Penguin

With a Canadian federal election just a few days away, I thought I would do a blog post about the role religion has played in the platforms of the parties and the campaigns so far. However, when I went looking for the religion on the campaign trail, I discovered that it was barely to be found.

All the party leaders have had the obligatory photo-ops at various religious events, but these - such as Ignatieff and Layton's appearances at the Sikh Khalsa Day parade in Toronto - seemed to be more about reaching out to different cultures than they were about being seen as aligned with religious faith. The underlying theology was unimportant.

And as for the party platforms themselves, religion and faith barely get a mention. The only reference I could find was in the Conservative platform, which proposes to create a new Office of Religious Freedom within Foreign Affairs. While I'm still not entirely sure that this isn't a euphemism for some sort of evangelism-supporting or US-style "faith-based initiatives" program, at an estimated cost of $5 million per year, it's barely a blip in a federal budget of billions of dollars.

So what should we take from this? In the view of some, it's an indication that religion is a personal, private matter for Canadians; one recent opinion piece suggested that the Canadian political landscape has settled out with the Conservatives holding the religious vote and not needing to court it further, and the other parties not courting it because they know they can't get it.

However, I think there's a more straightforward reason for the lack of religious rhetoric in the campaign: religion is becoming increasingly irrelevant for Canadians. While most Canadians do consider themselves affiliated with some sort of religion, only 21% attend weekly religious services, and this number is dropping sharply year-over-year. A recent study predicted the impending "extinction" of religion in Canada and 8 other countries.

I think that in this country - and in sharp contrast to our neighbour to the south - religious affiliation has lost the social benefit it once did, so politicians, like Canadians in general, no longer experience the same sort of pressure to believe... or more importantly, to be seen believing.

Hopefully this means that they'll place more importance on being seen to govern.