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By common reckoning, Canada experienced secularization more rapidly in the 20th century than did the United States. Indeed, it is frequently remarked that as to manifestations of religious faith in public life, Canada more resembles the nations of Western Europe than she does the United States. It is the merit of Catherine Gidney's A Long Eclipse that it calls into question the application of this broad-brush interpretation of comparative secularization to the unfolding direction of Canadian university life.
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Conversant with the literature that suggests an extensive secularization of American universities by the 1920s, Gidney probed the institutional histories of five Canadian schools and found intriguing differences. According to her findings, Canadian universities, whether founded originally as church-backed or as government-funded institutions, reflected the ethos of mainline Protestantism into the late 1950s.
Canada's universities (excepting Roman Catholic institutions) existed to provide training in arts and sciences for a populace deemed essentially Protestant. Presidents for such schools were men who had been church leaders and these, with their university faculties, affirmed the indebtedness of the arts and sciences to the classical and Christian past. They understood their work to include the moral as well as intellectual formation of their students. Only by 1960 did this world vanish.
Gidney, having gathered impressive data, is not loath to explore why the changes came, and when. In the period surveyed, she notes that Canadian university education ceased to be the privilege of the professional classes. Also, these institutions increasingly reflected the cultural pluralism which followed on Canada's open immigration policies. Expanding enrollments required a proliferation of faculty members; these also were now more diverse. No longer could presidents hire only those whose academic credentials were augmented by loyalty to Christianity. Collectively these changes meant that Canada's Protestant hegemony was diminished and that long-established university deference to Christianity had ended. The issue was ultimately forced when the still Christian-oriented universities could not fund the level of technological research necessitated by the Cold War era; they similarly lacked the resources to fund the postwar faculty call for an expansion of scarce graduate programs. At this point, even Canada's church-backed universities were driven into the arms of their respective regional governments.
But the white flag of surrender had not been raised all at once. Gidney finds evidence that into the 1950s, Canada's universities were still trying to maintain distinctively Christian content through core curriculum in Scripture and theology. Presidents who were rightly concerned about secularizing tendencies on their campuses gave backing to Christian student ministries such as the Student Christian Movement and, after some initial reluctance, to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). Gidney looks at Canada's mainline Protestant churches and observes that these, which had founded and supported many of Canada's universities, had by their own embrace of a liberalized Protestantism grown ambivalent in upholding Christianity's uniqueness. The spiritual malaise of Canada's universities was thus rooted in the failure of Canada's mainline denominations to evangelize a secularizing culture. Here then are lessons to be pondered both by those who have lived to see their formerly Christian-oriented universities re-directed to other ends and by those who have strained to create new Christian colleges and universities since 1960.
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