioned about Graham’s absence, its coordinator was more loquacious when asked about the place of periodic revivals. The “genius of the United Church,” Berry replied, did not lend itself “to the revivalist technique of evangelism.” Its best work was done “through the ordinary channels of pulpit evangelism, visitation evangelism, communicant classes and the occasional preaching mission.” He added that contemporary revivalism was in some cases based on a theological perspective that differed from what was taught at United Church theological schools. While not denying that some still came to religious faith through a “catastrophic conversion,” Berry thought this had become rare in the United Church: most of its people were converted through the “ordinary preaching of the gospel and the fellowship of the church.”50 The divided mind of the United Church over evangelism was evident in the Observer. Forrest reminded readers that the United Church had deliberately placed evangelism and social service together under one board at the time of its founding, convinced that one must “not go rushing off into revivalism unrelated to moral issues and social concerns,” nor to divorce social reforms from personal evangelism. To explain the distinctive features of the United Church’s approach to evangelism, he quoted at length from a statement about the n em prepared by Angus MacQueen, minister of St Andrew’s United Church in London, Ontario, and chair of e & s s . MacQueen believed Donald Soper, the famed British Methodist preacher from the West London Mission, was the person who came closer than Billy Graham to representing the mind of the United Church on evangelism. He reported that when Soper challenged his Canadian audience with the demands of Christian discipleship, some left angry and disappointed because they had come expecting the “cheap brand” of evangelism: “fanfare and ballyhoo, hot songs and catchy tunes, pretty soloists and well-groomed announcers, and a ‘come to Jesus and collect your advantages’ appeal.”51 MacQueen admitted that although the United Church stood in the evangelical tradition, many ministers had misgivings about modern evangelism. Should a type of evangelism be approved, he wondered, just because it seemed to get results? Or should they be asking,

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what kind of results? Will the results last? What about scruples in matters such as intellectual and theological integrity, ethics, or social relevance?52 These questions remained long after the nem ended.53 Joining the Board of e & ss in calling postwar Canada to Christ was the much larger Board of Home Missions, which Mutchmor credited with contributing even more to the church’s active witness than e&ss.54 Under its auspices, presbyteries made ambitious plans for new church development, especially in the expanding suburbs, and a  National Committee on Church Extension chaired by Malcolm Macdonald launched a campaign to fund it.55 Macdonald passionately believed that the program “to extend the Kingdom of God within this land” was as great a challenge as the United Church or its parent bodies had ever faced.56 While he insisted that the United Church did not proselytize those from other faith traditions, it was “ready to provide not only a spiritual home for them, but also to assist them in understanding and finding their true place in our Canadian way of life.”57 Macdonald admitted that in the past, meeting the religious needs of every community in Canada had been easier: a missionary who arrived with a plan to open a new church had been met with an ­enthusiastic welcome. At present, indifference or competition from other attractions made church development in frontier areas or new suburbs more challenging. Yet the consequences of failure were grave and “exceedingly detrimental to the well-being of the nation,” for much of the population would be “left to the often extreme and eccentric leadership of the sects or else succumb to the invading secularism, materialism and paganism of our age.”58 Church extension committees handled most of the details of starting a congregation, but the commitment of lay leaders was essential to success. It was a layman who alerted Winnipeg Presbytery to the religious situation in his suburban neighbourhood. He’d stopped a young boy to ask why he wasn’t in Sunday school. The boy’s answer – “What is that?” – startled him so much that he started talking to others about organizing a congregation. Twenty-five women from the area joined fifty other women from Winnipeg Presbytery to conduct house-to-house surveys to gauge interest in having a United Church Sunday school and worship service nearby. As a result, Westworth United was built and quickly flourished. Within five years, over 500 children were enrolled in Sunday school. The church

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Table 6.1 Membership of Woman’s Missionary Society auxiliaries, bands, and affiliated cgit groups Years

Auxiliaries1

Mission bands

Baby bands

Affiliated CGIT2

1950

88,693

49,874

58,574

16,786

1951

89,185

52,919

61,004

17,714

1952

90,415

54,654

61,632

17,609

1953

91,943

58,747

67,521

19,952

1954

92,931

49,953

70,605

20,507

1955

93,097

47,812

71,697

22,060

1956

92,971

47,378

69,669

24,427

1957

94,937

47,724

70,490

23,978

1958

95,901

48,054

69,102

26,842

1959

98,122

46,849

67,942

27,352

1960

98,821

48,234

66,032

32,377

1961

96,444

43,227

56,242

31,452

1  Includes members of the Evening Auxiliaries, which were considered a separate category from 1950–52. 2 Affiliated CGIT groups included in the total membership during this period; method of counting other affiliates (e.g., Explorers) varied. Source: Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Society and The United Church of Canada Year Book (reports of the Woman’s Missionary Society)

was abuzz with Mission Band, Explorers, cg i t, Cubs, Scouts, Tyros, Hi-C, and Young People’s groups. Women were invited to join the wa and the wms; men served on the Session as elders and stewards until 1968, when women too became eligible.59 Following the Second World War, similar growth was reported across Canada. An increase in membership was not the only good news. Between 1941 and 1946, subscriptions to the denominational paper, renamed The United Church Observer in 1939, increased from 15,000 to over 50,000. A capital campaign exceeded expectations, raising $4 million in pledges in 194660 and helping to replenish the mission funds depleted during the Depression. The w m s announced in 1950 that a new record had been set for fundraising, and that amount was bettered in subsequent years. There was fellowship aplenty. With a baby boom well underway, a notable increase in Baby Bands and study groups for mothers soon followed.61 Programs for children and youth challenged the church building’s

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Woman’s Missionary Society

Woman’s Association (all purposes)

1926+ 1927+ 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961

$5 750 000 $5 500 000 $5 250 000 $5 000 000 $4 750 000 $4 500 000 $4 250 000 $4 000 000 $3 750 000 $3 500 000 $3 250 000 $3 000 000 $2 750 000 $2 500 000 $2 250 000 $2 000 000 $1 750 000 $1 500 000 $1 250 000 $1 000 000 $750 000 $500 000 $250 000 $0

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Figure 6.1 Funds raised by the Woman’s Association (all purposes) and the Woman’s Missionary Society, 1926–61 Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book. + 1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

capacity in many congregations. The Young People’s Union flourished during the 1950s. By mid-decade it was among the largest youth organizations in the country with some 30,000 members between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. A new organization called Hi-C quickly attracted 20,000 teenagers.62 Couples clubs, service clubs, and even camps for men and women in their thirties and early forties were organized to tap the spiritual and social longings of young adults. The first of several schools for lay leaders was opened in Naramata, b c , in 1947, and the training school for deaconesses in Toronto celebrated its move to a new building in 1955. A conspicuous exception to the successful ventures of the 1950s was recruitment of personnel for overseas missions, a situation that editor A.C. Forrest considered “the greatest concern of our time.”63 However, the vibrancy of congregational life likely generated more

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interest in ministry as a profession and helped to ease the chronic shortage of personnel after the war. In 1954, the United Church reported that 159 young people (nine from one Moncton congregation alone) had entered the candidacy process for ordination, the most in its history.64 Despite record high numbers of candidates, there were still not enough ministers by decade’s end to match the projected demand.65 This cohort prepared for ministry at an auspicious time. There was much talk of a theological renaissance underway, and many dared to believe that a positive and redemptive engagement with modern culture would ensue. Convinced of the transformative possibilities of Christian education for all ages, the United Church laid plans to capitalize on the revival of interest in religious questions by linking learning to evangelism and church extension. It launched a number of initiatives to acquaint its members with its particular theological orientation (and sometimes to defend itself against detractors). Broad and moderate was how United Church leaders liked to picture themselves. Their church was “liberal without being radical or humanistic,” explained Preston MacLeod to Christian Century readers, with neo-orthodoxy enjoying a “strong following, especially among the younger ministers” who, though not inclined to repudiate liberal theology, wanted to go beyond it to make theology “more central and vital in the life of the church, and distinctively Christian in its interpretation of biblical revelation.”66 Writing for an American audience in 1947, C.E. Silcox claimed that even the United Church’s critics had to concede that it was a dynamic church. While it admittedly had a tendency to issue unwise pronouncements before fully thinking through the implications, it could not be accused of pussyfooting. In general he found that it repudiated “both the mushiness of liberalism and the crudities of fundamentalism and is essentially liberal-conservative.”67 R.C. Chalmers agreed. A key staff member on the committee that had prepared the Statement of Faith, he reported that “orthodox liberalism or progressive conservatism” was “very apparent in leading theological circles in our United Church.”68 The publications that he oversaw at e & ss championed what he portrayed as an “evangelical type” of Christianity,69 a stance that continued to be as contentious in the 1940s and ’50s as it had been in the 1920s and ’30s. Chalmers made the customary distinction between the United Church’s evangelical identity and other parties who were claiming to

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define what it entailed: “a legalistic and rigid Fundamentalism,” or “some special esoteric and emotional religious experience,” or as “synonymous with the sect type of Christianity.” He urged the United Church to become more evangelical in faith and practice by seeing “the whole of life religiously interpreted through Jesus Christ.”70 But becoming more evangelical was easier said than done. On the one hand, there were hopeful signs of a growing interest in learning more about the Christian way of life. The Observer seized the opportunity to educate its readers, publishing a series on “What the United Church Believes,” which dealt with topics related to revelation, sin, and salvation.71 Reacting to religious competition on two different fronts (fundamentalist and Catholic), over the next decade the Commission on Christian Faith would prepare materials stating the United Church’s position on doctrines emphasized by sectarian groups, as well as on the differences between Protestants and Catholics: Why the Sects? (A.C. Forrest); In Remembrance of Me: Being an Account of Man’s Part in the Lord’s Supper (Harvey Forster); Is Christ Coming Again? (C.C. Oke); Christianity and Healing (C.G. Park); British-Israelism: Is It Christian? and Jehovah’s Witnesses (both by Alfred E. Cooke); and What’s the Difference? Protestant and Roman Catholic Beliefs Compared and Life and Death (both by A.G. Reynolds).72 As Mutchmor reviewed the United Church’s accomplishments in anticipation of its fortieth anniversary in 1965, he proudly recalled that a pamphlet containing the Statement of Faith was a best seller from the beginning and the catechism based on it in steady demand. By its nature and of necessity, the United Church was “deeply theological,” he boasted: “it’s a plain fact that a far larger proportion of the ministers and members of the United Church of Canada strive to learn and comprehend the deeper things of God and Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit; of man and his sin, of salvation, and of the Christian witness on all the fronts of life than any other Christian Communion in Canada.”73 The pamphlets by Reynolds in particular sparked a lively debate both inside and outside the United Church.74 What’s the Difference?, boosted by complaints from cardinals James McGuigan of Toronto and Paul-Émile Léger of Montreal, showed unprecedented numbers in sales of a United Church publication. Sales for Life and Death also shot up after fundamentalists condemned it.75 The “New Curriculum” became the linchpin of the United Church’s plans to create a more theologically literate membership. Utilizing

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the tools of modern biblical scholarship to interpret the Bible, the materials aimed to relate its teachings to the contemporary context.76 The project drew much of its inspiration from the Christian Faith and Life curriculum that had been launched by the Presbyterian Church in the u sa in 1948. Not surprisingly the United Church’s New Curriculum was similar in assumptions and planning process to its American counterpart.77 A critical difference was timing: development of the curriculum materials in Canada lagged behind by at least five years. Although the decision to produce new materials was made at the 1952 General Council, a series of consultations at both the national and regional level followed; the critical response to the presuppositions announced in 1958 likely slowed the process as well.78 The impact of delay proved devastating. Like the Presbyterian materials, the United Church’s New Curriculum focused on the family as integral to Christian education, and produced hardcover illustrated books intended for reading at home during the week. The failings of a family-centred program in the United States were perceptible even before the New Curriculum was sent to press in Canada.79 Alas, for the United Church, its poorly timed launch coincided with the end of the baby boom, more-complicated family relationships, and a completely different theological climate from the one that had informed its design. Unveiled in the mid-1960s, it was infused with the theological and educational presuppositions of the 1940s and ’50s. Its critics in the 1960s failed to appreciate how deeply biblical and theological it was in both aim and actual content – it was exactly what respected leaders like Line and Pidgeon had called for to preserve Christian culture. However, it appealed to neither conservative evangelicals nor a younger generation of more radical liberals.80 The troubled development of the New Curriculum provides a glimpse of the uphill battle that the United Church faced even at a time when people seemed to be deeply interested in religious matters. For all the talk of a postwar theological renaissance associated with the names of Barth, Niebuhr, Tillich, and other so-called neoorthodox theologians, how extensive was their influence? Speaking at a dinner at Emmanuel College in 1957, Forrest conjectured that if Victoria University’s president and Emmanuel College’s principal were to announce that Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale had been appointed to the faculty, “there would be within The United

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Church great rejoicing.” But the response to the appointment of Reinhold Niebuhr or Paul Tillich would likely be, “Who are they?” What he described as a cultural lag was greatest among “some of our best people” from farms and small communities. Forrest n ­ oticed a spiritual disorientation that surfaced when those folk moved to the city: despite being raised in the United Church, some felt more at home in Gospel Halls, small Baptist churches, or a Pentecostal Tabernacle.81 Little wonder then that a few years later, the New Curriculum was greeted with suspicion even by some of the church’s most stalwart supporters. The controversy it sparked revived memories of Billy Graham’s visit to Canada in the 1950s and the gap that was evident even then between his theology and that of the United Church. It was also out of step with a cadre of younger ministers who found it not sufficiently progressive. Such theological misgivings added to the practical problems of the New Curriculum after its launch in the 1960s. The design – in retrospect, flawed – disclosed a church operating in denial about the degree of acceptance of theological liberalism shorn of its evangelical roots, and seemingly unaware of the damage already done to the crucial links between church, home, and community life it presupposed. It epitomized the ill-fated efforts to  negotiate with modernity in the 1950s – to correlate faith and ­culture, as neo-orthodox theologians liked to put it. The United Church’s miscalculations in its approach to Christian education matched its misplaced confidence in mass evangelism and church extension. Its leaders were astute in identifying signs of a ­culture shift underway but ineffectual in their efforts to influence its ­direction, despite impressive outlays of time and resources. Headlines in the 1950s tended to trumpet the church’s accomplishments, but assessments of its leaders were more guarded. After visiting United Church congregations across Canada during his two years as moderator, James S. Thomson sounded somewhat optimistic in 1958 as he described the “manifold signs of a quickened vitality” indicated by the upswing in church attendance. He sensed a turning of the tide of interest in religion that he candidly characterized as an “anxious, sometimes ill-informed, yet not the less genuine seeking for spiritual enlightenment and help rather than profound spiritual revival.” However, he found little or no inclination to apply the gospel to social questions or world problems. That there was “no passion for public

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righteousness or social reform” was in his view the consequence of the relativity in faith and morals of an age “devoid of moral enthusiasm.”82 Thomson’s disturbing observation was consistent with other indications that modern life was running counter to the dynamics that had propelled the church union movement. Everyday life seemed to sap the sense of collective purpose that was integral to the identity of a denomination designed to connect faith and community. City life further hindered this goal. Those who gathered for worship on Sunday might otherwise have little contact with each other or the community in which the church was situated. The first of several reports from the Commission on Urban Problems set up in 1936 assessed “the cutting-off from the old social and spiritual moorings” as the most significant obstacle. Rural life could be nasty, vicious, and coarse, said the report, but seldom was its outlook so secular as in the city. Though religious observances in a rural community might suffer from neglect, the tradition of churchgoing overshadowed daily life. Not so in the city, where “public scrutiny and popular appraisal” of conduct were impossible due to urban anonymity and secular distractions. Social and racial groupings tended to be more “socially disintegrative” than in smaller communities where people knew each other and mingled at community events. The report found the impact on children particularly disturbing. “They belong to nowhere in particular. They grow up in no church or school, in the soil of which their lives become rooted. Their lives are barren in respect of loyalties and friendship.”83 The shadow of the church was even less visible to those on the move after the Second World War. Mobility disrupted old social ­networks and group norms, complicating the rituals of family life. Family members who moved to find employment in another community were no longer able to worship together as a clan. Memories of baptisms and funerals were associated with several church buildings rather than one. The disruption of old community ties also ­increased the likelihood of mating with someone from a different religious background. Mixed marriages were identified as a problem in the United Church’s first statement on marriage issued in 1932, which noted in particular the difficulty of rearing children in a home “where united religious acts are impossible, in which silence or extreme reserve must be maintained.”84 Concern for protecting the next generation of Protestants heightened as the number of mixed marriages increased after the war.85

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Church attendance at first withstood these pressures. The habit of going to church on Sunday morning was associated with ‘normal’ behaviour and good citizenship. Sin became a common theme in the preaching of the day, stirring feelings of guilt that some apparently tried to ease by attending church services regularly.86 Perhaps heightened anxiety about an unsettled world and the threat of nuclear weapons brought out a tribal instinct to be with others. However, on many city street corners, the community church was becoming an artifact of a bygone era. The residential patterns of city life were proving to be problematic, admitted Malcolm Macdonald in 1961 as he compared current home mission strategies with those of the past. What to do about the “great apartment structures, sometimes ten or twelve or even more stories high,” that had sprung up after the war baffled church workers. In one area of Toronto, for instance, it was estimated that 75 per cent of the 4,000 or so people living in the six or seven apartment complexes had little or no connection with a church. Tenants were hard to contact in the first place and difficult to track once they moved. Many were still childless, and thus had no sense of urgency to affiliate with a congregation. They thought of their situation as temporary and were unwilling to make a commitment to a particular community by joining a church.87 Rural life, usually applauded for its moral values, was changing too.88 In his role as associate secretary of e & s s , W.G. Berry was pleased to find strong and well-organized congregations in the cities he visited in western Canada in 1949. It was in the rural districts that he spotted failing congregations, apparently unable to make the transition from the horse-and-buggy era to the automobile era. Moral issues were becoming more challenging, at least according to some parents, who told him that they thought moral awareness was easier to instill in a child in the city than in a small Prairie town. The growing “alcohol problem” was evidence of a serious moral laxity among country youth. The decline of rural communities was a dangerous trend, he cautioned, since the United Church had more congregations there than other Protestant denominations.89 Nowhere was the widening gap between the United Church’s ideals and cultural realities more evident than in the homes of its members, microcosms as it were of the church’s troubled efforts to translate its teaching into lived experience. The Christian home was considered the critical nexus between church and community. Hugh Dobson

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summed up what was at stake in the drawn-out title of a pamphlet issued in 1940 – The Christian Family Is Essential to Democracy, to Canadian National Life and to the Coming Kingdom of God for Which We Pray – and sternly warned: “If family life breaks down, national life will crack.”90 As the 1946 report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home put it (apparently missing the irony of the language), the home was “the symbol of the Kingdom of God” and built on the conviction that “all men are brothers” and that “God is the Creator-Father, and that the world of men is or should be a family, a household of faith, inspired by family loyalty.”91 The 1950 report of the Commission on Culture still recommended that parents be mindful of the importance of the family in spreading Christian culture “through such means as reading the Bible aloud, singing hymns together, prayer, church fellowship and above all, by the kindliness, good temper, good manners and behaviour of the father and mother.”92 And yet domestic Christianity was not as robust as the rhetoric about its redemptive potential made out. The report on marriage and the home admitted that parents had been content to let the church take over responsibility for religious education, wrongly assuming that an hour of Sunday school would suffice to teach the Christian faith.93 To make matters worse, the home itself seemed in danger of disintegration. Family dislocation, secularism, materialism, encroachment of “outside groups” (such as state services), a lower childbirth rate, and divorce were listed as threats that had left Christian family life in a precarious situation: “A generation is growing up that knows little or nothing of Christian knowledge or experience, and in the time of crisis has no invisible resources to draw upon for its salvation.”94 One solution to the failure of the Christian home to nurture Christian beliefs was to expand the role of the church among children and youth beyond the Sunday school hour. In a bold depiction of a church intent on being at the centre of personal lives and social relationships, principal Richard Davidson pictured its authority extending far into homes and communities, usurping even the importance of the family in nurturing piety. There would have been few if any women present in 1943 at the Winnipeg retreat for ministers where he likened the church to a mother, a metaphor more familiar to Catholics than to his Protestant listeners, assigning to “her” responsibilities more commonly associated with the familial piety of

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the Victorian home. The family of God was the “home” of the Christian child, and the church was responsible for raising the infant member. “The Church teaches him what the Father is like and what a child’s duties in the family are. The Church shields him from evil and cares for him at school and at play.” (How “she” did so was not elaborated.)95 Worship was essential to raising the child: “She [the Church] knows that some of the richest memories men have in later years are of looking on at the Sacraments. She arranges and adorns the church building so that the child will feel there that he is in his Father’s house.” He stressed the effective use of architectural lines, light and shade, colour, windows, hangings, pictures, texts of Scripture, the font, the pulpit, the Communion table to convey a sense of the Father’s presence. Once the child reached manhood, the church was there to meet him “with God’s strengthening grace” by teaching him about God and duty, praying for him, confirming him, and then admitting him “to the fellowship of the Holy Sacrament.” The men who gathered for the retreat were assured that the church “loves each one of her children with the particularizing love of a mother” – indeed, its task was “mothering the children of men from the cradle to the grave.”96 The emphasis on God as Father and the church as Mother was an expression of a liturgical theology that had practical consequences as those influenced by Davidson’s teaching at Emmanuel moved into congregations. For instance, a more liturgically proper service of baptism was less focused on the natural family. Forrest observed in 1961 that it was becoming difficult to persuade younger ministers to perform private baptisms. Instead, they expected to have the babies and the parents “present before the whole congregation, so that vows may be made publicly and members of the congregation will realize they have a responsibility too.”97 It was also more challenging to schedule a Sunday morning baptism at a convenient time, especially for relatives travelling some distance. The escalating number of mixed marriages further complicated the details of performing a baptism, especially in the days before Vatican II. For a variety of reasons, the number of baptisms was declining in the 1950s even though church membership was on the rise. For many migrants to the larger cities who were experiencing the loss of old ties to family and friends, the church provided artificial forms of kinship and a semblance of community – though perhaps

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less intensely liturgical than what Davidson had in mind. One belonged to a home congregation; other members became a church family; the design features of new buildings, such as carpeted floors, made churches seem ‘homey.’ Belonging was likely a welcome respite from the anonymity of urban life, especially for those from small towns or rural communities, replicating some of the values of community life that were lost in the move. Forrest guessed that the majority of churchgoers were “displaced persons seeking a spiritual home within the Christian family.” Having once “lived within the shadow of the church’s spire,” they now “sensed the rootlessness of life outside the church” and wanted to “belong to the fellowship which is good, and is the gift of God.”98 He defended the United Church against critics who dismissed it as “a big social centre.” It was that and more, and he considered “being a family within the community” that welcomed everyone who wanted to belong to the “family circle” to be the United Church’s greatest strength.99 And yet church leaders were nervous about what they saw happening in their busy congregations. Those who emphasized the importance of worship worried that it was taking a back seat to education, fellowship, humanitarian work, and other auxiliary activities. Children and youth whose experience of church before confirmation was based primarily on age-specific activities discovered, upon arriving at a worship service, that the language was strange, the music unfamiliar, and some of the sermons boring. There was more fun to be had elsewhere on Sundays, especially with the loosening of laws enforcing Sabbath observance. Moreover, the lessons that children learned outside the church did little to reinforce its message. The innocent pleasures of the so-called pagan culture were tempting, and the media’s celebration of materialism in programming and advertising was often more powerful and immediate than spiritual instruction offered by either parents or pastors. Even the usually optimistic Forrest became a little less sanguine as he followed the trends during the 1950s. Sunday school sessions were shorter, and Sunday services were over by noon. Gone were afternoon Sunday schools (except in some rural areas in eastern Canada) and evening services. In 1961 he summed up the pattern of typical adult activity in many United churches during the 1950s: “Bible classes are small, prayer meetings few, midweek meetings numerous.”100 He astutely noted a generational divide: older members criticized the young for not being concerned about alcoholism and

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heavy smoking, and for not observing Sunday as a day of rest; young people criticized the older generation for “being obtuse on matters of race discrimination, indifferent to the needs of undeveloped countries, and for supporting a medieval penal system.”101 It was a preview of the clash of values that was about to hit the church. There was almost as much uneasiness about crowded churches as empty ones. Berry discovered a disturbing explanation for the increase in church membership in an article by American sociologist Will Herberg that described three types of character development: tradition-directed, with a code of behaviour transmitted from one generation to the next (and tending to die out in industrial and urban societies); inner-directed, relentlessly and often individualistically moving toward a goal (whether for good or evil) as though driven by an “internal gyroscope”; and other-directed, a new type that had emerged in the last generation, which operated with a “built-in radar apparatus” that received signals from the social group to which the person wished to conform.102 Berry assessed the trend in Canada to be “almost all in the direction of the other-directed kind of characters.” The man who a few years later was charged with leading the Mission to the Nation campaign was struck in 1954 by what he characterized as the “tragedy of our time”: “People join our churches in droves in order to conform, but deny our gospel day by day for the very same reason that they joined, in order to conform!”103 But those who were inner-­ directed were problematic too, for they spurned the restraints of communal guidance offered by the church. These self-regulating individuals were bombarded by choices with a range of options for political positions, media channels, leisure activities, and religious views. A different way of looking at the world was as close as the nearest television, where a wider range of ‘normal’ behaviour was on display daily. Resistance to moral regulation by the church stiffened after the war, undermining its efforts to guide members through the moral maze in what it believed to be the right direction. A church concerned about Sunday observance, temperance, and sexual purity had always had hecklers, but increasingly its critics were sitting in its own pews. No longer was it possible to identify its members by particular practices associated with their spiritual forebears (temperance for Methodists, Sabbath observance for Presbyterians, and the permanence of

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marriage for all the uniting traditions). This was not for lack of ­trying. Its teaching on Sunday observance, for instance, was reaffirmed in the new catechism, which offered this response to Question 60 about how to observe it: “We should spend the Lord’s Day in public and private worship, in reading and meditation, in converse with family and friends, in deeds of kindness, and in grateful rest from all but necessary labour.” Yet its own reports show a church struggling to convince its members to comply. “On the Lord’s Day,” a report to the General Council prepared in 1948, reaffirmed the importance of a day of rest despite the cultural influences that were undermining it: godlessness, secularism, hedonism, improper use of leisure, commercial and sports interests, Sunday motoring, and even a variety of ‘good’ activities (meetings, concerts, entertaining friends) that were not considered to be the best use of the day. An ominous sign of what was to come was the “wideopen disavowal of the Lord’s Day” that was most evident in areas near the U.S. border, and exacerbated by the growing number of immigrants with a Continental European background.104 The commission made a bold claim for the importance of its cause, i­nsisting that the church “must teach that the Lord’s Day is the keystone institution in building and maintaining a Christian civilization.”105 It was, of course, easier to keep the Sabbath the Protestant way when nearly everything was closed in order to preserve a day free from commercial activities and professional sporting events. The United Church’s failure to influence popular opinion on Sunday observance was evident by 1950 when its support for the Lord’s Day Alliance was not enough to win a municipal plebiscite on banning Sunday sports in Toronto.106 Part of the framework for a Christian Canada was demolished as one community after another removed similar restrictions. Just as striking was the waning support for the temperance cause. By 1950 even the wms found that collecting signatures for the total abstinence “purpose cards” was a hard sell.107 Its committee on Temperance and Christian Citizenship was renamed “Christian Citizenship” that year, although temperance was still listed among its concerns alongside peace, racial brotherhood, and social welfare. Meanwhile the United Church debated whether total abstinence from the use of beverage alcohol ought to be a condition of membership, deciding instead to adopt voluntary total abstinence in 1948.108 In an effort to encourage compliance, a flurry of flyers and

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pamphlets targeted married couples and individuals.109 Even that policy proved too restrictive. Deliberating in 1960 on the report of a temperance commission set up four years earlier, the General Council conceded that while abstinence was still the wisest and safest course of action, one could drink responsibly and be a member in good standing.110 The United Church’s strategy for discouraging the use of beverage alcohol also included pressure on the federal government to restrict advertising and to nationalize pricing and profits.111 Mutchmor’s tactics included both public statements and behind-the-scenes lobbying. Writing to thank Mutchmor after enjoying dinner at his home, Stanley Knowles, a United Church minister and ccf Member of Parliament, laid out the steps he had since taken to raise the issue of liquor advertising. Knowles evidently appreciated the groundwork Mutchmor had laid, and encouraged him to continue his visits to Ottawa.112 Their exchange of letters on establishment of the Canada Council (which Knowles hoped would “relieve the Dominion Drama Festival from its dependence on liquor money”) show them collaborating to rally other mp s to support their cause, specifically Liberal Cabinet ministers Lester Pearson and Walter Harris. The political sensitivity of the issue was not lost on Knowles, who was alarmed by “Bronfman’s influence in the Liberal Party” (a reference to the owner of a large distillery in Quebec).113 The United Church was also forced to confront resistance to its efforts to regulate family life. The emphasis on the Christian home as an institution with a redemptive role in raising good citizens was gradually giving way to a focus on family relationships.114 Despite the growing number of women working outside the home, there was remarkably little change between 1932 and 1962 in the way the United Church portrayed Christian marriage. Its purpose remained three-fold: procreation, companionship, and the “divine vocation” of parenting.115 Marriage was assumed to be a lifelong commitment. Commissioned reports during this period were unequivocal. Having children, rather than the regulation of sexual satisfaction, was considered the end and purpose of marriage and not to be evaded “in the pursuit of selfish ease and pleasure at the cost of a childless home.”116 Procreation was promoted as both a delight and a duty, although the United Church defended “voluntary parenthood” and sided with the Federal Council of Churches and the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops against the Roman Catholic condemnation of contraception.117

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By mid-century, however, the “art of controlling birth” had led to what a 1950 report described as “the most sudden biological change the human race has known.”118 The United Church had reason to be concerned about the smaller family size that resulted. During the baby boom, the fertility rate among its female members was lower than the Canadian average.119 Reproductive control became even more reliable when ‘the Pill’ came on the market in 1961, although the sale of contraceptives was still illegal in Canada until 1969.120 The United Church was adamant that procreation was not the sole purpose of marriage, and set great store by the companionship of the couple joined in marriage. However, the notion of marriage as a mere contract between private individuals was repeatedly denounced.121 Sexuality was part of the work of God’s creation and, as such, was declared a good and natural aspect of companionship, albeit requiring disciplined expression.122 Family life disclosed God’s grace, and both marriage and sexuality were often described as sacred or sacramental (although not a Sacrament as theologically defined). Marital difficulties, on the other hand, seemed to mirror the brokenness of relationships after the Fall. The United Church was concerned about a sizable and increasing number of couples who had separated while still legally married, either because they had no legal grounds for divorce or could not afford to obtain one. An annulment of the marriage might settle the legal ambiguity of the couple, but the United Church worried that it left their children in an ambiguous position as illegitimate offspring.123 By 1946 the United Church admitted that old solutions for dealing with failed marriages were inadequate, and called for the matter to be studied.124 A decade later, still without a formal policy to guide ministers, a Commission on Christian Marriage and Divorce was formed, and its reports came before the General Council in 1960 and 1962. It was not the United Church’s position on marriage that changed in the process, but its decision (shocking at the time) to see redemptive possibilities in the remarriage of divorced persons. The second report admitted that for healing and wholeness, divorce was sometimes a better choice than remaining unhappily married. In Jesus’ teaching, commissioners found a message of compassion that dared them to conclude that it was “God’s will for his church to deal compassionately with those whose marriages are threatened or broken.”125 The provocative decision to permit United Church ministers to solemnize marriages of divorced persons set out conditions that

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included confession, repentance, acceptance of the responsibilities of the new marriage, and a desire for the grace of God to forgive and be forgiven.126 A Christian ceremony thus became an alternative to civil marriage or common-law cohabitation for those whose first marriages had failed. The United Church’s biblical and theological rationale for linking home, church, and community became more tenuous once the ‘moral mother’ became the ‘working mother,’ with less time to oversee her children’s spiritual formation. As the spiritual significance of parenting as a divine vocation faded – even for women – the Christian home was drained of some of its sanctity. The impact of more women working outside the home was noticeable in the church and the community. Even in the 1950s, women were finding it more difficult to find time to volunteer at church or community events. Lamenting what he had witnessed, especially in work with the disadvantaged, Mutchmor blamed it on the decline in volunteer service that “in turn is largely caused by the much greater proportion of gainfully employed married women.”127 Others in ministry shared this view of a woman’s primary vocation as that of a parent. Earl Lautenschlager, soon to move from a large Sudbury congregation to the principal’s office at Emmanuel College, offered guidance to brides and grooms in 1962 that would have sounded conventional to young people raised during the 1950s. A sidebar of quotations from the first of two articles was designed to catch the attention of readers leafing through the Observer: “People who don’t want children should remain single.” “The wife who works can unman her husband.” “Women who can’t cook should be ashamed of themselves.”128 Lautenschlager’s frank words were no doubt drawn from years of dealing with couples who came to see him about their problems. His own view of marriage breakdown differed from the new position of the United Church: there was “no good reason to break up any marriage for any reason,” given the spiritual resources for forgiveness that God offered.129 To women who showed him a bruise after their husbands hit them, his candid counsel was not to take it too seriously – “He’s likely as sorry about it as you are.”130 That such a remark passed the scrutiny of a seasoned editor reflects a tolerance of domestic violence that would shock a later generation. Surprisingly, it drew no letters to the editor (or at least none were published).

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After the war women had been bombarded by messages discouraging them from working in paid employment and advising them to put their energies into motherhood and homemaking.131 Those admonitions went unheeded. What both secular and religious critics of women who worked outside the home often overlooked were economic shifts that made homemaking less economically viable. The United Church’s own studies identified a trend toward a new economy where the basic necessities of life, once produced in the home or acquired by bartering services, were now purchased with cash. The report of the Commission on Culture presented to the General Council in 1950 pictured family life in pioneer times as a “closely knit cultural nursery,” with the home producing most of its own material goods. The situation of the modern family was drastically different; it was enmeshed in a money economy, and faced disaster unless it had cash to purchase almost everything it needed.132 The 1961 census reported a startling consequence of that trend: nearly half of the women in the labour force were married. This was a dramatic increase from 1941 (one in twenty) and 1951 (one in ten).133 The divided mind of the United Church over married women who worked outside the home was evident at the General Council in 1962. The Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women presented a report that Mutchmor characterized as “unduly slanted in favour of the demands of woman as woman.”134 It assumed that working women were here to stay, and the church’s task was to figure out how to deal with the problems that were expected to follow. Billed as the first study in Canada to consider the implications of married women in paid positions from a Christian perspective, the report challenged many stereotypes. It pointedly observed that a woman who taught school or worked as a hospital custodian might be using her time away from family concerns as profitably as one who filled her days with such idle amusements as bingo, bridge, shopping, or coffee-partying. Among its recommendations was a call for government and social service agencies to help working families and support for the principle of equal pay for equal work.135 In marked contrast to this affirmation of working women was another report involving the ordination of women, presented to the same General Council. Although the United Church had ordained Lydia Gruchy in 1936 (and several women thereafter), a married woman was still not eligible for consideration. Deaconesses who married were disjoined – formally released from the vows they had

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made when they joined the order – but there was no similar pro­ vision for ‘un-ordaining’ women. Women could thus sidestep the problem by delaying marriage until after they were ordained, but not everyone felt comfortable taking that route. When Elinor Leard, a married women, was ordained in 1957 (over the objections of the moderator), the General Council was asked to clarify “the relationship of an ordained woman minister to her work following her marriage.” The Commission on Ordination concluded that a married woman was not able to discharge her obligations to her husband and children and, at the same time, carry on the work for which she was ordained. Hesitant to adopt this course of action when it was put to a vote, the General Council referred the report to its executive for further deliberation.136 The executive rejected the report’s direction, in effect upholding the Basis of Union (as amended in 1936), which referred to ordaining “men and women” – with no reference to marital status. When the 1964 General Council approved the action of the executive, the path to ordination was cleared for women like Lois Freeman, who had declined to follow a friend’s advice to postpone her marriage to Roy Wilson until she was ordained. Lois Wilson was ordained in 1965, on her fifteenth wedding anniversary, with her husband Roy involved in the laying on of hands at the service.137 It was another sign of what was to come: resistance to male-led public worship, to g­ ender-segregation in much of the life of local congregations, and to women being underrepresented in church structures beyond the congregation. The United Church’s initiatives in the 1940s and ’50s were the work of a church still intent on saving souls and society, and hoping to redeem modern culture as well. It had not yet given up on Christian Canada. It poured time and money into evangelism, church extension, and Christian education. Those who found their way to Sunday services during those years heard the familiar call to Christian citizenship that connected the church with the community. When the United Church called the nation to Christ, people still took notice. The problem was that it seemed to make little difference. The disappointing practical results of the United Church’s postwar initiatives can perhaps account for some of the later skepticism toward what was dismissively dubbed as the Billy Graham–type of evangelism. A number of church leaders concluded that evangelism by itself would not lead to a Christian Canada as they defined it;

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while it might improve church attendance, there was little evidence of it affecting social views or even personal behaviour. Templeton’s own example was hardly reassuring. At the height of his success, still beset by doubts about his faith, he left the ministry in 1957, divorced his wife Connie, and pursued opportunities in secular media. He later wrote in his memoirs that although he did not realize it at the time, the itinerant mass evangelism in which he had been involved was about to die because of television and televangelists, with his old friend Billy Graham the lone survivor.138 The United Church’s identity as an “evangelical” church was doomed once support for Graham’s crusades became a theological litmus test of authenticity. The United Church’s collective purpose was further diminished by the growing separation between neighbours and within families in a more mobile society. Its own members were becoming more selective in their acceptance of its stance on moral issues such as Sabbath observance, temperance, and the permanence of marriage. In an ­individualistic society, they no longer had the same sense of being ­involved in one another’s lives; fellowship was more elusive. As the gap between the guiding principles espoused by denominational leaders and the views of people in the pews widened, more was at stake than just the church’s sense of what it meant to be United. If the church was not influencing the conscience of its own members, how could it be the conscience of the nation? Before the time when public opinion polls regularly took the pulse of the population, church leaders were assumed to speak for their members. One historian has remarked that on matters such as banning beverage alcohol, divorce, and abortion, “the flocks may or may not have heeded their pastors. But governments certainly did.” 139 Ministers were perhaps less surprised than politicians as evidence mounted that people were not always heeding their spiritual leaders, trusting themselves as moral authorities instead. As a result, politicians began to take less notice when someone like Mutchmor came to call. In a democratic society, the ‘church’ doesn’t vote; individual members do. The United Church had hoped that Christian identity could be  cultivated by seeding the culture with Christian values. That Christian culture – whether of the Protestant or Catholic variety – was more tenuous than traditionally assumed created apprehension across denominational lines. The consequences of failure were grave, and United Church leaders were not alone in their fear for

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the future of the church. As one of its ministers who pondered the findings of the Maclean’s survey in 1961, W.J. Gallagher, then secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches, sounded a chilling word of warning: “Christianity is never more than a generation away from extinction.”140

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Rev. William Berry, Rev. Ernest E. Long, Rt Rev. Angus J. MacQueen, and Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker (left to right behind the pulpit) leading the General Council in a hymn of praise. E.L. Homewood, The United Church Observer, September 1958. uc c a 92.185P / 378.

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Rev. Dr Alfred Clinton Forrest, editor of The United Church Observer (far right), with unidentified ministers and Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson (centre). Dominion-Wide Photographs, n.d. uc c a , 76.001P / 1950.

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Rev. J. Raymond Hord, secretary of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service. The United Church Observer, 1 September 1967.

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Student Glee Club at Portage la Prairie Indian residential school, [1967?]. uc c a , 86.158P / 33.

Dr J.P.C. Fraser, port chaplain in Halifax, introducing immigrants to his wife at United Church booth, Berkeley Studio, [196-?]. uc c a 2008.011P / 2679.

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Rev. Clarke MacDonald, secretary of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service, head of the new department of Church in Society in the Division of Mission in Canada after restructuring, and former minister of St Luke’s United Church, Toronto. The United Church Observer, February 1971.

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Tuxis boys entertain at a church coffee house event. Berkeley Studio, [196-?]. u cca, 2008.011P / 2276.

At the “Dugout,” a coffee house on skid row run by First United Church, Vancouver. Berkeley Studio, 1970. uc ca, 2008.011P / 4133.

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Meeting of members of the Committee on the Revision of the Hymnary, 1964. Anglican and United Church members pictured (left to right): Donald S. Henderson, R.D. Atkinson, Jay Macpherson, John Webster Grant, G.G.D. Kilpatrick, R.H.N. Davidson, Stanley Osborne, John W. Stinson, H.A.A. Rose, F.R.C. Clarke. uc c a , 92.185P / 527.

Harriet Christie, secretary of the Board of Women, and other senior church executives. The United Church Observer, October 1970.

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Rev. Bruce McLeod, newly elected United Church moderator. The United Church Observer, October 1972.

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7 Uncoupling Christianity and Culture in Canada Original sin of institutions: priests may pray for guidance with utter ­sincerity, but what they are unconsciously praying for is the continuance of the social ascendancy of their Church. Northrop Frye, “Notebook” 11e [56]

As the retiring United Church moderator stepped forward to give his final address, few of those assembled for the 1962 General Council were expecting a speech that would make headlines the next morning. The Rev. Hugh A. McLeod had been introduced to delegates two years earlier as the “quiet and highly respected minister” of Winnipeg’s Knox United Church – more of a “highland mystic” than an agitator. Yet reputedly where he stood was always clear if he thought it necessary to take a side.1 On this occasion, there would be no doubt about his views on immigration trends.2 The nation’s future would be in peril, he predicted, if immigration continued “overwhelmingly as in the past ten years to make Canada predominantly Roman Catholic.” McLeod tried to explain that his objections were not personal – the immigrants themselves were praiseworthy. Their church, however, was another matter entirely. Insisting that Catholicism favoured “the establishment of a monolithic infallible authority under Rome” (and rejecting the notion that Canadian Catholics believed otherwise), he feared that their growing numbers heralded “the end of liberty as we have known it.” Democracy was “very vulnerable to infiltration,” he cautioned, for political parties wanted to win votes and the press wanted to increase circulation. “By reason of our vaunted tolerance we are in danger of losing our freedom by default.”

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Although aware that the Second Vatican Council was to get underway in a few weeks, he dismissed the optimism of those who hoped for a different kind of Catholicism.3 Given the prevailing assumptions about the role of organized religion in society, McLeod had good reason to be uneasy about the rising number of Catholics: more members, it was supposed, would translate into more political influence for a church’s leaders. However, what McLeod and other leaders failed at first to appreciate was the extent to which the public role of both Protestant and Catholic churches was shifting. Faced with the prospect of conflicts generated by religious pluralism, Canada and other western countries ventured to promote solely secular values to provide cultural cohesion – among them the tolerance, liberty, and democracy that McLeod had proudly promoted as distinctively Protestant ideals. With the demise of Christendom that this move signalled, churches were to find their influence in key social and cultural areas more limited than in the past. An examination of issues of the semi-monthly Observer following McLeod’s speech illustrates some of the complexities of the United Church’s relationship with the Catholic Church at that pivotal ­moment. The magazine was quick to defend McLeod against the critical press coverage that his controversial remarks drew. The comments on immigration had been taken out of context, explained the Observer, insisting that the address had been well received by those who heard it.4 A.C. Forrest, editor of the Observer (and still dealing with the fallout as the next issue went to press), declared the superficiality of the secular media startling and claimed that little notice had been given to the steps the United Church was taking to deal constructively with Canada’s rapidly changing religious configuration. He drew attention to two commissions that the United Church’s recent General Council had set up to study the related issues of immigration and religion in the public schools.5 By happenstance a miniature photo of Pope John XXIII, inserted to publicize the cover story for an article in the next issue of the Observer, appeared just a few pages away from Forrest’s attempt to deal with criticism of the former moderator.6 The situation was ­further exacerbated by what readers saw when that issue arrived two weeks later: an attractive picture of the pope graced the cover and inside was a reprint of an article by a prominent American

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theologian, Robert McAfee Brown, who attended Vatican Council as a Protestant observer. Readers learned that the idea for convening a council had come to the pope during a period “devoted to prayers for the re-union of Christendom.” It is unlikely that those Protestants who feared Catholic domination were placated by the disclosure that the pope sought to show the world how the Catholic Church was facing its internal problems in hopes of welcoming back to the fold “other sheep” that had “strayed.”7 Forrest was shrewd enough to anticipate the furor the picture would create. He assured readers that the cover story had been planned for some time to mark the opening of the Vatican Council. “Just in case some think that we decided to put His Holiness on the cover as a public relations gesture after all the recent bad press, please be assured we don’t scare that easily.”8 His attempt at humour did little to soften reader response: almost all the correspondence published in “Letters to the Editor” was negative – and that was just a sampling. One angry, unsigned, and unprinted note was blunt: “Your Observer just came. I am returning it as I am a Protestant, and feel I shouldn’t have to be staring at the Pope’s picture from a church paper, that I understood was Protestant. I don’t want it in my home.”9 At the same time, to Forrest’s dismay, word came of a request for more government support for Catholic separate schools in Ontario, a proposal that he knew was bound to open old wounds and spark new controversy. “Not This!” shouted the editorial headline, with the body of the editorial denouncing the bishops’ request, calling it “political dynamite.”10 There was reason for Protestants to be apprehensive about the population patterns. Postwar immigration had made for a religiously plural mix, with Protestant numbers increasingly in the minority. After years of restrictions, the resumption of admissions brought refugees and other immigrants, and showed a definite trend: more continental European immigrants meant more Catholics outside Quebec, an unsettling demographic fact that ­further undermined the notion of “British Canada.” It did not help matters that Catholics were said to be smugly aware that the ­recent census showed them at 46 per cent of the population – and growing. “We Will Bury You with Babies” was the title of an ­article in a Catholic magazine that turned the old revenge of the cradle into an attack on the United Church’s position on artificial birth control.11

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The United Church was of two minds where immigration was concerned. Its International Affairs committee supported a “vig­ orous and well directed immigration policy” to attract people to Canada from all regions of the world. It recommended that Canada accept “at least a token number from the Orient, India, The [sic] British West Indies and Africa,”12 including a “fair share of the ‘Hard Core’ in refugee camps, at the rate that this country can successfully integrate them.”13 The committee was fully aware that a more open immigration policy would complicate social integration, especially at a time when Anglo-Saxon culture was disappearing as a source of common values. Making the case for admitting immigrants from places beyond the uk and Europe, one International Affairs report stated the problem candidly: “There is the dilemma between the need to open up empty lands by immigration and the desire to restrict immigration only to the assimilable – had the Indians been able to enforce such a policy of assimilable immigration they would have been around still!”14 The committee denounced Canada’s immigration laws as a “brand of apartheid” because they were based on racial discrimination.15 The tone of its reports was still pro-immigration in 1962 as the country awaited details of a new immigration policy that would benefit chiefly Asians, Africans, and those from countries in the Middle East.16 The response of the Board of Home Missions was more reserved, reflecting perhaps the mixed results of the United Church’s outreach programs to immigrants under its auspices, especially in urban areas.17 Statistics confirmed what many suspected: the United Church had kept pace with other Protestant churches, but lost ground to Catholicism even outside Quebec due to lower fertility rates and higher numbers of Catholic immigrants.18 Home Missions secretary Malcolm Macdonald reported in 1961 that of the 106,928 persons admitted into Canada during the previous two years, only 33,235 were Protestants. The most dramatic change was in Toronto, then Canada’s second-largest city and long considered its Protestant centre. Projections showed that the city would be predominantly Roman Catholic by 1980. It was already losing what he called its AngloSaxon Protestant stock to the suburbs (still mainly Protestant), “while Roman Catholic Non-Anglo-Saxons concentrate in the city proper and replace old church constituencies that were Protestant for decades.”19 Protestants and Catholics in Toronto were soon to be joined by significant numbers of new Canadians who were neither.

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The year 1962 was arguably a tipping point for both the United Church and Canada. A reckoning with religious and cultural pluralism was inescapable, for by then, it was apparent that Quebec’s Quiet Revolution was dramatically altering the role of the Catholic Church and its vision for a Christian society in that province.20 Outside Quebec another revolution, just as momentous, was underway. Among its casualties was the cultural role in nation-building ascribed to the major Protestant churches. With the search for a new collective identity for Canada would come the realization that religion was as much a hindrance as a help in that enterprise: no longer could Christianity be harnessed as a unifying force in a religiously diverse Canada. Evident at the General Council that year was what the Observer described as a liberalizing trend. Delegates had affirmed the controversial position on remarriage taken two years earlier by accepting broader grounds for divorce, recommended that birth control information be provided to married couples, rejected a call for a censorship board, and acknowledged “the increasing prestige of gainfully employed women” (more commonly known as working women). The call for laws against gambling; restrictions on production, advertising, and sale of beverage alcohol; and protection of the ­ Christian Sunday were more muted than in the past, replaced by calls for “self-discipline of the members in faith and practice.”21 A ten-year process of restructuring was set in motion with the first report of the Long Range Planning Committee, whose task was to answer the question: What is the purpose of the church and the ­nature of a congregation?22 A commission was formed to study how the United Church could “best share in the World Mission of the Church.”23 A new organization for women, United Church Women (u c w), was celebrated as a merger of the w m s and the wa. Publication of The Word and the Way for adult education marked the arrival of the New Curriculum. And it was at the 1962 General Council that the indomitable J.R. Mutchmor was elected on the first ballot as the next moderator. Mutchmor promised to make evangelism his priority during his two-year term as moderator by targeting the 1 million persons who had recently told census-takers that they belonged to the United Church but were never seen there. He implored the church to think of these no-shows as “a fringe to be cultivated, not cut off.”24 This was likely a reference to changes to the United Church’s membership

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policy being considered at the time. In 1956 a Committee on Membership, chaired by Donald Mathers of Queen’s Theological College, had been appointed to clear up some problems that had surfaced in recent years. Church records had not kept pace with postwar mobility and church growth in the 1950s. The committee’s interim report had already been presented to the previous General Council and then discussed at most presbyteries, where it generated “a considerable volume of comment and suggestion.”25 By 1962 the committee’s final report was ready. Compared with the many other contentious matters before the General Council that year, the membership issue was a sleeper. The recommendations seemed innocuous. The only item that drew any real attention simply encouraged congregations to enforce an already existing provision in the Manual that authorized the removal from its roll of the names of members who “without reasonable excuse” had been absent from public worship and Communion in their local church for three years (or some other period determined by the session).26 There was no need for a person to make a formal request to have their name removed from the membership roll.27 It was a solution to a practical problem of church discipline that perhaps had unintended consequences, as congregations followed this directive and purged their membership rolls over the next few years. One wonders how many commissioners took note of the bold new introduction to the final report, which set the practical recommen­ dations for church membership in a theological framework that ­divulged the precarious condition of Christendom in Canada and offered a frank theological assessment of what was in store. A year earlier Mathers had offered a group of United Church leaders a preview of what his committee members saw on the horizon. Speaking to representatives of two key boards (Christian Education and e&ss), he warned that the Constantinian Era, a period of more than a thousand years when “Christian standards were accepted by all as the normal and natural basis of public life,” was coming to an end. He mused that the United Church might overestimate its political and social influence in its attempts to adapt to the end of the era and be tempted to take stands on issues that would lead to humiliating defeat, weakening whatever influence it still held.28 He also cautioned that the end of Christian civilization meant that the public school system could no longer be counted on to provide effective religious instruction, making it all the more important for the church

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to develop its own educational resources.29 As author of The Word and the Way, the adult study book for the New Curriculum, Mathers himself was already deeply involved in one such initiative. The seriousness of the new situation was set out in response to an obvious question (given the rather mundane subject matter of the report and a booklet based on it that was being prepared for congregational discussion): Why study church membership? “We have become aware of a great change in relations between church and world,” was the reply. The report announced the end of Christendom in Canada with its blunt assertion that “the Middle Ages have finally come to an end.” Living in a religiously plural society, where one no longer needed to be a church member in order to be a good citizen, would soon mean making a clear distinction between church membership and citizenship. The report predicted that the United Church was about to enter a new and different age. It would continue to “seek to serve society” as in the past; however, church membership would no longer be considered “the religious aspect of citizenship,” and Christians would no longer be expected to accept the “standards of good citizenship uncritically from the state.” This new freedom was cause for celebration, according to the report, for Christianity was awakening from “the comfortable slumber of a thousand years of European domesticity” and could now embrace its “world mission” more fully.30 Although other United Church leaders were soon to take the notion of a new world mission much further, Mathers and his committee laid some of the early theological groundwork. The end of Christendom in Canada, as elsewhere, meant that religion was soon less visibly present in everyday life. The quest for secular alternatives to the guiding principles of Christian civilization raised a host of new questions. What did it mean to be a Christian citizen if the notion of Christian civilization no longer had currency? Were churches whose mission had been construed in those terms rendered useless? What was the role for the church in community life if Christian values were separate from civic values, rather than their source? If religion divided opinion when it entered the public arena, should it simply be kept out? Politicians and pundits were quietly asking those same questions as they pondered the new exigencies of postwar Canada. It had long been presumed in the West that religion had a part to play in civi­ lizing society. The close ties between Christianity and culture had

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survived the division of medieval Christendom after the reformations of the sixteenth century; in and beyond Europe, religion continued to shape the identity of nation-states. As he studied Canadian society in the 1940s, sociologist S.D. Clark identified the close relationship of church and community as an important feature of nationalism in the western world. One of “the fullest expressions” of that association, he claimed, was “found in one of our own churches, the United Church of Canada.”31 That connection still appeared to be intact as Canada faced the uncertainties of the nuclear age; in public, at least, political leaders applauded the church’s civic contributions.32 The International Affairs committee began its 1952 report to the General Council with testimonials from three United Church Members of Parliament. Leading off was Lester Pearson, who urged the United Church to take a greater interest in Canada’s foreign policy. He assured the church that its attentiveness to international issues was helping “to ensure that Christian principles and endeavour are directed to the task of promoting a just and peaceful world order.”33 His words would have had a familiar ring to those raised, as he was, in homes and churches imbued with the missionary spirit of Christian internationalism. The United Church exuded a sense of its own importance. Meetings with prominent politicians and civil servants such as Pearson and Paul Martin occurred frequently; likewise, collaboration with other church bodies (notably the w cc) and consultations with scientists and other academics in preparing of recommendations were common.34 When the Learned Societies met in Ottawa in 1957, the United Church moderator presided at a meeting of church leaders and scientists.35 And it was a service in Sydenham Street United Church in Kingston that Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip attended during their 1959 royal visit to Canada. Pearson’s addresses in the early 1950s reflected the customary ­assumption of Christianity’s influence. His installation address as chancellor of Victoria University challenged the school to give its students “a faith, a sense of mission, and understanding of social and moral values.” Education, “especially at a university such as ours” (perhaps a reference to its standing as a denominational college of the United Church) “must be based on a belief in something deeper and higher than oneself, whatever it may be called; on Christian morality, as a basis for the individual and for society.”36 His public roles sometimes called for him to speak from pulpits where his

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Methodist father or grandfather had preached. In what he later described as the nearest he came to giving a religious address, he ­offered his listeners counsel with Christian overtones: “Today, it is true, we live in fear and tension and under the awful shadow of a nuclear cloud. But if each of us remains true to those Christian ideals and Christian principles, which provide an answer to every question, a solution to every problem, we have no cause for despair.”37 Particularly vexing was that implementing some of the progressive social and cultural initiatives associated with those ideals and principles seemed to erode the customary relationship between church and community in Canada and elsewhere. In Victorian times governments had shown little interest in providing social services, leaving it up to individuals to help themselves or to seek help from a benevolent organization, often under the auspices of a church.38 In their attempts to meet the public demands of Victorian society, argues historian Jeffrey Cox, the Non-Conformist churches in Britain (the denominational counterparts of the United Church’s founding traditions) idealistically claimed responsibility for education, poverty relief, entertainment, character development, and social cohesion. In time, as their inability to meet expectations became evident, they were happy to turn these tasks over to specialized institutions. But in doing so their own world view, and their role as regenerators in it, disintegrated; the next generation was less convinced of the power of the church’s influence. Cox describes what followed in the interwar period as a “sort of retreat into the church,” with a shift of emphasis from serving to belonging.39 Cox pinpoints more specifically what some have referred to variously as the impact of secularization, secularism, urbanization, industrialization, and materialism: churches were “hit all at once by the emergence of new philanthropic, administrative, and educational bureaucracies which destroyed their claims to social utility, by a changing age structure, and by a generational revolt.” In order to gain an advantage in their bid to influence Victorian society, they had invested in philanthropic work. Now, with the dismantling of that philanthropic work, they became irrelevant: they were “left with little to do and even less to say, since ‘church work’ had been a central justification for their existence.”40 In Britain, the expansion of government into education and social services during the interwar years was, as historian Frank Prochaska

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sees it, “both the cause and effect of Christian decline.” Ceding ­responsibility for social well-being to the government “reflected a social and cultural transformation that had repercussions for Christianity that were arguably as great as any since the eighteenthcentury religious revival.” Although at least some of the impetus was connected to war and reconstruction (and thus, he concedes, beyond the churches’ control), he poignantly pictures church leaders participating in their own demise by calling for more government investment in social welfare: “The bishops blew out the candles to see better in the dark.”41 The situation of the United Church was strikingly similar, and the impact on its social services (and the volunteerism of the Christian citizens who supported them) was likewise profound.42 By the 1940s its boarding schools were closing because there were too few residents.43 The prospect that Canada would have thousands of new immigrants once the war was over, with their children filling the schools, delayed dealing with a situation already described in 1944 as a crisis.44 By the end of the 1950s, it was clear that boarding schools were headed for obsolescence, school buses and rural school consolidation making it possible for more children to attend school while living at home.45 Hospitals operated by the United Church were undergoing a similar transition. Church union had brought together the medical missions of the Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church, a number of them operated by the wms . The Board of Home Missions and the w ms shared oversight of hospitals that were set up to serve indigenous peoples and immigrants in sparsely populated districts where there was no other provision for medical care.46 Hundreds of doctors and nurses saw this as an expression of practical Christianity that paralleled overseas missionary service. Longest serving among them was Morley A.R. Young, whose career at the Lamont, Alberta, hospital between 1922 and 1977 included such distinctions as a term as president of the Canadian Medical Association.47 Rising health-care costs and shifting demographics made this form of Christian service less feasible. Better means of transportation meant that even those who lived in rural areas had access to a wider range of medical services than church hospitals could provide, especially with more generous government funding of municipal hospitals. The wms realized by 1954 that hospital work was in transition and asked the Commission on Church Hospitals that year if it was

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time to withdraw these services now that the government was taking responsibility for caring for the sick.48 The commission’s first report (1956) noted that in the past, hospital work had served an important social purpose. It reiterated the findings of an earlier survey that medical missions in “Non-Anglo-Saxon districts” was of “special value in breaking down natural barriers of prejudice and suspicion and in securing a better mutual understanding and in promoting good fellowship among the various racial groups.”49 But the vulnerability of medical missions was evident in its second report two years later. Of the twenty-four facilities in operation before the war, only eleven remained; six were operated by the Board of Home Missions and five by the wms. It noted an ironic consequence of the new government-funded hospital insurance plans: although the grants had reduced the church’s outlay in some areas, the rising costs of maintaining modern standards of hospital care meant that the church could expect larger capital expenditures in the future.50 As the United Church withdrew from medical ministries, its hospitals were sold to municipalities or, in some cases, Catholic charities. A benevolent state with the power to tax was covering more and more of the escalating costs of education, health care, and other s­ocial programs. Secular standards of social work made religious social service appear outdated and redundant, and its past contributions to the community were quickly forgotten.51 It was difficult to object to better-funded government initiatives – after all, the United Church had lobbied for them! Yet the church’s place in society was subtly transformed once it relinquished responsibilities that had made its presence visible in many communities. Friendly service to the nation had been central to the case for church union. Its congregations, once considered centres of community activity, suddenly had less to do – and in any case, with more women working outside the home, not as much volunteer time available. There were fewer and fewer church-related institutions to oversee. And for church members, there was not as much to lose by flouting the church’s moral authority; they now relied instead on the state for social services. Meanwhile, the state was emerging as a formidable rival in other vital areas of Canadian life. By 1949 the threat of American ascendancy in mass culture, competing claims about who was to control the broadcast media, and a crisis in university funding were serious enough issues to persuade the Liberal government to appoint a

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commission to address them.52 The findings of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (more often dubbed the Culture Commission or the Massey Commission, in recognition of Vincent Massey’s role as chair) went far beyond the mandate suggested by its name. It implicitly endorsed Massey’s own view of culture as a political rather than moral force, and presented a compelling case for state support of culture as a means of promoting national identity. As a young man, Massey had been an active member of the Methodist Church, a delegate at the Edinburgh Conference in 1910, and a participant in congregational and denominational ­affairs. But his church’s attitude to culture was fraught with contradiction, as historian Karen Finlay’s study of Massey notes: supportive of educational institutions on the one hand, but frowning on visual arts and the theatre, to which Massey found himself drawn.53 Shortly after his father’s death in 1926, Massey became an Anglican, and criticism of “Puritan” attitudes toward the arts and contempt for their use as moral propaganda cropped up in his writings around the same time. After diplomatic postings in the United States and Britain, Massey returned to Canada in 1946 convinced, says Finlay, of the peril that Canada faced from the escalation of American imperialism.54 The Massey Report offered a defensive strategy based on the interlocking connections it presumed between citizenship, national sovereignty, and culture (notably the arts, ­sciences, and education). The United Church was one of three churches invited to present a brief to the commission.55 All underscored the importance of religious broadcasting on c b c radio and television to communicate the Christian message.56 Some of the United Church’s theologians had at first frowned on religious broadcasting as a “menace,”57 but most had since come to see its opportunities, especially after witnessing the adroitness of conservative preachers who disseminated their teachings on radio programs originating in the United States. The United Church was among the early supporters of public broadcasting, and provided material for the c bc’s religious programming.58 It no doubt hoped that the Massey Commission’s work would elevate the tone of Canadian culture and defend it from American domination. For its part, the commission perhaps considered the United Church a useful ally, given its customary antipathy to popular entertainment as “pagan” (or at least American) in tone.

