Plenary session address: Is There Faith in Canada, and Does the Media Care? (2)

It's time to rethink coverage

It's time to rethink faith coverage, to shift our glasses, get our prescriptions checked, change the lens, enlarge the picture about the role of faith in Canada. Faith is not equal to organized religion in Canada. A presentation by Andrew Grenville, Senior Vice-President for the Global Research division of the Angus Reid, to the June 7-9, 1998 Faith and the Media Conference Press release and tables from the survey can be found at the Angus Reid site. We've got two questions here: Is there faith in Canada, and do the media care? And being a dealer in facts, I have the answer: It depends. It really depends on your perspective. No one comes to this without some sort of lens or some sort of bias or some sort of way of looking at things that really colours their perception of the facts. What I'd like to do is go over some information that I hope will help us look at things in a slightly different light.

The common wisdom or common theme that's out there is a story that religion disappeared, that it's no longer important, that it's fading away and soon to die. That's not really true today in Canada. I think part of that comes from this secularization story that's circulated among the chattering classes, the idea that religion is going to fade away--as soon as people are educated enough, faith will disappear. Unfortunately, people faith groups really share the blame for the circulation of that story. Why? Because there has been a kind of persecution complex, an us-and-them mentality which occurs in many faith groups which allows people to justify why they're not really engaging society and why they're not doing all that they really can do.

Another side of the coin is to say "God is alive," as Maclean's said a few years ago on their cover. That's a positive way of looking at it--the glass is half full. The negative way is the glass is half empty. And, again, the definite answer to the question: Is there faith in Canada? It depends.

Now, with regard to the other question--do the media care?--it's my hypothesis that the media cover religion as well as they understand it and as well as faith groups present it. I think that that's a key issue there. There's a nice story about a couple of smoking priests that I think illustrates it pretty well. One priest was wondering whether it was permissible to smoke while you pray. He wrote to the Pope about it. The Pope writes back and says, "No--you shouldn't smoke while you pray. Your focus needs to be on prayer." The other priest writes in and he asks, "Is it permissible to pray while smoking?" The Pope writes back and says, "Yes, of course. One should always be constant in prayer." This is a nice example of the way your perspective really shapes the way you frame the question and also frame your understanding of it.

What I'd like to do is cover off a couple of different things. First, on the question of is there faith in Canada, I just want to briefly give some numbers on Canada in the international context, then I want to spend a bit of time sketching out some different schools of thought on public and private faith in Canada. I especially want to emphasize the private side of things because I think that's an exceedingly important point in understanding religion in Canada today. And then finally I'll touch very briefly on whether the media care, from the perspective of how Canadians see it, particularly people who attend religious services regularly.

International context. First, attendance at religious services. If we look at attendance as an indicator (from an Angus Reid world poll) Canada sort of fits in the middle between France at the low end, where 9% say they attend services weekly, and the United States, which is really an exception at 40% who say they attend weekly. In Canada. it's 22%, or roughly one in five. Perhaps one of the reasons Canadians feel relatively irreligious is we're right up next to one of the most religious nations in the world, the United States.

If we look at the question of prayer,--which I think is probably an even better indicator, given that the private side of faith is probably the most important element--again Canada is about in the middle with 35% of Canadians praying at least once a week, with most of them praying daily. The interesting thing to note here is there's a lot more people praying on a regular basis than there are attending church--a difference I'll sketch out a little more as I move into describing the segmentation.

What I want to do now is refer to some data from a study called God and Society in North America, which we did in conjunction with the Queen's University project on religion and politics in Canada and the United States, headed up Marguerite Van Die and David Lyon at Queen's University. That was a study about Christians that was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, Philadelphia. In the fall of 1996 we surveyed 3,000 Canadians and 3,000 Americans, asked them a variety of questions, including some things about their beliefs, their religious behaviours, their attitudes towards the privatization of faith and how they related to church groups. It's the result of a cluster analysis, which is just a statistical technique for grouping people into kind of schools of thoughts or modes of practice, if you will.

In this case, we've got a two-stage segmentation. The first stage has three groups I think that are pretty self-evident: 1) committed churchgoers; 2) private believers; 3) nominal and non-Christians.

