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What happened to Christian Canada? (1).

Article Excerpt
By asking "what happened to Christian Canada," I begin with an assumption that there once was a Christian Canada which is now gone. That assumption is intentional. It is intended to highlight not only the dramatic changes that have taken place in Canadian religious life over the last sixty years, but also substantial contrasts between the religious histories of Canada and the United States, which otherwise are so similar in so many respects. (2) This paper explores the question primarily with American observers in mind, for whom the Canadian past is often as much a shadowy mystery as the great expanse of Canadian geography. But I hope Canadians who read this account may benefit from observing how one sympathetic American views their history and also from realizing that the splendid array of marvelous historical studies that have been produced by a splendid array of marvelous Canadian historians have reached at least some appreciative readers in the United States.

A historical snapshot illustrates the contrasts over time with which I am concerned. On September 15, 1959, Georges Vanier was installed as Canada's nineteenth Governor-General, the Queen's formal representative in her Canadian dominion. Vanier, a much decorated general, diplomat, and active Roman Catholic, began his acceptance speech like this: "Mr. Prime Minister, my first words are a prayer. May Almighty God in his infinite wisdom and mercy bless the sacred mission which has been entrusted to me by Her Majesty the Queen and help me to fulfill it in all humility. In exchange for his strength, I offer him my weakness. May he give peace to this beloved land of ours and, to those who live in it, the grace of mutual understanding, respect and love." (3)

Fifty-six years later, on September 27, 2005, Michaelle Jean, became Canada's twenty-seventh Governor-General. Jean, a multilingual, Haitian-born filmmaker and journalist, offered a forward-looking address that stressed, as had Vanier's, the importance of mutual toleration for Canada's social well-being. Otherwise, however, there were no themes in common, for Jean's primary concern was the exaltation of individual liberty; for her, Canadian history "speaks powerfully about the freedom to invent a new world." In this speech there was no mention of the deity. (4)

The contrast with the United States is striking. Vanier's straightforward invocation of God could be likened to the prayer with which Dwight D. Eisenhower began his presidential inaugural in January 1953. And Governor-General Jean's stress on the theme of freedom certainly echoed emphases in the presidential inaugural of George W. Bush in January 2005. Yet her sphere of discourse was far removed from both Georges Vanier's 1959 address and the speeches that John Kerry and George Bush made during the 2004 presidential campaign, when talk of God and more general religious matters was noticeably more prominent than it had been in Eisenhower's day.

A second example underscores a similar contrast. Until the recent past Canada's constitutional existence had been enfolded in the common-law traditions of the British Parliament before which Americans, with our penchant for thinking that a constitutional democracy requires a written constitution, stand in clueless bemusement. Yet in 1982, after painstaking exertions by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada, with the relieved cooperation of the British Parliament, finally took control of its own constitution. Even at that relatively late date public theism remained prominent in Canada's new Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In a complex drafting history, Trudeau first proposed including one off-hand reference to God in the new constitution, which was taken from an earlier Canadian Bill of Rights written during the administration of Conservative leader, John Diefenbaker. That reference was removed because of pressure from members of Trudeau's own Liberal party. But then the issue resurfaced when a broad ecumenical coalition lobbied for formal recognition of Canada's traditional Christian posture. As a result of its pressure, the new Charter was amended to include the following assertion in its preamble: "Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law." (5) The inclusion of such an affirmation in the Charter did not, however, presage a resurgence of traditional Christianity, for under the new Charter, 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.

Education provides another example of significant cultural change. Ontario public schools long included a major place for confessional Christian instruction, even as the province also funded a separate system for its Catholic citizens. This well-established practice, however, came to an end in the recent past. In the words of R. D. Gidney and W. P. J. Millar, "The centrality of Christian doctrine in Ontario's public schools, albeit in a nondenominational Protestant form, was alive and well in the mid-twentieth century; still alive, though less well, as late as the mid-1960s; and, even in the last third of the century, finally ousted only through a prolonged, contested process." But the result of this recent change is unmistakable: "In this particular part of the public arena ... Christianity has not only been disestablished but banished." (6) Inherited religious traditions lasted longer in Quebec and Newfoundland, where virtually all education had been effectively under church supervision until the 1990s. But even in Quebec, which had enjoyed more than two centuries of Catholic educational dominance, and in Newfoundland, which entered the Dominion in 1948 with an explicit guarantee for its government-funded but denominationally administered school system, the tide of de-christianization has proven irresistible, and education has been secularized. (7)

