Phase Change: Christian Canada Has a Minority Future
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/12/13
The reason Canadian Christianity has been experiencing a precipitous decline over the last several decades has been, more or less, its Truth coming to Light. That is not to say the ‘light’ of Jesus Christ or the ‘truth’ of the religion, as propounded by neo-Christian existentialists in the manner of Dr. Jordan Peterson who argue for the Christian faith in hostile – to them – secular territory in an implicit manner because it’s – to him once more – more powerful that way, but more in the facts.
The facts are a continual wave of three streams of truths about the faith. One is the pervasive stories of maltreatment of human beings under the care of the Christian churches in Canadian society. Two is the reluctance to admit these crimes to the extent of pervasive covering from the hierarchs down to the priests. Three is the decade-on-decade secularization of Canadian society.
A sidebar on point three is that the secularization has not come anywhere close to completion. Therefore, any public commentary of a post-secular society is incorrect while a post-Christian society becomes more appropriate. What do these three points clarify in public discourse in Canadian society and its relation to the Christian religion? A short flippant answer is a collapse.
Not merely on the numerical front, that’s abundantly clear in the StatsCan or Statistics Canada data. Not simply in the sincerity sphere, that’s less clear, but more qualitatively apparent in the culture and in social life. People go to churches and cathedrals less. They know fewer of the dogmas and adhere to fewer of the beliefs. We’re witnessing a phase change in Canadian society.
The phase change is the dominance of secular culture with a decline of Christianity and a modest increase in Islam. Most of the religious maintenance of the culture comes from the immigration of religious people, as second-generation and third-generation Canadians become less and less religious than their parents.
The intergenerational loss of faith, failure to account for decades of crimes against humanity, a diminishment of sincere faith, the secularization of society, the plurality of faith based in Canadian culture, and the rise of the Nones, depict a non-religious future for Canadian society.
Those demographic and cultural shifts reflect much global sociocultural demographics too. In a post-World War II and post-Cold War Era with the rise of spheres of influence, we witness a rise of a global culture unseen except in ancient myth. The world is the Tower of Babel. A plurality of languages and people scattered everywhere. Yet, the waters are mixing drastically due to loose border policies and a cosmopolitanism winning over a cultural monopolity.
We will see two threads from the Christian faith in the 2020s and 2030s. One is adaptive and recognizes reality; the other is reactive and defies reality, think: collective defense mechanism. Freethought communities can work with the former in the inevitable culture war with the latter. The main tool will be humour in sociocultural life, and legislation and unifying oratory in legal and political life, respectively.
P.S. War began in the 2010s – get to work. I am.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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