If we look at these six, there's two types of committed churchgoers, the church-centred and privatistic churchgoers. They split over the degree of privatization of their faith. The church-centred place high value on church attendance and the church's teachings, and that's a key point. A privatistic churchgoer is quite different in some respects. They attend services weekly and take the Bible very seriously, but they place higher value on their personal beliefs than on church teachings. Of the privatistic churchgoer group, many are not convinced church attendance is required of good Christians. This is an important point to understand and explain why we see high levels of faith, but relatively low levels of church attendance.

The second group, the private believers, unravel into two strands, independent believers and occasional Christians. Independent believers are really what we might call the poster children for privatized faith. While they have a prayerful relationship with God, praying regularly and attending church semi-regularly, they're not terribly orthodox and are resolutely convinced that church attendance is unnecessary and that their private beliefs are more important than what's happening in any church. Occasional Christians, the other strand of private Christians, fill the pews at Christmas and Easter but otherwise give relatively little thought to religion and they don't place high value on it in their lives.

The nominal non-Christians partition into private theists and atheists and agnostics. Private theists believe in God, pray on occasion, but neither feel that religion is particularly important to them nor do they spend a lot of time in devotions. The atheists and agnostics are fairly self-evident in terms of what they are.

I'll just go into some of these groups again in some depth to give you a better understanding of where we're at in terms of the nature of faith in Canada today. If we adjust our lenses and stop viewing things through denominations or strictly through church attendance, and think a little bit more about what is the nature of faith--particularly paying attention to the private sphere of it (which I think has been unfortunately neglected to date)--it might help us better understand the nature of faith in Canada, which I think again is crucial to the question of the media covering it appropriately.

In terms of the church-centred group, this is about one in ten Canadians, 20% of Americans. These are really the pillars of the church. They uphold the church's authority in their lives, they attend regularly, four in ten of them attending a couple of times a week or more. These are really the faithful as far as the church is concerned. They disagree that their private beliefs are more important than what the church teaches and highly value church teachings, which places them at odds with the rest of North Americans. They pray every day, read the Bible weekly and three-quarters see the Bible as the literal Word of God. Interestingly, a quarter of these are Catholic and four in ten would describe themselves as evangelical Christians, including 20% of the Catholics.

Next group along is the privatistic churchgoers. Again, this is about one in ten Canadians. This is a large percentage of the Americans, though--three out of ten Americans fall into this category. They are regular attenders, they're doctrinally quite orthodox, but--and this is very important--they feel their private beliefs about Christianity are more important than what is taught by any church. So we have quite a difference between the church-centred, who are really looking to the church for teaching. These are the more unruly, difficulty to control, kind of independent Christians, from a church's perspective, but I think a very important group to understand because their locus of control--their theological centre, if you will--is not externally driven by the church, but rather more internal. Many of these people are not convinced you need to go to church. However, almost all of them are showing up weekly at least, if not more often, so they're there, they're committed, they're participating, but they don't believe you need to go to church in order to be a good Christian. This is an important element in North America today.

Move on to the independent believers. Again, this is a fairly large chunk of Canadians. 22% percent of Canadians fall under this category of privatized faith. 20% of Americans would also fall into this category. These people are quite interesting. They pray regularly, but attend only occasionally. They are not particularly doctrinally orthodox. For example, most of them would agree with a statement like, "through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God provided a way for the forgiveness of my sin." Most of them would agree with that, but a third of them would agree only moderately, so there's some not gung-ho buying in on that particular type of statement. Also, all would agree that the Bible is the inspired word of God, but 44% would agree only moderately with that. In kind of an ironic twist on "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," they do not feel it's important to share their faith with others or encourage non-Christians to become Christians. 43% of these are Catholics and six in ten would describe themselves as liberal or progressive Christians.

Now we come to a group that I think are probably often set up as the standard of Christian religion in Canada, when in fact in fact are not a huge group--only one in five Canadians. These are the occasional Christians. They're the holiday Christians, people who come and fill up the pews at Easter and Christmas. But they are not a large group. The three preceding groups, who take their faith very seriously, are twice the size of this group in total. This group are twice-a-year churchgoers and religion is not particularly important in their day-to-day life. They believe, they identify, they call themselves Catholics or they call themselves Anglican, but it's not terribly salient to their day-to-day life. It's part of their cultural identification. Seven in ten would agree that their private beliefs are more important than what's taught by any church. They would pray or read only on occasion, so this is part of who they are, but it's not part of their day-to-day living. Three in ten of these will be Catholics, and half would describe themselves as liberal or progressive Christians.

