Why are more Saskatchewan residents leaving religion behind?

So, what has changed in the last decade and why are more people in the province saying no to religious identity?

The answer can be one of many things from a rise in immigration to changes in family dynamics and society to controversy among many religions in the past and present.

Sandra Dunham is the executive director of the Centre for Inquiry Canada, an organization that provides education and training on skeptical, secular, rational and humanistic inquiry.

Dunham said many who answer the Census question on religion do so because of their childhood, and the faith they were brought up in. Dunham explained this doesn’t mean they are practicing their religion, instead just putting down an answer based on the fact they went to church on Christmas or Easter.

“The actual number of non-believers is likely significantly higher than what you’re reading in these statistics,” she said.

She added the Census also showed the number of kids over the age of 10 has increased substantially and while that may look like a small stat, she said when it comes to religious identity, it has a big effect on the numbers.

For example, she believes adults who identified as Christian based on their childhood are more likely to identify their kids as non-religious.

Dunham also touched on several factors that may have pushed people away from churches and organized religion including the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church and many religions’ views on abortion rights and LGBTQ issues. Recently, Briercrest College in Caronport, Sask. came under fire after several former LGBTQ students came forward alleging discrimination, harassment, and abuse from people at the college.

That has prompted more calls for less or no government funding for private Christian schools and colleges and also reignited the call for religious institutes to be taxed.

That topic has been covered extensively in the past by the CFI, as “Advancing a Religion” is a criteria used to claim charitable status in Canada.

“That is costing Canadians (around) $5.5 billion a year,” she said pointing to the Centre’s annual report on “The Cost of Religion in Canada.” In April 2021 the report claimed that the preferential GST/HST and property tax treatment costs Canadian governments $1.2 billion annually.

However, these numbers are nothing new according to Dr. John Stackhouse, a professor of religious studies at Crandall University in Moncton.

He said this decline started roughly 50 years ago.

“The decline has been pretty impressive since the highwater mark in the 1971 Census,” he said. “The continued decline is impressive because we keep wondering when it’s going to bottom out and it hasn’t yet. The jump in people identifying as no religion was higher than most of us expected.”

One of the stats from the Census that Stackhouse said he didn’t expect to see was the number of Indigenous people who identify as non-religious.

“Up until the last 20 years, they were Canada’s most Christian population. Since the 1990s they have been very strongly identifying themselves with Christianity. But what we see now is more of them are identifying as no religion than the population at large.”

He said some of the reasons for this are the inquiries and discoveries at residential schools and the fact that more younger Canadians are abandoning religion, which includes the young Indigenous population.

Another voice lending his thoughts on these numbers is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS).

Duane McKay is an elder in the LDS church in Prince Albert and sits on the High Council of the Stake that oversees several congregations in central and west-central Saskatchewan.

He said many residents have some relationship in history with religion but as times and family activities have changed, so has the landscape of religion. He said churches were at one time the community centre and the hub of some cities, but now that’s not the case.

“Over time, people have become less dependant on the church and less dependant on God and the values they had within their families and perhaps they decided they don’t need to,” he said.

But he added that just because someone does not identify with a religion, doesn’t mean they don’t identify with a concept of God.

“Some that have no affiliation will say they believe in a higher intelligence or some description and perhaps don’t have a personal testimony of that relationship with their creator,” he said.

When it comes to numbers from the Latter-Day Saints Church specifically, McKay said it’s difficult to tell based on purely Census data, but church membership records have been stable with many newcomers coming to the Mormon faith while some have left over the years,

He touched briefly on the Latter-Day Saints missionary program which sends young people to overseas on missions for two years. Worldwide, he said that the program has about 54,000 missionaries.

“In some ways that helps us maintain that membership, or at least spread the word,” he said.

In the 2021 Census, just over 2,000 Saskatchewan residents were a part of the Latter-Day Saints compared to just over 3,000 a decade ago.

As for whether this trend will continue, Dunham, McKay, and Stackhouse say it will but each is looking at it from a different lens.

“Time will tell whether this trend will continue up or down but certainly I think it’s a concern for all the denominations,” McKay said.

“If the parents grow up and don’t go to church, the children don’t become that religion. Increasingly, people are just falling away from it,” Dunham added.

“We as Canadians are sorting ourselves out into people who are serious, observant religious leaders and people who really aren’t and who don’t see any personal gain to being affiliated with a religion and practicing it,” Stackhouse said. He added that sorting could take another 20 years if not sooner.

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derek.craddock@pattisonmedia.com

Twitter: @PA_Craddock

by Derek Craddock

Why are more Saskatchewan residents leaving religion behind?

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