Class, status and crisis: upper-class Protestants and the founding of the United Church of Canada

The decision by the Congregational, Methodist and Presbyterian churches to merge in 1925 into the United Church of Canada produced a crisis. This paper examines the responses of upper - class members of these churches to this crisis and explains the results through the dynamic between social class and social status.The concept "crossroads" is a powerful metaphor which demands choices of actors. This metaphor is even more compelling when the crossroads are imposed on actors and the consequences of their forced choices are life - long, sometimes even historic. Canadian history is replete with such crossroads; this paper will focus on one -- the reaction of a category of Protestants to the establishment of the United Church of Canada in 1925.(f.1) This historic event forced many Protestants to make a choice and, after the choice was made, while some members of one family attended the new United Church, the others continued to go to the Presbyterian Church. As a result of the choices, many congregations were split into two hostile factions; some ministers, after years of service, found themselves unacceptable to their congregations. Finally, as a consequence of choices made, a once - proud, nation - wide denomination was reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. The category of Protestants investigated in this paper is upper - class Protestants, more specifically Congregationalists, Methodists and Presbyterians. For purposes of discussion it will be hypothesized that these people uniformly chose to enter the United Church of Canada. Three concepts are central to the study.The ConceptsFew concepts have enjoyed greater attention in the history of sociology than social class and social status, two concepts that also lock together in intellectual combat two great sociologists: Karl Marx and Max Weber. Marx is considered the theorist par excellence of social class and social - class relations. Believing as he did that economic relations determined social life, Marx considered private property and the division of labour as the fundamental determinants of the class structure. Marx assigned the three famous classes to the industrial society: the bourgeoisie (the owners), the petit bourgeoisie (independent small business people) and the proletariat (the propertyless labourers). (There were a number of fragments as well within each of these classes.) Marx was also a student of dialectical processes, and saw these classes in dynamic tension with one another; as industrial capitalism matured, the classes, particularly the proletariat, developed greater class consciousness. (It was much easier for the bourgeoisie to have class consciousness because, among other reasons, of their small number.) This class consciousness was considered a prerequisite for class struggle.Depending on one's source, Max Weber's construction of social class is either very similar to or different from Karl Marx's.(f.2) Whereas Marx used the sphere of economic production as the generator of social classes, Weber used the market. For Weber, it was what one brought to and exchanged in the market that determined one's life chances and therefore one's social class. As a result, Weber claimed that class was unlikely to be the basis for collective action. The status group in Weber's scheme, however, had greater potential for collective identity and collective action. "The market knows no personal distinctions.... The reverse is true of the status order, in which men are grouped by their prestige and way of life. All actions based on considerations of status are oriented to the 'feeling of the actors that they belong together."'(f.3) Vis - a - vis class and status, Alfred Hunter makes this interesting observation: "Social change, in the Weberian view, can often be seen to involve cycles in the shifting importance of class (representing the rational) and status (representing the nonrational) relative to one another in the market. …