Leaving Christianity: Changing Allegiances in Canada since 1945 9780773551930

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Figures and Tables
Introduction
1 What Happened to Canada’s Mainstream Protestant Denominations?
2 Other Protestant Denominations
3 Canada’s Roman Catholics
4 No Religion: The Growth among the Disaffiliated and the Unaffiliated
5 Major Trends: Why the 1960s Mattered
6 Quo Vadis Canada?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Citation preview

l e av in g c h r isti ani ty

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Advancing Studies in Religion Ser ies e di to r : C hr i st i ne Mi t ch e l l Advancing Studies in Religion catalyzes and provokes original research in the study of religion with a critical edge. The series advances the study of religion in method and theory, textual interpretation, theological studies, and the understanding of lived religious experience. Rooted in the long and diverse traditions of the study of religion in Canada, the series demonstrates awareness of the complex genealogy of religion as a category and as a discipline. A S R welcomes submissions from authors researching religion in varied contexts and with diverse methodologies. The series is sponsored by the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion whose constituent societies include the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, Canadian Society of Patristic Studies, Canadian Theological Society, Société canadienne de théologie, and Société québécoise pour l’étude de la religion.

1 The al-Baqara Crescendo Understanding the Qur’an’s Style, Narrative Structure, and Running Themes Nevin Reda 2 Leaving Christianity Changing Allegiances in Canada since 1945 Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald

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Leaving Christianity Changing Allegiances in Canada since 1945

Brian Clarke and S t ua rt M acdon a ld

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2017 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-5086-5 (cloth) 978-0-7735-5087-2 (paper) 978-0-7735-5193-0 (ep df ) 978-0-7735-5194-7 (ep ub)

Legal deposit third quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Clarke, Brian, 1952–, author Leaving Christianity: changing allegiances in Canada since 1945 / Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald. (Advancing studies in religion; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isb n 978-0-7735-5086-5 (cloth). – is bn 978-0-7735-5087-2 (paper). – isb n 978-0-7735-5193-0 (ep df ). – is bn 978-0-7735-5194-7 (ep u b ) 1. Christianity – Canada.  2. Secularism – Canada.  3. Irreligion – Canada.  4. Canada – Church history – 20th century.  I. Macdonald, Stuart, 1957–, author  II. Title.  III. Series: Advancing studies in religion; 2 BR 570.C62 2017

277.108'2

C 2017-903467-7 C 2017-903468-5

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Sabon.

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To Edith and Gale

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Contents

Figures and Tables  ix Introduction 3 1 What Happened to Canada’s Mainstream Protestant Denominations? 27 2 Other Protestant Denominations  72 3 Canada’s Roman Catholics  122 4 No Religion: The Growth among the Disaffiliated and the Unaffiliated  163 5 Major Trends: Why the 1960s Mattered  197 6 Quo Vadis Canada?  232 Acknowledgments 247 Notes 251 Index 279

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Figures and Tables

F ig u r es 1.1 Canadian population (total) and United Church of Canada (UC C ), age distribution 1961  38 1.2 Canadian population (total) and United Church of Canada (UC C ), age distribution 2001  39 1.3 Anglican Church of Canada membership, 1948–2001  44 1.4 United Church of Canada, Sunday School enrolment, 1945–2011 47 1.5 Presbyterian Church in Canada, Sunday School enrolment, 1945–2011 48 1.6 Presbyterian Church in Canada, baptisms, 1945–2011  50 1.7 United Church of Canada, baptisms as a percentage of total Canadian births, 1945–2011  50 1.8 United Church of Canada, actual and projected professions of faith, 1945–2011  54 1.9 Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (E L CI C), baptized members 61 1.10 Lutheran Church-Canada (L C -C), baptized members  62 1.11 Lutheran churches, Sunday School enrolment  63 1.12 Canadian Baptists of Western Canada (CBW C), baptisms 65 1.13 Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec (CBO Q ), baptisms 66 2.1 Salvation Army Junior Soldiers  103 2.2 Salvation Army Senior Soldiers  103 2.3 Salvation Army adherents  104

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x

Figures and Tables

2.4 Canadian classes of the Christian Reformed Church, membership 106 2.5 Canadian classes of the Christian Reformed Church, baptisms 106 2.6 Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (P AO C), active individuals 108 2.7 Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, believers’ baptisms  109 2.8 Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, Sunday morning attendance 109 4.1 Numbers of those indicating No Religion by age cohort, 1981–2001 170

Tables I.1 I.2 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

Religious composition of Canada, 2011  7 Religious composition of Canada, selected categories, 2011  7 Catholic and Protestant population, 1921–2011  29 Denominational affiliation, 1941–1961  32 Denominational affiliation, 1971–2011  34 Male-to-female ratios of Census affiliates in larger Protestant denominations, 1961–2011  40 Membership changes over decades, Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches  46 Changes in key denominational statistics over decades, Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches  56 Comparison of denominational statistics to Census affiliates 58 Baptist denominational membership  67 Percentage of total Protestant population within the Canadian Census  80 Percentage of selected groups compared with the total population in the Canadian Census  80 Census identity and change (increase / decrease) in selected Protestant denominations  82 Census identity and change as a percentage in selected Protestant denominations  84 Difference (gain / loss) of selected groups between Censuses, 1941–2011 86 Male-to-female ratios of Census affiliates, selected other Protestant denominations (percentage)  90

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Figures and Tables xi

2.7 Selected other Protestant denominations by age group, 1961–2011 (percentage)  93 2.8 Other denominations, growing membership (selected examples, 19 of 48)  97 2.9 Other denominations with mixed growth  98 2.10 Other denominations in decline  99 2.11 Membership / Census ratios, selected Protestant denominations 101 2.12 Census affiliates for Christian Reformed denominations, 1961–2011 107 2.13 Gallup polls: Protestant attendance, 1945–1998  112 2.14 Project Canada: Protestant weekly attendance (percentage) 114 2.15 General Social Survey: Protestant attendance, 1986–2011 (percentage) 116 2.16 Protestant attendance by frequency, 1990–2006 (percentage) 117 2.17 Protestant attendance by sex, 1986–2011 (percentage)  119 3.1 Roman Catholic population, 1921–2011  125 3.2 Roman Catholics by province and territory, 2001 and 2011 126 3.3 Visible minorities as a percentage of the Roman Catholic and total Canadian population, 2001 and 2011  127 3.4 Immigrants from selected regions of origin as a percentage of the Roman Catholic and total Canadian population, 2001 128 3.5 Roman Catholics in Quebec by age group, 2001 and 2011 130 3.6 No Religious Affiliation in Quebec by age group, 2001 and 2011 132 3.7 Roman Catholics in the Rest of Canada by age group, 2001 and 2011  133 3.8 Roman Catholics in Ontario by age group, 2001 and 2011 133 3.9 Selected Roman Catholic ethnic origins by percentage (single origins), 1991  136 3.10 Gallup poll: Roman Catholic weekly church attendance in Canada and Quebec (percentage)  138 3.11 Project Canada: Roman Catholic weekly church attendance (percentage) 141

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xii

Figures and Tables

3.12 Roman Catholic attendance in Quebec by age group (percentage) 143 3.13 Roman Catholic attendance in the Rest of Canada by age group (percentage)  143 3.14 Roman Catholic attendance by sex in Quebec and Rest of Canada (percentage)  147 4.1 No Religion by province and territory (percentage)  166 4.2 Male-to-female ratios: No Religion compared with general population 168 4.3 Christian not otherwise specified (n.o.s.) age distribution compared with select denominations  175 4.4 Christian not included elsewhere (n.i.e.) by province – number and percentage in each group  177 4.5 Percentage variance from age distribution of total population, selected religious denominations  182 4.6 Age profile of four conservative denominations compared with nonvisible minority Christian n.o.s. (percentage)  183 4.7 Incidence of urban Christian n.i.e. compared with Roman Catholics and No Religion (percentage)  184 4.8 Ranking of Christian n.o.s. (2001) and Christian n.i.e. (2011) by province  185 4.9 Ranking of Christian n.o.s., Protestant n.o.s., and No Religion by province  187 4.10 Top ten religious groups among visible minorities  191 4.11 Significant visible-minority religious groups – Chinese  192 4.12 Significant visible-minority religious groups – Korean  192 5.1 Anglican, Presbyterian, and United de-churched and non-churched, 2001 and 2011  205 5.2 Catholics who never attend, by age group, 2001 and 2011 (percentage) 207 5.3 Estimate of de-churched and non-churched Catholics: General Social Survey Results as a percentage of Census and N HS 207 5.4 No Religious Affiliation in Canada compared with selected countries, circa 2011  212

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Introduction

In May 2010 the London Free Press ran a three-part series on how churches were faring, and the front-page headline for the lead story said it all: “Empty Pews: Church Closings in Southwestern Ontario.” “Many have closed; others have no prayer of survival,” the article went on to say. “Across the London area, mainline churches are under siege.” In the previous decade, the United Church alone had closed eighteen churches in the region, while Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Lutherans were also closing churches. When the series considered the  potential causes for this drastic turn in fortunes, it contrasted the example of a growing Baptist church: the various attempts by Anglican and United Church clergy to reach out, characterized as “searching for new ways to be relevant,” had failed. Despite offering a variety of proposals to improve the fortunes of the United Church and other major Protestant churches, such as the Anglican and Presbyterian, the series left little doubt that in the early twenty-first century these kinds of churches are in serious trouble.1 The London Free Press series, one suspects unintentionally, shares the widely held assumption that Canada’s larger Protestant churches – those often thought of as mainstream – were destined to wane. (We will discuss the question of terminology below, but our primary distinction among Protestant denominations is their size – whether they are large or small – not the social and theological position implied by the terms mainstream or mainline.) After all, we all know what has happened to Canada’s traditionally dominant Protestant denominations over the last few decades.2 Even if one has paid only cursory attention, one could not fail to be aware of their massive losses in membership and attendance. To take but one example, according

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4

Leaving Christianity

to the national Census, in the last three decades of the twentieth century the United Church lost about one-quarter of its supporters. Indeed, the loss of support and status of Canada’s major Protestant churches seems to many all but inevitable. Wasn’t this a decline that we all expected? Weren’t these mainstream institutions supposed to be left behind? Certainly, today there is no shortage of evidence of decline. But as this study will document, church decline is far more widespread than is commonly assumed. At the same time, the image of Protestant decline is so persistent that it is hard to remember that  these larger Protestant churches were once vital and growing institutions. At the beginning of the 1960s, Canada’s larger Protestant and Catholic churches were in good shape. So let’s put aside what we think happened since then and imagine for a moment that we are looking at the returns for religious affiliation from the 1961 Canadian Census just after they had been released in 1962. John Kennedy is president of the United States. Men wear colourful (your choice of grey, black, or navy) suits, white shirts, and narrow ties. John Diefenbaker is prime minister of Canada. Many fear communism as an existential threat to the West, as well as around the world, including in a small country called Vietnam where a small number of American military advisors are stationed. For the moment – forget about what we know happens next (Kennedy’s assassination, Trudeaumania, psychedelia) – just look at things as they would have appeared in 1962. The news from the Census was good, very good, for Canada’s major Protestant denominations. They had grown, yet again, and along with the Roman Catholic Church, they continued to dominate the Canadian religious landscape. Taken together, Roman Catholics and Protestants from the country’s five largest Protestant churches – the Anglican, Presbyterian, United, Baptist, and Lutheran churches – made up over 90% of the Canadian population in the 1961 Census. If one looked more closely at the Census returns for the larger Protestant churches and examined their Census affiliates (that is, those who identified with a particular denomination for the ­purposes of the Census), the news would have been even better. Each had seen its Census affiliates increase. For example, affiliates of the United Church of Canada, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, had grown from 2.8 million in 1951 to 3.6 million in  1961, for an increase of over a quarter. The Roman Catholic Church also saw robust growth, surging by well over a third.

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Introduction 5

Canada’s smaller denominations witnessed notable growth too, with Mennonites increasing by a fifth and Pentecostals by just over a half. To be sure, a few church leaders grumbled about the Census results. The Presbyterian Record expressed sentiments such as “Why aren’t we seeing more of these folks in church?” and “Why aren’t we doing as well as the United Church?” Nevertheless, no one could doubt that the C ­ ensus numbers reflected real membership growth. Canada’s Protestant denominations were expanding in other ways as well. They had successfully planted new churches in the growing suburbs, and everyone expected this growth to continue. More churches would need to be built. More ministers would need to be trained. Indeed, some were concerned that the number of ministerial candidates would not keep pace with church growth. And, as the baby boom continued, more Sunday Schools would need to be established. All these signs indicated that Canada’s denominations were strong institutions and that everyone anticipated that they would continue to be so. Even critiques of the churches, such as Pierre Berton’s famous The Comfortable Pew, need to be understood, as Nancy Christie has suggested, as part of the general cultural critiques of the 1960s and as speaking to the strengths of the churches: “Thus it was the success and not the failure of the churches that most troubled commentators both within and outside the mainstream denominations. It was not dechristianization but rather the spectacular revival of religion during the 1950s that shaped the critique of the institutional churches.”3 Canada’s churches were strong and numerically significant institutions in the early 1960s, and with such vast memberships the Catholic and leading Protestant churches were socially powerful ones too. As we now know, this was not to last. For four of the five largest Protestant denominations – the United, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches – the 1971 Census was to represent the peak level of affiliation. After that, the decline among Census affiliates was considerable. For instance, over the next three decades, Anglicans would decline by a fifth and United Church affiliations by nearly a quarter. These are stunning numbers, to be sure. But they represent only part of the story. What we have discovered is that the trend of religious decline is broad and deep, and it is not limited to the larger Protestant churches. A number of smaller denominations, such as the Christian Reformed, the Pentecostals, and the Salvation Army, have also lost members, especially since 1991. Nor is the Roman Catholic Church

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Leaving Christianity

immune (the London Free Press in its series on church closings reported that the Roman Catholic Diocese of London had closed some forty parishes). True, many Catholics have retained their affi­liation on the Census, but even among those who self-identify as Catholic, regular attendance has fallen significantly in the Rest of Canada. In Quebec, the decline can only be described as precipitous. And now there are signs – even among older Catholics – of disaffiliation. Meanwhile, the number of those claiming No Religion has taken off. Something significant has changed. We see this when we compare the results of the 1961 Census on the religious composition of Canada with data from the most recent equivalent, the 2011 National Household Survey (tables I.1 and I.2). Christians still dominate the religious composition of Canada (67%), but that is down significantly from the approximately 96% of Canadians who identified as various kinds of Christians in 1961.4 Moreover, according to the 2011 National Household Survey (N H S ), some 7.8 million Canadians, almost 25% of the total population compared to less than 1% in 1961, identified themselves as having No Religion. Another notable trend is the growth of global religions other than Christianity. Adherents of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism made up just over 8% of the national population in 2011, with Muslims alone at 3.2%. This is undoubtedly a major trend, and one that reflects a profound change in Canada as it becomes a truly multicultural and religiously diverse society, but the increase of those with No Religion is even more dramatic: this group now represents the second largest “religion” in Canada. The development we focus on in this study – people disaffiliating themselves from organized Christianity, along with those who have never been affiliated with organized Christianity – is part of this profound change in Canadian society. When we break the Christian category into subcategories, the change from 1961 is pronounced (table I.2). Whereas in 1961 Roman Catholics and the larger Protestant churches accounted for over 90% of the population, in 2011 members of these churches accounted for less than 60% of the national population. Other Protestant denominations (4.5%) have become a significant group, as have those nearly 1.5 million Canadians combined together in the Census as “Christians not included elsewhere (n.i.e.),” who also make up 4.5% of the popu­ lation. This religious diversity, especially the option to have No Religion, is a new reality in Canada.

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Introduction 7 Table I.1  Religious composition of Canada, 2011 Religious identification Christian

Number

Percentage

Rank

22,102,745

67

1

No Religious Affiliation

7,850,610

24

2

Muslim

1,053,945

3

3

Hindu

497,960

1.5

4

Sikh

454,960

1.4

5

Buddhist

366,830

1

6

Jewish

329,495

1

7

Other religions

130,830

0.1%) (0.2%) (0.1%) (100%)

10,090

Sources: Statistics Canada, Census of Canada, 2001, custom table E 00870, 17 May 2005; NHS, 2011, custom table E01908, 30 June 2013.

Christian n.i.e.

3,210

2,485

Total

2011

0 0 0 0 15 120 25 35 125 40 0 35 0 (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.1%) (0.1%) (0.1%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (3.8%) (0.0%)

Christian Assembly

1,165 (0.2%)

701,330 (89.9%)

  0 0 0 0 0 515 225 45 65 315 0 0 0 (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.2%) (0.5%) (0.2%) (0.1%) (0.2%) (0.0%) (0.0%) (0.0%)

24,220 (3.1%)

Canada

Igliesia ni Cristo

NU

17,640 (2.3%)

NT

 45 170 490 400 580 7,630 1,280 975 3,050 2,995 25 10 0 (1.8%) (5.3%) (4.9%) (4.9%) (1.0%) (2.5%) (2.9%) (3.6%) (2.5%) (1.5%) (2.5%) (1.1%) (0.0%)

YT

Born again Christian n.o.s.

BC

24,825 (3.2%)

AB

Evangelical 15 0 70 65 6,115 6,770 1,925 1,030 4,340 4,480 0 10 10 n.o.s. (0.6%) (0.0%) (0.7%) (0.8%) (10.8%) (2.2%) (4.3%) (3.8%) (3.5%) (2.2%) (0.0%) (1.1%) (1.2%)

SK

10,855 (1.4%)

MB

295 0 190 95 1,450 3,650 945 2,760 750 710 0 10 0 (11.9%) (0.0%) (1.9%) (1.2%) (2.6%) (1.2%) (2.1%) (10.2%) (0.6%) (0.4%) (0.0%) (1.1%) (0.0%)

ON

Apostolic n.o.s.

QC

1,855 2,820 8,905 6,770 47,025 273,830 38,955 20,560 111,145 187,255 950 835 430 (74.6%) (87.9%) (88.3%) (83.5%) (82.9%) (90.7%) (87.4%) (76.0%) (90.3%) (93.5%) (94.5%) (90.8%) (51.2%)

NB

Christian n.o.s.

NS

275 220 435 780 1,565 9,410 1,195 1,665 3,675 4,545 30 20 400 (11.1%) (6.9%) (4.3%) (9.6%) (2.8%) (3.1%) (2.7%) (6.2%) (2.9%) (2.3%) (3.0%) (2.2%) (47.6%)

PE

Other Christian

2001

NL

Table 4.4  Christian not included elsewhere (n.i.e.) by province – number and percentage in each group

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would be lower than the latter figure. And by far the largest subcategory previously included in the Christian n.i.e. other than Christian n.o.s. – evangelicals – is now listed separately. So if we estimated the Christian n.o.s. for 2011 to be the same proportion of Christian n.i.e. for 2001, at around 90% of the Christian n.i.e., that would be a safe and conservative estimate at some 1.3 million Canadians. So what can we say about the Christian n’s? That so many Canadians should prefer to identify themselves as Christians rather than identify with a specific denomination, as the Census urged them to do, presents us with a problem of interpretation. What did these Canadians mean by this response? Why did they choose the term Christian? Rick Hiemstra has suggested that more people identified as simply Christian in the 2001 Census because some conservative Protestant denominations – including the Pentecostals, Mennonites, and Salvation Army – were dropped from the list of religions bodies that respondents could choose from. Not seeing their own denomination but noticing several world religions listed, respondents thought that what they were “being asked for was their world religion, not their denomination,” and so they chose to write down Christian.25 It should be noted that in 2011, Statistics Canada attempted to rectify that situation by reinstating Pentecostals to its list of examples and adding an even smaller denomination, the Evangelical Missionary Church (some 7,820 Census affiliates) to the list. And still the Christian n’s continued to grow. There are, however, other possibilities. Perhaps some respondents were making a theological statement: their relationship with God and their Christian identity trump denominational affiliation. Marc S. Mentzer has suggested that some conservative Protestants would take the term Christian to signify evangelical Protestant.26 Another possibility is that we are seeing a growing number of people joining independent churches. They could also be post-denominational Christians, such as the participants in the Emerging Church movement. Among conservative Protestants, many post-boomers value diversity and other “liberal” values and thus – unlike their parents – may be willing to explore new forms of Christian witness and affiliation.27 So far we are moving in a mainly conservative Protestant orbit. There is yet another, very different possibility. Identifying oneself as Christian could reflect alienation from organized religion. Are we,

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No Religion: The Growth among the Disaffiliated and Unaffiliated 179

then, looking at people who are drifting away from Christianity? Or are we seeing among the Christian n’s a sign of vitality among conservative Christians? The rest of this chapter will seek to answer these two questions. The first thing to be said is that we are looking at large numbers of people who are choosing to identify themselves in this manner. When Christian n.o.s. made its first appearance in 1981, it included 93,095 individuals, and by 1991 this had leapt to 275,815. Between 1991 and 2001, the Christian n’s category spurted yet again, to stand at 701,330. In 2011 we estimate that Christian n.o.s. would be about 1.3 million Canadians. If these respondents were ranked against other Christian denominations or denominational families and the Census’s other religious categories, they would have been in seventeenth place in 1981, just ahead of the Church of Latter Day Saints. By contrast, in 2001 they were the sixth-largest religious category in Canada (they make up 90% of Christian n.i.e., who actually rank fifth among the top ten denominations), right on the heels of the Baptists with their 729,470 Census affiliates. In the 2011 Census, based on our estimates, the Christian n’s were nearly twice the size of the Baptists and had moved up to the fifth spot in rank, right after the Anglican Church of Canada. As these figures suggest, the numbers of Christians not otherwise specified are growing rapidly. Between 1981 and 1991, Christian n’s grew by an astounding 3 times, and in the following decade they jumped ahead by over 2.5 times. In the 2000s, they again nearly doubled. More Canadians indicated on the Census that they were Christian (without specifying a religious denomination) than indicated Presbyterian, Lutheran, or Pentecostal. Once again, we are looking at a large, deeply entrenched trend. And the numbers suggest that Hiemstra’s explanation of a confusion of categories on the part of conservative Protestants is unlikely. The numbers involved are simply too massive (between 1991 and 2001 the increase was 504,635 Canadians), and the explosion in growth predates the 2001 Census (in 1981 the increase was 160,835 Canadians). In short, we are witnessing a trend that was well under way before the 2001 Census. So we are still left with the question: what is going on here? While the nature of the Census data does not allow us to give a definitive answer, we believe that a careful look at the data from a variety of perspectives – the ratio between the sexes, age distribution, urban profile, and regional distribution – points us in a couple of promising

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Leaving Christianity

directions. We will also explore how visible minority status functions to differentiate the saliency of Christian n’s for visible minorities in contrast to white Canadians. We will try to see in what ways these particular Christian n’s resemble those in other religious categories in terms of these variables in the hope that the comparisons might shed light on this identification’s strength or lack thereof. We admit that no single comparison establishes our case. What we do suggest, however, is that taken together the comparisons indicate a high degree of probability. We will propose that the response as “Christian” appears to function in two different ways: first, primarily as a default or attenuated identification for nonvisible minorities; and second, as a category of primary identification for visible minorities.28 We will return to the Christian n’s among visible minorities later in the chapter. For those who do not belong to a visible minority, our findings suggest that they claim the Christian label as a default or fallback position. Their allegiance to this identity is residual and very likely attenuated. For example, one might claim one were a Christian, rather than Muslim or Jew, without this indicating a strong attachment to the Christian religion or faith. Turning now to distribution by sex. Unfortunately, we do not have this information for the Christian n’s, but we do for Christian n.i.e. Among them the ratio of male to female is 48 / 52 for both 2001 and  2011. This is quite different from that found among those of No Religion, where men predominate, 55 / 45 in 2001 and 54 / 46 in 2011. The question arises as to which other groups might provide a  closer match. Some conservative Protestant denominations have a  similar ratio; among both Mennonites and Christian Reformed, the ratio among Census affiliates is 49 / 51 in both 2001 and 2011. Among other conservative Christian denominations, the ratio is more tilted to females: among the Pentecostals it is 45 / 55 in 2001 and 2011, and among the Church of the Nazarene, 46 / 54 in 2001 and 44 / 56 in 2011. In fact, the ratio almost matches exactly that of the Canadian population as a whole, 49 / 51 in both 2001 and 2011. Nor is it that far off from the ratio found in the general Protestant population – 47 / 53 in 2001 and 46 / 54 in 2011. As we have seen, this population is made up of a high proportion of Census affiliates who are inactive, at about two-thirds for the larger Protestant denominations. Admittedly, we are dealing with probabilities here. But after looking at the sex ratio for “Christians” from several

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No Religion: The Growth among the Disaffiliated and Unaffiliated 181

different angles, it doesn’t seem that their sex ratio tracks that of the conservative Protestant population as much as it does that of the wider Protestant Census affiliate population, many of whom have little connection to organized Christianity. We turn next to the issue of age distribution, for which we have data on white Christians not otherwise specified in 2001. In short, the question here is, Which age groups are most represented in this category? Tables 4.3 and 4.5 consider the age distribution of the Christian n’s as a whole throughout Canada. It is clear from these data that nonvisible minority Christian n’s – that is, white Canadians – are younger than the national norm. About three-quarters of this group (76.7% in 2001 and 70% in 2011) is under forty-five years of age, compared to about 60% of the general population that would be under forty-five. It is also worth noting the variations between some of the other major denominations in Canada when it comes to age distribution (table 4.3). With 63% under forty-five in 2001, for example, Roman Catholics are very close to the national norm. This is to be expected. Roman Catholics are close to the Canadian total in each age category – mainly because they belong to such a large denomination (43.2% of the total population) that its membership drives national demographic trends. Yet it is very unlikely that lapsed Catholics are becoming Christian n’s. As we have noted when discussing the No Religion Canadians, Catholic identity, if not practice, has tended to persist. And it is improbable that lapsed Catholics, let alone practising Catholics, would identify themselves as Christian. If anything, they would opt for nothing – No Religion – rather than something that might have a vaguely Protestant ring to it. Moreover, Catholics have no theological rationale for identifying themselves primarily as Christian as opposed to Roman Catholic. In fact, Catholic theology would lead them to identify themselves as Catholics. Nor do members of the Protestant mainstream churches fit the younger profile of Christian n’s. For example, members of the United Church of Canada (UC C ), the largest of the mainstream Protestant denominations in the country, are notably older – with 48% (62% in 2011) of those so identified being forty-five or older. Those who indicated simply that they were Protestant show a similar pattern, with a high percentage (45% in 2001 and 62% in 2011) being forty-five and older. As already noted, this is not the case for Christian n’s, where only 23% in 2001 and about 30% in 2011 would fall into this

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Table 4.5  Percentage variance from age distribution of total population, selected religious denominations 0–14

15–24

25–44

45–64

65+

No Religion 2001

3.8

2.8

4.5

–5.0

–6.1

No Religion 2011

3.4

2.6

5.8

–4.8

–6.9

Christian n.o.s. 2001

5.6

4.0

3.8

–6.2

–7.2

Christian n.o.s. white Canadians 2001*

6.0

3.6

3.1

–5.6

–7.2

Christian n.i.e. white Canadians 2011*

6.4

1.9

5.0

–5.4

–6.9

Protestant n.o.s. 2001

–3.6

–1.6

0.2

2.0

3.1

Protestant n.o.s. 2011

–7.1

–3.2

–7.2

6.9

11.1

ucc 2001

–3.7

–2.5

–5.4

4.9

6.8

ucc 2011

–5.9

–3.5

–9.5

7.5

11.5

* See the textbox “Visible Minorities” on terminology. Sources: Statistics Canada, Census of Canada, 2001, custom table 2001 2B, E 00870, 17 May 2005; nhs, 2011, custom table E 01908, 30 June 2013.

older demographic. Indeed, Christian n’s more closely resemble those who indicated No Religion – where 26% were forty-five or older, and 74% were younger in 2001. The variance from the population as a whole, summarized in table 4.5, simply illustrates this point in a different way. In sum, Christian n’s are generally younger than the national average, even compared with those who claim to have No Religion, and in 2011 they kept getting even younger. It is this demographic profile that accounts for their exceptional growth. How then does the Christian n’s age profile among white Canadians compare to that of conservative Protestants? The results are sum­ marized in table 4.6. On the whole, these Christian n’s are younger than their conservative Christian counterparts, with the exception of Mennonites. They have a much larger concentration among the twenty-five to forty-four cohort. Overall, the age profile of Christian n’s is closer to that of No Religion. It is possible that some younger conservative Protestants are now identifying themselves as Christians as opposed to being members of a specific denomination. But the significant size of the twenty-five to forty-four age cohort of Christian n’s suggests that other factors are driving the growth of this category. Nor does it seem likely that we are seeing a large trend among conservative Protestants to identify themselves as Christian as a sign of

