Religion

The Twentieth Century

The patterns of religious adherence among Irish Protestants in the nineteenth century persisted into the twentieth. Methodism, in the nineteenth century already receiving proportionally more support from Canada’s Irish Protestants than from non-Catholics in the Irish homeland, became Canada’s largest Protestant denomination. Presbyterianism, weak because of nineteenth-century immigrants’ stronger roots in Ireland’s Anglican and Methodist communities and consequently dominated by Canadians of Scottish descent, divided once more, in 1925, over the issue of union with the Methodists. Anglicanism received the support of many English immigrants after 1900, but it was not replenished from Irish sources to anything like the same degree, and continuing defections to Methodism diminished its significance for Canadians of Irish descent.

Data on ethnic religious affiliation were compiled by Statistics Canada’s predecessors in 1931 and 1941. Because the Methodists and the greater proportion of the Presbyterians had merged to form the United Church of Canada in 1925, these calculations do not allow us to distinguish Methodist and Presbyterian support in any meaningful way. Still, the overall picture is not without interest. The Anglican share of Irish Protestant adherence then stood at 26 percent, with this national figure fairly well representing the situation in Ontario, where the Anglican proportion was down from 37 percent in 1871, and in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Manitoba. The Anglican share dropped below a fifth in Saskatchewan and Alberta, where the United Church was stronger, but was larger in British Columbia and most notably in Quebec, where 41 percent of Irish Protestants were Anglican. Anglicanism was weakest, at 14 percent in Prince Edward Island, where the great majority of Irish were Catholics and where nearly a quarter of the small Irish Protestant population were continuing Presbyterians (the group that remained outside the 1925 union), probably a result of intermarriage with local Scots. Another reason for the weakness of the Anglican Church in P.E.I. is that the province’s English residents descended mostly from West Country Methodists.

In 1931, half to a third of Irish Protestants across Canada as a whole claimed to support the United Church, the heir mostly of the Methodist tradition; in the prairies, however, support rose to between a half and two-thirds. Continuing Presbyterians accounted for 17 percent nationally, ranging from 7 to 24 percent in the various provinces. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Baptists were as numerous among the Irish as Anglicans and Presbyterians together. Baptist success operated at the expense of United Church support, however, and seems not to have substantially diminished Anglican numbers. Anglicans were over-represented among Irish immigrants to Canada, but their adherence declined in favour of Methodism over the years, as it tended to do among the general population.