As Special Projects Editor for Books in Canada, I have played a large part in putting together this special edition, and I thought it might be of interest to our readers to learn how we conducted our survey. Also, since the responses to our questions are many and varied, I thought it might be useful to explain the order in which we have presented them.
We mailed out invitations to well over one hundred notable Canadians. We contacted representatives or adherents of most major (and minor) faiths as well as non-believers. While our respondents are largely (though not exclusively) academics, authors, and poets, we invited people from a wide variety of walks of life to participate, including physicists, filmmakers, actors, painters, politicians, and astronauts. We also sent invitations to several French Canadians and Native Canadians. We have printed, with a very minimal amount of copyediting, every response that we received.
While our survey therefore may not offer a picture of what the majority of Canadians think about our subject, even a brief glance at it shows that it does offer a picture of what a diverse group of very thoughtful and fairly brave human beings think about it. Moreover, a lingering glance reveals several themes that recur through our contributors' responses, and thus that our survey, unlike many others, may provide an in-depth look at current thinking on this topic. It is around these recurring themes that we have grouped their responses, so let me say a few words about what these themes are.
Perhaps the most surprising result of our survey is that nearly all of our respondents, believers and non-believers alike, think that religion in some form is here to stay (the possible exception is Joan Thomas). This is not to say that all think that there will be a general religious revival (though some do), or that all people will embrace a single, universal religion, but that almost all do think that religion is on the upswing and that it is an ineradicable feature of human life. The startling character of, and evidence for, this result is made most clear in pieces by Louis Greenspan, Gregory Baum, T. F. Rigelhof, and Iain Benson, so it is with these pieces that we chose to begin. (This is not to say that other pieces do not make this point-see, among others, the pieces by Victor Shepherd, Janette Turner Hospital, Patrick O'Flaherty, and Sharon Butala-but that these first four pieces devote considerable text to it.)
While T. F. Rigelhof offers surprising evidence of a revival of Christian fundamentalism, he also examines a question that might be thought to arise naturally from the surprising possibility that religion may be a permanent feature of human life: why is this so? Along with Mr. Rigelhof, Patrick O'Flaherty, Suzanne Scorsone, Keath Fraser, Janette Turner Hospital, and Mary Jo Leddy all attempt to offer some explanation or account of why religion will always be with us. And, to characterize their attempts in a way to which some of these respondents might object, they do so by offering a variety of analyses of the needs of the human soul.
Ms. Hospital and Ms. Leddy also voice a concern of many of our respondents: they worry that the religious revival that we are about to confront will be what is often characterized as a "fundamentalist" revival. Furthermore, both lay the blame for the turn to fundamentalism in its various forms at the feet of modern liberalism (Ms. Hospital argues that Western governments are often insufficiently inclusive and caring; Ms. Leddy blames the globalization that follows from liberal principles; others, such as Kenneth Hart Green, locate the turn of many people from liberalism to fundamentalism in liberalism's failure to provide a workable form of morality.) Finally, they hope that a compromise can be found that will embrace what they see as best in both religion and modern liberalism. But, they lead us to wonder, can such a compromise be reached without abandoning what is good or attractive in both? If religion is ineradicable and indeed a religious revival of some kind is on the horizon, can it coexist with liberalism? These questions are explored, in very different ways, by the next group of respondents: David Atkinson, Kenneth Hart Green, Charles Levin, Sam Ajzenstat, A. H. Armstrong, Joan Thomas, Sheila Grant, Ivor Shapiro, and William Mathie.
The authors of the next two pieces, David Helwig and Thomas Langan, do not worry about a compromise between liberalism and religion because they state forthrightly and argue for a view that is indicated in passing by several other respondents, including T. F. Rigelhof, Robin Metcalfe, Iain Benson, and Sheila Grant: liberalism and the other pillar of modern rationalism, modern natural science, are themselves faiths or religions. But this simply leads us to raise another question: If this increasingly commonplace view is right, that is, if liberalism and science, which were assumed to have displaced or refuted religion, do not tell us the truth about ourselves and our world, must we not consider the possibility that in some form the religious life may provide the best (and even the truest) way of life for human beings? To this concern we may add another. Many of our respondents have reservations about more traditional religions (to say nothing of "fundamentalism") because they are "exclusivist" (see, among others, A. H. Armstrong, Janette Turner Hospital, Mary Jo Leddy, Robin Metcalfe, Gregory Baum, and David Atkinson). If we claim, though, that the principle that provides the basis of modernity's rejection of "exclusivism"-namely, the principle that all human beings are free to rationally pursue their own good-is merely a faith, then on what grounds do we argue against "exclusivism"? Unless this principle is true, are not those who rail against exclusivism themselves merely believers who form their own sect, or, to put this another way, are they not themselves "exclusivists"?
With these difficulties in mind we conclude with the replies of those contributors who largely devote their pieces to offering pictures of the religious revival, or revivals, that are taking or may take place: Emil Fackenheim, Stan Persky, Dennis Duffy, George Elliott Clarke (who argues, remarkably enough, that progressive liberalism only has a future if it assumes the character of a religious revival), Robin Metcalfe, Sharon Butala, Barry Cooper, Susan Palmer, Victor Shepherd, David Homel, and Gerald Owen. Not all of those who offer these pictures find them to their taste, and some of their pictures are, as befits the subject, fanciful. Nevertheless, some of the pieces offer vivid depictions and searching analyses of alternatives to our current situation.
Matthew Davis
