The idea of Christian Socialism in Canada is often viewed as an English import, coming directly from continental thought and in this sense its politics prioritized over any theological competent; in some ungenerous readings, the theological practice could be considered window dressing to make the political palatable. In English Canada, the presence of the Anglican church as a direct conduit to the mother country imbued this reading with less cynicism and more authority—the disputes between high Anglicans and low Anglicans; between evangelicals and catholics; between those seeking charity and those seeking justice; even between those who stayed in the church of England those who left, were not only English political disputes, but Anglo Canadian ones as well.
But those disputes suggested a political and social homogeneity, an argument to use the same language with the same people in the same contexts. Though Christian socialism in eastern Canada was not exclusively Anglican, the churches that worked through its messages had similar castes, powers, desires and structures.
Canada has always been a loose confederation, barely federal in how they connect to each other, and that looseness has influenced our political and theological heritage. Western Canada’s experiments with Christian socialism lacked the homogeneity of the east. They were more communitarian, derived information and practice from more sources, originated less in patterns of emigration and more in patterns of exile, featured religious movements that were very much outside the mainstream, and originated in a world view that was more multi-cultural, less organized by traditional family and power structures, and to this day, have an almost libertarian willingness to allow unconventional patterns of human connection.
In the next ten pages, starting with a brief history of Western Canada, and fully recognizing the problems inherent in some of these discourses, I hope to talk about how three religious communities (The Dukabhors, the Latter Day Saints, and the Hutterites) worked within the context of this psycho-geographic place, how they interacted with both local and national thought, how their political and social practice were intractable form their theological sensibilities, some of the later difficulties they might have had, and how the western Canadian experiments with collective action allowed for a wider and stranger understanding of how the gospel could work, in relation to both Canadians and Christians
. Beginning with the idea of Western Canada, it began not as wilderness in the manifest destiny imbued American sense of that word, and was founded as part of a business contract, between the Hudson’s Bay Company, and a fey prince named Rupert. The land was settled by men, but men who under the careful supervision of factors, and other bosses. They were expected to live, work, and function as a family unit, without women, and without the carousing and drinking that often accompanied social collectivity—there were no individual, and no settled identities in this world, and it can be seen in for example, how the Hudson Bay Company refused to allow all but the most substient farming around the factories.
This idea of men together, working, without the benefit of women, or religion; this cult of homosociality, founded on the voyagers and courier de bois of western Canada grew from the end of the fur trading movement, ca 1860 and the rise of ranches and railroads closer to the borders. At this point, the gender of those who were on the ranches, became less important then the idea of Western Canada as a place that made new kinds of families, that broke apart the old ways, and cut ties from England