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It was here that evangelicalism first came to Canada in the eighteenth century. Colonists in the outlying villages of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick felt cut off from their fellow Yankees in the revolutionary 13 colonies to the south. Henry Alline (1748-84) born in Rhode Island and raised in Nova Scotia, brought a message of God's radical favor upon those whom the world had ignored. His work sparked the Canadian "Great Awakening" in the Maritime region.

Unlike the well-educated leaders of the awakenings in the American colonies a generation earlier—such as Oxford graduate George Whitefield or Yale man Jonathan Edwards—these Maritime revivalists left behind no profound theological or homiletical works. But they did foster a warm piety and expressed it in gospel hymnody. Alline himself composed more than 500 hymns, a few of which are still known by heart among Maritime Baptists 200 years later:

He pluck'd me from the jaws of hell
With his almighty arm of pow'r,
And O! no mortal tongue can tell
The change of that immortal hour!

Then I enjoy'd a sweet release
From chains of son and powers of death;
My soul was killed with heav'nly peace,
My groans were turn'd to praising breath.

Leaders of this Great Awakening did more than preach individual salvation; they sought to transform the little settlements of the Maritime hinterland into loving communities of worship, mutual edification, and social service. Their success stamps Maritime culture to this day with evangelical orthodoxy, piety, and social concern.

Quebec's Quiet Revolution
As one travels up the Saint Lawrence, the huge province of Quebec (almost three times the size of France) stands as a kind of fortress against evangelicalism. Until the 1960s, this officially French-speaking province was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church—to the extent that public education was ceded to it by successive provincial governments. Notorious laws—some passed just decades ago—enabled priests and their Catholic partisans to incite local mobs and law-enforcement authorities to harass and even arrest Protestant evangelists in their communities.

Since Quebec's "quiet revolution" began in the 1960s, however, the province has undergone remarkably rapid secularization. According to University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby (a Canadian combination of George Barna, George Gallup, and Robert Wuthnow), almost nine in ten Quebecois attended church on a weekly basis as late as 1957. Fewer than three in ten do so today. The challenge for the few evangelical churches in Quebec today is to evangelize an increasingly secular population, not to convert a Catholic one.

The cultural revolution of the sixties affected a wide range of Canadian institutions, including the church. The liberalization of divorce laws and sexual ethics, the increase of government-sponsored gambling, the secularization of public schools and Universities, the availability of abortion virtually on demand, the progressive dismantling of Lord's Day legislation—all have shown Canadian Christians that they no longer command their culture as they did in the nineteenth century.

As Bibby has detailed, well over 80 percent of Canadians now maintain a nominal allegiance to the Christian faith. A recent article in Maclean's magazine (Canada's answer to Time) recently declared that Canada is an "overwhelmingly Christian nation." But many Canadians know little and practice less of historic Christianity. "Canada emerged late out of the Victorian periods mused historian John Webster Grant, but Canada seems to have made up for lost time. Religion generally figures in the news only when it is extreme (which is rare in Canada) or immoral (which, sadly, is not so rare).

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April (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45