During the Great Depression in Canada the unemployment rate was at 30 percent, the export markets dried up, and national expenditures were down by 43 percent. Church leaders engaged in painful soul searching. The more conservative sought prophetic messages, while social gospel liberals examined the capitalist system to determine what limitations or flaws could have led to such economic calamity. Near the end of the decade, fascism and Nazism were perceived as even greater challenges to faith as Canada entered World War II.

Influenced by radio and motion pictures from the United States during the 1920’s, Canadians had grown more materialistic, leading some pastors to rage against flappers, Jazz Age culture, and “Americanization” in general. In the relatively small Jewish population in Montreal, New York City was known as “Babylon on the Hudson.” However, as economic distress grew, Canadian churches concentrated more on social than personal redemption. A few church leaders concluded that individual improvement could not be achieved without social reform. Labor unions gained favor, and European theologians who criticized capitalism were taken more seriously. Though Canada remained divided—in what the Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan called “the two solitudes”—between French-speaking, Roman Catholic Quebec and the English-speaking, largely Protestant provinces, common problems faced all the churches in a land where religion was still a dominant influence.

Roman Catholicism

During the 1930’s, Roman Catholics made up approximately 42 percent of the total Canadian population. In Quebec, priests and nuns in full clerical array were visible in every village. The church controlled education and provided numerous social services not yet assumed by the government. In searching for solutions to their poverty, some Catholics looked to the social teachings of Pope Pius XI, who advocated reforms in the capitalistic system. Catholic Action, an Italian import, addressed working-class problems. A number of future national leaders, including the young Pierre Trudeau, became activists through this movement. Though some later broke their ties with Catholicism, they did not forget the social conscience they had developed within the church. Outside Quebec, anglophone Catholics were more attracted to the Antigonish movement, which promoted credit unions and cooperatives for producers and consumers. Even while these initiatives improved the lot of working folk, conservative bishops in Quebec opposed movements they considered too socialistic, believing they promoted class warfare, materialism, and a philosophy that denigrated the spiritual.

An exception to the Catholic conservative hierarchy was Father Neil McNeil, who was archbishop of Toronto from 1912 to 1934. An anglophone who looked to England for his social views, he was influenced by British Labor politics and European Christian socialism. A distinguished educator, he lobbied for fair taxation for parochial schools and established Newman Clubs for college students. He supported labor unions, ministered to non-English-speaking immigrants, and founded the Federation of Catholic Charities, which did its finest work throughout the 1930’s. Though McNeil died in 1934, while still serving as archbishop of Toronto, his influence lingered throughout the decade and beyond.

One of the problems facing Canadian Catholicism had long been the divide between the French- and English-speaking members of the faith. By the 1930’s, Catholicism had grown even more ethnically diverse. Though immigration was virtually halted during the Depression, Italians, Hungarians, Poles, and Ukrainians had already immigrated in large numbers, so that by 1931, these Catholics were as numerous as those of British and Irish background. Most lived in Ontario and the West. For at least a generation, their ethnicity remained intertwined with their religion, and they were not always happy to follow English- or French-speaking bishops. Ukrainians were further estranged, because, according to the Eastern Rite, 90 percent of their priests in the old country were married. Yet at the end of the nineteenth century, the Vatican had banned married priests in North America.

The United Church of Canada

In 1925, the United Church of Canada, had consolidated Methodists, Congregationalists, and the majority of Presbyterians, but during the 1930’s, it faced disappointments. Many members were beginning to concede that their goal of uniting Protestant Canada into a single spiritual force would never fully succeed. The United Church still ranked second, after Catholics, in membership numbers, with 19 percent of the population claiming to belong to the church. However, the Anglican Church, representing about 15 percent of the population, had refused to join any union that failed to recognize its historic episcopacy. Conservative Presbyterians had also broken with their more liberal brethren, winning the legal right to designate themselves the Presbyterian Church of Canada.

Despite what novelist Robertson Davies would call their “flabby benevolence and boneless theology,” the United Church made many contributions to social welfare during the decade. Intellectuals within the church were influenced by Swiss theologians Emil Brunner and Karl Barth. Brunner’s melding of Lutheran and Reformed theological perspectives appealed to the syncretists, while Barth’s concern for social betterment and approval of unions pleased the activists. Later, Canadian church people would be even more impressed by the courageous rejection of Nazism by both these Swiss theologians.

In 1935, a group of United Church activists organized the Fellowship for a Christian Social Order, uniting with church agencies to issue “Christianizing the Social Order,” a declaration identifying modern industrial economy as the cause of the Depression. E. H. Oliver, moderator of the United Church from 1930 to 1935, proclaimed the Depression a judgment of God upon an unfair social order.

