By common reckoning, Canada experienced secularization more rapidly in the 20th century than did the United States. Indeed, it is frequently remarked that as to manifestations of religious faith in public life, Canada more resembles the nations of Western Europe than she does the United States. It is the merit of Catherine Gidney’s A Long Eclipse that it calls into question the application of this broad-brush interpretation of comparative secularization to the unfolding direction of Canadian university life.
A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920-1970 (Volume 32) (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion)
McGill-Queen's University Press
272 pages
$111.26
W. Stanford Reid: An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy (McGill-Queen’s Studies in the Hist of Re) (Volume 31)
McGill-Queen's University Press
408 pages
$110.00
Conversant with the literature that suggests an extensive secularization of American universities by the 1920s, Gidney probed the institutional histories of five Canadian schools and found intriguing differences. According to her findings, Canadian universities, whether founded originally as church-backed or as government-funded institutions, reflected the ethos of mainline Protestantism into the late 1950s.
Canada’s universities (excepting Roman Catholic institutions) existed to provide training in arts and sciences for a populace deemed essentially Protestant. Presidents for such schools were men who had been church leaders and these, with their university faculties, affirmed the indebtedness of the arts and sciences to the classical and Christian past. They understood their work to include the moral as well as intellectual formation of their students. Only by 1960 did this world vanish.
Gidney, having gathered impressive data, is not loath to explore why the changes came, and when. In the period surveyed, she notes that Canadian university education ceased to be the privilege of the professional classes. Also, these institutions increasingly reflected the cultural pluralism which followed on Canada’s open immigration policies. Expanding enrollments required a proliferation of faculty members; these also were now more diverse. No longer could presidents hire only those whose academic credentials were augmented by loyalty to Christianity. Collectively these changes meant that Canada’s Protestant hegemony was diminished and that long-established university deference to Christianity had ended. The issue was ultimately forced when the still Christian-oriented universities could not fund the level of technological research necessitated by the Cold War era; they similarly lacked the resources to fund the postwar faculty call for an expansion of scarce graduate programs. At this point, even Canada’s church-backed universities were driven into the arms of their respective regional governments.
But the white flag of surrender had not been raised all at once. Gidney finds evidence that into the 1950s, Canada’s universities were still trying to maintain distinctively Christian content through core curriculum in Scripture and theology. Presidents who were rightly concerned about secularizing tendencies on their campuses gave backing to Christian student ministries such as the Student Christian Movement and, after some initial reluctance, to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). Gidney looks at Canada’s mainline Protestant churches and observes that these, which had founded and supported many of Canada’s universities, had by their own embrace of a liberalized Protestantism grown ambivalent in upholding Christianity’s uniqueness. The spiritual malaise of Canada’s universities was thus rooted in the failure of Canada’s mainline denominations to evangelize a secularizing culture. Here then are lessons to be pondered both by those who have lived to see their formerly Christian-oriented universities re-directed to other ends and by those who have strained to create new Christian colleges and universities since 1960.
This instructive volume provides us with a context for tracing two other trajectories: the expansion of a struggling new Christian initiative toward the university (IVCF) undertaken in Canada (and later in the United States) by an expatriate Australian, Stacey Woods (1909-1983); and the career of a Canadian determined to make a difference in Canada’s universities as a Christian historian, W. Stanford Reid (1913-1996). For the probing portrayal of these trajectories—so nearly parallel, yet so utterly distinguishable—we are the debtors of the Canadian church historian A. Donald MacLeod; he knew both his subjects well over decades.
That Woods was selected in 1934 to stabilize the fledgling Canadian InterVarsity movement—begun in a 1929 visit of British medical student Howard Guinness—was itself both a marvel and a parable. By what standard of reckoning was an Australian graduate of what is now Dallas Theological Seminary (then Evangelical Theological College), whose only prior experience of Canada was leading summer beach missions for adolescents, the natural choice for such a role? It was that both Woods and the major Canadian backers of the struggling student movement shared a Plymouth Brethren tie; their network had taken note of his beach ministry; and they could think of no one better suited to the task of rescuing the movement (of which they were the substantial backers) from its Depression-era jeopardy.
That was the marvel. The parable had to do with the fact that InterVarsity—which at this stage existed (on this side of the Atlantic) only in Canada—was turning for leadership to a person who was himself no product of the public university system. Credits from Woods’ first degree (in theology at Dallas) had been taken north to Wheaton, where after additional coursework, an arts degree had been conferred. No one would maintain that Woods was ill- or miseducated by this process; yet it provides some insight into the state of evangelicalism in 1934 that a fledgling work taking aim at the public university looked for leadership to one who would engage it only when he took this post.
Woods, something of a human dynamo at Toronto from 1934, was also in demand in Chicago by 1939. The movement that had been so near disintegration in 1934 had taken on new life in conjunction with Woods’ leadership. Entrepreneurial, innovative, yet also seemingly incapable of delegating responsibility to associates, Woods for a time directed InterVarsity in both countries. Important Chicago connections were formed with Christian philanthropists (notably Herbert W. Taylor) and soon the InterVarsity movement possessed camping properties in the Michigan peninsula, a student magazine (HIS) and a publishing arm (IVP). Before the 1940’s were out, Woods—representing InterVarsity—had come to play a significant role in the young National Association of Evangelicals, and spent time at an evangelical think-tank at Plymouth, Massachusetts in which names such as Harold Ockenga and Carl F. H. Henry figured prominently. By this time, Woods was also in the orbit of London minister (and British IVCF pillar) D. M. Lloyd Jones, and with him helped to launch the global version of InterVarsity: the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES).
