In recent years several notable studies—including those by Judith Perkins, Daniel Boyarin, and Elizabeth Castelli—have assessed the importance of martyrdom and suffering in constructions of ancient Christian identity. This essay takes as its starting point the observation by Perkins that in early Christian communities, the threat of suffering (whether real or perceived) worked to create a particular kind of self. In Perkins's view, many ancient Christians came to believe that “to be a Christian was to suffer.” Christian martyr acts, when understood as textual vehicles for the construction of culture and the articulation of Christian identities, emerge as one mechanism by which such selves were constructed. In the pages that follow I will explore how the reading and hearing of narratives about martyrdom constituted an exercise derived from Greek philosophy, adapted to inspire a largely nonliterate audience. This exercise not only trained early Christians to be ready for death and the world to come, but also worked to shape their perceptions of the Christian way of life in this world.

In the 1570s the Mexican Inquisition prosecuted high-profile heresy and piracy cases against John Hawkins and other English and French corsairs. These trials prompted a high alert for Lutheran and Calvinist books as well as vernacular Scripture reaching Mexico. Many of the accused were simply merchants while others were indeed pirates, but their foreign national and linguistic identities placed them in the crosshairs of a larger debate about the transatlantic diffusion and regulation of books and religious ideology. The issue of trade violations by Hawkins and others paled in comparison in the collective Catholic apprehension over the possibility that the newly conquered Mexico could become “infected” by the Lutheran and Calvinist “heretical plagues“—language used commonly by inquisitional and episcopal authorities to refer to the threat of these same sailors. Among the central concerns was the possibility that vernacular translations of the Bible or books by “heresiarchs” like Calvin, Melanchthon, or John Knox would reach Mexico, infiltrate Catholic homes and minds, and result in an ecclesiological disaster in which the unsuspecting faithful succumbed to the duplicitous charms of salvation by faith and the unapproved theological-linguistic renderings of the Gospels and Pauline letters.

Readers of the New Testament could be excused for thinking that there is little consistency in the manner in which miracles are represented in the Gospels. Those events typically identified as miracles are variously described as “signs” (semeia), “wonders” (terata), “mighty works” (dunameis), and, on occasion, simply “works” (erga). The absence of a distinct terminology for the miraculous suggests that the authors of the Gospels were not working with a formal conception of “miracle”—at least not in that Humean sense of a “contravention of the laws of nature,” familiar to modern readers. Neither is there a consistent position on the evidentiary role of these events. In the synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—Jesus performs miracles on account of the faith of his audience. In John's Gospel, however, it is the performance of miracles that elicits faith. Even in the fourth Gospel, moreover, the role of miracles as signs of Christ's divinity is not straightforward. Thus those who demand a miracle are castigated: “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” Finally, signs and wonders do not provide unambiguous evidence of the sanctity of the miracle worker or of the truth of their teachings. Accordingly, the faithful were warned (in the synoptic Gospels at least) that “false Christs and false prophets will rise and show signs and wonders [in order] to deceive.”

By asking “what happened to Christian Canada,” I begin with an assumption that there once was a Christian Canada which is now gone. That assumption is intentional. It is intended to highlight not only the dramatic changes that have taken place in Canadian religious life over the last sixty years, but also substantial contrasts between the religious histories of Canada and the United States, which otherwise are so similar in so many respects. This paper explores the question primarily with American observers in mind, for whom the Canadian past is often as much a shadowy mystery as the great expanse of Canadian geography. But I hope Canadians who read this account may benefit from observing how one sympathetic American views their history and also from realizing that the splendid array of marvelous historical studies that have been produced by a splendid array of marvelous Canadian historians have reached at least some appreciative readers in the United States.

On July 15, 1318, a twenty-six-year-old laywoman named Aude Fauré was called before the Inquisition tribunal at the diocesan seat of Pamiers in southern France and immediately confessed to having temporarily doubted both the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ's body and blood; her doubt, she explained, had been cured by intervention from the Blessed Virgin. Less than a month later, Aude abjured her errors by the usual formula and was sentenced to a series of pilgrimages and fasts stretching over the next three years. Aude's multiple confessions, along with depositions from her family, friends, and neighbors, take up a mere six folio pages in the famously detailed Register kept by Bishop Jacques Fournier, head of the Pamiers tribunal, and preserved in the Vatican Library after Fournier became Pope Benedict XII. This relatively quick-moving and insignificant case seems unrelated to the best-known activity of Fournier's tribunal, namely, the extinction of the last vestiges of Occitan Catharism. Yet Aude's case has gleaned several mentions in recent historiographic works, and these mentions are striking for their focus on the protagonist's psyche: she has been variously diagnosed as hypersensitive, neurotic, masochistic, morbid, hysterical, obsessive, afflicted with atheism, prone to fantasy, tormented by guilt, suffering from postpartum depression, and simply deviant.

