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It is fitting that Preston Jones' book on the public use of the Bible in Canada comes in an unassuming package. The volume is slim and marketed with the standard-issue cover that the University Press of America puts on most of its publications. It thus embodies the characteristic Canadian disinclination against gaudiness, pretension, and hype, which citizens to the North tend to see as characterizing their neighbors to the South. Jones, who teaches at John Brown University and who has published discerning works on subjects as diverse as Alaskan history and the East Asian sex trade, is not a Canadian himself, but long-time residence in Canada has allowed its culture to seep in.
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The book is, therefore, surprising for reaching much the same conclusion about the Bible in Canadian public life that others have reached for the United States. The Scriptures, that is, were ubiquitous at almost all levels of public discourse in the second half of the 19th century. But that very ubiquity revealed more about the Canadians' skill at using the Bible for their own purposes than letting the Bible exert a discernible sway on their actions. In Jones' words, "Canadian nationalists wrenched Bible verses out of context and arrived at implausible parallels between biblical history and their own and they waged rhetorical war against others with the words of the Bible." As in the United States, especially before and during the Civil War, Canadians used Scripture to "promote opposing visions of the Canadian nation." The result was that "the Bible's status as something to be revered was diminished."
This conclusion leads Jones to challenge historians (including myself) who have argued that Canada in the late 19th century came closer to the ideals of genuinely Christian civilization than did the United States. To the claim I once made that Canada had not thrown its weight around internationally as much as the United States, Jones' reply is preemptory: "If the language of Canada's … English-speaking nationalists is taken seriously, one can conclude that had Canada ever acquired any such weight, it would have been thrown."
Jones may not be entirely convincing in this comparative blame game. The ethnocentrism of Canada's British population was indeed deep and wide, but whether it reached the depth or extended as broadly as American prejudice against colored peoples can be questioned. There was a great deal of discrimination in turn-of-the-century Canada that was supported by Bible-quoting Protestants, but no lynchings sanctioned by conservative evangelical clergy. Nevertheless, in a well documented account of Canada's leading statesmen and Protestant ministers, Jones demonstrates that Canadian use of the Bible could be just as formulaic and just as merely rhetorical as the American.
The Dominion of Canada, which was established in 1867, took its name from Psalm 72:8: "And he shall have dominion also from sea to sea and from the river even unto the ends of the earth." This ascription came after the Fathers of Confederation decided not to call Canada a "Kingdom" for fear of offending the triumphant republicanism of the victorious Union armies. Yet if pious Canadians were more successful at sneaking a few open biblical references into Canada's founding documents than had been their American counterparts ninety years earlier, it did not mean, according to Jones' convincing argument, that Canada's scripturalism went deeper or was freer from hypocrisy than the American case.
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