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Elliot B. Hanowski, "Towards a Godless Dominion: Unbelief in Interwar Canada" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2023)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Carrie Lynn Evans
This is Carrie Lynn Evans welcoming you back to New Books Network today. I'm looking forward to sharing with you. Towards a Godless Unbelief in Interwar Canada by Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski. In recent surveys, one in four Canadians say they have no religion. But a century ago, Canada was widely considered to be a Christian nation and the vast majority of Canadians claimed they were devoutly religious. But some were determined to resist. In the 1920s and 30s, groups of militant unbelievers formed across Canada to push back against the dominance of religion. Towards a Godless Dominion explores both anti religious activism and the organized opposition unbelievers faced from Christian Canada during the interwar period. Despite Christianity's prominence, anti religious ideas were propagated by lectures in theaters, through newspapers and out in the streets. Secularist groups in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver actively tried to win people away from religious belief. Looking at interwar controversies around religion, Hanowski shows how unbelievers were able to use these conflicts to get their skeptical message across to the public. Challenging the stereotype of Canada as a tolerant, secular nation. Towards a Godless Dominion returns to a time when intolerant forms of Christianity ruled a country that was considered more religious than even the United States. Dr. Elliot Hanowski is an academic librarian at the University of Manitoba with a doctorate in Canadian History and one of the founders of the International Society for Historians of Atheism, Secularism and Humanism. His research focuses specifically on the history of unbelief in Canada and he joins me today to talk about his new book. Hi everybody and welcome back, Elliot, thank you so much for being here.
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Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
No, thanks for having me.
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Carrie Lynn Evans
I want to begin by asking you about your background, how you came to be an academic librarian, and how you came to be particularly interested in unbelief in Canada.
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Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Yeah, well, I, I was working in the library field as a library technician assistant for a while and. And then I went off to grad school at Queen's University and did a master's and a PhD in history. And while I was there I got interested in. I was sort of interested in looking at the connection between religion and politics, but then my supervisor, Ian Mackay suggested that I look at the archives of Marshall Govin, who we'll be talking about in a bit, which were at the University of Manitoba. And so I ended up digging into the story of atheism and secularism in Canada through that and I wrote my dissertation on it, which eventually turned into the book that we're discussing today. As for sort of Personal interest. I was raised as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and I left that organization in my early 20s. So I spent some time as a sort of a mainstream Christian and then eventually became an agnostic, which I am today. And so for me, the questions of religion and belief and unbelief were very real in a way that maybe they aren't to other people who don't have those experiences. So I found that I was very sort of intrigued by these stories that I ended up researching.
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Carrie Lynn Evans
Well, that makes a lot of sense. So let's start where your book does with defining some key terms and connecting those to their context. Because as we've discovered before on this podcast, the vocabulary related to atheism, unbelief and the like, not to mention ideas like Christendom, have undergone a lot of proliferation and variation over the last few hundred years. So what do those words mean in Canada?
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Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Yeah, well, I use unbelief in the book as sort of an umbrella term to discuss these different movements in the period that we're looking at. Many of the people called themselves rationalists. Rationalism was a. A term that was picked up by unbelievers sort of in the early 20th century, as they were previously. They had often gone by the name like free thinker or secularist or, you know, atheist or agnostic. And rationalist was kind of like an umbrella term of the time. And then later in the 1930s, you start to see the word humanist get starting. People start to use it in terms of a secular humanism, which often is used today. And so partway through, like Marshall Govin's organization in Winnipeg that I talk about, he switched the name from the Winnipeg Rationalist Society to the Winnipeg Humanist Society. So you see a change in terminology there. But, yeah, there's a lot of fuzziness around the borders of some of these terms. You mentioned the term Christendom, and that's a term that I use in the book. It's a. It's a concept that historians use to talk about the way that religion, the Christian church, was intertwined with the state or a variety of states over the centuries. So often people talk about Constantine, the emperor, when he began to favor Christianity in the early in the Roman Empire. That's when we start to see the beginning of Christendom. And so the reason that it matters in the period that I'm talking about is, um, the. For many people, Canada was still considered a Christian nation. And so you see a version of this Christendom where. Where people felt that that's the Canadian state needed to defend Christianity and, you know, persecute anybody who was opposed to Christianity. So that's what kind of where that term comes in.
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Carrie Lynn Evans
You know, the way you describe that makes me think of the caliphate for, for Islam. I don't, I, I just haven't, I haven't run across the concept of Christendom as much. And so. Yeah, so that's been an interesting one to think about. Do you think that's a worthwhile parallel or. I realize you're not an expert in
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Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Islam, but for what I know about it, I think so, yeah. Sort of this idea of, of this political entity that is charged with defending and promoting the faith. Right. And so, and some historians will talk about, you know, multiple Christendoms. So for example, in the period that I'm talking about, like some, some people talk about Quebec being a mini Christendom in that it was the people felt that the politicians in charge of Quebec felt that they had to promote and defend the Catholic Church, whereas in, in English speaking Canada, you know, the state was more tightly connected with Protestant churches. Right. And so there's sometimes different interpretations of what Christendom should stand for, but sort of some common themes as well.
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Carrie Lynn Evans
Interesting. So I wondered if you might also fill in the necessary context by saying something about Canadian Marxists and Communists in the early 20th century, because they seem to have a really important place in the history of Canadian unbelief, if not always in the foreground, then at least in the background. Would you say that's right?
