Canadian historians have neglected the role of churches and religion in shaping post-war sexual, gender, and domestic ideals. This article explores the interplay of religion and sexuality in Glad Tidings Pentecostal and First United Church in Victoria, British Columbia. It argues that church officials actively regulated and defined heterosexual gender relations in the late 1940s and 1950s. While traditional "family values" were upheld in Glad Tidings, Pentecostal beliefs about the individual's relationship with God subtly challenged the primacy of heterosexual marriage. The United Church defined marriage as the most important of relationships, and, drawing on the advice of secular “experts”, started a range of sexual and marital training programs in the post-war years. While church officials contributed to the post-war normalisation of heterosexuality, religion also helped to shape alternative and contested meanings of sexuality and family in this period.
La Colombie-Britannique et l'État de Washington formaient ensemble la région la moins religieuse d'Amérique du Nord durant l'époque d'après-guerre. Les lettrés ont cherché en vain une explication démographique à ce sécularisme. Les données colligées d'une foule de documents imprimés, de sources quantitative et d'entrevues orales semblent indiquer que le sécularisme était un phénomène moins démographique que culturel, produit et entretenu dans les mythes, les récits et les présomptions de tous les jours quant à l'« authentique » Nord-Ouest Pacifique. Bien que le sécularisme ne fût ni stable ni essentiel, on en est vu à le considérer, durant les années qui ont suivi la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, comme une caractéristique typique, voire inévitable, du Nord-Ouest. Le sécularisme, avec la classe et le genre, a joué un rôle capital dans l'invention d'une identité régionale transfrontalière à nulle autre pareille.
This article is based on newspapers and magazines, statistical sources and oral histories with 42 white, English Canadian women who rejected religious belief in the 1960s–1980s. During that era, organised religious involvement declined sharply in Canada and levels of unbelief gradually increased. This article explores how feminism shaped women's departure from religion in those years. The second‐wave women's movement tended to disregard religious feminisms and to associate religiosity with women's disempowerment; while secularity was endemic to the movement, the focus was on challenging institutional religion rather than belief itself. The secularity of the second wave could be narrow and exclusionary, but it also helped some women to challenge religious constraints. Although few interviewees were active in the women's movement, many recalled that feminism informed their journeys away from religion. Most came to an awareness of the patriarchy of organised religion – and dismissed it as such – in their teens or twenties, but rejected religious belief later in life. Due to persistent religious and gender norms, nonbelieving women were often reticent in voicing their unbelief. Nevertheless, they disseminated irreligion in a range of subtle yet powerful ways, and played a central role in the secularisation of post‐war English Canada.
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