Richard Allen (politician) - Background

Background

Allen has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto, a Master's Degree from the University of Saskatchewan and a Ph.D. from Duke University. He was a professor at the University of Regina from 1964 to 1974, and at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario from 1974 to 1987.

Prior to entering political life, Allen was best known as an historian of Christian socialism within Canada. In 1971, he published a work entitled The Social Passion, chronicling the history of the Canadian social gospel in the early twentieth century. This work focused primarily on western Canada, and contained detailed assessments of Canada's Labour Church movement as well as the political careers of socialist ministers such as J.S. Woodsworth, William Ivens and William Irvine.

Allen's most significant argument in The Social Passion is that the 1918 statement of Canada's Methodist General Conference (which called for a "new social order", opposed profiteering in industry, and advised direct state investment) was the most radical document released by a major social movement in Canada before the Regina Manifesto of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in 1933. As of 2005, The Social Passion is still considered the most comprehensive overview of the social gospel within Canada.

In addition to The Social Passion, Allen has published Region of the Mind: Interpreting the Western Canadian Plains (1973), Religion and society in the prairie west (1975) and Man and Nature on the Prairie (1976), and was the editor of a collection entitled The Social Gospel in Canada (1975). He has also written several articles on Salem Bland, a prominent Canadian Christian socialist from the early twentieth century. In 2008 Allen published volume one of his biography of Salem Bland, The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity.