Still 'coming of age': The long adolescence of English Canadian religious history

This study analyzes the relationship between Canadian religious history and its more advanced American counterpart. A comparison of both fields shows that American religious historiography has had a longer more thoroughly academic pedigree, while Canadian studies remained essentially institutional and hagiographic long into the twentieth century. While American religious historians have been in dialogue with the broader historical enterprise, Canadian church history has only recently migrated from the seminary to the academy where it has struggled to find a berth in history departments. Reasons for this discrepancy are found in an examination of the intellectual climate in which both grew. Tempered by revolutionary and enlightenment forces, the style of common sense realism that shaped Americans was more scientific than the Baconian moralism that arose in Canada. A survey of two nineteenth century historians, Robert Burns in Canada, and Philip Schaff in the United States, and two twentieth century historians, H. H. Walsh in Canada, and Sydney Ahlstrom in America provides useful insights into historiographic development in both countries. The American sense of divine destiny traced from its inception up to the current discussion of civil religion accounts for American interest in religious history, whereas the absence of these in Canada has left religious history out of the academic mainstream. Rather than developing as a branch of social history, Canadian religious history has been used as a tool by other histories, and better employed in departments of sociology and religious studies, than by historians.