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Each reader of Transition has personal opinions, feelings, and memories associated with religion and spirituality. Some of you are deeply involved in religious activity, some participate now and then, and some steer clear of anything that hints of religion. But, since the one thing all Transition readers have in common is an interest in families, and since new research shows that the life of the spirit still matters to most families, the Vanier Institute of the Family decided to invite three experts on religion and spirituality to write for this issue of the magazine.

To begin, we offer “Finding Family Spirituality,” a personal essay by Thomas Moore, a leading lecturer and writer in North America and Europe. Dr. Moore argues that families are inherently spiritual, and he illustrates his belief with stories from his own family life.

For the facts on Canadian families and their involvement in religion, we turn next to articles by two sociologists. Both Reginald Bibby and Donald Swenson are well-known and respected for their research and publications on the sociology of religion.

In “Religion, Spirituality, and the Family: Still Together After All These Years,” Reginald Bibby asks if there could be a connection between two trends: compared to the 1960s, more Canadians today are divorced and fewer participate in organized religion. Dr. Bibby also explores questions such as: Does religious activity enhance family life? Do Canadians value religion and spirituality? How do these values affect families?

In “Families and Religion in Canada,” Donald Swenson looks at religion’s many dimensions—the essential features that all religions have in common—and searches for links between these dimensions and aspects of family life such as marital happiness and willingness to care for others.

At the Vanier Institute of the Family, we approached this issue of the magazine with an open mind and an open heart, intent on learning what we could from the experts—and learn we did. We hope you will too.

The other day I received a photograph from my ninety-year- old father. It was taken over fifty years ago and shows me as a ten-year-old sitting on a farm wagon loaded with baled hay, my hands on the reins of two horses. Next to me, wearing his mischievous smile, sits my Uncle Tom. We were buddies in those days, walking around in the hundred acres of the family homestead every day, fixing fences, sharpening cutting blades, and checking the growth of wheat, oats, and alfalfa.

My uncle remains a powerful figure in the mythology of my childhood. He was a decent man, intelligent, friendly, and comical, with a hoard of stories at his command that could make children and adults scream with laughter. He had a mystic way with animals; the family still tells the story—as tall as any he might have concocted—that on the day of his funeral dogs, cats, and other animals lined the streets as his hearse passed by. I think the story reflects our sense that he had a secret, insider’s way with animals.

We were a large Irish-Catholic family, churchgoers all, except for Uncle Tom, who avoided the small village church where the highly educated and rather fussy Father Guy was pastor. I remember one hot summer day when Father Guy stopped by the farm, parking his long gray Lincoln under the trees for shade. He walked up to us, accepted a glass of iced tea, and gently asked Uncle Tom if he might be expected at church the next Sunday. My uncle softly and politely responded, “I don’t think so.”

My Uncle Tom was one of the most spiritual people I have ever known. I don’t know if I can explain what I mean, but when I think of family spirituality, his face immediately comes to mind. I don’t think he prayed, but he lived thoughtfully and honestly. On occasion he got seriously drunk, but he treated children with the highest regard, as though he were one with them. He never went to church, but he lived in nature with a reverence that was palpable. If you mention his name to anyone in our family today, you will see a spontaneous smile and hear words of praise.

I get the impression that people today think of spirituality as a step beyond psychology. You get yourself together and then you become enlightened or perfected. There is a tendency away from the ordinary in the search for a more spiritual way of life: you learn yoga and meditation, you clean up your diet, you focus on health through alternative medicines and special practices. But there is another kind of spirituality that is more a practice of the heart than a perfection of the self. In fact, I would define spirituality in the broadest sense as self-transcendence.

I used to think of spirituality as self-transformation, but the trouble with that idea is that you remain stuck on the self. Spirit is fundamentally transcendence, a going beyond the life you know. You may do this through personal education and cultivation, as in yoga, which, however, can be motivated by mere self-improvement. You can also transcend your own life through relationship and community, and therefore marriage is inherently spiritual when the couple surrender themselves to the process of a shared life.

In this same sense, family is inherently spiritual. You don’t have to use special theological language for the spiritual qualities of family. Simply going beyond self-interest through the means and motivation of love is sufficient. It doesn’t hurt to make that spirituality explicit at times, but you don’t have to import spirituality from outside.

The role of parenthood is spiritual by its very nature, for the parent has the office and the opportunity to shape a person. The parent supports, teaches, models, and acts as a sort of priest/priestess, guru, and Zen master in the many rites of passage a child goes through. The parent is in the business of caring for the soul of the child, and by definition that is a priestly role. In the Christian tradition, priests were given the task of cura animarum, the care of souls.

All of this may sound romantic and purely metaphorical, but I don’t mean it that way. After all, you live in a materialistic and secular culture. The majority of citizens might be religious, but the society itself is not. In fact, our society may be the only experiment in secularism the world has known. You learn from school and the media to understand all aspects of life according to a secular model that doesn’t take spirituality seriously. You may be convinced that parenthood is a social construct, and that your job is to raise children to simply be healthy, informed, and adapted to the society. But a human being is more than a function, and psychology and sociology cannot grasp the full scope of what it means to be human. Although they may seem anachronistic today, theology and religion have something to say about the spiritual dimension of every human being. It is within this context that every family dinner is a communion rite, every party a spiritual festival, and every graduation a rite of passage. You don’t have to call them such for them to be spiritual activities, and you can strip them of their spiritual worth if you handle them badly enough.

A family is a community in the spiritual sense. It is far more than a biological unit, because the infinitely precious and infinitely mysterious individuals within the family make up a family soul. Therefore, as a spiritual person, I would rather care for the soul of the family, giving it all the everyday spirituality it needs, than to engineer it into some modern notion of health and perfection.

Every time someone talks about the family unit or system, I cringe, because words like that make the family into a material construction. They suck the soul out of it. Focusing on the soul and spirit of a family helps us appreciate the imperfections and the wide variety of styles in which families are to be found. You may be part of a single-parent family, a gay family, or a dysfunctional family and still be in the thick of family love.

At this very point we arrive at the most subtle of mysteries: a family is not only a literal body consisting of parents, children, and extended relationships. A family itself can be a spirit—the kind of spirit that can also be found on a team, at a workplace, or in a town. This family spirit is the key thing in family life, although it may not even be present in a family unit, which may be nothing more than a quantity of persons, each playing a conventional role. Family spirit is a form of love and it is always a matter of the heart. In our modernism, we are not good at perceiving, valuing, and caring for concerns of the heart. The world we know is either physical or mental. We let the heart take care of itself, which means we allow it to be unconscious and uncultivated.

The ancient Greeks described love as a kind of spirit. The family is a way of loving and being connected through blood. But let us not understand blood as a physical substance. It is the fluid of the heart, and again, not the heart as a pump, but the heart as the seat of love and relatedness, the heart of Valentine’s Day, the heart carved into trees and meant to link two charmed people. The spirituality of the family is above all else a spirituality of the heart.

Now, the church may or may not foster family spirituality. If the church is moralistic, dogmatic, and sentimental, which unfortunately is often the case, it acts as a surrogate family, taking over the role of parent, although not in a spiritual way. But many churches have the wisdom to know that their purpose is to serve the spirituality of families, and these churches recognize that such spirituality is already a given. Anything they do to educate and support the family’s own spirituality is of great value, but not essential, at least in my view.

My Uncle Tom, rising at dawn like a monk and “meditating” in his own way at the udders of his beloved cows, was indeed a spiritual person who played the role of “bishop” in our family spirituality. It was important for him to decline the invitation to attend church, because it wasn’t in the nature of his spirituality to find nurturance there. He knew this to be true, and he was loyal to his conviction. That didn’t stop him from being a spiritual leader for the family in which I grew up. If anyone was ever a saint, to me, he was and ever will be.

I admit that this is a strange way to describe spirituality. You may not even agree with me that this little informal essay is a piece of theology. I love and respect the religious traditions and can’t imagine my life without them. But I will never again, as I was in childhood, be subject to the imperialism that too often characterizes religious groups. I find authority in the world’s religions, including my innate and beloved Catholicism, with its infinite wisdom and mysterious beauty. Yet I see no need to enslave myself to its rules in order to be a spiritual person.

I have been a father now for twelve years. Earlier on I had planned to become a priest, another kind of father. I have found that the parent’s calling is as religious and spiritual as the other one, and I’m grateful that fate chose this one for me. Maybe now I can say with some intelligence and sophistication that a family is a holy thing, and only when we lose an appreciation for that holiness does the family get into real trouble.

