I. The Big Picture

The story of Christianity in Canada has so far been a tragedy in three acts: growth, hegemony, and decline. According to this plotline, familiar to students of secularization theory, we are now in the dénouement. Canada has become politically and socially liberal, well educated, industrialized (even “post-industrialized”), and increasingly uninterested, therefore, in religion—what we used to call “organized religion.”

The dramatis personae of this narrative are the four major denominations that commanded the adherence of the vast majority of Canadians for more than a century, from the 1850s until the 1960s—the Roman Catholic Church, the United Church of Canada (formed in 1925 from the Methodists, the Congregationalists, some small union churches, and most of the Presbyterians), the Anglican Church of Canada, and the remaining or “continuing” Presbyterian Church of Canada—plus a few relatively minor characters: evangelical denominations, other religions, and a cohort of those claiming “no religion,” known as the “religious nones.”

While historians have sketched in various parts of the narrative up to the 1960s, pride of place in telling the recent chapters of this story belongs to sociologist Reginald W. Bibby. Bibby, showing no signs of retirement, has been tracking national and regional patterns of religion in Canada since the 1970s and reporting on his five-year polls in a regular series of books and articles that amount to a comprehensive oeuvre not paralleled, to my knowledge, by anyone else's in the Anglosphere.

Bibby's latest book, Resilient Gods: Being Pro-Religious, Low Religious, or No Religious in Canada, is true to form: lots of statistics and charts, breezy summaries, a comparative context with a particular focus on the United States but also the United Kingdom and other countries, and a clever catchphrase—in this case, the subtitle: “Being Pro-Religious, Low Religious, or No Religious in Canada.” This locution pithily identifies the three cohorts he studies: those Canadians who are observant of, modestly affiliated with, and decidedly not aligned with organized religion.Footnote ³

In Resilient Gods, Bibby continues to promote the so-called polarization framework that he initiated as his new interpretation of Canadian religion in Beyond the Gods and Back (2011).Footnote ⁴ Having already emphasized in that earlier book the increasingly obvious gap in Canada between those very committed to organized religion and the rising numbers of those who have no religion, however, Bibby now wants to emphasize the latent, or at least nontraditional, religiosity of those in between. This group, he suggests, represents a considerable market for Canada's churches if they would only adjust their “supply” to meet the perpetual “demand” for knowledge of the afterlife and meaningfulness in this one. In this market-based construct, of course, Bibby follows Rodney Stark, Roger Finke, and Wade Clark Roof.

Still, the story is mostly bad news for Canadian Christianity. “It's as if a fire of secularization has devastated much of what, through the early 1960s, was a flourishing religious forest.”Footnote ⁵ “Around 1950, national religious service attendance, led by Quebec and the Atlantic region, was actually higher than that of the United States. Churchgoing was relatively high pretty much everywhere”—namely, about 60% as a national average of weekly churchgoing. By the year 2000, however, that fraction of just under two in three had become just one in four.Footnote ⁶

What happened? The two factors Bibby isolates are these: a shift in immigration patterns and the changing mindset of Canadians, led by the baby boomers.Footnote ⁷ Immigration quotas changed in the 1960s away from northwest Europe and toward the rest of the British Commonwealth and east Asia, opening the way to many more Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos, a population that cumulatively included only a minority of Christians. Non-Christian religions have therefore grown apace, even though added all together they amount to barely a tenth of the population. With this in mind, these streams have mostly fed the rising number of “religious nones” rather than expanding Christian churches.

What Bibby calls the “Great Religious Recession” took place also as the mainline Protestant groups no longer had the benefit of large and constant immigration from countries of their denominational traditions. Additionally, their birth rates decreased, and they seemed unable to retain their offspring's interest in religion. By the 1960s these groups had also mostly given up on evangelism, because proselytizing had come to be seen as impolite and even un-Canadian.Footnote ⁸

Bibby traces the decline particularly to the baby boomers; he notes that the attendance of the pre-Boomers, that is, people born before 1945, “remained a consistent 37% between 1975 and 2005.” As early as 1975, however, boomer attendance was much lower: 15%.Footnote ⁹ So it is not as if all Canadians marched in lockstep away from church: progressive age cohorts did so, starting with the generation of the 1960s. “The Boomer era saw a major shift in motivational emphasis from obligation to gratification. Themes like duty and loyalty were replaced by a market model. That model stressed the importance of following the axiom of marketing gurus: successful organizations determine needs and then meet them.”Footnote ¹⁰

