Phyllis D. Airhart

"As Canadian as the maple leaf" is how one observer summed up the United Church of Canada after its founding in 1925. But was this Canadian-made church flawed in its design, as critics have charged? A Church with the Soul of a Nation explores this question by weaving together the history of the United Church with a provocative analysis of religion and cultural change. The story begins in the aftermath of Confederation, when the prospects of building a Christian nation persuaded a group of Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian leaders to set aside denominational differences and focus instead on shared beliefs. Phyllis Airhart traces the new church's struggle to save its reputation during a bitter controversy with dissenting Presbyterians who refused to join what they considered a "creedless" church. Surviving the organizational and theological challenges of economic depression and war, the future of the church seemed bright. But the ties between personal faith and civic life that the founders took for granted were soon tattered by the secular cultural storm sweeping through western Christendom. The United Church's remaking came with the realization that creating a Christian social order in Canada was unlikely - perhaps even undesirable - in a pluralistic world. A Church with the Soul of a Nation sheds light on the United Church's past controversies and present dilemmas by showing how its founding vision both laid the groundwork for its accomplishments and complicated its adaptation to the new world taking shape.

"As Canadian as the maple leaf" is how one observer summed up the United Church of Canada after its founding in 1925. But was this Canadian-made church flawed in its design, as critics have charged? A Church with the Soul of a Nation explores this question by weaving together the history of the United Church with a provocative analysis of religion and cultural change. The story begins in the aftermath of Confederation, when the prospects of building a Christian nation persuaded a group of Congregationalist, Methodist, and Presbyterian leaders to set aside denominational differences and focus instead on shared beliefs. Phyllis Airhart traces the new church's struggle to save its reputation during a bitter controversy with dissenting Presbyterians who refused to join what they considered a "creedless" church. Surviving the organizational and theological challenges of economic depression and war, the future of the church seemed bright. But the ties between personal faith and civic life that the founders took for granted were soon tattered by the secular cultural storm sweeping through western Christendom. The United Church's remaking came with the realization that creating a Christian social order in Canada was unlikely - perhaps even undesirable - in a pluralistic world. A Church with the Soul of a Nation sheds light on the United Church's past controversies and present dilemmas by showing how its founding vision both laid the groundwork for its accomplishments and complicated its adaptation to the new world taking shape.

Essential to Methodist revivalism was the personal conversion experience, which constituted the basis of salvation and church membership. Revivalism, maintains Airhart, was a distinctive form of piety and socialization that was critical in helping Methodists define who they were, colouring their understanding of how religion was to be experienced, practised, articulated, and cultivated. This revivalist piety, even more than doctrine or policy, was the identifying mark of Methodism in the nineteenth century. But, during the late Victorian era, the Methodist presentation of the religious life underwent a transformation. By 1925, when the Methodist Church was incorporated into the United Church of Canada, its most prominent leaders were espousing an approach to piety that was essentially, and sometimes explicitly, non-revivalist. The Methodist approach to personal religion changed during this transition and, significantly, Methodists increasingly became identified with social Christianity -- although experience remained a key aspect of their theology. There was also a growing tendency to associate revivalism with fundamentalism, a new religious development that used the Methodist language of conversion but was unappealing to Canadian Methodists. Airhart portrays the tensions between tradition and innovation through stories of the men and women who struggled to revitalize religion in an age when conventional social assumptions and institutions were being challenged by the ideals of the progressive movement. Serving the Present Age is an account of Canadian Methodist participation in a realignment of North American Protestantism which supporters believed would better enable them, in the words of a well-known Wesley hymn, "to serve the present age."