Canadians seem to have forgotten that multiculturalism didn’t begin with Pierre Trudeau. He extended policies begun by Lester B. Pearson and opened wide the immigration doors to non-Europeans like myself (I arrived in Canada from Pakistan in 1971). The heavy infusion of pigment into the Canadian cultural landscape has forced our nation to look at ethnicity and culture in significantly different ways. It has forced us to give it names — multiculturalism being the most benign; postmodernism, the most baffling — and to create public policies and funding streams. But a century ago, when Canadian multiculturalism was often a matter of white on white, of determining the not-so-subtle differences between Finns and Scots, for example, this country was rife with racial prejudice, cultural strife and the battle for identity.
Those are also known in the world of church as “the good old days;” before our identities got confused and we had to share space with folks (like me) who do not share primary cultural assumptions. So, it is only fitting to challenge the ethnic and cultural identities within the Presbyterian Church.
Rev. Dr. Stuart Macdonald, professor of church and society at Knox College, Toronto, is an affable fellow. His once bright red hair that spoke of his Scottish heritage is fading to a more neutral colour. One look at him and it would be hard to believe him a subversive, but through his research (published in a chapter in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, University of Toronto Press) he turns upside down the imagined identity of the Presbyterian Church. “The origins of [the PCC] were largely American. [They] brought a particular kind of evangelical and revivalistic faith to these areas …” Next came a wave of Scots — but, Macdonald cautions the reader to not be too general in using that phrase: “Most Scottish Presbyterian immigrants to British North America were Lowlanders, people who came from the more fertile southern regions of north Britain … Lowland immigration is often overshadowed by the emigration of Highland Scots, perhaps because Lowlanders were more similar in language and culture to English an American immigrants.”
They didn’t always get along, these Lowlanders and Highlanders. Macdonald quotes a prominent secessionist minister, Rev. William Proudfoot: “These ignorant Highlanders are a hindrance to improvement wherever they go — about them there is an obstinancy which nothing can move and then the Gaelic — alas for the Gaelic!” While these two groups wrangled with each other, Macdonald notes another important body of islanders that travelled to the new world. “The Irish, largely (though not exclusively) from Northern Ireland, comprised a significant group, establishing congregations. … In Kingston, Ont., there was an Irish Presbyterian church alongside two ethnically Scottish churches, and Cooke’s church in Toronto was also an ethnically Irish church.” The pattern of ethnic separation is set early, based as much on the comfort of the incoming immigrants as it is on the prejudice of those already in Canada. The church, then, inadvertently becomes the house of ethnic identity.
As it turns out, the Highland Scots win the battle for identity within the burgeoning church. And even though by the early 1960s most Presbyterians are born in Canada, in the long tradition of immigration, subsequent generations invent new traditions to assert their heritage. “These celebrations would include Robbie Burns suppers, Tartan Sundays, and the celebration of ‘Kirkin of the Tartans,'” writes Macdonald. The last of these was the invention of the Scottish-American minister Peter Marshall during the Second World War. It is a curious mixture of tribal colours (known as tartans), bagpipes, God Save the Queen, tartan covered Bibles and the national anthem.
With this subsequent assertion of the Scots identity, other ethnicities — Dutch, American Revivalist, Northern Irish, Korean, French, Hungarian — that contributed to the Presbyterian Church get squeezed out, even though some of them had tens of thousands of members. They either formed their own denominations or isolated congregations within this denomination. And while many of those congregations have today a proud legacy for their members and families, they have existed alone — one might go so far as to say lonely — within the Presbyterian Church in Canada.This is a quick history of this denomination’s ethnic identity, which casts a long shadow through to today.
Rev. In Kee Kim was a reluctant convert to the Han-Ca presbyteries; but once converted he led the charge in the mid-1990s to have two Korean-speaking presbyteries initiated within the polity and structure of the Presbyterian Church. Kim, who is minister at St. Timothy, Toronto — which is one of the larger congregations in the denomination and is profiled in Macdonald’s chapter — was born in Korea. As an immigrant and as a minister, he wanted very much to find a balance between his birth and his adopted culture. But he came to believe that Korean Presbyterians could secure their voice only by having a separate-but-equal structure within the denomination. It was a matter of self-preservation.
By the mid-1980s, Koreans were the largest visible minority within the Presbyterian Church. Though the first Korean-speaking church within the denomination had been established in 1965, there was heavy immigration of Koreans to Canada a decade later. By 1999, there were about 250 Korean-speaking congregations in Canada; but only a fifth of them were linked to an established denomination. The rest were largely independent. As Kim explained in an article in the May 2009 Record, the largest Protestant denomination in Korea is Presbyterian, within which category are many other denominations. The largest Presbyterian church in the world is in Seoul.
