For God’s Sake

Canadians often contrast their secular ways with the strange religious enthusiasms that haunt public life in the United States. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the shoe was on the other foot. Statesmen here routinely contrasted our God-fearing culture and schools with America’s separation of church and state, which had let unbelief and immorality run riot. They were right to consider the open profession of atheism or even free thought rare in Canada. The 1,157 Quebecers who declared themselves atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, or people of no religion in the 1921 census could have fit onto a single train or ocean liner. Yet the historian Elliot Hanowski argues that the struggle of tiny bands of the faithless to gain a hearing or just toleration for their opinions in the interwar years should instruct and perhaps inspire us today. Towards a Godless Dominion, his diligent and heartfelt study of freethinking activists from Vancouver to Nova...