Methodist Rome was a nickname sometimes given to the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The moniker implied that Toronto was as central to Canadian Methodism as Rome, or more specifically Vatican City in Rome, is to Catholicism.
Methodism was never the faith of the majority of Torontonians, yet it played a very important role in the city. In addition, Toronto had one of the largest (if not the largest) population of Methodists in the world. The strong Methodist influence greatly shaped the city's character. Toronto became known for being very puritanical with strict limits on the sale of alcohol and a rigorous enforcement of the Lord's Day Act. Discrimination against Jews and Catholics was also common, with both groups being excluded from the financial and political elite, and Jews even from Sunnyside Beach ("No Jews or dogs allowed"). Peter C. Newman has described Toronto in this period "a sort of Calvinist Tehran." The city was disparaged by outsiders as "Toronto the Good".
The name began to fade in the early twentieth century, especially after the Methodist Church in Canada merged with Presbyterians and Congregationalists to form the United Church of Canada in 1925. An influx of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe after the Second World War greatly altered the religious balance. The puritan Methodist heritage is still in evidence, though, as Toronto has some of the strictest liquor laws in North America.
Famous quotes containing the words methodist and/or rome:
“Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrine for a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)