Belief in God in Canada, 2020: Scholars of Religion Weigh In

After Reg Bibby published his most recent findings about belief in God in Canada, I asked some scholar friends to respond to his research. I used some of their comments in my January 16, 2021 Winnipeg Free Press column about Bibby's research. Their full comments are below.

The average Canadian has moved toward no religion

Sam Reimer, Crandall University

I’m delighted to see Reginald Bibby continue his decades-long examination of religion in Canada. Without Dr. Bibby’s important work, our understanding of Canadian religion’s trajectory and current reality would be much more fuzzy. Many of us are building on Bibby’s foundational work.

Survey methods have changed over time (mail out surveys to online panels), and so comparisons over time should note this change. However, I don’t think this is an important factor.

Bibby’s findings are consistent with what other research has found—declining religiosity, with older, immigrants, women, and less educated being somewhat more religious. This strengthens his conclusions.

I continue to disagree with Bibby that “polarization” is the correct way to describe religion in Canada. For me, polarization requires Canadians vacating the middle (“somewhere in between” or “low religious”) category and moving toward BOTH poles (high religion and no religion). 

There is very little evidence that Canadians are moving to the more religious pole (they are moving to the no religion pole in droves), and we are requiring significant numbers of immigrants to even maintain numbers in the “high religious” category.

Nor is there clear evidence that the highly religious are becoming more committed or extreme in their views over time (even if there is greater space between them and the average Canadian. 

The average Canadian has moved toward no religion, while the high religious have hardly moved (which explains the increased gap).  

Finally, research over time shows increased disaffiliation, lower religious practice (like attendance) and lower belief is the dominate trend. Canadians become less religious as they age, yes, but the greater effect is that younger Canadians are less religious than older cohorts. In sum, it looks more like religious decline than polarization to me. 

Telling a pollster you believe that God exists means squat

John Stackhouse, Crandall University

A few thoughts:

Even though we’ve all seen similar statistics for decades, it’s still impressive that reported belief in God, even if qualified by occasional doubts (as I have them myself), has dropped from 70% in 1975 to 40% today. That’s just generic belief in whatever-you-want-to-define-as-“God.” We Canadians continue to race the Dutch—and perhaps the Aussies and Kiwis—for the steepest rate of de-Christianization since perhaps the French Revolution….

I’m more impressed this time by what isn’t different: 

First, there is no statistically important difference between men and women (when women typically are more religious than men as a global generalization); 

Second, there is no big difference regionally (not even “Prairies” as a unit, just SK standing out—an artifact of the survey?—and “Atlantic”…which I am learning from living here is slightly more “traditional” than the rest of the country, but not much).

Third, there is no big difference between older Canadians and Boomers—both now at around 40%…like the average for the country.

In sum, Canada is manifesting an increasingly homogeneous religious culture—with the exceptions being evangelical Protestants (whom Reg keeps calling “Conservative”—and in my new book on Evangelicalism I’ll show again what a bad adjective that is for evangelicals), observant Catholics, and observant members of other religions (who are still such a small group that they barely move the national needle). 

I’m looking forward to the National Household Survey/Census/Whatever the Heck We Have Left of What Used to Be One of the Great Religion Surveys in the World to see if indigenous Canadians continue to stand as the most Christian people-group in the country. But at the level Reg is measuring, yeah: it’s a pretty flat landscape, with those few spikes as exceptions.

I also have to shake my head at “God Is Still Doing Reasonably Well in the Polls.” I’m no political expert, but I should think that when a third of the country isn’t even confident you exist, no public figure should be beaming with pleasure.

And as a historian who also plies a trade as a theologian and teacher of world religions, I can’t help but recall James 2:19: "You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.”

Telling a pollster that you believe that God exists means (to use the technical Religionswissenschaftliche term) squat, the last time I checked with any theistic religion I know about….

Responses from the 1970s and today about belief in God not really comparable

Rick Heimstra, Evangelical Fellowship of Canada

Reg is a pioneer on the study of religion in Canada and his work is the basis for those who come after him.

When he first started asking this question in the mid-1970s it landed in a more homogenous culture. The idea of what belief in God might mean and what someone might be asserting if they claimed to believe in God was more defined.

This doesn’t mean that there wasn’t diversity then, but there wasn’t the same level of perspectivalism. Today one is more likely to say, “I believe in God, and this is what God means for me.”

In the past to say you believe in God was to assent to a creed, confession or other doctrinal statement. It was aligning with the perspective of your church or religious community, not with your own.

To the degree that we’ve seen this change, the responses from the 1970s and from today are not really comparable. The question may have stayed the same but the way it is understood has changed.

The more important questions both for the individual and for society are:

What are the consequences of what you believe about God?

How does it change the way you live and relate to others?

What is your relationship with God like?

Questions about what people believe are important, but questions about behavior are more likely to be predictive. When we do survey research we will often ask the eight questions making up Andrew Grenville’s Christian Evangelical Scale (CES). The question from this scale that will tell you the most about a person is still the question about frequency of attendance at religious services.

