Lynne Marks – författare

British Columbia is at the forefront of a secularizing movement in the English-speaking world. Nearly half its residents claim no religious affiliation, and the province has the highest rate of unbelief or religious indifference in Canada. Infidels and the Damn Churches explores the historical roots of this phenomenon from the 1880s to the First World War.Lynne Marks reveals that class and racial tensions fuelled irreligion in a world populated by embattled ministers, militant atheists, turn-of-the-century New Agers, rough-living miners, Asian immigrants, and church-going settler women. White, working-class men often arrived in the province alone and identified the church with their exploitative employers. At the same time, BC's anti-Asian and anti-Indigenous racism meant that their "whiteness" alone could define them as respectable, without the need for church affiliation. Consequently, although Christianity retained major social power elsewhere, many people in BC found the freedom to forgo church attendance or espouse atheist views.This nuanced study of mobility, gender, masculinity, and family in settler BC offers new insights into BC's distinctive culture and into the beginnings of what has become an increasingly dominant secular worldview across Canada.

In this examination of the social and cultural meanings of religion and leisure in nineteenth-century small-town Ontario, Lynne Marks looks inside churches, hotel bars, fraternal lodge rooms, and roller-skating rinks to discover the extent to which a particular Protestant value system and lifestyle dominated small towns of the period. In assessing the extent of Protestant cultural influence, Marks also illuminates the nature of social relations and group identity, particularly with regard to gender, class, religion, age, and marital status.Based primarily on a study of the towns of Thorold, Campbellford, and Ingersoll - communities situated in different areas of southern Ontario and differing significantly in economic and occupational structure and in religious composition - this investigation seeks as well to determine the nature of commonalities and differences in patterns of participation in religious and leisure activities within both middle- and working-class families. To further examine working-class values and beliefs, Marks moves beyond the local level to explore two popular working-class movements of the 1880s, the Knights of Labor and the Salvation Army, providing insights into the complexities of class and gender identity among working-class women and men and shedding light on the nature and meaning of working-class religious beliefs and practices.