For a time, Woods divided his time between American InterVarsity and the secretariat of the latter, on behalf of which he regularly crisscrossed the globe; from 1960 he gave himself wholly to the latter. By then, his close American associate, Charles Troutman, so often driven to distraction by his colleague’s failure to delegate responsibility, had left the scene to direct the movement in—of all places—Woods’ native Australia. It becomes clear that Woods’ genius was for launching new initiatives and scouting new territory for student ministry around the globe. The “perfecting” of student ministry, in the sense of advancing the Christian understanding of learning, was a task pursued more resolutely by those who followed Woods.
The “recovery of the university” in conjunction with this foundational era was in truth the pursuit of Christ’s Great Commission in the universities. A key figure in this enterprise was the prominent Canadian Christian scholar, W.S. Reid. A historian in McGill (Quebec) and Guelph (Ontario) universities, Reid would eventually be known as a contributing editor to Christianity Today magazine and as a frequent Staley lecturer on U.S. Christian college campuses.
Those who knew Reid as the historian and churchman that he was might—if they viewed the early parts of his life from the vantage point of the last—suppose that it was bound to unfold just as it did. How easy it would be to suppose that his early academic prowess, the influence of a father and uncles (all ministers), and a tendency to be combative, were seeds that had merely to follow their natural development. The value of this biography, I suggest, is that it enables us to view contingent factors in Reid’s formation—circumstances which, had they unfolded differently, would have made for a very different story.
Born in 1913 as son to a Presbyterian minister, Reid’s youth was spent in Montreal and, in time, its Anglophone university, McGill. When, after the Great War of 1914-18, advocacy for the union of Canada’s Presbyterian, Congregational and Methodist churches resumed, Reid’s uncles and father were all caught up in the debate. What would have been the effect on young Stanford if in 1925 his own father had followed one brother into the new “United Church”? Stanford, whatever his temperament and intelligence, would then never have become a standard-bearer for conservative Presbyterianism; contingencies were in play.
After his McGill graduation in 1934, Reid, a pietistic student with roots in the InterVarsity movement, might have persisted through disconcerting experiences at Montreal’s Presbyterian College, a seminary of his denomination. As it was, pronouncements about the assured results of the higher criticism of the Bible and skepticism regarding the bodily resurrection of Christ provoked his withdrawal; he instead obtained a McGill M.A. in history. Had he remained, he would never have been faulted, subsequently, for snubbing the school; yet had he stayed, he might—as a young preacher of ability—never have ventured beyond the pastorate.
Reid did again take up the study of theology, and his choice was fraught with far-reaching implications. At Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia, Reid was exposed to neo-Calvinism, which provoked him to re-evaluate the evangelical pietism of his family and the early InterVarsity movement. His completion of a Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania raised the possibility that he might never work in Canada, never be associated with the church of his upbringing, never reconnect with McGill. And yet all three transpired. Though his sudden exit from Presbyterian College was remembered at his return to Canada in 1941, attempts to obstruct his entry to pastoral ministry failed; he also gained a part-time lectureship in McGill University.
As a Montreal pastor, Reid might have been less critical of ecumenical missionary policies focused on pre-communist China. He might also have refrained from opposing the absorption of the Presbyterian College into a joint McGill Faculty of Theology. The cost of such opposition appeared in 1949-50, when he was passed over in that college’s search for a church historian, a position for which Reid, an experienced pastor and McGill history lecturer, was eminently qualified. Officials remembered his “disloyalty” in 1934 and his strenuous conservatism since.
Reid might well have ended his academic career at McGill University, where by the 1960s he was a full professor. Yet the rise of Quebec nationalism provoked fears about the future of Anglophone Quebec higher education and culture. In 1965 therefore, he accepted the invitation to found a history department in the fledgling University of Guelph, Ontario. Just then, Reid might instead have become the president of Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia. In sum, this fine biography opens for us complexities about Reid that would never be appreciated if we took the shape of the man’s life to have been merely determined by his roots.
In the larger picture sketched out by Gidney, Reid was a Christian rowing “against the stream” in Canadian higher education during an era in which university life underwent rapid secularization. He did this concurrently with the InterVarsity movement’s expanding program of witness to the Gospel on campuses under identical influences. Reid persevered in the face of closed doors, some controlled by his denomination, some controlled by public universities which had steadily less room for the anachronism of the minister-scholar. Yet his career as a Christian academic illustrated the combination of faith and learning which the wider evangelical movement was increasingly struggling to recover.
Ken Stewart, a Canadian, is professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College, Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He is the author of Restoring the Reformation: British Evangelicalism and the Francophone Ré;veil (Paternoster, 2006) and co-editor of The Emergence of Evangelicalism (IVP-UK, 2008).
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