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Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Yeah. In the period that I'm looking at, there were a lot of connections between the left, politically Socialists, Communists and others, and free thought, rationalism and secularism in other countries. So when you're looking at the UK for example, there was often the sense that when secularism as a movement kind of went into decline in the early 20th century, because part of the reason was that many younger people were moving into socialism instead. So there was a bit of like tension or sometimes conflict between those strands. And in the States similarly, there's sometimes there are people who are, you know, both, you know, socialists and unbelievers, but sometimes there was a tension between the free thinking tradition and the, and the left. Whereas in Canada, maybe because it's just a smaller population or for whatever reason, I found that there was a lot more overlap between those movements. And so in, in the Canadian, I talk a bit in the book about how people talk about godless communism and this idea that Marxists and communists are all atheists. And that was Generally true, but there was a very sort of ambivalent relationship. There were certainly communists who felt that they had to promote anti religious talking points and that true communists should be atheists, but at the same time there was this idea sort of descending from Marx's writings that religion was kind of a secondary phenomenon. Right. That if you change that religion was people trying to deal with the suffering that they were encountering due to their material conditions and poverty. And that if you change those material conditions and you organize the workers to fight for their, for their own control over the working, you know, over the means of production, you would change society and make religion kind of irrelevant. People wouldn't want it anymore, they wouldn't need it anymore. So it would grant, gradually wither away. So some, many communists were like kind of turned off of, of explicit anti religious campaigning in the Canadian context. And as I'll talk a little bit about Alberto Martin, who was a communist, but he, he was too anti religious for many of the, the mainstream communists. Right. And so there's, you see these, and there's no, I don't feel like there's any one correct, or at least me as a historian, I can't say what the correct stance was, but there was a lot of ambiguity in the way the left and these, these unbelieving activists related to one another. And, and some of the people I'll be talking about, they went in very different directions, but there was very often they were rubbing shoulders with, you know, socialists as well as secularists, and many people had these, these dual identities.
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Carrie Lynn Evans
Yeah, it's just so interesting to see how much they overlap. As a person who's not, who wasn't nearly as aware of Canadian history of secularism as I am, perhaps of American. Yeah, I was just really surprised how much these communities overlapped. So, yeah, we'll get into it. It is super interesting. Let's start with Marshall Govin, who is active as a debater, lecturer and leader in Winnipeg between 1926 and 1940. You call him Canada's professional atheist, also a notorious atheist and, and a man of extraordinary oratory power and bombast. So he certainly seems like quite the showman. In case anyone thought this was going to be a collection of stories about polite Canadian descent, you put that misconception to rest right from the beginning. So tell us about his career and impact.
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Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Yeah, well, Marshal Gouvin was born in the 1880s in New Brunswick and his father was a Baptist and his mother was a Catholic. So he grew up in an environment where religious difference was kind of normal. In his late teens, he fell under the influence of a Baptist minister and converted to Christianity. But very soon after that, he traveled to Boston to visit with some of his brothers and sisters. Like many Maritimers, they had traveled to Boston to find work and they had become rationalists or free thinkers. And they took him to this local meeting place where rationalists gathered and, and he was really impressed by this. He started to. To read rationalist literature and became very skeptical of religion. He read the Bible, he memorized big passages, you know, big portions of it, and became, you know, committed to the cause of free thought or rationalism. He was, they were from a working class family, he worked as a carpenter and he started giving free thought lectures in about 1907. By 1912, he decided to quit his job and become a full time free thought speaker. And it was an interesting time because I found a whole generation of rationalists or free thinkers had kind of died off around in the late 19th century, early 20th century. And so Gauvin was really coming into this movement as it was in retreat or as it was really losing a lot of its energy. But he was committed to this. And so he traveled from place to place trying to start congregations of free thinkers or rationalists. And he spent some time in the States. But then in 1925, he was contacted by R.B. russell, who was one of the leaders of the Winnipeg General Strike and a. A militant labor leader in Winnipeg. And they had. They were part of an organization called the One Big Union, which was very active in promoting sort of cultural, intellectual activities. And one of those was promoting anti religious ideas. And so they had Joseph McCabe, who was a British free thought or secularist speaker who had come through. And there was such a great response to that from local Winnipeggers that they ended up looking for other people to bring in. And so Marshall Govin, who was in Minneapolis at the time, was invited to come and speak. And he got such a good response from local people, mostly sort of working class people associated with the One big union, that he decided to move his family to Winnipeg and start the Winnipeg rational Society in 1926. So that's sort of the connection that brought him here. And yeah, he found a pretty good response and was able to get, like I found in his records, sometimes he would get like an audience of two or three hundred people to one of his talks that he would give and he would be like, oh, you know, kind of an average day, or it's like nothing special, you know, like today having two or three hundred people turn up For a lecture would be pretty remarkable, but in those days it was. There was not nothing to write home about. Right. And so again, he would even get, sometimes for special events, he would get like 6, 700 people to, to a lecture. For some of the debates that he held, I found, I think the largest one was like 3,000 people who came out to, to hear this debate. So there was a. Activity or these sorts of activities had a lot of interest. People were, People were looking for things to do. And there was this tradition of popular education so that a lecturer could get large audiences to come out. And his base of support in Winnipeg was originally people associated with one big union, but as kind of spread out to other constituencies, although they were mostly, as far as I could tell, pretty much entirely white, middle class or sorry, working class, sort of often skilled or upper working class people, an English descent, although there were some other European immigrants that were represented as well, as well as people from Ontario and the Maritimes, because Winnipeg was a fairly young and bustling city at that time. So Govin clashed with various local religious leaders. He had some big debates with fundamentalist leaders that were very enthusiastically attended. He would also, he, he debated like what we might call like a cult leader today. Like he was kind of in the business of debunking and attacking sort of what we might think of as New Age religious ideas. And he also aimed his, his criticism at more moderate Christians as well, those who had sort of pretty popular ministries with large congregations that were more well off and. But he attacked them as being kind of phony. He would criticize. Sometimes somebody would give a sermon in the morning and then he would, he would debunk that sermon that evening at his lectures on Sundays, or he would advertise and say, come to my lecture. I'm going to be debunking the sermon that was given by this particular minister. And he got a lot of attention for his controversial approach, his controversial style. And he was like, as you mentioned, he was very, he had a great oratorical power. He was very charismatic when he was presenting his ideas. And he apparently had a great skill for mimicry and he could mock, sort of would mockingly imitate preachers and their style of speaking. And he seems to have gotten his most, most success from this kind of confrontational approach to religious questions. Sometimes he tried to branch out and to talk about other topics like psychology or economics or science. And these were not usually as well attended as his more controversial attacks on religion.
