A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920-1970
Catherine Gidney
McGill-Queens University Press
Although Catherine Gidney's fine study of the decline of Protestantism within the Canadian public university finishes well within living memory in 1970, the university she describes seems as alien as that of the 15th century. At the end of a long eclipse is darkness and Christianity has now truly disappeared from Canada's taxpayer-funded universities, leaving little evidence that the light of Christ will shine in their dark halls any time soon. Christianity has been banished from the classroom and the common room; Christian faculty and students are few, marginalized, not infrequently ridiculed and best advised to stay in the closet; and any remaining vestiges such as church-funded chaplaincies are barely tolerated and largely invisible, swallowed up in the massive therapeutic bureaucracy devised by desperate administrators to attract, comfort and console the lost generations who wander aimlessly through for a few years of their young lives.
A Long Eclipse is a meticulously researched and thoughtful account of how liberal Protestants lost the universities over the course of the 20th century. It does not attempt to explain how that loss could have been avoided or whether that forgetful moment in the history of Christianity in Canada contains the seeds of recovery. Rather it chronicles the process and the reasoning of those responsible for the short decline into oblivion. It is a melancholic read about how seemingly good intentions can produce unforeseen and devastating results for the well-intentioned and their descendants. Gidney concludes that it was the very willingness of the majority of presidents and faculty to open up the universities in keeping with the Charter values in Canada — toleration, pluralism, relativism, neutrality, equality — that resulted in the eclipse of Christianity.
To plumb what these men were thinking, Gidney focuses on the culture of the 20th century university rather than on the classroom. Her book complements earlier books by A.B. McKillop (A Disciplined Intelligence and Matters of Mind), which examined the secularization of classroom education over the late 19th and 20th centuries, by studying student life and culture outside the classroom, especially the moral regulation of campus life by administrators and faculty, student clubs, sporting activities and mission activities, as well as religious life on campus in chapels and chaplaincy offices. Anyone who attended university into the early 1970s will recognize the culture. My students today would not. Paradoxically, they might have more in common with students of 15th century Paris, being divided into nations and anxious to master the new learning.
Gidney traces the evolution of the public university over the past century from when it was considered to be a moral community organized by Christian values to when it became a Babel of postmodernity, accommodating all, privileging none, but disowning the few who disagreeably cling to Western Christian cultural values. The marginalization of Christianity began at the top as presidents and faculty concluded that Christianity was best inculculated outside the classroom, which by the late 19th century had been given over to secularism. Deans of residences and chaplains were tasked with ensuring that Christian values prevailed in the residences, at chapel, orientation events, parties, dances and campus clubs. This relegation of Christianity to the margins of university life paralleled the marginalization of scriptural and creedal Christianity by social activists within the Protestant denominations, as the social gospel and its secular twin, socialism, came to be regarded as the sum total of a Christianity, cut adrift from Christ, the giver without end of the gift without end.
Gidney's study shows that it was not until the 1960s that the final eclipse suddenly came, thereby confirming the view of scholars such as Callum Brown (The Death of Christian Britain) that the 1960s were the watershed for Christian predominance in Western societies. Secularization may have been a work in progress from the mid-19th century but only in the 1960s did it become unstoppable or transformable.
Undoubtedly university presidents, faculty and their supporting denominations were largely well intentioned. There is much in our present age for which to be grateful: all persons in Western societies have fuller opportunities to exercise their innate abilities and enjoy full human dignity; rising affluence has eliminated genuine hunger and material need from industrialized societies and promises to do the same soon for industrializing societies worldwide with the troubling exception of Africa; and in polls most people admit to being happy most of the time about their lives. But rising affluence and happiness is the outcome of scientific innovation and commercial exploitation, neither of which have much connection to the universities. There was, therefore, no reason for Christians to abandon the universities to secularism. Contemporary society with its opportunities for all would still have resulted and Christians like all other groups would still have a place where they could enjoy integrity as a community among communities. But this is to stray too far from Gidney's book.
The abandonment of the universities, which were founded and once funded by liberal Protestants in the course of the 20th century, is considered by many of their descendants as an achievement. For a minority of Christians it is a matter for regret and melancholy because there are no major universities in Canada today, with the exception of the recently founded Trinity Western University, where Protestants can enjoy the advantages of a first-class university education within the context of a Christian scholarly community. For some this concept is sectarian and anathema; for others it is part of a vision for future Christian renewal. Liberal Protestants may see A Long Eclipse as an account of a world well lost while classical Protestants may see it as a warning from the past. But the debate about the value of Christian universities in Canada is one we should have soon if our eclipse in our land is not to become permanent.
