“Faith cries out for knowledge:” The Great War, grief, the search for consolation, and the rise of spiritualism in Anglophone Protestant Canada
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Date
2025-08
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University of New Brunswick
Abstract
Spiritualism was the salvation for many Protestants grieving the loss of a loved one to the Great War. In a small nation of barely eight million, hundreds of thousands of homes were visited by death on a scale unknown before or since. Grief was ubiquitous. Canada at the time was almost entirely Christian, but not all were equipped by their faiths to find consolation on equal terms. That it mattered whether one was Protestant or Catholic is explained by two historical factors. The first was the nineteenth century liberalization of Protestant theology – a progressive response to science and Biblical Criticism. This redirected energies into social justice and nation building at the expense of the salvation of souls and a clearly articulated vision of the afterlife. Secondly, the comparatively clear vision of the soul’s postmortem life in the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, where Prayers for the Dead also provided a relational schema between departed souls and their earthly kin, conferred important emotional benefits on Catholics which Reformation theology stripped from Protestantism in the sixteenth century. For the bereaved suffering religious doubt or a crisis of faith, spiritualism’s synthesis of an anthropomorphic heaven with popular religion, science, and intellectual respectability appealed to the modern secular mind, giving it a consolatory power that was lacking for them in Protestant doctrine. Using commercially accessible non-fiction literature and journals, seekers of consolation read how human personality, identity, and memory survive death and flourish in the afterlife. Moreover, they learnt that the bonds of family and kin remained unbroken, despite the physical separation imposed by death. The dead also remained mentally and spiritually active, and this activity could even manifest as communication across the temporal-spiritual divide. As a case study, Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery’s well-documented struggles with religious disillusionment and grief – discretely explored in her war novel Rilla of Ingleside, and painfully detailed in her private journals – offers a rare and representative insight into what made spiritualism so attractive as a doctrinal adaptation for thousands of Protestant Canadians.