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Carrie Lynn Evans
Hmm, that's so interesting. I think that's a Great format. The idea of the evening debunk session. So your discussion of Gauvain segues nicely into the topic of your next chapter about the Winnipeg Rationalist Society, specifically, which you were able to pull together based on all of these records that Govan preserved. So, once again, I have to admit how much I was surprised that the story of Canadian unbelievers in this area or in this era intertwined so much with socialist and communist movements. So talk to us about what was happening here and what kind of people were interested in these kinds of organizations.
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Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Well, as I mentioned, most of his congregation seems to have been, you know, white, working class, kind of male dominated, although not as much as you might expect. Like, there is a long tradition of these movements being very heavily male dominated. Their lecture halls or their lectures were often male spaces, in a way, in a time when things were pretty strictly gendered. And it's not unusual to find writers saying, oh, where are all the women? Why are women so religious? What's wrong with them? Why aren't they coming to our meetings? And often not really sort of questioning their own, shall we say, patriarchal assumptions. But Govin seems to have been able to attract a fair number of women to his lectures. In the research that I did, I found between 30, 30 to 40% of his membership lists were women. So he seems to have been able to present himself in a way that was kind of respectable and that women were not ashamed to come to his lectures. And in some ways, he kind of presented himself as like a secular version of a minister. Right. Like he had this congregation. Sometimes people would play music before his lecture and he would take up a collection to fund himself. So there were these sort of parallels. He slotted kind of neatly into, like, the model of, like, an alternate religious community in some ways. But, yeah, most of these people were working class, often involved with the railways, which were a huge part of the Winnipeg economy. And some of them came from traditions. Like, there were some Icelandic people who came from a Unitarian tradition, which was also kind of progressive in a religious or theological sense. There were some secular Jews who came out who were part of a strong secular Jewish tradition in Winnipeg. So there was. And there was a sense of a community that kind of grew up around this rational society, even throughout the hard times of the Great Depression. It was interesting that he was able. Like, this was Govan's main source of support. And he was able to keep going right up to 1940, although times were pretty hard, but they were able to kind of. The community was able to come together and kind of remain cohesive during these, these sort of more difficult times.
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Carrie Lynn Evans
Well, let's turn next to the trial of Ernest Victor Starry in Toronto in 1926. So this is the first person in English Canada to be charged with the crime of blasphemous libel. And Sterry does refer to the Christian deity as a touchy Jehovah. So I was curious if this charge means libel against God himself or against Christians. But you write that Canadians seem to be split on this trial. Conservatives were largely enthusiastic for his punishment, while others felt uneasy with this category of crime in general, which I was happy to hear. So unsurprisingly, the trial was the stuff of sensational news coverage extending beyond Canada's borders. And much more surprising, or to me anyway, is that Ontario once had a morality department. So, yeah. So please fill us in on this juicy story.
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Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Yeah. So Ernest Sterry was a British immigrant who had picked up his beliefs in rationalism in England. He actually traveled to New Zealand. At least he claimed to have done these things. I don't have hard proof, but he said he traveled to New Zealand in order to spread the message of rationalism and secularism there, because there was a fairly robust tradition of that in New Zealand. Some of the early political leaders in New Zealand were free thinkers, but he said he went there and he didn't really find any much cause or much interest in his message. And so he ended up finally coming to Canada and he happened to be out of work. In 1926, he was living in Toronto, and so he decided to put out this rationalist newspaper called the Christian Inquirer. He kind of misleadingly named, I think, to try and get people who might be otherwise skeptical of him. So he put together this newspaper and he handed it out to people in person, including going down to the head of like, or the area where the provincial government was headquartered. And he handed the copies of the paper to ministers in the government, one of whom was immediately decided that this had to be punished. And so in early 1927, Sterry was arrested for the crime of blasphemous libel. So, yeah, it's a little unclear whether the crime is. Is. Is liable against God or just against religion. There's some terminology in the law that basically said that, like, it's okay to talk about religion in a skeptical manner, but as soon as you do it in such a way that is designed to hurt the feelings of religious people, then it becomes blasphemous libel. And so Sterry's newspaper was written in this very sarcastic and polemical language. And so he. He found himself kind of stuck. Like he. He tried to defend himself, but he was found guilty. Interestingly enough, his lawyer was a man named Ethelbert Lionel Cross, who was probably Toronto's first black lawyer. And he was himself a free thinker or a rationalist. And he tried hard to. To defend Sterry, but ultimately was defeated and then, or, you know, lost the case and then lost an appeal as well. And so they, Sterry and Cross hoped to make the trial kind of a media circus, much like the Scopes trial, around evolution that had happened two years earlier in the States. And to some degree, they succeeded. There was a lot of newspaper coverage, not only in Canada, but throughout the US as well as people who were saying, oh, this is the Canadian answer to the Scopes trial. We're going to see this clash between, you know, fundamentalist religion and free thought. But unfortunately, it was a defeat for Sterry, who was also in trouble for embezzling some money from. From a man there. It was kind of complicated, but he was also. He was actually in. In prison already for this other thing by the time his trial for blasphemous libel happened. So he was. People were defending him, but they were like, well, you know, we recognize that he's kind of a flawed character, but we still have to defend his right for. To free speech. So this trial also led to J.S. woodsworth and his allies, who were kind of. This is they weren't part of an official party at this time, but they were kind of like the left wing members of Parliament and they tried to have the law of last month's libel abolished or removed from the criminal code. However, the vast majority of parliamentarians of representatives shouted them down and said, no, you know, Canada is a Christian nation and it's up to the state to defend Christianity. So like, get out of here with this, this nonsense. Right. So. So there were, there were some leftists who were trying to fight back against this kind of thing, but they were very much a small minority. And although it's interesting that the, the newspaper coverage was definitely mixed, as you mentioned, conservatives were very eager to, to punish Sterry, but there were a lot of more moderate sort of liberals who were kind of like a little bit uneasy with this case and they're like, well, this case shouldn't have really been embarked upon in the first place. So there was, he did have some support, especially from the Toronto Star newspaper, which was very pro Sterry. So yeah, it was an interesting kind of media circus, although it was definitely a defeat for the forces of free thought and rationalism.
