Christians in a Secular World: The Canadian Experience

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
most recently published works are Biblical Religion and Family Values,
Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics, and Religion and
Technology.

Bowen, a sociologist of religion at Acadia University, maintains in this
study that the Christian commitment of many Canadians has a significant
impact on their lives. This may well seem obvious enough to most people,
but in elaborating on this theme, Bowen sees himself as responding to
various sociologists of religion who have emphasized the increasing
marginalization and dilution of Christian commitment resulting from
secularization processes that began largely in the Enlightenment. Bowen
claims to have derived almost all of his conclusions from 18 social
surveys of Canadians—surveys conducted by, among others, Statistics
Canada, the Angus Reid organization, and Reginald Bibby, whose survey
data are frequently cited in the Canadian media. Bowen presents here
survey data relating to the views of Canadian Christians on personal
values, intimate relationships, civic responsibilities, social policy,
and the contemporary situation of the churches.

Bowen likely has much more confidence in survey methods and survey data
than many of his potential readers do, but even so, he does not so much
interpret the data as endeavour to reconcile it with his own
sociological vision of Canadian culture; and despite his familiarity
with work by sophisticated sociologists of religion such as Berger,
Bellah, Wuthnow, and Bryan Wilson, his own vision is an unsophisticated
one, inspired largely by a disdain for the “anti-religious
Enlightenment heritage in Canada today” that has vitiated “the
mindset of our secular elites in government, education, and the
media.” When he moves from empirical sociology to pious diatribe,
Bowen almost invariably shows himself to be exceedingly naive with
respect to the finer points of philosophy, theology, and church history
that might have helped him to say something genuinely useful to an
open-minded inquirer interested in the condition of Christian faith in
contemporary Canadian life and the prospects for authentic Christianity
in the Canada of the future. Yet even those Christian conservatives,
traditionalists, and reactionaries who have a deep mistrust of
sociological researchers may find Bowen’s apologetical pronouncements
to be reassuring.