When it comes to religiosity, what if we are measuring the wrong thing?

When it comes to religiosity, what if we are measuring the wrong thing? That’s the question that came to mind when I read a report about the decline in church attendance in Canada. 

I ask the question because attendance at religious services is one of the important ways Statistics Canada measures religiosity — along with religious affiliation (what faith you identify with), frequency of participation in private religious or spiritual activities (prayer or devotions) and the importance of religious or spiritual beliefs in how to live one’s life. 

Of those four markers, attendance at worship services is one of the more easy to measure. (And also one of the easiest to fib about since many people say what they think they should be doing, but not what they are actually doing.)

Whether people are fibbing or not, attendance at Christian worship services is clearly in decline (with some exceptions). That's what a 2021 report by the Association for Canadian Studies (ACS) and Leger, a Canadian-owned marketing and analytics company, found. 

According to the survey, respondents who said they never attend services increased from 30 per cent pre-pandemic to 67 per cent in 2021. 

And not only that; the poll found while 60.5 per cent of Canadians who say they strongly believe in God never or rarely attended a religious service since the beginning of the pandemic. 

Those findings echo a survey in fall by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. It found that weekly religious service attendance in Canada fell from 11 per cent pre-COVID — a figure that was stable for several years — to nine per cent during COVID. This included online services. 

It’s easy to blame the pandemic for the decline. After 22 months of interruptions and cancellations to in-person services, it’s easy for people to fall out of old habits or develop new ones. 

But attendance was falling even before COVID-19. According to Statistics Canada, from 1985 to 2019 the number of people who said they attended a group religious activity at least once a month fell by almost half, from 43 per cent to 23 per cent.  The pandemic didn’t cause the decline, in other words — it just accelerated it.   

And it’s not like not attending services is affecting the way many Canadians view spirituality. Despite the drop in attendance, the poll by ACS and Leger found a third of Canadians still say religion is important in their lives. At the same time, there was only a slight decrease in belief in God. 

A survey in spring by Angus Reid found something similar related to attendance. It prompted Angus Reid president Shachi Kurl to say while some people suffered in terms of spiritual health, “others came out stronger than ever before . . . people saw that God is not in a building, God is also inside us.” 

The drop in attendance makes me wonder if the counting the number of people who attend religious services isn’t a good way to measure religiosity in Canada any longer. 

That’s the view of Brian Clarke, who teaches at the Toronto School of Theology. “The idea that gathering for weekly congregational worship is the chief form of religious observance is a Christian one,” he said, referencing how Christianity has traditionally operated with saved or unsaved, heaven or Hell and member or non-member categories. 

As fewer Canadians identify with organized religion today, Clarke is becoming interested in the concept of “lived religion,” the study of what people do outside of sanctioned sacred spaces and activities like worship services. 

For him, it’s about looking at what practices people engage in and asking how they appropriate them, refashion them and cobble ideas and practices from various religious traditions together — with or without attending formal religious services. 

Lori Beaman of the University of Ottawa feels similarly. Yet, as someone who studies religion in Canada, she is reluctant to give up counting bodies at services. By dropping that marker, it would be tough to compare changes in religion in Canada over time. 

“I think in a perfect world we’d keep the old categories and introduce several more to capture the dynamic nature of religion and nonreligion,” she said — things like including alternative spiritual practices like doing yoga, a walk in the woods or walking a labyrinth. 

This will be hard, she acknowledged; how do you measure the spiritual influence of a daily walk in the woods? And yet, it’s the same with attendance. Going to services can only provide a limited amount of information about the role it plays in people’s spiritual lives. Just being at a service doesn’t reveal much about a person’s individual spirituality. 

This is not a new question. Back in the late 1990s, William Closson James addressed this topic in Locations of the Sacred: Essays on Religion, Literature and Canadian Culture. (Wilfred Laurier University Press.) 

In the book, the professor emeritus of Queen’s University said: “To the extent that our culture is secular, or the extent that we exist amidst a plurality of cultural forms infused with religious material, to that extent it is impossible to generalize about a single sacred anchoring point for Canadian culture, as if there were only one.” 

For that reason, he preferred to speak in the plural of “locations of the sacred,” in Canadian life, something he regarded as being “multiple, fluid and impossible to fix in any permanent or lasting way.” 

Today, as attendance at religious services declines, maybe researchers will need to find new ways to understand the many ways Canadians encounter the sacred. I look forward to what they discover.

From the January, 2021 Free Press.