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Carrie Lynn Evans
Yeah, I got a kick out of his actual. You quoted the part there that he was, that was the troublesome paragraph. And yeah, it made me chuckle. But also it just seemed like he was making really reasonable observations about the way God's character is portrayed in the Bible. But like you were saying, I guess it's about the tone, the sarcasm went a little too far, I guess. But.
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Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Well, I should also, I should also point, point out that people pointed this out at the time that he was a working class person. And so that kind of working class irreverence was punished. Whereas a professor or even a minister who was kind of progressive, they could get away with saying stuff that was more endless, but because they were upper class or more, you know, more middle class, they weren't seen as a threat in the way that working class irreverence was. Because if the working classes suddenly no longer had the fear of God or hell, you might see a revolution. Right. Like there was kind of this sense that that was really dangerous sort of these irreverent ideas among working class people. And I think that's one of the reasons Sterry was punished. Whereas maybe, you know, like a novelist or a scholar wouldn't be.
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Carrie Lynn Evans
That's right. That's right. And that is just so discrediting. But in any case, you argue that the Stereo case is indicative of the particular climate and its major players in Toronto itself maybe rather than reflecting sentiments Canada wide, as we've kind of already alluded to. So I want to ask you next about that city in particular. You found evidence in the 1920s for a pretty heated debate between the Rationalist Society of Canada and some fairly vigorous local anti atheist groups like the Canadian Christian Crusade. So what was happening here and what was it about Toronto?
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Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Yeah, Toronto was called Toronto the Good by some people because it was a very religious city. J.S. woodsworth and some other observers talked about how smug and intolerant a place it was, City of churches where, you know, most people were staunchly Christian and even sort of an Evangelical Protestant religiosity was the dominant set of values in the city. There was certainly evangelical Christians who were still part of the mainline denominations but were part of a self consciously evangelical movement, had done a lot to shape the public culture of Toronto. And things started to kind of change a bit in the 1920s and 30s and many of these people started to get quite alarmed at the influx of secular trends. Things like jazz music and people drinking out of hip flasks and flappers and this kind of more irreverent post World War I culture. And some of the, you know, like people going to the horse races and watching sports games and you know, some of these secularizing trends were very disturbing to these evangelical reformers who had had controlled so much of Toronto's culture. And so the, the Christian Crusade against Atheism came about as a reaction against those trends. And also the, the introduction of the Rational Society of Canada in 1925, which came about, it grew out of some rationalists who were doing basically street speaking on the street corners in the summertime. And then they started getting together and having meetings and so they started holding meetings at, advertising their lectures and so forth. And so this was a similar organization in some ways to Marshall Govan's. In Winnipeg. However, it was more diverse. There were two leaders, Bert Levins and his friend. But Bert Levins was really the, the moving, the, the most active member. But they had lectures from a bunch of different speakers would come and, and speak. It wasn't just a one, a one man show as it was in Winnipeg. And people like, there were, you know, definitely women involved with speaking. People like Lionel Cross, who I mentioned a black lawyer, was a member. So there was a bit more diversity in the people who were coming and there was more diversity in the topics that were presented. As the Great Depression took hold, there were struggles around what was called the free speech struggles in sort of 1928 1929. And these have often been seen as clashes between the left and the very conservative government and sort of elite ruling class that ruled Toronto. But I argue that there was also some of these clashes. We find the rationalists and sort of local atheists involved in them as well. And so that's why I argue that there was this transition that was happening where the hegemonic character of evangelicalism in Toronto was starting to be challenged. And so people were very pushing back against this. And so there was a lot of clashes over whether people should be allowed to speak in public, whether on religious radicalism or political radicalism or on sort of more religious themes. And so the atheists found them, found their meetings getting broken up sometimes they found it hard to find a place to rent for their indoor meetings. And so around this time you start to see Bert Levins and his, his friends start to bring in a lot more political thinkers, political speakers. And so there's a big cross section of communists, socialists and other left wing individuals who come and speak on, you know, political topics to this rationalist society. And so there was a lot of interesting things happening, an interplay between religion and politics. And eventually Levin's leaves basically in the later 1930s, he gets more and more involved with politics and starts running with the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, which was like this democratic socialist Social Democrat Party, which was the forerunner to today's ndp. And so he decided to put his energies into politics as well. And that's a trend that we see throughout this time period, is people saying, okay, so yes, we've killed God or we've banished God, we've proved God doesn't exist, now what? How are we supposed to live our lives? How should we organize society? Which inevitably leads them to talking about politics and economics and social conditions and things like that. So that's kind of the trajectory of the rationalists. And meanwhile the anti atheist forces were quite active for a while, but then many of them were quite old and they started to die off. And you start to see obituaries through the 1920s and 30s and they kind of become like a very diminished, like their, their organization continues for throughout the 20th century, but it becomes a lot more diminished and you see a lot, a lot less energy. Not that, not to say that Canada became secular overnight, but some of the, the energy around trying to keep atheists in the shadows was gradually sort of fading in the later 1930s.
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Carrie Lynn Evans
Something else I wanted to ask you about too is that because the term fundamentalist comes up a few times or fundamentalism and I got the clear sense that this was like, now it's kind of a pejorative term that means that, you know, somebody hews too closely to literalism or something like that. But it seems. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like back then, that was a term people chose to use to describe themselves, and there wasn't any kind of a negative connotation there.