Within early modern Christianity the idea of church government always entailed a basic contradiction. How could a spiritual body, devoted to Christ's teachings of love and forgiveness, exercise coercive authority? Given the widely accepted need of any sixteenth- or seventeenth-century government to enforce religiously based codes of behavior, churches and church officials were inevitably involved with the secular authorities in detecting and judging offenders. Inasmuch as such judgment had to include the threat of punishment, church officials of any kind were open to the charge of violating their Christian mission, which by nature was to be persuasive and educative rather than punitive, and also their Christian character, which, even among more radical Protestant sects, was to be more otherworldly than that of the laity.

Reformed churches in early modern Europe gave special prominence to moral discipline and created institutions to oversee public behavior and promote personal sanctification. These moral tribunals—known variously as consistories, kirk sessions, presbyteries, or Kirchenrat—have been of particular interest to social historians, who have found in disciplinary records a rich deposit for understanding popular belief and daily life in the age of Reformations. Today a veritable “cottage industry” (to use Judith Pollman's apt phrase) of specialized studies exists exploring the form and function of reformed discipline throughout sixteenth-century Europe, from Emden to the French Midi, from the Scottish lowlands to Transylvania. Accordingly, perceptions of these disciplinary institutions have changed significantly. Whereas consistories were once often portrayed as repressive agents of social control concerned primarily with punishing misbehavior and promoting a kind of puritan moral austerity, recent scholarship has shown that these disciplinary institutions played an important role in defining confessional boundaries and preserving the sacral unity (and witness) of the eucharistic community. The importance of Calvinist social discipline in the process of confessionalization and state-formation in early modern Europe is now widely acknowledged. At the same time, specialists have gained new awareness of the penitential and pastoral dimensions of reformed discipline. Consistories concerned themselves not simply with supervising and controlling public behavior and belief, but also with educating the unlearned, defending the weak, and mediating interpersonal conflicts. As Robert Kingdon recently commented regarding John Calvin's consistory in Geneva, “Discipline to these early Genevans meant more than social control. It also meant social help.”

As England's public upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century were turning ominous, the antinomian preacher Tobias Crisp set his own stamp upon tempestuous times. Christ Alone Exalted comprises a series of sermons that Crisp delivered, “in or neare London,” in the early 1640s. The collection oozes discontent. Excrescences theological and devotional, Crisp had decided, needed to be removed, for they were imperiling vulnerable souls. Christian truths were now contending with “brethren” too smitten by the “righteousnesse of the Law” to stand in any but an adversarial relationship with “the free grace of God which is by faith.” Crisp offered a reparative blade. He repaired by cutting and thrusting, and in so doing sought to make amends for a host of puritan horrors. And for all the quietism that informed his alternative covenantal vision, Crisp did not operate softly. He had targets in his sights; he would dislodge from its place of security in the hearts and minds of the brethren a world of religious thought and action. The seethingly indignant responses of his critics testify to the bang with which Crisp had arrived. Crisp delivered a combustible mix of acrid polemic and nonconforming theology. He let it be known that an overly legalized soteriology had precipitated a pandemic of religious troubles; a desiccated, formulaic piety was smothering the spiritual life out of the gospel message. In short, Crisp was issuing a vigorous challenge to the legitimacy of a pietistic tradition that was overly elaborated and destructive of souls.

In the historiography of English and American Baptist movements there is no more familiar convention than this: Baptists early and late championed freedom of the religious conscience, rejected the use of force in spiritual affairs, and, either expressly or by implication, accepted the corollary of religious pluralism. With few exceptions, modern scholars have either assumed or implied by the logic of their arguments that the historic Baptist commitment to religious liberty was not only strong but categoric. By implication also, it did not evolve but arose full blown in the initial Anglo-American Baptist insurgency itself in the seventeenth century. To take one example: in a chapter-length treatment of the “struggle for religious liberty,” a currently authoritative history of American Baptists affirms that colonial Baptists “led other dissenters in championing the cause of religious liberty” and the separation of church and state. Then as later, the advocacy of freedom “for persons of all faiths—or no faith” was their “genius.“ Genius—here is the key claim. Liberty of religious choice and practice is joined to conversion or adult baptism as a principle of the faith both original and definitive. Baptist intoleration in any form becomes a virtual oxymoron.

History demonstrates that the calendar is a tool of far more significance than simply a means to organize units of time. For Roman high priests prior to the reign of Julius Caesar, the calendar was a tool of power, symbolizing political supremacy over society through the manipulation of time at will. Under Pope Gregory XIII, the calendar was a symbol of papal responsibility to ensure the proper worship of the Catholic Church. In the case of European Protestants, the Julian calendar was a symbol of religious identity and protest against Catholic domination. Likewise, within revolutionary France, the Calendrier Républicain symbolized the rejection of the Ancien Régime and Catholicism. These few examples are an indication that throughout history in various times and places calendars have proven to represent more to humanity than mere time reckoning methods. Consequently, one may approach the study of the calendar as a means to grasp cultural and religious identity within specific regional contexts.

