Fragmented Gods : Reginald Bibby Examines The Disconnected State Of Religion In Canada
Interview by Peter Monk
For over a decade Dr. Reginald Bibby has been monitoring social trends in Canada through a series of well-known, national surveys. Three adult versions have been carried out in 1975, 1980, and 1985. They have been supplemented by two national youth surveys conducted in 1984 and 1987. He has also completed studies in Toronto and Calgary that have provided in-depth complementary data at the regional level.
Widely recognized as one of Canada’s foremost experts on religious trends, Dr. Bibby teaches in the sociology department at the University of Lethbridge. He holds a Ph.D. from Washington State University, an M.A. from the University of Calgary, a B.D. from Southern Seminary, and a B.A. from the University of Alberta.
His latest book, Fragmented Gods: the Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada, is the culmination of 20 years of research and provides a comprehensive picture of religion in Canada. His conclusion? The state of religion is frail; it lies in pieces. His prognosis? Reconnection is not impossible.
Aurora: Early in Fragmented Gods, you comment: “My primary interest is in ideas, not numbers. I encourage readers neither to get lost in numbers, nor to ignore the ideas because they don’t like the numbers. The reality of a culturally produced fragmented religion is there for the eye to see using the method of your choice. It is that depiction and its significance that I hope will be taken seriously.” Do you believe that most of your readers have done this?
Bibby: My sense is that that has been the case. A number of people have said they are glad the data is there, so that they can get the hard numbers if they want them. Others have commented about the fact that they can almost glide over the tables. They don’t have to get lost in all the numbers in the course of pursuing the ideas. So, I am not getting the feeling that people are intimidated by the numbers. People have been happy that the numbers are there in the sense that they now have some hard data, but what has really been interesting most people have been the ideas that have come out of the book. The section that has unquestionably been getting most response, as far as sparking a bit of controversy, has been the conclusion and the overall thesis. Namely, that when it comes to religion Canadians are into a selective style which reflects what they are doing in other areas of life, as well.
Aurora: Have there been any critical analyses of your book in the press?
Bibby: For the most part the general tone has been very positive. Most of the criticisms pertain to the conclusion which is where I went out on a little bit of a limb and took some chances as far as talking about the potential for religion in Canada. Some conservative Protestants have been concerned that I was giving excessive play to self-affirmation, too positive a view of self, and probably not enough emphasis on the limitations of the individual.
Dr. Jim Sawyer, who reviewed it for the Presbyterian Record, was very positive on the whole, but he was concerned with my suggestion that religion necessarily has to transcend culture and cannot simply reflect or mirror culture. So Jim was concerned about the way in which I was posing religion and culture as somehow having to exist in tension in order for religion to be acting out of some kind of integrity.
Quill and Quire suggested that I had not been explicit enough about my own theological biases. That, for the most part, is not something I have been hit very hard with; if anything the reviews give me a fair amount of credit for trying to be objective, trying to be fair. The concern about sometimes being too positive about self, the concern about the position religion should have against culture, and the concern about my objectivity are the three complaints I have been getting here and there.
Aurora: Pierre Berton, in The Comfortable Pew, went to great lengths to say why he was not an Anglican. Why didn’t you profess what you believed?
Bibby: I have been of several minds. In the book my intent was to offer, as George Gallup has said in the foreward, a fair and careful assessment of religion in Canada. So the reader is not told a lot of the biographical realities, for example, my growing up in a Nazarene environment or having gone to a Baptist seminary. I didn’t want the book to be seen, on the one hand, as written by someone who was essentially pro-Baptist or, for the sake of the conservative Protestants who know I am no longer actively involved in Baptist circles, as written by someone who is a disenchanted Baptist.
When I speak to groups, invariably the question does come up, and I am explicit about the fact that for Reg Bibby the Christian faith is important. I tried to write the book as a sociologist while, at the same time, not hiding some of my own biographical realities.
Aurora: You have done some work surveying teenagers. What is the teenage attitude toward religion?
Bibby: We are getting very much the same thing with teens that we are getting with adults. Generally, teenagers haven’t abandoned supernatural beliefs. They tend to hold the traditional beliefs about God and life after death on essentially the same level, if not even a little higher level, than Canadian adults. But when you move into organizational involvement you find, as most people would expect, that for 15 to 19 year olds the weekly church attendance level runs around 15 to 16 per cent whereas for adults it is running around 30 per cent.
