The secular revolution

Since the 1950s, across the four nations of Canada, Ireland, the four countries of the UK and the United States, religious change has been significant and in most of them of a dramatic nature. Decline of churchgoing, religious attitudes and identity has transformed mainland Britain and Canada in unprecedented ways. Whilst England & Wales and Scotland had already lost high churchgoing by 1960, they rapidly lost deeply religious customs, civil regimes and moral outlooks. Canada was remoulded from a highly religious nation, with one of the strongest levels of churchgoing in the Western world, into a nation with rapidly declining religious identities; and in the case of Quebec it suffered the remarkable Quiet Revolution which undid a one-church civil regime.

The United States, Ireland and Northern Ireland present something of a contrast. The hints of religious change evident in the USA in the 1960s did not materialise in the next fifty years quite in the way many expected. The apparent liberal challenge to religious institutions and culture did not turn into a general rout for religion but, rather, witnessed a levelling-off of change. Nonetheless, we should not underestimate what happened.