Evangelical decline may be down to categorization

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This article was published 26/11/2022 (1015 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For decades, mainline Protestant denominations in Canada have been declining. So it came as no surprise when the 2021 census reported that, since 2011, the number of Canadians affiliating with United, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Anglican churches collectively dropped from 4.5 million to 2.9 million.

But what was surprising this time around was learning that two evangelical denominations, Baptists and Pentecostals, also declined in the last decade. The number of people who identify as Baptist fell from 635,840 to 436,040, while those saying they are Pentecostal dropped from 478,705 to 399,025.

Since those are the only two evangelical denominations that Statistics Canada has been specifically tracking over time, it’s hard to tell if the decrease applies to all evangelical denominations.

What also muddies the waters are two other categories in the census — “Other Christian” and “Christian Not Otherwise Specified.” Both of those have grown over the last 10 years.

What’s happening? To find out, I turned to four scholars who study religion and make their homes in evangelical traditions. All felt more study is needed, but they offered a few thoughts.

Rick Hiemstra, director of research for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, linked the decreases for Baptists and Pentecostal denominations to the rise in those two other categories — catch-alls for those who might not know where to place themselves in the denominational spectrum.

Some Baptists and Pentecostals may have ceased being religious, he said, perhaps joining the ranks of the “nones” in the census. But others might now see themselves as generic Christians, now being part of a non-denominational church. “I suspect there are many in this category who would be considered evangelical,” he said.

If that’s the case, it mirrors what is happened in the U.S. In that country, there are now 9,000 non-denominational congregations. About 30 per cent of American Christians attend those churches, no longer identifying with a specific denomination.

As Christianity Today, America’s leading evangelical publication put it, if nondenominational was a denomination, it would be the largest Protestant sect in that country, claiming more than 13 per cent of churchgoers in the U.S.

Along with that, Hiemstra noted it could be that many Canadian evangelicals today are choosing non-specific categories because they are hesitant to be identified with evangelicalism due to what is happening with evangelicals in the U.S.

John Stackhouse, who teaches at Crandall University in New Brunswick, believes more study is needed of those two categories. “We need to bore into them to see who’s there,” he said.

Doing that would test the decades-old thesis that denominationalism in Canada is waning, he said — the idea that people care less about what group they identify with but instead seek out any church that meets their needs.

More study would also show whether evangelicals are holding their own or declining, like other Christian groups.

Sam Reimer, who also teaches at Crandall, believes the recent census actually does show evangelicals are in decline — something that has been happening for some time.

While their decrease will be slowed due to arrival of immigrants who are evangelical, the decline is inevitable for them because more younger people, including evangelical youth, are becoming “nones.”

“More people are willing to say they have no religious affiliation,” he said.

Reimer’s idea is borne out by other studies that have shown some evangelical groups have stalled or began to decline after 2000 or so, after more robust growth in the 1990s.

For Kevin Flatt, who teaches at Redeemer University in Ontario, one thing the census might not catch are new Canadians who are evangelicals, people who belong to unique groups such as African Independent Churches.

“Such new-to-us groups tend to get under-counted and under-noticed, but with immigration trends, are likely becoming a larger part of the evangelical mix in Canada,” he said.

Categories like “Christian Other” and “Christian Not Otherwise Specified” probably has a mix of evangelicals and cultural Christians “who retain some sense of Christian identification but have lost touch with any particular church community or tradition,” Flatt added.

At the same time, he agreed with Reimer that evangelicalism in Canada, as a whole, might be waning due to what he called a “stall out.”

This stalling is due to a couple of factors, he said, beginning with a drying-up of defections from mainline Protestantism to more conservative churches — there just aren’t that many disaffected United Church or Lutheran members left to move to an evangelical congregation, he said.

That move of “theologically and morally conservative Protestants out of liberalizing mainline churches was an under-appreciated contributor to evangelical growth in the 1960s-90s,” he said, adding that the switch-over began to wane in the late 1990s.

One thing all four agree on is that more study is needed. And they also agree something major is happening in the Christian landscape in Canada, including for conservative Christianity.

Read the full responses from the four scholars at John’s blog: onfaithcanada.blogspot.com

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