God on trial

When it comes to religion, Canadians are divided

By Michael Adams

God might be dismayed to read the list of the bestselling books in Canada for 2007.

The list includes The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (subtitled How Religion Poisons Everything), and Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali — an indictment of fundamentalist Islam that follows Canadian Irshad Manji's international bestseller The Trouble With Islam.

For many of the Canadians who buy these books, God is on trial. Or at least those who claim to be God's representatives and adherents on earth are.

For a population that has secularized rapidly and profoundly over the past half-century (six in 10 Canadians attended church weekly in the 1950s; today just one in five does), the fact that religion appears to be driving a great deal of conflict both between and within societies around the world seems a troubling regression into a dark and divisive past.

In the 1990s, secular Canadians were dismayed by Christian fundamentalism in the United States and its burgeoning influence on American politics. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, this concern has been eclipsed by fears about fundamentalism — particularly violent fundamentalism — in other parts of the world.

Religion is not dead

Idealistic Canadian baby boomers would rather find meaning in running a marathon for charity than in walking the narrow path of virtue as defined by a person of the cloth.

Their kids, generations X and Y, are generally more interested in saving the world they're living in than in trying to ascend to a celestial one. Young Canadians are global in their thinking, and thousands are leveraging their broad and idealistic social networks to see what they can do to fight poverty, war, genocide, AIDS and environmental destruction.

But religion is not dead in this country. A segment of the established Canadian population still practise various strains of Christianity and other faiths with great commitment, and newcomers who arrive on our shores from more religious societies bring their beliefs and practices with them.

For the secular majority, old-guard Christianity is a familiar force; they may disagree with its more traditional tenets but it's a known quantity. Religions, such as Islam, that have not traditionally been widely practised in Canada inspire greater anxiety: their orthodoxies and anachronisms are unfamiliar and thus seem less benign.

And of course, suspicion of religion is now entangled with concern about the cultural integration of immigrants into mainstream Canadian society.

The beliefs of newcomers

Stories — such as the arrests of 18 men and boys under the Anti-terrorism Act in Ontario in 2006, as well as the death of Ontario teenager Aqsa Parvez in December 2007 in an alleged dispute with her father over the wearing of the hijab and other intergenerational values — convince many Canadians that religion is the central obstacle to the successful integration of newcomers into a flexible, pluralist Canada.

Ontarians' concern about the balkanizing effects of religion came through loud and clear in the spectacular defeat of the Conservatives in the recent provincial election after their leader, John Tory, proposed that the government extend funding to non-Catholic religious schools.

But the combination of group belonging, emotional and spiritual sustenance, and community support that religion can provide is complex territory.

The children of immigrants, for example, while attaining impressive educational and economic outcomes suggestive of skillful navigation of Canadian culture and institutions, often express an even stronger sense of ethnic and religious identity than their parents.

Materially successful, deeply engaged

Are these young people retreating into homogeneous communities as refuges from racism and discrimination? Are they happily balancing their attachments to Canada and their countries of origin? Are they simply using their heritage as another marker of identity, like belonging to an online community, a creative collective, or any other matrix of belonging where they can feel connected to a group and special as individuals at the same time?

The quest for meaning is one that preoccupies all Canadians — and indeed all human beings who have met their basic needs for food, shelter and security, and begin to move up the Maslowian hierarchy to seek post-material satisfactions.

As aging baby boomers watch their parents and even their friends die, and as they look beyond materialism, hedonism and work that gave shape to their middle years, they will begin to search broadly for sources of meaning to fit later in life in contemporary Canada.

They are unlikely to be satisfied by the traditional religions so many abandoned in their youth.

But as they scan their environment for examples of the good life, they might find inspiration in the children of immigrants who are materially successful but often still deeply engaged with a spiritual life that is social, syncretic, globally conscious, and threatened neither by the old nor by the new.

Michael Adams is president of the Environics group of companies and author of Unlikely Utopia: The Surprising Triumph of Canadian Pluralism.

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"By reading the descriptions of different religions, it appears the intent of 'religion' is to better ourselves, give answers and, most importantly, find peace within. If that really is the case, then can believing in a god do us any harm?" — Chris, Saskatchewan
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"One thing I hope for is that people keep asking God their hardest questions." — Geoff Rousseau

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