Dr Lynne Marks - Infidels and the damn churches

Dr Lynne Marks is a professor of history at the University of Victoria. She studies Canadian history, women’s and gender history and the social history of religion/irreligion and atheism. Her 2017 book, ​Infidels and the Damn Churches: Irreligion and Religion in Settler British Columbia, looks at why British Columbians in the past have been less religious than those in the rest of Canada. This pattern remains true today, but she explores it for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, asking questions about how this particularly secular pattern links to issues of gender and class, as well as race and racism, in this early period.