British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest rate of unbelief or religious indifference in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches explores the historical roots of this phenomenon from the 1880s to the First World War. Lynne Marks reveals that class and racial tensions fuelled irreligion in a world populated by embattled ministers, militant atheists, turn-of-the-century New Agers, rough-living miners, Asian immigrants, and church-going settler women. White, working-class men often arrived in the province alone and identified the church with their exploitative employers. At the same time, BC’s anti-Asian and anti-Indigenous racism meant that their “whiteness” alone could define them as respectable, without the need for church affiliation. Consequently, although Christianity retained major social power elsewhere, many people in BC found the freedom to forgo church attendance or espouse atheist views. This nuanced study of mobility, gender, masculinity, and family in settler BC offers new insights into BC’s distinctive culture and into the beginnings of what has become an increasingly dominant secular worldview across Canada.

British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest rate of unbelief or religious indifference in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches explores the historical roots of this phenomenon. Lynne Marks reveals that class and racial tensions fuelled irreligion in frontier BC, a world populated by embattled ministers, militant atheists, turn-of-the-century New Agers, rough-living miners, Asian immigrants, and church-going settlers. This nuanced study of mobility, masculinity, and family in settler BC offers new insights into the beginnings of what has become an increasingly dominant secular worldview across Canada.

Why do some strategies for critique of religion seem to be more beneficial for constructive engagement, whereas others increase intolerance, polarization, and conflict? Through an analysis of the reasons underpinning a critique of religion in institutional contexts of secular democratic societies, A Constructive Critique of Religion explores how constructive interaction and critique can be developed across diverse interests. It shows how social and cultural conditions shaping these institutions enable and structure a critical and constructive engagement across diverging worldviews. A key argument running through the book is that to develop constructive forms of critique a more thorough and systematic investigation of resources for criticism located within religious worldviews themselves is needed. Chapters also address how critique of Islam and Christianity in particular is expressed in areas such as academia, the law, politics, media, education and parenting, with a focus on Northern Europe and North America. The interdisciplinary approach, which combines theoretical perspectives with empirical case studies, contributes to advancing studies of the complex and contentious character of religion in contemporary society.

The Cascadia bioregion – British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon – has long been at the forefront of cultural shifts occurring throughout North America, in particular regarding religious institutions, ideas, and practices. Religion at the Edge explores the rise of religious “nones,” the decline of mainstream Christian denominations, spiritual and environmental innovation, increasing religious pluralism, and the growth of smaller, more traditional faith groups in Cascadia. This volume is the first research-driven book to address religion, spirituality, and irreligion in the Pacific Northwest, past and present. Employing surveys, archival sources, interviews, and focus groups, contributors showcase a spectrum of adherents from Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Baha’i, New Age, Indigenous, and irreligious communities. Religion at the Edge expands our understanding of contemporary society, pursuing empirical and theoretical debates about the nature, scale, and implications of socio-religious changes in North America, and the relevance of regionalism to that discussion.

This book is the seventh and final volume in the Global Story of Christianity series. The volume’s chapters, written by major scholars in the field, spotlight vital episodes and themes for understanding the historical development of Christianity in the United States and Canada. Serving as an accessible text for students and an informative volume for scholars, the book provides new insights into Christianity’s development in North America, offering fresh perspectives on topics frequently overlooked by scholars. The book situates the history of North American Christianity within broader themes associated with Christianity’s role as a global religion.

A Liberal-Labour Lady restores British Columbia’s first female MLA and the British Empire’s first female cabinet minister to history. An imperial settler, liberal-labour activist, and mainstream suffragist, Mary Ellen Smith (1863–1933) demanded a fair deal for “deserving” British women and men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in England in 1863, the daughter and wife of miners, she emigrated to Nanaimo, BC, in 1892. As she became a well-known suffragist and her husband Ralph won provincial and federal elections, the power couple strove to shift Liberal parties leftward to benefit women and workers, while still embracing global assumptions of British racial superiority and bourgeois feminism’s privileging of white women. Ralph’s 1917 death launched Mary Ellen as a candidate in a tumultuous 1918 Vancouver by-election. In the BC legislature until 1928, Smith campaigned for better wages, pensions, and greater justice, even as she endorsed anti-Asian, settler, and pro-eugenic policies. Simultaneously intrepid and flawed, Mary Ellen Smith is revealed to be a key figure in early Canada’s compromised struggle for greater justice.

Compares secular attitudes characterizing “religious nones” in the United States and Canada Almost a quarter of American and Canadian adults are nonreligious, while teens and young adults are even less likely to identify religiously. None of the Above explores the growing phenomenon of “religious nones” in North America. Who are the religious nones? Why, and where, is this population growing? While there has been increased attention on secularism in both Europe and the United States, little work to date has focused on Canada. Joel Thiessen and Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme turn to survey and interview data to explore how a nonreligious identity impacts a variety of aspects of daily life in the US and Canada in sometimes similar and sometimes different ways, offering insights to illuminate societal and political trends. With numbers of nonreligious people even higher in Canada than in the US, some believe that secular currents to the north foreshadow what will happen in the US. None of the Above asserts that a growing divide between religious and nonreligious populations could engender a greater distance in moral and political values and behaviors. At once provocative and insightful, this book tackles questions of coexistence, religious tolerance, and spirituality, as American and Canadian society accelerate toward a more secular future.

British Columbia is often overlooked in the national story of women’s struggle for political equality. This book rights that wrong. A Great Revolutionary Wave follows the propaganda campaigns undertaken by suffrage organizations and traces the role of working-class women in the fight for political equality. It demonstrates the connections between provincial and British suffragists, and examines how racial exclusion and Indigenous dispossession shaped arguments and tactics for enfranchisement. Lara Campbell rethinks the complex legacy of suffrage and traces the successes and limitations of women’s historical fight for political equality. That legacy remains relevant today as Canadians continue to grapple with the meaning of justice, inclusion, and equality.

"With essays that cover the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this volume presents a collective portrait of change over time that allows us to view the shifting nature of Jewish identity in the U.S. West, as well as the evolving frameworks for racial construction"--

The two-volume Cambridge History of Atheism offers an authoritative and up to date account of a subject of contemporary interest. Comprised of sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this History is comprehensive in scope. The essays are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including religious studies, philosophy, sociology, and classics. Offering a global overview of the subject, from antiquity to the present, the volumes examine the phenomenon of unbelief in the context of Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish societies. They explore atheism and the early modern Scientific Revolution, as well as the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and its continuing implications. The History also includes general survey essays on the impact of scepticism, agnosticism and atheism, as well as contemporary assessments of thinking. Providing essential information on the nature and history of atheism, The Cambridge History of Atheism will be indispensable for both scholarship and teaching, at all levels.