That is what this essay by journalist Michael Valpy on the decline of religious identity and attendance in Canada implies. The article goes through several explanations of why Canadians have become sharply less religious since the 1960s. Rejecting other explanations, such as the postmodern condition and declines in voluntary participation in general, the article focuses in on the oppression of women by numerous religious institutions.
Basically, Valpy claims that Canadian women refuse to tolerate their church-assigned role as asexual, submissive supporters of their husbands and families.
Women — the traditional mainstays of institutional religion — in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church’s patriarchal exemplar of them as chaste, submissive “angels in the house” with all of the social and moral responsibility for community and family but none of the authority.
Unable to find acceptable religious role models or religious ideals that were not painful or oppressive, they reconstructed their identities as secular and sexual beings.
The article claims that the broader horizons created by increased labour force participation and university education secularized Canadian women.
Being a non-churchy feminist type myself, it is tempting to just accept this argument. Ahhh, women around me are just like me. Isn’t that comforting? And aren’t I just the hippest church-rejecting feminist ever?
Unfortunately, I don’t think this argument holds water. It implies that a feminist ideology is incompatible with religious identity or attendance, and that the only logical response to sexism in church doctrine is voting with one’s feet, and taking one’s whole family along.
And I can’t help but wondering what we are to infer from his argument if we expand the analysis south of the border. In the United States, church attendance is not down. Are we to take from Valpy’s essay that differences between these countries are caused by the difference in feminist ideology between Canadian and American women? I mean, I know that the U.S. is more conservative than Canada in terms of attitudes, but you know, there is a pretty strong feminist history down there, too. And, y’know, the cultural revolution of the 1960s wasn’t limited to Canada, as far as I know.
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Regarding church trajectories, the exception is the US of course. Practically nobody goes to church in Europe. In general, as I’m sure you know since you are there, the US is way more polarized than Canada. In a class discussion, a student from Alberta told us that some Catholics in her area had tried to fan an anti-abortion movement, and the Catholics in the area just said no, we don’t want to go down that path, they saw the battle in the US as a thing to be avoided. They had not given up Catholicism, in her story, they just did not see pitched ideological battles as a good thing. In the US, there are lots of conservative antifeminist churches, but there have also been strong (and successful) feminist movements inside other churches. US Protestantism is quite polarized on a left-right axis, with some of the most left-wing people in the country being religious, as well as of course a lot of the most right-wing people (who do have the numerical edge). There are feminists in lots of places. I know lots of Catholic women who conduct underground communion ceremonies as an act of protest. I’ve taught Sunday School out of materials from the United Church of Canada (which has the same initials as my denomination, the United Church of Christ, which is pretty much the most liberal US denomination), and the curriculum struck me as being pretty much mainline liberal and not patriarchal. I’d speculate that the difference between the US and Canada is the absence of the Bible Belt in Canada, and that Canada and the northern half of the US are probably pretty similar. Also, don’t forget that African Americans in the US have really high rates of church membership, although AfAm churches are not generally at the forefront of the feminist movement in Christianity. (But they are not a locus of the religious right, either.)
Hmm, adding a point to the above. Re the South and Blacks, I speculate that accounts for a big chunk of the difference in % going to church. I don’t know whether there is a difference between Canadian & US churches in their openness to different movements. The important thing about US churches is that you can find one to fit basically any ideological proclivity, including atheism. Sociologists of religion point to the structure of US religion — specifically the very absence of establishment — that encourages niche specialization and, hence, growth. I don’t know how Canadian churches are structured.
The G&M article is a pretty good illustration of one difference between journalism and sociology — data. It has interesting speculations on the causes of the decline of religion, but no evidence that relates to any of them. The article lacks only the typical journalistic ploy of the single case (”Bonnie MacKenzie hasn’t been to church, except for weddings, since October 14, 1974, the day her the pastor in her Edmonton church gave a sermon on the ‘proper’ role of women in Christendom. . . . “).
OW: I imagine there is a wide variety of church options up here in Canada as well, and I am certain there are liberal denominations. Of course, a big portion of church-goers here are Anglican, and this church is in the middle of a big debate, for example, over same-sex marriage and gay and lesbian clergy. Pretty liberal.
I have some deeper thoughts on why the religious right-type activism that is uniquely American hasn’t taken hold here in Canada. More discussion on that later, I promise!
Jay: to be fair to the author, it is an opinion piece, not an article, but yes, I think this is extrapolating out from too few cases. It makes a nice story, but I doubt it would hold up to the evidence.
We’d just attended the ordination ceremony of a former colleague of mine — amazingly, she gave up a life of economics for ministry in the UCC. She’s perhaps the poster woman for voting with the feet out of a more-sexist denomination (Roman Catholicism) to a less-sexist one.
One thing I wonder about U.S. church attendance is a quality dimension. My grandfather’s Sunday slogan was, “First in war, first in peace, and first out of the church parking lot.” My plural-of-anecdotes is that a lot of mainline church attendance is marking time by people who, for one reason or another, haven’t discovered the technology of having fun with the kids on a Sunday AM. (Says the mostly non-attending atheist with the slightly less non-attending spouse who’s gravitating towards UUism, neither of whom have mustered the guts to pull the plug on the monthly donation to our notional Catholic parish.) I don’t doubt that Americans are relatively religious, but I wonder how much the difference really is at the median. It would seem that there must be some Real Research on the subject, no?