One notes here the dovetailing with themes in Philip Rieff's classic book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1965), and Christian Smith's more recent characterizing of (North) American religion as moralistic therapeutic deism.Footnote ¹¹ Bibby also refers to the “death of deference,” a striking way of emphasizing the widely remarked decline of trust in authority typical of the 1960s.Footnote ¹² And, like other observers of the decade (notably the British historian Callum Brown), Bibby remarks on the huge migration of women out of the home and into the workplace following World War II, which resulted in the rise of family incomes and therefore the increased ability to purchase consumer goods, vacations, second homes, and a variety of other competitors with church life—coupled with a large decline in the church volunteer force.

An important correlation in his own statistics that Bibby does not happen to mention is that the difference between Canadians identifying with the mainline churches and those regularly attending those churches, previously quite large, shrinks to basically a one-to-one ratio.Footnote ¹³ The “default position” of church affiliation for other-than-spiritual reasons clearly and quickly was declining across the country.

In his most recent work, Bibby now wants to emphasize the “large and important segment of the population who constitute ‘the religious middle’ . . . [who are] neither embracing nor rejecting religion.” These are the people that he calls the “low religious.”Footnote ¹⁴ British sociologist Grace Davie is known for coining the phrase often deployed in such discussions, “believing but not belonging.” The question remains, of course, as to how much such people really believe and actually demonstrate in their behavior. Bibby's own statistics show that while those in the middle continue to espouse some version of traditional beliefs (for example, belief in God or a higher power, belief that Jesus was “the divine son of God”), they behave much more like atheists when it comes to such fundamental Christian practices as church attendance, Bible reading, and table grace.Footnote ¹⁵

The now-common term “SBNR” (“spiritual but not religious”) seems to mean “professing spiritual beliefs but manifesting little or no religiously distinctive behavior.” In fact, Bibby himself says, “despite describing themselves as spiritual, they are no more likely than those who define themselves as ‘religious’ to acknowledge that they have spiritual needs. They are far less inclined than the ‘religious and spiritual’ to indicate that they actually highly value spirituality—but considerably more likely not to value religion. And, contrary to stereotypes, SBNRs are only marginally more inclined than the ‘religious and spiritual’ to embrace alternative beliefs such as the possibility of having special psychic powers, precognition, or contact with the spiritual world.”Footnote ¹⁶

One wonders, therefore, whether this religious middle is in fact all that different from those who espouse no religion. Is there anything truly interesting about this religious middle, or is it merely a population in various stages of withdrawing from Canada's Christian cultural past and into a post-Christian/post-Christendom individualism? Are not such people, in fact—to borrow the famous term for the “do-it-yourself spirituality” (“Sheila-ism”) of Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart—just so many Sheilas?Footnote ¹⁷

Such questions are taken up by another recent survey of Canadian statistics, the masterful summary offered by two University of Toronto historians, Brian Clark and Stuart Macdonald, in Leaving Christianity: Changing Allegiances in Canada since 1945.Footnote ¹⁸ The authors repeat the grim news:

The authors continue:

Clarke and Macdonald note that, aside from the Pentecostals and a few other evangelical denominations, no Christian group has a happy tale to tell of late. Given that Sunday attendance at mass is required of all Catholics, it is striking how far attendance has fallen, particularly in Quebec but also across the country. And unlike the evangelicals, Catholics have been alienating their youth in particular: “Weekly attendance in Quebec has been in steep and steady decline among all age groups since . . . 1986. Among fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, the decline has been stunning. In 1986, close to a fifth of that age group attended mass weekly. Now it's just 1.5%.”Footnote ²⁰

Moreover, the number of Quebec Catholics who never attend has increased dramatically: from one-sixth of the Catholic population back in 1986, to two-fifths of the population in 2011.Footnote ²¹ As for the rest of Canada, one in four Catholics no longer attends church.Footnote ²² And the younger age group (15–24) had a church attendance rate of barely 11% in 2011.Footnote ²³

Still, as all observers of Canadian religion agree, the most remarkable change has been the rise of “No Religion” across the country.

