![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldTo the right is a picture of the former Centennial-Japanese United Church building at 701 Dovercourt Road, near the Ossington TTC station. Over the previous century. this building housed a series of Methodist and United Church congregations until its recent sale to a condominium developer that plans to convert the church into 28 heritage lofts.
The state of religion in Canada is interesting, with various figures--church attendance, belief in God, belief in the importance of religion--suggesting that patterns of religious practice and belief in Canada fall midway between the overtly religious United States and relatively non-religion northern Europe.
Why? John O'Toole of the University of Toronto suggests in his "Religion in Canada: Its Development and Contemporary Situation" that Canadian religion, as it came to be constituted in the 19th century, placed an emphasis on the outward structures of religious belief as opposed to belief that might well be more similar to European patterns than to American ones.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how many church buildings were physically collapsing, and how this collapse corresponds not only to the consolidation of smaller denominations but to declines in religious practice, even religious belief. Michael Valpy suggested that the disaffection of women with patriarchal church structures is the biggest factor in the non-transmission of religious belief. Various scholars of religion would argue that this non-transmission is the consequence of a lack of religious diversity, and that a religious diversity missing in Canada would encourage religion by creating a market driven by supply and demand. I'm not sure how true this is of at least English Canada, inasmuch as modern Canada is already a religiously diverse society that be may well be on the verge of a collapse in active religious practice.
That's what's going on in Canada. What's going on in your neck of the woods? Is religious practice, if not belief, quite common? Is it rising, is it falling, is religious belief becoming separated from religious practice, is religion so common that my question is silly?
Feel free to share your reports in the comemnts. As always, please be polite.
The state of religion in Canada is interesting, with various figures--church attendance, belief in God, belief in the importance of religion--suggesting that patterns of religious practice and belief in Canada fall midway between the overtly religious United States and relatively non-religion northern Europe.
In 2002, 30% of Canadians reported to Pew researchers that religion was "very important" to them. This figure was similar to that in the United Kingdom (33%) and Italy (27%). In the United States, the equivalent figure was 59%, in France, a mere 11%. Regional differences within Canada exist, however, with British Columbia and Quebec reporting especially low metrics of traditional religious observance, as well as a significant urban-rural divide. The rates for weekly church attendance are contested, with estimates running as low as 11% as per the latest Ipsos-Reid poll and as high as 25% as per Christianity Today magazine. This American magazine reported that three polls conducted by Focus on the Family, Time Canada and the Vanier Institute of the Family showed church attendance increasing for the first time in a generation, with weekly attendance at 25 per cent. This number is similar to the statistics reported by premier Canadian sociologist of religion Prof. Reginald Bibby of the University of Lethbridge, who has been studying Canadian religious patterns since 1975. Although lower than in the US, which has reported weekly church attendance at about 40% since the Second World War, weekly church attendance rates are higher than those in Northern Europe (for example, Austria 9%, Germany 6%, France 8%, Netherlands 6 % and UK 10%).
Why? John O'Toole of the University of Toronto suggests in his "Religion in Canada: Its Development and Contemporary Situation" that Canadian religion, as it came to be constituted in the 19th century, placed an emphasis on the outward structures of religious belief as opposed to belief that might well be more similar to European patterns than to American ones.
Perhaps the most enduring bequest of Victorian Christianity to its religiously committed descendants has been in the realm of form rather than content. The nineteenth-century "churching of Canada" differed significantly from the corresponding process witnessed in the United States (Finke and Stark, 1992) and, as a consequence, the anatomy of contemporary Canadian religion bears less resemblance to its American correlative than might initially or superficially be supposed. In this respect, the evolution of Canadian religion has followed a European rather than an American model, in keeping with a characteristic Canadian reluctance, both French and English, to abandon the ties of ancestral authority in a revolutionary American manner. Steeped in the heroic mythology of religious dissent and constitutionally celebrating the separation of church and state, the United States has long accommodated the sect as its predominant and paradigmatic mode of religious organization. In contrast, Canadian religion boasts manifestly establishmentarian roots. Though sectarianism has undoubtedly played a vital and vigorous minor role, it has been large churches with strong links to powerful political, business and cultural elites which have dominated Canadian religious experience since their importation. Thus, while acknowledging its religious diversity, one scholar has described Canada as "a society where Christian traditions with historical roots in Britain and Western Europe dominate the demography of religious identity from Newfoundland to British Columbia" (Simpson, 1988: 351).
Translation of these differences into the terms of the currently fashionable subdisciplinary market paradigm (Warner, 1993; Beyer, 1994) produces an image of the United States as an arena of religious free competition. North of the border, however, all indicators proclaim a condition of protracted religious oligopoly in the nation as a whole while the province of Quebec displays near-monopoly in the religious realm. If "much of the history of religion in Canada is the story of conflict, competition and accommodation between Roman Catholics, the United Church of Canada ... and the Anglicans," the "domination of churches and denominations", especially these so-called "big three", is still arguably the paramount characteristic of organized religion in this country (Simpson, 1988: 351; Nock, 1993: 47-53). Approximately two-thirds of Canadians identify themselves with one or other of these bodies and, while this proportion has diminished slightly over the last three decades, it remains, nonetheless, a singularly striking statistic.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how many church buildings were physically collapsing, and how this collapse corresponds not only to the consolidation of smaller denominations but to declines in religious practice, even religious belief. Michael Valpy suggested that the disaffection of women with patriarchal church structures is the biggest factor in the non-transmission of religious belief. Various scholars of religion would argue that this non-transmission is the consequence of a lack of religious diversity, and that a religious diversity missing in Canada would encourage religion by creating a market driven by supply and demand. I'm not sure how true this is of at least English Canada, inasmuch as modern Canada is already a religiously diverse society that be may well be on the verge of a collapse in active religious practice.
That's what's going on in Canada. What's going on in your neck of the woods? Is religious practice, if not belief, quite common? Is it rising, is it falling, is religious belief becoming separated from religious practice, is religion so common that my question is silly?
Feel free to share your reports in the comemnts. As always, please be polite.