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Canada’s churches still wanted and expected a voice in the cultural affairs of the nation. However, the report’s bold call for government funding of cultural activities gradually relieved them of their responsibility to sponsor literary work, education, and the performing arts. Instead the Massey Commission created an expectation in the public mind that the government was responsible for developing and funding a cultural policy for Canada; this was its greatest achievement, concludes historian Paul Litt.59 And so the state joined technology and mass culture in competing with the churches for the time and attention of the Christian citizen.60 It was hardly a fair contest, for federal and provincial governments had more means (taxes) and greater access to contemporary methods (such as more direct use of media) for shaping the hearts and minds of Canadians. The impact of its recommendations was to silently chip away at Christianity’s contribution to national distinctiveness by creating the impression that Canadian culture was itself a sufficient source of national identity. This new departure was later cause for concern for at least one of the five commissioners.61 Hilda Neatby was a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan and a staunch Presbyterian. While she saw Canada as “formally a Christian country,” with the vast majority of its people affiliated with a church, she was uneasy about the tension between Christianity’s message of sin and salvation, on the one hand, and the belief that human striving alone was sufficient. There was a great deal at stake in her view: “It is impossible to say whether a culture can develop without being centred in a religious faith of some sort; it is a fact that such a thing never has happened.”62 One of a number of prominent Canadians asked in 1957 whether there was a religious revival underway, Neatby expressed her misgivings by critiquing a cbc religious program produced by the National Religious Advisory Council. Within this program the hymn “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven” had been followed by a reading that included the words “man on earth has no one to help him but man.” Her assessment was scathing: “When popular ‘Christian’ national programmes combine purely pagan teaching with profoundly Christian hymns, without, apparently, any sense of irreverence or even of logical inconsistency, it is impossible not to fear that the apparent signs of religious revival may dissolve into the purely sentimental and archaic, or develop into a religious movement, powerful, but not Christian.”63

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The publication of the Massey Report in 1951 was to become a landmark in Canadian history. It coincided with new cultural initiatives that included the National Ballet of Canada, Stratford Festival, and c b c ’s telecast of Hockey Night in Canada.64 After his appointment in 1952 as the first Canadian-born governor general, Massey used his influence, along with his close ties to the Liberal government, to promote the report’s recommendations. In combination with other initiatives – abolishing the right of Canadians to appeal to the British Privy Council in 1949, letting the term ‘Dominion’ fall out of usage, and defining what it meant to be Canadian in terms of certain social programs to which all citizens of the country were entitled – it recommended measures that had the effect of downplaying British identity. For anglophones, says political scientist Kenneth McRoberts, it thus fostered “a new conception of a Canadian nationality, directly attached to the Canadian state and unmediated by any previous identity.”65 However, tampering with national identity appears to have raised hackles in Quebec, where the Massey Report was considered an attack on its prerogatives. McRoberts argues that premier Maurice Duplessis saw it as a challenge to the notion of Canada’s dual nationality. In 1956, Duplessis called his own Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems. The Tremblay Report reaffirmed Quebec as a Catholic society, but told the story of Confederation the way the separatists were to tell it a few years later, as a compact between two peoples, rather than a political pact between the provinces. Quebec also resisted Ottawa’s efforts to knit the country together by declining to participate in a number of national social programs that involved cost-sharing with the federal government.66 Government policies after the death of Duplessis in 1959 and of his successor, Paul Sauvé, a year later triggered a series of events that saw Jean Lesage’s Liberal party successfully campaigning in 1960 to become “masters in our own house.” The Massey model of national unity was on a collision course not only with Christian culture but also with Quebec’s aspirations for autonomy.67 By 1962 the precariousness of the situation was evident to Pearson. That year, as leader of the opposition, he delivered what he con­ sidered one of his most important speeches before the House of Commons. Warning of a divided Canada, he mused that most English-speaking Canadians considered protecting French language

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and culture a commitment that pertained only to Parliament, federal courts, and the province of Quebec itself. They assumed that “for all practical purposes, there would be an English-speaking Canada with a bilingual Quebec: What is called the ‘French fact’ was to be provincial only.” However, francophones in Quebec saw Canada as an equal partnership between two founding races, and presumed protection of their language and culture across Canada. This fundamental difference over the meaning of Confederation had been obscured by what Pearson described as a bicultural coexistence, with English as the language of communication when the two came into occasional contact.68 It was clear to Pearson that the people of Quebec were determined to control their own economic and cultural affairs, a situation that he likened to shock treatment for the rest of Canada. Hinting at the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism that he would call once he became prime minister the following year, he predicted that an inquiry would “show the importance of the contribution of our new Canadians other than the founding races, a contribution which has been of special and indeed exciting value since World War II.”69 What was nicknamed the “B & B Commission” was to go even further in redefining how Canadians thought of themselves as a people. The old notion of two races – and their tacit association with two faiths – no longer fit the new social reality of Canadian life. What historian Ramsay Cook found most striking about the final report was that “in some 140 pages religion was barely mentioned,” an omission that he guessed would not have been possible even ten years earlier. He was prepared to “state categorically that at no time before 1945 would it have been possible for a survey of FrenchEnglish relations to have been written without devoting a very considerable amount of space to religious differences.”70 Although the United Church may have been disappointed at that outcome, its own experience of preparing for its hearing before the B &B Commission showed why the commissioners preferred to steer clear of the subject. Constitutional expert Eugene Forsey agreed to  serve as chair of the group that prepared the brief. Born in Newfoundland, he had spent most of his years in Quebec, and was an active member of one of the United Church’s French-language congregations. He was in a unique position to address the commission’s terms of reference (which his committee believed to be too narrow) and set out to convince the commission to “consider the

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suggestion that the situation in Canada is wider than biculturalism and extends to multi-culturalism.”71 “We are not happy with the term ‘founding races,’” the United Church brief stated, noting that it was not a good translation into English of the French word peuples. Moreover, the reference to founding races might give the unintended and offensive impression of British or French superiority (sec. 21). To underscore the point, the brief made a pointed reference to “the contribution of the Indians and Eskimos, who were here before any of us, and who might well dispute the claim of French and British to the title ‘founding peoples’” (sec. 47). The brief also reminded the commission of the United Church’s long-standing concern for the schooling of Protestant children in Quebec and other predominantly French areas of Canada, and pressed the point that “French” schools should not be assumed to be “Catholic” schools. It urged the provision of French public schools in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada (sec. 53–64). The United Church’s brief exuded the more open and tolerant spirit that had captured the imagination of many Canadians, especially new immigrants or those growing up after the war, who had never thought of themselves as British. However, there was more going on behind the scenes. Some of the United Church’s own members were reluctant to let go of the old animosities between English / Protestant and French / Catholic. Hostility toward francophones and dismay over the federal government’s failure to prevent Quebec from ‘controlling’ Canada filled their correspondence. Typical of such sentiments was a letter to Mutchmor from Alexander Smith of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. He derided the aim of Canadian unity as an excuse “to give the French whatever they want – turn us into half Frenchmen – a new mongrel sort of breed which will always acquiesce with the French, IE [i.e.], the Roman Church in any demands.” It seemed to him that Canada was being asked to join Quebec, rather than the other way around. Although Wolfe had won at the Plains of Abraham, “our Religionists are well on the way to hand the country back without a fight to the Roman Catholic Church personified in the French Minority in Canada.” The only solution was for Quebec to separate completely: “then we will have an English speaking non denominational [sic] country free from Roman Catholic influence. Whether now or later it must come in the interests of the whole of this country.”72

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B. Doerksen from Regina, Saskatchewan, uttered similar sentiments: “we can see no room for bilingualism of any type. Having failed miserably to keep Canada British, we now face the prospect of keeping it English-speaking at least.” He was certain that “Quebec punks are itching for a bloody revolution,” and supposed that Canadians would have to ask the uk “to help us defeat the French a second time.” If that proved unsuccessful, he speculated “Canadians may well ask Uncle Sam to come in and liberate us from the French Romans.” The writer held Pearson responsible. With a Cabinet “half full of Frenchmen or Roman Catholics or both,” Quebec had him “exactly where they want him – over a barrel.”73 A copy of a circular letter, signed by a man from Ottawa, claimed that a French minority was attempting to “pack our Civil Service with French nationalists, to monopolize the voice, ears, eyes and legal system of Government by controlling radio, television, printing bureau, film board, Dept. of State, the Mint, and also the foreign service and Public Works, the last being the great pot of gold useful for purposes of patronage.” The flag, the national anthem, and the public school would be next, the letter warned. The writer was angry at the inference that only the French were “Canadian” and concerned that others could claim “no roots,” for they had been destroyed by subversive methods “conceived and well planned in the Province of Quebec.” The letter ended with the ominous words: “It is later than you think.”74 Forsey no doubt considered such sentiments extreme, but a trip to Banff to attend a conference on Canadian unity opened his eyes to equally disturbing views circulating among francophones. Growing up in Quebec, he was familiar with the old revenge of the cradle version of Quebec nationalism that dreamed of New Brunswick becoming a predominantly French province, and of spreading across eastern and northern Ontario and encircling the English in southern Ontario.75 The new brand of nationalism was more alarming. Forsey admitted to United Church general secretary Ernest Long that the meeting had been a “searing experience” that left him “a good deal less enthusiastic about the whole business than I was.” The three prominent French-Canadian academics who had spoken – self-­ described moderates – were, as he put it bluntly, “insane.” If they spoke for Quebec, the future for Canada looked grim: the “jig is up,” he predicted. He fumed that “not one English Canadian in a thousand would tolerate for thirty seconds” what they were demanding: a new constitution, an “Austro-Hungarian” style of dual government,

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and the adoption of French “as a working language” across Canada (and if “extremists” took over, the terms would be even worse). Lest Long think he was exaggerating, he added, such views were available in print.76 Forsey repeated his concerns to J. Ralph Watson, secretary of Montreal Presbytery and a member of the group that had prepared the United Church’s brief, and described himself as “plunged in gloom” by the remarks of the three “quite crazy” professors from Quebec. “I did tell them plainly that if this is what French Canada really wanted, then I thought the reply of English Canada would be, ‘In God’s name, go!’” He confided, “Personally I would sooner have two completely separate states than the sort of associate state monstrosity these gentry intimated was the only alternative.”77 Forsey wondered at the time if his protest to what he had heard at Banff had been forceful enough, but some thought he had gone too far. Reminiscing about the conference in his memoirs years later, he recalled that he was considered an Anglo-Saxon bigot. Most of the English-speaking delegates “were so anxious to show themselves kind, conciliatory, broad-minded, and penitent that they were prepared to agree to almost anything, however impracticable, absurd, or destructive.”78 With a month to go before he was to present the church’s brief to the Royal Commission, Forsey summed up the dilemma facing Canada and its largest Protestant church as he saw it: “Once our brief has gone into the Royal Commission, the subject may become a pretty hot one in the United Church, for I am rather afraid that a large part of our membership will go into orbit at what they will regard as too many concessions to French Canada. At the same time, a great many French Canadians may dismiss the whole thing as mere crumbs; but this reaction is of less immediate importance to us.”79 The conciliatory tone of the United Church’s brief hinted that a change in its relationship to the Catholic Church was in the offing. Dominican priest Philip LeBlanc was likely right in conjecturing that the United Church’s presentation to the B& B Commission was “in striking contrast” to what would have been said a decade earlier.80 But that was in part because the situation of the Catholic Church was changing too – both in Canada and internationally. Facing ­similar challenges, the two were discovering commonalities that had been ignored when pamphlets like What’s the Difference? focused on dissimilarities. Vatican II was still in session as the B& B

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Commission wrapped up its hearings in 1965 and issued a preliminary report81 that signalled to Canada’s churches that the political calculations that had inspired the notion of the revenge of the cradle for Catholicism and the movement for a united Protestantism had suddenly changed. The B & B Commission showed even less interest than Massey’s in harnessing Christianity as a cultural force. A Protestant Canada outside Quebec was not the aim of those promoting a bicultural Canada, and a Christian Canada was a contradiction in terms for those who fully embraced multiculturalism. Instead, bilingual / bicultural (and later multicultural) became the Canadian mantra. Christianity – in both its Catholic and Protestant expressions – was left out of the new formula for creating national identity. The state looked to its own social and cultural programs rather than to the churches to provide the new glue to make the Canadian mosaic. By the time the commission’s work was completed, the Pearson government had ­already proposed a new Canadian flag to replace the Red Ensign, strengthened national social programs, and launched plans for the country’s Centennial celebrations in 1967. If the B & B Commission needed a reminder of the political complications of religious differences, they had only to follow the latest round of an old controversy that had erupted in Ontario over the place of religion in public schools. Growing up in a country that still thought of itself as Christian, one did not have to be raised by devout Christian parents or attend church to be exposed to at least a modicum of Christianity. Many public schools taught the rudiments of the Christian faith through daily prayers and Bible readings. Except in provinces where public funding of Catholic separate schools was constitutionally permitted, and in Newfoundland where public schools operated on a denominational basis, religious instruction in public schools was non-sectarian, that is, non-denominational.82 From its inception the United Church had considered the school a critical link in connecting faith and community life. Its ambitious postwar agenda included promoting religion instruction in the curriculum of Canadian schools wherever provincial regulations permitted it. Religion could not be separated from culture, argued C.E. Silcox, commending the work of R.C. Chalmers and the Commission on Culture that had prepared the brief for the Massey Commission: “to ignore or pretend to ignore the significance of the relationship is

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not only tragic, but, if persisted in, will prove suicidal.” Nor could religion be segregated from education by leaving it to the home and the church, “no matter what the secularists say.”83 The public schools of Ontario, the United Church’s demographic centre, were of particular concern. Troubled by evidence that “a growingly large proportion of children are receiving no religious training in the home, and that many do not have even that wholly inadequate modicum of religious influence – one hour a week at Sunday school,” Alfred Gandier and other church union supporters had advocated more religious education in public schools. Community well-being was at stake, for religion’s primary purpose was “not restricted to the individual soul. Character as well as knowledge is essential to good citizenship, and stable moral character has its roots in religion.” Hence, given the public consequences of failing to provide religious education, a “Christian state, the organized government of a Christian people,” could not ignore the problem. Gandier was undeterred by the argument that not everyone wanted religious education in the schools, retorting that “no self-respecting community can allow a small minority to turn it aside from what the majority believe vital to the well-being, not only of their children, but of the community and the country.” Canada was a Christian country, and as such, its people had the right to have their children “educated daily in the great facts and distinctive teachings of the Christian religion.”84 Gandier was part of a movement that historians R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar see as forming in the 1920s and culminating in legislation introduced by Premier George Drew in 1944, which gave instruction in a non-denominational Protestant form of Christianity an even larger place in the Ontario public school curriculum.85 The Royal Commission on Education in Ontario (Hope Commission) that reported in 1950 gave further encouragement to those who pictured the school co-operating with the home and church in a child’s religious training.86 The United Church was among the denominations that seized this new opportunity. An Observer article described a visit to a school in Lambeth, Ontario, in the mid-1950s, where Allen Duffield, a United Church minister with degrees in both theology and education, was in charge of religious instruction of students from kindergarten through grade eight. Since Duffield was the only minister residing in the small community, there was little opposition to his involvement: all the

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students participated, and all the teachers helped with the preparations.87 In other schools, classes were taught by United Church teachers who had taken courses in religion as part of their training. However, more needed to be done, according to George Pidgeon. In 1955 he urged the United Church to “lead in giving Divine Truth a new place in the mind of the nation.”Although the door to the public school was open, whether or not to step in had largely been left to personal or local initiatives, and in many communities the work was left undone or was undertaken by “sectarian groups who have their own axes to grind.”88 There was little coordination either denominationally or ecumenically. While the United Church prepared to coordinate religious in­ struction, the realities of dealing with postwar pluralism – and the anticipation of even greater diversity in the future with changes to Canada’s immigration policy – eroded support for its non-­ denominational approach. Opposition to religious instruction became more vocal. According to the Observer, the non-Christian reaction was “much harsher than ever expected.”89 Joining the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Unitarian Church was the Ethical Education Association (e e a ), a new organization founded by Doris Dodds. Dodds herself was Unitarian, but saw her organization as working on behalf of and alongside others who opposed the way religion was taught in Ontario schools. By all accounts her group was very successful in heating up the debate. Critics of religion in the public school curriculum had three main concerns. Firstly, they charged that current instructional practices were “sectarian,” which caused dismay in United Church circles. How could non-Christians see them as sectarian, the same term the United Church scornfully used for those it considered fanatical? Moreover, “non-sectarian” in the context of education had a long history and well-established meaning: instruction was presented within a general Christian framework, avoiding beliefs that were “peculiar” to any particular denomination and resonating well with the common faith on which the United Church was founded. Not surprisingly, it was taken aback by “the attempt to say that Christianity is itself a sect as over against Buddhism or other ethnic faiths.” This was “a warping of the original intent of the word,” protested E.R. McLean, the Board of Christian Education staff member responsible for religious education in the schools.90 But it was more than hairsplitting and potentially devastating, as McLean would

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well have known, for the legislation in many provinces called for education to be conducted on a non-sectarian basis. Secondly, critics claimed that religion in the public schools was a violation of the principle of separation of church and state. Even Winnipeg Presbytery had deferred to such criticism when (against the sentiment of the United Church in most other places) it sided with those opposed to religious instruction in Manitoba’s public schools.91 This perpetuated an erroneous reading of history, church leaders protested, patiently pointing out that no such principle existed in Canada. Canadians had rejected an American model of church-state separation in favour of a co-operation between them more akin to the British pattern.92 Defending the teaching of religion in the public schools rested on the conviction that Canada’s unique history had led to a distinctive pattern of church-state relations. Forrest appealed to the customary story of Canada’s past as it had been told after Confederation, at least outside Quebec: “Two peoples were deposited here with different languages, cultures and religions,” an Observer editorial reminded readers. Education had been the area of most controversy between church and state, resulting in arrangements that differed in each province. Forrest likely spoke for the majority of Protestants of the day when he said that they expected only some of the rights to religious instruction in public schools that had been granted to the Catholic minority through the funding of separate schools. However, he was seemingly unaware of the rapid and radical change that was about to take place; in 1960 he boldly (but wrongly) predicted, “Whether our system is ideal or not – and we prefer it to America’s – it isn’t likely to be basically altered.”93 Finally, critics of religion in the public schools claimed that their rights as non-Christian minorities were being violated. This was a more difficult concern to counter, admitted the Observer’s reporter Kenneth Bagnell, who interviewed e e a’s Dodds for a story about the dispute. In this case, the minorities most vocally opposed were “infinitesimal” – Jews comprised only 1.4 per cent of Canada’s population, and Unitarians, Buddhists, and Doukhobors even less. Turning to C.B. Sissons, an authority on church-state relations in education, for a perspective on minority rights, Bagnell was informed that in a democracy, a minority was given the right to free discussion in order to persuade the majority of the rightness of its cause. This, too, was about to change in a more pluralistic Canada more inclined to agree

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with Dodds than Sissons. Issues should be decided on principle, rather than majority-minority percentages, she contended – after all, today’s majority could be a minority tomorrow. Rights should never be ignored, even if represented by only 1 per cent of the population.94 Bagnell’s story cited a statement that was “evolving” in the United Church’s Board of Christian Education in 1963, which he expected to be approved at the upcoming meeting of the General Council Executive. The board’s support for emphasis on “the HebraicChristian heritage” in the curriculum acknowledged that the majority had no right to “trample a minority,” but added a qualification: “neither has a minority the right to frustrate a majority.”95 A detail that Bagnell mentioned in passing did not bode well for that standpoint. It was often said that there was no controversy over religion in the public schools outside metropolitan Toronto (and even there, mainly an issue in North York – home to many Jews). However, Dodds told him that she had found support for her views wherever she spoke, and she claimed that United Church people were almost always in agreement with her.96 It was another hint that the leadership of the church did not speak for all its members – and that there was divergence on the left as well as the right. Reaching consensus within the United Church proved surprisingly difficult. Even the Commission on Church and State in Education appointed at the 1962 General Council was unable to bring recommendations two years later. To explain the delay, an update in 1964 pointed out that the commission’s work was complicated by the time-consuming task of consulting separately with each province, and the proposed extension of funding for Catholic separate schools in Ontario had made the situation there even more complex. Its members were reportedly studying a statement on the topic of the church and education by James S. Thomson, retired from the faculty of theology at McGill and a former moderator.97 Thompson presented his findings to the General Council in 1966, but as his own, rather than the commission’s, position. Instead of presenting a report, the commission asked to be discharged, admitting that no substantial recommendations could be made until the church arrived at an “adequate philosophy of education.” And there was the rub: to do so would require prolonged research and study by a smaller working group because of the wide diversity of opinion within the denomination itself.98

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Thomson’s statement on “The Church and Education” was a thoughtful proposal that insisted that the church had an obligation to “express its mind on all the influences that affect the national life” – a long list that included education. To do otherwise would “be a complete abandonment of our responsibility and, certainly a departure from our historic role.”99 Catholic schools were not about to disappear any time soon, he added; numerically they enjoyed “an entrenched position” from which no government would be likely to dislodge them. However, Thomson’s conjecture that Protestants and Catholics might soon become allies in promoting religious education in the schools was an indication of how quickly the situation was changing on the ground.100 This did prove to be the case, as Protestants and Catholics in Ontario found common cause in fighting the quiet drift toward separation of church and state in education. But the battle was lost on the public school front in that province, where the most intentional program of religious education in the country became the most endangered. The Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario (1969) was set up by the provincial government to study the problem. Headed by the Honourable J. Keiller Mackay, the committee saw Ontario’s program of religious instruction as Christian, and reasoned that as such, other faiths might be offended by it. “In no uncertain terms,” historians Gidney and Millar contend, “the Mackay Report proceeded to recommend an end to this sorry state of affairs.” Instead of reading the Bible to open the school day, it suggested singing the National Anthem and saying the Lord’s Prayer or some other inclusive prayer for God’s help.101 While the Mackay Report still affirmed the importance of religious faith, it represented a shift from teaching religious values held in common to teaching about religious differences. An Ecumenical Study Commission brought together representatives from the Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Education and several Protestant churches to respond to the Mackay Report. Among them was Robin Smith, associate secretary of the United Church’s Board of Education, who no doubt would have endorsed the ecumenical coalition’s criticism of the Mackay Report for treating religion as a personal commitment that ought to be cultivated at home or in church but not in public schools.102 Such an assumption negated the United Church’s customary claims of connections between home, school, and church. Severing one of them placed even more

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responsibility on the church for religious education at a time when it was already dealing with criticism of its New Curriculum. The coalition also took issue with the separation of values from religion, stressing that it was “not only legitimate but necessary to look beyond culture to religion as a fundamental source of morality.”103 However, those who had the ear of Ontario’s Ministry of Education disagreed, preferring instead to teach moral education divorced from religious particularity. By the 1980s, even the vestiges of Christianity that remained after implementation of the Mackay Report’s recommendations were excised after the courts ruled that compulsory religious instruction and opening exercises that featured Christian Scriptures or the Lord’s Prayer violated the guarantee of religious freedom in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Teaching about religion was allowed, but only if all religions were given equal attention. Christian prayers and readings could only be used in opening exercises if secular and other religious material was given equal weight. Christian holidays were still acknowledged, but categorized as secular pause days rather than religious celebrations. Gidney and Millar conclude that Christianity was not only “disestablished but banished, at least as an animating force, in both the ceremonial and mundane activities” of Ontario’s public schools.104 Politicians and educators were among those whose work attuned them to the new religious and cultural realities of pluralism. Political scientist Paul Fox astutely assessed the difficulty sincere Christians faced when the “inner light” of conscience led them to hold different opinions on social, political, or economic issues. With some French Canadians conscientiously opting for an independent Quebec, and English Canadians supporting national unity, it would be foolhardy for a church “to try to declare one truth.” Writing in 1968, with church union negotiations between the United Church and Anglicans underway, Fox made a prediction: if a united church “attempted to give one answer to the question of nationalism, I doubt that it would stay united very long.” He suggested that churches be free to express the views of their own members, but not try to speak on God’s behalf for all Christians, a proposal that he admitted came close to advocating a separation of church and state.105 Arnold Edinborough, editor of Saturday Night, was harsher in his assessment, blaming the churches for their marginalization. An ­Anglican himself, he might have had the United Church in mind as  well when he complained that churches had tried to influence

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politicians “to legislate for everybody that which they believed requisite and necessary for the body and souls of the chosen few.” They had looked like “dinosaurs in the political pit” in the discussion of public and separate school education in Ontario and in debates over liberalization of divorce, contraception, and abortion laws. Edinborough observed another important indication of the churches’ changing public role: mass media and universities had replaced them as “teaching institutions” on such issues.106 Whether or not separation of church and state was the goal of the mass media, public school boards, or politicians, the practical outcome was the same. It became more difficult to claim that church and state were co-operating in areas of mutual concern. In a society that was becoming more and more diverse, no particular faith ­tradition could claim to be a national church, and no definition of non-sectarian pleased everyone. Pluralism thus led in practice to the neutralization of public expressions of religion. It was a solution that was attractive not only to secularists but also to those dealing with the realities of pluralism. Since religion was a source of conflicting definitions of the common good, the state relied instead on secular values (with no necessary reference to Christianity as their source) to define it. The gamble was that liberal democracy’s values could stand on their own once they were dislodged from their religious moorings. These struggles to define the place of Christianity in Canadian culture are illustrations of a broader global trend that philosopher Charles Taylor identified as a “switch in mind-set” that made earlier notions of cultural assimilation unsustainable: the beginning of the erosion (probably in the 1960s, he suggests) of the assumption that “one ought to suppress one’s difference for the sake of fitting in to a dominant mold.” Religious minorities were among those who demanded that the dominant culture be “modified to accommodate them, rather than the other way around.” While most migrants were prepared to assimilate, they no longer considered it imperative.107 One could add that it was not just newcomers who were unwilling to conform. Women no longer automatically assumed their traditional family role, and insisted on freedom to make choices about reproduction and paid employment outside the home. Young people resisted assimilating to prevailing mores as they moved toward adulthood, ignoring the received culture of either their family or

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their church. To be different and do your own thing captured the cultural mood of the times, and the size of the postwar cohort amplified the effect. Taylor predicted that if this emphasis on difference were to become an unstoppable reality, democratic societies would have to “engage in a constant process of self-reinvention” to accommodate the variety of identities they encompassed.108 So it was that both Quebec and the rest of Canada would undertake to reinvent themselves in the 1960s. A frustrated Forsey complained that Canadian history was being ­rewritten to make it appear that Quebec’s place in Canada was not as secure as English Canada had assumed. The pseudo-history (as he termed it) taught at one French school in Quebec claimed that the  Fathers of Confederation had intended to form only a loose Confederation, but were duped while under the influence of alcohol after John A. Macdonald had gotten them drunk!109 In English public schools, a less British version of Canadian history was ready in time for Centennial celebrations. It featured a new Canada that was built on differences – individual, religious, and cultural – rather than a common culture shaped by Christian ideals. A Just Society replaced Christian Canada as a unifying vision of nationhood; Canadian culture was the new “orthodoxy,” with a “common faith” in human rights and social programs as its chief tenets. There was a growing separation of Christian virtues and secular values – and Canadians increasingly opted for the latter. Canada had set itself on a path that led away from a collective Christian past, and toward a future where religious expression was an individual right guaranteed by the state, with no reference to organized religion. New icons of culture replaced the old, perhaps in the hope that Canadians would rally around the maple leaf flag more readily than the cross. The old connections between church and community that had long been taken for granted were dissolved in the hopes that a distinctively Canadian identity, with no reference to a particular religious identity, would coalesce. Likewise, religious institutions that were deeply influenced by democratic principles found themselves in a parallel process of reinvention, perhaps none more urgently so engaged than the United Church. It had prided itself on being the most Canadian of churches. Yet there was mounting evidence that the nation-building partnership it had taken for granted at the time of church union was no

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longer viable, thus dissolving the core of a founding vision that had energized and guided the church’s national mission for four decades. As Christianity and culture grew more distant, its notions of  a Christian Canada and a national church were becoming anachronisms. Even calls for Christianizing the social order were quietly dropped. The end of Christendom in Canada raised a troubling new question for the United Church: if it no longer served the community and provided a civilizing cultural influence, what was its mission? The uncoupling of Christianity and culture was a giant step toward a more complete (though still formally undeclared) separation of church and state in Canada – the practical result of the state going its own way. This distancing, if not formal separation, of church and state consigned a different public role to all Christian churches, whether Protestant or Catholic. It erased religious particularity from public life. Few religious institutions were as profoundly altered as the United Church by this de-Christianizing of Canadian society. Its leaders had taken for granted the effectiveness of religion in promoting social responsibility and national solidarity. But the convergence of religious and cultural identity turned out to be far less inevitable than they assumed. In fact, its friendly service to the nation was sought less often. Its reputation as custodian of the common good and purveyor of culture was slipping. Its side had lost the battle for religious education in the public schools. It was small comfort that the situation in which the church found itself was part of a wider trend in the United States, continental Europe, and England: all the major churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, faced the consequences of a truncated alliance with culture. An incident in 1969 epitomizes the turnabout for the United Church and its place in the new Canada. Shortly after becoming prime minister, Pierre Trudeau appointed an envoy to the Vatican. Before making this daring move (one that Pearson had viewed as too controversial), he first sought the public’s advice. According to the Observer, Trudeau admitted that the response from Protestants, liberal Catholics, and non-Roman religious groups was overwhelmingly negative – but he made the appointment anyway. Trudeau was quoted as saying it was “better to please ten million Roman Catholics than to be deterred by a few militant Protestants.”110 Forrest was miffed. He felt that the prime minister had used him as window

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dressing, attempting to give the impression of a “democrat seeking advice,” and so advised Trudeau to “fly his kites elsewhere” in the future if this were the case.111 Ironically, by then politicians were ­offering similar advice to leaders of the United Church who sought to influence them.

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8 Listening to the World Revolutionary moments attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them. George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion

J.R. Mutchmor’s retirement in 1964 was aptly billed by the Observer as “The End of an Era”1 – for the man and for the United Church. As Mutchmor prepared to give his final address as moderator, a position to which he had been elected two years earlier, there was much to celebrate. The United Church’s membership was still on the upswing, despite a downtrend in the Anglican, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches.2 And there was other good news to report. Fundraising had set a new record, ministers’ salaries were up, and properties were in good shape. However, other numbers were not so reassuring: funerals were up, while baptisms, confirmations, and adult professions of faith were down, particularly in the major cities. Stricter practices, such as refusing to baptize children of non-members and purging the membership rolls of the names of those who no longer attended, explained some of the loss. But other statistics came as more of a surprise. Membership in men’s clubs was down, as was Sunday school attendance – an inauspicious sign for the New Curriculum materials for children that were to be introduced that fall. The Observer did not mince words in its assessment: “The United Church is financially stronger than ever. Spiritually it faces a crisis.”3 Those who had characterized the United Church as too modern in 1925 might have been surprised to discover how conventional it looked four decades later. There were still complaints that its theology was too liberal and its social agenda too politically left wing. However, when Mutchmor ventured in 1961 to make a few predictions about its future, he had pictured a church “heavily influenced

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by those who would make her membership more exclusive,” either by emphasizing “narrower doctrinal teaching” or adopting social positions favoured by “elite members” and “posh congregations.”4 It was also drawing the ire of secular pundits who saw it as too complacent about social issues. “Just a social club” was a putdown of a church that to outsiders – and sometimes even to insiders – appeared rather smug about its solid position in society. Those staid congregations were about to be shaken up by men and women who had been born, baptized, converted, and educated after church union. Personal memory of union was fading, and assumptions that had once seemed obvious could no longer be taken for granted. Across the country major educational and executive positions were being filled by ministers ordained long after church union; by the mid-1960s only two of the national church officers had been ordained before 1925.5 This new cohort was handed responsibility for a church that was headed for trouble. Among them were some considered radical for their insistence that the church pay attention to signs that the times were changing. They pointed to mounting ­evidence that past initiatives, including the United Church’s recent evangelistic campaigns, had failed to Christianize the social order. They were inspired by talk of a new world mission that called into question aspects of the old. Joining the vanguard of international ecumenism, they rejected the traditional approach to evangelism. Instead of the church proclaiming the gospel to the world and calling Canada to Christ, they appealed to the church to “listen to the world.” J. Raymond Hord, Mutchmor’s successor, soon came to per­sonify the new era. Hord stepped into the media spotlight when he was nominated as secretary of e & ss at the 1962 General Council. There was little at this point in his career to indicate that he would soon become “the most controversial churchman in Canada today” and “minister to the come-alive generation.”6 Though one newspaper reported that the United Church had “picked a man it scarcely knew,”7 Mutchmor would have been acquainted with him and might well have applauded the choice. A few years earlier Hord and Mutchmor’s brother had co-signed a letter expressing consternation about plans to allow the Regina Braves baseball club to play three games on Sunday. The matter was “one for serious concern,” their letter stated, for the United Church was “disturbed by an action which might turn a holy day into a pagan holiday.”8 Hord’s preaching as pastor of suburban congregations in Regina (Lakeview

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United) and Toronto (Royal York United) was thoughtful and at times hard-hitting, but consistent with the United Church’s piety and practices. While he did not expect the Kingdom of God to be “established perfectly in this world of sin,” it was still the “sacred duty of Christians to improve life on earth as much as we possibly can.”9 Hord’s conduct during his congregational ministry was a clue to the resolve he was to show once he moved into his new leadership position in 1963. His sense of duty was uncompromising – almost to the point of compulsion. He conducted a funeral service for ­another child the day after his own son Jamie drowned at camp.10 He preached a sermon on “Why Does God Allow Accidents to Happen?” the following Sunday.11 He was in the pulpit the Sunday after being attacked and badly beaten in his home.12 Once in office, burdened by his hopes for the emergence of a new kind of church, he tackled his new responsibilities with that same intense commitment. Talk of his dismissal was in the air. When he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1968, his family and some of his colleagues held his critics responsible for hounding him to death.13 And yet one might wonder whether the pressure of his own ideals was at least in small part to blame. Hord claimed the only thing he had in common with Mutchmor was his initials (J.R.). An article in Star Weekly contrasted his efforts to tackle the “big issues” that would make the church “relevant” with Mutchmor’s preoccupation with moral issues such as drink, decadence, and divorce. Mutchmor was “virtually adulated by middle-of-the-road church leaders and lay people,” his manner “gracious, exuding personal charm as he travelled the country, dropping in on powerful men and lobbying quietly against either open bars or  open Sundays.” Hord was not always considered so charming. Whereas Mutchmor was associated with the moral battles of “fighting evil, standing for righteousness, criticizing the world, but rarely the church,” Hord made headlines for tackling controversial po­ litical issues with his criticism of big business and the U.S. war in Vietnam, Prime Minister Pearson (whom he described as a “puppy dog on l b j ’s leash”); his support for draft dodgers; and his calls for more rights for Canada’s indigenous peoples.14 In his lifetime he was considered “a prophet of the New Age”; his untimely death was to make him its martyr. Much of the responsibility for what happened in the United Church after the Mutchmor era was ascribed to Hord and the board he ­headed. However, the dramatic changes that the church experienced

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in a brief span of time were not the result of Hord’s drive alone: his call to listen to the world resonated with a new approach to world mission that had captivated international ecumenism. It was the wc c that general secretary Ernest Long credited for drawing attention to “the pressing questions of the meaning of evangelism and of conversion for our time.”15 By the time the w cc met in Evanston, Illinois, for its second assembly in 1954, how to proclaim the gospel to the world was becoming a matter of debate. “The church is mission” was shorthand for a new understanding of the task: God’s mission was to the world, and the church had no mission in and of itself.16 More signs that ecumenism was in flux were evident at the next assembly, held in New Delhi in 1961, which saw the w cc merge with the International Missionary Council. Five years later, the United Church’s Commission on World Mission would declare this to have been a turning point: it “underscored the place of mission in the whole life of the World Council of Churches and so gave that body a new direction and significance.”17 The merger accentuated the double meaning of world mission: it was global in outreach, and it focused on the world rather than on the institutional church. The study process that followed urged groups to think of God as “His own evangelist” by pondering the question, “What is God doing in the world?”18 The idea that God’s mission could not be separated from other aspects of the church’s life and teaching generated much controversy as its implications for evangelism and social ministries were explored at ecumenical and denominational gatherings around the world. The temperature of the debates shot up when what was thought of as traditional evangelism was castigated as a distortion of the church’s true mission. At the World Student Christian Federation in 1964, for instance, a case was made for redefining evangelism as Christian presence, rather than proclamation: the church’s witness at times needed to be silent.19 And evangelism was not the only thorny issue. Ecumenism’s left wing was challenging the middle axioms approach to dealing with social issues that had been a breakthrough at the Oxford Conference in 1937. Then the aim had been to agree on a range of options for translating Christian principles into policy, in order to broaden consensus. When the w cc’s first World Conference on Church and Society met in 1966, it discarded the flexibility of middle axioms; they “fell by the ecumenical wayside as clear-cut

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positions were taken on issue after issue, from patterns of economic growth to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.”20 The deepening divide within Protestantism was on display two years later as the wc c celebrated its twentieth anniversary at ­Uppsala. Long after that 1968 assembly was over, the new approach to mission, with its attendant implications for evangelism and social action, created rifts between ecumenicals and evangelicals (as the two sides were often called by then). Historian William Hutchison describes the preparatory materials, published under the title The Church for Others and the Church for the World, as “a high point of  antitraditional thinking among ecumenicals.” Evangelicals, disturbed by the takeover of ‘their’ terminology to promote a different approach to mission, considered it “unusual provocation.” “It seemed to conservatives that once again, as so often in the past, modernists with dubious Christian credentials had stolen the evangelicals’ ­rhetorical clothing and were trying desperately to wear it.”21 At ­Uppsala, Union Seminary professor Johannes Hoekendijk raised more hackles when he condemned the traditional approach to evangelism as heretical. Dismissing the “introverted” parish system as a medieval invention, he questioned whether converts should join existing congregations. Instead he proposed direct action in society, a model of church organization that he dubbed “go-structures.”22 This new thinking about the relationship of the church to the world raised fresh questions about the viability of one of the United Church’s most cherished convictions. During the fundamentalistmodernist controversy at the beginning of the twentieth century, many Protestant churches in the United States had adopted what historians have called a two-party system by separating oversight of evangelism from social concern.23 The founders of the United Church had deviated from the typical pattern, insisting that the two belonged together. Whether out of commitment, convenience, or connivance, evangelism and social service remained under the administration of the same board.24 By joining the work of evan­ gelism and social service the United Church had, as a special issue of the Observer in 1963 put it proudly, “laid down the conviction that a man’s faith cannot be held aloof from his work, that evan­ gelism cannot be carried on apart from deep concern for the world  in which men are redeemed and in which they earn their daily bread.”25

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The new staff at e & ss still spoke of these twin aims. Hord insisted that evangelism “must start with personal commitment or it will not start. But it must never end there if it is to have any impact on our world ... A basic law of evangelism is: we can never give to others what we don’t have ourselves. Its corollary is, we haven’t got the real thing if we do not share it.”26 He advocated keeping “private conversion and public responsibility in proper balance and tension.”27 Stewart Crysdale, who joined e & ss as assistant secretary at the same time as Hord became secretary, made a similar point in his first annual report: “The genius of our Board is that evangelism – the telling of the news of God’s love – is tied directly with social service. Either one without the other is a truncated Gospel.”28 Little wonder, then, that seeing the United Church torn apart along seams that had been so deliberately stitched together was painful. Data appeared to indicate that church attendance made ­little difference when it came to changing everyday attitudes or actions. If that were so, was evangelism partly to blame? Was Australian Methodist theologian Colin Williams right in claiming that ministry in a twentieth-century society that was no longer Christian required a different approach to making disciples than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?29 To complicate matters, evangelism was not the board’s only problem. Now that it was speaking more softly (if at all) on moral issues and turning over its social welfare work to government agencies, what was left to do in the field of social service? Did one objective have to be sacrificed in order to save the other, or did both evangelism and social service have to go? The new way of thinking about the church’s mission was soon reflected in e & ss’s programming. A “project on evangelism” had been included on the Centennial Committee’s list when it gave its first report at the General Council in 1962.30 Two years later “social action” was added to the committee’s name, and forming “truly worldly Christians” became the top priority of the National Project of Evangelism and Social Action.31 Hord and his colleagues were determined to use what was often simply called the National Project to move people out of the church building and into the commu­ nity.32 The word evangelism was still used (rather hard to avoid, given the name of the board) – but often qualified as “new” or “experimental,” or circumvented with “outreach.” The upshot was to distance evangelism from traditional evangelistic campaigns, even the United Church’s own recent initiatives.33

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The National Project gave a voice to a more radical bloc within the United Church. Among them was Rex Dolan, professor of homiletics and worship at United Theological College. In 1965 and 1966, Dolan delivered a series of lectures across Canada, urging his audience to tackle the pressing social concerns of the day, such as poverty, war, oppression, and technological change. Later published with Hord’s encouragement as The Big Change, Dolan’s talks took aim at traditional evangelism.34 Convinced that many spiritual seekers were confused or even repulsed by “God-talk,” he proposed that the United Church consider outreach, rather than evangelism, as its objective, no longer necessarily connecting it to church attendance. Unlike the careful planning usually associated with evangelistic campaigns, there was no need of a blueprint for outreach – nor was it necessary to put a Christian label on it: “If it is loving it is Christian and part of the evangelistic task.”35 Dolan’s “big change” did not stop there; what he and the National Project had in mind discounted a good deal of what the United Church had customarily thought of as service as well: teaching Sunday school, singing in the choir, assisting in the congregation’s administration as a member of the board, or raising funds for the men’s club or the uc w. He had a ready response to those who wondered what this would mean for men’s and women’s organizations: they were “introverted,” their drawing card was sociability, and their work was directed toward maintaining the church itself. As such they were among the United Church’s “deficiencies” that the new reformation was intent on correcting.36 Proponents of the new reformation had in mind a church that existed for the sake of the world. Worship was to prepare the congregation for outreach in the community. The focus was no longer on the minister as resident “holy man,” but on the ministry of the laity, whose vocation as the people of God, when rightly understood, would put them in contact with the world.37 Listening to the world involved removing walls that prevented the church from hearing society’s most pressing needs. “Breaking the Barriers” was the theme of e & ss’s 1964 annual meeting, which featured Eugene Carson Blake, a prominent American Presbyterian minister. The publication distributed for study after the meeting included an article by Blake on breaking racial barriers, illustrated by a photo of his arrest at a civil rights march.38 A selection of articles

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on racial issues portrayed Canada’s treatment of indigenous peoples as the most striking parallel to American segregation. It reprinted Peter Gzowski’s stinging indictment of Canadian racial attitudes written after the murder of a young Saulteaux man by a party of  white farmers and businessmen from Glaslyn, Saskatchewan. “This is Canada’s Alabama,” Gzowski had written, referring to recent events in Birmingham. In fact, the situation of the Indian in Saskatchewan might be worse than the plight of the Southern Negro, he mused, since the latter shared the same language, religion, and culture in most respects as their oppressors, whereas many Indians spoke a different language and had “moral and cultural values utterly different from ours.” To join the North American way of life would be far more wrenching for the Indian than the Negro, he predicted, “and our acceptance of him as an equal could well be an even more difficult decision than the Southerner’s acceptance of the black man.”39 After the 1960s it was hard to imagine that the United Church had once promised, as it did in the first issue of the New Outlook, that it would “preach the elements of the Gospel to these primitive minds still influenced by pagan superstition” so that “very slowly but also, surely, the truth will enlighten even these dark understandings, as long ago it enlightened the minds of our British ancestors.”40 Accounts of its work in indigenous communities became less glowing as evidence of the failure of assimilation (and the tragic consequences of the attempt) raised questions about its complicity in their plight in the past and cast doubts about ending segregation.41 Was integration just as misguided as assimilation? Observing the deplorable social conditions he witnessed at a school on a reserve, one teacher likened adaptation to the aggressive economic practices of white culture to “feeding them into a new kind of cultural gas chamber.”42 Listening to the world did not mean that e & s s ’s leaders intended to stay quiet. Much of the theological and sociological groundwork for the new strategy was laid by Crysdale, who saw clashes between what he called the prophetic-reformative and priestly-pietistic functions of religion as a positive sign of viability and creativity.43 His three-fold typology of the church’s relationship to society – accommodation, isolation, and conflict – reserved no place for the oncefavoured option of co-operation. The days of friendly service to the nation were over. There was a more combative tone to his claim that the third option, conflict, was the United Church’s role as e & s s now

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understood it: “critical, prophetic witness to the eternal demands of the Gospel in the changing conditions of the world.”44 To help them formulate their prophetic witness, Hord and his colleagues at e & ss made the controversial move of turning to critics of the institutional church for direction. Some of these outsiders turned out to be what historian Hugh McLeod describes as a novelty for most Western countries: “those who rejected Christianity and were increasingly ready to say so loudly and openly.”45 An unflattering image of organized religion was forming in the public mind. Instead of building a Christian Canada, the United Church found itself accused of constructing what one of its critics dubbed a “comfortable pew.” In 1965 Pierre Berton’s The Comfortable Pew made publishing history in Canada with record sales. Drawing on the New Theology popularized by British theologian John A.T. Robinson in Honest to God two years earlier, Berton’s captivating book called on Canada’s churches to reconsider their outdated theological and ethical positions. Berton’s own views had evidently evolved since the 1950s, when he had pronounced the Christian ethic as “timeless,” and complained that it was the “constant urge to modernize that, in the end, makes the church appear to be forever out of date.”46 A decade later (and by then a proponent of the so-called new morality), he accused churches of being out of touch with the issues that really mattered.47 His devastating critique of the typical Protestant congregation gave credence to predictions that organized religion would be irrelevant in the coming New Age. The Comfortable Pew had been commissioned by the Anglican Church, which Berton had left some years earlier.48 Asked whether the book would have been different had he been hired by the United Church, he reiterated that it was an indictment of Protestantism in general, not one church in particular. United Church sermons might perhaps be considered more relevant, he supposed, but its congre­ gational life was no different. It displayed the same “success moti­ vation, the conformist attitudes, the status-seeking of the clergy.” It was behind the times in its approach to such issues as drinking, Sunday observance, abortion, and premarital sex. And while the New Curriculum was commendable, as far as he could see it hadn’t yet done much to change what was taught in Sunday school in Kleinburg, where his wife Janet, a member of the local United Church, was a leader of the Explorer group and their children were active in Sunday school, c gi t, and Scouts.49

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While Hord and his staff may have taken exception to some of the particulars of Berton’s book, they agreed with its central thesis: a New Age was dawning and the United Church was woefully unprepared for it, especially in urban areas. Statistics to support their case were supplied in an ambitious National Survey of the United Church in Canadian Life conducted by Crysdale that confirmed that congregational life in the United Church was predominantly middle class, and primarily suburban or rural rather than urban.50 The findings showed steady membership losses even in city neighbourhoods that had once been strongholds of the church. Read as corroboration that traditional approaches to evangelism no longer worked, the results supported calls for a New Evangelism designed for the New Age.51 Berton was among the contributors to Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Symposium on the Church and the World, described in moderator E.M. Howse’s foreword as “a cogent and vivid picture of the Church as it appears to the critical but not hostile outsider.” It was not a flattering picture of either clergy or laity, or of the organized church itself. The candid sketches pictured the United Church as irrelevant and insular. Berton repeated his general criticism of organized religion. Journalist and social activist June Callwood bitingly depicted congregational life as displaying “a de-humanizing pride in bigness, a preoccupation with pettiness and a viewpoint no taller than the steeple – but not including the Cross.” The staff at e & s s , who had overseen the project, concluded: “There is no doubt that the sea is boiling hot. Now we must plunge into it.” The choice was to “take up the challenge or end with nothing.”52 e&ss wanted to provoke – and to be provoked. Its 1966 annual meeting featured an address by Saul Alinsky, a social activist from Chicago who, one reporter claimed, made Canada’s arch-critics of the church Pierre Berton and Gordon Sinclair “look like a couple of simpering Victorian spinsters by comparison.”53 Alinsky immediately served notice that he wasn’t afraid to step on the toes of his teetotalling hosts. His amusing anecdote about his unsuccessful attempt to order a double Scotch when he arrived at the meeting was perhaps calculated to put them on edge, as was his comment that, to an American, the one thing that Canada represented was whiskey. Alinsky’s hard-hitting speech took North American church leaders to task for their complacency, insisting that action, not dialogue, was the only solution to social problems. He urged them to frame issues

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in black and white, rather than grey, and to create, rather than avoid, controversy and conflict – to go out to streets of the “secular city” and make their souls a little cleaner by getting their hands dirty.54 Such calls for action involved changing the tactics that Mutchmor and others of his era had championed. As recently as 1960, the printed materials for the Calling Canada to Christ campaign had reiterated the recommendation of the 1934 Commission on Christianizing the Social Order: those speaking on behalf of the United Church should avoid identification with any particular political party. The church was to be the conscience of the state, bringing Christian principles to bear on the issues of the day by preparing timely resolutions. Ministers were to confront critical issues boldly, without displaying political partisanship.55 A new generation of leaders called instead for direct action, clear-cut policies on pressing social issues, and even political par­ tisanship.56 With a federal election approaching, University of Saskatchewan chaplain Ben Smillie contended that it was “time for Christians to take off their halos and put on their party buttons.” The old spirit of non-partisanship still lingered in his reminder that no party was the Christian party (admitting that the n d p that he supported found it hard to remember that it did not have a “corner on righteousness”). However, he belittled the effectiveness of the customary approach to social issues in the real world of politics: “resolutions pouring out of committees.”57 Some ministers were prepared to go even further. Claude de Mestral defended what he called political ministry. Political action was an essential but neglected form of evangelism, he argued, dismissing the notion of political neutrality as “a dangerous illusion.”58 Listening to the world made it harder for the New Age reformers to tune in to supporters of traditional evangelism as theological disagreements between them grew. The two sides differed, for instance, on whether or not to support Billy Graham’s evangelistic campaigns, which caused more discord in the 1960s than it had a decade earlier. Critics pointed out, as had Forrest and others in the 1950s, that a denomination that endorsed the biblical and theological scholarship behind the New Curriculum should perhaps think twice before inviting fundamentalists to be its evangelists. They saw Graham’s approach as regressive, simplistic, and out of touch with the younger generation. But finding fault with Graham had its pitfalls. It was “as

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if we opposed mother on Mother’s Day,” one Ottawa minister complained. Oddly, given the desire of proponents of the New Evangelism to appeal to the New Age, Graham’s use of modern technology to communicate was dismissed by them as “Madison Ave. sales techniques.”59 Congregations and their ministers were put on the spot when the Billy Graham Crusade announced a six-city Maritime campaign led by Leighton Ford, Graham’s Canadian-born colleague and brotherin-law, for the fall of 1963. e & ss had already decided to focus on its own plans for evangelism rather than join Graham’s team. Still new to his position at e & ss, Hord sounded conciliatory when interviewed for the Observer’s cover story: “We are greatly indebted to Billy Graham; he has a lot to teach us,” he was quoted as saying. Even so, Hord hinted at the direction that e & s s was headed by cautioning that mass evangelism might create a wall of suspicion and misunderstanding between the church and the world that only dedicated Christians, practising their faith in daily life, could pierce. He expected the crusade to have its greatest effect on those already connected to the church.60 Many United Church ministers in the Maritimes supported the Billy Graham Crusade, but it met a less-welcoming reception in ­other parts of the country. “Let’s Stop Backing Billy Graham,” Ben Smillie bluntly proposed in 1965. He explained that as chaplain, he often met students who were suffering from a “fundamentalist hangover.” Evangelists like Graham encouraged biblical ignorance, he argued, and invited people to join an “ecclesiastical ghetto” (the church) rather than to pay attention to the world outside its walls. Smillie had served on a committee that reviewed the findings of Crysdale’s national survey, and knew that presbyteries and con­ gregations were divided over whether to support Graham. He was, nonetheless, adamant: “in the name of honesty, the Anglican and United Churches should both get out of this game completely.”61 Smillie’s article provoked a flurry of letters to the Observer, most of them sympathetic to Graham. One was from R.C. Chalmers, a Pine Hill professor who had earlier served as Mutchmor’s associate secretary at e & ss. Publications whose production he had overseen had typically presented the United Church as evangelical in its theology, though of a liberal rather than a fundamentalist variety. His defence of Leighton Ford illustrated the fraught position of the United Church. At nearly all of the evangelistic meetings in the Maritimes

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the previous year, the largest group who signed cards to commit their lives to Christ identified themselves as members of the United Church. Working with the campaign in Halifax had been a positive ecumenical experience for Chalmers, and an opportunity to gain a deeper appreciation of other theological points of view. He was disturbed by the rigidity of the “stop backing Billy Graham” appeal. “To some of us, Mr Smillie’s liberal theology sounds very sectarian,” he cautioned. “As one who is indebted to liberalism (and other movements, too) let me say that I am just as much afraid of sectarian liberalism as I am of sectarian fundamentalism.”62 Where Billy Graham was concerned, those who tried to find middle ground met with little success. Forrest had perhaps hoped to dampen Smillie’s fiery article with an editorial that questioned the accuracy of his description of Graham’s approach to the Bible as “literalist.” A few weeks later, a chastened Forrest conceded that his attempts to get Graham to say more about biblical authority had failed: “we were wrong. He is a literalist; and he waffles, too. We don’t like to admit this, not so much because we dislike being wrong, but we are deeply disappointed in Billy Graham.” Just as damning was Forrest’s allegation that Graham’s preaching had changed since the 1950s. Graham, he surmised, had reverted to the literalism of his childhood because it produced more converts. He had also taken to scolding churches that challenged the status quo on social issues such as disarmament, federal aid to education, birth control, and the United Nations.63 As an alternative to the “Billy Graham type” of gatherings, proponents of the New Evangelism experimented with Planning Fellowships held across the country.64 Facilitators stressed the importance of “listening to what God is saying in unmet human needs,” and built in large blocks of time for small-group discussion instead of formal presentations. The design reflected the assumption of the organizers that ministers needed to hear what “ordinary people,” rather than theologians, were saying about the questions of the day.65 Few were more committed to putting this new approach to evangelism into practice than the minister of a Toronto congregation reputed to be “the swingingest church in town.”66 Clarke MacDonald was convinced that without drastic change, the church would soon be written off. Ultimate truths needed translation “into terms that will be both received and lived by people,” especially young people. “We cannot do that when we express the truth in wooden creeds

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and mealy-mouthed platitudes,” he insisted.67 MacDonald defended linking social action to evangelism with words from John Wesley’s preface to the first Methodist hymnal: “The Gospel of Christ knows no religion but social religion, no holiness but social holiness. This commandment we have from Christ that he who loves God loves his brother also.”68 Reservations about the New Evangelism were aired when Observer reporter Kenneth Bagnell interviewed MacDonald, Hord, and e & s s staffer Gordon Stewart. Asked about what was widely perceived as a lack of enthusiasm for the type of evangelism the church had supported until recently, Hord denied that he opposed mass evangelism. However, he admitted that he could no longer support Billy Graham. The church could not, as he put it, ride “two horses theologically,” referring to Graham’s approach to the Bible and the United Church’s own New Curriculum. He was also dismayed that Graham had “blessed the U.S. war effort” in Vietnam and had become the “arm of the status quo.” When Hord mentioned that it was often con­ servative business groups who sponsored Graham’s organization, Bagnell asked, “What’s wrong with that? Is it a sin to be conservative?” Hord countered by pointing out that St Paul’s preaching had not been well received by merchants in first-century Ephesus.69 Stewart then added that spreading the gospel message now involved connecting it to particular social causes, such as improving the welfare state, providing better housing, and expanding health care. “But surely,” prodded Bagnell, “it’s necessary to begin, not with welfare statism, but with the faith itself.” Stewart replied that the gospel couldn’t be summed up in a “nice little set of words.” It was, rather, “the experience of the Lord Jesus, in whose person we find summed up all the significant self-disclosure of God as it reveals itself through the historical experience of the Hebrew people consummated in discipleship, those who went with Christ.” (One suspects that readers agreed with Stewart’s own assessment of this “relevant gospel”: it was “more and more complex”!)70 Once the welfare state arrived, was the work of the church then finished? No, Hord and Stewart insisted, for even the affluent were searching for the meaning of life. But isn’t that the point, Bagnell asked as he pressed them to consider whether “this whole emphasis ... of ‘listening to the world’ may be taking us down the wrong a­ venue. Has the world – confused and bewildered – anything really penetrating and perceptive to tell us?” And was the

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board still committed to changing both the individual and society, or was it interested only in social change? MacDonald was a­ damant that there was only one gospel, with both individual and social “prongs,” but agreed that the pendulum was swinging away from the individual, where the board’s work in the past had been directed.71 Hord had the backing of the United Church’s left wing and even part of its centre, with support in Saskatchewan particularly strong.72 But he was definitely out of favour with conservatives, whose efforts to take over the church, he claimed, were “more evident every week.”73 Disappointed by their dealings with the executive staff of their denomination, conservatives sought support and solidarity elsewhere. In 1966, looking to build networks among ministers and laity of like mind, they launched the United Church Renewal Fellowship (u crf ). They also banded together with evangelicals in other denominations who shared their antipathy to the wc c’s new approach to world mission, disturbed by its implications for evangelism. The growing polarization of ecumenical and evangelical Protestants was evident at the first World Congress on Evangelism that met in Berlin in the fall of 1966. Co-sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Christianity Today, it brought together 700 invited delegates (all Protestant), observers, and reporters. ­Taking the theme “One Race, One Gospel, One Task,” it proclaimed itself the “spiritual successor” of the first ecumenical conference in Edinburgh in 1910, tacitly denying the w cc’s pedigree.74 Delegate James Somerville’s glowing portrayal of the event in the Observer identified the developing tactical differences between the two factions. He reported that rather than “listening to the world,” evangelicals were preparing to speak to it in a new way. It was “clear that evangelicals are ready to enter the New Age of history utilizing the tools it provides,” he enthused. For instance, World Vision, a relief organization supported by evangelicals, was urging churches to make use of computers and other technological advances in promoting evangelism.75 United Church minister J. Berkley Reynolds attended the congress as another of the church’s four delegates.76 Sometimes dubbed “the Billy Graham of Canada,” Reynolds quickly gained a reputation for his outspoken criticism of the New Evangelism.77 He blasted liberals for being “more political than biblical,” and dismissed as nonsense the notion that “social reform and a jumbo church” (a disapproving reference to the aims of ecumenism) would result in a “regenerated

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society.” Wondering how long it had been since anyone at the United Church’s national headquarters had given an altar call, he charged that Hord and his board had “all but forgotten their responsibility to seek individual conversion.” Reynolds also took exception to the board’s more direct approach to social issues, claiming that people wouldn’t notice the difference if the words “Evangelism and Social Service” were changed to “New Democratic Party.” The United Church could as easily be called “The Church Without Doctrine,” he complained.78 Critics of Billy Graham were just as uncompromising. In “Why the Fundamentalists Are Wrong,” Smillie took issue with the theology he had been taught as a boy in a Plymouth Brethren Sunday school. He rebuked those in the United Church who were “trying to work both sides of the theological street,” and objected to the social conservatism he associated with Graham’s revivalism.79 Further criticisms of Graham followed in the denominational magazine. One article featured an inside look at Graham’s crusade by two reporters who had gone undercover, one to usher and the other to sing in the choir, during a revival service at Toronto’s cn e stadium. They compared Graham’s preaching before a crowd of 45,000 to Nazi recruiting rallies. “Graham plays on the emotions, the insecurity, the fears and the yearnings in the hearts of listeners, then at the moment of decision punches home the sale with soft music. His sincerity and integrity enable him to carry it off. But these techniques are the same ones Hitler used.”80 Those taking the customary United Church position on evangelism – that it was both personal and connected to all areas of life – were caught on the defensive. In Small Voice, a magazine published by u c r f, Newfoundland Conference evangelist Norman Wesley Oake reminded readers that those who claimed evangelism was not concerned with social problems needed to re-read the history of revivalism. And yet he was troubled by what he saw as an attempt to reduce the evangelistic mission of the church to “purely social action,” thereby diverting resources from traditional evangelism – an indication perhaps of how conservative evangelicals viewed events sponsored by the National Project. Considering the United Church’s past insistence on linking evangelism and social concern, one can understand his dismay as they diverged: “Confusion reigns as to what the mission really is.”81

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Imagining the new possibilities for mission, however, was invigorating for some, among them Katharine Hockin, a renowned United Church missionary and ecumenical leader. Born to parents working as missionaries in China, she eventually served there herself after studying and working in Canada for a number of years.82 Among the last of the United Church’s missionaries to leave China, she returned to Canada and became involved in initiatives to redefine the mission of the church. She was well positioned to assess the challenges at home and overseas – as she put it, “the fluidity of so many things, the mobility of peoples and the growing irrelevance of much of what is customary and habitual.” She exuded enthusiasm for the new global outlook that was developing in ecumenical circles, characterizing it as “one of zest, confidence, adventure and anticipation as we stretch to work under God in his world, in ways that may be unfamiliar but which will keep us growing in understanding, capacity and obedience.”83 In 1962 Hockin was invited to join the Commission on World Mission chaired by Donald Fleming, recently retired from federal politics after serving in John Diefenbaker’s Cabinet as minister of finance and later as minister of justice and attorney general.84 The United Church’s missionary program was facing some serious practical problems. Its failure to find replacements for vacancies in its overseas staff was what Observer editor A.C. Forrest considered the number one crisis facing the church. The United Church would soon have more of its staff “talking and writing and promoting mission, than are working at it,” he warned. The consequences were monumental: “The Church’s commission is to make disciples of all nations. The Church is mission. If we are not missionary, we are not Christian.”85 The low number of missionary personnel was one of several issues that the commission was asked to tackle. The findings of the commission confirmed Forrest’s fears: the number of missionaries had indeed decreased dramatically in the postwar period.86 But Forrest was troubled for another reason as he observed the presentation of the lengthy report at the General Council in 1966. “We are not certain that the commissioners were fully aware of the radical change that has taken place in what we used to call ‘foreign missions,’” he wrote in his editorial for the next issue of the Observer. He was convinced that Fleming was either unaware of that shift, or unwilling to acknowledge it.87

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New Appointments Total Withdrawals*

Total Withdrawals*

70 70 60 60 50 50 40 40 30 30 20 20

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1928 1928 1929 1929 1930 1930 1931 1931 1932 1932 1933 1933 1934 1934 1935 1935 1936 1936 1937 1937 1938 1938 1939 1939 1940 1940 1941 1941 1942 1942 1943 1943 1944 1944 1945 1945 1946 1946 1947 1947 1948 1948 1949 1949 1950 1950 1951 1951 1952 1952 1953 1953 1954 1954 1955 1955 1956 1956 1957 1957 1958 1958 1959 1959 1960 1960 1961 1961 1962 1962 1963 1963 1964 1964 1965 1965

10 10

Figure 8.1 Appointments and withdrawals of missionaries, 1928–65 Source: “World Mission,” Record of Proceedings of the 22nd General Council (1966), Appendix E * Includes retirements, deaths, and resignations for various reasons (such as unsettled conditions in China and, in the case of single women, marriage).

