Canada’s Religious Revival That Never Came
(ANALYSIS) Graduate school taught me plenty of technical skills: how to think carefully about causality, how to measure abstract concepts, and how to build statistical models that could separate signal from noise.
It also taught me something less tangible. If you want to become truly good at scholarship, it has to be your primary obsession — at least for a while. There isn’t much room for hobbies when you’re trying to master a craft.
But one of the most valuable lessons came at the very end of my methods training. After years of learning regression analysis and research design, we felt ready to explain the world. Our professors offered two words of caution.
The first was an old saying: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We had learned a powerful statistical tool, but that didn’t mean every interesting question could—or should—be answered with a regression model.
The second warning has stayed with me even longer: don’t use those tools to predict the future. Forecasting is a dangerous business. Even if you’re right most of the time, no one remembers your successes. They remember the one prediction that turned out to be spectacularly wrong.
Well, I was reminded of that lesson a few weeks ago when I stumbled upon a book written in the early 2000s by the Canadian sociologist Reginald W. Bibby. In 2002, he published ”Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada.” His thesis can be derived from the title: Despite huge drops in religious attendance and involvement in Canada, there was a deep well of spirituality present in the population. It would just require churches to adapt a bit to bring in these seekers.
You can probably guess where this post is going. The Canadian General Social Survey is fielded every year, but it doesn’t ask about religion in every wave. However, it did include a battery of questions about religious affiliation, importance, and attendance in 2003, 2008, 2013, and 2020. This gives me ample data to test the theory of a religious revival in Canada.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.