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Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
That's right, yeah. It comes from a series of little booklets that were put out or short books that were released in the early 20th century called the Fundamentals, which was basically a series of statements by religious leaders and scholars who were basically laying out sort of what they consider to be the fundamental aspects of Christianity in conflict with a more modernist reading. Right. So laying out, saying, yes, we must believe in these literal truths and things, like, you know, the literal resurrection of Jesus, the literal virgin birth, the literal. Like, all of this stuff has to be taken seriously. And that means you're a believer in the fundamentals or you are a fundamentalist. So it was a term that they used for themselves. It did. And then in the 1920s particularly, you see a clash between the modernists and the fundamentalists, these two sort of factions of Christians. And it really manifested itself in. In clashes like the Scopes trial, which I mentioned in Tennessee in 1925. Because of all this publicity, fundamentalism does start to become a bit more of a pejorative term. And they're seen as these backwards, hillbilly, redneck kind of people, and the movement as a whole kind of retreats in the States. It lost the struggle for control of the major denominations, and so it gradually started to turn inwards and start to form its own institutions. In Canada, we don't see that same clash as much. There are a few fundamentalist leaders who kind of go off and start their own churches. I argue in my book that part of the reason is that Canadian churches were already pretty conservative. So the fundamentalist sympathetic people here in Canada didn't feel the need to kind of split off and start their own organizations because they were like, ah, you know, we still have a pretty good home in the mainstream, mainstream churches. But, yeah, so there wasn't as much of a open clash between the fundamentals and the modernists here. But we do see some of it kind of bubbling up through the stair trial, for example.
- [37:54]
Carrie Lynn Evans
Yeah, okay, interesting. All right, now we get to my home province of Quebec, which today holds the distinction of being considered the stronghold of secularism and atheism in North America. Just a coincidence that this podcast Is makes its home here as well. But this was of course, not always the case. That's in large part an outcome of what's called Quebec's Quiet revolution, which was a civil rebellion against the overbearing presence of the Catholic Church leading up to the 1960s. So what seems to be a common characteristic among Quebecers of any era are fierce appetites for debate, protest and strong political beliefs. There's so much to unpack here. So tell us about the unbelief, anti clerical and yes, communist movements in La Belle Provence and their battles with the city's Catholics.
- [38:49]
Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Yeah, well, Quebec, of course, in this time period, the 1920s and 30s, was very, very religious, very, very Catholic. And because of the sort of deal that had been made between the British rulers and the leaders of Quebec's Catholic church in the 19th century, there was kind of this agreement that the British, as long as the Catholic hierarchy preached loyalty to the British rulers, they would leave the religion and language alone. And so many aspects of Quebec identity and eventually what became sort of a sense of nationalism was tied up with the Catholic identity. And so we have this term called clerical nationalism, this idea that the self expression and self identity of Quebec's Francophones was very much identified as being Catholic. And people talk about Quebec as this mini version of Christendom where the church controlled so many things, education and social services, and so much of culture and identity was routed through the Catholic Church. So the people that I'm looking at were a very tiny and very much hated and feared minority. So the person who main person I look at was named Albert St. Martin. He was, around the turn of the 20th century, he started to get involved with sort of alternative forms of politics. He started out as a liberal and then got involved more with labor struggles and then with socialism and then communism. He was involved with the Communist party. That was. That emerged in 1921 in Canada. But he argued that Quebec needed to have its own wing or its own Communist party because Quebec had its own set of issues, its own political and cultural struggles. This didn't win him any friends with the Communist party, so they ejected him. And he. So he turned around and said, well, you know what? I'm just going to start my own organization. So he started this thing called the Universite Ouvriere or like the Worker University or Labor University. And he basically had a few meeting halls in some of the most poor, downtrodden, Francophone neighborhoods in Montreal. And he would hold lectures, he had a library. People had to pay like a few cents. These were really, really Poor people mostly who he was attracting. And he would basically try to get them to, you know, educated and thinking about politics. Communists. He was still sort of what he considered a small C communist, although he also drew in some, some ideas from anarchist movements as well, from, from this, from Europe, some anarchist, anti clerical thoughts. But many of his lectures that were given and the, the conflicts that happened were around religion. He was a very, very staunch atheist and he believed that people needed to be disabused of these religious illusions before they could take up the struggle for a better world and for liberation from the oppressions of, you know, capitalism as well as of clericalism. So he was a very controversial figure, but he seems to have been a very charismatic one as well. He had certain lieutenants who helped him in this, these pursuits. One was a man named Gaston Pilon. And these were all autodidacts. These were like self educated people. I should say. That applies to Govin Levins and some of the other figures, figures I've talked about. None of these people had university educations, right? They were all like people who just read a lot and who got excited about ideas and about changing the world. So St. Martin faced a lot of pushback, obviously from the Catholic Church. There were Catholic youth movements that came and disrupted his meetings. At one time they came and smashed up one of his meeting halls and took, took all the library and burned it on the street outside in the name of Catholicism. He also faced opposition from the official Communist party who saw him as wasting his time with religious controversy when he should have been organizing the workers. And they, so they kind of said, you know, you're, you're not a real communist. You're spending too much time on religion. At one point there were a couple of fascist movements in the 1930s that started to get a lot of popularity in Quebec. And some fascists from one of These movements attacked St. Martin and some of his lieutenants and badly injured them. At that time he was getting on in age too, so he really suffered from that. So out of the organizations that I look at in my book, St. Martin's Movement faced by far the most repression from the state because he was also tried for blasphemous libel at least twice. One of his lieutenants, Gaston Pillon, went to prison for hard labor for a year, under which he cracked under the strain and converted to Catholicism very publicly and became like a Catholic crusader, you know, as he had previously been a communist crusader. And then at St. Martin obviously also faced this unofficial violence from, from fascists and Catholic militant Youth as well. But one interesting thing that I found was that Saint Martin, in the. The struggle of the. Or the chaos of the Great Depression and all the suffering, these people who are already poor were facing even worse conditions. We see him form this organization called the Association Humanitaire, which was basically a secular organization trying to bring relief and to advocate for better, more support for the poor and unemployed people that he. That were his constituency. And so one of the things that they did was they advocated for secular delivery of relief because all of the unemployment relief and that sort of thing was. And like food relief was filtered through the Catholic Church. So if you didn't go to Mass, you didn't get relief, right? Like, the priest was in charge of handing it all out. So if he didn't like you or, you know, you didn't go to Mass, you were left out. So one of the things that St. Martin did was he got people to write out these cards that basically said, I am hereby giving up my membership in the Catholic Church. I'm becoming an apostate, or I'm rejecting my Catholic faith to become an atheist or to become a secular person. And so they would send these letters into the local bishop who complained because he was getting hundreds of these letters of people saying they no longer wish to be Catholics. But that was part of the Association Humanitaire's mission, right? So you see this interesting blend between social radicalism and social change, as well as religious. Rejecting that religious framework that controlled so much of life in Quebec because they also were advocating for us, you know, that the state or the municipality of Montreal should be the one giving out this relief as opposed to the Catholic Church doing it. So there was this sort of this dual struggle, you know, supporting unemployed people, trying to keep people fed and alive, as well as rejecting the religious frameworks that we're trying to control them.