Forrest told readers that he had quizzed Fleming about this matter from the floor when the report was presented at the assembly. Fleming had assured the General Council that “if this were a departure from the traditional evangelical emphasis, my name would never have been attached to the report.” Forrest was not convinced. In his editorial rejoinder to their exchange, he pointed out that the report had emphasized “witness, sacrifice, and total mission,” but contained “little or no emphasis on proclamation, persuading, converting, making disciples of all nations, or ‘winning the world for Christ in this generation.’” Forrest himself had no quarrel with the theological shift; however, it bothered him that there had been “no clear-cut admission of the serious and radical departure from what many of our people still consider ‘missions.’”88 Fleming was riled by the editorial. His seven-page letter took Forrest to task for implying that the commission he had chaired was unaware of a radical change in the context of mission (which the report had in fact analyzed at length). He had understood Forrest’s question at the General Council as inquiring about the purpose of  mission. Insisting that the report proposed no change in what

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he characterized as “the traditional evangelical concept,” Fleming demanded a retraction.89 Forrest refused to back down. In his view a radical change in theological emphasis, not just method, had ­taken place. “If this report does not reflect that change then in my opinion it should, or we mislead our people,” he contended. As a compromise, Forrest invited Fleming to write a brief piece for the Observer to set the record straight.90 Fleming refused to settle for anything less than either publication of his lengthy initial letter in full or a retraction.91 In a last attempt at conciliation, and after what he described as “a long telephone conversation” with Fleming, Forrest drafted a piece for the Observer titled “Win Souls to Christ.” It confirmed that Fleming considered winning souls to Christ as the primary purpose of mission. However, Forrest went on to explain that while that had been the emphasis at the time of church union, the contemporary aim of mission was “to serve the world for Christ’s sake.” Conceding that Fleming spoke for “many, perhaps the vast majority,” of United Church members, Forrest argued that present mission policies (and at least the subtext of the report) took for granted a different theological point of view that ought to be named as such.92 Failing to gain Fleming’s endorsement despite several more letters, Forrest dropped the idea of publishing the piece. Although Fleming insisted that the World Mission report represented no change in the traditional evangelical emphasis, C. Douglas Jay, secretary of the commission and instrumental in drafting it, apparently thought otherwise. When Jay, also professor at Emmanuel College, gave the R.P. MacKay Memorial Lectures a year later, he described how the ecumenical task had recently shifted from focusing on missionary enterprises – “missions” – to making “an effective Christian presence in the world.” This was, he suggested, “a more acceptable theological and strategic approach” in an age when proselytism (which the report had defined in its glossary as the practice of making converts) had been called into question.93 Jay explained that highlighting the unity between home and foreign missions (as the wc c had recently done) had far-reaching implications for the conventional distinction between them. Whereas “revival, of recalling those with Christian memories, the lost sheep back to the fold of the church” was the focus of home missions, those working in foreign missions had been expected to “break new ground in a pagan world.” In current ecumenical thinking, however,

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the boundary was no longer between home and foreign missions, but between the church and the world. He saw the United Church’s Board of World Mission as “in general ahead of the church at large” in coming to terms with the end of Western missionary expansion.94 If that were so, little wonder that its advocacy of a new approach to mission met a chilly reception in conservative evangelical circles. They saw its emphasis on Christian presence and openness to other faiths as a repudiation of efforts to convert the world to Christ: what was evangelism to them had been defined by the United Church as proselytism, and disparaged as such. Confusion over the new direction the United Church had taken (knowingly or not) was further evidence of a shakeup that was transforming inter-church relations. Denominational loyalties were waning – but not for the reasons an older generation of ecumenists had assumed. Astute observers were spotting startlingly new trends. Principal George Johnston of United Theological College made a prediction in 1968 that would have seemed preposterous even a decade earlier: the future of ecumenism would be shaped by conservative Protestants and post–Vatican II Catholics.95 From his vantage point as a church executive, Ernest Long also detected signs of that repositioning: the United Church was growing more distant from “so-called evangelicals,” but enjoying more cordial relationships with Catholics than had often been the case in the past.96 While some in the ecumenical camp were growing impatient with making compromises to find common ground, their evangelical ­rivals were discovering the advantages of working together. The revival of interest in religion in the 1950s had swelled the numbers of fundamentalists and other conservative evangelicals, giving rise to what is sometimes described as a neo-evangelical movement.97 These evangelicals thought of themselves as non-denominational or transdenominational, rather than ecumenical, a word they deplored. Their ranks included many of the United Church’s “sectarian” competitors, who had generally adopted decentralized coordination of resources rather than the bureaucratic model of governance that larger and more liberal Protestant denominations preferred.98 The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, founded in 1964, offered these groups what they saw as a more suitable approach to co-operation, welcoming local congregations and ministry organizations, as well as denominations, as members.99 “A unity is being cultivated among

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Christian believers unlike the current ecumenism which seems to superimpose a pseudo-unity on organizational structure,” enthused Berkley Reynolds as he heralded the founding of the u crf as evidence of a new day dawning for Canadian evangelicals.100 Meanwhile the United Church was finding the company of old adversaries more enjoyable as an era of co-operation with Catholics commenced in the heady years following Vatican II.101 The InterChurch Committee on Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations, formed in 1944 by several Protestant groups to keep an eye on Catholic “encroachment” on the state, was discharged in 1973. By then neither ecumenical Protestants nor Roman Catholics seemed to have the energy for reciting old grievances. A committee report presented at the 1972 General Council recommended that the United Church “at every level” from congregation to the national divisions “no longer use any literature on Protestant-Roman Catholic relations which is pre-Vatican II,” and urged that new materials on mixed marriages be prepared to help couples accept their religious differences.102 The pervasive sense of being on the cusp of a New Age, in which there was no secure place for any of the institutional churches, generated different concerns than in the past. The United Church remained fiercely proud of its francophone members, many with longstanding connections to Protestantism. But some were former Catholics. The situation presented a new dilemma: should ecumenical Protestants encourage the latter to return to the Catholic Church in order to renew it from within?103 Others were more wary as they read the documents issued after the Vatican Council. George Johnston was troubled by what he feared was a “new type of Roman Catholic imperialism” that still regarded Protestants as belonging to mere ecclesial communities rather than true churches.104 What did these changes portend for ecumenism as once understood by the United Church? With the uncoupling of Christianity and culture underway in many countries, Canada among them, the old strategic intention of reuniting Christendom by first creating united national churches was no longer as viable. There was continuing interest in bringing confessional families together in the kind of organic union that the United Church had achieved in 1925. However, ecumenism was transformed by those who imagined alternatives to that model. Moreover, for those still committed to an organic model of Christian unity, Vatican II dramatically redefined what was at stake. It offered an intriguing new possibility: a church

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made more fully catholic by the return of the “separated brethren” of non-Roman ecclesial communities. At the same time, a glimmer of a different understanding of ecumenism, informed by the changing approach to world mission, was evident in the United Church’s avid support for inter-church coalitions organized around issues of common concern. This approach shifted the emphasis from beliefs held in common (still the basis for  much of the co-operation among conservative Protestants) to working together despite confessional fault lines. There would still be amalgamation in the future, Hord predicted, but with less money spent on buildings (temples to the idols of denominationalism, as he put it) and more on specialized staff, community service, and world mission. Inner-city work would be done ecumenically and coordinated with community developers and social workers in existing agencies.105 Such a venture in ecumenical outreach was launched in the Lakehead region of Ontario by Lois Wilson, serving in team ministry at First United Church, Fort William, with her husband, Roy Wilson. In the fall of 1967 they invited Protestant and Catholic churches to join in planning Town Talk, a month-long multimedia public forum to discuss such relevant community topics as family problems, poverty in an affluent society, pollution, science, and foreign aid.106 But the fissures that were remaking Christianity elsewhere were apparent in northern Ontario as well. While the success of Town Talk exceeded expectations, Wilson recalled that some conservative churches boycotted the project because there wasn’t enough emphasis on the Bible.107 It was a sign of the new ecclesial times: although the United Church’s interaction with Catholicism was growing less oppositional, it was drawing more criticism from conservative Protestants, including some within its own ranks. Town Talk was to reshape how Wilson viewed the United Church’s public role and the church’s place in an urban setting.108 The event showcased exciting possibilities for urban outreach, a crucial element of the United Church’s new mission strategy. The spiritual needs of the frontier had figured large in the case for church union. Its home missions strategy had been aimed at providing religious services for small communities as well as for non-Anglo-Saxons in cities. However, it was the urban frontier that caught the imagination of those preparing the United Church for its new mission to the

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world. “The cradle of our pluralistic society” was how the first report of the Commission on the Church on the Urban Frontier portrayed the city in 1964. People were flocking there to seek power, opportunity, and excitement in the economic, social, educational, and artistic exchanges it offered. But most congregations were unprepared to meet the demands of the new sort of community taking shape on this new frontier, and were in danger of providing answers in rural or outdated terms that expressed “nostalgia for bygone days.”109 Nothing was safe from scrutiny. The United Church’s praiseworthy studies on immigration, war and peace, capital punishment, national health insurance, and the use of alcohol and tobacco had sometimes shaped public policy in the past, noted a second report; however, “the large majority of church members have never heard of these reports, let alone taken action following their recommendations.” The New Curriculum – already under fire from conservatives – was hit with a different criticism: it might not be suitable for all communities, prepared as it was for “average, middle-class young people.” Nor should the church expect to make its influence felt in urban communities through social service work as in the past, now that the government or secular agencies were providing such services. Congregations were instead urged to take up “community issues of importance with a view to political action.”110 Shifting the focus to the urban frontier had serious consequences for the old frontier. Although rural churches still made up 65 per cent of United Church congregations, the encroachment of urbanism was having a negative affect. Changes in pastoral leadership were frequent. Some pastoral charges were in a precarious financial situation. Controversy over biblical interpretation or moral standards could be devastating in a rural church, Board of Home Missions associate secretary Harold Bailey reminded those who complained about the slow pace of change there. Losing some members over a hotly contested issue might make little difference in a large church, whereas such division in a small rural congregation could threaten its survival.111 Perhaps it is not surprising then that there was more resistance to adopting the New Curriculum in rural churches than in large urban ones. Moreover, the new ecumenical spirit created uncertainty about the purpose of home missions. When Forrest editorialized about the meaning of the term “national church” in 1957, he reiterated that the United Church had never intended to become a state church, but

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hoped to “provide fellowship for all who would come to Canada from whatever nation or culture.” Although at that time 80 per cent of its members still considered the British Isles their ancestral home, the United Church’s aspiration was that every Christian who came to Canada would “find fellowship in our church.” Forrest could boast that “in a real sense it is becoming the Church of Christ in Canada.”112 Home missions had helped to make it so. For instance, in contrast to the Anglican and Presbyterian churches, the United Church had expanded missions to Chinese immigrants in the 1950s, and the results were impressive. By 1961, over half the persons of Chinese extraction in Canada had joined a Protestant church, and the United Church’s share of Chinese Protestants was 38.7 per cent (up from 13.6 per cent two decades earlier.)113 Even though the 1961 census showed that Catholics were gaining ground on Protestants, the United Church could point to such successes. However, the theological and cultural rationale for sponsoring missionary work among immigrants was becoming less clear by the mid-1960s.114 Since most immigrants to Canada had no direct confessional link to the United Church in the country they had left, how was the United Church to extend fellowship without seeming to proselytize? Ecumenical sensitivity to the overtures of Vatican II combined with the new theology of world mission to scuttle the old home mission strategy, especially in urban centres where Catholic immigrants were arriving in large numbers. The shift to providing only technical services in health, education, agriculture, industry, etc. alienated some who believed, as George Johnston bluntly put it, that the Christian message was “proselytizing at its core.”115 Conservative evangelicals certainly thought so, and did not hesitate to encourage Catholics – and unhappy Protestants in liberal congregations – to join them. Caught between the old and new frontiers was suburbia, where the majority of the baby boomers were born.116 The merits of an ambitious church extension program in new housing developments had seemed obvious in the 1950s, and it was to new suburban congregations that the United Church owed most of its postwar success. Suburban churches were in a paradoxical situation: they were caught between the tug of nostalgia for old traditions associated with the  congregations (often rural) in which their members had grown up, and their willingness to experiment.117 A sympathetic

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Observer editorial published shortly after release of The Comfortable Pew noted that new suburban congregations were criticized for adjusting too much. Some had even gone so far as to change the time of worship from eleven o’clock on Sunday morning and cancel the Sunday evening service. Their ecumenism was expressed by dispensing with denominational programs that they deemed ineffective, and ignoring denominational labels, “partly because they [suburban parishioners] don’t know the difference or because they just don’t care.”118 To make matters worse, their sociability was suspect to those who urged the church to listen to the world. What critics denounced as a social club, suburban parishioners saw as putting down new roots: “They want to find or create a community and rear their children in the fear of God and the knowledge of Christ among believers – nice, decent believers.” With the inner city “left to the Roman Catholics, the ethnic churches and the Gospel halls,” Forrest protested, “jibing at the suburbs or depreciating their witness” offered “no assistance and no cure.”119 The Comfortable Pew no doubt reinforced negative images of the suburban congregation. But Forrest also attributed some of the snide remarks he heard when he was out and about to the impact of Americans Vance Packard and Gibson Winter, whose writings depicted superficial suburbanites switching churches casually in their quest for status.120 Months after the editorial about suburban congregations appeared in 1964, Forrest found that his positive assessment was making the Observer “the object of wearisome attack.” “You can’t mean it,” wrote someone he described as a good friend, who wondered if he was trying to be ironic!121 Forrest did mean it, and repeated his admiration for what was happening in the suburbs as “the most exciting and promising manifestation of our changing religious life.” Despite obvious experimentation, suburban churchgoers had “sought to preserve and nurture the best elements of community life they left behind on farm and in village and town.” They displayed “the best questioning, the freshest thinking, the most venturesome planning, and the most sacrificial giving.” Indeed, if there was to be a new reformation, it was likely to have the best chance in suburban churches, which had become “little ecumenical institutes.”122 Forrest decided to investigate what a wide cross-section of church leaders thought about suburban congregational life, and the result was a symposium published in the Observer in 1965.

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Many (including all the principals of theological colleges who ­commented) praised suburban churches for their innovation, enthusiasm, openness, and generosity. Disparagement was motivated by  jealousy, retorted principal E.S. Lautenschlager of Emmanuel College, and “initiated by the devil.” Bruce McLeod, who had spent six years as minister of a suburban congregation, reminded readers that behind the power mowers and morning cups of coffee were men, women, and children living in situations as hopeless as any other place. “What I miss in many well-phrased criticisms of the church’s involvement in suburbia is some alternative plan of caring for these people.” Mutchmor commended suburban churches for displaying “visible proof of a strong, intelligent faith” and providing more for the worship, work, and witness of the Christian church than his own generation.123 Hord, the former pastor of two flourishing suburban churches, took a more critical stance. He described the suburbanite as living a “schizophrenic existence” between the “impersonal structures of the business corporation and political machine” and the comforts of a middle-class, split-level home in the suburbs. Citing Winter’s Suburban Captivity of the Churches, he insisted that only by accepting responsibility for the inner city would the suburban church find its true life.124 Among the most scathing of the published responses were two ­letters from women, one a suburban minister’s wife who asked to remain anonymous. She characterized the suburban community as comprised of one socio-economic group (mainly families of young executives) who thought it was good for business to belong to a church. The main concern was for the building itself, rather than what was happening inside it. A compartmentalized attitude to religion that saw it as unrelated to social issues was being passed on to the youth of suburban churches, who, like their fathers, thought the church should “stick to its knitting” and not speak out on educational, economic, or political matters. She had found suburban ­congregations filled with status seekers and nominal Christians “rejoicing in broadloom wall to wall, full of pride, arrogance and selfrighteousness,” willing to “serve suppers and salve their consciences with a token money gift.”125 Katherine Burbidge concurred. Outsiders could not be blamed for “equating us with an ultra-respectable service club with religious overtones.” She claimed that the service club spirit of the United

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Church repelled many suburbanites. Consequently, “thinking Christians” were drifting to Unitarian churches. “We are not all born fund raisers, and it should be possible to sing in the choir, or teach Sunday school, lead a youth group or serve on the session without becoming involved as a huckster of anything from variety show tickets to 50-pound bags of potatoes,” she complained.126 Sociability had been a virtue associated with faith and fellowship, especially in rural communities and small towns. Now secular pundits and even some of the United Church’s own leaders, who frowned on the festivals of suburban church life, mocked it. Suburban churches had assumed that cultivating community within the congregation was laudable as an antidote to the anonymity of modern life. But this aspect of congregational life was coming under fire from those who insisted that rather than being preoccupied with drawing people in, the church should be sending them out into the world. Perhaps it is not surprising that some who had been only loosely connected to the United Church chose to stay at home rather than engage in activities that its own leaders considered a hindrance to God’s mission in the world.127 Some worried that old practices of pastoral care were no longer appreciated. Even if the welfare state were to take care of most ma­ terial needs in the future, Forrest reminded Observer readers, the government was not equipped to care for persons suffering from loneliness, frustration, neuroses, and ills that beset even the affluent. Sewing circles, knitting clubs, Bible classes, suppers, bazaars, prayer meetings, and choirs provided effective ministry to the lonely. “This, too, is evangelism,” he insisted.128 But those who associated evangelism with Billy Graham’s methods would not have agreed – and they appeared to be gaining exclusive recognition as the evangelical brand. Forrest was startled to hear conservative Protestants referred to simply as evangelicals. “Aren’t we all?” he asked plaintively, still convinced that Protestants who weren’t evangelical should be.129 By the end of the tumultuous decade of the sixties, those who would answer “yes” to that question were a shrinking minority. Was there a remedy for what was ailing the United Church? Could it be cured by listening to the world, as those who embraced the new concept of world mission hoped? The mixed results of the National Project and its Planning Fellowships at both the national and local levels were not encouraging. What emerged in 1967 in conjunction

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with Canada’s Centennial celebrations was barely recognizable as the National Project of Evangelism that had been announced in 1962. Many of the activities connected with the original focus on evangelism were sidelined to make way for the added emphasis on social action.130 The accomplishments described in the final report were modest: issues had been brought into the open, groups of like-minded persons (both conservative and radical) had come together, and the majority of those who attended the Planning Fellowships had experienced “catharsis.” There was a frank admission that Planning Fellowships had often left participants feeling “hung up” – aware of the church’s failings, but short on remedies.131 Meanwhile other groups, including the Jesus movement, offered Jesus as the answer to what was ailing society. Staffer Robert Christie sounded discouraged in 1970 as he approached retirement, timed to coincide with the closing of e & s s ’s Vancouver office where he had worked for nearly two decades. His stinging accusation was that the United Church’s misplaced priorities had “both minimized and jeopardized the ordinary Christian’s growth in faith and its practical expression in the workaday social setting.” Personal commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour had been replaced by “a less demanding brand of sub-Christian ­fraternizing and sharing of human experience and joint social action – proclaiming this to be ‘the New Evangelism.’”132 His visits to congregations and presbyteries had convinced him that the church’s once generally effective social ministry was also imperiled; it was “renamed, redirected, devitalized, devocalized – if not totally confounded.”133 He held his own board as partly responsible: the postMutchmor staff had replaced personal evangelism (such as preaching missions, teaching missions, visitation, schools for elders, Lenten studies, and evangelism conferences) with impersonal congregational self-analysis and Planning Fellowships.134 William Berry, another long-time staffer, saw things differently as he prepared to return to pastoral ministry that same year. His parting report was a reminder of why the United Church had been persuaded to listen to the world in the first place. The man who had steered the Calling Canada to Christ campaign in the 1950s insisted that “only a daring, enthusiastic continuing [sic] and vital policy of evangelism can save western culture from the decadence into which it has already fallen.” Yet thinking of evangelism in terms that were “too personal” obscured the “corporate power of society.” No one

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person was responsible for unemployment or war; such social sins were “more blatant, vicious and brutal than the sins of any one individual.” By focusing on personal evangelism during the Mutchmor era, the United Church had missed an opportunity: “We tried winning people one by one in the hope they would challenge society. But it never worked out.” Instead the revival had produced a “lack-lustre feeble Christianity.” Yet he agreed with Christie that the gospel was both social and personal: “We have only a lopsided arch, which cannot stand if we emphasize one side and not the other.”135 Even Hord admitted that the National Project had polarized the liberal and conservative wings of the United Church, dividing them over whether to emphasize evangelism or social service. But he still insisted that they “belong together and must not be separated if we are to be true to Christ.”136 “Finding Life’s Meaning,” a winsome poem penned a year before his death, spoke to how the personal and the social were enjoined in his own piety: Christ has broken the power of evil, And exposed it on the Cross; In response I want to serve Him Who has loved me at such cost. As Christ came to seek and win me And assure me I’m a child of God, So He sends me forth to win my brothers, And point them in the path He trod.137 The 1960s saw the rapid demise of the early twentieth-century approach to mission that had been celebrated with great fanfare at Edinburgh in 1910. Admittedly, balancing its twin goals of evangelization and Christianization had never been easy. But after the 1960s, there were fewer who thought the effort worthwhile. The so-called dual mandate of doing mission and doing justice was soon to replace the old two-pronged approach to evangelism and social service in the lexicon of the United Church.138 Evangelism still had liberal defenders. But by the end of the decade, as the emerging notion of world mission drew the line more sharply between ecumenical and evangelical Protestants, to be a liberal evangelical was almost a contradiction in terms. Evangelism was viewed with suspicion to be sure; however, just as significant was scrutiny of old assumptions about

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the social role of the church, which revealed a diminishing demand for the kind of social service the United Church had once delivered.139 The sometimes-querulous marriage of evangelism and social service was over, and the liberal evangelicalism they had once fostered was forsaken. A desire to move beyond the impasse between them perhaps explains the enthusiastic response to what was hailed as the “social action report” at the General Council that convened a few months after Hord’s death. Among the recommendations of the Commission on the Church in the Field of Social Welfare was that the areas of evangelism, social service, and home missions (and perhaps others) be collapsed into a new Church and Society division.140 In promoting partnerships with governmental and non-governmental agencies, it insisted that there was nothing about “religious” social programs, as such, that made them superior; rather, the quality of service and sensitivity to human need were the only proper criteria for judging a program’s merit.141 If in the coming years it was difficult to distinguish the United Church’s social ministries from secular social work, that was by design. The leaders of the 1960s are often blamed for the failure of the United Church to keep pace with the growth of the previous decade. Yet it is fallacious to pin numerical decline on particular persons or programs. The appeal to listen to the world was a genuine attempt to confront the challenges facing churches around the world, and to rethink mission accordingly. To be sure, there were flawed decisions. But as the so-called radicals listened to the world, they were convinced that a greater risk than failure was to do nothing. By forcing a hesitant church to imagine a New Age where the church was no longer assured of its customary place, they primed it for the difficult days ahead. As she pondered that future, Katharine Hockin even dared to ask: “Can it be that God is active in our world in ways that may not always be to our advantage?”142 As the 1960s drew to a close, the United Church was less certain of the answer to that question than the founding generation had been.

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9 Reconceiving the United Church A real tradition is not the relic of a past irretrievably gone; it is a living force that animates and informs the present ... It appears as an heirloom, a heritage that one receives on condition of making it bear fruit before passing it on to one’s descendants. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

Preaching at the annual pilgrimage service of the historic Old Hay Bay Church in 1965, general secretary Ernest Long warned an overflow crowd that unless his church changed its ways, it was headed for a “stunning defeat” over the next twenty years.1 Sounding even less optimistic two years later, “Mr United Church” (as Long was nicknamed) made headlines when he warned that his church had “five years to change radically – or else!”2 Defending his dire outlook for the future, he bluntly declared that the old idea of a worlddominating Christendom was dead.3 It was evident to Long that the very survival of the United Church was in question too. The signs were unmistakable; it was already in the throes of change. During the revivals of the 1950s, some church leaders had boasted that the United Church’s “amazing growth” would “continue, and perhaps even be stepped up in tempo.”4 A decade later the swagger was gone. “The revival is over; we may be in for a difficult time of retrenchment,” announced Observer editor A.C. Forrest as he delivered the bad news in 1967: church growth had halted in 1962, and total church membership declined in 1966 for the first time since church union.5 There were dire predictions that churches in Canada would follow the pattern of decline already evident in much of the  u k and continental Europe. Statistical projections indicated that ­before long Christianity would become a minority religion in Canada.6 One computer model predicted that attendance at Anglican

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Table 9.1 Geographical distribution of United Church membership, 1971 United Church

Total population

Membership

% of population

21,568,310

3,768,800

17.47

Newfoundland

522,105

101,805

19.50

Prince Edward Island

111,640

27,830

24.93

Nova Scotia

788,960

162,885

20.65

New Brunswick

634,555

85,185

13.42

Canada

Quebec

6,027,760

176,825

2.93

Ontario

7,703,105

1,682,820

21.85

Manitoba

988,250

256,560

25.96

Saskatchewan

926,245

274,285

29.61

Alberta

1,627,875

456,925

28.07

British Columbia

24.61

2,184,620

537,565

Northwest Territories

34,805

3,005

8.6

Yukon Territory

18,390

3,110

16.91

Source: Census of Canada (1971), vol. I, part 3, Table 10

churches in Toronto would cease by 12 February 1981. The United Church’s future was not much brighter; one of its own studies predicted that it would suffer a similar fate by the mid-1990s.7 With negotiations between the two churches underway, it appeared that any union between them would be short-lived. The United Church was to outlast these grim forecasts of its imminent end. And yet Long was in a sense proven right: in many ­respects the church that was born in 1925 did not survive the tumultuous 1960s. The hope of a Christian Canada that had inspired the bold experiment of the founders dimmed as the country grew religiously and culturally diverse. The customary insistence that faith was both personal and social in character, formed in Christian fellowship and practised in the course of everyday life, sounded quaint to a new generation that was demanding relevance and social action. There were complaints from across the theological spectrum that the organizational machinery – once hailed as a key to the success of the United Church’s mission – was broken. In response its leaders resolved to woo back the disenchanted, convinced that

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1926+ 1927+ 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

Persons under PastoralPastoral care Pastoral Members Persons under care Persons under Care

Figure 9.1 United Church of Canada membership, 1926–75

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1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1955 1960 1956 1961 1957 1962 1958 1963 1959 1964 1960 1965 1961 1966 1962 1967 1963 1968 1964 1969 1965 1970 1966 1971 1967 1972 1968 1973 1969 1974 1970 1975 1971

1926+ 1926+ 1927+ 1927+ 1928 1927 1928 1929 1929 1930 1930 1931 1931 1932 1932 1933 1933 1934 1934 1935 1935 1936 1936 1937 1937 1938 1938 1939 1939 1940 1940 1941 1941 1942 1942 1943 1943 1944 1944 1945 1945 1946 1946 1947 1947 1948 1948 1949 1949 1950 1950 1951 1951 1952 1952 1953 1953 1954 1954 1955 1955 1956 1956 1957 1957 1958 1958 1959 1959 1960 1960 1961 1961 1962 1962 1963 1963 1964 1964 1965 1965 1966 1966 1967 1967 1968 1968 1969 1969 1970 1970 1971 1971 1972 1972 1973 1973 1974 1974 1975 1975

mbership, 1926–751926–75 mbership,

2,800,000 Members Members

2,600,000

2,400,000

2,200,000

2,000,000

1,800,000

1,600,000

1,400,000

1,200,000

1,000,000

800,000

600,000

400,000

200,000

Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book +  1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

$100 000 000

Total Funds Raised

$90 000 000

$80 000 000

$70 000 000

$60 000 000

$50 000 000

$40 000 000

$30 000 000

$20 000 000

$10 000 000

$0

Figure 9.2 Total funds raised for all purposes, 1926–75

Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book. + 1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

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those who were ambivalent about organized religion were not necessarily rejecting God or abandoning Christianity, but only the conformity, clubbiness, and bureaucratic authority that critics associated with it. Scholars agree that the 1960s decisively changed the religious landscape of North America and Western Europe; they disagree on explanations for the sudden downward spiral in religious partici­ pation in mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches. Historian Hugh McLeod cautions that it is a mistake to single out one “master factor” to account for it. The United Church’s experience confirms his claim that a number of initially disparate currents converged to create the crisis: affluence, the decline of ideologically based subcultures, theological radicalization, political radicalization (especially opposition to the Vietnam War), the sexual revolution, and women’s search for independence, to name a few of the most significant.8 He finds the most serious religious decline to have been associated with the “low-key style of piety which had flourished in previous decades, which emphasized Christian ethics and membership of the Christian community, rather than the dogmatic or the miraculous”9 – an apt description of the United Church. In The Upside of Down, political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that the greatest opportunity for transformative change happens when a number of adaptive cycles collide. He uses the term “panarchy,” a concept borrowed from ecology, to refer to the un­ predictable change that results from such “cycles within cycles.”10 In  social systems, as in nature, catastrophe can clear the ground for  something new as innovations are introduced and tested.11 Experiments that fail are abandoned, while those that succeed shape the next phase of development.12 Breakdown is disruptive to some parts of a system, but does not need to be catastrophic overall; in fact, limited breakdown in a social system is necessary to create space for new leadership and structures to emerge.13 On the other hand, “excessive exuberance” can threaten the survival of a system.14 The challenge to leadership during times of adaptive change is to allow systems to “fail gracefully”: to limit the damage and preserve what will aid in recovery.15 Panarchy aptly describes the situation of the United Church during the 1960s: its heightened vulnerability after a period of growth, the collision of cycles within cycles, and the tension between innovators and conservers who both played critical roles by preventing (or

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at least delaying) its collapse. Picturing change as an adaptive cycle recognizes the significance of links between the parts of a complex system – an intriguing way to think of conciliar governance in the United Church. Slow change at one level protects the system while faster-paced innovation at another level energizes it. The theory also emphasizes the importance of connections between “remembrance” (persistence) and “revolt” (evolvability) during a cycle of change and renewal. Healthy systems in society, as in nature – whether a forest after a fire or a coral reef after a storm – rely on “memories” during such times of reorganization and renewal.16 While innovators clear the ground for change, conservers look for ways to plant the seeds of memory for another generation to harvest. The adaptive challenges facing the United Church in the 1960s were unprecedented in its short history. Though often described as a modern church, it was not well suited to cope with some key cultural dynamics that ran counter to its founding vision. The United Church had aspired to situate itself at the centre of communities across Canada, communicating both spiritual and social messages from a Christian vantage point. It had proudly identified itself within Max Weber’s famous typology as a church, rather than a sect, and adopted an organizational style to match. What seemed to catch the United Church by surprise in the 1960s was the growing presence, even in its own midst, of Weber’s third type. “Mystic” was a rather misleading English translation of the term Weber had used for those who regarded the autonomy of individual and immediate experience as their authority in religious matters.17 In centuries past this third type had been predominantly otherworldly in its orientation. The 1960s demonstrated that this third type could be radically this-worldly in its spiritual focus. Such mystics were ambivalent and even antagonistic to organized religion, sentiments that were captured in phrases such as ‘secular religion,’ ‘no religion,’ and ‘spiritual but not religious.’ The subjectivity of their spiritual quest eroded the United Church’s faith in fellowship, and their suspicion of bureaucratic organizations undermined its conciliar structure. It was this new challenge that Ray Hord had confronted in one of his last addresses before his death in 1968. “It’s later than we think for the institutional church,” he warned. The church had helped to define modern Christendom, with its edifice standing in the centre of

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the community and the priest or minister relating its teachings to all of life through preaching and the sacraments. But now, he contended, “Christendom with its homogeneity and common standards has all but disappeared.” The church no longer held a central place in people’s lives, nor did it bring the community together as it had in the past. The church would only continue to influence the world if it discovered “forms of fellowship and service that are more congenial to current experience.” Comparing the situation of the United Churchto that of the Jews in exile during the sixth century bc, Hord insisted that its most urgent task was “to prepare and train her members to be a part of the church of the dispersion” that was “scattered in a pluralistic culture.” Once it faced this new reality, he predicted it would worry less about its administrative structures and old forms of worship.18 A radically different approach to faith and fellowship was shaking the theological foundations on which mainstream churches like the United Church rested. Making Christianity “ready for the world” was how principal Donald Mathers summed up a decade of dramatic theological change to a gathering of the Queen’s University Saturday Club in 1969. The quest for salvation had once involved taking one’s sins to a religious expert, he mused, as one would take an ulcer to a doctor. But now individuals were expected to work out their own solutions – in effect to bear their own sins. “We seem to have moved from confession and absolution to counselling, and from the external restraints of a community bound by an official orthodoxy to the internal loyalties of a fellowship of pilgrims.” Mathers explained how this fellowship of pilgrims was altering assumptions about the spiritual quest. Terms like ‘personal maturity,’ ‘integrity,’ and ‘social relevance’ had become the modern equivalents of ‘salvation.’ The time would come, he expected, when God would be praised in the language of science, or politics, or medicine, for every workplace would be considered a place of service to God. Every person would be a priest, and each home a temple, he predicted (noting that the Apocalypse of John made no mention of a temple in the New Jerusalem). “We are indeed being secularized,” he declared, explaining that this was “not an elimination of religion from the world but a religious transformation of the world.”19 A conspicuous number of these “pilgrims” were affiliated with the United Church. They were inclined to turn to their own conscience, rather than the guidance of the church or even the Bible, in matters

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261

of moral and spiritual discernment. They distanced themselves from the organized fellowship that had defined their church for four decades, relying instead on their own experience to guide their actions. They did not want any organization – certainly not the church – to speak for them on social issues. This fellowship of pilgrims thus repudiated much of what ‘being United’ had entailed. Yet the United Church’s hope was that these pilgrims who needed no priest for themselves might be drawn to the prophetic message of the gospel for the sake of others. Paradoxically, while the new spiritual quest was not necessarily solitary, it was subjective. The individual autonomy it prized entailed a different understanding of belonging to a moral community. Not only was a person expected to make his or her own moral decisions (not an uncommon Protestant notion): autonomy now extended to the selection of criteria for making such decisions. This eroded the church’s traditional authority as the primary moral guide.20 Those wishing to uphold the moral values of the past were left to negotiate them privately with no backing from secular culture – and increasingly less encouragement from the church. As fewer heeded its advice on personal conduct, the United Church scrambled to find more relevant language to defend old causes. After the 1964 General Council, Forrest complained that the commissioners had engaged in long discussions on smoking but “refused to call it a ‘moral issue’ not because it isn’t but because that sounds like sin.” Instead smoking was discouraged as “a health hazard and a deep concern to the Christian conscience.”21 Some fights it seemed – even good ones – could not be won. Coming to terms with the eclipse of moral community was particularly difficult in the matter of beverage alcohol. “You have before you just about the most discouraging task of any group in Canada,” Forrest told a young people’s temperance group in 1965. Prohibition didn’t have a chance, and government control as a way of countering abuse had become a joke. Drinking was actually encouraged by government agencies to increase tax revenues. Even “decent people” were embarrassed about refusing to drink because of the bad image of the old temperance movement. He hoped that one day a politician might be able to do something to restrict the sale of beverage alcohol if, as he expected, things continued to get out of hand. “In the meantime we can be temperate in all things,” he counselled. “We must

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insist on our right to be total abstainers. And insist on the rights of others to be temperate users of alcohol. And promote and support every good effort aimed at understanding, and assisting the addict to solve his problems. If we do this then we may be able to enlist others who have a common concern for the welfare, economy and sobriety of Canada.”22 Nearly all churches had trouble with the topic of sex during the 1960s, and the United Church was no exception. The gap between what the church taught and what people were doing was an old problem. However, the divergence between the churches’ approach to sexual ethics and the message of the media and psychologists was new.23 Secular critics complained that churches were skittish about talking to young adults about sex. The United Church responded by tackling a broader range of issues and experimenting with ways to promote discussion. For instance, it joined the Anglican Church in commissioning Coffee House, a drama created to encourage young adults to discuss premarital sex, abortion, and the new morality.24 And more change was on the way. During the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the collapse of what historian Doug Owram calls “the cult of virginity” blurred the relationship between sex and marriage. By the 1970s the three-fold purpose of marriage (procreation, companionship, and the vocation of parenting) portrayed in United Church materials of bygone years was reduced to one: intimacy.25 In many communities across Canada, a more secular Sunday was another sign that belonging to a moral community was waning in significance. The effects of living in a secular society were felt with increasing strength each passing year, according to a 1962 report on “The Lord’s Day.”26 Pluralism was being used as an excuse to change Sunday legislation, the report complained. Conceding that urban areas of Canada were no longer “chiefly Anglo-Saxon,” it maintained that immigrants should generally “be prepared to accept Canadian ways rather than expect Canadians to adapt themselves to the ways of newcomers.”27 A child living in a “Christian country” should not have to choose between a baseball game and Sunday school; thus laws “which ensure such choices do not have to be made, are not only good Christianity but good citizenship.”28 A report on the same issue a decade later proposed a choice between one of two days of rest (Saturday or Sunday), basing its case on promoting “human well-being.” By then the United Church was ready to concede that in a pluralistic culture, “the Christian segment can no longer expect the

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263

state to enforce, by the law, religious practices which are uniquely matters of individual conscience.”29 By the 1970s another moral cause had been abandoned. Not only were United Church people inclined to flout their church’s lead in moral matters, they were more likely than in the past to dispense with Christian fellowship, even on Sunday morning. As people weighed the benefits of belonging, convincing them to join one voluntary organization over another was a problem both inside and outside the church. Mutchmor reported in 1962 that “loss of fellowship is reflected in sparsely attended old time political meetings and in the current decline of trade union membership.”30 As other groups competed for volunteers, the United Church discovered that it was harder to find adults willing to serve as Sunday school teachers, youth leaders, and committee members. Even showing up for an hour on Sunday morning was onerous, especially to young people who complained of being ‘turned off’ by boring worship services. With supporters of experimental forms of ministry provocatively claiming that going to church on Sunday did not make a person good, what was the point of being there?31 A cultural revolution was underway, unleashing forces that affected the habits of churchgoers as well as the organizations and institutions to which they belonged, noted Forrest in 1969. Nowhere was that more evident, he suggested, than in the changed attitude to Sunday. After years of well-attended worship services, requiring a double-shift in some cases, there were forecasts that the morning service and Sunday school would follow the path to extinction that Sunday evening services and mid-week prayer meetings had already taken.32 There was nothing holy about scheduling, he granted, and structures needed to change. However, there was “something sacred about Christian fellowship, about disciplined worship and prayer, about study, about teaching, about meeting in the name of Christ,” he insisted. His quarrel was not with those who had rejected the church because they had lost their faith, but “the people who believe but are not working at it” – the ones who still sent a cheque to support the church, but would rather curl, golf, play bridge, or spend time at the cottage than show up on Sunday morning.33 In communities across Canada, attendance at church-sponsored events was plummeting. For a denomination that placed a premium on fellowship as a way of nurturing faith, the declining appeal of

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264 A Church with the Soul of a Nation mbership, 1926–75 mbership, 1926–75 Persons under Pastoral care Members Persons under Schools Pastoral care Membership of Sunday 800 000 800,000

Members Members

Through-Week Organizations Members Through-Week Organizations

Membership of Sunday Schools

700,000 700 000 600,000 600 000 500,000 500 000 400 000 400,000 300 000 300,000 200 000 200,000 100 000 100,000

1926+ 1927+ 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

-

Figure 9.3 Membership in Sunday schools and through-week organizations, 1926–75

1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1955 1962 1956 1963 1957 1964 1958 1965 1959 1966 1960 1967 1961 1968 1962 1969 1963 1970 1964 1971 1965 1972 1966 1973 1967 1974 1968 1975 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975

Source: The United Church of Canada Year Book +  1926 and 1927: year ending 31 March. All others: year ending 31 December.

such activities did not bode well for the future. Particularly disturbing was the prospect of losing the generation of young adults born after the Second World War. With many of them pursuing post-­ secondary education in the 1960s, there was evidence that the baby boomers were entering university as Christians but leaving as agnostics or atheists.34 Student Christian Movement (s cm ) general secretary John Berry reported poor attendance at worship services and Bible study groups on university campuses. The majority of s cm ers leaned toward what he called churchless Christianity, and were “intensely dissatisfied with the state of the church” because of its divisions and its failure to connect its message with “life in the world.”35 The Sunday school was a leading indicator of the trouble that lay ahead. The United Church had invested heavily in the New Curriculum, expecting to tap the religious energies of children and youth. Despite the furor in the press after its children’s program was launched in 1964, the New Curriculum was in use in 90 per cent of United Church congregations a year later.36 But euphoria over classrooms filled to capacity and brisk sales of books was short-lived. Sunday school volunteers were dismayed to learn that three years after the New Curriculum was introduced, enrolment had dropped by 25 per cent. With the end of the baby boom, there were fewer children to replace those who left to work or attend university

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elsewhere. Sales of New Curriculum materials plunged after the first cycle, perhaps as much the result of recycling as a negative response to content: rather than being given to children to keep, the durable hardcover books were retrieved and re-used three years later. Children were not the New Curriculum’s only target: it was billed as a program that would “revolutionize the Sunday church school, and put the emphasis back on adults.”37 Some congregations found that introducing the New Curriculum to adults was a greater challenge than using it with children: it demanded more time than the adults were prepared to give. Women in particular were showing signs of volunteer fatigue. Sunday schools for adults had not been common in the past, and the theology underlying the curriculum was unfamiliar even to people who had grown up in the church. Sunday school teachers were no longer sure enough about their own faith to instruct others.38 Winnipeg’s Westworth United Church, for instance, reported that some members left because of the troubling theological issues that the New Curriculum raised, and even many who stayed struggled with it.39 Adults who volunteered to teach the New Curriculum were expected to be learners themselves. For instance, upon opening the manual to prepare for a Sunday school class of nine- to eleven-year-olds in the first year of the New Curriculum, a teacher would have found nearly a hundred pages of biblical background and pedagogical theory written by professionals before coming to the material on what to do at the first session.40 Although conservative evangelicals inside and outside the denomination were wary of the New Curriculum, some who took the time to examine it were surprisingly appreciative of its merits. The consensus of those who discussed it at a gathering of the Christian Research Seminar was “very favourable in many respects,” according to Wilber Sutherland, the general secretary of Canadian Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (and a Presbyterian). Writing to a friend connected to the uc r f, he reported that there had been “enthusiastic agreement” that it made sections of the Old Testament “readable and interesting.” Its handling of science and creation was “excellent,” and even its controversial handling of the first chapters of Genesis did a better job of conveying their theological significance than evangelical publications.41 However, Sutherland was worried by an implicit “philosophical naturalism” that left the impression that Christians had no resources for living that were any different from non-Christians. Once young people had “imbibed” it, he feared

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it “would not take very much to move them completely away from the Church and espousal of the Christian faith.”42 Though conservatives castigated it as too modern, others found the New Curriculum dated as soon as it came off the press. Its release coincided with the stir over John A.T. Robinson’s Honest to God, so it was widely but wrongly assumed to be an expression of the theological trends of the 1960s – as if the United Church had rushed publication to be ‘relevant’ to the debate. In fact, its writers were harvesting the theological renaissance of the 1940s and ’50s. Work on the 1940 Statement of Faith and the catechism based on it were, according to Mutchmor, the “seed-bed” out of which the New Curriculum had grown.43 Production had been delayed when the General Council rejected the design for a three-year cycle organized around the questions: “Who is God?”; “Who is my neighbour?”; and “Who am I?” Years later, editor Peter Gordon White recalled that commissioners had wanted “a curriculum built on the great affirmations of the Christian faith” rather than questions, which might give the impression of doubt. The discarded design was a decade ahead of its time, he speculated, and might have worn better.44 Like the New Evangelism promoted by e & s s , the New Curriculum was arguably as much the casualty as the cause of the crisis facing the United Church.45 With one in four families moving every year, ties to the community church were tenuous. As one teacher noted, there were plenty of other things to do on Sunday. The New Curriculum had not caused those changes, she insisted – nor had it been able to meet them as well as some had hoped, despite what most teachers considered a greatly improved course of study.46 Yet some blamed it for the decline in Sunday school attendance, despite the fact that almost every other North American denomination was showing a similar trend. A story in the Observer about a random sampling survey on Sunday schools taken in 1970, purportedly the first ever done at the national level, reported on the gravity of the situation. The Sunday school was on “a steep path to oblivion,” with the lowest enrolment since church union and a loss of nearly half of its teachers and students since 1962. Anglican numbers were, if anything, worse, while Presbyterian and Baptist Sunday schools were in trouble as well. Only “the most enthusiastically dedicated” (Pentecostals, unaffili­ ated congregations such as Toronto’s People’s Church, etc.) were flourishing – but by using “gimmicks” such as contests and prizes as

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attractions! The survey results also revealed a church divided – by region, age group, and community size – over how to respond to declining Sunday school attendance. Even the general reaction to the New Curriculum varied, with those from rural areas compared to those from communities over 50,000 opposing the New Curriculum by a margin of 2 to 1. Notes and letters attached to the questionnaires indicated that while some appreciated the new manuals for Sunday school teachers, others found them frustrating. An old hand at Sunday school teaching from Climax, Saskatchewan, wrote that he and his wife could no longer find time to prepare the lessons. More than a grade twelve education was needed to understand the material, he claimed, so where in a village of 400 would you find enough teachers?47 There was exasperation at the national headquarters too. Perhaps miffed by hearing constant criticism of the New Curriculum, the Board of Education was in no hurry to design another. According to one unnamed staff member, the New Curriculum had been the “last gasp of uniformity for a national church.” There was no plan to continue publishing it beyond 1973. Rather than rallying congregations to save the Sunday school, as traditionalists might have hoped, the staff at the Board of Education encouraged experimentation with new educational models and materials. “They insist that people must find their own answers – then they’ll help to find the resources to put the programs into action,” the Observer’s managing editor James Taylor reported. He added, “I’m afraid that congregations are likely to find coming to grips with their own needs a trying experience.”48 That was an understatement. The failure of the New Curriculum was only one of the challenges facing local congregations. They discovered, along with the Scouts and other organizations, that the formality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism associated with their activities had little appeal to baby boomers approaching young adulthood.49 The Young People’s Union (y pu ) had once attracted nearly 100,000 members who spent time together in Bible study, singsongs, and social activities such as weenie-roasts and sleigh rides. In 1964 the United Church approved a recommendation to create a new organization for young adults, and Kairos replaced the y p u a year later. According to those interviewed for a story in the Observer on the new organization, time seemed to have passed the y p u by, with secular organizations

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replacing church basements as places to gather. No longer was it possible to please everyone, explained field worker Wayne Barr, and those who showed up for y p u were too often those he characterized as rejects and misfits who “couldn’t make it anywhere else.”50 Kairos epitomized the new approach to mission that was rocking the United Church.51 Its aim was to challenge social and economic structures. For many (perhaps most) members of Kairos, its emphasis on ecumenical opportunities for social action was a drawing card. Programs such as Summer of Service (s o s ) attracted young volunteers to “become aware of and involved in the social problems facing Canada.”52 But it also reflected the subjectivity of the new spiritual quest. Based on what he had observed at a Kairos con­ ference, reporter Harvey Shepherd found an “intense interest in ­personal development, interpersonal relations and techniques for improving these.” The most popular session had been a sensitivity group, featuring a discussion of how participants felt about themselves, the meeting, and each other. Groups seemed to be comprised of friends whose relationship to a particular denomination was incidental. Some were already wondering whether Kairos could still be called Christian.53 Efforts to revamp activities for adults were also underway, and likewise met with mixed results. Creating a new organization for women did little to sustain participation, which peaked in the mid-1960s. Much of the impetus for merging the wms and wa to form the ucw in 1962 had come from women pressed for time. There seemed to be no good reason to support two women’s organizations that were often comprised of the same members. There were hopes that Bible studies, discussion groups, and practical projects rather than bazaars, bees, and suppers would better meet the personal and spiritual needs of working women.54 Sounding the new imperative of mission to the world, American theme speaker Peggy Way, a minister in the United Church of Christ, warned the Board of Women against seeking the “cheap grace” of irrelevant activities in a “sexual ghetto” rather than “attacking the social realities of our time.”55 But not all women wanted to leave church kitchens for community projects. Donating their time to help with suppers and bazaars was a way for women who had no money of their own to support the church. Reporter Patricia Clarke found many of them reluctant to give up the fellowship they enjoyed as they worked together. As one woman put it, “If you can bake a pie

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better than engage in theological debate, get on with it. I doubt if the pie is offered up to God, that he says, ‘I do wish she had made a political speech instead.’”56 As for men, a survey conducted in 1970 found a “sincere yearning for ‘fellowship’” and a desire “to know God better and serve Christ more.” The results did not support the conclusion that men were looking for bowling, bridge, or even community projects to undertake. Nor did the survey uncover much interest in tackling social ­issues of national concern, although respondents still regarded the church as the conscience of the nation. Instead, the men said they needed guidance for Christian living, help in finding opportunities for service, and ways to deepen their faith. A sympathetic editorial response described them as “aching for clarification” about basic ­issues of faith.57 Do people belong to the church because they believe or, as some scholars have wondered, do they believe because they belong to the church and have their faith formed by participating in its life and work?58 That conundrum would test the connection between faith and community – both within and beyond the congregation – that was the heart of ‘being United.’ What one generation prized as fellowship, another disparaged as clubby. Fellowship was the “secret weapon of the faith,” according to William Berry, a former church executive who had recently returned to the pastorate. Yet he had his doubts about how well the United Church coordinated Christian fellowship. “I protest against the graded Church of the twentieth century,” he wrote. He saw groups that appealed to newcomers according to interests, rather than age or gender, as a promising alternative to over-structured organizations.59 Others went further in their criticism of church fellowship, focusing instead on experimental forms of ministry with youth, university students, business professionals, and housing project residents. Bill Phipps, one of the United Church ministers who had formed Community Consultants Services in Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park, ­described their work as “part of the silent church”: “No counselling in the name of the church. No visiting to get people out to church. That’s crap. We try to get agencies and people to work together for the sake of the people. But we don’t seek visibility in the name of the church. Just the opposite.”60 Some ministries financed by the United Church were deliberately not identified with it.61

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Thorncliffe Park was one of the projects highlighted in Churches Where the Action Is! Written to inspire Christians to move outside the walls of the church and into the community, the book featured stories of ministries set up by the United Church (sometimes in ­collaboration with other churches) among people in diverse settings – blacks in Halifax after their displacement from Africville; low-income families in housing projects in major cities across the ­country; newcomers to suburban communities; hippies, indigenous peoples moving from reserves, and apartment-dwellers in Toronto; even a congregation meeting in a seed and fertilizer store in an Alberta village.62 But congregations that tried to combine outreach with fellowship sometimes met with resistance, as Rowntree Memorial United Church in London, Ontario, discovered. Its attendance had started to drop around 1964. About the same time it saw changes in the surrounding neighbourhood, which was less affluent than it had been when the church was built a decade earlier. The congregation decided in 1967 to become “more secular” by welcoming a variety of non-denominational organizations to use its property. The strategy not only failed to attract new members but also created a split in the congregation. The two University of Western Ontario sociologists hired as consultants to help the congregation assess its needs found a clash between those they named the “Contented,” who saw themselves as part of mainstream Canadian society, and the “Discontented,” who were critical of mainstream society and wanted to change it.63 The consultants also discovered that the minister’s attempts at outreach to the Discontented were at odds with the priorities of the lay leadership. The minister had urged the congregation to accept “less reputable” groups, such as a drop-in centre for youth and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings; the lay leadership preferred groups like the Girl Guides and the Badminton Club. Survey results indicated that Rowntree’s “desired minister” was “not one who leads the church toward identification of social problems and community action, but one who concentrates his efforts on the personal needs of the members of the congregation themselves.” The study provided data that illustrated the tension between those looking for fellowship and those wanting social action. It also uncovered a sense of alienation that was developing among active women in the congregation, who did most of the work while men exercised most of the power.64

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The dilemma of the Rowntree congregation, as described by the consultants, was the same one facing more and more congregations after the 1960s: “many people today, particularly the young, are less satisfied with life than the core members of Rowntree Church, and notably uninterested in joining a warm, supportive Christian congregation.”65 But the alternatives offered by the United Church proved to be no more appealing to idealistic young people. Many who in the past might have been drawn by their social concern to serve as ministers, missionaries, or church volunteers were finding new and exciting secular opportunities to engage in community development. Groups like Canadian University Service Overseas ­ (c u so) and the Company of Young Canadians, organized in the 1960s and funded by the federal government, competed with faithbased initiatives such as overseas missions and the s cm , which had once been magnets for student idealism.66 Meanwhile the momentum was shifting to groups that were more adept than the United Church at emphasizing the personal dimensions of being religious. The church’s attempts to become more cosmopolitan clashed with the approach of conservative evangelicals who focused on a personal decision for Christ and a few other key beliefs as tests of valid faith. Neo-evangelicals were not schooled to consider the fellowship of a worshipping community as counting for much when it came to salvation.67 Nor were they saddled with structures that were as bureaucratic as the denominations identified with ecumenical Protestantism. Their conversion experience provided a narrative that oriented their spiritual pilgrimage. ‘Being United’ required no similar testimony to a life-changing or charismatic experience – a vagueness that was sometimes mistaken for coldness and lack of Christian conviction. The baby boomers, observes Owram, had elevated experience as a way to restore the emotion that was essential to individual and social transformation, often turning to music to find it.68 The United Church had come to regard emotion as suspect, and was at a competitive disadvantage in this new spiritual marketplace, where religion was viewed as a personal, or at most ‘tribal,’ choice. Neo-evangelicalism was not ecumenical Protestantism’s only rival. At e& ss ’s annual meeting in 1962, the Christian Century’s Kyle Haselden warned that syncretism was the most dangerous threat facing American religion. Arriving almost everywhere in the world at the same time, according to Haselden, its particular expression in

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North America involved the practice of picking and choosing ideas from a variety of religions and putting them in “a secular basket” in an effort to convert “the pagan mind of our age.”69 The United Church soon discovered that its liberal tendencies made its youth highly susceptible to this eclectic approach to spirituality.70 The university campus was a place where the variety of religious experience was on display. The growth of departments of religion on university campuses was an indication that interest in religious questions was not dead. “Campus lectures on religion are crowded,” the Observer reported, but “mass meetings and preaching services are out.”71 To complicate matters further, the United Church found itself struggling to identify its theological distinctiveness once the old markers that had defined its forebears were forgotten. It had not been created to uphold or advance a particular doctrine, nor were there ritual practices that its members were expected to adopt. Though founded as a church that was broadly inclusive, it was not self-consciously diverse – in fact theological and cultural differences had initially been suppressed. Author Lucy Maud Montgomery had once expressed the sentiments of disheartened Presbyterian dissenters when she dismissed the new church as “nameless.”72 It was a taunt that came back to haunt the United Church when immigrants to Canada did not connect its name to the Methodist or Reformed churches they had left behind. After Vatican II, even the Catholic Church no longer served as a foil against which to construct an alternative Protestant identity. The United Church was thus imperilled by a tradition of theological inclusion that gave it the appearance of sameness in an age where difference increasingly defined identity. Donald Mathers had sounded confident about the United Church’s theological future as he assessed the situation at a mid-decade consultation on the world mission of the church. “I think we all realize that in the United Church we have far more of a common mind than most churches do in spite of the fact that people often think we are  scattered, vague and uncertain.” Disputing that the desire for Christian unity had led to a lack of firm conviction, he used the phrase “extreme centre” to describe the United Church’s theological orientation: “a centre in the sense that we represent no unbalanced presentation of the Gospel, but extreme in the sense that we are no less convinced or enthusiastic about our convictions than anyone else.”73

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During the 1960s, both the left and the right tugged at this extreme centre. The left offered a so-called secular theology that critics claimed was indistinguishable from the thought of Unitarians or well-meaning secular humanists. The right bore a resemblance to fundamentalism in its emphasis on a narrow definition of ­biblical authority as a test of faith. Those caught in-between – including many United Church ministers – interpreted what it meant to be in essential agreement with the articles of faith in the Basis of  Union in different ways. Those inside and outside the United Church assumed that its members had a wide berth for theological exploration. The ideal of a common faith was moving toward a multi-creedal pragmatism. A pivotal decision in that transition was the inclusion of what came to be known as the New Creed in the Service Book issued in 1969. The project to revise the Book of Common Order, which had been in use since 1932, was launched in 1958. By the time the Committee on Church Worship and Ritual completed its work a decade later, the United Church was in an entirely different liturgical situation. The report presented to the General Council in 1968 reflected the committee’s struggle to steer a course between “a very vocal ‘left’ that demands radical change” and “a not-so-articulate ‘right’ that resists all but minor emendations.” Their aim was to produce a service book for public worship that was “the work of the whole Church.” The committee admitted that the language problem had bedevilled them; they were well aware that efforts to communicate with “technological man” had challenged the authority of the Bible in new ways by raising questions about the adequacy of biblical concepts. However, they were unequivocal about their own approach: the Service Book affirmed the use of scriptural language “as the most fitting vehicle for liturgy,” insisting that to do otherwise would be “to cast ourselves adrift in a sea of chaos.”74 The committee assumed that worship would continue to evolve by adapting the best of the past to the needs of the present, as they believed they had done in preparing the Service Book. However, what they had witnessed as they prepared it led them to expect a revolution in liturgy in the years ahead that might well involve a sharp break with familiar practices.75 Despite the committee’s own instincts to preserve tradition, a decision made in 1965 proved to be a historic (though perhaps unintentional) step to break with tradition: a request was sent to the Committee on Christian Faith for a short

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creed that could be used as an alternative to the Apostles’ Creed in the baptismal service. By offering the choice of either an ancient or a modern creed, suggests N.K. Clifford, the new Service Book gave the impression that the use of a creed was “solely a matter of personal taste,”76 thus inviting theological novelty. Unlike many contemporary liturgical resources designed during the 1960s, the New Creed was to find an enduring place both as a baptismal creed and a brief statement of faith.77 It resonated with and beyond the spirit of the times with its opening words that captured a longing for fellowship in defiance of existential loneliness: “Man is not alone.”78 Parts of the New Creed were controversial from the outset, and the General Council that received it in 1968 sent it back to the committee for redrafting.79 Even then, not everyone was entirely happy with the results. Reflecting the position of those who objected to the continued use of ancient creeds in the liturgy John Burbidge, a young United Church minister doing doctoral work in philosophy at the University of Toronto, found it ironic that a church that encouraged moral action expected “weekly perjury” by its members. The executive should have left the version presented to the General Council as it was, he complained, rather than watering it down until it had “the force of a wet dishrag.”80 He was especially disappointed to note that those he called “the orthodox” had succeeded in replacing “we proclaim his kingdom,” with “to proclaim Jesus crucified and risen, our judge and our hope.” However, he conceded that the redrafted version was better than no new creed at all.81 Berkley Reynolds agreed that half a loaf was better than none, and praised God that “the most socialistic of any Council” in the United Church’s history had “refused to scuttle the cross and resurrection as the centre of Christian faith.” He commended the General Council for sending “the skeleton” back to the executive “to have some meat put on its bones.”82 He suggested that those who preferred a “humanistic” creed that spoke only of “the true Man, Jesus,” rather than the power of the resurrection, should join the Unitarians.83 But other u c r f members were not appeased. Graham Scott charged that a  creed that was only half true was still “intolerably heretical.” A Unitarian would, in his opinion, have no theological difficulty with the New Creed. He urged uc r f backers to emulate those in the early church who had paid no heed to the authority of heretical Arian bishops by likewise ignoring the United Church’s “ecclesiastical

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­ ureaucrats.” Perhaps, he added, conservatives should write their b own “short, memorable and accurate summary of the Christian faith in the several contemporary idioms of thought and language.”84 One of the paradoxes of panarchy was that the evangelical wing had already developed what the uc rf was calling a “new creed,” which had reworded the article on Scripture in the Basis of Union.85 This new article described the Bible as “God’s objective revelation in word written, given by Divine inspiration (God breathed), is entirely trustworthy, [sic] and therefore ‘the only infallible rule of faith and life.’”86 Its interpretation of revelation and infallibility ran counter to a report that had been presented to the General Council in 1966. The Committee on Christian Faith had admitted that after six years of study, it was still unable to “produce a clearly defined statement” on revelation. On one issue, however, its report sounded unequivocal: infallibility belonged to God alone, not to the human words of Scripture that bore witness to God’s self-revelation.87 Prepared as the debate over biblical inerrancy was heating up in evangelical circles, the uc r f ’s “new creed” placed more emphasis on the Bible “as a revelation in itself, rather than as a record of revelation,” Berkley Reynolds explained, and thus took “a stronger position on its infallible authority” than the Basis of Union. He admitted that the requirement that uc r f members be willing to sign this new declaration was a problem for some sympathizers, who objected to adopting it in addition to the twenty articles of the Basis of Union.88 Reynolds reported that conservative evangelicals were encouraged by signs that some theological college professors were disenchanted with “the radical theology that has plagued the church.”89 But there was little evidence that they considered the u crf a viable alternative. The “incipient fundamentalism” of the u crf ’s position on verbal inerrancy was a feature of the movement that bothered Alan Davies, a United Church minister teaching in the religion department at the University of Toronto. He was “in favor of spiritual renewal” but “not at the price of a new orthodoxy that is really an old and potentially dangerous heresy.”90 Others no doubt agreed with a young minister who wrote that he was opposed to a “gutless liberalism that leans over backwards to join the chorus of the Church’s critics and ends up calling on us to surrender the gospel to the spirit of the age.” However, he was just as opposed to the approach of Reynolds and the uc r f, which he described as “a sheer conservatism that blindly defends the status quo.”91

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Liberal evangelicals were also uncomfortable with the demand to sign a statement of faith. Clarke MacDonald declared that when it came to proclaiming the fundamentals as summed up by the Saviour, he would “take a back seat to no one in or outside of ‘Renewal Fellowship.’” But signing a statement that would put him “in some creedal strait jacket” was another matter – and he wanted no part of it. He pleaded for toleration to keep the split that was developing from growing into a chasm that might take thirty or forty years to bridge.92 Failing to find common ground was a disturbing prospect that had far-reaching ramifications, since the United Church’s conciliar system of governance presumed the possibility that guidance might come from those holding a theological perspective different from one’s own. With its own people testing the boundaries of being a “united” church, the 1960s was hardly a propitious time to explore what it meant to be a “uniting” church. Yet offers to try were hard to turn down. Since its own founding, the United Church had been hoping to add a chapter to the story of church union in Canada.93 Not surprisingly it jumped at the opportunity to work toward a re-united Christendom, as an invitation from the Church of England’s General Synod put it in 1943.94 However, nearly two decades passed with almost nothing to show from that initiative except for occasional outbursts of frustration.95 Fed up with futile gestures, the Observer reported in 1964 that the General Council had listened with “restrained enthusiasm to the customary reports that progress toward union with the Anglicans was still being made.”96 Suddenly there was a breakthrough in 1965 with agreement between representatives of the two bodies on the Principles of Union.97 Hopes ran high that union would happen within the next ten years. Even the somewhat skeptical Forrest was convinced that if the Anglican General Synod approved the document (as quickly happened later that year), “nothing should stop it.”98 The United Church followed suit and accepted the Principles of Union as a working document at the General Council in 1966. A draft of the Plan of Union was prepared by working committees in advance of a joint meeting of the General Synod and General Council in 1971. After two more years of study and revision, it was approved by both parties in 1973. However, all was in vain: despite the high calibre of the work done to advance the cause, negotiations ended two years later.99 In 1975

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the implementation committee stopped its work after the General Synod of the Anglican Church reaffirmed a commitment to Christian unity, but declined to proceed toward organic union with the United Church and the Disciples of Christ.100 Those who had optimistically presented the Principles of Union for approval in 1965 were never able to work out some irrecon­ cilable differences that were detectable from the outset. Anglicans generally assumed that the United Church had lost its distinctive Methodist quirks, relieving some of their lesser concerns. An Anglican sympathetic to uniting observed that the “emotional extremism” that had sometimes accompanied the Methodist emphasis on a direct experience of salvation (which Anglicans found “horrifying”) was no longer noticeable in the United Church. A puritanical attitude about personal conduct (which he claimed Anglicans found irrelevant) was gone too: “field research” at a cocktail party would, he conjectured, confirm that the younger generation no longer shared the same views of alcohol as the older generation. Its old moral fervour had “changed form and sphere of interest.”101 Yet the United Church that was taking shape in the 1960s retained characteristics that Anglican sensibilities found just as hard to tolerate. To begin with, it was still unabashedly Protestant, and as such was not regarded by some Anglicans as a real church. At Forrest’s invitation, an Anglican priest identified with its Anglo-Catholic wing (and vehemently opposed to union) prepared a statement about Christian unity from the perspective of those who held that “the Church” was comprised of Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox. In his view the United Church was one of the Protestant sects torn from the true Church by what he provocatively called the “Deformation.” Only by returning to the Catholic fold would the tragic schism end: “a watered-down Christianity, which would result from anything less than the complete submission of Protestantism to Catholicism, would be damnable.”102 Forrest knew full well that this candid statement of differences would rile readers, suggesting in an accompanying editorial that they contain themselves until the next issue, which would feature a rejoinder.103 But as negotiations proceeded, issues that had been intractable in the past remained sticking points. Among the most contentious was ordination. Put simply, without ordination by a bishop in accordance with the doctrine of apostolic succession, was the ordination of United Church ministers really valid? And to

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complicate matters further, the United Church ordained women; the Anglican Church did not. Although the Observer’s editorial position favoured union, the magazine provided opportunities for well-known United Church leaders to express their reservations about the Principles of Union. Couched in J.R. Mutchmor’s predictable defence of traditional Protestant practices was a show of support for the ideals of the new reformers. He warned that the Principles of Union would put in place a hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons “at a time when this out-moded, status-ridden ladder should be reverently stored in  some ecclesiastical museum.” Don Gillies, minister of Bloor Street United Church in Toronto, agreed. He was dismayed that the Principles of Union attempted to revive archaic and meaningless jargon and reassert a “religious ‘caste’ system” by making “fine distinctions between priest and layman, church and world.” Instead he believed the church ought to be “streamlining its organization, so that it might be an effective community of concern in the midst of a troubled world.”104 Not all who had reservations about the Principles of Union were against union as such. Jean Hutchinson, former chair of the Board of Women, supported it, but was disturbed by the ambiguity about the role of women in the document. “One would not have thought it possible that the question of ordination of women could be reopened in this age!” she remarked. Mary Coburn, chair of the Board of Women’s finance committee, objected that women ministers would feel humiliated by being put in an anomalous position if the new church were to suspend the ordination of women. She poked fun at a scenario of “bishops assuming their full dignity, double layers of skirts to prove it, and our ordained women, not unfrocked but feeling slightly naked, meeting with their brother clergy to vote on the propriety of admitting others of their kind.”105 Those who prepared the Principles of Union seemed unaware of how quickly the ecumenical scene was changing. Inadvertently, the negotiators stepped into what the United Church’s Committee on Ecumenical Affairs described in 1968 as an ecumenical ferment that had been sweeping through “the Church everywhere” during the previous two years. The report credited two events in particular for the sudden transformation of ecumenical dialogue: the optimism unleashed by Vatican II that closed in December 1965, and the Church and Society conference convened by the World Council of Churches

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in 1966. Inspired by what the report called “Secularization Theology,” a radical ecumenism was spreading like wildfire. European church leaders, particularly those influenced by the w cc, were saying that ecumenism ought to involve more than bringing together institutions that were themselves irrelevant.106 Supporters of Anglican-United Church union discovered to their chagrin that what seemed to them a daring plan to create a new church looked unadventurous when placed alongside the new ecumenism. George Johnston, himself a member of the General Commission on Union, admitted that some of the criticism of the Principles of Union from the left, such as the lack of modern idiom and its theological verbiage, was justified. And if predictions of a “wholly secularized” future were to come to pass, he wondered if new forms of worship, music, and ministry needed to be considered as well.107 The proposed episcopal structure bore more resemblance to bureaucratic systems of the past than the religionless Christianity predicted for the future. On the other hand, for Anglicans who saw the historic episcopate and the ancient creeds as the basis for Christian unity, Vatican II held out the enticing possibility of union on a more ambitious scale. Already suspicious about whether United Church ministers were properly ordained, Anglo-Catholics were unlikely to be reassured by news that the United Church had adopted a New Creed and was thinking about ministry in even broader terms. Union met resistance from the Council for the Faith, an organization formed to preserve Anglican doctrine and forms of worship as well as the historic creeds as the minimal basis for union.108 The results of a 1970 survey conducted by the Observer and its Anglican counterpart, the Canadian Churchman, turned out to be closer to the mark than church union supporters would have wished. It detected a predilection for the status quo that five more years of study and discussion was unable to counteract.109 Described as the first straw vote on the “feeling from the pews,” the survey was admittedly unofficial and open to the bias of mail-in polls (where strong feelings tended to be overrepresented). However, it was evident that United support for union was more widespread and enthusiastic than Anglican. There was also a striking difference between the young United and Anglican respondents: the former were most strongly in favour of union, while the latter were most strongly opposed to it (and threatening to leave if it took place).110

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Another hint of the dissimilarity in religious outlooks was revealed when respondents were asked where they would worship if there were no church of their own denomination nearby. More Anglican respondents indicated that they would choose a Roman Catholic rather than a United service (and among the Anglican clergy, the United Church placed third behind the Orthodox Church). By an even wider margin, United Church respondents picked the Presbyterian Church over the Anglican Church. When asked what change after union would concern them most, Anglican respondents chose doctrine, followed by the use of creeds, and worship practices. Acceptance of their ministers’ ordination was the main concern for United Church respondents, who reported hearing Anglicans refer to them as “so-called ministers.” Older respondents worried about being served wine at Communion, while younger ones wondered about the role of bishops (unimportant) and the ordination of women (imperative).111 Church union with the Anglican Church that seemed tantalizingly close in 1965 ultimately came to naught, landing a serious blow to the United Church’s claim to be a “uniting” church. Union with the Evangelical United Brethren Church in 1968, which added sixty-two congregations, was small consolation.112 The dream of re-uniting Christendom in Canada died; instead, interfaith coalitions attempted to transcend divisions by finding a common cause rather than a common statement of faith or common organizational principles. While there was public discomfiture when negotiations ended, those who had caught a vision of a more radical ecumenism may have breathed a sigh of relief. They had little allegiance to the traditions of the past; hence, for them, the loss of Protestant principles was not an impediment. However, the new church that union would create was, in their view, not nearly modern enough to meet the challenges of a post-denominational and anti-institutional age. So was organized religion doomed to obsolescence as critics supposed? The United Church’s own surveys concluded otherwise, but showed that it was facing serious challenges.113 Stewart Crysdale, who had conducted a number of those studies, reckoned that its organizational machinery had been designed to meet the rural conditions of the past, and was “singularly unsuited for dealing with modern social and personal problems” associated with urban life.114 Its structures assumed lines of authority and relationships that either

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no longer existed or no longer functioned as they had in the past. It was unclear what presbyteries, conferences, or the ‘Vatican’ (as the national leadership was sometimes called in jest) did for the church at the local level. The machinery was a mystery to some and a menace to others. And for those seeking religionless Christianity in the secular city, it was irrelevant.115 Two decades after church union, moderator J.R.P. Sclater claimed that his postbag was filled with letters on two issues in particular: whether the church “should, or should not, be solely an evangelistic power, dealing with the souls of men”; and who spoke authoritatively for the United Church, especially in cases where the proceedings of the General Council seemed at odds with regional and local church courts.116 The Commission on Church, Nation and World Order had considered presbyteries pivotal in implementing the United Church’s ambitious postwar agenda. But its assessment of how presbyteries were actually operating in the mid-1940s was hardly encouraging – and without well-functioning presbyteries, it predicted that the ­national body of the United Church would eventually become an association of “fairly independent congregations.”117 With the passing of another two decades, an organizational upheaval that transcended particular persons, boards, denominations, or even national borders brought that prediction closer to reality. The world, it seemed, was being turned upside down as lines of authority became horizontal rather than hierarchical, decision-making participatory rather than delegated to leaders, and action from the bottom-up rather than top-down. Authority was moving away from the centre, rather than toward it, and in the process, shifting more power to local congregations.118 The resulting turmoil left the national staff particularly exposed. Politicians and the general public could no longer confidently assume that United Church officials spoke for its members. Once the General Council was over, the force of its pronouncements was weakened by the disclaimer of the disaffected: “they don’t speak for me.”119 Church executives like Mutchmor had shown a smooth hand when they operated the machinery. “When I thought I had a good case, enjoyed my executive’s or board’s approval, and was able to fit a special endeavour into my generally crowded programme, I went to work,” he wrote in his memoirs.120 Even when people vehemently disagreed with or criticized Mutchmor, claims John Webster Grant, they seldom accused him of misstating the church’s policy.121 The

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same could not be said of national staff who served after him. Those who expected the General Council and its executive to speak as one voice on behalf of the United Church were frustrated by officers who expressed differing opinions. Hord, for example, was often criticized by some for his impatience, while others admired his efforts to be a catalyst for social justice. Colleagues argued that all members of the United Church ought to be free to speak their minds on difficult issues – and this included its officers, who were more than its “official spokesmen” (or its “intellectual eunuchs” as someone had described them).122 “Damn fools,” a minister who studied at Emmanuel College recalled principal Earl Lautenschlager fuming as he lambasted na­ tional executives for joining secular critics in complaining about organized religion; they were going to “break their neck kicking their asses so hard.” But he was also worried as he observed the impact of the changing times on students preparing for church leadership. His advice to those who were unsure about whether God was dead or Jesus was living was to get out of the ministry and find a job elsewhere.123 Some apparently did just that. The United Church had enjoyed an upsurge in candidates for ministry during the boom years of the 1950s. However, during the 1965-66 academic year alone, nearly 15 per cent of its candidates dropped out.124 By 1970 there was welcome news that many ministers who had resigned from the ministry or left a church position for a secular placement were quietly returning to the pastorate. But there was no denying the devastating losses: there were 1,121 fewer congregations in 1968 than in 1960, and only 280 students studying for full-time ministry, compared with 668 eight years earlier.125 The numbers reflected the impact that criticism of organized religion had on professional ministry.126 A contributor to Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot provocatively contrasted the manly figure he saw as the ideal clergyman with the typical minister, who was “paid to be good” and thus not treated as other men. As a result the typical minister had become a “ladies’ man” – his language free of obscenities, his thinking about sex more like a woman’s than a man’s, and a teadrinker at social functions where no liquor was served.127 A man who had decided to leave the ministry after twenty years poignantly described his professional crisis: worship was irrelevant, the focus of church members was on preserving the building, and there was little respect for his professionalism despite long hours of work.128

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A Commission on the Church’s Ministry in the Twentieth Century was formed to respond to the “growing sense of frustration amongst congregations, presbyteries, and ministers as they seek to actualize the church’s ministry in our changing society.”129 Its meetings were described as tense, as members struggled with their conviction that the state of the church demanded radical change.130 The report’s call for a less hierarchical model of ministry was bound to cause difficulties as it vied with the very different understanding of the church and its ministry in the Principles of Union. G. Campbell Wadsworth, retired in Montreal after many years in the ministry, was dismayed as he compared the two, so different that only with difficulty could he see them as “springing from the mind of one and the same Church.” If it truly represented the thinking of the United Church, he regretfully concluded, “we might as well speedily surrender all hope of further Reunion in our time.”131 Surprisingly even the new paradigm for ministry proposed by the commission in its controversial set of recommendations failed to appreciate fully the revolution in church life that women were about to trigger. The new theological understanding of the church’s relationship to the world had seeped into the vocabulary of those who prepared the report, but inclusive language evidently had not. The church was a place where “men are invited to grow as sons of God rooted in a Christian community and sustained by the Christian hope”; it was “so ordered that it can fulfill its role in God’s intentions for man.” The report played down distinctions between ordained ministers and the laity by emphasizing the ministry of the whole people of God, but still presented a picture of the church’s personnel as male.132 Women had always been active in the United Church’s congregational life, but were under-represented and less visible elsewhere in its organizational structures. Although the United Church had decided to ordain women in 1936, three decades later there were relatively few female ministers. There were inklings of change after 1964, when the way was cleared for married women to be ordained. That year the eloquence of the female commissioners to General Council caught Forrest’s attention. Even so, he opined that although United Church women were “at least a hundred years ahead of where their sisters are in most of the great churches of Christendom,” the General Council was “still a man’s world.”133 That too was about to change, though slowly at first.