I recently visited my mother in a hospital nursing unit. She is dying from a serious stroke she had months ago. She doesn’t have much awareness of her surroundings or her situation. On that last visit, when I was leaving, she took my hand and placed it on her forehead and began reciting the “Our Father.” I knew she was asking for my blessing, for she knows, and taught me long ago, that a family has its own spirituality. It is a church of sorts, and both children and parents are its ministers. We can bless each other with a solemnity and effectiveness that the Pope or the Dalai Lama could not surpass.

So, I recommend not treating your family as a mere functioning unit that has its breakdowns. See it rather as a magical, mysterious, spiritual entity, no matter how functional or dysfunctional it is. Know that it is made up of pure love, love that is complex and not only sentimental. The conflicts, differences, and struggles are aspects of that love. Give yourself to this particular kind of loving, and you will enlarge your spiritual existence. Don’t ask for perfection, but demand participation, for a family by its very nature exists to the extent that its members connect with each other.

Express your love in actions and words, clear and forthright words. Do all you can to support the family. What you honestly can’t do is also part of the love. Dare to be dependent on your family. Allow it its phases and transformations. Don’t give up on it too soon. It is the basis of your life and the source of your security, no matter how young or old you are. The family exists also in memory, even after its members have dispersed or passed on. For it is a spiritual thing, a holy thing, the very base of your soul.

Thomas Moore is a husband, father, and step-father who writes books and music in New Hampshire. He is the author of Care of the Soul and a dozen other books. His most recent book is The Soul’s Religion, and he has just completed a new work, Dark Nights of the Soul.

Since the 1960s, two of Canada’s most entrenched institutions—families and churches—have undergone dramatic changes. We all know about the myriad structural and functional changes that have characterized family life, especially, of course, the surge in divorces. As documented by Statistics Canada, a divorce rate that in 1925 stood at .1 per 1,000 population and just 550 couples nationally, rose slightly to .5 and just under 9,000 couples by 1965. But then, with the liberalizing of divorce laws in 1968, the rate jumped to 1.4 in 1970, and peaked at 3.6 in 1987, at that point representing over 90,000 divorces. In the past two decades, the divorce rate has gone down slightly, settling at annual rates of around 2.3 and 70,000 couples in recent years. Still, the impact on the structure of families is unmistakable. In 1975, 7% of Canadian adults said they had been divorced, by 1990 the figure had doubled, and by 2000 it stood at 16%.

Over the same period, active participation in organized religion declined in Canada. Weekly attendance at religious services stood at 60% in 1945, dropped to just over 30% by 1975, slipped further to 24% by 1990 and to 21% by 2000. Paralleling that downward pattern, fewer parents exposed their children to Sunday School or its equivalent. Of parents with school-age children, the proportion giving their children this kind of religious education fell from 36% in 1975 to 21% in 2000.

However, as with divorce, there are indications that the trend in service attendance has levelled off or even reversed somewhat. The drop-off in attendance may have hit bottom near the end of the 1980s. In fact, since the early 1990s, research findings point to renewed interest in organized religion among teenagers and young adults. Weekly teenage attendance, for example, dropped from 23% to 18% between 1984 and 1992, and was expected by most observers to keep heading downward. But to the surprise of pretty much everyone, in 2000 it rebounded to 22%. Similar increases have taken place among 18- to 34-year-olds in a number of religious groups.

For the most part, people who have given attention to these family and religion trends have been content to note that both patterns are the product of societal factors—notably, accelerated individualism and relativism—and that both are consistent with a weakening commitment to traditional institutions and to values generally. However, researchers and other observers have been slow to explore what, if any, connection exists between the two trends themselves. Put another way, both developments are assumed to have common parents, but little attention has been given to how the two offspring relate to each other.

I am not talking merely about the possibility that the decline of religion has contributed to more divorce—or that a higher level of divorce has contributed to people staying away from religious groups—although it would be good to have a clearer understanding of such possible patterns. Other questions that also warrant exploration include the ongoing place of religion in people’s lives, regardless of their marital status, as well as “the consequence question”: the relationship between family religious involvement and personal and social well-being. If, for example, religious involvement enhances family life and a broader social life, the decline in religious participation may be having a significant negative impact on individuals and on our society—unless equally effective functional alternatives have been emerging.

