Research 2006
Alive and Well:
Religion in the Modern Age
Paul Bramadat
Associate Professor, Religious Studies
If you think God is dead, guess again.
“For a couple decades, many North American experts have been in agreement that religion will eventually go away in modern societies,” says Religious Studies Associate Professor Paul Bramadat. “They treat religion as a society’s adolescence, yet survey after survey around the world shows us that religion in some form is still a powerful force.” This is one of the themes he explored in his first book, The Church on the World’s Turf.
“What I’m curious about now are people whose religious identities were formed in colonial contexts,” says Bramadat, talking about his newest project, funded with a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant. “Do people look back on their pre-Christian family history and see something that was lost? Or do they continue to accept the Christianity of their forebears as the better religion?” The project is called “Stories and Histories” and it started with Bramadat wondering about his own.
“My great-grandfather was an indentured labourer who went from India to Trinidad to cut sugar cane once slavery was abolished,” says Bramadat. “But at some point my family, originally Hindu, converted to Presbyterianism. Nobody forced it on them, but there was a fast track to living in a certain kind of house or moving to England or Canada.”
Bramadat will see publication of the second volume in a three-volume set of books he is coediting with a professor from the University of Waterloo. The second volume is about the intersection of religious and ethnic identity in Christian denominations in Canada. The third volume will address the place of Aboriginal spirituality and identity in Canadian public discourse.
The first of the series, entitled Religion and Ethnicity in Canada, focused on non-Christian religions in Canada and their relation to ethnic identity and public policy. Its approach is novel. “What we’ve tried to do is make it relevant to policy makers and other scholars, but also appropriate for students,” says Bramadat, adding that the accessibility of such information is crucial.
“We need to do a lot more public education about religious diversity in Canada,” he says. “Why is it we think it’s important that every high school student in Duncan, BC graduates knowing the capitol of Prince Edward Island, but nothing about the basic tenets of any of the religions they’re going to bump into? They’ll probably never go to Charlottetown, but they might have a Sikh dentist, or a Muslim neighbour, or Hindu police officer, and it would be awfully nice if they were prepared to deal with them in a respectful, productive manner.”
To learn more about his research on religious diversity in Canada, contact University of Winnipeg faculty member Paul Bramadat at p.bramadat@uwinnipeg.ca