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A series of events coincided to change the face of the United Church’s administrative and pastoral leadership. The first major overhaul of its governing structures since 1925 was already underway when serious negotiations with the Anglican Church commenced. The process that led to restructuring was set in motion in 1960, at a time when the United Church still hoped to escape the general decline that churches in the uk and continental Europe had experienced. The task of the Long Range Planning Committee was to study the planning procedures of other North American churches and to assess the adequacy of its own structures and policies “to meet the needs of a growing Church in a changing world.”134 By the time the plan was implemented, over a decade had passed and the United Church was facing a drastically different situation: it was no longer growing and the world had changed in ways that those preparing the report had not imagined. To improve effectiveness, the plan called for reducing the number of boards at the national level from twelve to five (no more than could be counted on the fingers of one hand, as it was sometimes explained). An ambitious two-year experiment was proposed as the first step. A new Division of Congregational Life and Work was established to coordinate the work of four boards.135 The transition from boards to divisions coincided with changes in a number of high-profile executive positions.136 The confusion of connecting new positions with new personnel likely reinforced suspicion in some quarters that a nameless ‘someone’ in Toronto was changing their church. Sadly, ‘divisions’ seemed an apt term to describe the lack of communication among the new units. Congregations experienced them as insular and resistant to influence, further weakening connections between them. The gradual loss of familiar names for the functions of evangelism, social service, home missions, and Christian education was also alienating; like the names of the persons associated with them, they seemed to vanish with the creation of the Division of Mission in Canada that was responsible for them after restructuring.137 Changing the descriptions of the divisions and their assigned responsibilities was to prove far more than cosmetic. Harold Vaughan, who witnessed events as former secretary of the Board of Colleges and Secondary Schools, claimed that restructuring coincided with the “diminished role of the dominant figure and leaders.” Thereafter national church staffers were “increasingly treated as if they were civil servants rather than executive secretaries and leaders.”138

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Before the 1960s the “dominant figure” had nearly always been male. The shortage of men preparing for ministry had been a persistent problem for the United Church from the outset, with the healthy supply of candidates for ordination in the 1950s an anomaly. A decade later, with enrolment dropping in theological colleges and discouraged clergy leaving in significant numbers, women found a more welcome reception than in the past as they made their way to the classrooms of the United Church’s theological colleges and eventually to church pulpits.139 Women began to insist on not only visibility but also a voice. For instance, as part of the negotiations that saw the creation of the uc w, the wms transferred $6.5 million in a combination of funds and property holdings to the newly integrated Board of Missions in exchange for a promise of more representation on committees, especially at the national level. The first issue of the Observer for 1962 launched “The United Church Woman” as a regular section of the magazine, and the masthead soon listed names in the role of women’s editor, including regular contributors Grace Lane and Patricia Clarke. The editorial voice of women was amplified in 1966 when the women’s editor became the associate editor, with Clarke named to the new position. But many women were left wondering whether the losses from the merger were greater than the gains.140 Meanwhile the situation of women in the church was still far from equitable. In one of the Observer’s early pieces on the feminist movement, Barbara Bagnell reported that many feminists saw the Christian church as a bastion of male superiority, and had decided therefore to leave it.141 Feminist theology combined with the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, instituted in 1967, to galvanize women in the United Church. Their numbers at meetings of presbytery, conference, and General Council had increased substantially by 1970. In fact, Forrest surmised that presbytery might soon be comprised of women, ministers, and a few laymen. “In the headquarters establishment,” however, it was “still a man’s world,” he reported. Women served as associate secretaries only where the Manual mandated a female appointment. Although most female members of the United Church were married, it appeared to Forrest that only single women were considered for senior positions. Only one senior secretary was female, and restructuring had reduced her office in size and status.142 Those who later claimed that feminists had “destroyed the church” were partly right.143 As women assumed leadership roles,

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they generated further changes to the United Church’s organizational culture. Often preferring more fluid networks and coalitions, they joined other critics of the United Church’s complex hierarchical structure; they were among those who hoped to change the United Church by helping it to “fail gracefully.” In doing so they believed that they were simply fixing machinery that had been designed and broken by men. By strengthening the church’s capacity for change, women were quarrelling with the ‘fathers’ to be sure – not only with their understanding of mission but also with the male assumptions embedded in the church’s organizational structures. But women, and especially the feminists among them, were also quarrelling with the ‘mothers’ of the  church, whose sense of vocation had been rooted in Christian homes. Those most dismayed by the growing feminist influence were the men and women who remembered the United Church of 1925 and whose hearts still resided there. One of the major challenges facing those who operated the denominational machinery was how to deal with the sheer volume of business. “A Church Court Forced into Preoccupation with Its Own Housekeeping” summed up in a subheading the Observer’s withering assessment of the 1964 General Council. The meetings had been socially overwhelming and spiritually uninspiring. People tended to focus on and debate trivial matters; the assembly had “tinkered well”; the “machinery creaked”; and the average commissioner had been confused by the complexity and sheer volume of the business to be done. Just when it seemed as though the church was on the verge of moving forward, something negative nearly always happened: “The wrong direction was taken. The amendments were confused. Things got referred to three boards, five committees, and seven conferences.”144 Four years later there were signs of change. To encourage wider participation, some of the business at the 1968 General Council was conducted in table groups rather than by formal debate. John Webster Grant suggests that assumptions about decision-making were changing as well: gut feeling was valued more than intellect, and relying on precedents (deemed the unwelcome influence of past elites) was rejected. There was a dismantling of traditional authority as “experts, including clergy, lost caste.” It marked for Grant an abrupt and radical change in how the United Church conducted its

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business.145 The gathering was variously described at the time as both “reckless” and lacking in “thorough discussion” of its decisions.146 Yet the 1968 General Council that some found frustrating was exciting and exhilarating to others. (One woman admitted that she had found it both infuriating and satisfying.)147 It made significant decisions related to worship, ministry, and the role of the church in the field of social welfare. It recommended that the Canadian government reduce sales of war materials to the United States, provide a guaranteed annual income, and designate 2 per cent of g n p to foreign aid. It also called for the end of bombing in Vietnam, recognition of Israel by Arab countries, resettlement of Arab refugees, population control, and sale of the church’s shares in a bank that supported apartheid in South Africa.148 Even though there was ­silence on the old moral issues, the United Church was clearly not about to pull back from speaking out on major social concerns, even when it meant breaking with the diplomatic style of past ­policy reports.149 The focus on what was new tended to obscure the ways in which the United Church managed to provide continuity and stability in key areas. The restructured machinery had familiar features – too many for some. There were still seemingly innumerable committees at all levels of church life and too much information to absorb. But, paradoxically, the United Church’s expansive administrative structure, so often blamed for the ills that beset the denomination, may have helped to safeguard its survival during a time of rapid change. The church was still large enough and strong enough to absorb shocks. Its conciliar model of governance was in a sense like a bridge, designed to withstand pressure and even damage in one section without collapse of the entire edifice. Its leaders were positioned to detect problems at one level and solve them before the entire system crumbled. To an extent the United Church was thus able to mediate the impact and pace of social and theological changes. At least when working effectively, the conciliar system meant that different levels experienced adaptation at varying paces, often with outcomes that differed as well. It thus operated as what ecologist C.S. Holling calls a dynamic hierarchy:150 it provided support for innovation at some levels, while elsewhere offering stability from the impact of experiments that were shaking the system; and it mitigated the effects of “excessive exuberance.”151 The instinct to preserve was strong in the lay leadership of congregations, especially in rural

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areas. Ministers provided pastoral care as before. At the national level, officials in a few key positions supplied a measure of continuity as well. Long, for instance, had served as the United Church’s third general secretary for nearly two decades by the time he retired in 1972. Forrest was editor of the Observer for almost a quarter of a century when he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1978. Forrest had an ear for hearing what was being whispered in the pews about controversial stands the United Church had taken, and offered space for both sides to air their views. His communications strategy not only boosted the magazine’s circulation figures during the 1960s but also helped its readers to anticipate and thus adapt to change.152 No one who took the time to read the Observer during those years could legitimately complain of not knowing that change was afoot. As those who founded the United Church could attest, major change does not come without risk. A process of change does not always end happily. While an adaptive cycle can renew a system, a maladaptive cycle can result in “cascading collapse,” says Holling. Adaptive change can be devastating to organizations, if the slow pace makes it seem as though nothing is happening, or when the process is so complex and highly contested that no agreement on action can be reached. Some systems are prone to what he calls a rigidity trap where novelty is smothered because the system’s high resilience makes it resistant to adaptation.153 Especially at risk are systems where past success has allowed stresses to accumulate, adds Homer-Dixon. “The longer people sustain a social, economic or ecological system in its growth phase, the sharper, harder, and more destructive its ultimate breakdown will be.”154 It gives one pause to consider the United Church’s adaptive cycle in these terms. Did its earlier successes, the postwar revival for instance, create the conditions for its later malaise? Did its response to the 1960s allow it to “fail gracefully,” or only to postpone the reckoning? Homer-Dixon tells of a conversation with Holling where they spoke of the threat of deep collapse: “a pan-caking implosion of the entire system as higher-level adaptive cycles collapse, which causes progressive collapse at lower levels.” A situation where many cycles “become synchronized and peak together” is particularly prone to this danger.155 If the higher levels of the United Church’s conciliar system were to collapse, would a pan-caking ­implosion follow? Was R.C. Chalmers right when he predicted in 1970, “if you close headquarters down, I can see the whole thing breaking up”?156

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Still, Ernest Long, whose gloomy warnings had made headlines a few years before, seemed heartened by what he had witnessed in 1968. He commended the delegates to the General Council that year for demonstrating “a real concept of the outward thrust of the church into the world” for the “first time.”157 His declaration perhaps startled those who assumed that the United Church had been concerned for social redemption from the outset. Had it not always called for building the Kingdom of God and Christianizing the social order? Yet Long had caught a glimpse of something new: the machinery was more and more being driven by those whose approach to mission focused on the world outside the building that housed the congregation rather than the faith and fellowship of the people gathered in it. It was a recognition that the United Church’s social impulse was changing as much (and perhaps with a greater impact on what it meant to be United) as its methods of evangelism. Insiders and outsiders alike sensed that the United Church was reforming. The contours of the emerging church were not to everyone’s liking – but then again, neither was the United Church that had been formed in 1925. Some were as disappointed with what they saw taking shape as the non-concurring Presbyterians had been with that earlier union. They felt as though they no longer belonged to the same church – and they hadn’t even voted to leave it. Among them were some its most committed members, who feared that the United Church was being destroyed by those trying to mend it. The underlying assumptions of the founding vision were giving way to new ways of thinking about faith and community. It was clear that adaptation would be easier said than done. Even the most optimistic conceded that, given the general decline of organized religion, a turnaround would take time.158 Conference presidents from across Canada interviewed in 1970 expected the situation in their region to get worse before it got better. “We ain’t seen nothing yet,” predicted the president of British Columbia Conference. He warned that there would be nothing left of the United Church unless it figured out how to do ministry in “a world without churches.” There was no such thing as “one congregation” anymore, since most were divided between groups wanting at least three different things: to be activists, to have a quiet place to remember the past, or to learn about their faith.159 So was there an “upside of down” to the panarchy of the 1960s? It was hard to find one at the time. But given the bleak forecasts for

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organized religion during that period, perhaps it should be said that simply surviving was an achievement in and of itself. The United Church discovered more resilience than many had given it credit for: its congregations were not willing to die quickly or quietly. More significantly, it emerged with a sharper sense of what it stood for and what was holding it together. No longer could the United Church be counted as evangelical, in the contemporary meaning of the term – but neither could it truthfully be called Unitarian. Though it was perhaps moving away from what Mathers had described as the ­ ­“extreme centre,” its formal theological framework was still rooted in a Christocentric liberalism. ‘Being United’ still allowed a freedom to explore that was discouraged in many other faith traditions. However, the appeal of eclectic theologies and the persistence of the  u crf were  indications that the United Church was becoming more self-­ consciously diverse. Moreover, at least for the time being, its machinery would not be run with episcopal parts borrowed from Anglicans. Few had done more than Donald Mathers to provide theological resources for the United Church as it began to come to grips with the demise of Christendom in Canada. His death from leukemia in 1972 at the age of fifty-one was a blow not only to Queen’s Theological College where he had served as professor and principal for nineteen years but also to a denomination that had turned to him for theological leadership.160 The order of service for his funeral at Chalmers Church reflected his appreciation for tradition: the organ music was by J.S. Bach; the readings were from Isaiah 40 and Romans 12; the congregation sang Psalm 23 (to the tune Crimond) and “Now Thank We All Our God.” But the words of assurance were from The Word and the Way, which Mathers had written for the controversial New Curriculum a decade earlier. Characterizing the book as “almost a devotional statement of the Christian faith” and “an intimate, deeply personal statement of Donald’s inner story,” the presiding minister drew from it to remind mourners of what Mathers had “written into our hearts and minds with his pen and his life.” Those gathered then heard him read what Mathers had written in the chapter on “The Resurrection and the Life to Come”: “Those who believe in Christ have already passed from spiritual death into spiritual life (John 5:24). Physical death still remains but it has now been robbed of its sting. To the Christian death becomes an occasion for the exercise of faith, and an opportunity for love to transform the painful necessity of dying into a willing act of giving up and of self-surrender to God.”161

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The United Church was by then dealing with its own painful necessities. During the 1960s it turned a corner and gingerly made its way into a world that no longer reserved a place of prominence for organized religion. It stepped toward that future with new models of worship and fellowship, a new creed, and a new organizational design. A new mission drove its agenda. It no longer considered itself a national church in the old sense. Instead it had a ministry in and to the world that came with a new emphasis on social action. The crisis kindled a difficult but unavoidable conversation about its identity that continues today. And in that exchange both conservers and innovators planted seeds of memory and hope, beneath the hard soil of an indifferent culture, for another generation to harvest.162

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Epilogue Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets

The result of a “lamentable misunderstanding” was how Walter Bryden of Knox College described the United Church as he defended his decision to remain a Presbyterian. “The Church is and shall remain the Church of God just in so far as she is not indigenous with the soil of any country, or determined by the habits, thoughts and customs of any people ... The true Church belongs to no age and no country.”1 Those who had founded the United Church disagreed. They saw adaptation to time and place as a sign of vitality, and ­believed that they had been called to work together to build the Kingdom of God in Canada. As the fortieth anniversary of church union approached, the United Church appeared to have made remarkable progress toward that end. Morale was so high that “outsiders often complain that we act as if we were the church in Canada,” wrote John Webster Grant in 1963.2 By then most of the old wounds left by the controversy over its founding had healed. Relations between the two churches were so friendly that a local newspaper reporter had the temerity to ask the minister of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Kitchener whether the United Church was “Presbyterian.” Answering “yes,” former moderator Findlay G. Stewart explained that those who had continued as the Presbyterian Church in Canada had resisted church union because they “were opposed to organizing the Kingdom of God.” But the United Church had since “evolved,” as he put it, and the “old Methodist traditions had not remained in the fabric.” Asked whether

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the time had come for Presbyterians to join the United Church, Stewart retorted that it was “just as fair to ask why the United Church doesn’t return to Presbyterianism in name since it already has in fact.” He predicted that union might happen within a generation, further evolving from present day co-operation to a “natural birth.”3 What followed was not an institutional evolution that would bring the Presbyterian and United churches together, but a cultural revolution that hit both with a speed and severity that stunned observers. Essayist Robert Fulford saw the decline of organized religion as a prime illustration of the impact of the new style of social criticism on Western societies: no consideration had been given to what would replace discarded ideas and institutions. “Under the pressure of criticism, great institutions vanish – not actually (they’re still there, in tangible form) but imaginatively.”4 Leaders of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution hadn’t burned churches or killed priests – they just ignored them. Meanwhile, Canadian Protestant churches, and the United Church in particular, “simply crumbled under the weight of the attacks against them from within and without.” In 1960 almost everyone took them seriously, but a decade later hardly anyone did. “Once, not long ago, it mattered what the United Church said about liquor laws or Sunday closing or birth control; now nobody cares, unless he’s professionally involved.” Fulford saw it as an example of how things change “without announcement, without decision, without any clear line of demarcation.”5 Smaller denominations and independent congregations have the luxury of declining or even disappearing free of public scrutiny. Not so the United Church. As Canada’s largest Protestant church, it drew much media attention when its influence began to wane. Its statistical decline is often interpreted as a consequence of a faulty approach to theology or flawed assumptions about the task of the church – the impending doom that critics had forecast at the time of union. For instance, when historian Mark Noll asks “what happened to Christian Canada?,” he links its passing to the victory of the “modernistic social gospel” at the time of church union, which “fatally compromised” the ability of the founding traditions “to make any kind of a sharp Christian impact on Canadian thought, society, politics, or spirituality.”6 Was the making of the United Church a “tragic failure,” as some have claimed?7 Judged by the standard of what it hoped to become, perhaps so. Yet measured by what it accomplished in the attempt,

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one might offer a more charitable assessment; one could say it has been both a failure and a success. The early twentieth century was one of the few times in Canadian history when the church union experiment could have been attempted at all. The movement was launched during the late stages of western Christendom, an era when a symbiotic relationship between religion, politics, and culture was still assumed. The United Church adapted to the ethos of the early twentieth century by presenting itself as the church best suited to meet the spiritual needs of a young nation. With religious identity tied to nationalism, ‘made in Canada’ was a feature that gave the United Church a boost in a country looking for partners in nation-building. Not so later: pluralism, the privatization of spirituality, and the church’s own failure to find consensus loosened the customary connections between faith and community. The United Church was not only sharing the public arena with other religious groups but also seeing its influence on its own members compromised by cultural competitors who vied for their attention. In the new global village, its national particularity was a liability that made it difficult to contend with ethnic or transnational denominational rivals that had better name recognition outside Canada. Immigrants who had belonged to Methodist or Reformed churches before their arrival did not always find their way to the church that had been formed to unite them in Canada. The United Church is less racially diverse ­today than it was before adopting a new approach to mission in the 1960s.8 Channelling divided religious traditions into a united force was an exciting prospect for the founders of the United Church. However, what they saw as the obvious path to the Kingdom of God appeared less certain to spiritual pilgrims a few decades later. As time passed, the church’s call to Christianize the social order seemed arrogant and paternalistic. The heady optimism that saw the 1925 union as the first in a series of unions that would end denominational divisions in Canada was chastened by the failure of union negotiations with the Anglican Church. Its organizational structure, once advantageous in coordinating scarce resources to help struggling congregations in small towns and rural communities, was less effective in a decentralized society. Even its community spirit seemed old-­fashioned, a vestige of village life that was unappealing to urban sophisticates accustomed to anonymity.

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The new world order that materialized after the Second World War was a precarious place for mainstream Protestantism in Canada. The religious neutrality espoused by the state gave an unintended advantage to religious groups that had not tried to weave their religious principles into public life or relied on the association of church attendance with good citizenship. A situation in which religion, politics, and culture were no longer mutually reinforcing was uncharted territory for the United Church as it grappled with the realization that creating a Christian Canada was unlikely – and perhaps even undesirable – in a pluralistic and segmented world. But would an ‘un-united’ Protestantism have done more to forestall the end of Christendom? After all, neither the Presbyterian name nor the more conservative theology of the Presbyterian Church was enough to ward off a statistical decline as steep as that experienced by the United Church.9 One can only speculate whether the Methodist and Congregational churches would have fared better if union had not happened; however, there is little cause for optimism if the situation of their denominational counterparts in the United States and Britain is any indication. Then was the making of the United Church a mistake? The answer to that question is not as obvious as the non-concurring Presbyterians believed. Its formation coincided with the late stages of what historian Jeffrey Cox describes as an institutional revival in Western Christianity. In his view, the attempt by churches to extend their influence was not a mistake, since they succeeded in shaping the politics, social welfare, and public values of their generation.10 It would be hard to find a more stellar illustration of that institutional revival than the United Church. Though Canada’s democratic ideals and social welfare policies have since become separated from their Christian roots, the United Church did help to lay the groundwork for them. It has also left its mark on Canadian life in more subtle ways. Surveying religious life in God’s Dominion, Ron Graham described the United Church as “the most Canadian of churches,” noting that “like Canada, its strengths may be the same as its weaknesses: diversity, tolerance, compromise, humility, practicality, and niceness. Truth gets written by committee, mystery gets lost in the negotiation, decency gets translated into dullness, and the spirit gets hamstrung by the bureaucracy.”11 Was the United Church helping to create a new national identity for Canada or uncritically reflecting it? It is fair to say it did both.

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By the end of the 1960s it was evident that Canada was “rescripting” the role of religion in public life.12 The importance of faith was still acknowledged, but there was little attention paid to the particular contributions of one church or another. The new Canada wanted no church – Catholic or Protestant – as its conscience; there was little state interest in the United Church’s offer of friendly service. It was one among many religious groups in the public arena – regarded as no more or less than they, but having no special status as an aspiring national church. It found itself written out of the story of Canada’s past, relieved not only of its illusions but also of many of its ambitions and cherished notions. A sightseer at Expo 67, the international exposition in Montreal that coincided with Canada’s Centennial celebrations, would have caught a glimpse of the new public place of religion in a pluralistic Canada. Gary Miedema describes in fascinating detail what went on behind the scenes as the organizers’ initial proposal for one pavilion that would display religion as a unifying force was turned into three – with two of them illustrating the growing divide within Christianity between ecumenical and evangelical Protestants. Roman Catholics and mainstream Protestants worked together on what was called the Christian pavilion. Visitors discovered to their surprise that there was no explicit reference to churches, Jesus Christ, or even God in an exhibit that was designed to raise questions about faith rather than provide answers.13 The growing confidence of evangelical Protestants was signalled by their refusal to support the Christian pavilion. Disappointed that Expo 67 organizers rejected their repeated attempts to set up a pavilion for Billy Graham,14 they found a back door into the exposition with a proposal for a “scientific” display. Their Sermons from Science pavilion was approved on the condition that there be no proselytizing (a ban that Miedema says was completely ignored).15 Then there was the Jewish pavilion, which “offered beauty and rest, not shock and provocation,” and “announced a positive, inclusive message that fit very well with the exposition’s larger theme.”16 It was this pavilion – representing a non-Christian minority – that might well have come closest to modelling how the state preferred faith to be put on public display in the new Canada. Meanwhile the Presbyterian and United churches were rescripting the stories of their past. In 1965, as Presbyterians celebrated the ­anniversary of their resistance to church union, theologian Joseph

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McLelland complained that his church had wandered in the wilderness for forty years, using the memory of the controversy in a futile attempt to create a confessional church mystique and an evangelical ethos17 – raising doubts thereby about the United Church’s pedigree. As for the United Church, it had insisted that the Reformed and Methodist confessional traditions had been duly blended in church union, and initially defended its own claim to have remained evangelical. Following the social revolution of the 1960s, however, not as  many seemed to care about preserving past identities. In 1968 Northrop Frye noted a change in the perception of time, which was eroding old assumptions of continuity between past and present, especially among radicals influenced by the New Left. There was, he maintained, a flight from the past as people anxiously tried to keep up to date, ridding themselves of unfashionable ideas and techniques in the process. To be released from the past was considered a necessary step toward a utopian future.18 The changing times forced (or freed, some would say) the United Church to reconsider how it told its own story. The drama of casting itself as Canada’s national church was over.19 A subtle revision of the past was soon detectable. The smallest of the three founding traditions enjoyed unaccustomed attention; both the right and left wings of the church appealed to Congregationalist ideals – radicals claiming freedom to dissent from creedal authority and conservatives taking heart in congregational autonomy. The evangelical roots of the progressive movement were grafted to the philanthropic work of home missions to show the United Church as the flowering of the Canadian social gospel movement. Missionaries became reformers providing education and health services in small communities. Gone too were the unfashionable moral battles that the public had associated previously with the United Church. Peace, human rights, and economic justice were the battles in the new “good fight.”20 The search for a prophetic past revealed new heroes – paradoxically, most of them from the Methodist tradition that had been downplayed after the controversy over church union to showcase the Presbyterian heritage. The radical wing of the social gospel, with its Christian socialist tinges and support for the labour movement, supplied critics of the dominant culture and the institutional church. Among them were Salem Bland, Nellie McClung, and J.S. Woodsworth, celebrated for their affinities to the utopian, feminist, and oppositional inclinations of the cultural revolution taking

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place.21 Making more room for the radical minority tended to ­diminish the role of the more moderate liberal evangelical majority who too had hoped to build the Kingdom of God – George Monro Grant, Nathanael Burwash, E.H. Oliver, even S.D. Chown and George Pidgeon.22 Those who grew up in the United Church in the 1940s and 1950s knew less about its prophetic past than one might suppose. Theologian Douglas John Hall attributed his “incipient notions of the political dimensions of Christian belief” to being the son of a socialist union man who was known to drink – behaviour frowned upon in the United Church congregation in southwestern Ontario where he grew up. He later learned of J.S. Woodsworth and Salem Bland, but thought of them as “exceptions.” The church that formed his early images of Christianity did not swim against the stream as they had. Instead it “gave every indication of supporting to  the  full the fundamental structures of society, namely, of the ­dominant culture.”23 Bill Phipps’s memories of growing up in the United Church in Toronto were similar. His parents observed the Lord’s Day and would not allow him to throw around a baseball or play street hockey on Sunday. The man who was to advance the idea of a moral economy during his term as moderator (1997–2000) divulged that he was unaware of the “social justice dimension of the Christian faith” until he worked in Brooklyn, New York, in 1964. “No one had told me about the Social Gospel tradition of the United Church of Canada, expressed in the ministry of such people as Salem Bland, J.S. Woodsworth, R.B.Y. Scott, and their fellow travellers.” He claims to have known “nothing of the church’s history of pursuing social justice for the poor, for immigrants, and for people of colour; nor of its requirement that we lobby governments and challenge oppressive corporate power.”24 By the 1960s the social gospel was apparently no better known in Winnipeg. Despite growing up in Transcona surrounded by ccf n dp supporters, Bill Blaikie admitted that he did not know “even loosely about the social gospel, about the connection between Christian activism and left-wing politics in Canada, about prophetic Winnipeg personalities in the United Church tradition,” such as J.S. Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles. “I didn’t know about the political dimension of the gospel because I was brought up in a Christian world view that saw itself as apolitical.” But that was changing by

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the time Blaikie arrived at the University of Winnipeg (the former United College) in 1970. When American minister and civil rights activist William Stringfellow spoke to students in one of his classes, he learned about a prophetic way of dealing with the world that “was neither religious liberalism nor evangelical authoritarianism.” Studying at Emmanuel College was another turning point both theologically and politically. When he graduated in 1977, he no longer considered his call to ministry as “something that contradicted my call to public life.”25 Having already won the n d p nomination in his riding by the time he was ordained a year later, he served as an m p for nearly three decades. The United Church’s response to the revolution of the 1960s did not reverse its statistical decline. Perhaps that was not its intention. Proponents of a more this-worldly Christianity saw preoccupation with membership and buildings as symptomatic of the malaise of religion. The radicals among them dared to loosen ties to the salvation establishment of the institutional church, and echoed Bonhoeffer in calling for a religionless Christianity. They were willing to risk theological anonymity and denominational invisibility when they took their faith into the wider community. Yet thousands of United Church congregations across Canada still believed themselves “called to be the Church,” as the New Creed put it, “to celebrate God’s presence.” Here too the changing times forced (or freed) the United Church to reconsider how faith was formed when its people gathered for fellowship as a Christian community. Variety in worship practices was more evident after the 1960s. Some congregations saw their release from the past as an opportunity to explore contemporary styles of worship,26 while others turned to earlier Christian traditions to broaden their Protestant roots. The liturgical renewal sparked by Vatican II was a reminder of the unity in worship in the Western church before the Reformation. Making the United Church in 1925 was possible because its founders refused to be tied to a fixed view of the church or the world. Its remaking grew out of a similar conviction: the church is not called to escape time and place, but to engage them more faithfully. If there are to be more chapters added to its story in the twenty-first century, the United Church will undoubtedly undergo another such metamorphosis.27 In a culture that has lost much of its Christian memory, re-Christianizing those affiliated with it may require as

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bold a venture as church union once seemed, with even more uncertainty about the outcome. Will its commitment to inclusion leave it with enough distinctiveness to thrive in a culture of diversity? Will the connections of its conciliar system be strong enough to hold its congregations together? Will there be enough people on a spiritual quest for meaning, guidance, and consolation who want to belong to an organized community of faith? Will sufficient memory of its past survive to sustain its renewal in either a post-Christian or postsecular future? Time will tell.

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Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to the memory of two scholars who were outstanding historians of religion in Canada and ordained ministers of the United Church of Canada. Both, in different ways, influenced the course of my professional life. All who teach Canadian religious history are indebted to John Webster Grant, but perhaps none more than I. When he retired, I followed him in the position he held at Emmanuel College. (For a time I was reminded of him each day when I opened my office door and sniffed a faint trace of his pipe tobacco!) Yet, in a way, everyone who explores the history of Christianity in Canada has ‘followed’ him. He continues to lead us in our study of the past with his wise words preserved in print. Writing a book about the United Church is not something I imagined myself doing when I started teaching at Emmanuel. That changed in the months following the death of N.K. Clifford. I had first heard of him at the University of Chicago, where he did postdoctoral research before accepting a position at the University of British Columbia. My teachers Jerald C. Brauer and Martin E. Marty were excited about the book on the United Church that he was planning, and occasionally remarked that I “must meet Keith.” When I finally did meet Keith, in the spring of 1984, he was putting the finishing touches on a different book, which was published the following year: The Resistance to Church Union in Canada. In the preface he tells of his decision to accept a collection of papers that Knox College principal Allan Farris had discovered in a vault. After suffering a series of heart attacks, Farris had feared he would be unable to complete the project and had persuaded Keith to work with

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the documents. The book that resulted took longer to finish than expected, but after more than a decade spent examining the opposition to church union, Keith resumed working on a history of the denomination that had supported it. Keith died of a heart attack as I was wrapping up work on Serving the Present Age. In the years since then, I am still grateful (most days!) to Brian Fraser, his friend and literary executor, for convincing me that Keith would have wished me to continue what he had started. My proximity to the United Church archives, at that time located in the adjacent building, made the decision seem less an opportunity than an obligation. With the blessing of Keith’s wife, Sabine, I became the beneficiary of several boxes of his papers – and thus ­indirectly, the  recipient of support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: most of the articles and archival documents had been photocopied for Keith by his researcher, Neil Semple, whose work was funded by a sshrc research grant. From casual conversations with Keith and familiarity with his published work, I know a bit about what he had in mind for his project. This is not the book he would have written — nor is it the one I expected to write when I started. The manuscript seemed to have a mind of its own, first pulling me back to the nineteenth century (the spirit of John Grant at work perhaps), and then plunging me further into the twentieth century than I initially wanted to go. In the end, it has come to reflect the issues that have been woven into my own teaching and research over the years: the practice of piety, faith and public life, and comparative themes in Canadian and American religious history. I have no idea what Keith might have called his book, but I’d like to think he would have appreciated the title of mine. We had in common the influence of Brauer and Marty. It was in their classes that I was introduced to the work of Sidney Mead, whose use of G.K. Chesterton’s description of the United States as “a nation with the soul of a church” made me wonder, as a graduate student, whether the same could be said of Canada. A Church with the Soul of a Nation is in part an answer to a question that I scribbled on a page many years ago. This book has been slow in the writing. Along the way, I have compiled a far longer list of persons and institutions to thank than I can name in a few paragraphs, but the following were involved at key points. Along with Brian Fraser and Sabine Clifford, the late

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Bob Smith, then bc Conference archivist, sifted through the mate­ rials that eventually came to me. I was well served by librarians (especially those who work in Emmanuel’s library) and the staff at  the archives of bc Conference, Queen’s University, Victoria University, the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and the United Church of Canada. I have been privileged to work with wonderful colleagues over the years. Co-teaching courses at the Toronto School of Theology with Brian Clarke, Alan Hayes, Brian Hogan, Stuart Macdonald, and Mark Toulouse has created occasions for a lively exchange of ideas about religion in Canada. Special thanks goes to Roger Hutchinson, who has been a constant source of support and encouragement, as well as a perceptive reader of the manuscript. His research on the social policies of the United Church was a happy match for my work on its history. Together we directed a project on the United Church, generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. that provided funding for several conferences, graduate student stipends, and research assistants. I received a grant from the Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada, and occasional funding from Victoria University through Emmanuel College. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Among the students funded by the Lilly grant was Ian Manson, who has worked with me in various roles for more years than I care to calculate: as M.Div. and doctoral student, teaching assistant, research assistant, Lilly project coordinator, minister of my congregation for a number of years, and most recently reader of various drafts of the manuscript. Allison Barrett and Kate Crawford helped to organize the Clifford papers, retrieve and reproduce sources, and gather statistical data. Over the years, other student assistants, including Peg Allin, Chris Dowdeswell, Stephanie Klaassen, Ross Lockhart, Jonathan Seiling, and Jeralyn Towne, handled similar tasks. Teaching assistant Philip Gardner added the task of proofreading endnotes to his other responsibilities. In a class by herself as first reader of drafts is my friend Heather Gamester, whose candid suggestions immeasurably improved the narrative flow of the manuscript. The making of this book also

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involved many people whom I came to know only through email exchanges or telephone conversations. An example is Patricia Ingold, editorial administrator for The United Church Observer, who scanned images of magazine covers for some of the illustrations. One was a particular challenge because her only copy was in a bound volume, so she suggested that I try to find a loose copy. Eventually, that led me to phone Joanne Lucyk, Ray Hord’s sisterin-law, who took time to find the issue with a cover story about him in some family papers, at a time when she was grieving the recent death of her son. I am grateful for the practical support of managing editor Ryan Van Huijstee and the editorial staff of McGill-Queen’s University Press. They selected two superb readers, later identified in the prepublication material as Duncan McDowell and Mark Noll, who provided very different perspectives on the manuscript (including advice from one to shorten it and from the other to lengthen it). I took their suggestions seriously (even when it was difficult to please both!). The managing editor assigned my manuscript to Eleanor Gasparik, a copy editor who manages to be both exacting and delightful to work with, and recommended Lee Frew, an indexer who works with remarkable skill and speed. Finally, I want to thank Don Akenson, editor of the series in which this book appears, for assurances that, like George Rawlyk before him, he would be interested in considering my manuscript whenever I was ready to submit it. And as always, my gratitude to Matthew, who has been with me even longer than this book, and who continues to give me love, joy, and harmony.

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Notes

p rol og u e   1 John Wesley, Journals and Diaries II, vol. 19 of The Works of John Wesley, ed. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990), 67 (emphasis in the original).   2 E.H. Oliver, “The Place and Work of the United Church in the Life of Canada,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 19–20.   3 Sidney Mead, “The ‘Nation with the Soul of a Church,’” Church History 36, no. 3 (1967): 262.   4 John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 519.   5 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).

c ha p t e r o n e   1 Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterson, eds., The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3:235; for her antipathy to church union (and Methodism), see 3:196–236.   2 John Webster Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union (London: Lutterworth Press, 1967), 21. C.T. McIntire, “Unity among Many: The Formation of the United Church of Canada, 1899–1930,” in Don Schweitzer, ed., The United Church of Canada: A History (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 13–4, counters the United Church’s claim to be the first union across confessional lines in the West with the formation of the Protestant Church in Prussia in 1817. The United Church’s founders no doubt agreed with church historian John T.

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306

  3

  4

  5

  6

Notes to page 4

McNeill (who had witnessed union as a Presbyterian) that the Prussian union had “produced a church without a general polity, a common worship, or a common statement of belief, and without any adequate sense of religious unity”; it could be called a union “only with reservations”; cited in Ruth Rouse and Stephen Neill, A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1517–1948, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 288. Claris Edwin Silcox, Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933), 127, and repeated, for example, in Randolph Carleton Chalmers, See the Christ Stand! A Study in Doctrine in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), 117. During the church union controversy, a few Presbyterian opponents insisted that the proposed doctrinal basis was not modern enough; see E. Lloyd Morrow, Church Union in Canada: Its History, Motives, Doctrine and Government (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1923), 215, who concluded that “there is scarcely anything in it of the truly modern point of view”; also see 155–6, 292. Kenneth McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5–24, describes the political dualism that allowed for Quebec and the rest of Canada to view nationality in different ways even after Confederation. Interestingly, Quebec in a sense was treated by the British as a distinct “confessional state,” to borrow the terminology that evolved after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended the devastating wars between Catholics and Protestants in Europe. Whereas in the seventeenth century the religion of the ruler determined the religion of the land, in democratic societies the religion of the majority of the population has since become the ­decisive factor. “‘I’m a Unionist Because I’m Canadian – Ralph Connor,’” St Thomas Times-Journal, 22 December 1924, United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series I (hereafter cited as Church Union Collection), United Church of Canada Archives (hereafter cited as uc a ) 83.063C, box 38 (scrapbook). S.D. Chown, “Church Union,” Christian Guardian, 28 June 1922, 13. This is from Chown’s infamous speech that was widely reported as referring to the new church as a “religio-political machine.” Chown did on occasion use the word “machine” to describe the church; for an example, see “That They All May Be One,” January 1912, 9, Samuel Dwight Chown Papers, uc a , box 3-67, a sermon preached prior to the Methodist vote in 1912 that referred to building “a machine of the highest efficiency for doing [Christ’s] work.”

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Notes to pages 4–6

307

  7 For example, in “That They All May Be One,” 7, Chown’s economic case for union was followed by a theological rationale that described the doctrinal statement as both “quite conservative in spirit” and “liberal.” For an analysis of the theological vs. the ‘non-theological’ factors, see George M. Morrison, “The United Church of Canada: Ecumenical or Economic Necessity?” (Bachelor of Divinity thesis, Emmanuel College of Victoria University, 1956); Edgar File, “A Sociological Analysis of Church Union in Canada” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1961); and W.E. Mann, “The Canadian Church Union,” in Religion in Canadian Society, ed. Stewart Crysdale and Les Wheatcroft (Toronto: Macmillan, 1976), 385–97.   8 “The Church and the Spirit,” [1924?], 4, Church Union Collection, box 29-653, one of many pamphlets issued by the Bureau of Literature and Information.   9 On revisions to the Basis of Union, amended in December 1914 and voted on the following year at the Presbyterian General Assembly, see Silcox, 170-2. 10 “Report of Home Missions and Social Service,” The United Church of Canada Year Book (1926), 330. 11 John Strachan, “Upper Canada: The National Church” in John Strachan: Documents and Opinion, ed. J.L.H. Henderson (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969), 91–2. 12 For a summary of the events leading up to disestablishment, see Terrance Murphy, “The English-Speaking Colonies to 1854,” in A Concise History of Christianity in Canada, ed. Terrence Murphy and Roberto Perin (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996), 134–7, 184–8. For an analysis of disestablishment, see John S. Moir, Church and State in Canada West: Three Studies in the Relation of Denominationalism and Nationalism, 1841–1867 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1959), and John S. Moir, “‘Who Pays the Piper ... ’: Canadian Presbyterianism and ChurchState Relations,” in The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow: The Presbyterian Contribution to Canadian Life and Culture, ed. William Klempa (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 70–3. 13 John Webster Grant, A Profusion of Spires: Religion in NineteenthCentury Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 153. 14 André Siegfried, The Race Question in Canada (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1906; ET 1907; 2nd ed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), 55. On ultramontane Catholicism in Quebec, see Susan Mann, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 115–31. Her opening sentence sums up well her assessment of its importance: “In the last third

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308

15 16

17 18

19

20

21

22 23

Notes to pages 6–8

of the nineteenth century the clergy was as much a means of national unity as the railroad.” When quotations are not indicated with an endnote number, it is because the same source will be quoted again shortly following the first quotation. The last quotation from the same source will be marked with a note number. Siegfried, 56. For a perceptive analysis of the social utility of religion before and after disestablishment, see William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1989), especially chapter 4. W. Stewart Wallace, The Growth of Canadian National Feeling (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1927), 2–3. On the ‘quasi-federalism’ in the constitutional settlement of 1867, with particular attention to the persistence of support for provincial autonomy in Ontario, see Robert C. Vipond, Liberty and Community: Canadian Federalism and the Failure of the Constitution (Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 1991). R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald B. Smith, Journeys: A History of Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Nelson, 2010), 303. The fragility of Confederation and the continuing tendency toward regionalism is ­discussed in chapter 14. Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 3–5, sees appeal of British imperialism as a way to dodge the threat of American expansion and thus an attempt to promote Canadian nationalism. John Ralston Saul, A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada (Toronto: Viking, 2008), 312–13. He highlights the role of Irish Protestants who “saw Canada through British blinkers”; he also notes that a “new school of historians emerged from 1867 determined to treat Confederation as a brand-new beginning” and thereby emphasizing its “Britishness.” Other cultures, including indigenous peoples and francophone, were marginal to this telling of the story (158–9). Ibid., 9, 107. J.R. Miller, “Anti-Catholicism in Canada: From the British Conquest to the Great War,” in Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930, ed. Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 40–1. Miller sees the competition between Protestant and Catholic missions to the West as a contributing factor to church union. On Irish

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24 25

26

27 28 29 30

31

32 33

Notes to pages 8–9

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identity, see Mark G. McGowan, The Waning of the Green: Catholics, The Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 218–49. A.G. Bailey, Culture and Nationality (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), 182. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 156–7. Horsman describes the complex theories of monogenesis (that all humans shared the same parental origins) and polygenesis (that racial ­differences supported multiple origins of the species). The latter raised a serious problem for the biblical account of creation, 44–5. Ibid., 189–207, for a discussion of how theories of racial destiny were used to explain the declining numbers of American indigenous peoples. For Canada, see J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), esp. 83–115. On the advocacy of assimilation in support of humanitarian causes and imperialism, see Douglas A. Lorimer, “Race, Science and Culture: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities,” in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Brookfield, v t: Ashgate, 1996), 23–4. George W. Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1968), 48–9. Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart Inc., 1990), 53–5. Ibid., 48–50, 63–4. George Emery, The Methodist Church on the Prairies (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 3–19, argues that immigration changed the prairie region, and in doing so, changed the future of religion in Canada. Among the consequences for the Methodist Church was the relocation of leaders with strong links to Ontario (78–103). On the controversy in Manitoba, see Paul Crunican, Priests and Politicians: Manitoba Schools and the Election of 1896 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). Terence J. Fay, A History of Canadian Catholics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 136–45. See the statistical tables in David V.J. Bell, The Roots of Disunity: A Study of Canadian Political Culture, rev. ed. (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 179, 182. On the challenges that the new type of immigrant posed for old assumptions about French-English duality, see Susan Mann, 171–3.

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Notes to pages 10–11

34 William T. Gunn, His Dominion (Toronto: Canadian Council of the Missionary Education Movement, 1917), 211. 35 John Webster Grant, “The Reaction of wasp Churches to Non-wasp Immigrants,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 1968, 3,5. 36 Brian Clarke, “English-Speaking Canada from 1854,” in A Concise History of Christianity in Canada, 293–96. For a discussion of the fears stoked by the Riel rebellions, the pope’s involvement in the dispute over the Jesuit Estates (1888), and Catholic schools in the west as expressions of French-Canadian ambitions in Quebec and beyond, see Susan Mann, 150–65. Fay, 155–75, analyzes the conflicts in terms of two competing forms of “messianism,” which created tensions between English- and French-speaking Catholics as well. 37 Quoted in Dominique Clift, The Secret Kingdom: Interpretations of the Canadian Character (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989), 50–1, ­citing and translating Michel Brunet, La presence anglaise et les Canadiens (Montreal: Beauchemin, 1964), 177–8. 38 See W.G. Smith, Building the Nation: A Study of Some Problems Concerning the Churches’ Relation to the Immigrants (Toronto: Canadian Council of the Missionary Education Movement, 1922), published jointly by missionary agencies within the Congregational, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches. The book includes an interesting chapter on immigrants from Asia (124–53) and a policy on immigrants developed by ­representatives of the uniting churches along with the Anglican and Baptist churches (195–7). Howard Palmer, “Mosaic versus Melting Pot? Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada and the United States,” International Journal 31, no. 1 (1975–76): 491–506, sees the “new type” as a variation of the old melting pot idea that was beginning to fall out of favour in the United States by the 1920s. He notes that while recent studies assume a “mosaic” approach to Canadian identity by the 1920s, the cultural pluralism that the metaphor implies found few proponents before the Second World War. Conspicuous among “new type” proponents that he mentions were some prominent supporters of church union, such as Nellie McClung, Walter Murray, E.H. Oliver, and J.S. Woodsworth. For McClung’s and Woodsworth’s views on assimilation, see Elizabeth Profit, “‘The Land of the Fair Deal’: Canadian Nationalism and the Social Gospel” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2001), 27–41, 147–53. 39 Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 2. What he calls the rebirth of the United States after the wreckage of the Civil War was created out of

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Notes to pages 11–14

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notions of regeneration, self-sacrifice, the superiority of the white race (purportedly based on science), and Anglo-Saxon civilization; see especially 1–11, 21–2, 92–110, 167–221, 276–355. 40 The influence of American social thought in Canada is illustrated by the books and magazine articles listed in J.S. Woodsworth, Strangers within Our Gates, or Coming Canadians, 2nd ed. (Toronto: The Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, 1909), 7: all were published in the United States. Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), discusses the influence of the eugenics movement. 41 N.W. Rowell, The Church and Immigration (Toronto: Canadian Council, [1908?]), 5. 42 Ibid., 6–8, 12. 43 William H. Magney, “The Methodist Church and the National Gospel, 1884–1914,” The Bulletin 20 (1968): 73–7, quoting Creighton’s editorial “Nationalizing the Foreigner,” Christian Guardian, 22 April 1908, 5. 44 J.W. Sparling, “Introduction” to Strangers within Our Gates, or Coming Canadians, 4. The emphasis is Sparling’s. 45 W.D. Reid, “The Non-Anglo-Saxon in Canada: Their Christianization and Nationalization,” Pre-Assembly Congress (Toronto: Board of Foreign Missions, 1913), 119–23. For similar fears expressed by a highly placed Methodist, see S.D. Chown, “How Shall the Foreigners Govern Us?” Christian Guardian, 23 February 1910, 8. The two men are interesting to compare: one was opposed to church union, the other a leading supporter. 46 J.R. Mutchmor, “Immigration 1914–15” (master’s thesis, 1917 [Columbia University]), 35; 61–2, 69. 47 Gunn, His Dominion, 217–23. 48 J. Lee Thompson and John H. Thompson, “Ralph Connor and the Canadian Identity,” Queen’s Quarterly 79, no. 2 (1972): 167–9. Barry Mack, “Modernity without Tears: The Mythic World of Ralph Connor,” in The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow, ed. Klempa, 150, makes the interesting observation that structurally, Ralph Connor’s novel The Man from Glengarry is the same as The Foreigner: the culturally backward Scottish Highlanders who change their old ways for liberal modernism and urban affluence were not unlike the Ukrainian immigrants who were expected to leave behind their old ways to become Canadian. 49 Ralph Connor, The Foreigner (Toronto: Westminster, 1909), 253. 50 Mary Vipond, “Canadian National Consciousness and the Formation of the United Church of Canada,” The Bulletin 24 (1975), 11, notes that a

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Notes to page 15

number of church union leaders gave at least lip service to the idea of a new Canadian identity after 1912. 51 Robert Falconer, “The Present Position of the Churches in Canada,” Constructive Quarterly 1 (1913): 278–80. 52 Paul T. Phillips, A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity, 1880–1940 (University Park, pa : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) is an exception. 53 See Rouse and Neill, 274–5, for the contribution of prominent Broad Churchmen to the concept of a comprehensive national church. 54 Phillips, Kingdom, 163. Arnold had a following among an eclectic and influential group of intellectuals who were interested in tapping the cultural potential of a “national church,” including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T.H. Green, John Robert Seeley, Arnold Toynbee, and B.F. Westcott. He also explores the influence of Fremantle’s “national church” on ecumenists, liberals, and social gospel proponents, such as William Reed Huntington, Richard Ely, Washington Gladden, W.T. Stead, and Hugh Price Hughes; cf. 164–70, 173–4, 179. 55 Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1970), 2: 280. 56 Fremantle, 282–4. It is such links between religion and empire that John Ralston Saul, 5, perhaps had in mind with his less charitable ­assessment of the outcome: “Throughout the Western world in the ­second half of the nineteenth century, middle-class, pew-chained and empire-obsessed civilizations gradually slipped toward the paranoid fears of the twentieth century.” 57 Paul T. Phillips, “The Concept of a National Church in Late NineteenthCentury England and America,” Journal of Religious History 14, no. 1 (1986): 31–2. 58 J.W. Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union, 29–30, observes that by simply substituting “Canada” for “United States” one could see William Reed Huntington’s proposal for a national church as “almost ideally suited to the Canadian problem and the Canadian tradition of Church and state.” However, Grant does not explore the connections between Fremantle and Huntington that Phillips describes in A Kingdom on Earth. His proposal drew some initial interest in Canada, particularly among members of the Canadian Society of Christian Unity; see Phillips, A Kingdom on Earth, 171n32, whose presidents included Presbyterian William Caven and Methodist S.D. Chown. 59 On Grant’s influence on religion and culture in Canada, see D.B. Mack, “George Monro Grant: Evangelical Prophet” (PhD diss., Queen’s University,

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60

61

62 63 64

65 66

67 68 69

70 71

Notes to pages 15–17

313

1992) and Barry Mack, “George Monro Grant and the Lost Centre,” Touchstone 12–1 (1994): 30–43. Barry Mack, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, s.v. “Grant, George Monro,” 13:404, notes that Grant was influenced by Arnold through Norman McLeod, as does Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1991), 156–7, 198; also see D.B. Mack, “George Monro Grant: Evangelical Prophet,” 94–106. Mack notes that Grant’s description of McLeod applied to himself as well: “He believed that a church should aim at including all the Christians in the land and thus be truly national ... and that the church should aim at being coextensive with the religious life of the nation” (95). Cited in William Grant and Frederick Hamilton, Principal Grant (Toronto: Morang and Company, 1904), 155–6, and F.A. Peake, “Movements toward Christian Unity in the Post-Confederation Period,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 9, no. 4 (1967): 97–9. G.M. Grant, “Organic Union of Churches: How Far Should It Go?” Canadian Methodist Magazine 10 (September 1884): 245. Ibid., 251–5. G.M. Grant, Sermon Preached before the Synod of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island (Halifax: James Bowes and Sons, 1866), 17–18, George Monro Grant Papers, Queen’s University Archives. Berger, 31–2. Ibid., 219–26. For Grant’s assumptions about assimilation and AngloSaxon culture, see Allan Smith, “The Thought of George Monro Grant,” Canadian Literature 83 (Winter 1979): 90–116. Grant and Hamilton, 500–2. Clarence Mackinnon, Reminiscences (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1938), 136. Richard Allen, The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 207–18; he speculates that Bland would have been dismayed by the conservative tone of some of “his idol’s” social and economic views (212). Also see A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979), 216–22. Grant and Hamilton, 439. John S. Moir, “From Sectarian Rivalry to National Vision: The ­Contribution of Maritime Presbyterianism to Canada,” in The Contri­ bution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada, ed. Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston:

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Notes to pages 17–18

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 162. Moir notes that by the 1870s a new generation of ministers committed to a national vision of the Presbyterian Church had appeared: a “clerisy” operating as a “family compact” in educational circles. 72 Douglas F. Campbell, “A Group, a Network and the Winning of Church Union in Canada: A Case Study in Leadership,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 25, no. 1 (1988): 41–66, provides bio­ graphical details about the members and how they combined their educational influences to effect a takeover of the organizational structure of the Presbyterian Church. In a surprising omission, Campbell does not include “King Arthur” among the members who lost faith in the unionist cause (54–5). On D.M. Gordon’s about-face on church union, see ­chapter 2 below. 73 Mackinnon, Reminiscences, 105. 74 The formation of the group is described in Mackinnon, Reminiscences, 105–8. It is not clear from Mackinnon’s account whether Gandier was an original member of the club (which at first was limited to ten): Mackinnon prefaced his account of Gandier’s involvement with the proviso, “A ­notable name must be added.” Moir’s discussion of the Round Table notes their important contributions to Canadian public life and emphasizes Grant’s influence on them, although he wrongly credits Grant, rather than Gordon, with the organization of the club; see “From Sectarian Rivalry,” 166. 75 John Dow, Alfred Gandier: Man of Vision and Achievement (Toronto: The United Church Publishing House, 1951), 98; also cited in Kenneth Cousland, “A Brief History of the Church Union Movement in Canada,” in Our Common Faith, Thomas Buchanan Kilpatrick (Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1928), 5. 76 Dow, 54. Privately, Grant’s opinion of Gandier appears to have been less enthusiastic. To his wife, Grant described Gandier as “a first-rate teacher of the second class. He will never rise to the first – neither from thinking power, nor from spiritual insight, nor from oratorial talent.” Still, he added, he wished that there were more like him. Mack says that Grant’s influence on Gandier was evident in the latter’s inaugural address at Knox College a few years later; see Mack, “Evangelical Prophet,” 358–9. 77 Alfred Gandier, “Church Union,” Theologue 10, no. 4 (1899): 114–15. 78 G.M. Grant, “The Outlook of the Twentieth Century in Theology,” American Journal of Theology 6, no. 1 (1902): 15. 79 Clarence Mackinnon, “The Compensations of Union,” Theologue 12, no. 1 (November 1900): 167–70.

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Notes to pages 19–20

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80 James G. Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 115. 81 Brian Fraser, Church, College, and Clergy: A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994 (Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 124–6. 82 David R. Murray and Robert A. Murray, The Prairie Builder (Edmonton: NeWest Publishers, 1984), 135–56, describe his leadership in the church and involvement in the union movement. 83 N.K. Clifford, “The Interpreters of the United Church of Canada,” Church History 46, no. 2 (1977): 203–7, notes Morton’s connections to key ­leaders in the church union controversy and the influence of his case for the inevitability of church union. 84 Mackinnon, Reminiscences, 174–5, describes the advice of Walter Murray, “the family mentor,” as instrumental in his decision to return to Halifax. 85 Clifford, “The Interpreters of the United Church of Canada,” 212–13. 86 Nathanael Burwash, “To the Members of the Methodist Ecumenical Conference,” [1911?], 3, Nathanael Burwash Papers, uc a , box 8-107. 87 Nathanael Burwash, “Our Federated Divinity Schools,” Christian Guardian, 17 October 1894, 661. 88 R.J. Wilson, Church Union after Three Years (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1929), 13–15, credits such voluntary associations as the y mc a , y wc a , etc., as contributing factors in “the breakdown of exclusiveness.” Silcox, 73–102, describes the growth of co-operation in these activities, noting the urge to present a united front against the influence of Catholicism as a motive in some cases. Siegfried, 57–8, also saw the church union movement as motivated by Protestant fear of “the Roman peril,” despite ­“outward courtesy”: to this observer from France it appeared that “Catholicism, the common enemy, reminds them periodically of the need for united action if not for unity.” 89 On the developing bureaucracy in the Presbyterian Church, see Brian Fraser, The Social Uplifters: Presbyterian Progressives and the Social Gospel in Canada, 1875–1915 (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988), 64–6; for Methodism, see John Thomas, “‘A Pure and Popular Church’: Case Studies in the Development of the Methodist ‘Organizational’ Church, 1884–1925” (PhD diss., York University, 1991). On the significance for church union of relationships between leaders involved in voluntary associations, see Douglas F. Campbell, “Ecumenists and Entrepreneurs: A Study of Coalition Leadership,” Journal of Canadian Studies 27, no. 3 (1992): 28–46.

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Notes to pages 21–4

  90 The Canadian Society of Christian Unity was formed in 1898. George Grant and William Caven preceded Chown as the second and third presidents of the organization.   91 Magney, 88–9.   92 See Phyllis D. Airhart, “Ordering a New Nation and Reordering Protestantism, 1967–1914,” in The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1790 to 1990, ed. George A. Rawlyk (Burlington, on: Welch, 1990), 98–138, for illustrations of the connections between them.   93 Marguerite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind: Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 158–9. For Burwash’s influential views on doctrine during the negotiations, see Van Die, 147–64. She concludes that what he “had been defending all along in church union was not so much the new as the old” (177).   94 Kilpatrick, 63–4. For his involvement in the formulation of the Basis of Union, see Brian J. Fraser, “Christianizing the Social Order: T.B. Kilpatrick’s Theological Vision of the United Church of Canada,” Toronto Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1996): 189–200.   95 Alfred Gandier, The Doctrinal Basis of Union and Its Relation to the Historic Creeds (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1926), 35.   96 Perhaps this accounts for the creation of a church that N.K. Clifford has described as “one of the most homogeneous denominations in Canada”; see “Interpreters,” 209.   97 A.S. Morton, The Way to Union (Toronto: William Briggs, 1912), 99–100.   98 Ibid., 100–8.   99 On the varieties and unions of Presbyterians, see Silcox, 56–70; John Thomas McNeill, The Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1875–1925 (Toronto: General Board, Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1925), 16–32; and Grant, Profusion of Spires, 26–8. 100 N.G. Smith, “The Presbyterian Tradition in Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, ed. John Webster Grant (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1963), 47. 101 Chalmers, 46–7. 102 Silcox, 69. 103 John T. McNeill, “The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the United Church,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 12. 104 “Inauguration Service of the United Church of Canada,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 6. 105 Morton, 123–46. 106 Ibid., 153.

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Notes to pages 24–7

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107 Earl B. Eddy, “The Congregational Tradition in Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, 31–2. Also see Silcox, 41–55, for a discussion of the development of Congregationalism in Canada. 108 On the United Church’s interpretation of Congregational theological principles, see Chalmers, 76–9, and Silcox, 143–6. 109 “Inauguration Service of the United Church of Canada,” 6. 110 The twenty-five articles are reprinted in Chalmers, Appendix 3, 296–9. For a comparison with the thirty-nine articles on which they were based, see Chalmers, 93–5. 111 For a Canadian interpretation of the importance of Wesley’s sermons, see Burwash’s preface and introduction to Wesley’s Doctrinal Standards, Part 1, The Sermons, ed. Nathanael Burwash (Toronto: William Briggs, 1881), iii–xviii. 112 On the United Church’s interpretation of Methodist theological principles, see Chalmers, 96–113. 113 “Inauguration Service of the United Church of Canada,” 6. 114 Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 71–126; Goldwin French, “The People Called Methodists in Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, ed. John Webster Grant (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1963), 71–7; and Silcox, 47–55. 115 See William T. Gunn, Uniting Three United Churches (Toronto: Bureau of Literature and Information of the Joint Church Union Committee, [1923?]) for details of these unions. His pamphlet includes a detailed ­diagram of the mergers that had created three traditions that would soon be one united church, 8–9. It is frequently reproduced as a graphic presentation of the case for church union, and currently appears on the United Church of Canada’s website as its “family tree”; accessed 7 August 2012, www.united-church.ca / history / overview / archival#familytree. 116 Walter Murray, “Why We Want Church Union in the Prairie Provinces,” clipping dated for release 17 February 1917, (newspaper not identified), Church Union Collection, box 35-769. 117 Silcox, 226–8. McIntire, 18–19, gives examples of the variety of local unions. 118 “Inauguration Service,” 6. Although the local union congregations were ceremonially recognized as a group at the inaugural service, they legally joined the United Church separately after 10 June 1925. See Silcox, 216– 30, for an analysis of the significance of the local church unions in the momentum for church union. E.H. Oliver, His Dominion in Canada: A Study in the Background, Development and Challenge of the Missions of

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Notes to pages 28–31

the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Board of Home Missions and Woman’s Missionary Society, 1932), 137–41, claimed that these churches in frontier communities led the way to union. 119 R.J. Wilson, “Church Union and National Unity,” (typescript, n.d.), 1, Robert J. Wilson Papers, u ca, box 2-27. 120 Bryan Smith, “The Destiny Factor,” in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization, ed. Peter Senge (London: N. Brealey, 1994), 341–4, argues that organizations have “callings” that shape their destinies.

c h a p t e r t wo    1 Statement provided by W.M. Birks for the Bureau of Literature and Information, United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series I (hereafter Church Union Collection), u ca 83.063C, box 29-663. He dates his trip “around 1920.”   2 “Modern Covenanters,” Fergus Record, 16 April 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook).    3 For a similar account from the anti-union side, see “Many Knox Church Dissenters from Union Debarred from Their Own Building Gather as Welcome Guest of All Saints’ Church,” Peterborough Evening Examiner, 3 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 33–736. In this case it was the non-concurring rather than uniting Presbyterians who identified with the resistance of the Covenanters and claimed to be the true guardians of their traditions “for which they are prepared to go out on the street beggared as to the church property but rich in the possession of their grand old faith.” For an analysis of one city’s vote that illustrates the impact of ministerial leadership and congregational culture on the outcome of the vote, see William Haughton, “The Experience of Church Union Among the Presbyterians of Galt, Ontario” (master’s thesis, Emmanuel College of Victoria University, 2007).    4 The work of the Dominion Commission on Church Property set up to handle the division of the denominational funds and assets was largely completed by 1927; see C.E. Silcox, Church Union in Canada: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933), 347–55, and N.K. Clifford, The Resistance to Church Union in Canada, 1904–1939 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1985), 194–9. Dividing local church property took longer since it was subject to different legislation in each province; see Silcox, 355–77, and Clifford, Resistance, 200–6.

