Religion

The Church of England, which has its origins in King Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic Church, initially enjoyed substantial privileges from government in both the Maritimes and Upper Canada. But it was never exclusively English in its composition. In Upper Canada there were more Irish than English and so the church drew much of its clergy and laity from Ireland. At the same time, many among the humbler ranks of Irish Protestants were resolute Tories who clung to the church as a familiar badge of identity against the danger of an incoming Roman Catholic tide, whereas many of the humbler English immigrants were political reformers and dissenters, notably Methodists.

For the nineteenth century, a study using an 1871 census sample from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Canadas shows those of English descent to have been 35 percent Methodist (broken down into 23 percent Wesleyan, 4.5 percent Episcopal Methodist, and 7.7 percent “other” Methodist), 34 percent Anglican, 17 percent Baptist, and 5.3 percent Presbyterian. This data is of dubious value, however, for it includes the considerable number of descendants of immigrant New Englanders, and that fact is reflected most obviously in the strong Baptist showing. Fortunately, we do have some statistics relating to the English-born in 1871 and 1931; the first set of figures follows the initial major wave of English immigration, largely into rural parts, and the second follows the great early-twentieth-century influx, mostly into the cities and the west.

The 1871 data relates only to Ontario, but there English-born heads of families were 45 percent Anglican, with Methodists a close second at 37 percent. Baptists accounted for 6.8 percent, a more realistic figure, and Presbyterians 4.5 percent. The 45 percent Anglican statistic was more than double the 20 percent share the Anglicans enjoyed among the province’s general population, but the Methodist denominations were also overrepresented by 8.9 percent. The English by then were slightly more Anglican than those of Irish Protestant descent (37 percent); the latter, in comparison to the English, were slightly more Methodist (33 percent), but of course much more Presbyterian (24 percent). Some English became Presbyterians through marriage, but others who came from the counties along the Scottish border were raised in the denomination.

Methodism, which originated in 1739 as a result of John Wesley’s discontent with the worldliness of the Anglican denomination of his day, is widely regarded as having been a movement of the poor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; however, it also appealed strongly to rising merchants and industrialists who sensed a parallel between, on the one hand, the movement’s emphasis on the necessity of a personal spiritual conversion and its general self-help philosophy, and, on the other hand, their own social position as self-made men hammering at the doors of landed power and privilege.

Methodism did not separate from the Anglican communion until after Wesley’s death in the 1790s, and it soon began to shed splinter groups. Many of the early Methodist circuit riders were Americans associated with the New York Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, but the loyalty of this body became suspect during the War of 1812. The dissatisfaction of immigrant British Methodists led the Canadian church to break with the American society in 1828. In 1832 the Wesleyan Missionary Committee of London sent out missionaries and the following year the British Wesleyans and Canadian conference united, but a number who remained outside this union took the name Episcopal Methodist. The Canadian Wesleyan circuits inherited a feeling of greater independence from the Anglican denomination than was encouraged by the English conference at that time, and so the Canadian conference became free-standing in 1840. In the Maritimes, many of the Yorkshire settlers of the 1770s were Methodist, and they were responsible for a good deal of missionary work in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, beginning with the Reverend William Black, who had come from Yorkshire as a child.

In 1871 Wesleyans in Ontario comprised the same percentage of the Methodists among the English-born as among the general population, 62 percent, but far fewer were associated with the revived Episcopal Methodists, a mostly American denomination (8 as opposed to 20 percent). Two smaller denominations were very much overrepresented, however. The Bible Christians enjoyed the support of 11 percent of immigrant English as opposed to 3.9 percent of Ontarians in general, and the Primitive Methodists claimed the adherence of 10.5 percent of English immigrants, twice their level of support among Ontarians as a whole. Both these denominations were regional churches in Britain and drew most of their support from parts of Canada settled heavily from those areas.

The Bible Christian denomination began at Shebbear in north Devon in 1815 when an enthusiastic preacher, William Bryan, refused to restrain himself from encroaching on the territories of other Wesleyan clergy. Though it was highly evangelical and extended its work into Cornwall, Somerset, the Isle of Wight, and London, it remained heavily a West Country denomination. The church appears not to have encouraged the emigration of its members but it quickly responded to calls for clergy and in 1833 sent two missionaries, one to Prince Edward Island and another to Cobourg, Upper Canada. The first “Bryanite” preacher in British North America, however, was Martha Jago, one of a number of female lay preachers who were characteristic of the denomination; she preached in public in Charlottetown and on the Miramichi in the late 1820s. In 1871 there were 18,225 Bible Christians in Ontario, mostly in traditional areas of West Country settlement: more than 4,000 in Durham County and 11,000 in total along the western Lake Ontario shore, and another 5,000 in the Huron-Perth County region. There were another 2,400 or so in P.E.I. (1881). Wesleyans were also prominent in these West Country settlements. Huron County’s Stephen, Hay, and Usborne townships were home to 1,500 Anglicans, 2,200 Bible Christians, and 1,400 Wesleyans; in Darlington Township near Bowmanville, there were 626 Anglicans, 2,109 Bible Christians, and 1,424 Wesleyans.

