This image of Canon Fred Scott appeared in his 1922 book, The Great War as I Saw it. This post will focus strictly on religious doubt, with the goal of offering insight into this broader question. Of course, Vance has not had the last word the debate around the existence or non-existence of a “lost generation” in Canada is complex and ongoing. Instead, he writes, they constructed a mythology of righteous valour and Christ-like self-sacrifice to justify their suffering and the deaths of their loved ones. In his study of the war’s impact on Canadian culture, Death So Noble, Jonathan Vance argued that most Canadians refused to accept a cynical interpretation of the war.
The situation in Canada, however, is a little more ambiguous. The idea of a “lost generation” of disillusioned Anglo-American vets is a widely accepted one.
Books such as Paul Fussell’s widely influential The Great War and Modern Memory portray the war as the origins of modern skepticism and cynicism. Leaving Christianity documents the true extent of the decline, the timing of it, and the possible reasons for this major cultural shift.Did the horrors of the Great War cause Canadian soldiers to lose their faith? Or is it true that there were no atheists in the trenches? The war has generally been seen as a powerfully disillusioning experience. Canada's civil society has historically depended on church members for support, and a massive drift away from churches has profound implications for its future. While the old mainstream Protestant churches are the hardest hit, the Roman Catholic Church has also experienced a significant decline in numbers, especially in Quebec. Drawing on a wide array of national and denomination statistics, they illustrate how the exodus that began with disaffected baby boomers and their parents has become so widespread that religiously unaffiliated Canadians are now the new majority. What happened? In Leaving Christianity, Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald quantitatively map the nature and extent of Canadians' disengagement with organized religion and assess the implications for Canadian society and its religious institutions. During the post-war boom of the 1950s, Canadian churches were vibrant institutions, with attendance rates even higher than in the United States, but the following decade witnessed emptying pews.
|a "Why Canadians started to walk away from organized Christianity in the 1960s and how that defection became an exodus. |a Electronic access restricted to Villanova University patrons. |a What happened to Canada's mainstream Protestant denominations? - Other Protestant denominations - Canada's Roman Catholics - No religion : the growth among the disaffiliated and the unaffiliated - Major trends : why the 1960s mattered - Quo vadis Canada? |a Includes bibliographical references and index.
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