We get into the third branch here, the nominal and non-Christians. The first group is the private theists and, again, they sometimes tend to be a little over-emphasized in terms of discussion of religion in Canada. They are one in five Canadians, 10% of Americans. This group tend to believe in God and pray on occasion. Religion is not particularly important to them. They do not assent to common Christian creeds. They see no need for church attendance. Now, one thing I should point out here is that while Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists are relatively small, small portions of our population in Canada, by default, they are largely forced into this group because of the way the analysis is structured. However, I should mention that among this group, they're not the particularly orthodox or devout Muslims or Jews. 21% of this group would call themselves Catholics, so we've got all stripes of Catholics. 59% percent would call themselves liberal or progressive Christians.

The last group I just want to touch on are atheists and agnostics, 20% of Canadians, 6% of Americans. They're generally defined by their rejection of the concept of God or other Christian doctrines. Eight in ten would believe that God's an old superstition and, again, I guess the name kind of says it all.

If we look at these six groups we see that there's really tremendous variation in the degree and manner of faith in Canada, as well as in the United States. I think that one thing that's crucial for anybody thinking about religion, anybody covering religion today, is that you need to look beyond the churches or other organized religious groups. If you focus too much on the church or other organized faith groups, if you view everything through the lens of the church or organized religion, you get a very distorted view of faith in Canada. As we've seen here, there are six very different, very distinct types of faith, or lack thereof, and many of them are detached from the church or organized religion. Even if they are ardent churchgoers like the privatistic churchgoers, they feel that really their private beliefs are more important than what's taught by any church.

It should be noted that these figures cross all denominations. For example, there's Southern Baptists in each of these categories, including the atheists and agnostics. All of the major denominations cut across all of these faith groups. So denominationalism is also not a particularly helpful lens when it comes to understanding the macro level of faith in Canada. There are many types of Catholics and Baptists.

So: Is there faith in Canada? Well, it depends. There's all sorts of different types of stripes of faith in Canada. Is it important? Yes, I think it is. I think one thing to understand about this is that this is a driving factor. It's a motivation. People's belief it's a motivating factor for many of the things they do. What study after study finds, just as ours did, is that the more committed people are, the more engaged they are in things like volunteer activities, the more they are donating to charities, the more they are active in the community, attempting to make a difference, and I think this is really where the media fall down and miss the story. Faith is the underlying factor for a lot of "why people do what they do in Canada today" has to do with their faith and their underlying values and it shapes that tremendously . To ignore that when reporting, I think, is to miss the story in many respects.

Do the media care? A study we just completed shows that 65% of weekly attenders of religious services feel the media does a poor job of covering faith and religious issues--two-thirds who think they're doing a poor job. (An interesting parallel finding again from the God in society in North America study is that regular church attenders had lower levels of confidence in the media.) Interestingly, if you look across other group segments within society, there was no difference between regular churchgoers in terms of their confidence in the government or in terms of their confidence in big business or unions. Where the difference came was in their confidence in the media, so I think this is a group that feels that they are misunderstood.

The less you attend services, the more likely you are to think that the media is doing a good job, and those people who never attend services think the media's doing a wonderful job of not covering religion. I don't think it's just a small interest group griping about their lack of coverage. I think, really, the missing dimension here has to do with having a good understanding of the motivation for why people do what they do. And if you look at the religious element and the various types and stripes that we've seen here today, there is tremendous variation, and for many people religion is a very salient point.

To conclude: Is there faith in Canada? Well, there are many types of faith. Its presence, I think, is undeniable. Do the media care? Well, regular attenders of religious services don't think so and they think less of the media for it, have a lack of confidence in it. Moreover, I think it's time to rethink faith coverage. I think we need to shift our glasses, get our prescriptions checked, change the lens, think a little bigger picture about the role of faith in Canada. Faith is not equal to organized religion in Canada.

Andrew Grenville is Senior Vice-President for the Global Research division of the Angus Reid Group. In 1993 he was asked to answer the seeming simple question: "How many evangelicals are there in Canada?" He took the bait and was hooked. Since that time he has directed numerous probes into the depth, nature and effect of faith in Canada, the U.S. and 30 other countries around the world, often in collaboration with scholars such as the late George Rawlyk, Don Posterski, Mark Noll, David Lyon and John Green. When the media do get around to reporting on faith in Canada, they sometimes call him.

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