Put in international context, the authors conclude that the proportion of “nones” in Canada is comparable to that found in France Sweden, and the United Kingdom—and thus significantly higher than the United States and even Australia.Footnote ²⁵

II. The Decline of Canada's “National” Church

After lacking a denominational history for the first 85 years of its life, Canada's largest Protestant communion, the United Church of Canada, suddenly gained three. The first is Don Schweitzer's edited book, The United Church of Canada: A History, which includes an eight-chapter summary of the church's history succeeded by six chapters of thematic reflections. A hint of what has happened to the United Church shows up in Schweitzer's table of contents. An entire chapter is devoted to a subject likely to surprise those not familiar with the last fifty years of United Church General Council debates: “Jews and Palestinians”—but there is no chapter on either evangelism or social action, formerly so crucial to the United Church that the two together were the concern of one of its most important national committees and many national initiatives.Footnote ²⁶

“In the minds of those who laboured to form the United Church, it was intended to play a decisive role in shaping the moral ethos of Canadian society by infusing the values of Evangelical British Protestantism into Canadian citizens and society through evangelism, Christian education, social service, public activism, and advocacy. This intention was reflected in its chosen name: The United Church of Canada. It was intended to become ‘the’ church, the ‘national’ Church of Canada.”Footnote ²⁷ This vision, however, has long faded away. “In Canadian society, religion is now generally regarded as a personal option that is not limited to Christianity. In the past, government policies and popular views might be criticized in public media as ‘un-Christian.’ Today it is Christianity that is likely to be criticized in public media as an obstacle to progress or a source of violence. This change in the United Church's context has contributed to it suffering a loss of membership, social status, and institutional vision.”Footnote ²⁸

Schweitzer's contributors continue the theme that the United Church changed as Canada changed—ironically, its quest to represent the mainstream of Canadian (Protestant) culture was realized in its entire history, both in its rise and in its fall. The United Church realized in the 1960s, at the pinnacle of its apparent success, that Canadian public life was rapidly transitioning from Christendom to a post-Christian celebration of diversity and individualism, from a normative Anglo-Protestant center to welcoming the previously marginalized. The United Church quickly matched strides with the culture, jettisoning evangelism for social protest and substituting apology and dialogue for proclamation:

The United Church thus made fundamental adjustments to its outlook and objectives:

Historian Phyllis Airhart, who teaches at the United Church seminary in Toronto, has produced her own history, A Church with the Soul of a Nation: Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada, that is built on the research of the late Keith Clifford and is cut from the same interpretative cloth as the Schweitzer volume. The United Church sought to represent the heart of (British Protestant) Canadian life, and it did—even when that heart lost interest in things British and Protestant and embraced a more cosmopolitan vision.Footnote ³⁰

“In many respects the church that was born in 1925 did not survive the tumultuous 1960s,” Airhart observes.Footnote ³¹ But the church metamorphosed into a home for the spiritual-but-not-religious and those continuing its social gospel tradition in the new registers of the second century of Canada's national life. “A Just Society replaced Christian Canada as a unifying vision of nationhood; Canadian culture was the new ‘orthodoxy,’ with a ‘common faith’ in human rights and social programs as its chief tenets.”Footnote ³²

How did the United Church so quickly and massively give way, however, to the new Zeitgeist? Airhart's research discloses an erosion of religious seriousness stretching back well before the 1960s. Indeed, the signs of diminishing piety were evident during the 1950s. “Sunday school sessions were shorter, and Sunday services were over by noon. Gone were afternoon Sunday schools (except in some rural areas in eastern Canada) and evening services” (177).Footnote ³³

Redeemer University historian Kevin Flatt's study of the United Church, After Evangelicalism: The Sixties and the United Church of Canada, shows that the makings of later United Church adaptability were in its very origins.Footnote ³⁴ “The central argument of this book is that after a lengthy period in which United Church leaders promoted key evangelical institutional practices while themselves rejecting evangelical beliefs (roughly from the 1930s to the early 1960s), the public evangelical identity of the United Church was systematically dismantled from within by its leaders in a relatively short time and replaced by new liberal one (between 1963 and 1971).”Footnote ³⁵ More particularly, “United Church leaders held generally non-evangelical beliefs but nevertheless enthusiastically promoted evangelical approaches to evangelism, moral reform, and Christian education.”Footnote ³⁶

Even as the church experienced a surge of revivalism and moral reform in the 1930s, those developments “did not indicate a repudiation of modernism or a widespread return to evangelical beliefs among church leaders. In fact, at the end of the decade, these leaders produced a Statement of Faith that incrementally moved the official position of the church further from evangelicalism.Footnote ³⁷ Flatt lists the following as increments: the loss of explicit mention of the three members of the Trinity, the personhood of the Holy Spirit and the deity of Christ, propitiation and justification, (physical) resurrection—all elements of the earlier doctrinal standard of the church, the Basis of Union.Footnote ³⁸ It is no surprise to him, therefore, that when the new cultural tide came in during the 1960s, the United Church, which had long since cut its moorings to traditional Christianity, could thereby float easily on the new currents.”

