December 26, 2004

Canada's making religious recovery

by Ted Byfield (Calgary Sun)

The Christian Christmas, judging from the latest Gallup survey, may be making a comeback in Canada. Gallup found that Canadian church attendance for the first time since the early 1980s is on the rise.

Perhaps most Christmas cards will no longer say "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings," but cards with Bethlehem scenes, the wise men, the star and the shepherds will gradually reappear. Who knows?

However, from a poll of 1,005 Canadians made last September, Gallup put the number who attend religious services weekly at 37% of the population. The equivalent British figure is 24% and the American 56%, reflecting a significant rise in Canadian religious practice from the 20% level recorded in 2000 by Lethbridge religion sociologist Reginald Bibby and others. Bibby, who also studies the sociological aspects of professional sports, compared the religious recovery to the recovery of the Canadian Football League. The public interest was already there, he said. The CFL learned how to appeal to it. The churches may be doing the same.

However, whether this turns out to be a permanent change, or just a "blip," he said, remains to be seen. The outcome will chiefly depend on what the churches do about it.

There are in general two possible responses, one of which is virtually guaranteed to fail, while the other might possibly succeed.

The doomed approach is the one favoured today by most mainline church seminaries and liberal clergy, the very people whose guiding hand has left the United and Anglican churches in a state of apparent disintegration, with membership plunging, churches closing and conferences and synods sundered by assorted attempts to re-invent morality and rewrite the Bible. The way to bring people into the Christian faith, these mentors will say, is to remove the obstacles that stand in their path, to make the road easy.

If people's sexual proclivities, marital status, or moral views do not accord with the Christian tradition, tell them that those old taboos and strictures no longer apply. If they find parts of the Bible offensive, tell them the Bible is being "reinterpreted" to accord with "modern perceptions." If they do not believe in miracles, or that God sometimes intervenes in the lives of His creatures, or that Christ literally rose from the dead, assure them that the church has "learned to be tolerant," that it has "escaped" from "the old dogmatism," and that today men and women can believe pretty well anything about God, and still consider themselves "good Christians."

This approach will certainly resolve all the immediate problems and remove all the obstacles -- all, that is, except one. The inquirer may reasonably ask: "Then why should I become a Christian at all? "If Christ makes no demands upon us, expects no change in what we do, think and say, if He poses no threat to our state of mind or lifestyle, if He leaves us essentially where we are already, then what's the point of the exercise? "Why bother with him?"

The other approach, of course, is the precise reverse. It provides the inquirer with the same response that Christians have been making for the last two thousand years. Christ does not ask for so much of our time, or so much of our money, or so much of our thought, they say. Christ wants us -- everything that we are, everything that we have, all our proclivities whether "good" or "bad" in the eyes of the world; all our loves and all our hates; all our fears and all our aspirations. We must hold nothing back. It is a process of capitulation, of total surrender. All must be put at Christ's disposal. He will make of it whatever He wills, and you will definitely change, often in ways that may astound you. This creation of the "new man," as St. Paul puts it, this so-called "born-again" experience, is not a mere manner of speaking. It is a literal fact. It is the most dangerous thing, the most decisive thing, and the most triumphant thing you will ever have done.

Under the first option, this incipient Christian recovery will certainly turn out to have been what Bibby calls "a blip." But if the churches take the second, it could well bring about the greatest social transformation in the history of Canada.