Is Christianity Declining in Canada? What the Statistics Actually Show

September 24, 2026

Canadian flag, Parliament buildings and church beneath a declining data chart, representing changing Christianity and religious trends in Canada.

Is Christianity Declining in Canada? What the Statistics Actually Show

In my own life, Canada has not necessarily felt dramatically less Christian as I have gotten older. I meet people from many different backgrounds, and conversations about faith still happen often enough that Christianity does not feel absent from everyday Canadian life.

But personal experience can be a poor way to measure what is happening across a country of more than 40 million people.

When I started looking at the numbers, the national trend was much clearer than my own experience suggested. Canada still has millions of Christians, and Christianity remains the country's largest religious affiliation, but the percentage of Canadians identifying as Christian has fallen substantially over the last two decades. At the same time, the number of Canadians reporting no religious affiliation has risen dramatically, while immigration has contributed to the growth of several non-Christian religions.

So is Christianity actually declining in Canada?

By religious identification, unquestionably yes. But understanding why is considerably more complicated.

Christianity Is Still Canada's Largest Religion—But Its Share Has Fallen Sharply

The clearest place to begin is Canada's census.

In 2001, 77.1% of Canadians identified as Christian. By 2011, that had fallen to 67.3%. In the 2021 Census, only 53.3% of Canadians identified with a Christian religion. More than 19.3 million Canadians still identified as Christian, but Christianity's share of the population had fallen by almost 24 percentage points in twenty years. Statistics Canada

Religious affiliation	2001	2011	2021
Christian	77.1%	67.3%	53.3%
No religion / secular perspectives	16.5%	23.9%	34.6%
Other religions	6.4%	8.8%	12.1%

Source: Statistics Canada, Census of Population 2001 and 2021; National Household Survey 2011. Statistics Canada

Those numbers make the overall direction difficult to dispute.

But they also show something important that can get lost when the discussion is reduced to Christianity versus other religions.

The largest change is not simply the growth of another faith.

It is the growth of no religious affiliation.

The Rise of Canadians With No Religion Is a Major Part of the Story

In 2001, 16.5% of Canadians reported no religion or a secular perspective. Twenty years later, that number had more than doubled to 34.6%—approximately 12.6 million people. Statistics Canada

Meanwhile, religions other than Christianity collectively increased from 6.4% to 12.1% of the population.

Both changes matter. But their scale is different.

Between 2001 and 2021, the share belonging to non-Christian religions increased by 5.7 percentage points. The share reporting no religion increased by 18.1 percentage points.

That does not prove that every person who stopped identifying as Christian became religiously unaffiliated. Census snapshots cannot track individual Canadians from one census to another. Immigration, births, deaths and other demographic changes also affect the totals.

But it does tell us that Canada's changing religious landscape cannot be explained simply as Christians being numerically replaced by people belonging to other religions.

A major part of the change is secularization and religious disaffiliation.

More recent survey research strengthens that interpretation. Pew Research Center defines religious switching as the difference between the religion in which an adult says they were raised and the religion they identify with today. Its international research finds substantial movement into religious non-affiliation in countries including Canada. Pew Research Center

That means at least some of Canada's decline in Christian identification is happening because people raised within Christianity no longer identify that way.

Is Immigration Causing Christianity to Decline in Canada?

This deserves a direct answer because immigration is an obvious demographic factor in modern Canada.

Immigration is changing Canada's religious composition.

Statistics Canada explicitly identifies immigration as one of the key drivers of non-Christian religions in Canada. In the 2021 Census, immigrants made up 68.9% of Canada's Buddhist population, 63.1% of Muslims, 62.9% of Hindus and 53.8% of Sikhs. Immigrants, by comparison, represented 23.0% of Canada's total population. Statistics Canada

The religious composition of recent immigration makes the effect even clearer. Among immigrants admitted to Canada between 2011 and 2021, 18.9% identified as Muslim, 9.0% as Hindu and 5.8% as Sikh. Statistics Canada

We can see the effect in the national numbers.

Muslims represented 2.0% of Canada's population in 2001 and 4.9% in 2021. Hindus increased from 1.0% to 2.3%, while Sikhs increased from 0.9% to 2.1%. Statistics Canada

So it would be inaccurate to discuss Canada's changing religious composition while pretending immigration has nothing to do with it.

