Reginald Bibby has recently argued that polarization is the best way to describe the religious reality in Canada. There is, in his view, a stable religiously active pole, a shrinking nominally religious middle, and a growing non-religious pole. Others have documented a similar trend in other Western countries. This paper examines evidence for religious polarization in Canada using data from Bibby’s Project Canada Surveys and other sources, with special attention paid to a prominent subset of the religiously committed: conservative Protestants. Evidence of polarization is weak for Canada as a whole. Instead, the data trends are consistent with religious decline. Even the conservative Protestants are not growing, nor showing evidence of increased conservativism.
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