From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada by Aaron W. Hughes (review)

Reviewed by: From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada by Aaron W. Hughes Ryan N. S. Topping From Seminary to University: An Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada. By Aaron W. Hughes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2020. Pp. xiii, 231. $71CAD ISBN: 978-1-48-750497-7.) How did Canada's English-speaking seminaries transmute into secular universities? Two groups of readers will benefit from this "overarching history" (11): those interested in the institutional history of higher education in Canada and those concerned with the future of theological and religious instruction. Due to the overwhelming influence of American culture, truly, Canadians too often "mistake events in American history for their own" (ix). In this respect, Hughes's detailed study of Canadian institutional life provides—even where one might take issue with specific interpretations—a genuine service. His account of the Anglican bishop John Strachan's (1778–1867) role in early educational debates is helpful, as is his preview of select legislative acts (such as the Hincks Act of 1887) and collegiate statutes in eastern Canada; his narration of the inter-Protestant debates that helped give rise to the University of Toronto's structure is illuminating, as is his attention to the economic contexts and religious compromises that led to the federated status of Catholic and Protestant institutions within Western Canada's founding provincial universities. While limited attention is paid to the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century intellectual origins of the so-called wissenschaftliche (scientific) study of religion, this is very much a material history of Canadian institutions which aims to offer readers "the data" for this past, the inferences of which may be taken, he hopes, in a variety of ways (13). Hughes' thesis is that Canada's institutional evolution occurred chiefly because of "numerous extra-academic" developments (12). Of these non-intellectual causes he singles out four: (1) the early "secularization" of public education after Confederation in 1867, which culminated in the movement away from Oxbridge style early Canadian colleges (e.g. Kings, Halifax) toward the non-confessional University of Toronto; (2) the 1925 union of the United Church of Canada, an "ecclesial" event that encouraged the ecumenical, non-denominational approach to theological study everywhere within Protestant, and eventually, within professedly-secular institutions; (3) the adoption of multiculturalism as a matter of Federal policy in 1971, which promoted interest in and publicly funded advocacy for non-Judeo-Christian religions; and (4) the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982— important chiefly because it enshrined multiculturalism at the highest level of law. While there is a great deal to praise in this synthetic account, Hughes overlooks some important details of (English-speaking) Canadian institutional life and occasionally steps beyond his own stated methodological limits. Though he promises to prescind from a "teleological" account, and even claims to "treat theological and academic approaches to religion equally" (13), his narration at times reads like Whig history. While the trajectory from religious to secular study is obviously correct in outline, the actual practice of religious instruction in Canada is simply more [End Page 205] complicated than his account of the ascendancy of "secular" study allows. I cite three phenomena that would have been helpful to address: (1) how during the 1960s and 1970s the University of Toronto's Department of Religious Studies was founded alongside the theologically-ordered Toronto School of Theology (TST)— a fact that Donald Wiebe has publicly bemoaned (since in his view the TST has hindered the development of a truly scientific approach to religion in Canada); (2) how for the last quarter century the relative importance of Religious Studies has declined and how some departments have begun to be combined within other academic units in Canadian universities (e.g., University of Ottawa, University of Calgary, University of Alberta); (3) how during this same period "Catholic Studies" programs in both the US and Canada (the first at St. Thomas University, NB, in 1994) arose as alternatives paths of the study of religion outside of the methodological constraints imposed by Religious Studies departments. Frequently, where comparisons are made between older confessional approaches to religious research and teaching...

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