Flatt thereby combines the two rival narratives of secularization in the past generation or so of Canadian church historiography: the early change interpretation, which sees evidence of serious departures from evangelicalism as early as the late nineteenth century, and the late change interpretation, which suggests a quick and radical disjunction fostered by the cultural revolution of the 1960s. His combination notes that the practices continued (with, one might note, the retention also of much of the traditional rhetoric) even as the substantive content of the faith was being revised. In this pattern, the leaders of the United Church followed a paradigm stretching back to Schleiermacher himself who, indeed, longed to be thought of as a faithful Pietist, but “of a higher order.” And Airhart herself shows how ambiguous United Church leaders could be. She quotes one leader describing the church's theology as “orthodox liberalism or progressive conservatism,” oxymorons that would be somewhat familiar to Canadian readers of a certain age who remember a national political party called the Progressive Conservatives, even as they would likely baffle those from countries with more straightforward terms.Footnote ³⁹

So why did the United Church not continue to flourish? As Airhart notes, the very campaign by United Church leaders to get the federal and provincial governments to pay more attention to the needy ended up being ironically successful: as the state increasingly involved itself in social sectors (education, health care, welfare), its dominance gave the churches less and less to do in public life. With the church's abandonment, then, of energetic evangelism and spiritual experience in favor of dialogue and social action, there was less and less for the church distinctively to do besides issue political pronouncements, which it did with ever-increasing scope, frequency, and stridency, and ever-decreasing impact. Airhart concludes, “In 1960 almost everyone took [church leaders] seriously, but a decade later hardly anyone did.”Footnote ⁴⁰ And Flatt sardonically reflects on the “get with the times” advice of the 1960s, typified in journalist Pierre Berton's bestselling recommendations from The Comfortable Pew, that would do the United Church no good: “Unfortunately for the keep-up-or-die theory, however, things happened precisely opposite to its predictions. In rough proportion to the extent to which they followed Berton's advice, churches lost members.”Footnote ⁴¹

III. The Rise of the Evangelicals

Almost a decade ago, sociologists Sam Reimer and Michael Wilkinson launched the first-ever national, multidenominational survey of evangelical pastors, their findings conveyed in A Culture of Faith: Evangelical Congregations in Canada. Almost five hundred pastors responded to a lengthy telephone interview (a 40% response rate) and one hundred telephone interviews were undertaken with youth and children's pastors. Fifty pastors provided face-to-face interviews. And national leaders of the denominations in this study were interviewed as well. The congregations were from five major evangelical denominations in Canada: Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, the Christian Reformed church, the Mennonite Brethren, the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and the four Baptist conventions, thus representing a broad array of Canadian evangelical varieties and fully one-third of all the evangelical congregations in Canada (there are more than 100 evangelical Protestant denominations in Canada, as well as independent congregations).Footnote ⁴²

Reimer and Wilkinson confirm the finding, reported elsewhere, that evangelicals continue to hold their own in the face of decline among other kinds of Christianity in Canada, roughly 10% of the national population, a proportion they have maintained for a century. Moreover, “while evangelical Protestants make up only about 10% of the population, they account for approximately one-third of the nearly 30,000 congregations in Canada.”Footnote ⁴³

Why have evangelicals done relatively well? First, evangelical congregations promote distinctiveness. They recognize and even encourage tension with the broader society. Second, evangelical congregations promote a communal religiosity and in two respects: they have more and stronger relational ties with each other and fewer ties with people of other religions. Third, evangelical congregations promote religious experience, both individually and corporately. They celebrate the traditional one-time conversion experience but also regular times of encounter with God, particularly at the weekend church service, of course, but also daily in one's “quiet time” with God and in special times of revival. Fourth, evangelical congregations focus on youth and children. They sponsor Sunday schools, yes, but also youth groups led by youth pastors, summer camps, boys’ and girls’ clubs, and other resources to promote the spiritual well-being of their young. (Oddly, none of these books on evangelicals discuss the Christian contemporary music industry, a huge phenomenon overwhelmingly dominated by evangelicalism that surely plays a role in fostering youth adherence to the faith.)