When we look at areas like the extent to which Canadian teens say they get enjoyment from a variety of areas of life, almost right at the rock bottom is the enjoyment they say they get or don’t get from church life. At the same time, even though they are not interested in active involvement in church life, 90 per cent of 15 to 19 year olds still claim some kind of Protestant, Catholic, or other religious tie.
In a major study of Canada’s 15 to 24 year olds right now, Don Posterski and I have found that over 90 per cent of them say that in the future they anticipate looking to the church to carry out rights of passage relating to things like weddings, baptisms, and funerals. So it appears that young people are not critical of the churches. We find that they claim they have about as much confidence in religious leaders as they do in the leaders of other major institutions like our educational institutions and supreme courts. They are not down on the churches, but they seem, like adults, to want only very specific things from them.
A very important point to keep in mind is that young people are not abandoning religious identification just because they were not exposed to things like Sunday schools and worship services like their parents were. The identification level remains around 90 per cent and, as far as the desire for on going rights of passage, that is still way up there at around 90 per cent.
Aurora: It becomes quite a problem for young people who have never darkened the door of a church since they left Sunday school to all of a sudden want to get married within the church.
Bibby: Yes. One of the most important issues that are going to face churches across Canada as we go into the next century is this apparent paradox. Canadians simply are not attending in the numbers that they once did, and young people are showing no inclination to even match the attendance levels of current adults. At the same time there is little sign that Canadians are not continuing to want rights of passage. From the standpoint of policy, the churches are in a real jam. They are faced with the fact that they have got all these people who, in effect, are really religious consumers wanting very specialized things.
Aurora: How has religion become a commodity that people shop for?
Bibby: Canadians have become highly selective consumers in every area of life. In a specialized age, people look at choices in every sphere of life—one only needs to look at the tremendous opportunities and selections we have in restaurants or clothing or education or politics. When Canadians look at religion they are not treating it very much differently from other areas. Often religious leaders, when they find Canadians are very selective about religion, take it personally, but the irony is that what Canadians are doing in the religion sphere is what they are doing in every other sphere.
People act according to time and money constraints. We found in our national surveys that on the personal level the number one concern of Canadians is that they don’t have enough money or at least they are concerned generally about money. And the second concern on a personal level is that they never seem to have enough time. Given then the pressures of money and time, when Canadians move into an area like religion, they aren’t responding very much differently there than they do elsewhere. They take a hard, pragmatic look at how much they want to bother to give versus what they receive for their investment.
The dominant pattern has been for Canadians increasingly to say that they don’t have to attend religious services every week in order to receive the kinds of rights of passage that they expect from the churches. But they don’t want to drop religion totally because just as they need a good dentist and a good lawyer from time to time, they also want to have access to a minister, priest, or rabbi. So the dilemma that the churches are facing is that Canadians consume religion in a selective way like they consume things in every other sphere of life. What is fundamental to the whole issue is that there are important cultural sources of this selective consumption that religion is experiencing.
Aurora: How can religious leaders respond to this?
Bibby: By way of response, churches are going to have to decide if they will be satisfied with providing religion à la carte for these selectively minded religious customers. There are some people who might take that position. I have talked to the odd renegade Anglican, for example, who suggested that maybe that should be the church’s role, that times have changed, and that the church should respond by simply recognizing that people have very select needs and should try to minister to them. And where it is possible to have more extensive ministry into a person’s life, then churches should do so. That could be one response.
On the other hand, if Christians and church leaders want religion to be more than just an à la carte type of thing, having a very, very specialized place in people’s lives, then the Canadian religious situation is a disaster. Talking to leaders and to individual lay people, I think that is the dominant response. These people think religion should address all of life.
Much of the issue is one of integrity. Initially the churches should establish a clear vision of what the Christian faith or religious faith should be. If there is a vision that faith should address all of life, then the churches have to dig in. They have to be incredibly explicit in dealing with Canadians and in stressing that even though they might want religion à la carte, that is just not acceptable.
For example, the Catholic church is coming out very strongly against abortion at a time when about 90 per cent of Canadian Roman Catholics are not opposed to the availability of legal abortion when a mother’s health is in danger or when a rape is involved. If the church really believes it is suppose to be speaking out on things, then it needs to speak out on those things.
So the first issue is just integrity. The churches won’t necessarily get a large number of people responding to that, but my sense is that that isn’t really the issue. The church may become something that involves a minority, very much a remnant of what it has been, but at least there would be the effort to say to Canadian culture, despite what culture wants religion to be, that religion addresses all of life.
