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They aren't dropping out. They're dropping in."
No, not Marshall McLuhan, though it mimics one of his gnomic sayings. This is another Canadian, sociologist and pollster Reginald Bibby, neatly summing up the powerful challenge his work poses to at least two important theories of contemporary religion in North America. This challenge, drawing on more than two decades of research, is the central thrust of Bibby's new book, Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada.
The "Bibby thesis" joins the sociological throng now dispensing with the idea that secularization necessarily accompanies modernity, sweeping away all traditional religion. (Even Peter Berger, among the foremost of his generation's prophets of secularization, has tendered a well-publicized recantation.) But Bibby also challenges Rodney Stark's influential account of religious adherence and identity in North America, which portrays a wide-open "marketplace" of religious options competing for the allegiance of individuals disembedded from traditional loyalties.
Since the mid-1970s, Bibby has conducted polls of increasing size and complexity across Canada from his base at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. The data show, he avers, that the Canadian religious marketplace is not nearly as open as Stark perceives it to be. Despite the much-publicized growth of New Religious Movements and the oft-remarked decline of mainline Christianity, Bibby finds simply this: Most Canadians believe in God in some distinctly Christian sense; most Canadians still call themselves Christians; and most Canadians continue to identify themselves with the particular Christian denomination of their parents.
Yes, church attendance in Canada has declined precipitously in just a generation or two. In the years following World War II, far more Canadians per capita (more than 60 percent) told pollsters that they were attending church weekly than did Americans (about 40 percent). Nowadays, the Canadian number has dropped to about 25 percent versus a continuing American average in the 40s.
Yet however much Canadians are losing touch with their churches, they have maintained a sort of allegiance to them. Canadians today essentially belong to four major groups, three of them Christian: Roman Catholic at 42 percent of the national population; Mainline Protestants (United, Anglican, Lutheran, and Presbyterian) at 19 percent; Conservative Protestant (Bibby's term for uniformly evangelical denominations) at 8 percent; and "No Religion" at 20 percent. Thus more than 70 percent of Canadians claim to be Christians (roughly 5 percent of the national total are some sort of Protestant that doesn't fit in the larger categories); about 20 percent claim to have no religion; and all of the other religions divide up the remaining 6 percent.
Furthermore, Bibby writes: "Some 90% of Mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics, along with close to 85% of Conservative Protestants, had the same religious identification in 1995 as they did in 1975." Among Bibby's most striking statistics (and his work is notable among popular sociologists of religion in being full of numbers that are intelligible to nonspecialists) is his finding that the vast majority of Canadians—upwards of three-quarters—continue to identify with the denomination of their parents. As Canadian Anglican Archbishop Lewis Garnsworthy observed a decade ago, "It was not that they were leaving—it was just that they were not coming."
So much, then, for both the theory of massive secularization accompanying modernity and the more recent theory of Stark and others that the contemporary religious marketplace is thronged with seekers looking for something importantly different. In Canada, at least, people rarely switch: They are either Catholic or ex-Catholic, say, but rarely "once-Catholic-and-now Protestant" or even "once-Anglican-and-now-Baptist."
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