IN GOD THEY DOUBT:

In God We Trust...Canadians Aren't So Sure (CLIFFORD KRAUSS, March 26, 2003, NY Times)

The French Canadian writer Yann Martel has acknowledged that he rearranged chapters in the Canadian edition of his new novel, "Life of Pi," because he feared that Canadians would be offended by its religious content.

"America is a very religious, almost puritanical country," he told Publishers Weekly last year. "In Canada, secularism is triumphant, and to talk noncynically, nonironically about religion is strange."

Mr. Martel's comments have been much quoted of late as a sign that in at least one vital respect, Canadian and American societies are moving in opposite directions despite their common language and geographical proximity.

In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington, only 30 percent of Canadians said religion was very important to them, compared with 59 percent of Americans. Twenty-one percent of Canadians said they attended religious services regularly in another survey taken in 2000 - about half the rate for Americans (although still a bit higher than the rate for most of Western Europe).

The statistics would be far more skewed if it were not for the growing number of devout Muslim, Sikh and Hindu immigrants to Canada. In Mr. Martel's city of Montreal, which is crowned by a giant illuminated cross atop Mount Royal, to commemorate the piety of its founder, Paul de Chomedy de Maisonneuve, church attendance is plummeting so fast that at least 18 churches in the last three years have been boarded up and abandoned or converted into condominiums and, in one case, even a pizza parlor. Meanwhile, rural churches are closing across the western prairies.

"This is a society where religion no longer wields cultural authority," Marguerite Van Die, a theology professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, wrote recently.

Hence, it's a dying nation, with a dwindling population, no serious conservative movement, no sense of a national purpose other than to prop up the Health Care system it has nearly sacralized, no future. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 26, 2003 7:40 PM