Children, Religion, and Society in Protestant Ontario Angela Rooke A DISSE

296 Pages·2014·2.45 MB·English

Raising Christian Citizens for the Twentieth Century:
Children, Religion, and Society in Protestant Ontario

Angela Rooke

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Graduate Program in History
York University
Toronto, Ontario
September 2014

© Angela Rooke, 2014
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Abstract
This dissertation examines the Sunday school as an important site for understanding
children’s lives in Canada’s past. It argues that examining children’s engagement with
institutional religion in Ontario offers valuable insights into Canada’s religious history.
When it came to dealing with children, Protestant churches sought to modernize their
methods and they self-consciously broke with the past. Between the late 1880s and the
early 1930s, Sunday Schools nurtured children’s peer cultures and drew on modern
pedagogy by encouraging age-graded Sunday school classes and age-graded auxiliary
organizations. Children were also meant to feel part of a wider, sometimes
transnational, community. In their attempt to teach children how to navigate the modern
world in appropriately Christian ways, Sunday school teachers also impressed on
children their responsibility for bettering their homes, their communities, their nation
and the world. In this way, this is also an examination of how Sunday Schools adopted,
and adjusted to, the social gospel.
Sunday school curricula focused on nurturing very young children’s Christian
character and, as they grew older, teaching them how to live up to those character ideals
as active, Christian citizens. Though it is difficult to gauge the success of these
Protestant efforts in terms of what children believed, the importance of religion to
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Canada’s childhood history is evident in the sheer numbers of children who participated
in Sunday School programmes, the large amounts of money children raised for
missionary and other purposes, and the vast resources that churches devoted to the
religious education of their young flocks.
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Acknowledgments
This project could not have been completed without the generous financial
support provided by CUPE 3903, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program, the
Ramsay Cook fellowship in Canadian History, the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council, and the York University Research Assistantship program. I am
grateful for the friendly help provided by archivists and staff members at The United
Church Archives, The Anglican Archives of Canada, The University of Guelph Library,
and the West Toronto Junction Historical Society. Thanks, too, to the different people
who were willing to send me photocopies of their Sunday school certificates, lessons, or
other related family keepsakes.
My supervisor, Bettina Bradbury, who read this dissertation way too
many times, has provided much more than the feedback and advice needed to complete
a project such as this one; she has also provided me with moral support, kindness,
friendship, encouragement, and much delicious food and wine. I feel so incredibly
lucky to have her as my supervisor, friend, and mentor. Kate McPherson and Bill
Westfall have, since I first met them in my Master’s year at York, consistently provided
me with excellent feedback and encouragement. Their insights have made this a better
dissertation. Committee member Molly Ladd-Taylor also deserves special thanks for
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being a brilliant mentor who shaped my development as a teacher and scholar in many
ways.
For sharing early drafts of their own dissertations, providing critical
feedback on my early chapters, and for providing friendship, fun and good advice, I
thank the members of Bettina Bradbury’s PhD reading group: Kristine Alexander,
Stacey Alexopolous, Becky Beausaert, Jarett Henderson, Dan Horner, and Heather
Steel.
The staff at York University’s Department of History, especially Karen
Dancy, Patricia Di Benigno, Lisa Hoffman, and Anita Szucsko deserve thanks for
helping me navigate office equipment, interpret important protocols, policies and
procedures, and for being there, even on Friday afternoons, just to chat.
Though each provided different kinds of support over the years, the
following friends deserve thanks for helping me be a better scholar, helping me stay
sane, or both: Katie Bausch, Jennifer Bleakney, Helen Fylactou, Brian MacDowall, and
Ian Milligan. My extended family, especially Linda Wagner and Kelly Miller, and my
future in-laws, Theresa and Dave Wing, encouraged and supported me in different, but
important, ways. I am also very fortunate to have had the support of my grandparents,
Earl and Valera Phillips, throughout this journey. Their stories about growing up have
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always fascinated me and helped to spark my interest in the history of childhood, even
though my grandfather’s funny and rich stories about growing up were taken from him
in the last few years by the memory loss that accompanies dementia.
Thanks to BJ Glidden, my partner, best friend, and very-soon-to-be
husband, for his moral support, for working extra hours to cover our bills, for putting up
with me and my stress during the long road to completion of the dissertation, and for
ensuring that coffee was brewed on early mornings of writing, research and teaching.
Finally, thanks to my large, loud and loving family: my siblings, Christopher, Daniel,
Rebecca, and Deanna Rooke who made my own childhood memories so pleasant and
my adult life so rich; and my parents, Denise and Dave Rooke, for all they have given
me – including financial support, sympathetic ears, use of their laundry facilities,
distractions from stress in the form of card games and fishing trips, and their never-
ending moral support.
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Table of Contents
Abstract.............................................................................................................................ii
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................iv
Table of Contents............................................................................................................vii
List of
Illustrations.....................................................................................................................viii
*****

