In Canada, secularism grows more pervasive

In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington, only 30 percent of Canadians said religion was very important to them, compared with 59 percent of Americans.

Twenty-one percent of Canadians said they attended religious services regularly in another survey taken in 2000 - about half the rate for Americans, although still a bit higher than the rate for most of Western Europe.

The statistics would be far more skewed were it not for the growing number of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu immigrants to Canada.

It goes on to say this

"This is a society where religion no longer wields cultural authority," Marguerite Van Die, a theology professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, wrote recently.

In stark contrast with American presidents, Canadian prime ministers rarely, if ever, speak in religious terms. They even avoid being photographed attending church. It would be almost unthinkable for a prime minister to say "God Bless Canada." It was only after former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's death that Canadians learned he was a devout Catholic.

Trudeau was a champion of keeping government out of the bedroom, and most Canadian politicians have followed that example. The few Canadian politicians who have raised abortion as an issue have suffered at the polls for doing so.

Though it has widened in recent years, Canadian scholars note, the divergence over religious content in Canadian and American societies goes back to different colonial pasts.