In the opening pages of his study, Hanowski observes that in 2019, “over a quarter of all Canadian citizens reported that they had no religious affiliation” (p. 4). By comparison, fewer than 0.003% of all responding Canadians identified as non-religious or secular in the 1921 census, while 96% identified as Christian (pp. 18–20). By writing about the lived experience and legacy of Canadians who explicitly rejected belief in God in the 1920s and 1930s – a time when “Christendom” was alive and well in Canada (pp. 7–8) – Hanowski paints a picture of Canada’s past that is at odds with the present-day image of Canada as more secular, tolerant, and pluralistic than the United States. He argues that while unbelievers were a marginal minority of Canadians in the interwar decades, “they had an outsized place in the public imagination” and that “their experiences shed light on the religious and political contexts of their society” and “open a window not only on Canada’s past but on its present as well” (p. 36).
The bulk of the book centers on key individuals and the communities of unbelief that they helped to coalesce in major Canadian cities. The two strongest chapters (in terms of original research) deal with unbelief in Winnipeg, Manitoba, drawing heavily on the archival records of Marshall Gauvin, a self-educated, left-leaning professional atheist and charismatic public speaker, whose weekly lectures drew sizeable audiences between 1926 and 1940. The first of these chapters is largely biographical, focusing on Gauvin, and his wars of words with Winnipeg’s clergy (both fundamentalists and liberal Christians), and with Winnipeg’s radical left (particularly the One Big Union, which took exception with Gauvin’s departures from socialist orthodoxy). The subsequent chapter employs a social historical approach; drawing on Gauvin’s membership records, mailing lists, and correspondence, and cross-referencing these sources with census and military records (among others), Hanowski constructs a list of over a thousand of Gauvin’s supporters in the Winnipeg Rationalist Society. He analyzes this list, demonstrating that the bulk of Gauvin’s supporters were working-class males (though with a substantial number of women), most of whom were immigrants from Great Britain and continental Europe. Furthermore, many of them were associated with the political left (p. 95). The demography of Winnipeg’s rationalists reflects key features of interwar atheism that Hanowski highlights throughout the book: its working-class base of support; close ties with the political left; and transnational connections.
The next two chapters center on Toronto, beginning with the most comprehensive recent study of Ernest Victor Sterry’s trial for blasphemous libel in 1927. While other scholars have written about this famous legal case, Hanowski’s study places Sterry and his trial in the context of Toronto’s community of unbelievers (particularly the Rationalist Society of Canada, which Sterry helped to found), and of Toronto’s evangelical Protestant establishment, which was willing to use the strong arm of the law to defend the Christian faith against the assaults of infidels. The second of these chapters reveals as much about that religious establishment as it does about Toronto’s rationalist community. While highlighting the importance of atheist public speakers such as Bert Leavens (later a Member of Parliament for the CCF, a democratic socialist party), this chapter also considers the roles of devout Christians such as William Jaffray (publisher of Toronto’s widely-read daily The Globe), Emerson Coatsworth (judge in the Sterry trial), and the “well-connected evangelicals” in the Canadian Christian Crusade who “struggled to make Toronto a moral city” (p. 165).
While “Toronto the Good” was one example of a regional “Christendom,” interwar Montreal was even more so, but in the context of a predominantly French-speaking and pervasively Roman Catholic province (p. 167). As in Toronto, Montreal’s atheist spokesmen Albert Saint-Martin and Gaston Pilon faced prosecution for blasphemous libel, and their organization the Université ouvrière (“Labour University”) was shut down. In addition, they faced “unofficial violence” as mobs “smashed up their meeting halls and…inflicted serious personal harm” (p. 198). Hanowski acknowledges that he does not unearth new primary sources and that other scholars have written about unbelief (and the reaction against it) in Montreal, but he endeavors to place it in a broader Canadian context (p. 283).
His chapter on the coastal provinces of British Columbia and Nova Scotia is the least substantial one and is based largely on historical newspaper sources. Other recent scholars such as Lynne Marks and Tina Block have written about unbelief in the Pacific Northwest (though not in the interwar years), and Hanowski’s research largely confirms earlier findings that British Columbia was an exceptionally tolerant society, with a greater percentage of unbelievers than in other provinces. In contrast, Hanowski maintains Nova Scotia was not as congenial an environment for unbelief, possibly due to “the relative strength of the churches” and the absence of “a critical mass of unbelievers” such as one might find in larger population centers like Toronto (p. 219).
In his discussion of the Canadian religious response to unbelief, Hanowski devotes significant attention to the role of Christian fundamentalists. While the author acknowledges that fundamentalism did not play as central a role in interwar Canada as it did in the United States, he could have assessed more clearly the relative strength or weakness of Canadian fundamentalism, especially in comparison with its American counterpart. Nevertheless, Toward a Godless Dominion is a strong work of scholarship, and an important contribution to the history of religious belief and unbelief in twentieth-century North America. As the author rightly argues, the people in his study paved the way for the “New Atheism” of our present century, but they did so in a time and place where unbelief was not the easiest option – at least, not the easiest to express publicly (p. 225). Regardless of whether this achievement was laudable, these activists merit scholarly attention.
