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It turns out God is alive and well in Canada. So are angels, heaven, and ESP
Lake Wobegon, the American humourist Garrison Keillor once said of his fictional Minnesota town, was so Lutheran that "even the Catholics were Lutheran." There's a lot of universal truth in that remark: religious faiths do shape the cultures in which they flourish, but the influence flows both ways. In Canada, since religious and linguistic tensions were inseparable for much of our past, Christian churches, according to University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby, have always been cautious, and careful to "play by the rules of diversity." That means "not making excessive claims of uniqueness and not being overly aggressive in raiding each other's ranks. This is not a country where Christians call other people 'heathen,' but they also cannot be ridiculed as 'bigoted Bible-thumpers.' " Canada, it seems, is so pluralistic that even the Christians are pluralists.
That religious civility, and the decline in church attendance that began in all developed nations during the 1960s, has led the chattering classes -- surely among the least devout of Canadians -- to conclude that religion is inexorably fading out of national life. The sale, often for condominium projects, of numerous empty church buildings across the country, has only solidified that assumption. But as Bibby's series of public opinion surveys shows, a funny thing happened on the way to an atheist Canada: rumours of Christianity's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Eighty-one per cent of Canadians believe in God, and two-thirds of us that Jesus Christ is His divine son. Belief in angels, heaven and (to a lesser extent) hell, is almost as prevalent. Crunch Bibby's 2005 numbers how you will -- based on age, on weekly or monthly visits, on denomination -- and the attendance decline not only levels off but shows a turn toward growth since 2000.
Helping to hide the evidence of decline before -- and resurrection now -- is the fact that our forms of devotion have held remarkably steady since Confederation. Between Canada's first census of 1871 and the 1951 count, the nation's overall religious allegiance hardly budged; from there until the census of 2001, Roman Catholicism held fast, "other world faiths" unsurprisingly grew from two to six per cent, and mainline Protestantism cratered -- falling from 44 per cent of the population to 20 per cent. But those lost sheep did not, as conventional wisdom expected, move even in part into conservative Protestantism, which has stayed at eight per cent since 1871. Instead, they swelled the ranks of the No Religion group, from less than one per cent in both 1871 and 1951, to 16 per cent. In truth that number should be higher, given the collapse of church-going among Roman Catholics, especially in Quebec. But immigration from Catholic southern Europe and, more significantly, the tendency of lapsed Catholics -- even those who have not darkened a church door in decades -- to still describe themselves as Catholic, has kept the Church's affiliation percentage stable.
Just as it was the decline in attendance among Catholics that drove down the national attendance rate, it is the recent 10 per cent increase in Catholic church-going outside Quebec that has seen those numbers turn around. The uptick makes Bibby think Canada could be in for a "significant revitalization of organized religion." Especially since research indicates that perhaps two-thirds of the 16 per cent-strong No Religion group will "re-identify" with their birth faiths as they seek rites of passage relating to marriage, children, and death.[snip] Macleans
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