- [46:18]
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- [46:36]
Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
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- [46:48]
Carrie Lynn Evans
Wow, that's a lot of bravery. Seems like that's a lot to face. Finally, you turn to consider unbelief on either of Canada's coasts, specifically in British Columbia and Nova Scotia, which coincidentally, are also places I've spent many years living. So it was really fun to read about the history there. I didn't realize that BC had been somewhat remarkable in its unusually low rates of church membership or its levels of unbelief even as early as the beginning of 20th of the 20th century, although it resonates as true just from my experience there. So I want to ask you about theories for why this might be the case, but I also want to hear more about the controversy that sprung up in the 1920s about faith healing. I thought I'd ask you about BC first, and then we'll move on to Nova Scotia.
- [47:42]
Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Yeah, BC is a really interesting case, and this is true of the westernmost states in the United States as well, is that there is this long tradition of secularism. There's. There's this quip, apparently, that people say, oh, they left God behind when they crossed the Rocky Mountains, right? That as. As people moved to settle in these areas, they. It was sort of newer settler societies that churches didn't have a strong foothold in. And many people were. Many people who originally went out. There were young men looking for, you know, to get rich quick, to work in mines, for example, and things like that. And so there wasn't a strong social pressure to conform and to become part of a church. There's also a theory that what defines people in these areas where there was a strong indigenous population as well as a fairly significant Asian population, was that whiteness became the marker for being a part of the in group and being Christian was not as important. So Lyn Marx, the historian from Victoria, has written about this, and that's one theory as to maybe why Christianity didn't become such a symbol of belonging. But yeah, so even in the early 20th century, we see a fairly significant number of atheists or people who explicitly rejected Christianity. They were still a small minority, but higher than the rest of Canada. In British Columbia, I think today it's something like 50% of British Columbians say that they have no religion at all, which is the highest in any province. I think Quebec has its own tradition of secularism, but many people still sort of culturally identify as Catholics, whereas in British Columbia that's not the case. So they kind of have competing versions of secularism. But yeah, so what I look at in British Columbia was what I looked at in the book. There was a case where a free or a religious revivalist came from the States to preach and hold revivals in Vancouver, and the local churches supported him in this until they realized that he was doing faith healing and he was doing very bombastic, spectacular faith healing services. And you know, people supposedly, you know, throwing down their crutches and getting out of the wheelchairs and walking away, of course, you know, turned out not to be. Most of these healings didn't last, right? But so the local, some of the local ministers withdrew their support from this faith healing and said, you know, we don't believe in this kind of stuff anymore. Christians do not believe that God will miraculously heal them and that, you know, God works through medicine and he works through doctors, like, not, not through the spectacular kind of mumbo jumbo. So there was a split that happened between the more conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians and then those who are more progressive or more mainstream who rejected this kind of stuff. And so I use that, that clash, which has been written about by other historians to kind of examine this moment when like atheists and secularists were able to make their voices heard because they were able to speak up and say, yeah, religion, we reject not only this mainstream religion, but we reject all religion. Like all religion is superstitious and full of, you know, fakery and this kind of nonsense that we're seeing with this faith healing. And so I write about, there was this guy who was putting these big full page ads in the local newspapers saying, you know, religion is. It's foolishness, it's bunk. And, and he was promoting, he started a little organization of Vancouver rationalists where he, he got this W.J. curry, who was a doctor, who was a dentist rather, to come and give these, these rationalist lectures attacking religion. And there were some other people as well who, who found an opportunity in this religious controversy to sort of make a case for completely rejecting religion. Turns out, however, the. A Mackay Jordan who was the person who was putting these ads out, he was actually like a pseudoscience grifter who basically argued that all disease was caused by electricity coming in through your eyeballs and that if you didn't have the right channels flowing to let the electricity come in through your eyeballs, then you would get sick. And so he was able to cure any sickness by adjusting, giving people certain special glasses. He got in trouble with the law obviously a few times, but he was tying up his grifting and his pseudoscientific marketing with this anti religious message. And that was sort of like another subtext in the ads that he would put out. So he was kind of a really weird, interesting character. I did some digging into W.J. curry. It turns out that he had a career in the 1920s of not only being a dentist, but being a radical politically. Some people called him the Red Dentist because he was involved with socialist politics. But then he would also give these anti religious lectures on a pretty regular basis. And I found a few other groups, most of them short lived throughout, in Vancouver and Victoria throughout the 20s and 30s that would sort of get together and have a few meetings and then they would kind of fade away again. So there was kind of a mainstream Christianity that was still kind of the popular culture, like sort of the dominant hegemonic culture in British Columbia in these years. But there was this. Yeah, I think skepticism and secularism had more acceptance there than elsewhere. And I think that might be why we don't see the same sorts of organizational structures that we see in other provinces. Because if you can just avoid religion, then why should you get up in arms about it? I think there was kind of this attitude of like, well, I could go to a meeting to hear God debunked, but I don't have to go to church either, so maybe I'll just do something more fun with my time. So I think there was kind of an interesting side effect of that openness to secularism there in that people didn't get as organized and up in arms about it.
- [54:22]
Carrie Lynn Evans
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, because if the temperatures turned down a little bit, why not just go down to see your favorite punk band, the Red Dentist. I absolutely love that branding. That's so great. Okay, so let's turn now to Nova Scotia. While it had a much different cultural atmosphere from British Columbia, with only 0.1% self identifying as some variety of non religion in the 1921 census. You point out that this was not that dissimilar from the climate in Ontario or Quebec, actually. So it's in this context then that the controversy erupted in this maritime province over a passing reference to evolution in a Canadian written school textbook, which unfortunately is still like a story we read about today, but in this time some Christians interpreted it as an atheistic attack against Christian faith in this one textbook. So not an entirely unfamiliar story, but. But tell us how this played out then in Nova Scotia.
