In June at the annual ideacity conference in Toronto, Cardus Religious Freedom Institute co-founder Ray Pennings said that “for religious people, religion is at the core of their identity.”
However, a 2017 survey by Cardus and the Angus Reid Institute asked “do you feel comfortable around religious people?” and 50 per cent of respondents replied “no.”
Only 23 per cent went to a religious service once a month or more often as compared to 43 per cent in the year 2000.
“Religion has the effect that it either brings people together or divides them apart. And so it has been throughout history,” Pennings said.
“Religious people in Canada – Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Jews – believe stuff that, to people on the outside of that community, seems weird. And yet it is very real to (believers).”
The 2017 survey, said Pennings, found that 19 per cent identified themselves as religious non-believers, 21 per cent as religiously committed, and 30 per cent each as either privately faithful or uncertain.
If you want to make a case that Canada is an irreligious society, you can interpret the data accordingly, Pennings said.
But if you want to make the case that Canada is still religious, you can use the same data, he added.
University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby, who has studied the place of faith in Canadian life for 50 years, says, “religion is not going away.”
Pennings noted that 80 per cent of Canadians support public funding of religious schools.
Forty-eight per cent of Canadians think that religion is as relevant or more relevant than ever.
Religious people are more likely to volunteer in their community and donate to charities.
Pennings referred to the Halo Project that calculates the cost to taxpayers if public services provided by religious organizations were discontinued (www.haloproject.ca).
For Calgary, Edmonton and Red Deer, the total estimated halo effect is $4.3 billion.
For Olds, Didsbury and Sundre, the total estimated halo effect is $32 million.
A sharper example underlines the lessons of the Cardus survey.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran minister, was imprisoned by the Gestapo on April 5, 1943 and hanged on April 9, 1945 -- a month before the Second World War in Europe ended.
In the 1930s, Bonhoeffer spent two years in Britain and America seeking refuge from the Nazis.
But he decided to go back to Germany in 1939 after the war started.
He wrote, “I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.
“Christians in Germany face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization,” Bonhoeffer wrote.
“I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make this choice in security.
“A community of Jesus which seeks to hide itself – because of fear, deliberate conformity to the world, for some ulterior motive – has ceased to follow him.”
-Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
