Churches as Allies and Agents of the State

Abstract

Government administrators and policy-makers in the nineteenth century in both countries frequently made use of churches and missionary organizations to promote government objectives with respect to Indian peoples, and had no hesitation about providing public funding for schools with explicitly religious goals. Indeed, government officials, a number of whom were themselves ordained Protestant ministers, did not hesitate to express the intention that Indians become Christian. This close alliance with missionary organizations was common practice in the United States until, in the 1880s, anti-Catholic prejudice on the part of the majority led to increasing restrictions on funding of religious schools among the Indians, and it remained the norm in Canada (where the role of the Catholic Church in education enjoys constitutional protection) until after the Second World War.