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Notes to pages 32–5

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 5 Clifford, Resistance, 226–35. He notes that Gordon Sisco, who succeeded T. Albert Moore as general secretary in 1936, played a pivotal role in the negotiations. The legal challenges to the use of the name are discussed in Donald John McCrae Corbett, “The Canadian Church Union and the Law” (Bachelor of Divinity thesis, Knox College, 1957), especially 61–9. Corbett says it is with “considerable amazement” that he hears the United Church still claim that the Presbyterian Church went into the union since “the courts have made it impossible for the United Church to make this claim” (67). For the implications of the legislation for Canada’s approach to church-state relations, see Sara J. Knight, “Voices United? The House of Commons’ Role in the Creation of the United Church of Canada,” Papers of Canadian Society of Church History, 2003, 39–64. Despite their criticism of the United Church for seeking enabling legislation from the state, Clifford, Resistance, 234, notes that the Presbyterians sought legislative protection by presenting an Act to Incorporate the Board of Trustees of the Presbyterian Church in Canada to the Dominion Parliament and the provincial legislatures after the United Church Act was amended.   6 John Thomas McNeill, The Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1875–1925 (Toronto: General Board of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1925), 247–53. Caven’s principles for union were set out in “The Union of the Christian Churches,” Westminster [new series] 1, no. 1 (July 1902): 26–9.   7 Brian J. Fraser, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, s.v. “Caven, William,” 13:181–4. The similarities to Grant and other supporters of church union discussed in the previous chapter are striking; Fraser describes Caven as an evangelical who believed that “a United Protestantism would have a much more powerful influence on national righteousness than separate denominations.” In view of later fundamentalist opposition to church union (discussed below), it is ironic that Caven’s pamphlet on The Testimony of Christ to the Old Testament was included posthumously in The Fundamentals (one of the few Canadian contributors).  8 Acts and Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (1902), 59.   9 Quoted in A Brief Sketch of the Negotiations for Union of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational Churches in Canada (Toronto, 1905), 6, Church Union Collection, box 1-2. 10 “The General Conference,” Christian Guardian, 17 September 1902, 8. 11 N.K. Clifford, “The Origins of the Church Union Controversy,” Journal of the Canadian Church Historical Society 18 (June–September 1976): 42; Clifford, Resistance, 13–15.

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Notes to pages 35–8

12 For typical unionist account, see Kenneth Cousland, “A Brief History of the Church Union Movement in Canada,” in Our Common Faith, Thomas Buchanan Kilpatrick (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1928), 6–21, and William T. Gunn, Uniting Three United Churches (Toronto: Bureau of Literature and Information of the Joint Church Union Committee, 1923). McNeill, 251, also downplays Patrick’s role at the General Conference, noting that he had informed those gathered that he was not speaking for the Presbyterian Church and pointedly mentioning that the Methodist invitation made no reference to Patrick’s address. 13 Cousland, “A Brief History,” 16–19, and Silcox, 106–20. The Presbyterians had sponsored discussions of proposals for Christian unity in 1886, the Methodists in 1890 and 1894, and the Presbyterians again in 1899. 14 “The General Conference,” 8. 15 Silcox, 122. 16 Clifford, Resistance, 1–3, 23–4. 17 Clifford, “The Origins of the Church Union Controversy,” 51. 18 Clifford, Resistance, 21. He suggests that articles supporting union were published in obscure journals by men who had not yet risen to prominence. However, by the time Patrick arrived, D.M. Gordon, Alfred Gandier, Robert Falconer, and Clarence Mackinnon were well known in the Presbyterian Church (and even in 1902, their positions may have ­compared favourably in prestige to that of the new principal of a small western college). 19 “The General Conference,” 8. Carman’s introduction mentioned that Presbyterians and Methodists in Winnipeg had already formed a committee to work on the home missions problem. 20 For a discussion of the conflict between Patrick and Mackay see Clifford, Resistance, 43–8, and John Webster Grant, George Pidgeon: A Biography, (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1962) 62–3. 21 Clifford, Resistance, 46. The federation model was at first an attractive alternative to organic union. For a discussion of its merits, see E. Lloyd Morrow, Church Union in Canada: Its History, Motives, Doctrine, and Government (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 1923), 70–1, 294–301, 435–44. 22 Silcox, 189. 23 Clifford, Resistance, 19–20. The complex legal arguments to the House of Lords in 1903 and the ruling in 1904 on the Overtoun appeal are compiled in Robert Orr, The Free Church of Scotland Appeals, 1903–4 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1904). See D.J.M. Corbett, “The Legal Problems of the Canadian Church Union of 1925,” Canadian Society of

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Notes to pages 38–40

321

Presbyterian History Papers (1979), 53–67, for a discussion of how the Presbyterians in Canada appealed to the case. On the legislative process as viewed by the lawyer who prepared the bills for the various jurisdictions (including Newfoundland and Bermuda), see Gershom W. Mason, The Legislative Struggle for Church Union (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1956); cf. Silcox, 243–71, and Clifford, Resistance, 142–64. 24 Grant, George Pidgeon, 68–9, notes that by 1899 Pidgeon was preaching a sermon on “The Unity of Believers,” and by 1903 had delivered it five times. Pidgeon was not alone in taking exception to the personal attacks on Mackay. Clarence Mackinnon, Reminiscences (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1938), 167, recalled that Patrick had presented the case for church union in 1910 “fully, though perhaps a little too vigorously.” 25 Letter to D.M. Gordon from E.D. McLaren, April 1923, D.M. Gordon Papers, Queen’s University Archives, box 2. McLaren had by that time switched his support and was writing to express his relief that Gordon had done likewise. 26 Mackinnon, 167–8. His assessment of their actions differs from Clifford, “The Origins of the Church Union Controversy,” 41, who sees the supporters of union as young liberals who believed that church administration was a matter of expediency, and were thus less concerned with how things had been done in the past. 27 John S. Moir, Enduring Witness: A History of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 3rd ed. (Burlington, on : Eagle Press, [2004?]), 216. 28 Cited in David R. Murray and Robert A. Murray, The Prairie Builder: Robert Murray of Saskatchewan (Edmonton: NeWest Publishers, 1984), 145. 29 Clifford, Resistance, 84–5. 30 Guy Bagnall, ed., Trinity United Church, Vernon, B.C., 1892–1967 (n.p: n.d.), 20; Marion R. Archibald, Historical Sketch of Methodist, Presbyterian and United Churches of Canada in Rosedale (n.p.: [1948?]), 5; and F.E. Runnals, The History of the Knox United Church, Prince George, B.C. (1945), 58, a sampling of publications in the Congregational History Collection, British Columbia Conference (United Church of Canada) Archives (hereafter bc Archives). 31 After 1925 the continuing Presbyterians were averse to the label “antiunionist.” Allan L. Farris, “The Fathers of 1925,” in Enkindled by the Word: Essays on Presbyterianism in Canada, ed. Centennial Committee of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (Toronto: Presbyterian Publications, 1966), 59–82, observes that the opposition included

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Notes to pages 40–3

federalists, ethical critics, and theological objectors, as well as those who were against union in principle. 32 Clifford, Resistance, 86. 33 H.F. Gadsby, “Love’s Labor Lost,” Saturday Night, 4 November 1916 [clipping], Church Union Collection, box 34-742. 34 Clifford, Resistance, 75, 89. 35 Ephraim Scott, “Letter 2,” in Continuing the Presbyterian Church in Canada: Letters to an Inquirer (Montreal, 1917), 2, Church Union Collection, box 20-455. 36 Scott, “Letter 12,” 13, and “Letter 19,” 20. 37 Ephraim Scott, “Church Union” and the Presbyterian Church in Canada (Montreal: John Lovell and Son, 1928), 123, 125–6. Whereas he claimed that the lay leaders of the resistance to church union were fighting clerical tyranny, he presented the lay leaders of church union as manipulative businessmen: the Methodist clergy give the orders – but only after taking instructions from their wealthy paymasters. 38 Clifford, Resistance, 132–4. Also see Roberta Clare, “The Role of Women in the Preservation of the Presbyterian Church in Canada: 1921–28,” in The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow: The Presbyterian Contribution to Canadian Life and Culture, ed. William Klempa (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 259–77. 39 “Parlour Meeting on Union Condemned,” Montreal Gazette, 18 May 1923 [clipping], Church Union Collection, box 33-724. 40 “Feminine Unionists Ask Divine Blessing,” Toronto Star, 19 December 1924, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). 41 “Church Unionists Not Taking Counter-Action,” Toronto Mail and Empire, 21 March 1923, Church Union Collection, box 39 (scrapbook). The minister and congregation are not named. 42 “Mrs J.W. Daniel to the President of the W.M.S. and W.A. of Bloor Street Presbyterian Church,” [undated], Church Union Collection, box 31-693. 43 The Presbyterian Church supported the war effort and co-operated with other churches in providing chaplaincy services. However, once the war was over, both sides used different aspects of that experience to support their position on church union. See George G.D. Kilpatrick, “The War and Church Union,” in The Need of Church Union by a Group of Presbyterians [1924?], 10–12, Church Union Collection, box 18-420, who argued that his experience as a Protestant chaplain confirmed that there was no incompatibility between the traditions; cf. Cyrus MacMillan, “The War and Church Union,” in The Need of the Presbyterian Church by a Group of Presbyterians [1924?], 9–11, Church Union Collection, box 19-442,

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Notes to pages 43–7

323

who saw the “forced uniformity” of church union as a denial of the liberty he had fought to defend. For an assessment of the “truce” and its implications for the controversy, see George C. Pidgeon, The United Church of Canada: The Story of the Union (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1950), 51–9. 44 George Pidgeon to Leslie Pidgeon, 19 October 1922, Pidgeon Papers, box 3-57. 45 Grant, George Pidgeon, 103. 46 George Pidgeon to Leslie Pidgeon, 19 October 1922, Pidgeon Papers, box 3-57. 47 “Memorandum on Organization of the Joint Bureau of Literature and Information as Related by Dr R.J. Wilson,” Claris Edwin Silcox Papers, uc a , box 20-16. 48 George Pidgeon to Leslie Pidgeon, 26 January 1923, Pidgeon Papers, box 3-60. 49 Memo from R.J. Wilson to Pidgeon, “General Review,” [undated], 1, Church Union Collection, box 30-673. Accusations of dirty tricks came from both sides. A. Donald MacLeod, W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 37–40, reports that the clergy in W. Stanford Reid’s family were divided on the issue. As a boy, Reid heard accusations about the behaviour of church leaders that made a lasting impression on him. 50 “General Review,” 1. 51 Ibid., 5. 52 “Outline Sermons and Addresses on Church Union and the United Church of Canada,” Bureau of Literature and Information of the Joint Committee on Church Union, December 1924, 16, Church Union Collection, box 29-656. 53 “Outline Sermons and Addresses on Church Union and the United Church of Canada,” 3–4. 54 “Report of the Committee on Literature and Information,” 17 October 1924, Church Union Collection, box 23-508; “Report of the Committee on Literature and Information,” 14 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 23-508. 55 Letter from R.J. Wilson to S.D. Chown, 24 February 1925, Church Union Collection, box 23-530. 56 “Outline Sermons and Addresses on Church Union and the United Church of Canada,” 7–8. 57 T. Albert Moore to D.R. Drummond, 4 February 1925, Methodist Church (Canada) General Conference, Correspondence of the Secretary,

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324

58

59

60 61

Notes to pages 47–8

1906–1925, u ca 78.107C, box 10-200. Drummond, the minister of St Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Hamilton, was promoting a federation proposal as a way around the impasse over church union. Although Moore’s letter is in the official Methodist Church records, he pointed out to Drummond that he was speaking for himself, and that no one knew he was writing. As if to underline that point, the letter was not written on institutional letterhead, and the return address was Moore’s residence rather than the church headquarters. Pidgeon to G.B. McLennan, 21 November 1924, Pidgeon Papers, box 4-91. The letter refers to a rumour that the “antis” were planning to turn the controversy into a debate about modernism, but perhaps had judged wrongly since it was “utterly baseless.” Other letters to Pidgeon around that time raised similar concerns, noting the unfairness of the charge given Fraser’s liberal theological positions. See the letter from J.W.S. Milne, 21 November 1924, Pidgeon Papers, box 4-91, which provided examples from Fraser’s sermons and noted that Fraser had been the only Presbyterian minister at the last General Assembly in Ottawa who was willing to preach in the Unitarian Church. The words “File carefully” are written in pencil at the top; whether it is Pidgeon’s handwriting is hard to say. Few if any of the pro-union leaders would have qualified as Protestant “modernists” according to the criterion described by Kathryn Lofton, “The Methodology of the Modernists: Process in American Protestantism,” Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 377–8, an aggressive methodology that involved a “demanding process of cross-examination and inquiry, a process that transformed the terming of biblical narrative and Christian faith.” Robert Campbell, The Relation of the Christian Churches to One Another, and the Problems Growing out of Them, Especially in Canada (Toronto: William Briggs, 1913), 233. Ibid., 256, 260–8. N.K. Clifford, “Robert Campbell: The Defender of Presbyterianism,” in Called to Witness: Profiles of Canadian Presbyterians, ed. W. Stanford Reid ([Don Mills, on ]: Presbyterian Publications, 1975), 60–2. Mary Vipond, “National Consciousness in English-speaking Canada in the 1920s: Seven Studies” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1974), 18, finds scant reference to social and national goals among the continuing Presbyterians. Robert Campbell was an early critic of church union as a solution to the immigration crisis; see Clifford, “Robert Campbell,” 57. For a critique of Campbell’s opposition to ecumenism, see Jay Newman, “The Case against Ecumenism: A Classic Canadian Argument,” in

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62 63 64

65 66

67

68

Notes to pages 48–50

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Pluralism, Tolerance and Dialogue: Six Studies, ed. M. Darrol Bryant (Waterloo, on : University of Waterloo Press, 1989), 29–36. George Duncan, “The Unity of the Church,” in The Need of the Presbyterian Church, 3–4. G. Washington, Why, as a Methodist I Cannot Accept the Basis of Union, [1911?], Church Union Collection, box 5-86. R.E. Welsh, The Things that Matter in Church Union (Montreal: Church Union Committee, n.d.), 1–2, referring to an editorial that Scott had published in the Presbyterian Record soon after the theological statement was issued. T. McMillan, Our Church and the Proposed Substitute [Toronto, 1922], 3, Church Union Collection, box 19-444. The Methodists in Newfoundland, then a British colony and not yet a Canadian province, voted against union as a conference but followed the direction of the General Council. W.S. Griffin, “Why I Am Against the Basis of Union,” Christian Guardian, 13 March 1912, 24. This is one of the rare objections to church union published after an editorial announced that only items shedding “new light” on the subject would be published in the magazine; see Christian Guardian, 14 February 1912, 3. On the discussion of the Basis of Union in the Methodist Church, see Marguerite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind: Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 143–66, and Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 421–3. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, mi: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1923), 7. Machen explains in the preface that the core of the book was published a year earlier as an article in the Princeton Theological Review. D.G. Hart, Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 67, points out that Machen’s lectures were an attack on an American plan for organic union. Hart notes the similarity of his concerns to those of the non-concurring Presbyterians in Canada (69), but does not explore his influence on the Canadian debate. D.G. Hart, “When Is a Fundamentalist a Modernist? J. Gresham Machen, Cultural Modernism, and Conservative Protestantism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65–3 (1997): 606, mentions that Machen’s books were widely reviewed in Canada. Machen’s relationship with “liberals” in his own denomination, as Hart describes it

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Notes to pages 50–2

(including Machen’s claim that they were not entitled to trusts and property since they had strayed from the Westminster Confession and his ­critique of inter-denominational creeds), resembles the strategy of the Presbyterian Church Association; see “When Is a Fundamentalist a Modernist?” 611–12, 615–21. It suggests collaboration between Machen and the Presbyterian Church Association, although to what extent I have so far been unable to determine. 69 Machen, 172–3, 178–9. 70 Ibid., 1–2. 71 Ibid., 161–2. His animus may be related to theological controversy among the Presbyterians in the United States. Princeton Theological Seminary was caught up in bitter disputes, and support for church union there was linked to the liberal position on biblical criticism. See John Abernathy Smith, “Ecclesiastical Politics and the Founding of the Federal Council of Churches,” Church History 43, no. 3 (1974): 356–8. On the importance of confessional statements in that controversy, see James H. Moorland, “Presbyterian Confessional Identity and Its Dilemmas,” in Holding on to the Faith: Confessional Traditions in American Christianity, ed. Douglas A. Sweeney and Charles Hambrick-Stowe (Lanham, md: University Press of America, 2008), 47–70. 72 Ibid., 162, 165. 73 Acts and Proceedings of the Fifty-first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (1925), 128. N.K. Clifford, “The Interpreters of the United Church of Canada,” Church History 46, no. 2 (1977): 214, also comments on Machen’s influence. 74 Moir, Enduring Witness, 226. Moir notes Machen’s continuing identification of ecumenism with modernism when he was invited in 1926 to preach at Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto and at MacVicar Presbyterian Church in Montreal. His sermons described St Paul as a conservative and Judas as a modernist (234). 75 John Webster Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union (London: Lutterworth Press, 1967), 75. Among them was W.S. Reid, who continued to oppose movements of denominational co-operation because they anticipated an organic union; cf. Moir, 253. On Reid’s opposition to church union and his relationship to Machen and Westminster Theological Seminary, see A. Donald MacLeod, W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 36–40, 53–65. 76 “Finds Church Union Is Pagan Movement,” [unidentified clipping], Church Union Collection, box 36-773.

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Notes to pages 52–4

327

77 “Church Union ‘Pagan,’ Shields an Outspoken Critic,” Toronto Telegram, 19 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 39 (scrapbook). Given the fierce newspaper competition of the day, the Telegram was no doubt pleased to report that Shields had condemned the editorial position of the Star in his sermon, complaining that “whoever writes the editorials is as blind as a bat spiritually and does not know the alphabet of the Christian religion.” Shields singled out The Blessed Hope, T. Albert Moore’s pamphlet published by the Methodist Department of Evangelism and Social Reform, as an example of the “infidel literature” associated with the union movement, perhaps adding to Moore’s unhappiness about the portrayal of Methodists as apostate discussed above. 78 “Sectarian Discord,” Catholic Register, 22 January 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). See also “Union and Disunion,” Kingston Freeman, 9 August 1923, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). 79 “Church Union,” Antigonish Casket, 25 October 1923, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). 80 The obituary in the Globe (1 May 1926) noted his religious affiliation, as well as his involvement in organizations that included the Social Hygiene Council. 81 Josephus the Second [pseud.], “A Religious Horoscope of June 1925: Will the United Church of Canada Be a United Church?” Saturday Night, 10 January 1925. For analysis of religion and social class, see T.W. Acheson, “Changing Social Origins of the Canadian Industrial Elite, 1880–1910,” Business History Review 17, no. 2 (1973): 198–200, who finds that Presbyterians and Anglicans were indeed over-represented among the “industrial elite” (with Methodists gaining significant ground in the west); and Douglas F. Campbell, “Class, Status and Crisis: UpperClass Protestants and the Founding of the United Church of Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies 29, no. 3 (1994): 63–84. 82 Scott, “Church Union” and the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 106. 83 D.J. Fraser, “Keep to Spirit Not Letter of Worship of Their Fathers,” Toronto Star, 9 June 1925, Church Union Collection, box 36-773. 84 W.D. Tait, “Church Union and Social Service,” in The Need of the Presbyterian Church, 8. 85 Morrow, 284–301, presented a federation model in a chapter entitled “The Kind of Church Union Canada Needs.” 86 Ibid., 86–7, 89 (emphasis in the original). Perhaps because they had a weaker presence in the province of Quebec, Methodists seemed less perturbed by the prospect of problems there. William Magney finds their “almost total neglect of Quebec and the French-Canadians” curious,

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Notes to pages 54–9



evidence perhaps of a live-and-let-live attitude among English-Canadian nationalists. William H. Magney, “The Methodist Church and the National Gospel, 1884–1914,” The Bulletin 20 (1968): 88–9.   87 Ibid., 296.   88 Machen, 148–9.   89 Ibid., 149–52.   90 Ibid., 154.   91 Shields, “Finds Church Union Is Pagan Movement.”  92 The Canadian Churchman, 10 April 1924, box 38 (scrapbook).   93 “Sees Presbyterians Gobbled Up by Methodists If Union Passes,” Toronto Star, 4 April 1924, Church Union Collection, box 35-772.   94 “The Very Rev. Dr. George Pidgeon Speaks,” St Peter’s Messenger, 26 November 1925, Church Union Collection, box 34-757.   95 Jas. Craig, “At the Crack of the Whip,” Toronto Telegram, 22 April 1925, box 38 (scrapbook).   96 “Church Union in Canada,” New York Sunday Times, 15 July 1923, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook).   97 Outsider [pseud.], “National Church?” Toronto Telegram, 22 April 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook).   98 “The Church’s Part in Politics,” Saturday Night, 4 July 1925, Church Union Collection, box 38 (scrapbook). Saturday Night provided unflattering accounts of the parliamentary debates; as examples, see articles by The Mace [pseud.], “Church Union in the Commons,” 8 March 1924, 4, and “Storming the Hill,” 17 May, 1924, 4.  99 Clifford, Resistance, 156. On the importance of temperance for the social gospel movement, and the role of the uniting traditions in supporting it, see Richard Allen, The Social Passion, esp. 264–83. The Presbyterian Church had its share of moral reformers as well, but even they were not always well received. Clifford, Resistance, 184, remarks that for some Presbyterians “the legislation of righteousness was abhorrent, and they believed that there was no way in which they could be comfortable in a church dominated by uplifters and social gospellers.” 100 The Fundamentals, n.d., Church Union Collection, box 29-654. 101 T.B. Kilpatrick, “The Unity of the Church,” in The Need of Church Union, 2. 102 A Vision of Unity, n.d., Church Union Collection, box 29-658. 103 A Choice and a Challenge, n.d., Church Union Collection, box 29-653. 104 George Pidgeon, “The Church Union Situation in Canada,” sermon preached 9 February 1924 and privately printed by a member of the congregation because of “insistent demand.” 105 “Why Bloor Street Should Enter Union,” Church Union Collection, box 35-733.

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Notes to pages 59–61

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106 “Address by Rev. Edmund H. Oliver ... at Complimentary Banquet Given by Sir James Woods, K.C.M.G.” (Toronto: Presbyterian Church-Union Movement Committee, [1923?]), 13–14, Church Union Collection, box 18-417. 107 “Three Thousand Congregations Already Adopt Forms of Union,” Manitoba Free Press, 22 March 1922, box 34-752. The article summarized the regional distribution of the 1,245 such pastoral charges as follows: Maritime, 30; Montreal and Ottawa, 29; Toronto and Kingston, 170; Hamilton and London, 1; Manitoba, 148; Saskatchewan, 431; Alberta, 297; B.C., 139. For a discussion of the local union movement, see Grant, The Canadian Experience of Church Union, 45–7. 108 N.K. Clifford, “Church Union and Western Canada,” in Prairie Spirit: Perspectives on the Heritage of the United Church of Canada in the West, ed. Dennis L. Butcher, et al. (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985), 283–95, disputes Oliver’s case for promoting church union. Whether the western local union churches were determined to form a united church regardless of what the negotiating denominations decided to do is debatable. When J.R. Johns, an active member of the Local Union Council, responded to a request from the United Church Archives for information on his involvement in church union, he was particularly ­anxious to correct what appeared to him to be a misunderstanding: “The one thing I am concerned [with?] is that you include in your record that the original meeting we held in Regina had no intention to form anything approaching an Organized movement separated from the negotiating churches (Mother Churches)” [emphasis in original]. See letter from J.R. Johns to Richard Ruggle, 9 March 1968, Church Union Collection, box 22-504. 109 J.R.P. Sclater, An Address on Church Union Delivered before the Congregation of Old St Andrew’s, Toronto (n.p.: 1924), 6. Church Union Collection, box 29-657. “New” St Andrew’s (King Street) opposed union. 110 Clifford, Resistance, 134, quotes a letter from Frances McCaskill that described Minnie Gordon as “the power behind the throne” in the Kingston branch. 111 Gordon to McLaren, 23 November 1924, Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 2 (correspondence). He recalled that during the 1905 meetings, he had pressed the matter about having the support of the whole church before uniting. 112 Draft of “The Present Situation in Regard to Church Union,” [April 1916?], Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 5-58.

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Notes to pages 61–74

113 Gordon to Mackinnon, 5 June 1924, Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 2 (correspondence). 114 Gordon to McLaren, 6 March 1924, Queen’s University Archives, Gordon Papers, box 2 (correspondence). 115 Clifford, Resistance, 59, notes that Mackay’s leadership of the resistance to church union was short-lived; by the time his wife died in 1912, leaving him with the care of a young son, he had already withdrawn from the fray. 116 Moir, 222. On the final congregational vote, see Clifford, Resistance, 165– 84; on the various denominational plebiscites, see Silcox, 173–77, 192–97, 479–81. 117 Kenneth H. Cousland, The Founding of Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto (Toronto: 1978), 45–55, discusses the impact of church union on both Knox College and Victoria University, a Methodist school with a faculty of theology. 118 For a study of missions, particularly as they related to indigenous peoples and non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, see Peter Bush, Western Challenge: The Presbyterian Church in Canada’s Mission on the Prairies and North, 1885–1925 ([Winnipeg]: Watson and Dwyer, 2000). Bush challenges what he calls the establishment view that church union was the most effective solution to meeting the needs of the new settlements. 119 Scott, “Church Union” and the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 122. 120 [First United Church, Victoria], “One Hundred Years: 1862–1962” [n.p.: 1962], 35, Congregational History Collection, b c Archives. 121 Osbert Morley Sanford, The Genius of the United Church (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1931), 6. 122 John Webster Grant, Divided Heritage: The Presbyterian Contribution to the United Church of Canada (Yorkton, s k : Gravelbooks, 2007), 201–2.

c h a p t e r t h re e    1 S.D. Chown, “Some Ideals and Responsibilities of the United Church of Canada,” Christian Union Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1926): 258–60.    2 Alfred J. Johnston, A Larger Fellowship (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1926), 111. The chapter on “The Church Organized for Its Task” includes a ­succinct description of the basic organizational structure of the United Church (114–23).    3 John Webster Grant, “Unauthoritative Reflections on the United Church’s Story,” Touchstone 12, no. 1 (1994): 6, claims that e&ss’s reports served “a function analogous to that of the Westminster Confession for Presbyterians and the Book of Common Prayer for Anglicans.”

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Notes to pages 74–6

331

  4 On the impact of bureaucratization on the ecumenical movement in the United States, see John Abernathy Smith, “Ecclesiastical Politics and the Founding of the Federal Council of Churches,” Church History 43, no. 3 (1974): 350–65. On its impact on denominational development, see Russell Richey, “Denominations and Denominationalism: An American Morphology,” in Reimagining Denominationalism: Interpretive Essays, ed. Robert Bruce Mullin and Russell Richey (New York: Oxford, 1994), 74–97; Mark Chaves and John R. Sutton, “Organizational Consolidation in American Protestant Denominations, 1890–1990,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43, no. 1 (2004): 51–66; William McGuire King, “Denominational Modernization and Religious Identity: The Case of the Methodist Episcopal Church,” Methodist History 20, no. 2 (1982): 75–89; and Milton J Coalter, et al., eds., The Organizational Revolution: Presbyterians and American Denominationalism (Louisville, ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), especially Louis B. Weeks, “The Incorporation of the Presbyterians” (37–54), Richard W. Reifsnyder, “Managing the Mission: Church Restructuring in the Twentieth Century” (55–95), and Craig Dykstra and James Hudnut-­ Beumler, “The National Organizational Structures of Protestant Denominations: An Invitation to a Conversation” (307–31).   5 For the Methodist experience with changes in the approach to temperance work, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “Condensation and Heart Religion: Canadian Methodists as Evangelicals, 1884–1925,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997) 93–6.   6 Gibson Winter, Religious Identity: A Study of Religious Organization (New York: MacMillan, 1968), 30–4.   7 Frank Langford’s submission to Reports and Agenda: First Annual Meeting of the Board of Christian Education (4–6 April 1933), 27, Board of Christian Education, Series I, u ca 89.079C, box 3-3.   8 Cynthia Comacchio, The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada, 1920 to 1950 (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 189–204, includes the United Church’s organizations in her discussion of the structured approach to recreation that flourished in this period. For a detailed description of personnel, programs for all ages, and their organizational structure, see Olive Sparling, “The United Church of Canada Board of Christian Education, 1925–71” (unpublished manuscript, 1979), u ca BX 9881 S75.   9 Lucille Marr, “Hierarchy, Gender and the Goals of the Religious Educators in the Canadian Presbyterian, Methodist and United Churches, 1919– 1939,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 20, no. 1 (1991): 68–70.

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Notes to pages 76–7

10 Margaret Prang, “‘The Girl God Would Have Me Be’: The Canadian Girls in Training, 1915–39,” Canadian Historical Review 66, no. 2 (1985): 157n12, describes Thomas as the most influential woman in the United Church at that time. Prang notes that her innovative approach to religious education included use of the Sharman method of Bible study, which proved effective in the yw ca as well as the Student Christian Movement (161–6). The Kingdom of God, a study booklet that she wrote, was used by many cg i t groups and church-run summer camps. 11 Ibid., 180–1. M. Lucille Marr, “Church Teen Clubs, Feminized Organizations? Tuxis Boys, Trail Rangers, and Canadian Girls in Training, 1919– 1939,” Historical Studies in Education 3–2 (1991): 259–60, finds that this approach was successful in attracting girls, but did not appeal as much to boys, who apparently still preferred the Scouts program (with no religious affiliation). 12 Ann Taves, “Feminization Revisited: Protestantism and Gender at the Turn of the Century,” in Women and Twentieth Century Protestantism, ed. Margaret Lambert Bendroth and Virginia Brereton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 307. For Coe’s influence on Canadian Methodism, see Phyllis D. Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1992), 98–102. 13 Marr, “Church Teen Clubs, Feminized Organizations?” 261. 14 “Report of the Lay Advisory Council,” r o p (1944), 148. If the Epworth League was established as a “Trojan horse” to re-masculinize the church, as suggested by Nancy Christie, “Young Men and the Creation of Civic Christianity in Urban Methodist Churches, 1880–1914,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2006, New Series, 17–1 (2006): 104–5, it apparently failed to retain the involvement of adolescents when they reached adulthood as had been hoped. 15 ao t s , A Guide for Programme Suggestions Handbook (Vancouver: National Association of aots Clubs, 1948), 1–3. 16 “Men’s Organizations,” r o p (1926), 110. 17 For details of the complex relationship between aots and other men’s groups in the United Church, see the introduction to the finding aid (F.A. 293) to the aots collection, u ca. 18 Jean Gordon Forbes, Wide Windows: The Story of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: The Woman’s Missionary Society, 1951), 114–15. 19 Forbes, Wide Windows, 116. As a case in point, Michael Owen, “‘Lighting the Pathways for New Canadians: Methodist and United Church wms

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20

21 22

23 24

25

26 27

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Notes to pages 77–9

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Missions in Eastern Alberta, 1904–1940,” in Standing on New Ground: Women in Alberta, ed. Catherine Anne Cavanaugh and R.R. Warne (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1993), 1–18, examines wms missions with Ukrainians. Donna Sinclair, Crossing Worlds: The Story of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1992), 67–70, describes the intergenerational networking. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1934), 380. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1938), 374, indicates that the Dominion Board reaffirmed the “Aim and Object of the Society” in 1937 in response to the challenge to “re-think missions.” The same list of objectives prefaced subsequent reports to General Council until the wms’s last report in 1960. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1936), 439. Marilyn Färdig Whiteley, “Drawing the Circles: Recruitment and Nurture in Women’s Church Organizations,” paper presented to the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, 8 June 1993, compares how the two groups and their successor (United Church Women) functioned in two Ontario churches between 1925 and 1965. It illustrates the dynamics of age-grouping, intergenerational connections, and “fellowship” for groups in different congregational settings (one rural, the other urban). F.E. Runnals, The History of the Knox United Church, Prince George, B.C. (n.p., 1945), 84, and W. O’Neill, ed., Knox Presbyterian, 1912–1925, Knox United, 1925–1972 (Parksville, bc: n.d.), 3, both in the Congregational History Collection, British Columbia Conference of the United Church of Canada Archives. Quoted in Sinclair, 3. On the w m s ’s fundraising success, see ibid., 97–110. Robert A. Wright, A World Mission: Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order (Kingston and Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1991), 112, notes the dominance of male leadership at the national level in Canada, despite a high percentage of women missionaries, in comparison to Britain where women had positional leadership. For the first board structure and the officers appointed by the General Council in 1926, see Yearbook (1927), 5. The resemblance to the committees and executive members of the 1924 Inter-Church Advisory Council illustrates the importance of the ecumenical networks that operated before church union: at least twelve of the sixteen secretaries listed in the United Church yearbook for 1927 had prior experience with the Inter-Church

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29

30

31

32

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Notes to pages 79–80

movement, generally chairing a committee in the same area of responsibility. On the work of the Inter-Church Forward Movement, see Airhart, “Condensation,” 97–105. Robert T. Handy, “Reflections on the Federal Council of Churches, the United Church of Canada, and the Social Gospel in the 1930s,” Toronto Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1996): 179–88, notes the similarities between their aims and purposes, as well as the involvement of a number of senior United Church leaders in its work. Historians and theologians are far from agreed on the significance of the Edinburgh Conference. For example, critic John Kent, The Unacceptable Face of the Church: The Modern Church in the Eyes of the Historian (London: s cm , 1987), 203, sees Edinburgh as the beginning of an organizational quest for Christian unity that had already run out of steam by the time the Faith and Order Commission of the recently formed World Council of Churches met at Lund in 1952. John Webster Grant, The Ship under the Cross: A Survey of the Ecumenical Movement (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1960), 36–7, assesses it more positively as “a critical point at which the ongoing life of the church was dramatically intersected by a new impulse of the Spirit.” Brian Stanley, World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids, m i : Eerdmans, 2009), 1–17, begins his comprehensive study of the event and its aftermath with an overview of interpretations. A number of church union supporters from Canada attended the conference, including Newton Wesley Rowell, who went as a Methodist delegate and served as a member of the Continuation Committee the following year. Dana Robert, “The First Globalization: The Internationalization of the Protestant Missionary Movement between the World Wars,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 26, no. 2 (2002): 50. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), explores the implications of self-­ determination for the treaty negotiations and the consequences of the ­lingering resentment over its terms. While the power shifts in AngloAmerican relations that were evident at Paris were important for Canada’s national aspirations, the hostility roused in China, Japan, and Korea is worth noting (306–44); the unresolved tensions later created a crisis for United Church missions. The ten articles were published between 4 April and 27 June 1928. Wallace also left detailed notes of the proceedings, as well as reports and minutes obtained at the conference, in his personal papers (uc a ).

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Notes to pages 80–3

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34 Edward Wilson Wallace, “The Pattern on the Mount,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 5, no. 4 (1928): 313. 35 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Going to Jerusalem,” New Outlook, 4 April 1928, 26. 36 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Who Is Sufficient for These Things?” New Outlook, 16 May 1928, 5, 7. 37 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Workers Together with God: The Christian Message in Action,” New Outlook, 30 May 1928, 8, 16. 38 Wallace, “The Pattern on the Mount,” 315. 39 Jerald D. Gort, “Jerusalem 1928: Mission, Kingdom and Church,” International Review of Mission 67, no. 3 (1978): 287–90. Concerns were further heightened by the provocative recommendations of “the laymen’s report” that appeared as Re-Thinking Missions in 1932. See James Alan Patterson, “The Loss of a Protestant Missionary Consensus: Foreign Missions and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Conflict,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880– 1980, ed. Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 84–91. 40 Daniel Fleming, Whither Bound in Missions (New York: Association Press, 1925), 47, had urged readers to discard the missionary maps that showed “sending” and “receiving” countries. Instead he pictured the West as part of the “non-Christian world,” one that was “a deeper black because it has had access to Christ so long.” 41 Grant Wacker, “Second Thoughts on the Great Commission: Liberal Protestants and Foreign Missions,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880–1980, 291. 42 Wright, 168–9. 43 Ibid., 168. 44 Wallace’s address to the General Council was published as “The World Situation as It Confronts the Church Today,” New Outlook, 19 October 1932, 968. 45 For a further discussion of the contested term “evangelical,” including its use in the “Evangelism” report, see chapter 4 below. “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 256, makes explicit reference to the influence of the Jerusalem meeting. 46 Jesse H. Arnup, A New Church Faces a New World (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1937), 96. 47 Ibid., 77. 48 N.K. Clifford, “His Dominion: A Vision in Crisis,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 2, no. 4 (1973): 315–36, argues that the p ­ ersistence of

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Notes to page 83

regional and ethnic loyalties among immigrants eroded the nationalist assumptions of Christian Canada in the decades after Confederation. While that may be so, “His Dominion” still resonated with the United Church’s founders before and after union. For example, William Gunn, secretary of the Congregational Missionary Society (1907–25) and moderator (1928–30), chose His Dominion as the title for his study of missions in 1917. The phrase also appears in the title of the overview of wms and home missions work by E.H. Oliver, His Dominion of Canada: A Study of the Background, Development and Challenge of the Missions of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1932). Neither work connects the mission theme to the theology of the social gospel, although the importance of social service is evident for both authors. 49 Ernest Thomas, “Shall We Recover a Lost God?” New Outlook, 8 February 1933, 129. He commended the Jerusalem meeting as going beyond the later and more liberal “Laymen’s Commission” (formally known a Re-Thinking Missions) “in its insistence of a God whose character is such as we see in Jesus Christ.” In “The Spirit of the Modern Church,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 7, no. 2 (1930): 86–7, Thomas credited the Jerusalem meeting with challenging “the whole educational programme of our Western Christendom on the ground that we have relied mainly on indoctrination and have departed from the programme of Jesus, so far as we have so done.” His article included extensive extracts from its reports. 50 See Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914–28 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 313–46, on connections between internationalism and social reform (especially pacifism). Allen observes that internationalism gained momentum in the years when some of the earlier expressions of the social gospel, notably prohibition, were dissipating (342). For analysis of similar links in the United States, see James Alan Patterson, “The Kingdom and the Great Commission: Social Gospel Impulses and American Protestant Missionary Leaders,” Fides et Historia 25, no. 1 (1993): 48–61. 51 R.J. Wilson, Church Union in Canada after Three Years (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1929), illustrates the convergence. A section on “The Task of the United Church” (32–40) highlighted the importance of home missions for dealing with the “problem” of the New Canadian. A discussion of “The Social Order” (40–4) followed, which presented the ­“individual” gospel as incomplete and made specific reference to the Jerusalem meeting (40).

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Notes to pages 84–6

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52 [R.J. Wilson], Two Years’ Progress in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church of Canada Bureau of Literature and Information, 1928), 13. 53 Arnup, 85. 54 Ibid., 93. 55 Ibid., 153–4. 56 Ibid., 151–2. 57 Ibid., 155, citing the report of a joint commission of the Home Mission Board and the w m s . 58 Ibid., 158–62. 59 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1932), 363, is typical in praising students who are training “for service among their own people as teachers or doctors and nurses.” 60 Mrs J. Erle Jones, “Canada, the Great Home Mission Field,” Missionary Monthly, August 1932, 352. 61 “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1938), 335–6 (emphasis in original). 62 J.I. MacKay, The World in Canada (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1938), 32–3, 203. The book provides a detailed description of the United Church’s work with indigenous peoples and immigrants just prior to the Second World War. 63 Allen, 123. 64 For suggestive work along these lines, see Eleanor J. Stebner, “More than Maternal Feminists and Good Samaritans: Women and the Social Gospel in Canada,” in Gender and the Social Gospel, ed. Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De Swarte Gifford (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 53–67, which deals mainly with pre-union social reform. The connections between evangelical feminism, missionary enthusiasm, and social reform are explored in Gayle I. Thrift, “Proscribed Piety: Woman’s Missionary Societies in Alberta, 1918–1939” (master’s thesis, University of Calgary, 1998). 65 William McGuire King, “An Enthusiasm for Humanity: The Social Emphasis in Religion and Its Accommodation in Protestant Theology,” in Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life, ed. Michael J. Lacey (New York: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Cambridge University Press, 1989), 60–1, notes the internationalist perspective of liberal Protestantism and its disillusionment with nationalism. 66 “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” r o p (1936), 291, prepared by a joint committee appointed in 1935 by the Board of Foreign Missions and the w m s . 67 Arnup, 240–3.

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Notes to pages 86–9

68 Daniel Fleming, “The World Task of the Church,” in The Church through Half a Century: Essays in Honor of William Adams Brown, ed. Samuel McCrea Cavert and Henry Pitney Van Duson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 322–3, observed that early missionaries were blind to their own Anglo-Saxon nationalism, and were now being forced by nationalistic trends “to inquire whether they have been too much presenting Jesus Christ as one whose significance has been thoroughly worked out in our Western creeds, theologies and social orders, rather than as one whose wondrous personality may break through in new directions not yet envisaged by the West.” 69 For a response to the drastic cuts proposed, see “The Voice of the Fields: What the Missionaries Think of the Proposed Cut” prepared by the Board of Foreign Missions [1935]; copy in George Campbell Pidgeon Papers, uc a , box 15-275. 70 “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” r o p (1936), 241–6. 71 The Jerusalem meeting is mentioned immediately after reference to “new lines of approach” in the “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” and its key assumptions are discussed throughout the report. It is striking that no reference is made to the more radical approach of “the laymen’s report.” This is not for lack of awareness of the study; see Ruth Brouwer, Modern Women Modernizing Men: The Changing Missions of Three Professional Women in Asia and Africa (Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2002), 26–30, for a discussion of the reception of Re-Thinking Missions in Canada. 72 Arnup, 229–31, 236. 73 Doug Owram, The Government Generation: Canadian Intellectuals and the State, 1900–1925 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 107–34. 74 F.N. Stapleford, “The Relation of the Church to Social Work,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 2, no. 1 (1925): 61–2. 75 Stapleford, 63, 68–70. 76 Time Marches On (e& s s Annual Report, 1935), 33. 77 For instance, D.N. McLachlan’s report for Thy Will Be Done (e&ss Annual Report, 1927), 18, urged vigilance in “invoking the coercive power” of the state to further the church’s objectives. 78 Allen, 280–3, describes Thomas’s strategy and the rifts it created with e & s s ’s associate secretary Hugh Dobson in particular. 79 D.L. Ritchie, “The Church in Public Life,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 2 (1926): 177–9. 80 D.L. McLachlan, “Must the Church Be Silent?” Western Recorder, August 1933, 5. For the Christian socialist position, see R.B.Y. Scott, “What Has

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Notes to pages 90–3

339

Christianity to Say on Social and Economic Questions?” New Outlook, 11 April 1934, 267, responding to the negative coverage of church pronouncements on social issues in the secular press. 81 “The Church and the Party,” Saturday Night, 17 June 1933, 1. 82 “Unchangeable Doctrine,” Saturday Night, 24 June 1933, 1. 83 “Report of the Commission on Christianizing the Social Order” (hereafter “Christianizing the Social Order”), r o p (1934), 235. For a different ­interpretation of the report, see David Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 240–8. 84 Robert A. Falconer, Religion on My Life’s Road (Houston: Rice Institute, 1938), 106. 85 James G. Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 85. 86 “Christianizing the Social Order,” 244–6. 87 Ibid., 247. 88 Ibid., 241. 89 Falconer, Religion, 106–7. 90 Gwen R.P. Norman, Grace Unfailing: The Radical Mind and the Beloved Community of Richard Roberts (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1998), 186. 91 Richard Roberts, The Contemporary Christ (New York: Macmillan Company, 1938), 135–6. 92 Session of St Marys United Church, A Critical Comment on a Pamphlet Issued by the General Council of The United Church and Entitled “Christianizing the Social Order” (n.p., n.d.), 2–5. 93 “Christianizing the Social Order,” 235. 94 Ibid., 247–8. The group had pressed the commission, without success, to make more explicit statements about the problems of capitalism and the “almost unlimited pursuit of private gain.” The similarities between their proposals for restructuring the economy on a Christian basis and the policies of the newly formed ccf party left Christian socialist sympathizers vulnerable to the charge that they had crossed the line between principles and partisanship. 95 Kenneth Norrie and Douglas Owram, A History of the Canadian Economy (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), 491–4. 96 John Herd Thompson and Allan Seager, Canada 1922–39: Decades of Discord (Toronto: McClelland and Stuart, 1985), 262–6. 97 Thompson and Seager, 274.

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Notes to pages 94–6

98 Norrie and Owram, 498–502. On King’s ambivalence to expanding social programs, see Thompson and Seager, 273–81. Owram, Government Generation, 180, notes the irony in Bennett’s poor relationship with the reform-minded intellectual community since his New Deal attempted to expand the role of the state in systematic social planning along the lines it had proposed.   99 Walter T. Brown and J.R. Mutchmor to Newton Wesley Rowell, 12 April 1938, a letter that accompanied “A Brief on Social Security by a Commission on Economic and Social Research ... Presented to the Royal Com­ mission on Dominion-Provincial Relations,” April 1938, Commission on Economic and Social Research, u ca 82.032C, box 1-3. 100 “A Brief on Social Security by a Commission on Economic and Social Research,” 12, box 1-3. 101 Ted Reeve, Claiming the Social Passion: The Role of the United Church in Creating a Culture of Social Well-Being in Canadian Society (Toronto: Moderator’s Consultation on Faith and the Economy, 1999), discusses the United Church’s involvement in promoting social welfare policies, including the “Christianizing the Social Order” report (54–68) and the Rowell Commission brief (75–83). 102 Roger Hutchinson, “The Public Faith of a Democratic Socialist,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 21, no. 2 (1986): 34. 103 Michael Bliss, A Canadian Millionaire (Toronto: Macmillan Company, 1978), 454. 104 Winter, 40–1, describes the problems that surface when pastoral and agency orientations work at cross-purposes rather than complementarily, identifying the agency’s takeover of the religious enterprise as a danger confronting many Protestant churches. 105 Bliss, 454–5. Ironically, Flavelle’s assessment is remarkably similar to the complaint of Presbyterian opponents of church union in both Canada and the United States. James H. Moorhead, “Presbyterians and the Mystique of Organizational Efficiency, 1870–1936,” in Reimagining Denominationalism, 277–81, points out that centralization was resisted by Machen and other conservatives in the Presbyterian church in the United States, and notes the tensions between national and local concerns. 106 “New United Church Comes into Being,” Toronto Mail, 11 June 1925 [clipping], United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series I, uc a 83.063C, box 36-773, reporting on Ritchie’s address to the General Council. 107 D.L. Ritchie, “The Fourth 10th of June,” New Outlook, 6 June 1928, 8.

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Notes to pages 96–100

341

108 Salem G. Bland, “The Most Momentous Issue of the Coming Council,” New Outlook, 21 September 1932, 872. 109 J.W.A. Nicholson, “The Church’s Role,” in Towards the Christian Revolution, ed. R.B.Y. Scott and Gregory Vlastos (Chicago: Willet, Clark and Company, 1936), 177. 110 Richard Roberts, “The Moderator’s Mission,” New Outlook, 31 October 1934, 954. 111 Roberts, The Contemporary Christ, 47–8, 119–20. 112 [R.J. Wilson], Two Years’ Progress, 9. 113 Marshall, 230–3, discusses the United Church’s dire financial situation, arguing that it stemmed from the economic crisis as well as its own spiritual depression. 114 “Report of the Special Committee on Policy,” 238. 115 Ian McKay Manson, “‘Fighting the Good Fight’: Salvation, Social Reform, and Service in the United Church of Canada’s Board of Evangelism and Social Service” (ThD diss., Victoria University, 1999), 154–81, describes the social services supported by e& s s , including “redemptive” homes, maternity homes, and reform schools for boys and girls. 116 McLachlan, Time Marches On, 30. 117 “The Largest Class since Church Union,” Missionary Monthly, July 1946, 300. Mary Anne MacFarland, “Faithful and Courageous Handmaidens: Deaconesses in the United Church of Canada, 1925–1945,” in Changing Roles of Women within the Christian Church in Canada, ed. Elizabeth Gillan Muir and Marilyn Färdig Whiteley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 248–55, discusses their role as missionaries, noting that after the Second World War opportunities for paid employment for women shifted to Christian education in congregations. 118 Katharine B. Hockin, “My Pilgrimage in Mission,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 12, no. 1 (1988): 26. 119 Arnup, 253. 120 Eleanor J. Stebner, “Young Man Knowles: Christianity, Politics, and the ‘Making of a Better World,’” in Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 221–32. 121 Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 226. 122 Richard Roberts, For the Kingdom of God (London: sc m Press, 1933), 82–3. 123 Norman, 221.

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Notes to pages 100–3

124 The generational shift bears a striking resemblance to the cycles of change described in William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 69–96; in this case the “Missionary” generation (an Idealist type) was succeeded by the “Lost” generation (a Reactive type) during a ­“crisis era.” 125 Richard Roberts to Don MacVicar, 20 February 1941, Richard Roberts Papers, uc a, box 1-14. When Arnup retired in 1952 he had been in national executive positions since 1913. Mutchmor was to remain as ­secretary of e& s s until 1962, with his own retirement coming in 1964. 126 Manson, 8. 127 Ernest Thomas, Christian Life in a Changing World (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1937), 61–3.

c ha p t e r f o u r    1 George Campbell Pidgeon, “The City without Walls,” New Outlook, 16 June 1926, 7, 28. D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 180, remarks that the unity of evangelical Protestantism in Britain and the United States was shattered by the 1920s, with divisions between conservatives and liberals sometimes so sharp that one side did not consider the other side as Christian, let alone evangelical. The church union controversy seems to have fueled a similar response to the United Church, with Machen and others providing sparks.   2 e & s s published a number of pamphlets that challenged apocalyptic and premillennial interpretations of the Kingdom; see Andrew Stewart, The Millennial Reign of Christ (n.d.); Ernest Thomas, Why Christians Expect the Reign of Christ (1936); Ernest Thomas, Waiting for the Lord’s Return (1936); and R.B.Y. Scott, The Gospel of the Kingdom (Montreal: Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, 1936).    3 The United Church was more ‘settled’ than the liberal Protestants ­featured in Leigh Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005); its leaders were also attempting to straddle the developing divide described in Jean Miller Schmidt, Souls or the Social Order: The TwoParty System in American Protestantism (Brooklyn, ny: Carlson, 1991). See Bebbington, 210–19, for a nicely nuanced analysis of conservative and liberal approaches to social reform among evangelical Protestants in Britain.

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Notes to pages 103–7

343

  4 A.B. McKillop, Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791–1951 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 406.   5 Pidgeon, “The Message and Mission of the United Church of Canada,” 23–4.   6 Talcott Parsons, “Christianity in a Modern Industrial Society,” in Sociological Theory, Values, and Sociocultural Change: Essays in Honor of Pitirim A. Sorokin, ed. Edward A. Tiryakian (Glencoe, il: Free Press, 1963), 36–7, 52–4. “Inner-worldly” piety bears a striking family resemblance to Nancy Ammerman’s “Golden Rule Christians”: lay liberals who hope to make the world a bit better through donations and volunteer activities, rather than overturning the political system; see “Golden Rule Christianity: Lived Religion in the American Mainstream,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton, n j: Princeton University Press, 1997), 203–6.   7 Phyllis D. Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Methodism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1992), especially chapter 4.   8 William McGuire King, “An Enthusiasm for Humanity: The Social Emphasis in Religion and Its Accommodation in Protestant Theology,” in Religion and Twentieth-Century American Intellectual Life, ed. Michael J. Lacy (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Cambridge University Press, 1989), 55, 57–8.   9 Edmund Oliver, The Social Achievement of the Christian Church (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada, 1930), 178–9. On the developing split among evangelical Protestants over what conversion entailed, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “‘What Must I Do to Be Saved?’: Two Paths to Evangelical Conversion in Late Victorian Canada,” Church History 59, no. 3 (1990): 372–85. 10 Oliver, 172. 11 J.S. Woodsworth, “Thy Kingdom Come,” Grain Grower’s Guide 30 (June 1915), in Malcolm Ross, ed., Our Sense of Identity: A Book of Canadian Essays (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954), 293. 12 “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 252–5. 13 J.R.P. Sclater, Modernist Fundamentalism (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1926), 23. The foreword notes that the chapters were adapted from a series of sermons that were later published in the New Outlook, an indication that this was considered a timely topic. 14 R.J. Wilson [undated report], United Church of Canada Church Union Collection, Series 1, u ca 83.063C, box 23-509. 15 John S. Moir, Enduring Witness: A History of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 3rd ed. (Burlington, on : Eagle Press, [2004?]), 234. Moir says

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Notes to pages 107–8

that Machen compared modernists to Judas; the published text of the ­sermon associates them with “the Judaizers” (a heresy unrelated to Judas) along with Gnostics and Pelagians. See J. Gresham Machen, “The Mission of the Church,” accessed 7 August 2012, www.pcahistory. org / findingaids / machen / mission.html. 16 “The ‘Fundamentalists,’” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 3 (1926): 170. 17 “True Fundamentalism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 3 (1926): 170–1. 18 D.L. McLachlan’s annual report in He Must Reign (e&ss Annual Report, 1928), 19–20. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 224–43, find evidence of a revival of personal religion in the 1930s, yet even the Oxford Group was not simply a return to mass meetings on the scale of earlier decades. 19 “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 257. 20 William S. Kervin, “Worship on the Way: The Dialectic of United Church Worship,” in The United Church of Canada: A History, ed. Don Schweitzer (Waterloo, on : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 188– 94, discusses the importance of Forms of Service and other liturgical resources in shaping the ethos of worship. 21 N. Keith Clifford, “No Easy Process: Alexander MacMillan and the Birth of the Hymnary,” Touchstone 8, no. 1 (January 1990): 42–3. On the “Presbyterian preponderance” of influence, see Thomas Harding and Bruce Harding, Patterns of Worship in the United Church of Canada, 1925–1960 (Toronto: Evensong, 1995), 39–41. 22 S.P. Rose, “The Making of a Hymn-Book,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 7, no. 4 (1930): 309, 311. 23 For an account of the use of service books in the United Church, see Harding and Harding, especially chapter 3. On the early liturgical ­development of the United Church, see William S. Kervin, “Forms of Service (1926): The Liturgical Ethos of the United Church of Canada,” Toronto Journal of Theology 17, no. 2 (2001): 215–29. Kervin notes that Presbyterian forms outnumbered Methodist sources by a ratio of 3 to 1 (218). Combined with Macmillan’s influence on the hymn book committee, it is not surprising that United Church worship developed a decidedly Presbyterian tone that was to last until the revolution of the 1960s. 24 J.A. Davidson cited in Harding and Harding, 121.

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Notes to pages 108–11

345

25 G. Campbell Wadsworth, “The United Church Communion Rite of 1932: An Appreciation and Apologia,” Canadian Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1966): 110. On the use of the Book of Common Order, see David R. Newman, “Worship in the United Church of Canada,” Worship 53 (1979): 538–48 and W. Morrison Kelly, “Fifty Years of Worship in the United Church,” Gathering (Advent / Christmas / Epiphany Study Papers, 1985): 1–6. 26 Harding and Harding, 97–102. 27 Osbert Morley Sanford, The Genius of the United Church (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1931), 11. 28 Sanford, 12–19. 29 A.G. Reynolds, For the Land’s Sake (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, [1944?]), 61, 63. 30 R. Edis Fairbairn, “Worship As a Substitute,” u c o , 14 September 1940, 15. 31 W.T. Brown, “The Meaning of Worship,” Baccalaureate Sermon: Victoria University and Union Theological College, 14 April 1928, 6. For a discussion of emotion as essential yet dangerous, see “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 259–60. On changes in what was deemed appropriate emotional expression prior to union, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “Condensation and Heart Religion: Canadian Methodists as Evangelicals, 1884–1925,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 99. 32 “The Church and Industry,” r o p (1932), 288–9. 33 Michiel Horn, The Great Depression of the 1930s in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1984), 9–14. 34 For an analysis of liberal theology between the wars, including a discussion of its challengers, see Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville, k y: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 435–521. For a succinct discussion of the “liberal era” of American Protestantism between 1875 and 1935, see William McGuire King, “Liberalism,” in The Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (New York: Scribner, 1988), 2:1129–45. Sydney Ahlstrom, “Continental Influence on American Christian Thought since World War I,” in Theological Themes in the American Protestant World, vol. 4 of Modern American Protestantism and Its World, ed. Martin E. Marty (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1992), 238–9, describes its central themes and notes that stagnancy was evident by 1920: “With the possible exception of the great religious depression of the Revolutionary epoch (1770–1800), there

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Notes to pages 111–13

was probably never a time in American history when less heed was paid to the message of the churches. At no time did it so deserve to be ignored.” 35 Heather A. Warren, Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 50–3. On Barth’s influence, see Gary Dorrien, Theology without Weapons: The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 14–80. Ahlstrom, “Continental Influence,” 244–5, sees 1934 as a critical year with the ­publication of Barth’s sermons in English; Edwin Lewis’s “Christian Manifesto”; Walter Marshall Horton’s Realistic Theology; and Niebuhr’s Reflections on the End of an Era as well as his lectures that came out a year later as An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. See also Dennis N. Voskuil, “America Encounters Karl Barth,” in Theological Themes in the American Protestant World, 253–66. He notes that, although Barth’s Commentary on Romans was published in 1919, the shockwaves of this “bombshell” took longer to reach North America. By then the continent was in the throes of the Depression and ready to take note of his message. 36 “A Significant Student Conference,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 4 (1931): 271–2. The editorial also expressed regret that the sv m had become a “separate fellowship,” and described them as “mere traditionists” [sic], while applauding the sc m event as manifesting a “vigorous and vital evangelical form without the graver defects which characterize the evangelical party.” For Visser ’t Hooft’s presentation of the theological shift see “An Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 1 (1931): 37–51. 37 W.A. Visser ’t Hooft, “A Farewell to the Social Gospel,” Student World 26, no. 3 (1933): 275–6. 38 John C. Bennett, “After Liberalism – What?” Christian Century, 8 November 1933, 1403–4. 39 Vlastos’s letter is cited in Warren, 61. 40 Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935), 169. Chapter 5 of this work displays Niebuhr’s biting critique of liberalism. Daniel F. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey: An American Odyssey (Albany: State University of New York, 1993), 196ff., provides an excellent summary of Niebuhr’s critique of the liberal creed. 41 Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, 177–9. 42 King, “An Enthusiasm for Humanity,” 75. 43 Henry Nelson Wieman, Methods of Private Religious Living (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 116.

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44 Ibid., 17–18. 45 Ibid., 63. 46 John Line, “The New Physics and the Religious View of the World,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 7, no. 1 (1930): 6–17, presents a positive assessment of new scientific developments, as do H.F. Leach, “The New Physics and the Idea of God,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 6, no. 5 (1929): 326–34, and Richard Roberts, The Christian God (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 82–6. All three mention the influence of Eddington and Whitehead. 47 Robert A. Falconer, “Difficulties for Religion in an Age of Science,” Religious Education 23, no. 4 (1928): 281–2. 48 Edward Wilson Wallace, “Going to Jerusalem,” New Outlook, 4 April 1928, 26. He left the conference convinced that “secular civilization” was “coming to be the great opponent in all lands” and a common challenge to all Christians. Samuel McCrae Cavert, The American Churches in the Ecumenical Movement, 1900–1968 (New York: Association Press, 1968), 134, confirms that assessment of the impact of Jones’s paper, crediting his presentation at the Jerusalem meeting in 1928 for an idea “little recognized in previous missionary gatherings”: that secularism, rather than other religions, had become Christianity’s main competitor. 49 Rice, 55. See John Dewey, “Humanist Manifesto,” in American Christianity, ed. H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), 2:248–53. 50 On the conflict over naturalism (including humanism) and liberal theology, see Rice, esp. 93–215. 51 H. Shelton Smith, “Is Religious Naturalism Enough?” Religious Education 31, no. 2 (1936): 107. 52 John Baillie, “The Predicament of Humanism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 109, 112–15. 53 John Line, “How Humanism Came and What It Is,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 98–108, and Walter T. Brown, “Humanism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 125–34. 54 My survey of the issues of the Federal Council Bulletin (f c b ) in the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School library suggests that the United Church’s ecumenical partners in the Federal Council of Churches were contending with similar problems. As illustrations, see Francis J. McConnell, “The Social Task of the Church in America,” f c b , March– April 1925, 13–14; S. Parker Cadman, “The Returning Emphasis on the Inner Life,” f c b , September–October 1926, 11; Reinhold Niebuhr, “Can

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Notes to pages 115–17

Religion Solve Social Problems,” f c b , March 1927, 11–12; “When Mysticism and Social Service Meet,” f c b , November 1927, 3; “Evangelism – Individual and Social,” f c b , June 1928, 1–2; “A FullOrbed Evangelism,” f c b , June 1930, 1–2; “Beyond Humanism,” f c b , November 1930, 5; Luther Weigle, “The New Paganism and the Coming Revival,” f c b , April 1931, 6–7; Rufus M. Jones, “The First Requisite for a Better World,” f c b , October 1931, 6; Robert Speer, “The Meaning of the Gospel for the Individual Today” f c b , February 1932, 7; “Salvation: Individual and Social,” f c b , May 1935, 3; “The Recovery of Evangelism,” f c b , September 1936, 3. 55 “Evangelism,” r o p (1934), 255–6, 262. 56 D.N. McLachlan’s report in Revive Thy Work (e&ss Annual Report, 1930), 17–18. 57 Richard Roberts, For the Kingdom of God (London: sc m Press, 1933), 15–17. 58 Richard Roberts, The Spirit of God and the Faith of Today (Chicago: Willett, Clark and Colby, 1930), 120–3. 59 John Herd Thompson and Allan Seager, Canada 1922–39: Decades of Discord (Toronto: McClelland and Stuart, 1985), 183–4. 60 Mary Vipond, The Mass Media in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1989), 21–33. 61 Charles W. Gilkey, “Protestant Preaching,” in The Church through Half a Century: Essays in Honor of William Adams Brown, ed. Samuel McCrea Cavert and Henry Pitney Van Dusen (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 320. 62 Richard Roberts, The Contemporary Christ (New York: Macmillan Company, 1938), 104, observed that people had “fallen into a way of accepting the good of life as a matter of course, even if not as a matter of right; and it hardly occurs to us to give thanks; and the giving of thanks is the key to worship.” 63 For an astute analysis of the Oxford Group movement’s blending of old and new and its shift to political concerns, see Kevin Kee, Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 96–142. For a sampling of the mixed reaction of United Church ministers to the “groupers,” see A.D. Miller, “The Movement through Friendly but Open Eyes,” (n.d.), Alfred Dennis Miller Papers, u ca, box 1-14; The Committee of Thirty, The Challenge of the Oxford Group Movement: An Attempt at Appraisal (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1933); Richard Roberts, “The Oxford Group,”

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64

65

66

67

Notes to pages 117–18

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Christian Century, 1 February 1933, 147–9; Ernest Thomas, “How to Make the Oxford Group Fruitful,” Western Recorder, January 1933, 4–5; Ernest Thomas, “The Oxford Group: Second Phase,” Western Recorder, March 1933, 4–5; and Claris Edwin Silcox, “The Oxford Groups in Canada,” Christian Century, 12 September 1934, 1137–40. David Plaxton, “A Whole Gospel for a Whole Nation” (PhD diss., Queen’s University, 1997), 108–13, notes that most observers viewed the movement as an attempt to recover evangelical piety because of its emphasis on experience. Christie and Gauvreau, A Full-Orbed Christianity, 224, suggest that the Oxford Group avoided references to basic evangelical doctrine because of the antipathy of those subscribing to social Christianity. On the other hand, Niebuhr, Interpretation, 177–8, described the Oxford Group as an expression of liberal Christianity. His assessment was scathing: “The Buchman movement, supposedly a revitalization of Christianity but in reality the final and most absurd expression of the romantic presuppositions of liberal Christianity, has undertaken to solve all the problems of modern economics and politics by persuading individuals to live in terms of ‘absolute honesty’ and ‘absolute love.’” David Marshall, Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 226–7, sees the Oxford Group movement as further evidence of the spiritual depression that Canadian Protestantism was experiencing. For example, the Joint Committee suggested studies on the topic of “God in National and Personal Life,” (Easter 1934), Pidgeon Papers, box 9-178. For the relationship of the Oxford Group to the Joint Committee, see Phyllis D. Airhart, “Christian Socialism and the Legacy of Revivalism in the 1930s,” in A Long and Faithful March: ‘Towards the Christian Revolution,’ 1930s / 1980s, ed. Harold Wells and Roger Hutchinson (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1989), 35–7, and Plaxton, chapter 4. Pidgeon chaired the Joint Committee, but continued to support the Oxford Group even after its meetings became a bone of contention in his own denomination. Gwen R.P. Norman, Grace Unfailing: The Radical Mind and the Beloved Community of Richard Roberts (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1998), 222–4. Ian Manson, “Religious Revival and Social Transformation: George Pidgeon and the United Church of Canada in the 1930s,” Toronto Journal of Theology 12, no. 2 (1996): 216–20.

