Determining religiosity a challenge

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This article was published 18/11/2023 (962 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Is it impossible to know how many people are religious? For American statistician and pastor Ryan Burge, who studies religion in the U.S., the answer is no.

“There’s no objective way to measure religion. There just isn’t,” he said. “There’s no objective measuring stick … everything is just a series of best guesses.”

To make his case, Burge pointed to surveys that ask how many Americans are non-religious, or “nones.” Six different surveys came up with six different answers, ranging from 21 per cent of the population to 36 per cent.

Based on the trend lines, the only thing that can reasonably be concluded is that the number of people with no religion has risen since 2008, he said.

I wondered if the same was true for Canada. Can we really know how many Canadians are religious, or not religious? To help with an answer, I reached out to religion scholars across the country.

For Sam Reimer, who teaches at Crandall University in Moncton, Burge is saying what all scholars of religion know: Different polls and surveys give different results and it’s probably good to find some middle ground.

“What we do know is that these results, though never perfect, are better than our best guess,” he said, adding “what is clear is the percentage of people who have no religious identity is increasing in both countries, and that younger generations are more likely to be nones than older generations.”

Joel Thiessen teaches at Ambrose University College in Calgary. He agreed there are no objective metrics for religiosity. Still, he said, “I’m partial to a relatively objective metric of ‘religious nones’ to simply mean someone who does not identify with a religion or religious group.”

Over time, these surveys, however imperfect, can “still yield useful descriptions and comparisons to track changes over time,” he added.

For John Stackhouse, also of Crandall University, a big problem with surveys about religion is they frequently don’t make sense to the people being researched.

“Definitions of a religious group should be ownable by that group,” he said. “If the observer’s definition materially differs from the participant’s definition, then a yellow flag should go up.”

He noted this can be a particular problem when, for example, non-evangelicals try to determine how many evangelicals there are in Canada.

For example, people who say they only go to church monthly are being counted as evangelicals in some studies. “Mere monthly attendance, outside of special circumstances, is not consistent with a form of religion that emphasizes vitality,” he said, noting that frequent worship service attendance is considered an important marker of evangelicalism.

The same is true for counting Roman Catholics, he said, since that religion’s understanding of the sacraments means going to mass weekly. “You just can’t be a ‘good Catholic’ and not regularly attend mass. That’s just not how that religion works,” he stated.

Sarah Wilkins-LaFlamme of the University of Waterloo agreed that any measurement of a concept, including of religion, will never be perfect.

“There are many dimensions of religiosity to measure,” she said.

For her, a good empirical study of non-religion “with a clearly defined measure and a pretty representative sample is much, much better than just a guess.”

At the same time, it’s important to not rely on only one survey. “This allows us to get a good sense of where trends appear in the various ways we measure religiosity … and where more study is needed.”

Rick Hiemstra is director of research for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. He believes that “some measure is better than no measure,” but agreed that good questions need to be asked to get good results.

Asking someone if they are evangelical or Catholic or any other religion isn’t helpful unless there are follow-up questions about adherence to the beliefs and practices of those religions, he said.

He is not a fan of asking people if they are religious or not based on doctrine or beliefs — the most common way of determining religiosity in the U.S.

“Statements of belief are now often performative,” Hiemstra said, noting that many today say they agree with certain statements of belief but fail to live accordingly.

In the meantime, he said, the current ways of determining religiosity are better than nothing since they do “find something, and that’s better than nothing… but I think we can do better.”

The last word goes to Peter Schurmann, who teaches at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ont. He has a friend who identifies as a “pagan Catholic Jew.” Surveys about religion never work for her; what does she put down? “Polls just can’t capture those layers,” he said.

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