Stuart Macdonald

Clarke and MacDonald assemble a convincing argument for the broad-based decline of the Christian religion in Canada over the past fifty or so years. In arguments carefully grounded on census data, they show not only that numbers have declined within the mainstream Protestant denominations and within the Roman Catholic Church, but also within the smaller, more conservative groups that are sometimes identified as holding out against the trend (usually reflecting the bias of an author in favour show more of the group out of which they come), and that the same trend shows a steady weakening of attachments among those who provide more general identifications (e. g. "Protestant" or just "Christian") to the census.

It is in fact the handling of the edge cases which makes this book valuable. The overall narrative of a decline in mainline Christianity in North America (and in particular in Canada) is a very familiar theme. But it has frequently been accompanied by some form of a "but" which changes the story fundamentally. Claims that the more conservative / smaller Protestant denominations have either been immune to this trend or have picked up a significant number of those who had fallen away purports to turn a story of secularization into a championing of "hardline" faith groups. Claims that there has been a detachment from the institutional churches but that there is still a (poorly-informed, but sincere) deep pool of those who choose, to express their faith in a purely individual, I/Thou, manner attempts to validate a Protestant theology (it corresponds quite nicely to a Miltonic view of the righteous believer) and palliate the narrative of decline in another way.

Some narratives seize on particular causes of decline, and end up inverting cause and effect. But (for example) - the authors point out - the introduction of the New Curriculum did not cause the United Church decline, but tracked a broad decline across denominations.

The hard figures adduced by Clarke and MacDonald put aside these divergences, and focus on the main story of the decline: beginning after the 1950s, which were characterized by an historically very high degree of church affiliation and attendance, both affiliation and attendance have dropped off heavily, resulting in a society with a secular component greater than at any time since, at least, the early Fifth Century. show less