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No Religion: The Growth among the Disaffiliated and Unaffiliated 183

Table 4.6  Age profile of four conservative denominations compared with nonvisible minority Christian n.o.s. (percentage) 0–14

15–24

25–44

45–64

65+

Pentecostal 2001

23.4

15.1

29.8

22.6

9.1

Pentecostal 2011

20.2

13.8

25.6

28.6

11.8

Salvation Army 2001

17.3

12.5

29.9

26.9

13.9

Salvation Army 2011

14.2

9.6

22.8

33.4

20.0

Jehovah’s Witnesses 2001

16.4

15.5

29.1

26.1

12.9

Jehovah’s Witnesses 2011

13.7

9.6

26.5

33.0

17.2

Mennonite 2001

26.2

15.2

27.1

19.6

11.9

Mennonite 2011

23.4

14.2

21.9

25.6

14.8

Christian n.o.s. white Canadians 2001

25.4

17.1

33.7

18.9

5.2

Christian n.i.e. white Canadians 2011

23.4

15.1

31.6

23.9

6.9

Sources: Census of Canada, 2001; nhs, 2011.

commitment. In 2001, Christian n’s were almost half as large as all those belonging to denominations outside the five largest Protestant denominations. In 2011, using our proxy of 90% of the Christian n.i.e. for Christian n’s, that proportion was up to an astounding 90%. They are now almost as large as all the smaller Protestant denominations across the country combined, Pentecostals included. Even if we add in Baptists (many of whom would not self-identify as evangelical according to the 2003 Ipsos Reid poll), Christian n’s still accounted for over a third of all other Protestants in 2001, and that figure jumped to over three-fifths of all other Protestants in 2011.29 Either we are seeing a huge and unprecedented trend among conservative Protestants, one that has previously not been documented, or we are seeing a wider trend not limited to smaller Protestant denominations or to conservative Protestantism. The scale of trend suggests that a wider trend is more likely. To sum up our case so far. Among white Canadians, the Christian n’s category signifies a drift away from organized religion. It is a significant trend among younger Canadians. In table 4.7, we observe that this trend may also be a result of the cosmopolitan experience of living in a big city. We cannot distinguish between visible minority and nonvisible minority n.o.s. and n.i.e. in urban settings because the data are not cross-tabulated for that. But data do exist on Christian

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Table 4.7  Incidence of urban Christian n.i.e. compared with Roman Catholics and No Religion (percentage) Christian n.i.e. 2001

Christian n.i.e. 2011

Roman Catholics 2001

Roman Catholics 2011

No Religion 2001

No Religion 2011

National

2.6

4.5

43.2

40.0

16.2

23.6

Vancouver

5.2

7.1

18.3

16.5

34.4

41.0

Calgary

4.3

7.0

25.8

23.9

24.6

32.0

Toronto

3.5

5.8

33.4

30.1

16.7

20.8

Montreal

1.1

2.1

74.2

63.2

7.4

14.7

Sources: Census of Canada, 2001; nhs, 2011.

n.i.e. for Census Metropolitan Areas (unfortunately, not for Christian n.o.s.). We looked at Canada’s four leading metropolises. Christian n.i.e. are more likely to be found in these major urban areas than elsewhere, as table 4.7 indicates. In Canada’s largest anglophone cities, Christians not included elsewhere range from double to 1.3 times the national average. So the incidence of people identifying as Christian n.i.e. is associated with the urban experience. But there are other factors at work. Religious background also counts. Cities like Montreal and Toronto, which have high concentrations of Roman Catholics, have a lower level of Christian n.i.e. compared with the national norm. Moving across the country, one sees that the lower the Roman Catholic population is in a city, the higher the Christian n.i.e. population is. This suggests that Christian n.i.e. is largely a Protestant phenomenon, a point we have mentioned earlier. Moreover, the level of Christian n.i.e. corresponds with the incidence of No Religion. All in all, it would seem that high levels of Christian n.i.e. are associated with multicultural environments, where people might want to distinguish themselves from other world religions. And this profile also strengthens our argument that white Canadians who identify themselves simply as Christian have weak ties to organized religion. We now turn to the Christian n.o.s. and their regional profile. Christian n’s and No Religion also have a similar regional distribution. We have already discussed the regional distribution of Christian n’s in relation to the Christian n.i.e. category as a whole. It is now worth considering where Christian n’s as a group are most significant

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No Religion: The Growth among the Disaffiliated and Unaffiliated 185

Table 4.8  Ranking of Christian n.o.s. (2001) and Christian n.i.e. (2011) by province

NL

PE

NS

NB qc ON MB

SK

AB

BC

2001 rank – Christian n.o.s. as proportion of population

8

5

6

7

5

2

1

Christian n.o.s as percentage of population

0.4 2.1 1.0 0.9 0.6 2.4 3.5 2.1 3.7 4.8

2011 rank – Christian n.i.e. as ­proportion of population

9

Christian n.i.e. as percentage of population

0.7 3.0 2.1 2.2 1.4 5.9 7.8 5.6 7.2 7.2

5

7

6

8

8

4

3

3

1

4

2

2

Sources: Statistics Canada, Census of Canada, 2001, custom table 2001 2B , E00870, 17 May 2005; nhs, 2011.

in Canada. Or, to put the issue in a different way, in which provinces would we find the highest concentrations of people who indicated to the Census authorities that they were simply Christian? Where would we most likely find these persons? The answer is western Canada (table 4.8). In 2001, British Columbia led the way at a national high of 4.8%, a full percentage point ahead of the next-ranking province. Ten years later, Manitoba led the pack at 7.8%, with Alberta and British Columbia tied for second place at 7.2%. What is more interesting is that in 2001, the ranking of Christian n’s ran more or less from west to east (with the exceptions of Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and Saskatchewan). The pattern changed somewhat in 2011 with Manitoba in the lead, but the overall regional pattern has held, with Christian n.o.s. having the strongest percentage representation in parts of western Canada and the weakest representation in eastern Canada. Once again, Quebec is an outlier, which confirms our point that, whether lapsed or otherwise, Roman Catholics would not selfidentify as simply Christian. Looking at table 4.9, which compares how provinces rank in the concentration in three categories – Christian n.o.s., No Religion, and Protestant n.o.s. – we immediately notice several things. One is that Quebec and Newfoundland have the lowest number of indi­ viduals in all three categories. Putting the case in positive terms, denominational identification remains strong in both these provinces. (Attendance at religious services and influence of religion on  ethical positions might be another matter entirely.) Publicly

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supported confessional education no longer exists in either of these provinces, but its legacy may account for their strength in denominational affiliation in the Census. As for the country as a whole, what stands out is the marked association between Christian n’s and No Religion. In 2001 in provinces where a high percentage of Canadians indicated No Religion, a high percentage stated Christian. This was true of every province west of Quebec. Conversely, in provinces where fewer people said No Religion, fewer people said simply Christian. Indeed, in eastern Canada in 2001, people were more likely to indicate that they were Protestant – without specifying anything further – than that they were Christian – without any further explication. That was no longer the case in 2011, but all the same the numerical difference between each group is typically small. We admit that comparing the regional rankings of the various religious traditions is not conclusive. We would argue, however, that it is suggestive. The provinces with the strongest numbers indicating No Religion also tend to have a strong number indicating Christian n’s. We also see a similarity between Christian n’s and those with No Religion when it comes to age distribution. In both categories those under forty-five are significantly overrepresented compared with the national norm and particularly with those affiliated with a Protestant denomination. It is difficult to tease out significant conclusions from the Census data. That is why we have looked at a variety of data sets. When we see similar trends emerging from different data sets, we are on much surer ground as to what is a more probable scenario: whether this is a trend that primarily affects ­conservative Protestants or one that is occurring in a wider part of the population. As we have seen, the ratio between the sexes doesn’t seem to point us to a trend derived from the population pool found among smaller, and for the most part, conservative denominations. Indeed, the sex ratio seems to point to a trend that is occurring in the broader population. The other four trends that we have observed – Christian n’s regional distribution, urban profiles, age distribution, and growth rate – closely track the trends among No Religion. These findings would strongly suggest that the growth of Christian n’s is a trend that is primarily occurring among a wider population and that is affecting Protestants or former Protestants as opposed to Catholics. Once again, let us be clear on this point. We are not saying all Christian n’s have a weak religious commitment. We admit that some people

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No Religion: The Growth among the Disaffiliated and Unaffiliated 187

Table 4.9  Ranking of Christian n.o.s., Protestant n.o.s., and No Religion by province

NL

PE

NS

NB

QC ON MB

SK

AB

BC

Ranking as a proportion of the population Christian n.o.s. 2001 Christian n.o.s. 2011

9

5

6

7

8

4

3

5

2

1

9

5

7

6

8

3

1

4

2

2

No Religion 2001

10

8

6

7

9

4

3

5

2

1

No Religion 2011

10

8

6

7

9

5

3

4

2

1

Protestant n.o.s. 2001

9

1

6

7

8

3

5

6

2

4

Protestant n.o.s. 2011

9

7

2

4

8

3

5

4

1

6

Provinces where Protestant n.o.s. outnumber Christians Protestant n.o.s. ­outnumber Christian n.o.s. 2001

X

Protestant n.o.s. ­outnumber Christian n.i.e. 2011

X

X

X

X

Note: X denotes where Protestant not otherwise specified (n.o.s.) is higher than Christian n.o.s. (2001) and Christian n.i.e. (2011). Sources: Data for table and subsequent discussion taken from Statistics Canada, Census of Canada, 2001, custom table 2001 2B , E00870, 17 May 2005; nhs, 2011.

identify themselves in this way to make a theological statement. Their Christian commitment supersedes denominational loyalty, as in the case of some evangelicals and other conservative Protestants. This has been confirmed by Adam Stewart in his research on Pentecostals, where “Christian” was clearly a significant identity for many involved in the Pentecostal churches he studied.30 And we also may be seeing the emergence of postdenominational Christians, such as those involved in the Emerging Churches. What we are saying is, given the nature of the trends we have described, it is far more likely that Canadians who do not self-identify with conservative Christianity predominate the Christian n’s than those who do. We can assess the significance of conservative Protestants in the emergence and growth of Christian n’s from yet another angle by examining the depth, scale, and rapidity of this growth. As we have noted earlier, Christian n’s have grown at a spectacular rate: from 93,095 in 1981, to 701,330 in 2001, and then to 1,328,020 in 2011, which translates into an astounding growth rate of 14 times

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in three decades. Visible minorities account for some of this growth, as they do in part for the younger age profile of Christian n’s. But what is fuelling this growth is that white Canadians are opting for this identification. And given the scale and rapidity of growth among Christian n’s, for the vast majority this identification is a new one. Again, we are assessing probabilities. Are we witnessing an unprecedented shift in conservative Protestant identity? In this case, we would be looking at a trend that affects hundreds of thousands of conservative Protestants. As we have noted, Christian n’s jumped from being half as large as all of the country’s smaller denominations in 2001 to nearly rival them in size just ten years later. This leaves us with one last possibility: that conservative Christians from the country’s largest churches, such as the United Church, increasingly identify themselves as Christian rather than as affiliates of their denomination. An Ispos Reid poll conducted in 2003 allows us to estimate the number of conservative Christians who adhere to the Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and United churches.31 The number of conservative Christians involved would be about 560,000 in 2001, growing to some 770,000 in 2011. This population pool is relatively small, given the scale of the trend we are looking at. Nor do these Protestants demonstrate any inclination to switch, for example, to a conservative denomination that might be more congenial to their faith.32 Clearly, the simply “Christians” are growing at an astonishingly high rate. And if this were largely a conservative Protestant trend, we would be looking at a phenomenon so huge and so rapid that it would literally be changing the face of conservative Protestantism among its traditional constituency of white Canadians. By contrast, those who are specifically “Nondenominational Christians” account for just 43,590 Canadians (up 7% from 2001’s 40,545 figure), most of whom very likely are conservative Christians. And as we saw in chapter 2, the Census affiliates for conservative Christian denominations are pretty well flat for the decade. We believe, then, that it is more probable that the growth of white Christian n’s exceeds what conservative Protestantism is capable of sustaining. No doubt some Christian n’s come from a conservative Protestant background and have in increasing numbers opted to identify themselves in non- or postdenominational terms, but in the end we need to look elsewhere for an explanation. And that leaves us with the general white Canadian population of self-identified Protestants or

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No Religion: The Growth among the Disaffiliated and Unaffiliated 189

former Protestants (Protestant n’s combined with Christian n’s), some of whom would be conservative Protestants. When we add up all these groups of white Canadians, we get approximately 7.9 million in 2001 and 7.5 million in 2011. This group is deep and wide enough to feed and sustain the tremendous growth we have seen among Christian n’s.33 We believe that on balance the size of the numbers involved and the nature of the demographic trends we have analyzed make it more likely that the majority of those white Canadians identifying themselves as simply Christian have in fact left church. Their closest cousins, so to speak, are Canadians of No Religion, who are similar in age, their region of residence, and their preference for cosmopolitan cities. The available evidence suggests that most Christian n’s are Canadians who are opting out of organized Christianity. At some point in the past, either they or their parents would have identified themselves in terms of a Protestant denominational allegiance. It would appear, then, that in calling themselves Christians they are eschewing denominational affiliation. If that is the case, and in our view it is the typical scenario, this designation does not suggest a strong religious identification.34 On the contrary, it seems likely that these white Canadians are choosing the label “Christian” for lack of any better designation. They may be holding on to a vague or residual Christian memory, but one not salient enough to prompt them to identify with a specific Christian community. Memory that one’s family was once United Church or Lutheran is fading. (As we mentioned earlier, Roman Catholicism has been an exception here.) One begins to think of oneself as a “Christian” as opposed to something else (e.g., a Muslim, a Jew, an Atheist). It may even be the case that some Christian n’s are not yet prepared to designate themselves as having No Religion and so are searching for a more neutral label. This we admit is speculation, but the Christian label could serve as a way station for them on the path to indicating they have no religious preference. Perhaps this is a reflection that many Canadians have weaker ties to organized religion than do Americans, but still have a  stronger residual attachment to the Christian religion than do Europeans. At least for the time being.35 Will they remain in this category? Or will they lose even this identity and move into No Religion? Or will they seek out a spiritual home and join a denomination? Only time will tell. But now, as part of the fifth-largest religious category (just behind Anglicans in rank),

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whatever these Canadians do will affect this country’s pattern of religious affiliation. This trend may be as important to the future of religion in Canada as the decline of mainstream Protestantism, the growth of those claiming No Religion, and the recent rise of nonChristian religions among some of the country’s immigrant communities, all of which have received much attention in our media. One thing is certain: it has already changed the pattern of religious identification in our nation.

Vi s i b l e M in o r it ie s a n d S i mply Chri sti an Visible minorities now account for about one-third of all those who identify themselves as simply Christian, and they are 2.5 times (2 times in 2001) more likely to identify themselves as Christian than the rest of the population. It is not surprising to see other world religious identities (Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist) rank highly among visible minorities (see table 4.10). What is surprising to observe is that, among visible minorities, Christian n.o.s. ranks higher than any individual Protestant denomination. Put simply, a member of a visible minority in Canada who is a Christian but not a Roman Catholic is most likely to respond simply as “Christian” on the Census. This identity is more dominant than any of the specific religious traditions (Baptist, Anglican, Pentecostal, etc.) enumerated by the Census. Interestingly, these Canadians are not likely to respond “Protestant.” Within specific visible-minority groups, this pattern often holds even when a particular denomination is especially prominent. For example, the strong Baptist presence among Chinese Christians is well known, and yet Christian n.o.s. remains a stronger identity among Chinese Canadians, ranking fourth overall (see table 4.11). The ranking among Koreans displays the same reality, with Christian n.o.s. in third position (see table 4.12). Among Koreans, Christian n.o.s. outranks Presbyterian, the denomination with which Koreans are most associated. While recognizing that Koreans in the United Church would also consider themselves in many cases “Presbyterian,” this does not take away from the fundamental reality that the strongest identifier for Korean Christians who are not Roman Catholic is simply Christian. And among blacks, Christians now outnumber Baptists and Anglicans by a factor of 1.6 times. There are exceptions to this trend among visible minority Christians. For Japanese Christians, the United, Roman Catholic, and

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No Religion: The Growth among the Disaffiliated and Unaffiliated 191

Table 4.10  Top ten religious groups among visible minorities Religion

% 2001

Religion

% 2011

Roman Catholic

23.6

Roman Catholic

22.5

No Religion

22.1

No Religion

22.1

Muslim

12.7

Muslim

14.8

Hindu

 7.4

Hindu

 7.9

Buddhist

 7.1

Christian n.i.e.

 7.6

Sikh

 7.0

Sikh

 7.2

Christian n.o.s.

 5.1

Buddhist

 5.3

Baptist

 3.0

Pentecostal

 2.5

Anglican

 2.4

Baptist

 2.5

Pentecostal

 1.8

Anglican

 1.3

Sources: Statistics Canada, Census of Canada, 2001, custom table 2001 2B , E00870, 17 May 2005; nhs, 2011, custom table E 01908, 30 June 2013.

Anglican churches outrank Christian n.o.s. by a significant degree, and Christian n.o.s. remains numerically a very small group among this particular visible minority. Still, the strength of Christian n.o.s. among visible minorities is noteworthy. For Arab Christians who are not Roman Catholic, Orthodox n.o.s. and Christians outnumber the next-largest religious group, the Copts, by about two to one. When visible minorities are taken as a whole, we can conclude that Christian n.o.s. is a leading category, and one that we would suggest functions as a meaningful form of identification. Indeed, many primarily describe their religious identity as Christian. We see the power of this identification in the Christian n.o.s. overall ranking – ahead of the historic Protestant denominations – among most Asian Christians as well as its high ranking among those visible minorities often associated with one particular Christian denomination. So what does this add up to? We mean the question quite literally. What we are assessing is the magnitude of the drift away from Christianity as it can be measured by the growth in the Census categories of No Religion, Christian n’s, and Protestant n’s. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the category of No Religion understates the number of people who in fact have no active religious affiliation. No Religious Affiliation, however, is an even broader category, one that includes those who identify themselves

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Table 4.11  Significant visible-minority religious groups – Chinese Denomination

2001 (%)

2011 (%)

No Religion

58.4

64.2

Buddhist

14.0

11.0

Roman Catholic

11.6

 9.1

Christian n.o.s. 2001 / Christian n.i.e. 2011

 5.7

 7.6

Baptist

 2.8

 2.4

United Church

 1.6

 1.0

Sources: Statistics Canada, Census of Canada, 2001, custom table 2001 2B , EO00870, 17 May 2005; nhs, 2011, custom table E01908, 30 June 2013.

Table 4.12  Significant visible-minority religious groups – Korean Denomination

2001 (%)

2011 (%)

Roman Catholic

24.5

21.1

No Religion

19.7

27.3

Christian n.o.s. 2001 / Christian n.i.e. 2011

18.4

18.3

Presbyterian

13.0

18.3

United Church

 6.8

 3.0

Baptist

 4.5

 3.0

Buddhist

 3.8

 3.2

Sources: Statistics Canada, Census of Canada, 2001, custom table 2001 2B , E00870, 17 May 2005; nhs, 2011, custom table E01908, 30 June 2013.

as Atheists, Agnostics, and the like on the Census as well as those with No Religion. So it is the figure for No Religious Affiliation that we will use (in 2001 it was 4.9 million versus nearly 4.8 million with No Religion) to establish a base level for the unaffiliated (to lump the de-churched and non-churched together) in 2001 and then in 2011. As we have seen, those with No Religious Affiliation are hardly alone in being unaffiliated. For starters we can add the Protestant n’s (549,205) in 2001 to the number of those having No Religious Affiliation (4,900,095), which gives us 5,449,530 Canadians or 18% of the total population. For 2011, the comparable figure would be 8,401,575 or one in four Canadians.

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No Religion: The Growth among the Disaffiliated and Unaffiliated 193

When it comes to the Christian n’s, the situation is a bit more complicated. As we have seen, among visible minorities, Christian does seem to be a salient identity. So for those who might be disaffected from organized Christianity, we need to look at the white population of Christians. In 2001, only 72% of Christian n’s (or 504,978) were white. Of these, the unaffiliated predominated, as we have argued. We’ll make a conservative estimate and say two-thirds of the remaining Christian n’s are among the unaffiliated and a third are in fact conservative Protestants. (This is a conservative estimate because, at 168,326 people, this group of conservative Protestants is larger than the Census affiliates of the Salvation Army and the Christian and Missionary Alliance combined. It is just 23,000 shy of  that of the Mennonites.) Excluding the five largest Protestant denominations, this group would represent 18% of all the Census affiliates of other Protestant denominations. Turning back to the two-thirds of white Christian n’s whom we number among the unaffiliated, we get the figure of 336,650. Add all these numbers up for No Religious Affiliation, the Protestant n’s, and the two-thirds of Christian n’s, and we get a total of 5,786,160, or 19.5% of the population. A similar calculation for the 2011 figures yields 9,001,310, or 27.4% of the population. So far, so good. But we need to remember that it is former white Protestants who are driving the growth of those with No Religious Affiliation. (As discussed in chapter 3, Roman Catholic identity, if not attendance, persisted up to 2001. Until then, the Roman Catholic contribution to No Religion was negligible.) So to get a sense of how the growth of No Religious Affiliation has affected Protestantism in  Canada, we need to adjust the overall figures to account for only white Canadians. (Black Canadians account for less than 2% of those with No Religious Affiliation.) First, we need to adjust for visible minorities, most of whom are Asian and whose traditional affiliation would be other than Christian. So sticking with the figures for 2001 for the moment, we subtract visible minorities from the total, which leaves us with 4,014,115 white Canadians with No  Religious Affiliation. Assume that four-fifths of these with No Religious Affiliation come from a Protestant background, no matter how distant: that gives us 3,211,300 Canadians. No further adjustment is required for the Christian n’s since they or their parents would have been former affiliates of a Protestant denomination. Add in the Christian n’s we calculated above along with the Protestant

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n’s  and we get the number 4,052,930. Now, in Canada there are 8,105,640 Protestant Census affiliates. So by putting No Religious Affiliation, Protestant n’s, and those Christian n’s that we estimate are among the disaffiliated together, we get a group that is just onehalf (50%) of the general Protestant population. When we turn to the situation in 2011, we need to make one further adjustment to the figures. As we saw in chapter 3, by 2011 those from a Roman Catholic background, especially among the young, had started to opt for No Religion. As many as 1.1 million of those with No Religious Affiliation came from a Catholic background. Almost all these would be white Canadians since visible-minority Catholics, such the Filipinos, have an extremely low incidence of No Religious Affiliation. So using similar calculations, but taking these former Roman Catholics into account, we see that in 2011 the number of disaffiliated white Protestants numbered some 6,748,700. Put another way, if these Protestants had not disaffiliated, the number of Canadian Protestants would be 15.4 million, not the 8,741,355 Protestants recorded in the NH S. What makes these figures so astounding in scale is that they exclude Asians, who as we have seen have disproportionately high rates of No Religion. Some disaffected conservative Christians and secular Jews might be found here as well, but their numbers would be relatively small. For the most part, conservative Protestants have retained those born in the faith.36 And secular Jews are simply not that numerous, being a minority within a small religious minority in Canada. As we have seen, however, the larger Protestant denominations have lost both members and Census affiliates on a huge scale. Most of the combined group of the disaffiliated that we have been looking at would have come originally from the five largest Protestant denominations. By any measure, the outflow that we chart here is massive and illustrates just how much Protestant Canada has changed since the 1950s. In his recent publications, Reginald Bibby suggests that two structural shifts are occurring. The first one is polarization, between those who are involved and those who aren’t. “We know – thanks to the census –” Bibby observes in one of his latest books, “that the percentage of Canadians who said they had no religion jumped from 4% in 1971 to 16% by 2001.” And departing from his previous work on the subject, he now admits that “their children and grandchildren would be expected to follow suit. And they have.”37 But he goes on to argue that “religion remains important for a fairly stable segment of the

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No Religion: The Growth among the Disaffiliated and Unaffiliated 195

population.” What has changed since the 1960s, he argues, “is the proportion of people who are ambivalent about religion.” So what we now have in Canada is religious polarization. On the one side we have those who are involved, and on the other, those who are unaffiliated. Between them lies the “ambivalent middle.” And it is among the “ambivalent middle” that Bibby sees the potential for a revitalization of organized religion in Canada.38 The demand for religion, and what religion uniquely offers, such as fulfilling people’s spiritual needs and providing answers to the questions of life and death, Bibby affirms remain constant.39 Whatever decline we observe in partici­pation is reversible. And this is so because religious identity persists and people are reluctant to look elsewhere for their spiritual needs. Finally, Bibby maintains, there are more vigorous players in the Canadian religious market – the Roman Catholics and conservative Protestants – who provide hope for the future.40 And so, according to Bibby, religious leaders need to reach out to their potential affiliates, to those who are occasionally present in church and above all to those who are inactive but still remain Census affiliates.41 Bibby’s interpretation of these trends, in our view, misreads the situation in general and the significance of No Religion in particular. True, people tend to stick with their religious identity, but this means that No Religion is a lagging indicator. It trails behind the trend it is attempting to measure. When people opt out of organized Christianity, they tend to remain nominal affiliates for quite some time before they switch to No Religion, if they ever do. As an indicator, No Religion confirms a long-term trend but only partially captures the current level of actual disaffiliation. So what we are seeing is in fact an unprecedented development. More and more people have decided to abandon their affiliation, however tentative that might have been. In addition, as we have argued, the scale of those who are unaffiliated is much larger than those who identify as having No Religion would suggest. This growth among the disaffiliated has had such a disproportionate impact on the five largest Protestant denominations that their pool of potential affiliates, the “ambivalent middle,” has shrunk dramatically. If the ratio of membership and Sunday School enrolment to Census affiliates that we tracked in chapter 1 has held for these denominations in the 2011 National Household Survey, that leaves just 3.5 million Canadians who are not members but who still belong for the purposes of the Census (see table 1.7). That compares to 5.3 million Census affiliates who were not members in 1971

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for the United, Anglican, and Presbyterian churches alone. Or to put the contrast in current terms, the unaffiliated are 1.8 times the size of Census affiliates who are not actual members, and the unaffiliated are still growing. Nor are smaller Protestant denominations likely to entice the ambivalent middle. On the whole these churches, for the most part conservative, are not showing great signs of vitality. As we saw in chapter 2, their record is decidedly mixed. The Roman Catholic Church, too, is now stumbling in the face of growing disaffiliation among the laity (chapter 3). Moreover, the growing and broadening generational effect among those with No Religion has long-term consequences. The unaffiliated and a significant proportion of Census affiliates have raised their children to have No Religion. Once again, as we have seen, looking at only those with No Religion not only minimizes the scale of the change that has taken place; it also fails to capture the extent and depth of a wider cultural change – that Canada has become a postChristian country. While in the case of the Protestant n’s we are looking at people who at one time belonged to a denomination and have since left, among both No Religion and the Christian n’s we are seeing a large and growing cohort of children and teenagers who have never been to church. To return to the distinction we used earlier, they are the non-churched or the never affiliated as opposed to their parents, who can be counted among the de-churched or disaffiliated.42 Among these youth, Protestant churches are met not with hostility or alienation, but with indifference and a complete lack of familiarity. The number of Canadians who have had little or no contact with Christian churches is growing. Many more have no idea what these churches are about and, what is more, have no inclination to find that out for themselves. Surveys indicate that many Canadians are seeking spiritual development and fulfillment. Yet many of them would not think to look for that in organized Christianity, perhaps not ­realizing that Christian denominations do in fact have rich spiritual traditions of their own.43 In the next chapters we explore what challenges this new phenomenon of the non-churched poses for Canada’s churches as well as the implications of people’s drift away from church for Canadian society.

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5 Major Trends: Why the 1960s Mattered

Christianity still remains by far the largest religion in Canada. Christianity will not disappear. Christian churches, however, face a far more challenging environment than ever before as their place in Canadian society continues the pattern of decline that began in the 1960s. Canada has become a post-Christian society, and churches can no longer act as though Canada’s culture is a Christian one, as they once did. In the early 1960s, the major Protestant denominations, together with the Roman Catholic Church, occupied a prominent place the country’s physical and social landscapes. Since then, as we have seen, religious adherence has undergone nothing less than a seismic change. So what has happened since then? Here are our main findings. Canada’s mainstream Protestant denominations are in decline. Few observers or churchgoers in the early 1960s would have predicted or imagined this occurring. After all, these denominations – the United Church, the Anglican Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Lutheran churches, and the Baptist churches – were vibrant institutions in the 1950s. They were recruiting new members and, what is more, successfully socializing the children and youth of their members. Then, very suddenly, many baby boomers – notably among the younger members of that generation born after the mid1950s – dropped out of the church, not to return even when they started having children.

