At our inaugural Foundations Conference on September 19 in Hamilton, Dr. Kevin Flatt of Redeemer University will be speaking about How We Got Here: The Secular Revolution. We’re all familiar with our current cultural milieu, where religion is largely banished from the public square. Dr. Flatt will explain how this came to be.
But Canadian history is more than just the secular revolution and its aftermath. There is a rich Canadian history of religion in the public square before the secular revolution that is little known and even less appreciated today. Peeking into this history not only allows us to appreciate the magnitude and scale of the secular revolution; it also can inspire us in the twenty-first century to see how the Christian faith can influence public life.
So, here’s one story of where we came from before the secular revolution. This is the story of clergy reserves and Canada’s formal establishment of the Protestant Christian religion.
A Brief History of British North America
But a little context first. The territory of modern-day Canada was first settled by the French in the early sixteenth century. For the first two centuries of Canadian history, the French were pretty much the only European players in Canada (aside from some seasonal English settlements on the coast of Newfoundland). They founded the colony of New France (now the province of Quebec) and Acadia (now the provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island). Only in 1713 did the British gain an official foothold in the territory when they conquered the Nova Scotia portion of Acadia. In 1763, Britain conquered the remaining portions of Acadia and the much more populous New France.
But in the years following the conquest of French territory in the New World, relatively few British (and Protestant) settlers immigrated to the new colonies. Most inhabitants of British North America, as it came to be called, remained French Catholics.
This created a conundrum for the British. Great Britain had formally established the Church of England as the state church and viewed Catholics with great suspicion. After all, as a part of their coronation oath, English monarchs swear to this day to “maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel,” “maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law,” and “maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof.”
So how would this Protestant establishment work in colonies dominated by Catholics?
The Establishment of the Clergy Reserves
The British government’s solution to this problem was set out in the Canada Act of 1791. Although the Act set out various religious stipulations – freedom of religion for Catholics and a guarantee that the tithes of Protestants would only support Protestant clergy – the most consequential religious clause was the establishment of clergy reserves “for the Support and Maintenance of a Protestant Clergy.” This policy set aside one-seventh of all land in newly established townships or parishes as clergy reserves, which could be sold to incoming settlers to generate income to support the salaries of Protestant clergy.
Although these clergy reserves sound non-denominational on paper, they would only support the Anglican Church in practice. These clergy reserves would be the primary way that the state would formally support – or establish – the Church of England in British North America. By 1839, 3,000,000 acres had been granted to the clergy reserves in Upper Canada (now the province of Ontario) and 673,567 acres in Lower Canada (now the province of Quebec).
But why? What was the motivation behind Britain’s establishment of the Church of England both at home and in her colonies?
At the heart of establishmentarianism was a cooperation between the church and the state. In an era where more than 95% of the population professed the Christian religion, these interests were far more aligned than in today’s far less Christian environment. In the words of Anglican Bishop William Warburton at the time, the church and the state had entered into “a politic league and alliance for mutual support and defence.”i
Establishmentarians believed that the church was not a private institution but a public one. The church received the temporal goods of legal protection and financial support from the state, while cultivating the eternal good of salvation for the nation’s citizens. Religion also provided a “higher motive” for good behaviour among citizens. The great goal of religious establishment “was to make the church coterminous with the nation, to bring the Anglican message of salvation to every subject of the Crown.”ii
The great defender of establishing a state church in Canada was Anglican Bishop John Strachan. Strachan argued that “a Christian nation without a religious establishment is a contradiction” and that “no Country can be called Christian, which does not give public support to Christianity.”iii
The Dissenting Protestants
But not everyone agreed.
In the late 18th century and early 19th century, the religious makeup of the loyal British North American colonies changed profoundly.
The first real wave of Protestant immigration to central Canada was the arrival of about 40,000 United Empire Loyalists from the United States after 1776. These loyalists refused to take up arms against Britain in the American Revolution and so migrated to the Canadian colonies, which remained loyal to Britain. And in the first half of the 1800s, massive waves of British immigration flowed to Canada: Presbyterian Scots, Anglican Englishmen, and Catholic Irishmen.
By 1851, Upper Canada (the future province of Ontario), where the clergy reserves were most prominent, was home to several major Christian movements. Boasting the adherence of 23% of the population, Anglicans were the largest denomination, but barely. Methodists (22%), Presbyterians (21%), and Catholics (18%) were close behind.
Anglicans, of course, supported the establishment of their religion in the colony. As Methodism began as an internal reform within the Anglican church, some Methodists continued to support the formal establishment of Christianity. Many Presbyterians, coming from Scotland where the Church of Scotland was established by law as well, were fine with the establishment of religion (even if they wished their church to be co-established alongside the Church of England). And the Catholics had no qualms with a close relationship between church and state; after all, the Catholic Church was integrally connected with the state in Lower Canada, even if it wasn’t formally established there.
Nevertheless, not all Protestants agreed. Dissenting Protestants – Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, Lutherans, and Quakers who had broken away from the national churches of England and Scotland – increasingly adopted a “voluntarist” approach to church-state relations. Voluntarists opined that there should be no established state church or favouritism of one religious denomination over another. Since the clergy reserves were the primary way the Anglican church was established in British North America, the voluntarist solution was to abolish the clergy reserves and allocate their proceeds elsewhere (the education system was a perennial favourite).