In Ontario, members of other ethnic groups became Bible Christian either through conversion or intermarriage or for convenience, and the denomination was, especially in its early years, aggressively evangelical. Nevertheless, in 1871 Ontario’s Bible Christians were still 83 percent English. Much the same situation prevailed in P.E.I. There, the Bible Christians absorbed most of the Guernsey immigrants at Murray Harbour, whom the Anglican rector in Charlottetown neglected to serve. But on the island the denomination seems to have assumed a special attraction as an English church, drawing English members from well beyond its traditional West Country constituency. So successful was it that Anglicanism became almost a residual denomination among the English there. There was much intermarriage among Protestant ethnic groups in P.E.I. and thus the Bible Christians also spread widely among those with maternal English ancestry.

The church extended its service to the west in the early 1880s, following migrants there from Ontario and P.E.I. Though some Bible Christians went to western towns and cities and were lost to the denomination, most settled in compact rural settlements; quite a number went from Huron County to the Crystal City, Manitoba, area in rail parties organized by Thomas Greenway, a native of Cornwall, England, who later became premier of Manitoba. Like the Wesleyans, the church had lost much of its evangelical enthusiasm by then and the western clergy “merely sought out their own” people.

The Primitive Methodists had a similar origin and were also a regional church in Canada, associated most strongly with Yorkshire settlers. It began in the Potteries district of North Staffordshire when Hugh Bourne was expelled from the Wesleyan body in 1807 for conducting a camp meeting; afterwards, the denomination extended into the north of England. It took root in Toronto in July 1829 when William Lawson, a local preacher from Brampton in Cumberland, organized a class meeting with some Primitive Methodists from Yorkshire. The following year the English conference sent a missionary north from New York where the sect was already established. That most of the early adherents were from Yorkshire is suggested by the fact that the Canadian mission was placed under the Hull (Yorkshire) circuit at first. By 1842 there were three circuits centring on Toronto, Brampton, and Markham; six years later, Reach and Whitby and Darlington had been added to the east, and Etobicoke, Hamilton, Guelph, and Talbot mission to the west, with a total membership of 1,343. By this time few Primitive Methodists were arriving from England. Its membership continued to grow in the Toronto-London area and extended beyond its Yorkshire base, but, in 1871, 40 percent of its strength of 24,000 was still in Peel, York, and Ontario counties, with four times as much support in rural York County as in the city of Toronto, and virtually no following outside Ontario.

The Methodist New Connexion was also of English origin, the first missionary arriving from England in 1837. The denomination remained small but spread beyond its original ethnic constituency; it was absorbed by the Wesleyans in 1874. Some of Ontario’s earliest East Anglian immigrants were Baptists, though, as in the Maritimes, the denomination was associated mostly with American settlement.

The Anglican Church’s Canadian membership increased by 53 percent during the first decade of this century, and it seems to have become a major element of English ethnic identity in that same period. By 1911 it was the third-largest denomination in Ontario, the second-largest in Manitoba, and the largest in British Columbia. The English dominated the church in the west in these years and some clergy worried that the denomination was perceived as “something for Englishmen alone.” Immigrants seem to have been more likely to attend church in Canada than they had been in England, for the church not only provided useful contacts for charity and employment but lessened immigrants’ sense of dislocation. They found the liturgy and dogma reassuringly familiar. As one immigrant put it, “When we are at church it seems so much like home.”

It has been argued that Anglican efforts to meet the challenge of serving the west largely failed. The English archbishops established a fund for the missionary effort there but concentrated their energies in the Regina, Edmonton, and Cardston areas. Though the church seemed “too English” to some, an impression intensified by a renewed reliance on imported clergy, western Anglicans proved quite traditionalist and found fault with the “low church” – or evangelical – ministers they received. Their attitude perhaps reflects the desire of the immigrants to enjoy the full-blown ritual of the imported product. Efforts to establish private Anglican schools to foster “the type of man needed . . . to share in the development of the Empire” touched sensitive nerves, as did the decision to concentrate efforts at clerical education in Toronto. The Presbyterians have been seen as the most “Canadian” denomination, one that succeeded in organizing effective services for its traditional constituency and in expanding missionary efforts into east European enclaves while the Anglicans were still trying to provide clerics for English settlers.

In 1931, the first year for which we have cross-tabulated birthplace and religion data, Anglicanism was very much the church of choice among English immigrants and its share of the group varied little across the country. More than 70 percent of the English-born were Anglican in the Northwest Territories, 68 percent in British Columbia, 65 to 68 percent on the prairies, 62 to 64 percent in central Canada (up in Ontario from an already impressive 45 percent in 1871), and 60 to 63 percent in the Maritimes. The one exception was Prince Edward Island, where only 51 percent of English immigrants were Anglicans. There, these late immigrants made up a large proportion of a small denomination, for the population of English descent was only 16 percent Anglican, a continuing legacy of the early strength of the Bible Christians. The data unfortunately post-dates the creation of the United Church of Canada in 1925, but the largest following of the continuing Presbyterians – those who remarried outside the new body – among English immigrants in 1931 was in the Northwest Territories, the Maritimes, and central Canada rather than in the west.

These statistics seem to reflect a disproportionate embracing of Anglicanism by the immigrant community, much of which was working class. The latter also adhered to a number of smaller new denominations, chief among them the Salvation Army, but the 6,948 English-born members of these denominations accounted for less than 1 percent of English immigrants. The “Sally Ann” was active in assisting emigrants, but only a small proportion of those they aided were themselves Salvationists.