As once again a mark of strong difference with the United States, the Canadian Parliament voted on June 28, 2005, to legalize same-sex marriage throughout all of Canada. That action followed by two years a decision of the Ontario Court of Appeals that the Charter of Rights and Freedom authorized marriage for any two people regardless of gender. When the federal legislation became the law of the land in July 2005, there was minimal public notice, with the only sustained political reservation the Conservative Party's stated desire that Parliament reconsider its vote. (8) Again, the contrast is striking with the United States, where a judicial action by the Massachusetts Supreme Court similar to the Ontario court's decision--and at about the same time--elicited a storm of national protest and where debate over same-sex marriage became a highly charged factor in many regions during the 2004 elections. In Canada, the redefinition of marriage, which had been unthinkable short decades ago, has been widely, if not universally, accepted. (9) In the United States, the unthinkable has become the contested.

Broad measures of church adherence underscore the magnitude of Canadian religious change over recent decades. As late as 1961, only one-half of one percent of Canadian citizens told census takers that they were not attached to any religious body. That proportion rose to 4.3 percent in 1971 and in the latest census from 2001 now stands at 16.2 percent. Over the same four decades, the proportion of Canadians telling census personnel that they were part of the Catholic Church declined slightly from 46 percent to 43 percent, while the proportion claiming a connection to the Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, and United churches--the four largest Protestant denominations that had long dominated religious life in English-speaking Canada--fell precipitously from 41 percent to 20 percent. (10)

Reports of church attendance offer an equally dramatic picture. (11) After World War II, when the Gallup Poll first asked Canadians whether they had been in church or synagogue sometime during the previous seven days, a full 67 percent of Canadians responded positively. Among all Canadian Catholics, the number was a robust 83 percent and in Quebec a stratospheric 90 percent. In the early 1960s, weekly mass attendance in the rapidly growing cities of Montreal and Quebec remained quite high, but some leaders worried openly that in working-class neighbors it was down to "only" 50 percent. (12) By 1990, positive response to the Gallup question had fallen to 23 percent throughout Canada. Although the foremost Canadian religious demographer, Reginald Bibby, has recently noted some increase in attendance, his non-Gallup calculations chart a weekly attendance rate for the year 2000 of less than 20 percent. (13)

Numbers, of course, must be interpreted, but these findings about church identification and church attendance nonetheless indicate a series of shifts in Canadian religion that have not taken place in the United States, or have taken place at a much slower speed. Put generally, in 1950 Canadian church attendance as a proportion of the total population exceeded church attendance in the United States by one-third to one-half, and church attendance in Quebec may have been the highest in the world. Today church attendance in the United States is probably one-half to two-thirds greater than in Canada, and attendance in Quebec is the lowest of any state or province in North America. Over the course of only half a century, these figures represent a dramatic inversion.

This inversion, and the history of the last sixty years that created it, could not have been imagined in the years immediately after the Second World War. At that time, the vigor of Canadian religious practice seemed entirely in keeping with the general trajectory of Canadian history. Not only was Canada more observant in religious practice and more orthodox in religious opinion than the United States, but these comparative results represented only the latest chapter in a remarkable history of christianization stretching back to the eighteenth century. That history began with the creation in Quebec of a full-orbed, organic Catholic society--grounded in the colonial period on the self-sacrificing labors of several religious orders (both male and female), subsequently renewed by devotional and institutional revivals in the mid-nineteenth century, and then sustained deep into the twentieth century by a hegemonic but still remarkably resilient blend of popular piety and clerical supervision. (14)

In English Canada, the histories were different for the Atlantic provinces, Ontario, the prairies, and the far west, but in each region the end result was similar, and similarly impressive. (15) From precarious beginnings, where understaffed churches and constantly stretched voluntary agencies performed prodigies, through stressful periods of economic, political, and cultural turmoil--and always confronted by the immensities of uninhabited space--Protestants, along with a strong minority Catholic population, successfully created a Christian civilization in English-speaking Canada that was almost as strong as the French and Catholic counterpart in Quebec. The marks of that civilization included fruitful cooperation between churches and provincial governments in organizing education, social services, and eventually health care; noteworthy syntheses of traditional faith and modern learning that avoided the excesses of both secularization and fundamentalism; deep interpenetration of religious convictions and social values in the outworking of family and community life in many localities; (16) and, not least, steady strengthening of the main denominations, which for most purposes meant the Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists (and from 1925 the United Church of Canada that resulted from the merger of the Methodists and about two-thirds of the Presbyterians.).

The parallel histories of Quebec and the rest of Canada--though never without hypocrisy, patriarchialism, power mongering, partisan conflict, pettimindedness, heavy-handed coercion, interdenominational strife, and the masquerading of self-interest as piety--nonetheless left Canada at the mid-twentieth...