- [55:30]
Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Yeah, so basically in 1930, I think late 1933, they introduced these new textbooks which were made in Canada and that was kind of one of the selling points of them for high school students. And they happen to contain a mention of evolution kind of in passing because they were more like history textbooks. But they were like, you know, we know that, you know, humans evolved from previous forms and that they you know, they were once cavemen, and then they became modern humans. And, like, it was just kind of. It wasn't a huge part of the book. But this set off local fundamentalists, many of them Presbyterians in Nova Scotia. And so they started this sort of little. I mean, it wasn't little. It was fairly popular crusade to get these textbooks removed from schools. And there were a few different things going on at the time. Partly, education for high school students was becoming more mandatory. So over the 1920s and 30s, you start to see laws being passed where it's like, okay, you have to stay in school until at least grade 10 or at least until grade 11. And then so gradually, the state was demanding that people stay in school longer. And so there was this sense the parents had of, like, oh, we're kind of losing control over our. Over our kids because teachers are telling them what to think and we're not telling them what to think. Right. So there was kind of this anxiety around that, as well as the fundamentalists, as I mentioned, had kind of lost the struggle for control of most of the major denominations. But in Nova Scotia, there was still a fairly strong presence of that kind of thing in the Presbyterian Church. And so there was kind of this energy, this very conservative or fundamentalist energy. And so there was this person named Alexander Murray who was kind of spearheading this. And he managed to get support from other religious leaders across the different denominations. And they were opposed by more mainstream or moderate Christians, many of them United Church people that tended to be a more progressive denomination. And so in the middle of all this controversy that was breaking out in the newspaper, some of the newspapers was like, you know what? We're going to stop printing letters about this because we're tired of hearing you people talk about it constantly. So they. It caused a lot of local uproar. But this is where you get to see some atheists making the case that, yeah, evolution is true and it disproves religion. So they were able to sort of make their voices heard. And so I found some letters from people making these very rationalist or secularist arguments in local newspapers. And there were people like Roscoe Fillmore or Charles MacDonald who were local socialists, who had one of them. McDonald had his own little. He had a little company, and he would. He would publish ads promoting his concrete company, but then they would also have little messages about secularism, about atheism. And then his friend Roscoe Fillmore was a columnist for some labor, local labor papers, and he would put these columns out attacking religion and Also, and so he spoke out in defense of the textbook and said, you know, one of the, one of the things he liked about the textbook was, you know, he said, oh, I read it. Unlike many of these religious people who are attacking it, I actually read it and I like the fact that it, it talks about social, social movements and, and broader social trends as being affecting history as opposed to the old way of history, which was basically looked at like kings and bishops and, and rulers as being the ones who made all the change happen in history. And whereas these were. These were actually just predators, like, they don't deserve all the praise that they get. And so he liked the fact that the textbook was a bit more modern and wasn't so connected to the great man theory of history. But of course, he also liked the evolutionary content as well. Right. And there was this sense among. And this is something that comes up with the one big union in Winnipeg and elsewhere that talking about evolution was important not only to secularists and atheists, but also to socialists because the sense that society itself was evolving and changing was a big part of their worldview. Right. And that they were often opposed to conservatives who were like, no, this is the way it's always been. This is the way it's always going to be. Like, don't talk about changing society because nothing ever changes and nothing should ever change. Right. Whereas the socialists were like, no, society has evolved and it can continue to evolve and hopefully it's going to evolve into something better. Right. So you see, these arguments are all kind of tied up and connected. And so in, in Nova Scotia, as you mentioned, it was a very conservative place in some ways. But I, I would argue not much more conservative than, you know, Ontario, maybe a little bit less conservative than Quebec in, in that, in that time period, most of the leftists in Nova Scotia were quite cautious about criticizing religion openly, even when they personally were not believers, because they realized that the working classes there were very much churchgoers and wouldn't look kindly on having their religion attacked. So people like Roscoe Fillmore and Charles McDonald were a little bit like outliers in that regard. But there were, you know, atheists and secularists who lived in Nova Scotia and who did speak up during this controversy.
- [60:58]
Carrie Lynn Evans
Well, that's super interesting. I love how you connect that with changing perspectives on history. Yeah, yeah. I just. That makes a lot of sense to me for how some of this intellectual history all fits together with the, with the evolution concept and the socialism and the communism. So. Yeah, that's great. So you mentioned that the various unbelief organizations we've discussed were not in contact or even really aware of each other during this interwar period. So again, remembering the context and how people were just, yeah, more separated and isolated. Especially in Canada where we're so large and each city is kind of its own island to some extent travel is a lot more difficult. Whereas some of the Christian activists at this time period, they were a little bit more connected. So what do we see if we zoom out and consider Canada as a whole?
