In Sunday’s Sun: conservative death by numbers
God is dead.
Or, at least, he’s irrelevant. So say a growing number of Canadians who, according to Statistics Canada’s just-released National Household Survey, are becoming less and less religious.
The numbers are drawn from the agency’s 2011 demographic study and they paint a picture that anticipates an increasingly secular Canada. Back in 1981, around 90% of Canadians were Christian and just over 7% had no religious affiliation at all.
Thirty years later, those self-identifying as Christians have plummeted to 67% — and the non-believers have surged to nearly one-quarter of the population.
Statistic Canada’s numbers show constant growth in the non-religious category, by about 5% every decade.
If that trend holds steady, a third of Canadians will be effectively godless by the end of this decade.
For students of politics — and conservative politics, in particular — there are other trends worth noting.
The survey also found that Jews are far less numerous than they once were, and are now in danger of slipping below 1% of the population.
Meanwhile, the number of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs are rising all the time. In 1981, for instance, less than one-half of 1% of Canadians was Muslim.
Now, they constitute more than 3% and are the second-largest religious group in Canada.
Any politician seeking to one day lead to the Conservative Party of Canada — or anyone hoping to win a Conservative nomination somewhere, and a seat in a federal or provincial legislative body — should scrutinize the Statistics Canada trend lines very, very carefully.
They strongly suggest the Conservatives have pursued a strategy that, ultimately, will see them marginalized in the way Republicans currently are in the U.S.
Going back a decade, Stephen Harper’s Conservative coalition had been partly made up of evangelicals, right-leaning Christians and Jews who were upset about Liberal party foreign policy.
At the same time, Harper’s party gave the cold shoulder to other faiths — going after the charitable status of left-leaning Christian causes, attacking the religious garb of Muslims and suggesting (as Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney famously did) that Sikhs were “overheated” and use “the race card.”
In the short term, it was nasty, but it was a strategy that worked. With a massive war chest — and with state-of-the-art electioneering techniques like psychographics and geo-demographic segmentation — the Conservatives cobbled together enough votes to win a majority in 2011.
But, if Statistics Canada is right, the Conservatives have also chosen a path that long-term will ultimately end in defeat. By championing Christian-right causes and demonizing Muslims, the Harper Cons are demographically putting themselves out of business.
(Personally, as a church-going Irish Catholic guy, the StatsCan data makes me sort of sad. I’m no missionary — I consider religion to be an entirely personal affair and detest those who are always lecturing and hectoring others about it — but I know I draw considerable comfort from my faith. It gives a measure of hope to me and, I believe, others. So how do the growing numbers of non-religious folks get by without hope? I’d find that pretty hard to do, but that’s just me.)
As citizens of the best country in the world, these statistics should make most of us pretty happy, however.
We are a peaceful, diverse society, and that’s helping to attract people from all over. We are the envy of the world, as Jean Chretien used to say, and that can only be a good thing.
But these statistics should fill future Conservatives with dread. They strongly suggest that Harper’s party — as conservatives so often do — is fighting the last war, and not preparing for the one that lies ahead.
God might have something to say about that, but at press time he could not be reached for comment.