Taking our temperature

Fascinating conversation about Canada and Christianity has been coming our way.

Some of it suggests we’re Canada the Cool, as in “with it,” progressive, tolerant, polite about faith.

Some of it says we’re really more like chilly, as in the “spiritual ice belt” (to borrow Martin E. Marty’s phrase), and growing chillier.

And some of it believes that, spiritually, Canada is warming up.

Distinguished evangelical scholar Mark Noll, who recently moved from Wheaton College to the University of Notre Dame (Ind.), made Canada the subject of his presidential address to the American Society of Church History in January. “What happened to Christian Canada?” published in Church History journal (June 2006), was written with an American audience in mind, he says, but he hopes Canadians who read it will benefit from the observations of one “sympathetic American.”

Benefit, indeed. Noll’s study tackles a complex history with thoroughness and insight, and is made even more pleasurable by the delight we Canadians derive from sustained interest shown in us (even if it’s puzzled) by anyone from our larger, more powerful neighbour.

Now it’s gone

Once there was a Christian Canada, says Noll, and now it’s gone. Canada has been “de-christianized.”

Under Canada’s new Charter of Rights and Freedoms, he writes, “Canadian legislation and jurisprudence have increasingly privileged principles of privacy, multiculturalism, enforced toleration, and public religious neutrality, even when such moves de-christianize public spaces in which religious language was once commonplace.”

We’ve taken a multi-everything outlook.

Census findings about church identification and attendance show “a dramatic inversion” compared to United States. Canadian church attendance proportionally exceeded church attendance in the U.S. by one-third to one-half in 1950, with church attendance in Quebec perhaps “the highest in the world.” Today, however, attendance in the U.S. is “probably one-half to two-thirds greater than in Canada, and attendance in Quebec the lowest anywhere in North America.”

So what happened to Canadian Christianity?

Noll describes the early establishment of a predominantly Protestant “Christian civilization” in English-speaking Canada that counterweighted Quebec’s strong Catholic presence, then traces rapid changes in the “two solitudes” after World War II – changes he calls “trajectories of de-christianization.”

Rejecting the revolution that birthed the United States, Canada had set upon a less republican course. While Americans aimed for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the motto of the Dominion formed in 1867 was “peace, order, and good government.” Religion in Canada thus became a significant cohesive force, binding scattered peoples.

Political changes in the 1960s, however, were the beginning of the end for a public life defined by religion.

Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution” emptied churches. The declaration of official bilingualism in 1969, promotion of multiculturalism as national policy beginning in 1971, the Free Trade Agreement, and the repatriation of the Constitution and new Charter of Rights were markers in a society moving away from its religious roots, notes Noll. “Equal access and mutual respect were assuming the public place that had once been occupied by recognition of the deity.”

81 percent of Canadians believe in God.

31 percent of Canadians are uneasy around born-again Christians.

Churches acted too

Noll shows that Canada’s de-christianization wasn’t just about political changes, however, or about new parties in Quebec and the West that pushed aside the churchly companions of former governments. Churches have “acted as well as been acted upon” in the re-location of cohesion from church to new political, economic, and ideological loyalties.

In both Catholic and mainline Protestant settings, he says, church leaders promoted agendas of reform that profoundly shifted their communities: by “personalist theology” and new possibilities for individual freedom in the case of Catholics and by “theological modernism and ethics of privatized selfhood” in the case of the United Church.

The irony, Noll says, is that the reforms won the minds of their respective churches, but left them with little “specifically Christian” to say to a society that had radically transformed along much the same lines. Noll references British sociologist David Martin, who suggests studies of de-christianization need to consider the content of messages, especially about God and redemption, adding, “The decline of preaching presumably has something to do with a diminishing stock of things to say.”

Sectarian and evangelical churches, including immigrant churches like the Mennonites, have gained strength since the 1940s, Noll says, but have not influenced broader society as Catholics and the older Protestants did. They have “often been content to remain in self-contained social, intellectual, and cultural ghettoes.”

