Paul R Wilson – författare

Public discussion about the relationship between religion and public life in Canada can be heated at times, and scholars have recently focused on the historical study of the many expressions of this relationship. The experience of Canada''s smaller Protestant Christian groups, however, has remained largely unexplored. This is particularly true of Canada''s Baptists. This volume, the first produced by the Canadian Baptist Historical Society, explores the connections between Baptist faith and Baptist activity in the public domain, and expands the focus of the existing scholarship to include a wide range of Canadian Baptist beliefs, attitudes, perspectives, and actions related to the relationship between Baptist faith and practice and public life.

This study of Baptist businessmen from Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto breaks new ground. The challenges to faith exerted by the arrival of a new materialistic social ethic and a business-dominated culture in the last half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has received little attention from Canadian historians. Instead, historians have primarily focused on religious leaders and intellectual challenges to faith. This study examines the sociocultural challenges that confronted one group of central Canadian Baptist businessmen from 1848 to 1921. Essentially, the findings offered here are used to sustain the argument that the rise of business and consumerism helped to secularize the beliefs, values, and practices of Baptist businessmen. Furthermore, the effects of secularization were profound on both the personal and church community levels.