Cross Border Evangelists and the Establishment

Would-be proselytizers have been swarming across what is now the US-Canadian border for as long as there have been European settlers in North America.

From New England Puritans seeking to displace the "papists" of New France in 1693, to Southern Baptists setting up branch plant churches in Western Canada in the 1960's, well-meaning Americans have never hesitated to share their "Yes, we can" and "I found it" experiences with their northern neighbours.

The greater cool or caution they have encountered across the Canadian border is sometimes seen as a lack of conviction. It may be ascribed to a more cautious temperament, or to a lack of having got it together in technical or promotional know-how. Even Canadians ask themselves sometimes, "Why are they (Americans) so much more confident about what they believe?

The difference is rooted not in confidence nor conviction but in a fundamental difference in our cultures that grows out of our religious history. The United States was built on expansionism and conquest by newcomers with new ideas competing in a culture of survival of the fittest.

Canada was built on a culture of accommodation of differences: of setting limits to the expansion of any one interest. The one "conquest" in Canada--that of New France by Britain in the Seven Years War--was followed almost immediately by measures to limit its impact on the conquered.

The merchants of New England who had benefited from the expulsion of the Acadians from their lands expected to similarly profit from the addition of Quebec to their sphere of influence within the British Empire. The 1774 Quebec Act set limits on this early expansive American spirit.

By delaying the grant of an elected assembly, it closed the door to American newcomers who could work the system politically and so take it over. By guaranteeing French Canadian society under the British Crown, it helped prevent Quebec participation in the impending American Revolution.

By protecting First Nations lands against American expansion from New England, it added fuel to Revolutionary grievances. By driving a wedge between New Englanders and both their French neighbours to the north and their aboriginal ones to the west, it assured that the continent would not be united but continue as two countries as it had been earlier under the French and British.

The impacts of the Quebec Act were economic, political and social but it was at its core a religious guarantee. It is now seen as having established both the Frenchness of Quebec and the ultimate bilingualism of Canada. But language and culture are not the focus of the Act. Religion was.

It guaranteed the Roman Catholic faith of the former French colony, the office of the bishop and the system of land tenure previously in effect, including the lands held by the Church. It was based on a act of toleration passed under Elizabeth I 225 years earlier, but it went much further than that Act and gave Catholics a status they enjoyed nowhere else in the British Empire.

Protection and accommodation of its religion was the price Britain paid for Quebec's loyalty. But the limits established by the Quebec Act did not prove to be watertight. They contributed to the US War of Independence, and this led to a tide of loyalists refugees northward, who once again called the French character of Quebec in question.

The response to this was the partition of Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada, to separate the new English speaking inhabitants from the previous French ones. But while the outcome of the division was a linguistic separation, its basis was a religious one: between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

However, the Protestants coming from the former Thirteen Colonies were not a homogenous group. They included Calvinists and Methodists, Mennonites, Lutherans, Baptists and other denominational groups. They were not prepared to accept a role for the Church of England and its bishop that the Catholic Church had had in Québec.

But the fact that there was an established church for at least part of Canada meant that the newcomers were not on the same basis in Canada as they had been in the US. And the guarantee of the Catholic religion originally legislated by the Quebec Act now extended by inference to a multiplicity of Protestant denominations in Upper Canada.

British governors worked long and hard to mitigate the intensive rivalries of these groups, and to grant them fair treatment in a developing society. It is from their efforts and those of their supporters that Canada has developed a culture of caution and balance, rather than unrestricted competition between religious groups. Publically funded religious schools in many regions was a result of this policy.

A less restricted competition between religious groups exists in Western Canada, settled by Europeans a century after Ontario. Yet there is still a special status for the Catholic Church in the West that does not exists in the US, from which a number of the western settlers were drawn.

Tomorrow we’ll look at some religious innovations that have originated on the Canadian side of the border.