Institute to provide new hub for religious research

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/06/2024 (477 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hardly a week goes by that I don’t look south with envy at all the research being done in the U.S. about the role religion plays in politics, culture and society at large in that country.

The Pew Research Center, Gallup, the Barna Group, the Public Religion Research Institute and Graphs About Religion — these are some of the organizations actively and deeply studying religion in America, along with individual scholars.

From their research, you can learn that 72 per cent of religiously unaffiliated Americans say conservative Christians have gone too far in trying to control religion in the government and public schools; that in the last 20 years self-reported weekly attendance at religious services in that country has fallen from 42 per cent to 30 per cent; and that the label “evangelical” has become more political than religious with the rise in the number of people who claim to be evangelical yet say they almost never go to church.

As someone who writes about religion, I love that kind of information. But much of it doesn’t translate into the Canadian context. I have often wished there were groups like that in Canada working to make sense of the religious landscape in this country.

That’s why I was happy to learn about the new Institute for Religion, Culture and Societal Futures (IRCSF), a new hub for empirical research related to religion, spirituality and emerging forms of communities of belief and practice in Canada.

The Institute, which was launched in June, is led by Sarah Wilkins- Laflamme and Galen Watts of the University of Waterloo and Carol Ann MacGregor of St. Jerome’s University. Based at St. Jerome’s, it aims to bring together scholars in the fields of sociology of religion and the social scientific study of religion to study and gain a better understanding of the religious landscape in Canada.

The IRCSF will specialize in four main areas of research: religious trends in Canada, the interaction between religion, spirituality and culture, religion and spirituality in schools and the realities and the future of Catholic life in Canada.

I caught up with two of the Institute’s creators, Wilkins-Laflamme and Watts, via a Zoom interview earlier this month.

Like me, Wilkins-Laflamme has long been frustrated by the lack of quality data about religion in Canada. “I get asked about it all the time,” she said, noting there are few places for Canadians to go if they want to know more about the Canadian religious landscape.

With the lack of good quality research about religion in this country, people in this country tend to be “influenced by news from the U.S., which frequently highlights the most extreme versions of religion,” she said.

And if they aren’t getting it from the media, Canadians are getting their ideas about religion from Hollywood, Netflix or other streaming services — movies and shows that mostly present it from an American point of view.

Along with studying what religion means for those who are religious, the Institute will also focus on the growing non-religion movement in Canada through the rise of the “nones” — people who say they have no religious affiliation.

“This is a significant moment with the rise of the nones and other new spiritual movements,” said Watts. “Canadians are seeking new spiritual frameworks to make sense of their lives and the world around them, but there is little systemic analysis of what is happening.”

Since many of the nones say they are spiritual, one thing the Institute will wrestle with is how to come up with new ways of describing spirituality and religiosity. The old ways of doing so, such as affiliation with a faith group, attendance at religious services and belief in God, “are less relevant than ever before,” he said.

The Institute will explore new ways of defining religiosity and spirituality, Watts noted, he said, adding that “people are not thinking of religion in conventional ways today. We want to study how they are expressing their spiritual and religious longings.”

Other topics the Institute wants to look at include the rise of Christian nationalism, religion and rural Canada, immigration and religion, education and religion and politics and religion, the impact of the pandemic on religious life and something called conspirituality — how some people combine religion and spirituality with conspiracy theories, such as happened during the pandemic.

At the same time, the Institute will explore the shift from Canada as a Christian hegemonic country, as it was 50 to 60 years ago, to a country made up of people of many faiths and no faith.

Fortunately, the Institute doesn’t want to keep what it learns in an ivory tower; the creators intend to share it with religious groups, the media, politicians and the general public through webinars, symposiums, conferences and social media.

“We want to bring our expertise to the subject, understand how it works and share it with others,” said Wilkins-Laflamme, inviting people to stay tuned by visiting the Institute’s website at https://sju.ca/institute-religion-culture-and-societal-futures.

I know I will.

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