How did the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada lose influence and relevance in the 20th century?

Inauguration of United Church at Mutual Street Arena, Toronto, on June 10, 1925

The union of the Methodists and the Presbyterians into the United Church of Canada

The official crest of the United Church of Canada.

When, however, Methodists and the majority of Presbyterians finalized Church Union, they were denominations in transition. In both groups a newer concern for social transformation as an end in itself and a wariness of former evangelical enthusiasm was beginning to compete against the older liberal evangelicalism. That competition between these two forces did in fact continue in the United Church at large until the final victory in the 1960s of social collectivism and theological modernism. But the mind of the United Church was captured by these newer forces well before the church itself.

The new United Church of Canada undergoes change in accordance with the times

Metropolitan United Church, Toronto, Ontario

 

Nancy Christie has recently provided a provocative interpretation of how those changes occurred, by specific reference to the United Church's official stance on marriage, sexuality, and the family. Her contention is that United Church leaders by the 1940s felt they were being marginalized by the expanding reach of the new Canadian welfare state, especially as represented by the Family Allowances Act of 1944. In response, church leaders turned to a neo-orthodox theology that, in effect, repudiated Canada's long tradition of an active social gospel. At the same time, they also redefined the place of the family as private rather than public, as existing for the sexual and personal satisfaction of spouses instead of for the moral well-being of Canadian society, and as designed less for triumph over sin than as an arena for self-realization. By 1960, the orthodox aspects of neo-orthodox theology were wearing away, and the commitment to personal self-fulfillment was becoming ever stronger. The result, according to Christie, was, first, that the United Church's efforts to contain the expansion of the federal government "had peculiarly liberal results ... in establishing the cultural preconditions for modern sexual mores;" and, second, that "by 1966, after two hundred years of forming the core of Methodist and Presbyterian theology, evangelicalism in mainline Protestantism foundered upon the rock of modern gender identities and human sexuality."

The latent power of this new theology of modernism and ethics of privatized selfhood was heightened by the fact that traditionally evangelical elements in the United Church could never quite establish an effective public presence, neither in the decades immediately after church union, nor in the century's middle decades of theology drift, nor in the recent period as a counter to liberalizing elements in the denomination. The irony of the situation was that while a modernistic social gospel succeeded in winning the mind of the United Church, that victory left the United Church with little to offer by way of specific Christian content in the radically transformed conditions of the 1960s, when Canadian governments acted far more effectively than the churches in guaranteeing personal welfare.

The union of the Methodists and the Presbyterians is viewed by some as a "tragic failure"

The Comfortable Pew : A Critical look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age, 1965.  By atheist Pierre Berton.

In sum, the ability of what had once been a socially responsible, moderately intellectual, Arminian evangelical Methodism and a socially responsible, reasonably comprehensive, Calvinistic Presbyterianism to make any kind of a sharp Christian impact on Canadian thought, society, politics, or spirituality was fatally compromised by what Barry Mack has very precisely labeled, "the tragic failure of Church Union."

The Anglican Church of Canada loses influence

Flag of the Anglican Church of Canada

The story of Canadian Anglicanism, which had been the socially dominant church of English Canada for most of the nineteenth century, does not exactly parallel the story of either Quebec Catholicism or the United Church. Rather, the ability of Anglicans to act effectively in Canada gradually receded as Canadian society moved further and further from the deferential assumptions of the colonial period when Anglicanism acted as a church establishment--sometimes formal, often informal--in guiding English Canada's elite, especially in Ontario.

The Anglican Church of Canada focuses on non-church matters

University of King's College. Founded by Bishop Inglis in 1789 as an Anglican college. It is the oldest English-speaking university in the Commonwealth of Nations outside Britain.

In a forceful series of books and articles, William Westfall has shown how Canadian Anglicans attempted to exert cultural authority through university education, through urban architecture, and through influence on social elites, but all with diminishing returns. As the principle of informal establishment faded along with the assumptions of Christendom, Canadian Anglicans were left at sea. Robertson Davies, noted novelist, journalist, playwright, and the most visible Anglican layman of the twentieth century, was a good case in point, since his own theology was as heterodox as his writing was captivating, and his appeal for "numinosity" as the soul of Canadian religion was as vague as his novels were compellingly concrete. More recently, efforts by Anglicans to preserve a measure of social influence have been set back by extensive court battles arising from earlier abuses of First Nation's children in residential schools and by corrosive internal debates on matters of sexuality and doctrine. The struggle to define a meaningful Anglican presence for a denomination now marked by wide doctrinal pluralism leaves little energy for the magisterial guidance the denomination once provided for at least some ranks of Canadian society.

Source: Noll, Mark A. What Happened To Christian Canada?, Vancouver, Canada: Regent College Publishing, 2007, pages 44-48.