Many modern readers might interpret this as an example of secularization, a sign that Christianity was on the wane, especially in the public domain. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was not secularists, atheists, or members of other religions who were arguing for the abolition of the clergy reserves or the marginalization of the Church, as many proponents of the French Revolution had called for. Indeed, proponents of these beliefs were almost unknown in nineteenth-century Canada. As one scholar put it, the Canadian political leaders of the day and the later “founders of the new dominion were men who were adamantly opposed to Enlightenment ideas, standing by their British, Christian heritage.”iv
Instead, this was a principled plea from various religious minorities. Their goal was one of justice in their eyes; why should the state support one specific denomination of the Christian religion when it was very much in the minority (as in Lower Canada) or barely a plurality (as in Upper Canada)?
The voluntarists also argued that the removal of state support for specific denominations would reinvigorate Christian belief, piety, and action. Even if they differed from Anglicans and Catholics on the means (i.e. establishing or disestablishing specific churches), they all agreed on the Christian ends of public policy.
Their goal was also to strengthen their own churches. Without the great resources provided by the clergy reserves, the Methodists, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians would have a greater chance to draw adherents to their strain of Christianity. Rather than seeking to weaken the force of Christianity within the colonies, proponents sought to strengthen religious adherence by fostering more equal competition between the various Christian denominations.
And finally, this voluntarism was central to the developing reform or liberal movement in Upper Canada. These reformers, headed by Presbyterian George Brown, vehemently sought a full-orbed vision of responsible government. But as one historian puts it, “as important as the principle of self-government was to the reformers, it was never about autonomy for its own sake, but was always part of a broader vision for ‘civil and religious liberty,’ complete with checks against the ever-looming threat of tyranny from Rome and Canterbury [i.e. the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church].”v
The Resolution of the Clergy Reserve Question
The growing voluntarist movement and the increasing religious pluralization of Upper Canada led to more tension over the Anglican Church’s monopoly over the clergy reserves. Eventually, the Church of England, Methodists, and Catholics received a slice of the clergy reserve pie, but the voluntarists wanted a full separation between church and state. In their mind, giving other denominations public funds simply made the problem worse. One reformer, pushing for the reform of colonial politics, said, “The payment of one church by the state is thought of dangerous tendency. How much more alarming is the proposition to pay four?”vi
This wasn’t a minor issue of the day. For example, it was a significant factor in one of Canada’s few violent uprisings, the Rebellions of 1837-38. One of the leaders of this rebellion, the radical reformer William Lyon Mackenzie, drafted a revolutionary constitution in which the first four articles dealt exclusively with church-state affairs. Lord Durham, in his famous Durham Report diagnosing the cause of these rebellions, wrote, “in the opinion of many persons this [dispute over the clergy reserve] was the chief redisposing cause of the recent insurrection, and it is an abiding and unabated cause of discontent… [it] must now be settled, if it is intended that the province is to be free from violent and perilous agitation.”vii
After numerous bills, compromises, delegations to London, and pronouncements by the Colonial Office, the clergy reserve question was settled by John A. Macdonald, the longest-serving (co-)premier of the United Province of Canada, the architect of Confederation, and Canada’s first Prime Minister. The solution to the age-old question was a final compromise: the clergy reserves would be sold, with their funds going to local municipalities. However, the ministers receiving payment from the reserves would be guaranteed these stipends for life. New ministers would not be eligible for government support. This legislation stripped the churches of the clergy reserve assets but “grandfathered” support for existing beneficiaries.
Macdonald remarked that “in a country where the majority of the people are of one religion, and that a Christian religion, the State should acknowledge itself as a Christian State, and make provision for the maintenance of religion.”viii Thus, in principle, he was on the side of establishment. However, in practice, he was a voluntarist, for “the question from the time it was first agitated until now has been a source of trouble and contention, setting man against man, neighbour against neighbour, Church against Church.”ix The formal establishment of religion just wouldn’t do in a colony with diverse expressions of the Christian religion. And so, he said, “we will give [the Clergy Reserves] up for the sake of peace, we give it up for the sake of settling those quarrels for ever, we give it up in the name of charity.”x
And it did bring peace. After the abolition of the clergy reserves in 1854, there was no serious proposal to re-establish religion in Canada, and quarrelling between the Protestant denominations died down.
Moving Forward
But this did not mean that the Church played any less of a role in the affairs of the colony or indeed the new Dominion of Canada. Just because Canadian society had decided that the state should not financially support the church did not mean that the church was simply a private institution. Christians of all denominations led the fight for Sabbath observance legislation (achieved in 1907), for the prohibition of alcohol (achieved in most provinces in the 1910s), and for various pieces of welfare legislation through the social gospel movement.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, various church unions amalgamated the splinters of some traditions into more unified and socially active churches. The various Presbyterian strands joined to form the Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1875, while the Methodists united as the Methodist Church in 1884. These unions culminated with the union of all of the Methodists, three-quarters of the Presbyterians, and almost all of the remaining Congregationalists to form the United Church of Canada in 1925.
One Congregationalist at the time of the latter union, William T. Gunn, wished for “other unions still, until we have one great National Church of all that love God, working together to make our Dominion His Dominion from sea to sea and all the kingdoms of this world the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.”xi
The mission of making the Canadian Dominion the LORD’s Dominion has been a constant feature for most of Canadian history. There has often been disagreement about how to achieve this, such as establishing a church using funds from the clergy reserves or adapting a voluntarist principle, but the end goal remained the same for centuries.
So how did Canada go from a place in which one of the dominant policy questions was how Christianity should play a role in the public square to effectively roping off religion from politics today?
To get a fulsome answer to that question, join us at our Hamilton Foundations Conference, either in person or online, as Dr. Flatt describes Canada’s secular revolution. Registration for this conference is required, so visit our Foundations Conference event page to sign up today!