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Notes to pages 118–21

68 J.W.A. Nicholson, “Realism in Religion: Giving the Prayer-Wheel Another Turn,” u c o , 21 March 1934, 206–7. 69 For a discussion of the fcs o’s position in relation to the United Church’s social message, see Roger Hutchinson, “The Fellowship for a Christian Social Order: A Social Ethical Analysis of a Christian Socialist Movement” (ThD diss., Victoria University, 1975), 26–70. 70 Eugene Forsey, “A New Economic Order,” in Towards the Christian Revolution, ed. R.B.Y. Scott and Gregory Vlastos (Chicago: Willet, Clark and Company, 1936), 101–2. 71 John Line, “The Fundamental Unity of Spiritual and Religious Values,” Address to the Toronto Ministerial Association, 5 January 1931, 5, John Line Papers, u ca, box 1-2. 72 Line, “The Theological Principles,” in Towards the Christian Revolution, 33. 73 Ibid., 32. 74 John Line, “Conditions of Religious Renewal,” Christian Century, 3 June 1936, 800, 802. 75 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Towards a Christian Revolution,” Radical Religion 2, no. 1 (1937): 42–4. 76 Gordon A. Sisco, “[Review of] Towards the Christian Revolution,” New Outlook, 19 February 1937, 160–1. 77 For Roberts’s response to the crisis in liberalism, see Michael Bourgeois, “Hope, History and Redemption in the Theology of Richard Roberts (1874–1945),” Toronto Journal of Theology 19, no. 2 (2003): 157–72. 78 Richard Roberts, The New Man and the Divine Society: A Study in Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 16–17. 79 Richard Roberts, “In Praise of Humanism,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 8, no. 2 (1931): 122–4. He found in process theology a tool for preserving his understanding of God as both transcendent and immanent, and Christ as both divine and human; see Roberts, The Christian God, 82–6, and The Spirit of God and the Faith of Today, 144–5. 80 Richard Roberts, [Moderator’s Final Address to General Council in 1936], Roberts Papers, box 3-84, 9–10. 81 Roberts, The Contemporary Christ, 44. 82 Ibid., 77. 83 Ibid., 124–5. 84 Clashes between the first chair and secretary of the commission (Queen’s professor J.M. Shaw and e& s s ’s Ernest Thomas) led to their replacement in 1938 by Richard Davidson, (principal of Emmanuel College) and J.R. Mutchmor (recently appointed as secretary of e&ss). For an analysis of

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85

86

87

88

89 90

Notes to pages 121–2

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the membership and work of the Commission, see Ian McKay Manson, “‘Fighting the Good Fight’: Salvation, Social Reform, and Service in the United Church of Canada’s Board of Evangelism and Social Service” (ThD diss., Victoria University, 1999), 194–201, which includes a comparison of the draft submitted by Ernest Thomas (“Statement A”) with one prepared by John Line and his Emmanuel colleague John Dow (“Statement B”). See Commission on Christian Faith, u ca 82.031C, box 2 for the statements and responses. Minutes, 20 November 1939, Commission on Christian Faith, box 1-1, recorded that Thomas was absent because of illness, and he died the following February. Line was absent from that meeting as well, perhaps accounting for the frank discussion of the merits of particular sections of the two statements suggested in the minutes. Minutes, 17 April 1939, Commission on Christian Faith, box 1-1. The minutes of the 26 May 1939 meeting (ibid.) indicate that Line complimented Thomas’s draft, but stated that in his view it was impossible to combine it with the (arguably more Barthian) one that he had helped to prepare. Gordon A. Sisco, “Shall We Return to Calvinism?” New Outlook, 17 September 1937, 837–8. Unlike Talcott Parsons (as noted above), who credited Calvin with a world-affirming theology, Sisco saw Barth’s worlddenying theology as an attempt to reclaim Calvin’s “stern views of God, man, and history.” Sisco referred to Scottish theologian John Macmurray as “a thinker who holds to the liberal tradition” and urged that his ideas be used to modify Barth. Macmurray’s name often crops up in the writings of John Line, and Richard Roberts as well. Randolph Carleton Chalmers, See the Christ Stand! A Study in Doctrine in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), 189. Chalmers succeeded Richard Roberts at Sherbourne Street United Church, became associate secretary of e& s s in 1945, and then left in 1950 to accept a position at St Andrew’s College. He returned to the Maritimes in 1957 to teach at Pine Hill Divinity Hall, retiring in 1974. For an assessment of his theology, see William Haughton, “Almost Forgotten: RC [sic] Chalmers and the Liberal-Evangelical Heritage of the United Church of Canada,” Touchstone 29, no. 2 (2011): 51–8. Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 59. “Gregory Vlastos,” accessed 3 May 2013, http: / / philosophy.princeton. edu / index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55&Itemid=145. For an assessment of his impact on students at Queen’s Theological

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Notes to pages 122–6



College as a Christian socialist, see George Rawlyk and Kevin Quinn, The Redeemed of the Lord Say So: A History of Queen’s Theological College (Kingston: Queen’s Theological College, 1980), 115–8.   91 Letter to Professor George F. Thomas, 12 March 1955, R.B.Y. Scott Papers, uc a, box 1-3. By that point in his mid-fifties, he accepted the ­position at Princeton with its “most generous” salary, and inquired about becoming an American citizen in order to receive Social Security upon retirement.   92 Ian Manson, “‘O Day of God Draw Nigh’: R.B.Y. Scott, the Church and the Call for Social Reconstruction,” in Doing Ethics in a Pluralistic World: Essays in Honour of Roger C. Hutchinson, ed. Phyllis D. Airhart, Marilyn J. Legge, and Gary L. Redcliffe (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002), 99–111.   93 Courtesy of Emmanuel College. Copyright © Emmanuel College 1965.   94 R.P. Stouffer, “Prof. Line and the Resolution,” Saturday Night, 24 June 1933: 3.   95 John Line, “Recent Trends in Theological Education,” u c o , 1 August 1941, 28, was written shortly after his move to Emmanuel, and reflects his theological transitions.   96 John Line, The Doctrine of the Christian Ministry (London: Lutterworth, 1959).   97 John Line, “The Significance of the Report of the Commission on the Christianization of the Social Order,” Time Marches On (e&ss Annual Report, 1935), 26.   98 “Rev. John Line,” Minutes of Toronto Conference (1971), 57–8.   99 Some initiatives were reframed to capture this new image of the “whole Gospel.” For example, e& s s still supported Pidgeon’s Evangelization of Canadian Life campaign, but insisted that its activities be interpreted in the light of the “whole Gospel” and conducted in consultation with the Social Service Council of Canada. See Pidgeon Papers, box 9-184, for a copy of the action taken by e& s s at its 1937 meeting. 100 Candidus [pseud.], “An Outsider Looks at General Council,” New Outlook, 14 October 1936, 956. 101 “Evangelism and Social Service,” r o p (1936), 80.

c ha p t e r f i ve    1 L.B. Pearson, “Canada and the United States,” in Words and Occasions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 25.

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Notes to pages 127–30

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  2 John Bennett, Georgia Harkness, and the brothers Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr are among those dubbed by one historian as “theologians of a new world order.” See Heather Warren, Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists, 1920–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). She notes the congruence between themes in the Oxford Conference reports and concerns of various group members circulated in their own publications as well as preparatory materials for the meeting, for example, worldwide social disintegration, sin as the cause of the turmoil, and the institutional church as the antidote for social ills (79–80).   3 “The Church and International Relationships,” r o p (1938), 93–5.   4 Minutes, 31 October 1939, War Service Committee, uc a 82.041C, box 1-1.   5 “A Witness Against the War,” u c o , 15 October 1939, 21.   6 John Coburn to H.D. Ranns, 10 October 1939, Board of Evangelism and Social Service, Series I, subseries 2, u ca 83.052C, box 46-80.   7 Ian McKay Manson, “The United Church of Canada and the Second World War,” in The United Church of Canada: A History (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 62–6, describes the wide-ranging involvement of the United Church in the war effort at the national and local levels.   8 Gordon Sisco, “Specific Tasks of the Crusade,” n.d., Gordon A. Sisco Papers, u ca, box 1-6.   9 “A Resume of the Wartime Services Rendered by the United Church Committee on Camp and War Production Communities,” n.d., 14, uc a 82.044C, box 1-6. Over a third of the names on a roster of the committee compiled at the end of the war were female. 10 “Practical Christianity in Wartime,” unidentified clipping appended to “A Resume of the Wartime Services.” 11 “United Church W.M.S. to Assist Women War Workers,” St Thomas Times Journal, May 27 1942 [clipping], Verda Ullman biographical file, uc a . 12 Minutes, 28 September 1942, Committee on Camp and War Production Communities, u ca 82.044C, box 1-1. For the wms’s involvement, see Isabel McIntosh Loveys, “The United Church and War Production Communities,” The Missionary Monthly, November 1942, 500–1. 13 “United Church W.M.S. to Assist Women War Workers.” 14 Malcolm MacDonald, They Look to the Church (Toronto: Committee on Camp and War Production Communities, 1944), 3. 15 Ibid., 11–12, 17–18, 20–3.

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Notes to pages 130–2

16 “Canadian War Bonds for the Church,” Christian Century, 5 February 1941, 172–3. The problematic relationship of church and state that Morrison identified is discussed in N.K. Clifford, “Charles Clayton Morrison and the United Church of Canada,” Canadian Journal of Theology 15, no. 2 (1969): 80–92. 17 R. Edis Fairbairn, “Indictment,” u c o , 1 February 1941, 11. He applied his criticism more broadly in Apostate Christendom (Ken-Pax Pub. Co., [1948?]), a booklet based on newsletters he fired off from his small pastoral charge in Windermere, Ontario, where he considered himself “exiled” after his acerbic pronouncements against the war led to his ouster from a larger church. 18 E.G.D. Freeman, “The Church and Social Reconstruction,” Church of the Air series; lectures delivered in Winnipeg, November 1941; mimeographed and mailed from the Department [sic] of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada, Toronto, lecture 1, 1–2. 19 Ibid., lecture 1, 3–5. 20 Ibid., lecture 2, 2–4. He credited Henry Sloan Coffin, one of his teachers at Union Theological Seminary, for influencing his faith in democracy. 21 Ibid., lecture 3, 3. 22 Ibid., lecture 4, 2. 23 Ibid., lecture 4, 4. 24 “Church Nation and World Order Interim Report,” r o p (1942), 129, notes the commission of the Federal Council of Churches that produced A Just and Durable Peace, to which the United Church had sent three representatives. 25 The wide-ranging topics included racial minorities, agriculture, postwar employment, housing, social security (including unemployment and disability insurance, worker’s compensation, health services, family allowances, and old age pensions), and English-French relations. 26 Gordon A. Sisco, “Christian Leaders Face Post-war Problems,” u c o , 1 August 1943, 27. The nine Canadian delegates included several from the United Church, among them Gordon Sisco, R.B.Y. Scott (who led discussions and was involved in drafting statements), W.C. Lockhart, and Gerald Hutchinson. 27 R.A. MacKay to J.R. Mutchmor, 2 February 1943, Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (hereafter cited as c nwo), uc a 82.046, box 1-7. 28 A.R.M. Lower, “Re the Basic Memorandum: Commission on the Church, Nation and World Order, United Church of Canada,” 9 August 1943, c nwo, box 1-10.

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Notes to pages 132–3

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29 Correspondence addressed to the commission expressed wide-ranging concerns that confirmed the point that Silcox was making. Letter William M. Birks to Gordon Sisco, 3 February 1943, box 1-7, for instance, expressed concerns about the group that was working on banking. Birks wrote, “If it is made up of ministers and not experts, I hope that it will, at least, take advice from outstanding bankers, and economists, including the governor of the Bank of Canada.” Sisco assured him that the commission did not intend to “pose as an expert in this field,” adding,“I imagine that whatever information is sent in on this subject would be used by way of illustration of some general principle”; see Sisco to Birks, 8 February 1943, box 1-7. The correspondence in cnwo, box 1-7, suggests the polarity that the commission was attempting to manage: for example, Harvey Forster to Gordon Sisco, 20 February 1943; Mel Staples to Gordon Sisco, 21 June 1943; and Sisco’s reply to Staples, 22 June 1943. 30 Gordon Sisco to H.W. Avison, 29 January 1944, c nwo, box 1-7. 31 For a summary of his career, see Alan Davies, “Claris Edwin Silcox (1888– 1961): Brave and Resolute Champion of the City of God,” Touchstone 27, no. 2 (2009): 50–7. 32 Silcox explained his rationale for the revised draft in “Memorandum to Members of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order,” 11 October 1943, cn wo, box 1-3. 33 Scott expressed frustration with the new direction taken in the fifth draft, finding it “hard to see why the practical suggestions for application of the Christian Charter are identified with socialism”; see letter from R.B.Y Scott to C.E. Silcox, 19 September 1943, c nwo, box 1-7. Scott also raised questions about importing middle axioms from the American “Six Pillars of Peace.” 34 Silcox, “Memorandum,” 11 October 1943, c nwo, box 1-3. In one of his first presentations to the commission, Silcox defended his approach as ­follows: “The problem of middle axioms is a vexed one, but while the Church should refuse to confine itself to pious generalities it should also refuse to issue dogmatic statements regarding a wide variety of detailed plans the implementation of which depends upon many factors varying with the time, the place and the specific situation.” He referred to a copy of the declaration on world peace which had been issued by major Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders as an illustration of how much agreement could be achieved by avoiding “maximum” statements, and promised to share the “secret history” of how this “remarkable agreement” was reached at the next meeting (18 October). Silcox’s view was likely shared by Gordon Sisco, and is strikingly similar to the views

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356

35

36 37

38

39

40 41 42

43

Notes to pages 133–5

expressed by John Foster Dulles, chair of the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace on which Mutchmor and Sisco served. On a copy of a Life magazine article that Dulles sent to Sisco (and which he in turn sent to cn wo commission members), Sisco highlighted the ­following words: “We need men who, as citizens, will think out the application of those principles to the daily life of our nation. That is something that every one must do for himself. The Church cannot and should not try to do that for him.” John Foster Dulles, “A Righteous Faith,” Life, [28 December 1942?], cn wo, box 1-17. Church, Nation and World Order: A Report of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, [1944?]), 6. Ibid., 13. For example, Hugh H. Wolfenden to Gordon Sisco, 25 February 1943, c nwo, box 1-7, warned those preparing the 1944 report: “This Commission on such a question could and should have great influence throughout the whole of Canada; and general thinking on the social security question at the present moment is so much in the stage of somewhat unreliable endorsation or opposition ... that it will be of paramount importance for influential groups like this Commission to state its conclusion only after the most careful exploration and deliberation.” On proposals for social programs during the war (including a discussion of the Marsh report and the impact of the Beveridge report), see Dennis Guest, “World War II and the Welfare State in Canada,” in The “Benevolent” State: The Growth of Welfare in Canada, ed. Allan Moscovitch and Jim Albert (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1987), 205–21. “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 133, referring to Sisco’s description of its work in 1946. The c c ia was under the auspices of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service, and replaced the Committee on International Relationships. Church, Nation and World Order, 34. George M. Grant, “Canada,” in Christendom Anno Domini MDCCCCI, ed. William D. Grant (Toronto: William Briggs, 1902), 1:81. Robert Choquette, “English-French Relations in the Canadian Catholic Community,” in Creed and Culture: The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930, ed. Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 19. Lester B. Pearson, Mike: The Memoirs of the Right Honourable Lester B. Pearson (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1972), 1:15. For his

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44

45 46

47

48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

Notes to pages 135–7

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description of life in a Methodist parsonage, and his parents’ hopes that he would follow his father into the ministry, see 8–10, 14. Max and Monique Nemni, Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919–1944, trans. William Johnson (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006), is a fascinating account of how Trudeau’s student papers were infused with the values of his teachers. They conclude that almost all the students at Quebec’s Jesuit colleges “ended up with identical values with respect to Catholicism and French-Canadian nationalism. And they were convinced that they reached these values of their own free will” (48). See John English, et al., eds., The Hidden Pierre Elliott Trudeau: The Faith behind the Politics (Ottawa: Novalis, 2004), especially David Seljak, “Trudeau and the Privatization of Religion: The Quebec Context,” 47–56, for Trudeau’s approach to religion in political life in his later years. Nemni and Nemni, 58. Ibid., 63–4. They describe young Trudeau as a dutiful student presenting notions that were widely disseminated in Quebec schools: “the revenge of the cradle, the return to the land, the apostolic mission of the French Canadian ‘race,’ which is even a biological entity.” They note that at another Jesuit college, a teenager named René Lévesque was publishing similar ideas in the student newspaper (64–5). John English, Citizen of the World: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 292–9, discusses Trudeau’s reversal in his views of the role of the Catholic Church in Quebec society. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1938), 342–3 (regional report submitted by J.U. Tanner). Claris Edwin Silcox, Protestant-Catholic Relations in Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1938), 10–11. Charles Thompson Sinclair Faulkner, “‘For Christian Civilization’: The Churches and Canada’s War Effort, 1939–1942” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1975), 112–15. Ibid., 123–4. Ibid., 117–32. J.R. Mutchmor, “Canadian Churches and Post-War Reconstruction,” Christendom 8 (1943): 374. C.E. Silox, The Revenge of the Cradles (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), iii. Ibid., iv–vi. Ibid., 25–7. The alternatives included a proposal to “dignify and render more livable and enjoyable the national vocation of the homemaker” by enabling women to “carry into married life the interests, acquired

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Notes to pages 137–9

aptitudes and activities” that would give them more security and economic independence. 57 Ibid., 21. 58 Ibid., 23. 59 The letter is undated, but the details suggest 1944 as the date of the meeting. George Campbell Pidgeon Papers, u c a , box 15–279. 60 “Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations,” r o p (1964), 458. The committee was discharged in 1973, replaced by a new committee that was to deal only with education issues. 61 “The Condition and Task of the Church in Canada,” n.d., Sisco Papers, box 1-11, 3. “Dr Sisco Says Quebec May Not Win Canada via ‘Battle of the Cradle,’” Toronto Star, 26 August 1948, indicates that he gave this speech in Amsterdam at the first General Assembly of the wc c . Sisco also served as the only Canadian on its first executive. 62 Arthur G. Reynolds, What’s the Difference? Protestant and Roman Catholic Beliefs Compared (Toronto: Commission on the Christian Faith, United Church of Canada, 1954), 6–8. Replies to other questions set out the history of the reformation and basic Protestant teaching about salvation, sin and grace, the authority of the Bible, sacraments, Mary and the saints, worship practices, and purgatory. “Daniel” [pseud.], Chats with a Prospective Convert to Roman Catholicism (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1954), a second booklet published the same year, used the literary device of a dialogue between a young man and a Protestant army chaplain as they talked about differences between the two religious faiths. Taking the pseudonym “Daniel,” the writer was identified in the preface as a man in the armed forces who had come to regret his decision to convert to Catholicism at the time of his marriage. 63 Reynolds, What’s the Difference?, 58–9. 64 Ibid., 60–1. 65 When and how the transition happened is difficult to pinpoint. John Webster Grant, “The Reaction of was p Churches to Non-wasp Immigrants,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 1968, 11, argues that the mosaic imagery was commonplace before church union. Other historians see the shift as happening in the 1920s and ’30s – and even then not really taking hold until after the Second World War with a new round of immigration underway and the tragic consequences of racism so apparent. See Allan Smith, “Metaphor and Nationality in North America,” Canadian Historical Review 51, no. 3 (1970): 257; and Howard Palmer, “Mosaic versus Melting Pot? Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada and the United States,” International Journal 31 (1975–76):

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66

67

68

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79

Notes to pages 139–42

359

491–2, are among the historians who date the transition later. Richard J.F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 149–76, also discusses the popularity of the mosaic as an alternative to the American overtones of the melting pot image. John Cormie, Canada and the New Canadian (Toronto: Social Service Council of Canada, 1931), 3. Cormie remarked that the notion of “assimilation” had recently become provocative, explaining the use of the images of fusing and amalgamation as alternatives to “the process of the melting pot” (29). Ibid., 29–30. The pamphlet gives a detailed statistical picture of the sources and distribution of immigration. On the challenge that ‘Canadianizing’ settlers from Southern and Eastern European presented for schools as well as churches, see Michael Owen, “‘Building the Kingdom of God on the Prairies’: E.H. Oliver and Saskatchewan Education,” Saskatchewan History 40, no. 1 (1987): 22–34. J.R. Watts, Fifty Years of Rural Canada: Summary of Surveys ([Toronto?]: Board of Home Missions, 1933), 51–2. The areas surveyed were Dufferin County, o n , Cumberland County, n s , and District of Hamiota, mn. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1940), 330 (regional report submitted by J.A. Cormie). Gordon Sisco, s.v. “United Church of Canada,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1947, 397. G.B. King, “Training of Men for the Ministry,” u c o , 1 January 1941, 11. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1940), 341. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1948), 375. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1950), 356. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1942), 352. “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1944), 339. “Questionnaire” [1944?], 1–2, Board of Home Missions, Series II, Section 1 (hereafter cited as bhm ), u ca 83.050C, box 26-422, “Report of the Commission on City Missions and Non-Anglo-Saxon Work,” 1–2, b h m, box 25-396. For questionnaire responses and reports of associate secretary George Dorey’s visits, see bhm , box 26, files 397 to 432; for Dorey’s memo summarizing the results from the questionnaire on nonAnglo-Saxon work, see bhm , box 26-422. The report was adopted in March 1944. The “Anglo-Saxon sect” reference found its way into the board’s report to the General Council; see “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1944), 309. Winnifred Thomas, “The Church Woman as Citizen,” Missionary Monthly, April 1945, 173–4.

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Notes to pages 142–3

80 Winnifred Thomas, “The Church Woman as Citizen,” Missionary Monthly, May 1945, 219–20. 81 See Missionary Monthly, June 1939, 249, for a copy of the petition. 82 C.E. Silcox, “The Church and Anti-Semitism: A Plea for a New Rapprochement of Christian and Jew,” Silcox Papers, box 9-14 (a draft of an article for Canadian Churchman dated 6 February 1941). 83 C.E. Silcox, “Should Canada Provide Sanctuary for European Refugees,” address delivered in Kingston, 1 November 1938, Silcox Papers, box 5-18, 3. 84 Ibid., 2. 85 E.M. Howse, Two Sermons (n.p., [1939?]), 12–13. The sermons were titled “Christian Canada and the Refugees” and “The Refugees – A Policy for Canada.” 86 Ibid., 15. Those exact words are found in Silcox’s Kingston address given the previous year. 87 Ibid., 13. 88 “Knowing the Facts about Refugees,” Missionary Monthly, November 1939, 482–3. 89 “Let Us Think about the Refugee Petition,” Missionary Monthly, January 1944, 14. 90 Constance Hayward, “Has the Christian Church Any Responsibility for the Refugees in Canada?” Missionary Monthly, June 1942, 245–6. 91 Alan T. Davies and Marilyn F. Nefsky, How Silent Were the Churches? Canadian Protestantism and the Jewish Plight during the Nazi Era (Waterloo, on : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998), 30–46. For a harsher assessment of the United Church’s response to the Holocaust, see Haim Genizi, The Holocaust, Israel, and the Canadian Protestant Churches (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 41–51. 92 Mary-Ann Shantz, “Kingston Christians and the Persecution of European Jews during the Nazi Era,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2003, 5–18. 93 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1944), 358–9. The Board of Home Missions and the w m s protested the sale of Japanese property to no avail. Eiji Yatabe, “From the Nisei (Japanese Canadian) Viewpoint,” Missionary Monthly, September 1943, 391–2, condemned the internment but praised the help of the w m s and United Church congregations as “one of the few comforting features” of the internment. The United Church also pressed for Japanese rights after the war; see “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1948), 458.

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Notes to pages 144–6

361

  94 Elda S. Daniels, “Evacuation from the Defence Area,” Western Recorder, June 1942, 11.   95 “Board of Home Missions,” r o p (1944), 308.   96 Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire (London, Allen Lane, 2007), xxvii.   97 Ibid., 365–504, describes the cost of victory as Britain undertook to discharge its financial obligations, and the role of the United States in the resulting “liquidation” of the empire.   98 Ibid., 509. Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 51–74, discusses how the differences between the United States and Britain figured into the un vote to create the state of Israel.   99 Arthur R.M. Lower, Canada: Nation and Neighbour (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1952), 188. 100 Linda Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (1992): 316–21. 101 For a history of Canada-U.S. relations before the Second World War, see Robert Bothwell, Canada and the United States: The Politics of Partnership (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 1–24. 102 Lawrence Aronsen, “An Open Door to the North: The Liberal Government and the Expansion of American Foreign Investment, 1945– 1953,” American Review of Canadian Studies (Summer 1992): 167. Both conservatives and those to the left of the Liberal Party saw this as a wrong turn at the fork in the road. He suggests that nationalist critics overlooked the debt load incurred during the war that left the federal government with few alternatives to foreign investment, and argues that the prosperity that resulted from American investment eventually “allowed for the expansion of the welfare state and cultural institutions that, in the years ahead, were to be the most important factors in maintaining the Canadian identity” (190–1). 103 Lawrence Aronsen, “From World War to Cold War: Cooperation and Competition in the North Atlantic Triangle, 1945–1949,” in The North Atlantic Triangle in a Changing World: Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1902–1956, ed. B.J.C. McKercher and Lawrence Aronsen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 212–13. 104 Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada since 1945: Power, Politic, and Provincialism, rev. ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 89. 105 Dianne Kirby, “Harry Truman’s Religious Legacy: The Holy Alliance, Containment, and the Cold War,” in Religion and the Cold War,

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362

Notes to pages 146–8

ed. Dianne Kirby (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), for a discussion of attempts to link democracy and Christianity (78–9), and the compli­ cations of uniting the Vatican and the w cc in the “holy war” against Communism (92–7). On the impact of liberal Protestant churches in ­shaping the approach to human rights that evolved as part of liberal democracy in Canada, see George Egerton, “Entering the Age of Human Rights: Religion, Politics, and Canadian Liberalism, 1945–50,” Canadian Historical Review 85, no. 3 (2004): 451–79. 106 E.M. Howse, The Field Is the World (Toronto: Board of Overseas Missions, United Church of Canada, [1949?]), 10–14, a reprint of a ­sermon preached at Bloor Street United, Toronto. 107 National Association of aots Clubs, Handbook, 1948 / 49 (Vancouver, [1948?]), 1–2. 108 Mary Kinnear, “Religion and the Shaping of ‘Public Woman’: A PostSuffrage Case Study,” in Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 196–8. 109 Margaret McWilliams, “A Constructive Philosophy for Our Time: ‘What Must I Do?’” Saturday Night, 28 June 1947, 24. 110 “The Christian Citizen in a Changing World,” in The Church and the International Disorder, ed. R.P. Barnes, et al. (London: sc m Press, 1948), 144. 111 Mark G. Toulouse, The Transformation of John Foster Dulles: From Prophet of Realism to Priest of Nationalism (Macon, ga : Mercer University Press, 1985), 196–8. 112 Ibid., 199–200. 113 See William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), for an analysis of the changing relationship of mainstream Protestantism to presidents Truman and Eisenhower and their key advisors (notably Dulles). 114 Edelgard Mahant and Graeme S. Mount, Invisible and Inaudible in Washington: American Policies toward Canada (Vancouver: ub c Press, 1999), 15–16. As minister of external affairs, Lester Pearson disagreed with the U.S. response to events in Korea, which may have had an impact on Canada’s relationship with U.S. leaders when he became prime minister a decade later; see 34–42 for a discussion of policy differences over Korea, China, and Vietnam. On the Korean War, see Martin Kitchen, “From the Korean War to Suez: Anglo-American-Canadian Relations, 1950–1956,” in The North Atlantic Triangle in a Changing World, 220–55.

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Notes to pages 148–50

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115 Mahant and Mount, 42–3, conclude that by the 1960s the United States considered Canada unreliable, unimportant, and meddlesome. 116 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1960), 407–8. 117 Ibid., 409–10. 118 Silcox and Howse drew criticism early on; later A.C. Forrest became the focus of attention. Typically, the United Church took a position similar to leaders who were prominent in ecumenical circles, among them the ­editors of the Christian Century, several influential theologians (including H. Richard Niebuhr and two presidents of Union Theological Seminary, Henry Sloane Coffin and Henry Van Dusen), as well as the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. An exception was Reinhold Niebuhr, who was instrumental in organizing a group of pro-Zionist Christian clergy; see Martin E. Marty, Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960, vol. 3 of Modern American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 184–7. 119 Davies, “Claris Edwin Silcox,” 54. Davies (rightly in my view) acknowledges Silcox’s anti-Zionism without accusing him of anti-Semitism as other interpreters tend to do. 120 C.E. Silcox, “Impasse in the Holy Land,” University of Toronto Quarterly 16 (January 1947): 123. There was plenty of blame to go around, in his view, including Britain’s treatment of Arabs in the peace settlement after the First World War that was causing them to resist a diplomatic resolution to the Middle East crisis (129–30). C.E. Silcox, “The Palestine Question,” an outline of an address to a Rotary Club in Brampton, 19 July 1948, is typical of his postwar perspective in his many public addresses; see Silcox Papers, box 6-67. 121 C.E. Silcox, “The Crisis in the Middle East,” u c o , 15 February 1956, 24–6. 122 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1954), 141–3. Settlement of Palestinians in host countries and compensation from Israel continued to be recommended; cf. “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 152. 123 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1954), 141. 124 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1956), 143. 125 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 149. For criticism of Howse and Forrest, see Genezi, 66–146. Genizi sees Howse’s addition to the cci a in 1956 as a critical turning point that nudged the United Church toward a pro-Palestinian position. 126 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 150. 127 Jesse H. Arnup, A New Church Faces a New World (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1937), 97–8.

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Notes to pages 151–4

128 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1948), 450. 129 “Board of Overseas Missions,” r o p (1954), 485. 130 “Board of Overseas Missions,” r o p (1948), 214 (a report optimistically referred to by its members as “Opportunity Now”). 131 “Overseas Mission Policy,” r o p (1952), 416. 132 Shirley Jane Endicott, China Diary: The Life of Mary Austin Endicott (Waterloo, on : Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2003), 24–34. Mary Endicott’s letters describe their harrowing experience during the revolution, as well as their personal struggles during the controversy. For a fascinating biography of his father’s work as missionary, his intelligence gathering for the United States during the Second World War, and his relationship with the Communist party in China during the civil war, see Stephen Endicott, James G. Endicott: Rebel Out of China (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 133 Letter from James Endicott (undated) in Wilfrid Arnold Burbidge Papers, uc a , box 2-36a. 134 Shirley Jane Endicott, 185–90. 135 Alvyn J. Austin, Saving China: Canadian Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1888–1959 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 314–22. 136 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 145–7. 137 “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1956), 516. 138 Daniel C. Goodwin, “The Canadian Council of Churches: Its Founding Vision and Early Years, 1944–1964,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 41, no. 2 (2004): 147–73, notes that the assumption of “Christian nations” reflected in the reorganization of international ecumenism along national lines after the war was soon tested. 139 On the family connections between missions and Cold War diplomacy, see Alvyn Austin, “Missionaries, Scholars, and Diplomats: China Missions and Canadian Public Life,” in Van Die, ed., Religion and Public Life in Canada, 142–6, and Sachiyo Takashima, “Dreams for Missionaries, Realities for Diplomats: Why the United Church of Canada’s Chinese Missionaries Were Involved in Politics during the 1940s and 1950s,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2001, 65–80.

chapter six    1 Ralph Allen, “The Hidden Failure of Our Churches,” Maclean’s, 25 February 1961. Its extensive analysis of religion in Canada includes a discussion of the changing role of the Catholic Church in Quebec.

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Notes to pages 155–8

365

  2 Ibid., 15.   3 Ibid., 46.   4 Ibid., 12–13.  5 Catechism: The United Church of Canada (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1944), III.27, 7.   6 Richard Davidson, “Purposes of New United Church Catechism,” Saturday Night, 15 April 1944, 22–3.   7 S.D. Clark, The Developing Canadian Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962, 2nd ed. 1968), 182; first published in 1947 as “The Religious Factor in Canadian Economic Development.”   8 Ibid., 171, 182.   9 Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald, “How Are Canada’s Five Largest Protestant Denominations Faring? A Look at the 2001 Census,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 40, no. 4 (2001): 511–34, analyze the growth in the 1950s, as well as the more recent relative decline. 10 For an astute assessment of the postwar expansion of Canadian churches and the cultural dynamics that undermined their vitality, see John Webster Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), 160–83. 11 H.E.F. [Harold E. Fey], “A Church Grows in Canada,” Christian Century, 3 October 1956, 1125–6. 12 Randolph Carleton Chalmers, The Pure Celestial Fire: An Evangelical Interpretation of Christianity (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1948), 212. 13 Ibid., 215–16. He quotes Union Theological Seminary’s Henry Van Dusen as warning of the “deep, undersurface tides” that for more than a generation had been “setting dead against everything of our concern,” despite the advantageous “winds of doctrine” of recent times. 14 John Line, “Decisive Theological Issues Today,” Theology Today 8, no. 1 (1951): 20–1, 28. 15 George C. Pidgeon, “Is the Church in Danger?” u c o , 1 May 1951, 5, citing an article by Marc Boegner, Christian Century, 7 March 1951. The warning about “paganism” had been sounded at the major gatherings of international ecumenism in 1928 and 1937; see John Flett, “From Jerusalem to Oxford: Mission as the Foundation and Goal of Ecumenical Social Thought,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 27, no. 1 (2003): 18, 21. 16 Jesse H. Arnup, A New Church Faces a New World (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1937), 232. 17 Church, Nation and World Order: A Report of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, [1944?]), 9.

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Notes to pages 158–62

18 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 87–9. 19 Arthur Organ, “Recreational Evangelism,” The Responsible Society (e&ss Annual Report, 1949), 39, 43. Organ was chair of e&ss at the time. 20 The Church and the Secular World (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1950), a reproduction of the report of the Commission on Culture to General Council, r o p (1950), Appendix, i–vi, 100. See page v of the pamphlet for the terms of reference, as well as the list of members. 21 Ibid., vi–vii. 22 Ibid., 36–53. 23 Ibid., 48–9. 24 The address was reprinted as W.J. Gallagher, “A New Situation,” in Frontiers of Faith (e& s s Annual Report, 1954), 77. 25 “‘Culture-Religion’ versus Christianity,” r o p (1954), 231 (emphasis in original). A commission report “On a Functional Ministry,” r o p (1954), 163–6, noted the challenge of attracting workers in an industrialized society to the church. Henry Gordon MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada, 1946–1977: A Study in the Sociology of the Denomination” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1980), 48–55, confirms that the United Church drew its membership predominantly from those who had higher levels of education, income, and occupational status than the general population. 26 J.R. Mutchmor, Mutchmor: The Memoirs of James Ralph Mutchmor (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 6. 27 Ibid., 21–7, 65–6, 75–9. 28 Ibid., 105. 29 These are among the anecdotes related in Kenneth Bagnell, “That Man Mutchmor,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 12–4, 46. 30 J.R. Mutchmor to Rev. James Fraser, 22 January 1951, James Ralph Mutchmor Papers, u ca, box 1a-11. 31 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 140–2. 32 J.R. Mutchmor, “The Church and Politics,” address to Annual Meeting of London Conference, 3 June 1948, 11–12. Mutchmor Papers, box 12-183a. 33 J.R. Mutchmor, “The Church and Social Action,” in The Minister’s Handbook: A Guidebook for Ministers in the United Church of Canada, ed. Randolph Carleton Chalmers (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1952), 217–21. 34 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 97. 35 “Reports of Secretaries,” in Right Relations among Men (e&ss Annual Report, 1943), 22.

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Notes to pages 162–4

367

36 David Plaxton, “‘We Will Evangelize with a Whole Gospel or None’: Evangelism and the United Church of Canada,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997), 117–20. Mutchmor, Memoirs, 107–19, recounts his support of evangelism and his strategic role. 37 For the message and methods of postwar evangelism, see “Forward Movement after the War,” r o p (1944), 114–20. For an early assessment of the campaign, see “The Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom,” r o p (1946), 163–6. 38 On Templeton’s work as evangelist, see Kevin Kee, Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 143–87, and David Vance, “Charles Templeton and the Performances of Unbelief” (master’s thesis, Carleton University, 2008), 19–41. 39 Charles Templeton, An Anecdotal Memoir (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983), 69–70. 40 Ibid., 80. 41 J.R.M. [Mutchmor], “Rev. C. Templeton Stirs Large Crowds, Holy Week, Ottawa,” u c o , 1 May 1951, 5. 42 The front page of the u c o for 15 October 1951 featured four stories: “The Templeton Missions Draw Great Crowds”; “Forty Thousand Attend Sydney [n s ] Mission”; “Templeton Mission Success in Smith’s Falls”; and “Ottawa Service of Witness Largely Attended.” For examples of u c o ’s coverage of the campaign, see “Charles B. Templeton in London,” u c o , 1 January 1952, 3; “The Templeton Missions Draw Great Crowds,” u c o , 15 November 1952, 3; “Templeton Mission in Winnipeg Was Resounding Success,” u c o , 15 December 1952, 1; “Calgary Will Long Remember the Templetons,” u c o , 1 January 1953, 1; and “The Templeton Missions in Fredericton and St John’s,” u c o , 1 January 1954. 43 Kee, Revivalists, 176; also see Kevin Kee, “Bobby-sox to Bach: Charles Templeton and the Commodification of Popular Protestantism in PostWorld War II Canada,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 15, no. 1 (2004): 231–53. 44 Ibid., 175. 45 See “The National Evangelistic Mission,” r o p (1956), 180–91, and “National Evangelistic Mission,” r o p (1958), 204–10, for summaries of the campaign’s approach. For illustrations of how the implications for “national life” were presented at conferences and in congregations, see W.G. Berry, ed., Calling Canada to Christ (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1957), especially the addresses by F.E. Vipond (91–5), Arthur

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Notes to pages 164–6

Organ (95–100), and W.B. Berry (106–11). Berry, for instance, stated that God “works through nations” and linked the “genius of the United Church” to its proclamation of a “national gospel.” 46 “What Has the N.E.M. Accomplished?” u c o , 1 March 1958, 23. 47 C.A. Myers, The Christian Family at Home, rev. ed. (Toronto: National Evangelistic Mission Committee, 1957). 48 Women and Evangelism (Toronto: National Evangelistic Mission Com­ mittee, 1959), 11–12. 49 “Billy Graham’s Canadian Crusade,” u c o , 15 September 1955, 4. Also see A.C. Forrest, “Billy Graham in Toronto,” u c o , 1 November 1955, 7, 14. Forrest’s descriptions of Graham’s personal qualities were uniformly positive over the years, despite his difficulties with Graham’s theology. 50 “What Has the N.E.M. Accomplished?” u c o , 1 March 1958, 23. 51 “Evangelism in Our Time,” u c o , 15 March 1958, 7. Forrest’s own view was that while some “fine things” had come out of the evangelical fervour of the past, the old-time revivalism had “little appeal for United Church people.” Its most effective evangelism was “members witnessing to the neighbours on the street, and bringing them to the church”; see “At the Concerns of the Church,” u c o , 15 September 1959, 7. 52 “Evangelism in Our Time,” u c o , 15 March 1958, 7. 53 Here I take issue with Kevin Neil Flatt, “The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church, 1930–1971” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2008), who argues that the leadership of the church supported evangelism in public, while rejecting it in private until the New Curriculum and other events in the 1960s forced them to end their duplicity. I am suggesting that honest differences over evangelism had surfaced well before the 1960s, and the United Church’s divergence from more theologically conservative groups would have been evident to anyone who paid attention to its publications. Whether the sentiments of Forrest and other church executives were typical of persons in the pews is a different matter. 54 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 235. This may have been modesty on his part, but see chapter 3 above for an assessment of the critical but often-overlooked role of home missions in creating the “social gospel ethos” that is often attributed (wrongly) to e& s s alone. 55 Malcolm Macdonald, “Planting the Church in New Areas of Canada,” u c o , 1 February 1951, 1, 28, is typical of the board’s reports. 56 Malcolm Macdonald, “The Church Says: ‘We Must Advance and Build,’” u c o 1 April 1953, 21. Macdonald’s article is followed by reports from Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, Sydney River, Saskatoon, The Lakeshore

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57

58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67

68

69

Notes to pages 166–9

369

(between Hamilton and Toronto), and Vancouver. For a study of church extension in the greater Toronto area, see Noelle Boughton, Meeting the Challenge of the Future: A History of the Toronto United Church Council (Toronto: Toronto United Church Council and the Emmanuel College Centre for the Study of Religion, 1988). Malcolm Macdonald, From Lakes to Northern Lights (Toronto: Commission on Missionary Education, 1951), 53–4. Macdonald appealed to what he called the United Church’s founding “charter” to urge that it become an institution that can “fully be described as national” (an interesting substitution for the word “fittingly” that was used in the Basis of Union). The Board of Home Missions reports continued to use the language of “Christian Canada” to present its task. Ibid., 190–1. Jean Doern, et al., All Things Are Possible: A History of Westworth United Church, 1950–1990 (n.p., 1993), 8, 30–1. Gordon Sisco, s.v. “United Church of Canada,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1947, 397. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1950), 416. A.C. Forrest, “What about Those Young People,” u c o , 1 November 1956, 15. The article noted that Intervarsity and Youth for Christ had attracted fewer United Church young people because of the vigour of its own programs (29). A.C. Forrest, “At the Concerns of the Church,” u c o , 15 September 1959, 7. W. Harold Young, “More Candidates than Ever Before,” and J.C. Johnson, “Nine Candidates from One Church,” u c o , 1 April 1954, 3. “A Desperate Shortage,” u c o , 15 October 1959, 6. G. Preston MacLeod, “What Is Disturbing the United Church of Canada?” Christian Century, 5 July 1944, 803. C.E. Silcox, “The United Church of Canada: An Appraisal,” typescript manuscript submitted to The Advance, June 1947, Claris Edward Silcox Papers, u ca, box 9-44. Randolph Carleton Chalmers, See the Christ Stand: A Study in Doctrine in the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1945), 228–9. For a summary of these educational resources and an assessment of their impact, see Randolph Carleton Chalmers, “The Faith of the United Church of Canada,” Religion in Life 19 (1949): 110–11. For a discussion of Chalmers’s contrast of the “evangelical” or “experiential” form of Christianity with the “Catholic” or “institutional” type, see The Pure Celestial Fire, 1–5. On the difference between “orthodox” and “unorthodox” liberalism as he defined them, cf. See the Christ Stand, 146–7.

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Notes to pages 170–2

70 Chalmers, The Pure Celestial Fire, vii. 71 The series of articles was published between May 1946 and February 1947, most of them written by men serving in pastoral charges. 72 For a report on the process and the complete list of topics selected (not all of which saw publication), see “Commission on the Christian Faith,” r o p (1946), 103. 73 J.R. Mutchmor, “The United Church’s Purpose and Task,” address to Annual Meeting of Manitoba Conference, 2 June 1964, 3–4, Mutchmor Papers, box 13-181. 74 What’s the Difference? angered Canadian Catholics and drew international commentary; Life and Death was described in press clippings as revolutionary. For reaction to the latter see Commission on Christian Faith, uc a 82.031C, box 3-66. 75 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 202. 76 William Bean Kennedy, “The Church as Educator: Religious Education,” in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935–1985, ed. David Lotz (Grand Rapids, m i : Eerdmans, 1989), 280–95. 77 For an overview of the New Curriculum and Peter Gordon White’s critical role, see A.C. Forrest, “The Crisis and the New Curriculum,” u c o , 15 February 1965, 19–21 (the first of a two-part article). 78 The presuppositions that circulated in 1956 were approved by General Council in 1958. They were included in Prospectus (Toronto: Board of Christian Education and Board of Publication of the United Church of Canada, 1961), 17–28. For a discussion of the development of the presuppositions, see George Johnston, “What the Sunday Schools Are Going to Teach,” u c o , 15 June 1959, 21, 24, and 26. He hinted that lack of consensus about the presuppositions (with resistance more likely coming from the theological left at that point) was slowing preparation of materials. Interestingly, Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Growing Up Protestant: Parents, Children, and Mainline Churches (New Brunswick, nj : Rutgers University Press, 2002), 115, finds a shift away from neo-orthodox theology and the family focus in Presbyterian circles in the United States around the same time. Its curriculum was renamed “Christian Faith and Action.” The United Church eventually made a similar theological shift – but not until after the New Curriculum was launched. 79 Bendroth, 112–18. 80 For the controversy over the New Curriculum, see chapter 9 below. 81 A.C. Forrest, “Address at Emmanuel College Dinner,” 28 May 1957, 5, Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, u ca, box 4-5.

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Notes to pages 173–7

371

82 “The State of the Church – Now: A Moderatorial Report,” u c o , 15 October 1958, 5, 20. 83 “Urban Problems,” r o p (1938), 212–14. Subsequent reports make for interesting reading, disclosing the United Church’s assumptions about its social position, as well as how it distinguished itself from other denominations, notably competition from new evangelical groups. 84 “The Meaning and Responsibilities of Christian Marriage,” r o p (1932), 283. 85 The Presbyterian Church in Canada raised similar concerns and came to the same conclusions in Christian Marriage and the Church (Toronto: The Board of Evangelism and Social Action, n.d.). A draft was presented to its General Assembly in 1948 and published after conducting a survey of presbyteries in 1949. 86 Andrew S. Finstuen, Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety (Chapel Hill, n c: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), explores the significance of the doctrine of sin for three religious leaders with markedly different assumptions. 87 Malcolm Macdonald, “Our Heritage and Horizons in Home Missions,” James Robertson Memorial Lectures, 1961, lecture 1, 8–10. 88 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 123–5. 89 W.G. Berry’s report in The Responsible Society (e&ss Annual Report, 1949), 36–7. 90 Hugh Dobson, The Christian Family (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1940), 15. 91 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” 107. The report also circulated as a pamphlet. 92 “On Culture,” r o p (1950), 145. 93 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” 117. 94 Ibid., 106–7. 95 Richard Davidson, A Faith to Live By (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1943), 29. 96 Ibid., 29–30. 97 “On Trends in the Churches,” u c o , 15 January 1961, 9. 98 “Why Churches Are Crowded? An Editorial Answer,” u c o , 1 March 1958, 7.

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372

Notes to pages 177–80

  99 “An Editorial Look-See at the Concerns of the Church,” u c o , 15 September 1959, 7. 100 A.C. Forrest, “On Trends in the Churches” (Part 1), u c o , 15 January 1961, 7. 101 A.C. Forrest, “On Trends in the Churches” (Part 2), u c o , 1 February 1961, 9. 102 W.G. Berry, “The ‘Character’ of Our Time,” in Frontiers of Faith (e&ss Annual Report, 1954), 75–6, citing Will Herberg, “Faith and Character Structure,” Christianity and Crisis, 25 January 1954. Herberg’s article did credit sociologist David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) for the terminology he was using, although Berry omitted this detail in his précis. 103 Berry, “The ‘Character’ of Our Time,” 77. 104 “On the Lord’s Day,” r o p (1948), 157–60. That French Canadians had a different “system” – Mass followed by “healthy relaxation and innocent pleasure” – on Sunday was acknowledged, but used to explain why Protestants should avoid activities such as golf or skiing (160–3). 105 Ibid., 164. 106 Paul Laverdure, Sunday in Canada: The Rise and Fall of the Lord’s Day (Yorkton, sk: Gravelbooks, 2004), 163–83. 107 “Temperance and Christian Citizenship,” Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Society (1949–50), 230. 108 “Board of Evangelism and Social Service,” r o p (1948), 363. 109 The following are examples of publications printed by the Board of Evangelism and Social Service: Helen and J.G. Macdonald, Why We Gave Up Social Drinking [1959?]; Martin and Margaret Johns, Why We Don’t Drink [1961?]; Hugh Dobson, For God and Our Families for the Community and the Nation for a Better World Order [1944?]; William G. Berry, The Christian and Social Drinking: A New Testament Approach (1946); Peter Bryce, Let’s Face the Facts (a sermon preached at Metropolitan United Church, 23 January 1946, and reprinted from the Toronto Star, 28 January 1946); Ernest Marshall Howse, Temperance and Realism: An Address (1947); Homer R. Lane, The Bible Says (1952); Ernest T. Campbell, Six Reasons for Voluntary Abstinence (1952); John A. Linton, You Are Involved (1958); Glenn Everett, You Don’t Have to Drink [1959?]; Norman Rawson, To Drink or Not to Drink (1959). In a number of cases, no author was indicated: Looking at the Ontario Liquor Law [1946?]; Unmasked – At Last! (1946); We Are Not Amused [1947?]; A Call to Christian Citizens: Make Your Church’s Stand Your Stand: An Appeal for Voluntary Action by United Church People (1951); The United

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Notes to pages 180–1

373

Church of Canada Is Convinced that Whichever Way You Look At It Voluntary Total Abstinence Makes Sense (1952); Urgent: 500,000 Christian Citizens Needed as Witnesses for Temperance [1953?]. 110 “The Commission on Temperance Policy and Program,” r o p (1960), 265–300, and published as The Church and the Alcohol Problem: Report of the Commission on Temperance Policy and Program (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Services, 1960). Also see Literature Review of Beverage Alcohol Use, Commission on Temperance Policy and Program, January 1960, a confidential and unpublished report that included essays on the use, criminal behaviour associated with, and social factors related to beverage alcohol. 111 For a summary of the plan of action, see J.R. Mutchmor, “The Temperance Policy and Program of the United Church of Canada,” 11 September 1957, Mutchmor Papers, box 12-174, an address that he gave to Brantford Presbytery. In anticipation of public interest in the address, it was issued as a “News Release” for 3 p.m. that afternoon. 112 Stanley Knowles to J.R. Mutchmor, 2 February 1956, Mutchmor Papers, box 1a-16. 113 Stanley Knowles to J.R. Mutchmor, 19 May 1956, Mutchmor Papers, box 1a-16. For an example of Mutchmor’s careful attention to detail, see his objection to reducing taxes on alcohol (urging tax relief to low-income families rather than multi-millionaires), written to Walter Harris, 8 March 1957, Mutchmor Papers, box 1a-17. 114 Bendroth, 128–34; Daphne J. Anderson and Terence R. Anderson, “United Church of Canada: Kingdom Symbol or Lifestyle Choice,” in Faith Traditions and the Family, ed. Phyllis D. Airhart and Margaret J. Bendroth (Louisville, ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 129–33. This shift is explored further in chapter 9 below. 115 The terminology varied slightly, but the three purposes were constant; see r o p (1932), 277; r o p (1946), 109–10; r o p (1960), 183; r o p (1962), 152–3. 116 “The Meaning and Responsibilities of Christian Marriage,” r o p (1932), 277, 279. 117 Ibid., 280–1, and “Report of Commission on Voluntary Parenthood and Sterilization,” r o p (1936), 324–32. 118 The Church and the Secular World (Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1950), 30–1. 119 MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada,” 76. 120 Owram, 264–70, discusses the impact of the Pill, observing that the shift in assumptions about what was sexually appropriate was another

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Notes to pages 181–3

important dimension of the sexual revolution. He notes that “the baby boom was over, long before the Pill had any meaningful effect” (183). 121 As late as 1974, the response of those delegated with the task of considering what to do with marriage vows that pledged “until death do us part” was firm; see the statement on the permanence of Christian marriage in the committee report “Christian Faith,” r o p (1974), 284–9, which insisted that marrying without the intention of permanence was not marriage “as understood in the Christian tradition” (284). 122 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 132–7, contrasted pagan and Greek ideas of the body as inherently evil with the Christian view. For a discussion of the doctrinal principles underlying the United Church’s position on marriage (including consideration of divorce as recognition that the marriage has already ended) by an influential member of the Commission on Christian Faith, see John Line, “The Theological Basis of Christian Marriage,” n.d., Commission on Christian Faith, u c a 82.031C, box 3-57, especially 5–8. 123 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 124. This added to concerns about the threat of annulment of mixed marriages not performed by a Catholic priest. 124 “Report of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home,” r o p (1946), 146. 125 “Report Number Two of the Commission on Christian Marriage and Divorce,” r o p (1962), 155. 126 Ibid., 160–1. 127 Mutchmor, Mutchmor, 192. 128 Earl Lautenslager [sic], “The Marriage Partnership” (Part 1), u c o , 15 April 1962, 25. 129 Earl Lautenslager [sic], “The Marriage Partnership” (Part 2), u c o , 1 May 1962, 27. 130 Lautenslager [sic], “The Marriage Partnership” (Part 1), 26. 131 Veronica Strong-Boag, “Home Dreams: Women and the Suburban Experiment in Canada, 1945–69,” Canadian Historical Review 72, no. 4 (1991): 475–9; Ruth Roach Pierson, “They’re Still Women After All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 215–20. 132 The Church and the Secular World, 30–3. In a telling detail indicating the social location of the commission members, the report described the “city mother” who “may easily deal with 10 or 20 tradesmen in an ordinary day,” thus functioning as “both family treasurer and family manager” while the father was at the shop or office.

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Notes to pages 183–98

375

133 “Report of the Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women,” r o p (1962), 259. It was subsequently published as a pamphlet titled Married Women Working. 134 Mutchmor, Memoirs, 125. 135 “Report of the Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women,” 259–60, 276–7. 136 “Commission on Ordination,” 370, 393–5; cf. recommendation 3 and 4. On the executive’s decision, see r o p (1964), 81–2. 137 Lois Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down: A Memoir (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1989), 23, 42. 138 Templeton, 85–90. 139 Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond, and John English, Canada since 1945: Power, Politics, and Provincialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, rev. ed. 1989), 93. 140 Allen, 50. Gallagher was then serving as general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches.

c h a p t e r s e ve n    1 “Veteran Westerner Elected Moderator,” u c o , 1 October 1960, 8.   2 Ibid.    3 “The Address of the Moderator,” in “‘Thus in the Stilly Night’: Being the Recollections of the Very Rev. Hugh Alexander McLeod,” unpublished mss., Victoria, bc, 1972, Appendix D, 283–4, Hugh Alexander McLeod Papers, u ca.    4 “Dr McLeod Also Said,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 6, pointed out that a vote had been taken to make the much-appreciated address available “in permanent form.” The only copy I was able to find was the one that McLeod included in his unpublished memoirs.    5 “Catholics: Immigration and Education,” u c o , 15 October 1962, 8.   6 “What’s Coming,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 5.    7 Robert McAfee Brown, “Pope John’s Vatican Council,” u c o , 15 October 1962, 15–16, a reprint of Brown’s article in Presbyterian Life. The editorial comments in issues of the u c o that followed indicate disappointment with the narrow terms of ecumenism at Vatican II and failure to acknowledge Protestant churches as equals in the universal church.   8 “What’s New,” u c o , 15 October 1962, 5.    9 Anonymous letter to A.C. Forrest, [1962?], Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, uc a , box 8-2.

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Notes to pages 198–200

10 “Not This! Roman Catholic Bishops’ Demands Endanger Ontario Educational System,” u c o , 15 November 1962, 9, 46. 11 Ibid., 9, citing a recent article in the Canadian Register. Forrest quoted another Catholic publication that asked Protestants to understand that “error” did not have the same rights as the “truth” held by the “only true church,” which he saw as evidence that Catholics had not changed their position on religious freedom. 12 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1956), 140–1. 13 “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1957), 161. 14 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1960), 405. 15 Ibid., 417. 16 “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1962), 532. 17 Henry Gordon MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada, 1946–1977: A Study in the Sociology of the Denomination” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1980), 49, notes that census figures from 1951 show that 82.7 per cent of United Church members identified themselves as British; the next largest group was German at 3.6 per cent, followed by French at 1.9 per cent. By 1971 little had changed: 78.6 per cent, 5.5 per cent, and 3.0 per cent respectively. He notes that United Church remained overwhelmingly European: 97 per cent by 1971. The 1961 census figures show that some European immigrants (notably Dutch and Hungarian Protestants) joined the United Church in significant numbers during the 1950s. See “The Commission on Immigration,” r o p (1964), 218. The report includes an interesting section on the history of immigration from the United Church’s perspective (214–19). 18 MacLeod, 75–9, 86, maintains that fertility rates were a more significant demographic factor than immigration: “Natural increase has been the crucial factor in the demography of United Church membership growth in the post-war period. Its foreign-born membership and mortality have remained relatively constant.” 19 Malcolm Macdonald, “Our Heritage and Horizons in Home Missions,” James Robertson Memorial Lectures, 1961, lecture 1, 7–8. 20 For a discussion of Catholicism in Quebec during the critical decades before the Quiet Revolution, see Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). The secularization of Quebec nationalism bears striking parallels to the transitions taking place in English Canada viz. the role of the churches as nation builders; see David Seljak, “Why the Quiet Revolution Was ‘Quiet’: The Catholic Church’s Reaction to the Secularization of Nationalism in Quebec after 1960,”

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21 22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34

Notes to pages 200–3

377

c c h s Historical Studies 62 (1996): 109–24. He concludes that “centuries – not decades” separate Quebec Catholicism in the 1980s from what it had been in the 1950s (124). Cf. Susan Mann, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 298–315, on what she calls Quebec’s “noisy evolution.” “Interpretation: Some Editorial Comments on the Actions of the 20th General Council,” u c o , 15 September 1962, 11. “Long Range Planning Committee,” r o p (1962), 313. The Commission on World Mission that reported in 1966 was set up as a recommendation of the Commission on Financial Policy, which was dealing with how to distribute money for missions; see “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 301. “Cultivate the Fringe,” u c o , 1 October 1962, 6. “The Doctrine and Practice of Church Membership: Interim Report,” r o p (1960), 348–91. The consultation process is described in Church Membership: Doctrine and Practice in the United Church of Canada (n.p., n.d), 3, which included the report presented to General Council as “The Doctrine and Practice of Church Membership,” r o p (1962), 458–510. Church Membership, 5, 52. Ibid., 52–3; see 55–6 for the suggested procedure, which was intended as a last resort after private reproof. D.M. Mathers, “Church Membership in a Secular Age,” in Command the Morning (e& s s Annual Report, 1961), 40–1. Ibid., 43. Church Membership, 8–9. S.D. Clark, The Developing Canadian Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 128; reprint of “The Religious Sect in Canadian Politics,” in The Report of the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, 1944, 86–96. Gayle I. Thrift, “‘Concerning the Evil State of the World out of Which Strife Comes’: Church-State Relations in Early Cold War Canada, 1945– 1955,” paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association, 2001, explores the effort of United Church leaders to counter Communism by emphasizing Christian values. She notes the important role of the c c ia in the attempt to influence public opinion (7–11). “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1952), 127. Gordon Graydon and Stanley Knowles also provided testimonials (127–8). “On the Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1956), 127, reported that by way of “correspondence and sometimes by personal interview, the

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378

35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47

48 49

Notes to pages 203–6

committee makes its work known to the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa and receives help from them.” Its connections to Diefenbaker’s External Affairs department continued through Howard Green (“The Church and International Affairs,” rop (1960), 423), although there was more ­qualified praise for him than Pearson and Martin and a different relationship signalled with the comment in “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1962), 525–6, that “the times demanded something different.” “The Church and International Affairs,” r o p (1958), 135. L.B. Pearson, “On My Installation as Chancellor of Victoria College” (4 February 1952), in Words and Occasions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 113. Pearson, “Christian Foundations for World Order” (1954), in Words and Occasions, 128 (his preface to this address) and 132–3. Frank Prochaska, Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 13. Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870– 1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 182, 210–11, 218. Cox, 253, 273–4. Prochaska, 150–2. He finds that across much of Europe high levels of social welfare correspond to low levels of religious adherence. While this chapter focuses on Protestant social services (and the United Church in particular), there are interesting parallels to the social role of the Catholic Church in Quebec society. Mark Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?” Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 255–61, describes how religion was sidelined in both Quebec and the rest of Canada with the secularization of social services. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1940), 356. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1944), 356. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1958), 527. “Commission on Church Hospitals,” r o p (1956), 151–2, which includes a brief history of the church’s work in this area. For a description of the hospitals and some of their workers, see Bob Burrows, Healing in the Wilderness: A History of United Church Mission Hospitals (Madeira Park, b c : Harbour Publishing Co., 2004). Neil Young, “The Life and Work of Dr Morley A.R. Young” (Unpublished paper, Emmanuel College, 1985), discusses his grandfather’s work; Burrows, 65–6, 153–8. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1954), 541. “Commission on Church Hospitals,” r o p (1956), 152, citing the findings of an “emergency meeting” of the “Hospital Survey Committee” in 1928.

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Notes to pages 206–8

379

50 “Commission on Church Hospitals,” r o p (1958), 180. 51 An article by the Director of Child Welfare for the province of Ontario, B. Beaumont, “The Role of the Church in Social Work,” The Time of Healing (e& s s Annual Report, 1947), 106–7, alludes to tensions between secular and religious social work. 52 Paul Litt, The Muses, the Masses, and the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 11–17, explores the origins of the commission and the political plotting of its Liberal backers, in which Pearson played a pivotal role by promoting the selection of his friend Vincent Massey as chair. 53 Karen A. Finlay, The Force of Culture: Vincent Massey and Canadian Sovereignty (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 17–50, discusses the transition from “conversion” to “culture” within Canadian Methodist thought, and assesses the cultural role of Methodist denominational colleges and the Massey family’s support for Victoria University. 54 Ibid., 200. 55 The United Church prepared for the brief by calling its own commission on culture that issued a report published as The Church and the Secular World (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1950); see chapter 6 above for a discussion of its assumptions about Christian culture. 56 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–51, accessed 7 August 2012, www.collectionscanada. gc.ca / 2 / 5 / h5-400-e.html. 57 “The Menace of the Radio,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 2, no. 2 (1925): 93–4. 58 Russell Johnston, “The Early Trials of Protestant Radio, 1922–38,” Canadian Historical Review 75, no. 3 (1994): 400ff., notes the organizational complications for denominations like the United Church when faced with competition with charismatic leaders. Also see Dorothy Zolf and Paul W. Taylor, “Redressing the Balance in Canadian Broadcasting: A History of Religious Broadcasting in Canada,” Studies in Religion /  Sciences Religieuses 18, no. 2 (1989): 153–70, and Mark G. McGowan, “Air Wars: Radio Regulation, Sectarianism and Religious Broadcasting in Canada, 1922–1938,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2008, 5–25. 59 Litt, 247. 60 On the challenge of technology and mass culture to religion, see L.B. Kuffert, A Great Duty: Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture, 1939–1967 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 107–34.

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Notes to pages 208–11

61 Litt, 91–4, notes the seminal role of Christian values for western civilization in the thinking of commission members Hilda Neatby and Henri Lévesque, a Dominican priest. 62 Hilda Neatby, “Culture, Religion and Broadcasting,” Frontiers of Faith (e & s s Annual Report, 1954), 77–8; excerpted from an article Neatby had published in the Globe and Mail, n.d. 63 “Is There a Religious Revival in Canada,” Presbyterian Record, April 1957, 11. One can only imagine what she would make of the later popularity of New Age spirituality. 64 On the Massey Commission and “cultural flowering” of Canada that followed, see Jonathan F. Vance, A History of Canadian Culture (Don Mills, o n: Oxford University Press, 2009), 365–97. 65 Kenneth McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. 66 McRoberts, 24–30. 67 Litt, 6, notes that more recently the report has been called the work of the “Massey-Lévesque Commission,” giving its sole francophone member the position of co-chair, which he did not actually have at the time, as a gesture to counter Quebec’s resistance to its recommendations. 68 Pearson, “The Canadian Partnership” (17 December 1962), in Words and Occasions, 191, 193–4. E.L. Homewood, “The Face of French Protestantism,” u c o , 1 May 1959, 8–9, 21, 24–5, discusses the linguistic challenge of the United Church’s ministry to French Canadians. 69 Pearson, “The Canadian Partnership,” 197. Although Trudeau is usually credited with championing multiculturalism before it became official policy in 1971, it was implicit in Pearson’s speeches about language and ­culture a decade earlier. 70 Ramsay Cook, “Protestant Lion, Catholic Lamb,” in One Church, Two Nations?, ed. Philip LeBlanc and Arnold Edinborough (Don Mills, on: Longmans, 1968), 3–4. 71 Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (hereafter cited as Commission on B& B), u ca 82.117C, GC 20 C5B5, box 1-1. The terms of reference were reported to the General Council a year later in “Bilingualism and Biculturalism,” r o p (1964), 185–6. The term “multi-culturalism” was used in the United Church’s “Brief Presented to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism” (1964), Commission on B &B , box 1-1 (sec. 20), but “other cultures” (e.g., sections 46–51) was the phrase more commonly used. The section numbers that follow refer to the brief. 72 Alexander Smith (Dartmouth, n s ) to J.R. Mutchmor, 12 April 1964, Commission on B& B, box 1-5.