Weekly religious service attendance has fallen from 67% just after the Second World War to about 11% today. I think that religious service attendance and religious affiliation are better measures of religiosity because, not-withstanding that there are some more individual expressions of faith, for most people faith is communal.

The people for whom faith is most important are also those who participate most in a church or other religious community. 

For the most part, these findings don’t explain why we’ve seen these changes. What is striking, however, is that the changes in affiliation and attendance are fairly consistent across all sociological generations.

In fact, we may be seeing more fall off in religiosity among the Boomers than the Millennials. This suggests a cultural change rather than one explained by generations.

Yes, high levels of Millennials are Atheist, Agnostic, Spiritual or None, but in most cases they started there and have never had a serious encounter with the church or other religious communities. It’s not that they’re leaving at greater rates than other sociological generations. 

Belief in God is only a small piece of the larger puzzle

Joel Thiessen, Ambrose University

Headlines grab, and this headline is in step with several decades of “positively” framed headlines. Technically the headline is not incorrect; it just doesn’t capture the main storyline and shifting trajectory of decline that I might stress.

This said, while I don’t like his use of and application of “polarization” language in recent years, this re-framing in his work better accounts for the religious declines that are present … seems to strike a better balance than Restless Gods in 2002, for instance.

We do, in fact, see a spread of varying beliefs across the more religious and secular ends of the continuum, and his descriptive data helpfully show this reality.

My take is that the question on belief in God is only a small piece of the larger puzzle on religion and religiosity in Canada. This question alone does not really tell us much about how salient this belief is for the rest of a person’s life.

For example, I’m thinking of Nancy Ammerman’s great work, Sacred Stories Spiritual Tribes, or the book I am currently reading, Prayer as Transgression? The Social Relations of Prayer in Healthcare Settings. Here we see what difference something like belief in God may or may not make in a person’s life, the particular aspects of one’s life, and so forth.

This is not a knock on Reg’s work; survey data can only tell us so much, where these other qualitative projects are very useful to give us thick description.

As such, my read of the data is “meh” – interesting data on belief in God that doesn’t really tell us a lot about what difference belief makes or not to people’s lived experiences, thus how high or low should people be in response to this data alone.

I am more interested in the saliency and importance of belief ramifications to better interpret the starting descriptive data on belief in God.

One more thing that I was thinking about was the diminished level of certainty in one’s belief in God. As Berger discussed in the 1960s, and Steve Bruce has since picked up on, with greater diversity of belief in a globalized world it stands that a greater segment of the population might become less certain as they see the variety of beliefs and practices around.

This diminished certainty happens simultaneous to the increased degrees of certainty at either end of the continuum (i.e., polarization in its worst form in society, as manifest in the USA, for instance).

Change from the past so striking

Stuart Macdonald, Knox College, University of Toronto

What I will say is that Christendom was alive in the 1950s! Amazingly so and for whatever reasons, but it was alive, and people were building new churches because there was a demand for them. 

What I would note is the contrast between then and now. 

Yes, people still believe in God... okay. But it all seems very vague. The change from the past is what I find so striking. 

I also think the headline misses far more important issues. 

One thing I'd be focusing on in the current situation (if I were doing polls) would be the potential damage being done to the "brand" of Christian within the broader Canadian culture, given its political associations in the United States and Russia with authoritarianism. 

I appreciate that's different research completely. Butto me far more relevant from a variety of perspectives.

A more complex picture

Lori Beaman, University of Ottawa

I don’t have much to add to the already insightful comments. I am not sure what measures of belief in God tell us about religion and social change.

I’d be more interested in exploring how people perceive God’s impact in their day to day lives and intersections around important issues like climate change, social justice and so on.

In other words, a more complex picture that focuses on practice rather than belief, or in addition to belief.

More important question is how belief affects behaviours

Kevin Flatt, Redeemer University College

I agree with what the others have said. Whether people believe in God, however defined, and how strongly, are interesting questions, but the more important question in my view is what their (non)belief means—if anything—for their values, priorities, behaviours, relationships, etc. 

That's where the action is. I suspect that over the past few decades a big chunk of Canadians have gone from saying "yes" to a belief-in-God question, but it not mattering very much for their priorities, behaviours, etc., to giving a "maybe" or "no" answer to the question that likewise doesn't matter much for the aforementioned list.

Shouldn’t forget magnitude of the trend

Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, University of Waterloo

I echo most of what my esteemed colleagues have already said, and don’t have a huge amount more to add.

I will say this: It’s easy to get jaded or bored by a trend that we’ve seen develop over many decades, but we shouldn’t forget the magnitude of that trend nonetheless.

In Charles Taylor’s words, we’re transitioning from an age that lasted many hundreds of years during which the vast majority of Westerners believed in a Christian God, to an age now where belief and non-belief coexist and each group experiences the ‘cross-pressures’ of the other. It’s a fundamental shift in the composition and prevalence of worldviews that has many consequences throughout society.

Yes, the belief in God survey question is but one indicator and has its limits. And yes, there is a lot more complexity playing out in reality. But I do think it has its merits, and it is still a good indicator to help measure this overall shift going on.

I’m currently looking at Millennial numbers for the U.S. and Canada, and they are very much at the forefront and further along in this trend.