Immigrants’ children are more likely to be religious than the rest of Canadian society, forthcoming research from the University of Waterloo says.
But that does not mean future generations continue to be religious.
“Immigrants are not exempt from religious decline,” said Jacob Legault-Leclair, author of the research.
There is often an assumption that immigrants are more religious than non-immigrants, and that they stay more religious, he says.
“Half of that is true and half of that is false,” Legault-Leclair said.
Many immigrants who arrive in Canada are, on average, more religious than the non-immigrant population. But immigrants’ children are less religious than their parents, in part because Canadian society is largely non-religious, he says.
“They’re not as non-religious or secular as the general population is, but they’re neither as religious as the immigrant generation is,” he said.
Religious ‘nones’
Just over one-third of Canadians identified as non-religious in the 2021 census, making non-religion the second largest religious group in Canada after Christianity.
Some religious groups see immigrants as crucial to their survival and growth.
However, Legault-Leclair’s research suggests that, over generations, immigrant families also become less religious.
Legault-Leclair examined data about the religiosity of immigrants to Canada, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom as part of his PhD research at the University of Waterloo.
Legault-Leclair says he expected to find that new immigrants — also called first-generation immigrants — become less religious the longer they live in Canada.
But the data did not show such an association.
“We saw with the first generation of immigration that the level of religiosity is rather stable, independent of the share of ‘religious nones’ in those regions,” he said, referring to people who do not identify with any religious tradition.
These findings suggest that the religious socialization that happens when people live in more religious countries has a lasting impact, he says.
‘In-between generation’
However, immigrants’ children — also called second-generation immigrants — do not necessarily keep their parents’ faith, even if they grow up in a religious household.
Immigrants’ children are an “in-between generation,” said Legault-Leclair, who recently started a postdoctoral fellowship at University College London, where he will continue studying the religious trends of immigrants.
While their parents may practise religion at home, most of their friends or classmates do not.
“It’s really a tension between the more religious family household, which transmit the religion, and the less religious, more secular environment in which [the children] live on a daily basis,” says Legault-Leclair.
The data did not indicate which religion was more likely to have children that retained their parents’ faith, Legault-Leclair says.
But the data do show that third-generation immigrants — whose parents were born in Canada — are less religious than second-generation immigrants, and hold beliefs that closely resemble those of Canadian society.
It is hard to say whether families or broader society are more influential in forming an individual’s religion, says Legault-Leclair, whose past research has studied how families transmit religion.
Families and society are “interdependent,” he said.
“Family is now the perhaps last institution where religiosity can freely be transmitted to the children,” he said. But families are not completely separate from the broader society, even if some individual families may be more religious than the rest of Canadian society.
“[Families] constitute what we consider society,” he said. “They’re creating that [secular] environment, but they’re also trying to resist that environment.”
Understanding immigrants’ religious identities is important in a country that depends on immigration for population growth, he says.
“If we don’t try to understand the cultural identity, the values, the practices of the immigrant population, we’re giving up on understanding how our own population is behaving,” he said.
“Understanding the immigrant population is understanding Canada.”