I want to attempt to address such questions about family and religion in Canada by drawing on data from my national “Project Canada” surveys. Adult surveys have been carried out every five years from 1975 through 2000, while youth surveys were completed in 1984, 1992, and 2000. The six adult surveys had sample sizes of about 1,500 people each, while the three youth surveys each included samples of around 3,500 teens aged 15 to 19 who were still in high school (or a CEGEP in Quebec). Together the surveys provide considerable information on family life, religion, and well-being.

My game plan is to focus first on the nature of family religious involvement in Canada, past and present, and then turn to the issue of correlates—exploring the relationship between religious involvement and personal and social well-being. Obviously the analysis could be much more detailed and, for the statistically minded, should eventually use multivariate techniques. But for now, I will simply offer a preliminary “aerial photograph” of the relationship between family life and religious involvement.

An important starting point in exploring religion’s association with almost anything in Canada is recognizing that the vast majority of Canadians continue to identify with religious traditions. Contrary to popular opinion, relatively few people either switch groups or drop out altogether; identification with a religious group readily outlives active participation. For example, even though the “no religion” category has officially grown from under 5% of the Canadian population in 1970 to around 20% as of now, it tends to be a very unstable place of residence. Large numbers of people in this category are younger people who, as they move through their twenties, thirties, and forties, turn to religious groups for rites of passage relating to marriage, birth, and death. For many, “no religion” is a short-lived self-designation.

So it is that about 80% of Canadians today identify with a religion in one of these four major categories:

People occupying the “No Religion” category provide an important control group when trying to make sense of religion and its correlates.

The Project Canada data show that divorce has increased significantly in all categories since the mid-1970s. There are, however, some important variations:

Religious identification, important as it is, is quite different from actual participation. When we look at service attendance by marital status, we find some striking patterns and differences:

Two possible interpretations of such findings readily come to mind. The first is that people who are highly involved in religious groups are more likely than others to marry and stay married. At the same time, religious groups have become more accommodating of divorced individuals, particularly if they remarry, and hence the increase in the presence of the divorced between 1975 and 2000.

A second interpretation is that people in a stable marriage are more likely than others to want to attend religious services regularly. Meanwhile, those who have gone through divorce are more inclined to shy away from religious groups, where—in the Catholic Church and some evangelical Protestant denominations, for example—divorce continues to be highly stigmatized. The first explanation sees religious involvement as the source of marital stability; the second sees religious involvement as the consequence of people staying together. In the words of the familiar adage, do people who pray together stay together, or is it more that people who stay together pray together?

One way to address “which comes first” is to look at lifelong patterns of religious involvement. The Project Canada 2000 survey provides data on respondents’ memories of how often they attended religious services while growing up. When combined with data on whether or not they have been divorced, plus their current religious identification and attendance level, the result is a preliminary peek at the impact that divorce—and, of course, the complex correlates surrounding divorce—could be having on the inclination to drop one’s “religious ID” and not attend as often as one previously did.

If we focus on people who attended services more or less weekly when growing up, and if we follow them into adulthood, we find that divorce is not associated with any significant decrease in people’s tendency to identify with the religion of their parents. But it is associated with a noteworthy drop in regular attendance.

Obviously, many factors influence both religious involvement and divorce. For example, involvement tends to decrease as people move from their early teens into their twenties. But the decline in participation is greater among the previously active who experience divorce—suggesting that regardless of religion encouraging people to stay together, the reality of divorce leads to lower attendance. At the same time, those who divorce are as likely as those who stay together to continue to see themselves as Catholics or Protestants.

One asterisk: there are some recent signs that greater inclusiveness on the part of some religious groups could be reflecting itself in age differences for attendance by the divorced. While only 19% of divorced individuals aged 55 and over attend services at least once a week (compared to 48% for their married contemporaries who have never been divorced), the figure for divorced individuals aged 35 to 54 is 27% (not far off the 35% figure characterizing those in the same age group who are married and never divorced).

Consistent with such patterns, there has been a noticeable increase since the early 1990s in the weekly attendance levels of teenagers whose parents are divorced or separated, and modest increases for those coming from homes where parents are remarried or cohabiting.

