What would happen to society if religion disappeared? Nothing worth worrying about, according to a new book

What would happen if all places of worship closed tomorrow? No services at churches, mosques, synagogues, gurdwaras or temples, and nobody saying they were religious anymore. 

The answer, according to a new book is — nothing. No societal collapse, no dramatic rise in crime, no huge fall in morality. 

That’s the conclusion of Goodbye Religion: The Causes and Consequences of Secularization (NYU Press) by American sociologists Ryan Cragun and Jesse Smith. 

Based on their interviews with over 100 people who are religious, were never religious or who left religion, together with data from the General Social Survey and other research in the U.S., they say Americans would remain engaged in society, volunteer, give to charity and continue to strive to make the world a better place—they wouldn’t start stealing, cheating on taxes, not paying bus fare, accepting bribes or committing acts of violence. 

A non-religious world wouldn’t be a catastrophe, in other words. 

Read about the book and its conclusions in my most recent Free Press column.

For singer/songwriter Steve Bell, life still filled with surprises—including a new album called "The Glad Surprise"

For Winnipeg Christian singer and songwriter Steve Bell, the release of his 23rd album this month is surprising for a few reasons.

For starters, Bell — who will be 65 next year — is surprised to still be recording and touring more than 45 years after starting in the music business.

“When I started in my late teens, I never expected to still be playing all these years later,” he said. “I’m actually shocked to still be making music at my age.” 

Read more about other things that surprise Steve, along with more information about his new album in my Free Press column.

“We wanted to know how our faith could be real for others in Altona.” Seeds Church finds a creative way to serve through The Community Exchange

During my 21 years as a faith columnist and reporter, I have chronicled the changes to religion in Canada—especially the decline of Christianity and decrease in attendance at and affiliation with churches. 

When it comes to what's happened to Christianity in Canada over the past two decades, there’s no sugarcoating it. The changes are real and have accelerated since the pandemic.

But that’s not the only story about Christian faith in Canada these days. That’s why I am happy to also tell stories about congregations like Seeds Church in Altona—congregations that are finding new and creative ways to be church in their communities. 

In 2022 the church created The Community Exchange (TCE), a separate organization that uses their building to provide people with meals, a place to practice English skills, to pick up warm clothing for winter along with other essential household items, or to get connected with various kinds of services. 

“We had some vibrant conversations about what it means to be the church in our community,” said co-pastor Darlene Enns-Dyck. “We wanted to know how our faith could be real for others in Altona.”

Read about Seeds Church in the Free Press. Bonsus sidebar about Central Station in Winkler, which inspired the creation of TCE. It was started by the Winkler Mennonite Brethren Church.

50th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons: From a portal to the demonic to being used by churches to engage youth

 

Fifty years ago, a new game appeared on the scene: Dungeons & Dragons. Soon after being introduced, the fantasy role-playing game, with its magic, wizards, sorcerers and warlocks, was criticized by many Christian leaders who saw it as a portal to the demonic — a way for Satan to steal the souls of unsuspecting youth. 

That was during the time of the so-called “satanic panic,” when some Christians saw the devil everywhere they looked, from heavy metal music to graffiti. 

In at least two churches in Winnipeg today, however, D&D is seen in a very different light—they use it as a way to engage and reach out to youth.

Read about it in the Free Press.

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.

Do lakes have rights? Indigenous people in Manitoba say yes

Are Indigenous people in Canada the William Wilberforces of our time when it comes to the environment and protecting creation? 

That’s what I ask in my most recent Free Press column, in response to a lawsuit filed by the Southern Chiefs’ Organization in Manitoba declaring Lake Winnipeg a person with constitutional rights to life, liberty and security of person. 

That may strike non-Indigenous Canadians as unusual. That’s how some viewed Wilberforce 200 yearw ago, when he argued for an end to the slave trade in Great Britain. Opponents cited the negative economic consequences if it was ended. Some even used the Bible to justify its continuation. 

Wilberforce was not swayed. Saying he felt called by God to end slavery, for 20 years he advocated tirelessly for an end to the buying and selling of human beings. In 1807, his efforts were rewarded when the slave trade was abolished in that country. 

Today, Indigenous people are doing something similar, arguing that the earth has rights—just as Wilberforce argued that enslaved people had inherent rights, too. He concluded one speech about the horrors of slavery by telling his fellow Parliamentarians: “Having heard all of this, you may choose to look the other way. But you can never again say you did not know.” 

Because of the Southern Chiefs, maybe when it comes to the health of Lake Winnipeg we can never say we didn’t know, either. 

Read the column here. 

Photo above: Southern Chiefs’ Organization Grand Chief Jerry Daniels. Credit Brook Jones of the Free Press.

Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities mark Oct. 7 anniversary

Monday is the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and the subsequent war in Gaza. 

It’s a tough time for Jewish and Palestinian/Muslim communities alike. As religion reporter at the Winnipeg Free Press, I looked at how those two communities in the city are responding to the anniversary, along with what some Christian groups are doing. Find the links below. 

Anniversary of Oct. 7 trauma colours High Holiday observance for city’s Jewish community 

Churches lament war’s anniversary 

A ‘very hard’ time for Muslims (sidebar to story above) 

And this one, about how Palestinians in Gaza honoured the memory of Israeli peace activist Vivian Silver, originally from Winnipeg, who was killed in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. An aid station in Gaza was named in her honour. (See photo above.)