- [61:58]
Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Yeah, it's interesting that there obviously were certain things happening in terms of the broader culture or like the broader society in that all of these movements that I look at happened at around the same time like Alberto San Martin forces organization in 1925. We see the Toronto group starting basically their street preaching activities. Marshall Govin starts his organization in. Or he comes to Winnipeg in 25 and then starts his organization in 1926. And so there were these common trends, but they don't seem to have actually like really been aware of each other. Like I think Govin preached about the sterry trial once in his. Or gave a lecture about it, I should say, but I didn't find any letters back and forth between these organizations. So Canada was very much a basically a archipelago of little communities and they tended to be more in touch with events in the States or in Britain than. Than here or sorry rather than like in Canada per se. Albert St. Martin, you know, he was like distributing this anarchist and anti clerical literature from Europe. Right. But so, but he wasn't paying too much attention about what the Anglophones were doing in. He could speak English, but he doesn't. He wasn't like corresponding with Marshall Levan or anything like that. As a whole, you know, Canada was still very much a Christian nation. I think 95% of people, 90 to 95% of people said that they were Christians of one variety or another. You know, the other 5% were Jews and a few other small religious organizations or religious traditions, I should say, as well as indigenous people who were sometimes counted as what they would. They sometimes written down in the censuses like pagans, that kind of thing. And so there was these religious people or these anti religious people were very much a small minority, but they were, they held a really large place in the public consciousness because people were kind of scared of them and, or kind of excited by these like daring things that these people were saying. And so there was kind of this sense in which, you know, they were these radicals who were like pushing the boundaries. Right. And like as we saw, you know, in some of these controversies that I talked about, Christians were constantly calling each other atheists. Right. They were constantly using. And as one of your previous guests, Nathan Alexander has written about, he wrote an article about how the word atheism originally comes about or was popularized because Christians were accusing each other of atheism right before anyone self consciously took that term and applied it to themselves. It was like a term of abuse. So you see a lot of controversies around atheism, but very few out and proud atheists like the ones that I'm writing about. However, I think it's an interesting story, interesting to know about what they were up to because it gives us a sense for what Canada was like at the time and how obviously today, I think at least one third of Canadians overall say that they have no religion. That doesn't mean that they're all outspoken agnostic or atheists. But there is, you know, Canada has secularized a lot faster than obviously the United States, although we're starting to see things change there as well. Some scholars think that Canada secularized faster than almost any other country in the world. And so it's interesting to contrast what things were like 100 years ago as opposed to what they are today. And I feel like reclaiming the story of these, these anti religious activists tells us a lot about what Canada is and what it's becoming today.
- [65:41]
Carrie Lynn Evans
Yeah, that is a really interesting comparison because I've come across arguments about the idea that the United States ironically clings to religion in part because it's not mandated by the state, as opposed to some of the northern European countries where it is mandated by the state. So you don't have as much room for proliferation. A lot of different religions, and it just kind of withers on the vine through modernity and whatever the natural causes. And so maybe this is why the United States is different. It was like this first or this early experiment in separation of church and state. But then you add Canada into the mix, and I think Canada is more similar to the United States in that sense in that the government isn't so much mandating a religion. And yet, yeah, the idea that we would become secular so so quickly, or even maybe the fastest country in the world in that development. That is just really interesting.
- [66:48]
Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Well, up until the 1950s, Canada was considered often by many to be more religious than the United States. Right. Like some of the writing that I found in my book was that people were saying, oh, look at all these terrible atheist ideas being brought in by these Americans, like these Irreverent Americans. Right. So there was kind of this attitude that, oh, yeah, you know, Canada is a safe and godly place. Right. So, yeah, it's quite interesting to see how quickly it changed. And yeah, obviously there's many theories as to why that is, which kind of are above my pay grade, I think.
- [67:20]
Carrie Lynn Evans
Well, probably scholars are still working on it. I know I spoke with a scholar a few years back whose specialty was demographics, and he had focused on what was such an outlier about the United States as well. And people were thinking maybe it was just always going to be an outlier, but now it's starting to catch up and follow the same patterns we've seen elsewhere. So maybe we're just in early days of this scholarship, but, yeah, Canada's a really interesting one. Well, Elliot, I've taken up a lot of your time. I so, so appreciate you joining me today. But in the few minutes we have left, can you tell us what you're currently working on? Are there any more books in your future?
- [68:08]
Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Well, I don't know if I'll have a whole book in me, but I am working on something that maybe become an article or maybe. Yeah, we'll see how much I find. Maybe there's enough for a book. But, yeah, I moved a bit backwards in time. I'm looking at the 19th century from about 1870 to, you know, about 1911 or thereabouts at that earlier generation. There was an earlier generation of rationalists and free thinkers that had an organization in. Well, they had organizations in Toronto and Montreal in the 19th century because not much has been written about them. There was a book that was written in the 1980s by Ramsay Cook, the famous Canadian historian, and he had a chapter about them in the 1980s. But since then, hardly anything has been written. So I've been trying to go back and read their newspapers and look at the things that they published to find out more about them and how they related to Canada in those years. And so that's kind of currently what I'm doing. I'm going to be heading to London, actually, to check out a newspaper that's in an archive there because no copies exist in Canada anymore. It's the only place that has it is in England. So, yeah, so it's been interesting to dig into that story and to get a sense for where people like Govin came into the movement as part of that earlier generation, but then he kind of survived and carried that movement forward in the 1920s and 30s. So I'm getting a look at sort of the environment that he cut his teeth in, so to speak.
- [69:45]
Carrie Lynn Evans
Yeah. Oh, that sounds great. Oh, I hope you do find enough for a book.
- [69:50]
Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Well, thank you. Yeah, I hope so, too.
- [69:53]
Carrie Lynn Evans
So, yeah. Let me thank you again for being on the show today. Really, really appreciate, appreciated everything you brought. It's super interesting. I made me realize I need to learn a lot more about Canadian history and Canadian secular history. Yeah. So very happy you were able to join me today.
- [70:09]
Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
Well, thanks very much for having me.
- [70:11]
Carrie Lynn Evans
All right, well, hopefully I will speak to you again and I will wish you a good afternoon.
- [70:16]
Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski
All right. Thanks again.
- [70:17]
Carrie Lynn Evans
I want to thank you for listening to New Books Network. I'm Carrie Lynn Evans and once again I've been speaking with Dr. Elliot B. Hanowski about his book Towards a Godless Unbelief in Interwar Canada, published by McGill Queen's University Press. If you enjoyed this podcast, please write us a positive review in your podcast player post about us on social media or tell a friend. I'm also interested in hearing from you about your thoughts on this podcast and the material we cover. Tell me about it. You can find me on blueskyarilyn Land. That's C A R R I E L Y N N L A N D bluesky Social or bsky Social. Do you have a book you'd like covered on one of our shows? Contact us through our website, newbooksnetwork.com also be sure to follow us on all the socials and in your favorite place for podcasts, where you'll see every time we post a new interview, you. In the meantime, I'll wish you an A la Prochen from Quebec. Until my next conversation about new books.