Is there a "renaissance" of religion in Canada? A critical look at Bibby and beyond
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research suggests Canada is a largely secular nation. Yet Reginald Bibby (2002) has recently proposed, surprisingly, that Canada is experiencing a religious renaissance. While "private spirituality" abounds in Canada, Bibby says his claim rests on increased levels of involvement in "organized religion." We have our doubts about Bibby's new optimism, and there are two sources of our scepticism. First, the cumulative weight of his own evidence is still more indicative of a continued preference for the consumption of religious fragments, a notion first popularized by Bibby (1987), than a renaissance of organized religion. Second, the credibility of his proposal is undermined by some nagging problems with the way he sorts, reports and interprets his data. To grasp whether something new is happening in Canada we need more precise and relevant data, and we make four methodological suggestions for acquiring the kinds of information needed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".