Religious institutions, values, and identities are fundamental to understanding the lived experiences of Canadians in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Christian Churches and Their Peoples, an inter-denominational study, considers how Christian churches influenced the social and cultural development of Canadian society across regional and linguistic lines. By shifting their focus beyond the internal dynamics of institutions, Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau address broad social issues such as the ways in which religion is linked to changing mores, the key role of laypeople in shaping churches, and the ways in which First Nations peoples both appropriated and resisted missionary teachings. With an important analysis of popular religious ideas and practices, Christian Churches and Their Peoples demonstrates that the cultural authority and regulatory practices of religious institutions both affirmed and opposed the personal religious values of Canadians, ultimately facilitating their elaboration of personal, ethnic, gender, and national identities.
Nancy Christie is the J.B. Smallman Chair in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario. Michael Gauvreau is a professor in the Department of History at McMaster University.
Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: The Religious Cultures of Discipline And Dissidence in Colonial Society Chapter Two: Machinery of Salvation: The Making of a Civic Christianity Chapter Three: 'Their Advance in Christian Civilization': Missionaries and Colonialism at Home Chapter Four: 'Canada is our parish': Social Christianity and its Discontents, 1910-1940 Chapter Five: 'The In-Group and the Rest':The Churches and the Construction of a New Urban Lifestyle, 1940-1965 Bibliography