This course will explore the history of Christianity in Canada and the United States in parallel. It will explore such key topics as secularization (or “dechristianization”), American fundamentalism, Church Union in Canada, and Truth and Reconciliation. In addition, the course will feature a few recurring “big ideas.”
1. Sometimes, Christianity develops the way it does in particular contexts because of the solutions that churches find for the particular cultural problems they are responding to—not always exclusively because of what can be abstracted from a “pure” ideal of what Christianity is in its essential nature.
2. Church decline should not automatically be seen as an inevitable, gradual process. Church attendance even improved in the years following 1945, only to sharply decline in the 1960s. What can we do with this knowledge?
3. The way our society is structured and how our political debates play out TODAY in Western society can be explained, at least in part, by the trajectory of modern Church History
Prerequisites: None