Andrew Faiz in an interview in Broadview Magazine with Brian Clarke, co-author of Leaving Christianity, commented on the secular shift in Canadian society. It was another in a series of articles in much of the Western world concerning the obvious. So, it gets discussed: secularization. Why so? How so? These types of questions.
I like interviews, though, especially print-based ones. The title of the interview was “Why over a third of Canadians now claim to have no religion.” Indeed, why?
Faiz opened the interview remarking on the wonderfully fabulous fact of 13,000,000-ish Canadians identifying themselves as having no religions affiliation — what a wonderful batch of people if I might say so myself.
His first deep, long question, “What’s happening here?” That’s a good question. Clarke answered with a historical perspective of the 1970s. Young people, males particularly, had ticked “no religion.” Now, old people, all young people, tick “no religion.” Those naughty Canadian intergenerational minxes; how could they? Religion is serious business, after all.
When Clarke was younger, 20 years ago, religion was a big item in Newfoundland. Now, people are leaving and they aren’t coming back to the churches. No religion is not a temporary trend at all. It is an aspect of the deep and generalized culture too.
Faiz said, “Second- and third-generation immigrants are also moving toward No Religion. The Korean Presbyterian community, for example, built a lot of churches in the 1980s and ’90s. Now, a lot of those congregations are closing.”
“We do know there’s a generational effect here. Particularly into the third generation. They may not know the language of their group, or if they do, it’s pretty tenuous. By the time you get to the third generation, and even further, they start looking very much like the rest of the Canadian population in terms of education, social status,” Clarke responded.
Of particular concern to denominational Christians of various sects is the category, of which I do not know a lot, actually, the category of “Christian, Not Otherwise Specified”; an 8% hunk of the population and a growing portion of the population, so taking more demographic territory from the denominational Christian than from those with No Religion ticked.
Clarke said something astute on the matter. “Christian, Not Otherwise Specified is eight percent of the population now. It keeps getting bigger. A portion are evangelical Christians, and that’s how they prefer to identify. But Stuart and I managed to drill down into the 2001 survey and noticed that 90 percent of this category, in terms of demographics — geography, age, urban orientation — looks very close to the demographics of No Religion. They’re on the way to disaffiliation.”
In other words, this growing category would, eventually, deflate as No Religion burgeons as they would be the transitional population into No Religion — fascinating. For rationalists, humanists, atheists, agnostics, and the like, this is great news.
Even pillars of religious identity for decades in Canada, like Roman Catholicism, they are stagnating are deflating too. Only Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism show some growth. However, it is uncertain if this is new generations of Canadians in those households being born or simply more immigrated. It would appear all Christian populations have declined.
Faiz and Clarke remark on the lack of generational transmission of the faiths. The churches and derivative indoctrination into the faith institutions were great at the transmission of the dogmas and ideologies.
“Sunday school enrolment was just expanding like gangbusters for everyone — United Church, Presbyterians, Baptists, Lutherans — in the 1950s. Churches couldn’t keep up. Sunday school enrolment peaked in either the late 1950s or very early ’60s, depending on the denomination. And then for every denomination, with the United Church in particular, it just fell off a cliff,” Clarke said.
The decline in religious faith in general is not surprising, the loss in Christian faith isn’t either. We’re bound to a developed countries benefits and curses. One, we don’t replace ourselves in our comfort; two, we reap the benefits of a rationalistic and technologically oriented society, primarily around automation and communications technologies.
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Photo credit: Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.