Conservative Protestants and Religious Polarization in Canada

Abstract

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.