Indifference to religion played huge role in B.C. history

We are different, we British Columbians; we are different because of our indifference to religion. Nearly half of us claim no religious affiliation.

Lynne Marks, an associate professor at the University of Victoria, takes on the topic in this book, and it is about time. Many books have been written on the role of religion in the colonization and settlement of Western Canada, but this is the first one to look at the role that indifference to religion played in our history.

For the non-Indigenous peoples, Early British Columbia was a place where men were men and women were scarce. And manly men did not spend time in churches.

Marks notes that in transient resource towns, the concept of masculinity caused men to “abandon religion along with the families they left behind.”

Some men, she writes, did not completely discard God, but embraced drinking, gambling and the sex trade. That left little room for Christianity. They preferred to spend their free time espousing the virtues of socialism.

White women were a minority throughout the province, but a majority in churches, where they were isolated from influences such as the Indigenous peoples and the immigrants from Asia.

One of the key chapters in this book is “Sundays are so different here.” In it, Marks compared four small communities in British Columbia with two in Ontario and two in Nova Scotia, and compares census data with church records.

Involvement with churches was at a lower rate in three towns in the Kootenay that in the towns in Ontario and Nova Scotia, reflecting the “no religion” entries in the census. But there were remarkable differences in church involvement between three Kootenay communities and Vernon, in the Okanagan Valley, which saw a higher rate of church involvement than was seen in the eastern provinces.

As Marks notes, it was families, led by women, who formed the backbone of congregations.

The Kootenay towns were much more transient, while the ones in the east had been established for much longer, and families in Vernon, a young community, had formed deep roots. The three Kootenay towns also had more people who were lodgers or boarders, a group generally associated with being male, and irreligious.

The gender gap was key. Women were more likely to attend churches, to join church organizations, and to fight for temperance causes and against brothels. They may have gone to church regularly to make it clear that they were respectable, unlike the women who were in the red-light areas.

The force of religion had a huge influence on the history of this province, an influence that, as time has proven, was not always positive. The influence of the indifferent cannot be discounted, and with the publication of Infidels and the Damn Churches, it cannot be ignored, either.

This is a scholarly work, not surprising given the author’s background, and represents many years of research.

It is an invaluable record of a subject that has not been touched on. Beyond that, it gives the reader a sense of what the ministers were up against when they tried to spread the word in the years before the First World War. The reviewer is editor-in-chief of the Times Colonist.