ABSTRACT
The similarities end there, however, for until the 1960s in Canada, both the government and the people considered the church to be an institution essential to a functioning society. Religious innovation in New England began as new-world conditions put strains on Puritan preconceptions. The Loyalists joined the French, whose lives were minutely controlled by the Catholic Church, and while few of them had any fondness for Catholicism, they had to accept these well-established people. The English struggled to establish the Anglican Church and thus duplicate British society in the New World. British law required tolerance, but each colony made its own rules with regard to relations between church and state. Church influences have decreased throughout Canada. Despite the fact that Emerson was himself a Unitarian minister until he resigned in 1838, his individualist philosophy discouraged organized religion and church affiliation. The Transcendentalists were religious enthusiasts in a broad sense, although the term is usually applied to fundamentalists or evangelicals.
