Infidels and the Damn Churches

Lynne Marks is an associate professor and past chair of the Department of History at the University of Victoria, where she teaches gender history, the social history of religion, and Canadian history. She won the Marion Dewar Prize in Women’s History in 2012. Her first book, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario, won the 1996 Floyd S. Chalmers Award for the best book on Ontario history.

British Columbia is in the vanguard of a secularizing trend that is afoot across the Western world… As Lynne Marks demonstrates in her impeccably researched book, this phenomenon is deeply rooted in the province’s history.

Randi Jones Walker, Pacific School of Religion:

This is an important book for anyone who wants to understand the secularizing trends in the Pacific Northwest, whether in Canada or the United States, and increasingly in the rest of their societies.

Callum G. Brown, author of Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s:
This is the finest historical study yet done on the culture of atheism and non-religionism in the late modern Western world. It explores the origins of modern secularity in the most secular part of North America. Marks excels in moving from the micro study of individual families and small communities up to cities and the nation. This is a path-breaking work.

Alison Marshall, author of Cultivating Connections: The Making of Chinese Prairie Canada:
Infidels and the Damn Churches addresses a glaring omission in the history of Canada’s West – the role of religion and religiosity (and, in this case, irreligion and irreligiosity) in the formation of a settler society.