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 ii 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 iii 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. iv 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 v 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 vi 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. vii 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 viii 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 1 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, 2 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