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Other Protestant churches are growing, but not all are, and that growth has slowed down. Indeed, the Census affiliates of these Christian churches were flat from 2001 to 2011, when the total Canadian population grew by 10%. The commonly heard idea that “conservative churches are growing” is true for only some Protestant churches, and this growth has in no way replaced the overall losses from Christian identification. Indeed, the overall decline in Census affiliates among other Protestant churches in the 1990s, and the fall in affiliates in the 2000s for some of the leading denominations – such as the Christian Reformed, the Mennonites, and the Salvation Army – portend weakening support. The number of Catholics in Canada is now stagnant. This has never happened before. But it is now happening across the country, strikingly in Quebec. This is due in part to changing patterns in immigration. But there is another reason, one that has ­profound consequences for the Catholic Church: some Roman Catholics are now switching to No Religion. For the longest time, Catholic identity was a persistent one. Whether or not people ­actually went to church, they still identified themselves as Roman Catholic. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic, as the saying goes. In the 2011 nh s returns, however, there is evidence that this is no longer the case, and we can date this shift to the preceding decade. While there is still a strong sense of Catholic identity among some immigrant groups, most notably Filipinos, surveys on church attendance track a remarkable rise of Roman Catholics who never attend. This is especially so in Quebec, where the trend is becoming transgenerational. The number of Canadians with No Religion is exploding. As of 2011, one-quarter of all Canadians – 7.8 million people – identified themselves as having No Religious Affiliation. We refer to them as the religious “Nones.” We have three points to highlight here. First, this number is so large because No Religion has kept growing by 1.5 times or more every decade since 1971. Not only is this trend deeply entrenched; it has huge momentum. Second, a growing number who have No Religion have never had a religious affiliation. Unlike those in the 1970s or 1980s who identified as No Religion because they left the churches they had been raised in,

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there are now many Canadian youth who have never been part of a church. This is a new trend, and one that is no more than a couple of decades old. Finally, No Religion is a lagging indicator; that is, it reports what is for many the last stage of their disengagement from organized religion, or when religious somethings decide to identify themselves and their children as religious Nones. As we have seen throughout this study, the timing of people’s disaffiliation from organized Christianity is critical. Among Canada’s ­largest Protestant denominations – the Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches – membership peaked in the mid-1960s, slipped through the 1970s, and then plummeted in the 1980s and after. In terms of Census affiliates, their rate of growth slowed down markedly in the 1960s before heading into absolute decline in the 1970s. Among the Baptists, although we have observed distinct regional patterns, it is clear that they haven’t grown since the 1960s. Lutherans eventually hit choppy waters in the 1980s. Other Protestant denominations tended to do well in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but as a whole they have seen their growth stall. Even Roman Catholic identity is starting to fade. According to the Gallop surveys, the longestrunning survey we have, Roman Catholic attendance held steady at high rates in the 1950s, eased off slightly in the 1960s, slipped in the 1970s, and plummeted in the 1980s. By contrast, No Religion has been growing at an astounding rate since the 1960s, decade in and decade out. What was once an identity for a tiny minority now describes over a quarter of Canadians. There is, then, an overall pattern and one of wide social significance. People started to disengage from organized religion during the 1960s, most obviously in the case of Canada’s largest Protestant denominations: the Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches. Among Roman Catholics in the Rest of Canada, the movement to disengage was initially modest, but in retrospect these early motions signalled what would become a seismic shift. After the 1960s, things would never be the same. Moreover, that change was revolutionary and broad based – not having a religious identity became extensive. The effects on Canada’s Christian denominations were cumulative, as the emerging tendency among former Roman Catholics, even older ones in Quebec, to embrace No Religion illustrates. Even denominations that had in the past created strong social boundaries to keep their members apart from the wider society were no longer immune.

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So now it’s time to step back and take stock of the magnitude of the changes that we have described. Many of the trends we have mapped out started to occur before Canada became a multifaith and mul­ticultural society. Canada was not a multifaith society in  1961. Judaism, the largest world religion in Canada next to Christianity, had only 254,368 adherents, representing 1.4% of the total Canadian population. The only other adherents of world religions noted in the published Census data were Buddhists and Confucians, who combined accounted for only 16,700 individuals, or 0.1% of the popu­lation. Other world religions would have been  invisible in 1961, listed under the large “Other” category, which accounted for 283,732 Canadians. This number would also have included members of smaller Christian denominations, comprising the bulk of “other” religion, and those indicating they had no ­religious identity.1 Although Canada was clearly not a multifaith society in 1961, this  changed dramatically in subsequent decades. In 1961, world ­religions other than Christianity accounted for less than 2% of the Canadian population. But changes in immigration policy in the 1960s led to world religions reaching 2.5% of the population (602,315 Canadians) by 1981. This was also the first Census year in which Muslims in Canada were listed (98,160).2 By 2011, 8.2% of Canadians belonged to a world religion other than Christianity. Canada’s transformation into a multifaith society is for many scholars the religious story of the last decades.3 Within this complex story one can see that Judaism has ceased to be the dominant other world religion, and Islam has gained considerably, as have Sikhism and Hinduism. While we do not want to diminish the importance that the growth of world faiths represents for Canadian society, we believe that there are other changes – those that have been the primary focus of this study – that also deserve attention. Christianity itself has undergone an unprecedented development. Canadians have chosen to leave Christianity in increasing numbers, either in opposition to organized expressions of Christianity or in the belief that life outside the church is equally valid and meaningful. What is more, many Canadians belong to a generation that has had no significant exposure to Christianity, let alone contact with a church. Knowing that you come from a United Church background may not mean all that much, but it is very different from not having any tie to that, or any other, denomination.

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In this book we have looked at a number of indicators of disengagement from organized Christianity. We will now consider a variety of these indicators in order to arrive at an estimate as to how many Canadians are not involved in organized Christianity. The most notable trend is the escalating number of Canadians identifying themselves as having No Religious Affiliation. This category has the advantage of including all those who have No Religion, who identify themselves as Atheists or Agnostics, or who otherwise indicate that they aren’t affiliated. In short, they are the religious Nones. In 2011, the Nones included 7.8 million (compared to 4.9 million in 2001) Canadians, over 8 times as many Canadians who would have identified themselves as having No Religious Affiliation in 1971. Those with No Religious Affiliation in 2011 accounted for almost 24% of the nation’s population. Religious Nones are now the second-largest category after Roman Catholics, having overtaken those Protestants who belong to a specific denomination in the Census. The growth in No Religious Affiliation marks a generational shift in religious identity. Among mainstream Protestants, three striking developments occurred. First, between 1958 and 1960, baptisms dropped off significantly. At the same time, Sunday School enrolment dropped precipitously. Neither could have occurred without parents deciding not to involve their children. The third development, however, seems to have been quite different. Beginning in the mid1960s, baby boomers who had gone to their denominations’ Sunday Schools increasingly decided not to undertake a profession of faith or its equivalent, such as confirmation, and become members of their church. Many of them left church and never came back. The vast majority of baby boomers had been brought up in the Christian faith and had attended Sunday School in their youth, but at some point they stopped going to church. We refer to them as the de-churched. In addition to this persistent trend among the baby-boom gen­ eration, we see No Religious Affiliation becoming increasingly an intergenerational category, as children (in 2001, 1.1 million Canadians) and young adults from the post–baby boom cohorts (797,710 Canadians between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four) joined the ranks of the religious Nones. In 2011, these cohorts swelled to over 1.5 million children (about two-thirds of whom newly joined the ranks of No Religion) and 1.2 million young adults (many of whom had always been counted as No Religion). Many of these post-boomers, as we have seen, were probably raised in households in which

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they received little or no exposure to organized religion. We refer to these Canadians as the “non-churched.” This phenomenon marks the emergence of a new trend. No Religion represents a new and massive change in identity. One only has to remember that in 1961 only a tiny minority (0.5%) defied the pressures of social conformity that existed then to identify themselves to enumerators in this way. That in itself is a telling sign of how much the status of religion has changed in Canadian society. But as large as the No Religion strata has become, this Census category almost certainly undercounts those who are among the de-churched and the non-churched. As we have argued in chapter 4, many of those half a million Canadians who identified themselves in 2001 and 2011 as just “Protestant” on the Census form would fall into the category of de-churched. We also saw that many who self-identified as simply “Christian” very likely had a tenuous affiliation with organized religion, if any at all. We estimate that number to be around 336,630 Canadians in 2001, increasing to 600,500 in 2011. So the unaffiliated from organized Christianity numbered at least 5.7 million Canadians in 2001 and almost 9 million in 2011. We have already noted the prevalence of youth among the nonchurched. So to arrive at an estimate of the bare minimum who are non-churched among the religious Nones, we begin with a cohort analysis of the 2001 Census and then follow the further inflow of children and youth in 2011. In 2001, 4.9 million Nones were under the age of fifteen, and some 1.1 million of them were being raised without religion and were therefore non-churched. To estimate how many more Canadians might belong to this category of the nonchurched, we turn to the 1991 Census. Back then there were 875,670 children under fourteen with No Religion. So if we estimate that about two-thirds of them entered the 2001 Census age group of ­fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, we can add another 583,780 youths to the non-churched. To this we can add another 310,320 to No Religion who were under fifteen in 1981 (again using the figure of two-thirds of that cohort) and who were between the ages of twenty and thirty-four in the 2001 Census year. All this adds up to a total of 1.99 million Canadians as of 2001. Turning to the 2011 nhs, we see that some 1.5 million Canadians under age fifteen had No Religious Affiliation. If we assume that about two-thirds of these Canadians were listed for the first time as religious Nones, then the absolute minimum number of those who

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Major Trends: Why the 1960s Mattered 203

are certainly non-churched is just over 2.99 million. A small number of them may have joined a religious body at some point, but that would be offset by the non-churched (for example, those raised by nominal Anglican parents) whom we can’t track through the Census. That means the non-churched in 2001 represented about a third of those 5.7 million Canadians who, we can reasonably be sure, had no involvement with organized religion, and remained at that level in 2011. The proportions of non-churched and de-churched held steady because both grew at an unprecedented clip, to increase by at least 50% in the opening decade of the twenty-first century. Those 5.7 million Canadians in 2001 and 9 million in 2011 whom we can identify from the Census as being unaffiliated are a significant proportion of the population, at about 19.2% in 2001 and up to an impressive 27.4% in 2011. And as we pointed out in chapter 4, these figures certainly understate the phenomenon. In that chapter we attempted to measure the true extent of the exodus from Protestant denominations by looking at where they might have ended up among those of No Religion, Christians n’s, and Protestant n’s. The figures we have looked at so far in this chapter take that flow of disaffiliation into account. At this juncture, we want to complete the picture by getting a handle on the level of actual disaffiliation among those who remain nominally Protestant for the purposes of the Census. As we have seen in the case of Canada’s former mainstream Protestant denominations, some of these Census affiliates could be called cultural Anglicans, Presbyterians, and United Church people. They still identify as such, and may attend church at Christmas or even Easter. But as they do not attend ordinary church services, they increasingly are not presenting their children for baptism or enrolling them in Sunday School. Call them the “soft de-churched.” For all intents and purposes, they have left church. Then there are those who have left church and never attend. Call them the “hard de-churched.” As to the actual numbers of de-churched from the Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches, we cannot say with precision. As previously mentioned, membership is a lagging indicator; that is, churches keep people on their rolls long after they have ceased to attend. Membership numbers, then, offer a high baseline to work from. So if we subtract the total inclusive membership (which in the United and Presbyterian churches includes Sunday School enrolment) from the number of Census affiliates, we are left with the minimum number of those who we can be sure are counted among the

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de- and non-churched. As for tracking the remaining de- and nonchurched, there are some telling leads to follow. The results are summarized in the first column of table 5.1, and as can be seen, we are looking at a very sizeable group – nearly 3.7 million Canadians in 2001 and some 2.9 million in 2011 – a reflection of declining affiliation no matter how nominal that affiliation had been. So how many of these would be among the non-churched? Again we can do a rough-and-ready estimate. If we take those in the under-twenty-four cohorts, and prorate the number according to the ratio of Census affiliates to members (column 2 in table 5.1), we can see the results in columns 3 and 6. Now admittedly, these numbers include both the de- and non-churched. But as we have seen from surveys on religious attendance, these age groups have a very high rate of never attending a religious service, something on the order of one-quarter. So the totals we see here for under twenty-fours of 965,112 in 2001, or about 26% of the total de- and non-churched, and 851,860 in 2011, or about 29% of the de- and non-churched among former Anglicans, Presbyterians, and United Church members, are a pretty good proxy for the non-churched in these cohorts. In sum, these figures provide us with the minimum for this pool of Census affiliates who are among the de-churched and non-churched. At this point, we can round out our picture of the unaffiliated. We can be certain that in 2001, 5.7 million Canadians were unaffiliated from organized Protestantism and that this figure rose to 9 million in 2011. To the 2001 figure, we can now add nearly 3.7 million nominal Census affiliates who had become disengaged from the Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches. That figure declined to 2.9 million in 2011, but when we add those whom we previously estimated to be unaffiliated (5.7 million in 2001 and 9 million in 2011), we arrive at new totals for the unaffiliated: 9.4 million Canadians in 2001 and 11.9 million in 2011. This, it needs to be stressed, underestimates the level of disengagement as we have not attempted to measure the departures from other Protestant denominations. So far we have been looking at disaffiliation among Protestants. As we have seen, however, Roman Catholics have also become increasingly disaffected from their church. Until recently, Roman Catholics who were not active in parish life still largely identified themselves as Roman Catholics. That’s what the Census results up to 2001 tell us. By contrast, the nhs results for 2011 provide strong indications that, immigrants aside, Catholicism is losing its hold as a cultural identity,

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Major Trends: Why the 1960s Mattered 205

Table 5.1  Anglican, Presbyterian, and United de-churched and non-churched, 2001 and 2011 As a As a percentage percentage Under 24 of Census De- and Under 24 of Census De- and non-churched affiliates non-churched non-churched affiliates non-churched 2011 2011 2011 2001 2001 2001 Anglican

1,393,655

68

353,485

1,099,114*

67

337,440

225,890

62

 61,485

352,480

75

 96,085

United Church

2,075,102

73

550,142

1,468,068

73

418,335

Total

3,694,647

965,108

2,919,662

Presbyterian

851,860

* 2008 latest membership figure Source: Acts and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada; General Synod of the Anglican Church in Canada; United Church of Canada Yearbook; Census of Canada, 2001; NHS, 2011.

especially in Quebec. Between 2001 and 2011, No Religion increased by just about 2.2 times, an increase largely accounted for by the province’s francophone population. No Religion was concentrated among the under-forty-five cohorts, at some 718,530 Quebecers. But based on the age cohorts for No Religion in 2001 (the two cohorts under twenty-four plus half of those twenty-five to forty-four) that flowed through into 2011 to make up the under-forty-five cohort in that year, we estimate that just over two-thirds of them were new to No Religion. Moreover, there are strong indications that this growth will continue. Of the 937,545 Quebecers with No Religion, one-third of them (some 336,110 in all) are between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four. These Quebecers are in the prime age group for raising children, and it is very likely that their children will be raised without religion. So those Catholics who have switched to become Nones will be joined by those who never had religion. These figures give a sense of the scale of disaffiliation among Roman Catholics, and it is possible to map out further the scale and scope of this disaffiliation as well as its process. We don’t have the membership data for Roman Catholics that we do for Canada’s larger Protestant denominations, and so we are unable to parse the process of disaffiliation in quite the same way. To probe that process, we need to turn to another one of the sources that we have for religious involvement among Roman Catholics, and that is survey data. To establish a baseline for both involvement and disaffiliation, we look

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at the 2001 General Social Survey, which we examined in chapter 3. Statistics Canada conducted this GSS in the same year as the Census, and so we can apply the results directly to the 2001 Census returns and come up with an estimate of how the g s s results translate into actual numbers among the Catholic Church’s Census affiliates. The figures are most dramatic for Quebec, once the bastion for Catholicism in North America, where churchgoers are now a small and aging minority. According to the 2001 gss, only 23% of Roman Catholics attended church monthly or more frequently. In terms of Census affiliates, that translates into 1,363,990 Quebecers. In the Rest of Canada, 45.6% of Catholic Census affiliates, or 3,194,975 adherents, attended church at least once a month. In all 4,558,965 Catholics, or just over 35% of Census affiliates, attended Mass regularly. It is these Catholics who in 2001 made up the Roman Catholic Church’s main constituency out of its nearly 12.8 million Census affiliates. That leaves us with nearly 8.2 million Census affiliates who do not attend regularly. Although we don’t have the kind of church membership data we would need to distinguish between actual and nominal members, the gss looks at how many say they are Roman Catholic and never attend church, and it gives us sufficient data by age group to come up with rough estimates for the combined de-churched and non-churched population by applying the percentages in table 5.2 to each of the cohorts listed in table 5.3. The General Social Survey only tracks Canadians fifteen and older, and  so for the purposes of this exercise we have assumed that attendance patterns for the under-fourteen age group match those observed for fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. The results are admittedly rough and ready, but they give a good sense of the magnitude of the defection from organized religion among those who identified themselves as Catholic. The number who never attended in 2001 is large: some 3.8 million in all. That’s nearly 30% of Canada’s Catholic population. So the two ends of the spectrum, those who attended regularly and those who never attended, were, if not equal in size, running pretty closely together. More telling is that among those who never attended, youth under twenty-five accounted for 1.22 million, or nearly a third of that age group. Most of these – about three-quarters in all – lived in Quebec and Ontario, where they very likely would have had at least some education in the Catholic system. That so many who had gone to Catholic schools would still not attend church is a good indication

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Major Trends: Why the 1960s Mattered 207

Table 5.2  Catholics who never attend, by age group, 2001–2011 (percentage) Quebec 2001

Quebec 2011

Rest of Canada 2001

Rest of Canada 2011

All

37.7

42.7

22.9

25.3

15–24

43.1

42.7

22.8

23.4

25–44

44.2

51.0

24.1

25.8

45–64

35.8

45.0

22.8

28.2

65+

20.9

27.5

19.6

19.0

Source: General Social Survey.

Table 5.3  Estimate of de-churched and non-churched Catholics: General Social Survey results as a percentage of Census and NHS Quebec 2001 All

Quebec 2011

2,237,270 2,462,400

Rest of Canada 2001

Rest of Canada 2011

1,571,570

1,761,420

0–14 (est.)

394,890

362,525

298,365

303,920

15–24

327,055

351,730

209,435

214,945

25–44

784,565

618,070

431,440

461,875

45–64

571,220

863,710

482,000

596,160

65+

159,540

266,365

150,330

184,520

Sources: General Social Survey; Census of Canada, 2001; NHS, 2011.

that they simply didn’t want to get involved beyond being in the Catholic school system, which is a pretty good proxy for those who we can be reasonably sure are non-churched. In-between those who attend regularly and those who never attend are those who say they attend a few times a year and those who say they attend at least once a year. In terms of actual numbers, that works out to 4,425,320 Catholics in 2001 who attended occasionally, among whom some 1.39 million attended at least once a year. And we know that Catholics tend inflate their attendance at church.4 As we have seen in chapter 3, this is how people in general respond to being surveyed on church attendance, and given the canonical requirements of their church, Catholics – even cultural Catholics – are more prone to

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do so than others. We might describe those who attend a few times a year as “fringe” Catholics. They may attend from time to time, but their personal connection to a parish is tenuous. As for those 1.39 million Catholics who say they attend at least once a year, we could consider them “nominal” Catholics. Notice that they won’t say that they attend several times a year. But unlike those who say that they never attend, these Roman Catholics are saying that they are possibly open to the idea of attending at least once in a while. Perhaps they do attend at least once a year, likely at Christmas or some other family occasion. Or perhaps they intend to do so, but the occasion may not arise in any given year. In short, these Catholics don’t want to definitively state that they have left the church, but unlike those who say they attend occasionally, they don’t see themselves as being part of parish life either. These nominal Catholics have little, if any, involvement in the worshipping life of the church. If we add these soft de-churched Catholics with those who are hard de-churched (those who never go to church), we arrive at something like 5,191,240 Catholics – just over 40% of the total Catholic population – who are in effect de-churched or nonchurched. And remember, this number is the minimum baseline. And it is a number that is only going to get bigger over time. Catholic immigration as a proportion of immigrants is declining, and we have also seen a growing lack of engagement among youth. In 2001, a third of those between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four never went to church, and never had gone. Being non-churched had become a generational trend. When we turn to the 2011 results, we find that a total of 4.2 million Catholics, or about a third of the Catholic population, never attend church. If we assume that there was a flow-through among fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in 2001 who never attended into the twenty-five to forty-four age group in 2011, nearly 42% of those who never attend are among the non-churched. As just seen, we can add those who attend once a year, the soft de-churched, into this mix. This adds another 1.74 million, up from 1.39 million in 2001, to the de-churched and non-churched. The total, then, comes to just over 5.9 million Canadians, or 47% of the Catholic population. These are large numbers by any measure. The scale of those who still identify as Roman Catholic but are actually among the de-churched and nonchurched is massive. And, as seen earlier in this book, the growth trends, both generational and intergenerational, are strong. Finally,

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we have seen telling indications of a loss of religious memory. Catholic identity has been a persistent one, but the evidence shows that it is becoming increasingly attenuated. All the indicators, then, point to a significant decline in Catholic affiliation and practice. Now that we have looked at disaffiliation from a variety of different perspectives, we are finally in position to determine the total number of unaffiliated. When we add all the de- and non-churched Canadians from across the Christian spectrum, we are looking at very large numbers. In 2001, the de- and non-churched accounted for nearly 14.6 million Canadians. That’s almost half of the nation’s population, and this figure is the minimum estimate that we can provide. Ten years later, in 2011, the number of de- and non-churched had jumped to 17.9 million Canadians, accounting for 55% of the Canadian population. We have been able to track some of the disaffection among the boomers and subsequent generations from organized religion by observing the levels of Census affiliates, the ratio of membership to Census affiliates, Sunday School attendance, baptisms, and other such indicators. This has been much harder to do for pre-boomers. But we know that a significant number of parents of the baby-boom generation pulled back on their religious involvement, most notably by not enrolling their children in Sunday School. In making such decisions, some of these parents would themselves end up among the de-churched, but just how many that might be is impossible to put a figure to. It is possible to come up with a rough-and-ready estimate of the number of Canadians who are non-churched. To do so for 2001, we take the non-churched we identified above among those of No Religious Affiliation and add them to the non-churched among those who self-identified with the Anglican, United, and Presbyterian churches (see table 5.1). Among Catholics, we include those under fourteen who never attended (table 5.3) together with those who never attended back in 1991, who by 2001 were in the fifteen to twenty-four age bracket (approximately two-thirds of the underfourteen cohort in 1991). To arrive at a figure for the non-churched in 2011, we repeat the same process but use the 2001 figure to get the number of non-churched Catholics among the fifteen to twenty-four cohort. The totals we arrive at using this approach are admittedly approximate, but the estimate of the non-churched is a minimum figure as it does not include many older Canadians who are among the non-churched. Using this approach, we estimate the non-churched

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in 2001 to be over 3.9 million Canadians or about 13% of the overall population, and 26% of the de- and non-churched. In 2011, the nonchurched jumped to 4.6 million, or about 14% of the total population, and around 26% of the de- and non-churched. Two things must be noted here. First, the real number for de- and non-churched is certainly higher. No Religion is, as we have seen, a lagging indicator. Second, as we have repeatedly noted, the figures we have for the non-churched are the minimum estimate we can provide. Our figures are certainly a low estimate for Roman Catholics, and our estimates for Protestants are based solely on three of the country’s larger denominations. In the Anglican, Presbyterian, and United churches, the proportion of inclusive membership to Census affiliates fell from between two-fifths and one-half in 1961 to about a third or lower in 2011, an indication that many of their Census affiliates are increasingly inactive. Second, the number of disaffiliated Canadians is growing because youth are disproportionately represented among those of No Religion and what we have called the simply Christian. Members of the largest Protestant churches are aging; children in these churches are few and becoming fewer. And youth, by and large, just aren’t there. So the non-churched will keep growing, and they will keep growing from a sizeable base. What we are witnessing, then, are three completely new trends. First, people are not only leaving churches; they are leaving Christianity. And many of them have no interest in returning. As we have seen, this trend started in the 1960s and became entrenched in the 1970s. Second, an increasing and significant proportion of the population has never had any first-hand experience of organized religion. This trend is related to the first trend, as it emerged initially among the post-boomer generation, when we saw a significant drop in baptism among Canada’s largest denominations, then accelerated among children of the post-boomer generation and the cohorts that followed. And finally, there is the scale of this phenomenon. In his most recent work, Reginald Bibby has argued that between the two extremes of those who are active religiously and those who are not lies a vast middle ground composed of Canadians who recognize they have spiritual needs and who would be open to being persuaded to being involved if only churches and other religious bodies would directly address those needs.5 The number of ­disengaged Canadians needs to be compared, however, to those who we can be reasonably sure are engaged in some form of organized

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religion. The 17.9 million Canadians who are non-churched and dechurched dwarf the 4.4 million Census affiliates who belong to the other Protestant denominations we have looked at or the 4.5 million active Roman Catholics. It is the unaffiliated who now constitute the mainstream in Canadian society. Those who are involved in organized religion occupy the margins. The Canada when going to church was the thing to do and part of what it was to be an upstanding member of society is receding into the past. So where does Canada stand on the international field when it comes to people leaving Christianity and identifying themselves as having No Religious Affiliation? Table 5.4 situates Canada in relation to selected countries in Europe and the British Commonwealth, as well as the United States. In all these countries Christianity has been historically the dominant religion, and indeed at one time all of these societies would have seen themselves as part of Christendom. As of 2011, the proportion of those without a religious affiliation, or the Nones, ranged widely from a low of 6.2% in Ireland to a high of well over a third in New Zealand and Australia. The proportion of 23.8% or 7.8 million unaffiliated Canadians in table 5.4 is taken from Statistics Canada’s most inclusive category, No Religious Affiliation. But as we have seen, this category almost certainly understates the proportion and number of unaffiliated given the large number of generic Christians and Protestants recorded in the Census. The adjusted figure that we noted above (and explained in our analysis in chapter 4) of 9 million unaffiliated Canadians or 27.4% of the population is the most accurate figure we can use in comparing the level of the unaffiliated in Canada and other countries. On this count, the proportion of Nones in Canada is comparable to that found in France and Sweden. When we look at the absolute difference in the proportions, measured in percentage points, of the religious Nones, Canada exceeds the level found in Britain, Australia, and Germany by a slight margin (a couple of percentage points or so) and by a wide margin of 11.2 percentage points compared to the United States. In relative terms, the tally of the unaffiliated in Canada is higher by two-thirds compared to that in America. By contrast, when comparing Canada to countries on the higher end of the scale of religious Nones, that is, Australia and Scotland, Canada falls short by a considerable margin of just under 10 percentage points. These, however, are national figures. As we have seen, Quebec has a much lower incidence of Nones because it was once a largely

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Leaving Christianity Table 5.4  No Religious Affiliation in Canada compared with selected countries, circa 2011 Country

Unaffiliated as percentage of population

New Zealand

36.6

Belgium

29.0

France

28.0

United Kingdom

28.8

 Scotland

36.7*

 Britain

25.1**

Sweden

27.0

Germany

24.7

Australia

24.2

Canada

23.8***

United States

16.4

Italy

12.5

Denmark

11.8

Ireland

 6.2

Sources: Pew Charitable Trusts, Future of World Religions; *National Records of Scotland; **United Kingdom, Office for National Statistics; ***Census of Canada.

