Living in a World of ‘Riotous Difference’: Canadian Multiculturalism and Christian Hospitality within the Presbyterian Church in Toronto (Tkaronto)

With the secularization of Canadian public institutions, mainline protestant churches in urban centers are witnessing a steady decline in membership in recent decades. Church members are not participating in church activities as they once did, which has motivated some congregations to discuss the influence of immigration and multiculturalism within the church. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the interethnic relationships and the value of multiculturalism in Presbyterian congregations in the multicultural and multiracial city of Toronto (Tkaronto), Ontario, and more broadly, within the national denomination of the Presbyterian Church of Canada. In recounting the crisis of church precarity, this dissertation considers the contours of church governance that structure racializing practices within congregations. Additionally, this study examines the virtue of hospitality, a central theme among Presbyterian congregations that attends to denominational identity, church-run social programmes, and inclusion of minorities within congregational polity. Based on 25 months of ethnographic research among three congregations, this dissertation focuses on the personal experiences and Christian understandings of racialized and white congregants who are working to develop a meaningful church community, which is fraught with ideological and affective friction. This thesis makes two key arguments. First, the inclusion of different (non-white) bodies is needed to sustain and grow the church, both economically and spiritually, yet different bodies and their subjectivities (vis-à-vis class, racialization, and age) are challenging to congregational unity in terms of Anglo-centric denominational identity. Second, to welcome its racially, ethnically and economically diverse participants, church members express a virtue of openness in welcoming guests and strangers. Christian hospitality, which is distinct from charity, mediates and at times blurs the boundaries between stranger, guest and host, as well as the cleavages arising from modes of inclusion and exclusion. The friction in 'welcoming the stranger', a ubiquitous phrase indexing Christian hospitality, is a theological, ideological and practical conundrum. The friction is revealed in the narratives of congregants and the mundane acts of in/hospitality that highlight the affective, temporal, and spatial ambiguities that arise from the politics and ethics of integration. Throughout, this thesis investigates the linkages and ruptures between Christian hospitality and Canadian state multiculturalism.Ph.D