We know from a sociological point of view that there is a tremendous desire to relate to something like God, a tremendous desire for self-affirmation, and a tremendous on-going desire for community. In acting out of integrity, the churches may find a response that they hadn’t anticipated.
Aurora: Have the churches contributed to this fragmented consumerism or is it something that is just inherent in our society?
Bibby: Obviously, there are cultural sources of the fragmentation but also the churches have unconsciously been serving religion la carte, not because they have met behind closed doors and have conspired to do it, but because they have fallen into the cultural pattern of providing what people want.
When you look at individual programs, it doesn’t take a sociologist to peruse a bulletin and get the gnawing suspicion that the program largely arises out of what the people want. So, if they want social action or leisure activities or early morning aerobics, this appears on the church program. In speaking to church groups, I say obviously you are free to do what you want, but if you are going to argue that your program is more than just a reflection of a consumer-oriented society, you better have a clear vision of what you are trying to do. Out of that sense of vision of what you are all about, you begin to develop a church program rather than the program simply being a response to consumer demand.
Very often churches have not been providing a very integrated version of faith that stresses God, self, and society. There has been a strong God thrust, historically, and now we have a tremendous hope message as far as self and self-affirmation. There has been a tremendous emphasis on loving not only your immediate neighbour but the concern with social and global issues as well. An integrated faith that addresses all of life would try to address God, self, and society.
Given the fact that there are societal pressures toward fragmentation or selective adoption of religion, what has not been helping the situation is that churches often stress one or two of those things but do not offer all three. The United Church of Canada is very strong, for example, as far as addressing social and global issues. Evangelicals are really strong in the God dimension but not strong in addressing self-affirmation or social and global concerns.
A person who wanders into a church, coming from this culture of selective consumers, is likely to hear a strong message about one selective aspect of life—either God, self, or society—and so he has little choice except to practice a faith which is fragmented. People who have a vision of faith as something that addresses all of life need to get that across and stress God, self, and society in an integrated faith. If they did that, religious groups would be acting out of integrity with respect to what religion has always claimed that it is trying to be, namely, a system of addressing all of life.
Aurora: What is happening to non-Christian groups like Judaism and Buddhism in Canada?
Bibby: The data is limited but the la carte pattern is seemingly characteristic of these other groups as well. Judaism, for example, has become very much of a consumer religion in many ways, and I do try to document that. One of the real serious problems of other faiths with small numbers of adherents is that intergenerationally they seem to be losing numbers to Roman Catholicism and to Protestantism or to the nothing category.
Aurora: The Roman Catholic Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops put a great note of caution into charismatic religion in the Catholic church. In many ways it seems that some of this charismatic movement in all the churches talks about some of the things you want.
Bibby: My understanding of the Catholic Conference’s position is that they were concerned about some extremes that they thought would not be productive. They were concerned about things like the tendency of some people caught up in the charismatic movements to get kind of ghettoized. But they certainly saw that the charismatic movement could add something to the church providing that it didn’t become insular and turned in on itself. There is no question that there was concern. I could be mistaken here, but my sense is that probably in the long-run the Canadian Conference and Catholic views generally would not see the charismatic movement as having had a negative effect on the church in Canada, but they are certainly concerned about those kinds of problems I mentioned.
Aurora: What about the evangelical churches? Do you see them growing?
Bibby: The evangelical churches are growing as far as their absolute numbers but not as a percentage of the Canadian population. In 1871 eight per cent of Canadians identified with those groups. One hundred and ten years later that eight per cent has gone to seven per cent, so it seems there is a lot of internal switching going on. There is some graduating as people come, for example, out of groups like the Full Gospel and the Pentecostal, and maybe over generations become Baptist and Alliance. But there is not much recruitment from outside.
I think it is fairly accurate to talk about a circulation of the saints. One of the really serious problems that the evangelicals have in Canada is that they constitute such a minority that they lose people through intermarriage. The harsh fact is that Roman Catholics looking for someone to marry have a large pool to choose from. The evangelicals don’t. So gains they are able to make by recruiting people from outside often are offset by losses that they experience by intermarriage.
Aurora: An area much in the news today is television ministries. Do you think that what is happening to people like Swaggart and a few others is going to turn people off the church generally?