But despite their numbers, the Koreans weren’t seen to have a voice within the church. (This is what led Kim and others to lead the charge for the Han-Ca presbyteries.) Some would call this racism. I call it institutional indolence. It’s not that the church doesn’t want to be inclusive and it’s not as if the church doesn’t know what the right thing is to do; it’s just that the church doesn’t know how to go about being inclusive, given the established structure, the traditional shorthands, the smug tribalism, the comfortable pews. In other words, it is not a matter of racism — an active hatred — but of laziness, a comfort in doing things the way things have always been done. (This theme of tradition versus change was the deferentially muted clarion call of Rev. Cheol Soon Park, moderator of the 2008 General Assembly. His pastoral voice was likely the first contact many Presbyterians have had with the Koreans in their midst.)
And if the very large Korean population within the denomination cannot crack the well established, traditional Highlander identity, what hope do the other ethnic cultures have? The answer is self-evident. I witness this every month as managing editor of this publication. In my five and a half years here, we have never received a People and Places or other submission from the Ghanaian churches in Toronto and Montreal, both of which are amongst the largest churches in the denomination. I don’t mean to pick on the Ghanaians — I could easily choose the Chinese, the Koreans, the Hungarians, and many others. I sense they do not feel a sense of ownership within the church. That is, they think of themselves mostly as ethnic congregations and not as full members of the Presbyterian Church in Canada.
Conversely, there are congregations which send us submissions because their choir got new robes — they feel such a strong sense of ownership within the denomination that they want to share every bit of congregational news. That’s great; since this publication is a monitor of the denominational voice, the more engagement the better. But there are some deafening silences within the national choir. And only by listening for those silences can we identify the missing voices: they are mostly the ethnic congregations, but they also include our rural and western members and our more evangelical churches.
The barrier to greater involvement and engagement seems to be a perceived identity — Highland Scots. But, Macdonald argues that the Presbyterian Church is ethnically Canadian. He further argues that identity is constructed. It is a self-creation. Let me take his points a bit further: to be an ethnic Canadian, that is, somebody born in Canada, is to choose one’s own identity. Identity in the Canadian context is a totally malleable thing; this is Postmodernist Studies 101. My face may hint at my Pakistani birth, but Pakistan was a construct less than 15 years old when I was born. I haven’t lived there in 40 years, I barely speak any of the native languages, I don’t know the slang, and I don’t know the hidden cultural references, those subtle markers and shortcuts by which people live and negotiate daily activity. I am a Canadian — I speak the language of this country. And within that context, I am a Canadian Presbyterian.
But even though I have been a member of the PCC since I arrived in Canada, even though I have been an elder of the church for about a quarter century, even though I went to church camps in my youth (Stuart Macdonald was my counselor), even though I have worked for the church at various stages in my life, even though I have a fairly prominent position within the church today and even though I speak with an authoritative voice of “Our Church,” I don’t feel — I emphasize that word — wholly comfortable. I am willing to admit the problem may be of my perception. But I had a very curious experience two years ago this month when I was at a weekend conference at Crieff Hills, outside of Guelph, Ont., of “ethnic and racial minority Presbyterians.” I felt I belonged. I belonged in that room of ethnically diverse people — people like me.
With nary a hint of a Highlander, with only active ethnic elders and members from across Canada, there was a freedom of conversation and recognition felt by all the participants. We all belonged there; we weren’t poaching on somebody else’s turf, ingratiating ourselves into somebody else’s church. It was a very strange and powerful sensation; and by the end of the first day we all wanted to rush straight from the meeting space to the nearest General Assembly and declare in one loud voice that we were tired of feeling like second-rate citizens within the Presbyterian Church in Canada.
This should have come as no surprise, and for two reasons. This was the first time for all of us to be in the midst of such a gathering of the like-pigmented. And secondly, Rev. Paulette Brown gave the keynote address the first night. She can do that to people.
I first met Paulette about 15 years ago when I profiled her for a CBC radio broadcast. (It can still be found on the CBC website.) She has since become my congregational minister at Gateway Community Church, Toronto. Then she was minister at a Presbyterian church in the notorious Jane-Finch neighbourhood in Toronto. Jamaican by birth, she had studied economics and Spanish in university and found her calling several years after arriving in Canada. She went to Knox College in the 1980s and found it a strange and unwelcoming environment. She recently told me that at the end of a week of school she needed to speak in her heaviest patois to a friend back in Jamaica. That is, after a week of feeling extremely estranged, she needed to touch base with her birthroots. (By many accounts our colleges have learned from the experiences of Paulette Brown and others.)