Given the diversity of religious and spiritual interest in Canada, a methodological hurdle is to find a way of adequately tapping that diversity in order to examine the possible impact such interest has on Canadians’ personal and social lives. It is fairly easy to look at service attendance. But, if large numbers of people are not actively involved in religious groups, it is also important to explore other ways in which they might be experiencing and affected by spirituality.

One possibility is to simply ask them about the importance they place on religion and spirituality respectively, as we did in the Project Canada 2000 survey. Asked outright, an even 50% indicated that both religion and spirituality are either “very important” or “somewhat important” to them. A further 20% said they regard spirituality rather than religion as important, while only 2% said they see religion but not spirituality as important. The remaining 28% told us that neither is particularly important to them.

Religion and spirituality tend to be equally valued by Canadians who are married. Likewise for those who are divorced or separated. The never-married group includes those who value both religion and spirituality, as well as a comparable proportion who value spirituality but not religion. Those who are cohabiting are more likely than others not to regard either as important. And the widowed readily exceed everyone else in the importance they accord both.

There are some important variations in the religion-spirituality mix, however, by religious group identification and attendance:

Those who place a high value on spirituality are not exactly a monolithic group. We have been asking Canadians since the mid-nineties what they mean by “spirituality.” What we have found is that about 50% of them think in fairly conventional terms—using phrases such as “believing in a higher power,” “communication with God through prayer,” “nourishing our souls so we can be closer to God,” and so on. These are people who typically place a high value on both religion and spirituality, and are actively involved in religious groups.

The other 50% of Canadians tend to offer highly subjective, less conventional ideas along the lines of “peace of mind,” “a feeling of oneness with the earth and with all that is within me,” “inner awareness,” “searching for meaning,” and “communication with the world around me.” As amorphous as these descriptions may be, identifying such individuals as highly valuing spirituality versus religion enables us to explore what, if any, significance their valuing of spirituality is having on their lives.

So what about it? Is there any evidence that the valuing of religion and/or spirituality is having an impact on life at the personal and social levels?

Significantly, this pattern holds across marital status, including the never-married group. In many instances, however, differences between Canadians who value both religion and spirituality, and those who value spirituality only, are fairly small. What is more apparent is that people who place importance on either religion or spirituality tend to score higher on all these measures than individuals who value neither.

The same three-tier pattern is particularly evident when we examine additional values that are more broadly interpersonal in nature:

The apparent contribution of religion and spirituality to family and social values is even more pronounced among teenagers:

Religion and spirituality remain very important in Canada. Some eight in ten Canadians continue to identify with religious traditions, while more than seven in ten affirm the importance of religion and/or spirituality for them personally. Sometimes the valuing of religion and spirituality is accompanied by active involvement in religious groups, but people who only value spirituality often do so without actively participating in any group.

The inclination to identify with religious groups, attend services, and place value on religion and spirituality has little to do with a person’s marital status, with the sole exception being people who have never married. Yet, even here, the story is not over: half of those in the never-married group already value spirituality, and the findings suggest that many in this disproportionately young category will eventually marry, have children, reconnect with the religious groups of their parents, and, to varying degrees, become more involved in religion and more inclined to value religion.

During the past thirty years, Canada’s major religious groups have all experienced marital diversification in their congregations. Increasing proportions of remarried, divorced, separated, and cohabiting individuals identify with them and participate in their activities. And, of course, the rise in representation of these individuals also includes their children.

It all adds up to a situation where religion and spirituality pervade the country. To the extent that Canadians embrace both religion and spirituality, they give evidence of being exposed to values that contribute to their placing importance on family life, regardless of their own marital or home situation. Collectively, they also exhibit a greater tendency than others to value honesty, compassion, and community involvement. Also very significantly, Canadians who place particular value on spirituality, if not religion, appear to have a collective disposition that leads them to similarly value family and civility-related characteristics—more so than people who value neither religion nor spirituality.

Clearly there are other sources that lead to the valuing of family life and civility, and large numbers of people who do not particularly embrace religion or spirituality do place importance on these areas of life. But religion and spirituality are among those sources, and still appear to be among the most prominent.

If that’s the case, then to the extent that “the gods are restless” in our time, leading Canadians to re-examine the role of religion and spirituality in their lives, the collective quality of life in this country will be among the beneficiaries.

