VID Colloquium
Towards a Catholic North America? Projections of religious denominations in Canada and the US up to 2060
Anne Goujon, VID, IIASA, WIC
Co-Authors: Éric Caron Malenfant (Statistics Canada), Vegard Skirbekk (IIASA)
Date: Thu, 21 April 2011 , Time: 11:00-12:00
Religion and religiosity are important identity markers, and changes in a country’s religious composition may affect its culture, value orientations and policies. In recent decades the Protestants in both the US and Canada have lost their absolute population majority. In the US the Protestant share is estimated to have decreased from above 60% in the 1980s to around 47% by 2003, although it remained the largest religious group. The US Catholic proportion reached a level of 28% in 2003, following growth among Hispanic-Catholics and decline among non-Hispanic Catholics. In Canada, Protestantism was the largest religion in every decennial census from 1891 to 1961. This 70 year period saw the Protestants share fall from 57% to 49% while the Catholic proportion rose from 42% to 47%. Censuses from 1971 to 2001 have consistently shown that Catholicism is the largest religious entity in Canada, and in 2001 the Protestants were only 29% while the Catholics were 44% of the population (Canadian Census 2001). In the present study we investigate the future of the religious composition in both the US and Canada jointly. Past projections that consider religion in both Canada and the US have been carried out (Bélanger and Caron Malenfant 2005, Caron Malenfant et al. 2010, Skirbekk et al. 2010). However, these projections had a somewhat different focus (ethno-religious change for US, visible minority change for Canada) and too short projection horizons (2031 for Canada and 2043 for the US) to capture the effects of demographic differentials. The earlier projections also lacked consideration of the impact of intermarriage trends and the consequences of mixed marriages on fertility, intergenerational transmission of religion and the religious composition of the population. We take these issues into account, use religious categories that are comparable across the two countries, and extend the time horizon to 2062. The longer projection period allows us to understand how religion changes due to demographic forces, the level and composition of migration, fertility differentials and intergenerational religious transmissions, as well as differences in the religious distribution of the demographic momentum. The joint focus on both the US and Canada allows one to better understand the commonalities and differences between these two nations which are tightly knit in terms of geography, politics, economics and culture.
About the presenter
Anne Goujon is a demographer working in the world population program at IIASA and at the Vienna Institute of Demography. Her main research interests are the analysis and projections at macro-level of characteristics of the population acquired during childhood that rarely change once an individual has emancipated from parental control such as education and religion. She likes to apply the projections to many settings showing trough scenarios the impact of the long-term dynamics of demographic change on these characteristics, and reversely the impact of heterogeneous demographic behaviors of these groups on the overall population.