Fundamentalism in Canadian Religion

Fundamentalist-Modernist church conflicts were less disruptive in Canada than they were in the United States. Nonetheless, charismatic preachers from the United States reached Canadian audiences, and the country was capable of producing its own firebrands, such as Thomas T. Shields. Though British born, for more than fifty years Shields was a leading personality in Ontario. Newspapers followed his exploits, and he was satirically profiled in magazines such as Maclean’s. Justly known as “the Battling Baptist,” his primary pulpit was the influential Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto. There he railed against gamblers, card players, burlesque comedians, “bobbed hair” in women, pacifism, the liquor trade, and the United States. Everywhere he went, a schism seemed to follow. Though his congregation was expelled from the Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec, he led his own faction, the Union of Regular Baptists. He denounced Methodists, high-church Anglicans, the United Church, and fellow Baptists who did not concur with his opinions. Certain that the Roman Catholic Church in Canada was a puppet of Vatican politicians, he led his own crusade against “rum and Romanism” in 1935.

One politician called for a public hanging of Shields, and even such a placid group as the Quakers suggested a public execution would not be inappropriate. Still, his accomplishments were considerable, some of them lasting. He established Sunday morning as the proper time for Bible instruction of children, an innovation that took hold throughout the country. He founded a Baptist Bible college to train preachers free from what he believed to be the taint of theological liberalism and German biblical scholarship. His radio broadcasts always attracted large audiences.

The Oxford Group

Though economic problems were the central preoccupation of churches during the Depression, personal spiritual renewal was not totally neglected. The Oxford Group moved into Canada in the fall of 1932, when Frank Buchman, an American religious enthusiast, brought his movement to Montreal. The group’s name stemmed from its initial success at England’s Oxford University. Buckman’s disciples quickly gained favor with leading citizens and clergy. Members of the group organized “house parties,” primarily for young people, who prayed together, read the Bible, and made elaborate public confessions of their sins, especially offenses of a sexual nature. Some recruits were accused of “sinning boldly” in order to have something interesting to confess.

After attracting so many devotees in North America, Buchman became ever more grandiose, aspiring to save the world in addition to reforming individual lives. He spoke of Nazis as a deterrent to communism and was said to be plotting the conversion of Hitler and other German officials. By the time he made his second tour of Canada in 1934, however, Buchman’s critics had mobilized. Princeton University banned “Buchmanism” as a questionable cult, and anti-Nazi theologians Reinhold Niebuhr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer openly opposed him. Though his movement did not die, its force was spent.

The Jewish Plight

During the 1930’s, Jewish citizens made up about 1 percent of the total Canadian population and had not yet achieved their later prominence in arts and letters. Though some accounts of Nazi persecution in occupied lands did reach North America, such news was frequently dismissed as wartime propaganda. Hard economic times had made Canadians uneasy about further immigration. Jewish Canadians, intent on establishing themselves in North America, could do little to counteract the strain of anti-Semitism in both English- and French-speaking populations. The Canadian government still lacked a policy on giving asylum to victims of religious and political oppression and was uncertain that Jews from Europe could support themselves in a country suffering severe economic crisis. As increasing numbers of Jews fled Nazi-dominated Europe, Canada feared that if it opened its doors, the country would be flooded with more immigrants than could be absorbed.

Politics and Religion

Canadian clergymen have frequently entered politics. For example, the Baptist preacher Tommy Douglas first became politically active during the 1930’s economic crisis. He later became premier of Saskatchewan and was honored as the founder of Canadian national health care. In Alberta, another outspoken Baptist preacher, William “Bible Bill” Aberhart, became obsessed with biblical prophecy and the doctrine of Dispensationalism, believing that during seven divisions of sacred history God had bestowed different covenants on humanity. At the height of his fame, Aberhart’s radio broadcasts reached listeners throughout midwestern Canada and the northern United States.

Concerned with body as well as soul, Aberhart accepted the Social Credit System as outlined by C. H. Douglas, an English engineer. In Alberta, during the first half of the 1930’s, Aberhart taught that a lack of money in circulation was the cause of the Depression. His solution was for government to supply each citizen with a twenty-five-dollar monthly stipend. When he was elected premier of Alberta in 1935, he was able to introduce programs of debt relief and public works. Despite conflicts with the federal government, Aberhart’s party remained in power long after the 1930’s. Though some critics complained that social credit politics did not harmonize with Aberhart’s sectarian, eschatological theology, his defenders argued that his theology and politics were a coherent system.

A third and less flamboyant clergyman entering public life was J. King Gordon. Ordained in the United Church in Manitoba, he was professor of Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in Montreal. In 1933, he coauthored the Regina Manifesto, advocating centralized government planning, public control of financial institutions, socialized health care, and a national labor code. In later years, Gordon became an international advocate for human rights and an officer in the United Nations.

Impact

Canada survived the Great Depression years with its churches intact and with church attendance higher than in the United States. Numerous religious leaders had proven their concern for the material welfare of their parishioners and of all citizens. The path was clearly set for social reforms that came in the following decades, and important activists got their start in religious organizations. When Canada entered World War II in 1939, both Protestants and Catholics supported the effort as an extension of their humane goals. After the full carnage of the war had been revealed, the country proved more hospitable to Jews and displaced persons of all races and creeds.

Further Reading