Roman Catholic province and Catholic identity is still part of its cultural legacy. Not surprisingly, using the same calculations as above to estimate the true level of unaffiliation, we find that only about 13.5% of the province’s population numbered among the unaffiliated, roughly the same as in Italy. In the Rest of Canada, however, the proportion of the religious Nones using the same method of calculation comes in at 31.2% of the population. That is nearly double the incidence found in the United States, and about half way between Britain and Australia on the one hand and Scotland and New Zealand on the other. What these observations underscore is just how dramatic the decline in affiliation with organized Christianity in Englishspeaking Canada has been compared to other countries, which themselves have undergone sharp declines in affiliation. On this basis Quebec may appear on first sight to be an outlier. As we have seen, weekly attendance in Quebec is around 10% according the General Social Survey. This compares to 4.5% found in France.6

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But Quebec’s attendance rates are bolstered by its seniors, one-third of whom attend weekly. What this signifies is that disaffiliation started much later (and one would add much more precipitously) in Quebec than it did in France. Given declining attendance among baby boomers and the negligible attendance among the generations who follow them, Quebec will likely reach levels of observance seen in France as the province’s population ages. Turning now to Catholics in the Rest of Canada, their weekly attendance at around a quarter of the Catholic population is roughly comparable to that found in Spain.7 While the incidence of disaffiliation does not match that found in European countries like France where leaving church is a long-lasting trend, it is comparable to some European societies that have only recently undergone disaffiliation, and it is much lower than that in once Catholic Ireland (now around 45%).8 As for Protestants in the rest of English-speaking Canada, overall attendance at around 30% far exceeds that found in the United Kingdom (6.3%), New Zealand (about 10%), and Australia (about 8%).9 As we have seen in chapter 2, this higher rate of attendance is mainly supported by conservative Protestants. Among the affiliates and former affiliates of the country’s mainstream churches, weekly attendance is likely half that. Even so, members of the Anglican, United, and Presbyterian churches likely attend weekly at double the rate found in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, or Australia. By contrast, Protestant attendance in Canada compared to the general rate of attendance in America runs in the opposite direction. Whichever benchmark one uses, Canadian attendance is much lower than the roughly two-fifths (or more) of the population who attend weekly in the United States.10 As Grace Davie has astutely observed, Canada “looks increasingly European” in its declining levels of ­religious participation.11 All of this is represents quite a dramatic change in how Canadians relate to organized Christianity. Canadians were once church-joining and church-going people. Now they are not, and this is decidedly so among the Québécois. So what happened? Both Callum Brown and Hugh McLeod look at church-joining and church-going and adherence as part of a wider cultural configuration. Brown identifies four facets of Christianity’s impact on society in the past: institutional Christianity (church adherence and participation in worship), intellectual Christianity (the influence of religious beliefs on society and the individual), functional Christianity (the churches’ place in public

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life), and discursive Christianity (protocols of behaviour – for example saying grace before meals – that shape people’s identity). Brown argues that Christianity had such a pervasive presence in society ­precisely because of its discursive power for people to forge a sense of self. “What made Britain Christian,” Brown affirms, “was the way Christianity infused public culture and was adopted by individuals, whether churchgoers or not, in forming their own identities.”12 Hugh McLeod draws on the concept of Christendom to map Christian hegemony and its loss. Christians not only constituted the bulk of the population but their religion also enjoyed a privileged and unique status such that societies considered themselves to be Christian societies. In such societies there were close links between lay and religious elites; the churches had a large public presence (such as in education); had an important say in law and morals; and, ­crucially, most children were socialized into being members of a Christian society (not just a particular denomination). In such societies, Christianity constituted the common language, “the taken-forgranted environment” shared by all, even those who were not among the committed Christians.13 If one can speak of a Christian Britain, as Brown and McLeod do, there are many ways in which Canada was even more markedly a Christian society. Canada’s Protestant and Roman Catholic churches had successfully navigated the social changes inaugurated by the country’s industrial revolution and urban explosion during the Victorian era to secure broad-based support, including among the working classes.14 The vast majority of people attended church and, among Protestants, children attended Sunday school, often on afternoons as well as Sunday morning. Indeed, Sunday evening services were highly popular, in part because of the opportunities they offered for youth of the opposite sex to socialize with one another.15 By ­contrast, large swathes of the working class in Victorian England had a more tenuous connection with organized religion. Many adults attended church irregularly or not at all, but they still thought it important that their children be baptized and attend Sunday School to learn the basics of the Christian faith. That they thought so was a testimony to the strength of what Jeffrey Cox has called “diffusive Christianity,” an array of Christian beliefs and observances that were part and parcel of popular culture.16 But in England this religious culture presupposed a church established by law as the official religion of the country and supported by the state. In short, that church

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was a public institution that offered its ministry to all. In Canada, however, churches – even those such as the Catholic and Anglican churches that were organized on a territorial basis – functioned as denominations, that is, as organizations which people joined. As all churches depended upon the voluntary financial support and ­volunteer work of their members, Canada’s religious culture was more securely rooted in people’s active engagement with organized Christianity, and denominational identity was much stronger as a consequence. At the same time, because there was no established church, the Protestant churches were better able to create a more general Protestant culture as they shared a common social project.17 Around the turn of the last century, large urban churches augmented their social presence in the lives of their members when they began to  offer an extensive array of programs and activities.18 Canada’s churches confidently faced the social issues confronting the country, and they forged new forms of Christian service and piety to engage both men and women, but especially men.19 Canada’s leading churches, John Webster Grant argued, functioned as an unofficial establishment.20 In effect, each church sought to act as a national church.21 This was most clearly the case with the Catholic Church in Quebec, where religion and nationalist identity were once closely intertwined. But each of the major Protestant churches also saw themselves as national institutions in that they self-consciously contributed to nation building and sought to embody the religious and civic ideals of the nation. Each church strove to make Canada God’s dominion, and it did so because its members believed their church was the soul of the nation.22 Moreover, the Catholic Church in English-speaking Canada also endeavoured to create a national identity for members as devout Catholics, loyal subjects, and true Canadians.23 Clergy were recognized as leaders in society and as civic figures. The Catholic Church integrated immigrants and, more often than recognized, so did Protestant churches.24 Christian values and beliefs were integral to school curriculums across the country. Churches ran a vast array of social institutions – hospitals, housing for the disadvantaged, and so on – right up to the 1960s. The churches had not only weathered the Depression and the war that followed, but had emerged from those calamitous times with renewed vigour.25 One expression of the optimism with which church leaders greeted the 1960s, the confidence they had for their place in society, and the

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strength of their conviction that Canada was a Christian society can be seen Gary Miedema’s description of the service celebrated on 1 July 1967 on Parliament Hill to open the celebrations commemorating Canada’s centennial. Eight clergy sat on the dias, including the moderator of the United Church, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Quebec, and the Anglican bishop of Rupert’s Land, with only a rabbi among them to represent non-Christian religious traditions. With the exception of the Centennial Hymn and “O Canada,” all the songs were Christian hymns or anthems. The crowd joined in reciting the Lord’s Prayer, Prime Minister Pearson read from 1 Peter (3:8–18, that the righteous are blessed by God), Cardinal Roy invoked Christ’s name in prayer, and the service concluded with a benediction.26 That 25,000 came out to participate in the prayer service was a testament as to how widely and enthusiastically Canadians believed theirs was indeed a Christian country. But by then Canadian culture and organized Christianity were already experiencing the shock waves that erupted in the 1960s, and the Christian Canada celebrated in this ceremony was about to disappear. So, “What happened to Christian Canada?” Mark Noll asked in an essay by that title. Noll posed this question because in his view, in the middle of the twentieth century Canada had “a much stronger claim as a ‘Christian nation’ than its large neighbor to the south.” Historians and sociologists have long noted the vitality of American religious culture and the prominence of Christianity in its public life. But Noll noted that Canada had even higher levels of religious observance (with church attendance running a third higher than in the US), and its churches’ success in Christianizing society and their close collaboration with all levels of government in the delivery of social services and education as well as the inculcation of their world view and values among ordinary Canadian men and women exceeded that in the United States.27 That ended abruptly. Noll draws on John Webster Grant’s observation that the “realization that Christendom was dead … dawned with surprising suddenness in the 1960s – at some time during 1965.” An observation, Noll points out, that was uncannily echoed in Denys Arcand’s film The Barbarian Invasions, when a priest comments during a tour of a church crypt that “in 1966 all the churches emptied out in a few weeks. No one can figure out why.”28 To explain why this happened, Noll draws on the concept of a “web of contingencies.” Contingencies, such events or the choices people make, play a part as do changes in the web, as do those factors

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that are large scale, even tectonic in scope. Among these tectonic shifts, Noll placed the Quiet Revolution and the transformation in  English-speaking Canada’s self-conceptualization, culminating in the multicultural turn and the Charter of Rights. But it was the churches’ loss of religious vitality, their close association with the existing social order, that sealed their fate. In both Quebec and the Rest of Canada, the churches were critical forces in establishing respect for social hierarchy, traditionalism, and communal values. In the case of Quebec, Noll, drawing on the work of Michael Gauvreau, argued that in response to the church’s moribund traditionalism, Catholic activists in the 1950s and early 1960s looked beyond the church to secular institutions to achieve renewal, thereby anticipating and creating the groundwork for the rupture to come with Quebec’s religious past in the Quiet Revolution. Catholic traditionalism ran counter to the norms of Anglo-Canadian society but was the basis for Quebec’s distinct society and identity. By contrast, the end of old social values in the Rest of Canada and the rise in their place of the values of personal freedom, individualism, and self-fulfiliment fatally undermined the United Church. The church’s theologically liberal leadership had long advocated such values, along with those of service and social welfare, but at the price of losing sight of their distinctly Christian message. In all this the Anglicans were something of an outlier. Their emphasis on deference and establishment simply left them “at sea.”29 Certainly, Canada’s leading Protestant churches were vulnerable to the charge of being part of the Establishment, as it was then called. And that was to prove to be a point of vulnerability when the Establishment itself came under attack. Moreover, a gap was already opening between pew and pulpit. Lay people were going their own way on the issues of divorce and remarriage (both of which had arisen with the dislocations of the Depression and the war), and what constituted suitable leisure pursuits (social drinking, dancing and so on).30 A similar gap was opening among Roman Catholics on issues regarding sexual fulfillment within marriage, recognition of lay leadership, the church’s control over social institutions, and people’s openness to popular culture, such as the cinema and recorded music.31 But these rumblings did not portend what was to come. By and large, social conventions were intact, and churchgoing was still part of what it meant to be a responsible adult, a respectable member of society, and a solid citizen. So too was getting married and having children. Hence lay Protestants pushed

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to have remarriage accepted by the churches, which assumed that sex and companionship between man and woman ought to occur within the holy bonds of matrimony. That social and religious world – and what it stood for – was soon to be shaken to its foundations by the cultural shifts that erupted in the 1960s. Before turning our attention in greater detail to the cultural challenges of the 1960s and their impact on Christianity in Canada, it is necessary to step sideways for a moment and consider how one version of secularization theory has charted the changes we’ve seen. David Martin offers a useful topography to situate the Canadian religious scene as Canada began to be shaken by this cultural shift. Martin locates English-speaking Canada in the Anglo-American orbit, but he also argues that the religious landscape in English-speaking Canada differed from the church establishment in Britain and from the freewheeling Christian pluralism and voluntaristic or denominational model of institutionalized Christianity in the United States. In Englishspeaking Canada, Martin argues, the leading churches functioned as a shadow or quasi-establishment, and as in the United States (in contrast to Britain) institutionalized Christianity was a vital and growing force until the 1960s, after which disaffiliation set in, leaving Englishspeaking Canada (like New Zealand and Australia with similar institutional configurations) somewhere between Britain (with a “residual state church” and low attendance) and America (no state church and high attendance).32 By contrast, in francophone Quebec adherence to Catholicism was strong and persistent; the alliance of faith and ethnicity enabled French Canadiens (as they then called themselves) to forge an identity distinct from and a society apart from and counter to that of the dominant Anglo-Protestant culture.33 Once the protective dyke provided by the church erodes, there are several pathways a society can follow. One pattern found in Belgium is that people generally give up practising their religion, but Catholicism remains part of their identity, even if it is vestigial, and religious institutions remain a recognized part of public life.34 As a consequence, there is no cultural schism between religionists and others. Gregory Baum once argued that this was the road Quebec was travelling on, and for good reason.35 As we have seen, the Quiet Revolution was accompanied by what Jacques Grand’Maison described as Quebecers’ “hate and love” relationship with the church. While many resented the church’s former social power, anticlericalism was rare and debates over the

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place of the church in Quebec society were conducted without acrimony. Until very recently, francophone Quebecers culturally identified with the church and wanted their children to be baptized, even if they themselves did not attend church. Baum now argues that Quebec is following an alternative pathway, one that Martin considers to be the main pathway for Catholic countries: the French or Latin model.36 In this model one sees massive rejection of religion, the deconfessionalization of society and of social institutions, and conflict between secularists and religionists (typically a small minority).37 Now that the school system is deconfessionalized, religious instruction takes place in the local parish, and only a minority of parents enroll their children in parish catechetical programs to prepare them for first communion. Certainly, the Parti Québéçois’ promotion of the Charter of Quebec Values, which would have prohibited civil servants from wearing religious symbols and would require women to be unveiled when either offering or receiving government services, fits this pattern. Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor’s call for “reasonable accommodation” for the province’s faith communities resulted in heated debate, of which the Charter was one response, an indication of just how much a secularist public culture has taken hold and marginalizes religious perspectives. Those religious symbols that remain – one thinks of the crucifix that hangs in the National Assembly – are associated with a sense of peoplehood and patrimony, not with religion or the church.38 Martin sees secularization largely as a process of differentiation (religious institutions become a subcomponent of society and as result lose their influence), one that is universal to industrial societies. But, he insists, this process is “inflected or deflected” by each society’s history.39 Martin has in mind several factors that are relevant to the Canadian scene. First is the cultural factor. Catholic and Protestant countries have different pathways, where Catholic countries tend to undergo rapid and massive disaffiliation and produce a militant, secular culture. By contrast, in Protestant countries the presence of evangelism in its historical sense of Protestant revivalism typically sustains Christianity’s resonance in a society, at least for a time. Second, the institutional form Christianity takes matters. Christianity remains strong in societies such as the United States where religion is  disestablished and religious pluralism reigns. In such contexts denominations are experimental and able to appeal to wide segments of society. By contrast, societies with strong religious establishments,

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in other words where a religious monopoly obtains, typically experience de-Christianization. Third, Christianity’s role in forming a national identity (usually among an oppressed group as in Catholic Ireland) makes it a powerful force. In mixed societies, the outcome depends on the link of Christianity with social identity. When present, Christianity tends to be vital; when not so, Christianity declines.40 Martin’s typology does much to explain why Christianity was vital in English-speaking Canada and especially so in Catholic Quebec, and it also accounts for why formerly Protestant English-speaking Canada looks much like Australia or New Zealand, and why Quebec now resembles France, with Catholicism in the Rest of Canada showing persistence (given its salience for ethnicity) until very recently. Martin admits that the 1960s were a pivotal decade. The factors he adumbrates do help to account for how the much-diminished religious landscape that emerged as a consequence of that decade took the forms that it did, but they do not explain the timing for what occurred. Why in the 1960s did long-standing connections between church and state, indeed between church and society, as well as the interconnections between people’s religious and social identities suddenly dissolve? As we noted in the introduction, Hugh McLeod and Callum Brown both see the 1960s as the crucial transitional decade. Both agree that  a Christian culture persisted in European societies right up to the 1960s. And they agree that the 1960s constituted a cultural watershed. The long 1960s – from 1958 through to 1974 – in McLeod’s view inaugurated a “rupture as profound as that brought about by the Reformation.”41 But McLeod and Brown disagree as to why that decade proved to be so pivotal for the dissolution of those religious cultures as people gave up on long-standing religious observances and abandoned traditional values. According to McLeod, “the 1960s were a time when history moved faster,” unleashing profound and rapid change that the churches and social world they sustained were “powerless to withstand.” “This revolution,” however, “did not come out of the blue.”42 For McLeod the ferment of the 1960s resulted from the convergence of long-term change (such as the emergence of rival systems of belief, the growing emancipation of society from the aegis of the church, and declining adherence among some segments of society), “medium-term processes” developing over two or three decades (such as rising affluence and the individual autonomy that it afforded, and the decline in old

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collective identities), and specific catalytic events (such as Vatican II and the war in Vietnam).43 By the eve of the 1960s, “the foundations on which the edifice of Christendom was built were far from solid.”44 Many among the intellectual class had rejected Christianity; a segment (sometimes a large one) of society (mainly among the working class) had limited involvement with organized Christianity (primarily rites of passage), and some (including progressive church leaders and theologians) were already questioning the churches’ teachings on morality and, in particular, sexual ethics.45 Wider social change together with changes internal to the churches (Vatican II generated division in the Catholic Church, as did the avant-garde in Protestant churches by undermining old certainties) combined to produce the religious crisis of the 1960s.46 For Callum Brown, gender, specifically women breaking free of their traditional roles, is critical to understanding what happened in the 1960s. The religious revivals of the nineteenth century sacralized femininity so that “a woman’s very essence was pious.” Women’s identity as a respectable wife, mother, or young girl was wrapped up tightly with religion and sexual propriety – the angel in the home and the epitome of piety – in ways that were not so for men. The sexual revolution of the 1960s thus marked a clear expression of women’s rejection of religious conformity. One other legacy of the sexual revolution and of the women’s movement was women marrying and bearing children (and fewer of them) later in life. This in turn enabled women to pursue careers of their own and forge new identities, all of which contributed to a female revolt against the church. On this score, women’s affirmation of autonomy made it possible for them not only to walk away from organized Christianity but also to affirm in a positive fashion an identity of not having any religion.47 Brown’s approach has the virtue of showing that identity and notions of autonomy are themselves gendered. It is also worth noting that in contrast to McLeod, Brown underscores the primacy of social change and its precipitous impact on religious culture. Christianity was especially salient for women’s identities in Brown’s view. Once thought of as personifying Christian piety, women were often the mainstay of the local congregation and because of them Christianity was at the heart of family life. The “short and sharp cultural revolution” of the 1960s was about how to conduct their lives – in particular their sexual and family lives – free from the influence of the church. So fundamental was this change that it resulted in the end

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of Christian Britain.48 And it is women who have been the most affected by this de-Christianization as they abandoned their former identities as respectable women, centred on domesticity and religion, and forged newly liberated, secular identities for themselves.49 Wade Clark Roof’s examination of the American scene dovetails neatly with this line of analysis by adding a generational element to the picture. The cultural shift of the 1960s was driven, he argues, by what happened among one generation, the baby boomers. This was so because they were so large, nearly one-third of the total population. Size counts. And this especially so when it comes to setting social trends. Among baby boomers, exposure to the counterculture, Roof maintains, was critical as to whether one adopted a new set of  values and dropped out of organized religion. Indeed, the link between walking away from organized religion and adopting the new values of personal fulfillment and distrust of institutions was especially close. Autonomy and the ability to choose for oneself were highly valued by this generation. These aspirations were made possible by unparalleled affluence and the promise this affluence seemed to offer of “almost limitless expectations.” Mass media also played a part in these aspirations. Baby boomers, Roof noted, were the first generation to grow up with T V and its cornucopia of visual images and new products, all pitched to fulfill their particular needs.50 The 1960s inaugurated a new era in which traditional authority was questioned and traditional values jettisoned. Roof sees what he calls the “gender revolution” – women’s entry into the full-time workforce and taking control over their own bodies in sexual reproduction – as being part of this broader cultural shift.51 The shift away from organized Christianity among Englishspeaking Canadians is quite different from what occurred in either the United States or Britain. Until the 1960s, a greater proportion of the population was involved in Canada’s churches, and they were so to a greater degree than in England where significant segments of society – among parts of the intelligentsia and the working class – had already disengaged from Christian adherence and practice. Moreover, an even larger part of the British working class had a vicarious and tenuous connection with church. Many working-class parents thought it important to send their children to Sunday school but would themselves attend rarely, for funerals, weddings, and the like. By contrast, Canadian urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was accompanied by a revival of Christianity

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and its churches rather than the reverse, as occurred in much of Britain.52 And much of that momentum continued on and even accelerated with the opening of the suburban frontier. In sum, Canadians, like their American cousins, were a churchgoing and a church-joining people. There were counterindications to be sure, but on the whole Canadian churches were in good shape on the eve of the 1960s. The religious revival of the 1950s that had seen membership and Sunday School rolls swell had owed much to suburban expansion, people’s desire to fit into a middle-class way of life, and their eagerness to socialize their growing number of children.53 But as the controversy over Pierre Berton’s The Comfortable Pew illustrated, people also wanted the churches be authentic in their mission (however that was understood) and speak to the dilemmas of daily life.54 True, there were the downtown hipsters and beatniks, but at best they could all fit comfortably into the local jazz club, if there was one. Even those who were critical of the contemporary religious culture – the most notable of whom were insiders like Frère Untel and Stewart Crysdale – assumed that Canada’s churches would continue on as dominant social institutions and that Canada would remain a Christian society. Christianity was part of the Canadian (both English and French) way of life, and much the same could said of America. But when Canadians started to leave organized Christianity, that departure was broader based and had far more momentum than it did in the United States. Part of the reason for this was that Canada’s mainstream Protestant churches (which accounted for over 90% of the Protestant population in the 1960s) loomed large relative to other denominations, whereas in the United States, conservative denominations formed a much more important part of the religious spectrum (just over two-fifths of all Protestants).55 But there is more to it than that. Over time, a greater proportion of former affiliates in Canada compared to their American counterparts left organized Christianity and instead identified themselves as having No Religion. In the early 1970s, the religious Nones were roughly even in both countries, at 4% in Canada and 5% in the United States. Over the next two decades, the Nones increased rapidly in Canada, nearly doubling to 7% in 1981 and 12% in 1991, whereas in the United States the level of Nones remained relatively stable at around 6%. Only after 1991 did the religious Nones take off in the United States, primarily as a backlash to the conservative right.56

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The dynamics of No Religion among baby boomers in Canada and the United States were also quite different. No Religion had sufficient momentum in Canada to expand among baby boomers as they aged and to pick up a growing proportion of the cohorts who followed them. In the United States, by contrast, one sees a significant countertrend among baby boomers, which likewise affected religious affiliation among young adults. About half of the American baby boomers who left church and became religious Nones eventually returned when they started to raise families, and they brought their children with them.57 In Canada, as we have seen, the Nones among the baby boomers walked away from church and didn’t come back. They tended to raise their children without exposure to organized religion. As a consequence, the growth in No Religion and the shift in culture that it represented had a much greater cumulative impact in Canada than in the United States. As Canadians know from their long winters, if they keep rolling along a goodsized ball of snow across a field to make a snowman, it will grow to become several times larger. Much the same has happened in the growth of No Religion in Canada. Timing is the critical issue for understanding religious change in Canada. The scale and rapidity of this change are also crucial. If for McLeod the 1960s was an era when time moved faster, in the case of Canada it was as if the country’s social development had suddenly – and without warning – entered into warp drive of Star Trek fame. The 1960s were in Canada a watershed for religious involvement. Canadians decisively broke with their long-established custom of churchgoing, and over time a growing proportion of the population eschewed identifying themselves in religious terms. In Canada at least, medium-term factors and catalytic events proved to be decisive. One critical medium-term factor was the rise of affluence in the 1960s, which inspired people to embrace the future with optimism. The overarching themes of Expo 67, Terre des Hommes, held over the summer of 1967, encapsulated Canadians’ hopes for progress. With the proper use of technology, the world’s problems could be overcome and humanity could be united in a global community.58 One would be hard pressed to find a more enthusiastic celebration of human autonomy and a greater expression of the faith in human achievement. Rising affluence in and of itself did not necessarily lead to disengagement with religion, as illustrated by the United States where organized Christianity thrived in

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the most affluent society in the world. But affluence did make it possible for many to act autonomously in their social lives. In this context, whether to join a church became increasingly a matter of individual choice. Another crucial medium-term factor was the sheer size of the babyboom cohort, which led to the creation of a distinct youth culture (in 1966, one-half of the Canadian population was under the age of twenty-one).59 In retrospect, the teen culture of the 1950s and early 1960s appeared relatively tame compared to what followed, but by creating a sense of generational identity, it made possible the eventual emergence of the counterculture of the later 1960s.60 Youth heard the counterculture’s message of peace and love in their folk music and acid rock and from be-ins as well as underground newspapers – such as Logos in Montreal, Satyrday in Toronto, Georgia Straight in Vancouver – hawked on downtown street corners and available in head shops.61 Now the thing to do among those who joined the counterculture was to rid themselves of middle-class conformity and to search for life-enriching experiences (whether with or without the aid of mind-altering substances). Authority was out; “doing your own thing,” whatever it was, was in. In the wider culture, expressive individualism affected all segments of society, even those who would never enter a head shop or read an alternative newspaper. The sexual revolution was central to the cultural shift that occurred in the 1960s. Not only did more youth engage in premarital sexual activity than ever before, but the attitudes of many Canadians of all ages shifted from condemnation to acquiescence if not outright approval.62 The sexual revolution was a revolution in values, one that rejected the old ideals of domesticity and respectability and replaced them with the individual’s “inalienable right to sexual expression” as part of defining their identity and questing for authenticity and experience.63 Catalytic events also played their part in shifting Canadian culture. The war in Vietnam shattered the hopes of many for a more peaceful world and the conviction that the United States was a force for good. Vatican II seemed to inaugurate a new era in ecumenical understanding and cooperation among Canada’s churches, raising hopes that churches would work together to improve the world. Very quickly, however, the Catholic Church, like its mainstream Protestant counterparts, was overwhelmed by the cultural shift inaugurated by the 1960s.64 In the face of the increasingly widespread quest for autonomy in sexual relations and in so many other aspects of life, the

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Catholic Church took a traditional stance that many found to be irrelevant. The church appeared to many to be out of touch with their hopes and daily lives. The church’s defence of traditional sexual mores was a flash point for youth alienation from organized Christianity, but it was symptomatic of a broader disconnection between church and youth, and youth dissatisfaction with church. It has been long recognized that the shift in identity from French Canadian to Québécois during the Quiet Revolution marked a transition from an identity based on language and religion to one based on language and culture. The Québécois identity emerged as the Catholic Church lost its central place in Quebec society. A similar process, however, also took place in English-speaking Canada. In the 1950s and early 1960s most English-speaking Canadians thought of themselves not only as British subjects but also as being part of the British people. Britishness embodied the ideals and norms of fair play and freedom of conscience, the basis of the country’s democratic system. And to be British was to be Protestant. In popular lore, their monarch was a Protestant, the Defender of the Faith, and the Supreme Governor of a Protestant church. Moreover, it was widely believed that the Protestant faith had inspired the fight for religious freedom against the forces of obscurantism. Protestant Christianity was thus the foundation upon which British free institutions and ideals rested. In this scheme, Catholicism remained highly suspect, and indeed a potentially alien presence.65 But in the 1960s, Canadians began to realize that the exclusivity of these patriotic and religious ideals denied the reality of cultural diversity in English-speaking Canada. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, which was launched in 1963, quickly discovered that for many citizens the concept of two founding peoples – one British and the other French – failed to reflect the multiculturalism that they experienced in their daily lives. This dramatic shift in how English-speaking Canadians defined their collective identity was marked in 1964 by the adoption of a new flag to replace the Red Ensign and the Union Jack. The red maple leaf design deliberately eschewed British symbols and signified the emergence of a new ­identity that would replace the older British-Canadian identity with one that was simply Canadian. The eclipse of Britishness was at first highly contentious, at least judging from newspaper editorial comment.66 But such controversy was rapidly forgotten, as Englishspeakers picked up on identifying themselves as just Canadian. While

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the federal government would not formulate a policy on multiculturalism until 1971, one of the reasons it did so was precisely because this new identity embraced English-speaking Canada’s cultural diversity. Among this identity’s salient features was that it had none of the associations, which Britishness did, with either empire or religion.67 In sweeping away their British past, English-speaking Canadians were preparing to adopt a national identity free of the religious establishment of empire or indeed any religious establishment. This was to be, it was hoped among English-speaking Canadians, an inclusive identity that all could embrace regardless of their ethnic background or religion, or even the absence of religion. The growth of the category of No Religion was an integral part of the 1960s cultural revolution. As Callum Brown has pointed out, the meaning of the term changed as a result of this cultural revolution, and this change in meaning in turn signified the emergence of new ways in which people could identify themselves.68 Up to the 1941 Census, the usual term used on the returns was “Not stated.” As we have seen, enumerators were instructed to accept “none” as an answer. Nevertheless, the general assumption of the instructions was that most people were something and, moreover, that they did belong to a specific religious body. The guidelines therefore encouraged enumerators to elicit as specific an answer as possible. Nor were those who drew up the Census guidelines mistaken in believing that,  when it came to religion, Canadians were overwhelmingly something. Only 0.5% of the population signified that they had No Religion. When in 1971 No Religion became one of thirteen choices that respondents could check off, No Religion was listed alongside being Roman Catholic or an affiliate of the United Church. The message was clear: No Religion became not only an option that one could choose, it also became – and this is even more telling – an openly accepted option. So No Religion went from being a tiny minority, a deviant minority according to Brown, made up of dissidents and freethinkers to a large segment of society who embraced a world view and identity that was equally valid to being a Christian.69 In short, No Religion became a new form of social belonging and “an accepted part of cultural diversity.”70 As Hugh McLeod has observed, the 1960s were a cataclysmic event for Christianity in the West on the scale of the Reformation. The religious landscape would never be the same. When it came to No Religion, the new development was “that those who rejected Christianity were increasingly ready to say so