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Notes to pages 212–15

381

73 B. Doerksen (Regina) to J.R. Mutchmor, 12 April 1964, Commission on B & B , box 1-5. 74 Roland Garrett to Forsey, 29 May 1964, includes the text of the circular letter, Commission on B& B, box 1-5. 75 Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 203. 76 Forsey to Ernest Long, 2 July 1964, Commission on B &B , box 1-5. 77 Forsey to Rev. J. Ralph Watson, 20 July 1964, Commission on B &B , box 1-5. 78 Forsey, A Life on the Fringe, 118. 79 Eugene Forsey to Frank P. Fidler, 24 February 1965, Commission on B &B , box 1-6. Claude de Mestral, the bilingual minister of Noranda-Rouyn United Church in Quebec, was a prudent addition to the United Church delegation. As it turned out, United Church members were apparently not as outraged as the letters to Forsey and other church leaders had intimated. Instead there was nervousness about indifference to the seriousness of the situation. e& s s attempted to counter the complacency by organizing conferences and preparing study materials that drew attention to the looming national crisis. For example, the Lenten study book in 1965 was written by Claude de Mestral, A New Dawn in Canada? A Bilingual Minister Looks at Critical National Issues in the Light of the Cross (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service and Board of Christian Education, United Church of Canada, 1965). Some bilingual pamphlets were produced by the board, including Bilingualism and Biculturalism: Recent Statements of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church of Canada, [1967]). 80 Philip LeBlanc, “Preface,” in One Church, Two Nations?, xii. 81 The report was issued in instalments. The commission concluded its work in 1969, a year before the final instalment was published. 82 See C.B. Sissons, Church and State in Education (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1959), for an in-depth study of each province’s provisions for religious instruction. “Religious Education in the Schools of Canada,” Close the Chasm (e& s s Annual Report, 1962), 134, summarized in a chart the type of instruction as of 1962, with recitation of the Lord’s Prayer obligatory in six provinces and permitted in four; daily Bible readings obligatory in seven and permitted in three; and religious instruction obligatory in three, permitted in three, not permitted in three, and an extramural elective in one. 83 C.E. Silcox, “Religious Education and the Schools,” u c o , 1 August 1952, 11.

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Notes to pages 215–18

84 Alfred Gandier, “Religious Education in the Public School,” Canadian Journal of Religious Thought 3, no. 2 (1926): 119–20. 85 R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, “The Christian Recessional in Ontario’s Public Schools,” in Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 275–80. They note that compared with other North American school systems, Ontario was unique in making provision for religious instruction in public schools. 86 Ibid., 281. 87 E.L. Homewood, “Three R’s Have Become Four,” u c o , 1 May 1954, 14–15. 88 George C. Pidgeon, “The Church Should Enter Open Doors,” u c o , 1 January 1955, 3. 89 “For a Conference on Religion in the Schools,” u c o , 15 February 1960, 7. Forrest was particularly concerned that Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, with whom Protestants had worked well in the past, referred to religious instruction in Ontario schools as “an unjust political means fashioned by sincere men for narrow sectarian purposes.” 90 E.R. MacLean, “Religion in the Schools,” u c o , 15 May 1961, 16. Ironically, McLean ended his protest against the arguments of Jews and Unitarians by drawing inspiration from the words of the late Catholic Bishop Fallon of London, Ontario, who had defended Protestant religious instruction in public schools. 91 Kenneth Bagnell, “The Big Fight about the Bible in the Schools,” u c o , 1 March 1963, 40. The article noted (11–12) that some Baptists were staunch supporters of separation, a historic position for them, but one that the United Church disputed as the Canadian tradition. 92 See, for example, E.R. MacLean, “Religious Education in the Schools of Canada,” u c o , 1 January 1955, 7. Immigrating from Switzerland to Canada, and serving in a pastoral charge in Quebec, de Mestral was struck by what he saw as an alternative to the more rigid separation between church and state in the United States. In the mid-1960s he still claimed that “our policy is co-operation between them”; see A New Dawn in Canada?, 48. 93 “For a Conference on Religion in the Schools,” 7. 94 Bagnell, “The Big Fight about the Bible in the Schools,” 12. Israel’s director of religious education confirmed that there was a compulsory program there, which the Christian minority was expected to attend, an embarrassing inconsistency to Jews in Canada, according to Bagnell. 95 Ibid., 40.

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Notes to pages 218–21

383

  96 Ibid., 12.   97 “Church and State in Education,” r o p (1964), 191.   98 “Church and State, [sic] in Education,” r o p (1966), 275. Why the commission declined to support his report is not clear. Perhaps his appeal to the national role of the church sounded quaint to its younger members. Although Thomson used some of the new catch phrases of the 1960s (“mission to the world” and “social action” rather than “social service”), for the most part his analysis reads more like a throwback to earlier decades. I could find no evidence of an initiative to develop a philosophy of Christian education after the Commission was discharged.   99 James S. Thomson, “The Church and Education,” r o p (1966), 276–7. 100 Ibid., 279–80. 101 Gidney and Millar, 281–2, citing the Mackay Report. They describe the steps to purge Christianity from the curriculum (and the objections to removing such instruction); it was replaced by either a “World Religions” course or values education (282–8). 102 Religion in Our Schools: An Ecumenical Reaction to the Keiller Mackay Report (Toronto: The Ecumenical Study Commission, 1972), 16, citing sections of the Mackay Report. As an indication of the position of the United Church, see Robin Smith, “Religion in Public Education,” in You Have a Right to Be Here (Toronto: Division of Mission in Canada, United Church of Canada, [1973?]). Smith agreed that the public school should not be an arena for proselytism, but worried that if parents turned to ­private schools to ensure religious instruction, it would result in “separate ghettos”; giving religion the place it deserved was one way to avoid a school system “fractured by religion” (321–3). 103 Ibid., 24. 104 Gidney and Millar, 288–9. 105 Paul W. Fox, “Mutuality with Differences,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 18–19. Fox claimed that Protestant churches were scorned by many because of their “obsessive devotion to the cause of prohibition,” and warned that if the Anglican and United churches used the augmented power that might come with union to influence secular issues, the result would be “increased resentment from a lay public, and probably eventually comparable retribution.” 106 Arnold Edinborough, “Introduction,” in One Church, Two Nations?, xvi–xix. 107 Charles Taylor, “Democracy, Inclusive and Exclusive,” in Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity and Self, ed. Richard Madsen, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 187.

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Notes to pages 222–6

108 Ibid., 188. 109 Forsey, A Life on the Fringe, 208–10. 110 “Report to the United Church Committee on Inter-Church Relations from the secretary of the Inter-Church Committee on Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations,” 21 October 1969, u c a 82.0001C, Series IX, box 165-3. The report pointedly noted that Trudeau had taken the time for an audience with the pope a year earlier. The appointment was a stunning blow to this committee, formed twenty-five years earlier to counter such signs of “Catholic aggression.” The appointment perhaps gave Catholics pause as well: Trudeau chose as Canada’s first ambassador to the Vatican a self-described humanist from Manitoba who leaned toward Unitarianism. See Frederick J. McEvoy, “The Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between Canada and the Vatican, 1969,” c c h s Historical Studies 68 (2002): 81. 111 “Mr Trudeau and the Vatican,” u c o , 15 November 1969, 10. Forrest was later given a rare glimpse into Trudeau’s personal faith for “An Observer Interview with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau,” u c o , September 1971, 16–20 (which ended with Forrest asking him if anything positive had yet come of the new relationship with the Vatican).

chapter eight    1 “End of an Era” was a cover story on J.R. Mutchmor in the 15 September 1964 issue of the Observer, occasioned by his retirement. The first part (“The Summing Up”) contained excerpts from Mutchmor’s report as the retiring moderator, followed by “The Controversial Years,” an article by editor A.C. Forrest.   2 J.R. Mutchmor, Mutchmor: The Memoirs of James Ralph Mutchmor (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 207–10.   3 “Crises,” u c o , 15 June 1964, 7.   4 J.R. Mutchmor, Command the Morning (e&ss Annual Report, 1961), 53.    5 Forrest, “The Controversial Years,” 13.    6 Ken Bagnell, “Ray Hord – The United Church’s Great Dissenter,” Star Weekly Magazine, 27 January 1968, 26.    7 “Ilderton Native Selected to Take Key Church Post” [clipping], London Free Press, 20 September 1962, u ca, J. Raymond Hord biographical file.    8 “Sunday Sport Issue May Go to Voters,” Regina Leader-Post, 8 July 1955, 3, accessed 7 August 2012, http: / / library2.usask.ca / sni / stories / spo3c.html

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Notes to pages 227–8

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  9 J.R. Hord, “A Christian’s Attitude toward His Culture,” sermon delivered 21 September 1958, 3–4, for instance, was based on H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture. The original copies of Hord’s sermons are in my possession, given to me by his brother-in-law Stan Lucyk, who later served as a minister at Royal York Road United. 10 Sandra Beardsall, “Ray Hord: ‘Prophet Evangelist’ of the United Church,” Touchstone 24, no. 3 (2006): 50. 11 J.R. Hord, “Why Does God Allow Accidents to Happen?” sermon delivered 29 July 1962. Lucyk’s handwritten note on the sermon identifies it as “preached after Ray and June’s son, Jamie, drowned at Pinecrest camp.” Hord’s reaction to his son’s death was often noted in articles about him in the 1960s, and is still remembered by members of Royal York Road United Church who witnessed it. 12 The police concluded that Hord was likely mistaken for the man living in an identical house next door, who had recently testified at a court proceeding. June Hord wondered at the time if the attack was linked to his support for religious education in the public schools. See “Pastor’s Wife Tells of Vicious Attack” [unidentified clipping], Hord biographical file. 13 Beardsall, 55–6. 14 Bagnell, “Ray Hord – The United Church’s Great Dissenter,” 26. 15 E.E. Long, “The State of the Church,” 1, [1967?], Ernest Edgar Long Papers, u ca, box 9-128. 16 Robert W. Spike, “The Glorious Confusion about Missions,” Dead or Alive (e &s s Annual Report, 1966), 82. Spike, a prominent American theological and civil rights leader who was murdered in 1966, identified three competing perspectives on mission, each based on a different way of understanding the relationship between the church, the gospel, and the world (83–4). 17 “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 327. The International Council on Mission had been formed in 1921 by the Edinburgh Conference’s continuation committee. For a summary of the main conferences and committees of the modern ecumenical movement, see Paul A. Crow Jr, “The Ecumenical Movement,” in Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, vol. 2, ed. Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (New York: Scribner, 1988), 983–92. 18 Spike, 83. 19 William Hutchison, “Americans in World Mission: Revision and Realignment,” in Altered Landscapes: Christianity in America, 1935– 1985, ed. David W. Lotz (Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 1989), 159.

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Notes to page 229

20 Theodore A. Gill Jr, “American Presbyterians in the Global Ecumenical Movement,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: The Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Christian Witness, eds. Milton J Coalter, John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1991), 140–3. J.H. Oldham, a Scottish missionary deeply involved in the ecumenical movement and the formation of the wc c , is credited with coining the term “middle axioms.” The new direction is evident in, for instance, “The Church in the Field of Social Welfare” report (1968) ­discussed below. 21 Hutchison, “Americans in World Mission: Revision and Realignment,” 161–2. For the impact of the animosity between liberals and conservatives in a denomination similar to the United Church, see Milton J Coalter, “Presbyterian Evangelism: A Case of Parallel Allegiances Diverging,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Christian Witness, 33–54, and Theodore A. Gill Jr, “American Presbyterians in the Global Ecumenical Movement,” in The Diversity of Discipleship: The Presbyterians and Twentieth-Century Christian Witness, 144–5. 22 Hutchison, 160–1, who remarks that these provocative positions were presented with Hoekendijk’s “characteristic acerbity.” 23 Martin E. Marty popularized the phrase “two-party system” used by his doctoral student Jean Miller Schmidt to describe the split in U.S. churches often noted by historians. Marty used this terminology when he addressed e & s s ; see “The Controller, the Centaur and the Commissar,” It’s a Big Responsibility (e& s s Annual Report, 1970), 437. Schmidt’s dissertation was later published as Souls or the Social Order: The Two-Party System in American Protestantism (Brooklyn, n y: Carlson, 1991). 24 D.W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 226, finds a “broadening continuum” (rather than separate camps of conservatives and liberals), among the Nonconformist churches in Britain that I see as similar to the United Church. In both cases, moderates managed to hold the two parties together until after the Second World War. Kevin Neil Flatt, “The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church of Canada” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2008), tends to interpret these leaders as dissembling in their public statements so as not to alienate their more conservative supporters. My own assessment of their motives is more charitable. 25 “Evangelism and Social Service,” The United Church Observer Special Reference Handbook of Facts and Church Directory, January 1963 (Reference Issue), 21.

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Notes to pages 230–2

387

26 J.R. Hord, “Every Christian Is an Evangelist,” Breaking the Barriers (e & s s Annual Report, 1964), 11–12. 27 J.R. Hord, “The Price of Hope,” Listen to the World (e&ss Annual Report, 1965), 6–7. 28 “Report by Rev. Stuart Crysdale,” Breaking the Barriers, xii (insert). 29 Robert Christie, “New Focus for Commitment,” xi–xiii (insert), and “Experimental Evangelism and Social Action,” 125–35, both in Canada and Its Future (e& s s Annual Report, 1967), illustrate the implications of Colin Williams’s approach to evangelism for the work of the National Project. At the time, Williams was executive director of the Central Department of Evangelism for the n cc. 30 “The Centennial Committee,” r o p (1962), 253–4. 31 “Evangelism and Social Service,” r o p (1964), 115. The resolution noted that the latest statistics indicated a “crisis” in evangelism, in particular the failure of teenage membership to keep pace with their numbers in the ­general population. 32 J.R. Hord, “Some Goals for a National Project of Evangelism and Social Action,” Listen to the World, 106–7. 33 The section on evangelism in Dead or Alive illustrates well the new emphasis. “The Changing Church in a Changing World,” 11, provides a chart that identifies fourteen approaches. 34 Rex R. Dolan, The Big Change: The Challenge to Radical Change in the Church (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1967). Dolan did his doctoral studies at Union Theological Seminary, and the influence of Hoekendijk and other promoters of the new view of the mission of the church as service to the world is evident in his references; see, for example, his discussion of the role of the church, 22–8. Dolan identified architects of the “big change” as Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, Rudolph Bultmann, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (97–100), and devoted a chapter (39–59) to the “death of God” theologians and the debate over John A.T. Robinson’s Honest to God. 35 Dolan, 61–70. Given his dismissal of the need for a blueprint, it is ­curious that the new approach was set out in a pamphlet titled A New Blueprint for Evangelism, prepared by an e&ss committee that Dolan chaired. 36 Ibid., 36–7. 37 Ibid., 17–18. 38 Eugene Carson Blake, “The Racial Barrier,” Breaking the Barriers, 63–7. 39 Peter Gzowski, “This Is Our Alabama,” Breaking the Barriers, 89–90, an excerpt from Maclean’s, 6 July 1963.

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Notes to pages 232–3

40 D.M. Ramsay, “Home Mission Enterprise of the United Church of Canada,” New Outlook, 10 June 1925, 41. 41 See the essays in George Dorey, et al., eds., No Vanishing Race: The Canadian Indian Today (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 1955), for a positive assessment of home mission work with indigenous peoples, including one by A.E. Caldwell, later convicted of abuse. “Woman’s Missionary Society,” r o p (1956), 526, reported that the book topped the wms ’s list of its “best-sellers” with 6,000 copies sold. For a more ­critical assessment of the United Church’s involvement, see the articles in Touchstone 16, no. 2 (1998). 42 James E. Milord, “Genocide in Canada: We Call It Integration,” u c o , August 1970, 24–6. On the United Church’s shift to a policy of integration, which involved phasing out its residential schools, see the records of the Commission to Study Indian Work, u ca 82.079C. The commission’s report was presented to General Council in two instalments: r o p (1956), 207–34, and r o p (1958), 185–94. 43 Stewart Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is! (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, United Church of Canada, 1966), 2. One of the congregations featured in the chapter “Real Cool at Yorkville” (7–20) was St Paul’s Avenue Road United Church in Toronto, where Crysdale had followed Berry as minister. Bruce Michael Douville, “The Uncomfortable Pew: Christianity, the New Left, and the Hip Counterculture in Toronto, 1965–1975” (PhD diss., York University, 2011), 142–3, discusses the congregation’s attempts at outreach to the youth who were drawn to the Yorkville scene. Although Douville does not track Berry and Crysdale’s work at e&ss, it is interesting to consider how their programming was influenced by their former congregation’s encounter with the culture of the 1960s. Douville provides a concise presentation of his research as it relates to the United Church in “A Puppy-Dog Tale: The United Church of Canada and the Youth Counter-Culture, 1965–73,” Papers of the Canadian Society of Church History, 2008, 27–46. 44 Stewart Crysdale, “Prophecy in an Industrial Society,” Breaking the Barriers, 161. 45 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1. 46 “Is There a Religious Revival in Canada?” Presbyterian Record, April 1957, 10. Berton was the managing editor at Maclean’s magazine at that time, and one of several public figures invited to comment on the upswing in church attendance. His assessment that “there is a great deal of

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47

48

49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56

57

Notes to pages 233–5

389

nonsense talked about the need for ‘modernizing’ the church” is ironic in view of his own critique a few years later. It is interesting to speculate whether Berton’s friendship (and occasional literary collaboration) with Charles Templeton influenced his later, more critical view of religion. A.B. McKillop, Pierre Berton: A Biography (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2008), makes several references to their relationship, as does David Vance, “Charles Templeton and the Performances of Unbelief” (master’s thesis, Carleton University, 2008), but neither considers that possibility. Berton’s dismissal from Maclean’s in 1963 after a public outcry against a column that condoned premarital sex (McKillop, 394–97) perhaps accounts for some of his antagonism toward the ‘old’ morality. Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965). On Berton’s publishing relationship with the Anglican Church, the promotion of his hugely successful book, and its impact on the churches, see A.B. McKillop, 403–4, 427–34. A.C. Forrest, “What Berton Would Say Differently If Writing for the United Church,” u c o , 1 February 1965, 31–3. For the published findings, see Stewart Crysdale, National Survey of the United Church in Canadian Life (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, 1964) and Stewart Crysdale, The Changing Church in Canada: Beliefs and Social Attitudes of United Church People (Toronto: Evangelism and Social Service, 1965). Stewart Crysdale, “The Hazards of Interpreting Signs,” Listen to the World, 25. Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Symposium on the Church and the World (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), iv, 22, 57. Charles Wilkinson, “Less Tact, More Action,” Dead or Alive, 69–70. Reprint of column in Hamilton Spectator, n.d. Saul Alinsky, “The Dynamics of Social Change,” Dead or Alive, 71–5. G.B. Mather, ed., Christianity and Politics (Toronto: National Evangelistic Mission Committee, 1960), 35. Roger Hutchinson, “Witnessing against War: Peacemaking in the Changing Canadian Context,” in Challenging the Conventional: Essays in Honour of Ed Newbery, ed. Wesley Cragg, et al., (Burlington, on: Trinity Press, 1989), 168–82, illustrates the distinctions between principles and concrete proposals in the United Church’s consideration of issues related to pacifism and nuclear weapons. Ben Smillie, “Off with the Halo,” u c o , 15 October 1965, 21, 40.

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Notes to pages 235–9

58 Claude de Mestral, “When Should the Church Speak?” in One Church, Two Nations?, ed. Philip LeBlanc and Arnold Edinborough (Don Mills, o n: Longmans, 1968), 168–71. 59 E.L. Homewood, “Billy Graham and Evangelism,” u c o , 15 October 1963, 13, captured the tone and range of criticism that was to follow. Hord claimed that “a sociologist” had made the Madison Ave. comparison. The article referred to reservations about Graham’s methods that had been expressed by leading theologians of the day, notably Paul Lehman and Reinhold Niebuhr. 60 Homewood, 13–14. 61 Ben Smillie, “Let’s Stop Backing Billy Graham,” u c o , August 1965, 17–18. 62 R.C. Chalmers, “It’s Commitment That Counts,” u c o , 15 September 1965, 26; the letter was included in a three-page section under the heading “Billy Graham: Should We Really Stop Supporting Him?” 63 “Waffling,” u c o , 15 November 1965, 11. Almost a year later, Graham provided answers to a list of twenty-six questions sent to him by the Observer; see “Billy Graham in Reply,” u c o , 1 July 1966, 10–13. The social issues that Forrest identified are interesting, suggesting a convergence of conservative evangelical theology with right-wing politics. The political shift in neo-evangelicalism that Graham’s critics detected is ­analyzed in William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), including a discussion of the deteriorating relationship with the nc c and the wc c . 64 Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is!, 149–56, 173–7, explained the theory behind the Planning Fellowships, which was influenced by the Chicago Urban Training Center’s action / reflection model with its links to community organization tactics. 65 Ibid., 168. 66 Ibid., 35–47, described MacDonald’s work at St Luke’s United Church, formerly Sherbourne Street United (whose previous ministers had included liberal evangelical sympathizers Richard Roberts and R.C. Chalmers), until its merger with Carleton Street United Church in 1959. 67 Clarke MacDonald, “The Shape of Things,” Life for the Choosing (e&ss Annual Report, 1969), 297. 68 Clarke MacDonald, “The King Has No Clothes,” The Cutting Edge (e&ss Annual Report, 1968), 6–7. 69 Kenneth Bagnell, “What’s All This So-Called New Evangelism?” u c o , 15 April 1966, 16–17. 70 Ibid., 17. 71 Ibid., 17–18.

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Notes to pages 239–40

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72 Kenneth Bagnell, “The View from the Firing Line,” u c o , 1 September 1967, 15, 40. He described St Andrew’s College in Saskatoon as “among the most avant-garde theological colleges” in Canada, noting that it had recently awarded an honorary degree to Hord. Saskatchewan Conference registered its support by passing a resolution that affirmed Hord’s leadership at e &s s . 73 Ken Bagnell, “Ray Hord – The United Church’s Great Dissenter,” 27. 74 Accessed 7 August 2012, www.wheaton.edu / bgc / archives / GUIDES / 014. htm#3. The timing suggests that the Congress was organized as a theological alternative to both the w cc and Vatican II, and to signal a geographical shift in emphasis: from Europe and North America to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 75 James Somerville, “The World’s Evangelicals Look at Themselves – and Their Future,” u c o , 1 January 1967, 14–15. For all the talk of appealing to the New Age, the United Church was slow to make the transition to the new technology; it continued to rely heavily on print materials. “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 349, suggests one explanation for this more cautious attitude toward the use of technology: the fear that it could weaken the church’s witness by leaving it vulnerable to “mass indoctrination.” 76 Somerville, 15. The article mentioned that at the time, Reynolds was the Canadian representative for Christianity Today, a magazine that Graham had helped to found in 1956 as an alternative to the Christian Century. 77 Reynolds, a native of Newfoundland, was to become a controversial figure in the United Church. Forty per cent of the members of West Ellesmere United in Scarborough, Ontario, voted against calling him in 1968 after he had served as the congregation’s interim minister. See the story on Reynolds by James Taylor, “Sharing the Faith: A Visitation Evangelism Program that Works,” u c o , July 1979, 10–13. “Gimme That Prime-time Religion,” Maclean’s, April 28, 1980, 48–9, is one of many accounts of his highly publicized battles with the United Church. He was placed on the discontinued list after a three-year dispute – not for his conservative theology per se, but for refusing to bow to pressure when he tried to move his congregation to a larger building against the wishes of the presbytery. His name is last listed in the Yearbook in 1980. 78 J. Berkley Reynolds, “Long Live the Old Evangelism,” u c o , 1 May 1967, 14–15. Reynolds singled out Crysdale and Dolan for reproof. 79 Ben Smillie, “Why the Fundamentalists Are Wrong,” u c o , 15 May 1967, 21. His reference to the Plymouth Brethren is interesting, since Smillie was born in India, where his parents served for a time as United Church missionaries.

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Notes to pages 240–1

80 John Burbidge and Patricia Clarke, “He Came; He Preached, and Here’s What Happened,” u c o , 15 October 1967, 17. They described the event in carnival, marketing, and Hollywood terms as well. 81 Norman Wesley Oake, “Evangelism Today,” Small Voice (Winter 1968): 8. Evidence of that confusion was supplied by a survey that Crysdale had conducted with participants at his Planning Fellowships, who were asked to identify the church’s “chief purpose.” A surprisingly small percentage of laity (3 per cent) and clergy (2 per cent) thought its purpose was “to guide and minister to believers.” A higher percentage of laity (16 per cent) than clergy (3 per cent) identified as its main purpose “to establish a more Christian social order.” The most favoured response by far was “to make Christ and his gospel known in the world” (67 per cent of laity and 73 per cent of clergy). Stewart Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is!, 162. At first glance it would seem to show support for the New Evangelism. However, when asked directly about evangelism (166), most respondents still preferred that there be an equal emphasis on proclamation and the witness of Christ-like action (laity 46 per cent, clergy 52 per cent). One wonders how representative the Planning Fellowships were, but their association with the New Evangelism makes the strong support for “proclamation” all the more striking. 82 See Katherine Hockin, “The Changing Face of Mission,” Mandate, October 1985, 17–20, and Katherine B. Hockin, “My Pilgrimage in Mission,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 12 (January 1988): 23–8, 30, for accounts of her life that place her experience alongside the major shifts in missionary thought and her own changing understanding of “world mission.” 83 Katharine Hockin, “Revolutionary Changes in the Twentieth Century Challenging Conventional Approaches to Missions,” n.d., 11, Commission on World Mission, u ca 82.124C, box 1-10. The paper was presented at a consultation, possibly at a special meeting held 12–13 February 1965. 84 The prestigious group of missionaries, church executives, and scholars included Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a Canadian with connections to the United Church who was then teaching World Religions at Harvard, and whose approach to world religions featured the implicit pluralist position of the 1966 report. 85 “The Crisis in the United Church,” u c o , 1 March 1960, 7 (captioned “An Editorial Repetition”). 86 The entire report was printed as “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 299–493. For statistics on the number of missionaries, see Appendixes D and E, 462–3. It is interesting to note that the numbers of new appointments

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87 88 89

90

91

92

Notes to pages 241–3

393

between 1961 and 1964 indicated in the table in Appendix E were among the highest in forty years. “Radical Change in Mission,” u c o , 15 October 1966, 10. Ibid., 10. Letter from Donald Fleming to A.C. Forrest, 21 October 1966, 3–5, Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, u ca, box 8-7. I have wondered at the vehemence of Fleming’s response. Was the quarrel set off because of a misunderstanding between the two men over the word “commissioners” in the editorial? I assume Forrest had in mind the commissioners (delegates) to General Council; Fleming’s first letter obviously thought Forrest was referring to the members of the commission he had chaired (e.g., his reference to their two and a half years of work). Fleming was defending those who had worked with him on the report, whom Forrest seemingly had portrayed as daft – “unaware” of the shift. However, Fleming himself seems not to have appreciated fully the implications of the lengthy report his group had produced. Letter from A.C. Forrest to Donald Fleming, 3 November 1966, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. One of the difficulties was that the two men could not agree on the wording of the question that Forrest had asked on the floor. Forrest claimed that he had explicitly referred to the understanding of mission in 1925 as “making disciples of all nations,” and whether the report represented a shift in that emphasis. Fleming, he protested, had distorted his meaning by rephrasing his question. Letter from Donald Fleming to A.C. Forrest, 10 November 1966, 4, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. The exchange of letters gives a fascinating glimpse of the commission’s work and the response to it, as well as Forrest’s role as editor. Fleming mentioned more than once that he had the support of the new moderator (Wilfred Lockhart), but Forrest refused to give in to pressure once he was convinced that he was right. “Win Souls to Christ” [undated draft], 2–3, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. Forrest circulated this draft among some of the national staff. A memo from the associate secretary of the Board of World Mission suggested that Forrest emphasize “secularity and servanthood as the marks of Christ’s people” as “the theological emphasis today”; see Garth Legge to A.C. Forrest, 16 November 1966, Forrest Papers, box 8-7. Forrest’s reply to Legge (17 November 1966) and the draft statement indicate that he took his advice. Legge summed up what he saw as Forrest’s main point: a “rejection of a false evangelicalism which contends that the goal is ‘to win souls for Christ’ and society will take care of itself.” This, said Legge, “is for the birds – the vultures, that is – and the sooner it is disposed of, the better.”

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Notes to pages 243–5

  93 C. Douglas Jay, World Mission and World Civilization (Toronto: Board of World Mission, United Church of Canada, [1967?]), 2–4. For the definition of proselytism, see “World Mission,” r o p (1966), 303.  94 Jay, World Mission and World Civilization, 3–4, 11–12.   95 George Johnston, “The Future of Ecumenism in Canada,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 186. He noted in particular an active evangelical group within the Presbyterian Church.   96 Ernest E. Long, “The Truth about the Crisis in the Church,” u c o , 15 November 1967, 30.   97 Martin E. Marty, Under God, Indivisible, 1941–1960, vol. 3 of Modern American Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 434–55, analyzes the theological and cultural divisions within Protestantism in the 1950s. David Bebbington, “Evangelicalism in Its Settings: The British and American Movements since 1940,” in Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 367, sees the time around 1940 as the nadir of the evangelical movement; it was “crushed between the upper and nether millstones of fundamentalism and modernism.” On the resurgence of conservative evangelicalism in the postwar period, see George M. Marsden, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, mi: Eerdmans, 1987); Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Garth M. Rosell, The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, m i : Baker Academic, 2008).   98 See Phyllis D. Airhart, “Condensation and Heart Religion: Canadian Methodists as Evangelicals, 1884–1925,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. G.A. Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 90–105, for early indications of different organizational assumptions.   99 Whereas the Anglican, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches and the Canadian Council of Churches have since sought observer status in the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the United Church is represented only indirectly through the Canadian Council of Churches. 100 J. Berkley Reynolds, “Evangelical Renaissance,” Small Voice 1, no. 1 (1967): 2. He also drew attention to the Canadian Anglican Evangelical Fellowship and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (comparing the latter to the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals) as signs of the evangelical revival. He credited the Berlin Congress along with the

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Notes to pages 245–8

395

Graham and Ford crusades for bringing evangelicals from different denominations together (10). 101 The sea change was evident in the Observer. Compare the skeptical tone of the Observer’s coverage of the Second Vatican Council in October 1962 to the hopeful tone of R.H.N. Davidson, “What Vatican II Can Mean for Protestants,” u c o , January 1966, 17–18, 30. Davidson described the closing service as “the end of the most important event in modern church history” and “the beginning of a new era.” For other indications of the shift, see A.C. Forrest, “A Protestant at Vatican II,” u c o , 15 November 1962, 14–15, 17; A.C. Forrest, “The New Mood in Catholicism,” 1 February 1964, u c o , 10–12, 40; and Patricia Clarke, “The RomanCatholic Protestant Thaw: How It Is Changing Your Church,” 1 May 1965, u c o , 13–15. For other illustrations of the impact, see John H. Young, “Reaction to Vatican II in the United Church of Canada,” in Vatican II: Canadian Experiences, ed. Michael Attridge, Catherine E. Clifford, and Gilles Routhier (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2011), 106–23. 102 “Inter-church and Inter-faith Relations,” r o p (1972), 267. I have been unable to find evidence that the recommendation for preparing new materials was followed. 103 Claude de Mestral, A New Dawn in Canada? A Bilingual Minister Looks at Critical National Issues in the Light of the Cross (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service and Board of Christian Education, 1965), 27. 104 George Johnston, “The Future of Ecumenism in Canada,” 186. 105 Brydon, 11. 106 Lois Wilson, “Town Talk,” The Cutting Edge, 230–3. 107 Wilson, Turning the World Upside Down: A Memoir (Toronto: Doubleday, 1989), 47–9. 108 Ibid., 50. 109 “The Church on the Urban Frontier,” r o p (1964), 275–7. 110 “The Church on the Urban Frontier” r o p (1966), 193–7. 111 Harold Bailey, “Rural,” u c o , 1 August 1966, 9. 112 “Is It a National Church?” u c o , August 1957, 6. 113 Jiwu Wang, “His Dominion” and the “Yellow Peril” (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006), 85. 114 Ibid., 85. He notes Protestant missions to Chinese immigrants were abandoned in the 1960s after the collapse of the vision of “His Dominion.” 115 George Johnston, “The Strategy of the Church in the Space Age,” Listen to the World, 76–80.

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396

Notes to pages 248–51

116 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 79. Chapter 3 discusses the impact of this new approach to housing, which made the upbringing of the baby boomers different from their grandparents or even their parents. 117 Wesley Morris, “The Suburban Church,” Telstar – Tell Peace! (e&ss Annual Report, 1963), 153. 118 “Suburbia,” u c o , 1 May 1964, 7. 119 Ibid., 7. 120 Forrest put his finger on an important dimension of the criticism. James Hudnut-Beumler, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965 (New Brunswick, nj : Rutgers University Press, 1994), discusses the critique of suburban religion and links the “jeremiads” of secular and religious critics (notably Will Herberg, Gibson Winter, Peter Berger, and Harvey Cox among the latter) to the views of the youth culture of the 1960s. e&ss’s staff reports and articles indicate familiarity with this sociological research, and the names of Talbot Parsons, Peter Berger, and Gibson Winter crop up frequently. For instance, Crysdale’s essay on “The Church’s Functions in Contemporary Society,” Listen to the World, 48–50, listed several sociologists of religion, but no theologians. 121 “The Suburban Church: A Symposium,” u c o , 15 October 1965, 12. 122 Ibid., 12. Douglas John Hall, The Future of the Church (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1989), 5–19, gives a poignant description of growing up in a United Church congregation that I suspect was quite typical for someone born in 1928. He confirms Forrest’s hunch about suburban congregations: “The village church! it is the dream church of every suburbia I know!” (17). 123 “The Suburban Church: A Symposium,” 13–16. 124 Ibid., 13. 125 Ibid., 13–14. 126 Ibid., 17. 127 The section on “The Congregation in Mission” in “The Church on the Urban Frontier,” r o p (1966), 196–200 is a good summary of the application of the new approach to mission at the congregational level, e.g., study-action projects. The ambivalence about identifying the mission of the church with a building – often “a decaying monument to the ­prosperity of the institutional church of a previous generation” (199) – is evident.

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Notes to pages 251–4

397

128 “Evangelism,” u c o , 15 November 1967, 11. 129 “Evangelicals,” u c o , 15 May 1970, 8. 130 Cf. “Centenary Committee,” r o p (1964), 187–8; “Centenary Committee,” r o p (1966), 190. 131 “Final Report of the National Project of Evangelism and Social Action,” Life for the Choosing, 378–9. 132 Robert Christie, “Man of the Sixties – Scientific Genius and Social HalfWit,” It’s A Big Responsibility, 491–2. 133 Ibid., 495. 134 Robert Christie, “Where the End Is the Beginning,” Man Fully Alive (e&ss Annual Report, 1971), 3. 135 William Berry, “Evangelism – Retrospect and Prospect,” Man Fully Alive, 23–4, 27. 136 J.R. Hord, “Journey into the Future,” Canada and Its Future, iv (insert). 137 J.R. Hord, “Finding Life’s Meaning,” Man Fully Alive, 55, stanzas from a poem published posthumously in e& s s ’s last report. 138 Arch McCurdy, another e& s s staffer phased out by restructuring, saw the creation of a new Division of Mission in Canada as the end of the old two-pronged thrust of evangelism and social service. He makes the interesting observation that social action had “emerged” in the 1960s as a third facet of the old board’s work; see Arch McCurdy, “Transition,” Man Fully Alive, 19. 139 While some claimed that restructuring was a convenient way to rid the United Church of the term “evangelism,” there was also speculation that it was designed “to muffle the prophetic but sometimes embarrassing voice” of e& s s by replacing it with a church in society department within the new Division of Mission in Canada; see Patricia Clarke, “Clarke MacDonald: An Ear for Evangelism at the Top,” u c o , February 1971, 16. On Clarke MacDonald’s understanding of his responsibilities as head of the new department, see “The Department of Church in Society,” xix–xxi, which includes a reference to committing his life to Christ at the age of fourteen, and “Some Aspects of Our Task – At this Point in Time,” 272–5, an account of his impressions of the church’s work since the 1940s, both in You Have a Right to Be Here (Division of Mission in Canada Report, 1972–73). 140 “The Church in the Field of Social Welfare,” r o p (1968), 297. 141 Ibid., 295. 142 Hockin, “Revolutionary Changes in the Twentieth Century Challenging Conventional Approaches to Missions,” 1.

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398

Notes to pages 255–8

chapter nine   1 “Change Ways or Suffer Defeat Warns United Church Minister” [clipping], Napanee Beaver, 1 September 1965, Ernest Edgar Long Papers, uc a , box 11-173 (scrapbook).   2 “Mr United Church Warns of the Coming Crisis” [clipping], Toronto Daily Star, 18 November 1967, Long Papers, box 11-173 (scrapbook).   3 Ernest E. Long, “The Truth about the Crisis in the Church,” u c o , 15 November 1967, 12–15, 30, 40.   4 “An Editorial Measurement: Of the United Church’s Amazing Growth,” u c o , 1 May 1959, 7, 29.  5 “Disappointment,” u c o , 1 June 1967, 11.   6 J.R. Hord, “Where Is the Church in Canada Going?” Canada and Its Future (e & s s Annual Report, 1967), 11.   7 E.E. Long, “The State of the Church,” address delivered 26 January 1971, 1, Long Papers, box 9-file 128, which cited recently published surveys of church attendance.   8 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15. His book explores each of these contributory streams separately. Although much of his analysis focuses on Britain, Europe, and the United States, he includes Canada (with specific attention to Quebec), Australia, and New Zealand as examples of the geographical extent of the crisis. For a critique of theories of secularization, see Jeffrey Cox, “Master Narratives of Long-term Religious Change,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 201–17. Cox does not deny religious decline, but focuses on different categories, such as religious toleration and the impact of state and legal power.  9 McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 243. 10 Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 207– 34. He makes use of the work of ecologist C.S. Holling, “Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological, and Social Systems,” Ecosystems 4 (2001): 396, who pictures panarchy as “a nested set of adaptive cycles” operating in a hierarchy. 11 Homer-Dixon, 228. 12 For a description of the phases see Holling, 396–404. 13 Homer-Dixon, 308. 14 Holling, 398–9. 15 Homer-Dixon, 289–90.

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Notes to pages 259–62

399

16 Holling, 397–8, 402. 17 See Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “Individualism Religious and Modern: Continuities and Discontinuities,” in Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada between Europe and America, ed. David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 52–7, for a discussion of the connections between mysticism and modern individualism. 18 J.R. Hord, “It’s Later than We Think,” The Cutting Edge (e&ss Annual Report, 1968), 11–12. Hord expressed similar thoughts in undated handwritten notes marked “Future Sermon” and titled “The Church of the Dispersion.” The original copies of Hord’s sermons are in my possession, given to me by his brother-in-law Stan Lucyk. Lucyk adds a comment: “I believe Ray was writing this just before his death.” 19 Donald Mathers, “The Concept of Secularization,” paper presented to the Saturday Club at Queen’s University, 12 April 1969, in Not by Sight (published privately by his friends, 1974), 36–8. An earlier sermon had described secularization as “a religious achievement,” though it warned of a “false secularism that slides back into pagan religiosity”; see “Secularization: A Sermon,” preached at Chalmers United Church in Kingston, 26 May 1968, in Not by Sight, 41–3. 20 Daphne J. Anderson and Terence R. Anderson, “United Church of Canada: Kingdom Symbol or Lifestyle Choice,” in Faith Traditions and the Family, ed. Phyllis D. Airhart and Margaret J. Bendroth (Louisville, k y: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 135. 21 “What the Council Did!” u c o , 15 October 1964, 39. 22 A.C. Forrest, “The Churches’ Role in the Alcohol Problem,” address to young people in Toc Alpha, Niagara Fall, 29 December 1965, 10, Alfred Clinton Forrest Papers, u ca, box 4-45. 23 McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 29. 24 Hilda Benson Powicke, Coffee House: A One-Act Play (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada and the Department of Christian Social Service of the Anglican Church of Canada, [1965?]). 25 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby-Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 272. Anderson and Anderson, 129, identify Marriage Today: An Exploration of Man-Woman Relationship and Marriage (1978) as pivotal in separating sexuality and marriage, on the one hand, from procreation and family formation, on the other. They see this as a crucial step toward acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships, which had been thought of as “unnatural” because they did

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400

26

27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34

Notes to pages 262–4

not involve reproduction. In the 1960s, the United Church was not ready to accept homosexuals as ministers. For example, when asked what would happen if a candidate for the ministry was suspected of having a “homosexual problem,” Hord said he knew of no committee in the church that would recommend “a man with this aberration.” He was in favour of amending the Criminal Code to remove legal penalties for homosexual relationships between consenting adults, but felt that ministry was a ­different matter: a minister had an “unusual opportunity to mix” with boys and young men, and “confidence in him would be fatally undermined” if his homosexuality were known; see Toronto Daily Star ­[clipping], 20 January 1968, J. Raymond Hord biographical file, uc a . “The Lord’s Day,” r o p (1962), 338–40. The report noted the impact of television and other media, weekend travel, rootless communities, and competition from leisure activities. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 347. “The Lord’s Day Act,” r o p (1971), 161–2. J.R. Mutchmor’s report in Close the Chasm (e&ss Annual Report, 1962), 43. For two perspectives on the “why go to church” question, see W. Clarke MacDonald, “Sunday 11:00 a.m.: What’s It All About?” u c o , 1 September 1969, 24–5, and N. Bruce McLeod, “Why Won’t They Go to Church,” u c o , 1 November 1969, 20–2, 40. MacDonald warned that neglecting worship was “suicidal to the Christian life”; the “generation yet unborn” would be handed “cold ashes and not the flame of faith” (24). While not a direct response to MacDonald, McLeod’s article counters the assumption that people who neglect worship will eventually end up neglecting God. Kenneth Bagnell, “Are Prayer Meetings Passé?” u c o , 1 January 1966, 15, found that prayer meetings were a thing of the past but noted that Bible study was enjoying a renaissance, with groups taking “a more sophisticated approach to the scriptures.” “Guilty? Faith Crisis? Cultural Revolution? Golf? Me?” u c o , 15 October 1969, 11. Address by s cm general secretary Roy G. DeMarsh, “Campus Religion Slumps,” Command the Morning (e& s s Annual Report, 1961), 124–5. Owram, 179–83, describes the dramatic changes in higher education that corresponded to the surging number of students. For sc m’s postwar challenges and changes in this context, see Catherine Gidney, “Poisoning the Student Mind? The Christian Student Movement at the University of

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Notes to pages 264–6

401

Toronto, 1920–1965,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, New Series, 8 (1997): 157–63. 35 John W. Berry, “The Student Christian Movement – A Study in Creative Tension,” Breaking the Barriers (e& s s Annual Report, 1964), 53–4 (emphasis in the original). Bruce Michael Douville, “The Uncomfortable Pew: Christianity, the New Left, and the Hip Counterculture in Toronto, 1965–1975” (PhD diss., York University, 2011), 199–200, 203, indicates that the scm was having discussions about dropping “Christian” from its name; the loss of church funding that might result from the change was a consideration in retaining it. Douville sees connections between the youth counterculture (especially the s cm ) and the United Church’s shift to the left in the late-1960s (171–205), as well as its support for feminism and gl b t persons decades later (520–4). 36 Peter Gordon White, “Magnifying Voices, Sharing Visions,” in Voices and Visions: Sixty-five Years of the United Church of Canada, ed. John Webster Grant, et al. (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1990), 110. Even one of the New Curriculum’s harshest critics admitted that there had been “no loud protests” against it in the United Church; see J. Berkley Reynolds, “The Hot New Fight for the Good Old Faith,” u c o , 15 February 1968, 12, 14. 37 “Crises,” u c o , 15 June 1964, 7. 38 Joanne Strong, “Rx for the Sunday School,” u c o , 1 August 1968, 13. 39 Jean Doern, et al., All Things Are Possible: A History of Westworth United Church, 1950–1990 (n.p.: 1993), 31. 40 Robert Dobbie, et al., The Junior Teacher’s Guide (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1964). 41 “Comments on the New Curriculum,” Small Voice (Winter 1968): 4–5 (a letter from Wilber Sutherland to an unnamed friend). 42 Ibid., 7, 16–17. 43 J.R. Mutchmor, “Forty Years,” u c o , 1 June 1965, 11. 44 White, 107–9. 45 Judging from demographic patterns in other denominations, a decline may well have happened regardless of the controversy over curriculum. For a study that sees a more direct link between the New Curriculum and the decline in attendance, see Kevin Neil Flatt, “The Survival and Decline of the Evangelical Identity of the United Church, 1930–1971” (PhD diss., McMaster University, 2008), especially chapter 3. 46 Strong, 10.

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402

Notes to pages 267–9

47 James Taylor, “What’s Happening to Our Sunday Schools?” u c o , September 1970, 13, 15. 48 Ibid., 13, 14–15. 49 Owram, 103. 50 Harvey L. Shepherd, “Is There Room in Kairos for You?” u c o , 1 March 1969, 26. This group should not be confused with the ecumenical organization k a iros that was formed later. 51 Ibid., 27. For instance, in contrast to the y pu’s nationally designed programs of the past, Kairos was based on locally defined goals and actions. The article conveys the author’s skepticism about Kairos’s organizational effectiveness. Although impressed by the intelligence of those he had met, he was uncertain about what it meant for the United Church: “Kairos looks like the vanguard of the church and Kairos looks a mess” (30). 52 “Ecumenical Affairs,” r o p (1968), 366–7. Some of the projects underway included setting up recreational facilities, working on Indian reservations, organizing multi-denominational and multiracial church services, providing folk music for worship, and developing activities for action in Latin America. 53 Shepherd, 27. 54 “Report of the Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women,” r o p (1962), 275. The decision to merge the two organizations came after nearly a decade of study. “The Work of Women in the Church,” r o p (1958), 214–18, relates the background and findings that led to the recommendations in “The Commission on the Work of Women in the Church,” r o p (1960), 301–17, which took two years to implement. 55 Patricia Clarke, “What’s Keeping Women in the Church Kitchen?” u c o , 1 September 1965, 12. 56 Ibid., 13, 14. 57 “Laymen: Okay. We Say It Again. Let’s Give Them What They Want,” u c o , 1 May 1970, 11. 58 S.J.D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organization and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire, 1870–1920 raises this question about the correlation between belonging and believing as he considers what happens when people stop attending church; cited in Cox, “Master Narratives of Longterm Religious Change,” 213. 59 William G. Berry, “Secrets of a Successful Evangelist,” u c o , 15 January 1968, 23. 60 See Kenneth Bagnell, “What’s Happening in the Church? A Stirring ... New Styles ... Search for Meaning, A New Reformation, Perhaps?”

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Notes to pages 269–72

403

Excerpt from Globe and Mail Magazine, 28 March 1970, It’s A Big Responsibility (e& s s Annual Report, 1970), 42–3. 61 A number of such projects were connected to the Canadian Urban Training project funded by e& s s and the Board of Home Missions; see Ted Reeve, “Walking the Talk,” in Action Training in Canada: Reflections on Church-Based Education for Social Transformation, ed. Ted Reeve and Roger Hutchinson (Toronto: Emmanuel College Centre for Research in Religion, 1997), 13–58. Other “experimental projects” were funded by the Stabilization Fund, including a seminar on “Secularization and Christian Education,” family counselling services, chaplaincies to industry, and social ministries in the downtown cores of Toronto, Hamilton, and Vancouver; see “Experimental Projects Financed from the Stabilization Fund Income,” r o p (1968), 260–5. Douville, 173–7, finds that the New Left radicals influenced by cu t’s approach were more confrontational and increasingly critical of organized religion. 62 Stewart Crysdale, Churches Where the Action Is! (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, United Church of Canada, 1966). 63 E. Westhues and E. Burrill, “Summary Report Presented to Rowntree Memorial United Church,” November 1974, 2–3, Office of the Moderator, Series 2, u ca 83.069C, Wilbur Howard Papers, box 2 [unnumbered file]. 64 Ibid., 4–5, 8–10. 65 Ibid., 11. 66 For a study of the transition from missions to international development, see Ruth Compton Brouwer, “When Missions Became Development: Ironies of ‘NGOization’ in Mainstream Canadian Churches in the 1960s,” Canadian Historical Review 91 no. 4 (2010): 661–93. 67 Association with the institutional church is not included, for instance, in David Bebbington’s popular quadrilateral for defining evangelicalism: ­conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism. 68 Owram, 206–8. The appeal of the Jesus movement is perhaps not surprising, given its embrace of popular music. 69 Kyle Haselden, “Christianity’s Subtlest Foe,” Close the Chasm, 11–13. 70 McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 243–4, notes the popularity in the 1960s of charismatic forms of Christianity, mysticism, and other esoteric alternatives (e.g., neo-paganism, ecology, goddess, yoga). Leigh Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), sees the roots of New Age mysticism and seeker spirituality in nineteenth-century Transcendental liberalism. 71 “The 70s: Will They Be Sad, Soaring, Sordid, Sinful or Violent?” u c o , January 1970, 11.

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404

Notes to pages 272–4

72 Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterson, eds., The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3:133. 73 D.M. Mathers, “The Mission of the Church and the Rule of God over History,” [1965?], 1, Commission on World Mission 82.124C, box 2-13. 74 “Church Worship and Ritual,” r o p (1968), 357. 75 Ibid., r o p (1968), 357–8. One member of the committee who supported that “revolution” was Ronald Atkinson. For his views on liturgy as an expression of the “new worldliness and secularity,” see Ronald Atkinson, “Factors in the Preparation of a ‘Contemporary’ Liturgy,” in Ordered Liberty: Readings in the History of United Church Worship, ed. William S. Kervin (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 2011), 224–6, a reprint of an article published in 1965. 76 N.K. Clifford, “The United Church and Doctrinal Confession,” Touchstone 2, no. 2 (May 1984), 18. He contends that the Committee on Faith knowingly departed from the ancient creeds, the Reformed confessions, and its own traditions by beginning with a statement of the human condition rather than God. 77 Its reception differed from other materials prepared around the same time, including the Service Book (1969) for which the creed had been prepared and the Hymn Book published in co-operation with the Anglican Church of Canada (1971) that was long in use but much criticized. 78 Although the committee that worked on the new creed included two women (Katharine Hockin and Dorothy Wyman), feminist concern about sexist language was apparently not an issue. When the New Creed was revised in 1980, its striking opening affirmation was changed from “Man is not alone” to “We are not alone,” and “the true man Jesus” was replaced by “Jesus, the Word made flesh.” 79 For the presentation of the case for the New Creed, see “Christian Faith,” r o p (1968), 311–43, which includes the original version of the creed that was sent to the General Council. The creed was redrafted by the Committee on Faith and approved for congregational use and inclusion in the new service book by the General Council Executive on 5 November 1968; see Creeds: A Report of the Committee on Faith (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service of the United Church of Canada, 1969), 3. 80 John Burbidge, “A Creed Is a Short, Memorable and Accurate Summary of the Important Parts of the Christian Faith,” u c o , 1 February 1969, 18. 81 Ibid., 30. 82 Berkley Reynolds, “A Creed Is a Short, Memorable and Accurate Summary of the Important Parts of the Christian Faith,” u c o , 1 February 1969, 40. 83 Ibid., 19.

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Notes to page 275

405

84 G.A.D. Scott, “The New Creed of ’68,” Small Voice [3?], no. 2 (1969): 24–5. The article was a response to a question that had been broached in an editorial in the previous issue of Small Voice: how much diversity “on the very truths which constitute its identity” could go unchecked without threatening the existence of the United Church? 85 Reynolds, “The Hot New Fight for the Good Old Faith,” 14, used the term “new creed” to describe the u crf’s statement of faith in an article published a few months before what eventually became known the New Creed was presented at the General Council. 86 “The Editorial,” Small Voice 1, no. 1 (1967): 1. The somewhat awkward wording and punctuation are in the original; the statement appears in later versions in a slightly modified form. 87 “Christian Faith,” r o p (1966), 509–11. Michael Bourgeois, “Awash in Theology: Issues in Theology in the United Church of Canada,” in The United Church of Canada: A History, ed. Don Schweitzer (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 266–70, astutely notes the shift in the understanding of revelation from the Statement of Faith, which had affirmed “God’s self-revelation only in Scripture and the events to which it witnesses, especially in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” 88 Reynolds, “The Hot New Fight for the Good Old Faith,” 13–14. The explanation is similar to the editorial in Small Voice that introduced the redrafted statement on biblical authority, suggesting that Reynolds wrote, or at least had a hand in writing, the editorial. The new language echoed the neo-evangelical defence of inerrancy described in Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids, m i : Zondervan, 1976), written by one of the most prominent champions of the inerrantist approach to biblical interpretation. Reynolds would have been familiar with the debate that was heating up through his connection to Christianity Today, where Lindsell was editor. 89 J. Berkley Reynolds, “Evangelical Renaissance,” Small Voice 1, no. 1 (1967): 2, 10. He was pleased that principal Lautenschlager supported the Emmanuel College students who were perturbed by former moderator Ernest Howse’s beliefs about the resurrection and deity of Christ. Kenneth Hamilton, a professor at the United Church’s theological college in Winnipeg, had criticized Paul Tillich and the “God is dead” theologians in his writings. While Hamilton described himself as a liberal evangelical, Reynolds claimed he was becoming more conservative. For an assessment of Hamilton’s theological evolution, see John McTavish, “Kenneth Hamilton: Canada’s Kierkegaard,” Touchstone 28, no. 3 (2010): 51–68. 90 Alan T. Davies, [letter to the editor], u c o , 1 April 1968, 2.

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406

Notes to pages 275–7

91 John McTavish, [letter to the editor], u c o , 15 March 1968, 2. 92 W. Clarke MacDonald, “The King Has No Clothes,” The Cutting Edge, 6–7. 93 For a summary of the tasks undertaken at the various stages of the negotiations, see Neil Semple, “Introduction,” Anglican Church, United Church, Christian Church (Disciples) Union Negotiations (Finding Aid 197), 1981, u ca. 94 For the response to the invitation and early negotiations, see the first report of the “Commission on Re-Union,” r o p (1946), 180–2. 95 See Forrest’s editorial “To Anglicans ‘Time Is Not Yet,’” u c o , 1 February 1959, 5, a reply to the lead editorial in the first issue of the new Canadian Churchman magazine that had suggested union would not be happening anytime soon. A letter from United Church moderator Angus MacQueen and a statement from Anglican acting primate Phillip Carrington followed in the u c o , 1 March 1959, 11, 24. MacQueen pointed out that the invitation in 1943 had come from the Anglican bishops, not “zealous and ambitious Unionists” from the United Church, and regarded the advice to continue discussing union in good faith as “tantamount to saying ‘Let’s Pretend’” (11). A later editorial, “Anglicans and Union,” u c o , 15 March 1959, 6, informed readers that little had been done to prepare for union by either side over the past thirteen years. 96 “What the Council Did!” u c o , 15 October 1964, 40. 97 The document was widely circulated, including publication in full in the u c o , 15 June 1965, 8–11, 26. 98 “Union,” u c o August 1965, 9. The editorial credited Vatican II and an Anglican Congress held in Toronto two years earlier for the “new reformation” that was underway. 99 For an astute analysis of the failure of negotiations from the perspective of one of the United Church’s representatives, see John Webster Grant, “Leading a Horse to Water: Reflections on Church Union Conversations in Canada,” in Studies of the Church in History, ed. Horton Davies (Allison Park, pa: Pickwick Publications, 1983), 165–81. 100 The United Church continued to discuss union with the Disciples of Christ, but they withdrew from negotiations in 1985. 101 John Gywnne-Timothy, “The Evolution of Protestant Nationalism,” in One Church, Two Nations?, ed. Philip LeBlanc and Arnold Edinborough (Don Mills, on : Longmans, 1968), 48. 102 William A. Collins, “The Catholic Nature of Anglicanism,” u c o , 1 September 1962, 10–11, 40. 103 “Blunt Talk,” u c o , 1 September 1962, 9. George Johnston took up the challenge of defending church union in the next issue.

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Notes to pages 278–81

407

104 “Union with the Anglicans? Here Come the Dissenters!” u c o , 1 April 1966, 19, 21. 105 “Union with the Anglicans?” 20–1, 22. 106 “Ecumenical Affairs,” r o p (1968), 362. The report rightly anticipated that the “new radicalism and activism” would drive a wedge between conservative evangelicals and churches within the ecumenical mainstream. 107 George Johnston, “The Future of Ecumenism in Canada,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 185–6. 108 Patricia Clarke, “Some Impolite Fears about Church Union,” u c o , 15 March 1969, 8. 109 “Let’s Get a Perspective on Union!” u c o , November 1970, 10. 110 Patricia Clarke and Jerry Hames, “Union: What Church Members Really Think about Church Union,” u c o , November 1970, 18. 111 Ibid., 19–20. 112 On the Evangelical United Brethren union, see “From the Church Union Front,” u c o , 1 June 1959, 7; “The Other Church Union,” u c o , 1 May 1966, 14–15; and John Burbidge, “Gentle Shepherd of 10,000 Brethren,” u c o , 1 January 1968, 10–12, 29 (a story on Emerson Hallman’s leadership in the negotiations as superintendent of the Canada Conference of the e ub ). 113 Stewart Crysdale, “Social Change and the Re-Formation of the Church,” Dead or Alive (e& s s Annual Report, 1966), 77–81. 114 Stewart Crysdale, “Upheaval and Integration,” in One Church, Two Nations?, 139. 115 Some theologians saw the de-institutionalization accompanying urbanization as a positive development. Among them was Harvey Cox, who popularized Bonhoeffer’s “religionless” Christianity in his best-selling book The Secular City. 116 See J.R.P. Sclater, “A Conciliar Church,” Right Relations among Men (e & s s Annual Report, 1943), 85. 117 Church, Nation and World Order: A Report of the Commission on Church, Nation and World Order (Toronto: Board of Evangelism and Social Service, [1944?]), 35. 118 Martin E. Marty, “From the Centripetal to the Centrifugal in Culture and Religion,” Theology Today 51, no. 1 (1994): 7–8, claims that the world changed in 1968 in its organizational assumptions: from the centripetal, convergent, universalizing, and unitive inclinations of the postwar period to what he describes as the centrifugal, divergent, particularizing, mutually exclusive, and disruptive forces that reshaped the world after 1968. The restructuring process coincides with the declining significance of

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Notes to pages 281–2

denominations described by Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, nj : Princeton University Press, 1988), 71–99. For an analysis of this paradigm shift on the national structures of denominations (and the concomitant shift of energy to the congregational level), see David Roozen, “National Denominational Structures’ Engagement with Postmodernity: An Integrative Summary from an Organizational Perspective,” in Church, Identity, and Change: Theology and Denominational Structures in Unsettled Times, ed. David A. Roozen and James R. Nieman (Grand Rapids, mi: William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 596–8. 119 John Webster Grant, “‘They Don’t Speak for Me’: The United Church’s Crisis of Confidence,” Touchstone 6, no. 3 (September 1988): 9–17, assesses this distrust of ecclesial authority in the United Church. 120 J.R. Mutchmor, Mutchmor: The Memoirs of James Ralph Mutchmor (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 141–2. 121 John Webster Grant, “What’s Past Is Prologue,” in Voices and Visions, 132. 122 G.B. Mather, “Debt of Love,” The Cutting Edge, 299–300, his final report as associate secretary. 123 John McTavish, “‘An Honest Bar of Soap’: Earl Lautenschlager Affectionately Remembered,” Touchstone 6, no. 3 (1988): 45. 124 Roy DeMarsh, “The Crisis in the Ministry Today,” The Cutting Edge, 204. 125 “Dropbacks,” u c o , 15 May 1970, 9. 126 E. Brooks Holifield, God’s Ambassadors: A History of the Christian Clergy in America (Grand Rapids, m i : Eerdmans, 2007), 235–74, describes the challenges to ministry as a profession in the United States from 1940–70, which are strikingly similar to what the United Church was facing. Bernard Ennals, Telling the Story: The Memoirs of Bernard Ennals (Sackville, n b: Hitcham Press, 1995), recounts how the rapidly changing context shaped his thinking about his own work as a minister in rural, small town, and suburban congregations in British Columbia and Ontario. The second section of his memoirs, titled “Changed Country! Changed Church!,” looks at the impact of urbanization, immigration, fundamentalism, and the sexual revolution. 127 Arnold Edinborough, “The Minister and the Twentieth Century,” in Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Symposium on the Church and the World (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965), 15. 128 R.S. Lederman, “Why I Am Leaving Parish Ministry,” The Cutting Edge, 208–13. Others seem to thrive on the challenges; see N. Bruce McLeod, “Why I Am Staying in Pastoral Ministry,” The Cutting Edge, 213–16.

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Notes to pages 283–4

409

129 “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century,” r o p (1968), 220, quoting the resolution that formed the commission in 1964. 130 Ibid., 221. 131 G. Campbell Wadsworth, “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century: A Critical Appraisal,” 1, 7, in “Report of the Commission on the Ministry in the Twentieth Century to the General Council: Three Appraisals,” Committee to Implement Decisions of the Twenty-third General Council relating to the Commission on Ministry in the Twentieth Century Recommendations, u ca 82.148C, box 1-2. Wadsworth had solicited assessments of the report from two well-known scholars in 1969, and ­submitted them to the implementation committee along with his own appraisal. George B. Caird of Mansfield College, Oxford, was disturbed that the report portrayed the church as “one of the social services.” T.F. Torrence of Edinburgh University linked the report’s questionable elements to what had been “learned from the World Council of Churches.” He warned that the shift of the centre of gravity from God and Christ toward “the human-technical realm” would imprison the United Church in sociological structures. By “trying to gear its message into the sociological patterns of contemporary living,” the United Church was “building obsolescence into itself.” 132 “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century,” 222–5. 133 “Council,” u c o , 15 October 1964, 36–7. An article after the previous General Council had hinted at the changes that were to come, with seventy-four women voting as commissioners (15 per cent), up from only four women commissioners in 1925. See Grace Lane, “As Women See the Church,” u c o , 1 November 1962, 25–6, for an assessment of the General Council from the point of view of several women who attended that year. 134 “Long Range Planning Committee, r o p (1962), 312. 135 Ibid., 323. The new division brought together the boards of Christian Education, Evangelism and Social Service, Men, and Women. (One wonders if most people noticed the change since the boards continued to operate and report under their old names.) 136 After serving as editor of the New Curriculum, Peter Gordon White became secretary of Christian Education in 1965. Floyd Honey’s short stint as secretary of the Board of World Missions ended in 1964 when he accepted a position with the w cc that took him to New York. Harold Bailey became the new secretary of Home Missions in 1968 after Malcolm Macdonald’s retirement. e& s s was rocked by the sudden loss of three leaders in a short period of time. Stuart Crysdale headed off to pursue a

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410

Notes to pages 284–6

doctoral degree in 1966; Bert Mathers’s decision to return to pastoral ministry was announced at e& s s ’s annual meeting in February 1968; a few weeks later, Ray Hord died. 137 Harold Bailey became the secretary of the Division of Mission in Canada, with former board secretaries Harriet Christie (Women) and Clarke MacDonald (e& s s ) as deputy secretaries responsible for Christian Development and Church in Society respectively. 138 H.W. Vaughan, “Memoirs,” Appendix, i–iv, Harold W. Vaughan Papers, uc a , box 3. Henry Gordon MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada, 1946–1977: A Study in the Sociology of the Denomination” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1980), 183–8, analyzes this shift from the more formal autocratic style of the 1950s and ’60s to the delegated power of national staff after restructuring. His conclusion corroborates Vaughan’s observation: “The work of the United Church is carried out by a group of executives, an oligarchy with rational authority, so that their control is not identified and not recognized as power. Their activities, policy-making decisions and published materials may appear to be anonymous” (190–1). 139 Phyllis D. Airhart, “Ecumenical Theological Education and Denominational Relationships: The Emmanuel College Case, 1960–85,” in Theological Education in Canada, ed. Graham Brown (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1998), 21, 26n31. 140 Donna Sinclair, Crossing Worlds: The Story of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 2001), 111–29. 141 Barbara Bagnell, “The Feminists,” u c o , 1 May 1970, 12–13. 142 “What’s Wrong with Church Women? u c o , August 1970, 10. 143 See Joan Wyatt, “‘We’ve Feminists Like You to Blame for this Mess,’” Touchstone 24, no. 2 (2006): 6–16, discusses the connections between the General Council’s decision on the ordination of gays and lesbians in 1988 and the feminists’ earlier fight for inclusion. 144 “Council,” u c o , 15 October 1964, 11. MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada,” 138ff., confirms that reports were increasing in number and taking longer to prepare. He supports his assessment with charts of General Council commissions (144–6) and major issues tackled by e& s s (155–6) during the period covered in his study. At a time when membership was declining, the ratio of executives per membership actually increased significantly from 3.4 per 100,000 members in 1946 to 9.5 in 1977 (196).

