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

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 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.