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loudly and openly.”71 In Canada, the rupture identified by McLeod was perhaps even more dramatic than it was in Britain, where there were long-standing subcultures of freethinking and other forms of independence from organized religion. By contrast, in Canada rival belief systems lacked a significant social following. The turmoil of the 1960s thus caught Canada’s churches completely by surprise, and they were unprepared for the cultural and social transformations that were to come. That was particularly the case in Quebec, where a nationalist resurgence in reaction to anglophone domination in society resulted in a new cultural identity free of its Catholic heritage. Brown has argued that the cultural revolution inaugurated by the 1960s, which made it possible for Canadians to identify themselves as having No Religion, was a “gendered event.”72 It is certainly the case that No Religion emerged as part of a constellation of developments that had a more profound effect on women’s lives than they did on men’s lives. Women’s control of their own fertility, the feminist movement and its demand for women’s autonomy, women’s expanding enrolment in higher education on a mass scale, and their lifelong engagement with the workforce were all associated with 1960s demands for equality, baby boomers’ rising expectations, and the emergence of a large, well-educated cohort of women entering en masse into the professions.73 That said, when No Religion took off in the 1960s and 1970s, it remained a predominantly male phenomenon, in the range of 58–60% compared to 40–42% for females (see table 4.2). That ratio was significantly lower than the 69% to 31% ratio seen in 1951, when No Religion was definitely a minority phenomenon.74 Since 1981 the proportion has been inching down gradually, but as of 2011 males still outnumber females in No Religion by 54% to 46% compared to the proportion of 49% to 51% seen in the overall population. These shifts in the proportions between males and females tell us that one of the reasons why No Religion is increasing, and increasing at such a strong rate even as it includes a larger number of Canadians, is that females are increasingly represented. And this increase builds on a significant level of women’s representation of at least 40% among those of No Religion. By any measure that is a solid demographic foundation to build on. That said, males are still overrepresented – by about 5 percentage points from what one would expect if there were demographic parity between the sexes. Or to put the point in another way, when No Religion became an open option in 1971, it

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was a significantly more accessible one for males to identify with than it was for females, when the difference in overrepresentation was about 10 percentage points. It still is one that males more readily identify with, but the degree of significance has dropped considerably. So No Religion is most certainly a gendered phenomenon. Demographically, males are overrepresented, although to a lesser extent than they used to be. Culturally, the growth of No Religion and the affirmation of self-definition and autonomy that this trend represents has had more profound (and intimate) ramifications for women than for men, as has been the case for so many developments that have occurred as a consequence of the 1960s. As we saw in the introduction, the term secularization is a complex one that encompasses multiple meanings. The leading proponents of the secularization thesis – Peter Berger, Bryan Wilson, and Steve Bruce – have highlighted different aspects of what they took to be the prime features of secularization, and yet they also agreed that it was a long-term process driven by structural differentiation (resulting in the proliferation and specialization of social institutions) and social differentiation (resulting in social and cultural diversity). These processes led to, among other things, individualism and privatization of beliefs (Berger and Bruce), disenchantment with the world for modern people (Berger), and the prevalence of instrumental thinking (Wilson), all of which serve to diminish the social significance of religion and its salience in people’s lives. Both Wilson and Bruce see church affiliation and attendance as an important index for the declining influence of religion and religious institutions.75 But both authors deny that an abrupt shift occurred in the 1960s, either dealing with that decade in a tangential manner, in association with the fluorescence of sectarian movements (Wilson and Bruce), or dismissing its significance (Bruce responding to Callum Brown) as the effect of religion’s weakening sway over society and people that long predates the sixties.76 The evidence for Canada that we have cited so far suggests that theories of long-term decline of religion simply do not fit the facts. We have seen that affiliation first began its downward trend as recently as the sixties, well within the lifetime of Canadians of the boomer generation and older. Although the roots of this seismic shift can be traced to previous decades, to some of the parents of baby boomers, neither the structural nor social trends favoured by the exponents of classical secularization theory help to explain the

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timing of what occurred. Nor can they explain the surprise with which Canadians met the sixties’ cultural revolution with its overturning of long-standing mores and social patterns. In opposition to the proponents of long-term decline of religion, Reginald Bibby and Rodney Stark contend that the demand for ­religion is still strong. Both posit that the problem rests with the suppliers of religion, the churches. In their view, many of them are not adequately responding to and addressing people’s religious needs. According to Stark, an American sociologist of religion, mainstream denominations experienced decline because they downplayed the supernatural and transcendent dimensions of faith, and they attempted to blend in with the rest of society. Stark posits that people value what is costly to them, what they need to sacrifice in order to belong, and these churches in effect reduced the value of belonging.77 As we have seen, the argument that the churches’ attenuation of Christian faith contributed to church decline has also been made by  Canadian scholars. Kevin Flatt attributes decline in the United Church to its drifting from its evangelical heritage to adopt a theological modernism that revised (even in some cases outright rejected) traditional teaching.78 The theological spectrum is more diverse and engagement with the Christian tradition more profound in the United Church and other mainstream churches than Flatt and other critics allow.79 Be that as it may, it wasn’t so much a question that the churches failed to deliver their spiritual message. Rather, their ready audience shrivelled and people stopped listening. For many, the reforms of Vatican II in the Roman Catholic Church and the New Evangelism in the United Church, to take just two of the more prominent initiatives undertaken by the churches in Canada in the 1960s, were seen as too little and too late.80 For them what the churches had to say seemed old-fashioned, and even quaint. What is telling, contra to what Stark, Bibby, and others have argued, there was no mass defection to conservative denominations. There is, after all, no shortage of churches offering what they consider to be traditional Christian teaching on doctrine or morals. Most of those who left church weren’t interested in checking them out; they simply walked away from organized Christianity. Bibby’s insistence that “there is a market for religion,” that “suppliers” just have to let people know that they can answer “the life and death questions” people are asking,81 ignores the wider cultural shift that we have observed hitting Canada’s leading churches in the 1960s

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and after. One of the defining features that Joel Thiessen has discovered in his interviews with marginal affiliates and those with No Religion is their marked individualism and their commitment to toleration. They see churches as being exclusive and restrictive, and so antithetical to their values. Joining a faith community is just not something they are interested in pursuing.82 Religious Nones and many of those on the margins of organized Christianity who have not yet declared themselves to have No Religion may well believe in God or an afterlife. Surveys consistently show that the vast majority of Canadians do so. What Thiessen’s study demonstrates is that belief doesn’t motivate most of them to seek a compatible community of faith or to regularly perform private religious practices. In the past, that is what Canadians did, and they did so because they valued the corporate dimension of religion and the collective expression of faith that it offered. Now, these Canadians are quite comfortable to believe without belonging, as Grace Davie puts it.83 The cultural revolution of the 1960s had far-reaching consequences for the wider culture and for those who ended up on the margins of organized Christianity. Not only did Christian institutions lose their dominant position and much of their privileged status, but Christian beliefs and values were no longer part of the “common language.”84 During this time, as Brown usefully reminds us, the churches lost their social power and their ability to sustain a dominant Christian culture. In the process, the long-standing social identities that were integral to that culture stopped making sense to many men and women.85 Christianity has thus become a local language, intelligible to insiders but not understood otherwise.86 Churches are offering answers to questions about life and death, but to most Canadians whom we have identified as unaffiliated – some 55% of the population – those answers don’t seem to speak to their existential issues. Nor does a Christian community offer them anything – a sense of belonging, an identity, or a sense of purpose in life – that they can’t get elsewhere and on more familiar terms.

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6 Quo Vadis Canada?

The decline in church affiliation and participation, which began in the 1960s, has accelerated markedly since then. Further changes in culture, some whose roots lie in the 1960s as well as newer trends whose origins lie elsewhere, have altered the landscape in which churches function. Many baby boomers became disenchanted with Christianity – and with other parts of the establishment – during a time of unprecedented prosperity, which seemed destined to continue indefinitely under the aegis of the welfare state and Keynesian economics. Such optimism dissipated in the face of stagflation (galloping inflation and rising unemployment) and the oil crisis during the 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, according to the pollster Darrell Bricker and his collaborator John Ibbitson, Canadians have become less confident in government and have lost faith in the state’s ability to redress social issues (crime excepted). Instead, they value individual independence and trust that individuals can rely on their own initiative to get things done.1 Consumerism was a vibrant force in the 1960s, but it has been intensified and extended over a range of social activities since the advent of neoliberalism following the electoral victories of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper in Canada. As François Gauthier and Tuomas Martikainen have pointed out, deregulation was the most obvious result of this new regime.2 What affected religion, however, was another aspect of the neoliberal program: its project to reframe social issues (and indeed the social good) as well as social interactions in terms of market economics. As a result, the language of the market has permeated public discourse, and society has become understood in contractual terms:

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we are now “customers” or “taxpayers” – the consumers and paymasters of civic services – as opposed to citizens.3 The eclipse of the Protestant and Catholic social identities that prevailed right up to the 1960s, and the culture of respectability and service that were integral to them, left a void. For many, consumerism and pursuit of self-fulfillment filled that vacuum. In this cultural ethos, liberty is understood as the freedom to choose,4 and freedom to choose is understood in terms of consumer choice, where one acts in one’s self-interest to enhance personal satisfaction and self-expression. In exercising this freedom to choose, consumption becomes a means by which people not only express individual identity but form it.5 Organized Christianity has become one option among many. Moreover, Canadian public discourse, where religion – if it is heard – is one voice among many reinforces this conception of religion as personal choice among which belonging to organized Christianity is just one alternative. One has the freedom to belong to organized religion or not, depending on one’s needs and priorities. People now shop to satisfy their spiritual needs just as they shop to fulfill their physical needs and aspirations for status. In this regard, François Gauthier and Tuomas Martikainen suggest that consumerism should be viewed as a culture in which the dominant values derive from consumer practice that is framed in terms of interactions made in a free market. In this scenario, people are seen as autonomous, rational actors behaving in their own self-interest; they know what they want, and so they can express themselves and define their identity through their purchases as consumers and exercise their discretion as connoisseurs of brands.6 People with No Religious Affiliation, whom we have called the religious “Nones” – in this case people who have left organized Christianity – echoed this thesis in interviews with Joel Thiessen, discussed in the previous chapter. For them autonomy trumps community, at least the kinds of community they associate with organized Christianity. The Canadian cultural ethos of consumerism favours No Religion, and so it is no surprise that No Religion remains a growing and robust trend. The rapid and increasing disengagement from organized Christianity that we have mapped here has enormous ramifications for Canadian society. Historically, the Catholic Church and Canada’s larger Protestant denominations were part and parcel of the country’s cultural fabric. They were once the custodians of the nation’s conscience and the arbiters of its values, and they held that position because it

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was widely assumed that Canadian society, its culture and its social institutions, were Christian.7 As a consequence of their power and prestige, churches occupied a privileged position in Canadian public life. Their norms were embedded in Canadian law, and a wide array of social institutions, such as those relating to health, welfare, and education, socialized Canadians into their values and world view. Since the 1960s, these churches have lost their position of dominance in Canadian culture. As we have shown, Christendom in Canada is no longer a reality.8 What is not always recognized is just how recently Christendom in Canada was a reality. Only some thirty-five years ago, in 1983, the Roman Catholic bishops of Canada issued a statement on the Canadian economy. By that point religious leaders had already lost much of their earlier prestige. Nevertheless, they caused a flurry of newspaper and tv coverage (provoking the ire of Conrad Black, which itself was considered newsworthy). What the bishops said about the economic life of the country mattered, and it mattered because churches were still regarded as one of the country’s principal institutions. Since then church leaders have weighed in on a wide variety of issues – from the 1995 Quebec referendum to speaking out against poverty, from opposition to abortion to supporting the need for affordable housing – but they have become one voice among many, if they are heard at all in the mass media. Indeed, what standing religion or religious values ought to have is now subject to debate, as in the controversy over the refusal by the law societies of British Columbia and Ontario to grant accreditation to Trinity Western University’s law school. Christian institutions can no longer assume that they can secure public recognition; they must do so on the basis of civil and human rights or how they might contribute to the common good, rather than specifically Christian values. Indeed, the participation of Christians in multifaith advocacy groups and how these groups make their case on specific issues – for example, the religious coalition against a casino in downtown Toronto – are telling indications that Canada is no longer a Christian society, which it certainly was in the 1960s.9 True, Christians still enjoy vestiges of their privileged place in Canadian society; after all, Christian holidays like Christmas and Good Friday are still marked as public holidays. Nonetheless, the context has fundamentally changed, as for many these holidays are just that, holidays not holy days. Christianity is

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now one of many religions represented in Canadian society, and its leaders are no longer the social dignitaries they once were. This change in public standing can also be seen in the local church and its role as a community institution. Churches were once part of the fabric of the community in which they were located. In addition to being a place of worship, the local church was a place where people went to socialize, engage in recreational activities, attend public meetings, and participate in community events. So when the Second World War ended, a generation of single men and women got married and started families, seeking a return to stability after experiencing years of turmoil through the Depression and the war.10 They joined congregations across the country and brought their children in record numbers. And one of the reasons they did so was that they believed that through the church their children would be socialized into Canadian society and acquire its values.11 During the 1960s that close connection between the wider culture and the larger Protestant as well as the Roman Catholic churches started to unravel. These churches became the objects of suspicion and critique, and the source of alienation for many, and not just among the country’s youth. While some people consciously rejected organized expressions of Christianity, many more, we suspect, simply lost interest and fell out of the habit of attending church.12 They drifted away because churches had ceased to matter. People stopped looking to the churches to help initiate their children into Canadian social life. And, as we have seen, many Canadian adults didn’t find it important that their children become initiated into the religious world of the church. Roman Catholic parents were an exception. They enrolled their children in Catholic schools where these were part of the public system. But tellingly, many of these same parents who wanted their children to be exposed to the Catholic faith through its schools didn’t take their children to church regularly. As a result, among the rising generation of both Protestant and Catholic youth, Christian churches meet not hostility or alienation, so typical of the youth in the 1960s, but rather indifference coupled with a complete lack of familiarity. As opposed to their parents who left church, they have had extremely little or no exposure to Christian beliefs and practices. As we have observed before, to them Christianity is, in the words of the Church of England’s report Mission-Shaped Church, “an utterly foreign culture.”13

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Today Canada’s churches are experiencing an entirely new situation since they were first planted in this country as part of settler societies from Europe and the United Kingdom. The number of Canadians who have had little or no contact with churches is growing. Many more have no idea what these churches are about and, what is more, have no inclination to find out. Surveys indicate that many Canadians are seeking spiritual development and fulfillment. Yet many of them would not think to look for that among mainstream Protestant churches, perhaps not realizing that these denominations do in fact have rich spiritual traditions.14 That is but one indication that we are now facing a post-Christian society. As Danièle Hervieu-Léger has usefully reminded us, religious groups are communities of belief and practice, ones which gather past, present, and future members in a chain of belief or memory. “A religion,” she maintains, “is an ideological, practical, and symbolic system through which consciousness, both individual and collective, of belonging to a particular chain of belief is constituted, maintained, developed and controlled.”15 Another way of putting this is that religious beliefs and practices are legitimated and constituted by strands of tradition. As contact with organized religion becomes increasingly episodic, as fewer and fewer people recall Sunday School or catechetical instruction as a formative time in their lives, so too the chain of memory – of religious tradition – becomes increasingly attenuated. What’s at stake is not just the transmission of beliefs and symbols particular to denominational traditions. That certainly is at stake, but also at stake is their religious culture, their ways of being and doing. For more and more Canadians, that too is terra incognita, even strange terrain. Not only is the active membership in Canada’s churches declining; there are fewer Canadians who remember what churches are about, and many for whom their identity is not even a distant memory. Such is the extent of the rupture in the country’s chain of memory. We can speak, as Callum Brown does in the case of Britain, of the de-Christianization of Canadian society. Here the concept of “diffusive Christianity,” developed by American social historian Jeffrey Cox in his study of late Victorian and Edwardian Christianity in England, helps us to understand what de-Christianization might entail.16 By the term “diffusive Christianity,” Cox means a cluster of beliefs and values that were broadly Protestant in character (a belief in God, a conviction that God rewards good people in the life to come, a confidence in the Bible as being uniquely the good book, and

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so on). Cox’s point is that this form of Christianity was so diffusive that it informed the outlook and moral sensibility of people who were not regular churchgoers. A similar form of diffusive Christianity would be found among non-churchgoing Catholics, except that instead of turning to the Bible for counsel or inspiration, they would have recourse to Mary or a saint in time of need. Those boomers who left church in the turmoil of the sixties and after were clear about what it was about institutional Christianity that they rejected, but many continued to believe even if they didn’t belong, as Grace Davie puts it.17 But even this memory of Christianity has faded for many raised in the families of boomers, and for most of today’s youth this memory was never transmitted in the first place. So not only has the idea of Christendom passed away but in a very real and profound way, Canada is no longer a Christian society and its culture has become de-Christianized. Most of us still have a weekend or “day of rest,” value charity, and take pride in our work ethic – all legacies of Christendom – but for most Canadians these have lost whatever religious connotations they once had and have become part of society’s secular culture. A growing segment of the population, raised by parents who once belonged to a church, are now forming their own families. Their children very likely have never been exposed to even diffusive forms of Christian belief and practice. A simple example can illustrate the challenge faced by the churches in a post-Christian society: How do they recruit members? They may put leaflets in mailboxes, create a website, or simply rely on their front door sign. Either way, they wait for visitors or newcomers, as they are known, to appear. And so, greeters are trained to welcome visitors or newcomers, give them relevant information, help them find a seat, and answer any questions. There is usually a welcome during the service and an invitation to sign a guest book, which allows the congregation to follow up on any newcomers or visitors. Another approach used by many congregations is to have members of the congregation invite their friends to a worship service. Indeed, many congregations now set aside one Sunday a year as “Back to Church Sunday.” All of this assumes that visitors or newcomers have some basic familiarity with a Christian worship service. In our current context, there are more and more Canadians who have no clue about what they might be encountering. They will not understand any of the ­rituals they are expected to observe or know what to do when, for

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example, a prayer is offered. What is a “Pastoral Prayer” or the “Prayers of the People”? What is the Bible, and why are people reading parts from it aloud? More fundamentally, the churches’ appeals go unnoticed by a generation who does not believe in a general Christian fashion because they have never belonged and the wider culture no longer transmits these beliefs. This places the onus on the churches to proclaim what they are about. At the moment, it seems that many congregations do not even recognize that this might be something that is needed. They wait for Canadians to show up on a Sunday morning. Fewer and fewer do, because they have no religious memory and have no understanding of how churches could possibly relate to their lives. Some churches recognize this and are responding to this challenge. They are revisioning their mission and are seeking to briefly and fully explain their purpose, fundamental values, goals, what they expect of their members, and the unique qualities of their community. In this regard, the experience of service clubs is not encouraging; although they may be clear about their raison d’etre, fewer Canadians are joining. And so even those churches that have the capacity to revision their mission and think strategically may find themselves in the same predicament as many service organizations: How do they get people to care about what they represent? These trends have far-reaching implications for Canada’s churches. Prognostication, we realize, is a risky enterprise at the best of times. Change, as we have seen, can occur unexpectedly and suddenly. The trends we have been tracking, however, are well entrenched, and they indicate that the pool of Protestant and Catholic affiliates will continue to shrink and to do so at an increasing pace as new cohorts of youth appear, other cohorts age, and still others disappear. The implications for Canada’s Christian churches are clear. Continued decline certainly will happen unless Canada’s churches recognize how much their place in Canadian culture has changed. Mainstream churches need to move beyond the “discourse of loss” described by Paul Bramadat and David Seljak, to an acceptance of this new reality.18 It is not just the case that these churches can no longer act as if they are part of the dominant culture, as they once were. Rather, it’s that they exist in a culture that no longer understands what they are talking about. They can no longer appeal to Christian symbols and ideas that used to be diffused in the general culture to proclaim their message and initiate members. A more dramatic change in religious outlook

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taking place in less than half a century would be hard to imagine. In such a post-Christian society, Canada’s churches will need to rediscover Christianity’s founding impulse for mission and engage their new cultural and religious context. If prognostication is subject to contingency, so too is suggesting the means of recovery. What should Canada’s Christian churches do in order to meet the challenges of their current situation? There is no shortage of answers to that question. Clergy bookshelves are full of books suggesting how their church can thrive if only it follows the author’s advice, which will fix their problem in attracting worshippers.19 Change the music program to include guitars and drums. Change the liturgy and make it more sensitive to those who arrive with no knowledge of church – the so-called seekers. Change stewardship models. Change how congregations are governed. Change how the sermon is done. There are numerous suggestions of what has to change. Most authors, despite how much they may talk about cultural change, assume that we are still in a religious context similar to the one we were in fifty to sixty years ago. They assume that by tweaking a program, churches can improve their fortunes or even return to the golden days of the past. We do not believe this is possible. Our evidence suggests that ­changes in Canadian culture have been so dramatic that the first step  churches across the theological spectrum of Protestantism, Catholicism, and other Christian traditions need to take is to accept that Canada is a de-Christianized, post-Christian society. The challenge for churches is to adapt, adjust, and start to function effectively in this context. One thing we would note is that when developing strategies, Canadian churches too often rely on American studies, assuming that Canadian trends are similar to those in the United States. As should be evident from our analysis, in the early twentyfirst-century Canada and the United States have very different religious cultures. Canadian churches would be better advised to look for new ideas, not south of the border, but to countries elsewhere that have witnessed the kinds of religious changes seen in Canada. Resources from the United Kingdom, from Australia and New Zealand, and even from the European continent may speak better to the Canadian situation. The trends we have been tracking in this study also have implications for Canadian society as a whole. Since the 1960s another major change in Canadian society, one related to the end of the churches’

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cultural hegemony, has been the changing nature and overall decline of civic engagement. Men no longer belong to the local fraternal lodge: the Orange Order and Masons were thriving organizations right up to the Second World War and immediately after. Women’s entry into the workforce has meant they no longer volunteer in traditional women’s organizations, such as the Junior League I O D E (Independent Order of the Daughters of the Empire). Children specialize in competitive sports or arts activities rather than the traditional, all-purpose young people’s organizations such as the Scouts or Guides. Christian churches are not the only organizations to have been affected by the massive shift in culture that has occurred since the 1960s. But they are certainly the largest, and given their former cultural dominance, the social consequences of their changing fortunes are far reaching. The decline in church membership and involvement has profound consequences for Canadian society as a whole, beginning with the country’s voluntary sector. American sociologist Robert Putnam has argued that people’s participation in voluntary organizations and other forms of civic involvement generate what he terms social capital. By social capital, Putnam means how people develop “social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.”20 Social capital, Putnam elaborates, comes in two varieties: bonding, which is exclusive (think, for example, of the formation of group identity), and bridging, which is inclusive (think of social service).21 Bonding capital, Putnam explains, is like “sociological superglue”; by contrast, bridging social capital is like “sociological wd-40.” The former builds up groups and sustains them; the latter makes it possible for individuals and groups from different backgrounds to work together. Social capital, then, has the potential to reinforce social conformity and exclusivity as well as to promote social diversity and inclusivity. In the past, Canadian churches did much to promote religious and ethnic chauvinism and, as we have seen, gender-specific expectations for women’s social life. Church leaders and lay activists were responsible for making such attitudes respectable and diffusing them. Yet, there is another side to the churches’ role in fostering civic engagement. Historically, the local church was where most Canadians would first learn how to become civically engaged. It was there that they would learn how to speak in public, run meetings, engage those with  differing viewpoints, and understand the needs of their local

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community.22 The critical point is that by becoming involved in a congregation, ordinary men and women not only built up bonding capital but they also generated bridging capital. One only has to look at the contribution of the Social Gospel in the Protestant churches and of social Catholicism to see how Canadian churches contributed to the common good by improving labour relations, social welfare, and social equality. And churches today still do. They are major supporters of organizations working for social justice, ranging from ­k a iros, the ecumenical organization dedicated to justice and peace, to Out of the Cold and similar shelter and dinner programs in cities across the country. Shrinking church membership means that fewer Canadians will have the chance to learn the skills necessary for civic engagement that they used to learn in church, and since there is no sign that other organizations will be able to fill the vacuum left by declining congregations, that means fewer Canadians will have such an opportunity pure and simple. Not only that, but there will be fewer church members to support the social activism and engagement that Canada’s churches have sustained over the years. Political scientists and sociologists have long recognized the importance of a vibrant civil society – that space in society that lies between the private, corporate, and state spheres – for civic engagement to flourish. Associations – what are formally referred to as charitable and non-profit organizations – are essential to civil society, and they need volunteers and donors to exist. Declining church membership has huge implications for the level of volunteering and donor support in this country. Church members tend to join organizations more than those who don’t belong to a church.23 In other words, they are joiners. And they are active in a wide variety of organizations ranging from hobby groups to service organizations. Moreover, church members tend to volunteer more than others.24 This is hardly surprising as many congregations foster volunteering as a way of life. Congregations couldn’t do what they do, which ranges from leading worship and music on Sunday and providing coffee and cake afterwards to ministering to the ill and housebound and running community gardens, without volunteers. The best data we have about who volunteers come from the Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (c sgv p ) that has been conducted by Statistics Canada since 1997. These surveys have established that weekly attenders volunteer more than others, 66% who attend weekly versus 44% who do not, according to the most recent cs g vp, conducted

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in 2007.25 Weekly attenders also give a whole lot more of their time: 232 hours a year versus 143 hours for those who don’t attend weekly. That works out to almost 90 more hours for weekly attenders in any given year. The c sgv p conducted in 2000 allows us to tease out what may lie behind these overall numbers. In that survey, of those who declared they had a religious affiliation, some 28% volunteered, compared to 26% for those who did not have a religious affiliation.26 However, of those who said they were very religious, the proportion of those who volunteered went up to 33% compared to 28% among those who said they weren’t very religious. Turning to those attending weekly, the proportion jumped to 41% compared to 24% among those who did not attend weekly. Among those who were highly committed to religion, volunteer work for their church accounted for less than 40% of the time they spent volunteering.27 These data tell us that volunteering is strongly associated with being involved in a church. Those who are involved with their church are involved in a whole host of other organizations. Volunteering is also associated with giving, and those who are involved with a religion are more likely to donate, and to donate more, than other Canadians.28 Some 92% of weekly attenders give compared to 82% among those who do not attend church. Although this difference in proportions is hardly overwhelming, the difference in the amount given is nothing short of stunning. In 2007, weekly attenders gave $1,038 a year compared to $295 among those who did not attend weekly. In fact, 49% of weekly attenders account for top donors (the highest 25% of all contributors) compared to 15% of those who do not attend weekly. Even when one factors in that about half of what is donated goes to churches (and note that weekly attenders contribute 80% of the churches’ finances), weekly attenders are still staunch supporters of Canadian associations and charitable organizations above and beyond what they give to their denomination. Although donations increased by some 12% from 2004 to 2007, the proportion of the population who volunteered and the number of hours they gave declined. While the volunteer rate held steady between 2004 and 2007, it had declined significantly between 1997 and 2000, from 31% of all Canadians over age fifteen to 27%.29 A number of factors can be adduced for why people don’t volunteer. The lack of time is one reason Canadians most often cite.30 In

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analyzing the decline that occurred between 1997 and 2000, the report prepared by Statistics Canada cited the decline in religious attendance as a possible factor.31 Certainly when one looks forward to the shape of volunteering in the future, the general decline in attendance is a cause for concern. As the latest cs g vp of 2007 revealed, weekly attenders were likely to be top volunteers, the 25% of the population who contribute the most in volunteer time. Of weekly attenders, 23% were top volunteers compared to 9% for those who did not attend weekly.32 So weekly attenders are disproportionately represented among the country’s top volunteers, and these volunteers accounted for 78% of all volunteer hours.33 As Statistics Canada noted in its report of the 2004 cs g vp, “Although the vast majority of Canadians provide support to charitable and nonprofit organizations through their contributions of volunteer time and charitable giving, most make only modest contributions.”34 “Indeed,” the authors of the report added, “the bulk of support ­provided to these organizations comes from a strikingly narrow segment of the population.” In short, Canada’s charitable and nonprofit organizations rely on “a small group of core supporters,” among whom weekly attenders are strongly represented. As the pool of those who are religiously active recedes, so too, one can project, will this group of core supporters. The c sgv p surveys reveal that Canadians participate in a wide variety of organizations ranging from cultural to social service ­organizations, from sports clubs to advocacy groups, and from environmental organizations to self-help groups. Through these organizations, Canadians work together to help others, to address issues affecting our society, to offer opportunities for recreation, and to make their views known. Such participation, as the 2004 cs g vp report notes, is “an important contributor to the development of social capital, enabling people to build the bonds of trust and reciprocity that provide the foundation for vibrant communities.”35 For that to happen it is critical that participation be broadly based, but opportunity to participate depends on the ongoing existence of charitable and nonprofit organizations. And the vitality of these organizations as places where volunteering and participating take place depends on a small core of volunteers. Cutting a cheque is an important way to contribute, but it is no substitute for volunteering and for what volunteering accomplishes socially. And as one of the mainstays of this core – those who are religiously active – age, it is doubtful that

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they will be replaced. Canada’s associational life will continue, but without the depth and intensity of volunteering that has sustained it until now. Larger, national charitable and nonprofit organizations will continue to thrive; more locally oriented ones, especially those that rely on volunteers for their operations, could well be challenged. And finally, there will be a loss of social capital as a result. Our sense of being connected will become diminished.36 One possible tangible manifestation of this diminishing sense of being connected could be fewer forums where people can gather and discuss matters of common concern (social media would be a symptom of, not a remedy for, this trend). Churchgoing is also related to civic participation, and this involvement can be tracked by such measures as voting, keeping up with the news, and such. The association of churchgoing and politics may conjure the image of the Christian Right, and certainly that is a common image in the media. Conservative Christians constitute a significant proportion of the churchgoing population in Canada, something like a quarter of all weekly attenders.37 But aside from these conservative Christians, who tend to vote for conservative political parties, the political preferences of churchgoing Christians tend to lie in the middle.38 What really stands out about active Christians is their political engagement. In Kurt Bowen’s analysis of the 1997 cs g vp survey, 82% of the “very committed” (weekly attenders who said religion was important to them) voted in the June 1997 federal election compared to 72% who were nonreligious.39 Moreover, 74% of the very committed followed the news daily compared to 62% among the nonreligious. When it came to being active in their neighbourhood, 62% of the very committed belonged to a community organization compared to 34% for the nonreligious.40 What these figures suggest is that going to church does make a difference as to whether one gets involved in politics. And the numbers underscore Putnam’s claim that church communities are “the single most important repository of social capital.”41 To be sure, other groups do contribute to society’s social capital. But the point that needs to be stressed is that the churches have been one of the major gateways to participation in the rest of society and, for whatever reason, they are unique in the ways that they empower people to become active members of Canadian society. The decline in churchgoing, then, is a societal issue. Let us be clear; we are not calling for a religious revival. As our findings have shown, such a mass change in sentiment is not very likely.