Late Tudor London comes alive when Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed biography of William Shakespeare, shadowing its subject, takes to the streets. “The unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling … crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and theaters and churches,” Greenblatt suggests, is a “key to the whole spectacle” of crowds in the playwright's histories and tragedies. To be sure, his little excursions in London left their mark on his scripts, yet he scrupulously sifted his literary sources from which he drew characters and crises onto the stage. He prowled around Plutarch and read Stow and Hollinshed on the wars of succession he chronicled. Nonetheless, “the sight of all those people—along with the noise, the smell of their breath, and their rowdiness and potential for violence—seems,” Greenblatt says, “to have been Shakespeare's first and most enduring impression of the city” in the 1580s and to have been the inspiration for the “greasy aprons” and “gross diets” of “tag-rag people” or rabble in his plays. There, onstage, the glory that was Rome and the grit of fifteenth-century England were “suffused less with the otherness of the past than with the familiar coordinates of Shakespeare's own present.” And familiarity bred contempt for “the sweaty multitude.” “All those people” were terribly, dangerously unpredictable or, as with Jack Cade's crowd in the second part of Henry VI, just plain dangerous. Cade stirred his prole followers to kill the city's more cultured citizens. Sinisterly self-interested tribunes—or so they may have seemed to some playgoers—swayed the crowd in Coriolanus against the play's protagonist, Rome's most noble soldier. And commoners could be “lightly blown to and fro.”

Despite the continuing “discovery of southern religious history” and the growing scholarly fascination with southern intellectual and cultural history, historians of the South have devoted all too little attention to the origins of southern evangelicalism in the colonial period. Over the past thirty years or so, they have generally tended to follow the lead of Samuel S. Hill, Jr., arguably the single most important and influential southern religious historian, who concluded in an interpretive survey article that “the history of religion in the South before it was the South … is, in all candor, not very impressive.” In his pioneering Religion in the Old South, for instance, Donald G. Mathews paid but scant attention to the origins of popular Protestantism in the South during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. What is more, he focused almost exclusively on colonial Virginia.

Healing—whether via medical or miraculous means—has increasingly caught the attention of scholars of North American Protestantism within the past decade. Recent studies have convincingly argued that healing was at the heart of Protestant identity, especially in turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States and Canada. Loosely defined as the restoring of physical or emotional well-being with recourse to medical, symbolic, or religious means, healing is often distinguished from curing as a therapeutic approach with more “ho-listic” goals than the cessation of particular physical ailments. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century groups known for their commitment to divine healing and their antipathy to biomedicine, such as Christian Scientists and Pentecostals, are readily fit within this paradigm of healing, but so too are groups often thought to have disparaged faith healing in their embrace of biomedicine, such as mainstream Anglo-Protestants. Through foreign and domestic medical missions, establishing hospitals and medical schools, and initiating deaconess orders, mainstream Protestant groups, including Anglicans and Methodists, made healing central to their public identity and daily practice. In the process, they faced the tricky negotiation of embracing epistemologies of scientific medicine without surrendering their own theologies of God's omnipotent love, all the while living in an increasingly “therapeutic culture.” Complicating their task was their persistent encounter with different, often competing versions of religious healing, whether in the encounter with natives in colonial missions or in the challenge of rival therapeutic theologies such as those of Christian Science. Making their way through this era of increasing medicalization (and increasing contestation of medicalization), mainstream Protestants developed a strain of Christian healing that was unabashedly medicalized and modern, and they testified to its power in print and in practice.

In the several decades after their arrival in the New England states in the late 1780s, Methodists were the objects of a wide variety of attacks, some of them mutually contradictory. Their preachers were accused of being pickpockets, horse thieves, and sexual predators, while on the other hand some converts were mocked for their excessive moral seriousness. They were suspected alternatively of being agents of the English crown, spies for the French government, and Jeffersonian radicals. Further, to some it seemed that their episcopal form of government and ecclesiastical tribunals functioned as a sort of shadow government undermining the political institutions of the nation. They were attacked for their Arminian theology, in defense of which they vigorously condemned Calvinist doctrine. They were mocked as enthusiasts and fanatics whose preachers, pretending to an immediate divine calling, inflamed the passions of their listeners and whose gatherings degenerated into bedlams of disorder, confusion, and moral scandal. They were disturbers of churches, transgressing parochial boundaries, sowing disorder, and fracturing the covenant relationship between minister and flock, all of which recalled memories of the upheaval accompanying the awakenings of the 1740s. They were unlearned rustics not fit to instruct people in divinity, but they were also sly enough to worm their way into the hearts and minds of people by shrewdly hiding their true intentions and prejudicing their hearers against the standing ministers.