A final insight Noll offers concerns the significance of the Second Vatican Council, which “disconcerted” rather than “energized” Canadian Catholicism. But it also unsettled Protestant churches, which had relied on a certain fear of and negativity about Catholics for their identity.

How we are

“How Canadian are you? The 2006 Canada Day Poll” (Maclean’s, July 1) confirms Noll’s assessment of where we’ve landed, but sounds positively thrilled in comparison. (It was a “giddy moment,” writer Lianne George recalls, when The Economist pronounced Canada “cool.”)

Maclean’s got a pre-publishing look at Lethbridge sociologist Reginald W. Bibby’s latest data in the Project Canada Survey Series (begun in 1975), which will appear this fall in The Boomer Factor: What Canada’s Most Famous Generation is Leaving Behind.

Bibby’s findings, it says, show we’ve “transformed” ourselves into one of the most pluralistic societies in the world. Personal freedom is our highest goal; and, says Bibby, we’ve taken “a multi-everything outlook.”

The study links changed attitudes about matters such as interracial and homosexual relationships and acceptance of relativism to official policies of multiculturalism, but the increased public influence of women has also been a factor, Bibby says; “women are quantifiably the more compassionate sex.”

Bibby further explains Canadians’ tendency to see in “increments of right-ish and wrong-ish” versus Americans’ preference for absolutes as a function of population. About a third of Americans identify with evangelical or conservative Christian groups, compared to eight percent of Canadians, he says. The larger numbers in the U.S. “shape the overall picture.”

Affirmative responses to survey questions on some fundamental religious beliefs were surprisingly high. Eighty-one percent of Canadians believe in God; two-thirds believe Jesus Christ is his divine Son.

But Canadian churches have always been “cautious,” Bibby says, “and careful to ‘play by the rules of diversity.’ ” Polite that is, not boasting too much or aggressively stealing sheep.

“Keeping religion out of the public sphere remains crucial to keeping the peace between denominations, and more critically, between religious and secular,” Maclean’s comments, going on to cite poll responses that showed 31 percent of Canadians said they felt uneasy around born-again Christians (compared to 24 percent around policemen and 18 percent around Muslims).

Church attendance numbers, however, which dropped disastrously after the 1960s, have shown a turn towards growth since 2000. In fact, Bibby thinks Canada may be heading for a “significant revitalization of organized religion.”

Not running

This is also the view of Brian C. Stiller, president of Tyndale College and Seminary and former head of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada.

Writing in ChristianWeek (June 9) Stiller’s reference to the 1960s’ “collapse of an old and tired theological liberalism” echoes Noll’s analysis. He also knows evangelicals feel marginalized, that they assume “Christian faith is on the run.” But in the wake of the collapse, he says, church groups that had been ignored began to show “energy and credibility.”

To his article title’s question, “Is Canada experiencing a renaissance of faith?” Stiller answers Yes – or is, at least, on the edge of it.

He points to Christian community ministries now on Canada’s “main street,” the tremendous movement of the Spirit in prayer across the country, and the rise of Christian universities. Evangelical views of the world have shifted from a “sectarian mindset” to engagement with the world. And, declares Stiller further, “The pendulum of secular denial [of faith] is now in retreat.”

What about MBs?

Mennonite Brethren are likely one of the “immigrant communities” Stiller was thinking of when he expresses amazement over what these groups are beginning to contribute to the Canadian religious scene.

Closer analysis of how MBs fit the conversations discussed above would require another article, but it is interesting to note what they were up to during the decades upon which Noll maps Canada’s turns to de-christianization.

MBs were completing a transition from German to English, getting involved on the ground floor of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (though also becoming more intentional about Anabaptism in their educational institutions), and fostering a strong national identity alongside their bi-national denominational one. For Mennonites, multiculturalism and some of its associated shifts did not represent spiritual loss but opportunity; it meant they were equally part of Canada’s beautiful mosaic!

We may wish to challenge the views – and underlying assumptions – about Canada’s spiritual temperature coming to us in these history lessons, surveys, and observations about life “at the edge of a renaissance.”

But we might also ask: how do we understand ourselves as a church in this particular nation, Canada? And, what is it that we need to be saying?