I fairly recently came back from a trip to Canada (where I grew up) and was struck by an increased level of overt hostility to religion than when I was growing up there, with people explicitly giving as the reason for their feeling the tide of fundamentalism that's waxing around the world.
There's been a lot of talk on this blog about the distinction between true Christianity and the atavistic, authoritarian nonensense the relgious right in the U.S. is preaching. I'm not going to argue that this distinction doesn't exist, just that some, perhaps many Canadians aren't in the mood to make that distinction.
This hostility isn't just personal, it has political meaning; Canadians see both Islamic fundamentalism and George W. Bush as reverse sides of the same utopian coin and as evidence of a trend that threatens both the post World War II political order and the Canadian experiment, a kind of liberaly toryism.
Much more below.
I don't have any statistical evidence of what I assert below, I just have anecdotal evidence from the media and the sentiment of my childhood and university friends, who are MUCH more likely to say slighting things about religion now than the were even a year ago.
First off, a word about the place of religion in Canadian public life. To start, it's much smaller. Canada does in fact have a lot of aggressive religious types, the kind of people whom Australians call God-botherers, and of which the religious right in the U.S. is a subset. They make up a smaller percentage of the population in Canada than in the U.S. and their political power is much smaller, primarily for historical reasons.
Canada is almost evenly divided between Protestants and Catholics, with Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and what have you comprising small minorities making up the balance. Those Protestants who are observant are much more likely than their American counterparts to belong to mainstream protestant denominations such as Anglicanism and the United Church of Canada, which tend to be either liberal or old-line conservative, rather than radical rightwing utopian.
This relatively even division, combined with the Canadian obsession with the French/English language and cultural divide which tends to predominate, has meant that religion, at least in recent decades, has been pretty much a taboo subject in Canadian politics. As well, Canadian anti-Americanism has meant that anyone who seems too American in ANY grounds, including religious is immediately suspect among the fast majority (say 80-85 percent) of the Canadian public.
This suspicion, bordering on hostility, has already cost one political leader his job: Stockwell Day, the former leader of the Reform and then Canadian Alliance parties, lost his party leadership after a tape surfaced of him giving a speech that showed him as a "young earth" creationist. He was relentlessly ridiculed by the Canadian media (which isn't all that left-wing) until he went. Canadians for the most part have made peace with evolution and an old earth.
This fear of the U.S. also probably cost the Conservative Party of Canada a chance of government in the country's last federal election last year. The party ran around during the campaign telling everyone that it wasn't the Republican Party of Canada (and, apologies to Canadian Kos poster who feel otherwise, it really ain't -- and this is a New Democratic Party supporter say this), but couldn't convince enough of the electorate to gain a public mandate, despite the fact that the Liberals had been for more than a decade and that Paul Martin ran a terrible campaign.
The conservatives, who I think would be a disaster in government for other reasons, are doing their best to distance themselves from U.S. right-wingers. The Conservative Party of Canada held its policy convention while I was in Canada. In addition to putting a strident anti-abortion `baby-killers' type on the platform, it also had a full-on feminist giving an equally strident address -- a full-on 'women have gained in society only since they took control of their bodies' speech. Imagine a similar speech at the Republican convention? I can't.
On the flight on the way over to Canada, I set next to an older man, a retired schoolteacher, who I would call a Red Tory -- monarchist, socially conservative in the Canadian context, a scholar and fan of the so-called United Empire Loyalists who fled to Canada from the U.S. because they remained loyal to Britain after the revolution.
[Update]
Sorry, posted too soon by accident.
This man, who i'd guess wouldn't have commented on religious matters before Bush, made a point of telling me how he'd teased a bunch of missionaries in Taiwan, where he'd been to visit, about being a pagan. He criticized the Bushies for their absolute lack of doubt, saying this certainty was dangerous -- as dangerous as Islamists who make similar claims to infallible knowledge of God's will.
Now, I've never read Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, but this struck me as a reflection of a very old-line type of conservativism -- a deep suspicion of utopian claims from any direction. Stick with the established institutions and make gradual changes to them as need to preserve them. This isn't the same kind of conservatism the U.S right is advocating.
The second item i'm going to point out -- leaving aside the opinions of my friends, a self-selecting group -- was an interview with a believing Christian Nobel laureate for physics and the most recent recipient of the a prize for research in `spiritual realities.' The interviewer on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.'s Radio 1 channel, without yelling, rancor and with total politeness, took the old man apart -- his point of view seem completely incoherent by the end. Listen to the interview here It's the second section of the program.