The late nineteenth century in Canada saw Protestants and Catholics in often bitter conflict through explosive episodes like the trial and execution of Louis Riel, the Jesuit Estates Act controversy, and the Manitoba Schools Question. It is easy to assume that religious prejudices faded rapidly thereafter in the increasingly secular twentieth century.
In this ambitious and revealing book, Anderson, a historian at two Alberta universities, argues that anti-Catholicism did not in fact disappear after 1900, but was alive and well in Anglo-Protestant thought in Canada into the 1990s and beyond. He demonstrates that a cluster of anti-Catholic narratives, stereotypes, and anxieties was shared by a broad swath of English-speaking Canadians: conservatives, liberals, and socialists; fundamentalist and liberal Protestants; eccentric conspiracy theorists and respectable public figures. Again and again, such voices portrayed the Catholic Church as an alien, authoritarian, regressive force in Canadian society, and Catholics as priest-ridden dupes. In fact, Anderson contends, anti-Catholicism helped buttress English-Canadian identity throughout the century by providing the “Other” for a British, Protestant, liberal-democratic self-image. Although the transition from explicitly British and Protestant to avowedly multicultural and secular conceptions of Canadian identity in the 1960s changed the accent of anti-Catholicism, its underlying tropes survived this transition quite intact.
During the course of the book, the reader encounters a large cast of characters, some familiar, like popular author and jurist-activist Emily Murphy, politician George Drew, and historian Arthur Lower; others relatively little-known, like YWCA official Kate Foster and eccentric rubber magnate and birth control enthusiast A. R. Kaufman. To explore their views, Anderson draws on an impressive range and variety of archival sources, mostly personal papers, supplemented by selections from the popular press and published primary sources. Along the way, he documents both highbrow and lowbrow forms of anti-Catholicism, ranging from fairly mild criticisms inflected by patronizing stereotypes, to shocking expressions of raw hatred. Striking examples of the latter range from Great War soldiers jocularly telling King George V their plan to “exterminate” all Canadian Catholics after the war, including the prime minister (52), to a well-known progressive journalist's description in 2010 of the Catholic Church as “little more than an organized pedophile ring” that should be shut down and sold to pay for condom distribution (236–237).
The book follows a strict chronological format. The initial chapter covers anti-Catholicism up to 1930 in the context of progressive reform movements, the conscription crisis of World War I, and immigration. Here anti-Catholicism joins the list of already documented eugenicist and xenophobic attitudes held by many early feminists and other reformers. Chapters 2 and 3 address the 1930s and World War II, with a focus on French-Canadian Catholics’ high birth rates and alleged sympathies for fascism. Chapter 4 investigates the early Cold War era, when anti-Catholicism was gradually “universalized” (156) as it was separated from specific ethnic prejudices and Protestant theological concerns. The final chapter extends the story beyond 1970 through the prism of issues including abortion, public funding for Catholic schools, and John Paul II's visit in 1984.
Historians have not tackled twentieth-century English-Canadian anti-Catholicism in any sustained way before, and Anderson commendably sets his sights on a large, diverse group of thinkers over a long time frame rather than retreating to the safer but less informative confines of a narrow subtopic. Admittedly, Anderson does not really explain or justify his specific selection of thinkers in a way that would satisfy a social scientist of their representativeness. Yet the recurrence of similar anti-Catholic imagery and ideas across such a diverse group of individuals, over such a long period of time, leaves the reader convinced of Anderson's main argument that anti-Catholicism was indeed a vigorous and widespread current within Anglo-Protestant attitudes throughout the twentieth century.
The book's secondary theme—that the continuity of anti-Catholic tropes after 1970 demonstrates the continuing indebtedness of a supposedly universal civic nationalism to older exclusionary Anglo-Protestant identity—is partially convincing, but excessively downplays the extent to which anti-Catholicism could be thoroughly secularized and disconnected from a British frame of reference while remaining as exclusionary as ever. The striking reversal of the symbolic position of conservative Protestants, from anti-Catholic allies of liberal Protestants at midcentury to emblems of benighted repression alongside Catholics by the 1990s—mentioned but understandably not much explored by Anderson—is instructive here. More consistent attention to shifts in official Catholic theological and political postures in this period (the implications of Vatican II, for example, get short shrift) and comparisons with criticisms of the church from other contemporary viewpoints, including dissident French-Canadian Catholic intellectuals in the Duplessis era, would also have helped tease out more precisely the extent to which post-1970 forms of anti-Catholicism were disguised Anglo-Protestant exclusivism, and the extent to which they reflected more broad-based, though potentially equally exclusionary, themes.
Criticisms aside, this book is an illuminating and thought-provoking contribution to our understanding not only of anti-Catholicism but also of the limits of tolerance under both older mainline Protestant and contemporary secular progressive versions of the liberal order in English Canada. In both incarnations, English Canada's hegemonic public culture has struggled to make space for religious minorities whose (putative or actual) thick commitments are not reducible to liberal individualism—an observation that seems equally true of post-1960s French-Canadian public culture. As Anderson underscores, this unease has been especially evident when minority religious commitments have implications for education, sexuality, and demographics. There are obvious parallels to debates over the place of Muslim, Orthodox Jewish, and conservative Protestant communities across Western societies today (which Anderson notes but does not overstate). In such a context, Anderson's troubling claim that “anti-Catholicism remains a means of communicating one's liberal and progressive bona fides in Canadian society” (202) is worth serious attention.