In 1921, William Norton of the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago pushed, pulled, and dragged his Model T along the back roads of the southern Appalachians. He visited churches, schools, and private homes, talking with anyone and everyone he could find. His question was always the same: “Do you have enough Bibles?” The answers he received shocked him. As far as Norton could tell, many of the “mountaineers” were nominally Christian, but they had often never seen a Bible, much less read one of their own. As the head of the Moody Bible Institute's Bible Institute Colportage Association, he immediately put together a plan. “To reach these people quickly,” he wrote in his report, “I am convinced that it can be done most efficiently … through the public schools.… A great majority of the teachers are ready to cooperate.”

The decades between 1850 and 1930 saw traditional understandings of Christianity subjected to rigorous social, intellectual, and theological criticism across the transatlantic world. Unprecedented urban and industrial expansion drew attention to the shortcomings of established models of church organization while traditional Christian beliefs concerning human origins and the authority of Scripture were assailed by new approaches to science and biblical higher criticism. In contradistinction to lower or textual criticism, higher criticism dealt with the development of the biblical text in broad terms. According to James Strahan, professor of Hebrew at Magee College, Derry, from 1915 to 1926, textual criticism aimed “at ascertaining the genuine text and meaning of an author” while higher “or historical, criticism seeks to answer a series of questions affecting the composition, editing and collection of the Sacred Books.” During the nineteenth century, the controversy over the use of higher critical methods focused for the most part upon the Old Testament. In particular, critics dismissed the Mosaic authorship and unity of the Pentateuch, arguing that it was the compilation of a number of early documentary fragments brought together by priests after the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century B.C. This “documentary hypothesis” is most often associated with the German scholar, Julius Wellhausen. Indeed, higher criticism had been fostered in the extensive university system of the various German states, which encouraged original research and the emergence of a professional intellectual elite. It reflected the desire of liberal theologians to adapt the Christian faith to the needs and values of modern culture, particularly natural science and history.

Scholarship on early-twentieth-century American Protestant modernism appears to have arrived at an impasse. Although scholars continue to explore the biographical contours of modernist individuals, and theologians still review the capacity of modernist theologies, the body of analytical scholarship on the “modernist impulse” has failed to keep apace with the glut of materials addressing its fraternal twin, fundamentalism. Published in 1976, William Hutchison's The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism remains the last significant historical commentary on the cultural and intellectual dynamics of Protestant modernism. In that masterful exegesis, Hutchison supplied the classic definition of this impulse, arguing that despite the diversity of its participants and complexity of their thought, the modernist movement in America could be accurately summarized as a shared commitment to cultural adaptation, God's immanent role in human development, and a postmillennial progressivism. While this tripartite formulation still provides the authoritative elucidation of early-twentieth-century Protestant thought, a reappraisal of the modernist canon reveals that Christian liberals not only were invested in theological overhaul and intellectual malleability, but also persistently specified an elaborate methodological structure for belief. In works such as Minot Savage's Jesus and Modern Life (1898), Margaret Benson's The Venture of Rational Faith (1908), Douglas Clyde Macintosh's Theology as an Empirical Science (1919), J. Macbride Sterrett's Modernism in Religion (1922), and Henry Nelson Wieman's The Wrestle of Religion with Truth (1927), seminarians and ministers offered detailed descriptions of how Protestants should think in the modern era. These were not expansive tracts bent on exploring the fluid boundaries of faith in a plural culture; rather, these were precise, pointed exhortations on the virtue of scrupulous historical research, scriptural comparison, and relentless self-examination. Rather than continue to translate Protestant modernism as cultural acquiescence and enthusiastic historicism, this essay suggests that a recalibrated portrait of this movement is needed.

In June 1924, Christian Neff, president of the Conference of South German Mennonites, sent an invitation to “all of the major Mennonite bodies around the world,” to participate in a world conference that would commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first Anabaptist rebaptisms. The meeting was to be held in Basel and Zurich, Switzerland. Whether or not the one hundred or so attendees at the June 1925 conference thought of themselves as pilgrims, the combination of the date and the locations defined this gathering in a way that at least subconsciously reflected the idea of pilgrimage. As both early and contemporary Christians have been fascinated with and have desired to visit places associated with biblical characters, and especially with Jesus, descendants of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists who planned the 1925 gathering were clearly reflecting on the importance of place to their faith. If they had not, they could have held the meeting solely in Basel, which met their need for a centrally located and easily accessible city to European Mennonites. Instead, they added Zurich, the place of the first Anabaptist rebaptisms in January 1525 and one of the earliest sites of Anabaptist martyrdom, to their meeting schedule.