Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
By asking “what happened to Christian Canada,” I begin with an assumption that there once was a Christian Canada which is now gone. That assumption is intentional. It is intended to highlight not only the dramatic changes that have taken place in Canadian religious life over the last sixty years, but also substantial contrasts between the religious histories of Canada and the United States, which otherwise are so similar in so many respects. This paper explores the question primarily with American observers in mind, for whom the Canadian past is often as much a shadowy mystery as the great expanse of Canadian geography. But I hope Canadians who read this account may benefit from observing how one sympathetic American views their history and also from realizing that the splendid array of marvelous historical studies that have been produced by a splendid array of marvelous Canadian historians have reached at least some appreciative readers in the United States.
2. In attempting what is, in effect, a comparative Canadian-American study, I am following self-consciously in the footsteps of Airhart, Phyllis D., “‘As Canadian as Possible Under the Circumstances’: Reflections on the Study of Protestantism in North America,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Stout, Harry S. and Hart, D. G. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116–37Google Scholar; William, Westfall, “Voices from the Attic: The Canadian Border and the Writing of American Religious History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Tweed, Thomas A. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 181–99Google Scholar; Handy, Robert T., “Protestant Patterns in Canada and the United States,” and Paul R. Dekar, “On the Soul of Nations: Religion and Nationality in Canada and the United States,” both in In the Great Tradition, ed. Ban, J. D. and Dekar, P. R. (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson, 1982), 33–51, and 53–72Google Scholar; and especially Handy, Robert T., A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar
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9. For an academic colloquy dominated by voices opposing this recent change, see Daniel, Cere and Douglas, Farrow, ed., Divorcing Marriage: Unveiling the Dangers in Canada's New Social Experiment (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
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