“Canada is not post-Christian yet. There are two dominant narratives that characterize social tensions in this shifting terrain: one constructs an “us” that enshrines Christian practices and symbols as “our culture and heritage”. These are imagined to be universal. The other narrative seeks to reconstitute the story of “us” as diverse, equal, and inclusive.”

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“In order to mobilize a conceptually rich notion of enchantment, territory must be ceded. Religious people must stop imagining nonreligious people as bereft and barren, lost souls and ethical wastelands. Nonreligious people must stop characterizing religious people as deluded. Religious people must stop counting as one of theirs those who have withdrawn, rejected or minimized involvement. Nonreligious people must allow for the messiness of everyday life that includes strands of religious participation, the wisps of childhood socialization and fluctuations in practice and belief. Both must stop longing for the other to be like them. And both must acknowledge similarity in a manner that does not reduce to a will to religion or a will to nonreligion. Both must engage in agonistic respect in the project of world repairing. Why? Because we are ruining the earth and destroying the habitat of others whose lives count as fully as those of humans.”

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“We argue that a continued shift away from a majoritarian Christian society in Canada and toward the “new diversity” has rather significant implications for law and society. The law has been increasingly required to balance the beliefs, values, and practices of both nonreligious and religious people to ensure Canadians can “live well together” in an ever changing (non)religious landscape.”

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An increasing number of people identify as having no religion. Recent surveys from countries that were traditionally majority Christian show that a significant percentage of the population is nonreligious. 

The results from the 2021 Canadian census showed that 35% of the population was not religious, more than doubling from 16.5% twenty years earlier. In the United States, recent findings from the Pew Research Center suggest that Christians could become less than half the population in just a few decades. Right now, about 30% of people in the United States are religiously unaffiliated.   

Other countries are experiencing similar trends. In recent census results from 2021 in England and Wales, only 46% of the population identified as Christian while 37% checked the “no religion” box. In Australia, 39% of the population is nonreligious while only 44% are Christian. In Latin America, where most people have traditionally identified as Roman Catholic, the “nones” are also on the rise. As of 2019, about 19% of the population in Argentina is religiously unaffiliated. In Brazil, meanwhile, 12% of the population states that they belong to no religion. 

In the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark), no religion makes up from about 20% to 30% of the populations, but when considering questions like the percentage of people who believe in God or who say religion is important in their lives, we see that the trend toward nonreligion in the region becomes even starker. 

In the countries mentioned above, young people are even more likely to identify as nonreligious, suggesting that the percentage of people identifying as nonreligious will continue to grow. This is an important social shift with wide-ranging implications, but it has yet to receive sufficient attention.  

Many people define nonreligion by focusing on what is absent: that is, what do nonreligious people lack that religious people have? But our project has a different focus: we investigate the substantive content of nonreligion – what are the values, beliefs, and practices of people who self-describe as nonreligious? How do social institutions reflect this massive social change? What might the positive and negative impacts be?

The NCF project identifies the social impact of the rapid and dramatic increase of nonreligion. The NCF has five focal areas, which each have various projects underway: environment; law; migration; health; and education. Learn more here.