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What Happened to Christian Canada?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Mark A. Noll
Affiliation:
McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. On January 7 2006, he delivered this paper as the presidential address to the American Society of Church History.

Extract

By asking “what happened to Christian Canada,” I begin with an assumption that there once was a Christian Canada which is now gone. That assumption is intentional. It is intended to highlight not only the dramatic changes that have taken place in Canadian religious life over the last sixty years, but also substantial contrasts between the religious histories of Canada and the United States, which otherwise are so similar in so many respects. This paper explores the question primarily with American observers in mind, for whom the Canadian past is often as much a shadowy mystery as the great expanse of Canadian geography. But I hope Canadians who read this account may benefit from observing how one sympathetic American views their history and also from realizing that the splendid array of marvelous historical studies that have been produced by a splendid array of marvelous Canadian historians have reached at least some appreciative readers in the United States.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2006

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References

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51. For background, I am drawing on Grant, , Church in the Canadian Era, 124–28, 171–76, 186–87.Google Scholar

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