Reginald W. Bibby, Ph.D., holds the Board of Governors Research Chair in Sociology at the University of Lethbridge. Since the 1970s he has been monitoring social trends in Canada through a series of well-known national surveys of adults and young people. He is the author of nine books, including Fragmented Gods (1987), Unknown Gods (1993), Canada’s Teens (2001), and his latest book, Restless Gods: The Renaissance of Religion in Canada (2002).

Are you religious? Do you go to church every week? Does it matter? Do families function better if they are spiritual? Is there credibility to the statement: “The family that prays together, stays together”? These are some of the questions that come to mind when discussing the relevancy of religion in people’s lives. What I hope to do here is to use social science to provide some answers.

An important question to ask of any social phenomena is: What is its essence? or What makes it distinct from all else? The answer in this case needs to include all the many types of religion, namely, folk religions (of hunting and gathering societies such as the aboriginal religions of Canada), archaic religions (of ancient societies like those of Greece and Rome), Eastern religions (such as Buddhism and Hinduism), and Western religions (such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam).

What is common to all religions is the concept of the holy or the sacred. Durkheim (1965), a sociologist, and Otto (1958), a comparative religion scholar, both concluded that the holy is that unique element that distinguishes religion from non-religion. The holy, they argue, is that which is set apart, unique, different from every other phenomena. The sacred inspires two responses: one of awe and the other of desire. The “awe” response is when the believer moves away from the holy because it is too inspiring and far removed from normal human experience. The “desire” response beckons the believer to come forward, to see, to touch and to experience.

About a fifth of all Canadians participate every week in their chosen religious group, but most people in Canada and the Western world have stopped participating. Why is religion so important to some and not to others? When religion is alive, vivacious, and vibrant, people participate and experience positive change. However, when it becomes routine, it loses its life and vitality and can in fact come to inhibit meaning and positive experiences.

British historian Toynbee (1946) goes further. Religion can be like a chrysalis that evolves into a beautiful butterfly; it can be a source of positive change not only for individuals but also for a society as a whole. American sociologist Stark (1996) gives the example of early Christianity, which was a very dynamic and powerful instrument of change that empowered women, gave meaning to the lives of peasants and slaves, eliminated violent sports, saved the lives of infant girls, and transformed the ancient Greco-Roman world.

On the other hand, Christianity lost much of its vitality in the high Middle Ages and even became an instrument for the persecution of Jews, Muslims, religious dissidents, and women (in the infamous witch hunts). Clearly, when religion turns to persecution, it has become a cancer in the society it once helped.

Sociologists have long known that no social phenomenon can be understood by investigating only one aspect of it. Rather, we must see it in all its various dimensions. For example, in observing a family, one can see it as a structured group of people who interact with one another, perform unique functions, and are informed by cultural values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour. Likewise, religion must be seen as multi-dimensional.

I define religion as the individual and social experience of the sacred, manifested in mythologies, rituals, and ethos, and integrated into a group such as a community or an organization—a definition that covers all the major dimensions of religion.

To break down my definition, the first dimension of religion is the personal or individual experience of the sacred—in other words, what psychologists of religion call “religious experience” and what many Canadians call “spirituality.”

Secondly, since we are social beings, religion also involves the social experience of the sacred. We are linked to the sacred through the many public manifestations of religion such as pilgrimages (Medieval peoples journeyed to sacred places and Muslims still travel to Mecca, where they believe Allah spoke to Mohammad); rites of passage (baptisms, confirmations, Bar Mitzvahs, weddings, funerals); and weekly services in mosques, churches, temples, and synagogues.

The third element of my definition says the sacred is manifested in mythologies—which are not to be seen as something false but, rather, as belief systems. This dimension of religion carries us into specific beliefs of the wide varieties of religious tradition. Social science scholars are unable to make claims about “the truth” of any of these traditions, but they can study believers and see if their beliefs can be empirically linked to other aspects of social life.

Ritual, the fourth dimension of religion, is very similar to the social experience of the sacred. One way to understand the importance of ritual in religion is to understand that we are a forgetful people; we have short memories of our previous experiences and behaviours both as individuals and as a group. As religious elites (sacred leaders) have long known, a ritual is a way of remembering sacred stories and historical religious events.

The Passover celebration of the Jewish people is a concrete example of the vitality and importance of ritual. Every Spring, Jewish families celebrate this ritual in their homes by acting out the last meal that their ancestors had before Moses led them out of Egypt. Each participant is encouraged to celebrate this meal as if he or she had been present with Moses millennial years ago. The ritual reminds them not only of the liberation of their ancestors but of their own liberation as well.