“In sum, churches will have relative success in individualistic, pluralistic societies like Canada if they facilitate an external locus of authority in their constituents; supply a religiosity that is distinctive and communal, yet personally experiential; and prioritize the faith development of youth and children. We think that part of the success of evangelical congregations, and evangelicalism more broadly, then, is the type of religiosity they promote.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The contrast with the United Church is obvious.

There is no triumphalism here, however, but instead a warning: “While evangelical congregations appear to be doing well when compared with mainline Protestants, there are some demographic factors that show growth is slowing or has stopped completely.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Evangelical leaders tell us that the majority of their new churches are ethnic churches. Yet, even if most evangelical immigrants join evangelical churches, their proportion of the immigrant population (less than 16%, but we are not sure how much less) is not much higher than the current evangelical population of 10%. Of course, some evangelicals may be converts to Christianity, but evidence shows that the growth of immigrant conversion is slight. Add to this that evangelicals are having difficulty attracting the Canadian-born residents, while evangelical families also have fewer children than they did in previous generations. The demographic future does not look bright.Footnote ⁴⁶

The authors thus agree with their sociological peers that “the key mechanisms for growth are birthrates [and retention] and immigration patterns and, to a much lesser extent, denominational switching or conversions.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Reimer and Wilkinson are so convinced of that conventional wisdom, to which we shall return in conclusion, that the only hope they can muster is for what they imply is a sociological miracle: “Evangelical congregations may still see a brighter day if effective means of evangelism are found, or if demographics change.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Sociologist Adam Stewart trained a high-powered lens on three such evangelical congregations in The New Canadian Pentecostals. In truth, they are three Pentecostal congregations in southwestern Ontario. But Stewart found that all three, even given their different ages and demographics, were tending in the same direction: away from Pentecostal distinctives, which Stewart lists as speaking in tongues as the universal sign of receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit subsequent to conversion, plus healing, prophecy, other miraculous occurrences, and experience with the angelic and demonic. Canadian Pentecostals, at least as exemplified by these congregants, are embracing a “generic evangelicalism” more and more, which is nicely in line with American sociologist Christian Smith's concept of “moralistic therapeutic deism.”

At least, that is what Stewart thinks he is finding. Yet while his Pentecostal-cum-evangelicals are largely unaware of, and indifferent to, the classic Pentecostal marker of Spirit baptism-as-signified-by-tongues, they embrace and testify enthusiastically to experiences of healing and other encounters with the supernatural. These experiences, Stewart rightly notes, dovetail with the moralistic and therapeutic aspects of Smith's construct, but certainly not the deistic part. To be fair to Stewart, Smith himself fudges on the “deism” part as he allows that God can be called upon for help to resolve a problem. Even so, part of what continues to attract Canadians to evangelicalism is the promise and experience of a God actively and frequently involved in people's lives.

That would be, of course, in people's private lives. But what about in public life?

IV. Religion in Public

Two books trace the diminishing evidence of religion in Canadian public life. Religion and Canadian Party Politics, written by Ontario professors Rayside, Sabin, and Thomas, provides an account of religion and Canadian politics in which they make three broad claims. First, the division between Catholic and Protestant Christians, a division so important that it had to be addressed in the Canadian Constitution, survived as a factor in both voting patterns and party platforms until the most recent several decades (1990s and onward). It seems no longer, however, to be important.Footnote ⁴⁹

Second, the stronger division now is between the religiously observant, who incline toward what the authors call social conservativism, and the religiously lax, skeptical, or simply nonaligned, who tend toward social progressivism. However, the authors properly note that the “conservative versus progressive” lines are not fixed, since some evangelicals (notably the Mennonite tradition) can be found on the progressive side of some issues, while some secularists (specifically Québécois nationalists) fiercely defend certain religious traditions and artifacts, such as the crucifix in the National Assembly chamber, as symbols of identity.

