Protestant Liberty: Religion and the Making of Canadian Liberalism, 1828-1878
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study offers a new interpretation of the origins and nature of nineteenth-century liberalism by re-examining the role of religion in the politics of Upper Canada (Ontario). Whereas other recent studies have characterized this era’s liberal thought as neutral toward religion and universally transferable across cultures, this study argues that the early origins of Canadian liberalism were firmly rooted in the British tradition of Protestant Dissent and based on the premise of guarding against the encroachment of illiberal non-Protestant faiths. After the union of Upper Canada with the predominantly French-Catholic Lower Canada in 1840, this “Protestant liberty” perspective came into conflict with a more neutral alternative which sought to strip liberalism of its religious roots in order to appeal to Catholic voters and allies. Beginning with the reform victory in the 1828 election, this study traces the development of liberal thought in Upper Canada through the political turmoil and rebellions of the 1830s, the Union of the Canadas and its resultant mid-century sectional crises, and the separation of this union due to the reformers’ initiative in the Confederation talks of the 1860s. As a political strategy in the early national period of the 1870s, however, the Liberal Party explicitly sought a more decisive break from its Protestant heritage and instead began to favour the culturally neutral version of liberalism based on free markets and appeals to the workingman. This eventual marginalization and stigmatization of the “Protestant liberty” perspective signaled the beginning of a secular-materialist ethos for the liberal order in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".