Champions of the Truth: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and the Maritime Baptists

Rawlyk argues that in the early part of this century the Maritime Baptist mainstream was far more accommodating and open-minded than Baptists in central Canada and the West. He shows that during the fundamentalist-modernist controversies of the 1920s and 1930s the vast majority of Maritime Baptists rejected the closed-minded Central- Canadian Fundamentalism of T.T. Shields. Instead they stressed what Barry Moody has referred to as the prevailing "Breadth of Vision" and "Breadth of Mind" of the nineteenth-century Maritime Baptist tradition. The Maritime Baptist mainstream emerges in Champions of the Truth not only as surprisingly progressive but as a force which, Rawlyk believes, helped significantly to shape certain key features of Maritime life between the wars. Rawlyk provides an answer to the question of why the Maritime Baptists in the 1920s and 1930s did not experience the same kind of bitter schism as central Canadian and western Baptists. As well, he attempts to explain the weaknesses of Maritime fundamentalism - especially that preached by the two sectarian Baptists, J.J. Sidey and J.B. Dagget. In the foreword to this volume, Larry McCann, Davidson Professor of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University, describes Champions of the Truth as "a remarkable volume" and Rawlyk as "a gifted historian." He says that Rawlyk's essays, firmly rooted in a theoretical base and centring on dialectical analysis, constantly provoke.