Observant Christians in Canada do not inevitably and entirely line up behind a particular political party. Advocacy of same-sex marriage (passed by the Canadian Parliament in 2005) drove many away from the Liberal and New Democratic parties into the arms of the Conservatives. And the current Trudeau regime has not helped the situation, as the prime minister has insisted on a strong pro-choice stance, support for physician-assisted suicide with little regard for conscientious objection, the legalization of marijuana, and other issues not likely to win over religious conservatives. However, the previous Conservative regime of Stephen Harper eventually so thoroughly alienated many believers through Harper's lackluster support for and even foot-dragging resistance to their concerns about abortion, same-sex marriage, and the other key elements of their social agenda that evangelicals once again distributed themselves across the parties in the federal election of 2015, at which point fully half of Canadian evangelicals supported other parties despite their antipathy for so many Liberal positions. The authors conclude that the influence of religiously motivated social conservativism is declining in Canada, both because the number of such people is declining, but also because they refuse to automatically and always to line up behind the most conservative party in an election. They instead weigh up a variety of issues and vote accordingly. (American readers will, of course, take a moment to ponder this fact in comparison with recent evangelical voting patterns in their own country.) The specter of a powerful Religious Right in Canada has, once again, been refuted by actual data.

Third, religious differences figure in conflicts over the accommodation of peculiar immigrant practices, particularly those stemming from minority faiths. Again, however, the situation is not binary. Some theologically conservative and observant Christians have been stalwart defenders of minority rights, such as the wearing of Islamic head coverings, and they have hosted many Islamic refugees, even as members of those same constituencies have harbored considerable suspicion of newcomers, particularly Muslims. Meanwhile, leftist secularists, particularly, but not only, in Quebec, paradoxically have joined political conservatives, notably the Harper government, in antipathy toward certain minority faith practices. So there is no clear polarization in Canada between enlightened liberals and xenophobic conservatives, but instead there is considerable complexity about allies and opponents, issues and implications.

Commendably, the book deals not only with federal politics and the heavyweight provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia but also with regions demonstrating different patterns. Newfoundland and Labrador, whose late entry into Confederation (1949) and whose extraordinarily large proportions of Pentecostals and Salvationists made it unique, at least until very recently, gets a long look, and even New Brunswick, Canada's most anonymous province, appears briefly as well as a case of enduring Catholic/Protestant and French/English divisions. Strikingly, the authors also look north, comparing the secularism of Yukon with the piety of Nunavut. Indeed, this is the only significant mention of native peoples in any of the books under review.

Janet Epp Buckingham's lightly revised dissertation, Fighting Over God: A Legal and Political History of Religious Freedom in Canada, surveys many of the over 4000 legal cases involving religion in Canada. Fighting over God is oddly titled, since “God” is rarely at stake in these cases, while the religious freedom of individuals and institutions always is. Buckingham groups the cases under key headings: education, broadcasting, religious expression, employment, other religious practices, family life, and religious institutions, with, of course, some overlap in each.Footnote ⁵⁰

Epp Buckingham sustains three now familiar themes. The first involves religious conflicts between the French and British, the Catholics and Protestants. Would Canada be primarily British and Protestant with a small French Catholic minority? Or is Canada the product of two nations working together? This issue has stayed largely regional: for example, the defense of the French language and of Francophone populations in Quebec and New Brunswick and the perpetuation of significant financial support for Catholic schooling in Ontario and a few other jurisdictions in the country. The second theme focuses on religious minorities. Before World War II, “religious minorities tended to be excluded or ignored.”Footnote ⁵¹ After that, Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses in particular lobbied successfully for human rights legislation, and by 1982, the new Charter of Rights and Freedoms had entrenched those rights in Canadian law. The third theme is secularization and particularly the question of whether governments should maintain neutrality toward religion or act instead to marginalize religion and relegate it to private life, especially the private life of individuals but not the private life of communities. “If religious freedom is reduced to an individual right,” Epp Buckingham suggests, “it [merely] becomes equated with freedom of conscience.”Footnote ⁵²

Alas, while Epp Buckingham understandably fears the rise of secularism in the halls of Canadian cultural power rather than mere secularity, she seems unable, or at least unwilling, to specify a legal situation to protect the legitimate rights of religious communities in balance with the religious rights of individuals who may not want to conform in every respect to the dictates of those communities. Nor does she indicate to what extent those who do not belong to those communities are obliged to accommodate those communities. She never actually defines what a religious community is in terms of Canadian law—a key question, of course—nor how the language of rights ought to apply to such an entity. We do not advance much past questionable axioms, such as “Religious organizations must be free to grow and develop free from the state,” and dubious generalizations, such as “The level of state regulation of religious institutions in Canada is high,” a judgment accompanied by no canon or frame of reference.Footnote ⁵³

