Leaving Religion in Canada

Canadian deconstruction has two main shapes. In Quebec, the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s did most of the work of secularizing French-Canadian Catholic families a generation ago, and the leaving that is happening now is often the second wave — grandchildren of cultural Catholics who never really practiced, untangling the residual guilt and the family Mass that everyone still attends at Christmas. In the rest of Canada, the most active deconstructions are coming out of the immigrant churches and mosques and gurdwaras of the Greater Toronto Area, the Lower Mainland, and Calgary, where first- and second-generation Canadians are leaving the faiths their parents brought from elsewhere.

There is also a Mennonite, Hutterite, and rural-evangelical exit happening on the Prairies that gets very little press but is real, and a steady stream of ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses across the country. Ex-Catholic Filipino-Canadian and ex-Catholic Italian-Canadian communities are large enough to have their own visible secondary networks of people who left.

The Canadian advantage, if there is one, is that the broader culture is pretty post-religious already, so the "what will the wider world think of me as an apostate" pressure is much lower than in the US South. The cost is concentrated in the immediate family and the immigrant community, not in being a public unbeliever.