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The Religious Sect in Canadian Economic Development*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

S. D. Clark
S. D. Clark*
Affiliation:
The University of Toronto
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Extract

There is probably no other form of organized group life in the Canadian community which has been more unstable than the organization of religion. The history of Protestantism in the country is very largely a history of church unions and sectarian divisions. If account were taken of the activities of the Jesuit Order in New France, of the defection at various times of many Catholics to Protestant religious sects, and of recent anti-clerical movements in the province of Quebec and among the Catholic immigrant population in Western Canada, the same would be found to be true in a general way of Catholic development in the country.

The dream of the universal church, of the church which would unite all nations and all classes, has never been fully realized, in Canada as elsewhere in the Western World. Efforts to accomplish such an object, by the establishment of a state church, by the union of separate religious bodies, or by the initiation of a new religious movement which would transcend all other religious groups have invariably failed in face of the expression of strong separatist forces in religious organization. Out of every such effort to create an all-embracing religious body in the community have come new movements of religious protest, the religious sect.

On the other hand, the sect form of religious organization has proved equally unstable. The pure sect, the religious group organized exclusively in terms of the other-worldly or spiritual interests of its members, has never been more than an idealistic conception of religious organization finding expression in movements of religious reform at various times. The necessity of existing in a worldly society has led religious sects from the very beginning to accept to some extent a worldly outlook. Where they have not succeeded in developing into churches, or at any rate into types of religious organization accommodated to the secular community, they have perished. Almost from the moment of their inception, they have been forced to make such a choice between social accommodation or extinction.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , November 1946 , pp. 439 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1946

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Footnotes

*

This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Toronto on May 24, 1946. For a detailed study of religious movements in Canada, see the author's Church and Sect in Canada to be published shortly by the University of Toronto Press.

References

1 See Clark, S. D., “Religious Organization and the Rise of the Canadian Nation, 1850-1885” (Report of the Canadian Historical Association, 1944).Google Scholar

2 “All commercial communities,” Brooks Adams wrote, “have rebelled against paying for miracles, and it was the spread of a scepticism already well developed in the thirteenth century among the manufacturing towns which caused the Reformation of the sixteenth.” The Law of Civilisation and Decay: An Essay on History (London, 1895), p. 129.Google Scholar Of developments after about 1400, Adams wrote again: “Year by year, as society consolidated, the economic type was propagated; and as the pressure of a contracting currency stimulated these men to action, the demand for cheap religion grew fierce.” Ibid., p. 157.

3 “Religion,” H. A. Innis wrote, “has been vitally related to the mysteries of life and death and to the family. The decline of the Church in Europe reflected the impact of birth control on the confessional …. Religious sects have fostered the accumulation of wealth over long periods by intermarriage of families. Whereas the Church in its fight for sacerdotal celibacy as a means of preventing the dispersion of wealth left itself open to the looting of its monasteries, the Jews and other sects have been persecuted because of the building up of large fortunes ….

“In the United States the importance of religion to the growth of trade is shown in the large numbers of denominational periodicals and their promising returns to advertisers in a national market. Significantly, among the first advertisers who were alert to these possibilities were those large-scale dealers in human credulity, the patent-medicine firms.” Innis, H. A., “On the Economic Significance of Culture” (The Tasks of Economic History, Supplement IV to The Journal of Economic History, 12, 1944, p. 89).Google Scholar

4 See Clark, S. D., The Social Development of Canada (Toronto, 1942), introduction.Google Scholar

5 Acadia University Library, Baptist Historical Collection, “Onslow, Nova Scotia, Baptist Church Record Book, 1791-1869.”

6 Canada, Sessional Papers, 1860, no. 32.

7 “A man of rank and fortune,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “is by his very station the distinguished member of a great society, who attend to every part of his conduct, and who thereby oblige him to attend to every part of it himself. His authority and consideration depend very much upon the respect which this society bears to him. He dare not do anything which would disgrace or discredit him in it, and he is obliged to a very strict observation. of that species of morals, whether liberal or austere, which the general consent of this society prescribes to persons of his rank and fortune. A man of low condition, on the contrary, is far from being a distinguished member of any great society. While he remains in a country village his conduct may be attended to, and he may be obliged to attend to it himself. In this situation, and in this situation only, he may have what is called a character to lose. But as soon as he comes into a great city, he is sunk into obscurity and darkness. His conduct is observed and attended to by nobody, and he is therefore very likely to neglect it himself, and to abandon himself to every sort of low profligacy and vice. He never emerges so effectually from this obscurity, his conduct never excites so much the attention of any respectable society, as by his becoming the member of a small religious sect. He from that moment acquires a degree of consideration which he never had before. All his brother sectaries are, for the credit of the sect, interested to observe his conduct, and if he gives occasion to any scandal, if he deviates very much from those austere morals which they almost always require of one another, to punish him by what is always a very severe punishment, even where no civil effects attend it, expulsion or excommunication from the sect.” The Wealth of Nations (Oxford, 1880), vol. II, p. 380.Google Scholar

8 See Clark, S. D., “The Social Development of Canada and the American Continental System” (Culture, 06, 1944).Google Scholar

9 See Clark, S. D., “The Religious Sect in Canadian Politics” (The American Journal of Sociology, vol. LI, no. 3, 11, 1945).Google Scholar