Bibby: No. The proportion of Canadians who are watching those programs is only about four per cent. Most of them tend to identify themselves as evangelical Protestants. They are older and watch these programs in part as a substitute for being unable to attend church services. You also have people, though, who are regular church attendees—again, usually evangelical Protestants. My sense is that what is happening, and this is based on nothing more than a lot of informal chats with people within that community, is those people are obviously going through some real tough times these days with Jim Baker and Swaggart and are feeling very disenchanted. But I think about 96 per cent of the rest of the country, certainly in Canada, are looking on the scene as entertainment. People are guffawing about the whole thing.
The fundamental issue that comes out of all of that, and the data we have as far as the small proportion of Canadians watching religious programs, is that the media has not been used well by the religious community in Canada. Television is such a fact of life these days that the real issue should be how, in a positive way, might the mass media generally and television specifically be used by religious groups?
Aurora: Your figures indicate a continuing downward trend in terms of church attendance. There has been some attempt to reconcile, for example, the Anglican and Roman Catholic religions. Do you think that this would be a way for the church to reconnect God, self, and society and also remain economically viable for the diminishing number who add to the collection plate?
Bibby: One thing that I think is going to be inevitable at the beginning of the twenty-first century is that if things continue pretty much as they are going with the numbers declining, that is going to have obvious implications for revenues and the overall economic stability and viability. It is safe to assume that as we get into the next century, we are going to see mergers taking place. Churches are going to make theological virtues out of economic necessities. I suspect where affinities are being felt, those are the logical places where we are going to be seeing unions taking place. As you say the affinity with the Roman Catholics and Anglicans possibly. But who knows? Maybe even that hearty core of Presbyterians who are becoming an ever-increasing minority, at some point, will join with someone else. I think we are definitely going to see mergers of various kinds.
Aurora: You quote an Australian Methodist evangelist, Sir Alan Walker, who says “There are few greater needs in the church today than to find a synthesis between personal evangelism and social witness.” I have to think of Bishop Tutu in South Africa and the rebel priests in Poland and elsewhere. Will efforts like theirs help bring about this synthesis?
Bibby: Obviously the social problems out there are calling for societal response. People for the most part are lauding the likes of the Tutu who are alert and alive to those kinds of problems. Not only sociologists but certainly futurists are saying that there is that on-going desire across much of the world for community, but there is also the tremendous on-going desire for self-affirmation. My strong feeling is that a successful religious organization of faith must be responsive to all three of those things—God, self, and society. Walker mentions the two—the God dimension and the society dimension. But I think on top of that, faith must be alert also to the whole idea of self-affirmation because there is such a tremendous desire in people to be able to tap into who they are, to experience the fullness of life on an individual basis, recognizing human potential and soon. A faith that is responsive to those three themes is going to get a significant response from a relatively large number of people. So, the concern that Walker has, is exactly mine: the need for synthesizing the God and the society dimension. In addition, the clincher for a potentially powerful religious package is that it also have a message with respect to self.
When I am talking specifically to Christian groups and mention God, self, and society I sense that some of them think that because I’m a sociologist I’ve come up with these themes out of the air. So I preface my comments by saying it is not my job as a sociologist to prove texts. If Christians want some biblical documentation for this I remind them that Jesus says the summation of the law is caught up in loving God with all our being and our neighbour as our self. And I point out, of course, that there you have got those three themes: God, self, and society.
The cultural reality is that people are looking for meaning, they are looking for self-affirmation, and they are looking for a religion that can deal with serious issues whether they be here or in Latin America or in Poland. The faith that is responsive then to all three of those themes is potentially very, very powerful.
Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada, 1987.
The Emerging Generation: An Inside Look at Canada’s Teenagers, 1985.
Religionless Christianity: Profile of Religion in Canada, 1982.
Project Canada: A Study of Deviance, Diversity and Devotion in Canada, 1976.
Originally published Summer 1988
Dr. Reginald Bibby holds the Board of Governors Research Chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of Lethbridge. He also is the recipient of an honorary doctoral degree from Laurentian University. In 2006, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the nation, the Governor General appointed him an Officer of the Order of Canada.
His book, Canada's Teens: Today, Yesterday and
Tomorrow
landed the April 2001 McLeans Magazine's cover story.
Related Links:
Recent Listing of Publications: http://www.reginaldbibby.com/bibbybooks.html
Updated March 2011Aurora Online
Citation Format
Monk, Peter (2001). Fragmented Gods: Reginald Bibby Examines The Disconnected State Of Religion In Canada. Aurora Online: