Is it possible to know how many people in Canada and the U.S. are religious? Ryan Burge, who studies religion in the U.S., says no. But some Canadian scholars disagree—although they note we could do a better job at asking questions about religiosity and spirituality. And they agree that the number of people who claim to be religious is declining. Read about it in my recent column.
Also find below the full answers from the scholars who responded to my query about this topic.
Sam Reimer, Crandall University
I think Ryan is saying what we all know—that different polls/surveys give different results, and it probably good to find some middle ground based the different results. What we do know is that these results, though never perfect, are better than our best guess! What is clear is the percentage of people who have no religious identity is increasing in both NA countries, and that younger generations are more likely to be nones than older generations (see Sarah WL new book).
Obviously, different polls use different methodologies, different wording in the question, which will give different results. Differing results can also be related to which religious groups are listed, the order of the questions on the survey, and other factors. It seems like Canadians are more likely to select a religious identity in the census than on an online survey. The census has less nones. This may be because they are more likely to want to identify according to their family's historical religion on the census, or panels tend to have more young respondents, not sure.
Joel Thiessen, Ambrose University
I agree that we lack objective metrics for ‘religiosity.’ Still, I’m partial to a relatively objective metric of ‘religious nones’ to simply mean someone who does not identify with a religion or religious group. This approach privileges affiliation as the lowest common denominator, separate from the varied beliefs or behaviours that may or may not accompany a religious none.
However, even when measuring ‘religiosity’ as a category, consistent measures – however imperfect – still yield useful descriptions and comparisons to track changes over time. And yet, as Burge intimates, we still need to be cautious in our interpretations of what these data reveal or not across time and space, mindful along the way of different forms and expressions – and thus measures – of religiosity over time.
Ideally, we should aim to compare the constant measures of religiosity that survey researchers have used over time (e.g., belief, behaviour, belonging, and even salience), accounting for new/evolving measurements plus variations across religious groups/traditions whenever possible and applicable.
Moreover, we must gather and pay attention to high quality and multi-layered forms of qualitative research that can offer a far more granular understanding of what quantitative indicators mean or not. Nancy Ammerman and Lori Beaman are two great examples of what difference this approach can have on our scholarly understandings and interpretations of (non)religion.
I’m far less comfortable with the assertion that “There’s no objective measuring stick for us. So, everything is just a series of best guesses.” Guesses is an unfair and misleading descriptor, reducing the role of legitimate experts in this space (all of us!) to armchair fill-in-the-blanks. Just because we cannot draw upon objective measures does not imply we’re just guessing.
Our work as scholars of religion is set apart both in our ability to measure different aspects of (non)religion and religiosity, however imperfect, and then to interpret those data carefully and robustly. In the process, we must – and no doubt are – cautious to not overstate what the data potentially mean or not. This latter contribution of interpretation is part of what sets us apart from the armchair guesser.
Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, University of Waterloo
I agree and echo Sam’s and Joel’s thoughts. Any measure of a concept, including of religion, will never be perfect. Additionally, there are many dimensions of religiosity to measure. So it’s important to build good-quality measures, and to clearly state what they are when presenting results from them.
And even though no one study is ever perfect, a good-quality empirical study of (non)religion with a clearly defined measure and a pretty representative sample is much, much better than just a guess.
I proceed with survey/Census data on (non)religion in the same way as many recommend working with election polls: don’t rely on just one poll alone, but instead look at all the data being gathered (and we’re fortunate that there is quite a bit out there), and identify the trends that emerge (along with any discrepancies in results).
This allows us to get a good sense of where trends appear in the various ways we measure religiosity dimensions, and where findings are still mixed and more study is needed.
John Stackhouse, Crandall University
A few small points, then, if I may.
1. In my work on evangelicalism, I’ve long chided pollsters—going back to George Rawlyk’s 1990s poll with son-in-law Andrew Grenville, working with Angus Reid at the time, and recently with Cardus/Canadian Bible Society—that definitions of a religious group should be “own-able” by representative members of that group. If the observer’s definition, that is, materially differs from the participant’s definition—and particularly from that of the leaders and spokespeople for that group—then a yellow flag should go up.
(I published an article a few [!] years ago to show that the massive scholarship on conversion that both drew from and applied to Billy Graham generally misunderstood conversion as taught by evangelicalism in general and by Graham himself—such that most sociologists literally didn’t understand what they were looking at when they looked at Billy Graham: "Billy Graham and the Nature of Conversion: A Paradigm Case," Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 21 (1992): 337-50.
When it comes to evangelicalism, to illustrate, I insist (most recently in Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction) that all six descriptors ought to be present if one is confidently identifying evangelicalism: Trinitarian theology; the centrality of the Bible to theology, ethics, and piety; conversion as both gift and quest; missional vocation; pragmatic flexibility beyond core convictions; and populism in both theological authority and ecclesiastical politics.
These, I am confident, can be reduced to good survey questions and—my point here—all must be present, not just some, to be sure you have found evangelicals, rather than this or that other kind of Christian.
Even more basically, with church attendance statistics continuing to decline, pollsters are, in my view, caving in (and have for thirty years) to count evangelicals-in-good-standing among those who go to church only monthly.
But mere monthly attendance, outside of special circumstances (like frontier conditions in which a church is a twenty-mile horseback ride away, or Chinese conditions in which precious pew seats are rationed), is not consistent with a form of religion that emphasizes vitality. John Wesley, in short, would not have approved of any Methodist attending church only monthly. Any good evangelical pastor would feel the same.
Thus many things are attributed to “evangelicals” that are true only of people who for one reason or another happen to be caught in a too-wide net.
2. Having said all that (!), I’m reminded of Michael Lindsay’s sociological work on American evangelical elites (published eventually as Faith in the Halls of Power, OUP 2008) in which he reported that fully one-quarter of these successful people identifying as evangelicals didn’t go to church. And I know a number of keen evangelicals who struggle with churchgoing.
So do I contradict myself? Then I contradict myself! But disillusionment with contemporary church life is actually characteristic of the evangelical heritage—indeed, characteristic of its “feeder” movements of Puritanism and Pietism.
What Lindsay also reports is that these disaffected evangelicals nonetheless met regularly with intimate and sustaining small groups of fellow believers. And that is a page right out of the Pietist playbook, taken up by, yes, Wesley himself. So then the pollster must ask a question about some other form of sustaining religious fellowship. And Bob, as they say, is your uncle.
3. I think likewise, then, of the massive decline of church attendance among Canadian Roman Catholics. Given that form of religion’s understanding of the sacraments, you just can’t be a “good Catholic” and not regularly attend mass. That’s just not how that religion works, so to speak.
So, again, pollsters need to hear from spokespeople in that religion and informed experts on that religion to draft their questions to make sure they are finding who and what they want to find. And the resistance of sociologists as a group even to read us historians, let alone us theologians (as is persistently evident in sociological bibliographies and footnotes), is sometimes a truly fatal flaw in the sociology of religion.
In sum, the right questions will come from a proper grasp of the thing to be found. Part of what is making the results vary in these disparate polls is more-or-less accurate definitions.
Rick Hiemstra, Evangelical Fellowship of Canada
I agree that some measure is better than no measure, but John Stackhouse makes some very good points. In my world, I look at evangelical Christians. As John points out in this paper, Stackhouse Jr, John G. “Defining ‘Evangelical.’” Church & Faith Trends 1, no. 1 (October 2007): 1–5. Evangelicals can be operationalized by type or by movement.
On a recent Angus Reid survey, we asked a religious affiliation question (movement) and the Christian Evangelical Scale questions (type), and we asked respondents straight up whether they considered themselves to be evangelical Christians. I realize that the last question could be considered a movement question, but our religious affiliation question found a different set of people than our do-you-consider-yourself-to-be-an-evangelical-Christian question.
So, who are the real evangelicals then? Is it those who claim to be evangelical but have nothing to do with an evangelical church and who don’t evidence the beliefs and behaviours of evangelicals? Is it those found by the Christian Evangelical Scale who don’t consider themselves to be evangelical, nor do they affiliate with an evangelical church. Is it those who affiliate with an evangelical church, but don’t consider themselves to be evangelical, nor do they have the beliefs and behaviours that the CES measures?
Let me present the CES and affiliation data another way:
Here you can see that
evangelical affiliates are found across the CES scale.
My colleague Lindsay Callaway and I are working on a survey of the ways evangelicals are operationalized in North America. In the U.S. it is almost always doctrinal scales, not behaviours.
As Sam Reimer points out in his recent book Caught in the Current, and as Abby Day points out, statements of belief are now often performative. This means they’re more about belonging than about someone having considered a doctrinal proposition and decided that this is what they believe. This means that the American operationalizations are more likely to indicate a tribe than a conviction.
The EFC has used the Christian Evangelical Scale, however, we’re working towards holding a consultation on revising it because, as the first figure above shows, it doesn’t do a great job of finding evangelicals. As Joel and Sam point out, it does find something, and that’s better than nothing, but I think we can do better.
As Lindsay and I are discovering, some of the American operationalizations are baffling. For example, Barna has 4-point and 9-point evangelical definitions (all doctrinal statements), and yet the 4-point definition is not a subset of the 9-point definition. You can see for yourself here: https://www.barna.com/glossary/
And yet, these are the stats many rely on when they talk about evangelicals. In one definition we found, Evangelicals are defined as ethnically white?! It’s no wonder people are finding a link between evangelicalism and white-ness. They just started with that assumption.
So, I agree with John Stackhouse that there need to be measures of piety (behaviours) to substantiate measures of doctrine. Doctrine alone just isn’t good enough to find evangelical Christians. The CES asks just one behavioural question (frequency of religious service attendance). That one question, however, is one more than other scales use.
The CES has an evangelism question, but it’s not about whether people evangelize, rather it asks if you think evangelism is important. If there ever was a question that begged for a performative answer from evangelical affiliates, this is it.
I personally find a lot of media representations of evangelicals (that are usually bad) frustrating when they’re relying on measures that may not actually be finding my community. Evangelicals certainly have our sins to answer for, but often the ways we’re portrayed are barely recognizable to us.
We should be more skeptical about measures of religiosity than we are. I suspect most of us accept uncritically the stats that confirm our own biases, but this is dangerous in a culture awash in stats and fragmenting under the considerable social pressures of the moment.
Kevin Flatt, Redeemer University
I have little expertise to add to the original question. I'll just note that as the number of "nones" grows, I become more and more interested in studies and surveys that can begin to discern some of the different subsets of this category. Of course, nones have in common that they do not affiliate with or identify with a "religious" tradition.
But just as there are many different varieties of religion and ways of being religious, some of which lead to meaningfully different ways of life, there are differences among the non-religious too in terms of the values, beliefs, and behaviours that shape their lives.
I'm aware of a few books and studies that have started to ask these questions, but several of you are experts on this, and I'd love to hear your pointers for the best places to start to learn more about this question.
Peter Schuurman, Redeemer University
Shipley and Young have a recent book on sexuality, gender, and religion (Identities Under Construction) and they have a nice section on how religion could learn from gender studies about the wide variety of lived experience. In this sense, sexual studies are "ahead" (I hate that word) of religious studies. They say we need a new grammar for religion. You can see from the ol' SBNR term that we do have our own acronyms in the world of religion (!). I have a book coming out with Angela Bick this spring (we hope) introducing another term. We'll see if it catches on.
Secondly, I have a friend who is a pagan Catholic Jew. She said surveys never work for her. Does she contradict herself? Then she contradicts herself! These are the days of blessed incoherence. Polls just can't capture those layers (paradoxes? jumbles?) The multiphrenic self said Gergen in The Saturated Self. Or you might say, we are legion, to put a more ominous pall over the issue. Is it Advent soon? I'm feeling more liturgical--almost Catholic. We'll see.
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