It is fitting that Preston Jones' book on the public use of the Bible in Canada comes in an unassuming package. The volume is slim and marketed with the standard-issue cover that the University Press of America puts on most of its publications. It thus embodies the characteristic Canadian disinclination against gaudiness, pretension, and hype, which citizens to the North tend to see as characterizing their neighbors to the South. Jones, who teaches at John Brown University and who has published discerning works on subjects as diverse as Alaskan history and the East Asian sex trade, is not a Canadian himself, but long-time residence in Canada has allowed its culture to seep in.

The book is, therefore, surprising for reaching much the same conclusion about the Bible in Canadian public life that others have reached for the United States. The Scriptures, that is, were ubiquitous at almost all levels of public discourse in the second half of the 19th century. But that very ubiquity revealed more about the Canadians' skill at using the Bible for their own purposes than letting the Bible exert a discernible sway on their actions. In Jones' words, "Canadian nationalists wrenched Bible verses out of context and arrived at implausible parallels between biblical history and their own and they waged rhetorical war against others with the words of the Bible." As in the United States, especially before and during the Civil War, Canadians used Scripture to "promote opposing visions of the Canadian nation." The result was that "the Bible's status as something to be revered was diminished."

This conclusion leads Jones to challenge historians (including myself) who have argued that Canada in the late 19th century came closer to the ideals of genuinely Christian civilization than did the United States. To the claim I once made that Canada had not thrown its weight around internationally as much as the United States, Jones' reply is preemptory: "If the language of Canada's … English-speaking nationalists is taken seriously, one can conclude that had Canada ever acquired any such weight, it would have been thrown."

Jones may not be entirely convincing in this comparative blame game. The ethnocentrism of Canada's British population was indeed deep and wide, but whether it reached the depth or extended as broadly as American prejudice against colored peoples can be questioned. There was a great deal of discrimination in turn-of-the-century Canada that was supported by Bible-quoting Protestants, but no lynchings sanctioned by conservative evangelical clergy. Nevertheless, in a well documented account of Canada's leading statesmen and Protestant ministers, Jones demonstrates that Canadian use of the Bible could be just as formulaic and just as merely rhetorical as the American.

The Dominion of Canada, which was established in 1867, took its name from Psalm 72:8: "And he shall have dominion also from sea to sea and from the river even unto the ends of the earth." This ascription came after the Fathers of Confederation decided not to call Canada a "Kingdom" for fear of offending the triumphant republicanism of the victorious Union armies. Yet if pious Canadians were more successful at sneaking a few open biblical references into Canada's founding documents than had been their American counterparts ninety years earlier, it did not mean, according to Jones' convincing argument, that Canada's scripturalism went deeper or was freer from hypocrisy than the American case.

The one possible exception to this sober conclusion is Quebec. The irony here is that Protestant denunciation of the province as a priest-ridden domain where laypeople were barred from opening the Bible actually spurred Quebec Catholic promotion of Scripture (just so long as it was an authorized French translation of the church's official Vulgate). One of the most interesting of the ironies concerned Charles Chiniquy, whose violently polemical Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, published first in 1886, remains in print to this day. Chiniquy began as a priest in Quebec who was favored by the hierarchy because of his able promotion of temperance. But repeated immoralities cost him the favor of his superiors, his head-strong independence led to excommunication in 1856, and his animus against the church then grounded a long career as an anti-Roman crusader. In the era's standard Protestant propaganda, the anti-Catholic Chiniquy repeated the charge that Catholics were prohibited from reading the Bible. In response, Quebec Catholics unearthed the records of a debate between Father Chiniquy and a Protestant pastor from 1841, in which Chiniquy had displayed a New Testament he called his constant companion and repeated the church's injunctions urging lay attention to Scripture.

More edifying than the period's Catholic-Protestant polemics is Jones' account of how leading Quebec figures used the Bible for outlining Quebec's unique status as a people "under God."[1] To them, by contrast, it was French and Catholic Canada that deserved to be considered the antitype of biblical narrative. For over fifty years, as Quebec suffered growing economic subservience to English Canada, and as up to half a million Québécois immigrated to the United States, a number of prominent clerics promoted the view that French Canada was nothing less than God's new Israel. Most prominent in this number was the third bishop of Trois-Rivièrs, Louis-Fran&ccedit;ois Laflèche (1818-1898), who in 1866 published a major work, Some Considerations on the Connections between Civil Society and Religion and the Family, that led on to a lifetime of further exploration of French Canada's unique place in God's design for the world as a whole.

Laflèche proved a master in using the Bible to defend his conviction that "our mission and our national destiny are the work of native missions and the extension of the Kingdom of God by the formation of a Catholic people in the Valley of the St. Lawrence."[2] In making these arguments Laflèche called upon more Scripture than almost any of his Canadian or American contemporaries, and he actually developed a theology to provide not only an inspiring vision for Quebec nationalism, but also a practical antidote against "la fièvre de l'émigration."[3]

Laflèche's theology was based on a general conception of nationhood as part of God's design first expressed to Abraham in Genesis chapters 12 and 13. Careful study of Scripture as well as careful attention to history proved to him that God judged the nations depending on how they fulfilled their missions under God. In Laflèche's understanding, the exemplary record of the founders and early martyrs of French Canada verified the sacredness of Quebec's destiny. Laflèche was not as sophisticated in his use of Scripture as, for example, Steven Keillor in his recently published case for deploying the category of divine judgment in assessing the United States in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001.[4] But compared to others who were proposing scriptural accounts of Canadian or American nationhood during his own age, Laflèche stood out.

Preston Jones is not persuaded that Bishop Laflèche was using the Bible correctly by interpreting it as a Quebec-ocentric text. Nor does he romanticize Quebec Catholicism; he shows that even with serious encouragement from the Bishops, most Québécois were not going to be reading the Bible since the province's rate of literacy was so low. Yet he does find in spokespersons like Laflèche, along with the biblical representations in the art and sculpture of Quebec churches, a public use of Scripture at least somewhat less superficial than in English Canada and the United States.

Canadian history deserves more attention than it receives from Americans because the northern neighbor's differences from the United States are so small, yet also so strategic. In this case, paying attention to Jones' carefully researched study would show breast-beaters (like myself) that American malfeasance is perhaps not as singular or as egregious as we sometimes think. It might encourage American filiopietists to pause when tempted to treat the United States as a unique object of God's concern—if Canadians thought the same about their land (and if Russians, Germans, English, Dutch, South Africans, and Poles have done so too), then maybe no modern nation deserves such distinction. Most cogently, Jones shows that Canadian experience illustrates just as much as American experience the beatitude arising from treating God-given "holy things" as gifts from a merciful Sovereign, but also the enervating peril when these "holy things" are mishandled as objects of partisan advantage.

Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.

1. An earlier article in Books & Culture, which also benefited from some of Jones' work, has already mentioned some of these figures: Mark Noll, "The Bible in American Public Life, 1860-2005," September/October 2005, pp. 7, 46-50.

2. Louis-Fran&ccedit;ois Laflèche, Quelques Considérations sur les Rapports de la Société Civile avec la Religion et la Famille (Saint-Jacques, Quebec: Editions du Pot de Fer, 1991 [orig. 1866]), p. 71: "notre mission et notre destine nationals sont l'oeuvre des missions sauvages, et l'extention du royaume de Dieu par la formation d'un people catholique dan la vallée du St.-Laurent."

3. Ibid., p. 25.

4. Steven Keillor, God's Judgments: Interpreting History and the Christian Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2007); Brad Gregory discussed this work in Books & Culture, July/August 2007, pp. 18-19.

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