Religion Fuels Difference Between Canadians And Americans

Every Canadian has heard how momentous events in 1776, 1812 and 1867 put Canada and the United States on profoundly different historical trajectories. But a just-published book by a Simon Fraser University professor has identified an intriguing new turning point in Canadian history: the day in April 1843 when the world didn't come to an end.

In Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792-1852, author Jack Little argues a failed end-of-the-world prophecy by the radical and powerful U.S.-based Millerite movement was a watershed moment in Canada's rejection of the fire-and-brimstone religious culture at the centre of American identity today.

"There's clearly an evangelical tradition in the States but we don't define ourselves in terms of religion," Little told CanWest News Service this week."We have to ask ourselves: Why don't we?"

One of the answers, he says, can be found in the failed"millenarian invasion" of Canada in the 1840s by charismatic American preacher William Miller.

The Millerite movement represented"the most serious American challenge to British religious hegemony" in English Canada, writes Little."But it was one that dissipated quickly when the predicted apocalypse failed to take place in 1843. ..."

Little's research is focused on a campaign for converts in eastern Canada by fervent devotees of Miller, a breakaway Baptist and founder of a new fundamentalist Christian sect.

Miller is best known today as the spiritual godfather of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and a host of other messianic Protestant groups with millions of adherents in the U.S. and around the world.

But in the 1830s and '40s, he was an ex-farmer from New York state who had given the Bible a close reading and calculated the second coming of Jesus Christ would occur sometime in 1843 or 1844.

A rapidly growing army of Miller's followers in northeastern North America settled on different dates for the"End Time" depending on local circumstances. In Quebec's Eastern Townships - settled largely by immigrant Americans - and adjacent areas across the Canada-U.S. border, the Millerites came to believe that the heavenly horrors predicted in Revelations would kick in on April 14, 1843.

Miller himself led a conversion crusade in Quebec, where his sister and brother-in-law lived at Magog.

"The world and all the wicked will be burnt up," Miller had prophesied in a letter to her,"and then Christ will descend and reign personally with his Saints."

The Millerite message - at least for a while - took serious hold north of the border. One of Miller's chief lieutenants, Josiah Litch, led a series of revival meetings under tents in eastern Quebec in 1842 that drew"waves on waves of people" - an increasing concern for the more conservative Anglican and Wesleyan Methodist churches.

But the evangelical foray into Canada ultimately failed. Miller, under pressure to predict an exact date upon which the Messiah would return from heaven, set April 14, 1843, as the Day of Reckoning.

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Needless to say, the apocalypse did not occur.

Nor, in what is known to historians as the"Great Disappointment" of a generation of Millerites, did it come to pass on the next predicted date of Oct. 22, 1844.

Millerism began to fade in Canada, its believers increasingly"open to ridicule," Little writes. But south of the border the movement reconstituted itself in the Adventist churches and bolstered an American evangelical tradition that remains a powerful force in U.S. politics and culture.

In English Canada, said Little, the failed importation of American-style evangelical fervour allowed the British-based Anglican church to become entrenched as the bastion of 19th-century Protestantism.