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Nor would we advocate a re-Christianization of Canadian society. When Canada’s churches held social power, often they did not use it wisely, and the social pressure that existed before the 1960s for religious conformity should not be underestimated. Religious diversity, and the attendant freedom to choose one’s religion or not to have any religion at all, is something to be valued by all Canadians, Christians included. That said, we as a society need to recognize that the decline in religious affiliation will see involvement in our country’s civic life diminish. The story told in this book is not a story most people have heard before; indeed, it runs contrary to most of the stories we hear. In Canada today there is a tendency to imagine that we have always been the kind of society we are now and that the place of Christianity has always been in decline. As a consequence, the narrative of longterm secularization is commonly believed. Canadians are even starting to talk as if we had a long tradition of the separation of church and state. Nothing could be further from the truth. Canada’s past was quite different. The collapse of the vitality of what has been the dominant religion in Canada – Christianity – is in fact very recent, and it is a story that needs to be told and understood. There are, as we’ve described, serious ramifications for all of us, whatever our religious beliefs or nonbeliefs. This book, it is hoped, will contribute to a developing recognition of the issues we face in our country’s public life now that Christianity is no longer the formative force in the wider society that it once was. For good or ill, the place of Christianity in Canada has undergone a dramatic shift. We are now in a post-Christian Canada.

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Acknowledgments

We began work on this book shortly after the release in 2003 of the 2001 Census returns, and we have accumulated many obligations over the years to those who have offered us assistance, support, and wisdom. We are grateful to those who have served as research assistants on this project. Anne Miller, then of the Centre for Clergy Care, was invaluable in contacting religious denominations and seeking to obtain statistics related to membership, baptisms, and other infor­ mation. David Robinson also helped in collecting statistics, while Renate Roney compiled figures from the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. Derrick Cunningham provided some early mathematical assistance. This project would not have been possible without funding received at various stages. We are grateful to Bob Faris and the Churches’ Council on Theological Education in Canada for the grant that enabled us to purchase the custom table from Statistics Canada to  do  detailed analysis of the 2001 Census category “Christians not included elsewhere.” Knox College, and in particular Principal Dorcas Gordon, very generously provided financial assistance for purchasing data related to the National Household Survey as well as for securing editorial, indexing, and other services. We are deeply grateful to the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, which ­provided support for the publication of this work. We are indebted to Emmanuel College and Knox College for their continued support of our research as it developed for more than a decade. We also acknowledge the support of the Centre for Clergy Care and Congregational Health in the early years of this project.

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248 Acknowledgments

Obtaining membership and related data on various denominations and traditions was a challenging task. We would like to thank Bruce Guenther for sharing with us the data he collected on various conservative denominations. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the following people who helped us to compile membership data for individual denominations: Peter Coutts, for his assistance with the Presbyterians; Bruce Adema, Alida van Dijk, and Nancy Haynes for their assistance with the Christian Reformed Church; Andrew Eason and Hartley Godenthal for the Salvation Army; Karen Baron of the Lutheran Historical Institute for the Lutherans; Tanya Couch and David Hazzard for the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada; Gord Heath, and the Canadian Baptist Archives at McMaster University for the Baptists; and Reginald Bibby of the University of ­Lethbridge for providing us with the 1948 Gallup poll. Berenica Vejvoda, data librarian at University of Toronto Libraries, introduced us to the databases for the General Social Survey. We also benefited from conversations with denominational staff: Michael Joshua and Dave Robinson of the Anglican Church, and Rob Dalgleish of the United Church of Canada. Ralph Wushke of the Ecumenical Chaplaincy at the University of Toronto contributed to our discussion of Lutherans and Gord Heath to our section on Baptists. We are grateful to all at the Canadian office of the Christian Reformed Church for attending our presentation and offering comments. We appreciate the insightful responses to our presentations at the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, Trinity-Western University, McMaster University, and various forums at the Toronto School of Theology. We also thank our colleagues at our home colleges for their support and their commitment to academic inquiry. Bringing this research together into a book has been a collab­ orative process. We have benefited from the editorial gifts of Kate Merriman who helped us prepare this work for submission to the publisher. At McGill-Queen’s University Press we have been blessed to work with Kyla Madden, who has been incredibly supportive of our venture and guided us through the submission and peer review process; Ellie Barton, who served as our superb editor; Ryan Van Huijstee, managing editor; and Kathleen Fraser, associate managing editor, who expertly saw this through production. Thanks to Stephen Ullstrom for expertly preparing the index. We are also deeply grateful

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for the anonymous readers who provided invaluable advice and prodded us where we needed it most. We thank Sage Publications for permission to reuse material that first appeared in “How Are Canada’s Five Protestant Denominations Faring? A Look at the 2001 Census,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 40, no. 4 (2011); and the Toronto School of Theology for permission to reuse parts of “‘Simply Christian’: Canada’s Newest Major Religious Denomination,” Toronto Journal of Theology 23, no. 2 (2007).

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Notes

I nt roduct i o n  1 London Free Press, 20 May 2010 (A1, A8); 21 May 2010 (A11); 22 May 2010 (A1, A11). The series was written by John Miner.   2 The question was posed very articulately by Mark Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?” Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 245–73. This article led to a series of responses by various Canadian church historians published online in Church and Faith Trends (October 2008) 2, no. 1, http:// www.evangelicalfellowship.ca/page.aspx?pid=6208 (accessed 5 November 2014).   3 Nancy Christie, “‘Belief Crucified upon a Rooftop Antenna’: Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew, and Dechristianization,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 327.   4 These are our calculations. The 1961 Census returns did not have a general category for Christians and so did not publish a total number or ­percentage. The Census allocated Canadians into twenty-two different kinds of Christians (ranging from the largest denomination at the time, the Roman Catholic Church, through to the Doukhobors and Adventists), three world religions (Buddhism, Confucianism, and Judaism), and “Other,” which included smaller Christian denominations and other world religions (for example, Islam and Hinduism). The Jewish population was the largest world religion other than Christianity (1.4%) followed by Buddhists (0.1%) and Confucians (under 0.05%). Other faiths, as well as those identifying as having No Religion, would have been included under “Other” (2.3%). Census of Canada, 1961, “Percentage

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Notes to pages 8–14

Distribution of the Population by Religious Denominations, Canada, 1901–1961,” Introduction, 6061–532.   5 James W. Lewis, “Mainline Protestants,” in The Encyclopedia of American Religion, ed. Charles W. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (Washington, dc: cq Press, 2010), 1311–12.   6 Putting the Baptists together with these other traditions will strike some as odd. Reginald Bibby includes the Baptists under the category “Conservative Protestants,” which he then notes are “the ‘evangelicals,’ as they are commonly known collectively,” while including the Lutherans under the category of Mainline, for example, in his discussion in Beyond the Gods and Back: Religion’s Demise and Rise and Why It Matters (Lethbridge, AB: Project Canada Books, 2011), 195–200. In contrast, Lutherans might correctly point out that their traditions have historically not always been part of the Protestant consensus in Canada. This demonstrates how challenging it is to define these traditions and to group them together.   7 Reginald W. Bibby, Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1987), 23–31; Kurt Bowen, Christians in a Secular World: The Canadian Experience (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 24–5; Robert K. Burkinshaw, Pilgrims in Lotus Land: Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia 1917–1981 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 8–12.   8 The Orthodox population reported in the 1961 Census was 239,766. For a discussion of the Orthodox and other Eastern Christians, see Myroslaw Tataryn, “Canada’s Eastern Christians,” in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, ed. Paul Bramadat and David Seljak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 287–329.  9 n h s User Guide (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2013), 14; Aboriginal Peoples Reference Guide (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2013), 7. 10 Michael Hill, A Sociology of Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 258–9. 11 Larry Shiner, “The Concept of Secularization in Empirical Research,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 6, no. 2 (1967): 207–20. 12 David Martin, “Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation,” in Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences, ed. Julius Gold (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965), 176, 182. 13 Jeffrey Cox, “Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation: A Progress Report,” in Secularisation in the Christian World, ed. Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 16.

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Notes to pages 14–18

253

14 Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 14. 15 Ibid., 37. 16 Ibid., 33–4, 38. 17 Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?,” 251–2. 18 David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), viii. 19 Ibid., 2–3. 20 Cox, “Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation,” 15. 21 Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1994), 76. 22 Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2002), xii, 5, 19, 21–6. 23 José Casanova, “Beyond European and American Exceptionalisms: Towards a Global Perspective,” in Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular and Alternative Futures, ed. Grace Davie, Paul Heelas, and Linda Woodhead (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2003), 19. 24 Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Simon Lee (New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 127. 25 Ibid., 165–8, quotations from 166 and 168. 26 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 37–40, 47–9, 61–7. 27 Ibid., 29. 28 Ibid., 16. 29 Ibid., 15. 30 Ibid., 88–90, 99–100, 160–82, 198–200, 202–7. 31 Ibid., 265. 32 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, “Introduction: ‘Even the Hippies Were Only Very Slowly Going Secular’: Dechristianization and the Culture of Individualism in North America and Western Europe,” in The Sixties and Beyond, 3–26. 33 Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 2. 34 Ibid., 29; Callum G. Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2012), 38. 35 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 178–9, 188–92, 195–6; Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, 1.

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Notes to pages 19–22

36 Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3, 65–7. 37 Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 2–3. 38 Ibid., 5–7. 39 Ibid., 11. 40 Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, nj : Rutgers University Press, 1992), 1. 41 Ibid., 238. 42 Roof, Spiritual Marketplace, 3, 86, 95–6. 43 Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion, paperback edition (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), vii–viii. Page references in roman numerals are to this edition. All other references are to the original edition, Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 44 Ibid., 37, italics omitted. 45 Ibid., xii. 46 Dean M. Kelley, “Why Conservative Churches Are Still Growing,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 17, no. 2 (1978): 168. Italics in the original. 47 Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, viii. 48 Reginald W. Bibby, Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 2002), 31. 49 Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back, 213–14. 50 Reginald W. Bibby, A New Day: The Resilience and Restructuring of Religion in Canada (Lethbridge, AB: Project Canada Books, 2012), 4–5, 11–12, 19–21, 31, 42–5, 48. 51 Joel Thiessen and Lorne L. Dawson, “Is There a ‘Renaissance’ of Religion in Canada? A Critical Look at Bibby and Beyond,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 37, no. 3–4 (2008): 389–415. See also Reginald Bibby, “The Perils of Pioneering and Prophecy: A Response to Thiessen and Dawson,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 37, no. 3–4 (2008): 417–25. 52 Kurt Bowen, Christians in a Secular World: The Canadian Experience (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), provides an overview of Canadian religious demography in chapter 2. Sam Reimer,

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Evangelicals and the Continental Divide: The Conservative Protestant Subcultures in Canada and the United States (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 53 Denominational data is discussed in a variety of ways in studies of the United Church of Canada (U CC). Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, “Normalizing Denominational Statistics with Demography Data: The Case of the United Church of Canada,” Canadian Review of Sociology 49, no. 2 (2012): 173– 87, uses denominational data from the UC C to test Bibby’s idea of a religious renewal. Denominational statistics were also part of a PhD thesis completed in the early 1980s: Henry Gordon MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada, 1946–1977: A Study in the Sociology of the Denomination” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1980). Recent studies of the U CC include the essay collection edited by Don Schweizer, The United Church of Canada: A History (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2012) and two monographs: Kevin N. Flatt, After Evangelicalism: The Sixties and the United Church of Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), and Phyllis D. Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2014). 54 Sam Reimer and Michael Wilkinson, A Culture of Faith: Evangelical Congregations in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). 55 Joel Thiessen, The Meaning of Sunday: The Practice of Belief in a Secular Age (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). 56 Catherine Gidney, A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University 1920–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 47, 146–8. 57 Gary R. Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). 58 Christie and Gauvreau, The Sixties and Beyond. 59 For an instalment of this broader study underway see É.-Martin Menuier, Jean-François Laniel, and Jean-Christophe Demers, “Permanence et Recomposition de la ‘Religion Culturelle’; Aperçu socio-historique due Catholicism Québécois (1970–2006),” in Modernité et Religion au Québec: Où en Sommes Nous?, ed. Robert Mager and Serge Catin (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010), 79–128. 60 Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution.

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Notes to pages 27–38

c ha p t e r o n e   1 “107 New Members,” Presbyterian Record, June 1962, 14–15.  2 London Free Press, 20 May 2010 (A1, A8), 21 May 2010 (A11), 22 May 2010 (A1, A11). The series was written by John Miner. References to our work were made on the first two days of the series, including quotations from an interview.   3 Reginald W. Bibby, Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 2002), 12.   4 Reginald W. Bibby, Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1987), 12–15.   5 Reginald W. Bibby, The Boomer Factor: What Canada’s Most Famous Generation Is Leaving Behind (Toronto: Bastian Books, 2006), 198.   6 The divisions between Roman Catholics and Protestants in this period are particularly evident in studies of the changes in these relationships at the time of Vatican II. See Stuart Macdonald, “Canadian Presbyterians and Vatican II: A Silent Revolution”; John H. Young, “Reaction to Vatican II in the United Church of Canada”; and Alan L. Hayes, “‘Hold onto Your Hats’: Vatican II and Aggiornamento in the Anglican Church in Canada,” in Vatican II: Expériences canadiennes / Canadian Experiences, ed. Michael Attridge, Catherine E. Clifford, and Gilles Routhier (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2011), 78–147.   7 The growth in the number of Presbyterian Census affiliates from 1951 to 1961 (approximately 31,000) fits with the patterns we have observed in the Anglican and the United churches. It is the loss of 50,000 Census affiliates in the period from 1941 to 1951 that is responsible for the overall decline in this twenty-year period. One possibility for the very high number of Presbyterians in the Census in 1941 might be that many in the United Church (formed sixteen years previously by a merger of Methodists, Congregationalists, and the majority of Presbyterians) still considered their identity to be “Presbyterian,” even though they were now part of the United Church of Canada. Over time many of these individuals may have gradually shifted their identity so that they reported “United Church” on the Census.   8 Brian Clarke and Stuart Macdonald, “How Are Canada’s Five Largest Protestant Denominations Faring? A Look at the 2001 Census,” Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 40, no. 4 (2011): 529.   9 Warren Clark, “Pockets of Belief: Religious Attendance Patterns in Canada,” Canadian Social Trends no. 66 (Spring 2003): 23–4; Warren Clark and Grant Schellenberg, “Whose Religious?,” Canadian Social

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Trends, no. 81 (Summer 2006): 3, 6; Bibby, Restless Gods, 77; and Bibby, The Boomer Factor, 196. 10 An important exception is Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, “Normalizing Denominational Statistics with Demographic Data: The Case of the United Church of Canada,” Canadian Review of Sociology / Revue canadienne de sociologie 49, no. 2 (2012): 173–87, which appeared after we had completed this part of our study. Another study that has examined denominational statistics closely is Henry Gordon MacLeod, “The Transformation of the United Church of Canada, 1946–1977: A Study in the Sociology of the Denomination” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1980). Denominational statistics are used in a limited sense in some of Bibby’s work (e.g., Fragmented Gods, 14). 11 This skepticism is discussed by Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 15–16. 12 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (Nashville and New York: Abingdon Press). We consulted the years 1972–2003. 13 For Anglicans, membership had dropped briefly in 1963 from what had been seen in 1962, but rebounded to reach the peak in 1964. The other two denominations saw only consistent numerical growth in their membership. 14 Wilkins-Laflamme in “Normalizing Denominational Data,” 177–8, confirms the national trend we note for the United Church, but notes its regional variations: Ontario experienced the steepest decline between 1970 and 2006 (52.4%), followed by the West (48.3%), and then Atlantic Canada (21.7%). 15 Kevin N. Flatt, “The ‘New Curriculum’ Controversy and the Religious Crisis of the United Church of Canada, 1952–1965,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). Flatt also makes this argument in After Evangelicalism: The Sixties and the United Church of Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 139–40. 16 Phyllis D. Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 266. 17 Wilkins-Laflamme in “Normalizing Denominational Statistics,” 181, notes that the United Church’s aging membership does not fully account for the decline in baptisms. Disaffiliation is also a factor.

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Notes to pages 51–70

18 Flatt, After Evangelicalism, 140, recognizes that “a variety of factors in addition to the New Curriculum” contributed to numerical decline in the ucc. We would suggest that the evidence of the earlier decline in baptisms would raise the importance of these other factors in any discussion of changes in Christian affiliation in this period. 19 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). The specific changes in religion in the United States have been explored more recently in Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). 20 Bryan Hillis, “Outsiders Becoming Mainstream: The Theology, History, and Ethnicity of Being Lutheran in Canada,” in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, ed. Paul Bramadat and David Seljak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 254–62, examines the process of Lutheran mergers as well as their churches’ membership trends in the postwar period. 21 Communicant membership, a more restrictive category in this tradition, followed a similar pattern. By 2011, it stood at 103,207, down from 137,203 in 2001 and a peak of 153,199 in 1988. 22 Bruce Guenther shared the attendance and membership data for the year 2001 in the appendix to his article “Ethnicity and Evangelical Protestants in Canada,” in Bramadat and Seljak, Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 411. We are grateful that Bruce Guenther shared with us similar data for 1981 and 1991. 23 Data provided by Bruce Guenther. 24 If we were to consider reported weekly attendance rather than membership for these traditions, by 2001 the Canadian Baptist Ministries would be smaller than the other Baptist groups. This is due to the weak attendance reported by the cabc, in contrast to the very strong attendance of the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches and the Canadian National Baptist Convention (formerly the Canadian Convention of Southern Baptists). Data supplied by Bruce Guenther. 25 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 167, 188, 201, 205–6, 255–72. 26 The importance of the 1960s was a theme in our early work, including Clarke and Macdonald, “How Are Canada’s Five Largest Protestant Denominations Faring?,” 511–34. Recent Canadian works that have also argued for the importance of the 1960s would include the collection edited by Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, The Sixties and Beyond, and Kevin Flatt, After Evangelicalism.

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27 Callum Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Pearson Education, 2006), 224, 239, 240, 244, 266, 270, 314. Brown has restated and argued his case forcefully in his recent book, Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, u k and u s a since the 1960s (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012). 28 Reginald Bibby, There’s Got to Be More: Connecting Churches and Canadians (Winnfield, bc: Wood Lake Books, 1995), 77. 29 Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations and the Re-Making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), xi–xv. 30 Bibby raised this question in his classic study Fragmented Gods, where he explored several options.

c h a p t e r t wo   1 John Miner, “One Church, Three Questions, and Fuller Pews,” London Free Press, 22 May 2010, A11. Citing our research, Miner acknowledged the complexity of the situation in an earlier story, “Predeceased by Their Churches,” London Free Press, 20 May 2010, A8. But the series left readers with the impression that growth among other churches stood in contrast to mainline decline. In many of the newspaper and media reports we’ve encountered over the last decade, there has been little questioning of this basic idea.   2 Reginald W. Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back: Religion’s Demise and Rise and Why It Matters (Lethbridge: Project Canada Books, 2011), 4. Throughout the book, Bibby contrasts those doing poorly – Roman Catholics in Quebec and mainline denominations across Canada (by mainline, Bibby means the Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and United churches) – and those faring much better, namely, evangelicals (including Baptists) and Roman Catholics outside Quebec. For example, Bibby writes: “The ‘evangelicals,’ as they are commonly known collectively, are characterized by considerable vitality” (197). He states this argument even more clearly in his subsequent book A New Day: The Resilience and Restructuring of Religion in Canada (Lethbridge: Project Canada Books, 2012), 33.   3 S.D. Clark, Church and Sect in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1948).   4 This reality has been noted by a number of scholars. For one discussion, see Bruce L. Guenther, “Ethnicity and Evangelical Protestants in Canada,”

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  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

Notes to pages 73–4

in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, ed. Paul Bramadat and David Seljak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 399–400, n1. Reginald Bibby, Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Irwin, 1987), 26, and elsewhere; Bibby, Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 2002), 24; Kurt Bowen, Christians in a Secular World: The Canadian Experience (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 24. Sam Reimer, in his study of the differences between Canadian and American evangelicals, considered both Lutheran and Baptist groups. Sam Reimer, Evangelicals and the Continental Divide: The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 10. All of this only demonstrates the challenge of grouping the various religious denominations in Canada. Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1972; 2nd rev. ed., 1977). Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew: A Critical Look at Christianity and the Religious Establishment in the New Age (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965). For a discussion of this book, see Nancy Christie, “‘Belief Crucified upon a Rooftop Antenna’: Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew, and Dechristianization,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 321–50. This idea was challenged by Reginald Bibby in both Fragmented Gods and Restless Gods, and in a series of articles he wrote with Merlin Brinkerhoff; Reginald Bibby and Merlin Brinkerhoff, “The Circulation of the Saints: A Study of People Who Join Conservative Churches,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 12, no. 3 (1973): 273–83; “Circulation of the Saints Revisited: A Longitudinal Look at Conservative Church Growth,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 22, no. 3 (1983): 253–62; and “Circulation of the Saints 1986–1990: New Data, New Reflections,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33, no. 3 (1994): 273–80. See also Guenther, “Ethnicity and Evangelical Protestants in Canada,” in Bramadat and Seljak, Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 365. Rick Hiemstra from the Centre for Research on Canadian Evangelicalism authored a series of articles analyzing the Census and Canadian evangelicals in the period after the data from the 2001 Census were published in 2003: Rick Hiemstra, “Counting Canadian Evangelicals,” Church and Faith Trends 1, no. 1 (October 2007): 1–10; “Evangelicals and the

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Notes to pages 75–88

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Canadian Census,” Church and Faith Trends 1, no. 2 (February 2008): 1–13; and “Evangelicals and the Dissemination of Canadian Census Data,” Church and Faith Trends 2, no. 3 (August 2009): 1–19. 10 Sam Reimer and Michael Wilkinson, A Culture of Faith: Evangelical Congregations in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 19, 37–9, 47, 52–3, 203, 205. 11 An excellent detailed analysis of the various ways in which other denominations have been underreported in the Census can be found in Hiemstra, “Evangelicals and the Dissemination of Canadian Census Data.” 12 Census of Canada, 1961, table 42, “Population by religious denomination and sex, for provinces and territories, 1961.” In table 41, which offers comparative data, from 1901 to 1961 only twenty-six groupings are provided. Hiemstra has noted that there were 415,062 affiliates coded as other in 1961, and he broke out which individuals were included in this category. See his “Evangelicals and the Dissemination of Canadian Census Data,” 4–6. 13 The number of people who answered No Religion in 1961, and indeed for the period from 1921 through 1971, was given in the 1971 Census, table 9. 14 Hiemstra, “Evangelicals and the Dissemination of Canadian Census Data,” 7. 15 Other Christians, 44,105; Nondenominational, 22,835; Interdenominational, 2,605. Statistics Canada Census 1981, table 1. 16 Statistics Canada, 2001 Census: Analysis Series: Religion in Canada (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2003). 17 Kevin N. Flatt, “The ‘New Curriculum’ Controversy and the Religious Crisis of the United Church of Canada, 1952–1965,” in Christie and Gauvreau, The Sixties and Beyond, 313. 18 Reginald W. Bibby, Restless Churches: How Canada’s Churches Can Contribute to the Emerging Religious Renaissance (Toronto: Novalis Books, 2004), 40–1, and Beyond the Gods and Back, 197. 19 Hiemstra, “Evangelicals and the Canadian Census,” 7. Hiemstra mistakenly suggests that “mainline Protestants all find their denominations listed in the suggested list of religions” in the 2001 Census. It is worth noting, as was clear in table 1 of his article (5), that Presbyterians were not included as an example. 20 The replacement of the long-form Census with the National Household Survey was a very controversial change. Various questions have, legitimately, been asked about the reliability of the data and their comparability. David Hulchanski, Robert Murdie, Alan Walks, and Larry Bourne offered a cogent analysis of how this change affected data on income

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Notes to pages 89–107

inequality in Canada, “Canada’s Voluntary Census Is Worthless. Here’s Why,” Globe and Mail, 4 October 2013, http://www.theglobeandmail. com/globe-debate/canadas-voluntary-­census-is-worthless-heres-why/ article14674558 (accessed 5 October 2013). 21 Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), 9–10. 22 Recent discussions about gender, which have challenged binary male / female classifications, have yet to be reflected in the Census, where the choice of male or female remains the only option available to respondents. 23 We again thank Bruce Guenther for providing us with this information. 24 As noted in the text, others in these data that are declining are some Lutheran and Baptist groups. These are also some of the largest groups in this data set. 25 See for example Shelley Youngblat, “Megachurch Draws ’Em in with Free Coffee, Big-Screen Monitors and Rock ’n’ Roll,” Globe and Mail, 2 December 2011, A10; Larissa Liepens, “It’s Hip to B Holy,” Alaska Highway News, 22 May 2009, B6. 26 Warren Bird in collaboration with a Canadian research team, “Large Canadian Church Report,” http://leadnet.org/large-canadian-churchesdraw-an-estimated-300000-worshippers-each-week-findings-from-anational-study (accessed 7 June 2016). 27 Peter Schuurman, “Bruxy Cavey and the Meeting House Megachurch: A Dramaturgical Model of Charismatic Leadership Performing ‘Evangeli­ calism for People Not into Evangelicalism’” (PhD diss., University of ­Waterloo, 2016). 28 William Closson James, God’s Plenty: Religious Diversity in Kingston (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). 29 R.G. Moyles, The Blood and Fire in Canada: A History of the Salvation Army in the Dominion 1882–1976 (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1977), 249, 251. Junior Soldiers are thus roughly comparable to Sunday School pupils in many other traditions, and Senior Soldiers comparable to members. 30 Stuart Macdonald, “Presbyterian and Reformed Christians and Ethnicity,” in Bramadat and Seljak, Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 178. 31 Ibid., 189. 32 Ibid., 191–2. 33 Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 34 Wilkinson notes this growth: “The numbers continued to grow, and upon reflection, turn out to be quite substantial in light of other changes in

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Notes to pages 108–15

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Canadian religious identification.” Michael Wilkinson, “Pentecostalism in Canada: An Introduction,” in Canadian Pentecostalism: Transition and Transformation, ed. Michael Wilkinson (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2009), 4. For tables and charts on Pentecostal growth, see 4–5. 35 The general observations of this section were confirmed in Adam Stewart, The New Canadian Pentecostals (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015), which appeared as our book went to publication. 36 Bibby, Fragmented Gods, 11–12. 37 Kurt Bowen, Christians in a Secular World, 28; Peter Beyer, “Religious Vitality in Canada: The Complementarity of Religious Market and Secularization Perspectives,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 36, no. 2 (1997): 283; George A. Rawlyk, Is Jesus Your Personal Saviour? In Search of Canadian Evangelicalism in the 1990s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 56–7. 38 Reginald Bibby, Unknown Gods: The Ongoing Story of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 1993), 3–4. 39 We want to thank Reginald Bibby for sharing with us a copy of the original poll results from the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion. An image from this poll has subsequently been published in Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back, 10. 40 The 1986 g s s used the term “Never.” Subsequent surveys used “Not at all” for the category. 41 C. Kirk Hadaway, Penny Long Marler, and Mark Chaves, “What the Polls Don’t Show: A Closer Look at U.S. Church Attendance,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 6 (1993): 741–52; “Symposium on Church Attendance in the United States,” American Sociological Review 63, no. 1 (1998): 111–30; C. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler, “Did You Really Go to Church This Week? Behind the Poll Data,” The Christian Century 115, no. 4 (6 May 1998): 472–5; C. Kirk Hadaway, “How Many Americans Attend Worship Each Week? An Alternative Approach to Measurement,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no. 3 (2005): 307–22; Penny Long Marler and C. Kirk Hadaway, “Testing the Attendance Gap in a Conservative Church,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 175–86. 42 Bruce Guenther, “Christianity in Canada: Statistical Summary Reports.” These findings were shared with the authors. 43 Reimer and Wilkinson, A Culture of Faith, 17, have noted that weekly attendance among conservative Protestants has held steady.