Similar stories were told at the Crieff Hills retreat, feeling as if there was an active collusion to dissuade pigmented folk from participating in the church. “No meaningful changes can be made without dealing with the structures,” Brown told the gathering on Friday night. “We must focus on where the power is concentrated in our church, who sits at the table of power and authority, influencing how decisions concerning the overall ministry of the church are interpreted and implemented. We must ask whether there are spaces at these tables that reflect the true diversity of the church’s racial and ethnic makeup. We must raise questions about ways in which we can support the church in hammering out its journey with God within the context of the general ‘culture of sameness’ that characterizes its executive offices and its educational institutions.”
Powerful stuff, and it rang loud bells for action within every faithful, lonely, Presbyterian heart in the room. No wonder we were riled up for action that night. There were excellent workshops the next day, but Brown’s words still rang inside of us. By Saturday night we were calmer in our mood and tone — what is this general culture of sameness? It is amorphous. Like the wind, we feel it but we can’t touch it. We don’t know where to apply pressure to push it away, to overturn it. What exactly were we asking for?
After reading an earlier draft of this article, Macdonald wrote this to me: “I think in recent years some Canadians have been very glad to have the Scots ethnicity so prominent, because we can then blame the failings of the denomination and its fate on them. We are a Canadian denomination. But, if we’re not doing too well it’s easy to blame that failure on one ethnicity or the fact that we’re tied too closely to them. So, if I had any solution I wanted to offer it would be this — recognize that we are a Canadian denomination and give fair space to the multiplicity of the denomination.”
The Presbyterian Church in Canada today is no more really Scottish than it ever was. It is, as always, an ethnically diverse denomination; but with a patina of Highlander. And that’s all it is, or ever has been. A thin layer of manufactured identity that can easily be reconstructed, redrawn, but hasn’t always been. It all comes back to the comfort zones, the traditions, the status quo. This theme reverberates through the denomination, as recent articles in this magazine have shown — from issues of depression or rural ministry, the barrier seems to be neither theology nor polity but that our very traditions have become ossified. We’ve lost their meaning and we seem incapable for a variety of reasons to refresh them for our times.
And my former camp counselor is correct — demonizing Scots is a form of reverse-racism. It’s too easy; and worse, it doesn’t work. Let them be proud of their heritage; and they have much to be proud of having, according to one account, invented the modern world. (Perhaps we need to import the Presbyterians who invented the postmodern world.) There is plenty of room for a multiplicity of cultural and ethnic traditions to be celebrated.
But it seems to me that ethnicity is the wrong brand for a denomination or a congregation. In feeling usurped or rejected, many feel compelled to preserve their heritage and we the church have let them do so as long as they pay their membership dues. But isn’t an honest desire to walk with Christ meant to be the cost of membership, instead of skin colour and the ability to roll R’s? It’s a naïve question and I’ll leave it at that.
Naivety aside, our ethnicities do matter. They are important, as is our faith. The two become conflated; and we call that tradition. So, what can we do? Many things. I think everybody should make an effort, at least once every two years, to go to an ethnic worship near you. If it happens to be Presbyterian, so much the better. My favourite is the Ghanaian: it’s the same liturgy, in English, but by the time most of us are rushing to our cars to leave the church grounds, the Ghanaians haven’t even finished the lectionary readings. The worship is over three hours long, feels shorter than most worship experiences and is absolutely energizing. Experience their joy in being at church and with each other; experience their hospitality, the way you are greeted half a dozen times by the time you get to a pew; learn of another way of experiencing God. Make certain to join the line of dancers during the offertory. You may not feel comfortable doing that the first few times you go, but once you’ve done it, you’ll be undone forever.
Go to a Korean worship. You may find its tone closer to your own comfort zone and there are many services in English. Listen closely to the voice of God speaking to you through that community. There are Presbyterians worshipping in many different languages, from many different ethnic traditions, within a driving distance from your church. Go join them in worship. Just do that and you will be transformed. Once that happens to you, the rest will follow.
Look at who is sitting beside you in your own pews. They are the new pioneers, like your ancestors, hewing their futures by working below their expectations and education just to make ends meet. They need you to be a part of their family, to know that somebody in this strange new country is praying with them. They are also amongst the estimated 75 million Reformed Christians worldwide — they have come from an exciting if different Presbyterian culture. When they are comfortable enough (your friendship will help), ask them to bring their traditions to worship. We all have as much to learn as we have to teach. Both roles are equally important.
One of the most memorable experiences for me was at the 2008 assembly when Rev. Cheol Soon Park, as moderator, spoke about healing and reconciliation to a few native representatives. On the one hand he was the titular leader of the offending institution. On the other, as a Korean, he personally identified with the legacy of pain and suffering because of what his ancestors had suffered a century earlier. And in that moment the identity of the Presbyterian Church in Canada was Korean, and aboriginal, and we were powerfully jerked out of our comfort zones into a new potential. It can happen again if we will it so.
