The past few weeks I’ve been digging through the results of the 2011 National Household Survey, focusing specifically on religion and non-religion in Canada. Last time I looked at the relationship between religion and sex. This time, I’m going to look at age.
Religious Canadians versus non-religious Canadians, by age group. Younger Canadians are to the left, older to the right.
There are few surprises in the data on religion and age in Canada; it more or less follows the same trends as US data. Younger people are more likely to be non-religious than older ones. All age groups below the [45-54) group are non-religious at a higher rate than the national average (23.9%), with a peak of 32.4% in the [25-34) group. By contrast, less than 12% of people - half the national average - in the 65+ age group are non-religious. (It is also likely that the younger age groups ([15-24) and under-15) under-represent the nones, because it is likely that their data was filled in by older relatives who simply assumed they have the same religion as their parents or family in general.)
A more detailed look shows that the bulk of the movement toward non-religion by young people is coming from Christianity.
All major religions, by age.
It’s hard to see what’s going on with the minority religions there, so here’s a zoomed in view of the bottom part of that chart:
The minority religions in Canada, by age.
You can see that the age distribution for most religions is generally pretty flat (though Buddhism, curiously, spikes in middle age). Only Sikhism, Hinduism and Islam show any growing trend among young people, but in most cases the growth being seen is probably all due to immigration – there is a spike in people between 25 and 45, prime immigration age, and then it flattens out. (Although, there is an enormous uptick in really young Muslims that I can’t explain, unless Muslims are breeding like rabbits.)
There is one interesting phenomenon I noticed. In my previous post on religion and sex, I noted the large gender disparity among the nones. It’s quite clear to see in the age data, too, and it is curiously consistent among non-believers 25 and up.
The nones, by age and sex.
However, as you can see, that disparity does not really exist among younger nones. It seems to come into being somewhere between 25 and 34 years-old. This is even apparent when you take a more detailed look at the makeup of the nones (which I will do in my next post, probably).
So what does that mean? I don’t know. It could be that somehow we were always poor at reaching out to women in the past, but are getting better. Or, it could be that there’s something wrong with us, and while women are giving up religion equally, they’re being driven back to it more than men. It could be a lot of things, and I can’t even begin to guess what might be causing the effect.
It does give us hope, though! Clearly the next generation of Canada is going to be a lot less religious than this one. And it also seems that the next generation of Canadian atheists might be more diverse, and better representative of Canada in general, than we are now. That’s certainly something worth looking forward to!
