Evangelist Frank Norris, the most famous fundamentalist U.S. preacher in the 1920s. Wikimedia Commons. Early 20th-century naked bigotry, sectarianism and misogyny were on prominent display in the Toronto Star, August 30, 1924, with the reported teaching and preaching of U.S. evangelist and self-styled “Texas Tornado,” Frank Norris (1872-1952). “SAYS KU KLUX KLAN KEPT OUT […]
Category: Religion
Scandals and charity of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson
“Los Angeles gasped at the costumes worn” by Ontario-born Pentecostal evangelist, radio preacher and faith healer Aimee Semple McPherson when she testified before a committee of the California legislature during impeachment hearings of state Supreme Court Judge Carlos Hardy, the Vancouver Sun reported, February 5, 1929. McPherson had given Hardy a $2,500 cheque, an alleged […]
Doff your hat to honour the dead
Men once doffed their hats whenever a funeral procession passed by, to honour and respect the dead. But this letter published in the London, Ontario Advertiser July 22, 1905, lamented that the fading of the custom. The other day as a funeral was passing down the streets of our city a man who was driving […]
Great joy, Sunday Blue Laws banned
Many of the more dour of Canada’s early Scottish settlers “scotched” such Sunday activities as cards, games, music and even whistling or singing (except hymns in church). Theatres were shuttered and streetcars and railways came to a stop. Many sports were also prohibited under Lords Day Profanation Acts passed by several provincial and territorial […]
7-day work week just isn’t Christian
The normal six-days-a-week of work (usually 12 hours a day) is fine, but seven-days-a-week just isn’t Christian, according to this item in the London Advertiser, February 6, 1902. Most of us have to work in this country, and practically all of us feel and respond to that need. It is in working that we learn […]
Angel ushers fluster papa, needle mama
Angelic young ushers are adapt at wheedling extra money from pappa when they pass the offering plate at church, much to the consternation of mamma, notes Kit Coleman in the following item from the Toronto Mail and Empire, January 22, 1898. The latest fad is Angel ushers. One Reverend already has them. They are charming. They glide around with the plate and stare […]
Last of the saddleback preachers
English-born Methodist minister Robert K. Peck, Alberta, 1910. “Wearing cowboy clothes, the Reverend Peck used to ride around the country preaching,” notes Calgary’s Glenbow Museum. Glenbow Archives NA-101-13. The passing of the fiery itinerant preachers, who galloped by horse throughout Canada, from hamlet to hamlet, to spread the gospel in the backwoods of nineteenth […]
Sodom and Gomorrah
Canadian Freeman, York (Toronto), Upper Canada rails against the town’s countless whore houses, one in a house controlled by a police magistrate, in this item published May 26, 1831. “And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Lord out of heaven. And he destroyed these cities, and all the country about, […]
Perils of immoral theatre
Excerpts: That lewd insinuations, immodest words, and more immodest action, are admitted upon the stage;—that scenes are exhibited shocking to female delicacy, and pestiferous to the minds of youth; and that these things too often form the zest of entertainment, and the glory of the performance, is as notorious as that the sun shines at […]
Mississauga Indians ask protection from drunk, wicked white men
In 1826, a group of Christian Mississauga First Nation people settled on a Methodist Church mission on the banks of the Credit River, in what is now Canada’s sixth largest city. Their Credit Indian Village thrived for a dozen years, with as many as 50 homes, a school, hospital, church, board sidewalks, “two public […]