But the opposite conclusion—that immigration explains Canada's decline in Christianity—goes further than the evidence supports.

Immigration helps explain why several non-Christian religious populations are growing. It does not, by itself, explain why such a large share of Canadians now report having no religion at all.

In fact, Statistics Canada reported that 21.5% of immigrants admitted from 2011 to 2021 had no religious affiliation. That was below the 34.6% share for Canada's population overall in 2021. Statistics Canada specifically noted that immigration alone could not explain the increase in Canadians reporting no religious affiliation. Statistics Canada

There is another complication: immigrants are not a religiously uniform population. Many immigrants to Canada are themselves Christians.

So the most defensible conclusion from the available evidence is narrower:

Immigration is contributing significantly to Canada's increasing religious diversity and to the growth of several non-Christian religions, but it cannot adequately explain the overall decline in Christian identification.

Something else is happening inside Canadian Christianity itself.

Canadians Are Also Leaving the Religions They Were Raised In

Religious identity is not inherited permanently.

Some people raised Christian remain Christian. Some move between Christian denominations. Some convert to another religion. Others cease identifying with religion altogether.

Recent Pew research helps demonstrate this movement, although its definition of religious switching is important. Switching from Catholicism to Protestantism, for example, remains movement within Christianity and is not counted as leaving Christianity in Pew's broad international switching analysis. Pew Research Center

More detailed Catholic data nevertheless illustrate the scale of change. Pew's 2026 analysis found that about 19% of Canadian adults had been raised Catholic but no longer identified as Catholic. Of all Canadian adults, 14% were raised Catholic and had become religiously unaffiliated, 3% had become Protestant, and 2% had moved to another religion. Pew Research Center

That should not be misreported as 19% of Canadian Catholics abandoning Christianity: some remained Christian after leaving Catholicism.

But it demonstrates something the census alone cannot show very well.

Canadian religious identity is changing within individual lifetimes, not merely through immigration or population replacement.

Younger Canadians Are Less Religiously Affiliated

Age and generation appear to matter as well.

Statistics Canada's analysis of religiosity from 1985 through 2019 found substantial differences between birth cohorts. During the 2017-to-2019 period, 30% of Canadians born between 1980 and 1999 reported no religious affiliation, compared with 13% among those born between 1960 and 1979 and 7% among those born between 1940 and 1959. Statistics Canada

Religious participation showed similar generational differences, although regional patterns—particularly Quebec—complicate any simple national explanation.

This is important because a country's religious composition can change even without large numbers of people formally announcing that they have rejected a religion.

Older generations eventually make up a smaller share of the population. Younger generations replace them. If younger Canadians are substantially less likely to identify with a religion, the country's overall religious composition changes through generational replacement as well as individual conversion or disaffiliation.

That suggests Canada's Christian decline is not one phenomenon with one cause.

It is several demographic and cultural processes occurring at the same time.

Identifying as Christian Is Not the Same as Practicing Christianity

There is another problem with relying entirely on census numbers.

The census measures religious affiliation. It does not tell us whether someone regularly attends church, reads the Bible, prays, believes historic Christian doctrine, or considers following Jesus central to daily life.

Statistics Canada's other research illustrates the difference.

Among Christians surveyed just before the COVID-19 pandemic, 68% said religious or spiritual beliefs played a somewhat or very important role in how they lived. Yet only 31% participated in group religious or spiritual activities at least once a month between 2017 and 2019. Statistics Canada

There were also enormous differences among Christian traditions. Statistics Canada reported monthly group participation of 86% among Jehovah's Witnesses, 80% among Latter-day Saints, 75% among Anabaptists and 72% among Pentecostal and other Charismatic Christians. Among Anglicans and United Church members, the figure was 19%. Statistics Canada

Whatever theological distinctions Christians may make among those groups, the statistical lesson is straightforward:

“Christian” is not a measurement of religious intensity.

Two people can both check Christian on a census form while having radically different beliefs and levels of participation.

That also means the decline in census Christianity may partly represent the disappearance of nominal Christian identification—people who might once have called themselves Christian because of family, culture or tradition but who no longer choose that label.

The available census data cannot tell us exactly how much of the decline should be attributed to that effect.

Even Christianity Itself Is Changing Shape

The denominational numbers contain another interesting development.

