Question:
Is religion alive and well or struggling to survive in Canada?
Answer: Since I am not
a sociologist of religion who has made a special study of this
question, I offer instead the following perspective. A dual, polar
phenomenon seems to be taking place simultaneously regarding religion
in Canada, and the western world generally: apathy or rejection — about
30 per cent of Canadians have no religious affiliation — and a
rekindling of the spiritual.
We live in a society that is dominated by a rampant secularism and
brutal materialism, with all the disastrous consequences that we are
currently witnessing: the marked degradation in moral behaviour,
political corruption, economic anarchy, marked conflict and ecological
ruination.
In the 19th century, when Nietzsche was dramatically proclaiming the
death of God — and we forget that Nietzsche said that God had died
because we killed Him — Bahá’u’lláh (the Glory of God) (1817-1892), the
Prophet-Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, had declared: “The vitality of
men’s belief in God is dying out in every land; nothing short of His
wholesome medicine can ever restore it. The corrosion of ungodliness is
eating into the vitals of human society; what else but the Elixir of
His potent Revelation can cleanse and revive it?” (Gleanings, p. 199).
At the same time, religion has doubtless been a persistent and
perennial factor in civilization right up to our day. The Bahá’í
writings optimistically state that humanity is on the threshold of a
world spiritual revival that is commensurate with a developing
world-consciousness of the oneness and wholeness of the human race.
Shoghi Effendi (1897-1957), the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, and an
astute observer of 20th-century international relations, wrote: “Who,
witnessing on one hand the stupendous advance achieved in the realm of
human knowledge, of power, of skill and inventiveness, and viewing on
the other the unprecedented character of the sufferings that afflict,
and the dangers that beset, present-day society, can be so blind as to
doubt that the hour has at last struck for the advent of a new
Revelation, for a re-statement of the Divine Purpose, and for the
consequent revival of those spiritual forces that have, at fixed
intervals, rehabilitated the fortunes of human society?” (The World
Order of Baha’u’lláh, p. 60). -
Jack
McLean