Introduction......................................................................................................................1
Part I:
Chapter 1: Creating Christian Childhood in Modern Ways ...........................................41
Chapter 2: “We Must Grow Them”: Raising Christian Babies and Infants....................80
Chapter 3: Caring, Sharing, and Making Friends with Jesus: Developing a Happy
Service Motive and Christian ‘Character’ in Beginners and Primaries.........................127
Chapter 4: Junior Citizens of the Kingdom of God: Boys and Girls between Childhood
and Adolescence ...........................................................................................................162

Part II
Chapter 5: “Little Hands can do God’s Work Too”: Child-Citizens, Service to Society
and Money for Missions, 1890-1930 ............................................................................201
Chapter 6: Assessing the Impact of Modernization in the 1930s: Religion as Child’s
Play?..............................................................................................................................244
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................262
Bibliography..................................................................................................................271
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List of Illustrations
Figure 1. Unveiling the Portrait Statue of Robert Raikes at Queen’s Park, Toronto
[1930]..............................................................................................................................43
Figure 2. Sunday School Banner.....................................................................................59
Figure 3. Sunday School Attendance Thermometer........................................................60
Figure 4. Erskine United Church Ground Floor – Floor Plan.........................................63
Figure 5. St. James Parish Hall, Toronto. Basement Floor Plan.....................................73
Figure 6. Boys enjoying Sunday School picnic food in Prince Edward County, 1909...74
Figure 7. Pie-eating contest at St. John’s Anglican Sunday School Picnic, Whitby,
1924…………………………….....................................................................................75
Figure 8. Beginners show off their Cradle Roll achievements in Shreiber, ON..............80
Figure 9 . Example of a Font Roll (Cradle Roll) Invitation Postcard..............................98
Figure 10. Cradle Roll Ceremony in St. Thomas, Ontario, 1924.................................101
Figure 11. Baptist Cradle Roll Certificate, 1929..........................................................104
Figure 12. Boys’ Explorer’s Pin....................................................................................194
Figure 13. Girls’ Explorer’s Pin (The Golden Key) .....................................................195
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Introduction

I placed a classified advertisement in the July 2010 United Church Observer, letting
readers know I was working on a project on the history of children and religion in
Ontario and that I would appreciate it if they would share any old Sunday School
records, photographs, or other memorabilia that they may have kept themselves or
which may have passed down in their families over the last 80 years or so. Most of
what people could share with me either was material I could find in the archives or were
personal Sunday School certificates, and so the advertisement was not as fruitful as I
had hoped it would be for uncovering children’s experience of Sunday school. Yet, the
responses I received demonstrate that Sunday school certificates and lessons were
cherished keepsakes to many; children (or their parents) kept them for decades. Does the
fact that such materials survived indicate that children’s experience of attending Sunday
schools was so memorable, or formed such a crucial part of their memories of childhood
that, even as adults, people thought these certificates were of great personal historical
value, similar to high-school yearbooks? Or were old Sunday school lessons and
certificates unintentionally preserved among other things in dusty boxes just because
they were always around, sitting on coffee tables, in dressers, and in desk drawers?
Whether such material survives because of a conscious choice to preserve them or,
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simply, because they were so abundant in the homes of average Ontario families, both
possibilities evidence the important role that Sunday schools played in the lives of
children in the past. Their very preservation demonstrates the importance of the church
to children in the early twentieth century, and of its continuing importance to adults who
were raised in Ontario during those years. Other archival and published records
examined here demonstrate the concomitant importance of children to the church.
This dissertation uses the lens of childhood history to unpack how Sunday
schools came to occupy so much of children’s time and attention in the period between
the 1890s and the early 1930s. I am interested not only in the lessons children learned
and the religious and social context that gave rise to such lessons, but also how the
Sunday School might have been a place for fun, friendship, and for the exercise of
children’s agency, as well as a place of learning and prayer. Gwen Terentiuk, an eighty-
seven-year-old woman, told me in a 2010 email that she began attending a United
Church Sunday School at the age of about four years, in a nursery class. She estimated
that another nine children in her Sunday school class graduated into each grade together
until they were eighteen years old. Though some of these members have now died,
three of them, all now in their late eighties, remain friends and meet every Friday
morning for breakfast. Stories such as this one remind us that Sunday schools are not