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Notes to pages 117–40

44 Warren Clark, “Patterns of Religious Attendance,” Canadian Social Trends, no. 59 (Winter 2000): 25; Warren Clark and Grant Schellenberg, “Who’s Religious?” Canadian Social Trends, no. 81 (Summer 2006): 5; Alain Baril and George A. Mori, “Leaving the Fold: Declining Church Attendance,” Canadian Social Trends, no. 22 (Autumn 1991): 25. 45 General Social Survey, 2011. 46 On this issue see also David E. Eagle, “Patterns of Religious Services Attendance in Canada, 1986–2008,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 50, no. 1 (2011): 195. 47 Guenther, “Ethnicity and Evangelical Protestants in Canada,” in Bramadat and Seljak, Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, 374. 48 Ibid., 365.

c h a p t e r t h re e   1 On Asian Catholics, see Terence J. Fay, New Faces of Canadian Catholics: The Asians (Toronto: Novalis, 2009) and Mark McGowan, “Roman Catholics (Anglophone and Allophone),” in Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada, ed. Paul Bramadat and David Seljak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 73–4, 85, 87–8.  2 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches (Nashville and New York: Abingdon Press, 1971–2002).  3 2001 Census: Analysis Series: Religions in Canada (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2003), 5.   4 Ibid., 4.  5 nh s , 2011, Religion and Various Demographic Features, E01908, for this and the data that follow.  6 gs s , 2011, Cycle 25 Family Survey.   7 Callum G. Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2012), xi, 19–22.  8 Census of Canada, 2001: Selected Demographic and Cultural Characteristics, archived 2010–03–09.   9 Hans Mol, “Major Correlates of Churchgoing in Canada,” in Religion in Canadian Society, ed. Stewart Crysdale and Les Wheatcroft (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1976), 243. 10 Data taken from Reginald W. Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back: Religion’s Demise and Rise and Why It Matters (Lethbridge, a b : Project Canada Books, 2011), 37. 11 McGowan, “Roman Catholics (Anglophone and Allophone),” 87–9.

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12 Fay, New Faces, 35–43, 137–44, 281–8. 13 Warren Clark, “Patterns of Religious Attendance,” Canadian Social Trends, no. 59 (Winter 2000): 24–5; Warren Clark and Grant Schellenberg, “Who’s Religious?,” Canadian Social Trends, no. 81 (Summer 2006): 4. 14 The 1986 g s s used the term Never. Subsequent surveys used Not at all for the category. 15 C. Kirk Hadway, Penny Long Marler, and Mark Chaves, “What the Polls Don’t Show: A Closer Look at U.S. Church Attendance,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 6 (1993): 741–52, and “Symposium on Church Attendance in the United States,” American Sociological Review 63, no. 1 (1998): 111–30. 16 Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1948: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1994). 17 Raymond Lemieux and Jean-Paul Montimy, “La vitalité paradoxale du catholicisme québécois,” in Le Québec en jeu: Comprendre les grands défis, ed. Gérard Daigle and Guy Rocher (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1992), 581. 18 Raymond Lemieux, “Le catholicisme québécois: une question du culture,” Sociologie et société 22, no. 2 (1990): 160. 19 Lemieux and Montimy, “La vitalité paradoxale du catholicisme québécois,” 581–2. 20 Lemieux, “Le catholicisme québéçois,” 591–2. 21 É.-Martin Meunier, Jean-François Laniel, and Jean-Christophe Demers, “Permanence et recomposition de la ‘religion culturelle’: Aperçu socio-­ historique du catholicisme québécois (1970–2006),” in Modernité et religion au Québec: Où en nous sommes?, ed. Robert Mager and Serge Cantin (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010), 92–5. 22 Meunier, Laniel, and Demers, “Permanence et recomposition de la ‘religion culturelle,’” 98. 23 Ibid., 100–1. 24 Ibid., 98. 25 Reginald Bibby, “La religion à la carte au Québec: une analyse de tendances,” Sociologie et sociétés 22, no. 2 (1990): 137–8; Lemieux, “Le catholicisme québécois,” 161–2. 26 Lemieux, “Le catholicisme québécois,” 161. 27 Raymond Lemieux, “Croyances et incroyances: une economie du sens commun,” in Croyances et incroyances au Québec, ed. André Cahron, Raymond Lemieux, and Yvon R. Theroux (Montreal: Fides, 1992), 30–2, 35, 44–9. 28 Lucia Ferretti, Brève histoire de l’église catholique au Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 1999), 172. We are familiar with Bibby’s concept of religion à la

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Notes to pages 152–9

carte (see Reginald Bibby, “La religion à la carte au Quebec”), which emphasizes a consumerist approach to religion. In using the term bricolage, we want to emphasize the cultural work that people do in creating their world view. 29 Lemieux, “Croyances et incroyances,” 31, 33. 30 Jacques Grand’Maison and Solange Lefebvre, Une génération bouc émissaire: Enquête sur les baby boomers (Montreal: Fides, 1993), 45–6. 31 Ibid., 44 32 Ibid., 253. 33 Ibid., 18. 34 Ibid., 18–19. 35 Ibid., 343. English expression in the original. 36 Ibid., 351, 419. 37 Ibid., 17. 38 Ibid., 347, 394. 39 Ibid., 395. 40 Ibid., 396. 41 Ibid., 348. 42 Ibid., 395. 43 Ibid., 18. 44 Meunier, Laniel, and Demers, “Permanence et recomposition de la ‘religion culturelle,’” 91, 124, 126–7. 45 É.-Martin Meunier and Sarah Wilkins Laflame, “Sécularisation, Catholicisme et transformation du régime de religiosité au Québec. Étude comparative avec le catholicisme au Canada (1968–2007),” Recherches sociographiques 52, no.3 (2011): 694–5. 46 Reginald Bibby, Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 2002), 42. 47 Meunier, Laniel, and Demers, “Permanence et recomposition de la ‘religion culturelle,’” 100. 48 Bibby, Restless Gods, 89. 49 For a contrary view, see Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back, 194–5. 50 John A. Dickinson and Brian Young, A Short History of Quebec, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1993), 270–1, 283–9. 51 Kenneth McRoberts and Dale Postgate, Quebec: Social Change and Political Crisis (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980); Gregory Baum, The Church in Quebec (Ottawa: Novalis, 1991), chap. 1. 52 Paul André Linteau, René Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and François Ricard, Quebec since 1930 (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company,

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Notes to pages 159–65

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1991), 307–13; Jean Hamelin, Histoire du catholicisme québécois, Part 3 Le XXe siècle, vol. 2, De 1940 à nos jours (Montreal: Boréal, 1984). 53 É.-Martin Meunier and Jean-Phillipe Warren, Sortir de la grande noirceur: L’horizon ‘personnaliste’ de la Révolution tranquille (Sillery: Septentrion, 2002). 54 Michael Gauvreau, The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005). 55 Ferretti, Brève histoire de l’église catholique au Québec, 164. On the general impact of Vatican II on the church in Canada, see the essays in Michael Attridge, Catherine E. Gifford, and Gilles Routhier, eds., Vatican II: Expériences canadiennes / Canadian Experiences (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2011). 56 Lemieux, “Le catholicisme québéçois,” 154–7. 57 Ferretti, Brève histoire de l’église catholique au Québec, 162, 165. 58 Ibid., 166. 59 Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, 126, 255–6.

chapter four   1 For studies that ignore the incidence of No Religion, see for example the survey commissioned by Vision TV conducted by Environics Research Group, “Still a Nation of Seekers: 2003 Annual Survey of Faith and Spirituality”; and George Rawlyk, “Religion in Canada: A Historical Overview,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 538 (1995): 131–42. For examples of studies that downplay the significance of No Religion, see Reginald W. Bibby, Unknown Gods: The Ongoing Story of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 1993), 157–8, and his Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 2002), 64–5.  2 See Census of Canada, 1941, vol. 1 (Ottawa: Dominion Bureau of Statistics), 288; Census of Canada, 1951, Enumeration Manual (Ottawa: Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1950), 41; Census of Canada, Bulletin 1.2–6 (Ottawa: Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1962), 2.   3 Reginald W. Bibby, Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Irwin Publishing, 1987), 44; Bibby, Restless Gods, 64.   4 Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme also traces the regional pattern for No Religion. See her “Towards Religious Polarization? Time Effects on Religious

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Notes to pages 166–74

Commitment in U.S., U K, and Canadian Regions,” Sociology of Religion 75, no. 2 (2014): 297–8.   5 Figures calculated from Statistics Canada, Census of Canada, 2001, ­custom table E0570; and n hs , 2011, custom table E01908.   6 And here we agree with Callum G. Brown’s comments regarding Canada in his “The Heritage of the Sixties in Britain,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 47.   7 Peter Beyer, “Modern Forms of the Religious Life: Denomination, Church, and Invisible Religion in Canada, the United States, and Europe,” in Rethinking Church, State, and Modernity: Canada between Europe and America, ed. David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 200.  8 Bibby, Fragmented Gods, 45.   9 Reginald W. Bibby, Restless Gods, 41, 64–5, and The Boomer Factor: What Canada’s Most Famous Generation Is Leaving Behind (Toronto: Bastian Books, 2006), 200–1. 10 Reginald W. Bibby, Restless Churches: How Canada’s Churches Can Contribute to the Emerging Religious Renaissance (Toronto: Novalis Books, 2004), 31. 11 Reginald W. Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back: Religion’s Demise and Rise and Why It Matters (Lethbridge, a b : Project Canada Books, 2011). 12 Merlin Brinkerhoff and Marlene Mackie, “Nonbelief in Canada: Characteristics and Origins of Religious Nones,” in The Sociology of Religion: A Canadian Focus, ed. W.E. Hewitt (Toronto: Butterworths, 1993), 117. 13 Reginald W. Bibby, A New Day: The Resilience and Restructuring of Religion in Canada (Lethbridge, ab: Project Canada Books, 2012), 36. 14 Graham Cray et al., Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context (London: Church House Publishing, 2004), 37. 15 Cray et al., Mission-Shaped Church, 37–9. 16 Brinkerhoff and Mackie, “Nonbelief in Canada,” 118. 17 Cray et al., Mission-Shaped Church, 37–9. 18 Census Dictionary (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1981), 122. 19 Cray et al., Mission-Shaped Church, 37. 20 Here we follow Statistics Canada’s definition, which identifies religious categories in the Census as denomination, group, or system of belief.

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Notes to pages 175–95

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21 Statistics Canada, 2001 Census: Analysis Series: Religions in Canada, Catalogue no. 96F0030XI E2001015, “Top 10 religious denominations, Canada, 2001” (table), 20n1. 22 Statistics Canada, 2001 Census custom table 2001 2B, EO0870, 17 May 2005. Our thanks again to the Churches’ Council on Theological Education for their generous grant which made this research possible. 23 Given the small population of the territories and their uniqueness, most of our remaining discussion will focus on the provinces. 24 George A. Rawlyk, Is Jesus Your Personal Saviour? In Search of Canadian Evangelicalism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 119. 25 Rick Hiemstra, “Evangelicals and the Canadian Census,” Church and Faith Trends 1, no. 2 (February 2008): 7. Italics in the original. 26 Marc S. Mentzer, “The Validity of Denominational Membership Data in Canada,” Sociological Analysis 52, no. 3 (1991): 297. 27 Bibby, The Boomer Factor, 220–2. 28 We recognize that some individuals who are nonvisible minorities do primarily identify as “Christian,” a topic we return to later. 29 Aileen Van Ginkel, “Evangelical Beliefs and Practices: A Summary of the 2003 Ipsos-Reid Survey Results,” Church and Faith Trends (December 2003): 5. 30 Adam Stewart, The New Canadian Pentecostals (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015), 13–15. 31 Calculations made using Census data and the figures reported in Van Ginkel, “Evangelical Beliefs and Practices,” 3, 5. 32 Bibby, Restless Gods, 43. 33 Figures calculated from Statistics Canada, Census of Canada, 2001, ­custom table E 0570; and n hs , 2011, custom table E01908. 34 One of the themes in Bibby’s work is that religious identification is a ­constant, that, for example, Anglicans continue to identify on the Census as Anglicans (Bibby, Restless Gods, 46–9). While agreeing with Bibby that identity tends to change slowly, we are suggesting that it does change – and one of these changes has been the growth in this category. 35 Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2002), 5, 11, 19, 28–30, 33–4, 43–4, 53. 36 Bibby, Restless Gods, 77, 88–9. 37 Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back, 32. 38 Ibid., 45–52, quotation p. 51. 39 Ibid., 38–42, 207–8.

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Notes to pages 195–213

40 Bibby, A New Day, 31–2. 41 Ibid., 51–4. 42 Cray et al., Mission-Shaped Church, 37. 43 Susan Catto, “In Search of the Spiritual,” Time (Canadian edition) 162, 24 November 2003, 74–80.

c ha p t e r f i ve  1 Census of Canada, 1961, table 42, “Population by religious denomination and sex, for provinces and territories, 1961.”   2 Most world religions were combined under the category “Eastern NonChristian religions” (305,890) in 1981, while Judaism (296,425) remained distinct. Census of Canada, 1981, table 1, “Population by religion and sex, for Canada and provinces, 1981.”   3 Paul Bramadat and David Seljak, ed., Religion and Ethnicity in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005).   4 See Daniel Cox, Juhem Navarro-Rivera, and Robert P. Jones, “I Know What You Did Last Sunday,” www.prri.org/research.aapor-2014; C. Kirk Hadaway, Penney Long Marler, and Mark Chaves, “What the Polls Don’t Show: A Closer Look at US Church Attendance,” American Sociological Review 58, no. 6 (December1993): 741–3, 745–8.   5 Reginald W. Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back: Religion’s Demise and Rise and Why It Matters (Lethbridge, ab: Project Canada Books, 2011), 46, 61, 71, 210.  6 C S A Institut, December 2004, 4.   7 Loek Halman, Inge Sieben, and Martha Zundert, Atlas of European Values: Trends and Traditions at the Turn of the Century (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2012), 65.   8 Iona Institute, news release, 2 November 2009.   9 Callum G. Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2012), 78; Kevin Ward, “Towards 2015: The Future of Mainline Protestantism in New Zealand,” Journal of Beliefs and Values 27, no. 1 (2006): 14; McCrindle Research, “A Demographic Snapshot of the Christianity and Church in Australia,” 18 April 2014. 10 Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 84. 11 Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman, Todd, 2002), 53.

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Notes to pages 214–15

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12 Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London and New York: Routledge), 8. 13 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 18, 31, 216, 256, 264–5. 14 Brian Clarke, “English-Speaking Canada from 1854,” in A Concise History of Christianity in Canada, ed. Terrence Murphy and Roberto Perrin (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996), 260–6, 271–9, 308–11. 15 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, Christian Churches and Their Peoples, 1840–1965: A Social History of Religion in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 72. 16 Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850–1914 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 60–4; S.C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark c.1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 132–7, 143–7, 163–5; Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society, Lambeth, 1870–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 94–5. 17 Phyllis D. Airhart, Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 85–6, 136–41. 18 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, “Secularisation or Resacralisation? The Canadian Case, 1760–2000,” in Secularisation in the Western World: Essays in Honour of Hugh McLeod, ed. Callum G. Brown and Michael Snape (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 100–2. 19 Clarke, “English-Speaking Canada from 1854,” 324–35; Airhart, Serving the Present Age, 103–11; Mark G. McGowan, Waning of the Green: Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 156–83; and Patricia Dirks, “Reinventing Christian Masculinity and Fatherhood: The Canadian Protestant Experience,” in Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969, ed. Nancy Christie (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 290–311. 20 John Webster Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era, updated and expanded (Burlington, ON : Welch, 1988), 240–1. 21 Robert T. Handy, “The ‘Lively Experiment’ in Canada,” in The Lively Experiment Continued, ed. Jerald C. Brauer (Macon, ga : Mercer University Press, 1987), 212. 22 We owe this turn of phrase, which is based on Sidney Mead’s iconic essay on American civic religion, “A Nation with the Soul of a Church,” to Phyllis D. Airhart, A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and

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Notes to pages 215–19

Remaking the United Church of Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2014), xviii. 23 McGowan, Waning of the Green, 135–42, 170–83, 262–78, 288–91. 24 Census of Canada, 1961, Bulletin 1.3-8, Religion By Ethnic Groups (Ottawa: Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 1964), 1. 25 Grant, Church in the Canadian Era, 148–55, 160–3. 26 Gary Miedema, For Canada’s Sake: Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), xii–xv. 27 Mark Noll, “What Happened to Christian Canada?,” Church History 75, no. 2 (2006): 245, 248–51. 28 Ibid., 251–2. 29 Ibid., 252–6, 263–8, 273. 30 Airhart, Church with the Soul of a Nation, 185. 31 Michael Gauvreau, “The Emergence of Personalist Feminism: Catholicism and Marriage-Preparation Movement in Quebec, 1940–1966,” in Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760– 1969, ed. Nancy Christie (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 324–31; Jean Hamelin, Histoire du Catholicism Québécois, le XXe siècle, Vol. 2, De 1940 à nos jours (Montreal: Boréal Express, 1984), 231–43. 32 David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 35, 160; David Martin, “Canada in Comparative Perspective,” in Rethinking Church and State: Canada between Europe and America, ed. David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 23, 27; David Martin, “What I Really Said about Secularisation,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 46, no. 2 (2007): 146, 148. 33 Martin, General Theory of Secularization, 204–5; Martin, “Canada in Comparative Perspective,” 23–4. 34 Martin, General Theory of Secularization, 42–3. 35 Gregory Baum, The Church in Quebec (Ottawa: Novalis, 1999), 26–30, 40, 47. 36 Gregory Baum, Response to a panel discussion of his book, Truth and Relevance: Catholic Theology in Quebec since the Quiet Revolution, Canadian Theology Society Meetings, Ottawa, 1 June 2015. 37 Martin, General Theory of Secularization, 6–7, 18–19, 36–41, 119–30. 38 Joseph Brean, “Controversial Quebec Charter Exemptions,” National Post, 10 September 2013.

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Notes to pages 219–25

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39 Martin, General Theory of Secularization, 3; Martin, “What I Really Said,” 145. 40 Martin, General Theory of Secularization, 4–36; Martin, “Canada in Comparative Perspective,” 25, 27, 30. 41 McLeod, Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 1. 42 Ibid., 16. 43 Ibid., 10, 14, 19–22, 24, 73–5, 102–3. 44 Ibid., 29. 45 Ibid., 24. 46 Ibid., 11–13, 83–101. 47 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 61, 68, 87, 175–80, 192; Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, 169–71, 172–8, 205–6, 215– 16, 244–51, 255–8, 263–9. 48 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 2. 49 Ibid., 8, 12, 144, 191–2. 50 Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 2, 8, 42–4, 53–4, 249. 51 Roof, Generation of Seekers, 48–51, and his Spiritual Market Place: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1999), 113. 52 Clarke, “English-Speaking Canada from 1854,” 260–6, 271–9, 308–11, 324–35. 53 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time; A History of the Baby Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 103–9. 54 Elizabeth Kilbourn, “A Confession,” in The Restless Church, ed. William Kilbourn (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), 3–6. 55 Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 1987), 82. 56 Michael Hout and Claude Fischer, “Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations,” American Sociological Review 67, no. 2 (2002): 165–8, 185–9. For a similar analysis of the growth of religious “nones,” see Mark Chaves, American Religion: Contemporary Trends (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2011), 19–20. 57 Roof, Spiritual Market Place, 119. 58 Miedema, For Canada’s Sake, 124–36. 59 Owram, Born at the Right Time, 309.

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Notes to pages 225–30

60 Ibid., 94–99, 187–94. 61 Ibid., 203–10. 62 Kurt Bowen, Christians in a Secular World: The Canadian Experience (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 102. 63 Myrna Kostash, quoted in Owram, Born at the Right Time, 270. 64 For a contrary position that stresses dynamics internal to the churches, see Christie and Gauvreau, “Secularisation or Resacralisation?,” 109–10. 65 Clarke, “English-Speaking Canada from 1854,” 300–6, 357–9; J.M. Bumsted, The Peoples of Canada: A Post-Confederation History (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992), 332–3. 66 José E. Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945–1971 (Vancouver: UB C Press, 2006), 177–92. 67 Miedema, For Canada’s Sake, 44. 68 Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, 61. 69 Ibid., 61, 63. 70 Ibid., 64, 267. 71 McLeod, Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 1. 72 Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution, 263. 73 Owram, Born at the Right Time, 272–9. 74 Callum G. Brown, “Gender, Christianity, and the Rise of No Religion: The Heritage of the Sixties in Britain,” in The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe, 1945–2000, ed. Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 47. 75 Bryan Wilson, Religion in Secular Society: A Sociological Comment (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969), 22; Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 64–6, 73–4. 76 Bryan Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 138–42; Bruce, God Is Dead, 129–40; Steve Bruce, “Secularisation in the U K and U S A ,” in Brown and Snape, Secularisation in the Christian World, 209–10. 77 Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 3, 5, 7–8; Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 238, 252–5. 78 Kevin N. Flatt, After Evangelicalism: The Sixties and the United Church of Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 12, 39–44, 186–7.

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Notes to pages 230–3

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79 Airhart, Church with the Soul of a Nation, 226–41, 265–7, 272–6; Wendy Fletcher, “Canadian Anglicans and Ethnicity,” in Christianity and Ethnicity, ed. Paul Bramadat and David Seljak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 148. 80 Airhart, Church with the Soul of a Nation, 266; Robert Choquette, Canada’s Religions: An Historical Introduction (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2004), 364–5; Lucia Ferretti, Brève Histoire de l’Èglise Catholique au Québec (Montreal: Boréal, 1999), 163, 166–8, 170. One prime example of this would be these churches’ inability to keep up with people’s expectations for sexual autonomy first among married couples and then, the 1960s being the 1960s, among single men and women. See Gauvreau, “Emergence of Personalist Feminism,” 338–9, and Nancy Christie, “Sacred Sex: The United Church and the Privatization of the Family in Post-War Canada,” in Households of Faith, 364–6. 81 Bibby, Beyond the Gods and Back, 210, 214. 82 Joel Thiessen, The Meaning of Sunday: The Practice of Belief in a Secular Age (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 121–5, 129–32, 136, 147, 153–8, 172–3, 176. 83 Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1994), 8, 43, 86. 84 Hugh McLeod, Religious Crisis of the 1960s, 1, 264–5. 85 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, 1–3, 12–13. 86 Hugh McLeod, “Introduction,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11.

chapter six   1 Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture and What It Means for Our Future (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2013), 43, 104, 131–2.   2 Tuomas Martikainen, François Gauthier, and Linda Woodhead, “Introduction: Religion in Market Society,” in Religion in the Neoliberal Age: Political Economy and Modes of Governance, ed. Tuomas Martikainen and François Gauthier (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 13–15.   3 Ibid., 16–17.   4 François Gauthier, Linda Woodhead, and Tuomas Martikainen, “Introduction: Consumerism as the Ethos of Consumer Society,” in Religion in

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Notes to pages 233–9

Consumer Society: Brands, Consumers and Markets, ed. Tuomas ­Martikainen and François Gauthier (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 11.   5 Ibid., 12–13.   6 Ibid., 10, 18, 23.   7 John Webster Grant, The Church in the Canadian Era, updated and expanded (Burlington: Welch Publishing, 1988), 150–1, 223–4; David Martin, “Canada in Comparative Perspective,” in Rethinking Church and State: Canada between Europe and America, ed. David Lyon and Marguerite Van Die (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 23, 25, 29.   8 See Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 19, 36, 215.   9 Elizabeth Church, “The Faithful Join Forces against Casino,” Globe and Mail, 5 April 2013, A12. 10 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 7–8, 16. 11 Ibid., 106. 12 Loren B. Mead, Transforming Congregations for the Future (Bethesda, MD : Alban Institute), 14–17. 13 Graham Cray et al., Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of the Church in a Changing Context (London: Church House Publishing, 2004), 39. 14 Susan Catto, “In Search of the Spiritual,” Time (Canadian edition), 24 November 2003, 13–21. 15 Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Simon Lee (New Brunswick, n j: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 82. 16 Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870– 1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 92–100, 102–5, 268–72. 17 Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1994), 4–5, 76, 86, 199. 18 Paul Bramadat and David Seljak, “Conclusion: The Discourse of Loss and the Future of Christianity and Ethnicity in Canada,” in Religion and Ethnicity in Canada, ed. Bramadat and Seljak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 418–22. 19 Examples of this literature include William Easum, Dancing with Dinosaurs: Ministry in a Hostile and Hurting World (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993); Thomas G. Bandy, Kicking Habits: Welcome Relief for Addicted Churches (Etobicoke, on : United Church Publishing House,

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Notes to pages 240–4

277

1997); Gary L. McIntosh, Make Room for the Boom or Bust: 6 Church Models for Reaching Three Generations (Grand Rapids, mi: Fleming H. Revell, 1997); Thomas G. Long, Beyond the Worship Wars: Building Vital and Faithful Worship (Bethesda, md: Alban Institute, 2001); and Russell Chandler, Feeding the Flock: Restaurants and Churches You’d Stand in Line For (Bethesda, md: Alban Institute, 1998). The seeker-sensitive model was pioneered by Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago under the leadership of Bill Hybels. His books or resources are published by Willow Creek Association. 20 Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 19. 21 Ibid., 22–4. 22 Ibid., 66. 23 Reginald W. Bibby, Anglitrends: A Profile and Prognosis (Toronto: Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 1986), 35–6. 24 Reginald W. Bibby, Unitrends: A Summary Report Prepared for the Department of Stewardship Services of the United Church of Canada (Toronto: Department of Stewardship Services of the United Church of Canada, 1994), 21. 25 Statistics Canada, Caring Canadians, Involved Canadians: Highlights from the 2007 National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2009), 43. 26 Statistics Canada, Caring Canadians, Involved Canadians: Highlights from the 2000 National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2001), 36–7. 27 Statistics Canada, Caring Canadians, Involved Canadians: Highlights from the 2004 National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2006), 37. 28 Statistics Canada, 2007 National Survey, 20, 23–4, 59. 29 Statistics Canada, 2007 National Survey, 35–6, and 2000 National Survey, 11. The methodology for collecting the data changed for the 2004 c sgv p survey, and so its findings cannot be compared to surveys conducted in 1997 and 2000. See 2004 National Survey, 8. 30 Statistics Canada, 2007 National Survey, 50. 31 Statistics Canada, 2000 National Survey, 54. 32 Statistics Canada, 2007 National Survey, 41. 33 Ibid., 35. 34 Statistics Canada, 2004 National Survey, 60. 35 Ibid., 51. 36 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 288–90.

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Notes to page 244

37 Figure derived from Reginald W. Bibby, Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Stoddart, 2002), 26, and Kurt Bowen, Christians in a Secular World: The Canadian Experience (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 35. 38 Bowen, Christians in a Secular World, 196–7. 39 Ibid., 44, 184. 40 Ibid., 144. 41 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 66.