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Notes to page 287

411

145 John Webster Grant, “Unauthoritative Reflections on the United Church’s Story,” Touchstone 12, no. 1 (1994): 7. His article is a critical assessment of the departure from established practices and processes. 146 Taylor, “The Twenty-third General Council,” 12–13. A case in point was “The Ministry in the Twentieth Century” report, which church union supporters in particular thought should be sent back to the commission for reconsideration. Instead the General Council set up a committee to implement its more than seventy recommendations. Among them were recommendations to broaden the understanding of ministry by no longer identifying it exclusively with a pastoral charge, and expanding the order of ministry to include the work of non-ordained employees of the church, notably deaconesses. It also was an indication of a shift in theological education that emphasized a professional ministry, rather than a learned ministry. For the impact of that transition in the United Church, see Nathan H. Mair, Education for Ministry in the United Church of Canada: An Historical Probe (Toronto: Division of Ministry Personnel and Education of the United Church of Canada, 1983), 11–72. 147 Taylor, “The 23rd General Council,” 12. 148 “What General Council Did,” u c o , 15 October 1968, 14. 149 Its Middle East policy is an example of the United Church’s shift to clearcut positions on issues, in contrast to the more tactful approach of the 1950s. The plight of the Palestinian refugees had been a repeated concern in reports from the International Affairs committee and the Observer; cf. E.L. Homewood, “Palestine’s Refugees – Scar of the Near East,” u c o , 1 January 1959, 8–10, 24, 30, and E.L. Homewood, “The Divided Holy Land,” u c o , 15 February 1959, 12–14, 20. In “The Holy Land Today,” u c o , 15 December 1964, 14–15, Forrest reported that hatred was being nurtured among Palestinian children in the refugee camps, whose ambition was to go to Israel to “kill Jews.” However, after the Six-Day War in 1967, Forrest’s writing became more stridently pro-Palestinian; see A.C Forrest, “Back to the Tents,” u c o , 1 October 1967, 10–14, 26. In an effort to publicize the Arab side of the conflict, he took a ten-month leave of absence in 1968 to report on the Middle East; his editorials, articles, and The Unholy Land (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971) certainly accomplished that aim. The Observer continued to present perspectives that differed from its editor’s; see, for example, Alan T. Davies, “Was the Editorial Anti-Semitic?” u c o , March 1972, 11. For analysis of the fraught relationships, see Alan Davies, “Jews and Palestinians: An Unresolved Conflict in the United Church Mind,” in The United Church of Canada:

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412

Notes to pages 287–90

A History, ed. Don Schweitzer (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012), 239–57. 150 Holling, 393. 151 For instance, two days after Hord’s board approved his proposal to welcome U.S. draft dodgers with a gift of $1,000, the executive of General Council overturned the decision and set up a committee to investigate how e & s s made decisions. 152 Holling, 401, states that communication is essential to adaptation, by allowing ideas to be tested before they become part of “slower parts of the panarchy” (myths, constitutions, policies, etc.). I suspect that the Observer played a critical role in this regard. With a circulation of 281,623 in 1960, it outsold Time (223,073), Saturday Night (77,249), and the Presbyterian Record (86,214); see “Observations,” Observer, 15 December 1960, 5. The circulation, proudly published on the masthead of each issue, continued to increase during the 1960s, despite the decline in church membership. Subscriptions peaked at over 300,000 in February 1970, perhaps reflecting the impact on renewals of the change from a twice-monthly to monthly issue due to an increase in postal rates around that time. 153 Ibid., 399–401. 154 Homer-Dixon, 232. 155 Ibid., 231. 156 R.C. Chalmers, president of Maritime Conference, quoted in A.C. Forrest, “Your Church Today: Where It Is and Where It Is Going,” Observer, September 1970, 29. 157 Taylor, “The Twenty-third General Council,” 40. 158 Chalmers quoted in “Your Church Today,” 27. 159 Ivan Cumming, president of British Columbia Conference, quoted in “Your Church Today,” 26–7. 160 Mathers’s personal papers in the Queen’s University archives provide a glimpse of his service to the United Church. In addition to a demanding schedule at the theological school, he authored The Word and the Way, oversaw the preparation of a number of significant publications as chair of the Committee on Christian Faith (and provided background papers for other commissions), was involved in union negotiations with the Anglican Church, travelled across Canada to speak at workshops and retreats for the laity, and represented the United Church at international ecumenical gatherings (including the seminal meeting of the wc c at Uppsala in 1968). On his contributions as principal, see George Rawlyk and Kevin Quinn, The Redeemed of the Lord Say So: A History of Queen’s Theological College, 1912–1972 (Kingston: Queen’s Theological College, 1980), 223–41.

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Notes to pages 290–3

413

161 “The Service of Worship,” Chalmers Church, Kingston, on, 15 September 1972, Queen’s University Archives, Donald M. Mathers Papers, box 8-45. The selection comes from The Word and the Way, 168. 162 Some of the seeds of memory have grown in interesting places. It was amusing to read the June 2011 issue of the Observer as I was working on this chapter. It featured a cover story on the pastoral importance of funeral rituals by Kenneth Bagnell (who had written sympathetically about the prophetic role of the United Church in 1960s); see “Give Grief a Chance,” u c o , June 2011, 21–3. In the same issue, Connie denBok, the minister of one of the few United Church congregations affiliated with the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, called for “fresh expressions of church for those not part of any Christian ministry,” new partnerships with other denominations, more flexible church structures, and less cumbersome procedures – not unlike what the “radicals” had called for in the 1960s. She quoted with approval missiologist David Bosch: “It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world”; see “At Issue,” u c o , June 2011, 32. Ray Hord would have agreed!

e p i l ogu e   1 W.W. Bryden, Why I Am a Presbyterian (Toronto: Presbyterian Publications, 1934), 74–5. His book makes it clear that he considered the nonconcurring Presbyterians as prone to the same faulty thinking.    2 John Webster Grant, “Blending Traditions: The United Church of Canada,” in The Churches and the Canadian Experience, ed. John Webster Grant (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1963), 141. The pessimistic tone of the chapter added to the 1972 edition of The Church in the Canadian Era (Burlington, on : Welch, rev. ed. 1988) was a reflection on how his mind was to change.    3 “United Church Is Now Presbyterian: Dr Stewart,” Kitchener-Waterloo Record, 4 May 1963. Ernest Edgar Long Papers, uc a , box 11–173 (scrapbook).    4 Robert Fulford, “So the Old Ways Die but Where Are the New?” Saturday Night, February 1972, 9–10.   5 Ibid., 9–10.    6 Mark Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?” Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 267. Noll carefully states that he begins “with an assumption that there was once a Christian Canada which is now gone” (245).

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414

Notes to pages 293–6

  7 For instance Noll, 267, says that Barry Mack has “very precisely labeled” church union as a “tragic failure.” For a typical illustration of Mack’s ­critical assessment of Presbyterian progressives, see “From Preaching to Propaganda to Marginalization: The Lost Centre of Twentieth-Century Presbyterianism,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. George Rawlyk (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 138–9, 143–8.   8 A table in Paul Bramadat and David Seljak, eds., Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 440, compares the percentage of Christian immigrants before and after 1971 (based on the 2001 census) in the major churches. At 5.38 per cent, the United Church has the smallest percentage of immigrants among the denominations listed; the Presbyterian Church, for instance, has 17.85 per cent. Greer Anne Wenh-In Ng, “The United Church of Canada: A Church Fittingly National,” in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 221–3, discusses the implications of “transnational identities” for the United Church.   9 Analyzing the dramatic drop in membership in the Presbyterian Church since the 1960s, historian Stuart Macdonald suggests that it demonstrates “the extent to which Presbyterian is no longer a brand that many in Canada identify with or possibly even recognize”; see Stuart Macdonald, “Presbyterian and Reformed Christians and Ethnicity,” in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 198n13. The dramatic decline in its membership occurred despite the arrival of large numbers of immigrants who brought with them a more conservative theology and a robust approach to evangelism. He notes that Korean immigrants do not identify with the “ethnically Canadian culture of the denomination”; not being in Canada to witness the boom years, they see a more accommodating approach as “a path to ruin” (186–7). 10 Jeffrey Cox, “Master Narratives of Long-term Religious Change,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 213. 11 Ron Graham, God’s Dominion: A Skeptic’s Quest (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990), 222. 12 The term “rescription” is used by Nick Nissley and Stedman Graham, “The Narrative Lens and Organizational Change,” l i a [Leadership in Action] 28 (January / February 2009): 14–17, to describe a process they use in working with executives who find themselves “stuck in dysfunctional story lines” when an organization fails to met its objectives (15).

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13

14 15

16

17

18

Notes to pages 296–7

415

They encourage leaders to consider “an alternative script” to find “a future narrative that will identify what’s needed to become unstuck.” Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 162–77, provides an excellent description of the layout of the pavilion, and discusses the mixed responses to it from members of the churches that had sponsored it. Even A.C. Forrest admitted that the message in one zone of the pavilion had to be explained to him before he understood it (176). Ibid., 146–50. Ibid., 156. Ironically, evangelicals committed to the old ideal of a Christian Canada turned to the United States for content when constructing their pavilion, which featured a scientist from the Moody Institute of Science. For a description of the pavilion, which showcased a film of Graham’s Canadian-born colleague Leighton Ford, see Miedema, 178–92. Ibid., 194. He notes that Canadian Jews had been quietly working for greater acceptance of diversity for over 200 years, and “had in recent years more actively campaigned for its [Christendom’s] fall” (195). Joseph McLelland, “Why Our Pond Is Lukewarm, or Forty Years in the Wilderness,” addresses to the Toronto and Kingston Synod, October 1965. His title linked his theme to similar concerns in the United Church by playing off the publicity generated by the latter’s Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot. His warnings in years to come about his church’s insularity from the world and its coming obsolescence echoed United Church ­concerns, and his call for a new blueprint for mission triggered similar disagreements; see J.C. McLelland, “Blueprint for a New Model,” Presbyterian Record, September 1967, 10–17. Stanford Reid, historian and leader of a renewal movement in the Presbyterian Church, agreed with McLelland’s bleak picture of the spiritual health of the Presbyterian Church, but offered a different diagnosis. “We must now face the issue of whether we wish to continue as Presbyterians,” Reid retorted, “or whether we are prepared to accept a revolutionary position which will largely eliminate our specifically reformed witness in favour of something much more general, in preparation for the next big church union movement”; see “McLelland’s Blueprint” [letters to the editor], Presbyterian Record, November 1967, 9. Northrop Frye, “The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract,” in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, ed. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French, vol. 7 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 366–7. The

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Notes to pages 297–8

“crisis of spirit” was a predicament that Frye saw as political, artistic, and intellectual, but above all religious. 19 After the early 1960s, the term national church is used infrequently and in a narrower sense – akin to its earlier usage as a reference to the United Church’s geographical expanse. 20 The essays in Fire and Grace: Stories of History and Vision, ed. Jim Taylor (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1999), published to commemorate the 75th anniversary, illustrate the rescripting of the United Church’s past. For example, the caption for the overview of the 1930s (12–13) reads “The Socialist Movement Flowers in the Thirties,” but only the first sentence refers to socialism, noting the involvement of J.S. Woodsworth and Stanley Knowles in the ccf party. (The second sentence describes support for the Missionary and Maintenance Fund during the Depression; the implication that giving was motivated by socialist sentiments is questionable.) Christopher Levan commends the United Church for its openness to difference that he claims was typical from its inception, and characterizes it as “the patron church of doubters” (61). Ted Reeve describes social activism as “the heart and soul” of the United Church, (105). It is interesting to compare this work to the commemorative volume prepared twenty-five years earlier, which highlights missions at home and overseas, but does not mention the social gospel movement or those associated with it. See Grace Lane, Brief Halt at Mile “50”: A Half Century of Church Union (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1974). The omission is striking since Lane was living in Saskatchewan, the province that has come to be most closely associated with the social gospel. For the way the telling of the past shapes the United Church’s ­current self-understanding, see “Dare to Be.” Accessed 7 August 2012, www.youtube.com / watch?v=66WctH5kE-M. 21 I suspect that the fine Canadian historian Richard Allen deserves considerable credit for drawing attention to the significance of the social gospel. In addition to his own study of the movement in The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914–28, published in 1973, he edited a reprint of J.S. Woodsworth’s My Neighbor in 1972. He also organized a conference in 1973 that brought together those who represented the social gospel’s “Living History” (including his father Harold T. Allen, a United Church minister) with “Contemporary Scholarship.” The proceedings were published as The Social Gospel in Canada: Papers of the Interdisciplinary Conference on the Social Gospel in Canada, ed. Richard Allen (Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1975). More recently, the first volume of

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22

23 24 25

26

Notes to pages 298–9

417

his biography of Salem Bland was published in 2008 as The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity; it deals primarily with the period before Bland moved to Winnipeg in 1903 ­(pivotal to his identification with the ideals of the social gospel movement). Oscar L. Cole-Arnal, “The Prairie Labour Churches: The Methodist Input,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 34, no. 1 (2005), raises questions about Allen’s portrayal of the Methodist Church’s dealings with the radicals, arguing that there was less institutional support for them than Allen implies when it came to putting principles into practice. Bland and McClung remained involved in the United Church, although Bland (born in 1859) was retirement age by 1925. Woodsworth’s inclusion among the pantheon of heroes is fascinating since he had severed his formal ties to organized religion by 1925. He is erroneously given a position as the e & s s board secretary in one study; see Ng, 229. Douglas John Hall, The Future of the Church: Where Are We Headed? (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1989), 13. Bill Phipps, Cause for Hope: Humanity at the Crossroads (Kelowna, b c : CopperHouse, 2007), 138, 143–5. Bill Blaikie, The Blaikie Report: An Insider’s Look at Faith and Politics (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 2011), 39, 51–6. The professors and ecumenical leaders whom Blaikie credits with this reorientation are an indication of the discovery of the Canadian prophetic past that was underway during the 1970s. For instance, in Winnipeg he was deeply influenced by John Badertscher, who had been a Methodist minister and civil rights activist in the United States before moving to Canada to teach religious studies. Blaikie described himself as “inspired by the work of United Church theologian Douglas John Hall,” by then teaching at McGill after studies at Union Theological Seminary. When he attended Trinity United Church in Toronto, Bill Phipps was his minister. Blaikie considered regular lunches with Roman Catholic theologian Gregory Baum and United Church social ethicist Roger Hutchinson as his “most important theo-political education” while studying at Emmanuel and the Toronto School of Theology. Barbara Bagnell, “Would You Call This Worship?” in Ordered Liberty: Readings in the History of United Church Worship, ed. William S. Kervin (Toronto: United Church of Canada, 2011), 229–35, conveys something of the flavour of Celebration Project, a short-lived experiment in contemporary worship that was launched in 1968.

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418

Notes to page 299

27 David Roozen, “National Denominational Structures’ Engagement with Postmodernity: An Integrative Summary from an Organizational Perspective,” in Church, Identity, and Change: Theology and Denominational Structures in Unsettled Times, ed. David A. Roozen and James R. Nieman (Grand Rapids, m i : William B. Eerdmans, 2005), 617, wonders whether mainstream Protestant denominations are currently in the midst of a significant shift from “doing” to “experiencing.” He suggests this would entail “a related change from asking how we best structure ourselves for doing mission to how we best structure ourselves for providing experiences of God.”

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Index

Aboriginals. See indigenous peoples Alinsky, Saul, 234–5 Allen, Ralph, 154–5 Allen, Richard, 85, 336n50, 416n21 Anglican Church of Canada: union with United Church, 276–80, 294, 406n95. See also Church of England; church union movement Anglican-United Church union, 276–80, 294, 406n95. See also Principles of Union anti-unionists. See church union movement apartheid, 152 Arminianism, 21, 47 Armstrong, A.E., 82 Arnold, Thomas, 15 Arnup, Jesse: and foreign missions, 82, 86–8, 99, 100, 150; and home missions, 84; on popular entertainment, 158; on residential schools, 84. See also missions As One That Serves (aots ), 76–7, 146–7

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assimilation. See cultural assimilation Atkinson, Joseph, 105 Atkinson, R.D., photograph,193 Austin, Mary. See Endicott, Mary b&b Commission. See Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism Bagnell, Barbara, 285 Bagnell, Kenneth, 217–18, 238–9, 413n162 Bailey, A.G., 8 Bailey, Harold, 247 Baillie, John, 114–15 Barr, Wayne, 268 Barth, Karl. See Barthianism Barthianism: doctrine, 121–2, 351n87; influence, 103, 111, 120, 171, 346n35 Basis of Union: “common faith,” 50–1; congregational governance, 74; conservatism of, 4; critics, 40, 49–52, 273, 275; doctrinal statement, 25, 41, 49, 57–8, 120; formulation, 14–15,

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420 Index

21–2, 37, 50; misinterpretation of, 56–7; ordination, 184; preamble, 5, 22, 58; Presbyterian support, 40; sections, 34–5; theological articles, 37; theological foundations, 49. See also church union movement; Statement of Faith; United Church of Canada Bennett, John, 111–12 Bennett, R.B., 93 Berger, Carl, 16, 308n20 Bernier, Thomas-Alfred, 10–11 Berry, John, 264 Berry, William G., 164, 165, 174, 178, 252–3, 269; photograph, 187 Berton, Pierre, 233–4, 248–9, 388–9n46, 389n47 Bible and tract societies, 20 Billings, Josh, 44–5 Birks, William M., 30, 44 Blaikie, Bill, 298–9, 417n25 Blake, Eugene Carson, 231–2 Bland, Salem, 17, 96, 297–8, 313n69, 417n22 Bloor Street Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 43 Bloor Street United Church (Toronto), 77, 146, 278 Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e& s s ): agenda, 83; Depression, 97; evangelism, 106, 107, 123–4, 229–31, 236; influence of reports, 330n3; non-partisanship, 89; outreach, 230–5; postwar period, 160; and Quebec, 137; social reform, 83, 92, 100–1; “whole gospel” of, 352n99; and w m s , 78, 143; work of, 79, 101,

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230–1. See also missions; New Evangelism; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees; Woman’s Missionary Society Board of Women, 194, 268, 278 Brown, Margaret H., photograph, 69 Brown, Walter, 110 Bryce, George, 35, 36 Bryden, Walter, 292 Buchman, Frank, 117 Burbidge, John, 274 Burbidge, Katherine, 250–1 Burke, Stanley, 162 Burwash, Nathanael, 20, 21–2, 39, 298 Calling Canada to Christ, 163, 235, 252 Callwood, June, 234 Calvin, John, 23, 24, 53, 104, 162 Calvinism, 21, 26, 47, 351n87 Campbell, Robert, 47 Canada: assimilation, 11–14, 54–5, 77–8, 84–5, 143–4, 221–2; biculturalism, 209–10; Britishness, 7, 144–5, 198–9, 209, 248, 308n21, 313n69; British North America Act, 37–8, 93; and Christian social order, 4–5, 14, 53–4, 59–60, 94, 101; church/state relations, 4, 23, 84–5, 87–93, 129–34, 220–1, 222–4; Cold War, 145–8, 150–2; cultural pluralism of, 7–14, 199–200, 210–11, 216–18, 221–3, 262–3, 295; demise of Christianity in, 153, 197, 201–3, 222–3, 290; education, 214–21;

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immigrants, 7–14, 32, 37, 16–27, 138–42, 210; indigenous peoples of, 8, 78, 84, 199, 211, 231–2; linguistic differences, 7–9, 134–5; national identity, 7–9, 11–14, 134–6, 144–6, 153, 206–10, 221–3; postwar religiosity, 154–5, 215; religious pluralism, 198–200, 202, 220–1, 248, 262–3, 294–5; religious tensions in, 10–11, 134–42, 198, 213–14; role of churches in, 11–14, 28–9, 83–93, 101, 126–31, 157, 204–8, 214–21; secularism, xix, xx, 114, 159, 197, 202, 204–6, 213–14, 221–3, 295–6; separatism, 209– 10, 211–13, 220; social services, 87–8, 93–4, 101, 204–6, 295; state funding of churches, 5–6, 28; urbanization, 141, 160, 204. See also Confederation; indigenous peoples; Maritimes; national church; Quebec; United Church of Canada; Western Canada Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 207, 208 Canadian Citizenship Act, 145 Canadian Conference of Christians and Jews, 149 Canadian Council of Churches, 152, 186 Canadian Girls in Training (cg i t), 75, 76, 77, 167 Canadian Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, 265 Canadian Jewish Congress, 216 Canadian National Committee on Refugees, 143. See also refugees Canadian School of Missions (Toronto), 81–2

25729_AIRHART.indb 421

Canadian Society of Christian Unity, 21, 34 Carman, Albert, 36 Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Education, 219 Catholicism. See Roman Catholic Church Caven, William, 19, 32–4, 35, 36, 319n7 c b c . See Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Chalmers, Randolph Carleton: career, 351n88; Commission on Culture, 159, 183, 214–15; on culture, 157–8, 365n13; on Graham, 236–7; on liberalism, 121–3, 157–8, 169–70; on Presbyterianism, 23; on United Church administration, 288 Chalmers Presbyterian Church (Kingston), 44 Chalmers United Church (Kingston), 290 Chalmers United Church (Ottawa), 163 Chown, Samuel Dwight: as “architect” of church union, 21, 73, 306n6, 307n7; criticism of, 55, 56; Joint Committee on Church Union, 46; Methodist superintendent, 4; as moderate liberal evangelical, 298; photograph, 65 Christendom: demise of, 153, 197, 201–3, 223, 259–60, 290, 294–5; differences within, 17–18, 28, 147, 202–3; and Jews in Canada, 415n16; reuniting of, xviii–xix, 4, 28, 35, 36, 198, 245, 276–7, 279, 280, 283; Western, 197, 255, 259–60, 294–5. See also

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Christian civilization; Christian internationalism; ecumenism Christian citizenship, 74, 78, 128, 141–2. See also Canada; United Church of Canada Christian civilization: Christian re-union, 198, 276, 280; church union movement, 59–60; Cold War, 145–8; First World War, 59–60; nation-building, 153; Nazi Germany, 128, 136; Second World War, 128, 136; World Missionary Conference, 80. See also Christendom; Christian internationalism; ecumenism; missions Christian Endeavor, 20 Christian internationalism, 79–87, 101, 146–7, 150–3, 203, 336n50. See also Christendom, Christianization, missions Christian realists, 103 Christian Research Seminar, 265 Christian reunion, 198, 276, 280. See also Christendom; ecumenism Christian Social Council of Canada, 160 Christian socialism, 15, 90–2, 96, 118–20, 122–3. See also Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; Depression; United Church of Canada Christie, Harriet, 410n137; photograph, 194 Christie, Robert, 252 Church Federation Association, 40 Churchill, Winston, 146 Church of All Nations, 85 Church of England, 5–6, 24, 25–6; Anglican-United Church union,

25729_AIRHART.indb 422

220, 276–80, 294, 406n95; and church union movement, 15–16, 35, 55–6; membership, 10. See also Anglican Church of Canada church union movement: antecedents, 20, 36–7, 305–6n2, 320n13; British North America Act, 37–8; “common faith,” 18, 21–2, 29, 41, 50–3; as controversy, 30–2, 35–64, 297; creed revision, 22; critics, 21–2, 51–7, 59; Dominion Commission on Church Property, 318n4; federation proposal, 37–8, 47, 54, 61, 323–4n57; First World War, 43, 59–60, 322–3n43; historical context, 294; legality, 37–8, 318n4; legislation, 31, 34, 44, 37–8, 53, 57, 63, 319n5; local union congregations, 27, 39, 64; nationalism, 5, 15–16, 22, 40–2, 55–7, 294, 297; negotiations, 32–40, 46–7; nontheological considerations, 4–5, 11–12, 32, 37, 40–1, 307n7; opponents, 3, 30–2, 41–3, 60; pragmatism of, 15; progressive element, 3–4, 153; propaganda, 41, 44, 46–7, 57–9; religious identity, 14; as response to immigration, 11–12, 32, 37, 45, 54–5; and Roman Catholicism, 315n88; Round Table, 17–19; social reform, 16, 20; supporters, 4–5, 14–23, 28–39, 43–7, 57–61; theological colleges, 19–20, 63; in United Kingdom, 36, 37, 342n1; in United States, 50, 51, 54–5, 325n68, 326n71, 342n1; vote results,

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61–63. See also Anglican-United Church union; Canada; continuing Presbyterians; Joint Committee on Church Union; national church; non-concurring Presbyterians; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada Act; Western Canada Clark, S.D., 156–7, 203 Clarke, F.R.C., photograph, 193 Clarke, Patricia, 268, 285 Clarke, Peter, 144 Clifford, N.K., 19, 35, 36, 274 Coburn, John, 128 Coburn, Mary, 278 Cochrane, R.B., 85 Coe, George, 76 Coke, Thomas, 26 Cold War, 145–8, 150–2 Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf (Montreal), 135 Colley, Linda, 145 Columbia University (New York), 161 Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home, 175, 181, 374n122 Commission on Church, Nation and World Order, 131–4, 158–9, 281; report of, 354n25, 355n29, 355n33, 355–6n34, 356n37 “common faith.” See Basis of Union; church union movement; United Church of Canada Communism. See Cold War Community Friendship, 77–8. See also Woman’s Missionary Society Confederation: and Britishness, 7, 145, 308n21, 313n69; and church union movement, 15;

25729_AIRHART.indb 423

history, 7; and migration, 9; pragmatism of, 15; Quebec, 7, 209–10, 217, 222, 306n4. See also Canada Conference on Church Unity, 33 Conference on World Mission and Evangelism (Jerusalem), 80–3, 99, 113–14, 336n49, 336n51, 347n48 Congregationalists, 10, 20–21, 24–5, 38–9, 48–9, 61–4, 297 Congregational Union of Canada, 27, 39. See also Congregationalists Conner, Ralph. See C.W. Gordon conscription crisis, 136 continuing Presbyterians, 31–2, 34, 41, 61–3, 292–3, 321–2n31, 324–5n61. See also non-concurring Presbyterians; Presbyterian Church in Canada Cook, Ramsay, 210 Cooke, Alfred E., 170 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (c c f), 89–90, 339n94. See also Christian socialism, Depression, United Church of Canada Cormie, John, 139 Cornell University, 122 Council for the Faith, 279 Cox, Jeffrey, 204, 295 Cragg, G.R., 100 Creighton, W.B., 12, 100 Crusade for Christ and His Kingdom, 163 Crysdale, Stewart, 230, 232–3, 236, 280, 388n43, 409n136 cultural assimilation: in Canada, 11–14, 54–5, 77–8, 84–5, 143–4,

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221–2; consumerism as, 13–14; cultural mosaic model, 139, 358–9n65, 359n66; melting pot model, 7–8, 139; Paris Peace Conference (1919), 80; racism, 8, 11–14, 142; as threat, 54–5; and United Church, 138–43, 199–200, 231–2. See also church union movement; cultural pluralism; indigenous peoples; missions; United Church of Canada cultural pluralism: post-Confederation, 7–14, 294; postwar, 134–5, 138–40, 210–11, 216–18, 221–3, 262–3, 294–5; wartime, 134–7, 139–44. See also Canada; cultural assimilation; Quebec; religious pluralism; United Church of Canada Dalhousie University, 19, 132 Daniel, Mrs J.W., 43 Daniels, Elda, 144 Davidson, R.H.N., photograph, 193 Davidson, Richard, 156, 175–6, 350–1n84 Davies, Alan T., 275 decolonization, 144–5, 152 democracy, 42, 131, 136–7, 142, 145–7, 153, 196–7, 221 Department of Temperance and Moral Reform (Methodists), 21 Depression, 89–93, 97, 100, 116– 17, 123, 124 Dewey, John, 114 Diefenbaker, John G., 241, 378n34; photograph, 187 dissenters, 6, 31, 42, 57, 272, 318n3. See also church

25729_AIRHART.indb 424

union movement; continuing Presbyterians; non-concurring Presbyterians Dobson, Hugh, 174–5 Dodds, Doris, 216, 217–18 Dolan, Rex, 231, 387n34 Dominion Parliament. See United Church of Canada Act Duffield, Allen, 215–16 Duke University, 114 Dulles, John Foster, 147–8 Ecumenical Conference (Methodist), 20 Ecumenical Study Commission, 219 ecumenism: and church union movement, 16, 20–3, 26–9; and mission work, 79–82, 85–7, 101, 247–8; modern, 3–4; networks, 14, 19–20, 79–80, 239, 333–4n28; and New Evangelism, 226, 228–9, 241, 243–4; postwar, 127–31, 137–8, 144–8, 152–3; radical, 278–9, 280; rift with neo-evangelicals, 228–9, 239, 244, 251–3, 271, 296–7, 390n63, 405n88, 403n68; and Roman Catholic Church, 137–8, 244–2, 248; suburban congregations, 248–51. See also Christian internationalism; church union movement; cultural assimilation; missions; United Church of Canada Eddington, A.S., 113 Eddy, Sherwood, 124 Edinborough, Arnold, 220–1 Edinburgh conference. See World Missionary Conference

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Index 425

Emmanuel College (Toronto), 19, 82, 171–2, 176, 299; faculty, 68, 114–15, 123, 156, 182, 243, 250, 282 empiricism, 113–14, 119–20 Endicott, James, 82 Endicott, James G., 151–2, 364n132 Endicott, Mary, 151–2, 364n132 Ethical Education Association (e e a ), 216 Evangelical Alliance, 15, 20 Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, 244, 394n99 evangelical identity, xviii, xix, xx, 10, 21, 22, 25, 26, 50–1, 57, 58, 63, 83, 102–7, 110, 111, 115, 118, 121, 124, 169–70 evangelical Protestants, 10, 140, 163, 171, 229, 239–40, 248, 265, 271, 275, 296, 342n1, 390n63. See also New Evangelism; Presbyterianism; United Church of Canada Evangelical United Brethren Church, 280 evangelism, 14, 81–3, 86, 106–7, 115, 117–8, 123, 124, 162–6, 226, 228–30, 240, 244, 253–4. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service; ecumenism; fundamentalism; Graham; missions; National Project; New Evangelism; United Church of Canada evangelization. See missions Expo 67 (Montreal), 296, 415n13 Fairbairn, R. Edis, 110, 130, 354n17, 321n24, 334n32

25729_AIRHART.indb 425

Falconer, Robert: address to Religious Education Association, 113; Canadian National Committee on Refugees, 143; career, 19; on church union movement, 14–15, 39–40; Commission on Christianizing the Social Order, 90–2; criticism of 44; Joint Committee on Church Union, 39–40; Round Table, 17 Faulkner, Tom, 136 Federal Council of Churches, 79, 347–8n54 Fellowship for a Christian Social Order (fc so), 99, 118, 133 Fey, Harold E., 157 Finlay, Karen, 207 First Nations. See indigenous peoples First United Church (Fort William), 246 First United Church (Vancouver), 68, 192 First United Church (Victoria), 64 First World War, 43, 59–60, 80, 87, 93, 115–16 Flavelle, Joseph, 19, 95, 96 Fleming, Daniel, 81, 86 Fleming, Donald, 241–4, 393n89–91 Ford, Leighton, 236 foreign missions. See missions Forrest, Alfred Clinton: on Anglican-United Church union, 276–7; on biculturalism, 217; on cultural revolution, 263; death, 288; on evangelism, 164–5, 251, 368n51; and Fleming, 393n89– 92; on foreign missions, 241–3;

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on Graham, 164–5, 171–2, 235–6, 237, 251, 368n49, 390n63; on Middle East, 411n149; on national church, 347–8; photograph, 188; on postwar growth of United Church, 255; on postwar immigration, 198–8; on postwar worship practices, 177–8; on staff shortages, 168–9, 241; on suburban congregations, 249; on temperance, 261–2; and Trudeau, 223–4; on women’s role in United Church, 283, 285; work, 288. See also United Church Observer Forsey, Eugene, 99, 118, 119, 122, 210–11, 212–13 Forster, Harvey, 170 Fort Massey Presbyterian Church (Halifax), 18 Foster, J. Arnold, photograph, 70 Fox, Paul W., 220, 383n105 Fraser, Daniel J., 47, 53, 324n58 Fraser, J.P.C., photograph, 190 Fred Victor Mission, 69. See also missions Free Church of Scotland, 33, 37 Freeman, E.G.D., 130–1 Freeman, Lois. See Wilson, Lois M. Fremantle, William H., 15, 312n58 French Canada, 9, 10–11, 137–8, 209–13. See also Quebec Frye, Northrop, 159, 196, 297, 415–16n18 Fulford, Robert, 293 fundamentalism: and church union movement, 47, 50, 54–5, 63, 102–3; and evangelism, 81, 107, 163; interwar period, 102–3; popularity, 163; postwar

25729_AIRHART.indb 426

resurgence, 124–5, 235–7, 240, 244; and United Church, 102–7, 169–70, 299, 273; United Church Renewal Fellowship, 275. See also church union movement; United Church of Canada Gallagher, W.J., 160, 186 gambling, 57, 88, 200 Gandier, Alfred, 17–18, 19, 20, 22, 63, 215, 314n76 General Assembly (Presbyterian Church), 19, 31, 33–41, 43, 46, 51, 53–4. See also Presbyterian Church in Canada; Presbyterianism General Commission on Union, 279 General Conference (Methodist Church), 34, 47. See also Methodism; Methodist Church General Council (United Church): agenda, 82, 131–4; Depression, 124; housekeeping, 96–7, 285; liberalization of, 200; New Creed, 273–5, 404n77–8; New Curriculum, 171, 266; overseas missions, 151, 241–3; role, 56–7, 74, 157, 281–2, 286–7, 412n151; Second World War, 127–8; and Statement of Faith, 120–1; and women, 183–4, 283, 285. See also missions; Statement of Faith; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees General Council of Local Union Churches, 33–4 Gidney, R.D., 215, 219, 220

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Index 427

Gilkey, Charles W., 117 Gillies, Don, 278 Girls’ Residence (Assiniboia, s k), 144 Gordon, C.W., 4, 14, 35, 311n48 Gordon, Daniel Miner, 17, 19, 60–1, 329n111 Gordon, Minnie, 60, 329n110 Graham, Billy: critics, 235–7, 240, 368n49, 390n59; crusade of, 164–5, 172, 185, 236; and Expo 67, 296; and Forrest, 164–5, 171–2, 365–6, 237, 251, 368n49, 390n63; and Hord, 236, 238, 390n59; National Evangelistic Mission, 165; United Church leaders on, 184–5; United Church supporters, 236–8, 251; World Congress on Evangelism, 239–40, 394–5n100 Grant, George Monro, 15–19, 34, 36, 65, 134, 298, 313n60, 314n76; photograph, 65 Grant, John Webster, 10, 15, 281, 286, 292, 330n3, 312n58; photograph, 193 Griffin, W.S., 49–50 Gruchy, Lydia T., 183 Gunn, William, 13–14, 317n115 Gzowski, Peter, 232 Hall, Douglas John, 298 Harris, Walter, 180 Haseldan, Kyle, 271–2 Hayward, Constance, 143 Henderson, Donald S., photograph, 193 Herberg, Will, 178 Hockin, Katharine, 99, 241, 254; photograph, 69

25729_AIRHART.indb 427

Hoekendijk, Johannes, 229, 386n22 Holling, C.S., 287, 288 home missions. See missions Homer-Dixon, Thomas, 258, 288 Hope Commission. See Royal Commission on Education in Ontario Hord, J. Raymond: beating, 227, 385n12; Board of Evangelism and Social Service secretary, 226–7; as controversial, 226–7, 253, 412n151; criticism of, 239–40; death, 227; on demise of Christendom, 259–60, 399n18; on draft dodgers, 412n151; on evangelism, 238–9, 253; on Graham, 236, 238, 390n59; on homosexuals as ministers, 400n25; legacy, 227– 8; poem, 253; photograph, 189; on suburban congregations, 250; work, 226–7, 230, 233–4, 385n11. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service; New Evangelism Howse, Ernest Marshall, 142–4, 146, 234 Huband, Allen R., photograph, 71 humanism. See secular humanism Huntington, William Reed, 15, 312n58 Hutchinson, Jean, 278 Hutchinson, Roger, 94 Hutchison, William, 229 i mc . See International Missionary Council immigration. See Canada; cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism

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imperialism: British, 144–5, 153, 308n20; Canada, 7–11, 16, 101; of United States, 144–5, 206–7, 361n102; Western, 101 Indians. See indigenous peoples indigenous peoples, 8, 77, 84–5, 99, 199, 205, 211, 227, 231–2. See also Canada; cultural assimilation; missions; residential schools; United Church of Canada Institute for Religious Research (New York), 133 Inter-Church Committee on Protestant-Roman Catholic Relations, 137–8, 245 International Missionary Council, 152, 228 Israel, 144, 149–50, 363n120, 363n125, 411n149. See also Palestine; refugees Japanese-Canadian internment, 129, 143–4, 360n93 Jarvis Street Baptist Church (Toronto), 51–2 Jay, C. Douglas, 243–4 Jerusalem meeting. See Conference on World Mission and Evangelism Johnston, George, 244, 245, 279 Joint Bureau of Literature, 44 Joint Committee on Church Union: Basis of Union, 4, 22; “common faith,” 22; establishment of, 32–5; work, 39, 46–7, 57–8, 61. See also Basis of Union; church union movement; United Church of Canada Jones, Mrs J. Erle, 84–5 Jones, Rufus, 114

25729_AIRHART.indb 428

Kairos, 267–8 Kee, Kevin, 164 Kilpatrick, G.G.D., photograph, 193 Kilpatrick, T.B., 22, 58 King, G.B., 140 King, William McGuire, 104, 112 King, W.L.M., 93, 146 Knowles, Stanley, 99, 180, 298, 377n33, 416n20 Knox College (Toronto), 19–20, 32, 63, 161, 292 Knox Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 106 Knox United Church (Prince George), 78 Knox United Church (Winnipeg), 196 Ladies’ Aid, 78 Lambeth Conference, 83, 180 Lane, Grace, 285 Laurier, Wilfrid, 7 Lautenschlager, Earl, 182, 250, 282, 405n89 Lay Advisory Council, 76 Laymen’s Missionary Movement, 11 League for Social Reconstruction, 133 Leard, Elinor, 184 Lears, Jackson, 11, 310–11n39 LeBlanc, Philip, 213 Le Fleur, Eugene, 43 legislation. See church union movement liberal evangelicals, xix, xx, 111, 122, 169–70, 236, 253–4, 276, 405 n89. See also evangelical identity; liberalism

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Index 429

liberalism: and church union movement, 50–1, 54–5; during Depression, 110–22; and evangelicals, 237–40; postwar United Church, 169–72, 200–1, 225–8, 272–6, 237–40, 290; prewar United Church, 106, 110; and religious naturalism, 112–15. See also church union movement; ecumenism; New Evangelism; religious naturalism; theological modernism; United Church of Canada Line, John, 113–4, 118–19, 123–4, 158, 350–1n84, 351n87; photograph, 68 Litt, Paul, 208 local union congregations, 27, 39, 317n118, 329n107, 329n108 Long, Ernest E., 212–13, 228, 244, 255, 288, 289; photograph, 187 Long Range Planning Committee, 284 Lord’s Day Alliance, 20, 74, 179 Lower, A.R.M., 132, 145 McCausland, J.A., 56 McClung, Nellie, 105, 297–8, 417n22 MacDonald, Clarke, 237–9, 279; photograph, 191 Macdonald, J.A., 19 Macdonald, John A., 17 Macdonald, Malcolm, 166, 174, 199, 369n57 McGill University, 133, 218 Machen, J. Gresham, 50–1, 54–5, 106–7, 325n68, 326n71, 342n1, 343–4n15 MacKay, J.I., 85 Mackay, J. Keiller, 219

25729_AIRHART.indb 429

Mackay, John, 37–8, 40, 61, 330n115 Mackay, John A., 163 MacKay, R.A., 132 McKillop, A.B., 103 Mackinnon, Clarence, 17, 18, 19, 38, 60, 61, 330n115 McLachlan, D.N., 89, 100, 107, 115–16, 161, 338n77 McLaren, E.D., 38, 321n25 McLean, E.R., 216–17 McLelland, Joseph, 296–7 McLeod, Bruce, 195, 250; photograph, 195 McLeod, Hugh A., 196–8; photograph, 72 McLeod, Hugh, 233, 258 Macleod, Norman, 15 MacLeod, Preston, 169 MacMillan, Alexander, 108 McMillan, Thomas, 49 Macpherson, Jay, photograph, 193 McPherson, Margaret, 79 MacQueen, Angus, 155, 165–6; photograph, 187 McRoberts, Kenneth, 209 MacVicar Memorial Presbyterian Church (Montreal), 106 McWilliams, Margaret, 147 Manitoba College (Toronto), 35, 61 Manson, Ian, 100–1, 350–1n84, 353n7 Maritimes, 7, 61, 236–7 Massey, Vincent, 207, 209 Massey Report. See Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences Mathers, Donald Murray, 201–2, 260, 272, 290, 399n19, 412n160; photograph, 72

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430 Index

Maurice, F.D., 15 de Mestral, Claude, 235, 381n79, 382n92 Methodism, 10, 20, 21, 25–7, 53. See also Methodist Church Methodist Church, Canada, Newfoundland, and Bermuda, 23, 27, 33–4, 39, 46–7. See also Methodism Methodist Missionary Society, 12 Miedema, Gary, 296 Millar, W.P.J., 215, 219, 220 Ministerial Association (Kingston), 143 missions: agenda of, 82–5; Board of Foreign Missions, 74, 82, 97, 100; Board of Home Missions, 78, 97–8, 140–1, 166, 199; church union movement, 45, 53, 58, 63; Depression, 97–9; ecumenism, 20, 247–8; finances, 30, 78, 97–8, 166–7; focus of, 243–4; immigrants, 37, 139–42, 199–200, 248, 310n38; Japanese-Canadian internment, 143–4; Jerusalem meeting (1928), 80–2, 83, 99; medical, 205–6; and nationalism, 82–6, 338n68; New Evangelism, 241–4, 253–4, 294; and “NonAnglo-Saxons,” 85, 141–2, 199–200, 205–6; postwar, 127, 150–3, 241–4, 364n132; refugees, 143; reports of, 86–7; rural communities, 77–8, 81, 83–5, 139–42, 174, 247–8; and social gospel, 81–7; staffing, 140, 241–2; urban outreach, 246–7, 388n43; women, 42–3. See also Christian internationalism;

25729_AIRHART.indb 430

cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism; ecumenism; indigenous peoples; prohibition; residential schools, social gospel movement; United Church of Canada; Woman’s Missionary Society missionaries. See missions Missionary and Maintenance Fund, 97 Mission to the Nation, 162–3, 164, 178 Moir, John S., 17, 313n71, 343–4n15 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 3, 4, 272 Moore, T. Albert, 47, 95, 100 Morrison, C.C., 130 Morrow, E. Lloyd, 54 Morton, A.S., 17, 19, 22–4, 26, 48 Mowat, Oliver, 7 multiculturalism. See cultural pluralism Murray, Walter, 17, 19, 27, 39 Mutchmor, J.R.: Board of e&ss, 155, 161–2; career, 161–3; on fellowship, 263; on immigrants, 13; moderator of United Church, 200–1; photograph, 72; preoccupations of, 227, 252–3; on Principles of Union, 278; on Quebec, 136–7; retirement of, 225–6; on suburban congregations, 250; temperance, 180; on United Church, 155, 170, 225–6, 281; on working women, 161–2, 182, 183 national church, 5–6, 15–16, 27–9, 40–2, 56–7, 312n54, 312n58, 416n19. See also Canada; church

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Index 431

union movement; cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism; religious pluralism; United Church of Canada National Council of the Churches of Christ (n cc), 152, 163 National Evangelistic Mission (ne m), 163, 164–6 National Religious Advisory Council, 208 nationalism. See Canada; church union movement; United Church of Canada National Project of Evangelism and Social Action, 230–1, 240, 251–2, 253 National Survey of the United Church in Canadian Life, 234, 236 naturalism. See religious naturalism natural theology. See religious naturalism Nazi Germany, 128, 142–3, 240 Neatby, Hilda, 208 Neighbourhood Workers Association, 87 neo-orthodoxy, 103, 111, 124–5, 169, 171 New Creed, 273–5, 279, 299, 404n77–8. See also General Council (United Church); United Church of Canada New Curriculum, 170–2, 200–2, 220, 225, 233–5, 238, 264–7. See also United Church of Canada New Evangelism, 234–6, 237–44, 251–4, 266, 268–70, 289–91, 299. See also ecumenism; evangelism; United Church of Canada Nicholson, J.W.A., 96, 118, 119

25729_AIRHART.indb 431

Nickle, W.F., 60 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 111–12, 119, 171–2, 349n64, 353n2 Noll, Mark, 293 non-concurring Presbyterians, 29, 32, 61–2, 289, 295, 318n3, 321–2n31. See also continuing Presbyterians; Presbyterian Church Association Oake, Norman Wesley, 240 Oke, C.C., 170 Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 59. See also Old St Andrew’s United Church (Toronto); St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto) Old St Andrew’s United Church (Toronto), 106. See also Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto) Older Boys’ Parliament, 75, 77 Oliver, E.H., 59, 104–5, 298 Oriental Home and School (Victoria), 144 Osborne, Stanley, photograph, 193 Owram, Doug, 87, 262, 271, 373–4n120 Oxford Conference. See World Conference of Christian Churches Oxford Group, 117–18, 349n64 Packard, Vance, 249 Palestine, 144, 149–50, 363n120, 363n125, 411n149. See also Israel; refugees Parliament. See Canada; church union movement; United Church of Canada Act

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432 Index

Parsons, Talcott, 104 Patrick, William, 35–7, 48, 321n24 Paul, Charles Frederick, 52–3 Pearson, Lester B., 126, 135, 180, 203–4, 209–10, 227; photograph, 188 Penman, John, 41 philosophical naturalism. See religious naturalism Phipps, Bill, 269, 298 Pidgeon, George: church union movement, 38, 43–5, 47, 58–9; “city without walls,” 124, 342n1; on education, 216; evangelism, 82; moderator of United Church, 102, 103–4; photograph, 66; on postwar cultural crisis, 158, 365n15; ProtestantCatholic relations committee, 137–8; temperance, 57 Pidgeon, Leslie, 43–5 Pine Hill Divinity Hall, 123, 236. See also Presbyterian College (Halifax) Planning Fellowships, 251–2, 390n64, 392n81 Presbyterian Association for the Federation of the Churches of the Protestant Denominations, 33 Presbyterian Church Association, 40, 41–3, 45, 47, 50 Presbyterian Church in Canada, 27–40, 45, 60–1, 63–4, 292–3 296, 313n71. See also continuing Presbyterians; Presbyterianism Presbyterian Church in the u sa, 50 Presbyterian College (Halifax), 17–18, 19–20 Presbyterian College (Montreal), 19–20, 47, 63

25729_AIRHART.indb 432

Presbyterianism, 6, 10, 18, 21, 23– 4, 38–9, 53. See also continuing Presbyterians; non-concurring Presbyterians; Presbyterian Church in Canada Presbyterian Pre-Assembly Congress, 12 Presbyterian Women’s League, 41, 42–3, 47, 60 Princeton Theological Seminary, 50, 132, 163 Principles of Union, 276–7, 278–9, 283. See also Anglican-United Church union process theology, 112–13, 350n79, 350n79 prohibition, 57, 88–90, 101, 261–2, 336n50, 383n105. See also temperance Protestant Reformation, 45, 52, 58 Quebec: and b &b Commission, 210–11; and Canada, 7–11, 134–8, 209–13, 222, 306n4; and church union movement, 27, 38, 54, 61–3, 327–8n86; and Massey Report, 209–10; Quiet Revolution, 200, 293, 376–7n20; Roman Catholic Church in, 134–8, 211; separatism, 135, 209–13, 220; United Church in, 75, 210–11. See also Canada; cultural pluralism; religious pluralism; Roman Catholic Church Queen’s Theological Alumni Conferences (Kingston), 17 Queen’s Theological College (Kingston), 72, 139, 201, 290 Queen’s University (Kingston), 15, 17, 19, 60, 112, 260. See also

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Queen’s Theological Alumni Conferences (Kingston); Queen’s Theological College (Kingston) Quiet Revolution. See Quebec racism, 8, 11–14, 84–5, 86, 139, 141–4. See also cultural assimilation refugees, 142–3, 149, 150, 363n118, 411n149. See also Israel; Palestinians Reid, W.D., 12–13 Reid, W. Stanford, 323n49, 326n75, 415n17 Religious Education Association, 113 religious naturalism, 103, 112–15, 124–5, 265–6 religious pluralism, 198–200, 202, 220–1, 248, 262–3, 294–5 residential schools, 78, 84–5, 190. See also cultural assimilation; indigenous peoples; missions; United Church of Canada; Woman’s Missionary Society Reynolds, A.G., 109–10, 170 Reynolds, J. Berkley, 239–40, 244–5, 274, 275, 391n76–7, 394–5n100, 405n88 Robinson, John A.T., 266 Roddan, Andrew, photograph, 68 Riel, Louis, 7 Ritchie, D.L., 89, 95–6 Robertson Memorial Presbyterian Church (Winnipeg), 161 Roberts, Richard, 91–2, 96–7, 99–100, 116, 117–18, 119–21, 350n79 Roman Catholic Church, 4–10, 40, 135–8, 196–200, 211–13, 244–6, 248. See also Roman Catholics

25729_AIRHART.indb 433

Roman Catholics: on church union movement, 52, 54, 56, 58; English-speaking, 8, 54, 134; French-Canadian, 10–11, 54, 134–8, 211–12; immigrant, 196–8; ultramontane Catholicism, 6, 10, 307–8n14. See also Roman Catholic Church; Quebec; United Church of Canada Rose, H.A.A., photograph, 193 Round Table, 17–19, 60, 314n74 Round Table Conference, 132 Rowell, Newton Wesley, 11–12, 94, 105, 334n30 Rowntree Memorial United Church (London), 270–1 Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems, 209 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 210–14 Royal Commission on DominionProvincial Relations, 94 Royal Commission on Education in Ontario, 215 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 159, 206–9, 214– 15, 380n67 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 285 Royal York United Church (Toronto), 226–7 St Andrew’s College (Saskatoon), 98, 105, 391n72 St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Fergus), 31 St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Kitchener), 292–3

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434 Index

St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 31, 40, 43, 49. See also Old St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Toronto) St Andrew’s United Church (London), 165 St James Square Presbyterian Church (Toronto), 19, 42 St Laurent, Louis, 146 St Luke’s United Church. See Sherbourne Street United Church (Toronto) St Marys United Church (Ontario), 92 St Matthew’s Presbyterian Church (Halifax), 15, 19 St Stephen’s-Broadway United Church (Winnipeg), 147 Sanford, Osbert Morley, 109 Saul, John Ralston, 7–8 Sclater, J.R.P., 59–60, 106, 281 Scott, C.T., 12 Scott, Ephraim: criticisms of church union movement, 41, 49, 63–4, 322n37; as opponent of church union movement, 30, 44–5, 47; photograph, 67 Scott, Graham, 274–5 Scott, R.B.Y., 122–3, 133, 298, 352n91 Second Vatican Council, 137–98, 245–6, 248, 272, 278–9, 299, 375n7, 391n74, 395n101, 406n98. See also ecumenism Second World War, 101, 108, 129– 37, 140–1, 143–4 secular humanism, 103, 113–22 Shepherd, Harvey, 268 Sherbourne Street United Church (Toronto), 91–2, 95 Shields, T.T., 51–2, 55, 327n77

25729_AIRHART.indb 434

Siegfried, André, 6–7 Silcox, C.E.: and church union movement, 10, 23–4, 27, 62; on culture, 214–15; on Israel, 149; and refugees, 142; on religious tensions, 136–7; and report of Commission on Church, Nation and World Order, 133; on United Church of Canada, 169 Sirois, Joseph, 94 Sisco, Gordon, 100, 119, 121, 132– 3, 138, 351n87 Sissons, C.B., 217–18 Smillie, Ben, 235, 236–7, 240 Smith, Alexander, 211 Smith, Shelton, 114 social Christianity, 15 social gospel movement: and fundamentalist-modernist debate, 55, 81; interwar period, 99–101, 111–12, 116, 119–24, 133, 155– 6; and missionary movement, 81–7; nationalism, 21; and temperance, 328n99. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service; fundamentalism; liberalism; missions; United Church of Canada; Woman’s Missionary Society socialism. See Christian socialism social reform, 16, 20, 83, 88–92, 100–1, 328n99, 350–1n84. See also Christian socialism; ecumenism; social gospel movement; United Church of Canada Somerville, James, 239 Soper, Donald, 165 Sparling, J.W., 12 Stapleford, Frank, 87–8 Statement of Faith, 120, 121, 123, 156, 170, 266 Stewart, Findlay G., 292–3

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Stewart, Gordon, 238–9 Stinson, John W., photograph, 193 Strachan, John, 5 Stringfellow, William, 299 Student Christian Movement (s c m), 99, 264, 271, 346n36 Student Volunteer Movement, 20, 346n36 Summer of Service (s os ), 268 Sutherland, Wilber, 265–6 Sydenham Street United Church (Kingston), 203 Synod of the Anglican Province of Canada, 33 Tait, W.D., 54 Taylor, Charles, 221–2 temperance: and church union movement, 10, 35, 55, 57; failure of, 88–9, 101, 261–2; opponents, 89– 90; and postwar moral regulation, 179–80; Woman’s Missionary Society, 78. See also missions; prohibition; social gospel movement; United Church of Canada Templeton, Charles, 163–4, 185 Templeton Missions, 163–4 theological modernism: church union movement, 3, 28, 47, 63; fundamentalist-modernist debate, 50–2, 54–5, 106–7, 324n58; and gender, 76; of United Church, 42, 102–3, 110–11, 158. See also church union movement; United Church of Canada Thomas, Ernest, 83, 88–9, 101, 121, 122, 336n49, 350–1n84 Thomas, Winnifred, 76, 142, 332n10; photograph, 67 Thompson, James S., 172–3, 218– 19, 383n98

25729_AIRHART.indb 435

Town Talk, 246 Trail Rangers, 75, 332n11 Tremblay Report. See Royal Commission of Inquiry on Constitutional Problems Trudeau, Pierre, 135, 223–4, 357n44, 357n46, 357n47, 384n110 Tuxis Boys, 70, 75, 332n11; photograph, 192 Ullman, Verda, 129 ultramontane Catholicism. See Roman Catholics union churches. See local union congregations unionists. See church union movement Union Theological Seminary (New York), 161 Unitarian Church, 51, 216 United Church Observer: on Anglican-United Church union, 276, 278, 279; on decline of United Church, 251, 255, 266–7, 272, 288; and ecumenicalevangelical rift, 239, 386n24; on education, 215, 217–8; and evangelicalism, 165; on evangelism and social service, 229; on General Council (United Church), 286; on Graham, 164– 5, 236, 390n63; on Middle East, 411n149; on missions, 241–3; on Mutchmor, 162, 225; and New Evangelism, 238; on pacifism, 128; pedagogy of, 170; on postwar growth of United Church, 225; readership, 160, 167, 412n152; on Roman CatholicUnited Church relations, 197–8;

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on suburban congregations, 248–50; on Templeton, 163; on Trudeau, 223–4; and women, 285. See also A.C. Forrest United Church of Canada: administration, 28, 73–9, 85–6, 94–7, 99–101, 280–2, 340n105; administrative restructuring 258–9, 284–8; agenda of postwar, 130– 4, 160–1, 162–4, 184–6, 202–3, 214–16; agenda of prewar, 73–94, 103–7, 139–40; Anglican union with, 276–80; anti-ritual tendencies, 109, 113; attendance, 162–3, 172–3, 174, 225, 260–5, 270; and baby boomers, 248, 264, 267–8; and biculturalism commission, 210–14, 380n71; Britishness of, 376n17; as a “club,” 155, 226, 249–51; and Cold War, 145–8, 150–2, 203–4; “common faith” of, 108, 120, 153, 273; as conformist, 233–4, 249–51; as conservative, 4, 158–60, 225–6, 239–40, 265–6, 273–6; on contraception, 180–1; creed of, 25, 273–5, 279, 299; as “creedless,” 32, 41, 47, 49, 51, 63, 102; decline of, 255–72, 280–3, 289–91, 293–6, 299; Depression, 89–93, 110–12, 118–19, 123–4, 131–2, 339n94, 341n113; ecumenical-evangelical rift, 239, 228–9, 239, 244, 251– 3, 296–7; and education, 170–2, 184, 201–2, 205, 214–21; and empiricism, 113–15; evangelicalism, 106–7, 110–11, 115–24, 163–5, 169–70; evangelism, 184–5, 200–1, 228–31, 234–44,

25729_AIRHART.indb 436

253, 297, 368n53; as failure, 293–4; feminist influence within, 285–6, 410n143; forebears of, 4–5, 14–23, 28–9; forecasts on, 255–6, 280, 288–9; founding, 30–2, 35–64, 102–3; fundamentalist-modernist debate, 50–2, 54–5, 106–7, 324n58; funds raised, 257; gender roles in laity, 75–9, 85–6, 89, 129–30, 147, 161–2, 175–6, 180–4; gender roles in leadership, 268–70, 278, 282–7, 333n27, 404n78; and government, 4, 84–5, 87–93, 101, 129–34, 220–1, 222–4; hospitals, 205–6; and humanism, 115–22; Hymnary of, 108–9, 193; indigenous peoples, 84–5; influence on members, 154–5, 230–1; on marriage, 173, 176, 180–4, 374n121; and Massey Commission, 207–8; membership of, 200–2, 218, 225, 234, 255–7, 263–4, 268–70; as middle-class, 160, 233–4, 248–51; mission, 156, 228, 240–1, 282, 284–5, 292; modernity as threat, 157–63, 172–80, 182–4, 207–8, 221–2, 347n48; and moral regulation, 178–80, 184–5; and national church, 28–9, 32, 36–7, 40–1, 47–8, 53–4, 57–8, 297; as nation-building, 4–5, 22, 48, 58– 9, 222–3, 335–6n48; and New Age, 227, 233–6, 239, 245, 254, 391n75, 391n75; new catechism of, 179; New Creed of, 273–5, 279, 299, 404n77–8; New Curriculum of, 170–2, 200–2, 220, 225, 233–5, 238, 264–7;

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non-partisanship of, 90–1, 235; organizations, 73–9, 167–8, 231, 263–9, 333n24; outreach of, 230–5, 246–7, 250, 269–71; as “pagan,” 50–1, 52; and “panarchy,” 258–9, 275, 289–90; political influence, 133–4, 157, 185, 203–4, 220–1, 223–4, 293; on popular culture, 158–60, 163; postwar growth, 154, 156–7, 166–7, 178, 225, 248, 254–5; on refugees, 142–3, 149–50; relationship with Anglican Church, 276–80, 406n95; relationship with Roman Catholic Church, 196–9, 213, 219, 244–6, 248; resilience, 289–91; revivalism, 107, 253; rural communities, 74–5, 77–8, 81, 83–5, 109, 139–42, 174, 234, 247–8, 267, 280–1, 287–8, 294; Second World War, 129–37, 140–1, 143–4, 353n7; service books, 108–10, 273–4, 344n23; on sexuality, 158, 178, 180–1, 233, 262, 373–4n120, 399–400n25; social services of, 87–8, 93–4, 101, 201–2, 204–6, 214–21, 254; staffing, 99–100, 140, 168–9, 241; suburban congregations of, 248–51; as success, 294, 295, 416n20; Sunday schools, 264–7; theological debates within, 102–25; “theological laxity,” 25, 40–1, 104, 106; and urbanization, 141, 160, 173–4, 176–7, 246–51, 280–1, 371n83; and working women, 76, 175–6, 182–4, 268; “world mission,” 226–34, 253; worship practices of, 102–10, 263–4,

25729_AIRHART.indb 437

273–4, 299; youth programs, 73, 75–6, 167–8, 190, 192, 331n8, 332n11. See also Basis of Union; Canada; church union movement; cultural assimilation; cultural pluralism; General Council (United Church); indigenous peoples; liberalism; missions; New Evangelism; social gospel movement; social reform; Statement of Faith; theological modernism; United Church Observer; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees: Board of Christian Education, 74, 218; Board of Colleges and Secondary Schools, 284; Board of Education, 219, 267; Board of Foreign Missions, see missions; Board of Home Missions, see missions; Board of Overseas Missions, see Board of Foreign Missions; Board of Missions, 285; Board of Women, 194, 268, 278; Board of World Mission, 244; Commission on Christian Faith, 123, 170; Commission on Christian Marriage and Divorce, 181; Commission on Christianizing the Social Order, 90–4, 131, 235; Commission on Church and State in Education, 218; Commission on Church Hospitals, 205–6; Commission on Culture, 159, 175, 183, 214–15, 374n132; Commission on Ordination,

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184; Commission on the Church in the Field of Social Welfare, 254; Commission on the Church on the Urban Frontier, 247; Commission on the Church’s Ministry in the Twentieth Century, 283, 411n146; Commission on the Gainful Employment of Married Women, 183; Commission on Urban Problems, 173; Commission on World Mission, 228, 241–3, 392n84; Committee on Christian Faith, 273–4, 75; Committee on Church Worship and Ritual, 273; Committee on Ecumenical Affairs, 278; Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools of the Province of Ontario, 219–20; Committee on the Church and International Affairs (ccia), 134, 145, 148–9, 150, 152; Committee on the Revision of the Hymnary, 193; Committee on Women Workers, 76; Division of Congregational Life and Work, 284; Division of Mission, 284; General Commission on Union, 279; International Affairs committee, 199, 203; Joint Committee on the Evangelization of Canadian Life, 117; Missionary and Maintenance Committee, 70; National Committee on Church Extension, 166; War Service Committee, 129. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e&ss); Christian civilization; Christian internationalism;

25729_AIRHART.indb 438

Commission on Christian Marriage and Christian Home; Commission on Church, Nation and World Order; ecumenism; General Council (United Church); prohibition; social reform; temperance; United Church Observer; United Church of Canada United Church of Canada Act, 34 United Church of Christ, 268 United Church Renewal Fellowship, 239, 240, 245, 274, 290; “new creed,” 275, 405n85 United Church Training School, 129 United Church Women (uc w), 200, 268–9, 285 United College (Winnipeg), 130, 140, 299 United Kingdom: Anglo-Saxonism, 144; demise of empire, 144–5; ecumenism, 131; Overtoun appeal, 37; Privy Council, 93; secularism 295. See also Canada; imperialism United Nations, 149–50 United States: Cold War, 146–9; emigration to, 7; fundamentalistmodernist debate, 50–1, 54–5, 106–7; immigrants, 9; imperialism of, 116–17, 126–7, 144–9; indigenous peoples of, 9; religious influence, 11, 23–4, 50–1, 103, 106–7, 116–17, 131; secularism, 116–17. See also Canada; church union movement; imperialism; United Church of Canada United Theological College (Montreal), 89, 231, 244

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Index 439

University of Toronto. See Emmanuel College (Toronto); Knox College (Toronto) Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Vaughan, Harold, 284 Victoria College (Toronto), 20, 113, 123, 159. See also Victoria University Victoria University (Toronto), 11, 49, 82, 110, 123, 171–2, 203 Vietnam War, 149, 227, 228–9, 238, 258 Villeneuve, Cardinal, 135–6 Vipond, Reid, photograph, 71 Visser ’t Hooft, W.A., 111, 112, 346n36 Vlastos, Gregory, 112, 122, 351n90 Wadsworth, G. Campbell, 108, 283 Wallace, E.W., 80–2 Warren, Heather, 111 Warriner, William Henry, photograph, 66 Watson, J. Ralph, 213 Watts, J.R., 139–40 Way, Peggy, 268 Weber, Max, 259 Wee Frees. See Free Church of Scotland Weiman, Henry Nelson, 112–13 Wesley, John, 25–6, 53, 135, 238 Wesley College (Winnipeg), 12 Wesleyan Methodist Church of Bermuda, 34 West London Mission, 165 Western Canada: church union role, 10, 27, 39, 59; home missions, 139–42;

25729_AIRHART.indb 439

Japanese-Canadian internment, 129, 143–4, 360n93; local union congregations, 27, 39, 317n118, 329n107, 329n108; moral issues, 174; non-concurring Presbyterians in, 61–3; settlement, 9, 139–42, 309n30. See also Canada; church union movement; cultural assimilation; missions Westminster Confession of Faith, Catechisms, and Directory of Public Worship, 23 Westminster Presbyterian Church (Winnipeg), 19 Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia), 50 Westminster United Church (Winnipeg), 71, 142 Westworth United Church (Winnipeg), 265 White, Peter Gordon, 266 Whitehead, A.N., 113 Wilson, Lois M., 184, 246; photograph, 71 Wilson, R.J., 44–7, 57, 83, 106, 336n51 Wilson, Roy, 246 Winter, Gibson, 74, 249–50 wms. See Woman’s Missionary Society Woman’s Association (wa ), 78–9 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 74 Woman’s Missionary Society (wms): Dominion Board of, 129; finances, 97–8, 167–8, 285; hospitals, 205–6; immigrant outreach, 141–2; membership, 76; merger with wa, 200, 268,

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285; mission, 85–6, 333n22; and postwar growth, 167; postwar missions, 151–3; rural communities, 77–8, 141–2; scope, 77–8, 79; and Second World War, 129; staffing shortfalls, 99; temperance, 179. See also Board of Evangelism and Social Service (e & s s ); indigenous peoples; missions; residential schools; United Church of Canada; United Church of Canada, administrative bodies and major committees; United Church Women; Woman’s Association Woodsworth, J.S., 12, 105, 297–8, 417n22 World Conference of Christian Churches (Oxford, 1937), 127– 8, 147, 228, 353n2 World Conference on Church and Society. See World Council of Churches World Conference on Faith and Order (Lausanne, 1927), 83 World Congress on Evangelism (Berlin, 1966), 239–40, 391n74, 394–5n100

25729_AIRHART.indb 440

World Council of Churches (wc c ), 138, 147, 158, 203, 228–9, 278–9 World Missionary Conference (Edinburgh, 1910), 4, 80, 207, 239, 253, 334n30 World Student Christian Federation, 111, 228 World Vision, 239 World War I. See First World War World War II. See Second World War ymc a . See Young Men’s Christian Association Young Men’s Christian Association (y mc a ), 20 Young, Morley A.R., 205 Young People’s Society, 73, 75. See also Young People’s Union Young People’s Union (y pu), 82, 168, 267–8. See also Young People’s Society Young Women’s Christian Association (y wc a ), 20, 76 ywc a . See Young Women’s Christian Association

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