George A. Rawlyk Champions of the Truth

Annotation

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.