A fifth element of religion is ethos, which refers to codes of behaviour and how these codes are to be lived out in everyday life. The concept of ethos includes values, norms, ethics, codes of conduct, and laws. There is no known religion that does not offer its followers direction on how to live out their sacred experiences or belief systems. Some examples are: almsgiving in Islam, the Ten Commandments of Judaism, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount for Christians, and the Eightfold Path for Buddhists. Again, social scientists cannot claim to know which code is “right” or “wrong.” However, they can study these codes to see how well believers live by them and if that makes a difference to their lives.

The last dimension essential to a full understanding of religion is integration into a religious group, community, or organization. Again, because we are social beings, we want to feel connected to others—to have a common bond, to “belong.” Although most Canadians do not actively participate in any religious group, Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby notes that the majority still identify with one. Moreover, relying on adult and teen surveys he conducted in 2000, he writes in his book Restless Gods:

Having identified the essential dimensions of religion, we can now move on to what we know about how these dimensions are linked (or not linked) to family life.

One measure of religious experience is how often people pray or read a sacred text. Booth et al.’s longitudinal study of adults surveyed in 1988 and 1992 reveals that those who regularly pray and read the Bible are less likely to divorce, although the study does not indicate that prayer has any significant effect on marital happiness or problems.

A study of German Catholics in the 1970s shows religious experience does influence marital quality as well as sexual morality, but the relationship is not a strong one.

Another aspect of individual religious experience is spirituality, which one may define as a quality of a person whose internal life is oriented towards God, the supernatural, or the sacred (Yamane, 1998). My own 1995 study shows that spirituality is a predictor of both marital quality and sexual satisfaction among Canadian evangelical ministers and their spouses. Meditation (as a surrogate of religious experience) also predicts marital quality.

One way to understand a mythology or belief system is to look at how people view the sacred or images of God. A wide range of research proves that the way people view God does have an impact on their lives.

For example, in my 1989 dissertation on family and religion, which used an American database of Roman Catholic believers, my findings indicate that those who view God as a judge are more likely than others to have traditional attitudes about family. And, in the above-mentioned study of Canadian evangelical ministers, I also show links between images of the divine and marital quality. Ministers who view God in intimate terms have higher levels of marital quality than do other Ministers.

Ritual is a dimension of religion that receives substantial attention from researchers, possibly because it is relatively easy to measure by asking people how often they participate in religious services or rites of passage.

One such researcher, Warren Clark, a Statistics Canada senior analyst, has published two articles discussing various links between ritual participation and family life. In a 1998 article using 1995 General Social Survey data, Clark compares the approximately 20% of Canadians who attend weekly religious services to the 80% who either don’t attend or do so only occasionally. Weekly attenders, he says, place more importance on home life and emphasize lasting relationships, being married, and having at least one child. Women who attend church place less emphasis on paid employment than do women who never attend.

When asked which is more important, market labour or family labour, both male and female weekly attenders agree more strongly than others with statements in support of the idea that, for women, family labour is more important. On the other hand, no significant differences exist between attenders and non-attenders on questions relating to the belief that men and women should both contribute to household income and that men should share in child raising.

Data from this survey also show that religious participation reduces divorce risk. Eighty-nine percent of the marriages of weekly attenders who married in the 1970s lasted at least ten years, compared to 74% for non-attenders. In the same article (but using the 1996 General Social Survey), Clark finds that weekly attenders at religious services are 1.7 times more likely to be satisfied with their life than infrequent or non-attenders. Further, the odds of having a very happy marriage are 1.5 times greater for weekly participants than for non-attenders.

In another article (2000), Clark revisits the relationship between religious observance and family phenomena using the 1998 General Social Survey. This time focusing on “regular attenders”—those who attend religious services at least once a month—he notes that young marrieds aged 15-24 are more than twice as likely to be regular attenders than single people of the same age (44% compared to 26%). Further, married couples between the ages of 24 and 44 with young children are more likely to attend on a regular basis than those without children.

Divorced or separated Canadians are also less likely than married Canadians to attend religious services, and this is especially true of divorced or separated men. To explain the gender difference, Clark suggests “Women are more likely to have custody of children and may want to ensure their continued religious instruction; women may also have stronger social ties with religious organizations than men.”