Catholicism remained Canada's largest Christian affiliation in 2021, with approximately 10.9 million people, or 29.9% of the population. The United Church represented 3.3%, Anglicans 3.1%, Orthodox Christians 1.7%, Baptists 1.2%, and Pentecostal and other Charismatic Christians 1.1%. Statistics Canada

But almost 2.8 million Canadians—7.6% of the entire population—identified simply as “Christian” without specifying a denomination.

Statistics Canada reports that this number was roughly double the 1.4 million people who did so in 2011. Statistics Canada

That is a fascinating countertrend.

It does not reverse Christianity's overall decline. But it suggests that denominational decline and Christian decline are not always exactly the same thing.

Some Canadians may be moving away from institutional or denominational labels while retaining a general Christian identity.

That distinction deserves attention whenever someone points to the decline of a particular church or denomination as evidence for the disappearance of Christianity as a whole.

Could Christians Simply Be Missing From the Census?

Another possible explanation is that Christians still exist in similar numbers but increasingly fail to identify themselves on census forms.

There may be some cases where that happens. No survey perfectly captures something as complicated as religious identity, and Statistics Canada itself acknowledges that religion is difficult to measure. The census allows respondents to report a religion, indicate no religion, or provide other applicable responses. Statistics Canada

But there is not enough evidence to use census non-participation as an explanation for the enormous change observed over twenty years.

More importantly, several different measures point in the same general direction: census affiliation has declined, younger cohorts report substantially higher non-affiliation, religious participation has changed, and survey research finds people switching away from childhood religions.

The precise size of Canadian Christianity depends on what we decide to measure.

The direction of change is much harder to dispute.

So Why Is Christianity Declining in Canada?

There is no single percentage that allows us to divide Canada's Christian decline neatly among immigration, secularization, generational replacement and religious switching.

The available evidence does not support that level of precision.

What it does support is a more nuanced explanation than either of the common extremes.

Canada's Christian share is declining partly because the country has become more religiously diverse, and immigration is an important reason Muslim, Hindu and Sikh populations have grown.

At the same time, Canada's religiously unaffiliated population has grown much faster than non-Christian religions collectively. Younger Canadians are substantially more likely to report no religious affiliation than older cohorts, and survey evidence shows that some Canadians raised within Christianity no longer identify as Christian adults.

Those processes are occurring simultaneously.

The result is a Canada that is both more religiously diverse and more secular than it was twenty years ago.

What the Statistics Cannot Tell Us

There is a temptation with numbers like these to make them say more than they actually do.

The census cannot tell us whether someone has genuine Christian faith.

It cannot tell us why an individual stopped identifying as Christian.

It cannot establish that social media caused younger Canadians to become less religious. It cannot prove that political changes inside churches caused people to leave them. It cannot tell us whether increasing individualism is responsible for declining religious participation. Those may all be legitimate subjects for research, but the census figures themselves do not establish those causal claims.

Nor can census data tell us what Canadian Christianity will look like twenty years from now.

What the statistics can tell us is what Canadians reported about themselves.

And on that question, the evidence is clear.

In 2001, more than three-quarters of Canadians identified as Christian. Twenty years later, just over half did.

Christianity has not disappeared from Canada. More than 19 million Canadians still identified as Christian in the most recent census, making Christianity by far the country's largest religious affiliation. Statistics Canada

But Canada is changing.

For Premium Works, that makes these numbers particularly interesting. We operate openly as a Christian brand in a country where Christian identity remains widespread but is no longer nearly as culturally universal as it once was. My own conversations with people may not always make that change obvious to me, but the national numbers do.

The statistics do not tell Christians how to respond to that change. That is a different conversation.

For now, they tell us something simpler:

Christianity is declining as a share of Canada's population, but there is no evidence-based reason to reduce that decline to a single cause. Immigration is changing Canada's religious composition, secularization is increasing, people are leaving religions they were raised in, younger generations are less religiously affiliated, and even the way Canadians identify within Christianity is changing.

Understanding the difference between those trends is the first step toward understanding what is actually happening to Christianity in Canada.

Sources & Further Reading

This article primarily uses Statistics Canada census and General Social Survey data, supplemented by Pew Research Center research on religious switching. Census religious affiliation measures how respondents identify themselves and should not be interpreted as a direct measurement of Christian belief or practice. Percentages, survey populations and years are identified throughout the article where relevant.