Canadian and American Religion Redux: Revisiting America’s Religious Exceptionalism and Persistence Compared to Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two core lines of argument presently define our understanding of why Christianity’s historical influence continues to persist in the lives of Americans to a degree not observed in Canada (despite the recent loss of religious affiliation in both countries). These are: 1) changes in the functional dominance of social systems (i.e. shifts to the welfare state in Canada) and 2) important foundational, cultural differences between Canada and America. Using a historiographic approach (coupled with quantitative research conducted in Canada and the US), this article argues that one less well-recognized factor also deserves our attention: Charles Taylor’s observation that American religious culture was primed for the Age of Authenticity. In this article I argue that Taylor was probably right. Over and above the well-established individualistic character of the religious lives of Americans is a related, but important, additional effect—the sanctioning of the ‘this-worldly’ potential of the individual life from within its religious institutions. It is this aspect of America’s religious exceptionalism, I argue, that has also helped to render the religious lives of Americans less vulnerable to – but not immune from – the watershed effects of the sixties compared to Christianity in Canada.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".