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Index

Figures and tables are indicated by page numbers in italics. Aboriginal peoples, 7, 167 Adventists. See Seventh Day Adventists affluence, 224–5, 232 age profiles: Christian n.i.e./n.o.s., 175, 181–3, 183; No Religion, 168–71, 170, 171–2, 182; Protestant denominations, mainstream, 37–8, 41; Protestant denominations, other, 89, 91–2, 93–4; Protestant n.o.s, 174; Roman Catholic church attendance, 141–2, 143, 144; Roman Catholics (Quebec), 129, 130, 131; Roman Catholics (Rest of Canada), 132, 133, 134, 181 Agnostics, 163–4, 201 Airhart, Phyllis, 22, 48 Anglican Church of Canada: age profile, 38; baptisms, 49, 51; church attendance, 116; factors for decline, 217; gender ratio, 40; membership/Census ratio, 55, 58; membership trend, 5, 32, 33,

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34, 35, 43–4, 44; rate of change, 54–5, 56; Sunday School enrolment, 45, 46, 54–5; timing of disaffiliation trend, 33, 199. See also Protestant denominations – ma instr ea m Apostolic Church of Canada, 97 Apostolic Church of Pentecost, 98 Arab Christians, 191 Arcand, Denys. See The Barbarian Invasions Asians. See Chinese Canadians; Filipino Canadians; Korean Canadians Associated Gospel Churches, 97 Association of Regular Baptists, 67, 67–8 Atheists, 163–4, 201 Atlantic Canada Association of Free Will Baptists, 67, 68 attendance, church: approach to, 24, 69; charitable giving and, 242; civic participation and, 244–5; comparison difficulties,

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120; volunteerism and, 243. See also under Protestant denominations; Roman Catholic Church Australia, 211, 212, 213, 218, 220, 239 baby boomers: disaffiliation by, 23, 57, 197, 201; never attend rate, 118–19, 144; in Protestant denominations, other, 92; return rates between Canada and US, 224; size of, and 1960s impact, 222, 225 Bainbridge, William Sims, 19 baptisms: Anglicans, 49; Baptists, 64–6; birth rate and, 50, 51; Christian Reformed (crc), 105, 106; mainstream Protestants, 49–52, 69, 201; Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, 108, 109; Presbyterians, 49, 50; Roman Catholic records, 123; Roman Catholics (Quebec), 151, 155; Roman Catholics (Rest of Canada), 157–8; and Sunday School enrolment, 51; United Church, 49, 50, 51 Baptist General Conference, 67, 68 Baptists: age profile, 38; baptisms, 64–6; categorization of, 73–4; church attendance, 116; conclusions, 68; denominations, 62–3; gender ratio, 40; membership trends, 23, 32–3, 34, 35, 63–4, 66–8, 67; statistics challenges, 57–8, 62; timing of disaffiliation trend, 197, 199. See also Protestant denominations – ma i ns tream

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Baptist Union of Western Canada. See Canadian Baptists of Western Canada Barbarian Invasions, The (film), 216 Baum, Gregory, 218–19 Belgium, 212, 218 Berger, Peter, 13, 229 Berton, Pierre: The Comfortable Pew, 5, 74, 223 Beyer, Peter, 168 Bibby, Reginald: introduction, 21; on children’s church attendance, 70; comparison of mainstream to other Protestants, 72; “conservative Protestant” usage, 8; on francophone Quebecer beliefs, 151; on growth of Protestants, other, 84; on mainstream Protestant church attendance, 110–11; on mainstream Protestant golden age, 28–9; on No Religion category, 164, 168– 9, 172; on polarization, 194–5; on religious demand and revitalization, 21, 195, 210, 230. See also Project Canada surveys (Bibby) Bible Belt, 117 birth rate, 51 Black, Conrad, 234 Black Canadians, 190, 193 “born again” label, 176 Bouchard, Gérard, 219 Bowen, Kurt, 8, 22, 244 Bramadat, Paul, 238 Brethren in Canada, Canadian Conference, 97 Bricker, Darrell, 232 bricolage, 151–2

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Brinkerhoff, Merlin, 168, 171 Britain: attend/never attend comparison, 211, 212, 213; diffusive Christianity, 214–15, 222; secularization of, 17; vicarious religion, 15, 145 Brown, Callum G.: on 1960s as pivotal decade, 18, 70, 220; on changing understanding of “No Religion” category, 227; on Christian decline as gendered phenomenon, 18, 89, 134; on churches’ loss of social power, 231; scholarship on 1960s, 22; on societal role of Christianity, 213–14; on women as key to 1960s, 221, 228 Bruce, Steve, 14, 229 Buddhism, 6, 7, 200 Burkinshaw, Robert, 8 Canada: consumerism and individualism trends, 232–3; multiculturalism, 226–7; as multifaith society, 200; religious composition (2011), 7. See also Christianity – i n can ada Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participation (c s gv p), 241–3 Canadian Baptist Ministries (Canadian Baptist Federation), 62–3, 68 Canadian Baptists of Ontario and Quebec (cboq), 62, 64–5, 66, 67 Canadian Baptists of Western Canada (cbw c), 62, 64–5 Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches, 97

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Canadian National Baptist Convention, 67, 68 Canadian Reformed Church, 105, 107 Canadian Sunday School Mission, 97 Casanova, José, 15 Catholic Church. See Roman Catholic Church Census: category concerns, 86–7; Christian n.i.e. category, 174–6, 178; differences from denominational records, 123; generic Christian enumeration, 173; introduction, 10; membership trends, 4–6; No Religion enumeration, 164–5, 227; Protestants, mainstream, 31–41; Protestants, other, 76, 79–87; religious categories, 76, 77–8; Roman Catholics, 123, 124–37; types of data in, 89; underenumeration concerns, 99–100; visible minorities categories, 167. See also National Household Survey (2011) change, rates of, 30–1 charitable giving, 242 Charter of Quebec Values, 219 children: in Anglican membership, 44; decline in church attendance, 70; No Religion, 168–9, 171–2, 201–2; professions of faith and, 52–3, 54; in Quebec, 129, 131. See also Sunday School enrolment Chinese Canadians, 166, 190, 192, 194 Choritzer Mennonite Conference, 99

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Christian and Missionary Alliance (c ma ): age profile, 92, 93; in Census, 76; gender ratio, 89, 90; membership/Census ratio, 99, 101; membership trend, 81–2, 82–5, 88, 96, 97 Christianity: 1960s crisis, 16–18; charitable giving and, 242; civic engagement role, 11–12, 240–4; consumeristic approach to, 233; factors in 1960s decline, 216–18, 220–1; society impacts of, 213– 14; women and, 221–2. See also post-Christian society; Protestant denominations; religious change; Roman Catholic Church – i n c a nada: approach to, 9, 12, 23, 245; centennial celebrations, 71, 216; factors in 1960s decline, 16–18, 216–18, 223; former role as quasi-establishment, 71, 214, 215–16, 218, 233–4; Martin’s secularization typology and, 220; membership trend, 4–6, 10–11; methodology and data sources, 9–11, 22–3; pre-1960s engagement, 222–3; ramifications of disaffiliation, 11–12, 234–5; scholarship on, 21–2; secularization failure to explain decline, 229–30; surprise at social transformations, 228; terminology, 7–9 Christian n. See Christian n.i.e. Christian n.i.e. (not included elsewhere): approach to, 25, 95, 179–80; age profile, 175, 181–3, 183; Census approach to, 174–6, 178; Census/n hs numbers, 7, 80, 86; Christian n.o.s. subset,

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176, 178; conservative Protestants and, 176, 178, 182–3, 183, 186–8, 193; gender ratio, 180–1, 186; geographical profile, 176, 177, 184–6, 185, 187; growth rate, 173, 179, 187–8; importance of, 189–90; National Household Survey approach to, 176; non-churched norm in, 196; No Religious Affiliation and, 186, 193, 202; Roman Catholics and, 181, 184; subcategory breakdown, 176, 178; theories for why respondents choose, 178–9; urban setting and, 183–4, 184; visible minorities and, 180, 190–1, 191–2; as white disaffiliated Protestants, 178–80, 183–4, 187–9. See also No Religious Affiliation; Protestant n.o.s. (not otherwise specified) Christian n.o.s. (not otherwise specified), 173, 176, 178. See also Christian n.i.e. Christian Reformed (tradition), 105, 107 Christian Reformed Church (c rc ): age profile, 92, 93; baptisms, 105, 106; gender ratio, 89, 90, 91, 180; introduction, 104; membership trend, 5, 74, 80–1, 82–5, 88, 98, 104, 106; possible factors in decline, 105; significance of decline, 107 Christie, Nancy, 5, 17–18 Churches of Christ, World Convention, 97 Churches of Christ, World Convention, Disciples of Christ, 99

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Church of England: MissionShaped Church, 171, 235 Church of God, Anderson, 97 Church of God, Cleveland–All Districts, 97 Church of God of Prophecy in Canada, 97 Church of the Nazarene: gender ratio, 89, 90, 180; membership/ Census ratio, 101; membership trend, 96, 97 civic engagement, 240–4; challenges in post-Christian society, 11–12, 241, 243–4; charitable giving, 242; decline, 240, 242–3; political participation, 244–5; role of churches and church attendance, 240–2; social capital from, 240 Clark, Warren, 117, 140 Comfortable Pew, The. See Berton, Pierre confessional traditionalism, 8. See also conservative Protestants confirmations, 52. See also professions of faith Confucianism, 200 conservative Protestants: Christian n.i.e. and, 176, 178, 182–3, 183, 186–8, 193; retention of members, 74, 194; use of term, 8. See also Protestant denominations – o t h er consumerism, 232–3 contingencies, web of, 216–17 Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches (cabc), 62–4, 66–7 conversion, individual, 18, 176 Cox, Jeffrey, 14, 214, 236–7 Crysdale, Stewart, 223

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Davie, Grace, 15, 145, 213, 231, 237 Dawson, Lorne, 21 de-churched, 171, 201–3 Denmark, 212 denomination: use of term, 8–9 diffusive Christianity, 214–15, 236–7 Diocese of St Jerome (Catholic), 152 Disaffiliation. See de-churched; non-churched; No Religion; No Religious Affiliation Doukhobors, 81–2, 82–5 Durkheim, Emile, 13 Dutch Reformed Church, 105, 107 England. See Britain Evangelical Covenant Church, 98 Evangelical Free Church, 96, 97 evangelicalism, 8, 22, 176. See also conservative Protestants; Protestant denominations – other Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (elc ic ), 58–60, 61, 63 Evangelical Mennonite Conference, 97 Evangelical Missionary Church of Canada, 97, 178 evangelism, in post-Christian society, 237–8 Expo 67, 224 Fellowship of Christian Assemblies, 97 Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches, 23, 67, 68 Fellowship of Evangelical Bible Churches, 98

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Filipino Canadians, 123, 126, 127, 135, 136, 137, 157, 198 Finke, Roger, 19 Flatt, Kevin, 22, 47–8, 83, 230 Foursquare Gospel Church of Canada, 98 France, 211, 212, 213 Free Methodist Church in Canada: gender ratio, 89, 90; membership trend, 82–5, 98 fundamentalism, 8. See also conservative Protestants funeral records, 52 Gallup poll: framing of church attendance question, 113–14; Protestant church attendance, 24, 110–12, 112; Roman Catholic church attendance, 137, 138, 139 Gauthier, François, 232–3 Gauvreau, Michael, 17–18, 217 gender: 1960s women’s emancipation, 221–2, 228; as factor in disaffiliation, 18, 89, 134–5 gender ratio (male-to-female): Christian n.i.e., 180–1, 186; No Religion, 166–7, 168, 228–9; Protestant church attendance, 118, 119; Protestant denominations, mainstream, 39, 40, 41; Protestant denominations, other, 89, 90, 91; Roman Catholic, 134–5; Roman Catholic church attendance, 145–6, 147, 148, 150, 161–2 General Social Survey (g s s ): end of, 115; Protestant church attendance, 24, 113, 116; Quebec francophone No Religion

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preference, 130; Roman Catholic church attendance, 140–2, 143, 144–8, 206 generation Y: Quebec, 155, 162. See also baby boomers geographical profiles: Baptists, 64–7; Christian n.i.e./n.o.s., 176, 177, 184–6, 185, 187; No Religion, 165–6, 166; Protestant church attendance, 117; Roman Catholics, 122–3 Germany, 211, 212 Gidney, Catherine, 22 Gospel Missionary Association, 67 Grand’Maison, Jacques, 152, 154, 218 Grant, John Webster, 215–16 Great Britain. See Britain Guenther, Bruce, 67–8, 75, 95, 115, 120 Hadaway, C. Kirk, 113–14 hard de-churched, 203 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, 15–16, 236 Hiemstra, Rick, 86, 95, 178, 179 Hinduism, 6, 7, 200 holiness movement, 8. See also conservative Protestants Humanae vitae (Paul VI), 160 Ibbitson, John, 232 immigration: Christian Reformed (c rc) and, 105; multifaith society and, 200; Roman Catholics and, 124, 126, 128, 140, 198 independent churches, 73. See also nondenominational churches Independent Holiness Church, 99 Indigenous peoples, 7, 167 individualism, 231–3

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interdenominational churches. See nondenominational churches Ireland, 211, 212, 213, 220 Islam, 6, 7, 200 Italian Pentecostal Church, 98 Italy, 212, 212 James, William, 100 Jehovah’s Witnesses: age profile, 92, 93; gender ratio, 89, 90, 91; membership trend, 81–2, 82–5, 88 Judaism, 6, 7, 194, 200 Kelley, Dean, 20, 74, 102 Korean Canadians, 190, 192 latent affiliation, 21 Lefebvre, Solange, 152 Lemieux, Raymond, 150–1 London Free Press, 3, 6, 28, 72 Luckman, Thomas, 13 Lutheran Church-Canada (lc-c), 58–61, 62–3 Lutherans: approach to, 59; age profile, 38; categorization of, 73–4; church attendance, 116; conclusions, 61, 69; denominations, 58–9; gender ratio, 40; membership trends, 23, 32, 32–3, 34, 35, 59–60, 61–2; statistics challenges, 57–8; Sunday School enrolment, 60–1, 63; timing of disaffiliation trend, 197, 199. See also Protestant denominations – m ai n s tream Mackie, Marlene, 168, 171 mainline Protestant: use of term, 7–8. See also Protestant denominations – m ai n s tream

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market model, of religion, 19–21 Markham–Waterloo Mennonite Conference, 98 marriages: changing attitudes, 151, 217–18; records, 52, 123 Martikainen, Tuomas, 232–3 Martin, David, 13, 14–15, 218–20 Marx, Karl, 13 McLeod, Hugh, 16–17, 213–14, 220, 227 megachurches, 100 Mennonite Brethren. See Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches Mennonite Church in Canada– Alberta, 98 Mennonite Church in Canada–b c , 98 Mennonite Church in Canada– Eastern Canada, 98 Mennonite Church in Canada– Manitoba, 98 Mennonite Church in Canada– Saskatchewan, 98 Mennonites: age profile, 92, 94; in Census, 76; gender ratio, 89, 90, 91, 180; membership/Census ratio, 99, 101; membership trend, 5, 74, 81, 82–5, 88, 96, 98 Mentzer, Marc S., 178 Meunier, É.-Martin, 22, 123–4, 150–1, 155, 157 Miedema, Gary, 22, 71, 216 minorities. See visible minorities Mission-Shaped Church. See Church of England modernity, 16 Moravian Church in America, 98 Mormons, 81, 82–5, 88

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multiculturalism, 226–7 multifaith society, 200, 234–5 National Household Survey (2011): approach to Christian n.i.e., 176; Canadian religious composition, 7; membership trends, 6; methodology, 10; Protestant denominations, other, 87–8. See also Census Nazarenes. See Church of the Nazarene neo-evangelicalism, 8. See also conservative Protestants neoliberalism, 232 New Curriculum (u cc), 47–8 New Zealand, 211, 212, 213, 218, 220, 239 1960s. See sixties Noll, Mark, 14, 216–17 non-churched: definition, 171, 202; distinction from de-churched, 171; estimate of total number, 202–3, 209–10; as growing trend, 196, 210; religious experience among, 15–16. See also No Religious Affiliation nondenominational churches, 73, 99, 100, 188 Nones. See No Religion; No Religious Affiliation No Religion: age profile, 168–71, 170, 171–2, 182; Census enumeration of, 164–5, 227; Christian n.o.s. and, 186; difference (gain / loss) between Censuses, 86; ethnic profile, 166; in francophone Quebecers, 129– 30, 131, 132, 137, 166; gender ratio, 166–7, 168, 228–9; and

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generic Christians, 73; geographical profile, 165–6, 166; introduction, 25–6, 163; as lagging indicator, 195, 199, 210 No Religious Affiliation: acceptability of, 227–8; affluence impact on, 224–5; Census categorization, 164, 191–2, 201; consumerism and, 233; cultural shift away from Christianity and, 225–6; estimate of numbers, 7, 192–6, 201–2; as generational shift, 168–9, 171, 196, 201; growth rate, 6, 163, 198–9, 201; as intergenerational, 201–2; international comparisons, 211– 13, 212; lack of interest in churches, 196, 230–1; and latent affiliation, 21; multiculturalism impact on, 226–7; as new mainstream, 195–6, 210–11; as new shift in religious identity, 202; non-churched number among, 202–3, 209–10; from Protestant (mainstream) backgrounds, 203–4, 205; ramifications for churches, 195–6, 234–35; from Roman Catholic backgrounds, 204–7, 207, 208–9; and Roman Catholics, 129; uniqueness of growth rate, 165, 168, 172–3, 198–9; US comparisons, 223–4. See also non-churched; postChristian society North American Baptist Church, 67, 68 Ontario: Roman Catholics, 126, 132, 133, 149, 158, 206–7 Orthodox churches, 7, 9

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Parti Québéçois, 219 Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada (pao c), 97, 99, 107–10 Pentecostal Assemblies of Newfoundland, 98 Pentecostal Holiness Church of Canada, 98 pentecostalism, 8. See also conservative Protestants Pentecostals: age profile, 92, 94; in Census, 76; gender ratio, 89, 90, 91, 180; membership / Census ratio, 101; membership trend, 5, 74, 81–2, 82–5, 88, 96, 107, 109–10; self-identity, 187 polarization, 194–5 political engagement, 244–5 post-Christian society: civic engagement challenges, 11–12, 240–4; introduction, 26, 197; loss of ­cultural memory of Christianity, 236–7; marginalization of Christianity, 231, 235; need for churches to adapt to, 238–9; political participation issues, 244– 5; public role of churches, 234–5; recruitment challenges, 237–8 Presbyterian Church: 1960s growth, 27–8; age profile, 38; baptisms, 49, 50; church attendance, 116; gender ratio, 40; membership / Census ratio, 55, 58; membership trend, 32–3, 34, 35, 43, 69; Port Colborne new members record, 27; rate of change, 56; Sunday School enrolment, 46, 47, 48; timing of disaffiliation trend, 199. See also Protestant denominations – ma i ns tream

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Presbyterian Record, 5, 27–8 professions of faith, 52–3, 54, 201 Project Canada surveys (Bibby): Protestant church attendance, 24, 112–13, 114, 115; Roman Catholic church attendance, 139–40, 141 Protestant denominations: overall decline, 79, 120–1; relationship with Roman Catholics, 29, 122, 161. See also Christianity – c hurc h attenda nc e, 110– 19; Bibby on, 110–11; children, 70; conclusions, 118–19; factors in calculating, 111; frequency, 117; Gallup poll on, 110–12, 112; gender ratio, 118, 119; General Social Survey on, 113, 116; never attend category, 115– 19; Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, 108, 109; Project Canada surveys on, 112–13, 114; rate inflation issue, 113–14; regional differences, 117; upward trend, 114–15 – ma instr ea m: approach to, 23–4, 31; age profile, 37–8, 38–9, 41; assumption of decline, 3–4; baptisms, 49, 50, 51–2, 64–6; conclusions, 37, 41, 68–71; conservative Protestants from, 188; cultural issues affecting, 217–18; difference (gain / loss) between Censuses, 86; disaffiliation numbers from, 203–4, 205; gender ratios, 39, 40, 41; growth rate, 36; impact of No Religious Affiliation on, 195–6; international comparisons, 213; interpretations of golden age,

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28–9, 31; membership/Census ratio, 55–6, 58; membership trends, 4–6, 28, 31–3, 34, 35–7, 43–5, 197; National Household Survey (2011), 7; pastoral involvement statistics, 52–3; as percentage of all Protestants, 31, 32, 35–6, 79; as percentage of population, 29, 31; privileged position, 71; rates of change, 53–5, 56, 57; relationship with other Protestants, 83–6; statistics from, 41–3, 57–8; Sunday School enrolment, 45, 46, 47–9, 60–1; terminology, 7–9; timing of disaffiliation trend, 33, 69–70, 199; US Protestants comparisons, 8. See also Anglican Church of Canada; Baptists; Lutherans; Presbyterian Church; United Church of Canada – o t h e r : approach to, 73, 75; age profile, 89, 91–2, 93–4; categorization considerations, 73, 120; Census categories and concerns, 76, 86–7; Census underenumeration concerns, 99–100; conclusions, 75, 87, 119–21, 198; data and statistics for, 75, 95–6; denominations with declining membership, 96, 99; denominations with growing membership, 96, 97; denominations with mixed growth, 96, 98; difference (gain / loss) between Censuses, 86; gender ratios, 89, 90, 91; impact of No Religious Affiliation on, 196; megachurches, 100; membership / Census ratios, 99, 101;

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membership decline, 81, 82–83; membership trends, 74, 80–3, 82–5, 87–8, 100–1; perceived strength, 72, 74; as percentage of all Protestants, 76, 79, 80, 119; as percentage of population, 79, 80, 119; relationship with mainstream Protestants, 83–6; timing of disaffiliation trend, 199 Protestant n. See Protestant n.o.s. Protestant n.o.s. (not otherwise specified): approach to, 25, 94–5; age profile, 181; Census approach to, 173; in Census/ nhs, 7, 80; demographic features, 174; difference (gain / loss) between Censuses, 86; growth trend, 94, 173–4; No Religious Affiliation and, 192, 202. See also Christian n.i.e. (not included elsewhere); No Religious Affiliation Putnam, Robert, 57, 240 Quebec: Protestant attendance rate, 117 – roma n c atholic c hurc h: age profile, 129, 130, 131; baptism rate, 151, 155; church attendance, 138, 139–41, 143, 151; cultural identification with, 150–1, 154–5, 218–19; Diocese of St Jerome, 152; factors for decline, 217; former civic role, 130–1, 215; gender ratio (attendance), 145–6, 147, 148, 150, 161; generation Y decline, 155, 162; international comparisons, 211– 13; loss of cultural identification, 155–6; loss to No Religion, 6,

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129–31, 132, 137, 146–8, 150, 166, 198, 205, 207; moral teachings and, 151, 154; Quiet Revolution, 17, 122, 159–60, 217–18, 226, 228; reformulation of beliefs, 151–4; Vatican II impact, 160 Quiet Revolution, 17, 122, 159–60, 217–18, 226, 228 rates of change, 30–1 Rawlyk, George, 176 recruitment, in post-Christian society, 237–8 Reformed churches. See Christian Reformed Reformed Church of America, 107 regional profiles. See geographical profiles Reimer, Sam, 22, 75 religious change: comparative approach to, 14–15; gender component, 134–5; impact of modernity, 16; impact of strictness of beliefs, 20–1, 74, 102; market model, 19–21; secularization, 12–14; vicarious religion, 15 rites of passage, 150 Roman Catholic Church: 1960s growth, 4; age profile (Quebec), 129, 130, 131; age profile (Rest of Canada), 132–4, 133, 181; approach to and introduction, 24–5, 122–4; baptisms (Quebec), 151, 155; baptisms (Rest of Canada), 157–8; Census on, 124–37; Christian n.i.e. and, 181, 184; conclusions, 128, 135, 198; cultural identification, 135, 137; cultural identification, loss

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of in youth, 158, 162, 209; cultural identification (Quebec), 150–1, 154–6, 218–19; cultural identification (Rest of Canada), 156–59, 162, 218; data difficulties, 123; difference (gain / loss) between Censuses, 86; ethnic and regional diversity, 122–3, 126, 128, 135, 136, 140; factors for decline, 157–62, 225–6; “fringe” and “nominal” Catholics, 207–8; gender ratio, 134–5, 161–2; Humanae vitae impact, 160; international comparisons, 212– 13; loss to No Religion, 129, 149–50, 204–7, 207, 208–9; National Household Survey (2011), 7; No Religious Affiliation and, 193–4, 196; Ontario, 126, 132, 133, 149, 158, 206–7; as percentage of population, 29, 124–25, 125–6; relationship with Protestants, 29, 122, 161; secularization models for Catholic societies, 218–19; stagnation and decline, 5–6, 128–9, 132, 158–9, 198; statements on public issues, 234; timing of disaffiliation trend, 199; Vatican II impact, 160–1, 221, 225; visible minorities in, 126, 127. See also Christianity; Quebec – c hurc h attenda nc e, 137– 50; in 1950s and 1960s, 111; age profile, 141–2, 143, 144–5; decline (Quebec), 141–2, 143; decline (Rest of Canada), 143, 148–9; Gallup poll on, 137, 138, 139; gender ratio, 145–6, 147,

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148, 150; General Social Survey on, 140–2, 143, 144–8; never attend (age profile), 145; never attend (gender ratio), 146; never attend (Quebec), 143, 144–5, 146–8; never attend (Rest of Canada), 143, 149; occasional attendees, 207–8; Ontario, 149; Project Canada surveys on, 139– 40, 141 Roof, Wade Clark, 19, 20, 222 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, 226 rules-based perception, 113–14 Salt and Light Ministries, 97 Salvation Army: age profile, 91–2, 94; gender ratio, 89, 90, 91; membership/Census ratio, 101; membership trend, 5, 74, 81–2, 82–5, 88, 96, 99, 102, 103–4; role in Canadian society, 101–2 Schweizer, Don, 22 Scotland, 211, 212 secularization, 12–14, 19, 22, 218– 20, 229–30. See also religious change Seljak, David, 238 Seventh Day Adventists: age profile, 91, 93; in Census, 76, 87; gender ratio, 89, 90, 91; membership / Census ratio, 101; membership trend, 81, 82–5, 88, 96, 97 sexual revolution, 70, 160–1, 217– 18, 221, 225 Shiner, Larry, 13 Sikhism, 6, 7, 200 sixties (1960s): affluence in, 224–5; baby boomers’ role, 222, 225; Christian loss of social power,

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231; as critical decade in secularization pivot, 23, 41, 69–70, 199; cultural shifts away from Christianity, 16–18, 216–18, 220–1, 225–7; immigration policy and multifaith society, 200; No Religion growth in, 227–8; scholarship on Canadian Christianity in, 22; women’s emancipation, 221–2, 228 social capital, 240–1 soft de-churched, 203 Sommerfelder Mennonite Churches, 99 Southern Baptists. See Canadian National Baptist Convention Sovereign Grace Fellowship, 67 Spain, 213 Stark, Rodney, 19, 21, 230 statistics and data: differences between Census and denominational records, 123; Protestants, mainstream, 41–3, 57–8; Protestants, other, 75, 95–6; Roman Catholic, 123. See also Census; National Household Survey (2011) Stewart, Adam, 187 St Jerome, Diocese of (Catholic), 152 strictness, 20–1, 74, 102 Sunday School enrolment: Anglican Church, 45, 54–5; and baptisms, 51; decline, 48–9, 69, 70, 201; Lutherans, 60–1, 63; New Curriculum (uc c ), 47–8; overview, 45, 46; Presbyterians, 47, 48; United Church, 45, 47, 48, 54. See also children Sweden, 211, 212

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Taylor, Charles, 219 theological spectrum, 8, 230 Thiessen, Joel, 21–2, 231, 233 Trinity Western University, 234 Trudeau, Pierre, 160 unaffiliation. See de-churched; nonchurched; No Religion; No Religious Affiliation Union of French Baptist Churches, 67, 68 Unitarians: gender ratio, 89, 90, 91; membership trend, 81, 82–5 United Brethren in Christ, 99 United Church of Canada: age profile, 37–8, 38–9, 181; baptisms, 49, 50, 51; church attendance, 116, 119, 120; factors for decline, 217, 230; gender ratio, 40; membership/Census ratio, 55, 57, 58; membership trend, 4, 5, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 43–5, 69; New Curriculum (Sunday School), 47–8; professions of faith, 52–3, 54; rate of change, 54, 56; scholarship on, 22; Sunday School enrolment, 45, 46–7, 47–8; theological orientation, 8; timing of disaffiliation trend, 199. See also Protestant denominations – m ai n s tream United Kingdom. See Britain United Pentecostal Church, 98 United States of America: church attendance comparisons, 213, 216; distinctions with, 8, 239; market model of religion, 19–20; megachurches, 100; No

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Religious Affiliation comparisons, 212, 223–4 universities, religion in, 22 Untel, Frère, 223 urban setting: Christian n.i.e. and, 183, 184 Vatican II, 160–1, 221, 225 vicarious religion, 15 Vietnam War, 221, 225 visible minorities: Census classifications, 167; Christian n.i.e. position and, 180, 190–1, 191–2; Roman Catholics, 126, 127 volunteerism. See civic engagement Weber, Max, 13 web of contingencies, 216–17 Wesleyan Church–Atlantic District, 97 Wesleyan Church–Central District, 98 Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (Kelley), 20, 74 Wilkinson, Michael, 22, 75, 107 Wilson, Bryan, 13, 229 women: 1960s emancipation, 221– 2, 228; ordination debate in Christian Reformed Church, 105. See also gender; sexual revolution world religions, 6, 7, 200 World Wide Church of God Canada, 96, 98 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, The, 42, 75, 123

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