In 1987, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission approved the country’s first religious cable channel, Vision TV. The CRTC had rejected many applications before this: Christian applicants hoped to broadcast American-style televangelism, but they had run aground on the CRTC’s requirement that religious programming include a diversity of faith-based views. Vision TV, by contrast, made multiculturalism its brand image. The channel offers a “mosaic” of religious shows ranging from the evangelical 700 Club to Sikh poetry and music, as well as agnostic programming that simply “celebrates the human spirit” (whether you consider watching Downton Abbey a religious experience or not, you can catch it at 10 p.m. Eastern on Wednesdays).
Five years later—in response to evangelicals who claimed that the CRTC’s rules violated the guarantee of religious freedom in...
Molly Worthen is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her most recent book is Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2013).
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