We thus gain no theoretical and political improvement beyond the famous Bouchard-Taylor Commission's recommendation of “reasonable accommodation.” Brief references to sociologist Lori Beaman's concept of “deep equality” and lawyer Iain Benson's notion of “deep diversity” remain, alas, at the level of suggestive slogans. How post-Christian Canada ought to foster or even just accommodate religion in public life remains unclear, even as religion refuses to fade away nicely according to the secularization trope.

V. The Post-Christian Future

Clearly, large sections of the Canadian religious landscape remain dark, or only slightly illuminated, by this set of recent books. Lutheran, Orthodox, and other significant groups of Christians remain on the periphery, while native peoples and members of other religions show up also only in passing. Given the increasing prominence of evangelicalism in the narrative, furthermore, study of evangelical special purpose or “parachurch” groups remains underdeveloped, despite their importance in evangelical life.Footnote ⁵⁴

Still, the overall picture seems clear enough. Observant Christianity remains vital in Canada, although clustered mostly in Roman Catholic and evangelical circles. The mainline denominations have diminished drastically and show no signs of revival. Non-Christian religions continue to grow, largely through immigration. Even then, however, second- and third-generation immigrants tend to “deviate toward the cultural mean,” so we shall see how observant they are decades hence. Meanwhile, the number of religions “nones” increases.

What, then, about the many Canadians in the “middle,” the de-churched or un-churched individuals who are still willing to identify themselves with the Christian faith? Bibby has been hopefully recommending for decades that churches to reach out to these latent members. But two of the books under review take steady aim at this idea.

At the macro level, Clarke and Macdonald indicate, in line with the underappreciated work of sociologist Kurt Bowen published more than a decade ago, that those folk in the middle show much stronger similarities with the “No Religion” group than with what Bowen called the “Very Committed.”Footnote ⁵⁵ While Stewart wonders if a number of Pentecostals identify instead as mere “Christians” or “Protestants,” thus confusing census-takers and giving hope that evangelicalism, or at least Pentecostalism, might be more vital than it appears, Clarke and Macdonald show that the vast majority of those in the census categories “Christians not included elsewhere” and “Protestants not otherwise specified” demographically and behaviorally look very much like religious “nones.”

At the microlevel, sociologist Joel Thiessen's disaffiliated Calgary, Alberta, interview subjects studied in The Meaning of Sunday: The Practice of Belief in a Secular Age, show little inclination to investigate, much less join, even neighborhood congregations that offer what they say they want in a church.Footnote ⁵⁶ Only a tiny minority—two in twenty-five of those who say they desire, or might desire, greater involvement—have actually attempted greater involvement:

Thiessen concludes, “Marginal affiliate religious belief and practice is in many respects more similar to those of religious ‘nones’ than active affiliates. My sense is that if marginal affiliates change their level of involvement, it is most likely going to be toward the religious none end of the continuum rather than the active affiliate side.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The polarization of Christianity in post-Christian Canada therefore seems destined to increase.

Bibby, however, might have the last word as well as the first, or at least the next. For, as church historians know, the growth of early Christianity could hardly be credited merely to favorable immigration patterns plus a high birth rate plus strong retention of youth.Footnote ⁵⁹ If we fast-forward from early Christianity to the eighteenth century's emerging Pietistic and Methodist evangelicalism, their ability to win over disaffected populations was key to their success. Among whom did the “Canada Fire” burn from the Maritimes to Upper Canada in the eighteenth and nineteenth century such that Noll's “Christian Canada” could be formed in the first place?Footnote ⁶⁰ And surely the global expansion of evangelicalism today cannot be attributed merely to immigration and reproduction.

To be sure, perhaps the interest of 10% of the population is all evangelicalism can aspire to in a country as comfortable, busy, and secure as Canada. Perhaps evangelical churches themselves have blunted their evangelistic edges with too many compromises with that culture, enduring, if not thriving, because they do not ask too much of it and offer enough to it. If there is one thing church historians know, however, it is that the future is not dictated by social scientific paradigms and prognostications.