Forging New Futures for the Study of Religion in Canada: A Review of Hughes’s From Seminary to University

Abstract

Aaron W. Hughes’s monograph, From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada, argues that, unlike other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the study of religion in Canada is imbricated with nation-state politics. The creation of Canada’s initial seminaries post-Confederation served to establish Christianity as normative. By the 1960s, these seminaries were largely replaced with departments that aimed to promote national values of multiculturalism and diversity. In her critique, Selby commends the book’s convincing argument and impressive historical archival work, and critiques the book’s limited engagement with the politics of settler colonialism and scholarly contributions in the province of Québec.

From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada offers a critical historical intervention as many departments of religion in Canada are shrinking, merging, and/or experiencing existential crises amid dwindling humanities and social sciences budgets and declining majors. A prolific scholar and thoughtful critic of method and theory in the study of religion, Aaron Hughes is well-positioned to undertake this meticulously researched historical chronology of the first 100+ years of religious studies in Canada; his survey begins pre-Confederation and ends in the 1970s.

Hughes’s primary argument is that, unlike other disciplines, the study of religion in Canada is intimately connected to shifting definitions of nationhood. He writes: “initially [the early creation of departments] took place in the intellectual context of seminaries whose raison d’être was the establishment of “true religion” (96); Christianity was the “lodestar” (55). By the 1960s, “as immigrants made their way to Canada, and as multiculturalism became an official governmental policy, it became necessary to understand the beliefs and the customs of new Canadians” (132). These very different nation-state-framed impulses—as seminaries for clergymen and as institutions promoting diversity—meant that, by the 1970s, most universities in Canada housed religious studies departments. This short review aims to engage the primary contributions of the book and consider how Hughes’s work can help us think about its potential futures.

Over eight chapters that take the reader from the discipline’s “Inauspicious Beginnings” pre-Confederation to its “Florescence” in the 1970s, Hughes’s book offers a detailed, well-documented and geographically sensitive overview mainly focused on the constituencies of eleven departments, at McGill University (established in 1949), McMaster University (1960), the University of British Columbia (1964), the Université de Montréal (1969), the Université du Québec à Montréal (1972), the University of Manitoba (1968), the University of Toronto (1969), the University of Alberta (1973), Dalhousie University (1973), the University of Regina (1974), and the University of Saskatchewan (1984). Woven into the chronology are interesting biographies of white men of European origin who were equally influential to the academic study of religion in Canada and to shaping the parameters of the nation state. Hughes describes George Munro Grant, who spent his career at Queen’s University, as Canada’s first “non-theological scholar of religion” (59) and as instrumental in the early Dominion of Canada; in the post-war period, Hughes compares William Aberhart and Tommy Douglas’s contrasting visions of Canada and of religious studies; Hughes then outlines the significant contributions of George P Grant (at McMaster) and Wilfrid Cantwell Smith (at McGill), before describing a scathing debate in the late 1960s between Charles Davis (Concordia) and Donald Wiebe (Brandon/U Toronto) on the parameters of theory and method for religious studies and theology. The book’s index helpfully highlights the contributions of other Anglophone white men of European origin as religious studies pioneers. While surely religious studies’ theological beginnings shaped the homogeneity of its participants, it would have been helpful to learn more about the sociological context that made it possible for only two women, Gertrude Rutherford and Sheila McDonough, and one racialized person, Ismail al-Faruqi, to play roles in Hughes’s account of the early developments of the discipline. A second edition could include reflection by Hughes on the singular make-up of the faculty and students in religious studies in its first century. Surely faculty recruitment that was “obsessed with the Oxbridge [Oxford/Cambridge] model of elite education” (50) had an impact? Is it not the case that these preferences were reflective of a metanarrative of white colonial history? Examination of concurrent gendered and racist Canadian politics could better situate this feature of the discipline’s history. Granted, in his first chapter, Hughes politely explains he does not want to be political [clarifying in an endnote that “my goal is to provide a historical as opposed to a sociopolitical analysis of the material” (179)], but given that scholarship is neither disembodied nor, as premised by the book’s central argument, apolitical, some mention of race and gender in Hughes’s account is warranted.

Chapters Seven and Eight are the heart of this book. Here, Hughes captures a seismic shift from departments where “religion” was tantamount to the seminarian’s Christianity to more comparative, non-Christian and cognate-related studies (especially anthropology and psychology). In the lead-up to this moment, in Chapter Five on “Battle Lines,” Hughes describes how epistemic space was carved out to make the study of (and not solely about) religion possible. For instance, beginning in the 1960s, declarations of religious faith were no longer necessary in most departments. Trends in higher criticism in biblical studies and oriental studies, which introduced historical methodologies that were also skeptical of notions like revelation and prophecy, further promoted the shift. As Hughes argues, “real intellectual battles would have to take place to force the structural changes required for the secular study of religion” (93).

This moment also spurred the material beginnings of academic societies in Canada, including the CSSR (Canadian Society for the Study of Religion) in 1965, the journal Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses (SR) in 1970, and the umbrella organization, the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion (CCSR) a year later. SR tellingly replaced the Canadian Journal of Theology (1955–1970) and sought to highlight scholarship beyond Christian theology. In arguing how the shift impacted the dissemination of Canadian societies and journals in the discipline, Hughes marshals an impressive number of archival materials, effectively engaging their content and political and methodological perspectives. At the same time, Hughes navigates how Canada was changing. Readers unfamiliar with the governmental policies on multiculturalism, bilingualism, and refugees will learn about them here.

While Hughes effectively argues for the seminary to university shift, I see two avenues that could be explored in potential follow-up work in the history of the discipline. First, Hughes omits a significant consideration of how, at their base, Canada’s universities and their departments of religious studies were significant cogs in settler colonialism. That said, to be fair, in his Introduction, Hughes again briefly acknowledges what he calls the “deep-rooted” connections between the creation of these institutions and the “civilizing” of Indigenous peoples (see p. 14). Still, Chapter One opens uncritically with a familiar sweeping and triumphalist narrative of Jean Cabot’s 1534 cross erection in Gaspé. How the theological underpinnings of terra nullius that rationalized this land claim were bolstered by early seminaries requires further exploration. Second, Hughes recognizes that he has not fully contextualized the RS project in Québec, noting that to do so would be “too voluminous or, alternatively, too superficial” (12). This decision, however, means that Hughes has omitted part of the Canadian narrative. Québec’s provincial story in Canada, particularly in relation to multi/interculturalism, diversity and immigration policies, is often a fascinating counterpoint to the rest of Canada’s and central to its national narrative. This reader would like to know how these language-based contexts shape intellectual interaction in the discipline.

In sum, despite these potential avenues for further development, completing Hughes’s book left me hoping for a sequel that would survey a post-1970s study of religion in Canada. This imagined volume would grapple with the influences of feminist, queer studies, and critical race studies on the discipline, as well as the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation report and ongoing settler colonial violences perpetuated in and by institutions like public universities. If, as Hughes argues, religious studies departments reflect nation states’ “specific and unique concerns and anxieties over religion” (174), a second seismic shift for the discipline is, I think, happening. How to respond to this shift is up to all of us—as readers of SR and scholars of religion in Canada. Hughes’s critical history of the field is a good start.