In this intellectual history of Canadian Presbyterianism, covering the period from sustained British migration beginning in 1815 to the unification of four major bodies into the Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1875, Denis McKim adds to a growing body of literature that illuminates the centrality of religion in Canada before the processes of secularization gained momentum. At the heart of the Presbyterian intellectual endeavor “lay a desire to facilitate God's achievement of dominion, or spiritual sovereignty . . . and to promote an uncompromising piety across the wider world” (5). Well before the creation of the political entity of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, Presbyterians strove to extend God's spiritual dominion throughout the land, particularly in the five provinces where they were most concentrated: Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Lower Canada, and Upper Canada.

An introductory chapter traces the roots of Canadian Presbyterianism back to Calvin's Geneva, then moves to the British Isles and discusses the dizzyingly diverse forms of Presbyterianism (primarily Scottish) that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and were then reproduced in the early nineteenth migration to Canada. (I highly recommend this chapter to anyone trying to make sense of the complexities of Scottish Presbyterian schisms.) The main elements unifying these various Presbyterian bodies were common expressions of worship and piety, doctrine that adhered to the Westminster Confession of Faith, and shared devotional and religious texts, especially the Bible.

The core of the book consists of four parts, each with two chapters. Part 1, “Providence,” details how the Presbyterian sense of providentialism conferred meaning on all events, however mundane or momentous, joyous or tragic. Buttressed by their attachment to the British Empire, Canadian Presbyterians, like New England's Puritans two centuries earlier identified with the ancient Israelites and perceived themselves as a chosen people in covenant with God. Their providential thinking extended to vociferous opposition to Roman Catholicism and American slavery. Typifying contemporary Protestant attitudes, they identified Protestantism with freedom and Catholicism with oppression. While generally supportive of Old School Calvinism, their objection to slavery precipitated a rupture with their coreligionists to the south, as they supported the Buxton Mission (a settlement established in 1849 for fugitive slaves) and interpreted the Civil War as God's punishment for the sin of slavery.

Part 2, “Politics,” examines church-state attitudes among the three major branches of Scottish Presbyterians. The persistence of convictions held in Scotland belies the often-assumed homogenization of these religious bodies in Canada, where the Church of Scotland advocated a state-supported establishment, Secessionists opposed state-supported religion, and the Free Church of Scotland pursued a mediating position, looking to the state to provide financial support but keep out of church affairs. Conflict among these Presbyterian bodies ensued over “Clergy Reserves” (land set aside whose sale would go to support the clergy) and extended to other cases throughout all of Canada (Upper, Lower, and Maritime). Despite these disputes, all Presbyterian parties made common cause with the larger Protestant culture in support of a state imposed “moral establishment” that regulated alcohol consumption and eradicated Sabbath desecration.

Part 3, “Nature,” explores the Presbyterian encounter with Canada's vast and harsh physical wilderness. McKim views this encounter as analogous to a God-forsaken moral wilderness in need of taming with the gospel. Addressing the popular critique that Presbyterians made little effort to evangelize frontier regions due to the demands for an educated ministry with its cumbersome ecclesiastical machinery, McKim points to the individual efforts of traveling evangelists such as James MacGregor in the Maritime and Robert McDowall in Upper Canada, as well as the collective efforts of female missionary societies to support evangelistic endeavors. Initial efforts to extend beyond their own kin and evangelize the First Nation peoples proved largely fruitless. However, in the second half of the nineteenth century, missionaries achieved some success among the Plains Cree, combining conversion with assimilation, although largely on Cree terms, not theirs. Among their own, Presbyterians redeemed the wilderness and nurtured a sense of solidarity by their annual outdoor communion festivals, patterned after the Cambuslang (Scotland) sacrament of 1743.

In Part 4, “History,” McKim returns to the central worldview of the Presbyterians, one imbued with providentialism and British imperialism. In their internecine conflicts over government funding for the Pictou Academy and the Clergy Reserves, Church of Scotland establishmentarians, Secession voluntarists, and Free Church adherents selectively retrieved the past, creating mythic narratives to sustain their respective positions. As an aggregate, Presbyterians shared a view of time as the progressive outworking of God's sovereignty; their post-millennial eschatology conceived of worldly improvement precipitating the final denouement of history at Christ's second coming.

The strengths of this book are notable. First, McKim perceptively highlights the diversity of and tensions within Canadian Presbyterianism. Second, his focus on the Presbyterian worldview provides a rich and layered interpretive approach, encompassing not only religious institutions and doctrine but the natural environment and everyday life as well. Ideas, he argues throughout, have social consequences. Third, the author situates Canadian Presbyterianism within the transatlantic world, demonstrating how the larger context of Britain's “three kingdoms” (England, Ireland, and Scotland) ineluctably shaped the religious world of the Canadian colonists. Finally, McKim offers helpful comparisons and contrasts between Canadian Presbyterians and their Anglo-American coreligionists. Although both shared a common theological and ecclesiastical pedigree, an anti-Catholic fervor, and a “middle-class morality,” they parted ways over their relationship to the British Empire, divided over the issue of slavery, and differed in their views of religious freedom. Even so, colonial Presbyterians can at least claim to have left a somewhat less contentious legacy than what was bequeathed to them by their disputatious metropolitans of ages past. They did, after all, agree to unite under the single banner of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.