In the late 1960s when I was a novice newspaper journalist, the Christmas Eve edition of the Calgary Herald had as its lead editorial the Bible passage of Luke 2: 8-20.
It seemed perfectly natural that the passage was from the familiar King James Version.
“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
“And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”
The annual commemoration of the Christian Christmas in a major metropolitan newspaper would be controversial 50 years later and launch a public outcry.
Secularism and the tolerance nurture by the a Canadian religious demographic that includes Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Wiccans and other faiths and beliefs won’t allow such a prominent acknowledgement of one faith.
If a newspaper used the biblical Christmas story as an editorial, there would be inevitable protests from the non-religious who would protest to the paper as they did in the day when there was prayer in the schools and at city council meetings.
Angus Reid is a leading intellectual force in Canada because of his many years of study of public opinion of everything from favourite cereals to the public approval of political leaders. Reid and his wife Margaret are practising Catholic Christians.
Reid did his first study in 1969 of First Nations poverty in Churchill, Man., and its effects such as suicide, for the Canadian government.
After making his comfortable fortune as a leading Canadian pollster doing 3,000 major studies for a wide variety of clients, he set aside commercial work to found the Angus Reid Institute, a non-profit that studies social issues.
In November he did a study entitled Faith in the Public Square. The Reid study is at angusreid.org/religion-faith-public-square/.
As you might expect, just 37 per cent of respondents to the Reid study think that faith belongs in their life and in the community – the public square.
But Reid and his academic allies such as University of Lethbridge sociologist Reg Bibby see the bottle as half full, not half empty.
Reid points out that only 32 per cent are opposed to public expressions of faith. The remaining 32 per cent are uncertain and therefore open to consider the public place of faith.
And contrary to the expectation that proponents of public faith are older and conservative, Reid found that the 37 per cent of public faith advocates is dominated by those who are young, well educated and liberal in their social attitudes.
Canada is no longer a Christian or even a religious country.
However, in Angus Reid’s data there is a path forward for the presence of faith in the public square.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
