In Canada, unbelievers are increasing while Christians are decreasing and people no longer go to church every week: Mark A. Noll

The Greek word αθεοι (atheoi), as it appears in the Epistle to the Ephesians (2:12) on the early 3rd-century Papyrus 46. It is usually translated into English as "[those who are] without God".

Unbelievers are increasing while Christians are decreasing



"Then Atheist fell into a very great laughter."

Atheist, a mocker of CHRISTIAN and HOPEFUL, who goes the opposite way on the "King's Highway" because he boasts that he knows that God and the Celestial City do not exist.

Illustrations by Frederick Barnard, J.D. Linton, W. Small, etc. Engraved by Dalziel Brothers from the Henry Altemus edition of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

Broad measures of church adherence underscore the magnitude of Canadian religious change over recent decades. As late as 1961, only one-half of one percent of Canadian citizens told census takers that they were not attached to any religious body. That proportion rose to 4.3 percent in 1971 and in the latest census from 2001 now stands at 16.2 percent. Over the same four decades, the proportion of Canadians telling census personnel that they were part of the Catholic Church declined slightly from 46 percent to 43 percent, while the proportion claiming a connection to the Anglican, Baptist, Presbyterian, and United churches--the four largest Protestant denominations that had long dominated religious life in English-speaking Canada--fell precipitously from 41 percent to 20 percent.

People used to go to church every week, but no longer

God Is an Atheist - She Doesn't Believe in Me by Bill Lewis

Reports of church attendance offer an equally dramatic picture. After World War II, when the Gallup Poll first asked Canadians whether they had been in church or synagogue sometime during the previous seven days, a full 67 percent of Canadians responded positively. Among all Canadian Catholics, the number was a robust 83 percent and in Quebec a stratospheric 90 percent. In the early 1960s, weekly mass attendance in the rapidly growing cities of Montreal and Quebec remained quite high, but some leaders worried openly that in working-class neighbors it was down to "only" 50 percent. By 1990, positive response to the Gallup question had fallen to 23 percent throughout Canada. Although the foremost Canadian religious demographer, Reginald Bibby, has recently noted some increase in attendance, his non-Gallup calculations chart a weekly attendance rate for the year 2000 of less than 20 percent.

A dramatic inversion has taken place: Now more Americans go to church than Canadians



Title: Smelling out a rat; or the atheistical-revolutionist disturbed in his midnight "calculations"Abstract: Print shows Richard Price seated at a desk, he turns to look over his right shoulder at a vision of an enormous Edmund Burke, his spectacles, nose, and hands emerge from the haze, a crown in one hand and a cross in the other, on his head an open copy of his "Reflections on the Revolution in France...." Hanging on the wall is an illustration of the beheading of Charles I titled, "Death of Charles I, or the Glory of Great Britain."
Notes: Forms part of: British Cartoon Prints Collection (Library of Congress).; At end of title: Vide a troubled--conscience.; Attributed to James Gillray.;

Numbers, of course, must be interpreted, but these findings about church identification and church attendance nonetheless indicate a series of shifts in Canadian religion that have not taken place in the United States, or have taken place at a much slower speed. Put generally, in 1950 Canadian church attendance as a proportion of the total population exceeded church attendance in the United States by one-third to one-half, and church attendance in Quebec may have been the highest in the world. Today church attendance in the United States is probably one-half to two-thirds greater than in Canada, and attendance in Quebec is the lowest of any state or province in North America. Over the course of only half a century, these figures represent a dramatic inversion.

1929 cover of the USSR League of Militant Atheists magazine, showing the gods of the Abrahamic religions being crushed by the Communist 5-year plan

This inversion, and the history of the last sixty years that created it, could not have been imagined in the years immediately after the Second World War. At that time, the vigor of Canadian religious practice seemed entirely in keeping with the general trajectory of Canadian history. Not only was Canada more observant in religious practice and more orthodox in religious opinion than the United States, but these comparative results represented only the latest chapter in a remarkable history of christianization stretching back to the eighteenth century. That history began with the creation in Quebec of a full-orbed, organic Catholic society--grounded in the colonial period on the self-sacrificing labors of several religious orders (both male and female), subsequently renewed by devotional and institutional revivals in the mid-nineteenth century, and then sustained deep into the twentieth century by a hegemonic but still remarkably resilient blend of popular piety and clerical supervision.

Source: Noll, Mark A. What Happened To Christian Canada?, Vancouver, Canada: Regent College Publishing, 2007, pages 13-16.