Nice, Tolerant, Indifferent Canadians: Religious Nones North of the 49th
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Those who say they have no religion are the fastest growing “religious” group in Canada. Who are these religious nones, and how and why are they different in Canada than religious nones in other nations, such as the United States? In this article we draw on sociological theories, concepts, and data to address these questions. We show that one’s social environment plays a critical role for the perceptions, behaviors, and experiences found among religious nones north of the 49th parallel. We also demonstrate that Canadians have become less religious from one generation to the next, a process that started earlier and more rapidly than elsewhere in North America. When comparing religious nones in Canada and the United States, three key empirical differences stand out. First, Canadian religious nones are on average more secular than those in the United States, notably when it comes to personal spiritual practices such as prayer and meditation. Second, religious nones in Canada are on average less antagonistic toward the religiously affiliated and vice versa. Third, religious nones, like most Canadians regardless of their religious (un)affiliation status, are on average more Left leaning on a range of sociopolitical issues compared with religious nones in the United States. We conclude by exploring how and why this discussion of religious nones in Canada matters for other areas of social life, such as social, political, and moral views and behaviors. Throughout, we give attention to the dynamic interplay between the religiously affiliated, particularly evangelical Christians, and religious nones, notably nonbelievers.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".