A similar story happens for men when their spouses die. Widowers are more likely than widows to stop going to church.

The genesis of religion is in religious experience, both social and personal, followed by the building of a mythology to explain that experience. Rituals are then constructed to continue that experience through one’s life-course and to pass it on to succeeding generations. Thereafter, religious organizations emerge for the framing or maintenance of religious experiences, myths, and rituals. These organizations also create an ethos—a set of moral values and a code of behaviour.

Several studies provide evidence for linking myth, ritual, and morality. One of these, a survey of San Francisco Bay area residents by Piazza and Glock (1979), shows connections between myth (images of the divine), ritual, church attendance, daily prayer, and morality as shown by a willingness to perform compassionate acts. The researchers concluded that those with a “personal view of God,” or a belief that God is active in their lives, are more likely to attend church and to pray, and also more likely to lend money to a co-worker without interest or to give money to a stranger for bus fare.

Adding further credibility to the linkage between ritual and morality, a study by Morgan (1983) using an American nationally representative sample shows that those who pray frequently or who integrate prayer into their day-to-day lives are more likely than others to “stop and comfort a crying child,” be a “good listener,” “get along with loud and obnoxious people,” and “turn the other cheek.”

Another American national study by the Gallup organization (Poloma and Gallup 1991) reveals similar results. They extend the measure of prayer beyond mere frequency to different types of prayer: ritual prayer (reading from a prayer book or reciting memorized prayers), conversational prayer (talking to God in one’s own words), petitionary prayer (asking God for favours), and meditative prayer (spending time thinking about God, feeling a divine presence, worshiping God, or trying to listen to God speaking). The study indicates that those who pray meditatively are more likely to forgive others who have hurt them and less likely to nurture resentments than those who use the other forms of prayer.

Going back to Clark (1998), the 1995 General Social Survey reveals links between ritual and family ethics in the sense that weekly participation in a religious service is positively related to the value of marriage permanency and pro-natal attitudes (wanting and having children). These same people are more likely to support “care feminism,” a new kind of feminism that accents care, love, nurture, compassion, and support to people in general but to children in particular (Zelizer, 2002).

Clark adds that the weekly attenders value self-control (not abusing drugs or alcohol), conformity to the law, marital commitment, and life (as opposed to suicide). Some of these values are not specifically family values, yet they would obviously be good for families—for example, being opposed to drug abuse, which is very detrimental to family life, and to suicide, which traumatizes the family that’s left behind. In summarizing the links between religion on the one hand, and values and ethics on the other hand, Clark says:

Religious communities and organizations can be thought of as “homes” or “wombs” for families. In these “sacred spaces” participants celebrate rituals, go through sacred/familial rites of passage, learn about their faith, and construct bonds of friendship and support. However, there is a dilemma. The purpose of a sacred organization is to put people in touch with the sacred. However, it can easily become a bureaucracy, much like our many secular bureaucracies. When that happens, the organization is more likely to be an obstacle than a conduit to religious experience. The dilemma for the religious organization is that, like any organization, it needs to bring some sort of order to the chaos of spontaneity. But, since spontaneity seems to be almost a prerequisite to an authentic experience of the sacred, cumbersome ordering processes tend to interfere with such an experience, as well as with creativity and many of life’s more joyous moments.

An important family-related issue in regard to religious groups is how well parents socialize their children into their faith. Bibby (2002) provides evidence that children who have Catholic or Protestant parents are more likely to retain their parents faith than are the children of Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, or Hindu parents. As he points out, “Over time, smaller religious groups have encountered considerable difficulty retaining their offspring, many of whom ‘defect’ to Catholicism and Protestantism through acculturation and assimilation.”

In the end, it can be said that religion does have an impact on the family. The family, in turn, potentially provides a home for daily religious experiences, the celebration of rituals, living out sacred ethics, and a collective decision to participate in organizational features of the sacred.

Donald S. Swenson, Ph.D., a professor of Sociology at Mount Royal College, Calgary, has taught, researched, and written on the sociology of religion for over twenty years. He is the author of Society, Spirituality, and the Sacred: A Social Scientific Introduction (1999), and co-author (with Mahfooz Kanwar) of Canadian Sociology (2000).

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