Canadians often caricature their western-most province, British Columbia, as an offbeat and secular “Lotusland.” While some scholars have argued against British Columbian exceptionalism, Lynne Marks, an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Victoria and author of a previous study of religious habits in small Ontario communities, suggests otherwise. Her rigorous study of British Columbians' pre–World War I religious attitudes shows they were indeed exceptional. Since 1901, British Columbia has reported the lowest rates of church participation, and the highest proportion of those with “no religion,” of any province in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches seeks to mine late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century statistics to determine more explicitly who were the “irreligious” and how and why they got that way. The outcome is an intriguing exploration of the roots of the secularizing tendencies that would eventually sweep across Canadian culture.

Marks's study involves, foremost, meticulous work with census data to determine the class, gender, ethnicity, marital status, and lifestyles of those who claimed various kinds of “irreligion”—atheism, agnosticism, no religion—or non-Christian religions in British Columbia. She supplements this analysis with other primary resources, such as newspapers, pamphlets, letters, diaries, and recorded reminiscences, while also referring to larger studies of religion, race, labor, and secularization in Canada, the U.S., and England to scan for broader themes and connections.

Each of the seven chapters explores a different aspect of the question of irreligion in British Columbia: a quantitative overview of religious adherence; a qualitative cultural analysis; a description of the world of transient working class men (those most likely to be irreligious); an analysis of religious observance in four small towns (compared with data from four small communities in other parts of Canada); an examination of irreligion in the two largest cities, Vancouver and Victoria; an analysis of the religiosity of non-Christian communities, especially the racialized; and a portrait of those who claimed alternative religions and philosophies, such as Theosophy. The final chapter summarizes the book's argument: irreligion in pre–World War I British Columbia emerged from a cluster of obvious and more subtle factors.

Among the obvious secularizing ingredients was British Columbia's large population of single men, especially itinerant miners whose “rough cultures” (drinking, gambling, and prostitution) and fraternal societies resisted the feminizing and moralizing world of the Christian church. Other palpable influences include the varying degrees of hostility within trade union and other workers' movements to capitalist-tainted Christianity as well as the significant presence of previously secularized immigrants from the American northwest.

However, Marks argues compellingly that a less obvious factor, racism, was at least as significant to the story. White settlers formed alliances that crossed boundaries of class, gender, and religious practices to keep racialized communities at bay. British Columbia was the most racially diverse province in Canada in this era. Asian migrants represented up to eleven percent of the population. The Indigenous population was nominally Christian, but many maintained their previous spiritual allegiances. Marks demonstrates that white settler racism crossed all divides: it was propounded by Christians and atheists, by the wealthy and the poor, and by males and females. Both Christians and atheists turned on Christian and secular leaders who dared to advocate for the rights of Asian men to immigrate, bring their wives, and vote. Suffrage for white women, leniency around Sabbatarian and temperance legislation, and the social tolerance of a variety of white settler religious and irreligious opinions were the prices hegemonic white Christians were willing to pay to maintain their racist solidarity against “othered” populations.

This nuanced appraisal is one of the book's great strengths. Another lies in Marks's ability to identify just who the irreligious were. In her hands, the dry figures of the census tables come alive. She compares, where possible, numbers of “communicants,” or those practicing Christian faith, with those who simply reported adherence. She observes fine distinctions: between married and unmarried men and women, for example, and between persons who lived in boarding houses and those who lived in families. She compares mining towns to farming communities and transient hard rock mining settlements to the more settled coal mining towns. Using the manuscript census, she follows families across decades, noting shifts in their responses as indications of the religious fluidity of the population. Yet, Marks is also careful to note the limitations of the census data, especially in the ways that census-takers recorded responses from the Asian community—making “wild guesses” or labeling all Asian respondents as “agnostics” (52). The complexity of the data and its inferences can sometimes overwhelm, but its precision and accuracy ground the work.

While we learn in detail who was irreligious, there is not much new here about why they claimed to have made their choices. The refrains Marks reports are typical of that era in Canada: Christians are moralizing hypocrites, the churches are allies of the managerial classes, and faith is unscientific. Where Marks draws her own inferences, she is careful to say “perhaps,” but she tends to rely on a secularist vocabulary wherein irreligion represents “freedom” from “the forces of family, respectability, and Christian hegemony” (46), while clerical antisecularizing rhetoric is called “whining” (14). She does not explore the wider role that burgeoning capitalism was playing in developing a religion of wealth acquisition. Similarly, she tends to assume that women turned to Christianity primarily for piety, sociability, and solace, ignoring the possible draw of intellectual stimulation.

Those are small complaints, however, about a book that makes a significant contribution to regional and Canadian historical research and beyond. Lynn Marks encourages historians who wish to study secularization to look more closely at local contexts. She challenges all historians of religion and secularism to investigate the intersections of class, race, racialization, and gender in their research. Finally, she reminds us that religion and irreligion must be studied as interrelated forces. This book accomplishes those tasks with fruitful results.